Forget peaceful interbreeding: a new analysis of archaeological sites in south-west France has resurrected the idea that it was good old-fashioned competition that led to the demise of the European Neanderthals in the face of modern humans, and not the interbreeding which we now know occurred. Image: erix!
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The fate of the dinosaurs may have been sealed half a billion years before life even appeared, by two geological time bombs that still lurk near our planet’s core. A controversial new hypothesis links massive eruptions of lava that coincided with many of Earth’s largest extinctions to two unusually hot blobs of mantle 2800 kilometres beneath the crust. Image: gnuckx
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Philip Currie at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, knows all about squeezing information out of relatively unpromising starting material. He has spent the last 15 years chipping away at an impressively bold hypothesis: that the tyrannosaurs hunted in packs rather than alone, making them even more formidable than we had thought. Image: Kabacchi
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No matter how long you gaze at the clouds in the sky, you’ll never spot them behaving like those in Martin Zwierlein’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bizarrely, when two of Zwierlein’s clouds collide, they bounce off one another like billiard balls. The feat could aid our understanding of some of the most enigmatic systems in the universe. Image: Velo Steve
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To survive in frigid polar regions, many cold-blooded creatures employ a natural antifreeze to protect themselves from the damage that large ice crystals would cause. These antifreeze molecules lock onto ice crystals, but not liquid water – though how they do this has been a mystery. Image: derekkeats
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