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Researchers still don’t know the cause of a recently discovered malware infection affecting almost 1.3 million streaming devices running an open source version of Android in almost 200 countries.

Security firm Doctor Web reported Thursday that malware named Android.Vo1d has backdoored the Android-based boxes by putting malicious components in their system storage area, where they can be updated with additional malware at any time by command-and-control servers. Google representatives said the infected devices are running operating systems based on the Android Open Source Project, a version overseen by Google but distinct from Android TV, a proprietary version restricted to licensed device makers.

Last month, in a profile of newly named Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, The New York Times included a throwaway line about "the time his wife had seized his Dreamcast, the Sega video game console, because he had been playing to excess." Weeks later, that anecdote formed the unlikely basis for the unlikely Crazy Taxi: Tim Walz Edition mod, which inserts the Minnesota governor (and top-of-the-ticket running mate Kamala Harris) into the Dreamcast classic driving game.

"Rumor has it that Tim Walz played Crazy Taxi so much his wife took his Dreamcast away from him... so I decided to put him in the game," modder Edward La Barbera wrote on the game's Itch.io page.

The earliest humans to settle the Great Lakes region likely returned to a campsite in southwest Michigan for several years in a row, according to a University of Michigan study.

Until recently, there was no evidence that people from the Clovis period had settled the Great Lakes region. The Clovis people appeared in North America about 13,000 years ago, during the geologic epoch called the Pleistocene. During the Pleistocene, sheets of glaciers covered much of the world, including Michigan, making the land inhospitable for human settlers. But a 2021 U-M study confirmed that Clovis people built a camp, now called the Belson site, in southwest Michigan.

The Minnesota Historical Society is digitizing more a hundred years of Native American newspapers, so they can be accessed online.

“To be able to just archive our histories as it happens, and especially that first-person perspective,” said Rita Walaszek Arndt, program and outreach manager for Native American Initiatives at the Minnesota Historical Society. “Being able to have those primary sources from the people is really important.”

This prehistoric carving, discovered inside a cave in France, depicts a steppe wisent (Bison priscus), a now-extinct species of bison. It was crafted from a piece of reindeer antler that was previously used as a spear thrower for hunting, according to the Bradshaw Foundation.

Despite its small size — roughly 4 inches (10.5 centimeters) wide — the figurine contains a wealth of meticulous details, including finely carved individual hairs across the animal's body and a pair of horns jutting from its head, giving the piece a lifelike quality.

The Neolithic farmers and herders who built a massive stone chamber in southern Spain nearly 6,000 years ago possessed a good rudimentary grasp of physics, geometry, geology and architectural principles, finds a detailed study of the site.

Using data from a high-resolution laser scan, as well as unpublished photos and diagrams from earlier excavations, archaeologists pieced together a probable construction process for the monument known as the Dolmen of Menga. Their findings, published on 23 August in Science Advances1, reveal new insights into the structure and its Neolithic builders’ technical abilities.

How did early humans use sharpened rocks to bring down megafauna 13,000 years ago? Did they throw spears tipped with carefully crafted, razor-sharp rocks called Clovis points? Did they surround and jab mammoths and mastodons? Or did they scavenge wounded animals, using Clovis points as a versatile tool to harvest meat and bones for food and supplies?

UC Berkeley archaeologists say the answer might be none of the above.

Instead, researchers say humans may have braced the butt of their pointed spears against the ground and angled the weapon upward in a way that would impale a charging animal. The force would have driven the spear deeper into the predator's body, unleashing a more damaging blow than even the strongest prehistoric hunters would have been capable of on their own.

Minnesota officials certified last week’s primary vote Tuesday, confirming it as the lowest primary turnout since 2016.

Fifteen percent of registered voters cast ballots on Aug. 13. This translates to only 12 percent of all eligible voters. In 2016, 7 percent of eligible people voted.

“The thing about primaries is it is so dependent on who or what is on the ballot. If there's a hot contest somewhere, then people show up. If not, they tend not to,” said Steve Simon, Minnesota’s Secretary of State.

A large-scale study of fossil human teeth from Ice Age Europe shows that climate change significantly influenced the demography of prehistoric humans.

Using the largest dataset of human fossils from Ice Age Europe to date, an international research team shows how prehistoric hunter–gatherers coped with climate change in the period between 47,000 and 7,000 years ago.

Population sizes declined sharply during the coldest period, and in the West, Ice Age Europeans even faced extinction, according to the study published August 16 in the journal Science Advances.

Cooking is important — in fact, some researchers believe it's what allowed our human ancestors to unlock the extra calories needed to grow larger brains. So when was cooking invented?

The timing is uncertain, but evidence suggests people were cooking food at least 50,000 years ago and as early as 2 million years ago. This evidence comes from two fields: archaeology and biology.

One piece of archaeological evidence for cooking is cooked starch grains found in dental calculus, or hardened dental plaque. "People can find it in teeth that are 50,000 years old," said Richard Wrangham, a retired professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University and the author of "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" (Basic Books, 2009).

But earlier than that, the evidence is less clear. Generally, scientists look for evidence that people were controlling fire. But evidence of controlled fire isn't necessarily evidence of cooking; — people could have used that fire for heat or to make tools, for example.

Michael Rubke, a desk attendant at La Rive condo complex in Minneapolis, is fighting for a union against a behemoth building management company, FirstService Residential of Minnesota, that has a near-monopoly on high-rise condos in the Twin Cities. It’s been a difficult battle so far. The unionization campaign is “at square one,” the 41-year-old explained over the phone after working an overnight shift. “They’re pretending we’re not there.”

But that lack of formal union representation did not stop Rubke and his colleagues throughout the Twin Cities from fighting for—and winning—statewide legislation this summer that improves the terms of their jobs, by beating back a little-known provision used to erode the job security of contracted workers.

Under the legislation, which went into effect on July 1, companies in Minnesota are barred from entering into new contracts that contain restrictive covenants, which function like noncompete agreements but have previously slipped past the prohibitions on noncompetes in Minnesota because they have a slightly different structure. Existing restrictive covenants, however, are left in place.

'Since Inuvialuit ancestors arrived in the Mackenzie Delta around 800 years ago, beluga whales have been central to their livelihood and culture,' said archaeologist and co-senior author Professor Max Friesen from University of Toronto.

'However, little is known of the impact of centuries of sustained subsistence harvests on the beluga population'.

Integrating paleogenomics, genetic simulations, and stable isotope analysis of 45 zooarchaeological beluga remains, and comparing the findings with contemporary data from tissue samples provided by Inuvialuit hunters from their beluga subsistence hunts, the team characterised the effect of 700 years of subsistence harvests on beluga genetic diversity, population structuring, and foraging ecology.