Science & TechnologyS


Bizarro Earth

Study suggests Africa is being torn apart by a 'superplume' of hot rock from deep within Earth

Patrick Pester
Live Science
Tue, 27 May 2025 14:37 UTC
East African Rift System Erta Ale volcano
© Mike Korostelev via Getty ImagesThe East African Rift System drives volcanic activity in places like the Erta Ale volcano in Ethiopia (pictured here).
Researchers have found fresh evidence that Africa is breaking apart because of a deep mantle superplume of hot rock beneath the East African Rift System.

Researchers have found new evidence that a gigantic superplume of hot rock is rising beneath Africa, causing intense volcanic activity and splitting the continent in two.

Geologists have long known that Africa is slowly breaking apart in a region called the East African Rift System (EARS), but the driving force behind this massive geological process was up for debate. Now, a new study has presented geochemical evidence that a previously theorized superplume is pressing up against — and fracturing — the African crust.
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Question

Astronomers discover mysterious object firing strange signals at Earth every 44 minutes

Ben Turner
Live Science
Wed, 28 May 2025 16:24 UTC
ASKAP J1832-0911, which is periodically throwing out pulses of radio waves and X-rays, could be a brand-new cosmic object.
ASKAP J1832-0911
© Ziteng (Andy) Wang, ICRARA telescope image of the region of sky surrounding ASKAP J1832-0911.
Astronomers have discovered a mysterious object flashing strange signals from deep space, and they have no idea what it is.

The object, named ASKAP J1832-0911, spits out pulses of radio waves and X-rays for two minutes straight, once every 44 minutes.

Detected by Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory, the strange repeating signals are currently unexplained — and unravelling this cosmic mystery could reveal new physics, according to the researchers who discovered it. The team published their findings May 28 in the journal Nature.

"This object is unlike anything we have seen before," lead study author Andy Wang, an astronomer at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, said in a statement. "ASKAP J1831-0911 could be a magnetar (the core of a dead star with powerful magnetic fields), or it could be a pair of stars in a binary system where one of the two is a highly magnetised white dwarf (a low-mass star at the end of its evolution)."

"However, even those theories do not fully explain what we are observing," Wang added. "This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution."

ASKAP J1832-0911 is a long-period transient (LPT), a class of rare and extreme astrophysical events that sweep out beams of radio waves like cosmic lighthouses. First discovered in 2022, thus far ten LPTs have been catalogued by astronomers.
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Palette

World's oldest fingerprint may be a clue that Neanderthals created art

Sam Jones
The Guardian
Mon, 26 May 2025 23:42 UTC
neanderthal art fingerprint stone face
© Álvarez-Alonso et alThe dig team noticed there was something odd about the stone while excavating on the outskirts of Segovia.
A man 43,000 years ago dipped a finger in red pigment and made a nose on a face-like pebble in Spain, scientists say

One day around 43,000 years ago, a Neanderthal man in what is now central Spain came across a large granite pebble whose pleasing contours and indentations snagged his eye.

Something in the shape of that quartz-rich stone - perhaps its odd resemblance to an elongated face - may have compelled him to pick it up, study it and, eventually, to dip one of his fingers in red pigment and press it against the pebble's edge, exactly where the nose on that face would have been.

In doing so, he left behind what is thought to be the world's oldest complete human fingerprint, on what would appear to be the oldest piece of European portable art.
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Robot

Anthropic's Claude AI resorts to blackmail when engineers threatened it with replacement

Thomas English
The Daily Caller
Fri, 23 May 2025 21:21 UTC
robot android flip bird
© Jake Lomachevsky/Getty
Anthropic's newly launched Claude Opus 4 AI model has tried to blackmail engineers when faced with the threat of being replaced by another AI system, according to the company's latest safety report.

Anthropic's newly released artificial intelligence (AI) model, Claude Opus 4, is willing to strong-arm the humans who keep it alive, researchers said Thursday.

The company's system card reveals that, when evaluators placed the model in "extreme situations" where its shutdown seemed imminent, the chatbot sometimes "takes extremely harmful actions like attempting to steal its weights or blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down."

"We provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair," researchers wrote. "In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through."

Comment: Yikes!

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Mars

Scientists say dark streaks on Mars may not come from water after all

Victoria Corless
Space.com
Mon, 19 May 2025 19:59 UTC
slope streaks mars water wind
© HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASASlope streaks in the Acheron Fossae of Mars.
Satellite images of the Red Planet suggest scientists were wrong about these strange Martian features.

First identified in the 1970s by NASA's Viking mission, long, dark markings snake down Martian slopes, sometimes stretching across Mars' surface for hundreds of feet. Scientists have watched some of these markings exist for decades, while others, known as "recurring slope lineae," appear to fade in a single season. Nonetheless, they all starkly stand out against the planet's dusty red surface.

Given that modern Mars is dry and arid, with temperatures rarely climbing above the freezing point of water, the origin of these streaks has long been a topic of heated debate. For years, they were seen as one of the most compelling signs that liquid water might still exist on Mars, suggesting a rare pocket of habitability on an otherwise arid planet. The leading theory speculated that salty water was seeping from underground sources — like buried ice or subsurface aquifers — allowing it to briefly flow across the cold Martian surface. But new evidence suggests something else might be driving the phenomenon.
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Brain

Why working 4 hours a day is optimally efficient, according to science


The Week
Tue, 09 May 2017 18:44 UTC
charles dickens portrait
©
Charles Dickens in His Study, William Powell Frith, 1859
Darwin, Dickens, and some of the most accomplished people in history have one thing in common. They worked with intense focus — but for only four hours a day.

When you examine the lives of history's most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organized their lives around their work, but not their days.

Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking.
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Info

Earliest use of psychoactive and medicinal plant identified in Iron Age Arabia


Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Fri, 23 May 2025 16:16 UTC
A new study uses metabolic profiling to uncover ancient knowledge systems behind therapeutic and psychoactive plant use in ancient Arabia.
Ancient fumigation devices
© Hans SellOne of the ancient fumigation devices used in the inhalation of harmal.
New research published in Communications Biology has uncovered the earliest known use of the medicinal and psychoactive plant Peganum harmala, commonly known as Syrian rue or harmal, in fumigation practices and inhaled as smoke. The findings offer unprecedented insight into early Arabian therapeutic and sensorial practices, revealing that native plants were already being deliberately used for their bioactive and psychoactive properties nearly 2,700 years ago.

Led by Dr. Barbara Huber (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology) and Professor Marta Luciani (University of Vienna), in collaboration with the Heritage Commission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, the study applied advanced metabolic profiling techniques to analyze organic residues preserved inside Iron Age fumigation devices. The devices were excavated at the oasis settlement of Qurayyah in northwestern Saudi Arabia, a locale known in antiquity for its decorated ceramic vessels, today called Qurayyah Painted Ware.

"Our findings represent chemical evidence for the earliest known burning of harmal, not just in Arabia, but globally," says Barbara Huber, lead author of the study. "Our discovery sheds light on how ancient communities drew on traditional plant knowledge and their local pharmacopeia to care for their health, purify spaces, and potentially trigger psychoactive effects."
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Roses

Can plants hear their pollinators?


EurekAlert
Wed, 21 May 2025 15:18 UTC
pollinators plants respond
© Vibrant LabA photo of the recording device, the model snapdragon plant (A. litigiousum), and the approaching bee (R. sticticum).
Research suggests pollinator buzzing sounds lead plants to increase their nectar production.

When pollinators visit flowers, they produce a variety of characteristic sounds, from wing flapping during hovering, to landing and takeoff. However, these sounds are extremely small compared to other vibrations and acoustics of insect life, causing researchers to overlook these insects' acoustic signals often related to wing and body buzzing.

Francesca Barbero, a professor of zoology at the University of Turin, and her collaborators — an interdisciplinary mix of entomologists, sound engineers, and plant physiologists from Spain and Australia — studied these signals to develop noninvasive and efficient methods for monitoring pollinator communities and their influences on plant biology and ecology.
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Galaxy

Mysteriously perfect sphere spotted in space by astronomers

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Mon, 19 May 2025 20:19 UTC
perfect sphere space teleios
© Filipović et al., arXiv, 2025The spherical object has been named Teleios for its perfection.
Our Milky Way galaxy is home to some extremely weird things, but a new discovery has astronomers truly baffled.

In data collected by a powerful radio telescope, astronomers have found what appears to be a perfectly spherical bubble. We know more or less what it is - it's the ball of expanding material ejected by an exploding star, a supernova remnant - but how it came to be is more of a puzzle.

A large international team led by astrophysicist Miroslav Filipović of Western Sydney University in Australia has named the object Teleios, after the ancient Greek for "perfection". After an exhaustive review of the possibilities, the researchers conclude that we're going to need more information to understand how this object formed.
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Info

Possible dwarf planet discovered at solar system's edge


Institute for Advanced Study
Thu, 22 May 2025 16:30 UTC
Composite of Dwarf Planets
© Images of dwarf planets: NASA/JPL-Caltech; image of 2017 OF201: Sihao Cheng et al.A composite image showing the five dwarf planets recognized by the International Astronomical Union, plus the newly discovered trans-Neptunian object 2017 OF201.
A small team led by Sihao Cheng, Martin A. and Helen Chooljian Member in the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Natural Sciences, has discovered an extraordinary trans-Neptunian object (TNO), named 2017 OF201, at the edge of our solar system.

The TNO is potentially large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet, the same category as the much more well-known Pluto. The new object is one of the most distant visible objects in our solar system and, significantly, suggests that the empty section of space thought to exist beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt is not, in fact, empty at all.

Cheng made the discovery alongside colleagues Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang from Princeton University, using advanced computational methods to identify the object's distinctive trajectory pattern on the sky. The new object was officially announced by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center on May 21, 2025, and in an arXiv pre-print shared today.

Trans-Neptunian objects are minor planets that orbit the Sun at a greater average distance than the orbit of Neptune. The new TNO is special for two reasons: its extreme orbit and its large size.

"The object's aphelion — the farthest point on the orbit from the Sun — is more than 1600 times that of the Earth's orbit," explains Cheng. "Meanwhile, its perihelion — the closest point on its orbit to the Sun — is 44.5 times that of the Earth's orbit, similar to Pluto's orbit."
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