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    Did Mayan game use ashes of dead rulers to make the balls?

    Feedback explores a shocking Mayan game in Mexico, while discovering the true nature of Amazon and trying to avoid autonomous cars

    Humans

    17 August 2022

    Josie Ford
    Bounced out of office
    A month after Wimbledon, Feedback’s summer of sport travels to Central America and a claim that one ancient Mayan ball game required some extremely specialist equipment. As if the capital “I”-shaped court used to play this form of pelota weren’t fiendish enough, the ashes of dead rulers were used to make the game’s rubber balls.
    At least, that is the suggestion made by Juan Yadeun Angulo, an archaeologist at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. An article in Science Alert concludes that Angulo’s physical evidence, from a 1300-year-old crypt in Toniná, Mexico, beneath a … More

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    Scent review: How fragrant plants weave their magic

    From frankincense to cacao and vanilla, Scent: A natural history of fragrance shows how aromatic substances have helped shape human culture

    Humans

    17 August 2022

    By Chris Stokel-Walker
    Fragrances from plants such as roses help make established and new perfumesOliver Rossi/Getty Images
    Scent: A natural history of fragrance
    Elise Vernon Pearlstine
    Yale University Press
    FOR countless people worldwide, their first inkling that they had covid-19 didn’t come from a test, but from something far more visceral: anosmia, the loss of the ability to smell.
    Our sense of smell, and our understanding of it, helps us to navigate the world, protecting us from harm and adding to the joy of living in equal measures. Catching a whiff of mercaptan, the eggy-smelling chemical … More

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    What hackers get up to when left on an island in the Pacific

    Campsite coding Deerpunk costumes, tacos delivered by drones and a game called “Beerocracy” featured at this year’s ToorCamp for hackers – it was a blast, writes Annalee Newitz

    Humans

    | Columnist

    17 August 2022

    By Annalee Newitz
    Annalee Newitz
    LIGHTS in every colour of the rainbow illuminated the forest. People wearing antlers on their heads wandered through a barrage of soap bubbles that released puffs of dry ice smoke as they popped. In the distance, I could hear the sound of music and video game bleeps. No, it wasn’t a rave, nor had I gone back in time to some kind of Druid ritual. I was on a tiny island off the coast of Washington in the US Pacific north-west, attending a five-day festival for hackers called ToorCamp.
    According to security researcher David Hulton, one of the camp’s … More

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    How to dry the seeds from your garden to plant next spring

    Expand your plant collection for free by saving seeds this year, storing them over the winter and sowing them next spring, says Clare Wilson

    Humans

    17 August 2022

    By Clare Wilson
    GAP Photos/Chris Burrows
    GROWING your own plants using seeds saved from the previous year has several benefits. It is free, easy and you already know if these plant varieties grow well in your garden.
    You can also branch out, if you have been coveting any of your neighbours’ flowers, by asking them if they could donate a few flower heads once they have set seed. I have acquired some tall ornamental grasses by taking a few seeds from some striking specimens at my local park.
    Bear in mind that some hybrid “F1” varieties of fruits and vegetables shouldn’t have their seeds stored. These … More

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    The secrets in our sewers helping protect us from infectious diseases

    Waste water contains a treasure trove of data on our health, well-being and inequality, and can be used to head off epidemics, track pandemics and even spot new designer drugs before their effects show up in the population. But how much information are we willing to flush down the toilet?

    Humans

    16 August 2022

    By Claire Ainsworth
    The countless chemicals and pathogens that you flush away end up in your nearest sewage treatment plantAbstract Aerial Art/Getty Images
    WHAT’S the largest source of mass moving in and out of a city every day? You think, if it’s a port city, it must be boats – or, you know, maybe if it’s a landlocked city, it’s trains or trucks or cars or planes. No, it’s water. It’s water. There’s so much more water moving in and out of a city any day than there is any kind of cargo. It’s basically pure water coming in. And then the water that leaves has some traces of almost every human activity that’s going on in the city.”
    Once Eric Alm is in full flow, it is hard to stop him. But it isn’t hard to understand his enthusiasm. Alm, a biological engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of a growing band of researchers turning their attention to the fluid coursing through our sewers. This waste water, as it is known, contains the whispered biochemical confessions of millions of people, and by listening to them, scientists can paint surprisingly detailed pictures of our health, wealth and environment, head off epidemics, track pandemics and even spot new “designer” drugs before their effects show up in the population.
    Water treatment plantSuriyapong Thongsawang/Getty Images
    The field, called waste water-based epidemiology, not only has the potential to revolutionise public health but also transform our view of sewage from disgusting waste to … More

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    Over time, Betelgeuse changed color. Now it’s also lost its rhythm

    The star Betelgeuse has always been a diva.

    Astronomers from antiquity through the present day have watched the red supergiant pulsing at the shoulder of the constellation Orion, and the star has continually put on a show, two new studies suggest. Betelgeuse may still be recovering from a deep dimming episode a few years ago, one team reports. And the star appears to have put on its reddish stage makeup just 2,000 years ago, before which it wore yellow, another team says.

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    Together, these studies could tell researchers about how stars spew their guts into space and hint at how long it will be before Betelgeuse explodes in a supernova.

    “This star always fools you,” says astronomer Edward Guinan of Villanova University in Pennsylvania, who has studied Betelgeuse for decades and was not involved in the new works. “You think you have it, and all of a sudden, it changes.”

    The “Great Dimming”

    In late 2019, Betelgeuse captured astronomers’ attention when it suddenly grew dark for several months — an event astronomers now call the Great Dimming. Months of subsequent observations led researchers to an explanation: The star had coughed out a big bubble of plasma. That material cooled, condensed into dust and blocked the star’s face from the perspective of Earth months later (SN: 11/29/20). The surface of the star also cooled down, contributing to the dimming (SN: 6/16/21).

    But what happened next was equally surprising, astrophysicist Andrea Dupree and colleagues report in a paper submitted August 2 to arXiv.org. The star’s regular pulsating brightness, it seems, went completely out of whack.

    In its non–Great Dimming life, Betelgeuse’s brightness was on a quasi-periodic dimmer switch. As the star breathed in and out — ballooning out before shrinking back down — its brightness went up and down. “For 200 years, it had a nice, 400-day oscillation in brightness,” says Dupree, of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. “But that’s gone now.”

    That regular drumbeat has since grown erratic. Instead of a regular thrum, the oscillations are “like an unbalanced washing machine, going ‘wonka wonka wonka,’” Dupree says.

    The wonkiness is a sign of the star struggling to recover from the loss of material in 2019, Dupree says. She calculates that Betelgeuse ejected several times the mass of the moon from its surface, leaving a large cool spot behind. The star’s surface plasma is sloshing around as it returns to equilibrium.

    If this picture is correct, it means red supergiants like Betelgeuse can spray material into interstellar space in discrete bursts, rather than a continuous stream. That’s important to know because many of the elements that make up planets and people were formed in stars undergoing what Betelgeuse is going through right now. Studying Betelgeuse’s growing pains and death throes can tell us about our own origins.

    But while this picture of Betelgeuse holds together, it is still speculative, Guinan cautions.

    One confounding factor is a new set of observations of Betelgeuse during the four-month period when it’s usually out of view. From May through August every year, Betelgeuse is too close to the sun from Earth’s perspective to be seen at night. Usually that leaves a hole in the datasets of astronomers who track its periodic behavior.

    But amateur observer Otmar Nickel of Mainz, Germany, developed a technique to measure Betelgeuse’s brightness using multiple images taken during the day. Dupree’s paper is the first to include those daytime data.

    “That’s cool,” Guinan says. “You can follow the star all year round.”

    Those extra observations might reveal recurring changes that have always been there, rather than picking up on something truly new. “Those little variations you’re seeing…could easily be present right before the Great Dimming,” Guinan says.

    Dupree’s team predicts that the dust Betelgeuse lost could become visible to some telescopes on Earth in 2023. “That would be proof” that the brightness changes were due to a single outburst, Guinan says.

    Seeing yellow

    The Great Dimming isn’t the first time humans have recorded a major change in Betelgeuse’s personality. Two millennia ago, the star was a completely different color, astrophysicist Ralph Neuhäuser and colleagues report in a paper in press in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

    The team analyzed ancient descriptions of more than 200 stars whose colors should have been visible to the naked eye in the past few thousand years. Most stars observed over human history had the same color recorded in the past as they display today, the team found. But not Betelgeuse.

    The ancient Roman astronomer Gaius Julius Hyginus, who lived from about 64 B.C. to A.D. 17, and is thought to have written the Latin work De Astronomia, described the star in the right shoulder of Orion has having a similar color to Saturn ­— which is yellow. Astrologer and archivist Sima Qian, working during the Chinese Han dynasty around 100 B.C., independently described the star as yellow. Observers from other ancient cultures conspicuously left Betelgeuse out of their lists of red stars.

    “I thought, ‘Oh, how can this be?’” says Neuhäuser, of AIU Jena in Germany. “I was not expecting such a result … to find a star to change color in historical time.”

    A star’s color is a sign of its evolutionary stage (SN: 7/23/21). When stars burn through the hydrogen fuel in their cores, they puff up and expel gases into space. That expansion makes their surface temperatures drop, and they change color from blue to red in fairly short order — about 10,000 years for a giant star like Betelgeuse, which is around 14 times as massive as the sun.

    [embedded content]
    Measuring a star’s age isn’t as easy as you’d think. Here’s how scientists get their ballpark estimates.

    That relatively recent color change suggests Betelgeuse has just reached the end of its hydrogen-burning life and became the red supergiant we know it as today while human observers were watching.

    “It’s fully consistent with astrophysical knowledge,” Neuhäuser says. “It could have been expected, but no one really checked.”

    That result means anyone waiting for Betelgeuse to go supernova will have a very long wait. If the star just became a supergiant in the last few millennia, it has more than 1 million years to go before the boom. More

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    Losing parts of our voice box may have helped humans evolve to speak

    Unlike people, 43 species of monkeys and apes are known to have so-called vocal membranes, which may prevent them from having precise voice control

    Humans

    11 August 2022

    By Clare Wilson
    Unlike in other primates, the human voice box has lost small tissue structures called vocal membranes, which may have been involved in the evolution of speechSEBASTIAN KAULITZKI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
    The loss of small tissue structures from the voice box may have been essential for the evolution of human speech.
    In a study of 43 non-human primates, all the animals had “vocal membranes”, a small extension of the throat’s vocal cords that makes their sounds louder and higher but also more irregular and harder to control.
    As humans lack vocal membranes, this suggests they were lost when our ancestors diverged from chimpanzees to allow more precise voice control, says Tecumseh Fitch at the University of Vienna in Austria.Advertisement
    While many animals make calls to communicate, the evolution of complex human speech seems to have required anatomical changes, as well as changes in the brain. In humans, the vocal cords are flaps of tissue in the throat that vibrate as air is expelled from the lungs, allowing us to make “voiced” sounds, as opposed to breathy ones.
    We already knew that a few species of monkeys and apes have vocal membranes. To better understand the loss of these structures in humans, Fitch’s team looked at the voice box, also known as the larynx, of 43 species of apes and monkeys. This was done by carrying out magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT) scans on dead or anaesthetised animals in the first such large-scale study of primates. The researchers found that all 43 species had this vocal cord extension.
    The team also analysed video footage that showed the voice box of an anaesthetised chimpanzee with an endoscope in its throat while the animal made grunts and growls as it was waking up. They did the same for anaesthetised rhesus macaques and squirrel monkeys that were stimulated to make noises by having an electrode put into the part of their brain that causes them to produce vocalisations.

    The researchers found that in all these animals, vibration and collision of the vocal membranes are the primary source of their calls, as their vocal cords were in motion less often.
    If humans still had vocal membranes, our speech would probably sound more rough and variable, with abrupt pitch changes, like someone with laryngitis, says Fitch.
    “A key thing that distinguishes human speech from animal sounds is our fine-grained control over the sounds we make. That is only possible if our vocal apparatus is easy for our brains to control,” says Richard Futrell at the University of California, Irvine. “If the system is complex, then it will behave in a way that is chaotic and unpredictable.”
    But Adriano Lameira at the University of Warwick in the UK says many apes and monkeys make both loud and irregular calls as well as some quieter and more controlled noises. “The alleged limiting effect [of vocal membranes] on primate vocal production seems exaggerated,” he says.
    Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abm1574

    More on these topics: More

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    Egyptian mummy’s head discovered in Kent attic

    Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

    Humans

    10 August 2022

    Josie Ford
    Hair-raising heirloom
    Tidying the stationery cupboard throws up many archaeological treasures, but nothing so exciting, or terrifying, as the discovery made by a gentleman sorting through his deceased brother’s attic in Kent the other day. He found a head.
    This Egyptian mummy’s remains, brought to England as a souvenir, must have been passed down the family line for several generations. You would think it might have come up in conversation now and again. But no: the discoverer, who has gifted the grisly object to Canterbury Museums and Galleries, says he knew nothing about it. A CT scan has established that … More