A lava tube is just what it sounds like; a cave created when the surface of lava hardens but continues to flow underneath. When that trickles to a halt, the cave is left behind.

These remaining caves exist on Earth and high-resolution pictures taken by interplanetary probes inferred lava tubes on Mars and Luna by observing linear cavities and sinuous collapse chains where the galleries cracked. A new paper measured the size and gathered the morphology of lunar and Martian collapse chains (collapsed lava tubes), using digital terrain models obtained through satellite stereoscopic images and laser altimetry taken by interplanetary probes.

Scientists have sequenced the genome of the tuatara, a single species reptile which originated in the Triassic period around 250 million years ago but is now only found in New Zealand, and it revealed an unusual architecture - it is mammal and reptile. 

Its genome shares features with those of mammals such as the platypus and echidna.

Some sequences of DNA move or jump location, they are even referred to as 'jumping genes', and those found in the tuatara are most similar to those found in platypus while others are more similar to those in lizards.

Evidence of prehistoric fluting techniques, using hammering or pressure to create a groove, has been found on the Arabian peninsula from 8,000 years ago.

Archeological finds are not new on the Arabian peninsula. There is evidence for lithics (stone tools) but evidence showed they were less advanced than northeast Africa or the Levant.

In Europe, the Levant and Africa, the Middle Paleolithic showed use of Levallois flaking methods, including predetermined forms of flaking products. Like spear tips, which gave hunters a big advantage in food. But new work also shows fluting, which was more common n Arabia.

The 1948 Samuel Beckett play "Waiting for Godot" is about two people that are, as you can guess, waiting for Godot. They wait at a tree, but they have no idea who he is or if he will arrive. When the person they do not know and had no idea was ever arriving does not arrive, they decide to commit suicide using the tree, but give up on that because they don't have a rope. They say they are leaving, but stay. You get the idea. 

Experts asked to rank 20 ways Artificial Intelligence could be used to facilitate crime over the next 15 years, in order of concern, listed "deepfakes" - fake audio or video content so real it would have been considered conclusive just a few years ago - as number one.

The 20 ways were ranked in order of concern based on the harm AI could cause, the potential for criminal profit or gain, how easy they would be to carry out and how difficult they would be to stop.

What does a pandemic smell like? If dogs could talk, they might be able to tell us.

We’re part of an international research team, led by Dominique Grandjean at France’s National Veterinary School of Alfort, that has been training detector dogs to sniff out traces of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) since March.

Most adults will remember spending much of their childhood playing outdoors without much parental supervision. But fears for children’s safety plus the demands of modern life mean many parents don’t allow their children the same freedoms.

With the world COVID-19 pandemic in its sixth month, food activists are back to trumpeting locally grown, and even home grown, as a viable option for mass food production, but for most of the world how realistic is that? It's fine if Michael Pollan claims it is from his walled Berkeley back yard, but even most New York Times subscribers can't afford that.

To make it suitably ironic, environmentalists who have spent decades and $40 billion on campaigns saying single-family homes in suburbia are a blight on nature and we should all live in urban apartments are now claiming we should be growing vegetables and trading them with each other to create a more sustainable future.

The public was sold a false bill of goods by “grassroots” anti-vaping activists when they crusaded against e-cigarettes and e-cigarette flavors in front of city councils, state houses and the U.S. Congress throughout 2019.

We were told that the seductively delicious flavors of Juuls and other e-cigarettes were luring youngsters to dangerous nicotine products. To curb underage vaping, the government needed to get rid of the flavored nicotine replacement products.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to rampant new use of personal protective equipment (PPE) but we're also facing a problem of more garbage in landfills. It could be trivial but in a world where people people about Keurig K-cups, technology to turn billions of items of disposable PPE from its polypropylene (plastic) state into biofuels mean it can be a viable consideration.

A study in Biofuels explains that the transformation into biocrude, a type of synthetic fuel, will not just prevent the severe after-effects to humankind and the environment but also produce a source of energy.