u/ADragonFromTheAbyss

Japan’s $350 million Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is going to do something even more: Fly to Phobos (ancient Greek for “fear”), one of the two small, battered moons of Mars, and land on the roughly Manhattan-size body not once, but twice. Using two novel extractors, MMX will gather several tablespoons’ worth of material and return the treasure to Earth in 2031.

“Phobos will be the second best known moon in the Solar System,” says Matija Cúk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute.

Those precious few grams of material could resolve the mystery of Phobos’s origin—and, potentially, that of its diminutive partner, Deimos (“dread”). Scientists are split on whether the moons are captured asteroids or the consolidated remnants of material thrown up by a long-ago martian impact.

But regardless of their genesis, MMX researchers say it’s likely they have since picked up a dusting of material blasted off Mars itself.

“This is not going to be just a Phobos sample return mission,” says Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built one of MMX’s sample extractors. “It’s going to be P

Fifteen cuneiform tablets from the Iraq Museum record farming, irrigation, land, grain, and labor during the Ur III period.

The tablets date from 2112 to 2004 BCE. Most come from the Umma region in southern Mesopotamia. Twelve tablets come from Umma, while two belong to the Irisaĝrig archives.

One tablet might come from Ur or Ĝirsu/Lagaš. The study by Abather Rahi Saadoon, Noemi Borrelli, and Maurizio Viano examines the records and their unusual details.

Most tablets deal with farm work, grain, land, or workers. Several texts record huge amounts of barley.

One tablet lists 124,260 liters of barley linked with fields in the Umma region. Another records more than 30,000 liters shared among people and different types of land.

The records also separate domain land, sustenance land, and tenant land. These terms show how land and grain were managed within the farming system.

Irrigation work appears in several tablets. One record gives plans for digging earth around the mê-Lamassim canal. The work involved thousands of cubic meters of soil.

The same record names places called Šaddad-ZU.ḪAR, Timilišu, and Gawarrum. Their readings are still uncertain. The canal name had not appeared in earlier Ur III texts studied by the authors.

Another tablet lists work needed on an irrigation system serving the field Nanna-gugal. The planned work totaled 4,824 cubic meters of soil. The record links the field with waterways near the border between Ur and Ĝirsu/Lagaš.

Workers also appear in the records, along with payments made to them. One tablet from the Šat-Eštar archive lists 12 workers who received 810 liters of barley as monthly wages.

Four workers were Elamites. Four worked as ox drivers, while four served as junior herdsmen. The record links each group with a specific role and payment.

Garamaudo bauciensis lived in what is now Europe during the Santonian age of the Late Cretaceous, roughly 84 million years ago.

The species was a type of the tethysaurine, a group of early mosasaurs within the superfamily Mosasauroidea.

“Mosasauroidea is an extinct group of aquatic squamates that invaded and diversified in the aquatic environment at the beginning of the Cenomanian, spreading worldwide from the Santonian to the end of the Maastrichtian, and becoming extinct during the biological crisis of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction,” said lead author Dr. Nathalie Bardet and Dr. Alexandra Houssaye from France’s National Museum of Natural History and their colleagues.

“They possess elongated skulls and bodies, and long, laterally compressed tails. They encompass a high diversity of sizes, from 1 to 15 m (3.3-50 feet) in length, in ecology, from freshwater, shallow marine to open waters, and in diet, from mollusks and arthropods to large fish and reptiles.”

>“Most mosasauroids possess a morphology strongly modified for an aquatic lifestyle, with paddles and the loss of connection between the vertebral column and the pelvis — that is, the absence of a true sacrum.”

>“More primitive forms display limbs looking adapted for a terrestrial locomotion and a sacrum, illustrating a plesiopedal and plesiopelvic condition.”

“Most mosasauroid remains are from marine deposits,” they added.

“However, a few species and undetermined mosasauroid remains have been encountered in freshwater environments, such as shallow estuarine and fluvial deposits.”

“Particularly common are freshwater occurrences in the Santonian-Campanian continental deposits of Europe, from Portugal to Hungary and Austria, passing through southern France.”

Garamaudo bauciensis’ fossilized remains were found in 1997 at the Bouc-Bel-Air – Sousquières locality in the city of Bouc-Bel-Air, Provence, southeastern France.

The fossils include part of a lower jaw, vertebrae, ribs, a pelvis and a humerus. They comes from at least four individuals, though most of it appears to belong to one.

“The Bouc-Bel-Air – Sousquières locality represents a freshwater ecosystem, probably a moderately eutrophic, carbonate-producing lake periodically influenced by flooding and shallowing events, within the continental deposits of the Aix-en-Provence Basin,” the paleontologists said.

“Such rapid flooding episodes could explain the state of preservation of the holotype specimen of Garamaudo bauciensis, which includes broken bones having however well-preserved surfaces.”

>Garamaudo bauciensis was about 2.5 m long and, unlike the better-known mosasaurs, kept limbs that look suited to walking on land, along with a pelvis firmly attached to the spine.

Its ribs were long and straight, suggesting a deep but narrow, side-to-side flattened body.

The researchers suggest the animal swam by undulating like an eel.

CT scans showed thick, compact bone in the vertebrae, ribs and humerus, a trait they link to buoyancy control.

>They propose that Garamaudo bauciensis could dive to shallow depths and may have been an ambush predator, but the density of its bones seems incompatible with life on land.

The animal was probably among the top predators in its ecosystem, possibly feeding on small fish, reptiles or amphibians, though its diet remains unknown.

“The assignment of this new freshwater mosasaurid to the tethysaurines highlights an additional occurrence of a freshwater species in this clade and the fact that, based on current knowledge, it is only within the Tethysaurinae that freshwater forms evolved among mosasaurids,” the scientists said.

“During the same period, hydropedal and hydropelvic mosasaurs with a higher growth rate and spongious bones, indicating an active carangiform swimming mode, evolved and radiated in open marine environments, spreading throughout the world.”

“This new discovery therefore contributes to a better understanding of a more diverse and complex evolution and history of post-Turonian mosasaurids, including more extensive niche partitioning than previously realized.”

>The study was published on September 28, 2026 in the Peer Community Journal.

The ‘' Out of Africa ’' model that has dominated palaeoanthropology for nearly three decades was originally based on five elements: a recent ancestry to human populations; an African origin for the ancestral population; limited or no gene flow among archaic hominins and no admixture between modern humans and Neanderthals; a marked difference between the behaviour of modern humans and archaic populations; and a major role for dispersals.

The first four of these have been significantly modified by accumulating fossil, genomic, and archaeological data. Dispersals, however, have remained central to the model, and have been extended to earlier phases of the evolution of Homo.

Here we consider the evidence for dispersals in Pleistocene hominin evolution, and place these into the broader context of comparative evolutionary biology.

We distinguish between dispersals that are essentially habitat tracking as climate or environment changes, and those conditioned by adaptive changes.

Finally, we consider the consequences of dispersals for the structure of hominin populations, emphasizing the multiple potential outcomes of dispersals, the role of density dependence in structuring rates of divergence, and the role of centre-edge models in understanding hominin diversity.

Range expansions (dispersals) and contractions have been a major characteristic of hominin evolution, and we have suggested here that these can be the product of both environmental change (habitat tracking) and the evolution of novel adaptations that expand habitat tolerance and niche space.

However, while there is no doubt that the Eurasian expansions of Homo sapiens occurring around 60 ka were very successful, and resulted in the displacement and extinction of other hominin species, the outcomes of dispersals can be highly variable.

These outcomes may range from complete replacement, absorption by the indigenous population, admixture and hybridization, or complete failure to establish a long-term population.

>Scientists have known about these markings for roughly a century, yet the chemical identity of the material responsible—the “unknown absorber”—remains unresolved.

An international research team has now placed new quantitative constraints on the properties of this mysterious absorber.

By combining observations of Venus with radiative-transfer modeling, the researchers estimated how strongly the liquid inside Venus’s cloud droplets would need to absorb light to reproduce the planet’s observed ultraviolet and blue reflectance.

The study, published in Astrobiology, approached the mystery from a new perspective.

It used a model to answer a question posed by lead author Dr. Jan SPACEK:

If we were to collect Venus’s cloud droplets into a spectrometric cuvette, how would the re-formed bulk liquid appear?

The difference between how a cloud looks and how its material looks when collected in bulk can be striking.

Cigarette smoke, for example, appears white because its sub-micrometer particles scatter light very efficiently. Yet when the smoke particles are collected in a flask, they form a dense suspension of burned tobacco—a tar-like sludge.

A similar optical principle applies to Venus’s clouds, as their particle size distribution is comparable to that of cigarette smoke. Thus, even though the clouds appear pale yellow to a remote observer, the liquid forming the cloud droplets might be surprisingly dark.

A female staff member at an anti-plague institute in the Irkutsk region who died amid rumours of a "black death" outbreak was diagnosed with "pneumonia of unknown origin".

Rospotrebnadzor insists that the situation in the region is "stable".

Residents of Russia's Irkutsk region are deeply worried by rumours of a possible outbreak of pneumonic plague in this Siberian area.

Speculation began to spread rapidly after the death of an employee of the Irkutsk Research Anti-Plague Institute.

Darya Shipilova died in the early hours of 2 October in the intensive care unit of the district hospital in the town of Shelekhov. According to local media, she broke a test tube containing the plague pathogen.

The incident prompted authorities to introduce quarantine measures: around 200 people have been placed under strict medical observation. The outlet "Baikal People" (source in Russian) reports that several Irkutsk hospitals were immediately closed and placed under quarantine, due to last three weeks.

On Saturday, masks were made compulsory as a preventive measure at the Irkutsk aluminium plant in Shelekhov.

Residents of Shelekhov have seen people on the streets wearing protective suits, masks and gloves. Local parents also say masks were handed out in kindergartens.

The deceased, a 28-year-old laboratory assistant, specialised in research on dangerous pathogens. According to the main account reported by her colleagues and independent media, on 25 September, while working with live biological material in the laboratory, she accidentally smashed a test tube containing the dangerous bacterium Yersinia pestis.

Two days later Shipilova's condition suddenly worsened. She was rushed to Shelekhov district hospital.

At first doctors, unaware of what had happened, suspected a severe case of coronavirus and admitted her to a specialised Covid unit. However, the rapid deterioration and the clinical picture forced them to carry out rapid tests for highly dangerous infections.

The patient was put on a ventilator, but her life could not be saved.

Deep in Peru's Acarí Valley lie the ruins of Tambo Viejo, an Inka provincial center where excavations have uncovered tasseled sacrificial llamas and brightly adorned guinea pigs.

But save for a few seeds and some stored leaves, evidence of how the Inka used one of their most sacred plants in rituals remained elusive. Now, archaeologists have discovered coca leaves still stuck in the wool of some sacrificed llamas.

>The discovery, reported in the journal Ñawpa Pacha, is the first direct evidence of coca in a ritual at the site. It contradicts what Spanish chroniclers reported hundreds of years ago: that coca was burned or bundled up during ritual offerings.

"Above all, coca was a sacred plant to the Inkas and according to written records was used in almost every single ritual activity," Lidio Valdez, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, said. "I had been looking for it for a while, when finally I found it."

Scientists may have found a clue to one of the biggest mysteries surrounding the origin of life: how fragile RNA molecules could gather and survive before cells existed.

New research shows that RNA is unusually good at assembling into tiny liquid-like droplets that concentrate molecules and can harden into protective, gel-like structures.

>Remarkably, much of this behavior may come down to a single oxygen-containing chemical group that RNA has but DNA lacks.