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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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GeekWire

Scientists harness generative AI for cancer diagnosis

Illustration: Visualization of microchip with the look of a whole-slide image
Prov-GigaPath harnesses AI for digital pathology. (Ella Maru Studio via Providence / Microsoft)

Researchers at Microsoft, Providence Health System and the University of Washington say they’ve developed a new artificial intelligence model for diagnosing cancer, based on an analysis of more than a billion images of tissue samples from more than 30,000 patients.

The open-access model, known as Prov-GigaPath, is described in research published today by the journal Nature and is already being used in clinical applications.

“The rich data in pathology slides can, through AI tools like Prov-GigaPath, uncover novel relationships and insights that go beyond what the human eye can discern,” study co-author Carlo Bifulco, chief medical officer of Providence Genomics, said in a news release. “Recognizing the potential of this model to significantly advance cancer research and diagnostics, we felt strongly about making it widely available to benefit patients globally. It’s an honor to be part of this groundbreaking work.”

The effort to develop Prov-GigaPath used AI tools to identify patterns in 1.3 billion pathology image tiles obtained from 171,189 digital whole-slides provided by Providence. The researchers say this was the largest pre-training effort to date with whole-slide modeling — drawing upon a database five to 10 times larger than datasets such as the The Cancer Genome Atlas.

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Fiction Science Club

How a science-fiction star blazed a trail for diversity

Stylized portrait of Vonda McIntyre with Space Needle sunglasses
Seattle author Vonda N. McIntyre's science fiction reflected an imaginative view of other worlds. (Illustration: SFWA / MS Copilot / Media.io)

Decades before the current debates over gender and sexuality, the late Seattle science-fiction writer Vonda N. McIntyre flipped the script on those subjects.

“In many of her stories, there are characters that, by the end of the book, you go, ‘You know, I don’t think it was ever established whether they were male, or female, or something in between,’” fellow science-fiction author Una McCormack says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “And it’s done with such a light touch that you would never notice.”

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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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GeekWire

NASA boosts four proposed climate science missions

Graphic charting extent of ozone hole on world map
A color-coded image based on satellite data shows the extent of the Antarctic ozone hole in September 2023. (ESA / DLR Graphic)

NASA has selected four proposals for climate science missions, including an effort led by a University of Washington researcher, to go forward for further study with millions of dollars in funding.

STRIVE, which has UW atmospheric scientist Lyatt Jaeglé as its principal investigator, would focus on interactions between the stratosphere and the troposphere.

“STRIVE would allow us to see the composition and temperature of the atmosphere with much finer detail than previously possible from space,” Jaeglé told me in an email. “It would enable us to observe how smoke from fires and volcanoes affect the ozone layer. It would give us needed information to understand how the troposphere and stratosphere interact, and how these interactions influence weather, climate and air quality.”

Jaeglé said “the entire STRIVE team is very excited at the prospect of moving forward in this next step to prepare the concept study.”

The three other studies winning support from NASA’s new Earth System Explorers Program are ODYSEA, EDGE and Carbon-I. Each of the science teams for the four selected proposals will receive $5 million to conduct a one-year concept study.

After the study period, NASA will choose two of the proposals to go forward to launch, with readiness dates expected in 2030 and 2032. For each chosen investigation, the mission cost will be capped at $310 million. That figure doesn’t include launch costs, which will be covered by NASA.

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Fiction Science Club

How de-extinction could change our destiny

Illustration: Woolly mammoth and calf
A woolly mammoth and her calf are shown trudging through frozen steppes in a promotional video from Colossal Biosciences.

It may sound cool to bring back the woolly mammoth after thousands of years of extinction — but Douglas Preston, the author of a novel that features the revival of the mammoths, has his doubts.

“If you take this and game it out to its logical end, you’re going to end up with something really terrifying,” Preston says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

That realization led him to write “Extinction,” a fictional tale that wraps the genetic resurrection of woolly mammoths and other extinct species from the Pleistocene Era into a murder mystery.

“‘Extinction’ does not have any science fiction in it,” the 67-year-old author insists. “This really is actual science that’s being done right now. It is here, and the ability to resurrect these extinct animals is here. … Maybe in my lifetime, we are going to see a de-extincted woolly mammoth, or a creature that looks a lot like a woolly mammoth.”

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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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GeekWire

Scientists back AI principles for biomolecular design

Visualization of protein molecule
AI technologies now allow scientists to generate biomolecules unlike any seen in nature. (Illustration by Ian C. Haydon / UW IPD)

More than 90 researchers — including a Nobel laureate — have signed on to a call for the scientific community to follow a set of safety and security standards when using artificial intelligence to design synthetic proteins.

The community statement on the responsible development of AI for protein design is being unveiled today in Boston at Winter RosettaCon 2024, a conference focusing on biomolecular engineering. The statement follows up on an AI safety summit that was convened last October by the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

“I view this as a crucial step for the scientific community,” the institute’s director, David Baker, said in a news release. “The responsible use of AI for protein design will unlock new vaccines, medicines and sustainable materials that benefit the world. As scientists, we must ensure this happens while also minimizing the chance that our tools could ever be misused to cause harm.”

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Scientists take a freeze-frame look at excited electrons

Illustration: X-ray pulses blasting water molecules
Scientists used a pair of X-ray pulses (shown in pink and green) to study the energetic response of electrons (gold) in liquid water on attosecond time scales, while the hydrogen (white) and oxygen (red) atoms are ‘frozen’ in time. (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory / Nathan Johnson)

An international team of scientists has blazed a new trail for studying how atoms respond to radiation, by tracking the energetic movement of electrons when a sample of liquid water is blasted with X-rays.

The experiment, described in this week’s issue of the journal Science, required “freezing” the motion of the atoms with which the electrons were associated, on a scale of mere attoseconds. An attosecond is one-quintillionth of a second — or, expressed another way, a millionth of a trillionth of a second.

Attosecond-scale observations could provide scientists with new insights into how radiation exposure affects objects and people.

“What happens to an atom when it is struck by ionizing radiation, like an X-ray? Seeing the earliest stages of this process has long been a missing piece in understanding how radiation affects matter,” Xiaosong Li, a chemistry professor at the University of Washington and a laboratory fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said in a UW news release. “This new technique for the first time shows us that missing piece and opens the door to seeing the steps where so much complex — and interesting — chemistry occurs!”

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Cosmic Science

Image revives hopes of solving Amelia Earhart mystery

Comparison of sonar image and aircraft diagram
A sonar image shows a shape similar to that of Amelia Earhart's lost airplane. (Credit: Deep Sea Vision)

Update: The object that Deep Sea Vision thought was wreckage from Amelia Earhart’s plane turns out to be a rock formation.

What happened to Amelia Earhart, the famed aviator whose plane disappeared in 1937 as she was trying to fly around the world? After surveying 5,200 square miles of the Pacific Ocean, searchers say they may have picked up the sonar signature of Earhart’s sunken aircraft.

If their hypothesis holds up, the find could well solve one of the aviation world’s greatest mysteries. But if it doesn’t hold up, it wouldn’t be the first dead end in the 87-year-long search.

The 90-day sonar survey was conducted last year by Deep Sea Vision, a team of underwater archaeologists and robotics experts led by Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer who reportedly sold his  real estate investments to fund the $11 million expedition.

In a news release issued today, Deep Sea Vision said it made use of a customized underwater robot to search wide swaths of the ocean floor with side-scan sonar. As the survey was winding up, the team identified a blurry shape that appeared to match the dimensions of Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.

“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.

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