A groundbreaking paper in Nature reports the "Complete sequencing of ape genomes," including the genomes for chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, Bornean orangutans, Sumatran orangutans, and siamangs. I noted this in an article here yesterday, reporting that an evolutionary icon — the famous "1 percent difference" between the human and chimp genomes, touted across the breadth of popular and other scientific writing and teaching — has fallen. The researchers, for whatever reason — I'm not a mind reader — chose to bury that remarkable finding in technical jargon in their Supplementary Data section. Now for more on the scientific details.

You might be thinking, "Hey, weren't these genomes sequenced long ago?" The answer is yes but also no. Yes, we had sequenced genomes from these species in the past, but, as the paper explains, "owing to the repetitive nature of ape genomes, complete assemblies have not been achieved. Current references lack sequence resolution of some of the most dynamic genomic regions, including regions corresponding to lineage-specific gene families."

Scientists have uncovered fresh evidence that Venus is not dead — geologically speaking. Venus and Earth are similar in size and were bombarded by comparable amounts of water billions of years ago. This shared origin has long fueled one of planetary science's biggest questions: Why did Venus become a hellish, uninhabitable world while Earth flourished into a cradle for life?

Now, more than three decades after NASA's Magellan spacecraft mapped Venus' surface, scientists have found signs of hot material rising from the planet's interior, indicating that its crust is still being sculpted from within.

The findings, published May 14 in the journal Science Advances, add to a growing body of evidence that Venus, despite lacking Earth's plate tectonics, may share more internal dynamics with our planet than scientists previously thought.

"This research has provided a new and important insight into the possible subsurface processes currently shaping the surface of Venus," Gael Cascioli, an assistant research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland who co-led the new study, said in a statement.

Astronomers may have discovered a rare type of binary star system, where one star used to orbit inside its partner.

In the new study, astronomers investigated a pulsar known as PSR J1928+1815 located about 455 light-years from Earth. A pulsar is a kind of neutron star, a corpse of a large star that perished in a catastrophic explosion known as a supernova. The gravitational pull of the star's remains would have been strong enough to crush together protons and electrons to form neutrons, meaning a neutron star is mostly made of neutrons. That makes it very (very) dense.

Pulsars are spinning neutron stars that emit twin beams of radio waves from their magnetic poles. These beams appear to pulse because astronomers see them only when a pulsar pole is pointed at Earth. The researchers estimate this particular pulsar was born from a hot blue star more than eight times the sun's mass.

Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China, the world's largest single-dish telescope, the astronomers discovered PSR J1928+1815 had a companion, a helium star with about 1 to 1.6 times the sun's mass. This star has lost most — or all — of its outer layers of hydrogen, leaving behind a core made up mostly of helium.

How many times have you heard it said that the human and chimpanzee genomes are so similar that they are only "1 percent different" at the level of their DNA? This shows, we were told, not only that humans and chimps share common ancestry, but that humans aren't all that special, which is a common talking point in science journalism and other public discussions. After all, we're just slightly modified chimps! This "fact" has been discussed so much that it has become what the late biologist Jonathan Wells famously called an "icon of evolution."

But now, new data reported in a recently published Nature paper by Yoo et al. has overturned this previous claim. The new findings reveal that human DNA is far more different from chimp DNA than previously thought.

That should be major news in the science world, yet those involved don't seem interested in highlighting their discovery. More on that later.

Over the last few days the UK has experienced balmy spring weather with temperatures often settling in the low 20s Celsius. The Met Office has been out in force colouring the maps orange and declaring 'extreme' highs all over the green and pleasant land. Or more accurately, a remarkably few chosen spots across the g&p land. Net Zero promotion demands ever higher temperature recordings so only unnaturally heat-ravaged sites provide most of the daily records. I looked at the last nine days of Met Office records to Sunday May 18th and can reveal that nearly nine out of 10 local 'extreme' daily temperature highs were posted in junk Class 4 and super junk Class 5 sites with internationally-recognised 'uncertainties' of 2°C and 5°C respectively.

Certain locations crop up constantly in the records. In nine days the Scottish sites at Aboyne and Tyndrum recorded area highs eight and seven times respectively. In England, Coton-in-the-Elms recorded seven daily highs while Kielder Castle posted six. Of course the recording of highs in these corrupted sites didn't mean the air temperature was representative of the wider surrounding area. It just meant that the sites were poorly located next to unnatural heat sources and were producing a false natural air record, recently re-badged by the Met Office as a so-called 'extreme" high. Until the Met Office sorts out its largely junk-class 380-plus weather station network, these records and recordings are largely meaningless.

Cooling trends of up to -2.15°C per decade are not consistent with the "global warming" narrative.
According to a new study (Li et al., 2025), 98% of the Central Eurasia study area (40-65°N and 50-130°E) experienced significantly declining temperatures from 2004-2020.

Specifically, the region cooled by nearly -2.0°C - a rate of -1.425°C per decade - from 2004 to 2018.

The authors attribute the cooling trend to a 5.38% per decade increase in snow cover percentage (SCP) across the study area.

Dubbed Teleios, the unusually symmetrical space object is puzzling astronomers with its near-perfect shape and mysterious origin.
The universe is a chaotic place filled with exploding stars, material falling into black holes, and rogue planets wandering off on their own. All that chaos makes astronomers suspicious when they glimpse a hint of perfection in the cosmos, like a bubble of material left over from the death of a star that appears to be in perfectly symmetrical shape.

Astronomers recently discovered the remnant of a galactic supernova with a remarkable circular symmetry, making it stand out as one of the most perfectly spherical objects detected in the universe. Perfection is not always a bad problem to have, but it does prompt certain questions regarding how the object came to be this way.

The discovery, submitted to the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia and made available on the preprint website arXiv, was spotted in images collected by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder. The researchers behind the paper identified the object as a galactic supernova remnant — an expanding cloud of debris that forms in the aftermath of the exploding death of a star.

The object, located in the Milky Way galaxy, has been dubbed Teleios, the Greek word for perfect. Although it is almost perfectly symmetrical, Teleios is not very bright. It has one of the lowest recorded surface brightness levels among known supernova remnants. Astronomers observing Teleios are also uncertain about its distance to Earth, estimating that it could either be around 7,175 or 25,114 light-years away. That's a huge difference in distance, and the uncertainty is affecting our understanding of how long the object has been there.

Researchers have recovered Homo erectus bones from the seafloor, which points to an unknown hominin population hunting on land that is now underwater in Southeast Asia.
Bones from an extinct human ancestor have been recovered from the seafloor, revealing a previously unknown Homo erectus population in Southeast Asia that may have interacted with more modern humans, new studies find.

The H. erectus bones were among a cache of more than 6,000 animal fossils hoovered up as part of a construction project off the island of Java in Indonesia. This is the first time scientists have seen fossils from the submerged parts of the Indonesian archipelago, which connected islands like Java to the Asian mainland during the last ice age, when sea levels were lower.

These lost lands, called drowned Sundaland, were once vast open plains interspersed with rivers around 140,000 years ago. The newly discovered fossils revealed the rivers were teeming with fish, turtles, river sharks, hippos and other marine life, while terrestrial giants such as elephants, the elephant-like Stegodon and water buffalo populated the plains, according to the studies.

H. erectus' presence on this landscape confirms that our ancient ancestor was taking advantage of drowned Sundaland's fertile hunting grounds, at least between Java and another, smaller island called Madura. This region, once a valley, is now submerged in a body of seawater called the Madura Strait.

The researchers found cut marks on some of the fossils that confirmed the Madura Strait hominins (humans and our close relatives) were hunting turtles — the earliest evidence of this in Southeast Asia — and large game. The remains also suggested that these hominins were selectively targeting cow-like bovids in their prime, which Indonesian H. erectus isn't known for. This hunting strategy is associated with more modern humans on the Asian mainland, raising the possibility that the newly discovered H. erectus population copied the strategy from other human relatives.

Things are heating up hundreds of miles off the coast of Oregon, where a large undersea volcano is showing signs of impending eruption, scientists say.

The volcano, known as Axial Seamount, is located nearly 1 mile (1.4 kilometers) underwater on a geological hot spot, where searing gushes of molten rock rise from Earth's mantle and into the crust. Hotspot volcanoes are common on the seafloor. But Axial Seamount also happens to be located on the Juan de Fuca Ridge — an area where two massive tectonic plates (the Pacific and the Juan de Fuca plates) are constantly spreading apart, causing a steady buildup of pressure beneath the planet's surface.

The frequency of earthquakes has recently picked up dramatically as the volcano inflates with increasingly more magma, signaling an eruption could be near, according to researchers at the National Science Foundation's Ocean Observatories Initiative Regional Cabled Array, a facility operated by the University of Washington that monitors the activity of Axial Seamount.

The sun has released several powerful M- and X-class solar flares over the past few days, resulting in radio blackouts around the world.

The sun has had an active few days, firing several powerful solar flares and plumes of searing-hot solar material out into space.

On Tuesday (May 13), a sunspot on the sun's surface named AR4086 exploded, releasing an X1.2-class solar flare, part of the most powerful category of flare. Then, during the early hours of Wednesday (May 14), another sunspot named AR4087 spat out an M5.3 flare, followed by an even more powerful X2.7 flare, and yet another M7.7 flare a few hours later.

The radiation of these solar flares triggered radio blackouts on the sun-facing side of the planet at the time of the flares, affecting North and South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.