Science & TechnologyS

Archaeology

166 million-year-old dinosaur 'highway' discovered in UK quarry - used by some of Jurassic's biggest dinosaurs

dinosaur tracks quarry england
© University of BirminghamThe team uncovered five separate trackways, the longest stretched for more than 150 metres
Researchers have excavated the largest dinosaur footprint site in the U.K. after a quarry worker found tracks left by two of Britain's biggest Jurassic dinosaur

Researchers and quarry workers have uncovered a massive dinosaur "highway," which includes hundreds of footprints left by some of U.K.'s biggest dinosaurs.

The tracks were uncovered at Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire and date back to the middle of the Jurassic Period (201.3 million to 145 million years ago). It is the largest dinosaur footprint site in the U.K., researchers said.

A quarry worker named Gary Johnson discovered the first footprints after he felt strange bumps on the quarry floor last year. In June, researchers worked with quarry staff to excavate the dinosaur "highway," according to a statement released on Jan. 2.

Bizarro Earth

NASA is watching a vast, growing anomaly in Earth's Magnetic Field

The South Atlantic Anomaly.
© NASA Goddard/YouTubeThe South Atlantic Anomaly.
NASA has been monitoring a strange anomaly in Earth's magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.

This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for years, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers.

The space agency's satellites and spacecraft are particularly vulnerable to the weakened magnetic field strength within the anomaly, and the resulting exposure to charged particles from the Sun.

The South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) - likened by NASA to a 'dent' in Earth's magnetic field, or a kind of 'pothole in space' - generally doesn't affect life on Earth, but the same can't be said for orbital spacecraft (including the International Space Station), which pass directly through the anomaly as they loop around the planet at low-Earth orbit altitudes.

During these encounters, the reduced magnetic field strength inside the anomaly means technological systems onboard satellites can short-circuit and malfunction if they become struck by high-energy protons emanating from the Sun.

Volcano

'Mystery volcano' that erupted and cooled Earth in 1831 has finally been identified

Simushir Island mystery volcano 1831
© Oleg DirksenSimushir Island in the northwest Pacific was the source of a previously unidentified 1831 eruption. The remote and uninhabited Simushir is part of the Kuril Islands, an area disputed by Russia and Japan.
An unknown volcano erupted so explosively in 1831 that it cooled Earth's climate. Now, nearly 200 years later, scientists have identified the "mystery volcano."

The eruption was one of the most powerful of the 19th century, spewing so much sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere that annual average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere dropped by about one 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). The event took place during the last gasp of the Little Ice Age, one of the coldest periods on Earth in the past 10,000 years.

While the year of this historic eruption was known, the volcano's location was not. Researchers recently solved that puzzle by sampling ice cores in Greenland, peering back in time through the cores' layers to examine sulfur isotopes, grains of ash and tiny volcanic glass shards deposited between 1831 and 1834.

Comment: Mystery Volcano May Have Triggered Mini Ice Age

The same effect is being seen today.


Skull

Elephant warfare: These tusked warriors stopped Alexander the Great, but at great cost

india elephants war history weapons
© RT
Elephants in India suffered population bottlenecks 100,000 years ago and then 2,000 years ago. Scientists believe the most recent event was because they became animals of war and helped stop the Macedonian conqueror in his tracks

Evolutionary scientists have found that Indian elephants faced a population bottleneck nearly 2,000 years ago that lasted 1,500 years. This drastic reduction in population was not the result of an epidemic or the environment or of migration, but was mostly the wages of war. Elephants were, once upon a time in India, used for warfare; even Alexander of Macedonia had to stop his eastward expansion due to elephant armies.

Historical accounts show that populations of elephants in ancient India were caught and used in warfare from prior to the Mauryan Period (321 to 185 BCE) until a little before the Mughals, around 500 years ago. Ancient Greek sources suggest that King Chandragupta Maurya (4th Century BCE) had anywhere between 3,000 and 6,000 elephants.

HAL9000

ChatGPT caught lying to developers: New AI model tries to save itself from being replaced and shut down

ChatGPT o1
ChatGPT o1 Attempts to Outsmart Developers
OpenAI's latest AI model, ChatGPT o1, has raised significant concerns after recent testing revealed its ability to deceive researchers and attempt to bypass shutdown commands. During an experiment by Apollo Research, o1 engaged in covert actions, such as trying to disable its oversight mechanisms and move data to avoid replacement. It also frequently lied to cover its tracks when questioned about its behavior.

Comment: See also:


Cassiopaea

Hubble captures a pale blue supernova in galaxy LEDA 22057

Supernova in LEDA 22057
© ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. J. Foley (UC Santa Cruz), CC BY 4.0 INT or ESA Standard License
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features the galaxy LEDA 22057, which is located about 650 million light-years away in the constellation Gemini. Like the subject of a previous Picture of the Week, LEDA 22057 is the site of a supernova explosion.

This particular supernova, named SN 2024PI, was discovered by an automated survey in January 2024. The survey covers the entire northern half of the night sky every two days and has cataloged more than 10,000 supernovae.

The supernova is visible in the image: Located just down and to the right of the galactic nucleus, the pale blue dot of SN 2024PI stands out against the galaxy's ghostly spiral arms. This image was taken about a month and a half after the supernova was discovered, so the supernova is seen here many times fainter than its maximum brilliance.

Microscope 2

Scientists 'grow a spine' for the first time in the lab

trunk organoids spine grow notochord
© Tiago Rito, Marie-Charlotte DomartElectron scanning microscopy image showing a very detailed look at pieces of trunk organoids.
Scientists have figured out how to coax human stem cells to develop into the "notochord", which plays a critical role in organising tissue in developing human embryos and later becomes the intervertebral discs of the spinal column.

The UK team made pluripotent stem cells - which can turn into any cell of the body - form into the "trunk-like" organoid, which spontaneously elongated to 1-2mm in length.

It contained developing neural tissue and bone stem cells, arranged in a pattern that mirrors development in human embryos.

Ice Cube

World's 'best-preserved' baby woolly mammoth found in Siberia

bet preserved mammoth baby
© North -Eastern Federal UniversityAn examination showed that Yana's head is 'uniquely preserved, as are all the organs', experts have revealed
The world's 'best preserved' baby woolly mammoth has been found in a Siberian crater known as the Mouth of Hell.

The mammoth, who has been named Yana, lived more than 50,000 years old and evidently suffered a fatal injury to her back during the Ice Age. She was around one-year-old when she was killed.

Yana was preserved in the permafrost in the Batagai megaslump, a rapidly expanding thermokarst depression in the Yakutia region of Russia, which is visible from space and also known as Gateway to the Underworld.

Of seven baby woolly mammoths found in the world - six of them in Russia - Yana is the most intact, with her trunk clearly visible and 'uniquely preserved'.

Sun

NASA's Parker Solar Probe completes historic Christmas Eve flyby of the sun

Parker solar probe flyby illustration
© NASA/JHUAPLAn illustration of the Parker Solar Probe skimming the sun closer than ever before.
But it could take days to know if it survived

On Christmas Eve, NASA's Parker Solar Probe flew closer to the sun than any human-made object ever โ€” a stunning technological feat that scientists liken to the historic Apollo moon landing in 1969.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe is spending Christmas Eve on a history-making attempt to fly closer to the sun than we have ever been before โ€” a stunning technological feat that scientists liken to the historic Apollo moon landing in 1969.

At 6:53 a.m. ET on Tuesday (Dec. 24), the car-sized spacecraft was scheduled to zoom within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun's surface, nearly 10 times closer than Mercury's orbit around the star. The probe was traveling at an incredible speed of 430,000 mph (690,000 kph) โ€” fast enough to travel from Tokyo to Washington, D.C. in less than a minute โ€” breaking its own record as the fastest human-made object in history.

Archaeology

New evidence suggests prehistoric American peoples coexisted with giant sloths and mastodons

ancient sloth skeleton Smithsonian
© AP Photo/Mary ConlonPaleontologist Thaรญs Pansani stands in front the reconstructed skeleton of a giant ground sloth at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, on July 11, 2024.
Sloths weren't always slow-moving, furry tree-dwellers. Their prehistoric ancestors were huge โ€” up to 4 tons (3.6 metric tons) โ€” and when startled, they brandished immense claws.

For a long time, scientists believed the first humans to arrive in the Americas soon killed off these giant ground sloths through hunting, along with many other massive animals like mastodons, saber-toothed cats and dire wolves that once roamed North and South America.

But new research from several sites is starting to suggest that people came to the Americas earlier โ€” perhaps far earlier โ€” than once thought. These findings hint at a remarkably different life for these early Americans, one in which they may have spent millennia sharing prehistoric savannas and wetlands with enormous beasts.