DNA results from Pompeii, published today in Current Biology, are forcing archaeologists to re-evaluate many of their long-held assumptions. For example, researchers had long assumed the huddled forms of two adults and two young children, found together in one of Pompeii’s most luxurious dwellings, were a mother, father, and their children. A golden bracelet weighing half a kilogram on the wrist of one adult with a child on their lap reinforced the idea one adult was a wealthy matron.

One of these studies was done with regards to the Himba tribe in Northern Namibia!

The Himba tribe is a branch of the Herero tribe that has been isolated from most modern societies, with this I mean that they have chosen to maintain their traditional lifestyle rather than adopting traditions from western cultures.

The tests they performed were done with individuals that could not speak any other languages, and the researchers used translators to communicate with the Himbas. They used different coloured tiles to put together a baseline of colour groupings according to the Himba language.

What they found was intriguing.

Western languages have eleven colour categories, ie. green, blue, yellow, red, white and so forth, but the Himbas only have five. These include:

Serandu – is used to describe reds, browns, oranges and some yellows.

Dambu – includes a variety of greens, reds, beige and yellows, and is also the term used for a Caucasian person.

Zuzu – is used to described most dark colours, black, dark red, dark purple, dark blue, etc.

Vapa – is used for some yellows and white.

Buru –is used to describe a collection of greens and blues.

Gamma radiation can convert methane into a wide variety of products at room temperature, including hydrocarbons, oxygen-containing molecules, and amino acids, according to a new article

This type of reaction probably plays an important role in the formation of complex organic molecules in the universe—and possibly in the origin of life.

Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii. The first signs of its presence on Earth have been dated at over a billion years, well before the appearance of the first animals.

Marine Olivetta, laboratory technician at the Department of Biochemistry in the UNIGE Faculty of Science and first author of the study, observes, "It's fascinating, a species discovered very recently allows us to go back in time more than a billion years."

In fact, the study shows that either the principle of embryonic development existed before animals, or that multicellular development mechanisms evolved separately in C. perkinsii.

This discovery could also shed new light on a longstanding scientific debate concerning 600 million-year-old fossils that resemble embryos, and could challenge certain traditional conceptions of multicellularity.

When we look up at the night sky, we can see other planets with the naked eye: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and other Solar System bodies appear as bright dots, visible even without the need for binoculars or a telescope.

It's amazing to think that we can actually see these distant worlds with our own eyes, but have you ever wondered what Earth would look like when viewed from other planets of the Solar System?

Origins of life

Biomolecular condensates are also changing how scientists think about the origins of life on Earth.

There is ample evidence that nucleotides, the building blocks of RNA and DNA, can very plausibly be made from common chemicals, like hydrogen cyanide and water, in the presence of common energy sources, like ultraviolet light or high temperatures, on universally common minerals, like silica and iron clay.

There is also evidence that individual nucleotides can spontaneously assemble into chains to make RNA. This is a crucial step in the RNA world hypothesis, which postulates that the first “lifeforms” on Earth were strands of RNAs.

Today we revisit the topic of US Government Interest in UFOs/UAPs, with Lue Elizondo. Next week is a counterpart with Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick.

Culture may play a role in how birds build collectively in the Kalahari Desert

Researchers analyzed more than 400 structures built by 43 different groups of White-browed Sparrow-Weavers in the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. These birds live communally, and the entire cohort works together to build a nest and multiple roosts from grass. The group’s dominant female then lays eggs in the nest, which has a long, tubelike entrance. Individual birds slumber nearby in the U-shaped roosts, which have both an entrance and an exit.

The scientists found that different gatherings of birds, even those living only a few meters from one another, built very different tube structures.

Lightning has killed a 34-year-old player and injured five others during a football match in Peru.

• 34-year-old Hugo De La Cruz dies on way to hospital

• Other players treated in hospital after incident

Sunday’s game between Juventud Bellavista and Familia Chocca in Huancayo province, about 70km south-east of Lima, was halted when lightning first struck, but a second bolt hit players as they began leaving the field. Video footage shows eight of the players collapsing after a loud crack.

One class of epidemiological models that works for misinformation is known as the susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) model. These simulate the dynamics between susceptible (S), infected (I), and recovered or resistant individuals (R).

These models are generated from a series of differential equations (which help mathematicians understand rates of change) and readily apply to the spread of misinformation. For instance, on social media, false information is propagated from individual to individual, some of whom become infected, some of whom remain immune. Others serve as asymptomatic vectors (carriers of disease), spreading misinformation without knowing or being adversely affected by it.

By the 1990s, it was clear that the so-called Yixian Formation contained uniquely well preserved remains of dinosaurs, birds, mammals, insects, frogs, turtles and other creatures.

Unlike the skeletal and often fragmentary fossils unearthed in most other places, many animals came complete with internal organs, feathers, scales, fur and stomach contents. It suggested some kind of sudden, unusual preservation process at work. The finds even included a cat-size mammal and a small dinosaur locked in mortal combat, stopped in mid-action when they died.

The world's first known non-avian feathered dinosaurs showed up—some so intact that scientists worked out the feathers' colors. The discoveries revolutionized paleontology, clarifying the evolution of feathered dinosaurs, and proving without a doubt that modern birds are descended from them.

How did these fossils come to be so perfect? The leading hypothesis up to now has been sudden burial by volcanism, perhaps like the waves of hot ash from Mt. Vesuvius that entombed many citizens of Pompeii in A.D. 79. The Yixian deposits have been popularly dubbed the "Chinese Pompeii."

A new study says the Pompeii idea is highly appealing―and totally wrong. Instead, the creatures were preserved by more mundane events including collapses of burrows and rainy periods that built up sediments that buried the dead in oxygen-free pockets. Earlier studies have suggested that multiple Pompeii-type events took place in pulses over about a million years.

50 Minutes of Mysteries to Fall Asleep To

A galaxy cluster bends light from seven background galaxies around it, letting astronomers peer into space and time

An almost impossible alignment of galaxies that forms a giant magnifying lens could give astronomers an unprecedented deep view of the universe.

The Carousel Lens—named for its concentric circular patterns, like the reflections in a fun-house mirror—incorporates a cluster of galaxies about five billion light-years from Earth whose gravity is so intense that it magnifies the light of seven galaxies behind it, between 7.6 billion and 12 billion light-years away. This phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, occurs only when galaxies line up precisely from our perspective.

As seen from Earth, the massive gravitational lens creates multiple images of six of the seven background galaxies, each of whose light arrives to us by a slightly different path. If a “transient” event, such as a supernova, occurs in any one of those galaxies, astronomers here will have up to four views of it at slightly different times.

The Very Reverend Canon Dr Jason Bray is an Anglican priest.

He also happens to be a deliverance minister – more commonly known as an exorcist.

“We’re the people that go out and deal with the paranormal," said Dr Bray.

"A bit like ghostbusting, that sort of thing, and a bit of an exorcist as well."

Dr Bray is one of four deliverance ministers in Cardiff who are called upon to investigate reports of paranormal activity on behalf of the Church in Wales.

Though known only from a shinbone fragment, a newly-described flesh-eating terror just might be the largest known member of its feathered kind.

Phorusrhacid 'terror birds' stalked what's now Colombia's Tatacoa Desert around 12 million years ago, among car-sized armadillo relatives, giant sloths, and saber-toothed marsupial cousins.

The recently analyzed fossil suggests this specimen was far larger than its relatives, which have been estimated to range from 1 to 3 meters (3 and 9 feet) in height.

It also bears signs of how this fearsome predator likely met its end – in the jaws of an even more terrifying beast.

Backbones of ocean-dwelling mammals evolved differently than those of species living closer to shore, study finds

If you’ve ever seen dolphins swim, you may have wondered why they undulate instead of moving side to side as fish do. Though they have a fishlike body, cetaceans, which include whales, dolphins, and porpoises, are mammals that descended from land-dwelling ancestors.

Cetaceans have undergone profound changes in their skeletal structures to thrive in aquatic environments, including the reduction of hindlimbs and the evolution of flippers and tail flukes, resulting in a streamlined body. Scientists still don’t understand how the transition from land to water, approximately 53 million years ago, impacted cetaceans’ backbone, a central element of their skeleton.

The discovery of a 4,000-year-old fortified town hidden in an oasis in modern-day Saudi Arabia reveals how life at the time was slowly changing from a nomadic to an urban existence, archaeologists said on Wednesday.

The remains of the town, dubbed al-Natah, were long concealed by the walled oasis of Khaybar, a green and fertile speck surrounded by desert in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula.

Then an ancient 14.5 kilometer-long wall was discovered at the site.

Black volcanic rocks called basalt concealed the walls of al-Natah so well that it "protected the site from illegal excavations.

Tombs inside a necropolis there contained metal weapons like axes and daggers as well as stones such as agate, indicating a relatively advanced society for so long ago.

Pieces of pottery "suggest a relatively egalitarian society", the study said. They are "very pretty but very simple ceramics

Al-Natah was still small compared to cities in Mesopotamia or Egypt during the period.

Shortly after the Big Bang, the entire observable universe was compressed into a region that was so dense that electrons weren't attached to atomic nuclei, floating around as an ionized plasma. It turns out colliding neutron stars (aka kilonovae) simulate these conditions surprisingly well. Shortly after the 2017 kilonova event, atoms were smashed together with such force that atomic nuclei and electrons were separated, but then their reunion was seen by astronomers.

Due to chaos, it was long thought that planets couldn’t stably orbit systems containing three stars. GW Orionis is the first counterexample.

Key Takeaways

• It’s easy to have planets that orbit around a single star, and in a double star system, you can either orbit close to one star or far from both members. 

• These configurations are stable, but adding a third star into the mix was thought to render the formation of planets unstable, as mutual gravitational interactions would eventually force their ejection. 

• That wisdom got thrown out the window with the discovery of GW Orionis, which boasts multiple massive dust rings and possibly even more planets, all orbiting three stars at once.

Abstract

Mysterious craters, with anomalously high concentrations of methane, have formed in the Yamal and Taymyr peninsulas of Siberia since 2014. While thawing permafrost owing to climate warming promotes methane releases, it is unknown how such release might be associated with explosion and crater formation. A significant volume of surface ice-melt water can migrate downward driven by osmotic pressure associated with a cryopeg, a lens of salty water below. Overpressure reached at depth may lead to the cracking of the soil and subsequent decomposition of methane hydrates, with implications for the climate.

Key Points

• Surface ice-melt water can migrate downward driven by the osmotic pressure associated with a cryopeg, a lens of salty water below

• Overpressure can cause the frozen soil to crack resulting in mechanical explosion

Plain Language Summary

We show how osmosis drives explosions and methane release in Siberian permafrost. We anticipate that as well as being of direct relevance to permafrost researchers, this work will be of interest to a large number of people involved in climate change research, because the mechanism we uncover of osmotic pumping leading to permafrost explosions has potentially grave consequences involving the release of methane

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL108987

The dead, if you are to heed the warning of burials conducted hundreds of years ago, may not always lay so quietly in their grave.

Over a span of more than 1,000 years, in different parts of Europe, burials were conducted seemingly to keep the dead safely in their graves, and not walking about causing havoc among the living.

The formal name for practices of this kind is apotropaic burial rites. Informally, they have a more bone-chilling name: the vampire burial.

Decades ago, astronomers predicted a time when there would be so much orbital debris that it could threaten future satellites and even space exploration. That future seems to be arriving, with an estimated 13,000 metric tons of space junk already in low-Earth orbit. Most recently, we learned that the Intelsat 33e satellite experienced a sudden power loss, tumbled, and broke up into at least 20 pieces. We still don't know what caused the breakup.

This system not only reduces the burden on ground crews but also ensures that drones can operate more safely and efficiently."

The system uses a unique technique called optical speckle which projects specific images dependent on what the optical fiber nervous system feels.

These can be interpreted using AI to assess the health of the drone.

Bats are incredibly diverse animals: They can climb onto other animals to drink their blood, pluck insects from leaves or hover to drink nectar from tropical flowers, all of which require distinctive wing designs.

But why aren't there any flightless bats that behave like ostriches—long-legged creatures that wade along riverbanks for fish like herons—or bats that spend their lives at sea, like the wandering albatross?

Researchers may have just found the answer: Unlike birds, the evolution of bats' wings and legs is tightly coupled, which may have prevented them from filling as many ecological niches as birds.

We initially expected to confirm that bat evolution is similar to that of birds, and that their wings and legs evolve independently of one another. The fact we found the opposite was greatly surprising.

Last year, an intriguing theory was put forward: black holes could be causing dark energy. As more black holes formed in the Universe, the stronger the pressure from dark energy. Now, a survey from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is strengthening the case for this theory. The first year's data from the survey show that the density of dark energy increases over time in a way that seems to correlate with the number and mass of black holes.