The oldest recorded stone tool found to-date has been unearthed in Turkey.

The chance find of a humanly-worked quartzite flake, in ancient deposits of the river Gediz in western Turkey, show that humans passed through the gateway from Asia to Europe much earlier than previously thought, approximately 1.2 million years ago and provides new insight into when and how early humans dispersed out of Africa and Asia.

The international team used high-precision equipment to date the deposits of the ancient river meander, giving the first accurate time-frame for when humans occupied the area.

Our Milky Way is part of a cluster of more than 50 galaxies that make up the ‘Local Group’, a collection that includes the famous Andromeda galaxy and many other far smaller objects.

And now one more, a tiny and isolated dwarf galaxy almost 7 million light years away, named KKs3. KKs3 was found using the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) in August 2014 in the southern sky in the direction of the constellation of Hydrus and its stars have only one ten-thousandth of the mass of the Milky Way.

In the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), British MI6 agent James Bond designed his own martini, comprising three measures of Gordon's gin, one of vodka and half a measure of Kine Lillet (vermouth) shaken until it's ice cold and served with a slice of lemon peel.

He named it a 'Vesper' after his love interest Vesper Lynd but he never drank the Vesper again in the books.

Shaking a martini was...working class. Drink experts knew then and know now that you don't do it, because it aerates the drink as ice breaks off. You shake drinks with egg or citrus. It is believed that Fleming had his anti-hero order it shaken to thumb his nose at elites.

We might think that Christmas is more commercial now than in the past - and the season certainly starts earlier - but when it comes to one key barometer the 1950s were pretty bad.

Though the 1950s had lots of cultural problems compared to today, economically things were much better, with lower taxes, less government interference, and most families having only one parent forced to work outside the home. And that meant spending money, but there were no malls or online retailers so everyone had to come into town to shop.

Windows with transparent photovoltaic modules or façades in which microalgae are being bred to provide the house with its own biofuel are just some of the aspects buildings of the future could feature. 

A new international research effort, coordinated by  Friedrich Schiller University in Jena’s materials scientist Lothar Wondraczek, is aiming to change this. In the project ‘Large-Area Fluidic Windows – LaWin’ the scientists intend to develop functional façades and window modules, together with an integrated production process to achieve an as to yet unmatched readiness to market.

Metamaterials have long held promise for extraordinary properties when it comes to diverting and controlling waves, especially sound and light: for instance, at the right optical frequency, they can make an object invisible, or increase the resolving power of a lens.

A new project has created three-dimensional metamaterials by combining physico-chemical formulation and microfluidics technology, making soft metamaterials that are easier to shape. In their experiment, the researchers got ultrasonic oscillations to move backwards while the energy carried by the wave moved forwards.