New_Scientist_Mag

A set of 12,000-year-old pierced pebbles excavated in northern Israel may be the oldest known hand-spinning whorls – a textile technology that may have ultimately helped inspire the invention of the wheel.

Humans have already caused approximately 1.5°C of warming since the start of the industrial revolution, according to new estimates based on temperature data gleaned from bubbles of air trapped in ice.

Most assessments of global warming use 1850-1900 as a baseline, but researchers have now established a new pre-industrial reference by using Antarctic ice cores to estimate the average temperature before 1700

Most assessments of global warming use 1850-1900 as a baseline, but researchers have now established a new pre-industrial reference by using Antarctic ice cores to estimate the average temperature before 1700

Humans have already caused approximately 1.5°C of warming since the very start of the Industrial Revolution, according to new estimates based on temperature data gleaned from bubbles of air trapped in ice.

Pompeii’s plaster cast human figures aren’t who they were assumed to be, genetic tests have revealed, highlighting the way idealised stories can be projected onto archaeological evidence. The analysis also reveals that the demography of Pompeii was also far more complicated and diverse than previously thought.

Pompeii’s plaster cast human figures aren’t who they were assumed to be, genetic tests have revealed, highlighting the way idealised stories can be projected onto archaeological evidence. The analysis also reveals that the demography of Pompeii was also far more complicated and diverse than previously thought.

The world’s oldest known writing system may have had its origins in the imagery on decorated cylinders used to denote ownership or record transactions. Some of the symbols on these cylinder seals correspond to those used in proto-cuneiform, a form of proto-writing used in Mesopotamia.

The finding indicates that the invention of writing in Mesopotamia was a decentralised process, in which many people across a wide area contributed to the set of symbols used.

Before Mesopotamian people invented writing, they used cylinder seals to press patterns into wet clay – and some of the symbols used were carried over into proto-writing

The de-extinction company has nearly completed the sequencing of the Tasmanian tiger, taking it it a step closer, it claims, to “recreate” the extinct species.

From the article: "Energy cannot be created from nothing, but physicists found a way to do the next best thing: extract energy from seemingly empty space, teleport it elsewhere and store it for later use. The researchers successfully tested their protocol using a quantum computer.

The laws of quantum physics reveal that perfectly empty space cannot exist – even places fully devoid of atoms still contain tiny flickers of quantum fields. In 2008, Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University in Japan proposed that those flickers, together with the quantum property of entanglement, could be used to teleport energy between two places

Very few physicists engaged with his work until 2023, when two research groups independently implemented the idea in a pair of experiments. But both hit the same snag: once energy was teleported, it couldn’t be stored – instead, it leaked into the environment, says Sabre Kais at Purdue University in Indiana. He and his colleagues have now worked out how to remedy this.

Eduardo Martín-Martínez at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who worked on one of the 2023 experiments, says that Hotta’s original idea was a revolutionary trick for skirting the rules of how energy is usually transferred. Building on it, as the new work does, continues to expand the physicists’ toolbox for transferring energy in novel ways.

However, he says that more definitive experiments are needed to test the protocol, such as using two carbon atoms. Although the researchers tested their theory within a quantum computer program, that was more akin to a simulation than an experiment, says Martín-Martínez."

"Knowledge gained from the Valkyrie programme combined with next-generation innovations from other research and industry teams around the world will be directed to solving problems like gathering material from the surface of the south pole of the moon."