by tyler | May 3, 2023 | CNN, world
Traces of ancient hormones were detected in the tusks of a woolly mammoth that lived more than 33,000 years ago, revealing that the now-extinct creatures had episodes of raging testosterone.
The findings provide what researchers believe to be the first direct evidence that, like elephants, mammoths also experienced musth. A study detailing the findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Musth, which means “intoxicated” in Hindi and Urdu, is a testosterone-fueled period of heightened aggression and unpredictable behavior during mating season when male elephants become rivals.
Previously, researchers inferred that mammoths, the extinct relatives of modern elephants, might have experienced musth due to the discovery of broken tusk tips and other skeletal injuries preserved in fossils.
Evidence of the testosterone surge from musth is can be detected in the blood and urine tests of living elephants.
A team of researchers turned to elephant and mammoth tusks to see if their layers might also preserve the presence of steroid hormones like cortisol, said lead study author Michael Cherney, a research affiliate at the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology and a research fellow at the University of Michigan Medical School.
In addition to cortisol, the mammoth tusk revealed annually recurring testosterone surges up to 10 times higher than baseline, according to the study.
“We didn’t really know what to expect, so most everything was a surprise,” Cherney said. “I think the biggest surprise, however, was just how clear the pattern in testosterone was.”
The researchers studied three tusks during their analysis, including two adult mammoth tusks and one from an African bull elephant that was between 30 to 40 years old when it was killed by a hunter in Botswana in 1963.
The right tusk of the male mammoth, which lived to be about 55 years old, was uncovered by a diamond mining company in Siberia in 2007 and is estimated to have died between 33,291 and 38,866 years ago.
A tusk from a female mammoth that lived between 5,597 and 5,885 years ago on Wrangel Island was also used in the study. Wrangel Island, once connected to northeast Siberia, is the last known place where woolly mammoths lived until going extinct about 4,000 years ago.
Annual growth increments were identified in each tusk using CT scans. Then, the researchers used a drill bit operated beneath a microscope to grind samples of dentin, the mineralized tissue inside teeth, since tusks are elongated incisors.
The dentin powder was analyzed using a mass spectrometer, or an instrument that can identify chemicals by sorting charged particles.
“We had developed steroid mass spectrometry methods for human blood and saliva samples, and we have used them extensively for clinical research studies. But never in a million years did I imagine that we would be using these techniques to explore ‘paleoendocrinology,’” said study coauthor Rich Auchus, professor of internal medicine and pharmacology at the University of Michigan Medical School, in a statement.
“We did have to modify the method some, because those tusk powders were the dirtiest samples we ever analyzed. When Mike (Cherney) showed me the data from the elephant tusks, I was flabbergasted. Then we saw the same patterns in the mammoth — wow!”
Both the elephant and male mammoth tusks contained evidence of musth-related testosterone surges. Meanwhile, the female mammoth tusk showed little variation and very low testosterone, as expected.
Tusks are a bit like tree rings. They grow throughout the life of an animal, recording molecules like hormones that are tied to an animal’s behavior and physiology. Testosterone accumulates within tissues and circulates in the bloodstream.
“Tusks hold particular promise for reconstructing aspects of mammoth life history because they preserve a record of growth in layers of dentin that form throughout an individual’s life,” said study coauthor Daniel Fisher, a curator at the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology and professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, in a statement.
When scientists study elephant tusks, they can identify the age when the animals experience musth, if it happens at the same time of year and other factors that help them uncover more information about environmental factors and population dynamics, Cherney said. Gleaning this type of information from mammoth tusks can reveal more insights into the lifetimes of the extinct creatures.
The researchers believe their findings show that the hormone records in teeth could contain key information that can last for thousands of years, especially when studying ancient populations.
“This study establishes dentin as a useful repository for some hormones and sets the stage for further advances in the developing field of paleoendocrinology,” Cherney said. “In addition to broad applications in zoology and paleontology, tooth-hormone records could support medical, forensic and archaeological studies.”
by tyler | May 3, 2023 | CNN, world
The president of the UN’s COP28 climate conference has said that he sees a future for fossil fuels – even as scientists say the world must rapidly transition to clean energy – in remarks that have raised concerns about a backsliding on climate commitments.
Sultan Al Jaber, who will oversee the UN’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai in November, called for a focus on technologies to capture the planet-heating pollution produced by coal, oil and gas.
“We know that fossil fuels will continue to play a role in the foreseeable future in helping meet global energy requirements,” said Al Jaber, speaking on Wednesday at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin, a conference attended by representatives from around 40 countries to help set the agenda for COP28.
He said that the world needed “to come to terms with some realities” and embrace an energy transition that includes “all sources of energy.”
“Our aim should be focused on ensuring that we phase out emissions from all sectors,” added Al Jaber.
It’s a departure from what other countries have called for. In March, European countries agreed to promote a global phase-out of fossil fuels in a text setting out their priorities for COP28.
“The shift towards a climate neutral economy will require the global phase-out of unabated fossil fuels,” the text said.
More than 80 countries supported a commitment to phase out oil, coal and gas at COP27 in Egypt last year, but Saudi Arabia and other oil and gas producing nations opposed it.
Tasneem Essop, the executive director of Climate Action Network, an alliance of environmental groups, told CNN that it was “concerning” that Al Jaber was speaking about a “‘foreseeable future for fossil fuels’ and a ‘phase out of emissions.’”
“A plan to end the era of fossil fuels should be central to the discussions and outcomes from COP28,” she said.
Nils Bartsch, head of oil and gas research at the German non-profit Urgewald, told CNN the world faces “an absolute carbon budget for 1.5 degrees Celsius. Reducing emissions intensity of oil and gas production does not change that – it just helps to exhaust our budget a little slower.”
Scientists have said that the world should make every effort to stay under 1.5 degrees of global warming above pre-industrial levels, and nations have been working to keep that goal within reach at the annual climate summits.
Al Jaber emphasized the role of technologies like carbon capture in reducing planet-heating pollution. However, some experts are concerned that these technologies remain prohibitively expensive, are unproven at scale and would take too long to implement, given the urgency of the climate crisis.
“We cannot pretend the solutions to the climate crisis lie with unreliable, untested techno fixes that will bring new risks and threats,” Essop told CNN.
Al Jaber was a controversial pick to oversee COP28. He is also CEO of the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas producers.
Some, however, welcomed Al Jaber’s appointment. US climate envoy John Kerry told Associated Press that he was “a terrific choice,” citing his commitment to expanding renewable energy.
Al Jaber used the Berlin conference to set out priorities, including tripling renewable energy by 2030, doubling hydrogen production, expanding nuclear power and improving battery storage.
He also called on rich countries to deliver on their funding promises to climate-vulnerable countries. In 2009, wealthy nations pledged to mobilize $100 billion in annual climate funding, but they have consistently fallen far short of that target.
Al Jaber said this failure to deliver is hindering progress and undermining trust. He asked countries to “supercharge” climate finance.
“What I hear time and again is that climate finance is simply not available, not accessible, and not affordable,” Al Jaber said in Berlin on Tuesday. “If the world doesn’t come up with effective mechanisms to deliver climate finance to developing and emerging economies, they will have no choice but to choose a carbon-intensive development path.”
This year’s COP28 is considered particularly significant because it will include the first “global stocktake,” which will evaluate countries’ progress towards climate targets.
“All indicators… are telling us that we are way off track,” said Al Jaber.
Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, also speaking at the Berlin conference on Wednesday, said it will be important that “we actually take stock of what we have achieved and the targets we set ourselves. We have to get out of fossil fuels, we have to dramatically reduce emissions.”
“it is no longer about visions. It is finally about delivering on the pledges we made,” she said.
by tyler | May 3, 2023 | CNN, world
Traces of ancient DNA contained in old bones have spilled fascinating secrets about the past.
But extracting genetic material involves a certain amount of damage to the object in question, and many archaeologists have been reluctant to hand over their most precious finds to DNA labs.
Now, scientists have found a way to extract DNA in a non-invasive manner, applying the pioneering new technique to a pierced deer tooth likely worn as a pendant. The research, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, revealed intriguing details about its ancient wearer and is the first time scientists have successfully isolated ancient human DNA from a Stone Age artifact.
Excavated from Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, the pendant was worn by a woman who lived between 19,000 and 25,000 years ago, according to the analysis of human genetic material preserved in the pendant. She belonged to a group known as Ancient North Eurasians, which have a genetic connection to the first Americans.
The new method will hopefully allow scientists to learn about the sex and genetic ancestry of the Stone Age makers, wearers and users of an array of bone tools and ornaments unearthed from digs around the world.
“It’s amazing. It means that we’ll be able to answer very simple questions such as what tasks males and females were doing at that point time,” said study coauthor Marie Soressi, a professor and chair of human origins at Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University in the Netherlands. “We actually will have a direct line of evidence to tell us.”
The technique may also, for example, be able reveal whether a tool was used by a Neanderthal or our own Homo sapiens ancestors, she added.
Human DNA was likely preserved in the deer bone pendant because it is porous and therefore more likely to retain genetic material present in skin cells, sweat and other body fluids.
Typically, researchers would use a small drill to extract bone powder from an artifact or bone. Lead study author Elena Essel, a molecular biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, described the newly developed technique as a “laboratory washing machine without the movement.”
The pendant was submerged in a sodium phosphate buffer solution while gradually increasing the temperature. This allowed the DNA to be released into the solution, where it was isolated, purified and sequenced using existing tools.
“If we want to stay in this image of the washing machine, it’s the wash water that was exciting for us,” Essel explained.
While bone tools and artifacts are rarer than stone ones, they are still much more common in the archaeological record than humans remains, opening up new avenues for research.
The pendant study, however, is essentially a proof of concept, and it’s not clear how easy it will be to extract ancient human DNA from other bone ornaments and tools.
The technique, at least as it stands, only worked on freshly excavated material and where archaeologists had taken steps to ensure that the artifact is “clean” — i.e. not contaminated with modern human DNA — by wearing gloves and a mask and making sure the object was sealed in a bag immediately after being unearthed.
The technique didn’t identify ancient DNA when applied to a set of bone tools from the French cave Quinçay excavated back in the 1970s to 1990s — when nobody had any idea that genetic material could be preserved for so long.
Nor was it possible to extract ancient DNA from three freshly excavated tooth pendants from Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria, home to some of the earliest known modern humans in Europe, according to the study.
“Right now, it’s like this one sample. I would be really interested in learning more about how often we can can extract ancient human DNA and if it’s like a specific type of artifact that is more promising or if it works equally well for (bone) tools,” Essel said.
It’s not known why the deer tooth pendant contained such a large amount of the ancient woman’s DNA (about the same amount as a human tooth) — perhaps it was well-loved and worn close to the skin for an exceptionally long period of time, Essel said.
“How we think it works is that the longer there was close body contact, the higher the chances that a lot of DNA is in the material … but we have no idea if we’re talking about days or months or years or decades.”
by tyler | May 2, 2023 | CNN, world
The James Webb Space Telescope has detected water vapor around a rocky exoplanet that orbits a star located 26 light-years away from Earth.
Now, astronomers are trying to determine whether that water vapor is an indicator of what would be the first-known presence of an atmosphere around a rocky exoplanet.
Small, cool red dwarf stars are the most common stars in the universe. The exoplanets found in the “habitable zone” — the perfect distance from a star to allow the planet to be warm enough to host liquid water on its surface — often orbit red dwarfs very closely since they aren’t as warm as the sun.
Red dwarf stars lash out with ultraviolet and X-ray radiation that has the potential to demolish fragile layers of gas, leading scientists to question whether rocky planets orbiting them can maintain — or regain — atmospheres.
Astronomers observed a hot, rocky exoplanet called GJ 486 b using the Webb telescope. The planet is about 30% larger than Earth and has much stronger surface gravity than our planet.
The planet is so close to its host star that GJ 486 b completes one orbit around it every 1.5 Earth days, and this proximity heats the planet to a surface temperature of 800 degrees Fahrenheit (430 degrees Celsius). Astronomers believe the planet is tidally locked, meaning that one side always faces the star while the other is a permanent night side — similar to how the moon orbits Earth.
Although the scorching temperatures make the planet too hot to be habitable, observations of GJ 486 b with Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph revealed hints of water vapor. A study detailing the findings has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The presence of water vapor could suggest that GJ 486 b somehow has an atmosphere, despite its heat and proximity to the star.
While water vapor has previously been detected on gaseous exoplanets, scientists have yet to find an atmosphere around a rocky exoplanet — doing so would be a landmark event, since that would make it similar in a way to planets in our solar system like Earth and Mars, which are considered rocky.
“Water vapor in an atmosphere on a hot rocky planet would represent a major breakthrough for exoplanet science. But we must be careful and make sure that the star is not the culprit,” said study coauthor Kevin Stevenson, principal investigator on the Webb observing program at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, in a statement.
The team observing GJ 486 b watched as the planet crossed in front of its star twice, and then they used multiple methods to analyze the data captured by the telescope’s instruments.
When planets pass in front of their stars, also known as a transit, the starlight can filter through a planet’s atmosphere and highlight the chemical traces of different gases and elements. The results from the Webb data analysis pointed to water vapor being present around GJ 486 b.
But astronomers are taking care with their interpretation of the findings because it’s possible that the water vapor is connected to the star itself.
“We see a signal, and it’s almost certainly due to water. But we can’t tell yet if that water is part of the planet’s atmosphere, meaning the planet has an atmosphere, or if we’re just seeing a water signature coming from the star,” said lead study author Sarah Moran, postdoctoral research associate at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in a statement.
Water vapor even exists on our sun in sunspot regions. Sunspots or starspots are areas that appear dark on stars because they’re cooler than other parts of the surface.
Since the red dwarf star hosting GJ 486 b is much smaller and cooler than the sun, it may contain even more water vapor in its starspots — enough to create a signal that could be misinterpreted as a planetary atmosphere surrounding the closely orbiting exoplanet, according to the researchers.
“We didn’t observe evidence of the planet crossing any starspots during the transits. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t spots elsewhere on the star. And that’s exactly the physical scenario that would imprint this water signal into the data and could wind up looking like a planetary atmosphere,” said study coauthor Ryan MacDonald, a NASA Sagan Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, in a statement.
The heat and radiation from the star would likely erode GJ 486 b’s potential atmosphere over time. If the exoplanet currently has an atmosphere, it would need replenishment from a constant source, like steam from volcanoes.
Future observations of the planet using different instruments on the Webb telescope could reveal additional details about the source of the water vapor.
“It’s joining multiple instruments together that will really pin down whether or not this planet has an atmosphere,” Stevenson said.
by tyler | May 1, 2023 | CNN, world
Exceptionally well-preserved fossils of tiny worms, starfish, sponges, barnacles and other creatures with no modern parallel discovered at a quarry in Wales are painting a picture of life on Earth 462 million years ago.
It was a critical time in the planet’s history when there was virtually no life on land, but animals and algae were thriving in the seas.
The Castle Bank fossil site near Llandrindod Wells in Powys is remarkable because of the time period it captures and because the fossils show soft tissue such as eyes, nerves, the gut and brain that are preserved as films of carbon in mudstone, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution on Monday.
The site gives a fuller picture of the variety of life in the deep past — not just the animals with hard shells and bones that are usually found as fossils.
Joseph Botting, study author and honorary research fellow at Amgueddfa Cymru Museum Wales, had first spotted a sponge at the site in 2013 and collected some similar fossils over the years — but he hadn’t conducted an in-depth study on the site.
In April 2020, with time afforded by a Covid-19 lockdown, he went back to the fossil site, which is near his home, and he discovered a piece of rock “which had things with tentacles in.”
“I basically didn’t sleep that night. As soon as you find that sort of level of soft tissue you know that anything could fossilize. So at that point we knew it was going to be important,” he said.
The fossils come from a period of time known as the Ordovician when life was becoming more complex. The earlier Cambrian period witnessed the origins of animals but by the end of the Ordovician period, Earth was home to more varied and diverse ecosystems.
Most of the 170 animals discovered so far from the fossil site were tiny (1-5 millimeters) and many were either completely soft-bodied when alive or had a tough skin or exoskeleton. The vast majority appear to be completely unknown species.
While other soft bodied creatures from the past have preserved in a similar way, most notably in the Burgess Shale deposits in the Canadian Rockies in British Columbia, Castle Bank dates from 50 million years later in the Middle Ordovician.
“There’s no comparable site of the same age. It’s a completely unique site,” said Lucy Muir, study coauthor and also an honorary research fellow at Amgueddfa Cymru Museum Wales.
Muir and Botting, who are married, said they also wanted to highlight the contribution of their local community to the discovery. A crowdfunding project to buy microscopy equipment helped them identify the animals and understand the importance of the site.
by tyler | May 1, 2023 | CNN, world
Archaeologists in Livorno, Italy, are putting together the pieces of a great mystery that began with a stunning find.
While hiking in a cleared area of a Tuscan forest northeast of Livorno, a member of the Livorno Paleontological Archaeological Group spotted a few glimmering coins in the dirt in November 2021. Upon closer inspection and excavation, researchers determined that the find included 175 silver Roman denarii coins. Nearly all were in good condition, making this one of the few hoards of ancient coins found intact, according to the group.
But the discovery prompted a number of questions: Whose treasure was it? Who were they hiding it from? And why didn’t they come back for it?
The archaeological group, along with the archaeologist official for the provinces of Pisa and Livorno, Dr. Lorella Alderighi, has spent more than a year measuring, weighing and documenting the coins, according to a news release posted on its Facebook page. Now, the researchers think they have some answers.
“This treasure is about a person’s life, the savings of a soldier’s life and his hopes for building his farm,” Alderighi said via email. “However, it also tells a sad story: (T)he owner of the coins died before he could make his dreams come true using his savings. The coins tell his story.”
The hoard will soon be on display in an exhibition at the Museum of Natural History of the Mediterranean in Livorno from May 5 to July 2, Alderighi said.
It’s impossible to know exactly who buried the coins, Alderighi said, but the coins would most likely have been the treasure of a former soldier who served during Rome’s Social War from 91 to 88 BC and during the civil war between Sulla and the Marians from 83 to 82 BC.
The owner of the hoard buried it in a terra-cotta pot, which served as a sort of piggy bank. The earliest coins in the stash dated to 157 or 156 BC, and the latest up to 83 or 82 BC, according to the archaeological group’s release.
During that time, 175 denarii would have been a soldier’s salary for about a year and a half, Alderighi said. Now, the treasure has a value of around 20,000 to 25,000 euros, she added.
The coins were preserved well in their buried state. Only two are fractured, but they can be reassembled, the release noted. Studying them could provide scholars with more background on the history of coins and how people used them and could even lead to changes with the fundamental typology — created in 1974 and still used today — to identify and date Roman coins, she added.
“It is one of the very few hoards of ancient coins found intact and provides a lot of numismatic, historical and social information,” Alderighi said.
