Scientists at UC San Diego and the Brookhaven Laboratory in New York have discovered superconductivity in meteorites.
After analyzing 15 pieces of comets and asteroids the researchers found two meteorites with superconductive grains, dubbed “Mundrabilla” and “GRA 95205.” This is the first time that extraterrestrial superconductive grains have been identified.
Meteorites have a wide range of “material phases” from the oldest states of the solar system, researchers say. In a statement, naturally occurring superconductive materials are described by UC San Diego researcher James Wampler as unusual, but significant because they could be superconducting in extraterrestrial environments.
Superconductive grains were found in this piece of the Mundrabilla meteorite, which scientists say is the first identification of extraterrestrial superconductive grains. (Image courtesy of James Wampler)
In the paper, scientists characterize the meteorites’ material phases as alloys of lead, tin and indium, which is the softest non-alkali metal. The research was undertaken by UC San Diego researchers Mark Thiemens, Ivan Schuller and the paper’s first author Wampler, along with Brookhaven Lab’s Shaobo Cheng and Yimei Zhu
The findings could boost our knowledge of a number of astronomical environments, according to the researchers. Superconducting particles in cold environments could affect planet formation, shape and origin of magnetic fields, dynamo effects, motion of charged particles, they say.
A small chunk of an asteroid or comet is also known as a meteoroid. When it enters Earth’s atmosphere, it becomes a meteor or fireball or shooting star. The pieces of rock that hit the ground, valuable to collectors, are meteorites.
In 2017 a meteor made headlines when it flashed across the sky in Michigan. The blazing fireball sent meteorite hunters scrambling to find fragments of the rare space rock.
Archaeologists in Russia have found a large circle made out of the stuff of horror movies: the bones of mammoths and other ice age creatures that lived more than 20,000 years ago, a new study finds.
Among the remains are the bones of more than five dozen mammoths, as well as bones from reindeer, horses, bears, wolves, red foxes and Arctic foxes, the study researchers said.
“It is made up of thousands of bones that come from at least 60 different woolly mammoths,” study lead researcher Alexander Pryor, a lecturer of prehistoric archaeology at the University of Exeter in England, told Live Science. “All parts of the mammoth bodies are represented, from very large bones like skulls and leg bones to smaller bones like vertebrae.”
There are about 70 other ice age “bone circles” at about 25 sites in Ukraine and Russia already known to archaeologists, but the newly discovered one is the oldest on record, Pryor said. It was found by study co-researcher Alexander Dudin, the director of the Kostenki Museum-Preserve in Voronezh, Russia, who was doing survey work in 2015 at the archaeological site of Kostenki 11, about 350 miles (560 kilometers) south of Moscow.
The bone circle measures about 36 feet (11 meters) in diameter. It’s difficult to say what this and other bone-made structures would have looked like during the last ice age, Pryor said, “but at Kostenki 11, we can imagine a ring of mammoth bones piled up on top of each other. Some of the bones were still in articulation [joined together], indicating that at least some of the bones still had flesh on them when they were added to the pile.”
He added that, “beyond this, some have speculated about wooden poles used to support a roof made of animal hides, but there is no evidence for this yet at Kostenki 11.”
The bones used to construct the structure were likely scavenged, Pryor said. There is some evidence that during the ice age people hunted mammoths, as evidenced by the discovery of a javelin embedded in a 25,000-year-old mammoth rib in Poland, but this may have been an exception, not the norm, Pryor said.
Archaeologists excavate the incredible bone structure made during the last ice age. (Image credit: Alex Pryor)
During the last ice age, humans arranged these bones in a circle. (Image credit: Alex Pryor)
A view of the sheer amount of bones at the site. (Image credit: Alex Pryor)
A bird’s-eye view of the site. (Image credit: Alex Pryor)
Notice the mammoth tooth just above this researcher’s arm. (Image credit: Alex Pryor)
This structure may have served as a house, a storage facility for meat or even a place for rituals. (Image credit: Alex Pryor)
Extreme cold
The last ice age swept northern Europe between 75,000 and 18,000 years ago, but it reached its most bone-chilling temperatures during a period lasting from about 23,000 to 18,000 years ago, when the circle at Kostenki 11 was built.
During this time, the summers were short and cool, while the winters were long and cold, reaching temperatures as low as minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius). These freezing temperatures prompted many human groups to head south, where prey and other resources were more abundant. Eventually, the community that built this bone circle left, too, even though there was a river nearby that could have provided them with fresh water, Pryor said.
That community didn’t leave behind many clues about how it used this structure. Maybe it was a dwelling, archaeologists have suggested. But Pryor and his colleagues have another idea; perhaps these boney buildings were used for rituals or even for food storage, given that each mammoth had a “mammoth” amount of meat on it, he said.
It’s unlikely that it was a dwelling because there’s less evidence of human activity there than would be expected of a full-blown abode, he said. Moreover, this sort of house wouldn’t have been safe. “The fact that some of the bones are still articulated means that they would have still been smelly,” because they would have had meat on them, Pryor said. “They would have been attractive to wolves and foxes and other scavengers.”
An analysis of tiny debris found within the bone circle and three pits located outside of it revealed burned pieces of charcoal and bone. These findings indicate that, despite the bitter cold, there were trees nearby that could be burned, Pryor said. In addition, it shows that these people were burning bone, which produces a brighter fire with less heat compared with a wood fire, he said.
The debris analysis also revealed 300 tiny stone and flint chips, likely produced when ancient people there knapped stones into sharp tools for butchering animals and scraping hides. It also turned up more than 50 small charred seeds, the remains of plants growing locally or maybe food remains from cooking and eating.
“This is a story about our human ancestors innovating to survive the coldest point of the last ice age and using all resources and materials that they had,” Pryor said. “It would have been a challenging place to live, but they were making a success out of it.”
The suggestion that the bone structure was used for storage and the pits around it as trash cans “are not Earth-shattering revelations, [but] they do provide useful insights into the lives of the people who once occupied the site,” said E. James Dixon, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico who was not involved in the study.
The last ice age is a “fascinating time period in Eurasian archeology,” Dixon told Live Science in an email, and the study “clearly demonstrates that modern humans were adapted to higher latitudes at the very height of the last ice age.”
The study was published online March 17 in the journal Antiquity.
Archaeologists have discovered the capital of a long-lost Maya kingdom in the backyard of a cattle rancher in Mexico.
Experts from Brandeis University and Brown University were part of an international team that excavated the site, dubbed Lacanja Tzeltal, in Chiapas in southeastern Mexico. The site, which was settled in 750 B.C.E and occupied for 1,000 years, was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Sak Tz’i’, according to Brandeis University.
The discovery came about in unusual circumstances. In 2014, Whittaker Schroder, a graduate student of archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, was waved down by a carnita seller on a highway in Chiapas. He told Schroder, who was researching archaeological sites in the area for a dissertation topic, that his friend had uncovered an ancient stone tablet. When Schroder and Harvard graduate student Jeffrey Dobereiner visited the friend, a cattle rancher, he showed them the tablet and they were able to verify its authenticity.
Schroder informed Charles Golden, an associate professor of archaeology at Brandeis University, and Brown University Bioarchaeologist Andrew Scherer. It took a number of years to gain permission to excavate the site, which is in the cattle rancher’s backyard. Archaeological work began in June 2018, with researchers having to carefully fence off the site from the rancher’s cows.
Schroder (left) and Scherer (right) excavate in the ancient city’s ballcourt. (Charles Golden)
Although not as large as the well-known ancient cities of Chichen Itza or Palenque, the Sak Tz’i’ capital contains the remains of a 45-foot high pyramid and nearby buildings that were once the homes of the city’s elite and religious sites. A 1.5-acre “Monuments Plaza,” which served as the city’s ceremonial center, was also found, along with the remains of ancient fortifications and dozens of sculptures. An ancient ballcourt was also uncovered.
The archaeologists, with the permission of the Mexican government and the local community, are planning to return to excavate the site in June. The next stage of their research will also include LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) surveys of the area. LiDAR uses a laser to measure distances to the Earth’s surface and can prove extremely valuable to study what is hidden in areas with thick vegetation.
A map of the excavation site. (Courtesy of Charles Golden)
The find is the latest in a series of fascinating Maya discoveries.
Last year, experts discovered a unique ancient tool in southern Belize that was used by Maya salt workers more than 1,000 years ago.
In 2018, an ancient mask depicting a 7th-century Maya king was discovered in southern Mexico.
A drawing of a tablet found at the site (left) and a 3D-model of the tablet (left).
Also in 2018, archaeologists harnessed sophisticated technology to reveal lost cities and thousands of ancient structures deep in the Guatemalan jungle, confirming that the Maya civilization was much larger than previously thought.
LiveScience reports that hundreds of Maya artifacts that may have been used in ritual animal sacrifices have also been discovered at the bottom of a Guatemalan lake.
From its heart in what is now Guatemala, the Maya empire reached the peak of its power in the 6th century A.D., according to History.com, although most of the civilization’s cities were abandoned around 900 A.D.
The Associated Press contributed to this article. Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers
Runes at the famous Rök runestone, Sweden, telling a story about the Vikings and the loss of a son. (Credit: iStock)
Powerful storms on the Orkney Islands in the far north of Scotland recently exposed ancient human bones in a Pictish and Viking cemetery dating to almost 1,500 years ago. Volunteers are piling sandbags and clay to protect the remains and limit the damage to the ancient Newark Bay cemetery on Orkney’s largest island.
The cemetery traces its origins to the middle of the sixth century, when the Orkney Islands were inhabited by native Pictish people, akin to the Picts who inhabited most of what is now Scotland.
It was used for almost a thousand years, and many of the burials from the ninth through the 15th centuries were Norsemen or Vikings who had taken over the Orkney Islands from the Picts. But waves raised by storms are eating away at the low cliff where the ancient cemetery lies, said Peter Higgins of the Orkney Research Center for Archaeology (ORCA), part of the Archaeology Institute of the University of the Highlands and Islands.
“Every time we have a storm with a bit of a south-easterly [wind], it really gets in there and actively erodes what is just soft sandstone,” Higgins told Live Science.
About 250 skeletons were removed from the cemetery about 50 years ago, but it’s not known exactly how far the graveyard extends back from the beach, he said. Hundreds of Pictish and Norse bodies are thought to be buried there still, Higgins added.
The Orkney Islands have been inhabited for thousands of years and have many of the best-preserved archaeological sites in Europe. That includes the prehistoric village of Skara Brae and the standing stones of the Ring of Brodgar, a ceremonial site that includes 13 burial mounds and dates to 3,000 B.C., according to the government agency Historic Environment Scotland (HES).
The ancient cemetery at Newark Bay was excavated in the 1960s and 1970s by the famed British archaeologist Don Brothwell, who preserved the skeletons for future study, Higgins said. Brothwell’s methods were current at the time, but they were very different from modern archaeological techniques, and “the archive isn’t quite the way we’d have it nowadays,” Higgins added. Volunteers now hope to preserve the bones until the remains can be examined by scientists over the next three years, in HES-funded studies.
But a more immediate concern is the vulnerability of the remaining graves to flooding and damage from Orkney storms, which batter the sandstone cliff with enormous waves and storm surges, representatives of the Archaeology Institute said in a statement.
“The local residents and the landowner have been quite concerned about what’s left of the cemetery being eroded by the sea,” Higgins said.
Exposed bones are typically either covered with clay to protect them or removed from the sandstone cliff after their positions are carefully recorded, so it is rare for bones to end up on the beach, he said
It’s not known yet if the exposed bones are those of Picts or Vikings; no burial objects or traces of funeral clothing remain, and bodies in the cemetery were buried four or five layers deep.
Cultural transition
Historians say the first Norse immigrants to the Orkney Islands settled there in the late eighth century, fleeing an emerging new monarchy in Norway. They used the Orkney Islands to launch their own voyages and Viking raids, and eventually, all Orkney was dominated by the Norse, The Scotsman reported. The islands became a Norwegian earldom late in the ninth century, and they remain the region of the British Isles that is most influenced by Norse culture.
The relationship between the Picts and the Norse on the Orkney Islands is hotly debated among scholars: Did the Norse take over by force, or were they settlers who traded and intermarried with the Picts? The ancient cemetery at Newark Bay may help to answer that question, Higgins said.
“The Orkney Islands were Pictish, and then they became Norse,” he said. “We’re not really clear how that transition happened, whether it was an invasion or people lived together. This is one of the few opportunities we’ve got to investigate that.”
Excavations at the site had unearthed a carved Pictish stone and the buried remains of a medieval Christian chapel. However, some of the graves could be pre-Christian, Higgins said.
Part of the scientific work on the remains would involve testing genetic material from the ancient bones, which might show that some people living on Orkney today are descended from people who lived on the islands over 1,000 years ago.
“We’re fairly confident that we’re going to find that some local residents are related to people in the cemetery,” Higgins said.
Hand sanitizers provide a convenient and effective way to clean your hands if soap and water aren’t available and your hands aren’t covered in visible dirt or grease. According to a 2019 ruling by the FDA, a product can be marketed as a hand sanitizer if it contains ethyl alcohol (also called ethanol), isopropyl alcohol (isopropanol) or benzalkonium chloride as the active ingredient.
The FDA hasn’t made a decision on whether to categorize those three ingredients as “generally recognized as safe” because the agency doesn’t think there is enough research to say. But they’re also not pulling the products from shelves. Ingredients other than those three have shown little to no evidence of being effective at killing germs and have not won the FDA’s approval.
How does hand sanitizer work?
The key ingredient in most hand sanitizers is alcohol. Chemically speaking, alcohols are organic molecules made of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. Ethanol is the chemical in alcoholic drinks and is the chemical most people are thinking of when they say alcohol. Propanol and isopropanol (isopropyl alcohol) are two other alcohols that are common in disinfectants because they’re highly soluble in water, just like ethanol.
Alcohols destroy disease-causing agents, or pathogens, by breaking apart proteins, splitting cells into pieces or messing with a cell’s metabolism, according to a 2014 review published in the journal Clinical Microbiology Reviews. Solutions with as little as 30% alcohol have some pathogen-killing ability, and the effectiveness increases with increasing alcohol concentration. Studies have shown that alcohol kills a more broad variety of bacteria and viruses when the concentration exceeds 60%, and it works faster as the concentration increases. But the effectiveness of alcohol seems to top out at about a 90-95% concentration.
Another strength of alcohol is that the bacteria it kills don’t develop a resistance to it, so alcohol doesn’t lose effectiveness with continued use.
According to the 2014 review, ethanol is so powerful that a few studies have found that in high concentrations, it’s better at getting rid of three species of disease-causing bacteria — Escherichia coli, Serratia marcescens and Staphylococcus saprophyticus — compared with washing hands with regular or antibacterial soap.
But alcohol doesn’t work for all germs, such as norovirus; Clostridium difficile, which can cause life-threatening diarrhea; or Cryptosporidium, a parasite that causes a diarrheal disease called cryptosporidiosis, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. Hand sanitizers also don’t remove harmful chemicals like pesticides or heavy metals, nor does hand sanitizer work well on especially dirty or greasy hands. So, soap and water still win the contest overall.
There are a few small-scale studies demonstrating that an alcohol-free hand sanitizer containing benzalkonium chloride as the active ingredient, at a concentration of 0.13%, is just as effective and even more effective than alcohol at getting rid of bacteria. The alcohol-free hand sanitizer that was tested was called HandClens, and the scientists who conducted the research on it worked for the now-closed laboratory that developed the product. That doesn’t mean benzalkonium chloride isn’t effective, but there doesn’t seem to be independent research to suggest that it’s better than alcohol. Plus, benzalkonium chloride might be harmful for some individuals, especially at higher concentrations, according to the Hazardous Substances Database.
According to the CDC, hand sanitizer without alcohol may not kill as many germs and may only reduce the growth of germs rather than killing them outright. The CDC recommends hand sanitizers with at least 60% alcohol in them for maximum effectiveness.
Does hand sanitizer expire?
Hand sanitizer doesn’t really expire. There will likely be an expiration date on the bottle because hand sanitizers are regulated by the FDA, which requires certain things to be on the packaging, including an expiration date. The expiration date is supposed to be the last date at which the product contains the ingredients in the amount specified on the label. Whether the manufacturer has tested how long the product meets the label claim or they just came up with an arbitrary date to determine the expiration date is mostly unknown to consumers. (Manufacturers are supposed to conduct testing, but not all do.)
Alcohol is a shelf-stable chemical according to its safety data sheet from chemical-supplier Sigma Aldrich. This means that if alcohol is kept in a sealed container at room temperature it will remain at the same concentration for a very, very long time.
However, alcohol evaporates easily because of its relatively low boiling point, and over time, as the bottle is opened and closed, some alcohol may escape and the concentration of alcohol in your hand sanitizer might start to decrease. Still, if you keep the bottle closed and at room temperature, you’re likely to have an effective product for as long you need it.
Is hand sanitizer bad for you or toxic?
Alcohols are considered safe for use as an antiseptic and generally have no toxic effect on the skin, although repeated use may cause dryness or mild irritation, according to the Hazardous Substances Database. Several studies have shown that repeated use of hand sanitizer is less irritating than repeated hand washing with soap. But damaged skin is more susceptible to irritation from alcohol.
And let’s be honest, would you rather have some mild skin irritation, or distribute and contract an illness?
Additional resources:
Read more about why hand sanitizer is a good alternative to soap and water, according to the FDA.
Here’s more info on what the FDA considers hand sanitizers to be.
And here are the guidelines from the CDC on hand washing and hand sanitizer use.
Ice volcanoes spewed great plumes of water on the shores of Lake Michigan last weekend, and the National Weather Service (NWS) caught the odd phenomenon in action.
During a stroll on Oval Beach on the lake’s eastern shore, located in the state of Michigan, an employee of the NWS Grand Rapids snapped a few photos of water bursting from mounds in the frigid ground. “You never know what you’ll find at the lake until you go out there,” the employee tweeted. “Today it was volcanoes.”
Despite their nickname, ice volcanoes aren’t really volcanoes at all. The cone-like mounds form at the edges of lakes, where thin sheets of ice form, and water shoots through holes in the ice, Tom Niziol, a contributor for Weather Underground’s Category 6 blog, explained in a Facebook post. Water sloshes beneath the ice sheet and builds up enough pressure to force spurts of water to the surface. If the air above is cold enough, the released water freezes over the surrounding ground, forming a mini volcano of sorts.
“[Ice volcanoes] can be very dangerous to climb on however because they are hollow and built over that hole in the ice,” Niziol said. “Don’t ever go venturing out onto them.”
Frozen volcanoes formed along the shores of Lake Erie a few years ago, Niziol added. Although not unheard of, ice volcanoes remain a relatively rare phenomenon.
“It’s almost a ‘Goldilocks’ situation where you need just the right conditions over a period of time to get these [formations] to develop,” Matt Benz, a meteorologist for AccuWeather, said in a news report. Ice volcanoes typically form near large bodies of water where below-freezing temperatures allow an ice shelf to form over the water’s surface along the coastline, he said. Simultaneously, waves beneath the shelf must be powerful enough to crack the ice and push water out. For this reason, ice volcanoes tend to form along shorelines where winds churn up waves consistently, Benz said.
On Feb. 16, when the Oval Beach volcanoes were spotted, the wind was almost due west, which would have been “ideal for pushing waves right into the shoreline at this location,” Benz added. Due to their enormous size, the Great Lakes may be more likely to form ice volcanoes along their shores than smaller lakes whose water completely freezes over in winter, before much ice can build up along their beaches, he said.
So if you want to see an ice volcano in person, the Great Lakes may be your best bet — but be wary where you step!
So-called ice volcanoes erupting on Oval Beach in Michigan (Image credit: National Weather Service of Grand Rapids)
One of the ancient cockroaches is pictured preserved in its amber grave. (Credit: Lenka Podstrelená, Sendi et al. Gondwana Res 2020 (Copyright Elsevier 2020))
A pair of 99-million-year-old cockroaches are rewriting the early history of the underworld.
The ancient roaches, found preserved in amber in Myanmar, are the oldest-known examples of “troglomorphic” organisms — creatures that adapted to the weird, dark environments of caves. And they’re the only such dark-adapted creatures known from the Cretaceous period, having scurried around in the world’s shaded crevices even as Tyrannosaurus rex walked the Earth. Nowadays, biologists have plenty of examples of cockroaches and of cave-dwelling insects with small eyes and wings, pale bodies, and long arms and antennae. But these specimens, from two distinct, related species, are the oldest animals ever found with those traits.
“Caves lack unequivocal fossils before the Cenozoic,” the researchers wrote in a paper describing their find, referring to a later period after the mass extinction (known as the K/Pg boundary) when dinosaurs died and mammals rose to their current prominence.
And even cave fossils from after the extinction tend to be of animals that spent only some of their time in caves, using them as shelters in between excursions into the sunlit world.
“Cave environments are well suited for fossilization of bones and coprolites [or fossilized feces] and the fossil record of cave mammals includes rodents, ungulates, marsupials, ursids, felids, hyaenids, canids, primates and humans,” they wrote — all species with plenty of bones and poop. They added that “there is no relevant fossil record of any troglomorphic fauna before K/Pg with the exception of the present find.”
Until now, the history of cave-dwelling cockroaches was known to go back to the Cenozoic era, which began about 65 million years ago. But researchers had long suspected that cave-dwelling roaches might date back to the dinosaur age, the researchers wrote, based on genetic analyses. But there had never before been firm evidence.
These two “exquisitely preserved” species, they said, according to a news article on Phys.org, were likely descendants of a common ancestor from earlier in the Cretaceous, before continental drift separated their homes on the supercontinent Gondwana.
It’s not clear, the researchers noted, how the roaches ended up so well preserved. Amber fossils are common for small creatures that live near trees, because amber is fossilized tree resin. It’s possible, the researchers suggested, that ancient resin dripped from tree roots into the cockroaches’ caves and then hardened around the paleo-arthropods.
The study researchers, hailing from several institutions in Slovakia, China, Russia and Thailand, detailed their discovery online Feb. 11 in the journal Gondwana Research.
Snow that looks like it was mixed with food coloring is not what you’d expect to see in Antarctica — or anywhere else, for that matter.
But that’s the bizarre phenomenon scientists recently photographed on an Argentine island in Antarctica.
The images, depicting a watermelon-colored snow, were revealed by Ukraine’s Ministry of Science and Education. Warmer weather during the Antarctic summer prompts the spores to germinate, triggering an algae bloom that creates these weird pockets of pink “watermelon snow,” the Daily Mail reported.
The bright red photosynthetic algae — which can thrive in very low temperatures — are located in snowfields around the world.
Scientists have photographed amazing images of ‘watermelon snow’ in Antarctica. ((Ministry of Science Ukraine; EAS))
The Ukrainian scientists told the Mail: “Such snow contributes to climate change, because the red-raspberry color snow reflects less sunlight and melts faster.”
Archaeologists in Scotland have discovered an ancient monolith that’s engraved with a spear-holding warrior sporting an “elaborate hairstyle” and “pronounced” butt.
In September 2017, construction workers uncovered the stone monument in the northwest side of Perth in Scotland while clearing the ground to build a new road. They found the stone facedown and buried a little more than 3 feet (1 meter) in the ground
The so-called Tulloch stone is about 6.4 feet (1.9 m) high and 2.3 feet (0.7 m) wide; on one side, it depicts a human figure holding a spear with a “kite-shaped blade and a doorknob-style butt,” the authors wrote in a paper describing the findings, published Jan. 23 in the journal Antiquity.
The surface of the stone was partly broken apart into layers, and portions of the carving were faded. But with the help of 3D imaging and a technique called photogrammetry, which involves stitching together hundreds of photographs of an object taken from different angles, archaeologists were able to reconstruct the original design. It’s not clear if the figure was depicted naked, as faint lines at the ankles might suggest he wore shoes or tight leggings.
The stone was buried near a ring ditch, possibly indicating that the monolith was part of a burial, according to the paper. The carving belonged to the Picts, an ancient, Celtic-speaking group that lived in what is now eastern and northern Scotland. (The Romans coined the name “Picts,” meaning the “painted people,” possibly in reference to the Picts’ distinctive tattoos or the war paint they wore.)
In the late Roman period, the Picts helped to defend the area that’s now known as Scotland from multiple Roman attacks; as such, in the early medieval period that followed, war became an important part of how the Picts’ society was organized.
We know from historical records and poetry that “the warrior is an essential part of society, the central part of power,” said senior author Gordon Noble, a professor in the school of geosciences at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom. Pictish society adopted a warrior way of life initially as a “form of resistance” against the Roman empire, but it later became an “inspiration” and a key part of their culture, he added.
It’s not clear what the warrior on this monolith — and similar ones previously found nearby depicting warrior figures holding “doorknob-butted spears” — represent, but they could be depictions of warrior gods or religious figures within this war-oriented Pictish ideology, Noble told Live Science. War ideology was common across a large part of Europe but was more typically represented through the burial of weapons with the dead.
Such burials, historical sources and poetry that depict the “heroic warrior ethos” were common across Northern Europe but largely absent from northern Britain in the first millennium A.D. Rather, in northeastern Scotland, such values were publicly shown with carvings on monuments and likely associated with cemeteries belonging to the elite, the researchers noted in the paper.
The Tulloch stone is only one of three such Pictish monoliths found in the area with carvings of warriors on them. But there have been numerous other Pictish stones found with carvings of abstract or animal symbols often thought to be a simple way of representing names, Noble said.
“Over the last 10 years, it seems like we’ve had a new Pictish stone every year or even more than one every year,” Noble said. “So I’m sure more will come up, but the stones with images of warriors are still quite rare in the wider Pictish stone corpus.” The stone will eventually be put on display in the Perth Museum in Scotland.
Could cyborg locusts be the bomb-sniffing dogs of the future?
Scientists who received funding from the U.S. Navy revealed last week that they were able to program the bugs to sense various different smells, including from explosives.
The team’s preprint research paper, published in BioRxiv, states that the insects have been used to detect gases released by substances such as ammonium nitrate – often used by terrorist groups for bomb-making – as well as military explosives TNT and RDX.
The robot-bound locusts were exposed to five different explosives, and it only took 500 milliseconds of exposure for a distinct pattern of activity to appear in the locusts’ brains. The scientists chose locusts because their tiny antennae are filled with about 50,000 olfactory neurons.
Scientists put sensors on the insects to monitor neural activity and decode the odors presents in the environment. (Baranidharan Raman) (Baranidharan Raman)
Researchers chose locusts because they are sturdy and can carry heavy payloads, according to the preprint paper. They implanted electrodes into the insects’ brains to analyze their neural activity when they were around different substances.
The U.S. Office of Naval Research had allocated $750,000 for the project back in 2016.
Although the team has not commented about its new work, lead scientist Baranidharan Raman, associate professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Washington University at St. Louis, expressed optimism when he received the grant.
“We expect this work to develop and demonstrate a proof-of-concept, hybrid locust-based, chemical-sensing approach for explosive detection,” Raman told The Source.
Michael Bradley - Time Traveler 