An undated photo provided by Craig Williams/The Trustees of the British Museum shows an artist’s conception of a fire in Barnham, southeast England, 400,000 years ago. (Craig Williams/The Trustees of the British Museum via The New York Times) By CARL ZIMMER Some 400,000 years ago, in what is now eastern England, a group of Neanderthals used flint and pyrite to make fires by a watering hole — not just once, but time after time, over several generations. That is the conclusion

Casa Batlló, center, in Barcelona, Spain, May 22, 2025. The fantastical look of Casa Batlló is a trademark of Antoni Gaudí, its designer. (Edu Bayer/The New York Times) By KATRINA MILLER Every summer, scores of tourists take to the bustling streets of Barcelona, Spain, a city known for its breathtaking architecture. Nicolás Atanes Santos, a young Spanish mathematician, sees this as an opportunity to engage more people in his favorite subject. In partnership with the regional

A conservation team, including Elizabeth Fly, standing at rear, on the Edisto River in South Carolina, July 25, 2025. “We’ve been testing and piloting things for so long, and now is the time to scale it up,” said Fly, who is the director of resilience and ocean conservation at the Nature Conservancy’s South Carolina chapter. (Madeline Gray/The New York Times) By DELGER ERDENESANAA Working from a dock on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, on a sweltering day this summer, Ed At

An image provided by Rocket Lab shows an artist’s concept of an ESCAPADE spacecraft above Mars. The ESCAPADE mission, which launched to space on a Blue Origin rocket on Nov. 13, 2025, breaks the mold of how planetary science missions typically come together. (Rocket Lab via The New York Times) By KENNETH CHANG NASA’s latest robotic mission to Mars, ESCAPADE, should perhaps have been named the Great Escape, given how many times it has eluded doom. The data that the mission eve

In an undated photo from M. Eulàlia Subirà, a lower jawbone from Individual 39, found at the settlement site of Puig Castellar, with a cut mark from decapitation visible on its chin. Skulls displayed in public 2,000 years ago were intended as a warning to enemies and a celebration of comrades, a new paper argues. (M. Eulàlia Subirà via The New York Times) By FRANZ LIDZ Some 2,000 years ago, a macabre ritual was observed in the northeastern Iberian Peninsula, a region of Spain

More than half the plastics found in sea turtles were soft types, such as plastic bags that can resemble their jellyfish prey. (Freepick) By SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY Two baseballs for a sea turtle. Three sugar cubes for a puffin. A soccer ball for a harbor porpoise. That’s roughly how much ingested plastic would be deadly for each animal, according to a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers analyzed data from more than 10,000 auto

In an image provided by Marco Villegas, an orca swimming with a young great white shark with a visible wound in waters off Baja California, Mexico. New research has documented how a pod of orcas in the Gulf of California has repeatedly hunted juvenile white sharks to feast on their livers. (Marco Villegas via The New York Times) By ALEXA ROBLES-GIL In mid-August 2020, Erick Higuera’s drone recorded a brutal hunt off Baja California in Mexico. A pod of orcas was hitting a grea

James Watson, who helped discover the double-helix structure of DNA, in the Library of the Human Genome at the Wellcome Collection in London, June 20, 2007. The discovery of the structure of DNA in the early 1950s is one of the most riveting dramas in the history of science, crammed with brilliant research, naked ambition, intense rivalry and outright deception. (Jonathan Player/The New York Times) By CARL ZIMMER The discovery of the structure of DNA in the early 1950s is one