Latest science news: Comet 3I/ATLAS | Perfectly preserved Neanderthal skull | Astronauts stranded

3.3-billion-year-old traces of life

That isn’t quite the oldest evidence of life. There are stromatolites, or microbial mats, found in Australia that date to 3.48 billion years ago. Other traces of ancient life have been more controversial: In 2017, scientists argued that chemical traces in 3.95-billion-year-old rocks from Labrador, Canada may constitute Earth’s earliest evidence of life.

But many very ancient samples are hotly contested, in part because what’s left behind is not the organism itself, but the chemical equivalent of a “life was here” sign. But because the biological molecules themselves break down over billions of years, these signatures of life are open to interpretation.

In the new study, the AI model looked at more than 400 samples of ancient rocks and sediments, modern-day plants and animals and ancient meteorites to pinpoint a “signature of life” that is left behind in rocks even after the most obvious biomolecules break down.

The team says they can distinguish rocks that once harbored life from those that did not with greater than 90% accuracy.

NIH terminates funding for hundreds of trials

Most of the terminated trials were in early phases, according to a summary of the new study in American Journal of Managed Care. But that still resulted in 74,000 enrolled patients being removed from trials.

The biggest funding cuts came from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), due in large part to $500 million in mRNA vaccine research being halted in August.

That won’t be a surprise to those who have followed public health news. Vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now heads the Department of Health and Human Services, and has taken several steps to discredit and hamper vaccine uptake and development.

While the administration has said only mRNA vaccines are in the crosshairs and that other uses of mRNA technology are unaffected by the funding cuts, “the industry doesn’t trust that,” Jeff Coller, the Bloomberg distinguished professor of RNA biology and therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University, told health editor Nicoletta Lanese in an interview in August.

That’s a real pity, because mRNA technology has enormous potential, from attacking hard-to-treat, deadly cancers to curing genetic diseases, Nicoletta reported in October.

Tia Ghose

The Crying of Launch Complex 39

It sounds like the setup for a Pynchon novel, but as Harry outlines, it’s all very much true.

Here’s what he had to say about the strange signals:

“Amateur astronomer Scott Tilley discovered the new signals while accidentally monitoring the wrong radio wavelengths. What’s really weird is that the signals seem to be deliberately using frequencies normally reserved for “uplinking” by satellite operators. But they are actually being used for “downlinking,” or sending messages back down to Earth, which not only goes against international regulations but could also potentially disrupt other spacecraft around them.

Not much is known about why they might be doing this or how widespread it is, and we may never know the full story due to the secretive nature of these satellites. Earlier in the year, I also wrote an in-depth report on how private satellites, like Starlink, are emitting radio pollution that overlaps with frequencies used by radio astronomers. If this problem gets worse, it could majorly impact our ability to study the cosmos, experts say.”

You can read the full story here.

Comet 3I/ATLAS’s tail as old as time

Some of the comet’s now iconic features, such as its green glow and its tail and anti-tail, are clearly visible in the photo, and it should be more than enough to whet our appetites ahead of NASA’s big reveal of its 3I/ATLAS images tomorrow.

You can read the full story here.

Ben Turner

A thousand years of solartude

Researchers in Australia simulated heatwaves in a hypothetical net zero world, in which the amount of greenhouse gases humans emit are offset by the amount absorbed from the atmosphere — something many scientists hope for and many countries, in theory, support.

The team found that heatwaves will be more severe and more frequent the longer it takes us to reach net zero. This isn’t really a surprise, given that we know greenhouse gas emissions trap heat in the atmosphere and warm up the planet.

However, the fact that it could take at least 1,000 years for heatwaves to return to preindustrial levels, even after we get our emissions in check, is a tad ominous for future generations.

“The thing with net zero and heat waves is: we’re damned if we do, but we’re completely stuffed if we don’t,” study lead author Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate science professor at the Australian National University, told the Guardian. “We’re already locked into a certain amount of warming.”

It’s quantum o’clock

Researchers have built a teeny tiny quantum clock that requires more energy to read than run.

In a classic quantum quirk, the researchers found that the energy needed to read the clock far exceeded the energy required to run the thing, suggesting measurement costs in quantum physics are more significant than previously thought.

Patrick Pester

Cloud down

An ongoing outage to Cloudflare, a US company which defends millions of websites against hacking attacks, has brought down vast swathes of the web, including X and OpenAI, today.

“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,” the company wrote in an emailed statement. “We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”

Once they’ve addressed the errors, Cloudflare staff will turn to investigating the cause of the “unusual spike in traffic.” Could it be yet another AI-driven cyberattack? Cloudflare writes that it will post updates to cloudflarestatus.com and more in-depth analysis to blog.cloudflare.com.

Until then, Live Science is still online, so where else do you need to go?

And you think you have family drama?

With Thanksgiving and the holiday season both around the corner, many of us are already preparing for some raucous family get-togethers.

But no matter how riotous we humans can be, nothing compares to the activities of the worker ants highlighted by this recent study. Ater being tricked by the pheromone spray of a parasitic queen, some ant species band together to dismember their mother and enable the imposter to usurp the throne for herself.

Countdown to NASA’s new 3I/ATLAS images

NASA will host a live news teleconference on Wednesday (Nov. 19) at 3 p.m. EST. The images are expected to be the clearest yet of comet 3I/ATLAS, and should help scientists learn more about the interstellar visitor.

Nosy Neanderthals

The new study involved taking a fresh look at the “Altamura Man,” which is an exceptionally well-preserved Neanderthal skeleton covered in a thick layer of calcite, sometimes called “cave popcorn.” The researchers’ findings suggest that the size of Neanderthal noses might not have had anything to do with living in cold temperatures.

You can read the full story here.

Patrick Pester

NASA sets date to share 3I/ATLAS images

Earthlings eager to see NASA’s newest images of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS will have to wait a few more days. The space agency just announced a live image viewing event scheduled for Wednesday (Nov. 19) at 3 p.m. EST.

During the event, NASA will share never-before-seen images of the interstellar comet taken during its close approach to Mars in early October. The U.S. government shutdown, which lasted from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12, prevented the agency from releasing these images until now.

Woman versus goose

A 12,000-year-old clay figurine unearthed in Israel may depict a goose attempting to mate with a squatting woman, archaeologists say.

Staff writer Kristina Killgrove reported on the unusual figurine, which may be the oldest representation of an animal and a human interacting.

But why did the sculptor depict this event, and what does it say about the Natufians, the ancient culture that crafted the object? You can read the full story here.

Dementia more deadly than heart disease?

“People are now more likely to live to an age where they have a higher risk of developing dementia,” Moran said.

Whether Australia is a harbinger for the rest of the world remains to be seen. In the U.S., for instance, heart disease remains the top killer, closely followed by cancer. Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth-leading cause of death, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dueling climate change impacts

Meanwhile, climate change is also fueling the rapid melt of Antarctic ice.

Yet the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which some climate scientists say is “all but inevitable” could have a surprising side effect — staving off the AMOC collapse, New Scientist reports.

Still, the ice sheet melting would be catastrophic for sea levels, and the AMOC would still decline by 60% and take 3,000 years to bounce back to its previous strength, according to new research.

Tia Ghose

Three more Chinese astronauts stranded

The latest trio — Zhang Lu, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang — are the crew of the Shenzhou-21 mission, whose return capsule was taken home by the Shenzhou-20 crew following a potential space debris collision that rendered their original capsule inoperable.

The development could highlight a potential flaw in China’s space protocols that could put astronauts needlessly at risk.

You can read the full story here.

3I/ATLAS’s trajectory narrowed down ten-fold

Now, thanks to data collected by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter during the comet’s flyby of the Red Planet, scientists have improved their estimates of 3I/ATLAS’s trajectory ten-fold.

The ESA is hoping to repeat the trick with its Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), which will get a good look at 3I/ATLAS later this month.

You can read Harry’s full story here.

Why are astronomers interested in 3I/ATLAS?

While it is indeed an interstellar visitor from beyond our solar system, most astronomers are confident that 3I/ATLAS is just a normal comet.

This means that researchers will carefully study new images of the comet for clues to its makeup, origins, and a better understanding of the journey it took to arrive at our cosmic backyard.

Comets heat up as they fly closer to stars, causing ice on their surface to sublimate into gas, which researchers can then detect and study. Previous observations have already revealed that comet 3I/ATLAS appears to be unusually rich in carbon dioxide, with potentially a thick irradiated crust from billions of years of exposure to cosmic rays.

The comet’s irradiated nature could make it more difficult to decipher the properties of its material that would otherwise reveal more about the conditions of its home star system. Still, researchers still have a lot to learn about interstellar comets, and just having more data on this one is as good a start as any.

Other images taken by HiRISE

What is HiRISE?

The images are expected to be the highest-resolution images of comet 3I/ATLAS yet, and even clearer than the Hubble Space Telescope’s comet snaps taken in July, the New York Post has reported.

When will NASA release images?

The U.S. government shutdown delayed the release of the images, but that’s now over, so they should be on their way. These images are expected to be some of the best yet, and will help researchers further understand the comets makeup and origins.

Everything you need to know about 3I/ATLAS

3I/ATLAS, which was first discovered in early July, is the third interstellar object ever found in our solar system. That means it doesn’t come from our cosmic neighbourhood, but from somewhere else in our Milky Way galaxy.

Where exactly in our galaxy the comet came from is unclear — scientists aren’t sure whether it came from the Milky Way’s ‘thin’ disk or its ‘thick’ disk — but depending on its origins it could be more than 7 billion years old, making it more than 3 billion years older than our sun. Tracing 3I/ATLAS’s origins is made even more challenging by its material, which has been transformed by billions of years of exposure to cosmic rays.

Telescope observations suggest the comet is roughly 7-mile-wide (11 kilometers) and zooming at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h). Having passed perihelion, or the closest point to our sun, roughly two weeks ago, 3I/ATLAS is now zipping toward its closest point to Earth on Dec. 19.

The exotic comet has many peculiar properties, from its chemical composition to its large size. This, alongside radio signals coming from it that are typical of all comets, has fuelled a frenzy of speculation that the 3I/ATLAS is an alien probe.

That’s almost certainly not the case, but it doesn’t mean that astronomers aren’t excited to study it. Investigating the comet could yield fresh insights into the conditions around other stars, our early galaxy, and the vast frontier of interstellar space.

NASA set to share best images of comet 3I/ATLAS yet

The images were taken by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and could have significantly better resolution than those by the Hubble Space Telescope on July 21, 2025.

We’re getting to work on what all of this could mean for the rapidly-brightened comet, which is roughly 7-miles (11 kilometers) wide, more than 7 billion years old, and traveling at 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) as it sheds its highly-irradiated coma across our solar system.

In the meantime, check out this breathtaking shot of the 3I/ATLAS snapped by astrophotographer Satoru Murata over the weekend.