Isaac Schultz

A hunk of rock found on the South African coast may be the oldest human artwork representing another animal, according to a team of researchers that examined the stone. The aeolianite rock was found east of Still Bay, about 205 miles (330 kilometers) from Cape Town. Based on its symmetry and the grooves on its surface, the researchers posit that the rock may be a human-made representation of a blue stingray (D. chrysonota), which is native to the area. The team’s cautious conclusion was publish…

NASA and its international partners have big plans when it comes to the Moon—plans that will require the careful synching of Earth-based clocks with those on the Moon. The White House wants NASA to develop a solution to support the Artemis program, but to also maintain the United States’ leading position in the global space race. The plan, first reported by Reuters, is for the U.S. space agency to develop Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) by the end of 2026. Coordinating time systems on Earth is a r…

Abandon all hope, ye who enter the waters off Cyprus. A team of researchers report that the giant water bug L. patruelis has arrived in the country, sparking concerns that the creature has an established presence on the island. The bug has never been recorded in Cyprus before, though it inhabits nearby continental countries like Greece, Turkey, and Israel. Now, a team of researchers report seven sightings of the insect, primarily on Cyprus’ eastern coast. Research describing the evidence that t…

Researchers working on data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory buried deep in Antarctic ice think they may have spotted tau neutrinos, a certain flavor of the subatomic particles from space. The seven candidate signals appeared in 9.7 years of observatory data, a testament to just how elusive these little particles are. About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second, according to the observatory. They are the lightest particles we know of that have mass, and are fundamenta…

Each year, photographers across Britain—and, unknowingly, Britain’s wildlife— vie for the attention of the British Wildlife Photography Awards, a competition celebrating the Britain’s biodiversity. Only a handful of the 14,000-odd photos could be selected as honorees, with the grand prize winner taking home over $6,000. The photographs were submitted to 10 different categories: Animal Behaviour, Animal Portraits, Botanical Britain, Black & White, British Seasons, Coast & Marine, Habitat, Hidden…

Colossal Biosciences, which calls itself “the world’s first de-extinction company,” has created stem cells it thinks will hasten the company’s marquee goal of resurrecting the woolly mammoth. The team’s research describing the accomplishment will be hosted on the preprint server bioRxiv. The cells are induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), a type of cell that can be reprogrammed to develop into any other type of cell. The cells are especially useful in bioengineering, for their applications in…

World Wildlife Day was March 3, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare celebrated the event with its annual International Youth Art Contest. Now, the winning artworks have been selected from a group of 15 semi-finalists. These selections were made from over 3,000 entries submitted from 141 countries and sovereign areas. The theme of this year’s competition was “Connecting People and Planet: Exploring Digital Innovation in Wildlife Conservation,” and subjects of the entries featured specie…

If you want to stay grounded—which is to say, you want a haunting reminder of your own diminutive size and mortality—do I have the tool for you. Meet Galactic Compass: an app which will point the user towards the whopping black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*. As you read this article, you are hurtling through space on a spinning, wobbling sphere, which is itself spinning around a hot ball of gas at the center of our solar system. But if you zoom much, much farther out, our so…

Despite keeping us grounded and warping light that travels through space, gravity is actually quite a weak force. The smaller the mass, the less gravity appears to have any pull, until at quantum scales it appears to have no force at all. Now, physicists in England and Europe have measured a tiny—but apparent—gravitational pull on a minuscule mass, making it the smallest mass to yet show the signs of gravity, a force that has perplexed physicists for centuries. The team’s research is published…

Our Sun is about 330,000 times the mass of Earth, yet it is dwarfed by the black holes that lurk at the centers of galaxies. A team of astronomers recently found the fastest-growing of this group: a 17-billion solar mass black hole in the distant universe, which is growing at the rate of one solar mass per day. The black hole is actually a quasar, aka an actively feeding black hole at the center of a galaxy. When quasars accrete matter—which is to say, as their strong gravitational fields pull…