Cave paintings finally get a true age, and a rat-free island's birds return

Radiocarbon dating needs carbon, and the black pigments were long assumed to be pure iron and manganese oxide minerals with none. Using Raman microspectrometry and hyperspectral imaging, techniques gentle enough not to damage the art, researchers found hidden charcoal woven into the black paint of two figures 2. The bison, it turns out, was painted about 13,000 years ago. A masklike figure nearby was even stranger: different sections of it were added during widely separated visits, meaning people returned to that same wall across generations to keep adding to it.

Older methods to link qubits require either firing a single controlled photon between them or waiting for each to release a photon that must be precisely matched, both finicky and hands-on. This new approach is fully automatic: subject two distant qubits to the same microwave bath, and they lock into a stable, synchronized entangled state with no active tinkering, in principle over any distance.

It's the same fight that has played out on hundreds of New Zealand's islands since Polynesian and European ships first brought rats ashore, a threat conservation biologist James Russell calls "one of the most powerful conservation interventions possible."

That matters because many disease-causing proteins are "undruggable," meaning no small molecule can find a good enough grip on them to block them at all. Protacs don't need that grip; they just need to touch the protein long enough to flag it for destruction. This year marked the approval of the first protac drug, two decades after the idea was first floated as a long-shot lab curiosity.

The drug improved motor learning, the brain's ability to pick up and lock in a new physical skill, the day after dosing, and participants reported lower perceived stress for up to a week afterward. Using tools that measure sensory processing and muscle-control signals, the team also found subtle, lingering shifts in how the brain handles sound and movement.

Local volunteers and park staff responded with the simplest fix imaginable: small bamboo bridges over the water crossings, and closing a stretch of road whenever the crabs are on the move 252. Last year, 10,000 crabs completed the migration, double the number counted the year before.

The overall rate now lines up with the national average of 87 to 88 percent, closing a gap that stood at just 51 percent as recently as 2015. BIE credits modernized data systems, real-time dashboards for catching struggling students early, and remote-learning options that let students balance school with family caregiving or work.