Curiosity Rover Images Sun Rays and Feather-Shaped Clouds on Mars
‘Sun rays’ are also known as crepuscular rays, from the Latin word for twilight. It was the first time sun rays have been so clearly viewed on Mars. This feather-shaped…
Researchers Create Space Salad for Astronauts
The space salad contains ingredients — including soybean, poppy, barley, kale, peanuts, sweet potato and sunflower seeds — that could be grown on spacecraft and provide optimum nutrition for astronauts.…
DART Offers Insight into How Deflection Missions Can Protect Earth from Hazardous Asteroids
On September 26, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) intentionally slammed into the 160-m-wide asteroid moonlet Dimorphos — which orbits the larger, 780-m-wide asteroid Didymos — for the first…
Venus’ Outer Shell is Shaping Planet’s Surface, Study Suggests
Earth has a hot core that heats the surrounding mantle, which carries that heat up to the planet’s lithosphere. The heat is then lost to space, cooling the uppermost region…
3-Million-Year-Old Oldowan Tools and Cut-Marked Bones Unearthed in Kenya
Oldowan tools, consisting of stones with one to a few flakes removed, are the oldest widespread and temporally persistent hominin tools. The oldest of these were previously known from around…
Neanderthal Diet Included Crab Meat, Archaeologists Say
Archaeologists have unearthed a rich assemblage of human-accumulated terrestrial and marine faunal remains, including those of several crab species, in Gruta da Figueira Brava, a cave in Portugal that was…
Archaeologists Uncover Upper Paleolithic Proto-Writing System
In at least 400 European caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira, Upper Paleolithic humans drew, painted and engraved non-figurative signs from at least 42,000 years ago and figurative images…
15,700-Year-Old Projectile Points Found in Idaho
Archaeologists have unearthed an assemblage of 14 stemmed projectile points at the Cooper’s Ferry site, located on a terrace of the lower Salmon River of western Idaho, the United States.…
320,000-Year-Old Cutmarked Bones Provide Evidence for Exploitation of Bear Skins
Researchers from the University of Tübingen and elsewhere have unearthed the cutmarked bones of cave bears at the Middle Pleistocene site of Schöningen in Lower Saxony, Germany. Bear skins have…
Planetary Scientists Find Evidence for Active Mantle Plume on Mars
Elysium Planitia, a flat-smooth plain just north of the Martian equator, is underlain by an 4,000-km-diameter active mantle plume, according to new research by scientists from the Lunar and Planetary…