...In 2013, a team of anthropologists led by Lee Berger unearthed the remains of more than 20 small-bodied hominins (ancient relatives of humans), all 335,000 to 236,000 years old, from the Rising Star Cave System in South Africa. Excavations at Rising Star have sparked debate about whether these little hominins had all ended up in the caves by tragic accident, or whether they’d been carefully placed there by other members of their enigmatic species, dubbed Homo naledi.

Now there’s a plot twist that may speak to how the remains got there: All of the hominins in Rising Star are female, at least according to the proteins in their dental enamel...

There’s an ongoing debate about Neanderthal art and abstract thought despite a growing pile of evidence. And that sort of debate rises in intensity when the early hominins in question have brains as relatively small as Homo naledi’s, which is about the size of a chimpanzee’s.

“There is a divide in the field between those that think that humans evolved from cultural species that were before us, and those that believe that culture originated with modern humans,” says Hawks, “so they resist any claims of culture earlier unless they have some sort of extraordinary evidence.”...

“This is our first contact with a—and I think it’s important to repeat this—a non-human species. Their brains are not human brains,” says Berger. And he’s deeply concerned about how humanity navigates that first contact.

...no other hominin species, meaning none of the Australopithecines and not even Homo erectus, have presented us with such clear evidence that they tended to their dead and etched art or symbols on the cave walls nearby. In other words, Homo naledi might have thought and felt in ways that we have to recognize as on a level with our own cognition...

...He hopes the protein study will prompt anthropologists and Homo sapiens in general to seriously think about the ethics of digging up the graves of an intelligent and cultured but non-human species.

“It certainly will mean we have to stop digging hominins like dinosaurs,”...

...The discovery expands how motors and actuation systems can be designed. Most electromagnetic motors today depend on magnets and copper coils. This new approach can create motion without magnets or rare earth metals, which could be valuable in a world where material resources are limited.

The design could also be lighter and simpler. Since the rotating component can be made from resin instead of metal, devices may become lighter and faster to respond. That could help in robotics, compact machines, and precision systems.

Because the motor does not depend on magnetic fields, it may also work well in places where magnetic noise causes problems, including medical equipment and data storage devices...

The discovery of all five nucleobases on Ryugu strengthens the idea that life’s molecular ingredients formed in space before reaching Earth.

A new study reports that samples from the asteroid Ryugu contain all five fundamental nucleobases, the molecular “letters” of life.

Tiny asteroid grains can preserve chemical clues about the ingredients that may have helped life emerge on Earth. The Ryugu material was returned from space in 2020 by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Hayabusa2 mission.

In 2023, an international research team reported finding uracil, one of the nucleobases, in the Ryugu samples. Now, a study published on March 16, 2026, in Nature Astronomy by Japanese scientists has confirmed that all five nucleobases are present in the pristine asteroid material.

The finding suggests that these life related ingredients may have been common across the young Solar System...

On a flat dry lakebed in Death Valley National Park, heavy rocks sit at the end of long grooves they have plowed across the mud. The trails run for tens of meters, some bending in sharp turns or doubling back, yet no one had ever watched a rock actually move. For more than sixty years the question of how they travel sat unanswered, the subject of guesses that ranged from hurricane-strength winds to floating sheets of ice.

In 2014 a research team published the first direct scientific observation of the rocks in motion, and the mechanism turned out to be far gentler than the leading theories. The stones glide when a thin sheet of ice, only three to six millimeters thick, covers a shallow winter pond, starts to melt in the late morning sun, and breaks into floating panels that a light wind nudges across the water. The ice shoves the rocks along at a walking pace of a few meters per minute...

Malaysian scientists have discovered a new species of parasitic fungus in Borneo's jungles that preys on "zombie fungi" known to infect insects before subjecting them to a gruesome death...

The Lebanese Armed Forces on Monday urged people displaced from the south of the country by Israeli military operations there not to return to their homes and await further instructions, following Sunday's announcement of a memorandum of understanding that could bring an end to the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

"In light of recent developments in the region and with news circulating about reaching a ceasefire, the Army Command emphasizes the need for residents to postpone their return to the southern border villages and towns, and to adhere to the instructions of the deployed military units, in order to protect their safety from the danger of Israeli violations and attacks,"...

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz on Monday said that the Israel Defense Forces will not withdraw from areas it has seized in southern Lebanon, Syria and the Gaza Strip regardless of a deal with Iran.

Qcells has begun manufacturing solar cells at its new facility in Cartersville, Georgia, bringing the company closer to operating what it says is the United States’ first and only fully vertically integrated solar manufacturing factory.

The company announced that the plant is now producing solar cells and expects all production lines to reach full capacity by the third quarter of 2026. Once fully operational, the facility will manufacture ingots, wafers, cells, and solar modules under one roof.

The start of cell production marks a significant milestone for domestic solar manufacturing, as most solar panels installed in the US still rely on imported components. Qcells said the Cartersville site will become the largest operating solar cell factory in US history...

Images from EarthCam showed numbers on the lawn since at least Wednesday afternoon, with the number eight appearing most clearly as browned grass. It's not clear what caused the grass to brown.

A little over a year ago, Sen. Tim Sheehy floated an audacious proposal to reshape the way the federal government fights wildfires. It called for expanding the use of private planes and helicopters to quickly attack blazes while also eliminating the U.S. Forest Service’s rigorous airworthiness inspections for those aircraft.

The idea stood to benefit Sheehy, a Montana Republican, personally. Before running for Congress, he founded and ran an aerial firefighting company called Bridger Aerospace, which is known for its scoopers, aircraft built to retrieve water from lakes or oceans and drop it onto fires. Since 2021, the Forest Service has paid Bridger more than $235 million for use of its scoopers, according to public records.

Sheehy’s ownership of Bridger is well known, but what hasn’t been reported is that the same month the proposal leaked, a Forest Service inspector had discovered a crack in a wing of an aircraft Bridger had presented as ready for service. The scooper had failed the very inspection Sheehy sought to eliminate...

“Very seldom do you find a crack in a major component,” said Paul Markowitz, a former national aviation maintenance manager for the Forest Service. Detecting such problems is the reason the Forest Service operates an airworthiness program, he added: “It’s to keep people alive.”...

...“Why can’t we be inspecting ourselves?”...

Since 2010, when the Forest Service implemented its current airworthiness program, the accident rate for aircraft it owns or contracts has plummeted. Between 1993 and 2010, it reported 85 accidents that killed 63 people — an average of nearly four deaths per year. Between 2011 and 2023, the last year for which data is available, the agency reported just 17 accidents and seven fatalities...

...In January 2024, Bridger presented its first scooper as ready for service, only to have a Forest Service inspector find issues with the engine and electronics...

In early April 2025, Bridger presented two scoopers for carding, saying they were ready for service. During one of these assessments, a Forest Service inspector found a crack in a wing...

Former Biden administration official Shuwanza Goff is joining Paramount Skydance as VP of U.S. government affairs...

Goff will be tasked with helping shape the company’s public policy and government affairs strategy, including engagement with federal and state policymakers and industry partners. She was previously a partner and chief strategy officer at lobbying firm Empire Consulting Group.

Goff served as the director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs from 2023 to 2025 in the Biden administration. In that role, she drove the White House’s policy agenda and was the steward of key bipartisan relationships on Capitol Hill...

...New research examines the issue. It's titled "The Life and Death of Stars That Capture Primordial Black Holes," and it's available at arxiv.org...

...When a star captures a PBH, the PBH finds its way to the stellar core. Once there, it accretes material from the star's interior, having a dramatic effect on the star's evolution. "The resulting object, a “Hawking star”...

There are two diverging paths post engulfment, and both are terminal...

It's all about disk formation, which is governed largely by angular momentum. Above a certain threshold, accretion is rapid, and powerful feedback destroys the star. If accretion is slow and steady, the Hawking star can survive...

The quiet terminal branch potentially produces gravitational waves (GWs). While the explosive branch leaves behind a low-mass, rapidly spinning BH..."Any future GW detection of a compact binary containing a subsolar or otherwise anomalous low-mass BH would be a striking signature of nonstandard compact-object formation."

The remnants from both branches are valuable probes of PBH. "Their rates, environments, and electromagnetic signatures could constrain the PBH contribution to dark matter," write the authors...

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has verified the core plasma physics assumptions for its upcoming ARC fusion power plant following a peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Plasma Physics.

The research confirms the ARC reactor design aligns with known physics, allowing the company to shift its focus toward detailed hardware engineering...

According to the validated models, the ARC plant will produce approximately 1.1 gigawatts (GW) of fusion power to generate 400 megawatts (MW) of net electricity for the grid...

CFS engineers are using this simulation framework to optimize upcoming design iterations, adjusting dimensions like tokamak width and divertor length to refine reactor performance before manufacturing begins.