https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. In the ancient past, when human communities were small and the only way to travel was by walking, what were the chances of meeting a stranger? And what would happen next? https://phys.org/news/2026-10-animal-bones-malawi-social-people.html Archaeology Thu, 29 Oct 2026 17:10:06 EDT news712511163 For a long time, some researchers believed that the South Sámi population arrived in Central Norway in the 18th century at the earliest, and that Norwegian farmers were present long before the Sámi. This is known as the "hypothesis of late immigration." https://phys.org/news/2026-10-snfrid-smi-matriarch-norway-royal.html Archaeology Thu, 29 Oct 2026 16:10:01 EDT news712492238 Icelandic government officials recently met to discuss a dramatic scenario: what if the current that circulates Atlantic waters weakened significantly, or collapsed altogether? https://phys.org/news/2026-10-key-atlantic-currents-collapse-century.html Earth Sciences Thu, 29 Oct 2026 14:20:45 EDT news712494304 Scientists at Bournemouth University (BU) have solved a 150-year-old mystery about the identity of an extinct giant crane that lived in Europe over 20,000 years ago. The work is published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-year-mystery-identity-extinct-giant.html Paleontology & Fossils Wed, 28 Oct 2026 16:30:01 EDT news712422061 Antarctica's glaciers were changing long before satellites, weather stations or cameras captured their transformations, and they left behind clues. Along Marguerite Bay on the western Antarctic Peninsula, ridges of rocks and debris mark former glacier margins. For decades, scientists lacked direct evidence about when many of these ridges formed. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-antarctic-reveal-chapter-glacier-history.html Earth Sciences Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:30:05 EDT news712335722 In places like South Asia, Africa and parts of the Americas, monsoon rains supply water for drinking, crops and hydropower for billions of people. Understanding the patterns that monsoons tend to follow can help people plan for drought risks affecting agriculture, reservoirs and hydropower across distant regions. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ancient-stalagmites-reveal-exceptions-asiasouth.html Earth Sciences Sat, 24 Oct 2026 09:00:01 EDT news711981698 More than 30,000 years ago, people associated with one of Europe's major Paleolithic cultures (the Gravettian) were more interconnected than previously thought. An international research team led by the University of Vienna has uncovered new genetic evidence of long-distance connections between these populations. Published in Science Advances, the study combines genomic data from rare human remains with human DNA preserved in cave sediments. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-paleolithic-human-dna-reveals-east.html Archaeology Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:00:11 EDT news711899701 Two thousand years ago, the Arctic remnants of a once-vast ice sheet started to grow again. It was the beginning of a new glacial period, more conversationally known as the next ice age—but by the 1960s, summer temperatures were already so high that the ice sheet started to shrink. In other words, global warming ended a period of glaciation that had already begun. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-global-halted-emerging-ice-age.html Earth Sciences Thu, 22 Oct 2026 14:00:10 EDT news711882661 New research from the University of St Andrews has uncovered a previously unknown process that may have helped drive Earth into past ice ages. Published today (Oct. 22) in the Journal of Climate, the paper links ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere to changes in ocean circulation and sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere understood to drive down atmospheric CO₂. Linking these two key features of the ice ages has long been a challenge, given how far apart the two regions are. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-earth-hemispheres-ice-ages.html Earth Sciences Thu, 22 Oct 2026 14:00:06 EDT news711733921 When people think about democracy, they tend to think about national elections, parliaments or the policies of national governments. Even the recent special election in Holborn and St Pancras showed that democratic events are often framed around what they mean for the fortunes of national leaders, rather than what they mean for daily life within a community. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ways-cities-democratic-values.html Political science Thu, 22 Oct 2026 13:00:01 EDT news711877636 About 20,000 years ago, an enormous, floating ice shelf more than a mile (1.6 kilometers) thick helped lock in three of the largest ice sheets in northern Canada and Greenland. When that ice shelf disappeared, it helped unlock part of these ice sheets, which contributed to hundreds of feet of sea level rise, establishing modern coastlines as we know them. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-massive-ice-shelf-buttressed-age.html Earth Sciences Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:20:08 EDT news711807181 The glacial Arctic Ocean was not a barren ice desert but a breeding ground for the evolution of cold adaptation in marine fish. This is the main conclusion of a new scientific publication from Stockholm University that examines small fish bones found in deep-sea sediments during an expedition aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ancient-fish-bones-reveal-arctic.html Evolution Wed, 21 Oct 2026 15:20:01 EDT news711803702 The site of a former U.S. military base in Greenland was ice-free at a time when summers were a few degrees warmer than today, according to a new University at Buffalo–led study of ancient sediment recovered from beneath the site in the 1960s. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-forgotten-samples-greenland-cold-war.html Earth Sciences Tue, 20 Oct 2026 19:40:01 EDT news711727681 Legend has it that a giant elfin, owl-like creature called the chickcharney haunts the islands of the Bahamas. Those who encounter this cryptid on cordial terms are said to be blessed with good luck. Those who disrespect the chickcharney, however, don't fare as well. "If you see one shoe in the field, it means that chickcharney came, picked up this person and took them away," said Jessica Oswald, recounting a story she was told in the Bahamas. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-caribbean-islands-center-diversity-barn.html Evolution Tue, 20 Oct 2026 19:00:04 EDT news711714482 For thousands of years, humans shaped their world with stone, wood and bone. Metallurgy, the art and science of working with metals such as copper, bronze and iron, marked a turning point in human history. The mining that fueled metalworking also shaped Europe's and the Mediterranean's economies and politics over centuries. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-peat-bogs-natural-archives-fallout.html Archaeology Tue, 20 Oct 2026 10:20:12 EDT news711706402 Some 23,000 years ago, during the coldest part of the last ice age, people walked across the muddy margins of an ancient lake in what is now White Sands National Park, New Mexico. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-early-humans-america-climate-chaos.html Archaeology Sun, 18 Oct 2026 17:40:01 EDT news711294961 When a massive environmental disaster strikes, do societies simply collapse and disappear? Or do people find a way to adapt, rebuild and recover? https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ancient-volcanic-eruption-resilience-today.html Earth Sciences Sat, 17 Oct 2026 13:00:05 EDT news711298328 Expanded excavations at White Sands National Park in New Mexico have provided researchers an opportunity to refine the age of the oldest human footprints in North America and establish a deeper understanding of the landscape and environmental conditions at the time humans were present there. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-white-sands-footprints-humans-experienced.html Earth Sciences Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:20:08 EDT news711297661 The coastline near the southern tip of Africa looked vastly different between about 400,000 years ago and 70,000 years ago, compared with today. At times it lay as much as 100km (62 miles) south of its present location, exposing the vast Palaeo-Agulhas Plain, which contained an extensive habitat for large mammals. At other times the sea level was briefly as much as 13 meters (43 feet) higher than today's mean level. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-lion-tracks-ice-age-ways.html Paleontology & Fossils Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:00:33 EDT news711282012 The area of water between Russia and North America and the Pacific and Arctic oceans is now known as the Bering Strait. Yet it was once what we call the Bering Land Bridge, an exposed land and maritime region that connected Asia to North America. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-bering-bridge-base-reveals-life.html Archaeology Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:00:58 EDT news711185822 New discoveries from Australia's oldest known underwater archaeological record reveal how First Peoples lived, transported goods and used different places within a vast cultural landscape that was submerged when rising seas transformed the continent after the last ice age. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-australia-oldest-underwater-archaeology-reveals.html Archaeology Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:40:11 EDT news711189614 The seventh annual report by an international coalition led by Oregon State University scientists says the Earth's climate system is quickly becoming unstable and that while signs of important societal changes are emerging, greater and faster action is necessary. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-earth-climate-unstable-positive-emerge.html Earth Sciences Wed, 14 Oct 2026 09:00:05 EDT news711173232 The first definitive evidence of when post-Roman lead production began in one of Europe's largest medieval lead-producing regions, the Derbyshire Peak District in central England, has been uncovered by archaeologists after centuries of mining had erased much of the archaeological evidence. The work has been published in Antiquity. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-human-impact-britain-largest-medieval.html Archaeology Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:00:08 EDT news711015128 A research team from the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen and Leiden University in the Netherlands has examined a tooth from the Schöningen archaeological site in Lower Saxony. The study was published in Quaternary Environments and Humans. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-baby-tooth-macaques-northern-germany.html Evolution Mon, 12 Oct 2026 16:20:23 EDT news711036661 A rare assemblage of micro- and macro-fossils found in a roadside outcrop in South China, featuring thin ribbons, branching shapes and a tiny balloon on a stalk, offers a glimpse of marine life after one of Earth's most extreme ice ages. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-tiny-fossils-reveal-chapter-ocean.html Ecology Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:40:10 EDT news711034845 Oryza rufipogon is an ordinary-looking wild grass found today in parts of China, India and Southeast Asia. More than 8,000 years ago, people living in the Lower Yangtze Valley began cultivating it. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ancient-people-genetic-variation-wild.html Agriculture Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:00:07 EDT news711018841 Off the coast of East Antarctica, researchers led by Kiel University (CAU) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), have investigated an exceptionally large sedimentary body embedded in the seafloor of Vincennes Bay: a so-called "grounding-zone wedge"—symmetrical, wedge-shaped, approximately 260 meters (853 feet) high and 65 kilometers (40 miles) long. With a volume of more than 580 cubic kilometers (139 cubic miles), it is the largest known isolated grounding-zone wedge on a glaciated continental shelf to date and constitutes an exceptional archive of East Antarctica's glacial history. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-seafloor-sediments-reveal-east-antarctic.html Earth Sciences Wed, 07 Oct 2026 13:40:01 EDT news710593682 Imagine you're an infant. Just a few months in the world, trying to gather your faculties, testing gravity—you're pretty helpless and fully reliant on the people around you. As a result, one of your primary tasks as a new person—even before hand-eye coordination and responding to your own name—is to figure out how the people you've just met are connected to each other. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-young-infants-saliva-bond.html Social Sciences Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:50:01 EDT news710525522 Imagine two candidates with identical qualifications interviewing for the same job. One arrives carrying a bottle of water, while the other walks in with an iced coffee. Should that difference matter? https://phys.org/news/2026-10-iced-coffee-wont-job-reveal.html Economics & Business Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:00:01 EDT news710426162 One of the unresolved mysteries about the history of the Americas is when the first people arrived. Despite extensive debate centering on genetic, archaeological and environmental evidence, there is still no consensus or conclusive proof. Did they enter before, during or after the coldest period of the last ice age, known as the Last Glacial Maximum? Evidence from recent analysis of ancient DNA is providing fresh clues. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ancient-dna-evidence-narrows-people.html Archaeology Mon, 05 Oct 2026 17:00:12 EDT news710425242