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The extinct human relative, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the “hobbit,” did not hunt big game or cook its food over fire, according to a new study. Instead, it fed on the raw remains that Komodo dragons left behind after killing large prey and stripping off the best meat. The finding pulls apart a reputation for advanced behavior that this small-bodied, small-brained species has carried since its bones surfaced on the Indonesian island of Flores.

Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory shows the enormous burn scar left by Utah’s Cottonwood fire. Wildfire season arrived early across parts of the western United States this year, and the warning signs had been building for months. Warning signs appeared months earlier A winter with below-average snowpack, followed by an unusually warm and dry start to summer, left forests and grasslands primed to burn.

Coyotes have become a familiar sight in cities across North America, yet attacks on people remain remarkably rare. When dozens of people were bitten or scratched in Vancouver’s Stanley Park during the pandemic, researchers wanted to understand what had changed. Their answer points squarely at human behavior. A new study found that feeding coyotes and increased human activity in the park eroded the animals’ natural fear of people.

Children whose mothers were born with a heart defect are more likely to fall behind in their first year of school, a large new study has found. About one in four of these children lagged in two or more areas of early development, against one in six of the rest. The higher risk showed up across physical health, language, communication, and social skills, not in a single corner of development.

Picture a single seed landing on a bare stretch of roadside, hundreds of miles from where its parent grew. There are no neighbors of its kind anywhere in sight. For most flowering plants, that is where the story ends. A flower usually needs pollen from another plant of the same species before it can set seed, so one lonely arrival has nowhere to go. Yet some plants shrug off that rule. They make seeds from their own pollen, so a single survivor is enough to launch a whole population.

The search for life beyond Earth has always been full of surprises. Strange radio signals have sparked excitement. Odd gases on distant worlds have raised questions. Even ordinary objects have been mistaken for UFOs. Time and again, scientists have had to separate genuine clues from false alarms. Now, researchers have found that artificial intelligence can make the same kind of mistake. A new study suggests today’s AI systems can confidently identify signs of life where none actually exist.

The human immune system relies on a protein that acts like an alarm, springing into action the moment a virus invades. Scientists expected to find the same strategy in one of our oldest animal relatives, the sea anemone. Instead, they discovered the opposite. A new study found that sea anemones fight viruses using a nearly identical protein that normally keeps their antiviral defenses switched off.

For decades, fire crews and foresters in Canada have shared a piece of hard-won wisdom. When a wildfire runs into a stand of aspen, it tends to lose its momentum. That reputation earned aspen a memorable nickname, the asbestos forest. A sweeping new analysis has now put hard numbers behind the old story. Trees that resist fire Trembling aspen is the most widespread deciduous tree in Canada. Its leaves hold a lot of moisture, enough to make the canopy hard to ignite.

Put on a song at a family party and watch what happens. Toddlers bounce, grandparents sway, and before long almost everyone is moving to the beat. Moving to music feels automatic, like something we were simply born knowing how to do. But were we? A baby a few months old can’t tap a foot on the beat or clap along to a chorus. So the real question is when this whole thing switches on. A group of researchers in Vienna and Rome decided to actually look inside the first year of life to find out.

Migratory birds cross the North Atlantic every year, linking cold, scattered islands that would otherwise sit alone in the sea. A red-throated diver might spend its summer on a lake in West Greenland and its winter along the coast of western Europe, thousands of miles apart. For a long time, biologists assumed these long-haul travelers were doing something else along the way. They were ferrying passengers too small to see.