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This week, researchers pinned down the age of a complete Homo-genus skull found in Greece in 1960 to at least 286,000 years old. Medical researchers reported that the majority of chronic pain patients . And engineers prototyped , a new solar technology designed with natural tree morphology that can be incorporated into natural branches in the upper canopies of trees while allowing light to penetrate to underlying vegetation.

Additionally, there's a theoretical new black hole origin story if the right kind of dark matter exists; cosmologists are looking beyond general relativity for new ways to explore the evolution of the universe; and researchers report that effortful pastimes are perceived as more meaningful.

Could Jupiter harbor a singularity?

An exciting new model of black hole development proposes that gas giants could gradually accumulate dark matter particles in their cores over a long period of time, which could eventually collapse into a tiny black hole. The newborn black hole could then consume the core and grow, ultimately absorbing all the planet's matter. This scenario is only possible, however, with superheavy, nonannihilating dark matter particles, and the nature of dark matter is still poorly understood.

The proposal suggests that exoplanetary observations could also provide new evidence for dark matter. First author Mehrdad Phoroutan-Mehr says, "In gaseous exoplanets of various sizes, temperatures and densities, black holes could form on observable timescales, potentially even generating multiple black holes in a single exoplanet's lifetime. These results show how exoplanet surveys could be used to hunt for superheavy dark matter particles, especially in regions hypothesized to be rich in dark matter like our Milky Way's galactic center."

Old math inadequate

General relativity is great for describing gravity and physics in space, but if you look back in time far enough, the math produces a singularity, which is kind of a science-y way of saying that relativity breaks down and can't describe anything that happened before the Big Bang. It's a state of infinite density and temperature, if you believe in that kind of thing, and the laws of physics no longer apply.

This breakdown of math and physics also occurs at the singularity of a black hole and other conditions in which extreme gravity prevails. So physicists like saying that it's meaningless to speculate about what happened before the Big Bang or the dynamics at the singularity of a black hole.

But a multi-institutional group of cosmologists and astrophysicists has now proposed applying numerical relativity to the problem of singularities in order to shed light on what happened prior to the Big Bang, along with ideas about multiverses and the nature of early spacetime. First suggested in the 1960s, numerical relativity uses numerical methods and algorithms to study spacetime. The calculations are so complex that they require supercomputing capacity, but the researchers are hoping to probe existing theories such as string theory or the possibility of cycles of Big Crunches and Big Bangs.

"Bouncing universes are an excellent example, because they reach strong gravity where you can't rely on your symmetries. Several groups are already working on them—it used to be that nobody was," says Eugene Lim of King's College London.

Fun evaluated

I'm married to a woman who likes running and who just registered for the Bronx 10-mile, which she will run on a Sunday in September while I will most likely be at home playing Elden Ring. These two pastimes—running and video games—have differing perceptions, as confirmed by a new study that found effortful pastimes are considered to be more meaningful than those involving a couch. Would it help if I emphasized that Elden Ring is a famously difficult video game?

The researchers at the University of Toronto by conducting a survey among 1,000 undergraduates that asked questions regarding beliefs about free-time activities. Additionally, they partnered with a puzzle-making company to compare effortful leisure activities like Sudoku puzzles with less-effortful activities like watching internet videos.

Finally, they prompted a group of volunteers during their everyday activities to share what they were doing several times a day and to rate it for effort, meaning and enjoyability. They found that the more effortful the activity, the higher people were likely to rate its meaningfulness.

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