Moon-bound
NASA’s going back to the moon. President Trump signed a directive last year which ordered the agency to make plans for a lunar return, and today the agency took another step on that journey by announcing a slew of commercial partnerships aimed at getting payloads off the ground and moon-bound.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced the nine companies that will be the first to participate in the agency’s new Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

The pr …

Astrophysicists estimate that our universe formed about 13.7 billion years ago, with the first stars forming when the universe was just a few hundred million years old. By peering back at the earliest days of stellar creation, scientists in South Carolina have measured all of the starlight ever produced throughout the entire history of the observable universe.

Scientists have been working to obtain this measure, also known as extragalactic background light (EBL) or “cosmic fog,” for a …

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile has been up and running since 2011. However, its initial incarnation involved only about one-third of the array’s total planned 66 antennas and only a few of its 10 receivers, each capable of observing a different band of radio wavelengths. Over time, the array has taken strides toward full operation; today, all antennas are functional and ALMA has now added its highest-frequency observing band — Band 10 — to the mix.
Spotting …

As humans spread across the planet, high-altitude places like the Tibetan Plateau were some of the last regions to be inhabited. Now archaeologists have discovered a cache of ancient stone blades in northern Tibet from at least 30,000 years ago. The find is the earliest evidence for people living at high altitude and means humans were living in the harsh conditions of the miles-high Tibetan Plateau much earlier than previously thought.

“We did not expect to find such early evidence o …

Got milk? Of course you do; few things are as uniquely mammalian as our milky infancies. Sure, we’ve all got backbones (but so do lizards), warm blood (but so do birds), and hair (but so do plants) – but it’s the mammary glands from which mothers nurse their young that really set us mammals apart from the rest of the Tree of Life.

That’s why it was a little shocking when researchers announced today that another species was found to provide milk to its young. The newest member of  …

Stone tools and animal bones with cut marks, excavated at a site in eastern Algeria, are up to 2.4 million years old, the oldest archaeological evidence in North Africa and one of the oldest known examples of butchery. The finds suggest hominins, members of the human family tree, were living in the region almost half a million years earlier than previously thought.

Paleoanthropologists had long believed that tool use among hominins began in East Africa. The oldest stone tools, 3.3 million …

If you think dating culture only applies to humans, think again.

A team of researchers recently discovered that female fruit flies take their mating preferences from their peers. When presented with a few differently-colored suitors, the flies were more likely to choose the color they’d seen other flies select before them. This kind of conformity suggests that the fruit flies are passing behaviors among themselves socially — what we humans call culture.

These traditions persisted a …

One of the great mysteries in marine research is how whales developed baleen, the unique array of plates and bristles that allow them to filter thousands of pounds of krill and plankton every day.

Because baleen whales’ ancestors had teeth, it was thought that some ancient whales began to filter feed using their teeth like a sieve. Over time, the filtering behavior would have caused whales to evolve baleen to fill in the gaps of their teeth before replacing them entirely. Another theory …

Hundreds of stone tools and related materials, found in central Saudi Arabia, reveal new information about early migrations of archaic humans into Southwest Asia. The discovery suggests multiple waves of tool-makers may have passed through the region, at least some by following waterways now lost to the desert.

Saffaqah, an archaeological site in the heart of the Arabian Desert, is not new to science. It was first studied in the 1980s, when researchers found more than 8,000 artifact …

Space Bacteria
Wherever humans go, our bacterial companions will follow. That’s as true in space as it is on Earth, and while we’ve known that microbial astronauts are present on the International Space Station, one group of researchers has just found a new reason to worry about them.

A genomic analysis of samples collected from the space toilet aboard the station, among other places, has revealed that some of the bacteria on the ISS possess genes conferring resistance to antibiotics. Ther …