A 50,000-Year-Old Fossil Reveals Neanderthals Had a Far Richer Diet Than Scientists Once Believed

New evidence from fossilized dental plaque, coastal excavation sites and ancient feces is upending long-held assumptions about Neanderthal diets. Far from being brutish carnivores who hunted woolly mammoths and gnawed on raw meat, Neanderthals appear to have been remarkably adaptable eaters — with menus that included cooked crabs, medicinal plants, and even legumes.

Findings from multiple peer-reviewed studies, including a seminal paper published in Nature, reveal significant regional variation in Neanderthal diets across Europe. In northern sites like Spy Cave in Belgium, stable isotope analysis confirms a meat-heavy intake — primarily woolly rhinoceros and wild sheep. But in Spain’s El Sidrón cave, researchers found almost no trace of meat. Instead, genetic sequencing of calcified dental plaque uncovered remnants of mushrooms, pine nuts, moss, and tree bark.

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Ancient Genomes

An international team of geneticists, led by those from Trinity College Dublin, has joined forces with archaeologists from Bournemouth University to decipher the structure of British Iron Age society, finding evidence of female political and social empowerment.

The researchers seized upon a rare opportunity to sequence DNA from many members of a single community. They retrieved over 50 ancient genomes from a set of burial grounds in Dorset, southern England, in use before and after the Roman Conquest of AD 43. The results revealed that this community was centered around bonds of female-line descent.

Dr. Lara Cassidy, Assistant Professor in Trinity's Department of Genetics, led the study that has been published in Nature.     READ MORE...

Quantum Mechanics in Ultra Cold

There's a hot new BEC in town that has nothing to do with bacon, egg, and cheese. You won't find it at your local bodega, but in the coldest place in New York: the lab of Columbia physicist Sebastian Will, whose experimental group specializes in pushing atoms and molecules to temperatures just fractions of a degree above absolute zero.


Writing in Nature, the Will lab, supported by theoretical collaborator Tijs Karman at Radboud University in the Netherlands, has successfully created a unique quantum state of matter called a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) out of molecules.

Their BEC, cooled to just five nanoKelvin, or about -459.66°F, and stable for a strikingly long two seconds, is made from sodium-cesium molecules. Like water molecules, these molecules are polar, meaning they carry both a positive and a negative charge. 

The imbalanced distribution of electric charge facilitates the long-range interactions that make for the most interesting physics, noted Will.     READ MORE...

An "Intelligent" Liquid

Harvard researchers have created a versatile programmable metafluid that can change its properties, including viscosity and optical transparency, in response to pressure. This new class of fluid has potential applications in robotics, optical devices, and energy dissipation, showcasing a significant breakthrough in metamaterial technology. (Artist’s concept). Credit: SciTechDaily.com

Scientists have developed a metafluid with programmable response.

Scientists at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a programmable metafluid with tunable springiness, optical properties, viscosity and even the ability to transition between a Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid.

The first-of-its-kind metafluid uses a suspension of small, elastomer spheres — between 50 to 500 microns — that buckle under pressure, radically changing the characteristics of the fluid. The metafluid could be used in everything from hydraulic actuators to program robots, to intelligent shock absorbers that can dissipate energy depending on the intensity of the impact, to optical devices that can transition from clear to opaque.

The research is published in Nature.     READ MORE...

Scientist Left Out Truth About Climate Change

A California scientist admitted that he "left out the full truth" about climate change, blaming it primarily on human causes, to get his study published in a prestigious science journal.

Patrick T. Brown, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and doctor of earth and climate sciences, admitted in an online article in The Free Press, a blog post and a series of social media posts that he distorted the findings of his studies to appeal to the editors at Nature and Science magazines, which are prestigious online science journals.

"And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society," Brown wrote in The Free Press.

Brown's study published in Nature on Aug. 30 stated that climate change affected extreme wildfire behavior like the devastating fires in California and Maui. The established scientist now admits that he "focused narrowly" only on the human influence of wildfires, instead of focusing broadly on the complexities of other "obviously relevant factors."

He blamed his angle on the pressure scientists face to get their studies published in prestigious articles and the need to create catchy abstracts that can be turned into headlines.

Brown said in The Free Press he is not "disowning" his paper by criticizing how he chose to approach the piece, but admitting it is less "useful than it could have been."

"You might be wondering at this point if I’m disowning my own paper. I’m not," Brown wrote. "On the contrary, I think it advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior. It’s just that the process of customizing the research for an eminent journal caused it to be less useful than it could have been."  READ MORE...

Brain Reading Devices Using Thoughts

A brain-computer interface translates the study participant’s brain signals into the speech and facial movements of an animated avatar. Credit: Noah Berger




Brain-reading implants enhanced using artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled two people with paralysis to communicate with unprecedented accuracy and speed.


In separate studies, both published on 23 August in Nature, two teams of researchers describe brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) that translate neural signals into text or words spoken by a synthetic voice. The BCIs can decode speech at 62 words per minute and 78 words per minute, respectively. 

Natural conversation happens at around 160 words per minute, but the new technologies are both faster than any previous attempts.

“It is now possible to imagine a future where we can restore fluid conversation to someone with paralysis, enabling them to freely say whatever they want to say with an accuracy high enough to be understood reliably,” said Francis Willett, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California who co-authored one of the papers, in a press conference on 22 August.  READ MORE...

Diamonds Making Their Way to the Surface

"A diamond is forever." That iconic slogan, coined for a highly successful advertising campaign in the 1940s, sold the gemstones as a symbol of eternal commitment and unity.

But our new research, carried out by researchers in a variety of countries and published in Nature, suggests that diamonds may be a sign of break up too – of Earth's tectonic plates, that is. It may even provide clues to where is best to go looking for them.


Diamonds, being the hardest naturally-occurring stones, require intense pressures and temperatures to form. These conditions are only achieved deep within the Earth. So how do they get from deep within the Earth, up to the surface?


Diamonds are carried up in molten rocks, or magmas, called kimberlites. Until now, we didn't know what process caused kimberlites to suddenly shoot through the Earth's crust having spent millions, or even billions, of years stowed away under the continents.

Supercontinent cycles

Most geologists agree that the explosive eruptions that unleash diamonds happen in sync with the supercontinent cycle: a recurring pattern of landmass formation and fragmentation that has defined billions of years of Earth's history.


However, the exact mechanisms underlying this relationship are debated. Two main theories have emerged.  READ MORE...