Sometimes a store manager or sommelier will file a wine under ‘miscellaneous’ when it doesn’t fit comfortably elsewhere. Lettie Teague goes straight to this section for interesting discoveries and terrific bargains.

Please hold US Interior secretary orders offshore wind project shut down Stoppage comes the same week a government report finds few problems with permitting. John Timmer – Apr 17, 2025 4:25 pm | 2 Credit: Chris McLoughlin Credit: Chris McLoughlin Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more On Thursday, Norwegian company Equinor announced that it was suspending the construction of a planned 800 MW-capacity offshore wind farm currently being built in the waters off New York. The reason? An order from US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who alleged that the project was rushed through review. The move comes as the US's nascent offshore wind industry is facing uncertainty, with all future leases placed on hold by an executive order issued on the day of Trump's inauguration. The hold was ostensibly put in place to allow time to review the permitting process. But Burgum's move comes the same week a report from the Government Accountability Office, done in response to the executive order, found only minor issues with the existing permitting process. On hold The Equnior project, termed Empire Wind, is a key part of New York's plans to meet its climate goals. Combined with a second phase that's currently in planning, Empire Wind would have a rated capacity of two Gigawatts, or over 20 percent of the state's planned offshore wind capacity. The initial construction, combined with the development of shore facilities, already has an estimated value of $2.5 billion, Equinor estimates, and is currently employing roughly 1,500 people. Construction was expected to be complete in 2027, although energy production from a subset of the 54 planned 15 MW turbines could have begun before then. Burgum's order was only made public via a post on X, which says that the hold will last "until further review of information that suggests the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis." There is no indication of what that information is or how long the review is expected to last. It's notable that this hold comes despite Trump's executive order explicitly stating, "Nothing in this withdrawal [of future leasing] affects rights under existing leases in the withdrawn areas." GAO undercuts the message The order alleged there were "various alleged legal deficiencies underlying the Federal Government’s leasing and permitting of onshore and offshore wind projects, the consequences of which may lead to grave harm." In response to those allegations, the Government Accountability Office began an evaluation of the Department of the Interior's activities in overseeing offshore wind development. The results of that were made public on Monday. And the report only found minor issues. Its primary recommendations are that Interior improve its consultations with leaders of tribal communities that may be impacted by wind development and boost "incorporation of Indigenous knowledge." The GAO also thinks that Interior should improve its methods of getting input from the fishing industry. The report also acknowledges that there are uncertainties about everything from invasive species to the turbines' effect on navigational radar but says these will vary based on a wind farm's site, size, and other features, and we'll only have a clearer picture once we have built more of them. Notably, it says that wind farm development has had no effect on the local whale population, a popular Republican criticism of offshore wind. Trump's animosity toward wind power has a long history, so it's unlikely that this largely positive report will do much to get the hold on leasing lifted. In reality, however, the long-term uncertainty about offshore wind in the US will probably block new developments until the end of Trump's time in office. Offshore wind companies have budgeted based on tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, and the administration has suggested they may revoke those in future budgets. And the move by Burgum means that, even if a company clears all the leasing and improvement hurdles, the government may shut down a project for seemingly arbitrary reasons. John Timmer Senior Science Editor John Timmer Senior Science Editor John is Ars Technica's science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots. 2 Comments

Artist’s impression of the exoplanet K2-18bA. Smith/N. Mandhusudhan One of the strongest signs of life outside Earth was announced this week, but some astronomers cautioned that it is extremely difficult to verify. That raises the question: will there ever come a point where we have definitive evidence of extraterrestrial life, and when might that be? The supposed signs of life were picked up by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) from the exoplanet K2-18b, 124 light years away. Nikku Madhusudhan at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues reported a signal of dimethyl sulphide (DMS), a molecule that…

Google DeepMind’s latest update to a top Gemini AI model includes a dial to control how much the system “thinks” through a response. The new feature is ostensibly designed to save money for developers, but it also concedes a problem: Reasoning models, the tech world’s new obsession, are prone to overthinking, burning money and energy in the process. Since 2019, there have been a couple of tried and true ways to make an AI model more powerful. One was to make it bigger by using more training data, and the other was to give it better feedback on what constitutes a good answer. But toward the end of last year, Google DeepMind and other AI companies turned to a third method: reasoning. “We’ve been really pushing on ‘thinking,’” says Jack Rae, a principal research scientist at DeepMind. Such models, which are built to work through problems logically and spend more time arriving at an answer, rose to prominence earlier this year with the launch of the DeepSeek R1 model. They’re attractive to AI companies because they can make an existing model better by training it to approach a problem pragmatically. That way, the companies can avoid having to build a new model from scratch.  When the AI model dedicates more time (and energy) to a query, it costs more to run. Leaderboards of reasoning models show that one task can cost upwards of $200 to complete. The promise is that this extra time and money help reasoning models do better at handling challenging tasks, like analyzing code or gathering information from lots of documents.  “The more you can iterate over certain hypotheses and thoughts,” says Google DeepMind chief technical officer Koray Kavukcuoglu, the more “it’s going to find the right thing.” This isn’t true in all cases, though. “The model overthinks,” says Tulsee Doshi, who leads the product team at Gemini, referring specifically to Gemini Flash 2.5, the model released today that includes a slider for developers to dial back how much it thinks. “For simple prompts, the model does think more than it needs to.”  When a model spends longer than necessary on a problem, it makes the model expensive to run for developers and worsens AI’s environmental footprint. Nathan Habib, an engineer at Hugging Face who has studied the proliferation of such reasoning models, says overthinking is abundant. In the rush to show off smarter AI, companies are reaching for reasoning models like hammers even where there’s no nail in sight, Habib says. Indeed, when OpenAI announced a new model in February, it said it would be the company’s last nonreasoning model.  The performance gain is “undeniable” for certain tasks, Habib says, but not for many others where people normally use AI. Even when reasoning is used for the right problem, things can go awry. Habib showed me an example of a leading reasoning model that was asked to work through an organic chemistry problem. It started out okay, but halfway through its reasoning process the model’s responses started resembling a meltdown: It sputtered “Wait, but …” hundreds of times. It ended up taking far longer than a nonreasoning model would spend on one task. Kate Olszewska, who works on evaluating Gemini models at DeepMind, says Google’s models can also get stuck in loops. Google’s new “reasoning” dial is one attempt to solve that problem. For now, it’s built not for the consumer version of Gemini but for developers who are making apps. Developers can set a budget for how much computing power the model should spend on a certain problem, the idea being to turn down the dial if the task shouldn’t involve much reasoning at all. Outputs from the model are about six times more expensive to generate when reasoning is turned on. Another reason for this flexibility is that it’s not yet clear when more reasoning will be required to get a better answer. “It’s really hard to draw a boundary on, like, what’s the perfect task right now for thinking?” Rae says.  Obvious tasks include coding (developers might paste hundreds of lines of code into the model and then ask for help), or generating expert-level research reports. The dial would be turned way up for these, and developers might find the expense worth it. But more testing and feedback from developers will be needed to find out when medium or low settings are good enough. Habib says the amount of investment in reasoning models is a sign that the old paradigm for how to make models better is changing. “Scaling laws are being replaced,” he says.  Instead, companies are betting that the best responses will come from longer thinking times rather than bigger models. It’s been clear for several years that AI companies are spending more money on inferencing—when models are actually “pinged” to generate an answer for something—than on training, and this spending will accelerate as reasoning models take off. Inferencing is also responsible for a growing share of emissions. (While on the subject of models that “reason” or “think”: an AI model cannot perform these acts in the way we normally use such words when talking about humans. I asked Rae why the company uses anthropomorphic language like this. “It’s allowed us to have a simple name,” he says, “and people have an intuitive sense of what it should mean.” Kavukcuoglu says that Google is not trying to mimic any particular human cognitive process in its models.) Even if reasoning models continue to dominate, Google DeepMind isn’t the only game in town. When the results from DeepSeek began circulating in December and January, it triggered a nearly $1 trillion dip in the stock market because it promised that powerful reasoning models could be had for cheap. The model is referred to as “open weight”—in other words, its internal settings, called weights, are made publicly available, allowing developers to run it on their own rather than paying to access proprietary models from Google or OpenAI. (The term “open source” is reserved for models that disclose the data they were trained on.)  So why use proprietary models from Google when open ones like DeepSeek are performing so well? Kavukcuoglu says that coding, math, and finance are cases where “there’s high expectation from the model to be very accurate, to be very precise, and to be able to understand really complex situations,” and he expects models that deliver on that, open or not, to win out. In DeepMind’s view, this reasoning will be the foundation of future AI models that act on your behalf and solve problems for you. “Reasoning is the key capability that builds up intelligence,” he says. “The moment the model starts thinking, the agency of the model has started.” This story was updated to clarify the problem of "overthinking."

Emma McIntyre/WireImage via Getty Images 2025-04-17T20:21:47Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Facebook's cultural relevance has been on the rocks for years. Emails between Mark Zuckerberg and a Facebook exec reveal Meta's concerns about the social network. The emails were used as evidence in the FTC's antitrust lawsuit against Meta. Mark Zuckerberg has been worried about Facebook's cultural relevance for years.Emails from April 2022 between Zuckerberg and Tom Alison — Meta's head of Facebook — were presented in court this week during the FTC's antitrust trial against Meta.The main topic of the email exchange: How to keep Facebook relevant."Even though the FB app's engagement is steady in many places, it feels like its cultural relevance is decreasing quickly and I worry that this may be a leading indicator of future health issues," Zuckerberg wrote. He added that even if Instagram and WhatsApp did well, he didn't see a path to success for Meta if Facebook faltered.Just months before these emails, Facebook had widely rolled out reels, its short-form video product resembling TikTok. While Zuckerberg said in the emails that he agreed with Facebook's recent shift of resources to reels, he wanted to "make sure we have a unique vision" for the Facebook app.So, what was going wrong on Facebook, then?According to the emails, here's what was affecting Facebook's cultural relevance at the time:Facebook's classic act of "friending" someone seemed to have lost its luster. "First, a lot of people's friend graphs are stale and not filled with the people they want to hear from or connect with," Zuckerberg wrote, adding that the act of friending someone also felt too "heavyweight" for users. "Do you want to be seen as someone adding friends on FB, or would you rather be seen adding the person on IG?" In the same exchange, Zuckerberg presented three options to Alison that could help Facebook's relevancy, including one "crazy idea" of wiping people's friend graphs and having them start from scratch.People were turning to other platforms, like Instagram, to follow friends and public figures. Zuckerberg himself even admitted that he was more likely to follow surfers or MMA fighters on Instagram or Twitter. "Every other modern social network is built on following rather than friending, so it seems possible that the FB app is just outdated because it never adopted this fundamental innovation," Zuckerberg said.Facebook's attempt to focus on communities with groups still needed work. "I'm optimistic about community messaging, but after running at groups in FB for several years, I'm not sure how much further we'll be able to push this," Zuckerberg wrote. "It's possible groups will just never be as big as friending/following, and that a lot of group behavior is moving to messaging anyway."Its push into short-form video needed to feel more social, and also unique to Facebook. Zuckerberg said that while Facebook's push of reels was good for surfacing interesting content in the feed, "it reduces the social sense of feeling connected to the person creating the content," especially if it wasn't made on Facebook. Alison responded to Zuckerberg in one email that the "problem with Facebook is that we don't have a culturally relevant public content ecosystem as a baseline since it's mainly comprised of commoditized news and video publisher content."Facebook has a litany of competitors — even its own sibling, Instagram. TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit all came up in the exchange. Smaller social apps were also referenced, like friend-sharing apps BeReal and Poparazzi. But one of the most interesting competitors was Instagram, especially since its acquisition by Facebook is core to the FTC's case against Meta. (It appears that Instagram's top exec, Adam Mosseri, was cc'd on these emails.) "Differentiating between IG and FB is important, but I think we need to find a strategy that doesn't leave one service picking up the scraps the other service leaves behind or having either service artificially or unreasonably constrain itself," Zuckerberg wrote. "Right now IG is doing well on cultural relevance and FB isn't, so I'm more focused on figuring out a reasonable path for FB longer term." Nothing like a little sibling rivalry. Recommended video

China has banned automakers in the country from marketing their vehicles with grandiose terms such as “smart driving” or “autonomous driving” following a fatal crash involving a Xiaomi SU7. The car was in driver assistance mode as the vehicle approached a construction zone, but the driver took control only just before the car hit a concrete barrier. Three passengers were killed in the accident. The problem with any assistance system below Level 4—in which a vehicle can operate entirely without human intervention—is that drivers are still required to pay attention to the road and intervene as needed, but complacency sets in. By the time the driver realizes that an accident might occur, it can be too late. It is the primary reason why Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have been criticized for rolling out autonomous driving capabilities with terms like “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving.” To protect itself from liability, Tesla now hedges in its language, referring to its most advanced system as “Full Self-Driving (Supervised),” and the company monitors drivers to ensure they have their hands on the wheel. The new rules set forth by Chinese authorities also state that automakers can not use car owners as guinea pigs to test new updates to their driver assistance programs. Any new algorithm updates must undergo a battery of tests before they can be delivered to vehicles over the air. For all its problems, one nice thing about a single-party dictatorship like China is that it can make policy moves quickly. In the United States, a similar move to ban marketing language would get caught up in lawsuits and regulatory challenges for years. Case in point: Back in 2022, the California DMV accused Tesla of falsely portraying its vehicles as autonomous based on its marketing language. The company’s vehicles have been at the center of high-profile crashes that involved some level of driver assistance, and critics say Musk’s grandiose claims have led some drivers to overestimate its abilities. But Tesla argued it was within its free speech rights to use the language, and no action was taken. China’s dictatorship is the same reason why the country has been able to out-innovate the United States in electric vehicles as a whole—the Communist Party decided they matter, and nobody in the country is going to dissent. Democracy moves much slower, though that is a good thing and by design; occasionally, a little authoritarian muscle has its benefits. Tesla has long claimed that its autonomous software makers drivers safer,  but the company has nonetheless faced a slew of regulatory investigations in the United States over the years, with the National Highway Transportation Safety Board most recently initiating a probe into Tesla’s “Smart Summon” feature that allows vehicles to navigate short distances, such as through a parking lot, without the driver being inside. The agency has been a thorn in Musk’s side for quite some time: A report in 2022 released by the NHTSA claimed that, in the preceding twelve-month period, Teslas accounted for some 70 percent of the car crashes that involved driver-assist systems. Tesla’s driver-assisted function, Autopilot, has often been criticized, with regulators speculating that it may be playing a role in crashes. Indeed, the NHTSA published yet another report this past April that claimed Tesla’s Autopilot function had a “critical safety gap” that could be linked to hundreds of crashes. An analysis conducted by the Washington Post last summer similarly found that Tesla’s Autopilot function had been involved in a total of 17 fatalities and as many as 736 crashes since 2019. The newspaper again cited NHTSA statistics. The NHTSA’s reporting that Teslas are involved in such a large number of fatal crashes is thanks to Biden-era rules that required automakers to inform the agency whenever a car using autonomous software was involved in a crash. Back in December, it was reported that the Trump transition team was considering the possibility of killing the rule. Acolytes of Tesla claim that its Full Self-Driving technology is nearing a point where it will be able to fully operate vehicles on its own. The company says it plans on launching an autonomous cab service in Austin by the end of the year. Musk has missed his stated projections for full autonomy going back to 2016, when he said Tesla vehicles would be able to drive themselves within a year. In 2019, he predicted that over a million robotaxis would be on the road by 2020. It turns out that the last 10% of solving autonomy might have been the hardest part, but other companies, including Waymo, are starting to get there, rolling out fully autonomous services across the U.S. at a rapid pace. In China, automakers like BYD have been rolling out their own self-driving features, suggesting that Tesla does not command the lead it once did.

Grecov House / ARQBR Arquitetura e UrbanismoSave this picture!© Joana FrançaHouses•Brazil Architects: ARQBR Arquitetura e Urbanismo Area Area of this architecture project Area:  3423 ft² Year Completion year of this architecture project Year:  2023 Manufacturers Brands with products used in this architecture project Manufacturers:  Estrutural Esquadrias, Prática Marcenaria, Vidromex, Área Pedras Lead Architects: Eder Alencar e André Velloso More SpecsLess Specs Save this picture! Text description provided by the architects. The plot is located in the Residential Alphaville II condominium, on the outskirts of DF-140. With a view of the native riparian forest, the house is constructed on two levels, taking advantage of the natural slope of the topography to integrate the landscape into the project. The main entrance, facing the internal part of the condominium, features a wooden panel that connects two defined volumes. The opposite facade, facing north, has strategically placed openings to allow contemplation of the surrounding nature.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!The ground floor is designed to integrate the living/dining room, kitchen, guest bathroom, barbecue area, and an external social bathroom. This integration forms a patio that functions as both an overlook and a socializing space for the residents. On the semi-underground level, the intimate area provides a more reserved space, including an office and suites. This level is below the natural ground level, offering a direct view of the landscaping at eye level, connecting this tier to the adjacent nature.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!The house combines elements of handcrafted design, such as eco-bricks and in-situ concrete, while a monolithic floor extends throughout the living area, establishing a spatial unity. Lateral skylights in the living room allow natural light to enter, giving the concrete slab the sensation of floating in space and highlighting the presence of daylight throughout the day.Save this picture! Project gallerySee allShow less About this office MaterialsConcreteBrickMaterials and TagsPublished on April 17, 2025Cite: "Grecov House / ARQBR Arquitetura e Urbanismo" [Casa Grecov / ARQBR Arquitetura e Urbanismo] 17 Apr 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1028947/grecov-house-arqbr-arquitetura-e-urbanismo&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has reported “evidence of a carbon cycle on ancient Mars,” according to a recent press release. These new findings could help researchers better understand if and how Mars ever supported life.As Curiosity continues to traverse the Gale Crater, researchers are working to better understand the Red Planet’s habitability and climate transitions that lead to the environment it has today. The findings have been published in the journal Science. Curiosity’s Latest Discovery Working with the NASA Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover team, Ben Tutolo, Ph.D., an associate professor with the Department of Earth, Energy and Environment in the Faculty of Science at the University of Calgary, and the team analyzed data from three of Curiosity’s drill sites. From this data, the research team noted the presence of siderite, “an iron carbonate material, within sulfate-rich layers of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater,” according to the press release. “The discovery of large carbon deposits in Gale Crater represents both a surprising and important breakthrough in our understanding of the geologic and atmospheric evolution of Mars," said Tutolo in the press release.Reaching this point has been a long-term goal for the research team. Mars’ Great DyingSome 250 million years ago, an event took place on Earth known as the great dying, where nearly 80 percent of all life on Earth died. Through analyzing the Curiosity data from this and other reports, the team believes that a great dying event likely happened on Mars too, as the warmer, humid climate shifted to one that was much colder and drier. “The abundance of highly soluble salts in these rocks and similar deposits mapped over much of Mars has been used as evidence of the ‘great drying' of Mars during its dramatic shift from a warm and wet early Mars to its current, cold and dry state,” Tutolo said in a press release.Researchers have predicted that Mars’ sedimentary carbonate, such as siderite, likely formed under the ancient Red Planet’s carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. Now, thanks to these findings, their predictions may be more concrete. A Thinning Atmosphere The presence of carbonate on Mars suggests that there was enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to support liquid water on the planet’s surface. However, at some point in time, the atmosphere thinned and turned that carbon dioxide into rock. “The broader implications are [that] the planet was habitable up until this time, but then, as the CO2 that had been warming the planet started to precipitate as siderite, it likely impacted Mars’ ability to stay warm,” Tutolo said in a press release. “The question looking forward is how much of this CO2 from the atmosphere was actually sequestered? Was that potentially a reason we began to lose habitability?” he added in the release. According to Tutolo, this researcher is similar to projects on Earth that aim to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into carbonates as a way to mitigate climate change. It’s possible that these findings could help keep Earth a thriving, hospitable planet in the future. “Learning about the mechanisms of making these minerals on Mars helps us to better understand how we can do it here,” Tutolo said in a press release. “Studying the collapse of Mars’ warm and wet early days also tells us that habitability is a very fragile thing.”NASA’s Curiosity team will continue to look for other sulfate-rich areas on the Red Planet to help provide more evidence to back up this data and to better understand how Mars transformed with the loss of its atmosphere. Understanding Mars could help us better understand Earth. “The most remarkable thing about Earth is that it’s habitable and it has been for at least four billion years,” Tutolo said in a press release. “Something happened to Mars that didn’t happen to Earth.”Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:A graduate of UW-Whitewater, Monica Cull wrote for several organizations, including one that focused on bees and the natural world, before coming to Discover Magazine. Her current work also appears on her travel blog and Common State Magazine. Her love of science came from watching PBS shows as a kid with her mom and spending too much time binging Doctor Who.

Great bustards are among the largest flying animals in the world. They are widely distributed across much of Eurasia, although their populations are highly fragmented. CREDIT: ©Rudmer Zwerver. Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Ancient humans living about 15,000 years ago in present day Morocco may have ritualistically feasted on some of the world’s largest birds as they buried their dead. The butchered bones of great bustards (Otis tarda) that were recently discovered in one of the African continent’s oldest cemeteries hint that these avians were culturally significant at the time. The findings are detailed in a study recently published in the journal IBIS. Into the Pigeon cave Roughly 14,700 years ago, a group of people were living and burning their dead in a cave located in what is now Morocco. Called Taforalt cave, or Grotte des Pigeons, this site contains graves of over 30 ancient humans. During this time, mammoths were still grazing the northern steppes and sheep would not be domesticated for another 5,000 years or so.  This group was beginning a transition between a semi-nomadic and a more settled life. Studying the other objects found within their graves offers scientists an insight into their daily lives and culture as a community. Additionally, the environmental conditions in the cave preserved the bones, tools, and a huge range of biological material. Having access to this kind of DNA evidence allows for researchers to build a more detailed picture of their lives. Earlier work found that they were burning and consuming the medicinal plant Ephedra, along with other foods such as juniper and acorns. Recent findings suggest their death rituals included the great bustard. Bustards are among the largest flying animals on the planet, with males regularly weighing in at about 44 pounds. Bustards still exist today, but they were once more widespread across Europe, Asia, and parts of north Africa. The new evidence found in this cave confirms that the birds have a long history on the African continent–and have long been valued by humans.  “We see a strong cultural association with the great bustard because the people are not only depositing them in burials, but there’s also evidence that they were eating them as well,” Joanne Cooper, a study co-author and senior curator of the avian anatomical collections at the Natural History Museum in London, said in a statement. “We believe that was part of the funeral rites. It seems to be a feasting set up, which is a very specific type of ritual eating.” An ancient ritual feast The bones of butchered and cooked animals have been found in the most high-status graves. Some hold the skulls of wild sheep, but one specific burial has the breastbone, a great bustard with cut marks. The team believes that this is evidence of a meal similar to the turkey eaten on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas now.  The repeated presence of great bustard remains suggests that the avians were culturally significant. It would have taken a great deal of valuable time and effort to catch and prepare the animals, which suggests ritual feasting over routine behavior. Bones of great bustards found in the graves of the ancient people show cut marks and evidence of butchery. CREDIT: © Natural History Museum. “This is a communal behaviour that involves special foods that people have to go out of their way for that is then consumed in some kind of special context,” says Cooper.  “The habitat for the great bustard isn’t really the kind of the mountainous area around the cave in which the remains are found. They would have had to trek down to the plains to catch the bustards, carry them back up to the cave, prepare them, cook them and eat them. The special context is that they’re associated with these burials.” Life among the big birds Great bustards are typically found in open grasslands and farmland, requiring large areas of undisturbed land for breeding and living. Their breeding typically occurs in March, when males will reveal themselves to females. They compete for female attention with elaborate displays and violent fights in an area known as a lek. They were already naturally vulnerable to human disturbance because they need so much space, but have also been hunted for both food and sport. This hunting and habitat destruction has significantly fragmented their population. The only population seen in Africa today is in Morocco, where the species is considered critically endangered. This group is closely related to a population in Spain, but also genetically distinct. Still, there has been some debate among biologists about how long great bustards had lived in north Africa. In northwestern Morocco, about 70 birds live in two small areas, but this new evidence indicates that their presence goes back generations.  The team hopes that the discovery showing the ancient human connection to great bustards spurs more conservation efforts to keep this population from going extinct.

Skip to content News Astronomy A claimed hint of alien life whips up spirited debate There’s a lot to unpack behind hints of biosignatures on the far-off world K2 18b Some astronomers think the distant planet K2 18b (illustrated) may be an ocean world capable of hosting life. A. Smith, N. Madhusudhan/Univ. of Cambridge By Lisa Grossman 36 minutes ago You may have already seen the headlines: Signs of life have reportedly been discovered on an alien world.  A team of astronomers led by Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge used the James Webb Space Telescope to search for interesting molecules in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system called K2 18b. The team now says they’ve found molecules that, on Earth, are associated with life, in an abundance that is hard to explain otherwise. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.