(Credit: lzf/Shutterstock) (Inside Science) -- Millions of years ago, after the ancestors of humans diverged from the last link they shared with chimpanzees, they began developing the numerous adaptations that made endurance one of the defining traits of our species. By about 2 million years ago, the genus Homo had emerged and the process really took off. Today, humans can run for miles or walk all day thanks to those changes. In new research, scientists have shown just how […]

(Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Calzetti) Some 30 million light-years from Earth, a faint monster lurks in the constellation Cetus the Whale. Astronomers dub the object UGC 695, and astronomers recently caught this image of it using the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a galaxy fainter than even the background brightness of our planet’s atmosphere, which makes it tough to see with Earth-bound telescopes. These so-called “low-surface-brightness galaxies” get […]

A true color approximation of Jupiter's moon Io taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1999. (credit: PIRL/University of Arizona) A volcano spread across an area greater than Lake Michigan could erupt any day. Located on Jupiter’s moon Io scientists predict that Loki, named after the Norse trickster god, is due to explode sometime in mid-September. The volcano last erupted in May 2018, an event also predicted by scientists.  “Loki volcano is huge — 200 kilometers […]

Native Americans have been visiting Calvert Island off the Canadian coast for more than 10,000 years. (Credit: Pacific Northwest Sailing/Shutterstock) Humans have long found comfort on Calvert Island, just off the coast of mainland British Columbia. For millennia, they have climbed the island’s rocky outcrops, walked through its rainy conifer forests, and waded through its chilly intertidal pools to collect crabs, mussels, and other marine life. There, in 2014, a group of Canadian […]

This is an estimate of what Denisovan's may have looked like, based on a new DNAS analysis technique. (Credit: Maayan Harel) Every time archaeologists pry the remains of a newly-identified human ancestor from the earth, there’s one question we care about most: What did they look like? For the first time, researchers have tried to answer that burning query about Denisovans, one of the most intriguing ancient relatives on our family tree. Discovered in 2010 in a Siberian cave, these […]