Isaac Schultz

Fossilized feces from the Pleistocene epoch have divulged the mitochondrial DNA of a woolly rhinoceros, whose genome had never previously been assembled. The ancient poop was not excreted by an ancient rhino but by a hyena—an animal that evidently ate the massive herbivore before it, too, died sometime in the Middle Paleolithic. The team inspected two coprolites from different caves in Germany, and one hyena coprolite excavated in the 1930s. The samples yielded hyena and rhino DNA—enough of the…

The quantum world operates by different rules than the classical one we buzz around in, allowing the fantastical to the bizarrely normal. Physicists have described using quantum entanglement to simulate a closed timelike curve—in layman’s terms, time travel. Before we proceed, I’ll stress that no quantum particles went back in time. The recent research was a Gedankenexperiment, a term popularized by Einstein to describe conceptual studies conducted in lieu of real tests—a useful thing when one…

The natural world is filled with dramas that play out on the macro- and microscopic scales, in our cities and in remote wilderness alike. In the British Ecological Society’s annual photo competition, ‘Capturing Ecology,’ those activities take center stage as flora and fauna of all sorts find a way to persist in every corner of the world. The following 24 images include all the competition’s winning photos as well as the highly commended images. Each showcases a different facet of the world’s won…

A sweeping analysis of European and Asian genomes over the last 40,000 years reveals when and how some genetic exchange occurred between Homo sapiens and our closest cousins, Homo neanderthalensis. It also shows how the Neanderthals’ genetic footprint depended on later exchanges between members of our own species. Neanderthals are an extinct species of hominin that lived in Europe and Asia until about 40,000 years ago. Remains of Neanderthals were first found in a German quarry in 1856; their b…

Marks on the ribcage of a 48,000-year-old cave lion skeleton suggest the animal was killed by Neanderthals, making it the first evidence that our nearest human cousins hunted the Ice Age predators. A team of paleoanthropologists and archaeologists recently scrutinized the remains of four lions: the aforementioned skeleton, which was excavated in 1985 in Siegsdorf, Germany, and phalanges and sesamoid bones from three lion specimens excavated from Einhornhöle, Germany, in 2019. The former showed…

The latest data release from the European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory just dropped, and it’s a massive one: the spacecraft has identified half a million stars in a nearby cluster, nearly 400 gravitational lenses, and the orbits of some 156,000-odd asteroids. This outpouring of science is part of the observatory’s third data release, the first part of which came out in June 2022. Gaia has been in space since December 2013, and is positioned in a region called L2, the same area that the Webb…

The animal kingdom is a dynamic place, filled with action, splendor, and drama. But freeze any one moment in time, and creatures’ behavior can become hilarious. These images represent the final shortlist of the 2023 annual Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards competition. Previous finalists have included a lion colliding with a tree (2022) and a monkey landing in the most unfortunate way on a branch (2021). This year’s selection does not disappoint. “Everyone Can Fly” This cute shot of a rather…

A team of paleontologists studying the fossilized shell of a sea turtle from the Miocene Epoch found something surprising and perhaps impossible: preserved bone cells that they believe may contain ancient DNA, the molecule that holds the genetic information of living things. In an ancient turtle shell found on Panama’s Piña Beach, northwest of Panama City, the team identified osteocytes, or bone cells. They then used a type of stain called DAPI to attempt to label the DNA in the fossilized cell…

The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope launched from Earth on July 1 and has since been getting set up to begin its investigation of the dark universe. But the instrument commissioning hasn’t been rainbows and butterflies, as the telescope’s engineers and scientists have worked to untangle several issues that have come up in the process. You can read all about the Euclid mission here; in short, the telescope will study the dark universe—the parts of our cosmos made up of dark energy…

Life finds a way. It’s a cliché, but one borne of the inarguable perseverance of creatures in hostile conditions. The images that follow—part of this year’s Nature TTL Photographer of the Year competition—showcase life’s indomitable nature, as well as some of the remarkable environments that foster it. “Seal Hunting” The winning image in the Animal Behavior category is this shot of a polar bear patiently waiting for a seal to pop its head out of a breathing hole in Svalbard, Norway. “Traffic…