Science Archaeology World's oldest-known rock art found in Indonesian cave The claw-like drawing of a human hand is roughly 67,800-years-old. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A drawing of a claw-like hand on the wall of a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia is now the oldest known rock art in the world. The roughly 67,800-year-old art exceeds the previous record holder in the same region of Southeast Asia by 15,000 years or more. The drawing is detailed in a study published today in the journal, and helps fill in the archaeological timeline of how and when Australia was first settled.

Science Archaeology 3D map of Easter Island takes you places visitors aren't allowed One of the world's most isolated islands is open to virtual tourists. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Nestled in the South Pacific Ocean, some 6,000 people live on the most isolated, inhabited island in the world: Rapa Nui. Known to many as Easter Island, a name Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen coined after landing on the island on Easter Sunday 1722, Rapa Nui is roughly double the size of Disney World, or 63.2 square miles. And every year, some 100,000 people visit the remote island to see the famed 13-foot-tall moai statues or Easter Island heads .

With human help, the mammals can defy'the world's most fundamental natural boundaries.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Despite not exactly being world-renowned swimmers, pigs have spread across the Asia-Pacific region for thousands of years . With the genetic and archeological data from over 700 pigs, a team of scientists documented how people helped the mammals make their way across thousands of miles. "This research reveals what happens when people transport animals enormous distances, across one of the world's most fundamental natural boundaries," evolutionary geneticist and study co-author author Dr. David Stanton of the University of Cardiff and Queen Mary University of London said in a statement. "These movements led to pigs with a melting pot of ancestries. These patterns were technically very difficult to disentangle, but have ultimately helped us understand how and why animals came to be distributed across the Pacific islands."

China launches new military exercises around Taiwan following record $11.1 billion U.S. arms sale, with warships conducting live-fire drills that could escalate toward war.

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.

Expanded carrier screening: Is it worth it? Carrier screening tests would-be parents for hidden genetic mutations that might affect their children. It initially involved testing for specific genes in at-risk populations. Expanded carrier screening takes things further, giving would-be parents an option to test for a wide array of diseases in prospective parents and egg and sperm donors. The companies offering these screens "started out with 100 genes, and now some of them go up to 2,000," Sara Levene, genetics counsellor at Guided Genetics, said at a meeting I attended this week. "It's becoming a bit of an arms race amongst labs, to be honest."

Community science observational datasets are useful in epidemiology and ecology for modeling species distributions, but the heterogeneous nature of the data presents significant challenges for standardization, data quality assurance and control, and workflow management. In this paper, we present a data workflow for cleaning and harmonizing multiple community science datasets, which we implement in a case study using eBird, iNaturalist, GBIF, and other datasets to model the impact of highly pathogenic avian influenza in populations of birds in the subantarctic. We predict population sizes for several species where the demographics are not known, and we present novel estimates for potential mortality rates from HPAI for those species, based on a novel aggregated dataset of mortality rates in the subantarctic.

Modern AI inference faces an irreducible tension: no single computational resource simultaneously maximizes performance, preserves privacy, minimizes cost, and maintains trust. Existing orchestration frameworks optimize single dimensions (Kubernetes prioritizes latency, federated learning preserves privacy, edge computing reduces network distance), creating solutions that struggle under real-world heterogeneity. We present IslandRun, a multi-objective orchestration system that treats computational resources as autonomous "islands" spanning personal devices, private edge servers, and public cloud. Our key insights: (1) request-level heterogeneity demands policy-constrained multi-objective optimization, (2) data locality enables routing compute to data rather than data to compute, and (3) typed placeholder sanitization preserves context semantics across trust boundaries. IslandRun introduces agent-based routing, tiered island groups with differential trust, and reversible anonymization. This establishes a new paradigm for privacy-aware, decentralized inference orchestration across heterogeneous personal computing ecosystems.

Megalithic monuments in the otherworldly Orkney Islands remain a fundamental part of the landscape. Sheep linger at the Stones of Stenness, the remnants of a ceremonial circle. The Stones of Stenness, a brood of lichen-encrusted megaliths in the far north of the British Isles, could be mistaken for a latter-day work of land art, one with ominous overtones. The stones stand between two lochs on the largest of the Orkney Islands, off the northeastern tip of mainland Scotland. Three colossal planks of sandstone, ranging in height from fifteen feet nine inches to eighteen feet eight inches, rise from the grass, along with a smaller stone that has the bent shape of a boomerang. In contrast to the rectilinear blocks at Stonehenge, the Stenness megaliths are thin slabs with angled upper edges, like upside-down guillotine blades. Remnants of a ceremonial circle, they are placed twenty or more feet apart, creating a chasm of negative space. The monoliths in "2001: A Space Odyssey" inevitably come to mind. Given that the stones were erected five thousand years ago by a culture that left no trace of its belief system, it is unwise to project modern aesthetics onto them. Still, they can be seen only with living eyes. During a recent visit to Orkney, I kept returning to Stenness, at all hours and in all weather. On drizzly days, with skies hanging low, the stones resemble ladders to nowhere. In bright sun, hidden colors emerge: streaks of blue against gray; white and green spatters of lichen; yellowish stains indicating the presence of limonite, an iron ore. Pockmarks and brittle edges show the abrading action of millennia of wind and rain. I watched as tourists approached the stones and hesitantly touched them, as if afraid. When I put my own hands on the rock, I felt no obvious emanations, though I did not feel nothing. One evening, I leaned on a fence as the sun went down, the horizon glowing orange against a cobalt sky.

Gibbs sampling is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling technique that iteratively samples variables from their conditional distributions.