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Scientists uncover the aluminium shield that helps a tiny crustacean survive darkness, nearfreezing water and crushing pressure in the Mariana Trench

Nearly seven miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean lies a place so hostile that only a handful of human beings in all of history have ever seen it. Total darkness, near-freezing water, and pressure equivalent to a jet’s weight bearing down on a single postage stamp define this world.

Chemists set electrons free and break a decades-old chemistry barrier

Chemists have developed a catalyst that breaks a long-standing rule governing which molecules receive electrons during chemical reactions. By releasing electrons directly into solution, the technique could unlock reactions—and potentially useful new molecules—that were previously out of reach.

Oldest known giant rock scallop bead suggests California coastal trade began millennia earlier

Archaeologists have discovered two giant rock scallop beads that push back the clock on the first appearance of these high-status ornaments. The discovery shows that these prized marine beads were traded hundreds of miles from the California coast thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

Radiocarbon dating places one of the beads at roughly 8,500 years old, making it the oldest ever discovered. More unusually, they were found more than 42 miles (68 kilometers) from the nearest coast, extending the known range of these ornaments from the Channel Islands to the California interior.

“It’s cool that this is the oldest of its kind identified so far, but cooler still to view it as part of a broader Early Holocene cultural landscape seemingly well-established in this locale as much as 10,000 years ago,” said Barry A. Price, an archaeologist at Applied EarthWorks Inc. and one of the study’s authors, along with Simone Schinsing and Jasmine Kidwell. The study is published in California Archaeology.

An ultramassive white dwarf half Earth’s size may hold a rare oxygen-neon core

Astronomers have found evidence that one of the most massive white dwarfs known has an oxygen-neon core instead of the more common carbon-oxygen core. The finding is important because the composition of a white dwarf’s core determines how it will evolve. A paper outlining this discovery was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Typically, white dwarfs have a mass of 0.5–0.7 times the sun’s mass. Such objects have a core made up mainly of carbon and oxygen (C/O core). When they have stellar companions, these dense objects can accumulate matter from them and eventually produce a Type Ia supernova. Ultramassive white dwarfs, with masses above roughly 1.05–1.1 times the sun’s mass, tell a different story that is not yet fully understood.

These more massive white dwarfs are thought to form from “ancestor” or progenitor stars in the range of about 8–10 times the sun’s mass. In these heavier progenitors, the core reaches higher temperatures and densities, allowing carbon to ignite and fuse further into oxygen and neon (O/Ne core). This does not happen in the cores of lower-mass stars, which stop fusing once they have built up carbon and oxygen, lacking the required core temperatures.

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