Hobbit humans dined on dragon scraps, and smell wires us to mice

A new study says no. Researchers fed a dead goat to a captive Komodo dragon at Zoo Atlanta, then documented every tooth mark on the 72 remaining bones [1]. They compared those patterns to more than 3,000 Stegodon bone fragments found at Liang Bua cave, where hobbit remains and stone tools had been recovered. The Komodo dragon's bite marks clustered on the meaty haunches, exactly where any predator would eat first. The cut marks from hobbit stone tools clustered on skulls and thoracic vertebrae, the last scraps anyone would take if they had first pick [5]. Of more than 3,000 Stegodon bones associated with the hobbits, only one showed any exposure to fire. The hobbits, it appears, arrived after the Komodo dragon finished eating, scraped raw meat from the bones, and moved on.

A new study sequenced DNA from 85 Iron Age Scythians, 38 elite and 47 non-elite, across 20 archaeological sites spanning 700 years, and found that elite individuals were 11 times more likely to be genetically related to other elites than to the non-elites buried nearby [2]. Brothers turned up at sites hundreds of kilometers apart. Grandfathers and grandsons appeared in different cemeteries, all richly furnished with gold weapons and animal-themed jewelry. The study also resolved a decades-long debate about the "Golden Man" of Issyk, Kazakhstan, buried around 400 to 300 BCE with more than 4,000 gold ornaments, a gold-embroidered headdress, and a silver bowl bearing an undeciphered inscription. The DNA says: almost certainly male [17].

In the mouse study, researchers built a robotic multi-camera system to track free-roaming mice and noticed that when a mouse picks up a piece of food, it occasionally pauses and takes a single deliberate sniff, the way you lean into a cantaloupe at the grocery store. When researchers chemically blocked the mouse's sense of smell, the behavior continued. When they silenced the motor cortex, the brain region responsible for intentional action, it stopped entirely [18]. In the human study, researchers placed recording arrays inside the olfactory bulbs of conscious volunteers and found that a single deliberate human inhalation triggers theta oscillations at 2 to 8 Hz, the exact frequency range at which mice physically sniff. Humans breathe roughly ten times slower than mice, yet the brain generates this internal rhythm independently of breathing rate, packaging odor data into windows identical to a mouse's sniff tempo [38].

Now it's falling. Solar flares have repeatedly puffed Earth's outer atmosphere, increasing drag, and Swift's orbit has decayed from its original 600 kilometers to about 375 kilometers. Without intervention, reentry and burnup within months [7]. On July 3, a satellite called LINK, built by Arizona startup Katalyst Space Technologies, launched aboard the last scheduled flight of Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL rocket, dropped from the belly of a modified L-1011 jetliner over the Pacific Ocean. LINK is less than two meters tall, flanked by enormous solar panels. After weeks of approach, it will grab Swift with three robotic arms and push it slowly back to 600 kilometers over roughly two months. If it works, Swift gets a decade more [81].

The average person enrolled had tried 13, and had spent more than half of their lives sick with depression [26]. The trial enrolled 493 people. All received surgically implanted vagus nerve stimulators, small pacemaker-like devices tucked under the skin of the chest that send brief low-level electrical pulses to the left vagus nerve in the neck, which connects the brainstem to the heart, lungs, and digestive system. For the first 12 months, only half the devices were switched on, giving the trial a controlled comparison. The results over two years: about 69% of people with active stimulation had a meaningful improvement on at least one measure at 12 months. Of those who responded, more than 80% maintained or improved their benefits at 24 months, across depressive symptoms, quality of life, and daily functioning.

Every night for the next decade, its car-sized 3,200-megapixel camera will photograph the southern sky in 30-second exposures, compare each image to an archive, and issue public alerts within two minutes if anything changed. The observatory expects to detect between 7 and 8 million changes per night: flashing supernovas, streaking asteroids, colliding galaxies. The data will be publicly available almost in real time, to anyone who wants it. Chief scientist Tony Tyson: "In a sense, we're taking a digital color motion picture of the universe." Over ten years, the survey is designed to map dark matter and dark energy with unprecedented precision [4]. The same week, astronomer Vasily Belokurov won the 2026 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics for showing what large-scale sky surveys can already reveal: our galaxy, the Milky Way, experienced a massive merger billions of years ago that scattered its earliest stars into chaotic orbits still visible today. The Milky Way is already beginning to distort again, pulled by the gravitational weight of the Large Magellanic Cloud [123].

Yet across 30,000 hours of observations of 31 wild Bornean orangutan mother-offspring pairs over 15 years at the Max Planck Institute, researchers found a consistent pattern: mothers with similarly aged young spent a disproportionate amount of time together, and the youngsters played [8]. The distance the mothers traveled increased in the days before and after these meetups, as they made deliberate excursions into neighboring territories. This extra traveling came at a direct cost: less foraging for the mother. And the meetups happened regardless of fruit availability in the area, ruling out the simpler explanation that mothers converge on food and happen to meet. Play was more likely when the mothers were closely related.