Humans

Charging an electric vehicle at night can reduce the demand on the power gridifeelstock/Alamy
A small financial reward can persuade many electric vehicle owners to charge their electric cars during off-peak nighttime hours – even when behavioural nudges fail to have the same effect.
That is the finding of a real-world trial that demonstrated how modest monetary incentives can ease the demand on power grids during peak usage hours. Such flexibility could be crucial as the number of people driving electric vehicles continues to grow worldwide.
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“Offering an incentive to shift charging to the off-peak hours clearly reduced peak hours charging by 50 per cent, with a commensurate increase in off-peak hours charging,” says Blake Shaffer at the University of Calgary in Canada.
He and his colleagues enlisted 200 electric vehicle owners in Calgary and randomly split them into three groups. One received a financial incentive equivalent to 3.5 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity use – roughly equivalent to $10 per month – if they charged their cars at home between 10 pm and 6 am, a period when electricity demand on the grid is usually lower. A second group only received a behavioural nudge consisting of information on the societal benefits of charging their electric cars during off-peak hours. A third group acted as a control, merely monitored to track baseline charging habits.
Surprisingly, the behavioural nudge strategy proved “completely ineffective”, says Shaffer. “Just asking them to do it out of the goodness of their heart didn’t show a strong enough effect.” But he suggests that more frequent reminders beyond the initial notice might have been more successful.
By comparison, the financial reward significantly shifted charging times – but only as long as people kept receiving money. Any reward cutoff led them to immediately revert to their old charging habits.
“The analysis does a convincing job of showing how a small financial incentive can really affect electric vehicle charging behaviour,” says Kenneth Gillingham at Yale University. Such incentives may have seemed like “easy money” because charging vehicles at night wasn’t too inconvenient, he says.
This is important because “many grids would need substantial upgrades” if growing numbers of electric vehicles are charging earlier in the evening, during peak demand hours, says Andrea La Nauze at Deakin University in Australia. Her own research has shown how financial incentives can encourage Australian electric car owners to charge during the day, when solar power is delivering maximum electricity to the grid.
Meanwhile, some utility companies – such as Con Edison and Orange & Rockland in New York – have already begun offering similar incentive programmes for off-peak charging.

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Hominins have been using fire for various reasons for at least 1 million yearsSHEILA TERRY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Mastering fire may have also led to genetic changes that helped early humans survive mild burn injuries, but this evolutionary trait could complicate the treatment of more severe cases today.
An early-stage study suggests that the selection of genes preventing deadly infections that could arise from minor burns were prioritised in early Homo sapiens, but these same genes interfere with the healing of severe ones. This may be because, in primitive times, people with severe burns had almost no hope of surviving.… More

Reindeer fur would have helped ancient humans endure the climate of the last glacial maximumEsteban De Armas/Shutterstock
An open-air site in Austria occupied by humans during the coldest part of the last glacial period may have been dedicated to hunting reindeer for pelts, showing how people adapted to extreme temperatures in Europe.
The site, called Kammern-Grubgraben, was heavily occupied from around 24,000 to 20,000 years ago and contains the largest abundance of tools, ornaments, artefacts and stone structures in Europe during the cold and unforgiving most recent glacial maximum. At this time, the mean annual temperature… More

We know from ancient texts that Roman gladiators fought lions, but physical evidence has been lacking until nowDEA PICTURE LIBRARY/De Agostini via Getty Images
Bite marks on the pelvis of a man who lived in Roman-occupied Britain were probably made by a lion in gladiatorial combat.
The findings provide the first physical evidence that people battled animals in gladiator arenas in Europe, says Tim Thompson at Maynooth University in Ireland.

Gladiator spectacles involving wild cats, bears, elephants, and other animals are frequently described in Roman art and texts. But despite those accounts and the hundreds of excavated Roman amphitheatres scattered across the ancient empire, none of the approximately 200 suspected gladiator skeletons uncovered so far have shown clear signs of an animal attack.
During an urban development project in 2004 and 2005, scientists excavated the remains of about a hundred people from the Roman era just outside York, UK – a city originally founded by the Romans as Eboracum. Most of the people buried there from the 1st to the 4th centuries AD were young men, riddled with traumatic injuries and often decapitated.
One of the skeletons bore unusual depressions and puncture marks across both hips, which researchers thought might be evidence of a carnivore attack.
To find out, Thompson and his colleagues ran 3D scans on the ancient pelvis and compared their findings with scans of fresh bite patterns on the bones of animal carcasses – mostly horses – that had been fed to lions, leopards, cheetahs and tigers in zoos.
The researchers found that the 10 bite marks on the bones of the suspected gladiator closely matched those made on horse bones by zoo lions. Similarities included the position of the teeth marks, as well as the depth of their marks into the bone after piercing through soft tissue.
Part of the pelvis of a Roman-era man, with a bite mark made by a big catPLOS One
“We’re talking about some quite big teeth going through all these layers of the body,” says Thompson.
Even so, the bite was unlikely to be fatal: “It would sting,” he says. But when going for the kill, lions usually attack the throat.
“What probably happened here is that the individual got knocked down by some other means, and then the lion dragged him away.”

Historic Herculaneum – Uncovering Vesuvius, Pompeii and ancient Naples

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The now-extinct Tocharian language on a scrap of parchmentSakkmesterke/Alamy
ProtoLaura Spinney (HarperCollins (UK) Bloomsbury Publishing (US, 13 May))
A new book by Laura Spinney is rather tantalisingly called Proto, begging the question: proto-what? Prototype, the earliest version of a technology? Protoplasm, the stuff of our cells? Or even protoplanet, a small hunk of space rock with a big future ahead?
The answer, in fact, sits above and across those words: Proto-Indo-European. This is the great original language from which English, among many other tongues, both alive and dead, derives. As Spinney puts it: “Almost every second person on… More

A piece of the Antikythera mechanismLOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP/Getty Images
The Antikythera mechanism, a mysterious ancient Greek device that is often called the world’s first computer, may not have functioned at all, according to a simulation of its workings. But researchers say we can’t be sure of this since the machine is so badly damaged.
Since the mechanism was discovered in 1901, in a shipwreck thought to date to around 60 BC, researchers have struggled to work out exactly why it was built. X-ray scans and digital reconstructions show that it was originally a 30-centimetre box containing interlinked systems… More

Stone tools with purple dye residue found at Tel Shiqmona in IsraelMaria Bukin/Shalvi et al., 2025, PLoS One, CC-BY 4.0
For centuries, a coastal settlement in modern-day Israel was home to the industrial-scale production from marine snails of a purple dye that was one of the ancient world’s most precious commodities.
Known as Tyrian purple, it was especially sought after to colour woollen textiles and was highly prized by the wealthy and powerful in Iron Age Mediterranean societies. But until now the direct evidence of any sites of large-scale production has been sparse.
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From 1100 BC to about 900 BC, Tel Shiqmona was a small Phoenician fishing village where purple dye was produced on a small scale. Then, as the Kingdom of Israel began to expand, the site was transformed “from a fishing village to a fortified purple dye production centre”, says Golan Shalvi at the University of Chicago.
During archaeological work at the site, Shalvi and his colleagues found the remains of dye-stained vats used to process the substance, each of which could have held up to 350 litres of liquid. Altogether 176 artefacts related to purple dye production were recovered, including 135 purple-stained items.
The dye is harvested from sea snails in the Muricidae family, which secrete mucus to defend themselves and kill prey. “The secretion is initially a slightly greenish fluid, which oxidises upon exposure to air and gradually turns purple,” says Shalvi. “However, in order to transform it into an actual dye — one that chemically bonds with textiles — it must be processed into a solution through a complex series of chemical steps.”
The researchers claim Tel Shiqmona is the only site in the world where there is clear evidence for large-scale manufacture of purple dye in a specialised facility for so long.
However, there are no historical records that tie the site to the dye and little is known about the actual process that was used to manufacture it, says Shalvi.

After the Kingdom of Israel fell around 720 BC, the scale of dye production wound down until the Assyrians took over the site and ramped the process up yet again. Around 600 BC, when the Babylonians conquered the region, dye production at Tel Shiqmona was abandoned.
“It was an industrial site throughout most of the Iron Age, without monumental architecture or any particular beauty or elegance,” says Shalvi. “I imagine it as a very smelly place — especially to a modern nose — since the production process emitted a terrible odour. I picture wool fleeces dyed in various shades drying outside and inside the buildings, which may have given the site a purplish-reddish-blue hue.”
Purple dye has fascinated people all over the world, he says, and it has been the subject of extensive research. “Its association with elite classes and religious rituals gave it immense cultural, symbolic and economic significance far beyond its function as a mere colour.”

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Moai on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter IslandAll Canada Photos / Alamy Stock Photo
A newly identified drought on the Pacific island of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, could have spurred islanders to invest fewer resources in building their legendary stone monuments. But some archaeologists dispute this interpretation.
The island of Rapa Nui has become central to a cautionary tale of disaster caused by unsustainable use of resources. The standard narrative is that the arrival of the first Polynesians on the tiny island in the 1200s led to rapid deforestation, in part to support the… More