Did Spiders Evolved From The Ocean Before Adapting To Land?

One of the creepiest, crawliest creatures of the Earth may have been swimming freely before adapting to live on land, new research suggests.

Spiders and their arachnid relatives may have actually originated in the sea, according to analysis of an "exquisitely preserved" fossil that lived 500 million years ago. The findings were published last 22 July in the journal Current Biology.

Researchers at the University of Arizona completed a detailed analysis of the brain and central nervous system of an extinct animal called Mollisonia symmetrica, according to the study. The species was previously thought to represent an ancestral member of a specific group of arthropods called chelicerates that lived during the Cambrian period - between 540 and 485 million years ago. Chelicerates were believed to be ancestors to modern-day horseshoe crabs.

However, the scientists were surprised to discover that the neural arrangements in Mollisonia's fossilized brain are not organized like those in horseshoe crabs. Instead, they are organized the same way as in modern spiders and their relatives, the researchers said.

The anterior part of Mollisonia’s body - the prosoma - contains a radiating pattern of segmental ganglia that control the movements of five pairs of segmental appendages, the researchers said. In addition, an unsegmented brain extends short nerves to a pair of pincer-like "claws," similar to the fangs of spiders and other arachnids.

The decisive feature that demonstrates the fossil was likely an early arachnid is the unique organization of the brain - a reverse of the front-to-back arrangement found in present-day crustaceans, insects, centipedes and horseshoe crabs, the researchers said.

It's as if the brain has been "flipped backwards," which is what is seen in modern spiders," said Nick Strausfeld, a regents professor at the University of Arizona and lead author of the paper, in a statement.

This may be a crucial evolutionary development, as studies of existing spider brains suggest that a back-to-front arrangement in the brain provides shortcuts from neuronal control centers to underlying circuits, which control the spider's movements, said Frank Hirth, a reader of evolutionary neuroscience at King’s College London and co-author of the paper.

The arrangement likely helps the spiders hunt stealthily and dexterity for the spinning of webs.

Spiders and scorpions have existed for about 400 million years with little change - dominating the Earth as the most successful group of arthropodan predators.

The finding challenges the widely held belief that diversification occurred only after a common ancestor had moved to the shore, according to the study. Previous fossil records appeared to indicate that arachnids lived and diversified exclusively on land.

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Tests Continue For Space Force Plane

The long-running, secretive X-37B spaceplane project has a new mission on the books, according to the US Space Force.

On 21 August, the Boeing-developed X37 aircraft will take its eighth flight with a mission designation of Orbital Test Vehicle-8 (OTV-8). The mission is designed to test key navigation and communication technologies that could help US aircraft and aerospace vehicles operate as enemies deny GPS navigation and radio-based communication.

Boeing has worked on the X37 since 1999, though the spaceplane didn't fly for the first time until 2010. Designed as a long-term orbital craft, it is also entirely reusable and recoverable, able to land in much the same way as the Space Shuttle that inspired its design. It is the smallest and lightest orbital spaceplane yet flown, and it's already demonstrated the ability to remain in orbit for over 900 days, showcasing its resilience to spacebound dangers and long-term reliability.

The next launch is scheduled to take place within the next few weeks, though an exact date has not been confirmed. It will see the latest version of the spaceplane, the X-37B, launching atop a Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket for the first time.

A big component of this launch is testing redundancies. As military conflicts have increasingly leveraged denial technologies like GPS and radio jamming, the X-37B will perform key tests on technologies that can still operate in these environments. One of them will be a GPS-free navigation system that uses a quantum inertial sensor. Operating like a traditional accelerator and gyroscope, the system will be far more accurate thanks to its ability to track the quantum properties of atoms.

This flight will also incorporate a secondary experiment aimed at testing laser-based communications. Fellow Expanse fans might think of this a little like "tightbeam" technology, in which a laser beam conveys information in a direct line to a receiver, rather than using more traditional wireless radio-based communications. It will leverage a network of inter-satellite laser communications systems, highlighting the Space Force's resilience to interrupted communications.

"OTV-8’s laser communications demonstration will mark an important step in the US Space Force’s ability to leverage commercial space networks as part of proliferated, diversified, and redundant space architectures," said General Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations (via SpaceNews).

This flight will also be part of continuing posturing between the United States and China, which has its own reusable spaceplane program. Known as the Shenlong, it has also demonstrated long orbital survival, runway landings, and a range of undisclosed payload transportation capabilities.

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AI Helps Decipher Ancient Roman Text

There are around 1,500 Latin inscriptions that are discovered every year, offering an invaluable view into the daily life of ancient Romans -- and posing a daunting challenge for the historians tasked with interpreting them.

But a new artificial intelligence tool, partly developed by Google researchers, can now help Latin scholars piece together these puzzles from the past, according to a study published last 23 July.

Inscriptions in Latin were commonplace across the Roman world, from laying out the decrees of emperors to graffiti on the city streets. One mosaic outside a home in the ancient city of Pompeii even warns: "Beware of the dog".

These inscriptions are "so precious to historians because they offer first-hand evidence of ancient thought, language, society and history", said study co-author Yannis Assael, a researcher at Google's AI lab DeepMind.

"What makes them unique is that they are written by the ancient people themselves across all social classes on any subject. It's not just history written by the elite," Assael, who co-designed the AI model, told a press conference.

However these texts have often been damaged over the millennia.

"We usually don't know where and when they were written," Assael said.

So the researchers created a generative neural network, which is an AI tool that can be trained to identify complex relationships between types of data.

They named their model Aeneas, after the Trojan hero and son of the Greek goddess Aphrodite.

It was trained on data about the dates, locations and meanings of Latin transcriptions from an empire that spanned five million square kilometres over two millennia.

Thea Sommerschield, an epigrapher at the University of Nottingham who co-designed the AI model, said that "studying history through inscriptions is like solving a gigantic jigsaw puzzle".

"You can't solve the puzzle with a single isolated piece, even though you know information like its colour or its shape," she explained.

"To solve the puzzle, you need to use that information to find the pieces that connect to it."

Latin scholars have to compare inscriptions against "potentially hundreds of parallels", a task which "demands extraordinary erudition" and "laborious manual searches" through massive library and museum collections, the study in the journal Nature said.

The researchers trained their model on 176,861 inscriptions -- worth up to 16 million characters -- five percent of which contained images.

It can now estimate the location of an inscription among the 62 Roman provinces, offer a decade when it was produced and even guess what missing sections might have contained, they said.

To test their model, the team asked Aeneas to analyse a famous inscription called "Res Gestae Divi Augusti", in which Rome's first emperor Augustus detailed his accomplishments.

Debate still rages between historians about when exactly the text was written.

Though the text is riddled with exaggerations, irrelevant dates and erroneous geographical references, the researchers said that Aeneas was able to use subtle clues such as archaic spelling to land on two possible dates -- the two being debated between historians.

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Can You Really Safely Jump Into A Black Hole?

In a finding copied from "Interstellar", scientists say humans can indeed explore black holes firsthand. The catch? If you’re going to jump into a black hole, don’t plan on ever jumping back out into our universe.

"A human can do this only if the respective black hole is supermassive and isolated, and if the person entering the black hole does not expect to report the findings to anyone in the entire Universe," Grinnell College physicists explain in a new article in The Conversation.

That’s because of special physics found in supermassive black holes, resulting in a combination of gravity and event horizon that wouldn’t instantaneously pull the human being into a very dead piece of spaghetti.

Because supermassive black holes are much bigger than stellar and intermediate black holes, all the parts of them are more spread out. A person falling in would make it to the event horizon—the border of the black hole beyond which not even light can escape, and where gravity is so strong that light will orbit the black hole like planets orbit stars—a lot sooner than in a smaller black hole.

The person would stay cognizant and intact for longer. But, of course, they would never emerge—making this a one-way rollercoaster ride of scientific discovery into oblivion.

Why does the math work this way? It’s a matter of facts about black holes of different sizes, the researchers say:

"For a black hole with a mass of our Sun (one solar mass), the event horizon will have a radius of just under 2 miles. The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, by contrast, has a mass of roughly 4 million solar masses, and it has an event horizon with a radius of 7.3 million miles or 17 solar radii. This implies, due to the closeness of the black hole's center, that the black hole's pull on a person will differ by a factor of 1,000 billion times between head and toe, depending on which is leading the free fall."

This means avoiding "spaghettification" and a safe, gentle float past the event horizon.

Why does stuff go in but never come out? Well, scientists have only begun to understand the specific instances in which black holes eject energy or information—and that’s unlikely to ever take the form of a missive, or even Morse code message, from a disappearing astronaut. Those black holes are very old, for example, with different physics than this special case.

But, like in "Interstellar", our imaginations reel at the idea of studying a black hole from the inside. Perhaps in some far future, someone will invent the right kind of tether to pull someone back out. And in that case, we can confirm some of the facts of life in a black hole, time dilation or not.

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Chinese Device Can Extract Oxygen, Water And Fuel From The Moon

Chinese scientists and researchers claimed that they've devised a new way to extract water from lunar soil and convert it into fuel.

As detailed in a new paper published today in the journal Joule, the team found that their proposed "photothermal strategy" — essentially converting light into heat — could effectively convert carbon dioxide from extracted water into carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and oxygen gas, a "potential route for sustaining human life on the Moon and enabling long-term extraterrestrial exploration."

"The sustainable utilization of local resources is essential for long-term human survival on the Moon and beyond," the researchers write, pointing out that bringing water from Earth is cost-prohibitive at roughly US$ 83,000 per gallon.

"We never fully imagined the 'magic' that the lunar soil possessed," said Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen professor and coauthor Lu Wang in a statement.

"The biggest surprise for us was the tangible success of this integrated approach," he added. "The one-step integration of lunar H2O extraction and photothermal CO2 catalysis could enhance energy utilization efficiency and decrease the cost and complexity of infrastructure development."

While plenty of questions remain about our future efforts to harness local resources on the surface of the Moon, it's a glimmer of hope that humanity could indeed establish a more permanent and potentially sustainable presence there.

For their research, the team focused on simplifying existing proposals for how to extract water from lunar regolith, which tend to be energy-intensive and stop short of breaking the water down into its usable elements.

The researchers also propose using the extracted water to turn carbon dioxide exhaled by astronauts into carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas, which could be used to make fuels.

The team tested their photothermal approach on actual Moon samples gathered during China's Chang'E-5 mission, which launched in November 2020, and collected samples from the northwest of the Moon's near side before returning to Earth.

While their lab-based experiments turned out to be a success, the actual lunar surface will likely prove a far more challenging place to extract and convert lunar water. As the paper points out, radiation, low gravity, and extreme temperature fluctuations could complicate matters significantly.

However, the advancements highlight how far the Chinese space program has come in a matter of years. A mere two decades ago, China was a distant underdog in the international space race. But now that the country is launching its own astronauts to space while the Trump administration is effectively looking to eviscerate NASA when it comes to space science, China could stand a chance to surpass the US in its plans to build a Moon base by 2035.

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Archaeomagnetism Helps Analyze Earth's Magnetic Field

In 2008, Erez Ben-Yosef unearthed a piece of Iron Age "trash" and inadvertently revealed the strongest magnetic-field anomaly ever found. This was sourced from Live Science.

Ben-Yosef, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University, had been working in southern Jordan with Ron Shaar, who was analyzing archaeological materials around the Levant. Shaar, a geologist at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was building a record of the area's magnetic field.

The hunk of copper slag — a waste byproduct of forging metals — they found recorded an intense spike in Earth's magnetic field around 3,000 years ago.

When Ben-Yosef's team first described their discovery, many geophysicists were skeptical because the magnitude of the spike was unprecedented in geologic history. "There was no model that could explain such a spike," Ben-Yosef told Live Science.

So Shaar worked hard to give them more evidence. After they had analyzed and described samples from around the region for more than a decade, the anomaly was accepted by the research community and named the Levantine Iron Age Anomaly (LIAA). From about 1100 to 550 B.C., the magnetic field emanating from the Middle East fluctuated in intense surges.

Shaar and Ben-Yosef were using a relatively new technique called archaeomagnetism. With this method, geophysicists can peer into the magnetic particles inside archaeological materials like metal waste, pottery and building stone to recreate Earth's magnetic past.

This technique has some advantages over traditional methods of reconstructing Earth's magnetic field, particularly for studying the relatively recent past.

Generally, scientists study Earth's past magnetic field by looking at snapshots captured in rocks as they cooled into solids. But rock formation doesn't happen often, so for the most part, it gives scientists a glimpse of Earth's magnetic field hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago, or after relatively rare events, like volcanic eruptions.

Past magnetic-field data helps us understand the "geodynamo" — the engine that generates our planet's protective magnetic field. This field is generated by liquid iron slowly moving around the planet’s outer core, and this movement can also affect, and in turn be affected by, processes in the mantle, Earth's middle layer. So differences in the magnetic field hint at turmoil roiling deep below the surface in Earth's geodynamo.

"We cannot directly observe what is going on in Earth's outer core," Shaar told Live Science. "The only way we can indirectly measure what is happening in the core is by looking at changes in the geomagnetic field."

Knowing what the magnetic field did in the past can help us predict its future. And some studies suggest our planet's magnetic field is weakening over time. The magnetic field shields us from deadly space radiation, so its weakening could lead to a breakdown in satellite communications, and potentially increase cancer risk. As a result, predicting the magnetic field based on its past behavior has become ever more important. But observational data of the magnetic field’s intensity only began in 1832, so it's difficult to make predictions about the future if we only dimly understand the forces that steered the magnetic field in the past. Archaeomagnetism has started to fill these gaps.

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A 78,000-Year Old Footprint Is A Story Of Survival

A Neanderthal family, hunting 78,000 years ago along the dunes of what is now modern-day Portugal, was likely stalking a meal of red deer.

Recently, thanks to the discovery of fossilized footprints — a range of tracks showing an adult male and two children — scientists were able to piece together the family’s movements and how they coincided with the wild game the ancient hominin were known to crave.

In a new study published in Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from the University of Lisbon and the Naturtejo UNESCO Global Geopark used optically stimulated luminescence to date prints found on the coastal cliffs of Monte Clerigo, along with a single print left 82,000 years ago, roughly four miles away at Praia do Telheiro.

The footprints along Portugal’s shifting coastal environment are considered "the first two hominin track sites found in the southwestern most region of Europe."

In the report, the team chronicles five trackways at Monte Clerigo that contain 26 total prints. They were able to determine that three of the tracks were left by an adult male — likely between 5-foot-6 and 5-foot-8 in height — twice from ascending the cliff dune and once descending. The other two tracks were left by children, one likely between the ages of 7 and 9, and the other from a toddler, probably younger than 2 years old.

When the fossilized prints of a red deer were found on the same dune, the researchers came to believe the family was hunting the deer, using the undulating landscape to attempt to sneak up on the prey.

"Tracks of three individuals demonstrate how Neanderthals navigated dune landscapes," the study authors wrote. It also gives more credence to the belief that coastal environments were used by Pleistocene humans and that they were important areas in "shaping hominin cognitive and social development."

The footprints, a combined result of foot anatomy, gait dynamics, and substrate properties, help tell the story of the family, which was likely camping nearby the dunes.

"A review of the Neanderthal coastal sites associated with faunal evidence shows that their diet was primarily centered on cervids [deer], horses, and hares," the study authors wrote.

"The consistent presence of these mammal taxa highlights their role as reliable food sources, irrespective of the varying environments inhabited by Neanderthals. In addition, the Neanderthal diet also incorporated animals form neighboring littoral habitats, indicating a broad foraging strategy that capitalized on local biodiversity."

At Monte Clerigo’s five trackways, the busiest featured 10 prints in one track.

The single footprint found at Praia do Telheiro, which was dated about 4,000 years older than those found at Monte Clerigo, was that of a "slim" foot, likely belonging to a female, the authors wrote.

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Is Red Light Therapy Effective In Battling Aging?

With the help of social media, red light therapy has become a popular treatment for skin conditions, wrinkles, redness, scars and acne. However, before TikTokers and influencers, there were astronauts.

NASA originally began working with red light therapy, a non-invasive treatment that uses red or near-infrared light, on plant growth in space and later found it helped heal astronauts’ wounds.

RLT is accessible in some dermatologists’ offices, which offer in-office treatments. Devices are also sold for at-home treatment.

Regular RLT treatments may help with improving skin health and cosmetic appearance by increasing collagen in the skin, increasing circulation between blood and tissue cells, and reducing fine lines and the severity of wrinkles in the skin, a National Institutes of Health study found.

RLT has not been associated with any side effects if used short-term and with a dermatologist consultation. The treatment also does not use ultraviolet (UV) lights, which has been linked to increased cancer risk.

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Possible Way For Black Holes To Develop

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has delivered the goods again. Launched on Christmas Day, 2021, it has since sent back a storm of dazzling images and a trove of good science.

Now Webb has done it again. As NASA reports, two astronomers working with raw Webb data the space agency periodically makes available to researchers, have found evidence of a fast-growing black hole in an unexpected place and formed in an unexpected way.

What the two astronomers—Pieter van Dokkumum of Yale University and Gabriel Brammer of the University of Copenhagen—found was a pair of spiral galaxies that collided in space. Each galaxy has a black hole at its center that was already present before the collision and which emit a red glow surrounded by a ring of light and matter, giving the overall formation the shape of the infinity symbol. Van Dokkum and Brammer nicknamed the pair the Infinity Galaxy.

What surprised them was that the formation was also home to a third, larger, supermassive black hole—one with the mass of perhaps one million suns. This black hole was not in the center of one or the other galaxy as a supermassive black hole should be, but rather in the mashup of dust and gasses between them.

"Everything is unusual about this galaxy," said Van Dokkum, in an extensive description he wrote for NASA. "Not only does it look strange, but it also has this supermassive black hole that’s pulling a lot of material in."

Just how the object formed is unknown, but Van Dokkum and Brammer have two theories, called the "light seeds" and "heavy seeds" scenarios. In the light seeds version, a star explodes and its core collapses, forming a black hole with a mass of perhaps 1,000 suns. Over time, other nearby stars collapse and form their own black holes and finally all of the bodies merge to form one supermassive black hole. But that theory has a problem.

"The merger process takes time," Van Dokkum says, "and Webb has found incredibly massive black holes at incredibly early times in the universe—possibly even too early for the process to explain them." That doesn’t mean the light seeds scenario doesn’t ever play out, but it does mean that it’s not as common as astronomers may believe.

In the heavy seeds scenario a supermassive black hole forms directly from the collapse of a large gas cloud. In the case of the Infinity Galaxy, this occurred during the collision, when the galactic gas was shocked and compressed by the violence of the cosmic crackup.

"This compression might just be enough to form a dense knot, which then compressed into a black hole," Van Dokkum says. That process is also called a direct collapse black hole. Not only did a supermassive black hole form from this collision, that black hole is still growing. Radio and X-ray emissions confirmed by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and by the ground-based Very Large Array, confirm that the black hole is still pulling in prodigious amounts of dust and gas from its surroundings.

Van Dokkum and Brammer prefer the heavy seeds scenario to explain what they found since it would be such a natural result of a galactic collision. "By looking at the Infinity Galaxy, we think we have pieced together a story of how this could have happened here," says Van Dokkum. But they concede that other, less likely occurrences could explain the supermassive black hole.

For one thing, the body between the two galaxies in the Infinity Galaxy might be a runaway black hole that was ejected from its parent galaxy and is now passing through the Infinity Galaxy, and just happened to have been spotted by the Webb telescope during this relatively brief interregnum.

Alternatively, the supermassive black hole might be at the center of a third galaxy that happens to be in the foreground of the same area of sky as the Infinity Galaxy. If that third galaxy were a dwarf galaxy, it might be faint enough that only the superheated gas and dust surrounding the black hole would be visible. But the researchers don’t expect those theories to be borne out.

If the black hole were a runaway, the velocity of the gasses flowing into it would likely be different from the velocity of the gasses in the Infinity Galaxy. While they haven’t yet measured the speed of the gasses, they expect them to be similar.

The idea that the black hole lies at the center of a dwarf galaxy can be dismissed almost out of hand since dwarf galaxies typically don’t form black holes that big. All that is enough for the astronomers to claim at least a cautious victory in their discovery.

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Cutting-Edge Energy Facility Opened In China

There is a new energy storage plant featuring sodium- and lithium-ion batteries that just opened in China's Yunnan province.

The energy storage station, operated by China Southern Power Grid, is approximately 33,333 square meters in size and features over 150 battery compartments, according to CnEVPost.

The station's leader told news agency Xinhua that it has a top response speed that's six times faster than other sodium-ion batteries. It can also store up to 800,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per day, which is enough to power approximately 270,000 households.

PV Magazine explained that the station can serve over 30 wind and solar plants to mitigate the impact of intermittent supply. The article highlighted that the power station can adapt to changing energy access and stabilize delivery.

Combined, these benefits make it easier for cities, companies, and everyday people to have an energy source they can rely on. And one they can trust to release less planet-warming pollution than dirty fuels such as coal, oil, and gas.

As the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services pointed out, a cleaner environment reduces the likelihood of respiratory and heart conditions.

While there are many ways to store energy, sodium-ion batteries are gaining popularity. CnEVPost emphasized that this is because sodium is more abundant, easier to extract, and costs less.

Additional information from Sodium Battery Hub detailed that this system can adapt to temperature variations and has a longer life cycle than lithium models.

Energy storage plays a crucial role in the transition to greener energy sources. As more solar and wind stations emerge, engineers believe that the rapid construction of lithium-sodium battery storage will be critical, per Sodium Battery Hub.

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What Is The Purpose Of The Roman Dodecahedron?

The Roman dodecahedrons have baffled archaeologists since 1739, when the first example of the 12-sided bronze object was discovered in the English Midlands. For nearly three centuries, experts and hobbyists have put forth dozens of theories as to why people treasured these items — but their purpose has never been confirmed or validated.

At least 120 examples of dodecahedrons have been discovered across the northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire. All date to the late second to late fourth centuries, and their general appearance is the same, according to classical archaeologist Michael Guggenberger, who has published several studies on the objects.

In a 2000 study, Guggenberger wrote that the basic shape is a regular or pentagonal dodecahedron: 12 pentagons form the faces of the hollow shape, and they meet at 20 corners. Each corner of a Roman dodecahedron is topped with a small sphere, and each pentagonal face has a hole of varying diameter. The dodecahedrons range from 1.6 to 3.9 inches (4 to 10 centimeters) tall and weigh 1 to 20 ounces (30 to 580 grams), with exceptionally thin walls. No writing has been found on any dodecahedron.

Because these dodecahedrons have been found in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland — but not in Italy — Guggenberger views them as "Gallo-Roman products" with a possible origin in the Celtic tribes of the Roman Empire. But there are no historical records or depictions of them in ancient art, so the origin and purpose of the dodecahedrons have been lost.

Archaeologists have recovered dodecahedrons from the graves of men and women, in coin hoards and even in refuse heaps, so a blanket explanation for their use has not been found. But many researchers have attempted to solve the puzzle, suggesting that dodecahedrons may have been used as weapons, decorations, candlestick holders, range finders, measurement devices, children's toys, dice, craftsman's samples or spools for knitting gloves.

Of the 50 or more theories, Guggenberger wrote, most can now be ruled out or considered highly improbable. The primary explanation he favors is symbolic, with a connection to the philosophy of ancient Greek thinkers Plato and Pythagoras.

In Platonic-Pythagorean symbolism, four solid shapes were associated with four elements — tetrahedrons with fire, octahedrons with air, icosahedrons with water, and hexahedrons with earth. And, as the fifth regular solid, "the dodecahedron served as an all-encompassing symbol representing the universe," Guggenberger wrote in a 2013 study. In the second century A.D., thinkers like Plutarch resurrected the earlier idea of the dodecahedron as a symbolic connection to the heavens and the universe, Guggenberger wrote, and that may have influenced Celtic peoples in the Roman Empire.

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Peru's Sacred City Of Caral Unveiled

The renowned site of Caral, one of Peru's most important archaeological areas, has a new jewel in its crown after eight years of excavations, intense research and conservation work.

It is called Peñico, and experts consider it to be a "city of social integration" because of its strategic location, which connected the populations of the Supe and Huaura valleys, but also because of the large number of homes, public buildings and ceremonial spaces it housed.

Last Saturday (12 July), the Caral Archaeological Zone will organise the first Peñico Raymi, a replica of a traditional Andean festival, to inaugurate the new archaeological site.

Although the Caral culture developed mainly between 3000 and 1800 BC (which, given its antiquity, places it in a society with a development and chronology comparable to Ancient Egypt), it's understood the city of Peñico began to develop a little later, around 1800 and 1500 BC.

The Caral are considered the oldest of the pre-Hispanic civilisations in the Americans, which went into steep decline around 1800 BC.

It is possible that the prestige achieved by Peñico society in the valley, coupled with its role as a hub in the exchange network, was linked to the extraction and circulation of hematite. This mineral, used to make a red pigment, had great symbolic importance within Andean cosmology.

Among the 18 constructions discovered during the excavations and now on display to the public, a ceremonial hall stands out: "We don't know its exact limits," explained Mauro Ordóñez, head of the Penico archaeological site. "This building continues to extend from east to west. The most interesting thing is the composition of several antechambers: one of them stands out for having on its sides the representation, in friezes, of pututus".

Pututus are objects also known as churus (the Quechua word for a mollusc, shell or snail). They are wind instruments originally made from a seashell that was large enough to emit a powerful sound. Ordóñez considers this to be evidence of close relations with other pre-Columbian groups in northern Peru.

The sacred city of Caral-Supe, located less than 200 kilometres north of Lima, the Peruvian capital, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Peñico, in particular, was built 600 metres above sea level on a geological terrace parallel to the Supe River and surrounded by hills that reach a height of 1,000 metres.

Its Caralan builders chose this strategic location for multiple purposes: to enhance the monumentality of their buildings, to protect themselves from floods or landslides and, as evidenced by findings such as the representation of musical instruments, and to promote interaction and exchange with other civilizations.

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How Big Are The Roman Defenders Near Hadrian's Wall?

An ancient Roman mystery is afoot in the rolling hills of northern Britain.

Archaeologists have unearthed a stash of unusually large shoes at the ruins of a first-century military fort along Hadrian’s Wall, a 73-mile (117-kilometer) stone barrier that famously shielded the Roman Empire’s northwestern perimeter from foreign invaders. The discovery is raising new questions about the lives and origins of the fort’s inhabitants.

The giant leather soles were found at Magna Fort in May among 34 pieces of footwear, including work boots and baby-sized shoes, that are helping to paint a picture of the 4,000 men, women and children who once lived in and around the English site just south of the Scottish border.

Eight of the shoes are over 11.8 inches (30 centimeters) in length — a US men’s size 13.5 or greater based on Nike’s size chart — making them larger than average by today’s standard and sparking suspicions that unusually tall troops may have guarded this particular fortress at the empire’s edge.

By contrast, the average ancient shoe found at a neighboring Roman fort was closer to a US men’s size 8, according to a news release about the discovery.

"When the first large shoe started to come out of the ground, we were looking for many explanations, like maybe it’s their winter shoes, or people were stuffing them, wearing extra socks," recalled Rachel Frame, a senior archaeologist leading the excavation. "But as we found more of them and different styles, it does seem to be that these (were) just people with really large feet."

As digging continues at Magna Fort, Frame said she hopes further investigation could answer who exactly wore these giant shoes. A basic sketch of the site’s past is just starting to come together.

When the Magna Fort was in use, multiple different Roman military troops and their families moved into the site every few years after it was built around AD 85, archaeologists suspect.

Inscriptions on the fort’s walls and altars recount settlements of Hamian archers from what is now Syria, Dalmatian mountain soldiers from Croatia and Serbia, and Batavians from the Netherlands, but the length of time each group stayed at the stronghold remains unknown.

Likely following orders from the Roman army, the troops would often leave the fort for distant regions and in their haste, ditch shoes, clothing and other belongings in the surrounding trenches, Frame explained.

Additionally, new occupants requiring more space would have built larger structures on top of the existing fort, packing rubble and clay between the walls and trapping any belongings left by the previous tenants, Frame said.

"As archaeologists, we like trash," said Dr. Elizabeth Greene, an associate professor of classics at the University of Western Ontario. "You get those habitational layers where things were just left behind, maybe forgotten about, and that tells us more about the space."

Greene has studied thousands of shoes collected from the nearby Vindolanda Roman Fort, which has been excavated since the 1970s and is among the most well-studied of the Roman forts along Hadrian’s Wall.

The recently discovered Magna shoes share some similarities with those in the Vindolanda Fort collection, said Greene, who was not involved in the Magna excavation process, but has viewed the artifacts.

For one, the soles of the shoes from both sites are made from thick layers of cowhide leather held together with iron hobnails, she explained. While only a couple of the shoes discovered at Magna have some of the upper portions still intact, the Vindolanda Fort shoe styles include closed military boots and open work boots, as well as sneaker-like shoes reaching just below the ankle and sandals with leather fasteners.

It’s likely that the leather soles of the Magna shoes survived thousands of years in the ground thanks to ancient tanning techniques that used crushed up vegetative matter to create a water and heat resistant coating, Greene said. Testing is still underway to confirm this hypothesis.

The length of the extra-large Magna shoes suggests the original owners may have been exceptionally tall, Greene said. At Vindolanda, only 16 out of the 3,704 shoes collected measured over 11.8 inches (30 centimeters).

Ancient Roman military manuals often described the ideal recruit as being only 5 feet, 8 inches or 5 feet, 9 inches in height, according to Rob Collins, a professor of frontier archaeology at Newcastle University in England. But the soldiers stationed around Hadrian’s Wall came from all around the far-reaching empire, bringing a wide diversity of physical traits to their settlements, he said.

Still, why Magna specifically might have needed troops of towering stature remains unclear.

To piece together the shoe owners’ identities, researchers will examine the Magna shoes for any signs of wear, Frame said. Any foot impressions left in the shoes could be used to model the feet of the original wearers.

Linking the shoes to real human remains, however, could prove difficult. For one, the Romans near Hadrian’s Wall generally cremated their dead, using a headstone to mark the graves, Collins said. Any bones that remain around the settlements are likely from enemy, illegal or accidental burials.

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What Generates Your Brain Consciousness?

Many believed that the human brain is similar to a computer. But in reality, that’s selling the brain pretty short.

While comparing neurons and transistors is a convenient metaphor (and not completely out of left field), the brain is ultra-efficient, its energy is renewable, and it’s capable of computational feats that even the most advanced computer can’t pull off. In many ways, the inner workings of the human brain make up an unknown computational frontier.

Although your brain is superior to your laptop—or even the world’s most advanced supercomputer—these machines run on classical physics. But there’s another kind of a computer out there: a quantum one.

The idea that the human brain contains quantum properties isn't new. In fact, the British physicist Roger Penrose and the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff first suggested the controversial concept back in the 90s, with their "orchestrated objective reduction" model of a consciousness. Since then, many pieces of evidence have at least hinted that, while the brain may not be a full-fledged quantum computer, some quantum properties may in fact help generate consciousness.

Now, a new study from Shanghai University submits yet another piece of evidence to the neurological court—that one particular process of the human brain exhibits behavior akin to quantum entanglement, a phenomenon when two particles (usually photons) become inextricably linked even across vast distances. This phenomenon confounded even the most brilliant of minds, including Albert Einstein, who called quantum entanglement "spooky action at a distance."

The study, published this month in the journal Physics Review E, suggests that a fatty material called myelin that surrounding the nerve cell’s axon—the fiber that transmits electrical impulses to other nerves or body tissues—provides an environment in which the entanglement of photons is possible. This could potentially explain the rise of cognition, and especially synchronization, which is essential for information processing and rapid response.

"Consciousness within the brain hinges on the synchronized activities of millions of neurons, but the mechanism responsible for orchestrating such synchronization remains elusive," the paper reads. "The results indicate that the cylindrical cavity formed by a myelin sheath can facilitate spontaneous photon emission from the vibrational modes and generate a significant number of entangled photon pairs."

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Why Statues Of The Beloved Egyptian Queen Were Smashed?

The beloved Egyptian queen Hatshepsut is a prominent political figure in global history because she was a powerful female pharaoh, which was exceptionally rare.

For 100 years, the popular theory held that, after her death, her nephew, who took over the throne, sought revenge, "purposefully smashing all her statues to erase her from public memory." Now, a new study finds that's not quite the case.

Although many statues of Hatshepsut were intentionally broken, the reason behind their destruction has nothing to do with her gender or even blotting out her existence, an Egyptologist says. Rather, Hatshepsut's statues were broken to "deactivate" them and eliminate their supposed supernatural powers, according to a study published on 24 June in the journal Antiquity.

Hatshepsut (who ruled circa 1473 to 1458 B.C.) was a pharaoh known for commissioning a beautiful temple built at Deir el-Bahri, near ancient Thebes (modern-day Luxor), and for ordering a successful voyage from Egypt to a land known as "Punt," whose precise location is now a matter of debate.

She was the wife and half sister of pharaoh Thutmose II (reign circa 1492 to 1479 B.C.) and was supposed to act as regent for her stepson Thutmose III. However, rather than serving as regent, she became a pharaoh in her own right, with Thutmose III acting as a co-regent who had limited power.

After Hatshepsut died, many of her statues were intentionally broken, including at the site of Deir el-Bahri, where archaeologists in the 1920s and 1930s found broken remains of her statues buried in pits.

It was believed that these were broken on the orders of Thutmose III after Hatshepsut died, as a form of retribution. However, the new study suggests that these statues were in fact "ritually deactivated" in the same manner that statues belonging to other pharaohs were.

In the study, Jun Yi Wong, a doctoral candidate in Egyptology at the University of Toronto, examined archival records of the statues from Deir el-Bahri that were found in the 1920s and 1930s. Wong found that the statues were not smashed in the face and didn't have their inscriptions destroyed. Instead, they were broken at their neck, waist and feet — something seen in statues of other Egyptian pharaohs during a process that modern-day Egyptologists call "ritual deactivation."

The ancient Egyptians saw royal statues "as powerful and perhaps even living entities," Wong told Live Science in an email. When a pharaoh died, it was common for the ancient Egyptians to deactivate their statues by breaking them at their weak points, or the neck, waist and feet, Wong noted.

"Deposits of deactivated statues have been found at multiple sites in Egypt and Sudan," Wong said. "One of the best-known finds in the history of Egyptian archaeology is the Karnak Cachette, where hundreds of statues of pharaohs — from across centuries — were found in a single deposit. The vast majority of the statues have been 'deactivated.'"

This isn't to say that Hatshepsut wasn't a target of political persecution after her death. "There is no doubt that Hatshepsut did suffer a campaign of persecution — at many monuments throughout Egypt, her images and names have been systematically hacked out," Wong said. "We know that this campaign of persecution was initiated by Thutmose III, but we are not exactly sure why."

The fact that her statues at Deir el-Bahri were deactivated normally while images and inscriptions of her at other sites were violently attacked suggests that the persecution she experienced may not have been for personal reasons.

Statues of other pharaohs also underwent ritual deactivation, Wong wrote. The fact that the statues of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri were deactivated normally while statues of her at other sites were more violently attacked suggests that Thutmose III may have felt that he had to persecute Hatshepsut for political reasons, such as concerns about her reign from his supporters.

"Early Egyptologists assumed that Thutmose III must have harboured intense hatred towards Hatshepsut, but this is unlikely to be accurate," Wong said. "The treatment of the statues, for example, suggests that Thutmose III was motivated by ritualistic and practical factors, rather than any personal animosity."

Thutmose III "would have been influenced by political considerations — such as whether Hatshepsut's reign was detrimental to his legacy as a pharaoh," Wong said.

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Rebuilding Humanity By Synthesizing Genome

The ethical duality of scientific discovery is nothing new. The most dramatic example is, of course, splitting the atom, which delivered a promising new energy source as well as weapons of mass destruction. A more recent example—the internet—was an unprecedented way to access the sum total of human knowledge, and it also became an insidious vector of mass misinformation.

Now scientists are embarking on a new scientific journey, one that could bring unimaginable benefits for human health while also providing the tools for immense destruction: synthesizing the human genome.

Over the next five years, the Synthetic Human Genome Project (SynHG), funded by the world’s largest medical charity Wellcome Trust (which was also a partner of the Human Genome Project completed in 2003), will work with scientists from Cambridge, Kent, Manchester, Oxford, and Imperial College London to build the foundational tools necessary to rebuild the human genome from scratch. This is different than gene editing, which typically involves much smaller changes to an organism’s original DNA.

"With recent technological advances, the SynHG project is at the forefront of one of the most exciting areas of scientific research," Wellcome's Michael Dunn said in a press statement. "Through creating the necessary tools and methods to synthesize a human genome, we will answer questions about our health and disease that we cannot even anticipate yet, in turn transforming our understanding of life and wellbeing."

In an interview with the BBC, Julian Sale, a member of the Molecular Biology in Cambridge who is part of the study, said that a synthetic human genome could improve the lives of humans as they age. This focus on healthspan—improving the quality of life for the years we do have—over lifespan is something medical professionals have been urging for years, and a synthetic human genome could address a wide variety of maladies that impact our quality of life in old age.

And then, there’s the other side of the scientific coin.

While a synthetic genome could help generate disease-resistant cells or repair damaged organs or the immune system in general, the technology could also be used as a highly efficient biological weapon if it fell into the wrong hands. That’s why SynHG will also develop social science programs that will examine the technology’s ethical, legal, and social implications.

"The genie is out of the bottle," Edinburgh University genetic scientist Bill Earnshaw told BBC News. "We could have a set of restrictions now, but if an organization who has access to appropriate machinery decided to start synthesising anything, I don’t think we could stop them."

When it comes to synthetic biology, the genie has actually been out of that proverbial bottle for a while now. In 2002, scientists in the U.S. first synthesized a viral genome, and since then, scientists have increased genomic complexity by synthesizing a bacterium in 2008 and a yeast organism in 2017. Of course, the human genome is leagues beyond these simple synthetic reconstructions, which is why the project scientists estimate that it could take decades to complete.

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Why Life Doesn't Exist In Mars?

Why is Mars barren and uninhabitable, while life has always thrived here on our relatively similar planet Earth? Interesting questions with very few answers.

A discovery made by a NASA rover has offered a clue for this mystery, new research said last 2 July, suggesting that while rivers once sporadically flowed on Mars, it was doomed to mostly be a desert planet.

Mars is thought to currently have all the necessary ingredients for life except for perhaps the most important one: liquid water.

However the red surface is carved out by ancient rivers and lakes, showing that water once flowed on our nearest neighbour.

There are currently several rovers searching Mars for signs of life that could have existed back in those more habitable times, millions of years ago.

Earlier this year, NASA's Curiosity rover discovered a missing piece in this puzzle: rocks that are rich in carbonate minerals.

These "carbonates" -- such as limestone on Earth -- act as a sponge for carbon dioxide, pulling it in from the atmosphere and trapping it in rock.

A new study, published in the journal Nature, modelled exactly how the existence of these rocks could change our understanding of Mars's past.

Lead study author Edwin Kite, a planetary scientist at the University of Chicago and a member of the Curiosity team, told AFP it appeared there were "blips of habitability in some times and places" on Mars.

But these "oases" were the exception rather than the rule.

On Earth, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warms the planet. Over long timescales, the carbon becomes trapped in rocks such as carbonates. Then volcanic eruptions spew the gas back into the atmosphere, creating a well-balanced climate cycle supportive of consistently running water.

However Mars has a "feeble" rate of volcanic outgassing compared to Earth, Kite said. This throws off the balance, leaving Mars much colder and less hospitable.

According to the modelling research, the brief periods of liquid water on Mars were followed by 100 million years of barren desert -- a long time for anything to survive.

It is still possible that there are pockets of liquid water deep underground on Mars we have not yet found, Kite said.

NASA's Perseverance Rover, which landed on an ancient Martian delta in 2021, has also found signs of carbonates at the edge of dried-up lake, he added.

Next, the scientists hope to discover more evidence of carbonates.

Kite said the best proof would be returning rock samples from the Martian surface back to Earth -- both the United States and China are racing to do this in the next decade.

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Genome Sequencing Revealed Ancient Egyptian Ancestry

Considered as a major breakthrough, researchers have sequenced the entire genome of an ancient Egyptian person, revealing unprecedented insight about the ancestry of a man who lived during the time when the first pyramids were built.

The man, whose remains were found buried in a sealed clay pot in Nuwayrat, a village south of Cairo, lived sometime between 4,500 and 4,800 years ago, which makes his DNA the oldest ancient Egyptian sample yet extracted. The researchers concluded that 80 percent of his genetic material came from ancient people in North Africa while 20 percent traced back to people in West Asia and the Mesopotamia region.

Their findings, published last 2 July in the journal Nature, offer new clues to suggest there were ancient cultural connections between ancient Egypt and societies within the Fertile Crescent, an area that includes modern-day Iraq (once known as Mesopotamia), Iran and Jordan. While scientists have suspected these connections, before now the only evidence for them was archaeological, rather than genetic.

The scientists also studied the man’s skeleton to determine more about his identity and found extensive evidence of hard labor over the course of a long life.

"Piecing together all the clues from this individual’s DNA, bones and teeth have allowed us to build a comprehensive picture," said lead study author Dr. Adeline Morez Jacobs, visiting research fellow at England’s Liverpool John Moores University, in a statement. "We hope that future DNA samples from ancient Egypt can expand on when precisely this movement from West Asia started."

Pottery and other artifacts have suggested that Egyptians may have traded goods and knowledge across neighboring regions, but genetic evidence of just how closely different ancient civilizations mingled has been harder to pin down because conditions such as heat and humidity quickly degrade DNA, according to the study authors. This man’s remains, however, were unusually well-preserved in their burial container, and the scientists were able to extract DNA from one of the skeleton’s teeth.

While the findings only capture the genetic background of one person, experts said additional work could help answer an enduring question about the ancestry of the first Egyptians who lived at the beginning of the longest-lasting known civilization.

The man, who died during a time of transition between Egypt’s Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods, was not mummified before burial because it was not yet standard practice — and that likely preserved his DNA, the researchers said.

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"Solid Refrigerant" Offers An Air-Con Revolution

When you look at the soft, waxy "solid refrigerant" being investigated in a UK laboratory, it doesn't look very exciting, but its unusual properties promise an air-conditioning revolution that could eliminate the need for greenhouse gases.

The substance's temperature can vary by more than 50 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit) under pressure, and unlike the gases currently used in appliances, it does not leak.

"They don't contribute to global warming, but also they are potentially more energy efficient," Xavier Moya, a professor of materials physics at the University of Cambridge, told AFP.

Approximately two billion air-conditioner units are in use worldwide, and their number is increasing as the planet warms.

Between leaks and energy consumption, the emissions associated with them are also increasing each year, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Moya has been studying the properties of these plastic crystals in his laboratory at the prestigious UK university for 15 years.

On his work surface, a large red and grey machine, topped with a cylinder, tests how the temperature of a substance changes under pressure.

The aim is to identify the best refrigerants among this class of materials, which are already used by the chemical industry and are relatively easy to obtain, even if the exact composition of the crystals eventually selected remains secret.

The phenomenon is invisible to the naked eye, but these crystals are composed of molecules that spin on their own axis.

When the substance is squeezed, that movement stops and the energy is dissipated in the form of heat.

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Eryops' Skull Looks Like From "Toy Story" Character

Paleontologist Andre LuJan had an assist from nature with his latest exciting fossil find. Heavy rains helped expose a nearly complete skull of an enormous ancient salamander-like creature in a quarry in northern central Texas. And while it looks a bit like an anxious T. rex from a beloved children’s film, this creature wasn’t a dinosaur.

LuJan found the Eryops megacephalus, a large, semi-aquatic predator amphibian with a large noggin that lived 280 million years ago. The climate at this time was a bit variable, but there were some long periods when desert-like conditions in present day New Mexico and Texas became a more humid and swamp-like environment.

"Eryops is an apex predator (amphibian) from the Permian period," LuJan, who is also the director of the Texas Through Time Fossil Museum, tells Popular Science. "They could grow up to six feet long (maybe more but this is based on known fossils)."

These enormous salamander-like creatures weighed in at upwards of 200 to 400 pounds and likely would have eaten anything it could fit in its large mouth. Its head was designed for aquatic or semi-aquatic ambush predators, similar to living alligators and crocodiles.

"We can tell by the design of their skull that they were ambush predators, eyes on top of the head along with nostrils to conceal the body while they lay in wait."

Eryops likely didn’t have the ability to chew, so would have eaten its prey whole or torn it into pieces.

Paleontologists have uncovered their remains along estuaries, streams, or other bodies of water that could support hunting and breeding. Fossils of animals like it have been found in rocks dating back to the Permian in what was once the supercontinent Pangea. Eryops is also a member of a larger group of amphibians which includes present day frogs, toads, and salamanders. Finding a complete skull like this one is exciting and rare, since they will often collapse under pressure over the millions of years it takes for the bones to fossilize. Having a more complete skull offers up a more full picture of the animal’s life. More skulls also helps because "in paleontology, sample size is everything." A wider pool of fossils to choose from enables more careful and accurate comparisons, which can tell us more about their evolution. "In some cases finding pathological growths can teach us about ancient diseases and possible predation and interaction with other predators," says LuJan.

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