An elephant foot bone found by archaeologists digging in southern Spain may be evidence that a troop of war elephants stomped through ancient Europe. It would be the first concrete proof of the legendary Carthaginian General Hannibal's troop of battle elephants, according to academics. Drawings of Hannibal's war against the Romans had long suggested that the beasts were used in fighting, but no hard evidence backed up the theories. Now the creatures' skeletal remains appear to have been found in an Iron Age dig near Cordoba. Beyond ivory, the discovery of elephant remains in European archaeological contexts is exceptionally rare, says the team of scientists in a paper published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The is one of evolution's most infamous species--but it's also a very confusing creature. All present-day birds are technically dinosaurs, but the 150-million-year-old, raven-sized hunter is the earliest known example of an avian animal. At the same time, lived during the Jurassic Period among multiple other feathered dinosaurs that were birds in the true sense of the term. But if it's any consolation, it's often still difficult for paleontologists to tell them apart, too.

Artist Tom Jung's 1977 painting introduced the world to the look and feel of George Lucas' blockbuster adventure. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Darth Vader's reign has ended. For a brief time, he owned the mantle of "Most Expensive Piece of Star Wars Memorabilia," but before you could say "more wealth than you can imagine" he fell once again, with a new challenger rising to take his place. It was only this past September that a verified screen-used lightsaber hilt wielded by the Dark Lord of the Sith in and set a sales record by fetching $3.65 million.

A 20,000 year old fossil uncovered in a tarantula-filled cave has paleontologists stunned. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Bees are frequently associated with large queen-serving colonies featuring hundreds if not thousands of insects . They lay their eggs in small cavities, and they leave pollen for the larvae to eat," explained paleontologist Lazasro Viñola López . "Some bee species burrow holes in wood or in the ground, or use empty structures for nests." Viñola López, a researcher at Chicago's Field Museum, added that some European and African species even construct nests inside vacant snail shells. That said, a beehive inside a bone is a new one even for seasoned researchers. Estimated to be around 20,000 years old, this newly discovered specimen is also the first known example of such a home, past or present. The findings are detailed in a study published on December 16 in the journal . Researchers located the unique find while exploring the many limestone caves that dot the southern Dominican Republic. Sinkholes are common across the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, and are often so well sheltered from the elements that they function like underground time capsules. These windows into the past are largely thanks to the work of the island's owls . The predatory birds often make their nests inside these caves, where they regularly cough up owl pellets filled with the undigested bones of their prey. Over thousands of years, these layers of bones fossilize atop one another across carbonate layers created from rainy periods. "The initial descent into the cave isn't too deep-we would tie a rope to the side and then rappel down," Viñola López said. "If you go in at night, you see the eyes of the tarantulas that live inside." After proceeding past the large spiders through about 33 feet of underground tunnel, the paleontologists began finding various fossils. Many belonged to rodents, but there were also bones from birds, reptiles, and even sloths for a total of over 50 different animal species. "We think that this was a cave where owls lived for many generations, maybe for hundreds or thousands of years," said Viñola López. "The owls would go out and hunt, and then come back to the cave and throw up pellets.

Science Dinosaurs Why did this ancient bird die with tiny rocks in its throat? The 120-million-year-old fossil may also be a choking hazard PSA. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Fossils may reveal what type of animal died millions of years ago, but they rarely depict exactly they perished. Even rarer are the examples that clearly showcase an animal's exact cause of death.

In true feline style, cats took their time in deciding when and where to forge bonds with humans. According to new scientific evidence, the shift from wild hunter to pampered pet happened much more recently than previously thought - and in a different place. A study of bones found at archaeological sites suggests cats began their close relationship with humans only a few thousand years ago, and in northern Africa not the Levant. They are ubiquitous, we make TV programmes about them, and they dominate the internet, said Prof Greger Larson of the University of Oxford. That relationship we have with cats now only gets started about 3.5 or 4,000 years ago, rather than 10,000 years ago.

We're learning more about what vitamin D does to our bodies The sunshine vitamin could affect your immune system and heart health. It has started to get really wintry here in London over the last few days. The mornings are frosty, the wind is biting, and it's already dark by the time I pick my kids up from school. The darkness in particular has got me thinking about vitamin D, a.k.a. the sunshine vitamin. At a checkup a few years ago, a doctor told me I was deficient in vitamin D. But he wouldn't write me a prescription for supplements, simply because, as he put it, in the UK is deficient. Putting the entire population on vitamin D supplements would be too expensive for the country's national health service, he told me.

Breast MRI provides high-resolution imaging critical for breast cancer screening and preoperative staging. However, existing segmentation methods for breast MRI remain limited in scope, often focusing on only a few anatomical structures, such as fibroglandular tissue or tumors, and do not cover the full range of tissues seen in scans. This narrows their utility for quantitative analysis. In this study, we present BreastSegNet, a multi-label segmentation algorithm for breast MRI that covers nine anatomical labels: fibroglandular tissue (FGT), vessel, muscle, bone, lesion, lymph node, heart, liver, and implant. We manually annotated a large set of 1123 MRI slices capturing these structures with detailed review and correction from an expert radiologist. Additionally, we benchmark nine segmentation models, including U-Net, SwinUNet, UNet++, SAM, MedSAM, and nnU-Net with multiple ResNet-based encoders. Among them, nnU-Net ResEncM achieves the highest average Dice scores of 0.694 across all labels. It performs especially well on heart, liver, muscle, FGT, and bone, with Dice scores exceeding 0.73, and approaching 0.90 for heart and liver. All model code and weights are publicly available, and we plan to release the data at a later date.

We introduce VoxTell, a vision-language model for text-prompted volumetric medical image segmentation. It maps free-form descriptions, from single words to full clinical sentences, to 3D masks. Trained on 62K+ CT, MRI, and PET volumes spanning over 1K anatomical and pathological classes, VoxTell uses multi-stage vision-language fusion across decoder layers to align textual and visual features at multiple scales. It achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across modalities on unseen datasets, excelling on familiar concepts while generalizing to related unseen classes. Extensive experiments further demonstrate strong cross-modality transfer, robustness to linguistic variations and clinical language, as well as accurate instance-specific segmentation from real-world text. Code is available at: https://www.github.com/MIC-DKFZ/VoxTell