The same is true, Einstein showed, for “stuff” like space and time, seemingly stable, unchangeable aspects of nature; in truth, it’s the relationship between space and time that always stays the same, even as space contracts and time dilates. “Einstein’s deep view was that space and time are basically built up by relationships between things happening,” said the physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where Einstein spent his final decades. Einstein connected the dots: The speed of light was a measurable manifestation of the symmetrical relationship between electric and magnetic fields — a more fundamental concept than space itself.

For capuchin monkeys at Brazil’s Serra da Capivara National Park, tool use is a tradition going back millennia: A new study finds that these primates have used stone tools to process their food for the past 3,000 years, making it the oldest non-human site of its kind outside of Africa. But before early hominins intentionally flaked off pieces of stone to use as tools, it’s thought they used unmodified stone cobbles to process foods, much like the Serra da Capivara capuchins do today. After all, not all groups of capuchins use stone tools—so why do the ones at Serra da Capivara and at sites in Panama?

Raptor talons and bird bones collected from Neanderthal sites now point to intentional hunting of the powerful birds, likely for decorative and symbolic use—perhaps as religious totems, perhaps as icons of personal strength. He says that the new evidence paints Neanderthals as smart, selective hunters, actively targeting raptors like Golden Eagles, scraping their wings for feathers, and harvesting their talons. By the time modern humans arrived in Europe 45,000 years ago, and before raptor remains begin turning up in their sites, Neanderthals had been capturing eagles and other large raptors for at least 85,000 years, Finlayson says.

In particular, an extra dimension which behaves like space (instead of like time) but is compact rather than infinite features in many theories of particle physics. There are now a lot of theoretical physicists who make a living calculating details of models with extra dimensions like, say, if a fifth dimension existed with these specific properties what would it do to this bump in the cosmic microwave background or such. Peter Woit
Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University
There are lots of ways of adding a fifth dimension, the problem is just that if it’s anything like the other four, there’s no experimental evidence for it at all, and no viable theory that uses a hidden fifth dimension to explain anything convincingly.

The scientists are still working out what this reason is, but their leading hypothesis—based in part on the work of team member and University of Auckland biologist Jane Allison—is that alkanes prevent the cyanobacteria’s cell walls from becoming large and rigid, which makes it difficult for the cells to split when the time comes to reproduce. Allison came to this conclusion based on experiments using a molecular modeling program called Gromacs, which lets her test how hydrocarbons and other molecules in the cyanobacteria’s cell walls interact on a chemical level. While the diesel-like alkanes are only produced by cyanobacteria, Lea-Smith’s team believes other microbes, including some yeast species, are producing a huge range of other hydrocarbons.

I found it impossible not to think “the bones are their money” when reminded that Russell Crowe once drunkenly agreed to buy a $35,000 dinosaur head from Leonardo DiCaprio. “[Cage’s] poolroom is sort of a prehistoric cave and it’s full of fossils and the skulls of different animals,” recalled actor Sean Bean in telling the story of how Cage, intoxicated, accidentally smashed a prehistoric bear skull, then insisted on burying the pieces. That’s hardly the only strange fossil anecdote involving Cage, who once outbid DiCaprio for a Tyrannosaurus bataar skull at the price of $276,000, only to return it to the government of Mongolia, the country from which it had been smuggled.

This morning, the Washington Post published an article that showcased the work of David Shahar and Mark Sayers—two health science researchers from Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast—who claim that horns are growing from the lower skulls of young people. Shahar and Sayers’s research focuses on enthesophytes, or bits of bone that grow due to some combination of chemical, genetic, environmental, or use factors. There’s also several reasons some people have poor posture that have nothing to do with smartphone use or discipline.

Now, I’ve tested its latest product, a Sleep and Stress examination to see how I can get calmer in the day and more rest in the night. “In your case,” said DNAfit’s Amy Wells, “you have a higher tolerance to stress than some people.” Essentially, the Sleep and Stress tests are only available through a new sequencing process that only works as part of the Health Fit product (currently available for $195 / £145).

A superflare would be hundreds or even thousands of times stronger than the largest solar flare recorded by modern instruments.With some eruptions, a related cloud of charged particles, called a coronal mass ejection (CME), billows off the sun, creating a space storm. The 2012 near-miss and the 1859 direct hit involved solar eruptions “only” five to 10 times more powerful than the March 1989 storm that knocked out Canadian power, Baker points out — nothing like Notsu’s prediction of a monster hundreds to thousands of times more powerful. Referencing a 1921 solar storm that struck Earth and is thought to have generated ground currents 10 times stronger than the 1989 Quebec event, the report explains how hundreds of failing transformers across the United States could leave 130 million people without power.

Jodi De Luca, a clinical psychologist in Colorado who considers the effect of altitude on emotions one of her areas of interest, says passengers might feel a lack of control over their environment or a sense of anxiety that something bad could happen on the plane. In an article for the International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science, he wrote that low air pressure and high levels of background noise in cabins also play a role in passengers’ ability to smell and taste. According to the World Health Organization, when a plane is at its typical cruising altitude of 36,000 to 40,000 feet, the air pressure in the cabin is equivalent to between 6,000 and 8,000 feet above sea level.