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Explanation: Sunlit arms of a crescent moon seem to embrace the faint lunar night side in this dramatic celestial view from planet Earth. The single telephoto exposure tracking the sky was captured on the night of April 19, when a two day old Moon was near perigee in its elliptical orbit. On that date, the young Moon was also close on the sky to the lovely Pleiades Star Cluster. With the moonlight dimmed by clouds the Pleiades sister stars gather below the Moon's bright crescent, seen through a faint but colorful lunar corona. The lunar night side is illuminated by...

Deep-diving robots help crack the mystery of Antarctica’s vanishing sea ice Something strange has been swirling in the waters around Antarctica. From the 1970s until a decade ago, the floating sea ice that radiates from the continent had been expanding, even with climate change already in full swing. Then, in 2016, it suddenly and dramatically contracted — and has yet to recover — as rising global temperatures seemed to catch up with the Southern Ocean. Far from being just a local issue, the loss of sea ice has huge implications for Antarctica’s vast ice sheet, which would drive sea levels...

Tod Cutler investigates a medieval hack for increasing arrow distance during archery. Using a calibrated crossbow to ensure repeatable test conditions, the experiment examines how removing bindings and altering fletchings impacts the flight performance of arrows compared to standard configurations. Archers Hack Could Have Revealed Archery's BIGGEST LIE!!! | 13:35 Tod's Workshop | 571K subscribers | 504,113 views | April 17, 2026

Ibiza became part of the Islamic world in the year 902, when it was conquered by the Umayyad Emirate of Córdoba. Settlement followed rapidly, taking place within little more than a generation, and by the twelfth century the island had developed into a modest but active urban centre within al-Andalus.Positioned along key maritime routes, Ibiza was not an isolated outpost but part of a dynamic network linking Iberia, North Africa, and the wider Mediterranean. This broader context helps explain the striking diversity uncovered in the new study, published in Nature Communications.The research team analysed 13 individuals buried between the tenth...

New examination of artifacts recovered from a tomb discovered in 1927 near the Etruscan site of Bisenzio suggests that luxury materials from the western Mediterranean were traded in the interior of the Italian peninsula, according to a report in La Brújula Verde. Located in central Italy's necropolis of Olmo Bello, the rectangular stone cist contained cremated remains, weapons, and ceramics dated to between 750 and 725 B.C. Andrea Babbi of Italy's Institute of Heritage Science said that one of these artifacts, a bronze brooch, had been wrapped with a thin, ornamental silver wire shaped by a series of grooved rollers....

It was more than it was Kraken-ed up to be. An octopus the size of the Hollywood Sign might seem like a monster from Greek mythology. However, new fossil evidence reveals that massive “kraken”-like cephalopods ruled the seas during the Cretaceous period, possibly preying on massive sea reptiles and other so-called apex predators, per a study published Thursday in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This massive mollusk “had among the largest body sizes of all organisms in the Cretaceous oceans,” wrote the researchers, who hailed from Hokkaido University. Indeed, at 62-feet-long, this colossal octopus could grow up...

According to a Greek Reporter article, a collection of Bronze Age jewelry was discovered in northern Germany during the construction of a wind farm. The cache was lifted with surrounding soil from the site for excavation under laboratory conditions by researchers from the Lower Saxony State Office for Monument Preservation. The 3,000-year-old neck collars, arm spirals, sheet metal ornaments, and disc pins are thought to have belonged to at least three women. One necklace was made with more than 150 amber beads. The valuable deposit, which is known as the Ahlum Hoard, is thought to have been buried by local...

On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, Ukraine, exploded—a combination of poor reactor design and serious mismanagement had caused the worst nuclear disaster in human history. Fast forward 40 years, and things have changed. While the horrific death, illness, and environmental degradation caused by the meltdown will never be completely forgotten, the area surrounding Chernobyl has come to provide a rare scientific opportunity. Today, it is a living laboratory for scientists exploring questions (many of them genetic) regarding long-term exposure to high levels of radiation. Frogs, for example, have adapted darker skin colors to protect against radiation....

Explanation: This is a map of the universe. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at Kitt Peak National Observatory, Arizona, has finished its five-year survey. It observed more than 47 million galaxies and quasars and created a 3D map centered on the Earth. Today's featured image shows a thin slice of these data: the black gaps indicate where our Galaxy obscures distant objects. The feathery web in the inset shows the large scale structure of the universe. Light of the most distant galaxies shown here travelled for 11 billion years to reach the Earth. Galaxies cluster throughout cosmic history under...

According to a statement released by the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies, genetic material from Streptococcus pyogenes, the bacterium that causes throat infections, scarlet fever, and toxic shock syndrome, has been detected in a 700-year-old tooth in the collection of Bolivia's National Museum of Archaeology. It had been previously thought that the bacterium arrived in South America with Europeans. "We weren't looking for this pathogen specifically," said Frank Maizner of the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies. The tooth came from the skull of a young man who lived between A.D. 1100 and 1450 in the arid Bolivian highlands....

Some people reach their 80s with memories sharper than many 50-year-olds. Scientists now think they know why: Their brains never stopped growing new cells. Scientists studying a rare group of older people known as superagers—those aged 80 and over whose memory rivals someone 30 years younger—have found that their brains produce new neurons at twice the rate of typical older adults. “For most of the last century, the prevailing belief was that brain cells only die as you age—you were born with what you had, and that was that,” Jordan Weiss, professor at the Optimal Aging Institute at NYU Grossman...

The state of “current” affairs is not good. An Atlantic current that’s key for maintaining the climate could collapse sooner than we thought, potentially bringing about a global weather apocalypse, per an alarming study in the journal Science Advances. “This is a key result with implications for the future climate of the Atlantic and beyond,” the international team of researchers wrote in the paper. The at-risk current in question is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a “conveyor belt of the ocean” that circulates warm water toward the ocean surface from the tropics to the Northern Hemisphere. This oceanic...

With all the excitement over sending scientists back to the moon, it’s easy to forget we’ve already got a pair of talented chemists on Mars: the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. Although they beam back plenty of breathtaking images, these two robots are more than just cameras on wheels. Their primary mission is to search for signs of ancient life, and they’re equipped with a suite of onboard scientific instruments and chemical reagents to carry that mission out. Now, new research published in Nature Communications details Curiosity’s latest find—never-before-seen organic compounds, including one with a structure similar to DNA precursors. “We...

The excavation of the Via Alessandrina, along the Via dei Fori Imperiali, continues. We can look together at some stunning results in April 2026 as the dig has arrived at the pavement level of the Forum of Augustus. It's an exciting moment, and Darius walks you through the newly revealed monuments. Excavating the Forum of Augustus: Under Via Alessandrina | 8:43 Darius Arya Digs | 37.5K subscribers | 2,892 views | April 22, 2026

Explanation: What does it mean for the Earth to set? Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman gave us another spectacular view of Earth from their historic flyby of the Moon. Commander Wiseman's video, taken with an iPhone at 8x zoom, shows our entire planet gradually blocked from view by the Moon. On the Earth, the 24-hour planetary rotation causes the Sun to set below your horizon every night. However, on Artemis II the Earthset was caused not by the Moon’s rotation but by the spacecraft moving behind the Moon (at about 55 seconds in this video). Once rare, views of Earth...

We’ve discussed many times the fact that humans and Neanderthals are so similar that Neanderthals provide no evidence we are closely related to some type of primitive non-human hominid. Now, a new pre-publication paper reviewed by New Scientist provides more evidence for this, proposing the radical hypothesis that Neanderthals are not only closely related to humans — they are descended from us!Michael Marshall asks, “Are Neanderthals descendants of modern humans?” He writes:Among the many other human species that once inhabited Earth, the Neanderthals are the most famous. They lived until relatively recently and in many ways, they were like us.Just...

Türkiye Today reports that a 1,500-year-old set of four iron knives of varying sizes and a whetstone were discovered at the site of Hadrianopolis in Turkey's Black Sea region. Ersin Çelikbaş of Karabük University said that the knives and the sharpener were uncovered in the kitchen section of an area of the city known as the Bath Structure Complex. Although the knives were recovered in pieces, they have been restored and reassembled. The knives were likely used to process locally raised animals, Çelikbaş explained. Analysis of the whetstone revealed that it was sourced from a nearby quarry and shows that...

Analysis of charcoal found at the site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in northern Israel shows that early hominins used readily available tree species for firewood, according to a statement released by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For tens of thousands of years, hunter-gatherers repeatedly returned to Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, which was situated near a lake. Ethel Allué of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, Naama Goren-Inbar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an international team of scientists examined more than 250 pieces of charcoal from an occupation layer at the site dated to some 780,000 years...

According to an Ahram Online report, a Roman-era tomb has been discovered in Upper Egypt at the site of Al-Bahnasa -- the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus -- by a team of Egyptian and Spanish researchers including Maite Mascort and Esther Pons of the University of Barcelona. Several decorated, linen-wrapped mummies were found in the tomb in addition to wooden coffins. Three golden tongues, one copper tongue, and gold leaf were also uncovered alongside some of the mummified bodies. A papyrus buried with one of the individuals contains a passage from book 2 of Homer’s Iliad known as the Catalogue of...

Ancient Egyptian mummified remains in the collection of the MNMKK Semmelweis Museum of Medical History were examined with a CT scanner equipped with a photon-counting detector, according to a statement released by Semmelweis University. The remains in the study include two heads, two left lower limbs, a mummy bundle containing a foot, and a hand. The oldest artifacts in the collection are some 2,300 years old. The resulting images revealed the internal structure of the body parts, said team physician Ibolyka Dudás, providing a highly detailed view of abnormalities and preservation techniques used in antiquity. The new images of the...