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• Betelgeuse is normally the 10th brightest star in the sky, but has varied over the past five years to be as high as #7, or as low as #20, faintening and brightening unpredictably.

• Along with Antares, it’s one of the two closest red supergiant stars to Earth: a star destined to end its life in a core-collapse supernova.

• There hasn’t been a naked-eye supernova within the Milky Way since 1604, and the next one will be not only a scientist’s dream come true, but a delight for billions across the globe.

The extraordinary preservation of Cueva de Los Murciélagos (Albuñol, Spain) provides a unique opportunity to identify the materials and the techniques involved in archery during the Early Neolithic period. Arrows with preserved feathers, tied fibres, adhesive substance, and two probable bowstrings have been studied trough an unprecedented multi-proxy investigation, including microscopy and biomolecular methods, to unravel archery techniques.

The study has identified the oldest known sinew bowstrings, the first evidence for the use of olive tree (Olea europaea) and reed (Phragmites sp.) to produce arrow shafts in prehistoric European archery, and the identification of birch bark tar as a coating on the shafts.

The results of this study provide insights into ancient craft, technological solutions, and adaptations to local resources in the production of these reed-shafted hardwood tipped arrows and bowstrings. Their deposition in a burial cave sheds new light on the role of these artefacts in a Neolithic farming community.

Professional cult deprogrammer Rick Alan Ross joins WIRED to answer the internet’s burning questions about cults. What makes a cult a cult exactly? What are some signs you’re in one? How do cults differ from religions? Can a family be a cult? And why are Americans seemingly so susceptible to cults?

Rick Alan Ross tackles these questions and many more on Cult Support.

The Hoard consists of 1,368 Iron Age and Roman gold and silver coins, which were gathered into a pot and buried in the ground in the Leigh and Bransford area of Worcestershire. The Hoard is one of the most important archaeological discoveries in Worcestershire in the last 100 years.

Most of the coins are silver denarii, minted in Rome and dating from the time of the Roman Republic in 157 BC up to the reign of the emperor Nero (AD 54–68). The sole gold coin is an Iron Age stater, which was minted for the local British tribe, the Dobunni, in AD 20–45 who were in the area now known as Worcestershire and neighbouring counties to the south and west. It is likely that the pot that contained the coins was made at one of the pottery kilns based at the foot of the Malvern Hills.

The coins almost certainly entered the region by means of the Roman army. Their sheer number means that the hoard would have represented a very considerable sum of cash at the time it was buried. One theory is that the hoard represents the savings of a wealthy local farmer, who made his money by supplying the Roman army with grain and livestock.

Highlights

• We summarize co-occurrence of body and emotion words in Neo-Assyrian texts from 934–612 BCE

• We create body maps to visualize how embodied emotions were described in ancient Mesopotamia

• The body maps demonstrate clusters of emotions with similar bodily representations

• These maps may enable comparison of embodied emotion between different eras and cultures

Almost all interstellar objects are temporary visitors to the Solar System, falling in and out of the Sun's gravity well and then continuing their journey through the Milky Way. But astronomers have identified "entry points," located about 3.81 light-years away, where an object entering the Solar System is permanently captured. Although the chance for any single object is low, the cumulative chance over millions of years is significant.

People may have domesticated canids that left no genetic trace in later dog lineages (including the American dog lineage). Alternatively, some wild canids may have been kept as pets and others hunted; some may have been fed salmon and others terrestrial resources, a dietary diversity seen in domesticated dogs a few millennia later. Yet in another scenario, salmon-feeding to canids (wild or domestic) started in the Younger Dryas but only became common during the Early Holocene.

None has ever been seen alive at sea.

The list of what scientists don’t know about spade-toothed whales is longer than what they do know. They don’t know where in the ocean the whales live, why they’ve never been spotted in the wild, or what their brains look like. All beaked whales have different stomach systems and researchers don’t know how the spade-toothed kind processes its food. They don’t know how this one died.

Researchers in Poland believe that Ancient Germanic warriors used tiny spoons to dose themselves drugs on the battlefield.

Were Germanic soldiers high on the battlefield in ancient Roman times? New research suggests that warriors might have used small spoons that fastened to their belts for a stimulant boost. 

The consumption of alcohol and stimulants has been well-recorded throughout history, especially in the context of ritual and war, to motivate soldiers and quell their fears and even hunger. 

However, “the custom,” study authors write in a new intriguing study, of ingesting drugs “went nowhere beyond Ancient Rome.” Except, that might not be true once the researchers dug deeper into the history of narcotics. After all, what were the Germans doing with these random yet commonly worn spoons?

A small but mighty weapon on the battlefield?

After collecting 241 spoons at 116 locations across Scandinavia, Germany, and Poland, researchers from Maria Curie Sklodowska believe that Germanic warriors dispensed stimulants with spoons that attached to their belts which they found in contexts related to ritual and war.

Plate Tectonics May Be the Surprising Solution to the Mystery of Earth’s Origins

Earth's surface is a turbulent place. Mountains rise, continents merge and split, and earthquakes shake the ground. All of these processes result from plate tectonics, the movement of enormous chunks of Earth's crust.

This movement may be why life exists here. Earth is the only known planet with plate tectonics and the only known planet with life. Most scientists think that's not a coincidence. By dragging huge chunks of crust into the mantle, Earth's middle layer, plate tectonics pulls carbon from the planet's surface and atmosphere, stabilizing the climate. It also pushes life-fostering minerals and molecules toward the surface. All of those factors add up to a place where life thrives from ocean abysses to towering peaks.

NASA-Led Team Links Comet Water to Earth’s Oceans

Scientists find that cometary dust affects interpretation of spacecraft measurements, reopening the case for comets like 67P as potential sources of water for early Earth. 

Researchers have found that water on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko has a similar molecular signature to the water in Earth’s oceans. Contradicting some recent results, this finding reopens the case that Jupiter-family comets like 67P could have helped deliver water to Earth.  

Water was essential for life to form and flourish on Earth and it remains central for Earth life today. While some water likely existed in the gas and dust from which our planet materialized around 4.6 billion years ago, much of the water would have vaporized because Earth formed close to the Sun’s intense heat. How Earth ultimately became rich in liquid water has remained a source of debate for scientists....

As a comet moves in its orbit closer to the Sun, its surface warms up, causing gas to release from the surface, including dust with bits of water ice on it. Water with deuterium sticks to dust grains more readily than regular water does, research suggests. When the ice on these dust grains is released into the coma, this effect could make the comet appear to have more deuterium than it has.

The researchers began by mixing two polymers with potassium bicarbonate, an acid-neutralizing compound, and silver nitrate, which forms antimicrobial nanoparticles that link the polymers together to form a gel. By adjusting the amount of silver nitrate, they were able to create hydrogels with different staying power. Gels with less silver liquified after 3–5 days, and those with more silver remained a gooey solid.

Imagine life without animals, trees, and fungi. The world would look very different. But while the first life was surely single-celled, we don’t know just how it evolved to multicellular organisms. Two long-term experiments hope to find out, and one has been running for more than 35 years. Hear about the moment scientists watched evolution take off in the lab, and how directed evolution was used to create a multicellular organism. Also, how single embryonic cells become humans, and what all of this says about the possibility of life on other worlds.

White dwarfs are dead stars like our Sun. Although they're no longer performing fusion in their cores, they're still hot and putting out radiation that could support life. A new paper calculates that a white dwarf could support planets in a new habitable zone for 7 billion years, providing the right temperature and radiation to support a biosphere. They're also small and dim, which makes it easier to study planets in orbit around them for potential biosignatures.

1. Spider divination

In Cameroon, Mambila spider divination (ŋgam dù) addresses difficult questions to spiders or land crabs that live in holes in the ground.

Asking the spiders a question involves covering their hole with a broken pot and placing a stick, a stone and cards made from leaves around it. The diviner then asks a question in a yes or no format while tapping the enclosure to encourage the spider or crab to emerge. The stick and stone represent yes or no, while the leaf cards, which are specially incised with certain meanings, offer further clarification.

The movements of the spider or crab rearrange these objects, so that if a leaf card is moved to the stone or the stick, the answer emerges.

The answer is not always clear, however. If neither the stick nor the stone are selected (or both are chosen), interpretive work is required. The diviner and client must resolve the ambiguity, or decide that in this case the spider wasn’t saying anything at all.

This haunted 17th-century pub was moved to a new city when it was already almost 300 years old. 

Found along Manchester’s Fountain Street, the Shakespeare pub stands out amongst its neighbors with its black-and-white, timber-framed exterior, telling a tale that spans over three centuries and two distinct cities.

Originally known as the Shambles, the pub was built in 1656 in the city of Chester, 40 miles away. In 1928, however, the entire pub was dismantled and transported to Manchester. Despite the challenges and technicalities of relocation, the pub managed to retain many of its original details and character, offering visitors a fascinating glimpse into its travels through centuries and cities.

Why These Millennia-Old Brains Are So Well Preserved

No part of our body is as perishable as the brain. Within minutes of losing its supply of blood and oxygen, our delicate neurological machinery begins to suffer irreversible damage. The brain is our most energy-greedy organ, and in the hours after death, its enzymes typically devour it from within. As cellular membranes rupture, the brain liquifies. Within days, microbes may consume the remnants in the stinky process of putrefaction. In a few years, the skull becomes just an empty cavity.

In some cases, however, brains outlast all other soft tissues and remain intact for hundreds or thousands of years. Archaeologists have been mystified to discover naturally preserved brains in ancient graveyards, tombs, mass graves and even shipwrecks. Scientists at the University of Oxford published a study earlier this year that revealed that such brains are more common than previously recognized. By surveying centuries of scientific literature, researchers counted more than 4,400 cases of preserved brains that were up to 12,000 years old.

Tracing the evolution of animals and multicellular life

Once upon a time, there were a bunch of one-celled microbes, swimming, eating, reproducing, doing all the things that a one-cell bit of life can do.

Then, some time later, there were their descendants, the early animals: multicelled creatures, still swimming, eating, reproducing, but doing it all as teams of cells.

Exactly what happened between those points is a nigh-unfathomable mystery. But that in no way stops scientists from wondering and hypothesizing and investigating how the transition, about 600 million years ago, might have gone down.

The question is an old one, but researchers have made great progress in the past two decades, thanks to the genetic sequencing of single-celled life forms that are animals’ closest kin. It turns out that the unicellular ancestors of animals, way back then, were already remarkably well-equipped to take on teamwork.

Alternatively, a fast black hole can leave a narrow tunnel in a solid object while passing through it. For example, a 10 22 g black hole should leave a tunnel with a radius of 0.1μm, which is large enough to be seen by an optical microscope. We could look for such micro-tunnels here on Earth in very old rocks, or even glass or other solid structures in very old buildings. While our estimate gives a very small probability of finding such tunnels, looking for them does not require expensive equipment and long preparation, and the payoff might be significant.

What sets the Hrafnistumannasögur apart is their depiction of flawed protagonists. The sagas openly discuss their half-troll ancestry and even describe many heroes as unattractive—something rarely seen in medieval narratives. “In three of the four stories, the protagonist is explicitly described as ‘not a handsome man,’” Broustin explains.

Moreover, these characters don’t begin their journeys as heroes. “At first, they are lazy and unmotivated and have to be told by their fathers that they’re good for nothing,” Broustin notes. Through personal growth and the acceptance of their destined roles, these unlikely heroes embark on transformative journeys that mirror the classic hero’s arc—but with a distinctly Icelandic flair.

For thousands of years, comets have fascinated us, filled us with dread, and, in some ways, made us who we are.

The earliest written mythology, the Epic of Gilgamesh, tells a story of a shooting star and questions what it could mean. References to Halley’s Comet are found in Babylonian clay tablets more than 2,000 years old. In China, the Mawangdui Silk Texts, an almanac dated to 168 B.C., contains the oldest known illustrated comet catalog. Later, Christian monks in the Middle Ages believed comets were visiting stars that brought messages or heavenly omens. The Venerable Bede, an Anglo-Saxon monk who lived in the eighth century, is the one who described them as having hair or beards.

Not all of the seals were fatally injured by the shark attacks.

Sometimes white sharks will intentionally "bite and spit" seals, which allows them to avoid being injured by the seal's teeth and claws while they wait nearby for the prey to bleed out, said New England Aquarium shark scientist John Chisholm.

Other times, sharks will simply take an "investigatory bite" to decide if the prey is worth pursuing. In both cases, seals often survive these encounters.

The complete analysis revealed that fabrics found in the Sanxingdui pits included silk and that silk residues were partially preserved due to mineralization processes facilitated by copper ions released from bronze artifacts.

Silk traces were found wrapped around jade artifacts and covering the bronze grid-like ware, suggesting their use in ritual contexts. The uneven mineralization of the fibers and the presence of ash-layer silk residues indicated that not all silk was fully incinerated during these rituals.

Geochemistry to biology

Carbon fixation is the process by which living organisms convert carbon dioxide, in the air and dissolved in water, into organic molecules.

Many life forms, including plants, bacteria and microorganisms known as archaea, have different pathways for achieving this. Photosynthesis is one example.

Each of these pathways contains a cascade of enzymes and proteins, some of which contain cores made of iron and sulfur.

We can find proteins with these iron-sulfur clusters in all forms of life. In fact, researchers propose they date back to the Last Universal Common Ancestor – an ancient ancestral cell from which scientists propose life as we know it evolved and diversified.

Iron sulfides are minerals that form when dissolved iron reacts with hydrogen sulfide – the volcanic gas that makes hot springs smell like rotten eggs.

One of the most perplexing reports I have encountered concerns an alleged close encounter involving two priests travelling south along Thurstaston Road in Heswall just before Christmas in December 2010.

The priests were en-route to visit a gravely-ill friend at 2am, navigating treacherous roads coated in black ice and falling snow.

As their Mini approached the junction of Village Road and School Hill near the Black Horse pub, they were startled by the sight of a peculiar craft hovering just three feet above the road ahead.

The object resembled the archetypal ‘flying saucer’ - lens-shaped with a domed top - and emitted a pale blue light from a perimeter band that illuminated the icy road and snow-laden pavements.

One of the priests proposed stopping and reversing, but the other suggested approaching for a closer look.

As they neared the craft, they discerned a transparent dome atop it, within which the silhouettes of two human-like figures were visible. These figures appeared entirely ordinary, wearing dark overalls and sporting short hair.

The driver halted the Mini as his nerve faltered, squinting against a beam of light that emanated from the craft towards the car.

As the light dimmed, the men saw that one of the figures had dark hair while the other, slightly smaller, had reddish hair. Suddenly, the craft shot forward, stopping about twenty feet away. The figures were smiling.

At that moment, the car radio inexplicably switched on, emitting soft static. Then, a voice came through, asking, 'Is this the year two thousand and nineteen?' The driver, astonished, replied, 'No, it’s two thousand and ten. Who are you?' Silence followed.

https://www.wirralglobe.co.uk/news/24760525.haunted-wirral-christmas-ufo-case/