Latest science news: Comet 3I/ATLAS | Perfectly preserved Neanderthal skull | Astronauts stranded

Managing editor Laura here with a striking archaeological find: Imagine a lake filled with medieval weapons. Such a lake exists in Poland, and underwater archaeologists have been diving there for decades. In their most recent excavation, they discovered four medieval spearheads, one of which is very fancy.

This elaborate spear is “plated with gold, silver, bronze, and other metals, and its surface is intricately decorated with spiral and triskelion motifs [interlocking geometric designs],” the team wrote in a translated statement. It was likely owned by a prince or nobleman.

However, it’s unlikely this spear was used in battle, Live Science contributor Owen Jarus writes. Rather, it likely served as a symbol of power, the insignia of a high-born warrior, or a ritual object, the researchers explained.

The new finds bring the total number of weapons found in the artifact-filled lake to 145 axes, 64 spearheads and eight swords. So, why are there so many medieval weapons in this lake?

You can read the full story here to find out.

Laura Geggel

For many amateur astronomers, just taking a picture of a comet or a planet is a great find. But when Scott Tilley clocked off from his day job this year, he uncovered a vast network of puzzling radio signals being shot into space by U.S. government-run Starlink satellites.

It sounds like the setup for a Pynchon novel, but as Harry outlines, it’s all very much true.

Here’s what he had to say about the strange signals:

“Amateur astronomer Scott Tilley discovered the new signals while accidentally monitoring the wrong radio wavelengths. What’s really weird is that the signals seem to be deliberately using frequencies normally reserved for “uplinking” by satellite operators. But they are actually being used for “downlinking,” or sending messages back down to Earth, which not only goes against international regulations but could also potentially disrupt other spacecraft around them.

Not much is known about why they might be doing this or how widespread it is, and we may never know the full story due to the secretive nature of these satellites. Earlier in the year, I also wrote an in-depth report on how private satellites, like Starlink, are emitting radio pollution that overlaps with frequencies used by radio astronomers. If this problem gets worse, it could majorly impact our ability to study the cosmos, experts say.”

You can read the full story here.

We can’t let even half a day go by without a fresh update on 3I/ATLAS at the moment. Senior staff writer Harry has published a write-up on this breathtaking shot of the comet, which was captured over the weekend by astrophotographer Satoru Murata as it photobombed a distant galaxy.

Some of the comet’s now iconic features, such as its green glow and its tail and anti-tail, are clearly visible in the photo, and it should be more than enough to whet our appetites ahead of NASA’s big reveal of its 3I/ATLAS images tomorrow.

You can read the full story here.

Ben Turner

New climate modelling suggests that global warming-fueled heatwaves will continue for 1,000 years after we hit net zero (if we hit net zero), the Guardian reports.

Researchers in Australia simulated heatwaves in a hypothetical net zero world, in which the amount of greenhouse gases humans emit are offset by the amount absorbed from the atmosphere — something many scientists hope for and many countries, in theory, support.

The team found that heatwaves will be more severe and more frequent the longer it takes us to reach net zero. This isn’t really a surprise, given that we know greenhouse gas emissions trap heat in the atmosphere and warm up the planet.

However, the fact that it could take at least 1,000 years for heatwaves to return to preindustrial levels, even after we get our emissions in check, is a tad ominous for future generations.

“The thing with net zero and heat waves is: we’re damned if we do, but we’re completely stuffed if we don’t,” study lead author Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate science professor at the Australian National University, told the Guardian. “We’re already locked into a certain amount of warming.”

A team led by scientists at the University of Oxford recently explored timekeeping at the quantum level and its thermodynamic cost. In their findings, published last week and announced yesterday, the scientists describe creating the clock from single electrons that jump between two regions in the nanoscale realm — with each leap acting as the ‘tick’ of a traditional clock.

In a classic quantum quirk, the researchers found that the energy needed to read the clock far exceeded the energy required to run the thing, suggesting measurement costs in quantum physics are more significant than previously thought.

Patrick Pester

Company staff are still investigating what caused the crash.

“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,” the company wrote in an emailed statement. “We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”

Once they’ve addressed the errors, Cloudflare staff will turn to investigating the cause of the “unusual spike in traffic.” Could it be yet another AI-driven cyberattack? Cloudflare writes that it will post updates to cloudflarestatus.com and more in-depth analysis to blog.cloudflare.com.

Until then, Live Science is still online, so where else do you need to go?

You can read all the gory details in the full story here.

Ben Turner

Yesterday, we wrote (at length) about the potential release of NASA’s long-awaited comet 3I/ATLAS images. Well, just a reminder that these are coming tomorrow.

NASA will host a live news teleconference on Wednesday (Nov. 19) at 3 p.m. EST. The images are expected to be the clearest yet of comet 3I/ATLAS, and should help scientists learn more about the interstellar visitor.

Good morning, science fans! Patrick here to kick off another day of our science news blog coverage. I want to start with a story about Neanderthal noses, which Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove reported on yesterday evening. Researchers re-examined perfectly preserved Neanderthal nose bones, and discovered their sizeable schnozzes weren’t evolved for the cold.

The new study involved taking a fresh look at the “Altamura Man,” which is an exceptionally well-preserved Neanderthal skeleton covered in a thick layer of calcite, sometimes called “cave popcorn.” The researchers’ findings suggest that the size of Neanderthal noses might not have had anything to do with living in cold temperatures.

You can read the full story here.

Patrick Pester

Space and physics editor Brandon Specktor shared the details on how to watch, and why it matters, in his full story here.

A 12,000-year-old clay figurine unearthed in Israel may depict a goose attempting to mate with a squatting woman, archaeologists say.

Staff writer Kristina Killgrove reported on the unusual figurine, which may be the oldest representation of an animal and a human interacting.

But why did the sculptor depict this event, and what does it say about the Natufians, the ancient culture that crafted the object? You can read the full story here.

Dementia is now more deadly than heart disease — at least in Australia. The new trend reflects dramatic improvements in health care which mean people live longer in general, Lauren Moran, the head of mortality statistics at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“People are now more likely to live to an age where they have a higher risk of developing dementia,” Moran said.

Whether Australia is a harbinger for the rest of the world remains to be seen. In the U.S., for instance, heart disease remains the top killer, closely followed by cancer. Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth-leading cause of death, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tia here with news of dueling climate change impacts. A key Atlantic Ocean current system, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), could be collapsing, due in large part to climate change.

Meanwhile, climate change is also fueling the rapid melt of Antarctic ice.

Yet the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which some climate scientists say is “all but inevitable” could have a surprising side effect — staving off the AMOC collapse, New Scientist reports.

Still, the ice sheet melting would be catastrophic for sea levels, and the AMOC would still decline by 60% and take 3,000 years to bounce back to its previous strength, according to new research.

Tia Ghose

Three more astronauts are stranded in China’s Tiangong station following the return of their previously stuck colleagues, Senior Staff Writer Harry reports.

The latest trio — Zhang Lu, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang — are the crew of the Shenzhou-21 mission, whose return capsule was taken home by the Shenzhou-20 crew following a potential space debris collision that rendered their original capsule inoperable.

The development could highlight a potential flaw in China’s space protocols that could put astronauts needlessly at risk.

You can read the full story here.

Since its initial discovery in July, astronomers have answered many questions about what 3I/ATLAS is made of and where it could have come from in our galaxy. Yet, due to insufficient observations, where it’s heading hasn’t been entirely clear.

Now, thanks to data collected by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter during the comet’s flyby of the Red Planet, scientists have improved their estimates of 3I/ATLAS’s trajectory ten-fold.

The ESA is hoping to repeat the trick with its Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), which will get a good look at 3I/ATLAS later this month.

You can read Harry’s full story here.

Well, normal in the sense that it’s natural. 3I/ATLAS is actually pretty amazing as comets go, being the oldest ever seen and the most massive of its kind, not to mention only the third interstellar object ever recorded.

This means that researchers will carefully study new images of the comet for clues to its makeup, origins, and a better understanding of the journey it took to arrive at our cosmic backyard.

Comets heat up as they fly closer to stars, causing ice on their surface to sublimate into gas, which researchers can then detect and study. Previous observations have already revealed that comet 3I/ATLAS appears to be unusually rich in carbon dioxide, with potentially a thick irradiated crust from billions of years of exposure to cosmic rays.

The comet’s irradiated nature could make it more difficult to decipher the properties of its material that would otherwise reveal more about the conditions of its home star system. Still, researchers still have a lot to learn about interstellar comets, and just having more data on this one is as good a start as any.

HiRise has imaged vast areas of the Martian landscape in unprecedented detail, according to NASA. Check out the HiRise website, hosted by The University of Arizona, to scroll through hundreds of previous HiRise images.

The as-of-yet unreleased comet 3I/ATLAS images were taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The orbiter has been flying around Mars since 2006, searching for signs of water on the Red Planet. The HiRISE camera managed to get images of comet 3I/ATLAS as it zoomed past Mars in early October.

The images are expected to be the highest-resolution images of comet 3I/ATLAS yet, and even clearer than the Hubble Space Telescope’s comet snaps taken in July, the New York Post has reported.

We don’t know when NASA will release new images of comet 3I/ATLAS, but we’re seeing reports that it could be early this week.

The U.S. government shutdown delayed the release of the images, but that’s now over, so they should be on their way. These images are expected to be some of the best yet, and will help researchers further understand the comets makeup and origins.

Here’s a selection of some of our 3I/ATLAS stories so far

Patrick Pester

So what is 3I/ATLAS? And why do people care?

3I/ATLAS, which was first discovered in early July, is the third interstellar object ever found in our solar system. That means it doesn’t come from our cosmic neighbourhood, but from somewhere else in our Milky Way galaxy.

Where exactly in our galaxy the comet came from is unclear — scientists aren’t sure whether it came from the Milky Way’s ‘thin’ disk or its ‘thick’ disk — but depending on its origins it could be more than 7 billion years old, making it more than 3 billion years older than our sun. Tracing 3I/ATLAS’s origins is made even more challenging by its material, which has been transformed by billions of years of exposure to cosmic rays.

Telescope observations suggest the comet is roughly 7-mile-wide (11 kilometers) and zooming at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h). Having passed perihelion, or the closest point to our sun, roughly two weeks ago, 3I/ATLAS is now zipping toward its closest point to Earth on Dec. 19.

The exotic comet has many peculiar properties, from its chemical composition to its large size. This, alongside radio signals coming from it that are typical of all comets, has fuelled a frenzy of speculation that the 3I/ATLAS is an alien probe.

That’s almost certainly not the case, but it doesn’t mean that astronomers aren’t excited to study it. Investigating the comet could yield fresh insights into the conditions around other stars, our early galaxy, and the vast frontier of interstellar space.

Good morning, science fans. We’re back with more updates on the comet 3I/ATLAS. Following the end of the U.S. government shutdown, we’re seeing reports that NASA is set to release some of the best-quality images yet of the comet.

The images were taken by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and could have significantly better resolution than those by the Hubble Space Telescope on July 21, 2025.

We’re getting to work on what all of this could mean for the rapidly-brightened comet, which is roughly 7-miles (11 kilometers) wide, more than 7 billion years old, and traveling at 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) as it sheds its highly-irradiated coma across our solar system.

In the meantime, check out this breathtaking shot of the 3I/ATLAS snapped by astrophotographer Satoru Murata over the weekend.

Ben Turner