Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have measured carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios in 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar visitor to sweep through the Solar System. Their analysis suggests the interstellar comet formed in the cold outer reaches of a protoplanetary disk surrounding a star far older and more metal-poor than our own. This image shows part of the spectrum of the...

NASA’s Perseverance rover has uncovered the most extensive evidence yet of complex organic molecules on Mars, detecting macromolecular carbon in rocks from the Bright Angel formation in Jezero Crater. The discovery does not constitute evidence of alien life, but it strengthens the case that the building blocks of life may have been widespread on the Red Planet billions of years ago. This artist’s...

New research suggests that the first widespread human cultures in the Americas were not opportunistic foragers who ate whatever they could find, but specialized big-game hunters who built their lives around killing the largest animals on the landscape: mammoths, elephant-like gomphotheres, giant ground sloths, and other Ice Age giants. Paleo-Indians hunting a glyptodont, a relative of the armadillo...

A small fossil collected on an Antarctic island more than four decades ago is a tail vertebra of a titanosaurian sauropod dinosaur that roamed Antarctica roughly 83 million years ago, according to a new paper in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. The discovery represents only the second sauropod body fossil known from Antarctica, although it was the first dinosaur bone to be collected from...

Biologists at the University of Minnesota say they have built a synthetic cell — made entirely from non-living chemical components — that can complete a full life cycle: taking in nutrients, growing, copying its genetic material, dividing into daughter cells and passing along beneficial mutations to the next generation. Called SpudCell, their project marks a major breakthrough in biological...

Physicists with LHCb Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have detected the elusive Ωcc⁺ baryon, a particle containing two charm quarks and one strange quark, completing a long-sought family of doubly charmed baryons first predicted over half a century ago. An artist’s impression of the doubly charmed Ωcc⁺ baryon. Image credit: Daniel Dominguez / CERN. “Quarks are basic...

A large review of clinical trials published this week in the journal PAIN suggests that melatonin — the over-the-counter sleep supplement taken by millions of people — may offer meaningful relief for patients suffering from chronic musculoskeletal conditions such as low back pain, osteoarthritis, and fibromyalgia. Melatonin showed modest benefits for musculoskeletal pain in a new analysis,...

For the first time, researchers have extracted ancient human DNA directly from the walls of a cave. Although their results do not conclusively link ancient DNA preservation to the generation of cave art, they show that traces of human DNA can persist on cave walls for thousands of years. Representative rock art figures from each of the 11 archaeological sites analyzed by Bossoms Mesa et al. Image...

Zircon crystals and impact-altered minerals show that a massive asteroid slammed into what is now the Pilbara region of Western Australia about 3 billion years ago. The North Pole Dome crater: (A) simplified map of the East Pilbara Terrane (EPT, Western Australia), showing Paleoarchean granite domes (pink) and greenstone belts (greens and blues); the North Pole Dome (NPD) lies near the terrane center;...

New research suggests that the first widespread human cultures in the Americas were not opportunistic foragers who ate whatever they could find, but specialized big-game hunters who built their lives around killing the largest animals on the landscape: mammoths, elephant-like gomphotheres, giant ground sloths, and other Ice Age giants. Paleo-Indians hunting a glyptodont, a relative of the armadillo...