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When Vance Holliday accepted a research invite to New Mexico’s White Sands in 2012, he didn’t know he was stepping near what would become one of the most pivotal archaeological sites in the Americas. While examining trenches on the U.S. Army missile range, he had stood just 100 yards away from ancient human footprints buried beneath the gypsum dunes. When they were unearthed in 2019, these prints became the most indisputable evidence that humans thrived in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum — well before the Clovis culture, long considered the continent’s first known inhabitants.

As per a Science Advances report, a new radiocarbon analysis of ancient mud samples has again confirmed that the prints were made between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. This study, undertaken by Holliday and doctoral student Jason Windingstad, bolsters contentious 2021 studies suggesting that the footprints are 10,000 years older than the previously accepted evidence from New Mexico’s Clovis site. Previous dating via seeds and pollen had been criticised as flawed, but with this third material — analysed in a separate lab — there is another level of reliability.

The footprints, preserved in sediment on ancient streambeds that flowed into Ice Age lakes, are surprisingly well-preserved, though many of them have been weathered away by wind erosion. Those who made the prints are thought to be hunter-gatherer humans, moving purposefully through the landscape, and who neither settled in any single location nor made any tools that have survived to this day. Holliday noted that the absence of artefacts didn’t discredit the findings, as groups would presumably have been careful about leaving valuable resources behind.

Windingstad, who has worked extensively in White Sands, remarked on the significance of seeing the tracks in person, acknowledging they challenge long-held narratives about early migration into the Americas. He emphasised that the new radiocarbon results are statistically consistent over 55 dates and three labs. “It goes against everything you’ve been trained,” he mentioned.

The results are so consistent that the evidence is hard to reject, Holliday noted. “It would take an awfully lot of serendipity to line that up by accident to the extent that we have it here,” he added. The White Sands footprints are not an anomaly anymore for those who study the peopling of the Americas — they’re a new cornerstone of understanding.

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Apollo Astronauts Found Orange Glass Beads on the Moon, Scientists Now Know Why

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June 19, 2025

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Apollo Astronauts Found Orange Glass Beads on the Moon, Scientists Now Know Why

When Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon, preparing to face a lifeless wasteland, they were taken aback to find the surface covered in gleaming orange glass beads. Tiny grains, about as small as a pencil tip, are left over from giant volcanic eruptions more than 3.5 billion years ago. Those raindrop-shaped beads were made from molten droplets that spouted during blazing explosions and then cooled in the Moon’s frigid vacuum. Such glass beads are safe in the storms of the airless, sheltered moon. They have been reconsidered yet again with forward-leaning tools, and with them come brightly dramatised, violent graphical bullet points of a world that once was tropical and full of colour.

Moon’s Ancient Glass Beads Reveal Explosive Volcanic Past and Clues to Lunar Interior Evolution

As per a recent analysis published in Universe Today, a team of scientists from Washington University and elsewhere employed high-resolution electron microscopy and ion beam techniques to analyse the mineral content of Apollo-era samples that contain a well-preserved record of lunar volcanic eruptions and associated eruption style, temperature, and chemical environment.

The beads range in colour from shiny black to matte dull red and vibrant orange, and they show differing eruption and magma source conditions on the moon’s surface. Some papers demonstrate rapid lava cooling, while others indicate so-called magma residence time. The surfaces of the beads contain isotopic data, and that information holds clues to the Moon’s molten interior, dating 3.3-3.6 billion years ago, as it first started to develop.

It’s because each bead is a testimony not to a dramatic volcanic event that took place on the Moon, but with each bead, there’s a journal entry written about that event, long ago, back in the days of our lunar volcanologists. “If we can date when that volcanism happened, we can start to assemble the history of what the moon was oriented like, the history of it and what was happening,” he says, “not just in the moon, but it has implications for planetary history in general; we can do this elsewhere in the solar system.

The proposed instruments for NASA’s Artemis missions will continue to search the Moon and discover more bead samples and other sampling varieties and enable a better understanding of the lunar volcanic record, rewriting lunar geology and transforming scientific views of the history of the cosmos.

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Fast Radio Bursts Reveal Universe’s Missing Matter Hidden in Cosmic Intergalactic Fog

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June 19, 2025

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Fast Radio Bursts Reveal Universe’s Missing Matter Hidden in Cosmic Intergalactic Fog

Astronomers have at last found the universe’s missing ordinary matter, the particles that formed in the first few minutes after the Big Bang and that account for everything we see around us, from the Earth to the stars. Some fast radio bursts (FRBs), vanishingly fast, hugely energetic signals from deep space, have allowed scientists to finally detect some of the missing normal matter that had eluded them for decades. 

Fast Radio Bursts Reveal Hidden Baryonic Matter Spread Across Vast Intergalactic Cosmic Fog

According to a mission update published in Nature Astronomy, researchers from Caltech and the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics looked at 69 FRBs, some of which travelled up to 9.1 billion light-years, to find baryonic matter that is spread out in the space between galaxies. Using instruments like Caltech’s Deep Synoptic Array and Australia’s ASKAP helped the research locate and home in on the FRBs, which are too small for regular sensors to detect.

So there is a type of missing matter that has been found: It is made of particles, of course, but we interact with those particles only secondhand, via the almost unimaginably infrequent creative collision. FRBs, the cosmic headlights, have validated this by revealing baryonic matter — 76 percent in the inter­galactic, 15 percent in galactic haloes, and 9 percent within galaxies — to be distributed much more uniformly in space compared to dark matter.

The first observational evidence of this distribution that they predicted has been obtained, indicating that the FRBs can be used as a “smart tool” to probe the large-scale structure and the evolution history of the universe. This light distortion seen from these bursts is now a new tool to explore the faraway areas in space.

Caltech’s DSA-2000 radio array could detect more than 10,000 FRBs every year, which would significantly advance the field of radio astronomy. This could provide a way to better understand the formation and evolution of galaxies and to more accurately measure cosmic structures. Every new FRB is a new chance to fill in the map of the unknown universe.

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World’s Oldest Tailored Dress Found in Egyptian Tomb Dates Back Over 5,000 Years

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June 19, 2025

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World’s Oldest Tailored Dress Found in Egyptian Tomb Dates Back Over 5,000 Years

Over 5,000 years ago, an Egyptian weaver, maker of the so-called Tarkhan Dress, created the world’s oldest woven and tailored garment. The linen dress was found in a tomb near Tarkhan, some 60 kilometres south of Cairo, and was made between 3482 and 3102 B.C., a time span that falls before Egypt’s First Dynasty. Originally found by archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie in 1913, the dress was buried in a mastaba tomb — likely as part of a funeral. Its rediscovery decades later revealed not only remarkable preservation but also an advanced level of textile craftsmanship for the time.

World’s Oldest Tailored Garment, the Tarkhan Dress, Reveals Elite Fashion in Ancient Egypt

As per a report from University College London‘s Petrie Museum, in 1977, the Victoria and Albert Museum found the almost complete Tarkhan Dress, made from linen with a V-neck, knife-pleated sleeves, and a calibrated waist. Experts don’t know if it was a tunic or full dress, but it was probably worn on the body of a slender, young woman before she was buried.

Experts suggest that the dress that was worn by elites was not made for the afterlife. It used to be an everyday piece of fashionable clothing. Radiocarbon dating dates it to the First Dynasty. This ancient clothing surviving thousands of years of decomposition is an anomaly.

Funerary art of the Early Dynastic Period of the Old Kingdom of Egypt had the appearance of the Tarkhan Dress, although the Tarkhan Dress itself is preserved only because of the arid burial conditions in Egypt, offering a rare opportunity for the close study of authentic materials and the identification of multistep processes involved in the production of textile in early civilisations.

The Tarkhan Dress – the world’s first fitting clothing – had a big influence on early Egyptian culture. It now resides at the Petrie Museum, inspiring historians and textile experts worldwide.

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