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This ancient Greek coin is now on view in Berlin.

Cool Finds

A 13-Year-Old Boy Found This Bronze Coin in a Field. It Turned Out to Be the First Ancient Greek Artifact Discovered in Berlin

Minted in Troy in the third century B.C.E., the object might have been buried as a gift to the dead. Archaeologists don’t know exactly how it ended up in modern-day Germany

Scientists now think humans settled South America in three waves.

A New Big Database of DNA From Indigenous Americans Shakes Up Scientists’ Theories About Human Settlement of South America

Genomic data provides evidence for a previously unknown wave of migration, with Indigenous groups living in central and southern Mexico spreading into South America and the Caribbean starting around 1,300 years ago

A photograph taken in 1926 depicting paintings by Peter Paul Rubens that likely burned in a fire in 1945

Fires in Berlin Destroyed Hundreds of Paintings During World War II. Now, a Museum Will Publish Photo Archives of the Lost Artworks Online

A proactive effort to document the collection of the Gemäldegalerie will pay off a century later as negatives of lost paintings by Rubens and Caravaggio are digitized and published online

Comet 3I/ATLAS has much more "heavy" water than comets that formed in the solar system, according to a new study.

Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Came From an Extremely Cold, Lonely Region of the Milky Way Galaxy, New Research Suggests

Astronomers analyzed the vapors coming off the comet when it neared the sun and found it had a lot of “heavy” water. That hints it grew up in a frigid planetary system, possibly before its home star formed

A duke in Florence commissioned the fountain in 1559.

A Tourist Damaged Florence’s ‘Fountain of Neptune’ While Attempting to Grope Its Marble Statue on a Dare

Fixing the fountain’s horse sculptures and frieze will cost nearly $6,000. The alleged offender is the latest tourist to harm artwork in response to peer pressure or in pursuit of social media clout

Illustration of the giant ancient octopus

Cool Finds

This Bone-Crunching Octopus Was Nearly the Size of a Semitruck and May Have Feasted on Giant Reptiles 100 Million Years Ago

The massive invertebrates may have been top predators, according to an analysis of their fossilized jaws. The work suggests that ancient oceans weren’t completely ruled by spine-bearing creatures, as previously thought

The two-toned lobster will go on display at the Woods Hole Science Aquarium when it reopens next year.

See the 1-in-50-Million Split-Color Lobster Caught Off the Coast of Massachusetts. It’s Carrying Two Sets of Genetic Information

The unusual-looking crustacean is two-toned, with a line dividing its body into an orange side and a brown side. This can happen when two fertilized, unlaid lobster eggs touch—causing one to absorb the other

New research indicates that Neanderthals had the genetic hardware for language.

Did Neanderthals Have Language? New Research Suggests They Had the Genetic Hardware for It, Like Humans

Specific genomic regions that seem to play a role in human language development evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, before humans and Neanderthals diverged from a common ancestor, a new study finds

The federal government is reclassifying medical marijuana as a less dangerous drug.

State-Licensed Medical Marijuana Has Been Reclassified as a Less-Dangerous Drug. Here’s What That Means

The move should make it easier for researchers to study the substance and give tax breaks to licensed medical marijuana dealers

A digital rendering of new museum Dataland 

The World’s First Museum of A.I. Art Will Open in Los Angeles as the Art World Ponders Questions of Ethics and Sustainability

Dataland’s immersive exhibitions, generated with artificial intelligence, will debut to the public on June 20, with an inaugural show about rainforests trained on millions of images of nature

Mission engineers have shut down Voyager 1's Low-energy Charged Particles experiment.

To Keep the Voyager 1 Spacecraft on Its Interstellar Journey, NASA Turned Off One of Its Few Remaining Instruments

The probe launched almost 50 years ago and is the farthest human-made object from Earth. Shutting down one of its scientific devices will help it conserve energy and continue traveling toward the edge of the solar system

The new Smart Cinema theater collects biometric data to track in-the-moment reactions to on-screen action.

Why Do We Love Movies? This New ‘Smart’ Movie Theater Tracks Viewers’ Brain Waves and Heart Rates to Find Out

Researchers at the University of Bristol are studying the appeal of the cinema-watching experience by turning one theater into a biometric laboratory

The researchers studied a wetland shaped by Eurasian beavers in Switzerland.

Beavers Are Ecosystem Engineers—and They Might Be Helpful Allies in the Fight Against Human-Caused Climate Change

New research suggests that wetlands created by the industrious rodents are carbon sinks, meaning they store a lot of heat-trapping carbon dioxide—the human-produced gas largely responsible for today’s global warming

Neanderthals survived from roughly 400,000 to 40,000 years ago, when they mysteriously disappeared.

What Killed the Neanderthals? New Research Suggests a Lack of Genetic Diversity May Be Partially to Blame

When the climate cooled, the population of Neanderthals shrank. Most that lived between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago were descended from the same lineage and had very similar DNA

The Strait of Gibraltar 

Cool Finds

In a Graveyard of Shipwrecks Between Europe and Africa, Archaeologists Discovered Vessels Doomed Over Thousands of Years

The “harbor” of the Strait of Gibraltar is the final resting place for shipwrecks from ancient Rome, the medieval era and World War II, according to a new archaeological survey

Yasuyuki Aono kept track of bloom dates for Yamazakura cherry trees in Kyoto.

In Japan, a New Steward for 1,200 Years of Cherry Blossom Data Has Been Found, Sustaining a Climate Change Research Project

Climate scientist Yasuyuki Aono, who died last summer, learned to read ancient Japanese script to compile records on peak bloom dating back to the ninth century C.E.

After drilling a rock sample from a spot on Mars nicknamed “Mary Anning,” NASA’s Curiosity rover took this selfie on October 25, 2020. Now, that sample has revealed organic molecules that have never been seen on the red planet before.

A Mars Rover Found Building Blocks of Life Never Seen on the Red Planet Before, Boosting the Case for Ancient Habitability

The organic molecules discovered by NASA’s Curiosity rover could have been formed by life, but they could have also come from geologic processes or meteorites

The monkeys sometimes steal food from tourists.

Gibraltar’s Famous Monkeys Are Eating Dirt, Likely to Alleviate Stomach Aches From Munching on Tourists’ Junk Food

The British territory’s Barbary macaques are the only wild monkeys in Europe. But many are consuming human snacks high in calories, sugar, salt and dairy, and low in fiber

A camera set up by the conservation organization Panthera captured a healthy male jaguar in the Sierra del Merendón mountain range.

A Rare ‘Cloud Jaguar’ Was Spotted in Honduran Mountains for the First Time in a Decade, Representing a Win for Conservationists

The big cats are rarely seen at high elevations, so the sighting suggests that efforts to protect a wildlife corridor in the region are working

The papyrus fragment with a passage from Homer's Iliad

Cool Finds

Archaeologists Unearth a Papyrus Fragment From the ‘Iliad’ Tucked Inside the Wrappings of a 1,600-Year-Old Egyptian Mummy

The excerpt from Homer’s epic poem features his catalog of ships, a famous passage listing the Greek forces that sailed to Troy. It may be the first Greek literary text found in the context of mummification

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