12.21.24
Welcome to your weekly space
and science digest.
By Katie Hunt
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Today, the limestone plateau in the United Kingdom’s Mendip Hills is famed for its natural beauty. But around 4,000 years ago in the Early Bronze Age, a grisly chapter of British prehistory unfolded there.
Thousands of human bones excavated in the 1970s and 1980s in a shaft that plunges about 49 feet from the grassy surface displayed evidence of violence.
Now, an analysis of those remains, which included at least 37 people, reveals the unprecedented scale and nature of the brutality at a time that experts had once considered to be largely peaceful in Britain.
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Analysis of more than 3,000 bones found at a site in Somerset, England, called Charterhouse Warren suggested unidentified assailants killed men, women and children before butchering and cannibalizing them between 2210 and 2010 BC.
Foot bones and a clavicle (above, third from left) show postmortem damage likely sustained from cannibalism, a study found.
The study authors think the cannibalism may have been a way to dehumanize the victims by “othering” the deceased: eating their flesh and mixing their bones with cattle bones as a way to liken them to animals, the researchers said.
Determining a motive during a time before written documents existed in the region is proving difficult. DNA analysis is in progress to discover how closely related the victims were.
In other archaeological news, researchers now think they know why Stonehenge was rebuilt around 2500 BC, a few hundred years before the devastating events in Somerset took place.
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When space scientists first spotted ‘Oumuamua in 2017, the discovery was immediately attention-grabbing.
The first observed object in our solar system that originated from outside of it, ‘Oumuamua turned out not to be an alien probe, but it was something unusual. The celestial body blurred the line between an asteroid and a comet.
Astronomers have dubbed this new cosmic object a dark comet, and a team of scientists recently announced it detected seven more of the mysterious objects.
The new research shows there are two distinct populations of dark comets, which may have helped deliver vital elements such as water to Earth early in the planet’s history.
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Unlike the snowy owl, the barn owl lives at latitudes where it doesn’t regularly snow.
Why then is its underside a brilliant white? The barn owl’s paradoxically bright plumage has baffled scientists, who have come up with competing explanations for the intriguing biological phenomenon.
The owl’s gleaming underbelly and wings, previous research argued, effectively stun and immobilize rodents, which have an aversion to bright light.
The latest theory suggests the opposite, finding that white plumage allows the nocturnal predator to mimic the moon and approach its rodent prey undetected in a form of nighttime camouflage.
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A group of eminent scientists has expressed concern about a nascent field of research: a push to create life-forms composed of mirror-image molecules, in which the molecular structure found in nature is reversed.
The key molecules for life feature a phenomenon known as chirality, or handedness. For example, DNA and RNA are made from “right-handed” nucleotides, and proteins are made from “left-handed” amino acids. Just as a right-handed glove cannot fit a left hand, interactions between molecules often depend on chirality.
While the science and technology necessary to create mirror bacteria in a laboratory is a decade or more away, the researchers argued that the work could put humans, animals and plants at risk of exposure to dangerous pathogens.
“It’s a genie you don’t want to let out of the bottle,” said report coauthor Jonathan Jones, a group leader at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, England.
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Long before dinosaurs roamed the planet, an egg-laying creature with long, serrated canine teeth was the dominant carnivore on land.
Called gorgonopsians, these saber-toothed predators are known mostly from bones that are less than 270 million years old.
However, a recent fossil find is thought to date back an unprecedented 280 million to 270 million years, filling in a long-standing blank space in the fossil record.
The discovery of the fossilized remains of the hairless, dog-size creature on the Spanish island of Mallorca could help shed light on the earliest forebears of mammals.
The newfound species, illustrated above, belongs to one of the earliest branches on the therapsid family tree, which includes not only gorgonopsians but also the ancestors of modern mammals and other now extinct nonmammalian groups.
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