« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 03, 2025, 07:35:42 pm »
Nautilus Is the Drought in the Southwest Permanent? Syris Valentine Wed, December 3, 2025 at 5:50 AM EST 4 min read
Lead image: Lisa Parsons / Shutterstock
Reservoirs along the Colorado River—some of the most important stores of water in the nation—dwindle by the day, exposing sunken boats, dumped bodies, and barren soils. It’s just the latest phase in a drought that has crushed the Southwest over the last two and a half decades: the driest period the region has seen in 1,200 years. Even the lashing rains of the atmospheric rivers that have swept over the Southwest in recent winters have done little to alleviate the trend.
Drought, it seems, is here to stay for many more years. In fact, the current dry spell could last another two decades, according to a paper recently published in Nature. The results of their analysis, which relied on the data of over 500 climate simulations produced by world-leading research institutions, rewrite our understanding of one of the key climate systems controlling weather in the western United States.
The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, is a fluctuating pattern of warm and cool sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific that shapes rainfall trends on both sides of the ocean. Much like the related El Niño/Southern Oscillation, the PDO has historically shifted between so-called positive and negative phases, with rainfall increasing in the western U.S. when it’s positive and decreasing when it’s negative. Since the PDO was first described in the 1990s, scientists have assumed that any shifts in the index were dictated by natural variability in the climate cycle and wholly independent of global warming and humanity’s various pollutants.
The prevailing wisdom no longer made sense.
But this assumption makes it difficult to describe the climate pattern’s recent behavior. Since the late 1990s, save a few odd years, the PDO has been consistently negative, according to the data maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “And July was the most negative in recorded history,” said University of Colorado, Boulder climate scientist Jeremy Klavans, lead author of the recent paper.
Klavans and his colleagues wanted to tease apart what has been driving this negative trend since the prevailing wisdom no longer made sense. According to conventional explanations, random fluctuations should have swung the PDO positive by now—pushing ocean surface temperatures to a warmer than normal phase. Instead, aside from a few brief upticks, it has spent nearly 30 years “stuck” in negative territory, or colder than “normal.” “The only way to get stuck, if you think that the PDO is driven by natural phenomena, is to have really extreme luck,” he said. Maybe there's something else at play, he thought.
To identify what that might be, the team collected the data from 572 different simulations across 12 different, state-of-the-art climate models, then calculated the average PDO index over time across all the simulations. Although the climate models cover a super wide range of results, the average closely aligns with what has played out in reality which, Klavans said, “ is totally unexpected.” If the fluctuations in the PDO were totally natural like most have believed until now, that correlation shouldn’t exist. When these simulations were averaged together, natural variability canceled out, leaving only one common factor: carbon emissions and climate change.
The drought enduring for another two decades or more becomes the most likely possibility.
Klavans believes the findings show that human impacts on the climate are responsible for about half of all decade-to-decade variability in the PDO. This includes both the increase in greenhouse gases that have warmed the atmosphere and the decrease in aerosols—tiny particles of dust, smoke, salt, and sulfur often emitted by heavy industries—that have had a cooling effect, until recently. “If these two things continue to happen at the same time, aerosol abatement and greenhouse gas forcing, we would expect the PDO to keep going on its negative trend.”
“It's very well done work,” said climate scientist Young-Oh Kwon from the Wood Holes Oceanographic Institute, who was not involved in the research. “It's definitely changing our view on what the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is.” Scientists can no longer just consider the PDO and related patterns like the El Niño or the North Atlantic Oscillation to be purely natural phenomena, as they have for decades; they have to reckon with the pronounced influence that human emissions have on these regional climate patterns and how that, in turn, shapes the range of possible climate futures that people can expect to experience.
This new view allows for better clarity on what the future holds for the western United States. Under classic assumptions, rainfall projections varied wildly for the region. Some predicted the drought would break; others suggest it will deepen. But when models are tweaked to fall in line with Klavans’ findings, the sensitivity of the PDO to climate change increases and the range of rainfall projections narrow. The drought enduring for another two decades or more becomes the most likely possibility. And while that outlook is far from heartening, the results ultimately give policymakers and water resource managers the ability to better plan for what the future holds.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 03, 2025, 07:19:37 pm »
Live Science James Webb telescope spots strange 'super-puff' planet frantically chasing its own atmosphere through space Elizabeth Howell Wed, December 3, 2025 at 5:00 AM EST
An illustration of exoplanet WASP-107b. The planet's escaping hydrogen atmosphere measures five time the radius of the planet itself, new JWST observations hint. | Credit: University of Geneva/NCCR PlanetS/Thibaut Roger
A "super-puff" exoplanet is leaking a lot of helium into space, new observations show — and may be in the process of losing a lot of its atmosphere.
A large plume of helium gas was spotted evaporating from the giant planet, known as WASP-107b, according to research based on observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
The results, published Monday (Dec. 1) in the journal Nature Astronomy, show that the gas spanned an area nearly five times the diameter of the planet and that the gas was visible speeding far ahead of the planet along WASP-107b's orbital path.
The research represents the first time JWST has "captured helium escape from this planet," lead author Vigneshwaran Krishnamurthy, a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University's Trottier Space Institute in Montreal, said in a statement.
The discovery could help researchers better understand how exoplanet atmospheres behave, especially in extreme star systems like WASP-107, where WASP-107b resides, the team said.
Planet puff-ball
WASP-107b was discovered in 2017 near a star about 210 light-years from Earth. (For comparison, the closest planets to us are about 4 light-years away.) WASP-107b is almost the same size as Jupiter, at 94% of the gas giant's diameter, but its mass is just 12% that of Jupiter. This extremely low density and large size place WASP-107b in the "super-puff" category of exoplanets.
Aside from its unusual density, WASP-107b is in an interesting spot: It is seven times closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun. In Earth's neighborhood, by contrast, rocky planets are closer to the sun and gas giants like Jupiter are farther away. That means scientists must come up with models to explain that difference.
They think WASP-107b, like Jupiter and Saturn, formed much farther from its star but something in the system — possibly another planet — forced WASP-107b to migrate closer to its star over time.
"WASP-107c, much farther out than WASP-107b, could have played a role in this migration," study co-author Caroline Piaulet-Ghorayeb, an exoplanet researcher now at the University of Chicago who completed her Ph.D. at the University of Montreal in 2024, said in the statement.
Another illustration of WASP-107b whipping past its star. | Credit: Angel P. Geego
Once the planet got close enough to its star, the extreme heat of its new orbit began gutting the exoplanet's gassy atmosphere, the researchers explained. The new JWST observations confirmed the extent of the damage: The powerful telescope spotted the helium cloud of the exoplanet's atmosphere passing in front of the system's parent star about 1.5 hours before WASP-107b itself.
The researchers spotted several elements in WASP-107b's atmosphere that reveal more clues about the planet's complicated history. For example, there was more oxygen in the planet's atmosphere than would be predicted if it had formed close to its star, which provides more evidence that its migration was relatively recent.
JWST also found water in the planet's atmosphere — confirming previous observations from the Hubble Space Telescope — alongside traces of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and ammonia. But methane, which was predicted to be part of the planet's atmosphere due to its chemistry, was curiously absent.
Because JWST's instruments are sensitive enough to detect methane from afar, the researchers suggest other gases poor in methane must have instead been drawn up from deep in the planet's atmosphere due to "vigorous vertical mixing" driven by the heat of the star, Piaulet-Ghorayeb added.
While planets like Earth also have some atmospheric loss, it is not this extreme. Studying worlds like WASP-107b could help us understand how atmospheric escape works on planets like Venus, which lost water over the eons, the research team said in a statement from the University of Geneva
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 03, 2025, 07:12:43 pm »
Reuters China's LandSpace fails to complete reusable rocket test By Eduardo Baptista and Joey Roulette Wed, December 3, 2025 at 3:20 AM EST 4 min read
Zhuque-3 rocket by China's private rocket firm LandSpace, takes off at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China, December 3, 2025, in this handout picture provided by LandSpace. LandSpace/Handout via REUTERS
BEIJING/WASHINGTON, Dec 3 (Reuters) - The maiden test of LandSpace's next-generation Zhuque-3 rocket ended in failure on Wednesday, dashing the Chinese firm's hopes of becoming the third company after Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to successfully test a reusable spacecraft.
The rocket was not able to complete a controlled landing following an initial launch, state news agency Xinhua reported.
"An abnormal combustion event occurred during the process, preventing a soft landing on the recovery pad," Xinhua said. "The recovery test failed and the specific cause is still under further analysis and investigation."
Zhuque-3's failed landing attempt highlights the difficulty of developing a rocket that can be recovered and reused after being launched into orbit. LandSpace said in a statement that it would use data collected during the flight to optimize its rocket recovery.
China's first domestically developed reusable orbital rocket, if successfully brought to market, would accelerate Beijing's growth in space, allowing for a quicker cadence of missions and lower launch costs as the country pushes to deploy large satellite constellations to rival SpaceX's Starlink.
"As low-orbit constellation deployment accelerates, Zhuque-3 will continue to ... progress from recovery demonstrations to routine reuse and toward airline-style operational cadence, contributing to China’s space-power objectives," LandSpace said.
CHASING SPACEX
SpaceX pioneered commercial rocket reusability about a decade ago with its workhorse Falcon 9, disrupting an established U.S. launch industry that relied primarily on expendable boosters that are discarded in the ocean or remain in space after their mission.
The reusable Falcon 9 core stage allowed SpaceX to start launching its Starlink satellites in 2019 far faster than its rivals, becoming the world's largest operator the following year and disrupting the global satellite communications industry.
In October, Musk praised Zhuque-3's design, saying on X that the Chinese rocket could even beat Falcon 9. LandSpace said on Wednesday that once mature, Zhuque-3 can be reused at least 20 times and carry a payload of multiple satellites weighing 18 tonnes.
But the gap is still wide and there is no guarantee that LandSpace will catch up. SpaceX had its first successful Falcon booster landing in 2015 after two failed attempts. Much of the global rocket industry has since gradually sought to mimic the company's reusability model.
Nevertheless, Zhuque-3's maiden flight puts LandSpace ahead of domestic rivals like iSpace, Galactic Energy and Deep Blue Aerospace, which are working on smaller or less mature systems. And it marks the first time that a Chinese firm has come close to a Falcon 9-class reusable vehicle.
A HIGH BARRIER TO ENTRY
Reusable rockets require complex, high-energy manoeuvres and so far, only SpaceX has carried them out routinely. After stage separation, the booster has to turn around in space, fire its engines to slow down, survive a supersonic fall through hot air and then restart its engines just seconds before reaching water or a landing pad.
The engine firings must be timed to within thousandths of a second by onboard software that is constantly correcting the rocket's path. Small mistakes in the rocket's angle or engine timing can make the booster spin out of control, miss the landing site or burn up on the way down.
In the face of those complexities, SpaceX is still the only company to have fully proven reusable rocketry, regularly landing and flying its Falcon 9 boosters again.
More than a decade of landings and dozens of boosters flown up to 20 times have given the company a near-monopoly in reusable orbital launches and the world's highest annual launch rate.
The gap in experience and data is a major obstacle for would-be rivals.
Firms in China, Europe, India and the U.S. are developing their own reusable rockets, but they lag behind SpaceX's record of flights and its manufacturing scale built up over hundreds of launches, leaving the company dominant in the global market for medium- and heavy-lift missions.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista and Joey Roulette; Editing by Sonali Paul and Thomas Derpinghaus)
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 03, 2025, 06:59:54 pm »
ScienceAlert Bioluminescence on Earth Evolved Over 500 Million Years Ago, Study Finds Michelle Starr Tue, December 2, 2025 at 9:47 PM EST 4 min read
A bioluminescent coral is glowing blue in darkness
In the darkest corners of the planet, where the light of the Sun never touches, eerie glows can yet be found, illuminating the shadows.
This is bioluminescence, a remarkable ability that has evolved, separately, at least 94 times throughout the history of life on Earth. Bioluminescent organisms can harness chemical reactions to produce a glow of their own, a tool used for various purposes by the different creatures that wield it.
Scientists have traced this tool to its earliest known evolutionary origins: a class of corals called Octocorallia in the depths of the ocean in the Cambrian, some 540 million years ago. This is more than double the age of the previous title holder, a tiny deep-ocean crustacean that lived 267 million years ago.
"We wanted to figure out the timing of the origin of bioluminescence, and octocorals are one of the oldest groups of animals on the planet known to bioluminesce," said marine biologist and lead author Danielle DeLeo of the Smithsonian Institution, when the study was published in April last year.
"So, the question was when did they develop this ability?"
Octocorals are a fascinating set of creatures.
Like other corals, they are made up of polyps that cluster together to form a colony, often living on a framework made of their calcified secretions.
However, octocorals, which get their name from the eightfold symmetry of the polyps, have softer skeletons than their rigid relatives.
The bamboo octocoral Isidella sp. displaying bioluminescence in the Bahamas in 2009. (Sönke Johnsen)
Some of them are also known to glow with bioluminescence, but the reason for it is a bit of a mystery, since they only do so when they're disturbed.
Scientists think that it might be a lure for prey, or for predators to come and eat the smaller fish that feed on and damage the coral.
Because corals are some of the oldest organisms on the planet, and octocorals are known to glow, DeLeo and her colleagues thought these organisms might be the best place to look for the early origins of bioluminescence.
The next step was to identify and trace the lineages of known species of bioluminescent octocorals, collected as part of fieldwork conducted by marine biologists Manabu Bessho-Uehara of Nagoya University in Japan and Andrea Quattrini of the Smithsonian Institution.
Their seafloor forays identified previously unknown bioluminescence in five octocoral types – a discovery they could use for the next step, an analysis called ancestral state reconstruction.
"If we know these species of octocorals living today are bioluminescent, we can use statistics to infer whether their ancestors were highly probable to be bioluminescent or not," Quattrini explained.
"The more living species with the shared trait, the higher the probability that as you move back in time, those ancestors likely had that trait as well."
The team deployed several different statistical analyses, and they all returned a similar result: Bioluminescence first emerged in the common ancestor of all octocorals some 540 million years ago.
At this time, multicellular life was still in its infancy, but there were marine invertebrates with eyes capable of detecting light sharing the Cambrian ocean.
The emergence of bioluminescence at the same time suggests an interspecies interaction of some kind, and could help figure out why the ability evolved.
But there's another huge question remaining.
If the common ancestor of the thousands of octocoral species alive today had bioluminescence, why do so few have it now? And how did they lose it?
That's the next step, and it could shed more light on the strange ecology of the Cambrian ocean.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 03, 2025, 06:47:35 pm »
The Inertia Orcas Spotted Hunting Birds in the Puget Sound Cooper Gegan Tue, December 2, 2025 at 6:14 PM EST 2 min read
Photo: Center for Whale Research
Nobody is safe from Orcas. The “wolves of the sea” have been spotted sucking the livers out of sharks, launching seals into orbit, and even sinking boats. The latest animals to feel the wrath of the ocean’s most persistent menace are seabirds in Washington.
While they were doing fieldwork in November, researchers with the Orca Behavior Institute and the Center for Whale Research spotted Bigg’s orcas stalking seabirds in the Puget Sound, as they reported in an announcement. “Members of the T36s and T137s along with T99B were going after common loons and surf scoters in Murden Cove off Bainbridge Island,” they explained. “You can see in this still image from the drone footage how shallow the water was: the trio of whales on the right is kicking up mud with their flukes! On the left, one whale has broken away from the group to sneak up on an unsuspecting group of birds.”
However, the orcas were not trying to actually eat the birds. Researchers believe the behavior was a way to practice hunting skills, or a form of play. To the birds, though, it was no laughing matter. One rhinoceros auklet was the target of a pod that “chased, tail slapped, pounced on [the bird] for about a half-hour,” said one researcher to the Vancouver Sun. Another person observed the orcas attempting to “punt a bird while another member spy hops, seemingly to see where said bird is launched to” (spy hopping is a behavior where orcas will poke their heads out of the water in order to watch what’s happening above the surface).
This is far from the first time such behavior has been observed, as scientists John Ford and Graeme Ellis described in their 1999 book Transients. “This interaction may continue for several minutes before the bird is eaten, incapacitated, or left dead in the whale’s wake,” they wrote. “Seabirds seem to be more important as objects of play or harassment than as a dietary item. Juveniles playing with seabirds no doubt learn useful skills in prey capture and handling that may enhance their success in hunting harbor seals and other wily prey.”
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 03, 2025, 06:42:21 pm »
Live Science Anacondas became massive 12 million years ago — and it worked so well, they haven't changed size since Skyler Ware Tue, December 2, 2025 at 4:03 PM EST 3 min read
Anacondas average between 13 and 16 feet (4 to 5 meters) long, the same length they've been for 12 million years. | Credit: Andres Alfonso-Rojas
Anacondas have been giant for millions of years, a new study finds.
The enormous snakes' average body size has remained constant since they first appeared in the fossil record about 12.4 million years ago, during the Middle Miocene (16 million to 11.6 million years ago), researchers revealed in a new study published Monday (Dec. 1) in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
During the Middle and Upper Miocene (12.4 million to 5.3 million years ago), warm temperatures, expansive wetlands and abundant food enabled many animal species to grow much larger than their modern relatives. But few of these giant animals have survived to the present day.
"Other species like giant crocodiles and giant turtles have gone extinct since the Miocene, probably due to cooling global temperatures and shrinking habitats," study co-author Andrés Alfonso-Rojas, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement. "But the giant anacondas have survived — they are super-resilient."
Anacondas make up a group of constricting snakes that today includes the heaviest snake species in the world. Modern anacondas average 13 to 16 feet (4 to 5 meters) in length, though the largest can reach up to 23 feet (7 m). Scientists weren't sure whether anacondas had been even larger during the Miocene, or whether they had been the same size and retained their massive size into the present day.
To estimate how big ancient anacondas might have been, Alfonso-Rojas and his colleagues measured 183 fossilized anaconda vertebrae from at least 32 individual snakes collected in Venezuela. They also used a technique called ancestral state reconstruction to predict the body lengths of ancient anacondas from characteristics of related snakes.
Researchers measured fossilized anaconda vertebrae to determine the ancient snakes' body lengths. | Credit: Jorge Carrillo-Briceño
Based on these calculations, the team found that anacondas averaged about 17 feet (5.2 m) long when they first appeared during the Miocene 12 million years ago — roughly the same length as modern anacondas.
"This is a surprising result because we expected to find the ancient anacondas were seven or eight meters [23 to 26 feet] long," Alfonso-Rojas said in the statement. "But we don't have any evidence of a larger snake from the Miocene when global temperatures were warmer."
It's still unclear why anacondas have not become smaller over time.
Although warm weather and abundant wetlands may have enabled anacondas to reach their giant size early in their evolutionary history, cooler temperatures and shrinking ranges haven't forced the snakes to get smaller to adapt. That could suggest that these weren't the primary factors keeping the snakes large in the intervening millennia, the researchers wrote in the study.
Predator-prey interactions likely didn't play a major role in maintaining the snakes' body size, either, the researchers said. A lack of competition for food could have helped the snakes grow large in the first place. But they didn't get smaller as other predators moved into South America during the Pliocene (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago) and the Pleistocene (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), suggesting that food availability isn't a big factor in anacondas' giant size.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 03, 2025, 06:34:29 pm »
Futurism 3I/ATLAS Appears to Be Erupting in Ice Volcanos Victor Tangermann Tue, December 2, 2025 at 4:23 PM EST 2 min read
Astronomers have found that the surface of 3I/ATLAS' nucleus could be dotted with erupting "ice volcanoes."
Mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS reached its perihelion, or its closest point to the Sun, earlier this year, shedding copious amounts of ice and dust in the process.
The material has formed enormous jets that reach out like a tail behind the visitor, which is widely believed to be a comet — and even an “anti-tail” that faces the Sun.
It’s such a violent process, astronomers have found that the surface of 3I/ATLAS’ nucleus could be dotted with erupting “ice volcanoes,” as Live Science reports. They posit that could make the visitor surprisingly similar to trans-Neptunian objects, faint chunks of rock and ice that form in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune’s orbit.
“We were all surprised,” Josep Trigo-Rodríguez, lead author of a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper and staff researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences in Spain, told Live Science. “Being a comet formed in a remote planetary system, it is remarkable that the mixture of materials forming the surface of the body has resemblance with trans-Neptunian objects, bodies formed at [a] large distance from the Sun but belonging to our planetary system.”
Trigo-Rodríguez and his colleagues used the Joan Oró Telescope at the Montsec Observatory in Spain to carefully study 3I/ATLAS’ perihelion in late October, a point at which solar system comets usually release the largest amount of material as they’re heated up by the Sun.
The team observed detailed images of jets of gas and dust particles being released, concluding that 3I/ATLAS was showing signs of cryovolcanism. Other planetary bodies, like trans-Neptunian objects, also frequently feature cryovolcanoes, caused by an internal heat source that causes ice to sublimate and spew vapor into space.
Trigo-Rodríguez and his colleagues suggest in their paper that sublimating carbon dioxide ice inside 3I/ATLAS may be reacting with metals, like nickel and iron sulfides, in its core, causing them to oxidize and thereby powering the object’s cryovolcanism.
Yet plenty of questions remain. For one, we don’t even know the exact mass of 3I/ATLAS; scientists have estimated that it could measure anywhere from 1,400 feet to 3.5 miles across.
Studying interstellar objects traveling through the solar system is an exceedingly rare opportunity that we shouldn’t take for granted. 3I/ATLAS is expected to reach its closest point to Earth later this month and Jupiter in March 2026.
“Interstellar visitors like 3I/ATLAS continue to challenge and refine our understanding of planetary-system formation and the chemical evolution of small bodies,” Trigo-Rodríguez and his fellow team members concluded in their paper. “Each newly discovered object reveals unexpected properties that test and expand current models.”
“Future intercept missions will be essential for visiting, and directly sampling these rare messengers and unlocking the record they carry from distant planetary systems,” they added.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 03, 2025, 06:29:35 pm »
Live Science Law of 'maximal randomness' explains how broken objects shatter in the most annoying way possible Skyler Ware Tue, December 2, 2025 at 3:31 PM EST 3 min read
From glass ornaments to dry spaghetti, almost everything on Earth that shatters follows certain principles of randomness and entropy, a new study finds. | Credit: Getty Images
A dropped vase, a crushed sugar cube and an exploding bubble all have something in common: They break apart in similar ways, a new mathematical equation reveals.
A French scientist recently discovered the mathematical equation, which describes the size distribution of fragments that form when something shatters. The equation applies to a variety of materials, including solids, liquids and gas bubbles, according to a new study, published Nov. 26 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Though cracks spread through an object in often unpredictable ways, research has shown that the size distribution of the resulting fragments seems to be consistent, no matter what they're made of — you can always expect a certain ratio of larger fragments to smaller ones. Scientists suspected that this consistency pointed to something universal about the process of fragmenting.
Rather than focusing on how fragments form, Emmanuel Villermaux, a physicist at Aix-Marseille University in France, studied the fragments themselves. In the new study, Villermaux argued that fragmenting objects follow the principle of "maximal randomness." This principle suggests that the most likely fragmentation pattern is the messiest one — the one that maximizes entropy, or disorder.
But that randomness has to obey certain limits. To account for this, Villermaux introduced a conservation law that he and his colleagues discovered in 2015. This law adds physical constraints on the density of fragments in space when an object shatters.
By combining the two principles, Villermaux derived a mathematical equation that describes the pattern of fragment sizes from a shattered object. He then validated the equation by comparing the equation's predictions to years' worth of fragmentation data collected on various objects, including glass, spaghetti, liquid droplets, gas bubbles, plastic fragments in the ocean, and even flakes from early stone tools. All matched the predicted size distribution.
Villermaux also tested the equation by dropping heavy objects onto sugar cubes and observing how they fragmented. "That was a summer project with my daughters," Villermaux told New Scientist. "I did this a long time ago when my children were still young and then came back to the data, because they were illustrating my point well."
However, the newly discovered law doesn't always apply: It doesn't apply in situations with no randomness, such as a smooth stream of liquid breaking into droplets of equal size; and it doesn't cover conditions where the fragments interact with each other, such as in certain plastics.
Ferenc Kun, a physicist at the University of Debrecen in Hungary, told New Scientist that understanding fragmentation could help scientists determine how energy is spent on shattering ore in industrial mining or how to prepare for rockfalls.
Future work could involve determining the smallest possible size a fragment could have, Villermaux told New Scientist.
It's also possible that the shapes of different fragments could follow a similar relationship, Kun wrote in an accompanying viewpoint article.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 03, 2025, 06:23:28 pm »
ScienceAlert DNA Analysis Reveals Two Routes Ancient Humans Used to Reach Australia Jess Cockerill Tue, December 2, 2025 at 10:24 PM EST 3 min read
DNA Analysis Reveals Two Routes Ancient Humans Used to Reach Australia
The first humans arrived upon the landmass now known as Australia around 60,000 years ago along two distinct routes, according to a new genomics study.
The question of when humans first arrived on the continent is contentious among archaeologists. Some cite previous genetic evidence that suggests dates of around 45 to 50,000 years ago, while others suggest the southern landmass may have been peopled as early as 65,000 years ago.
The new study, based on almost 2,500 sets of mitochondrial DNA from indigenous peoples of Australia, New Guinea, Oceania, and Southeast Asia, adds further support to an earlier arrival date, while also revealing it was not a singular voyage.
Sahul was a landmass that existed during the Pleistocene epoch, made up of what we now call Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea, which were all connected by land until about 9,000 years ago when sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age.
Archaeogeneticist Martin Richards, from the University of Huddersfield in the UK, and his colleagues analyzed DNA mutation rates and genetic connections between contemporary and ancient human populations, to trace the incredible passage trod – or rafted – so remarkably early in human history.
The researchers also compared this genetic information to archaeological evidence and climatic data.
It appears people took two routes from the ancient landmass Sunda to reach Sahul. Some travelled via Malaysia, Java, and Timor, entering Sahul west of the site of the modern-day city of Darwin. The researchers refer to these as the 'southern route lineages'.
Meanwhile, a separate flow of genes, which the researchers refer to as the 'northern route lineages', can be traced along the island chain that runs from the Philippines and Sulawesi through to Papua New Guinea, landing in Sahul via the northern tip of modern Queensland.
Map showing the continental shelves of Sunda, Sahul, and the Western Pacific. Orange arrows represent southern route lineages; blue arrows represent northern route lineages. (Gandini et al., Science Advances, 2025)
"We dated both dispersals to about the same time – roughly 60,000 years ago," Richards told journalist James Woodford of New Scientist. "This supports the so-called long chronology for settlement, as opposed to the so-called short chronology, which suggests settlement around 45,000 to 50,000 years ago."
The team estimates that roughly 36 percent of those first-wave lineages can be traced back to people who arrived in Australia via the northern route, while 64 percent descend from ancestors who took the southern route.
The research also suggests that some of the earliest pioneers of the northern route continued onward to the Bismarck Archipelago and Solomon Islands soon after landing in Sahul.
Taking their legacy into account, "most of the extant [surviving] lineages in ancient Sahul and Near Oceania descend from ancestors who arrived via the northern route, by way of the northern part of the now submerged Sunda continent and northern Wallacea, at around 60,000 years ago," the authors write.
"However, a minority of lineages overall (but around two-thirds of those in Australia) arrived via a southern route, through southern Sunda."
The authors note that ancient DNA from southern Asia and Sahul is lacking, which would offer further detail on the timing of these genetic events.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 03, 2025, 06:15:31 pm »
Jerusalem Post Archaeologists find record-size Ming Dynasty cannon at Great Wall of China JERUSALEM POST STAFF Tue, December 2, 2025 at 2:51 PM EST 2 min read
A Chinese flag flies with tourists hiking along the Great Wall, near Beijing, China, November 10, 2025; illustrative. (photo credit: Cheng Xin/Getty Images)
Chinese archaeologists uncovered the largest Ming Dynasty cannon ever found during excavations at the Great Wall’s Jiankou section, alongside rare artifacts and ancient structures.
Chinese archaeologists announced the discovery of the largest ever cannon found during an excavation of the Jiankou section of the Great Wall of China, state media confirmed on Monday.
The cannon, cast during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), measured 89.2 centimeters in length and weighed 112.1 kilograms, Xinhua, the official state news agency of the People's Republic of China, clarified.
Shang Heng, an associate research fellow at the Beijing Institute of Archaeology, spoke at a press conference announcing the excavation's findings.
Shang said that "well-preserved inscriptions on the cannon provide crucial new evidence for research on firearms manufacturing and historical military technology exchange," during the Ming Dynasty period, Xinhua reported.
Archaeologists find turquoise artifacts dating back to ancient Xia, Shang Dynasties
Other items found during the excavation included burial grounds, moats, residential remains, and 28 turquoise artifacts dating back to the Xia Dynasty (2070 BCE - 1600 BCE) and Shang Dynasty (1600 BCE - 1046 BCE), Xinhua added.
A visitor walks past cannons on display at the Jiayu Pass, the first frontier fortress at the west end of the Ming dynasty Great Wall, in Jiayuguan, China's northwestern Gansu province on October 28, 2024; illustrative. (credit: ADEK BERRY/AFP via Getty Images)
The archaeologists also found storage rooms used by frontier garrison troops during the Ming Dynasty, as well as three previously unknown watch towers and connecting walls, Global Times, a daily Chinese tabloid under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party's flagship newspaper, the People's Daily, reported.
The archaeology project was funded by "social forces rather than government or construction projects," the tabloid noted.
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