A Malawi farmer found copper ingots under a tree in 1967. The metal came from a mine nearly 800 km away. Lead isotopes tied the 5 surviving ingots to Kipushi, DR Congo, an NYU-led team found. Traders likely took a longer canoe route (Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports).

Seafloor bacteria make tiny magnets whose shape tracks oxygen in the water. Peking University-led researchers studied 217 sediment samples and over 4,500 crystals. Low-oxygen sites had more bullet-shaped grains, a new way to read past oceans (Geophysical Research Letters).

Uranus and Neptune look like twins, but their chemistry hints they formed in different places. An Aix-Marseille University-led team traced deep oxygen using carbon monoxide. Neptune has more, so it may have formed closer to the Sun and moved out (Astronomy & Astrophysics).

On tropical atolls, getting rid of rats can make nearby reefs grow faster. Rat-free islands keep their seabirds, whose droppings feed the surrounding reefs. A Lancaster University-led study of 28 atoll islands found those reefs grew 1.8 to 2.5 times faster (Science Advances).

Dwarf reedsnakes escape danger by rolling, about four times faster than they slither. Toho University researchers filmed the small Southeast Asian snakes at up to 3.69 m/s. Their heads stayed steady and facing forward while the rest of the body spun (Current Biology).

The first nuclear clock that keeps itself on time is ticking in Vienna. TU Wien and PTB scientists locked a 148 nm laser to thorium-229 nuclei in a crystal, so the nuclei correct its drift. It ran over 24 hours unattended, near 1 second of error in 30 million years (Nature).

After a giant eruption 7,300 years ago, some nearby Jomon groups in Japan kept growing. The Kikai-Akahoya blast, from an undersea caldera south of Kyushu, hit southern groups already in decline. Northern Kyushu grew on, likely aided by refugees and the sea (Science Advances).

Brothers on opposite sidelines all night, then a jersey swap at the final whistle. The McCaffrey family wins either way.

Webb has mapped the shape of an exoplanet's atmosphere. It's slightly egg-shaped. On hot Jupiter WASP-17b, over 1,000 light-years away, the hotter evening side bulges out. A Cornell-led team found a roughly 650 K gap between its morning and evening sides (Nature Astronomy).

Beech seedlings a bit taller than their neighbors in year one kept the edge for decades. Gottingen researchers tracked 2,214 seedlings in southern Germany for 25 years. Only 679 survived, and small ones rarely caught up. Heavier nuts gave bigger seedlings (Journal of Ecology).

Some mantis shrimp eye pigments switch on with red light and off with blue. Scientists in Liege and Berlin tested 17 opsins from the eye's color band. Three absorb light beyond 600 nm, which few animals see, and four flip between states with light alone (Science Advances).

2 million years ago, a human relative outnumbered our likely ancestors over 10 to 1 in a South African cave. At Drimolen, Paranthropus robustus fossils far outnumber Homo erectus. La Trobe researchers now add a skull piece, likely an adult H. erectus (Annals of Human Biology).

A buried meteor crater in Oklahoma is about 100 million years younger than thought. UT Austin zircon dating puts the Ames impact near 370 million years ago, not 467 million, close to a Late Devonian mass extinction about 372 million years ago (Meteoritics & Planetary Science).

J.J. Watt dares Jim Nantz to punch the ball out of his wrist lock, the grip backs use now to stop fumbles. The ball didn't move. Nantz needed ice 😂

Melted rock grains in comet dust match no known meteorite. In dust NASA's Stardust mission brought back from comet Wild 2, a UW-Madison-led team found chondrule bits that likely formed in a highly oxidized, icy outer region of the early solar system (PNAS).