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Puzzling prehistoric artifacts served a practical purpose: ropemaking
In 2015, archaeologists working at a cave in southwestern Germany found an enigmatic perforated baton in a cave called Hohle Fels. It was a near-perfect match for an artifact found in 1983 in a cave down the road. Carved from single pieces of mammoth ivory, the Hohle Fels baton—roughly 20 centimeters long, about the length of a large paperback book—had multiple holes with spiraling grooves around the openings . Similar objects have been found elsewhere in Germany and in nearby France, often made from ivory or antler. They date from the last ice age, more than 35,000 years ago, a time when human hunters ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 31, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Mysterious artifacts suggest modern humans and Neanderthals lived side by side for millennia
More than 45,000 years ago, small bands of hunters chased horses, reindeer, and mammoth over a vast expanse of tundra that stretched across most of northern Europe. They rarely stayed anywhere for long, leaving behind a scattering of stone tools and traces of the odd campfire in the depths of caves. For more than a century, archaeologists debated whether these artifacts were left by some of the last Neanderthals to roam Europe—or the first modern humans to brave the northern reaches of the continent. A trio of papers published today in Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution may help set...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 31, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

In a big bet on science, the U.S. just created 10 new ‘innovation engines’
Molly Hemstreet’s career as an English teacher, community organizer, and entrepreneur in rural western North Carolina doesn’t fit the typical profile of a grantee of the National Science Foundation (NSF). But her vision for reviving North Carolina’s struggling textile industry by using more recycled materials, green manufacturing practices, and a well-trained workforce was tailor-made for a new NSF program designed to fuel economic prosperity in neglected communities across the United States. Today, NSF announced that Hemstreet’s project is one of the first 10 it is funding under an ambitious and unprecedente...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 29, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

‘Landmark paper’ shows why ice age Europeans wore jewelry
Your jewelry may be sending all kinds of messages: You’re married or a Super Bowl champion. You worship Jesus or belong to the pearls and suits set—or perhaps the piercings and purple hair crowd. For ice age hunters in Europe some 30,000 years ago, styles of ornaments including amber pendants, ivory bangles, and fox tooth beads may have also signaled membership in a particular culture, researchers report today in Nature Human Behaviour . The study, which compared thousands of handcrafted beads and adornments from dozens of widespread sites, suggests at least nine distinct cultures existed acros...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 29, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Alzheimer ’s disease may have been transmitted in now-banned hormone treatments
Alzheimer’s disease can spread via brain tissue from one person to another, according to a new study of several people in the United Kingdom who, as children, were prescribed a now-abandoned hormone therapy treatment. All received years of injections of human growth hormone extracted from pituitary glands in the brains of cadavers. The approach was halted in the mid-1980s after alarming evidence that it could transmit another fatal brain disease. The researchers couldn’t prove the treatment caused Alzheimer’s, although mouse studies have shown that transplanting Alzheimer’s-affected brain tissue can recreate ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 29, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Sighting of newborn great white shark ‘unlike anything we had ever seen before’
No one really knows where fearsome great white sharks go to bear their young. But last year, a drone flying off the California coast captured video that could help solve that mystery—and provide the first proof that newborn great whites enter the world wrapped in a gossamer coat of their mother’s milk. The footage of a 1.5-meter-long newborn enshrouded in a milky substance—published today in Environmental Biology of Fishes —“was unlike anything we had ever seen before,” says study co-author Phillip Sternes, an organismal biologist at the University of California, Riverside. “It was exhilaratin...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 29, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

‘It’s insane’: New viruslike entities found in human gut microbes
As they collect and analyze massive amounts of genetic sequences from plants, animals, and microbes, biologists keep encountering surprises, including some that may challenge the very definition of life. The latest, reported this week in a preprint, is a new kind of viruslike entity that inhabits bacteria dwelling in the human mouth and gut. These “obelisks,” as they’re called by the Stanford University team that unearthed them, have genomes seemingly composed of loops of RNA and sequences belonging to them have been found around the world. Other scientists are delighted by obelisks’ debut. “It’s insane,�...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 26, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

How ants thwarted lions on the African savanna
This study was a beautiful snapshot of how complicated ecosystems can be—this idea that you pull on a single thread and the whole system reacts,” says Meredith Palmer, an ecologist at Fauna & Flora International who was not involved in the work, published today in Science . Across tens of thousands of square kilometers of eastern Africa, a type of acacia called the whistling thorn tree ( Vachellia drepanolobium ) sits at the heart of the ecosystem, accounting for 70% to 99% of woody plant mass wherever it grows. The trees provide nectar to native acacia ants ( Crematogaster ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 25, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

News at a glance: Long-awaited malaria shots, risks of face recognition technology, and Japan ’s first moon landing
GLOBAL HEALTH Long-awaited malaria shots rolled out After a 60-year quest, the first-ever routine childhood malaria vaccinations—those given as part of the regular immunization schedule—were administered to infants and toddlers in Cameroon on 22 January. They received RTS,S or Mosquirix, made by GlaxoSmithKline and approved for general use in 2021 by the World Health Organization (WHO). The vaccine’s efficacy wanes substantially over time, but a 4-year pilot rollout required by WHO in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi showed it slashed illness and death in young children. Nineteen other African countrie...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 25, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

How giant ‘water batteries’ could make green power reliable
The machines that turn Tennessee’s Raccoon Mountain into one of the world’s largest energy storage devices—in effect, a battery that can power a medium-size city—are hidden in a cathedral-size cavern deep inside the mountain. But what enables the mountain to store all that energy is plain in an aerial photo. The summit plateau is occupied by a large lake that hangs high above the Tennessee River, so close it looks like it might fall in. Almost half a century ago, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the region’s federally owned electric utility, built the lake and blasted out the cavern as well as a 329-me...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 25, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

With just weeks to live, these marsupials prioritize sex over sleep
If you only had 3 weeks left to live, what would you do? For a fuzzy little Australian marsupial, the answer is clear: Have as much sex as possible—even at the cost of sleep. During the single mating season that caps off the brief life span of a male antechinus (pictured above), these animals forgo shuteye to carve out more time for lovemaking , researchers report today in Current Biology . The work starkly illustrates “the trade-offs animals have to make between sleeping and doing something more directly related to survival [of the species],” says Paul-Antoine Libourel, an ecophysiologist a...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 25, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Watch a robot dinosaur hunt insects —and possibly reveal the purpose of early wings
Many species of dinosaur evolved wings long before they used them to fly. Scientists have speculated that these early structures may have helped the animals do everything from attract mates to protect hatchlings . But a robot dinosaur developed by researchers in South Korea suggests a far different purpose. “Robopteryx” is a peacock-size machine with paper wings modeled after Caudipteryx , a winged, flightless dino that lived 124 million years ago. Researchers hypothesize that Caudipteryx ’s wings, too weak to take it skyward, were used to help it hunt. Its feathers were ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 25, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Open-access papers draw more citations from a broader readership
For two decades, advocates of open access in scientific publishing have offered a fundamental justification: Making papers immediately free for anyone to read would speed the dissemination of findings and accelerate research progress. Now, after years of little conclusive evidence to support these assertions, researchers report that open-access papers have a greater reach than paywalled ones in two key ways : They attract more total citations, and those citations come from scholars in a wider range of locations, institutions, and fields of research. The study also reports a “citation diversity a...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 24, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Plan to allow wolf hunting in Europe to spare livestock could backfire, some scientists say
Far from being confined to folk tales, wolves in Europe are startlingly plentiful today. Now, governments want to reduce the numbers to protect livestock, sparking debate—with scientists caught in the fray. Late last month, the European Commission released a proposal to weaken protections for wolves living in the 27 nations of the European Union, drawing criticism from environmental groups. Just days later, environmentalists persuaded a court in Switzerland, which is not a member of the EU, to partially block a new government plan to kill up to 70% of the nation’s wolf population. After centuries of hunting...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 24, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Zapping ‘red mud’ in plasma turns mine waste into valuable iron
Over the years, mining for aluminum has left behind billions of tons of the caustic sludge called red mud. But today in Nature , scientists report that a simple chemical process can extract another useful metal, iron, from this waste and render the remainder into a mostly benign substance useful for making concrete. If the process can be scaled up and proves cost-effective, it could help manufacturers convert waste into climate-friendlier steel, the researchers say. “Very promising,” is how Yiannis Pontikes, a mechanical engineer at KU Leuven, describes the speed of the reactions and the purit...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - January 24, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research