All posts tagged: earliest

NASA’s Hubble opens the earliest window into the young Milky Way

NASA’s Hubble opens the earliest window into the young Milky Way

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Milky Way, spanning over 100,000 light-years, is our galactic home. Among its many discoveries, the ESA’s Gaia mission has found that the Milky Way galaxy not only has a warp to its galactic disk, but that the warp in the disk precesses and wobbles, completing a full rotation for roughly every three revolutions of the Sun (in yellow) around the galactic center. The origin of the Milky Way’s rotation is not cosmic, but rather is thought to arise from the relative gravitational and tidal forces acting on it during various stages of galaxy formation. Credit: Stefan Payne-Wardenaar Growing throughout cosmic history, it now possesses 400 billion stars, and 150+ globular clusters. There are slightly over 150 globular clusters identified within 200,000 light-years of the galactic center, with an additional five or six to be found if we double the radius of this search. While most formed along with the Milky Way, a substantial fraction did not, and were brought in at later times when smaller galaxies, such as the Kraken and Gaia-Enceladus, were devoured …

Brazil’s loss is its earliest World Cup exit in nearly 30 years

Brazil’s loss is its earliest World Cup exit in nearly 30 years

Published by Sam Flores

Head coach Carlo Ancelotti had much to answer for after the match, telling reporters that it was clear the team needs to find new ideas. “Obviously, everyone is profoundly disappointed given what happened,” Ancelotti said. “We didn’t have a spectacular World Cup campaign, but we did a good one.” But he will have to swallow the “bitter taste of defeat” in the meantime, he said. For decades, Brazil has given fans one of the most thrilling styles of play — especially in high-stakes tournaments such as the World Cup. But the nation’s summer has been an utter slog, lacking the identity and joy on the pitch that spectators have come to expect. The first 45 minutes against Norway were gritty, with Brazil fighting to create the few chances it inevitably failed to deliver on. Vinícius Júnior, Brazil’s rising star, remained muted on the right-hand side. Ancelotti made the baffling choice to sideline the Real Madrid player for a penalty kick in the first half. Bruno Guimarães took the opportunity, instead, and squandered it with a …

Earliest use of anaesthetics uncovered in Chinese doctor’s tomb

Earliest use of anaesthetics uncovered in Chinese doctor’s tomb

Published by skeptic

Scissors and tweezers from the tomb of Xia Quan, with residues containing the anaesthetic aconitine Courtesy Xue Ling, et al Two medical instruments recovered from the 15th-century tomb of a Chinese surgeon carry traces of an anaesthetic compound, the earliest chemical evidence ever found of doctors attempting to reduce the pain of a medical procedure. The surgical scissors and tweezers were unearthed in 1974 from the tomb of a famous doctor named Xia Quan who lived from 1348 to 1411, in Jiangsu province. Congcang Zhao at Northwest University in Xi’an, China, and his colleagues used lasers to study the composition of residues on the instruments, revealing traces of aconitine. This compound is produced by plants of the Aconitum genus, commonly known as wolfsbane and monkshood. They are frequently listed as ingredients in ancient Chinese medicinal prescriptions. Aconitine interacts with sodium channels in the cell membranes of neurons. At the right dose, it has an anaesthetic effect, but it is highly toxic and is rarely used today due to the risks of poisoning. The residues are …

Mysterious dust ring beyond Jupiter formed many of our Solar System’s earliest worlds

Mysterious dust ring beyond Jupiter formed many of our Solar System’s earliest worlds

Published by Jenni Sidey

In the young Solar System, a dust trap beyond Jupiter may have built wildly different meteorite parent bodies over two million years. New simulations suggest the same ring-shaped region sorted and recycled material by time, helping explain why carbonaceous chondrites differ so sharply. When Jupiter finished clearing out its neighborhood, it may have done more than carve a gap in the young Solar System. Just beyond that gap, according to new simulations, a ring of dust and gas became one of the most productive nurseries for early planetary building blocks, and one of the most versatile. The new work argues that this region outside Jupiter’s orbit did not produce just one kind of planetesimal. Over roughly two million years, it may have generated several distinct families, each with different mixtures of fine-grained dust and tougher, heat-processed solids. Those differences matter because many meteorites that land on Earth are fragments of these long-lost bodies, preserving a record of how the Solar System assembled itself. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany …

Rosamund Pike and Sacha Baron Cohen on their earliest film memories

Rosamund Pike and Sacha Baron Cohen on their earliest film memories

Published by Daniella Wilson

New gender war satire Ladies First arrives on Netflix today – with the comedy boasting a star-studded British and Irish cast led by Rosamund Pike and Sacha Baron Cohen. The latter plays Damien Sachs, an odious chauvinist and corporate boss who receives a blow to the head and wakes up in a flipped world where all the power rests in the hands of women. One of those women is Pike’s Alex Fox, who Damien had treated terribly in the real world only to find himself having to severely adjust his behaviour now that the odds aren’t stacked in his favour – leading to all sorts of shenanigans. To mark the release, Radio Times spoke to the pair for our Film Flashbacks series – discussing everything from their very first film memories to Pike’s film debut in Pierce Brosnan Bond flick Die Another Day. Want to see this content? This page contains content provided by Google reCAPTCHA. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as Google reCAPTCHA may use cookies and other technologies. To …

1.3 million people share DNA with Maryland’s earliest colonists

1.3 million people share DNA with Maryland’s earliest colonists

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In 1634, English settlers established St. Mary’s City as the first permanent outpost in the colony of Maryland. Many of these early residents were ultimately buried in the town’s Chapel Field cemetery, including 49 colonists between the town’s founding and 1734. Recently, geneticists collaborating between Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institute, and genetics company 23AndMe analyzed these previously unidentified remains as part of a larger genealogical project tracing colonial migration across the United States. Their findings illustrate how  such a small original population can have vast genetic influences over time. According to the team’s study published in the journal Current Biology, over 1.3 million living descendents can be traced directly to the handful of settlers buried at St. Mary’s City. What’s more, researchers believe that they potentially identified remains belonging to Maryland’s second governor. The results come after decades of work that began with the excavation of a trio of extremely rare lead coffins from the cemetery’s Brick Chapel in …

Edmonia Lewis Was the Earliest Known Black Artist to Show Emancipation

Edmonia Lewis Was the Earliest Known Black Artist to Show Emancipation

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Edmonia Lewis exhibition “Said in Stone,” currently at the Peabody Essex Museum, marks the first time that the tremendous late 19th-century sculptor has been featured in a comprehensive show of her own. More than a hundred years after unformed marble passed through her hands and into human form, her works are at long last assembled together to speak as a kind of family. As such, the museum serves as a space of historical vindication for an artist who struggled, rock hammer in hand, against mountainous odds. The show brims with stories that once chiseled their way out of one determined Black, Indigenous woman’s heart and hands. Related Articles I’m only a poet who stumbled upon her story a little over a decade ago. I’d read about the artist, also named Wildfire, who reached inside the earth to grapple and grind with her own understanding of history and consequence. The girl who grew up with Ojibwe family weaving, her mother’s traditional patterns traced into her consciousness. The young woman who sojourned to Oberlin College, where …

From early birds to emerging butterflies: UK shows signs of earliest spring on record | Spring

From early birds to emerging butterflies: UK shows signs of earliest spring on record | Spring

Published by Jenni Sidey

Bluebells are flowering, swallows are returning and orange-tip butterflies are flying in what could become Britain’s earliest recorded spring. Records for early spring occurrences are being smashed as 2026 looks to be the earliest this century for frogspawn laying, blackbirds nesting, brimstone butterflies emerging and hazel flowering, according to Nature’s Calendar, which has logged citizen science records of seasonal change since 2000. This spring has had the earliest egg-laying in an 80-year study of great tits in Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire, with the 23 March sighting beating the previous record by three days. The birds’ average egg-laying has moved forward by 16 days since the 1960s, with these tits and other species needing to ensure their chicks are fed on caterpillars emerging with the new spring leaves. Dunsford Woods, in Devon, has logged its earliest tit egg – in the nest of a coal tit – since records began in 1955. Record-breaking early tit egg-laying has been seen in the Netherlands as well, reflecting dramatic climatic shifts across northern Europe. A brimstone butterfly seen in Oxfordshire …

Ancient pottery shows the earliest evidence of humans doing math

Ancient pottery shows the earliest evidence of humans doing math

Published by skeptic

Floral designs on pottery made almost 8,000 years ago may be more than just art. They appear to be the earliest evidence of math-based thinking. The designs appear on pottery made by ancient Halafians. These people lived in Mesopotamia between about 6200 B.C. and 5500 B.C. (Mesopotamia was an ancient region in what is now Iraq. Some of the world’s first civilizations arose there.) The Halafians were known for their skilled ceramics. Many of the floral designs on their pottery show regular numbers of petals. Those patterns hint that these people used math in their art, archaeologists now say. The researchers shared these findings in the December 2025 Journal of World Prehistory. Archaeologists knew that Mesopotamia’s Sumerian people used math. Sumerians are famous for creating the first writing system around 3000 B.C. They did math based on the number 60. That’s the same type of system that gives us 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour. The new findings suggest Halafians used math thousands of years before the Sumerians. If so, these ancient …

Stone Age symbols may push back the earliest form of writing

Stone Age symbols may push back the earliest form of writing

Published by skeptic

The Adorant figurine, approximately 38,000 years old, consists of a small, ivory plate bearing an anthropomorphic figure and multiple sequences of notches and dots Landesmuseum Württemberg / Hendrik Zwietasch, CC BY 4.0 Stone Age people 40,000 years ago used a simple form of writing comparable in complexity to the earliest stages of the world’s first writing system, cuneiform, according to a study of mysterious signs engraved on figurines and other artefacts found in Germany. If confirmed, this pushes back the emergence of a proto-writing system by more than 30,000 years. Ancient humans have long made deliberate marks on objects, but some of the earliest groups of Homo sapiens to arrive in Europe around 45,000 years ago took this to a new level. Many of the artefacts they made, such as pendants, tools and figurines, were engraved with sequences of graphic symbols such as lines, crosses and dots. These groups also painted symbols on cave walls alongside depictions of animals, and the meaning of these symbols has been contentious. The use of sequences of symbols is …