Volcanic rock textures and ages suggest that the painting of a mural by residents of Çatalhöyük was recording an explosive eruption of the Hasan Dagi volcano. 

Scientists analyzed rocks from the nearby Hasan Dagi volcano in order to determine whether it was the volcano depicted in the mural from ~6600 BC in the Catalhöyük Neolithic site in central Turkey.

To determine if Hasan Dagi was active during that time, scientists collected and analyzed volcanic rock samples from the summit and flanks of the Hasan Dagi volcano using (U-Th)/He zircon geochronology. These ages were then compared to the archeological date of the mural.

The near-infrared vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has given us a new view deep inside the Tarantula Nebula - and its more than 800,000 stars and protostars within.

Everyone has seen what athletes do after a victory - footballers may take their shirts off and slide on their knees, baseball hitters may pump their fists. 

That instinctive reaction that occurs is a biological imperative to display dominance over opponents rather than a sense of personal satisfaction, according to a paper in Motivation and Emotion.

Marine cyanobacteria are tiny ocean plants that produce oxygen and make organic carbon using sunlight and CO2, and so they are primary engines of Earth's biogeochemical and nutrient cycles.

They nourish other organisms through the provision of oxygen and with their own body mass, which forms the base of the ocean food chain. Researchers have discovered a new benefit of these tiny cells: Cyanobacteria continually produce and release vesicles, spherical packages containing carbon and other nutrients that can serve as food parcels for marine organisms. The vesicles also contain DNA, likely providing a means of gene transfer within and among communities of similar bacteria, and they may even act as decoys for deflecting viruses.

The Battle of Raphia occurred in 217 BC near modern Rafah during the Syrian Wars. It was documented by Polybius and the orders of battles listed tens of thousands of foot soldiers, thousands of cavalry and elephants on both sides, making it the only known battle between Asian and African elephants. 

The Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories is moving us toward a fusion future by stepping into the past - in this case using a 19th century device called a Helmholz coil, which is a pair of circular coils on a common axis with equal currents flowing in the same sense and that produces a nearly uniform magnetic field when electrified. 

In recent experiments, two Helmholz coils, installed to provide a secondary magnetic field to Z's huge one, unexpectedly altered and slowed the growth of magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities, an unavoidable, game-ending plasma distortion that usually spins quickly out of control and has sunk past efforts to achieve controlled fusion.