The world's oldest star map has been found in Egypt: Researchers discovered what is believed to be a fragment of the world’s oldest complete star map at St Catherine’s Monastery, science and tech journal Nature reports. The search for the map by the renowned astronomer Hipparchus has been ongoing for centuries. James Evans, an astronomy historian, said Hipparchus mapped the heavens centuries before any investigative attempts, and the discovery gives insight into a decisive moment when astronomers began to calculate and predict patterns in the sky. “It gives us a fascinating glimpse of what he actually did,” Evans says, by introducing the “mathematization of nature.”

Trouble in the metaverse? Almost a year after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would rebrand as Meta Platforms and focus on developing the metaverse, the transition appears to have been anything but smooth, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing internal documents. Because technology has been flaky, users haven’t been able to get the most out of the metaverse, and many haven’t been interested in spending time in a virtual world. Even more worrisome is that it’s not clear what is needed for the metaverse to work at all.

Horizon Worlds, Meta’s flagship metaverse product, isn’t living up to internal expectations, the WSJ reports. The original goal was to secure 500k monthly active users by the end of the year, but in recent weeks this goal has shifted to a more realistic 280k. Internal documents indicate that the current count is less than 200k with most users not returning to Horizon after the first month. The number of users has been decreasing steadily since the spring, the documents reveal.

Problems across the board: Meta is facing increasing pressure on digital advertising aspects of the business, and competition from the popular app TikTok is fierce. The market value of the company has dropped by over USD 700 bn since its all-time high in September 2021 and shares have dropped by over 60% in the past year, the WSJ reports.