Caves

A flock of Cryptogyps lacertosus (left) watch on and wait their turn as several individuals of Dynatoaetus pachyosteus (center, right) feed from the carcass of a dead Diprotodon optatum in the Late Pleistocene Naracoorte landscape in southern Australia. Credit: Natural history reconstruction artist John Barrie (courtesy Flinders University)A new eagle and vulture have been discovered in fossil deposits.Australia’s only vulture, and a fearsome extinct eagle, are among the earliest recorded birds of prey from the…

New suggests that Ice Age cave art was partly influenced by pareidolia, a phenomenon where humans see meaningful shapes in random patterns. Focusing on caves in Northern Spain, the study found that many images incorporated natural features of the cave walls, indicating that artists were influenced by both pareidolia and their creativity. The research also explored the role of lighting conditions and advances our understanding of the experiences and influences of Upper Palaeolithic artists. (Artist’s concept)Recent…

The color of chat bubbles is extremely important to people in the US for some reason. Blue is good, green is poor - or something like that, right? We don't know, we're from Europe, and over here people have WhatsApp and Telegram and Facebook Messenger. But in the US, bubbles matter. And they will continue to, unfortunately, even with today's groundbreaking announcement from Apple. The company finally caved and revealed that it plans to adopt RCS in iOS from next year. RCS, as you may know, is the iMessage-like standard…

Image: izzuanroslan (Shutterstock)As the Writers Guild of America continues to strike for fair wages and against the looming threat of AI, one of the largest streaming services—Netflix—might have just heard their battle cry against executives.Netflix Passwords, ChatGPT Can’t Detect AI, and No More CoTweets | Editor PicksThe Hollywood Reporter writes that Netflix shareholders have rejected the pay packages that were set to be awarded to executives at the company, including current co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters as…

In this artist’s impression of the breadcrumb scenario, autonomous rovers can be seen exploring a lava tube after being deployed by a mother rover that remains at the entrance to maintain contact with an orbiter or a blimp. Credit: John Fowler/Wikimedia Commons, Mark Tarbell and Wolfgang Fink/University of ArizonaUniversity of Arizona engineers have developed a system that allows autonomous vehicles to scout out underground habitats for astronauts.House hunting on <span class="glossaryLink"…

Imagine a habitable colony on Mars or the Moon and the kinds of…

An artist’s impression of the breadcrumb idea, where a mother rover remains at the cave’s entrance while smaller rovers explore the system and drop nodes behind them. Illustration: John Fowler/Wikimedia Commons, Mark Tarbell and Wolfgang Fink/University of ArizonaResearchers from the University of Arizona have developed a possible new way of scouting for real estate on other planets: tiny robots that drop digital breadcrumbs while exploring Martian caves. It’s a method ripped straight from folklore. The breadcrumbs are…

Exploring the depths of an unmapped cave system is a daunting enough prospect on its own, but think how risky it would be to do so on another planet such as Mars. That's why a new system is in the works, which would use "breadcrumb"-dropping rovers to do the job.Currently being developed by a University of Arizona team led by Assoc. Prof. Wolfgang Fink, the system incorporates a ground-going "mother" rover which would carry several smaller rovers to the entrance of a cave system. Those smaller autonomous rovers would then…

Seven new funnel web spider species have been found emerging in caves in Israel, and they're all in various stages of losing their vision.In Charles Darwin's famous example of adaptation, a population of finches split apart on different islands gradually drifted from their shared ancestral form, to the point they came to represent distinct species.This early observation recognized isolation as a key ingredient for organisms to change enough to speciate.But as this latest cave discovery shows, vast stretches of water are…

Visiting sea caves isn’t just about seeing a cool grotto carved out by the ocean — it’s also about the journey to find these caverns. There are cliffs to descend, rocks to scramble, tide pools to tiptoe around and sea grass to avoid slipping on (trust me on this).Southern California is particularly good for sea cave hunting because the coast features large bluffs, fault lines and a relentless ocean. Carved out of rock cliffs that date back as many as 75 million years, caves are formed by waves pounding against the water…