Environment Animals Wildlife 14,000-year-old woolly rhinoceros DNA extracted from wolf's stomach The two-horned prehistoric mammal went extinct about 8,700 years ago. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Towards the end of the last ice age, an ancient wolf feasted on a young woolly rhinoceros (). When the wolf died, it ended up buried in Siberian permafrost for about 14,000 years until it was uncovered by paleontologists in 2015. Luckily for scientists, some woolly rhinoceros tissue remained inside of the wolf's stomach.

With great biological havoc comes great opportunity. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. About 445 million years ago, our planet completely changed. Massive glaciers formed over the supercontinent Gondwana, sucking up sea water like an icy sponge. Now called the Late Ordovician mass extinction (LOME), Earth's first major mass extinction wiped out about 85 percent of all marine species as the ocean chemistry radically changed and Earth's climate turned bitter cold. However, with great biological havoc also comes opportunity.

Science Biology Without dinosaurs, there'd be no Thanksgiving dinner The evolution of today's beloved side dishes took off 66 million years ago. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It's hard to pick a favorite dish on your Thanksgiving plate. But regardless of your selection, there's a decent chance its history can be traced back to one of the most cataclysmic events in Earth's history. "The dinosaurs' absence meant changes in the forest structure-you went from a more open canopy to a more-closed canopy rainforest," explained Mike Donovan, a paleobotanist and the fossil plants collections manager at Chicago's Field Museum .

Who finds dad jokes funniest? Feedback had a birthday within the past 12 months, and Feedback Jr gave us a card that read: "My ambition in life is to be as funny as you think you are." Still, we persist with our dad jokes, if only because our offspring's exasperated reactions are so much fun. So we were delighted to learn that two psychologists, Paul Silvia and Meriel Burnett, have taken a scholarly interest in dad jokes. They have written an entire paper on the topic.

Riding a wave means surrendering to the pull. Riding a wave means surrendering to the pull. Technology is radically reshaping how we make music. As I dug deeper into this for a radio 3 documentary I began to wonder if creative organisations are right to be so upbeat about AI. Are we riding the wave or will the wave destroy us?

W hat if I told you I could stop you worrying about climate change, and all you had to do was read one book? Great, you'd say, until I mentioned that the reason you'd stop worrying was because the book says our species only has a few years before it's wiped out by superintelligent AI anyway. We don't know what form this extinction will take exactly - perhaps an energy-hungry AI will let the millions of fusion power stations it has built run hot, boiling the oceans. Maybe it will want to reconfigure the atoms in our bodies into something more useful. There are many possibilities, almost all of them bad, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and who knows which will come true.

The Gaia space observatory helped astronomers chart 4,000 light-years worth of our home galaxy. Against a black cosmic backdrop, countless white stars sparkle like scattered diamonds. Parts of the Milky Way's spiral arms are visible at the top of the image. Wisps of reddish-pink nebulas drift across the scene, forming delicate tendrils and cloud-like structures. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A new 3D map can take you 4,000 light years from the sun-without leaving Earth.

Using type Ia supernovae (SNae Ia) as cosmological probes requires empirical corrections, which correlate with their host environment. We present a unified Bayesian hierarchical model designed to infer, from purely photometric observations, the intrinsic dependence of SN Ia brightness on progenitor properties (metallicity & age), the delay-time distribution (DTD) that governs their rate as a function of age, and cosmology, as well as the redshifts of all hosts. The model incorporates physics-based prescriptions for star formation and chemical evolution from Prospector-beta, dust extinction of both galaxy and SN light, and observational selection effects. We show with simulations that intrinsic dependences on metallicity and age have distinct observational signatures, with metallicity mimicking the well-known step of SN Ia magnitudes across a host stellar mass of $\approx 10^{10} M_{\odot}$. We then demonstrate neural simulation-based inference of all model parameters from mock observations of ~16 000 SNae Ia and their hosts up to redshift 0.9. Our joint physics-based approach delivers robust and precise photometric redshifts (<0.01 median scatter) and improved cosmological constraints, unlocking the full power of photometric data and paving the way for an end-to-end simulation-based analysis pipeline in the LSST era.

Nate Soares doesn't set aside money for his 401(k). "I just don't expect the world to be around," he told me earlier this summer from his office at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, where he is the president. A few weeks earlier, I'd heard a similar rationale from Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety. By the time he could tap into any retirement funds, Hendrycks anticipates a world in which "everything is fully automated," he told me. That is, "if we're around."

A lot of people do, and for powerful reasons – we are facing enormous challenges unprecedented in human history, from climate change and nuclear war to engineered pandemics and malicious artificial intelligence. A 2017 survey showed that nearly four in 10 Americans think that climate change alone has a good chance of triggering humanity's extinction. But we seem largely blind to the many profound reasons for hope – and it's not entirely our fault. Humans are wired with a "negativity bias" that triggers a stronger emotional response to bad news than good news – evident in the journalism maxim "if it bleeds, it leads". This loss-aversion behavior served a purpose in our evolutionary past, when information and resources were scarce, but in the age of endless information access, it can lead to pessimism, anxiety and a distorted vision of what humanity is capable of.