Wooden spear hole in a Neanderthal scapula may be earliest lethal strike
A circular puncture the size of a large marble sits in the left shoulder blade of a Neanderthal known as Shanidar A. The bone, roughly 75,000 years old, comes from…
Climate change outpaced El Niño in juicing Hurricane Polo, study finds
Scientists at World Weather Attribution say human-driven warming did at least as much as this year’s El Niño to strengthen Hurricane Polo. The eastern Pacific storm exploded into Category 5…
Istanbul’s heaviest rain in decades kills two and shuts schools
Istanbul’s governor called the downpour the city’s worst in 84 years, and the toll is already human as well as material. A 14-year-old boy died after stepping into an electrified…
Indonesia drops dry ice over South Sumatra in a bid to lift wildfire haze
Planes over Palembang released solid carbon-dioxide pellets into the lower sky on 15 October as Jakarta tried an unusual fix for choking wildfire smoke. Officials put the load at roughly…
Stickier flakes, deeper storage: why gooey marine snow matters for the climate
Far below the waves, a constant drizzle of organic debris drifts toward the seabed. Scientists call it marine snow: clumps of dead plankton, faecal pellets, mucus and mineral grit. A…
A classroom gives way: Peshawar school collapse kills at least 29, most of them young children
Morning lessons at the Al-Khair private school in Peshawar had barely started on Thursday when an upper-floor classroom came down onto the room beneath it, and that ceiling caved in…
Fake roots, real mud: Thailand’s eroding delta tries a mangrove shortcut
On one of Thailand’s hungriest shorelines, engineers have planted a forest that never grew. Rows of wood-plastic “roots” now stand in the Chao Phraya mud, and early monitoring says they…
Kenya confirms second Ebola case as contact tracers race to find 15 missing people
A relative of the man who brought Ebola into Kenya has now tested positive himself. The 39-year-old fell ill on Tuesday with fever, fatigue and aching joints – but he…
A Bronze Age cargo with no ship left: divers off Turkey find what may be the oldest wreck ever discovered
Some 4,500 years ago a small merchant boat went down off what is now Turkey’s southern coast, and the sea swallowed every trace of its timber. What it could not…
Budhi Gandaki flood: Himalayan slope collapse released energy of a magnitude-3.5 quake
When the mountainside above Nepal’s Budhi Gandaki valley collapsed on 11 October, the jolt matched a small tremor of magnitude 3.5, Nepal’s geological survey has calculated in a first assessment.…