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Human-Dog Bond is Ancient, Universal and Strikingly the Same Everywhere: Study

23 June 2026 at 21:47
Testing situation and hunters with their dogs -- examples from each of the four non-WEIRD societies: (a) pointing test in Mongolia, (b) unsolvable problem test in Vanuatu, (c) showing test in Mongolia, (d) Vanuatu, (e) Mongolia, (f) Madagascar, (g) Peru. Image credit: Bräuer et al., doi: 10.1038/s41598-026-57657-1.

New research spanning five continents and vastly different cultures -- from the steppes of Mongolia to the rainforests of the Pacific -- shows that hunting dogs and their owners cooperate, communicate and rely on each other in nearly identical ways, suggesting the relationship was forged in deep evolutionary time, perhaps 30,000 years ago.

The post Human-Dog Bond is Ancient, Universal and Strikingly the Same Everywhere: Study appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Domestic Cats Age Like Humans, New Study Shows

23 June 2026 at 20:02
Lauren Scott & Brittany Florkiewicz show that cat facial signals correspond to different social functions, which have likely been influenced by domestication. Image credit: Sci.News / Makieni777 / Rise-a-mui / Alexas_Fotos / Dorothe / Vaclav Zavada / Artem Makarov / Daga Roszkowska / Birgit / Pasi Mammela.

Domestic cats (Felis catus) develop the same patterns of brain shrinkage and neurological decline as aging humans, and scientists think that makes them an ideal window into dementia and aging.

The post Domestic Cats Age Like Humans, New Study Shows appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Asteroid Donaldjohanson is Wobbly, Peanut-Shaped Object with Watery Past, Scientists Say

22 June 2026 at 17:26
The asteroid Donaldjohanson is composed of two heavily cratered lobes, connected by a smoother neck, with overall dimensions 8.8 km by 4.4 km by 3.1 km. Image credit: NASA / Goddard / SwRI / Dan Gallagher.

The main-belt asteroid Donaldjohanson, a heavily cratered fragment born from a catastrophic breakup 155 million years ago, appears to wobble through space while preserving clues to the migration of water-rich worlds in the early Solar System, according to a new analysis of images and data from NASA’s Lucy spacecraft.

The post Asteroid Donaldjohanson is Wobbly, Peanut-Shaped Object with Watery Past, Scientists Say appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Webb Sees Jupiter-Size Exoplanet Being Roasted by Its Star

22 June 2026 at 16:05
An artist’s impression of the hot-Jupiter exoplanet HD 80606b. Image credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / Joseph Olmsted, STScI.

HD 80606b has one of the most extreme orbits of any known exoplanet and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope just caught it getting flash-fried as it whipped past its star.

The post Webb Sees Jupiter-Size Exoplanet Being Roasted by Its Star appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

CERN Physicists Discover Third and Final Member of Doubly Charmed Baryon Family

18 June 2026 at 19:13
An artist’s impression of the doubly charmed Ωcc⁺ baryon. Image credit: Daniel Dominguez / CERN.

Physicists with LHCb Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have detected the elusive Ωcc⁺ baryon, a particle containing two charm quarks and one strange quark, completing a long-sought family of doubly charmed baryons first predicted over half a century ago.

The post CERN Physicists Discover Third and Final Member of Doubly Charmed Baryon Family appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Astronomers Find Four Separate Generations of Stars in ‘Globular Cluster’ Terzan 5

17 June 2026 at 23:08
This Webb/NIRCam image shows the star cluster Terzan 5. Image credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / Webb.

New Webb and Hubble data not only confirm the existence of two distinct populations of stars in the ancient stellar system Terzan 5, once classified as a globular cluster, but also provides evidence for two more recent rounds of star formation.

The post Astronomers Find Four Separate Generations of Stars in ‘Globular Cluster’ Terzan 5 appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Radar Observations Reveal New Clues about Europa’s Hidden Interior

17 June 2026 at 19:57
This artist’s impression shows radar waves from NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar pinging Europa; the radar waves penetrate Europa’s icy surface before bouncing back to be collected by NSF’s Green Bank Telescope on Earth. Image credit: NSF / AUI / NSF’s NRAO / P.Vosteen.

Using NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar and NSF’s Green Bank Telescope, astronomers from the University of California, Los Angeles, confirmed that the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa scatters radio energy in an unusually strong and complex way not seen on rocky worlds.

The post Radar Observations Reveal New Clues about Europa’s Hidden Interior appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Schrödinger’s Cat Gets Stranger: Physicists Demonstrate Quantum States No One Has Seen Before

10 June 2026 at 21:54
Quantum mechanics defies classical intuition, most famously through Schrödinger’s cat, where systems exist in superpositions of opposing states. Such superpositions are central to quantum technologies. Quantum ‘cat’ states have been realized in harmonic oscillators, but implementations were largely limited to Fock, displaced, or Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill states. A different class of macroscopic superpositions, where an oscillator is squeezed along orthogonal axes so that its positional variance is simultaneously larger and smaller than the Heisenberg limit, was proposed previously but remained unrealized. Saner et al. introduce a trapped-ion hybrid spin-oscillator system enabling an experimental realization of these ‘siblings’ of Schrödinger’s cat. Image credit: Saner et al., doi: 10.1103/k1xk-yt42.

Physicists at the University of Oxford have engineered a new class of ‘cat states’ -- quantum superpositions constructed not from ordinary wave packets, but from deeply exotic, nonclassical components -- opening unexpected paths toward more resilient quantum computers.

The post Schrödinger’s Cat Gets Stranger: Physicists Demonstrate Quantum States No One Has Seen Before appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Earth’s Earliest Animals May Have Thrived Too Easily to Evolve

10 June 2026 at 20:25
Artist’s reconstruction of the Fractofusus community: the bottom right features a large Fractofusus around which there are 5 to 8 medium specimens clustered; each of the medium specimens also has small specimens clustered around them; the small specimens therefore form an independent double cluster pattern, namely clusters of clusters. Image credit: C.G. Kenchington.

Fossils from some of the oldest-known animals on Earth, dating from 574 million years ago (Ediacaran period), suggest that cloning, not competition, dominated the Ediacaran seas, slowing evolution until environmental stress helped drive the rise of sexual reproduction and a burst of biodiversity.

The post Earth’s Earliest Animals May Have Thrived Too Easily to Evolve appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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