The exhibition reveals how prehistoric communities lived, adapted, and left traces across the Trent Valley. Beneath the Trent Valley, artifacts, pollen, animal remains, and layers of sediment preserve evidence of communities that lived there thousands of years ago. A new exhibition at the University of Nottingham Museum brings those discoveries together, revealing how archaeological research [...]

Astronomers may have just found a first-of-its-kind phenomenon buried in the shadow of one of the Milky Way's most famous stellar explosions: two stars that died in separate supernovas, after spending millions of years orbiting each other.Using 16 years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, researchers detected high-energy gamma rays coming from a faint, previously overlooked supernova remnant called G189.6+3.3, which sits right beside the well-studied remnant IC 443 (nicknamed the Jellyfish Nebula). Their analysis suggests that the two remnants aren't just neighbors by coincidence. Instead, they may be the leftover wreckage of a binary star system, making this the first confirmed case of two supernova remnants traced to the same stellar pair. The findings were published July 21 in the journal Nature Communications."We weren't really looking for a binary supernova remnant," study first author Miltiadis Michailidis, an astrophysicist and postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, told Live Science. The team originally set out to characterize G189.6+3.3, which had long been overshadowed by its brighter neighbor. IC 443 is one of the best-studied remnants in the galaxy and among the first ever confirmed to accelerate protons — one of the key ingredients thought to produce cosmic rays, the high-energy particles that constantly strike Earth's atmosphere.By combining Fermi's gamma-ray data with X-ray, radio, ultraviolet and optical observations, the team teased out G189.6+3.3's faint signal and found something strange: Instead of glowing uniformly, its northern half was dominated by accelerated protons, while its southern half was dominated by electrons. It's the first time such a clean split has been spotted within a single remnant. The explanation, they found, came down to the environment: The northern edge of the remnant presses against a dense cloud of hydrogen gas, which gives fast-moving protons something to collide with, thereby producing gamma rays, Michailidis said. The southern half lacks that dense material, letting a different, electron-driven process take over instead. Ultraviolet observations showed that the northern shock wave had slowed after slamming into the cloud, backing up that interpretation.A dense cloud of hydrogen gas helped astronomers uncover clues that two neighboring supernova remnants may share the same origin. (Image credit: M. Michailidis et al. 2026)Earlier work had already shown that IC 443 interacts with the same cloud, which implies that both remnants sit at roughly the same distance from Earth. To rule out coincidence, the researchers simulated 1 million hypothetical binary star systems and calculated how often two unrelated remnants would wind up this close together purely by chance. Depending on the method used, the odds came out to somewhere between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 100. In other words, it's highly likely that the two supernova remnants are related.The team also estimated when each star likely exploded, finding that the two blasts were probably separated by tens of thousands of years. That finding is consistent with one star in a binary pair going supernova first, with its companion following suit long afterward.RELATED STORIESAstronomers spot 'time-warped' supernovas whose light both has and hasn't reached EarthScientists mapped the shape of a supernova for the first time ever ‪—‬ and it's not what we expected: Space photo of the weekThis bright star will soon die in a nuclear explosion — and could be visible in Earth's daytime skiesRather than relying purely on computer models, astronomers can use this real-world system to test long-standing theories about how massive binary stars live, interact and eventually explode. Michailidis said the team's next step is to search for similar binary remnant pairs elsewhere in the galaxy, to understand why this system has stood alone until now. He pointed to one particular payoff: Measuring the distance between two remnants' explosion centers can reveal how much energy a supernova actually released — a quantity that, until now, astronomers could only estimate from theory. "Now we can actually test it," he said.

Whale sharks may be the biggest fish in the ocean, but their feeding habits have remained mysterious. Now, new camera footage from the backs of these gentle giants has captured them doing something scientists rarely get to see: hunting for food far below the surface.The footage reveals that whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) spend far more time feeding underwater than scientists realized and that they use a surprising variety of foraging techniques that had never been documented before.The videos show whale sharks filtering food while cruising through open water, gliding downward as they feed during dives, climbing back toward the surface with their mouths still open, and cruising just above the seafloor to feed. Slow, steady underwater feeding turned out to be one of the sharks' most common activities.Philip Motta, a professor emeritus of biology at the University of South Florida who was not involved in the study, said the videos provide "very valuable" new information on the variability of whale shark feeding behaviors, which have been poorly documented to date.Cameras reveal whale shark feedingBefore this study, whale sharks had been studied from boats, from planes and by divers swimming alongside them. But those methods shared a blind spot: They could only follow the sharks when they were near the surface.Earlier research had hinted that whale sharks spend a lot of time feeding out of view, at varying depths. In a 2020 study, researchers estimated that whale sharks may forage at these depths for up to 20% of the day and feed at the surface for less than 1% of their time. In the new study, scientists strapped cameras directly onto the whale sharks, offering a rare shark's-eye view beneath the waves. They deployed camera tags on 10 whale sharks at Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia and gathered more than 22 hours of footage from the sharks' own perspective. They combined that footage with a review of 106 previously published studies to build the most comprehensive catalog of whale shark behavior to date. Ultimately, they cataloged 36 distinct behaviors ‪—‬ 12 were related to feeding, and of those, six had never been recorded before. The findings were published July 21 in the journal Marine Biology.RELATED STORIESWhale sharks are the world's biggest omnivores, scientists discoverWatch 1st-ever footage of whale shark eating from the bottom of the oceanAttempted whale shark mating caught on camera for the first time in HistoryWhale sharks can grow to 60 feet (18 meters) in length. And yet, this enormous fish survives on tiny prey ‪—‬ like krill, fish eggs and plankton ‪—‬ in tropical waters that are notoriously poor in nutrients. The ability to switch between so many feeding techniques may help to explain the long-standing puzzle of how such a large species can survive in these nutrient-poor waters. However, even with a shark's-eye view, the cameras captured only part of the story. Whale sharks are known to dive hundreds of feet below the surface, where sunlight disappears and conventional cameras can no longer record."The most important new discoveries could be what these gentle giants are doing when they perform really deep dives," Motta said.Shark quiz: How much do you know about these iconic ocean superstars?

Traces of two "ghost lineages" of extinct human populations lie hidden within our genome, a new study reveals.One of these ghost lineages left its DNA scattered in all present-day people. The other, a "super-archaic" lineage, dates back nearly 2 million years, researchers reported Thursday (July 30) in the journal Science."These extinct populations may have lived hundreds of thousands — or even more than a million — years ago, yet traces of their genetic legacy remain preserved in our genomes today," study co-author Priya Moorjani, a human evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science.For decades, experts have found DNA evidence that our species, Homo sapiens, once mated with now-extinct relatives such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. Most people not of sub-Saharan ancestry living today possess about 1% to 2.4% Neanderthal ancestry, and Asians and Oceanians (people from the island nations of the Pacific Ocean) harbor about 0.1% to 6% Denisovan ancestry. But scientists have suspected that modern humans may have interbred with other now-extinct human groups that have not been identified yet. However, the scarcity of ancient DNA samples makes it challenging to identify what these unidentified groups, often called ghost lineages, might have contributed to our species."Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of human evolution, but it can only tell us about populations for which DNA has been preserved," Moorjani said. "DNA survives only under very specific conditions — typically in cold, dry environments — which means that much of our evolutionary history, particularly in Africa, other tropical regions, and at very deep timescales, remains inaccessible."Looking for "long-extinct ancestors"In the new study, Moorjani and her colleagues reasoned that everyone's genome contains a record of their ancestry. They investigated whether it was possible to uncover signs of "long-extinct ancestors preserved within the genomes of present-day people," Moorjani said.The researchers developed a new technique to scan and compare more than 500 complete genomes of present-day humans from around the world. Using this data, they reconstructed the complete genealogies of each spot in each person's genome, developing family trees of the people's ancestors that mapped out every time genetic lineages diverged and merged. They focused on ancestors who had profound genetic differences from modern humans ‪—‬ a sign they evolutionarily split from the modern human lineage a long time ago."Most regions of our genome share a common ancestor relatively recently in our evolutionary history," Moorjani said. "Occasionally, however, we find stretches of DNA whose common ancestor lies much farther back in time, indicating they originated from a long-separated human lineage."Unlike previous approaches, this new method does not require DNA samples from fossils in order to spot ancient genetic sequences in the modern-human genome. "We no longer have to wait for extraordinary fossil preservation to learn about extinct human populations," Moorjani said. "Instead, the genomes of living people contain traces of these ancient ancestors, and genealogical methods allow us to recover some of that hidden history."The researchers experimentally tested the new method, which correctly identified Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestors in modern-human genomes. However, it also uncovered previously unknown instances of interbreeding with now-extinct groups.The researchers said one ghost lineage's DNA was found in all modern humans. This finding suggested that the lineage interbred with modern humans in Africa more than 50,000 years ago, before the most recent migration of H. sapiens out of Africa and into the rest of the world. "Previous publications suggested that there might be ghost ancestry — ancestry from unknown archaic lineages in modern humans — but they hadn't concluded whether this unknown ancestry is present only in Africans or not, and when this introgression event happened," study co-author Yulin Zhang, a computational biologist at UC Berkeley, said in a statement. "We were actually able to find and map genomic locations in modern humans that are from this ghost lineage and show that this ghost ancestry is in all modern humans, not only in Africans."This newfound lineage's DNA constitutes about 0.5% to 1% of the genomes of modern humans, comparable to the amount of Neanderthal DNA in many people living today. The scientists estimated that this ghost lineage diverged from the ancestors of modern humans about the same time Neanderthals and Denisovans did, about 800,000 years ago. Ghost candidatesOne possible candidate for the ghost lineage is Homo heidelbergensis, the researchers wrote in the study. This human species lived from about 700,000 to 200,000 years ago in Africa and Europe."I agree with their speculation that this ghost could have been the species Homo heidelbergensis, which was present in Africa as recently as 300,000 years ago," Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. The scientists also found evidence that people from Oceania inherited traces of a "super-archaic" human lineage that diverged from the ancestors of modern humans about 1.8 million years ago, before the emergence of the common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. This super-archaic DNA, on average, made up about 0.002% of the Oceanian genomes investigated and appeared within regions of Denisovan DNA, suggesting that the super-archaic DNA got into modern humans through interbreeding with Denisovans. The age of this super-archaic DNA suggests it may have come into Denisovans, and then modern humans, from Homo erectus, the longest surviving human species to date, Fernando Villanea, a population geneticist at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. That could make sense, because H. erectus skulls found in Yunxian, China, share some features with Denisovan fossils, Villanea added. But to date, only a limited amount of H. erectus genetic material has been analyzed.The study's findings highlight that modern humans are the product of multiple species and that "hybridization is the norm and not the exception," Villanea said. "We see hybridization being a common trait in the evolution of many other species, and these findings help us reframe our scientific thinking away from a mentality of human exceptionalism."The DNA segments from these newfound lineages are spread throughout the human genome, but they are most numerous in parts of the genome associated with the immune system and metabolic function. Moorjani said this makes sense, as the need to adapt to new germs and sources of food has been one of the strongest drives in human evolution. Interbreeding with other now-extinct human groups allowed modern humans to acquire potentially beneficial DNA.RELATED STORIESNewly discovered 'ghost' lineage linked to ancient mystery population in Tibet, DNA study findsDNA study of nearly 200 Indigenous genomes reveals unknown Asian 'ghost' population contributed to American ancestry'Mystery population' of human ancestors gave us 20% of our genes and may have boosted our brain function"This work reinforces a fundamental shift in how we think about human evolution," Moorjani said. "Rather than a simple branching tree, human history is increasingly emerging as a complex web of populations connected by repeated episodes of divergence, migration and mixing."Stringer agreed, adding that this new technique provides "indirect ways of reconstructing parts of the genomes of more primitive species like H. erectus and H. heidelbergensis."In the future, the scientists hope to use their new method to detect signs of more ghost lineages, "particularly those from regions such as Africa and South Asia that remain underrepresented in ancient-DNA studies," Moorjani said. The new technique can also help researchers "study evolutionary history in other species where fossil DNA is scarce or absent," she added.See how much you know about early humans with our human evolution quiz!

Primordial black holes (PBH) remain hypothetical, but that isn't stopping astrophysicists from figuring out how they could interact with other stellar objects. New research shows how PBHs, formed in the early Universe from collapsing pockets of dense subatomic matter instead of from stars, can enter white dwarfs. In some cases, that could've triggered a Type Ia supernova with particular chemical fingerprints, which should be detectable.