Starch-Rich Plant Foods Played Central Role in Hominin Diet 780,000 Years Ago
Archaeologists say they have extracted a wide variety of starch grains from stone tools found at an early Middle Pleistocene site in Israel. These include acorns, grass grains, water chestnuts, yellow water lily rhizomes, and legume seeds. Examples of some of the plants recovered from Gesher Benot Ya’akov percussive tools, including the whole plant, the
New Species of Durophagous Mosasaur Unearthed in Morocco
The newly-discovered species belongs to the mosasaurid genus Carinodens, and was a durophage, adapted for crunching hard-shelled invertebrates. An artist’s impression of a mosasaur. Image credit: Nick Longrich. Carinodens is a extinct genus of Cretaceous mosasaurs known from around the world. These marine lizards measured 2-3 m in length and were unusual in having low
Unexpected Mechanism Explains Formation of Pluto-Charon System
Planetary scientists at the University of Arizona say they have discovered an entirely new type of cosmic collision. Pluto and Charon are the largest binary system in the known population of trans-Neptunian objects in the outer Solar System. Their shared external orbital axis suggests a linked evolutionary history and collisional origin. Their radii, 1,200 km and
Recently-Discovered Fast Radio Burst Emerged from Neutron Star’s Magnetosphere, Astronomers Say
New research provides the first conclusive evidence that a fast radio burst can originate from the magnetosphere, the highly magnetic environment immediately surrounding an extremely compact object. An artist’s impression of a neutron star. Image credit: Sci.News. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are brief and brilliant explosions of radio waves that originate mostly from extragalactic distances.
The Math Mystery That Connects Sudoku, Flight Schedules and Protein Folding
Sudoku fan? After diving into the math behind the game, test your skills with our very own puzzles in SciAm Games ! Computer science seemingly rides a curve of unstoppable progress. Mere decades took us from vacuum tubes to microchips, dial-up to high-speed Internet and Office Assistant Clippy to ChatGPT. Yet thousands of everyday problems
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