Fragments

Genomic affinities between Buran-Kaya III and other ancient individuals. Credit: Nature Ecology & Evolution (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-023-02211-9 How did our species, Homo sapiens, arrive in Western Europe? Published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, our new study analyzes two skull fragments dating back between 37,000 and 36,000 years to conclude that our ancestors came from Eastern Europe and migrated westwards. These…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Skull fragments, presumed to be from Ludwig van Beethoven, have returned to Vienna, where the legendary 19th century German composer was buried, experts said Thursday. US businessman Paul Kaufmann donated the fragments, which he inherited, to the Medical University of Vienna where researchers will…

Avi Loeb, a physicist from Harvard University in the US, has recovered 50 tiny spherical iron fragments from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean that he claims may be material from an interstellar alien spaceship.Loeb is linking his finding with the passage of a fireball in January 2014. The meteor was observed by sensors of the US Department of Defense that track all objects entering the Earth's atmosphere.It was recorded as traveling faster than most meteors and eventually broke up over the South Pacific Ocean near Papua…

(NewsNation) — Nearly a decade ago, a meteor traveling faster than 95% of nearby stars crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb says there’s a possibility it wasn’t a space rock at all. Loeb just returned from an excursion to the Pacific Ocean, the aim of which was to recover pieces of that meteor. He says those fragments could be the remains of a “technological gadget” from another solar system. The 50 tiny spherules, or molten droplets, are believed to be made up of…

Avi Loeb, a physicist from Harvard University in the US, has recovered 50 tiny spherical iron fragments from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean that he claims may be material from an interstellar alien spaceship.Loeb is linking his finding with the passage of a fireball in January 2014. The meteor was observed by sensors of the US Department of Defense that track all objects entering the Earth's atmosphere. It was recorded as travelling faster than most meteors and eventually broke up over the South Pacific Ocean near Papua…

Over the past two weeks, I have circumnavigated the globe by land, air and sea. The reason? A kitchen sink–sized chunk of interstellar material that my colleagues and I believe collided with the Earth at 100,000 miles per hour nearly a decade ago. After years of effort, we may have finally found pieces of this elusive object on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, about a mile beneath the waves. The story began In April 2019, when I found what’s thought to be the first known interstellar meteor, hiding in plain sight in…

Even without the symmetry and curvature of fullerenes, the designed flat fullerene fragments which maintained the pentagonal substructure displayed the same electron accepting properties as fullerenes. Credit: YAP Co., Ltd Fragments of spherical ‘Buckyball’ molecules have stable electron-accepting ability with great practical potential.Researchers at Kyoto University in Japan have gained new insights into the unique chemical properties of spherical molecules composed entirely of carbon atoms, called fullerenes. They did…

Hailed as “the godfather of American avant garde cinema”, Jonas Mekas led an extraordinary, multi-hyphenated career whose wide-ranging influence must have proved a challenge for a documentary to encompass. When Mekas arrived in New York as a Lithuanian exile in 1949, the first thing he bought was a Bolex camera. For the displaced immigrant, when language faltered images became a means of communication.As Fragments of Paradise charts Mekas’s professional milestones – a critic, a film-maker, a curator, and so on – what…

Toxic substances leaking out from the gut can interfere with the functioning of fat cells and drive obesity, according to a recent study by a team of international researchers. The results could inform how we treat excessive and dangerous weight gain in the future.The substances, called endotoxins, are fragments of bacteria in our guts. While they're a normal part of the digestive tract's ecosystem, the microbial debris can cause significant damage to the body should they find their way into the bloodstream.Here, the…

Of the thousands of meteorites found on Earth, about 188 have been confirmed to be from Mars. How did they get here?Over the tumultuous history of our Solar System, asteroids have smashed into Mars with such force, the debris was blasted into space and then drifted through space, eventually entering the Earth's atmosphere, and surviving the journey to the ground.Astronomers once thought it was a complex process, with only the most powerful impacts capable of throwing rocks from Mars into space. But new research shows…