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Runes, the oldest form of writing in Scandinavia, are the result of what happened when one community met another.
Early Scandinavians began trading goods with the Roman army within the first few centuries AD. Experts believe the Roman alphabet may have inspired the Scandinavians to create their own writing system.
Evidence of runic writing exists from the Roman Iron Age and the Viking era, but researchers have puzzled for years over exactly when runes originated.
The enigmatic, spidery markings have appeared on memorial stones in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, mentioning a powerful Viking queen and even warning of a frigid climate crisis based on past events.
Now, researchers have traced a path back in time to the world’s oldest recorded rune stone — and it’s full of secrets.
Archaeologists unearthed a large, carved stone in an ancient cremation pit in 2021 at the Svingerud dig site in eastern Norway — and then they found more pieces nearby.
When the team recently put the fragments together, some of the inscriptions completed one another. The pieces represent some of the earliest known examples of runic writing, dating back about 2,000 years.
The stone may have once marked a single grave but was broken up over time as fragments were repurposed in subsequent burials, according to researchers.
Many of the markings are hard to decipher. Yet one appears to be the name of a woman, while another could provide evidence of the earliest known female rune inscriber, who left her mark on the stone.
This week, flaming debris from a SpaceX launch vehicle streaked across the skies over Germany, while what may have been a fuel tank landed in Poland.
The Falcon 9 rocket helped deliver a routine batch of Starlink satellites to space, but part of the rocket didn’t splash down as expected and reentered Earth’s atmosphere over Europe in fiery fashion.
Meanwhile, part of the Blue Origin New Glenn rocket’s nose cone, bearing the signatures of the company’s employees, washed up on a Bahamian island near a tourist destination.
The incidents highlight the ways that, when it comes to space junk generated by the increasing number of launches, what goes up must come down — and sometimes over populated areas.
In other space news, NASA confirmed it may have sidestepped sweeping layoffs that were expected, and lawmakers raised concerns over what the space agency won’t say about its interactions with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Vividly flamboyant birds-of-paradise display stunning plumage in emerald, lemon, cobalt and ruby hues. But they may also be sending secret color signals that are invisible to the human eye.
Scientists discovered that the birds’ plumage and body parts glow underneath blue and ultraviolet lights. Certain feathers take on a bright or yellow-green appearance, due to a phenomenon known as biofluorescence.
It’s possible the birds may be able to use this glowing display as a form of visual signaling, acting like beacons that their counterparts can spot and recognize, with humans none the wiser.
The nearly complete skull of an ancient, leopard-size apex predator has pointed an international team of paleontologists to a previously unknown species of ferocious carnivore called a hyaenodont.
“I think of them as like really beefy wolverines or basically like pitbulls. They have really big heads that were just covered in muscle,” said Dr. Matthew Borths, curator of fossils at the Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
The rare, well-preserved skull enabled researchers to recreate what Bastetodon syrtos looked like in real life, including some of its more bizarre features.
Why the creatures, who lived through global environmental changes, went extinct about 25 million years ago remains a mystery.
Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to spy fireworks of light radiating near the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
The swirling disk of gas and dust that feeds matter into the black hole, called Sagittarius A*, is responsible for the pyrotechnic display.
The telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera captured footage of powerful, bright flares of light as well as short flashes, unleashing around the black hole on a regular basis.
The observations are revealing more about the feeding frenzy of black holes and how their insatiable appetites can shape entire galaxies.
Feeling curious? Go down the rabbit hole with these stories.
— The entrance to a lone corridor led researchers into a lost ancient Egyptian royal tomb — once located beneath two waterfalls in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings — that they say belonged to Pharaoh Thutmose II.
— Asteroid 2024 YR4 has earned the title of riskiest space rock ever detected and could hit Earth in 2032. Here’s why the impact odds keep changing.
— Scientists have cracked the code on a new method that results in the “perfect” boiled egg — and you can try it out in your kitchen.
— A gray seal encounter and a tender moment between a mother humpback whale and her newborn calf are two of the winning images from the 2025 Underwater Photographer of the Year competition.
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