It's quick and easy to access Live Science Plus, simply enter your email below. We'll send you a confirmation and sign you up for our daily newsletter, keeping you up to date with the latest science news.
In this week's science news we covered some strange goings on throughout prehistory, a possible first dark matter detection, the first AI mass hacking event, and strange lights in the skies.
(Image credit: Getty Images | Dave Einsel/Stringer via Getty Images)
This study is a significant one for many reasons, not only showing differences in how offshoots of humanity’s family tree walked (with the Burtele foot being adapted for life in trees), but also having the potential to rewrite assumptions about who our ancestors really were.
A hominid-foot hop forward in time and over the ocean to the U.S.-Mexico border also brought us news of stunning rock art, starting 6,000 years ago and spanning roughly 175 generations, that depicts Indigenous Americans’ conception of the universe. On display are creation stories, complex calendars and human-like figures stretched to the length of giant dachshunds.
Dark matter is one of the universe's most mysterious components. It makes up 27% of our universe, with ordinary matter accounting for only 5%, but because it does not interact with light, it can't be detected directly.
Yet this week, a new study claimed to have spotted characteristic gamma-ray flashes that could be a smoking gun for the mysterious substance. The potential origin comes from hypothetical weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, which are 500 times heavier than protons and the prime candidates for dark matter.
Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now
Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.
Much more work is needed to rule out other explanations, so astronomers are responding to the claims with characteristic caution. But if they can finally unveil the mass-ter of disguise, it will offer a major boost for our best theory of the universe.
We know a handful of details about Neanderthals’ enigmatic lives — they buried their dead, kept animal skulls, made rock art and etched drawings onto bear bones. But do these proclivities for ritualistic practices, hinting at a spiritual side, mean our ancient relatives had religious beliefs?
The artificial intelligence lab Anthropic is known for its dramatic claims about its chatbot, Claude's capabilities. So when company representatives announced this month that their software had been hijacked by a Chinese state-sponsored espionage group to plan and execute a 90% autonomous cyber espionage attack on 30 worldwide organizations, we were a little skeptical.
Over 70 years ago and before humanity had launched the first satellite, astronomers captured several bizarre star-like flashes that appeared in the sky and vanished within an hour.
Now, as new researchers revisit the photographic plates that captured those mysterious images, Live Science contributor Sharmila Kuthunur wrote a fascinating story on their supposed correlation with Cold War nuclear weapons tests and UFO reports. Could the three phenomena be connected? Here’s how researchers are trying to find out.
Something for the weekend
If you're looking for something a little longer to read over the weekend, here are some of the best interviews, opinion pieces and science histories published this week.
A green fireball that exploded over Michigan’s Great Lakes was likely a fragment from a comet, and you can watch its 100,000 mph (160,000 km/h) descent through the atmosphere in eerie new footage captured by the Michigan Storm Chasers.
We’re still getting to the bottom of the comet this fragment could have split from, but its one-off occurrence suggests it wasn’t part of a wider shower.
Ben Turner is a U.K. based writer and editor at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
Live Science Plus
