« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 08:33:46 pm »
Live Science Unusual, 1,400-year-old cube-shaped human skull unearthed in Mexico Kristina Killgrove Sat, December 6, 2025 at 9:00 AM EST 3 min read
The man's skull (seen here from the back as a photo and a 3D scan and point cloud) was flattened on the top, giving it a cube-shaped appearance. | Credit: INAH; Technical Archive of the Physical Anthropology Section of CINAH Tamaulipas
Archaeologists digging at a Mesoamerican site in Mexico have discovered an unusual, cube-shaped human skull. It is the first evidence that people in this area practiced a unique form of head-shaping, scientifically known as cranial modification, around 1,400 years ago.
The skull was unearthed near the archaeological site of Balcón de Montezuma (Balcony of Montezuma) in the east-central Mexican state of Tamaulipas. Various Mesoamerican ethnic groups lived in the area between 650 B.C. and A.D. 1200. Around A.D. 400, a village sprang up, eventually encompassing around 90 circular houses in two plazas, according to the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).
In a recent review of artifacts and bones discovered at Balcón de Montezuma, researchers noticed that the skull of a middle-aged man was a shape they'd never seen before.
In a Nov. 25 translated INAH statement, biological anthropologist Jesús Ernesto Velasco González explained that, while artificially modified skulls have been discovered in the area before, the shape of this man's skull is unique.
Many people are familiar with cultures that practiced cone-shaped cranial modification, as these skulls have an almost "alien" appearance. Those skull shapes were typically created by using lengths of fabric or soft padding to "bind" the heads of infants and encourage the skull to grow in an "oblique" direction, and they appear elongated.
Most of the modified skulls from Balcón de Montezuma, meanwhile, are shaped in an "erect" direction by placing soft padding on the back and/or front of the skull, causing the person to have a more upright or pointy head.
But the man from Balcón de Montezuma has a different form of "erect" modification in which the top of his head was flattened, giving his skull a cube-shaped appearance that some experts refer to as parallelepiped (shaped like a three-dimensional parallelogram or rhombus).
Since examples of this flat-topped skull shape had only been seen outside the area, including in Veracruz and in the Maya area, the researchers wanted to test whether the man was local or foreign. Analyzing the chemistry of the man's bones and teeth, however, revealed that he was born in the area, likely lived there his entire life, and died there.
The researchers' speculate that man's uncommon head shape may have some sort of culturally-specific meaning that is still unknown. In many parts of Mesoamerica, slightly different head shapes are known to correlate with different cultural groups. Although this man himself was not from another geographic location, it is possible that the people who shaped his head were members of a different cultural group.
Research into the material recovered from past archaeological investigations at Balcón de Montezuma is ongoing, according to INAH Tamaulipas director Tonantzin Silva Cárdenas, and will help expand experts' understanding of the site and its cultural and historical relationships with other pre-Hispanic groups in the area.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 08:17:38 pm »
Jerusalem Post Civil Administration recovers dozens of looted artifacts from West Bank site ANNA BARSKY Sat, December 6, 2025 at 5:46 PM EST 2 min read
The Civil Administration seizes dozens of archaeological artifacts from the Burj Lasana site north of Ramallah in the West Bank, December 4, 2025. (photo credit: COGAT, MAARIV)
A targeted operation at "Burj Lasana," in Area B, near Wadi Haramiya, recovered Crusader- and Byzantine-era items from a villa built inside the site.
The Civil Administration’s Staff Officer for Archaeology recovered dozens of archaeological artifacts at the Burj Lasana site in the West Bank on Thursday.
The operation, carried out in Area B near Wadi Haramiya, followed the construction of a Palestinian villa inside the declared site that damaged ancient remains, the Civil Administration said.
According to the Civil Administration, inspectors from its enforcement unit, acting under the guidance of the Staff Officer for Archaeology, seized rare antiquities that had been looted from the adjacent Crusader fortress.
The items included coins, ancient stones, capitals, and Byzantine-period stone columns that had been displayed as decorative pieces inside the villa. A metal detector found on the premises was also confiscated.
The recovered artifacts were transferred to the Good Samaritan Museum for research and display, which is managed by the Civil Administration’s archaeology unit.
Coin recovered from archaeological site, December 4, 2025. (credit: COGAT, MAARIV)
Officials said the action is part of an ongoing effort to protect heritage sites, prevent the theft of antiquities, and preserve archaeological assets across the region.
Site spans Iron Age to medieval period
The Burj Lasana site, which sits atop a hill overlooking Wadi Haramiya, is regarded as one of the area’s significant archaeological sites.
Excavations and surveys have shown continuous habitation from the Iron Age through the Middle Ages, with remains that include a Crusader-era fortress, Byzantine church architectural fragments, burial caves, a ritual bath, and early Roman agricultural installations, the Civil Administration noted.
Tight monitoring after political directive
Following a directive at the political level, the archaeology unit increased monitoring of looting at the site and identified those responsible for the damage, officials said. They added that the unauthorized construction inside the site caused direct harm to the remains and disrupted the site’s historical stratigraphy.
A., head of Enforcement, Investigations and Intelligence in the Civil Administration’s archaeology unit, said: “Protecting antiquities sites is central to our work and to safeguarding the region’s history. Damage to an ancient site harms not only the artifact itself but also our ability to understand and document the historical story it reflects. We will continue to act tirelessly, using all available tools, to eradicate antiquities theft and protect national heritage assets and the region’s history.”
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 08:10:44 pm »
Live Science 1,800-year-old 'piggy banks' full of Roman-era coins unearthed in French village Marjanko Pilekić Sat, December 6, 2025 at 7:00 AM EST 3 min read
Archaeologists in France have discovered three ancient storage jars brimming with tens of thousands of Roman coins. The vessels were buried in pits 1,700 years ago in the house floor of an ancient settlement, possibly as a type of safe or piggy bank.
These three jugs, known as amphorae, were uncovered during excavations run by the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) in the village of Senon in northeastern France, and may contain a total of more than 40,000 Roman coins.
The first hoard held an estimated 83 pounds (38 kilograms) of coins, which "corresponds to approximately 23,000 to 24,000 coins," Vincent Geneviève, a numismatist with INRAP who is analyzing the hoards, told Live Science in an email.
The second jug and its coins weighed about 110 pounds (50 kg), "and, based on the 400 coins recovered from the neck, which was broken at the time of discovery, it could contain 18,000 to 19,000 coins," Geneviève said. The third jug was retrieved in ancient times and only three coins were left in the pit where the vessel once sat.
Around 30 coin hoards are already known in this area, so the real significance of this find lies not in the sheer number of coins but in the detailed information about where the hoards were found.
"Contrary to what one might think at first look, it is not certain that these are 'treasures' that were hidden during a period of insecurity," according to a Nov. 26 translated statement from INRAP. Experts believe based on the dates on the coins that the amphoras were buried between A.D. 280 and 310.
Among the hoard are coins that feature busts of the emperors Victorinus, Tetricus I, and his son Tetricus II, the emperors of the so-called Gallic Empire, which ruled Gaul and the surrounding provinces independently of the rest of the Roman Empire from 260 to 274, until it was reintegrated by emperor Aurelian in 274.
The coin-stuffed amphoras had been carefully sunk into well-constructed pits within the living room of a residence. The jugs' openings were level with the ground and therefore easily accessible as a kind of ancient piggy-bank.
"In two cases, the presence of a few coins found stuck to the rim of the jar clearly indicate that they were deposited after the vase was buried, when the pit had not yet been filled with sediment," according to the statement.
The accessible jars suggest the owners were using them as a long-term savings vehicle rather than a hastily hidden hoard. Within this residential district were stone buildings with underfloor heating, basements and workshops with stoves. There was also a Roman fortification nearby.
At the beginning of the fourth century, a large fire destroyed the settlement. Although the settlement was re-established before a second fire led to its permanent abandonment, the coin deposits were lost for nearly two millennia.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 08:00:19 pm »
Florida Today Pelicans eye the sky as rocket takes wing in Photo of the Week Britt Kennerly, Florida Today Sat, December 6, 2025 at 5:03 AM EST 1 min read
Launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a load of Starlink satellites on mission 6-95. The rocket launched at 5:18 p.m. EST on Tuesday, Dec. 2nd from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
It could've been just another shot of a rocket rising, something Malcolm Denemark, FLORIDA TODAY senior photographer, has been behind the camera for again and again in a record-breaking year for launches in Brevard.
The bird, however, is the word in this Photo of the Week, which pictures pelicans viewing the Dec. 2 launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a load of Starlink satellites.
Turned out the birds' choice of a landing spot, at just the right time, gave Denemark a shot that took wing.
"It would have been a routine daylight SpaceX Starlink launch, a common sight on the Space Coast," he said.
"But the light was getting dimmer for a 5:18 p.m. launch, darker than the rocket's flame, which added to the contrast. And the pelicans perched in the pilings stayed in place for the launch ... it made all the difference."
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 07:56:23 pm »
Mashable Webb telescope found a Milky Way lookalike 12 billion light-years away Elisha Sauers Sat, December 6, 2025 at 5:00 AM EST 4 min read
Scientists have discovered Alaknanda, a so-called "grand design" spiral galaxy, just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. - NASA / CSA / ESA / Rashi Jain
Researchers have discovered a large, orderly spiral galaxy that formed soon after the Big Bang, when space was only about 1.5 billion years old.
The galaxy, named Alaknanda, appears in observations made by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope as part of major sky surveys. Because the Milky Way lookalike is seen at an extreme distance, its light has traveled for more than 12 billion years to reach Earth. Only recently has telescope technology become powerful enough to spot galaxies with this level of detail from such an early time.
For decades, astronomers believed galaxies in the early universe were too turbulent to settle into neat spiral shapes. Young stars and gas were thought to move chaotically, producing irregular clumps instead of smooth disks and arms. Hubble Space Telescope observations supported this view, as spiral galaxies seemed more scarce beyond about 11 billion years in look-back time.
The discovery raises new questions about how such structures formed so early.
"Alaknanda reveals that the early universe was capable of far more rapid galaxy assembly than we anticipated," said Yogesh Wadadekar, the study's co-author, in a statement. "Somehow, this galaxy managed to pull together 10 billion solar masses of stars and organise them into a beautiful spiral disk in just a few hundred million years. That's extraordinarily fast by cosmic standards, and it compels astronomers to rethink how galaxies form."
Webb’s sharper vision has revealed many disk-shaped galaxies from the early universe, and now, a small but growing number of true spiral galaxies — including Alaknanda — far earlier than predicted by older models. The telescope found CEERS-2112 and REBELS-25, two spiral galaxies, in the early universe in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
The discovery of Alaknanda, made by scientists at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India, has been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
"The physical processes driving galaxy formation — gas accretion, disk settling, and possibly the development of spiral density waves — can operate far more efficiently than current models predict," said Rashi Jain, the lead author, in a statement. "It's forcing us to rethink our theoretical framework."
Alaknanda — named after the Himalayan river that is a twin headstream of the Ganga — spans roughly 32,000 light-years across, comparable to large modern spiral galaxies. It also contains a huge number of stars.
Images show that the galaxy already has a flat, rotating disk with two clear spiral arms with the classic pinwheel shape. These arms appear smooth and symmetrical, earning Alaknanda the label of a "grand-design" spiral galaxy, meaning it has defined arms rather than patchy or broken ones.
Along the spiral arms, scientists observed chains of bright clumps of newborn stars. These clumps look like a string of beads, marking areas where gas has collapsed into dense pockets that ignite new stars. In other views, each string appears as part of a larger spiral arm.
The research team was able to see immense detail in the distant galaxy with the help of a natural phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. A massive galaxy cluster's gravity acts like a giant magnifying glass in the sky, bending and enhancing the light of Alaknanda to appear twice as bright.
To understand Alaknanda’s history, researchers compared its brightness across 21 different wavelengths of light, spanning ultraviolet to infrared. By matching those measurements to computer models of stellar populations, they estimated that the galaxy’s stars average only about 200 million years old. That means roughly half formed in a rapid burst after the universe was already more than 1 billion years old.
Alaknanda continues to grow quickly. It forms new stars at a rate equal to about 63 suns per year — dozens of times faster than the Milky Way does today. Certain colors of light shine brighter than expected because glowing gas around new stars gives off strong signals, confirming the galaxy’s intense star-forming activity.
Scientists still do not know how spiral arms formed so quickly in these ancient systems. Some theories suggest they arise from slow-moving density patterns inside disks, while others point to gravitational disturbances from nearby galaxies or large clumps of gas. Alaknanda even appears to have a small neighboring galaxy that could have helped trigger its spiral structure, but more evidence is needed to draw that conclusion.
Future observations using Webb’s instruments for measuring motions inside galaxies, along with radio telescopes, could map how Alaknanda’s stars and gas orbit its center. Those data could help determine whether its disk has settled into its final configuration or whether the spiral arms represent a mere phase in its development.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 07:48:04 pm »
Nautilus A Speed Camera for the Universe Jake Currie Fri, December 5, 2025 at 10:00 PM EST 3 min read
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image released on Sept. 12, 2025, features a cloudy starscape from an impressive star cluster. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, J. Maíz Apellániz.
The universe is enormous. By the time you finish reading this sentence, it will be even more enormous.
That’s because the universe is expanding—but not everything is expanding at the same rate. The farther away things are, the faster they’re moving away from us. For every megaparsec (around 3.3 million light-years) of distance from our vantage point, this rate of expansion increases by around 45 miles per second. This rate is known as “Hubble’s Constant,” named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble of space telescope fame, who discovered it in 1929.
Now, astronomers from the University of Tokyo have developed a novel method called “time-delay cosmography” to get a more accurate measure of the Hubble Constant, publishing their findings in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Traditionally, the Hubble Constant has been recorded using “distance ladders.” Astronomers pick a relatively close and familiar cosmic entity—a supernova or star—and observe it, then pick one farther away and observe that, and so on, to measure the rate at which they’re traveling away from us.
COSMIC DISTORTION: Eight artificially colored time-delay gravitational lens systems. Each depiction features a massive galaxy in the center, and the surrounding bright spots are images of quasars lensed around the galaxy. Images by TDCOSMO Collaboration et al.
Meanwhile, time-delay cosmography relies on the gravitational lensing of massive objects in space to determine the Hubble Constant. In this method, scientists use a huge galaxy to act as a lens. Super bright objects beyond this galaxy called quasars look distorted because gravity deflects their light. Changes in these distorted images allowed the researchers to measure the difference in time that light from the objects took to reach them.
Using this clever methodology, the authors arrived at a value for the expansion rate consistent with the Hubble Constant. This could help solve a major cosmic kerfuffle.
When astronomers measure this rate of expansion using space telescopes (like the one named after Edwin Hubble), they get one number—around 45 miles/second/megaparsec; when they use another method, measuring the cosmic background radiation generated during the early universe, they get a different, smaller number—around 42 miles/second/megaparsec. This discrepancy is called the “Hubble Tension,” and it has attracted much debate about whether it was due to experimental error, or the actual physics of the universe.
“Our measurement of the Hubble constant is more consistent with other current-day observations and less consistent with early-universe measurements,” study co-author and University of Tokyo astronomer Kenneth Wong said in a statement. “This is evidence that the Hubble tension may indeed arise from real physics and not just some unknown source of error in the various methods.”
Still, the team stressed that they’ll need to further refine their time-delay cosmography method to get more precise results. Its current precision is at about 4.5 percent, but it would need to reach a precision of around 1 to 2 percent “to really nail down the Hubble constant to a level that would definitively confirm the Hubble tension,” said study co-author Eric Paic, also at the University of Tokyo, in the statement.
The only real constant in astrophysics? More research is needed.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 07:41:21 pm »
When a Chimp Screams, What Do You Hear? Kristen French Fri, December 5, 2025 at 6:00 PM EST 3 min read
Lead image: Fabrom / Shutterstock
When you listen to a jungle ape whooping through the canopy what do you hear? If it’s a chimp who’s responsible for the cacophony, it may trigger an ancient form of recognition, flickering below your conscious awareness.
Such are the findings of a new study from researchers at the University of Geneva: They observed that chimp calls light up pockets of a special voice-sensitive region of the human brain, known as the temporal voice area (TVA), which had been thought to respond only to the voices of our own kind. The results suggest that certain voice recognition abilities may be shared across species and predate human language.
“When participants heard chimpanzee vocalizations, this response was clearly distinct from that triggered by bonobos or macaques,” said study co-author and University of Geneva neuroscientist Leonardo Ceravolo in a statement.
Four primate species were enlisted for the study: humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and rhesus macaques. Ceravolo and his colleagues gathered 18 vocalizations from each of the four apes and randomly presented them to 23 human participants, asking listeners to play a sort of auditory guess-who, identifying which species was behind each cry. They also monitored the participants’ brains with MRI while they were listening and analyzed the calls using statistical modeling to understand how they differed acoustically.
The participants’ brains lit up when processing the calls of the chimps, their TVA regions responding more readily to the chimp sounds than to those of any of the other non-human primates. The researchers also found that positive social calls from chimps, but not bonobos, were acoustically most similar to positive human voices. The findings echo previous research that suggests the communication patterns of bonobos, our more peace-loving evolutionary cousins, evolved separately over time, even though we are genetically as close to bonobos as to chimps.
The primate vocalizations consisted of single calls or call sequences and included both threat and distress calls and positive social calls. The 15 chimpanzee individuals were recorded in the wild in the Budongo forest, Uganda, while the 10 bonobo individuals were recorded in the wild in the Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The 16 rhesus macaques were recorded in the wild from semi-free monkeys on Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico.
Previous studies have looked at how human brains respond to both primate and cat calls, but before now, no research has observed specific cross-species responses in the human TVA, the researchers point out. Future work may tease apart the acoustic fingerprints that set chimp calls apart from those of bonobos.
“We already knew that certain areas of the animal brain reacted specifically to the voices of their fellow creatures,” added Ceravolo. “But here, we show that a region of the adult human brain, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, is also sensitive to non-human vocalizations.”
It seems the call of the wild is still lodged deep inside the human brain.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 07:32:53 pm »
United Press International Astronaut Jonny Kim, 2 cosmonauts scheduled for ISS departure Mike Heuer Fri, December 5, 2025 at 5:57 PM EST 2 min read
NASA astronaut Jonny Kim (L), and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov (C), and Alexey Zubritskiy are scheduled to depart the International Space Station on Monday, ending their 245-day mission. Photo by Joel Kowsky/NASA/UPI
Dec. 5 (UPI) -- Astronaut Jonny Kim and two Roscosmos cosmonauts are scheduled to depart the International Space Station on Monday evening and land in Kazakhstan the following morning.
Kim and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexy Zubritsky will undock from the ISS's Prichal module at 8:41 p.m. EST on Monday and undergo a parachute-assisted landing southeast of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, at 10:04 a.m. local time, NASA announced on Thursday.
They arrived at the ISS aboard a Soyuz-27 spacecraft in April after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and will return on the same spacecraft, covering the 262 miles to Earth.
Upon landing, the trio will be flown via helicopter to Karaganda, Kazakhstan, to join their respective recovery teams.
A NASA aircraft will convey Kim to Houston, while Ryzhikov and Zubritsky will travel to the Roscosmos training base in Star City, Russia.
NASA will stream the event on NASA+, the NASA YouTube channel, Amazon Prime and several social media platforms.
Their departure ends Ryzhikov's command of the ISS, which he is scheduled to turn over to NASA astronaut Mark Fincke during a ceremony scheduled at 10:30 a.m. EST on Sunday.
NASA also will stream the change-of-command ceremony.
Kim, Ryzhikov and Zubritsky are approaching the end of their 245-day mission aboard the ISS, during which they will have orbited Earth 3,920 times and traveled nearly 104 million miles.
The deployment is Ryzhikov's third at the ISS and the first for Kim and Zubritsky.
The ISS has hosted international space crews for more than 25 years as they work to advance scientific knowledge by conducting research that is not possible on Earth.
The ISS recently had all eight of its docking ports occupied for the first time, and its crew in September managed to dock Northrup Grumman's Cygnus XL Cargo Craft after thruster problems delayed its arrival while carrying 11,000 pounds of cargo and scientific equipment to the ISS.
« Last post by Buster's Uncle on December 07, 2025, 06:04:18 pm »
ScienceAlert Supercomputer Creates One of The Most Realistic Virtual Brains Ever Seen David Nield Fri, December 5, 2025 at 4:00 PM EST 3 min read
Brain Neurons model
Getting a better understanding of how the brain works is tricky, as living brains aren't easily prodded and analyzed. Scientists now have a new simulation of a mouse's brain to refer to – one of the most comprehensive that's ever been put together.
The creation was led by a team from the Allen Institute in the US and the University of Electro-Communications in Japan, and it may allow diseases such as Alzheimer's to be modeled and studied in greater detail.
The simulation models an entire mouse cortex. While this isn't nearly as large or as intricate as a human brain, which contains billions of neurons, there are similarities between human and rodent brains – so this could be a useful study tool.
The numbers are impressive: the virtual brain contains 9 million neurons, as well as 26 billion synapses (neuron connectors). There are 86 interconnected regions in the brain simulation, and it can process quadrillions of calculations every second.
To put that in perspective, the real and full mouse brain contains roughly 70 million neurons in a space about the size of an almond.
"This shows the door is open," says computational neuroscientist Anton Arkhipov, from the Allen Institute. "We can run these kinds of brain simulations effectively with enough computing power."
"It's a technical milestone giving us confidence that much larger models are not only possible, but achievable with precision and scale."
The simulation enables researchers to track the activity of individual neurons. (Kuriyama et al., 2025).
The complexity of the simulation means that researchers can watch as models of cognition, consciousness, and disease spread through the brain. It's a three-dimensional, moving map that shows individual neurons firing and connecting.
Some of the ways this could be used, according to the researchers, are to test hypotheses on how seizures spread in the brain, or how brain waves contribute to focus – without any need for repeated, invasive, physical brain scans.
The necessary computing power was provided by the Fugaku supercomputer in Japan, which built upon existing cell databases and charts to form the model. The team also developed new software to more efficiently process brain activity and keep unnecessary calculations down to a minimum.
"Fugaku is used for research in a wide range of computational science fields, such as astronomy, meteorology, and drug discovery, contributing to the resolution of many societal problems," says computer scientist Tadashi Yamazaki, from the University of Electro-Communications.
"On this occasion, we utilized Fugaku for a neural circuit simulation."
Our brains are, of course, essential to good physical and mental health, and healthy old age – and studies of virtual brain maps and mini-brain structures are going to be crucial in learning more about how this organ works, and how it can break down.
The team has already been busy putting their new model to use, making discoveries about brain wave synchronization and the way the two hemispheres of the mouse brain interact with each other.
It's a massively impressive feat of computing and biological modeling, but the researchers have even grander plans, and one day want to build a full-sized model of a human brain inside a virtual computing space.
"Our long-term goal is to build whole-brain models, eventually even human models, using all the biological details our Institute is uncovering," says Arkhipov. "We're now moving from modeling single brain areas to simulating the entire brain of the mouse."
The research has been presented at the SC25 supercomputing conference, and is available online.
Kri'lan taught me of the resonance and how to feel it. After much training, I could see ? the very surface under our feet, Planet itself ? is a living, fluctuating nexus of energy, violent, beautiful and quite unstable. And I could also feel its cousins ? distant mirrors on the other side of the space-time continuum ? the far-flung Manifolds.
~Prophet Cha Dawn 'The Betrayer and I'
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