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6 May 2026 |
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Today’s Future News examines the importance of a simple name. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including a prehistoric mining camp and an atmosphere that shouldn’t exist. |
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Anthropology | PNAS |
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Early humans took dinner to-go |
If you want chicken or steak for dinner, chances are you go to your nearest grocery store to select the right cut—or perhaps you order takeout. New research shows early humans were similarly choosy, picking limbs that had more meat and taking them to-go.
To study early hominids’ meat-eating behaviors, researchers turned to a 1.6-million-year-old fossil assemblage in Kenya. They analyzed more than 1100 fossils from hoofed mammals, as well as hominid teeth, finding cut marks in spots aligned with large muscle groups, where the bones would have had more meat. They also saw repeated strikes that were likely used to crack open a bone for marrow, as well as few teeth marks from other carnivores, which suggests that we weren’t munching on leftovers from other creatures’ meals.
Interestingly, the bones at the site were mostly limbs and heads, rather than full bodies. That led the researchers to believe that ancient hominids were taking desired parts of the animal and transporting them to other locations for eating, perhaps due to competition from other predators.
“Understanding early human foraging is important because it shows how our ancestors dealt with real survival problems,” lead author Frances Forrest told Gizmodo. “They had to find food, avoid danger, compete with other animals, and adjust when conditions changed. Those are not small details. They are part of the story of how humans became so adaptable.” |
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Archaeology | Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology |
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Cave high in the Pyrenees may have been a prehistoric mining camp |
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Archaeologists meticulously excavate Cave 338, which is located more than 2000 meters above sea level in the Núria Valley and only accessible on foot. IPHES-CERCA |
Archaeologists have long assumed that prehistoric people spent little time at high altitudes, only occasionally passing through the mountains on their way to more hospitable destinations. Items recovered from a cave high in the eastern Pyrenees, however, are challenging that assumption.
Humans appear to have repeatedly visited Cave 338, which is located more than 2000 meters above sea level and only accessible on foot from the Núria Valley in Spain, between 5th millennium B.C.E. and the end of the 1st millennium B.C.E. These ancient travelers weren’t just using the cave as a pit stop: Archaeologists who excavated the site uncovered the remains of 23 hearths containing crushed, burnt fragments of a green mineral that resembles malachite. Since smelting malachite can produce copper, the team notes in a new study, Cave 338 may have served as a prehistoric mining camp
. Researchers also discovered a child’s finger bone and a baby tooth, which could mean that burials are hidden deeper in the cave, as well as two pieces of jewelry—one made from a clam shell and the other from the tooth of a brown bear.
The site “forces us to rethink the role of high mountain environments in Pyrenean prehistoric societies,” lead study author Carlos Tornero said in a statement. “For a long time, these spaces were assumed to be marginal. What we document here is recurrent occupation, with complex activities and a clear exploitation of mineral resources.” |
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Astronomy | Nature Astronomy |
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Tiny 500-km-wide ‘plutino’ has an atmosphere it shouldn’t |
Most small worlds in the outer Solar System are not expected to have atmospheres. Gas escapes too easily, and there is little to replace it. Pluto, larger and rich in ices that can vaporize into gas, has long been the only known exception.
Now, astronomers have spotted a thin atmosphere around a much smaller object. Known as 2002 XV93, it’s a distant plutino, a Kuiper Belt object that shares Pluto’s orbital pattern around the Sun, and is described in a new paper in Nature Astronomy. At roughly 250 kilometers in radius, it falls far below the size thought necessary to sustain an atmosphere. But in January 2024, as the object passed in front of a distant star, astronomers noticed something unusual: The starlight did not vanish all at once, but instead dimmed gradually.
That subtle fade is the telltale signature of an atmosphere. “This kind of smooth brightness change is naturally explained if the starlight was bent by a very thin atmosphere around the object,” lead author Ko Arimatsu told CNN.
By modeling the signal, researchers estimated a surface pressure of about 100 to 200 nanobars, tens of times thinner than Pluto’s atmosphere, but far denser than expected for an object this small.
At this size, any atmosphere should dissipate into space in as little as hundreds to thousands of years, suggesting that the gases detected here are temporary, perhaps refreshed by cryovolcanic activity or the aftermath of a recent impact. Small, icy worlds may not hold onto their atmospheres for long, but they may form them more often than previously thought. |
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Danaher combines AI-driven discovery with a proven strategic framework to expand what’s possible for the future of healthcare. |
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Future News |
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These two unassuming flies have very different scientific names—Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides (left) versus Anu una. Left: Norman E. Woodley via WIKIMEDIA COMMONS | CC BY; Right: Jacob Littlejohn via
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS | CC BY-SA |
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What’s in a scientific name? |
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Phie Jacobs, General Assignment Reporter, News from Science |
A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but does an insect with a name like Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides attract as much attention as one called Anu una? Long, complicated scientific names don’t exactly roll off the tongue, but new research suggests they may also have more serious consequences. As scientists report in a preprint posted last month on bioRxiv, organisms with longer, less readable names receive fewer mentions in scientific literature and are less visible to the public.
Lead study author Julia Mlynarek, who encounters a lot of unusual species names in her work as an entomologist, was curious to know whether an organism’s name might play a role in a researcher’s decision to study it. That curiosity sparked a series of studies, which revealed that insects named after their host plants are overrepresented in certain studies, while
species named after celebrities draw more media attention
. For this new study, Mlynarek and her colleagues examined a random sample of more than 3000 species.
While ranking scientific names based on length proved fairly simple (the longest valid binomial name for any organism, by the way, belongs to the myxobacterium Myxococcus llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochensis), determining a name’s readability and pronounceability was more complicated. Some names that appear unreadable to native English speakers, for example, might seem perfectly legible to someone from Eastern Europe. In the end, Mlynarek and her co-authors focused on hard-to-pronounce consonant clusters and letters that are uncommon in Latinized scientific nomenclature, which they used to create an “index of complexity.”
To quantify how much attention a species received, the team counted how many times it was mentioned in the scientific literature and the number of pageviews it received on Wikipedia—controlling for the fact that species discovered and named earlier would naturally be represented more. Increasing the length of a name from 10 to 30 characters, they found, was associated with a 66% decrease in literature mentions and a 65% decrease in Wikipedia reads. Less readable names also received far fewer mentions and pageviews than those rated as more readable. Of course, there were some exceptions: Dinosaurs, Mlynarek notes, can have some pretty bizarre names, “but they get a lot of clicks because, well, dinosaurs are cool.”
The results, she asserts, “demonstrate that scientists are human.” Mlynarek doesn’t necessarily think that researchers should have to follow stricter rules when it comes to scientific nomenclature. In fact, she notes the value of names that pay homage to communities and cultures that have historically been underrepresented in science. What researchers should do, she says, is recognize the power that names have to inspire the public’s interest in and appreciation of nature. The way Mlynarek sees it, the field of taxonomy needs to embrace its “poetic” side. |
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Cruisin’ for trouble |
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Cases of hantavirus aboard a cruise ship have raised a series of scientific and medical challenges that researchers from around the world are teaming up to solve. It’s not yet known which specific species of hantavirus is responsible or how passengers got infected—questions researchers say have consequences for how to deal with the 147 passengers without symptoms still quarantining aboard the ship, now on its way to dock in the Canary Islands. |
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Read more at ScienceInsider |
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Some organelles like it hot |
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New teeny thermometers are small enough to measure temperature differences within a cell—and surprisingly, they found that different areas can vary by as much as 1ºC. “I think it’s a fantastic milestone,” said one physicist. “It’s exactly where I hoped my own research into these materials would lead. It will be so useful for disease detection.” |
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Science Advances Paper | Read more at Nature |
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A solar nudge |
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A study found that space junk falls to earth faster during periods of high solar activity, as scientists have long suspected. This confirmation comes as the Sun is in a high-activity phase, creating a sense of urgency in updating predictive models. The results “emphasize the need to refine atmospheric models, particularly for polar regions, to improve reentry predictions and satellite mission planning.,” the team wrote. |
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Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences Paper | Read more at Science News |
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When uncertainty-focused language is applied to issues widely regarded as scientifically settled yet persistently contested in public discourse, it may act less as constructive transparency than as a salient cue for doubt. |
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Policy Article | 30 april 2026 | Robert Böhm et al. |
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