Science

14,000-year-old footprints in Italy’s Bàsura Cave reveal the clever fire trick humans used to navigate total darkness |

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Inside the narrow passages of Bàsura Cave in northwestern Italy, darkness is not just the absence of light. It is a physical constraint that shapes how bodies move, pause, and orient themselves. Around 14,400 years ago, a small group of Epigravettian hunter-gatherers entered this environment with a canid moving alongside them, leaving behind footprints that … Read more

The 400-year-old ocean secret that protected fish long before modern conservation existed |

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Image: The Nature Conservatory Since ancient times, communities living along the eastern parts of Indonesia have been employing a traditional system referred to as sasi in order to preserve the ocean waters on which they depended for their survival. Even before marine protection systems were invented and even before fishing quotas were established through conservation … Read more

Earth’s rarest material is ‘not’ diamond: Scientists reveal new evidence that changes how we consider ‘rare’ |

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A spacecraft drifting past Neptune would not need much imagination to picture diamonds forming in its atmosphere. Deep inside ice giants, carbon compounds are squeezed under pressures that break molecular bonds and reorganise atoms into crystalline structures. In lab experiments and planetary simulations, scientists have modelled this “diamond rain” for decades, and missions like NASA’s … Read more

Forget air conditioning: This brick could cool city streets by 9°C without electricity, and scientists say it works |

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PC: The James Dyson Award At a bus stop in a midsummer European city, heat does not arrive as a single spike. People wait in that trapped heat, often without shade or airflow, relying on nothing more than chance positioning or a passing breeze. This precise moment of exposure was when a pair of industrial … Read more