longlost

For a quiet, dusty lump of a planet we see today, Mars has had a surprisingly violent history, one that could reveal some clues about Earth's own past.A new survey of the Martian surface suggests that in its younger years, the red planet was littered with volcanoes that might resemble the rumblings of our little blue dot before it formed tectonic plates some 3 billion years ago.Planetary scientist Joseph Michalski of the University of Hong Kong and colleagues cataloged the scars of volcanic activity in the planet's…

A guitar bought by Paul McCartney for £30 in 1961 has been returned to the former Beatle after a global search to find the distinctively shaped Höfner bass.The instrument, bought by McCartney before his rise to stardom and reportedly his favourite, was last seen when the Beatles were recording their final album to be released, Let It Be, 54 years ago.A search to find the missing violin-shaped bass, a German-made Höfner 500/1, was launched last year, and on Tuesday a student, Ruaidhri Guest, shared a picture on social…

Scientists are now inspecting snagged, bagged and tagged bits and pieces from asteroid Bennu, the cosmic mother lode delivered by NASA's Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security — Regolith Explorer mission.Known in acronymic astro-speak as OSIRIS-REx, that seven-year-long voyage brought home the goods via a sample return canister that came to full stop on Sept. 24, 2023, parachuting into a remote stretch of the Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range. Those specimens from afar…

A new study demonstrates that apes possess an exceptional social memory, recognizing former groupmates after more than 25 years. This finding, suggesting a significant cognitive similarity between apes and humans, underscores the depth and duration of social relationships in our closest animal relatives.Study finds the longest lasting non-human social memories ever documented.Apes recognize photos of groupmates they haven’t seen for more than 25 years and respond even more enthusiastically to pictures of their friends, a…

Ten years ago, an archaeological curator by the name of Sara Rivers-Cofield bought a bronze Victorian-era silk dress at a shop in Maine.Upon turning the skirt inside out, she discovered a hidden pocket containing a scrunched-up ball of papers.The sheets revealed two dozen lines of apparent gibberish once they'd been smoothed out, including phrases like "Grub wrongful hug duck fagan each" and "Calgarry Cuba Unguard confute duck fagan egypt".For nearly a decade, these words, which Rivers-Cofield shared on her online blog,…

A team of conservationists have rediscovered a species of golden mole that hasn’t been seen in almost 90 years. The scientists tracked it to its home in the sand dunes of South Africa using environmental DNA (eDNA) and sniffer dogs.De Winton’s golden mole is an elusive species that had only ever been found in one small region – Port Nolloth, on the northwest coast of South Africa. As the name suggests, this cute little critter is blind, has an iridescent gold coat and spends most of its time underground. That habitat…

Ancient hnefatafl board game found at the newly identified site of the Monastery of Deer. Credit: Michael Sharpe A team of archaeologists, co-led by a researcher at the University of Southampton, believe they have located the site of the lost Monastery of Deer in Northeast Scotland. It is believed that the earliest written Scots…

We only have to look up at the Moon to see the remains of a cataclysmic collision between two early planets, billions of years ago. Now scientists suggest evidence may also be deep beneath our feet, as the remains of that ancient planet lurk near the Earth’s core.In the 1980s, geophysicists discovered two gigantic, unexplained blobs of material in the Earth’s mantle. Seismic readings indicated these regions, each spanning thousands of kilometers wide, were far more dense than the surrounding mantle and likely had much…

Avengers: Age of Ultron feels so far away now. Pietro Maximoff is no more, Wanda Maximoff has become an irrefutable anti-hero who settled down with her fake family in a fake town, and the Avengers have since gained and lost several members, namely one of its earliest contributors, Iron Man, who sacrificed himself in the battle for the Infinity Stones to undo Thanos’ snap and restore half the world’s population. From the earlier days of the MCU, when Wanda and Pietro were nothing but puppets in Ultron’s master plan for…

With satellite imagery and other modern tools, much of the globe is comprehensively mapped out at this point – but there are still plenty of secrets hidden in the most remote and inaccessible parts of the world.A team of archaeologists has been rewarded for trekking some 60 kilometers (37 miles) into the dense Yucatan Peninsula jungles of southern Mexico: they've discovered a long-lost ancient Maya city that there are no previous records of.The new city has been named Ocomtún, which means "stone column". The sprawling…