Feb 26th, 2026 - It may have been an extreme act meant to destroy rival bloodlines. First excavated in the 1970s, the mass grave at Gomolava in Serbia was long thought to be the tragic but natural result of a pandemic. In this 9th-century BCE mass grave, archaeologists were stunned to find the remains of 77 people, almost all of them women and children. The Iron Age mass grave was found beneath a mound. This artificial hill, or "tell," was built from the debris of collapsed mud bricks, broken pottery, and the old fires. But a second look with modern tools shows these people didn't succumb to disease. They ... [Read More]

Feb 26th, 2026 - How did mosquitoes get their taste for our blood? Ancient humans may hold the clues Mosquitoes are the deadliest animal on the planet, killing hundreds of thousands of people every year by transmitting malaria, dengue fever and a host of other deadly diseases. Understanding how the insects first got the taste for human blood has long intrigued scientists and could help us better fight the spread of mosquito-borne disease. Now a new study suggests that some mosquitoes' thirst for human blood may be truly primeval, stretching back as far as 1.8 million years ago—a time when our ancient ... [Read More]

Feb 26th, 2026 - Nearly all of the solar system's planets are about to file across the night sky in a planetary alignment, and it will be visible from anywhere on Earth Nearly all of the planets in the solar system are about to march through the night sky in a single-file line. This planetary alignment, sometimes called a planet parade, will include all of the solar system's planets except Mars , as it is currently on the opposite side of the sun from Earth and therefore not visible. Alignments like this only occur every few years, when all the planets' orbits happen to carry them to the same side of the sun ... [Read More]

Feb 26th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Uranus has always been the oddball of our solar system. It spins on its side. Its seasons last for decades. Its magnetic field refuses to line up neatly with its rotation. For years, much of what happens high above its blue-green clouds stayed out of reach. Now that has changed. For the first time, astronomers have mapped the vertical structure of Uranus's upper atmosphere. Teams tracked how temperature and charged particles shift with height, building a three-dimensional picture of a region that stretches thousands of miles above the planet's cloud tops. The work ... [Read More]

Feb 26th, 2026 - In graduate school, my experimental archaeology professor told a student to create a door socket – the hole in a door frame that a bolt slides into – in a slab of sandstone by pecking at it with a rounded stone. After a couple of weeks, the student presented his results to the class. "I pecked the sandstone about 10,000 times," he said, "and then it broke." This kind of experience is known as individual learning. It works through trial and error, with lots of each. Also known as reinforcement learning, it is how children, chimpanzees , crows and AI often learn to do something on ... [Read More]

Feb 25th, 2026 - Jason Molitoris, MD, PhD, discussed 2025 data on proton therapy for oropharyngeal cancer, highlighting immune preservation and reduced long-term AEs. The field of head and neck oncology is currently witnessing a paradigm shift, as the "more is better" approach to radiation is giving way to a sophisticated "precision-first" philosophy. In a recent discussion with CancerNetwork®, Jason Molitoris, MD, PhD, associate professor of Radiation Oncology and director of the Clinical Hyperthermia Program at the University of Maryland, detailed why intensity-modulated proton therapy (IMPT) has ... [Read More]

Feb 25th, 2026 - Answer: 1.98 square micrometers. That's smaller than many bacteria. In fact, it's so tiny that it can only be seen with an electron microscope. The QR code was developed by scientists from the TU Wien public research university in Vienna, Austria, in partnership with German startup Cerabyte. It was etched onto a thin ceramic film with the goal being that this particular medium would hold up well to wear and tear over time. To put the QR code on the film, the team used focused ion beams. Each pixel is 49 nanometers, 10 times smaller than the wavelength of visible light — hence the ... [Read More]

Feb 25th, 2026 - An astronomical alert system developed at the University of Washington started off with a bang this week, sending out 800,000 notifications about moving asteroids, exploding stars and other celestial changes detected by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. Tuesday night's surge was just the first wave of alerts. Eventually, the Alert Production Pipeline is expected to produce up to 7 million alerts per night. Astronomers around the globe will use the system to sift through the torrent of data, zeroing in on events ranging from newly detected asteroids to supernovas, variable stars and ... [Read More]