Philippa Kaur

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    Ancient ancestor of the plague discovered in Bronze Age sheep

    Yersinia pestis bacteria viewed with an electron microscopeConnect Images/Alamy
    An ancient ancestor of the pathogen that would later cause the Black Death and other major pandemics has been identified in a Bronze Age domestic sheep in Russia – making it one of the oldest pathogens ever found in an animal.
    Its DNA closely matches that of plague bacteria found in European human skeletons from the same period, providing the first evidence that the disease could have spread between humans and their own livestock well before the pathogen evolved to jump from rodents to people via fleas. More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Some of Earth’s meteors are probably coming all the way from a neighboring star system

    Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun, is probably shedding comets and asteroids into our solar system — and even producing a few meteors in our sky.

    Located just 4.3 light-years from Earth, Alpha Centauri consists of three stars that revolve around one another. If Alpha Centauri has an Oort cloud of distant comets as the sun does, about a million of these objects larger than a football field are now in our solar system, astronomers Cole Gregg and Paul Wiegert of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, estimate in work submitted February 5 to arXiv.org. More

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    in Humans

    A man’s brain was turned into glass by the eruption of Vesuvius

    A sample of organic glass found inside the skull of a man from HerculaneumPier Paolo Petrone
    The eruption of Mount Vesuvius around 2000 years ago caused one man’s brain to explode and turned the fragments to glass. The discovery is the only known instance of soft tissue turning to glass and sheds new light on how eruptions kill – and how we might protect people.
    The volcanic disaster struck in AD 79, burying the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae in thick layers of ash that eventually solidified. At least 1500 bodies and thousands of ancient papyrus scrolls have… More

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    From doomy prophecies to epic dystopias, we are suckers for end times

    We may live in an age of doomscrolling, but we can keep wild, apocalyptic thinking at bayStephen Taylor/Alamy
    A Brief History of the End of the F*cking WorldTom Phillips (Wildfire)
    In 1950s Chicago, aliens from the planet Clarion made contact with Dorothy Martin. They warned her of a “holocaust of the coming events” that would begin on 21 December, 1954. Lake Michigan would subsume Chicago, and the rest of the world would follow into oblivion. Martin and her followers would be airlifted to safety on Clarion via flying saucers – but only if they first removed all… More

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    Humans were living in tropical forests surprisingly early

    The Bété I archaeological site in Ivory Coast was overgrown when researchers visited in 2020Jimbob Blinkhorn, MPG
    Humans were living in a tropical rainforest in West Africa 150,000 years ago. The finding pushes human habitation of tropical forests much further back in time, suggesting our ancestors were able to live in a wide variety of terrains.
    It has generally been thought that humans evolved in open grasslands and savannahs, says Eleanor Scerri at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. Instead, she says, our ancestors were highly adaptable. “Ecological diversity is at the heart… More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Ancient Mars wasn’t just wet. It was cold and wet

    Frigid water helped paint Mars red and may have shaped a vast coastline, two new studies into the planet’s history reveal.

    Scientists have detected a possible ancient beach in Mars’ northern hemisphere and identified a water-containing mineral responsible for the planet’s rosy hue. The findings reveal details about conditions on Mars when the planet last contained large volumes of liquid water more than 3 billion years ago.

    “Early Mars has historically been thought of as either ‘cold and dry’ or ‘warm and wet,’” says Alberto Fairén, an astrobiologist at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid and at Cornell University who was not involved in the new work. “The two new studies, together, resolve the second part of the equation: Early Mars was wet; it was never dry.” More

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    When did people start building houses with corners?

    Rectangular buildings became common from about 10,000 years ago, as seen in this reconstruction of the ancient city of Çatalhöyük in Turkeyselimaksan/iStockphoto/Getty Images
    Buildings with corners have a much deeper history than we thought, adding an unexpected twist to a curious architectural mystery from the dawn of village life.
    Archaeologists have long been aware of a global trend in early architecture. From south-west Asia to the Americas, the very earliest settlements typically contained buildings with a round or oval-shaped ground plan. Then, usually a few thousand years later, these apparently went out of fashion, becoming… More

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    Ancient hunters may have used throwing spears 300,000 years ago

    Wooden spears from Schöningen, Germany, dated to 300,000 years agoMinkusimages; Matthias Vogel, NLD.
    Prehistoric people may have used throwing spears to hunt large animals 300,000 years ago – and perhaps as far back as 2 million years ago. A new analysis of preserved wooden spears indicates they could be thrown over medium distances, as well as used for thrusting.
    “Traditionally, you would say thrusting is more simple than throwing, as a technological concept,” says Dirk Leder at the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage in Hanover, Germany. “You have to understand aerodynamics for throwing to… More