Category: Cosmic Science

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Cosmic Science

How an ancient eruption turned a victim’s brain into glass

Organic glass fragment from eruption victim's skull
This fragment of organic glass was found inside the skull of a victim of Mount Vesuvius' ancient eruption. (Credit: Pier Paolo Petrone)

Researchers say they’ve solved a nearly 2,000-year-old cold case, sparked by the catastrophic volcanic eruption that destroyed the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum: What caused a victim’s brain to fuse into bits of glass?

The victim’s remains were unearthed in the 1960s, amid the ruins of a building in Herculaneum known as the Collegium Augustalium. In 2020, researchers announced that obsidian-like glass fragments found in the victim’s skull were actually vitrified bits of brain.

Archaeologists suspect that the victim was a guard who was caught up in the aftermath of Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in the year 79. The man died instantly, but how? For years, scientists have been debating the scenarios for vitrifying the brain in a way that’s never been seen elsewhere. Now an Italian-German research team has laid out a plausible explanation in research published by Scientific Reports.

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Cosmic Science

Archaeologists unearth a pharaoh’s lost tomb in Egypt

Artifacts from Thutmose II's tomb
Fragments of alabaster jars bearing the names of King Thutmose II and his principal wife, Queen Hatshepsut, were found within a newly explored tomb west of Egypt's Valley of the Kings. (Credit: Egypt Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities)

Archaeologists are showing off artifacts from what they say is the first royal tomb to be found in Egypt since the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s resting place in 1922.

But this tomb, located west of the Valley of the Kings, contains no solid-gold mummy case or glittering treasures. In fact, it took some effort to determine that it was made nearly 3,500 years ago for King Thutmose II, an ancestor of King Tut.

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Cosmic Science

Scientists find links between whale songs and languages

Humpback whale breaching
A humpback whale breaches in waters near Maui. (Photo by Alan Boyle)

When whales sing, what do they sing about? Researchers haven’t yet cracked that code, but they say a statistical analysis shows that those songs reflect a structure that’s similar to human languages.

Two studies, published in the journal Science and in a sister publication called Science Advances, lay out evidence that the songs of humpback whales follow long-accepted rules of efficient communication at least as well as our own spoken languages do.

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Cosmic Science

Grand and Egyptian: A tale of two great museums

Ramesses II statue and Tutankhamun golden mask
Left: Ramesses II statue at Grand Egyptian Museum. Right: Tutankhamun golden mask at Egyptian Museum. (Composite by Alan Boyle)

GIZA, Egypt — Twenty years may sound like a long time for building a monument like the Grand Egyptian Museum, but if you visit, all you have to do is look out the window to spot a historical precedent.

The Great Pyramid of Giza, which is a mile and a half away, took about the same amount of time to build 4,500 years ago. Now it’s the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that’s still standing.

Will the billion-dollar Grand Egyptian Museum be seen as a wonder as well? Just three months after its soft opening, the GEM has established its status as a must-see jewel for fans of ancient Egypt. But if you want to see the greatest hits of Egyptian archaeology, one museum — even a museum with more than 5 million square feet of floor space and 100,000 artifacts destined for display — still isn’t enough.

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Cosmic Science

Oops! That’s not Amelia Earhart’s plane — it’s a rock

Airplane-shaped rock formation
A sonar image shows a rock formation previously thought to be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's airplane. (Credit: Deep Sea Vision)

Once again, a seemingly promising lead in the search for traces of missing aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart and her plane has fizzled out.

Hopes of solving the 87-year-old mystery were raised in January when Deep Sea Vision, a team of underwater archaeologists and robotics experts led by former Air Force intelligence officer Tony Romeo, said they captured a fuzzy sonar image that looked like an airplane.

Deep Sea Vision said the find was notable because the shape was detected about 100 miles from Howland Island, in an area of the Pacific Ocean where the team suspected Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, may have gone down during their attempt to fly around the globe in 1937.

“You’d be hard-pressed to convince me that’s anything but an aircraft, for one; and two, that it’s not Amelia’s aircraft,” Romeo said on NBC’s “Today” show when the discovery was announced.

Unfortunately for Romeo and his team, higher-resolution sonar imagery revealed that the shape was merely a natural rock formation lying more than 16,000 feet beneath the ocean surface. The new sonar view was captured this month by an autonomous underwater vehicle.

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Cosmic Science

Scientists map a fruit fly’s brain — and are thinking ahead

Fruit fly connectome
This image shows how a fruit fly's neurons are connected. (Credit: Amy Sterling and Julia Kuhl for FlyWire, Princeton University / Dorkenwald et al., Nature)

Researchers say they have created a complete map of an adult fruit fly, showing how almost 140,000 individual neurons are linked up to each other and turn sensory inputs into behavioral responses.

The connectome — basically, a wiring diagram that traces the connections between brain cells — is the subject of a flurry of research papers published today by the journal Nature.

It’s not the first such brain wiring diagram, or connectome, to be traced out: Previous projects have charted the brain of a roundworm (302 neurons), plus the brains of a larval sea squirt and a larval marine worm, as well as the brain of a larval fruit fly (3,016 neurons).

But the adult fruit fly connectome, encompassing 139,255 neurons and roughly 50 million connections — raises the bar considerably. And it’s getting scientists thinking about what it will take to achieve a similar feat focusing on the human brain.

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Cosmic Science

Stonehenge’s mystery stone traced to … Scotland?

Aerial view of Stonehenge and its Altar Stone
Stonehenge's partially covered Altar Stone is indicated in orange in this overhead view of the ancient English monument. (Nature via YouTube)

Scientists say the most mysterious stone in England’s ancient Stonehenge monument appears to have been brought to the site thousands of years ago from northern Scotland, about 435 miles away.

The findings, reported in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, resolve a long-running debate over the origins of Stonehenge’s Altar Stone. Previously, the consensus view was that the 6-ton monolith was transported from a spot that was much closer: the Preseli Hills of western Wales, which was the source of Stonehenge’s “bluestones.”

Today, the central Altar Stone is partly covered by two other rocks in Stonehenge’s stone circle. But in ancient times, scientists suspect that it played a central role for the people who built and maintained the monument. The stone lies across Stonehenge’s solstice axis: On the day of the summer solstice, the sun would have arisen over the Altar Stone, framed by stones on the circle’s rim. There would have been a similar alignment at sunset on the day of the winter solstice.

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Cosmic Science

3,300-year-old shipwreck wows Israeli archaeologists

Jacob Sharvit and Karnit Bahartan examine ancient jars
Recovery team members examine jars brought up from an ancient shipwreck. (Israel Antiquities Authority Photo)

Israeli archaeologists say the world’s oldest known deep-sea shipwreck has been discovered about 55 miles off the coast of northern Israel, lying on the mile-deep bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.

The 3,300-year-old cargo vessel was found during a routine survey conducted by Energean E&P, a natural gas company that operates several offshore drilling fields, the Israel Antiquities Authority said today. The shipwreck, which is about 42 feet long, contained hundreds of intact clay storage jars known as amphorae. Such jars were typically used for transporting oil, wine, fruit or other agricultural products.

The Israeli Antiquities Authority dated the jars to 1300 to 1400 B.C., during the Late Bronze Age — an era traditionally associated with the biblical tale of the Exodus. The jars are said to reflect the style of ancient Canaanite culture.

Jacob Sharvit, head of the authority’s marine unit, said the find is “a world-class, history-changing discovery.”

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Cosmic Science

Scientists find traces of a lost river next to the pyramids

Eman Ghoneim in front of Pyramids of Giza and the Great Sphinx
Geomorphologist Eman Ghoneim studies the surface topography of the section of the ancient Ahramat Branch. (Credit: Eman Ghoneim / UNCW)

Why were more than two dozen of ancient Egypt’s pyramids — including the Great Pyramid of Giza — clustered in a narrow strip of desert? Scientists say they’ve come up with a solution to the mystery: Thousands of years ago, a river ran through it.

The research team, led by Eman Ghoneim of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, identified the extinct riverbed with ground-penetrating radar and some geological sifting and sleuthing. They call this dried-up branch of the Nile “the Ahramat Branch” — a name derived from the Arabic word for pyramid.

Confirming the existence of the Ahramat Branch could resolve some of the questions relating to how ancient Egyptians were able to accomplish the monumental task of building the pyramids.

“Many of the pyramids, dating to the Old and Middle Kingdoms, have causeways that lead to the branch and terminate with Valley Temples which may have acted as river harbors along it in the past,” the researchers write in a paper published today in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

“We suggest that the Ahramat Branch played a role in the monuments’ construction and that it was simultaneously active and used as a transportation waterway for workmen and building materials to the pyramids’ sites,” they say.

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Cosmic Science

Pompeii dining hall got Romans talking about Trojan War

Helen and Paris in Pompeii fresco
A wall painting shows Helen of Troy meeting Paris, with a handmaiden and a dog between them. (Credit: Archaeological Park of Pompeii)

Archaeologists in Pompeii have unveiled an ancient Roman banquet hall featuring a cleverly conceived set of frescoes inspired by tales of the Trojan War.

The 50-by-20-foot (15-by-6-meter) room was recently unearthed as part of a project aimed at shoring up the front of a perimeter between the excavated and not-yet-excavated areas of the Pompeii site near Naples, Italy. Pompeii’s archaeological park preserves sites that were buried in ash during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79.

During Pompeii’s heyday, the “Black Room” opened onto an open courtyard with a long staircase leading up to the home’s first floor.

The banquet room’s frescoes — portraying heroes and deities associated with the Trojan War — were apparently meant to entertain banquet guests and serve as conversation starters. Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, said the frescoes took advantage of painterly tricks to serve that purpose.

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