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From Viking sailors to New Age spiritualists, people have always been slightly obsessed with crystals, and it turns out that chimpanzees are no different. Observing our simian cousins go absolutely bananas over these shiny minerals, researchers believe they may now be able to explain the magpie-like behaviors of prehistoric humans who lived around 800,000 years ago. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. It’s at this point [...]

On a remote, volcanic Brazilian island, sea turtles gather and lay their eggs. However, a new study has found a worrying trend emerging in this quiet corner of the South Atlantic: nesting sites are becoming riddled with “plastic rocks”. Back in 2019, scientists came across a collection of blue-ish, green rocks on Trindade Island, around 1,140 kilometers (708 miles) off the coast of Brazil’s southeastern state of Espírito Santo. To their shock, chemical analysis of the material [...]

The concentrations of lead and other toxic elements exceed FAO limits for children and could pose long term health issues.

Take a closer look at a museum collection and you never know what might be hiding in the cabinets. For a group of researchers in Brazil it looked like one of their spider specimens was wearing a belt or a necklace of pearls – however, the truth is much, much more gross than that. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. At the Zoological Collections Laboratory of the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, researchers found [...]

Proponents of the Rubin Observatory promised that its wide field of view (9.6 square degrees) and 3.2-gigapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera would transform the search for objects moving through the Solar System. The most obvious practical application was to spot any that might threaten Earth. More recently, the excitement around comet 3I/ATLAS has turned the focus to the interstellar visitors it will spot. Even objects that fit neither of those categories can be [...]

The pursuit of becoming a world-first fossil is one of dogged determination. The majority of life on Earth doesn’t get preserved, so you’ve got to die just right, bathed in just the right conditions. For one filter-feeding pterosaur, that meant spending an eternity encased in vomit. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Yes, for the first time ever, an extinct species has been described locked inside a [...]

A new site in one of the most important basins for humanity’s evolution has provided evidence of occupation over an unprecedented period. Across 300,000 years, the toolmakers maintained a similar style in the face of a harsh and changing climate, in contrast to places occupied much more briefly. Millions of years ago, the Turkana Basin in northern Kenya was a center of innovation for our ancestors, or possibly one of the related species known to have lived alongside them. A new [...]

Venus probably shares its orbit with numerous asteroids with unstable orbits, and these could represent one of the most unpredictable threats to Earth from space. We’ve only found a few of these objects, but a new study notes that given how hard it is to find them, the sample we have indicates there must be many more. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Recent decades have seen a flood of discoveries of potentially [...]

In what is being hailed as a “groundbreaking achievement” for Uruguay and South America, a weight loss drug has successfully completed its Phase I human trials. The drug is the first to have been completely developed in the country, and operates by burning calories by generating creatine-based heat without impacting patients’ appetites. The drug is showing promising results as a treatment for obesity and type 2 diabetes. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please [...]