Bampot

In the northwest neighborhoods, exterior courtyards, clay drainpipes, and household refuse were uncovered. Excavated pottery included everyday items such as cups, plates, bowls and storage jars. Some of the pottery was surprisingly well-decorated and carefully made, hinting that private wealth may have been more common than expected.

Animal bones found with the pottery suggest that residents enjoyed a varied diet, including domesticated meat and wild game. This level of dietary diversity is unexpected for non-elite populations in Mesopotamian cities, based on limited current evidence.

These findings may challenge ideas about sharp divisions between elite and non-elite lifestyles in ancient cities. The material culture and dietary practices reflect a community where some people lived relatively well and suggests that further research and analysis is needed to answer lingering questions.

Controlling blood flow to their toes may help the amphibians stick to, and unstick from, their surroundings

Animals come with all kinds of things at the ends of their toes: nails, claws, talons. But the Aneides genus of salamander has them beat with translucent toes that inflate with blood.

The amphibians might be adjusting their toe shape, the researchers propose. Higher blood flow could inflate the toe, like a soccer ball, reducing its contact with the ground and making it easier to unstick. (The video above shows an engorging toe’s surface expand by 5%.) Lower blood flow could do the opposite, flattening the sticky toe against surfaces when hanging on for dear life. The team also showed the salamanders may fill and drain each side of their toes independently, providing fine-tuned toe shape adjustments.

It costs energy, and skin, to repeatedly peel an adhesive toe off of tree trunks and branches. But slipping is even worse. Salamanders’ inflatable digits may solve both problems.

Silicosis

Silica is one of the most abundant minerals in the earth's crust and is widely distributed in nature. Silicosis is caused by inhalation of tiny particles of crystalline silica (usually quartz). Workers at greatest risk are those who move or blast rock and sand (miners, quarry workers, stonecutters, construction workers) or who use silica-containing rock or sand abrasives (sand blasters, glass makers, foundry, gemstone, and ceramic workers, potters). Outbreaks of severe silicosis have recently been identified in workers in the engineered stone industry.

Factors that influence the incidence and severity of silicosis include

• Duration and intensity of exposure

• Form and surface characteristics of the silica particles

Amorphous silica, such as glass or diatomaceous earth, does not have a crystalline structure and does not cause silicosis.

When inhaled, silica dust passes into the lungs, and scavenger cells such as macrophages engulf it (see Overview of the Immune System). Enzymes released by the scavenger cells cause the lung tissue to scar and form nodules. In low-intensity or short-term exposures, these nodules remain discrete and do not compromise lung function. With higher-intensity or more prolonged exposures, these nodules coalesce (come together) and cause progressive fibrosis and lung dysfunction, or they sometimes form large masses (called progressive massive fibrosis).

MADAGASCAR – It turns out that the Indri Indri lemurs of Madagascar can carry a tune. Researchers have found that these furry, tree-dwelling creatures use music to communicate with one another, likely for generations. Through collecting songs and calls produced by 20 indri groups in Madagascar’s rainforests over the span of 15 years, the scientists have found that indri songs exhibit rhythmic patterns that are common in human music. One particular rhythm even echoes the stomp-clap beginning of Queen’s We Will Rock You.

The finding that these “singing lemurs” produce rhythmic calls provides an evolutionary pathway that may explain the origin of music. The study’s authors suggest that “the foundational elements of human music can be traced back to early primate communication systems.” While this is just a theory, this study is the first step to finding out more. It’s also a call to protect this critically endangered species.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has published a new guide for people fabricating and installing stone worktops. This guidance is designed to remind dutyholders and workers about the need to ensure that suitable procedures and controls are in place to help protect against exposure to stone dust and prevent workers breathing in respirable crystalline silica (RCS).

Stone workers are at risk of exposure to airborne particles of stone dust containing RCS when processing stone, including engineered stone, by cutting, chiselling and polishing. Over time, breathing in these silica particles can cause irreversible, life-changing and often fatal respiratory conditions such as silicosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer.

The world has never felt so still, so calm and so quiet to me as the evening when I stood inside the central chamber of the long barrow at Fingask Castle in the Braes of the Carse in Scotland. The skies, the darkest tones of obsidian and the stars clustered as if guardians of the moon.

I’m standing in a structure that’s been built by a small team of men led by seventh generation stonemason, James Davies whose father, Geraint Davies is a master stonemason and designer of long barrows. Each barrow is drawn by hand and in 2014, Geraint completed the long barrow at All Cannings, Wiltshire – thought to be the first Neolithic-style burial mound to be built in the UK for more than 5,000 years. It can be described as a columbarium – with more than 200 niches and, within these, cremated remains can be placed in urns.

This Supermassive Black Hole May Harbor a Bizarre Undead Star

Astronomers are grappling with a complex cosmic mystery lurking at the dark heart of a distant galaxy some 270 million light-years from Earth. And its resolution could revolutionize our understanding of how black holes feast on matter throughout the universe.

Known as 1ES 1927+654 and located in the constellation Draco, this far-off island of stars harbors at its core a supermassive black hole weighing more than a million suns—which, surprisingly, isn’t very remarkable.

Most large galaxies, including our own, host such hefty monstrosities at their center.

But this black hole has proved extraordinarily strange: the object shocked observers with an abrupt outburst of radiation so intense that it apparently obliterated the black hole’s corona, an enveloping cloud of whirling, billion-degree plasma, for three months in 2018.

The most obvious explanation for these x-ray oscillations, the researchers say, is that they’re a clear but indirect signal of a substantial something orbiting very close to the black hole. It’s so close, in fact, that it must be plowing through the black hole’s accretion disk—a maelstrom of infalling matter made incandescent from frictional heating as it piles up around the gravitational monster’s maw.

It comes after the SNP leader rejected his predecessor Nicola Sturgeon’s assertion in a Financial Times interview that indyref2 is “off the radar now”.

Swinney said: “No, I don’t think it is. I think what, if we talk in this interview about the economic circumstances that we face, I think it’s pretty clear that economic management in the UK and economic opportunity is deeply flawed and deeply weakened because of the folly of Brexit,” Swinney said.

“Now the way to sort Brexit is for Scotland to become an independent country and rejoin the European Union, that will open up economic opportunities for our country.

“It will, crucially, allow us to have our approach to migration which will actually be in our economic interests other than the folly that’s been pursued by the UK Government.”

https://www.thenational.scot/news/24866498.john-swinney-scottish-independence-referendum-will-happen-soon/

Lanarkshire has been named a UFO sighting hotspot by a group of researchers who recorded ten incidents over two years.

Areas such as Hamilton, East Kilbride, Airdrie, Uddingston, and Cumbernauld were all witnesses to mysterious objects, which varied from cylindrical to star-like.

Last year the British spotter group UFO Identified documented a total of 395 sightings in the UK in 2023, reports Lanarkshire Live. And from January 2021 to December 2023, the group logged ten sightings across Lanarkshire.

The presence of rhythmic patterns across two independent colonies of chimpanzees suggests that underlying mechanisms for rhythm production may be shared between humans and non-human primates. This shared mechanism indicates that the cognitive requirements for rhythm production potentially preceded human music and language evolution.

Snails have a reputation for being slow, with poor eyes that can barely see the world around them.

But conch snails defy these expectations with eyesight as good as some vertebrates. These marine snails combine exceptional vision, protective shells, and acrobatic leaping to evade deadly predators.

Stromboidea sea snails provide some of the best examples of nature's different approaches to eyesight. While some members of the group, like the strombids, have well-developed eyes at the end of long, mobile eyestalks, others have small ones on tiny eyestalks that are tucked under their oral tentacles.

The study presented a novel approach to understanding the associations between air pollution, fertilization, and embryo quality by evaluating the independent associations between maternal and paternal air pollution exposure at times when a female's ovaries are producing eggs (also known as oocytes) and when a male's testicles are producing sperm.

Ambient exposure to organic carbon—a major element of the hazardous fine particulate matter PM2.5, which is emitted from combustion sources such as vehicle exhaust, industrial processes, and wildfires—consistently showed negative impacts on oocyte survival, fertilization, and embryo quality.