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A major international research effort is reshaping the long-held belief that lead exposure is primarily a modern problem. The new findings show that early human ancestors encountered lead repeatedly for more than two million years, suggesting that this toxic metal may have played an unexpected role in shaping the evolution of hominid brains, behavior, and…

The Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS, President Lee Ho Seong) has captured the first-ever observation of water repeatedly freezing and melting at ultrahigh pressures above 2 gigapascals (2 GPa) while remaining at room temperature. These rapid changes were recorded on a microsecond (μs, one-millionth of a second) timescale. This achievement led to…

Milestone results released by the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) on November 16 have finally clarified a decades-old puzzle in astrophysics: the unusual drop in cosmic ray counts above 3 PeV that produces what scientists call the “knee” in the cosmic ray energy spectrum. The cause of this steep decline has remained mysterious…

Researchers led by Keiya Hirashima at the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) in Japan, working with partners from The University of Tokyo and Universitat de Barcelona in Spain, have created the first Milky Way simulation capable of tracking more than 100 billion individual stars across 10 thousand years of evolution. The…

Counties in Pennsylvania that contain or sit close to cultivated cropland show notably higher melanoma rates than other parts of the state, according to new research led by scientists at Penn State. Researchers at the Penn State Cancer Institute reviewed cancer registry data collected from 2017 through 2021 and discovered that adults over age 50…

Researchers from Stockholm University have — for the first time ever — managed to successfully isolate and sequence RNA molecules from Ice Age woolly mammoths. These RNA sequences are the oldest ever recovered and come from mammoth tissue preserved in the Siberian permafrost for nearly 40,000 years. The study, published in the journal Cell, demonstrates…

Chimpanzees may share more with human thinkers than researchers once realized. A new study published in Science presents compelling evidence that chimpanzees can revise their beliefs in a rational way when they encounter new information. The study, titled “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs,” was carried out by an international team that included UC Berkeley Psychology…

Does dark matter behave according to the same physical rules that apply to ordinary matter? This question remains one of the major puzzles in modern cosmology, since this invisible form of matter (which neither emits nor reflects any light) is still hypothetical and extremely difficult to study directly. Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE)…