science

Interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS are exciting, but there is no reason to claim that they are evidence of alien spacecraft – sometimes a comet is just comet, says Robin George Andrews Source link

Ochre artefacts found in Crimea show signs of having been used for drawing, adding to evidence that Neanderthals used pigments in symbolic ways Source link

Feedback comes across a YouTuber’s efforts to build a large language model in Minecraft and is impressed at the scale of it – even if it doesn’t quite live up to its promise to blow your mind “in spectacular fashion” Source link

Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022. In his new book, Doctorow lays out how tech companies have made our lives progressively worse, finds Matthew Sparkes Source link

The Trump administration has laid off government workers integral to major public health surveys, meaning the country will lack crucial information on births, deaths and illnesses nationwide Source link

Plague, leprosy, smallpox and other diseases didn’t jump from animals to humans when we thought. Ancient DNA is revealing where they come from and how they changed history Source link

The monster hurricane pummelling Jamaica is powered by abnormal sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean, which were made at least 500 times more likely by global warming Source link

Fibromyalgia, which causes chronic pain all over the body, is poorly understood, but two studies – made up of millions of participants – are helping us get to the roots of the condition Source link

Scientists are finding out how coffee beans are transformed when they pass through the guts of Asian palm civets in the hope of replicating the process without using animals Source link

Microbes high in Earth’s stratosphere produce pigments to protect them from UV light – so similar molecules could be biosignatures of life elsewhere in the galaxy Source link