Ancient Roman Tumulus Discovered in Bavaria

Archaeologists has just uncovered an extremely rare and massive Roman circular monument in Upper Bavaria, shedding new light on Raetia, an ancient Roman province in southern Germany.

The Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation recently announced "a particularly remarkable find," the base of a Roman tumulus off an ancient Roman road near Wolkertshofen, in the district of Eichstätt.

Burial mounds belong to the Roman tradition, but archaeologists discussed how rare it was to find one in the region. However, Ancient Origins noted that they appeared in Raetia from the 1st century onward.

"Discovering a burial monument of this scale and period here was entirely unexpected," said Prof. Mathias Pfeil, General Conservator of the BLfD, to Ancient Origins.

Interestingly enough, the tumulus represents a meeting of Roman and Celtic traditions, though, by the looks of it, this funerary monument, possibly attached to a stately though unknown elite, was a symbolic gesture, piquing intrigue and revealing a slice of Roman life rarely seen.

As per a press release, construction work began in the fall of 2024 to build a stormwater retention basin in the northeast of Wolkertshofen. As the site boasts a long history with settlements dating back to the Bronze and Iron Ages, it necessitated archaeological supervision.

However, once the remains of a massive circular stone foundation came to light, over 29 feet wide, archaeologists were admittedly astonished. On the south side, they uncovered a square extension measuring 6.65 feet by 6.56 feet, which they assume served as a foundation for a statue or stele.

The quality of its construction was notably superior, and the overall appearance of the tumulus signaled to archaeologists that they stumbled upon a stone circle that formed the peripheral wall of a funerary monument.

Ancient Origins continues that archaeologists expected to find human remains or grave goods, the absence of which communicated to researchers that the site was a cenotaph, a symbolic grave for someone who was laid to rest elsewhere.

Often, these monuments, when empty, represent an affluent family aiming to communicate its status in Roman society. Its extraordinary size, even, reflects that objective while simultaneously honoring and remembering a deceased member of the family who may have died far away from home, as per Archaeology News.

And behold, the monument was situated on a Roman road near "villa rustica," a Roman country estate, possibly suggesting a connection, though archaeologists didn’t explicitly state that. Only that, its location on a main road, would indicate that it was meant to be seen.

The press release continued that several Roman burial sites are known in the Augsburg area. Still, tumuli with stone ring walls, and specifically of this size, are "extremely rare to find in the province of Raetia," making the discovery distinguishably significant in advancing research into Bavaria under Roman rule.

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Nuclear Waste Facility Turns Radioactive Materials Into Glass

The work to turn radioactive waste into glass has begun at the Hanford Site in Washington state. Bechtel started the nuclear vitrification operations at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP).

This milestone marks an important step forward in reducing the long-term environmental risks of legacy tank waste in the Hanford area.

The vitrification process involves removing waste from leaking underground tanks, mixing it with additives, and heating it above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

"This milestone represents the realization of a vision shared by many. It reflects decades of teamwork, innovation, and partnership with our customer to solve one of the nation’s most complex environmental challenges—safely and permanently," said Dena Volovar, President of Bechtel’s Nuclear, Security & Environmental business.

"Together with the Department of Energy, the state of Washington, our labor partners, local suppliers, subcontractors, and world-class scientific experts, we’ve turned vitrification into a reality at Hanford. It’s an important step forward in protecting the Columbia River, surrounding communities, and future generations."

Bechtel designed, built, and commissioned the WTP for the U.S. Department of Energy. In the vitrification process, tank waste is blended with glass-forming materials and heated to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit inside one of two 300-ton melters before being poured into stainless-steel containers for safe, long-term disposal, according to a press release.

Reports revealed that there was also a sigh of relief from those who had feared federal officials might be planning a last-minute retreat from the technique known as vitrification, in which waste is mixed with molten silicate and other materials to create inert glass logs.

The acting head of DOE’s environmental program was fired in early September, prompting speculation that the agency was trying to shift toward storing the waste by mixing it with a cement-like substance called grout, reported Science.

As the world’s largest radioactive waste treatment facility, the plant’s successful startup represents a crucial achievement at this scale, demonstrating the ability to stabilize nuclear waste for safe, long-term disposal.

In the coming months, Bechtel’s project team will continue feeding waste and glass-forming materials into the melters, filling stainless-steel containers, and transporting them to the Hanford Site’s Integrated Disposal Facility. During operations, the plant will process an average of 5,300 gallons of tank waste per day.

The site became home to tens of thousands of workers recruited nationwide to support the war effort. Many did not know they were building the world’s first full-scale plutonium reactor until after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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Strange Species From The Deep Amazes Scientists

Our ocean covers more than 70 percent of Earth’s surface, yet scientists have formally identified only a small fraction of the life it holds.

Researchers estimate there could be around two million marine species, but many remain unnamed or undiscovered. Often, the official documentation of a new species can take decades, leaving some to vanish before science ever recognizes them.

To tackle this long-standing problem, an international team of researchers has launched the Ocean Species Discoveries project.

The initiative focuses on publishing concise, high-quality species descriptions to shorten the gap between discovery and formal recognition drastically.

By making the process faster and more efficient, it aims to ensure that marine biodiversity is documented before it’s lost to human-driven threats such as deep-sea mining, pollution, and climate change.

"Our shared vision is making taxonomy faster, more efficient, more accessible and more visible," the team said in their paper.

In its second major collection, published in the Biodiversity Data Journal, over 20 researchers from around the world came together to describe 14 new marine invertebrate species and two new genera.

The discoveries span worms, mollusks, and crustaceans collected from habitats ranging from shallow waters to the ocean’s deepest trenches.

Among the most remarkable finds is Veleropilina gretchenae, a new mollusk species retrieved from the Aleutian Trench at a depth of 6,465 meters.

This makes it the deepest-living animal identified in the collection.

It also marks one of the first times a species in the class Monoplacophora has had a high-quality genome published directly from its holotype specimen – the official reference used to define a species.

Another standout discovery is the carnivorous bivalve Myonera aleutiana, found at depths between 5,170 and 5,280 meters. It sets a new depth record for its genus.

Scientists used non-invasive micro-CT scanning to study it, producing over 2,000 tomographic images that revealed intricate details of its anatomy.

This is the first study to present such detailed internal views of any Myonera species.

In the Galápagos Rift hydrothermal vent fields, researchers described a new amphipod, Apotectonia senckenbergae.

The species was named in honor of Johanna Rebecca Senckenberg (1716–1743), a benefactor whose support for science and medicine helped lay the foundation for the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research.

In Australia’s intertidal zone, a parasitic isopod called Zeaione everta drew attention for its unusual appearance.

The female’s back is covered in small protrusions that resemble popped kernels of popcorn, inspiring its genus name Zea, derived from the corn plant.

This species also represents a completely new genus.

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Brown Dwarf Discovery Could Tell Us More About Venus

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was reported to have discovered phosphine in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf — the same chemical that stoked controversy following claims that it had been detected on Venus and could be coming from life.

This new detection on a brown dwarf is predicted by models that simulate alien atmospheres and is a reminder that phosphine is not necessarily a biosignature. However, astronomers remain puzzled about why some objects contain phosphine and others do not, even though theory says it should be there.

The phosphine was identified in the cold atmosphere of a brown dwarf called Wolf 1130C, which exists in a triple system along with a low-mass red dwarf star and a white dwarf. The phosphine exists with an abundance of 0.1 parts per million, which matches what models of the atmosphere of gas giant planets and brown dwarfs predict. Indeed, both Jupiter and Saturn contain a similar abundance of phosphine to Wolf 1130C.

The problem has been that many brown dwarfs that are expected to show detectable abundances of phosphine do not, and scientists don't know why.

Phosphine is a phosphorus-based molecule, composed of one atom of phosphorus and three hydrogen atoms. It is also pretty unstable in atmospheric conditions, and chemical reactions can easily break phosphine molecules apart. We see phosphine in Jupiter and Saturn's clouds because it is formed deep within the hot interiors of the giant planets, and then convection currents carry the phosphine to higher altitudes faster than the rate at which it is destroyed.

This is one of the reasons why the claimed detection of phosphine on Venus is so controversial.

It was in 2020 that a team led by Jane Greaves of the University of Cardiff in Wales detected phosphine in Venus' atmosphere using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. On Earth, phosphine occurs naturally as a product of biological processes, and Greaves' team strongly pushed the biological angle to explain their discovery, leading to speculation that there could be microbes living in Venus' toxic clouds.

However, a large section of the astronomical community differed with the team's findings, arguing that there were flaws in the analysis, and other groups have struggled to replicate the findings. In spite of this, Greaves' team has doubled down on their conclusions, and the presence of phosphine on Venus remains fiercely debated and controversial.

Part of scientists' disagreement with the discovery is that they find it hard to see how the phosphine could survive in Venus' atmosphere.

Nevertheless, phosphine is still considered a potential biosignature by astrobiologists in their search for alien life.

However, its existence in the clouds of Jupiter and Saturn, and now on Wolf 1130C, is a reminder that non-biological chemical processes can also produce phosphine. The question is why Jupiter, Saturn and Wolf 1130C have detectable levels of phosphine while other brown dwarfs that have been studied by JWST do not, or at least are so depleted in it that the molecule is not detectable.

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There's A New Formula For Pi

Physicists are now using principles from quantum mechanics to build a new model of the abstract concept of pi. Or, more accurately, they built a new model that happens to include a great new representation of pi. But what does that mean, and why do we need different representations of pi?

The reason is that it is because quantum mechanics looks at the tiniest particles, one at a time, even simple questions can have complex answers that require massive computing power.

Rendering high-tech video games and movies like Avatar can take days or more, and that’s still not at the level of reality. In the new paper, published in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters, physicists Arnab Priya Saha and Aninda Sinha describe their new version of a quantum model that reduces complexity, but maintains accuracy.

This is called optimization. Think of the way early internet video buffered in chunks of similar colors, or how classic animators painted static bodies with individual moving parts on top. Imagine how people cut the corners of squared-off walking paths until they make a dirt-path shortcut. Everyone is surrounded by optimization and optimizing behaviors.

As detailed in their paper, Saha and Sinha combined two existing ideas from math and science: the Feynman diagram of particle scattering and the Euler beta function for scattering in string theory. What results is a series—something represented in math by the Greek letter Σ surrounded by parameters.

Series can end up generalizing into overall equations or expressions, but they don’t have to. And while some series diverge—meaning that the terms continue to alternate away from each other—others converge on one approximate, concrete result. That’s where pi comes in. The digits of pi extend into infinity, and pi is itself an irrational number, meaning it can’t be truly represented by an integer fraction (the one we often learn in school, 22/7, is not very accurate by 2024 standards).

But it can be represented pretty quickly and well by a series. That’s because a series can continue to build out values well into the tiniest digits. If a mathematician compiles a series’ terms, they can use the resulting abstraction to do math that isn’t possible with an approximation of pi that’s cut off at 10 digits by a standard desk calculator. A sophisticated approximation enables the kind of nanoscopic particle work that inspired these scientists in the first place.

"In the early 1970s," Sinha said in a statement from the Indian Institute of Science, "scientists briefly examined this line of research, but quickly abandoned it since it was too complicated."

But math analysis like this has come a long way since the 1970s. Today, Sinha and Saha are able to analyze an existing model and remodel it with altered terms. They’re able to build a sequence and see that it converges on the value of pi within far fewer terms than expected, making it easier for scientists to run the series and then use that for further work.

All of that requires decades of foundational work in the field and large bodies of work showing that certain mathematical moves work where other ones don’t. It’s a comment on the ongoing and collaborative nature of math theory, even when what results is a working model that might help scientists. Our ability to meaningfully approximate has grown in tandem with our ability to solve complex problems outright.

"Doing this kind of work, although it may not see an immediate application in daily life, gives the pure pleasure of doing theory for the sake of doing it," Sinha said in the statement.

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