Researchers in the US have wound back the cosmic clock to determine that a spectacular comet whizzed past the Earth 5,000 years ago.

While the event isn't recorded in any historical account, the team were able to gather clues from more recently sighted comets.

In a paper published in the Astronomical Journal, they examined observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope of the comet ATLAS (C/2019 Y4), which Hubble watched break into pieces last year.

This comet is thought to be a fragment of a larger one that passed by the Earth in 1844, shining as brightly as Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.


By tracing the two comets' motions back through time, the researchers figured out that they are likely both parts of an even bigger one that last zipped through the inner Solar System 5,000 years ago, around the time that Ancient Egyptians were first settling into the Nile valley.

Elon Musk's Tesla said it is using technology tested out on self-driving cars to build a humanoid robot designed to assist humans in day-to-day work. The prototype is set to be unveiled next year.

The news was announced on Tesla's AI Day, which was streamed on the company's website Thursday night.

The presentation began with a person in a robot suit performing a variety of dances on stage. Musk quickly stepped in to assure everyone that "that was not real."

He then said that the prototype of a humanoid robot with a similar design, called 'Tesla Bot', will be ready sometime next year.

Ice losses from Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica are currently responsible for roughly four percent of the global sea-level rise. This figure could increase, since virtually no another ice stream in the Antarctic is changing as dramatically as the massive Thwaites Glacier. Until recently, experts attributed these changes to climate change and the fact that the glacier rests on the seafloor in many places, and as such comes into contact with warm water masses. But there is also a third, and until now one of the most difficult to constrain, influencing factors. In a new study, German and British researchers have shown that there is a conspicuously large amount of heat from Earth's interior beneath the ice, which has likely affected the sliding behaviour of the ice masses for millions of years. This substantial geothermal heat flow, in turn, are due to the fact that the glacier lies in a tectonic trench, where the Earth's crust is significantly thinner than it is e.g. in neighbouring East Antarctica. The new study was published today in the Nature online journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Unlike East Antarctica, West Antarctica is a geologically young region. In addition, it doesn't consist of a large contiguous land mass, where the Earth's crust is up to 40 kilometres thick, but instead is made up of several small and for the most part relatively thin crustal blocks that are separated from each other by a so-called trench system or rift system. In many of the trenches in this system, the Earth's crust is only 17 to 25 kilometres thick, and as a result a large portion of the ground lies one to two kilometres below sea level. On the other hand, the existence of the trenches has long led researchers to assume that comparatively large amounts of heat from Earth's interior rose to the surface in this region. With their new map of this geothermal heat flow in the hinterland of the West Antarctic Amundsen Sea, experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have now provided confirmation.

Paleontologists have reconstructed the life history of a male mammoth who traveled across Alaska 17,000 years ago.

We might not be able to study a walking, breathing woolly mammoth in real life, but what if we could track its movements and get a sense of where it traveled, from its birth to its death? For the first time ever, scientists have done just that.

An international team of researchers published a paper this week in the journal Science that reveals the 28-year movement history of a male woolly mammoth. With exciting detail about where it roamed throughout northern Alaska, its seemingly favorite locations — as it returned time and time — and where it eventually died, this paper offers unparalleled insight into an animal that lived approximately 17,000 years ago.

A new peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, "On the waiting time until coordinated mutations get fixed in regulatory sequences," is authored by three key scientists in the intelligent design (ID) research program: Ola Hössjer, Günter Bechly, Ann Gauger. The paper is part of the "Waiting Times" project, spurred by Discovery Institute as part of its ID 3.0 initiative, and it investigates a question of vital interest to the theory of intelligent design: How long does it take for traits to evolve when multiple mutations are required to give an advantage? A previous peer-reviewed publication from this team appeared as a chapter in the 2018 Springer volume Stochastic Processes and Applications. This latest paper is lengthy, technical, and math intensive. In other words, it's not for the fainthearted, but it's open access and free to read here. If you feel up to the challenge download and read!

The footage of the Atlas robots performing parkour is as impressive as it is unsettling.
Robot maker Boston Dynamics has released new video of its two-legged Atlas robot effortlessly completing a parkour obstacle course, offering a new display of its humanoid machines' unsettling repertoire.

In the video, a pair of Atlas robots can be seen leaping over large gaps, vaulting beams, and even performing backflips. The robot can even be seen jumping over a board while using its arm to remain steady.

While the display seems like anything but "free" running - as the original developers of parkour had envisioned - the routine does seem like an impressive, if terrifying, display of effective coding that took months to perfect, according to the Hyundai-owned robotics firm.

"It's not the robot just magically deciding to do parkour, it's kind of a choreographed routine, much like a skateboard video or a parkour video," said Atlas control lead Benjamin Stephens.

See for yourself:

A geological mystery is unfolding far beneath our feet, and it may shed light on the life-sustaining magnetic field that extends far above our heads.
Each year, the solid-iron inner core at the heart of our planet expands by about a millimeter as the Earth's nether regions cool and solidify. According to a recent study, one side appears to be growing faster — but scientists don't know why.

This phenomenon likely dates back to the inner core's creation, between 1.5 billion and half a billion years ago. At this point, after billions of years of cooling, the Earth's fiery interior finally lost enough heat to begin an ongoing process of crystallization. Now, as the outer core's molten iron loses heat, it crystallizes to become the newest layer of the inner core.

The center of this hyperactive hemisphere lies 1,800 miles (2,896 kilometers) under Indonesia's Banda Sea: About 60 percent more iron crystals form at that point on the inner core than on the other side of the world.

Today, the inner core boasts a radius of about 750 miles (1,207 km) — not to mention a scorching temperature of more than 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit (4,982 degrees Celsius). Yet even after an eon of lopsided growth, it hasn't actually deformed. Gravity acts constantly to mold it, redistributing the excess in the east and maintaining a spherical shape. Besides posing a captivating puzzle, this asymmetrical growth may help power the Earth's magnetic field (and enable our survival).

Until recently, scientists thought the modern humans with the highest proportion of Denisovan ancestry lived in Papua New Guinea and Australia. According to a new study published yesterday (August 12) in Current Biology, however, an Indigenous group in the Philippines called the Ayta Magbukon have 30 to 40 percent more Denisovan DNA than these other frontrunners, for a total of nearly 5 percent of their genomes.

Denisovans were a group of archaic humans first identified from a single pinkie bone in a Siberian cave. They coexisted with modern humans and other archaic human species, such as Neanderthals, for hundreds of thousands of years, until they went extinct an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. According to Gizmodo, only Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians have substantial Denisovan ancestry. By comparison, most people in other parts of mainland Asia have less than 0.05 percent Denisovan ancestry, and people of African and European descent don't have any.

Cybersecurity researchers said Tuesday they discovered a flaw that exposes live video data and audio from millions of internet-connected devices to hackers.

The vulnerability affects more than 83 million devices that use ThroughTek's Kalay network, according to the cybersecurity firm FireEye's Mandiant division. ThroughTek is a technology company started in Taiwan that services "internet-of-things" (IoT) devices and develops software.

"This vulnerability, discovered by researchers on Mandiant's Red Team in late 2020, would enable adversaries to remotely compromise victim IoT devices, resulting in the ability to listen to live audio, watch real-time video data, and compromise device credentials for further attacks based on exposed device functionality," Mandiant said in a statement. "These further attacks could include actions that would allow an adversary to remotely control affected devices."

Zinc traditionally has a valence of two, meaning two electrons take part in the element's chemical reaction. A new paper by Virginia Commonwealth University researcher Puru Jena, Ph.D., shows that the chemistry of zinc can be fundamentally changed, making it trivalent — or a valence of three — with the proper reagent.

"This technology allows you to manipulate chemistry at the fundamental level, making synthesis of new materials with tailored properties possible," said Jena, Distinguished Professor of Physics in the College of Humanities and Sciences.

While zinc is categorized as a transition metal element, its third electron shell — arranged around the nucleus and containing electrons — is full, and unlike regular transition metals, does not take part in zinc's chemical reaction and does not allow zinc to be magnetic. However, Jena found that when reacted with highly stable trianions, zinc's properties can be changed.