Category: 7. Science

Present-day speakers of Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian have substantial Siberian ancestry, a new study of ancient genomes finds. These roots likely spread westward from a group of people living in the forest steppes of the Altai Mountains of Central and East Asia 4,500 years ago.

Ancient DNA revealed that this group was patrilineal, or organized based on descent from fathers.

Female gorillas adjust their aggression depending on their needs and group structure. This finding comes from a 25-year-long study by Nikolaos Smit and Martha Robbins.

The research shows that female gorillas use simple but flexible rules, called aggression heuristics, based on risk and social dynamics.

“Animals that live in groups often compete for access to resources such as food and mates. The potential costs of this competition can drive the formation of hierarchies that determine priority of access to resources without superfluous conflicts,” wrote the study authors.

“Accordingly, individuals may choose strategically who they compete with, in order to minimize costs and maximize gains.”

Pregnant gorillas take more risks

The study includes data from five wild gorilla groups across Gabon and Uganda. The researchers found that most aggression comes from higher-ranking females targeting those just below them. However, 42% of aggression was aimed upward, toward more powerful females.

“Aggression, a proxy for competition, tends to increase when resources are limited and is usually directed toward lower-ranking individuals but can vary toward groupmates of different ranks, and variation is observed even within species,” said lead author Nikos Smit from the University of Turku.

Pregnant and lactating females showed more aggression toward higher-ranking groupmates. Among them, females in their third trimester took the most risk. These reproductive states require more energy, which may drive these females to act more boldly, especially when food is scarce.

Interestingly, lactating females, despite higher energy needs, were less aggressive toward powerful rivals than pregnant ones. This may reflect caution to protect their infants from retaliation.

Gorilla aggression and risky behaviors

Group makeup plays a big role in aggression direction. Female gorillas living in groups with more adult males tended to direct aggression toward more dominant females. This might be because male presence offers a protective buffer and reduces retaliation risks.

In contrast, in groups with more females, aggression was usually aimed downward. With more competition, females might prefer safer confrontations with weaker individuals.

These results show how gorillas balance risk and reward. “Overall, our results confirm that an individual’s circumstantial needs and their social environment may influence individual decisions to engage in more risky behaviors such as aggression toward more powerful groupmates,” said study senior author Martha Robbins.

Weak gorillas use light aggression

The researchers analyzed 6,871 aggressive interactions. Mild forms of aggression, such as vocalizations or vegetation pulling, were more common in upward aggression. Severe aggression, such as hitting or biting, was less frequent but present across the board.

The team quantified each aggressive act using a score. This score measured the difference in rank between the aggressor and the target. A high positive score meant a low-ranking female attacked a high-ranking one. A negative score meant aggression went down the hierarchy.

Mild aggression had higher average scores. This shows females prefer safer, non-escalating tactics when confronting stronger groupmates.

Gorillas adjust aggression to the situation

This study reveals that female gorillas follow simple rules when managing conflict. These rules change with the number of males and females in the group, reproductive status, and other social factors.

The authors highlight that such flexible aggression strategies may not just apply to gorillas. Other species, including humans, may also shift behavior based on risk, reward, and group dynamics.

Their work adds to growing evidence showing that social animals, like gorillas, make strategic decisions. They do not just follow fixed species-wide instincts. Instead, they adapt based on the challenges they face.

Research transparency and broader impact

This study not only opens new questions about the evolution of social rules in primates but also makes its data and code public.

Funded by Max Planck Society and several global conservation groups, this research highlights how long-term behavioral monitoring helps us understand animal societies and perhaps our own.

“Our study provides critical insights into the evolution of competitive behavior, showing that aggression heuristics, the simple rules that animals use to guide their aggressive interactions, are not simply species-specific but also dependent on the conditions that populations and individuals experience,” noted the researchers.

The study is published in the journal eLife.

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• Rivers were once common on Mars. Today, we can still see thousands of ancient riverbeds on the red planet.
• Scientists have now found many more ancient river valleys in the Noachis Terra region, which has been relatively unexplored until now. The river valleys appear as inverted channels, where harder standing sediments have been left behind after erosion.
• Mars was likely even wetter than first thought, the discovery shows. Rains formed the rivers over relatively long geologic timescales.

Ancient rivers on Mars

We know that Mars was once a watery world, with rivers, lakes and likely even an ocean. On July 10, 2025, a team of scientists led by Adam Losekoot at the Open University in the U.K. said it appears the planet was even wetter than previously thought. Using data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Global Surveyor, the scientists said they have discovered many more ancient riverbeds: over 9,300 miles (15,000 km) of them altogether. They are in the Noachis Terra region of Mars and are similar to other features on the planet called inverted ridges. They are evidence for widespread flowing water.

The features suggest water was stable in Noachis Terra around 3.7 billion years ago. They also indicate that precipitation was the most likely source of the water.

The researchers presented their findings at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham, U.K., on July 10, 2025.

Inverted riverbeds in Noachis Terra

Until now, scientists hadn’t studied the Noachis Terra region as much as some other places on Mars. One of the main reasons is that it contains relatively few recognizable ancient riverbeds. But Losekoot and his colleagues did something different. They looked instead for inverted channels called fluvial sinuous ridges. Those are like riverbeds, but appear as ridges instead of valleys. This happens when rivers deposit sediments, and those sediments gradually harden into standing ridges after the rivers have dried up. As erosion removes softer material around them, the ridges become exposed.

Noachis Terra is a relatively unchanged region of Mars. By studying it more, scientists can find clues about what this part of the planet was like billions of years ago. Losekoot said:

Studying Mars, particularly an underexplored region like Noachis Terra, is really exciting because it’s an environment which has been largely unchanged for billions of years. It’s a time capsule that records fundamental geological processes in a way that just isn’t possible here on Earth.

Data from Mars orbiters

The researchers used data from three instruments on two orbiting spacecraft for the study. These were the Context Camera (CTX) and the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on Mars Global Surveyor (which ended its mission in November 2006).

Analysis of the data revealed the locations, lengths and morphologies (shapes) of the ridge systems across a wide region. From the RAS meeting description:

We find fluvial sinuous ridges to be common across Noachis Terra, with a cumulative length of more than 15,000 km [9,300 miles]. These are often isolated segments, but some systems are hundreds of kilometers in length.

A stable, wet environment

The ancient riverbeds in Noachis Terra are extensive. They extend for hundreds of kilometres and cover about 15,000 km altogether. The ridges are also quite tall, rising tens of meters (yards) above the surrounding landscape.

Plus, the fact that they are so extensive shows the rivers formed under relatively stable conditions that lasted a significant amount of time. Their spatial distribution – the amount of space they occupy on the terrain – also indicates the source of the water precipitation, that is, rain. This conclusion is similar to that of another study reported last April. That study also said rain or snow fed ancient rivers and lakes on Mars.

Losekoot said at the RAS meeting:

The broad distribution of fluvial sinuous ridges suggests a broadly distributed source of water. The most likely candidate is precipitation, suggesting a benign surface environment. For fluvial sinuous ridges to have formed mature, interconnected systems, up to tens of meters high, these conditions must also have been relatively long-lived. This suggests that about 3.7 billion years ago, Noachis Terra experienced warm and wet conditions for a geologically relevant period.

Bottom line: A new study of data from two Mars orbiters shows vast ancient rivers on Mars in the Noachis Terra region. They show that Mars was even wetter billions of years ago than we thought.

Source: National Astronomy Meeting 2025

Via Royal Astronomical Society

Read more: New study says rain on ancient Mars fed rivers and lakes

Read more: Clays on Mars as tantalizing oases for microbial life

For decades we’ve been trying to make the robots smarter and more physically capable by mimicking biological intelligence and movement. “But in doing so, we’ve been just replicating the results of biological evolution—I say we need to replicate its methods,” argues Philippe Wyder, a developmental robotics researcher at Columbia University. Wyder led a team that demonstrated a machine with a rudimentary form of what they’re calling a metabolism.

He and his colleagues built a robot that could consume other robots to physically grow, become stronger, more capable, and continue functioning.

Nature’s methods

The idea of robotic metabolism combines various concepts in AI and robotics. The first is artificial life, which Wyder termed “a field where people study the evolution of organisms through computer simulations.” Then there is the idea of modular robots: reconfigurable machines that can change their architecture by rearranging collections of basic modules. That was pioneered in the US by Daniela Rus or Mark Yim at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1990s.

Finally, there is the idea that we need a shift from a goal-oriented design we’ve been traditionally implementing in our machines to a survivability-oriented design found in living organisms, which Magnus Egerstedt proposed in his book Robot Ecology.

Wyder’s team took all these ideas, merged them, and prototyped a robot that could “eat” other robots. “I kind of came at this from many different angles,” Wyder says.

The key source of inspiration, though, was the way nature builds its organisms. There are 20 standard amino acids universally used by life that can be combined into trillions of proteins, forming the building blocks of countless life forms. Wyder started his project by designing a basic robotic module that was intended to play a role roughly equivalent to a single amino acid. This module, called a Truss Link, looked like a rod, being 16 centimeters long and containing batteries, electronic controllers, and servomotors than enabled them to expand, contract, and crawl in a straight line. They had permanent magnets at each end, which let them connect to other rods and form lightweight lattices.

How are exoplanets discovered?

Star versus black hole

You’d think a star wouldn’t stand a chance against a supermassive black hole. But astronomers have spotted a star that apparently did battle with one of these behemoths, and later came back for another fight.

In 2022, astronomers spotted a bright flare at the center of a galaxy some 408 million light-years away. Labeled AT 2022dbl, it was what’s known as a tidal disruption event, where a star passes too close to a supermassive black hole, which rips it to shreds. These incredibly energetic events are nothing new to astronomers. But a surprise came two years later, when researchers spotted a nearly identical flare in exactly the same location.

Having confirmed it wasn’t just a similar star suffering the same fate, the astronomers said on July 23, 2025, that this was the first confirmed case of a star surviving a tidal disruption event and returning to experience another.

The researchers published their peer-reviewed findings on July 1, 2025, in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Black holes and star spaghettification

Astronomers believe that supermassive black holes – black holes with masses between hundreds of thousands and billions of times greater than our sun – exist at the centers of almost all large galaxies. That includes our own Milky Way galaxy, which contains the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*.

One of the ways distant supermassive black holes reveal themselves to us is during tidal disruption events. That happens when they feast on stars. Roughly every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a given galaxy, a star wanders too close to the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core. The immense strength of the black hole’s gravity exerts huge tidal forces on the star. In essence, the black hole pulls much more strongly on one side of the star than the other. This massively stretches the star, in a process astronomers call spaghettification.

Having lost its cohesion, some of the shreds of the star are thrown into space, while the rest forms an accretion disk around the black hole. The black hole slowly consumes this stellar material over weeks or even months. Meanwhile, the material swirls around the black hole at a pace approaching the speed of light. As it does so, it glows incredibly brightly, illuminating the black hole and giving astronomers a chance to study its properties.

A black hole snack or a whole meal?

Over the past decade, astronomers have spotted several tidal disruption events that haven’t behaved as they expected. The temperature and brightness of these flares have been much lower than theories predict. And AT 2022dbl – this newly discovered double tidal disruption event – could provide the answer.

Having ruled out a coincidence or a gravitational trick of the light, the scientists said the occurrence of two nearly identical flares suggests they both came from the same star. Thus, it wasn’t completely destroyed in the first event. Much of the star must have remained largely intact and returned 700 days later in its orbit to undergo the same experience again.

So this supermassive black hole might be nibbling on its food, rather than gobbling it down all at once as scientists previously believed.

Will this star fight again?

So now the big question: Did the star survive its second dance with death? We shouldn’t have to wait too long for an answer, study co-author Iair Arcavi explained:

The question now is whether we’ll see a 3rd flare after two more years, in early 2026. If we see a 3rd flare, it means that the 2nd one was also the partial disruption of the star. So maybe all such flares, which we have been trying to understand for a decade now as full stellar disruptions, are not what we thought.

Perhaps even more interesting is the prospect that we don’t see a 3rd flare. That would mean the 2nd flare marked the total destruction of the star. And that would imply that partial and full disruptions look almost identical. This is something scientists previously predicted, but no one has found evidence for yet.

So whether this brave star survived its latest encounter or not, 2026 will bring an improved understanding of tidal disruption events. Arcavi summarized:

Either way, we’ll have to re-write our interpretation of these flares and what they can teach us about the monsters lying in the centers of galaxies.

Bottom line: Astronomers have made the first confirmed detection of a star surviving destruction at the hands of a supermassive black hole. Then it returned for round two.

Source: The Double Tidal Disruption Event AT 2022dbl Implies that at Least Some “Standard” Optical Tidal Disruption Events Are Partial Disruptions

Via Tel Aviv University

Read more: Astronomers see a star ‘spaghettified’ by a black hole

As ice caps melt, researchers warn that dormant volcanoes could erupt — and the ripple effects could hit closer to home than you think.

What’s happening?

Scientists say melting glaciers might do more than raise sea levels — they could also stir sleeping giants beneath the Earth’s surface, according to Inside Climate News.

At a recent science conference in Prague, researchers presented findings showing that shrinking glaciers can trigger volcanic eruptions. A team supported by the National Science Foundation analyzed six volcanoes in the Chilean Andes and found that, thousands of years ago, volcanoes became more active as the last ice age ended. The reason? Less weight holding down the magma.

“When you take the load off, it’s just like opening a Coca-Cola bottle or a champagne bottle,” said Brad Singer, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, per ICN.

This shift doesn’t just apply to the Andes — scientists warn that as ice sheets continue to retreat in places like Alaska, Iceland, and Antarctica, once-quiet volcanoes could come roaring back to life.

Why are these findings concerning?

Volcanic eruptions aren’t just dramatic — they can be dangerous and far-reaching. Ash can ground planes, contaminate water, and choke crops. If one erupts during another extreme event — such as a heat wave, wildfire, or severe storm — it could overwhelm already strained systems.

Watch now: Giant snails invading New York City?

That’s not all that melting ice is changing. Higher tides are worsening flooding during storms, and shifting temperatures are expanding the range of mosquitoes that spread disease. While extreme weather events aren’t new, scientists have found that human activity is making many of them more intense — almost like putting extreme weather on steroids.

What’s being done about it?

Scientists are working on better ways to monitor volcanoes and spot warning signs earlier, but preparation doesn’t stop with research.

Cities are making changes on the ground — from planting more trees to cool neighborhoods, to updating infrastructure and emergency plans. And plenty of groups are stepping up in creative ways. Re:wild is protecting wild spaces that absorb carbon, and Trashie is helping people recycle everything from old sneakers to worn-out clothes instead of sending them to landfills.

You, too, can make a difference by exploring critical climate issues. Cutting back on food waste, switching to reusable products, and supporting clean transportation are all great ways to make a difference at home.

Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don’t miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.

Scientists have discovered a dinosaur that might have chirped like a bird, a finding that suggests the evolutionary origins of birdsong may be far more ancient than we previously thought.

In a paper published last week in the journal PeerJ, an international team of researchers describes a 163-million-year-old fossil found in northeastern China’s Hebei Province. The fossil dinosaur, which they’ve dubbed Pulaosaurus qinglong, measures just 28 inches (72 centimeters) and is largely complete, giving researchers an unusually detailed look at its anatomy, including its surprisingly birdlike throat.

“Even when you have a dinosaur skeleton preserved, you don’t always have these isolated bones preserved with other skull elements,” Xing Xu, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and an author of the paper, told The New York Times. “They’re very thin bones, very delicate and hard to preserve.”

In vertebrates, the vocal organs protect the airway and can produce sounds, including basic noises like hisses, groans, and grunts. In most living reptiles, these structures are made of cartilage and are relatively simple. Birds, however, have delicate, bony, flexible vocal organs that can make more complicated and diverse sounds.

Pulaosuarus’ throat seems somewhere between the two. Its vocal structures appear to be similar to that of another dinosaur, Pinacosaurus, a kind of ankylosaur with a large, bony larynx that may have been flexible enough to produce birdlike chirps and tweets, the researchers told the Times.

The researchers believe that Pulaosaurus lived during the late Jurassic period and belonged to the same group of creatures that would later give rise to “duck-billed” dinosaurs like hadrosaurs. But Pulaosaurus and Pinacosaurus are separated by millions of years of evolution, and neither belong to the group of dinosaurs that eventually produced birds. While it’s possible they developed their vocal features independently, the presence of similar structures in such distinct species indicates that dinosaurs’ ancient ancestors may have been pretty chirpy.

That means the origins of birdsong could lie in creatures that lived more than 230 million years ago, but it remains a mystery as to how or when modern birds’ voice box, called the syrinx, evolved—or if any dinosaur shared their incredible vocal prowess.