Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    Student uses AI to decipher word in ancient scroll from Herculaneum

    The Greek word for “purple” has been extracted from a Herculaneum scrollVesuvius Challenge
    Almost 2000 years after they were buried by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, scrolls from a library in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum have begun to reveal their secrets. The tightly wrapped papyrus scrolls were charred in the disaster, which also destroyed the nearby town of Pompeii. But by studying 3D X-ray scans of the scrolls, researchers have deciphered a word on one of them: “porphyras”, meaning “purple”.
    The breakthrough came from Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His success involved training an AI to identify nearly invisible ink-like patterns in the 3D scans.
    “Seeing Luke’s first word was a shock,” says Michael McOsker at the University of Cologne in Germany, who was not involved in the discovery. “It was immediately convincing, like ‘Good lord, that’s Greek.’”Advertisement

    Farritor analysed the 3D scans as a competitor in the open-source Vesuvius Challenge, which is awarding a series of prizes for deciphering the scrolls. He submitted his discovery in August.
    At almost the same time, Youssef Nader, a data science graduate student at the Free University of Berlin in Germany, independently discovered the same word using a different AI technique to detect possible letter shapes within the scroll image segments. This provided an even clearer picture of the scroll segment, and is already yielding new, clear images of others. McOsker described Nader’s first word snapshot as “even more impressive” than Farritor’s.
    The discovery builds on the work of previous Vesuvius Challenge contributors, who designed computational tools for mapping out segments of scroll. It was also made possible because of the 3D X-ray scans produced by a team led by Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky.
    In the past, papyrologists could only study the Herculaneum scrolls by physically unrolling them – a process that inevitably damaged the ancient papyri that had been carbonised by the heat of the volcanic debris that buried them, says McOsker. And even once researchers started using 3D imaging and computational techniques to digitally reveal the hidden contents of the scrolls, “attempts to read the still rolled-up papyri were mirages”, he says.
    This latest breakthrough may pave the way for someone to claim the Vesuvius Challenge’s grand prize, worth $700,000, by reading four passages of text from inside two intact scrolls before 31 December 2023.
    “I’m confident that Luke, Youssef, and the other competitors can solve a whole roll,” says McOsker. “Up until now, all the unrolled papyri that we study are missing their beginnings and are in bad condition, so the prospect of a reading a complete text, from beginning to end, is really quite something.”

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    in Space & Astronomy

    The black hole–powered jet in galaxy M87 is making stars explode

    High-speed gas shooting from the galaxy M87 is causing stars to go nova, a study suggests, and no one knows how.

    A nova occurs after a dense star known as a white dwarf receives gas from an orbiting star (SN: 2/12/21). As the white dwarf’s intense gravity squeezes the gas, it heats up and explodes, but both stars survive the violence. In fact, over millions of years, the same star goes nova again and again. Recent observations indicate that these eruptions forged much, and perhaps most, of the universe’s supply of the valuable metal lithium (SN: 5/7/19).

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    Nova explosions erupt in our galaxy as well as others, including the giant elliptical M87, whose jet of fast-moving gas is powered by the black hole at the galaxy’s center (SN: 4/10/19). Now Hubble Space Telescope data show that there’s an excess of these explosions along M87’s jet, researchers report in a study submitted September 28 to arXiv.org.

    Alec Lessing, an undergraduate student at Stanford University, Michael Shara, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and their colleagues used the telescope to locate 135 nova outbursts in M87, whose jet is many thousands of light-years long. The galaxy itself is 54 million light-years from Earth, at the heart of the nearest galaxy cluster, named Virgo.

    The Hubble Space Telescope snapped this composite picture of the galaxy M87 and its jet of fast-moving gas, which is many thousands of light-years long.NASA, The Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA

    After identifying the nova explosions, the team plotted their positions in the galaxy. “It was striking to the eye,” Shara says of the plot. “The novae appeared to be preferentially aligned with the jet.”

    By dividing the galaxy into 10 equal sectors, the astronomers found that 25 blasts occurred along the jet — versus only 10 to 16 in each of the galaxy’s other sectors. The chance that this is just a statistical fluke is only about 0.3 percent, the researchers say.

    “I was really surprised,” says Massimo Della Valle, an astronomer at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Naples, who was not involved with the new study. “If these objects are novae, the jet has to be responsible for this somehow.”

    Perhaps, he says, the jet pushes interstellar gas onto white dwarf stars in nova systems, increasing the amount of material that accumulates on the stars’ surfaces. As a result, the white dwarfs explode more frequently than they otherwise would, accounting for the surplus of nova outbursts along the jet.

    The jet itself, Shara says, doesn’t seem to supply enough gas or radiation to explain the explosions. “The jet is to blame, but we just don’t know why or how,” he says. “It is somehow causing the novae to be more prevalent in that sector, but whether it’s because it’s triggering the novae somehow or birthing the novae — making more of them there — or some other process … we don’t know.”

    For additional clues, Shara hopes to use Hubble to examine other galaxies that resemble M87, to see whether their jets are also accompanied by such eruptions. More

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    in Humans

    Early humans lived in Ethiopian highlands 2 million years ago

    Illustration of a Homo erectus child with her mother in the Ethiopian highlandsDiego Rodriguez Robredo
    Ancient humans were living in the highlands of what is now Ethiopia as early as 2 million years ago. A reanalysis of a fossilised jawbone from the region confirms that it belonged to a Homo erectus, and represents the earliest evidence of hominins living in such high-altitude areas.
    The highlands represent “a third pole for human evolution in Africa”, says Margherita Mussi of the Italo-Spanish Archaeological Mission at Melka Kunture and Balchit, based in Rome. Hominins have been found in large numbers in eastern and southern Africa, but not to date in upland areas.
    Mussi and her colleagues re-examined the lower jawbone of an infant, which was discovered in 1981 at a site called Garba IV in the Ethiopian highlands. Garba IV is one of a cluster of sites known collectively as Melka Kunture. Mussi has nicknamed the jawbone “Little Garba”.Advertisement
    The jawbone had previously been identified as an early member of the genus Homo, which includes our own species Homo sapiens and several now-extinct groups. However, it wasn’t possible to confidently identify the species.
    Mussi and her team used synchrotron imaging to study Little Garba’s teeth, which hadn’t yet erupted from the jawbone. They compared the shape of the teeth to those of multiple hominin species. “The teeth are a very good marker, so we can say for sure this is indeed an early Homo erectus,” says Mussi.
    In a previous study published in 2021, Mussi’s team also re-dated the Garba IV site. It consists of layers of sediment laid down over time. In the sediments, the researchers found traces of past shifts in Earth’s magnetic field, which could be matched to similar records elsewhere. Based on this, they conclude that Little Garba is 2 million years old. This makes it one of the oldest H. erectus ever found.
    It may even be that the species evolved in the highlands. “We don’t know if Homo erectus evolved at lower altitudes and came up, or if it evolved locally,” says Mussi.
    Furthermore, the researchers re-examined the stone tools found in the sediments at Garba IV. They say there is a transition from older and simpler Oldowan tools to more sophisticated Acheulean tools between 2 and 1.95 million years ago. The Acheulean tools were harder to make because they required careful planning, but they opened up a wider range of foods.
    Putting these lines of evidence together, Mussi argues that the H. erectus population had to adapt to conditions in the highlands, and developed new styles of stone tools to do so.
    The identification of Little Garba as H. erectus looks solid, says Clément Zanolli at the University of Bordeaux in France. He is less convinced by the transition from Oldowan to Acheulean, because there aren’t many Oldowan tools in the older layers.

    For Zanolli, “the most exciting aspect” of the study is the highland location. “It’s the oldest [hominin] we know to have reached the high plateau of Ethiopia,” he says. While it is possible that future excavations might find even older hominins in the area, “for now it’s the earliest”.
    Garba IV is about 2000 metres above sea level, which isn’t so high that low oxygen levels would be a major challenge, says Zanolli. It would have been colder than lowland areas, but the lowlands were also desert, so the highlands may have been more hospitable. “In this high-altitude environment you have more trees, more bushes, probably more animals,” he says. “So it’s very likely easier to find food and to survive there.”
    Millennia later, H. erectus became the first known hominin to expand its population beyond Africa, reaching Dmanisi in what is now Georgia by 1.8 million years ago, and Java in what became Indonesia by perhaps 1.3 million years ago. Living in the Ethiopian highlands may have been good preparation, says Mussi. If Homo erectus was able to adapt to this environment, it could also live in other cooler regions away from the equator, she says.

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    in Humans

    Neanderthals hunted cave lions with spears and made use of their pelts

    Illustration of Neanderthals butchering a freshly killed cave lionJulio Lacerda/NLD
    Neanderthals sometimes hunted now-extinct big cats called cave lions, which were larger than modern lions. The finding is some of the earliest evidence of ancient humans killing top predators, as opposed to plant-eaters like mammoths.
    The evidence is twofold: a cave lion (Panthera spelaea) specimen revealing evidence of hunting and the remains of a cave lion pelt with its claws still attached.
    Gabriele Russo at the University of Tübingen in Germany and his colleagues re-examined a 48,000-year-old cave lion skeleton found at Siegsdorf in Germany in the 1980s.Advertisement
    Researchers already knew there were cut marks on the bones, suggesting the lion had been butchered after death. Russo has now found a puncture mark on one of its ribs, which seems to have been made by a wooden spear thrust into the animal’s chest. The injury had previously been misidentified as a wound from another carnivore.
    Modern humans (Homo sapiens) hadn’t yet established themselves in Europe 48,000 years ago. Instead, the continent was home to Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). It seems they were the hunters.
    Russo’s team also uncovered a new cave lion specimen in the Einhornhöhle cave in Germany. In a layer of sediment dated to about 190,000 years ago, they found bones from the tips of the lion’s toes.
    These had cut marks consistent with the animal having been skinned “in such a way that the claws were left in the paw of the animal”, says Russo. The team interprets this as evidence that Neanderthals took the cave lion’s skin into the cave, perhaps for a ritual purpose or simply for decoration.
    The cave lion remains from Siegsdorf displayed alongside a reproduction of a wooden spear similar to those used by NeanderthalsVolker Minkus/NLD
    By this time, hominins had been hunting a wide range of animals for a long time. There is evidence of earlier species like Homo erectus killing the likes of wildebeest in Africa up to 2 million years ago. Later, Neanderthals hunted huge animals like elephants. However, Russo says they probably didn’t target top predators like cave lions very often, partly because they are less common than herbivores, and partly because of the danger involved.
    There is also a 2010 study describing the remains of a cave lion found at Atapuerca in northern Spain, from around 350,000 years ago. At the time, the region was inhabited by the ancestors of Neanderthals. In theory, this could push back the evidence for hominins hunting lions even further. However, although the paper is called “The hunted hunter”, Russo says there is no evidence of hunting-related injuries and the animal could have been scavenged.

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    in Humans

    Mysterious Viking queen may have helped unify Denmark in the 900s

    The Læborg runestone has an inscription that mentions Queen ThyraRoberto Fortuna/National Museum of Denmark
    A mysterious queen named Thyra who lived during the Viking era may have been one of the founders of what is now Denmark. Multiple commemorative “runestones” mention her by name, suggesting she was a central figure.
    “Because of the many runestones erected in honour of Thyra, we can conclude that she must have been very powerful and that she came from a very powerful family,” says Lisbeth Imer at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.
    Denmark’s Viking Age lasted from around AD 800 to 1050. A key figure was Harald “Bluetooth”, who was king from about AD 958 until his death in 987. The Bluetooth wireless technology standard is named after him. Harald’s parents were King Gorm, who came to power in around 936, and Queen Thyra.Advertisement
    Under these two generations of monarchs, Denmark became a unified state. Previously, it was divided into smaller kingdoms or territories. “We have no idea of how many, and who may have governed them, because of the lack of written sources,” says Imer. The lack of records also means we know almost nothing about Gorm and Thyra.
    However, Imer had reason to suspect that Thyra was a major figure. In Viking-era Denmark, powerful people were often commemorated with runestones: tall slabs of granite with runes engraved on them. The name “Thyra” is found on four runestones from the mid-900s. Two are from Jelling, where the monarchs lived, and were erected by Gorm and Harald. The other two, the Læborg and Bække 1 runestones, were found elsewhere and seem to have been carved by an unknown individual called Ravnunge-Tue.
    To find out if the runestones referred to the same Thyra, Imer and her colleagues set out to determine if they had all been carved by the same craftsperson. This would suggest that they were all produced around the same time and probably referred to the same person. To find out, the researchers examined the methods of engraving and the sizes and shapes of the runes.
    One of the Jelling runestones was too poorly preserved to get reliable results, but the other was in good condition and the style of its engravings matched the Læborg runestone. This suggests that Thyra was commemorated not just by her immediate family, but by other people elsewhere in the country.
    Thyra may not have been unusual in Norse societies, says Imer. “Elite women probably had much power,” she says. “A large burial mound in Oseberg in Norway contained the bodies of two women, who must have had some of the highest positions in the community.”

    Topics:Archeology More

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    in Humans

    The desire for legacy is a mental glitch but we can use it for good

    CONSIDER two scenarios. In the first, you have a life filled with love and meaning and enough money to get by comfortably. However, after you die, something terrible is revealed about you – which may not even be true – and people come to despise you. In the second, you have a life of relative hardship and obscurity, but after you die, it is revealed that you were an incredibly talented artist and your reputation is assured forever. Which option would you choose?
    If you picked the second, you aren’t alone, as Brett Waggoner at the University of Otago, New Zealand, discovered when he carried out this thought experiment. It may seem like a counterintuitive choice, but it reveals our deep concern for legacy. Across time and cultures, people seem to have acted with a desire to etch their names into the history books, from the pharaoh Khufu’s Great Pyramid of Giza to acts of scientific discovery, works of art, sporting achievements and public philanthropy. Nevertheless, such behaviour is something of a paradox. Why devote so much time and energy to being warmly recalled when you won’t be around to see the benefits?
    Researchers trying to answer this question have come up with some surprising answers. Some suggest it gives individuals an evolutionary advantage. Others see it as a sort of glitch in the way we think – a mistake based on various cognitive biases. Meanwhile, it is becoming clear that our desire to be positively remembered is far more than just self-aggrandisement. Nurtured in the correct way, it could be leveraged to tackle long-term, global issues, including climate change, biodiversity … More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Vela’s exploded star is the highest-energy pulsar ever seen

    The sweeping beams of cosmic lighthouses called pulsars are much more energetic than previously thought, calling into question the bulbs that power them.

    A new analysis, from the High Energy Stereoscopic System array in Namibia, reveals a pulsar that radiates at 20 trillion electron volts — making it the most energetic pulsar ever seen. The finding, described October 5 in Nature Astronomy, is challenging scientists’ understanding of how pulsars can emit such extreme radiation.

    The observation is “spectacular,” says Hayk Hakobyan, an astrophysicist at Columbia University who was not part of the study. “This is basically a stress test for our theories.”

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    Pulsars are the dense remnants of exploded stars, emitting beams of light as they twirl up to hundreds of times a second. Pulsars were first discovered in the late 1960s, from a throb of radio waves so consistent that some suggested it was an alien broadcast (SN: 3/8/18).

    As a pulsar rotates, its massive magnetic field rips charged particles from the surface, ejecting them along magnetic field lines and spitting radiation out the pulsar’s poles. Over the decades, scientists have found pulsars that beam radiation at higher energies, topping off at about a trillion electron volts, as observed in the Crab pulsar in 2016.

    In the new study, scientists analyzed 80 hours of data from the Namibian array, which looks for a wake of light given off when high-energy light emitted elsewhere in the universe crashes into molecules in Earth’s atmosphere. The researchers identified 78 super-energetic particles of light that they traced to a pulsar about 1,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Vela. That light, the team determined, had at least 20 times higher energy than the Crab pulsar observation.

    The team first spotted hints of the mighty radiation a few years ago and struggled to interpret the data. “This discovery was so unexpected … that it somehow was difficult to understand,” says Arache Djannati-Ataï, an astrophysicist at CNRS in Paris, who led the analysis.

    To reach such high energies, the light is probably boosted by collisions with other speedy, energetic particles such as electrons. But how it becomes so energetic is still up for debate.

    The new finding lends support to the growing idea that, thousands of kilometers from a pulsar’s surface, its magnetic field lines can collide and snap, launching particles to extreme speeds in a process called magnetic reconnection. But the observed radiation is pushing the limit of how much energy the reconnection process can release, and scientists will have to scramble for new explanations if higher-energy pulsar radiation keeps turning up.

    The possibility of extreme pulsar radiation had been looming over theorists, Hakobyan says. “But now, it’s definite. So now, you have to go do something about it.” More

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    The Amazon may contain thousands of undiscovered ancient structures

    Earthworks made by ancient societies have been found throughout the Amazon rainforestDiego Lourenço Gurgel
    There are probably more than 10,000 undiscovered pre-Columbian archaeological sites hidden in the Amazon, researchers have concluded after surveying a fraction of the sprawling rainforest.
    The study adds to growing evidence suggesting that the region isn’t a pristine tropical forest, but has been significantly altered by Indigenous societies that have inhabited it for more than 12,000 years.
    Luiz Eduardo Oliveira e Cruz de Aragão at the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil and his colleagues surveyed 5315 square kilometres of the Amazon using lidar, a technology that uses reflected laser light to create a 3D representation of a landscape.Advertisement
    By beaming pulses of light into the rainforest, usually from planes or drones, lidar records slight variations in topography and has uncovered numerous archaeological sites in recent years.
    The team discovered 24 previously unknown earthworks in the areas it surveyed, which are thought to be the remnants of civilisations that lived between 1500 and 500 years ago.
    The discoveries include a fortified village in the southern Amazon, a region known to have been densely populated due to the high concentration of earthworks that were connected by ancient roads.
    Defensive and ceremonial sites in the southwestern Amazon were also brought to light, along with permanent settlements and ceremonial sites with large stone structures arranged in circular clusters in the northern Amazon.
    The survey covered only 0.08 per cent of the Amazon’s 6.7 million square kilometres. Aragão and his colleagues used a computer model to predict how many other sites could remain hidden under the forest canopy, based on the concentration of earthworks in the new data and 937 earthworks previously discovered. They estimate that between 10,272 and 23,648 earthworks may lay undiscovered.
    The model analysed the typical characteristics of known earthworks, including the local temperature, rainfall, soil clay content and distance from the nearest river, to predict where others are likely to be. “These are the characteristics needed for building the structures, but also surviving in these regions,” says Aragão.
    Most of the predicted structures are in the southwestern Amazon, many in the Brazilian state of Acre.

    Emerging evidence indicates that the Indigenous societies that occupied the Amazon for more than 12,000 years were larger than previously thought, at one point numbering as many as 5 million people. It is unclear why the jungle cities disappeared centuries ago.
    In common with previous studies, Aragão and his colleagues also found high concentrations of domesticated plants that yield nuts or fruits close to archaeological sites, suggesting these lost societies significantly altered the composition of the rainforest. This might mean predictions about how the rainforest will adapt to climate change could be incorrect, as it isn’t as pristine as previously thought, the researchers say.
    “There has always been this bias in Western thought that the Amazon was like a Garden of Eden, a primordial society that was inimical to human society,” says Michael Heckenberger at the University of Florida, who wasn’t involved in the study. “We are now seeing there was a significant degree of human intervention and variation just 500 years ago.”
    The growing evidence that there were massive societies in the region before the arrival of Europeans could help protect the Amazon, says Heckenberger. Around 17 per cent of the rainforest has been cleared and some researchers believe it has already reached a tipping point where it no longer generates enough rainfall to support itself.
    “If we’ve now demonstrated that even more of the Amazon forest is actually an artefact of cultural influence, the implication of that is that it’s the heritage of living Indigenous peoples and must be protected as these are their ancestors,” says Heckenberger.

    Topics:archaeology/The Amazon rainforest More