The cockroach is one of several pieces of evidence suggesting that this tiny owl was diurnal, or active primarily during the day. Iridescence is associated with a diurnal lifestyle, so it appears that the owl, which measured less than 5 inches (12 centimeters) long, was hunting in the daytime, researchers said in the new study.

This indicates that owls were not nocturnal 47 million years ago and so must have switched to the night-owl lifestyle more recently, said study first author Gerald Mayr, a paleontologist and head of ornithology at the Senckenberg Research Institute and the Natural History Museum Frankfurt in Germany.

"There exists a consensus that owls must have evolved from a diurnal ancestor," Mayr told Live Science in an email. That's because some early owl fossils have head-rotation structures similar to those of diurnal raptors and bony ridges above the eye sockets that could have shaded the owls' eyes from the sun.

Therefore, it is plausible that the Messel owl was fully diurnal, rather than active during the daytime and nighttime as some owls are today, because that would imply that some of its ancestors had already evolved nocturnal traits, Mayr said.

Researchers also found a cockroach identical to the one in the Messel owl's stomach in sediments just a few feet away from the new fossil. This well-preserved cockroach helped the team to identify the insect inside the owl, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Nov. 2 in the journal Current Biology.

It's possible that the owl ate the cockroach at dawn or at dusk, which might cast doubt on whether the bird was diurnal. But there are other clues hinting that the owl was diurnal, including the appearance of some of the owl's feathers and the stoutness of its upper wing bones.

Mayr said he and his colleagues believe the shape of the upper wing bones, or humeri, is an indicator of when owls are active. The Messel owl's stocky humeri hint that the species flew during the day, when silent movement doesn't confer a significant advantage because there is enough light to see predators. Conversely, modern nocturnal owls have slim humeri and fly almost soundlessly, he said.

Assuming this hypothesis is correct, the earliest known nocturnal owl species are from about 35 million years ago, in the Late Eocene, Mayr said. Owl fossils from this period and more recently look a lot like modern owls and have elongated humeri, he noted. The oldest known owl in the fossil record, Ogygoptynx wetmorei, dates to around 60 million years ago.

This means that owls likely became nocturnal between 47 million and 35 million years ago. This is the best current estimate, because the owl fossil record is very sparse and species are often described from only a few isolated bones, according to the study.

"We still know so little about the early evolution of modern birds," Mayr said, adding that every fossil discovery has the power to change even well-established ideas in the field.

The big question that remains is why owls became nocturnal. Previous theories suggested that owls evolved this behavior to avoid competition with diurnal birds of prey or to benefit from a proliferation of nocturnal mammals. But studies show that both of these groups exploded much later than 35 million years ago — around 20 million to 25 million years ago — suggesting there wasn't a clear advantage driving owls to switch to nocturnal lifestyles at that time.

The new results have deepened the uncertainty of why owls turned nocturnal. But "by narrowing down the time frame when owls became nocturnal, our study may eventually contribute to solving this mystery," Mayr said.

'> Perfectly preserved owl fossil from 47 million years ago could help to solve a major evolutionary mystery James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Now, astronomers have developed a new way to spot planets that were formerly drowned out in a sea of light. Using a combination of modeling and machine learning techniques, they picked out a previously hidden giant exoplanet in data from JWST. The results were published Nov. 4 in the journal Nature.

"Planets are a million times fainter than their stars," study first author Rodrigo Ferrer-Chavez, an astronomer at Northwestern University, said in a statement. "So, to image exoplanets, we need to remove that glare."

Telescopes like JWST use instruments called coronagraphs to block out some of this excess light, similar to the way the moon and a pinhole camera operate during a total solar eclipse. But even the best coronagraphs have limitations — for example, they can't block all the glare, and the telescopes themselves move.

Even the most stable telescopes vibrate almost imperceptibly as they collect light, so the images a telescope produces contain ever-so-slight mismatches compared with what the instrument actually sees. These slight shifts can be enough to obscure even very large exoplanets.

To address this, Ferrer-Chavez and his team developed a "digital twin" of JWST that virtually recreates how light travels through the telescope's detectors, minus any movement-based imperfections. To fine-tune this digital replica, the researchers used computational models based in real-world physics alongside machine learning techniques similar to those used to train AI. But the authors stressed that this is not an AI model.

"Because we already know the physics, we don't need AI to understand what's happening," study co-author Jason Wang, also an astrophysicist at Northwestern, said in a statement.

The researchers named their approach Physics-based Learning for Imaging Planets, or FLIP.

Using FLIP, the team analyzed data from three stars, including 51 Eridani, which is located around 97 light-years from Earth and was already suspected to have a giant exoplanet orbiting it. Although the planet, called 51 Eridani b, had been detected by ground-based telescopes, it was drowned out by light in previous JWST observations. With FLIP, however, 51 Eridani b popped out from the dataset.

The scientists hope this approach will help astronomers pick out even more hard-to-spot exoplanets, especially ones that look like the planets in our own backyard. In the nearly 35-year history of exoplanet hunting, the vast majority of planets we've found have been radically different from those in our own solar system, partially because larger and more reflective worlds are easier to spot with current telescopes.

"It's not that [solar-system-like planets] don't exist," Ferrer-Chavez said. "It's that we can't see them."

'> Scientists removed the glare from a James Webb telescope image — and unmasked a hidden planet largest known canyon in the solar system — is still tectonically active even though the Red Planet is geologically "dead," new research on a previously record-breaking marsquake reveals.

On Aug. 25, 2021, NASA's InSight lander, which touched down on the Red Planet in 2018, detected a powerful marsquake, designated S0976a. The Martian equivalent of an earthquake reached magnitude 4.2, which, at the time, was the most powerful quake that InSight or any other Mars lander had ever seen. (Since then, a 4.7 magnitude marsquake in May 2022 knocked it off the top spot, but S0976a remains second on this list.)

Unlike most marsquakes, which have been minor tremors triggered by meteorite impacts near InSight, S0976a was a deep rumble that originated from the opposite side of Mars as the robotic seismologist, in the western half of Valles Marineris.

In the new study, published Oct. 15 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers reanalyzed the seismic wave data of S0976a and found that the quake originated from within a fault line running below the enormous canyon. The most likely explanation, they argue, is that there was tectonic movement in this hidden crustal crack.

"Valles Marineris is one of the most spectacular geological structures anywhere in the solar system, but until now we didn't know for certain that its faults are still active," study first author Jung-Hun Song, a researcher in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, said in a statement. "What we see is that this is not just a 'dead' fossil landscape, as faults deep beneath the canyon can still slip and generate marsquakes, long after the geological processes that originally formed them have ceased."

A geologically "dead" world

Valles Marineris is an enormous set of interconnected gullies and ravines stretching up to 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) in length, or roughly 10 times longer than the Grand Canyon. It is also up to 20 times wider and five times deeper, meaning that if you found yourself stranded at the bottom, it could take you a couple of months to climb out again.

The enormous chasm — named after the Mariner 9 spacecraft, which helped discover it in 1971 — is clearly visible from space, like a giant scar carved into the Red Planet's face. From orbit, you would also see the nearby Tharsis region, which is home to Mars' giant volcanoes, including Olympus Mons, which is at least three times taller than Mount Everest.

These imposing structures are proof that Mars was once geologically active, perhaps even more so than Earth. However, scientists think the Red Planet's surface has remained relatively unchanged for nearly 3 billion years, according to the European Space Agency.

The reason for this is twofold. First, Mars is smaller than Earth, so its core and mantle have cooled much faster than our planet's and are, therefore, less dynamic. Second, Mars has no tectonic plates. Instead of giant patches of crust butting against each other, the Red Planet's outermost layer is almost completely intact and acts like a giant lid over its cooling molten innards. (Research published earlier this week throws the "dead" theory into question, hinting that magma may still lurk below dormant Martian volcanoes).

Despite this, Mars still has fault lines. But rather than being a boundary between tectonic plates, these lines are more like giant cracks in its crust, some of which are visible at the surface.

Signs of tectonic life

In the new study, researchers discovered proof of what they call a slip-strike marsquake, where "blocks of crust move horizontally past one another along a steep, deeply rooted fault," the team said. They believe this occurred somewhere between 12 and 25 miles (20 to 40 km) below Valles Marineris.

The researchers also simulated several other potential causes of the marsquake, including a major asteroid strike or a landslide within the canyon, but nothing else could explain the patterns they saw.

"What makes the result compelling is that several completely different types of evidence point in the same direction," Song said.

The finding also raises hopes that similar tectonic activity could one day be detected on other worlds across the solar system.

"Our study opens up exciting possibilities for discovering ongoing seismic activity on other planetary bodies that we might otherwise consider geologically inactive," Song said.

Mapping Martian vibrations

The discovery highlights the importance of detecting and studying marsquakes, which were only officially discovered in 2019, thanks to InSight. (Scientists have since uncovered older marsquakes, using data collected by the Viking landers in the late 1970s.)

"S0976a has turned out to be an extraordinary event," study co-author Doyeon Kim, head of Imperial College London's Terrestrial and Planetary Seismology Lab, said in the statement. "Its waves traveled through the core and helped us investigate the deepest part of Mars, and now they are telling us what happened at the source itself. From a single marsquake, we can learn both about the center of the planet and about an active fault beneath one of its most remarkable landscapes."

Scientists have similarly used marsquake vibrations from InSight to map out Mars' interior, leading to several intriguing subsurface discoveries, including dozens of blobs left over from ancient protoplanets, the hidden cause of the planet's uneven hemispheres, a potentially active "mantle plume" and a gigantic underground water reservoir containing enough liquid to cover Mars with a mile-deep (1.6 km) ocean.

Unfortunately, in December 2022, InSight quite literally bit the dust: A thick covering of Martian powder blocked its solar panels, preventing the lander from returning signals to Earth and thus ending its mission.

This means we currently have no way of detecting new marsquakes. However, the new study proves that the lander's archived data can still lead to exciting discoveries.

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

'> Gigantic chasm on Mars is still tectonically active wrote that the Scythian nomads inhaled the fumes from burning hemp seeds. And evidence of cannabis use was previously discovered in a cemetery in China dated to about 500 B.C. The new study, however, pushes back this date by three centuries.

Researchers discovered more than 1,000 whole cannabis seeds and around 500 partial seeds in the Tunnug burial mound, and they carbon-dated them to between 800 and 760 B.C. They also recovered several human hair samples from the grave. An analysis of the hair revealed signals matching cannabinol and THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), psychoactive chemical compounds found in cannabis. The tests could not determine how much of the drug people consumed, however.

"The molecular traces in the hair and the cannabis seeds come from the same grave and suggest that cannabis was used for its intoxicating properties," study first author Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, said in a statement.

But given the burial context of the discovery, the use of cannabis may have had a darker purpose.

"In this princely tomb, the burials were accompanied by extensive horse sacrifices and, most likely, human sacrifices as well," Caspari said. The tradition of human sacrifice, in particular, "would have potentially made the plant a useful agent to calm individuals who were to be included in the rituals," the researchers wrote in the study.

The new study confirms the ancient use of cannabis in funerals in Central Asia and extends the date back to 2,800 years ago, the researchers noted. Future work is planned but will focus on other aspects of ancient cannabis.

"We have already begun sequencing some of the plant samples," Caspari said. "This will help us learn more about the history of the domestication and spread of the crop soon."

'> 2,800-year-old tomb in Siberia has evidence of the earliest use of cannabis — possibly as a way to calm human sacrifice victims

Between 1996 and 2017, metal detectorist Peter Hughes found the lock and much of the hoard, which included gold and silver coins. The lock was subsequently acquired by Amgueddfa Cymru — National Museum Wales, which worked with researchers at Cardiff University in Wales to decipher its combination.

To study the lock's internal mechanisms, the team used micro-CT scans, which make thousands of X-rays that can then be configured into a 3D digital image. By matching internal notches to external letters in the digital 3D image, the researchers were able to decipher the correct four-letter code — "ANCE" — and open the lock.

"We normally use this technology to study bones and other biological structures, so investigating a 400-year-old padlock was certainly a first for us," David Williams, a research associate at the Musculoskeletal Biomechanics Research Facility at Cardiff University, said in a statement. "It's not every day you get to solve a 400-year-old mystery!"

Smugglers' ship

The Ann Francis was owned by Francis Shaxton, a merchant and notorious smuggler. Francis claimed the ship was sailing along the eastern English coast from King’s Lynn to Hartlepool, when it was actually traveling in the opposite direction, heading to Spain to deliver a cargo of wheat. Spain was dependent on grain shipments at the time and paid for such shipments in gold and silver from colonial conquests in Central and South America, according to Amgueddfa Cymru.

The ship was traveling back from Spain to England when, on the evening of Dec. 28, 1583, it was caught in a violent storm. After heading off course, the ship ended its journey in ruin off Margam beach.

A parish register noted the loss of 14 sailors during the same month as the wreckage, which could have been The Ann Francis's crew, according to Amgueddfa Cymru. The deaths were blamed on the nefarious work of a supposed witch.

Locals were quick to loot the Ann Francis wreck before a legal dispute ensued over who had the right to its goods. One Welsh lord claiming the wreck made an inventory list of items he impounded, which included cannons, guns, a piece of mast, Spanish silver and three chests with their locks broken. The newly cracked lock could have originally secured one of these chests, according to Amgueddfa Cymru.

Centuries after the ship was wrecked, Hughes found the lock near a previously undiscovered stash of Spanish silver coins and coin weights while metal detecting on the beach.

"When I found the lock I was immediately astonished by the incredible workmanship and its astonishing condition," Hughes said. "When I moved the ring dials of the combination they turned with ease after over 400 years beneath the sands and I was left in disbelief."

Hughes said he attempted to open the lock himself over many years but could never find the right combination. After Amgueddfa Cymru acquired the lock, staff were concerned that they could hear grit moving around inside the dials, and with more than 1,000 possible combinations, they didn't want to cause any damage.

The micro-CT scans offered a nondestructive view inside the lock, and an opportunity to finally identify the correct four-letter combination.

"Elizabethan combination locks are known in Britain, but this one is in exceptionally good condition and is associated with a dated wreck, making it a unique find and the code a tantalising mystery to solve," Alastair Willis, the senior curator for numismatics and the Welsh economy at Amgueddfa Cymru, said in the statement. "Of course, now we've solved it, we are left wondering if the code meant something to its owner."

'> Cryptic padlock from a 400-year-old shipwreck finally opened ‪—‬ but it leaves a mystery