“Archaeologists have now found traces of a plant-based poison on several 60,000-year-old quartz Stone Age arrowheads found in South Africa, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. That would make this the oldest direct evidence of using poisons on projectiles—a cognitively complex hunting strategy—and pushes the timeline for using poison arrows back into the Pleistocene.”

From Ars Technica.

“Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece — the earliest wooden tools on record.

The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence.

Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred.

The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.”

From New York Times.

“The instrument is called LuSEE-Night, short for Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment–Night. It will be launched from Florida aboard a SpaceX rocket and carried to the moon’s far side atop a squat four-legged robotic spacecraft called Blue Ghost Mission 2, built and operated by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas…

A moon-based radio telescope could help unravel some of the greatest mysteries in space science. Dark matter, dark energy, neutron stars, and gravitational waves could all come into better focus if observed from the moon. One of Burns’s collaborators on LuSEE-Night, astronomer Gregg Hallinan of Caltech, would like such a telescope to further his research on electromagnetic activity around exoplanets, a possible measure of whether these distant worlds are habitable. Burns himself is especially interested in the cosmic dark ages, an epoch that began more than 13 billion years ago, just 380,000 years after the big bang. The young universe had cooled enough for neutral hydrogen atoms to form, which trapped the light of stars and galaxies. The dark ages lasted between 200 million and 400 million years.”

From IEEE Spectrum.

“A new map has unmasked the landscape beneath Antarctica’s ice in unprecedented detail, something scientists say could greatly enhance our understanding of the frozen white continent.

Researchers used satellite data and the physics of how Antarctica’s glaciers move to work out what the continent might look like beneath the ice.

They found evidence of thousands of previously undiscovered hills and ridges, and say their maps of some of Antarctica’s hidden mountain ranges are clearer than ever before.

While the maps are subject to uncertainties, the researchers believe the new details could shed light on how Antarctica will respond to climate change – and what that means for sea-level rise.”

From BBC.