On August 2, 1993, Apple launched the Newton MessagePad 1001 at Macworld Expo, the first product in the Newton line of PDAs.
(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)
On August 1, 1989, Apple introduced the Mac SE FDHD, which came with a versatile new SuperDrive capable of storing a massive 1.4MB of data.
(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)
New research has revealed the complex biological history preserved in DNA traces on the Shroud of Turin. Fibers taken from the Shroud of Turin nearly five decades ago still contain a complex record of biological material accumulated over centuries. In research published in Scientific Reports, scientists applied advanced genomic sequencing (rigorous PCR-free next-generation metagenomic sequencing) [...]On July 31, 2012, News Corp's "The Daily," the world's first iPad-only newspaper, axed almost a third of its staff of 170 employees.
(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)
In recent years, advances in ancient DNA sequencing have redefined our understanding of human evolution, revealing that our species did not emerge in isolation but repeatedly interbred with close evolutionary relatives like Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Yet one of the field’s greatest mysteries has remained unanswered: What if some of our ancestors also encountered extinct human groups whose DNA has never been recovered from fossils? Now, a recent study published in Science suggests researchers may finally have found a way to detect those long-lost relatives.
Instead of relying on ancient bones or preserved genomes, researchers developed a powerful computational approach capable of identifying genetic traces of previously unknown archaic humans using only the genomes of living people.
Applying the technique to modern populations around the world, the researchers uncovered evidence that an unidentified “ghost” hominin contributed DNA to the ancestors of all living humans before the great migration out of Africa.
Researchers also found new evidence providing evidence for the existence of an even older “super-archaic” human lineage whose genetic legacy may survive today through Denisovan ancestry in Oceania.
“Admixture between modern humans and extinct hominins has shaped the genomes of present-day individuals, but reconstructing this history has been constrained by the scarcity of archaic samples and unadmixed outgroup populations,” researchers write. “We introduce TRACE, a reference- and outgroup-free approach that uses features of ancestral recombination graphs to identify archaic ancestry.”
Past research has sequenced only a handful of high-quality archaic human genomes, all from Eurasia. While those genomes have revealed that most people outside Africa carry roughly 1 to 2 percent Neanderthal DNA and that many Asian and Oceanian populations also inherited Denisovan ancestry, scientists have long suspected those known groups represented only part of humanity’s evolutionary history.
Previous genetic studies had hinted that modern humans, especially African populations, contained fragments of DNA from unidentified archaic relatives. However, because no fossil genomes exist for those populations, proving their existence has been extraordinarily difficult.
The new method, called TRACE, short for “TRacking Archaic Contributions via ARG Estimation,” takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than comparing modern DNA against known Neanderthal or Denisovan genomes, it reconstructs ancestral recombination graphs. These enormous evolutionary family trees trace how pieces of DNA have been inherited over hundreds of thousands of years.
These ancestral graphs preserve signatures left behind when deeply divergent human lineages interbred. Such events create unusually long branches and distinctive genetic patterns that can persist in descendants for hundreds of thousands of years. By searching for those signatures, TRACE can identify archaic ancestry even when no reference genome exists.
To test the system, the researchers first ran extensive computer simulations modeling ancient human populations and known episodes of Neanderthal interbreeding. The method consistently revealed high accuracy while producing very low false-positive rates.
The team then applied TRACE to genomes from the 1000 Genomes Project, encompassing hundreds of individuals representing populations across Africa, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.
The program successfully recovered well-established Neanderthal ancestry in Europeans and Asians, along with Denisovan ancestry concentrated primarily in Asian populations. More intriguing, however, was the discovery of an additional category of DNA that matched neither Neanderthals nor Denisovans.
TRACE identified between roughly 0.5 and 1.1 percent “ghost” ancestry across all modern populations examined. The genetic evidence suggests these segments originated from an unknown archaic human lineage that diverged from our ancestors roughly 830,000 years ago, before later contributing DNA to the ancestors of modern humans.
Perhaps most surprising was where that ancestry appeared.
Rather than being confined to African populations, as several earlier hypotheses proposed, the researchers found remarkably similar ghost ancestry in both Africans and non-Africans.
Most of the segments detected outside Africa were shared with African populations, suggesting the interbreeding event occurred before modern humans started dispersing across the globe roughly 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.
The findings point toward a previously unrecognized chapter of human evolution in which an unidentified human population mixed with the common ancestors of everyone alive today.
The researchers also explored where these ancient genetic fragments survive in the modern genome.
They found ghost ancestry spread across more than 70 percent of the accessible human genome, although it was far from evenly distributed. Some regions contained unusually high concentrations of ghost DNA, including genes involved in immune function and metabolism.
Even more unexpectedly, ghost ancestry persisted inside genomic regions previously believed to be largely devoid of archaic DNA.
These regions, known as “Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry deserts,” have often been interpreted as places where natural selection eliminated archaic genetic variants because uniquely modern human versions proved advantageous.
The presence of ghost ancestry inside many of those same regions suggests the story may be more complicated. Rather than rejecting all archaic DNA equally, natural selection may have acted differently depending on which ancient human lineage contributed the genes.
The study also ventured even farther back in evolutionary time.
Focusing on genomes from Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and the Santa Cruz Islands, the researchers searched for evidence of “super-archaic” ancestry—genetic contributions from a lineage that diverged long before Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans separated.
Previous studies had suggested Denisovans themselves may have inherited DNA from such an ancient population. TRACE now provides additional support for that hypothesis.
The team identified deeply divergent genetic segments embedded explicitly within Denisovan-derived DNA in Oceanian populations. Based on their analyses, those ancient lineages may have split from the ancestors of modern humans approximately 1.77 million years ago.
While the researchers stress this represents a conservative estimate of surviving super-archaic ancestry, the findings strengthen the idea that modern humans indirectly inherited DNA from a much older human lineage through Denisovan interbreeding.
The identity of both the ghost lineage and the super-archaic population remains unknown.
The ghost population may represent Middle Pleistocene human groups or African populations of Homo heidelbergensis that encountered the ancestors of modern humans before the Out-of-Africa migration. For the older super-archaic lineage, the researchers note that Homo erectus remains one plausible candidate given its estimated divergence time and broad geographic distribution.
Although the new method cannot yet identify specific fossil species, it provides researchers with an entirely new tool for investigating chapters of human evolution that may never yield recoverable ancient DNA.
Because DNA older than roughly one million years is extraordinarily unlikely to survive outside permanently frozen environments, computational approaches like TRACE are becoming increasingly important for reconstructing humanity’s deepest evolutionary history.
“We find evidence for at least one ghost introgression predating the OOA expansion that contributed ancestry to all present-day populations,” researchers write. “These results point to multiple layers of introgression—both direct and mediated through other archaic groups—shaping modern human genomes.”
The study, “Recovering signatures of archaic hominin introgression using ancestral recombination graphs,” was published in the journal Science.
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
Laser scans revealed a Roman stronghold overlooking the battlefield where an Alpine people lost their freedom.On July 30, 1979, Apple engineers began work on the Lisa, the first computer in company history to come with a graphical interface and mouse.
(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)
Beneath the seemingly unbroken canopy of the southwestern Amazon rainforest lies evidence of one of the largest monumental landscapes ever discovered in the ancient Americas.
According to new research published in Nature, what archaeologists once believed were scattered ceremonial sites are instead part of an enormous precolonial civilization that may have changed vast stretches of the Amazon nearly 2,000 years ago.
Using airborne LiDAR capable of penetrating forest cover, an international team of researchers says they have identified hundreds of previously unknown earthworks, estimating that more than 20,000, and perhaps as many as 30,000, remain spread across southwestern Amazonia.
The findings dramatically expand the known scale of the so-called Aquiry civilization and suggest that millions may have inhabited the region during its peak nearly 2,000 years ago, forcing a reconsideration of how densely populated and intensively managed the ancient Amazon may have been.
“We also propose that the total human population of the area in 100–300 AD was 1.25–3 million people,” researchers write. “If similar results are found elsewhere in Amazonia, the total precolonial population density and its effect on the current Amazonian soil and forest structure, biodiversity, and even some modeling of the global climate should be re-evaluated.”
The study represents one of the most ambitious archaeological surveys ever conducted in the Amazon. Researchers flew more than 2,700 miles across the forests of Brazil’s Acre and Amazonas states using airborne LiDAR, a laser-mapping technology able to see through gaps in the dense treetops to produce detailed maps of the landscape below. Those maps revealed hundreds of geometric earthworks that had remained hidden for centuries.
The newly discovered structures include squares, circles, rectangles, and multilateral enclosures connected by roads and clustered into monumental complexes.
Some feature ditches up to 43 feet wide and more than 16 feet deep, with towering earthen embankments rising alongside them. Although a handful of these earthworks had previously been identified in deforested areas using satellite imagery, LiDAR revealed that those earlier surveys had dramatically underestimated just how many remained obscured beneath the forest.
One of the study’s most striking findings was that LiDAR scanning uncovered roughly five times more earthworks than satellite imagery had detected across the same landscapes.
In one survey block, researchers had previously identified only 30 structures using conventional imagery. Meanwhile, LiDAR revealed 156. Assuming similar results across the wider region suggests that between roughly 24,000 and 30,000 earthworks may exist within the estimated boundaries of the Aquiry civilization.
Those numbers alone would rank the region among the most monument-rich archaeological landscapes in the world.
For decades, archaeologists have debated whether much of Amazonia could have maintained large, complex societies before European contact. Prevailing interpretations portrayed much of the rainforest as environmentally limiting, capable of sustaining only relatively small and dispersed populations. However, more recent discoveries, including ancient cities in Bolivia and Ecuador, have steadily challenged that assumption.
Now, these latest findings suggest the region may have supported an even larger and more sophisticated society than researchers once imagined.
Rather than representing isolated ceremonial sites scattered through an otherwise untouched forest, the researchers argue the earthworks belonged to a civilization extending about 71,000 square miles, representing about three times larger than previous estimates of the Aquiry cultural area.
Many of the geometric enclosures appear not to have been permanent settlements themselves. Instead, researchers believe they served as ceremonial, political, and public gathering places where dispersed communities periodically assembled.
Similar patterns of temporary gathering centers are known from the Inca Empire, where populations converged for rituals, governance, and communal events despite living across broad landscapes.
Constructing these massive earthworks would have demanded sophisticated planning, organized labor, mathematical knowledge, and long-term social coordination. According to the study, some of these ceremonial centers remained in use for nearly 1,500 years, indicating remarkable cultural continuity across generations.
Estimating how many people actually lived within this landscape presented a separate challenge.
Rather than simply multiplying earthworks by a fixed population estimate, the researchers combined several independent lines of evidence. They examined radiocarbon dates to determine how many sites were occupied simultaneously, compared the earthworks with later mound villages built in the same region, incorporated ethnographic information from Indigenous communities, and evaluated the labor required to construct and maintain the monumental enclosures.
Their study indicates the civilization reached its greatest extent between approximately A.D. 100 and 300. During that period, somewhere between one-quarter and roughly 60 percent of the known ceremonial centers may have been active simultaneously.
Assuming each ceremonial center served communities of roughly 300 people, the researchers estimate the region’s population reached between about 1.25 and 3 million people during its peak. After accounting for earthworks that LiDAR may have missed beneath dense forest, they conclude the total could have been as high as 3.8 million.
Those estimates substantially exceed many previous reconstructions of southwestern Amazonia and imply population densities rivaling or exceeding some later historical agricultural societies.
Equally significant is what these discoveries reveal about how ancient Amazonians altered their environment.
The study points to fertile soils rich in nutrients, evidence of extensive cultivation of maize, squash, manioc, beans, peanuts, sweet potatoes, and chili peppers, as well as widespread management of Brazil nut groves and numerous economically important palm species.
Rather than exhausting the rainforest, researchers contend these communities actively managed forests, soils, and waterways throughout centuries, creating ecological legacies that remain visible today in the composition and biodiversity of Amazonian forests.
Present-day ecological studies have increasingly shown that many Amazonian forests long regarded as pristine wilderness actually bear the imprint of thousands of years of Indigenous landscape management. If similar densities of monumental earthworks are identified elsewhere across Amazonia, researchers argue that assumptions about precolonial population sizes, biodiversity patterns, soil formation, and even climate models may need substantial revision.
The work additionally underscores the key role of LiDAR in modern archaeology. Over the past decade, the technology has revealed hidden Maya cities beneath Central American jungles, extensive urban complexes in the Bolivian Amazon, and extensive settlements in Ecuador’s Upano Valley.
Nevertheless, researchers caution that important questions remain unanswered. The southeastern limits of the Aquiry civilization are still poorly understood because large portions of Rondônia have yet to receive comparable archaeological investigation. Dense vegetation also continues to obscure portions of the landscape, meaning many earthworks almost certainly remain undiscovered even after LiDAR surveys.
“These ancient achievements constitute an important legacy that is still observable in the soil, and the composition and biodiversity of the contemporary tropical forest,” researchers write. “This legacy should be fully considered in future studies of Amazonia, including climate modeling and sustainable land-use planning.”
The recent study, “Over 20,000 precolonial earthworks in the Southwest Amazonia,” by Martti Pärssinen et al., appeared in Nature.
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
Analysis of fallout debris caused by the World War II atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6th, 1945, has revealed that the event led to entirely new mineralogical and metallurgical phases that created a previously unidentified multicomponent metallic alloy that cannot be produced under ordinary conditions.
The Università degli Studi di Firenze researchers behind the new analysis said that understanding the hiroshimites, the name scientists have given to these unique materials, could offer unique insights into the types of natural events that can also create novel forms of matter. The researchers also note that the explosion site provides researchers with a natural laboratory to study the effects of natural and human-made high-energy events.
In a newly published study, Professor Luca Bindi from the university’s Department of Earth Science and colleagues explain that high-energy events like the nuclear explosions that ended World War II generate brief, transient physicochemical environments “comparable in nature to hypervelocity planetary collisions, meteor impacts, and lightning strikes.”
Like nuclear explosions, such naturally occurring events produce extreme temperatures, rapid fluctuations in ambient pressure, and the rapid vaporization of “heterogeneous materials.” These transient environments are followed by a rapid condensation of melts and aerosols generated by expanding fireballs.
The study authors note that these types of extreme environments “can form mineralogical and metallurgical phases that cannot be produced under ordinary conditions.” This includes the Hiroshima bombing, which generated a large nuclear ‘airburst’ over a large urban environment filled with several categories of human-made materials.
“The detonation produced a fireball reaching temperatures exceeding 7000°C within seconds, entraining and vaporizing building materials, soils, metals, glass, and water into a turbulent plasma cloud,” the study authors explain.
More recently, scientists have shown that the event created an abundance of micrometer-to-millimeter-scale “fallout debris” that has remained preserved in beach sands of Hiroshima Bay.
Before their examination, the researchers noted that previous microanalytical studies of many of the glasses produced during the World War II Hiroshima explosion are dominated by calcium-aluminum-silicon compositions, with microcrystalline traces of mullite and anorthite. The authors said this combination implies that they were formed at “temperatures exceeding ∼1800°C.” Additional analyses confirmed the hiroshimites condensed from a vapor during “rapid cooling” of the fireball.
“Together, these findings established that the Hiroshima explosion produced a previously unrecognized class of anthropogenic high-temperature condensates formed under near-atmospheric pressure but extreme thermal and redox gradients,” they write.
Still, they also suspected that such fireball conditions capable of producing silicates could also produce “chemically complex metallic phases.”
For example, multi-component alloys made from five or more principal metallic elements are typically made through a complex process of controlled melting and solidification. However, they note that the complex process fundamentally requires extreme mixing, high temperatures, and rapid quenching, “conditions that arise during meteorite impacts and in nuclear fireballs.”
At Hiroshima, the explosion vaporized structural steels, aluminum alloys, copper-bearing components, and other industrial metals. In theory, the team said that the formation of such metallic alloys “becomes plausible” under the extreme conditions experienced during the explosion
“Unlike conventional metallurgical environments, such a system would permit stochastic
atomic mixing of diverse metallic species (usually not present in common stainless steels) before rapid solidification, potentially stabilizing metastable phases,” they explain.
To test the theory, the study authors examined several hiroshimite samples they suspected may contain complex metallurgical alloys. As hoped, the team successfully identified a sample containing many micrometer-sized metallic fragments. A closer examination revealed the fragments were an alloy of Iron and Chromium. When the team examined these fragments, they found what they termed a “previously undocumented multicomponent alloy particle.”
“The alloy occurs within the same sedimentary units in Hiroshima Bay as the previously described silicate condensates and exhibits microstructural and compositional characteristics consistent with rapid condensation and quenching from a multielement metallic vapor,” they write.
When discussing the scientific significance of the finding, the researchers said their work “expands the known spectrum of materials generated by nuclear detonations.” They also note that the study supports the idea that human-made (anthropogenic) plasma events “can produce complex metallic phases in natural settings.”
“[Hiroshima] provides a unique natural laboratory for studying rapid alloy nucleation under extreme nonequilibrium conditions.”
The study “Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast” was published in Science Advances.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org
The animals’ energy needs favor a higher but shorter route into Italy.On July 29, 1993, Apple released the Macintosh Centris 660av. The Mac came with PlainTalk, Apple's first software that recognized speech.
(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)
For more than two millennia, astronomers have puzzled over a stellar mystery recorded by some of history’s greatest skywatchers. Hipparchus, Ptolemy, and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi—all separated by more than 1,000 years—each described Theta Eridani as one of the brightest stars in the night sky. Yet today, the previously celebrated star barely ranks among the more noticeable stars visible to the naked eye.
A new astronomical study published on arXiv suggests that those ancient observers may have unknowingly recorded an extraordinarily rare stellar event. The star system remained dramatically brighter than normal for roughly a millennium before fading back to its present appearance sometime between the 10th and 16th centuries.
If confirmed, the finding would be among the longest-lived stellar transients ever proposed, fusing modern astrophysics with historical astronomy to reconstruct an event spanning centuries rather than days or months.
The study combines historical star catalogs with state-of-the-art observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), high-definition spectroscopy, and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
Together, those observations allowed the researchers to reconstruct the architecture and evolutionary state of the Theta Eridani system and to propose a physical mechanism that could explain its mysterious ancient brilliance.
“The remarkable combination of orbital and stellar parameters hints that the historical brightening of Theta Eridani was due to a millenary transient phase,” researchers write. “This strengthens the case that the apparent brightening was real and not due to an error by three different ancient observers, as has been commonly claimed in the past.”
Today, Theta Eridani, also known by its traditional name Acamar, shines at approximately magnitude 2.9, making it a respectable but hardly spectacular star marking the end of the constellation Eridanus. Yet ancient records tell a very different story.
Hipparchus described it as an exceptionally bright star around 129 BC. Roughly 250 years later, Ptolemy ranked it among only fifteen first-magnitude stars in the Almagest, effectively placing it among the thirteen brightest stars visible in the night sky.
More than 800 years afterward, the Persian astronomer al-Sufi independently retained that same first-magnitude classification while revising the brightness estimates of many other stars toward values that closely match modern observations.
The sharp contrast between the historical accounts and Theta Eridani’s modest appearance today has made the star one of astronomy’s most enduring and compelling mysteries.
Researchers examined long-standing alternative explanations, including simple observational mistakes, copyist errors in ancient manuscripts, confusion with the much brighter star Achernar farther south, and even errors caused by atmospheric extinction near the horizon. One by one, they argue the evidence weighs against those explanations.
Theta Eridani would not even have been visible to the Greek and Arab astronomers because of Earth’s changing orientation over time. Likewise, statistical analyses of nearly 1,000 stars contained in the Almagest show that Theta Eridani represents the single largest discrepancy between ancient and modern brightness estimates, rather than part of a wider systematic mistake.
The historical trail eventually changes around the dawn of the Age of Exploration. By the late 1500s and early 1600s, after European navigators began mapping the southern skies, star catalogs consistently described Theta Eridani as only a third-magnitude star—essentially the same brightness observed today.
That suggests the bright phase had already ended.
To investigate whether Theta Eridani itself could plausibly have undergone such a transformation, the team turned to modern astronomical observations.
Rather than a single star, Theta Eridani consists of three stars. The primary component itself is a remarkably tight binary whose two stars orbit one another every 4.1077 days at a separation of just 0.083 astronomical units—roughly one-fifth the distance between Mercury and the Sun.
Using interferometric measurements from the VLTI, together with spectroscopy and precision photometry from TESS, the researchers determined that the two stars each contain just over twice the Sun’s mass and have swollen to approximately 4.3 and 4.0 solar radii.
Those enlarged sizes are significant because both stars have expanded to nearly 80 percent of the volume where gravity from one star begins pulling material toward the other, a region around a star in a binary system known as the Roche lobes. The close gravitational interaction also produces measurable ellipsoidal distortions that TESS detects as subtle, rhythmic brightness variations every orbit.
Researchers’ evolutionary modeling further revealed that the primary star occupies an unusually brief stage within stellar evolution, having only recently exhausted hydrogen in its core and begun transitioning into a subgiant. That evolutionary timing may be critical.
According to the researchers, Theta Eridani may once have possessed a much more elongated orbit. As the primary expanded, it could have begun overflowing its Roche lobe during each close approach, transferring material toward its companion and possibly generating an extended common envelope surrounding both stars.
Unlike the violent stellar explosions astronomers typically classify as transients, this proposed event would have evolved extraordinarily slowly. Instead of lasting weeks or years, the researchers suggest the envelope may have persisted for roughly a thousand years while gradually extracting orbital energy from the binary.
Because the surrounding envelope would have remained optically thick, it could have radiated from an area far larger than either star individually, making the entire system appear nearly ten times brighter than it does today.
Researchers’ calculations suggest that such an envelope could have reached roughly 20 times the Sun’s radius while needing only a tiny amount of encircling material, because that material would be continually replenished and slowly ejected over hundreds of thousands of orbits.
Importantly, researchers stress that this is still a proposed physical explanation rather than a demonstrated one. Modeling the detailed hydrodynamics of eccentric mass transfer and long-lived common envelopes remains beyond the scope of the current work.
Nevertheless, they argue that the unusual combination of orbital geometry, stellar evolution, and historical observations makes the scenario physically plausible.
The study of Theta Eridani also raises wider implications for time-based astronomy.
Modern astronomical surveys are exceptionally good at finding dramatic events that unfold over minutes, days, or years. A stellar brightening lasting centuries, or even a millennium, would be almost impossible to recognize within a human lifetime. Researchers suggest there may be other long-duration stellar transients hidden among ordinary-looking stars whose histories have been forgotten.
If their interpretation proves correct, some of humanity’s earliest astronomers may have unknowingly documented one of the most unusual stellar phenomena ever proposed—not an exploding star, but a binary system trapped in an exceptionally slow evolutionary episode which lit up the night sky for generations before quietly receding into obscurity.
“Although modern photometric surveys have had an observational coverage of a few years to a few decades rather than two millennia like Theta Eridani, they are sensitive to objects up to 14 magnitudes fainter than the naked eye limit,” researchers write. “Therefore, there could be unexplored or unexplained Theta Eridani-like transients that either brightened or faded in current data.”
The team’s new study, The Forgotten Bright Star: Theta Eridani as a Millenary Stellar Transient Observed by Hipparchus, Ptolemy and al-Sufi, is currently available on the arXiv.org preprint server.
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
The Israeli Antiquities Authority has announced the accidental discovery of a rare, 2500-year-old coin at one of the Ashdod beaches during a routine search for missing objects lost by beachgoers, such as car keys.
Authorities said that the ancient coin, which was made in Cyprus, is the first of its kind ever found in Israel, offering researchers a reliable historical source of information on maritime economic and trade activities in the region during this period.
According to a statement emailed to The Debrief, one of the informal everyday duties of the deputy director of the Ashdod Beaches Department is helping locals and out-of-town visitors locate lost items. While these searches typically involve beachfront hunts for jewelry, car keys, and other modern-day items, a recent search led by the current office holder, Avi Chaprak, led to a historic discovery.
According to Chaprak, when he spotted the coin, he noticed it was completely different from other items he was typically tasked with tracking down. Since antiquities laws require such historic items to be handed over, the deputy director immediately passed the unusual-looking coin to the Israeli Antiquities Authority.
After the IAA’s coin department analyzed the coin, they informed Chaprak just how unusual the coin was. First, they explained, the coin was minted in the ancient Cypriot city of Salamis in the mid-5th century BCE. This date is significant since the coin was made during a time when the Persian Empire ruled the island.
Second, the 11-gram standard coin, known at the time as a “Siglos,” was the first of its kind ever discovered on Israeli soil. The researchers said the first clue hinting at the coin’s origin was its material composition.
“At first glance, it looked to be made of silver,” explained Yanniv David Levy, Researcher and Curator in the Israel Antiquities Authority Coin Department, “but a closer examination showed it to actually be of metal that was only plated with silver; a known phenomenon in Cypriot silver coins from this period, given the shortage of silver on the island.”
A closer examination revealed that one side of the coin depicted a left-facing “recumbent” ram. The other side depicts a left-facing ram head placed within a sunken square frame. Next to the framed ram head is a vertical laurel branch with three symbols below it. The IAA statement said these symbols were “apparently of the Cypriot syllabic script.”
When discussing the historical significance and scientific value of Deputy Director Chaprak’s fortuitous discovery, Levy highlighted two points. First, the researcher said that Persian Empire period coins of this size and value “are rare altogether in the archaeological record.”
“Usually, silver coins of this size were not preserved intact,” Levy explained. “Over time, they were cut into small pieces, for use as local trade currency.”
The research also notes that evidence for this use of ancient silver Cypriot coins is “mainly from inland states in Israel.” As a result, Levy said that discovering a complete Cypriot coin from the coastal area is “unusual on all accounts, and of special historical importance.”
Dr. Evangeline Markou, a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Historical Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation, and a respected authority on ancient Cypriot coinage, agreed. For example, the researcher said, although 2500-year-old Salamis coins were circulating throughout the eastern Mediterranean, “finds with an exact provenance are rarer.”
“Therefore, this coin potentially offers significant information about trade ties and movement between Cyprus and the Land of Israel during this period,” Dr. Markou explained.
Along with recognition from the media and his colleagues, the IAA’s Coin Department awarded Chaprak with a certificate of appreciation for reporting the coin and delivering it to them. When asked about his role in the historic coin’s discovery, Chaprak said he felt privileged to do his part, while also noting how his own beliefs made the next steps after the discovery obvious.
“For me, it was clear that the coin belonged to our collective heritage, he said. “If through this act I contributed another small piece towards the research and history of the Land of Israel, then that is a great honor for me.”
Levy also highlighted the significance of Chaprak’s discovery and timely delivery of the 2500-year-old coin, noting how it helped preserve the object’s scientific and historical value.
“The circumstances of the discovery and the accurate reporting allow us researchers, not only to identify the coin itself, but also to use it as a reliable source of information about economic and maritime ties that existed in this region some 2500 years ago,” the IAA researcher concluded.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org
On July 28, 2012, Apple acquired biometric authentication company AuthenTec. This gave Apple tech that would power Touch ID and Apple Pay.
(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)
New analysis of dust deposits left after the massive asteroid hit Earth around 66 million years ago suggests the event created a thick, worldwide dust blanket that drove heat down toward the planet’s surface, resulting in global wildfires.
The researchers behind the new study said the evidence for a post-impact dust blanket and resulting heat wave adds new fuel to the debate about what role, if any, the Chicxulub asteroid played in their extinction, by suggesting most unsheltered animals would have died instantly.
While scientists agree that a massive chunk of space rock slammed into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, they have continued to debate the event’s impact on the end of the dinosaurs‘ reign. Still, the timing of the two events, and the evidence for a mass extinction of animals incapable of seeking the necessary shelter to survive the asteroid’s impact, has led most to connect the two events to some degree.
Further studies of the impact have shown that the event’s immense heat and pressure vaporized a massive amount of rock, resulting in a huge cloud of dust and rock vapor high into the Earth’s atmosphere. As some of that dust condensed into tiny rock ‘spherules’ and slammed back into the surface, the friction between them and the air generated a corresponding heat pulse.
According to the authors of the new study, many theories suggested that this heat pulse acted like a planetary-wide broiler, including “radiating enough heat to sizzle thin-skinned animals without shelter,” but not enough for plants to suddenly burst into flames. The team said that this result temporarily caused researchers to move away from the idea that the immediate impact event caused the dinosaur’s extinction rather than a longer, more drawn-out event.
Now, after years of new ideas, the team said that a 2023 discovery once again changed the debate, leading to their new proposal.
According to the team’s statement, the 2023 discovery involved a layer of “extremely fine post-impact dust” that could have formed from rock vapor that did not condense into spherules.
“It reinvigorated my interest in what happened to the leftover vapor,” explained Brandon Johnson, a planetary scientist at Purdue University and lead author of the study detailing the new theory, “that’s where this work started.”
To determine what effect such a post-impact dust layer might have had on dinosaurs and other terrestrial animals, the team plugged the new data into previous simulations of the Chicxulub event. Johnson and colleagues especially wanted to know how the dust layer would boost Earth’s retention and release of heat energy generated by the falling rock spherules.
After running several simulations, the team determined that the dust layer would have increased the surface heat by 3.5 times compared to an event that only included the falling spherules. Unlike earlier models, this new version with the dust layer included showed that the heat pulse would have been enough to “kill animals and start spontaneous forest fires.”
“We’re in the realm where we might be essentially killing off everything within that first hour or two,” Johnson explained.
Notably, the researcher said his team’s concept is not unlike alternative extinction theories that credit a global post-impact winter for the eventual mass extinction of dinosaurs and other lifeforms.
“It seems counterintuitive,” Johnson said, “but actually it’s the same effect.”
The research compared the idea to how an insulated mug can keep hot coffee hot and iced coffee cold.
“Once the spherules finished falling and the fires petered out, massive dust clouds could have blocked warmth from the Sun for years to decades and caused a global winter,” the authors explained.
When discussing how the team’s findings might affect the ongoing debate about dinosaur extinction, Johnson said the work seems to offer strong support to the impact extinction theory.
“This work of ours supports this idea that it really is the impact that was devastating to terrestrial life and caused the mass extinction,” the researcher explained.
Although the team suspects that the global fires caused by the dust amplified the heat wave, they point out that a more complete geological record would likely be needed to provide confirmation. Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist at University College London who was not involved with this study, said researchers could find a record of global wildfires, but “we just don’t have it so far.”
“It would be great to figure out which animals survived right at the impact and what their biological features were,” Chiarenza added. “This could finally tell us why some animals made it when others, like the dinosaurs, didn’t.”
The study “Heat and wildfires during the K-Pg mass extinction enhanced by fine dust” was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org
A new analysis of a set of 1.4-million-year-old fossilized footprints found along the shore of an ancient Kenyan lake revealed that the hominins responsible for leaving them were much larger than previously believed, with some specimens approaching the height and body size of modern humans.
The new analysis also determined that discovering a group of footprints belonging to eight different adult males from distant human ‘cousin’ species Paranthropus boisei walking together suggests a complex societal dynamic where males likely competed for females but also worked together for the group’s benefit.
According to a statement announcing the new fossilized footprint analysis, the team behind the research had previously “pioneered” methods allowing science to accurately identify the footprints as belonging to Paranthropus boisei in 2024.
However, lead author Kevin Hatala, of Chatham University and an associated researcher of the Department of Human Origins at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, said the new approach, which analyzes foot anatomy and movement patterns based on the fossilized footprints, revealed much larger individuals than expected.
“The sizes of the footprints indicate human-like body sizes – up to 1.8 meters tall and around 75 kilograms”, Hatala said, noting that scientists studying the rare fossils available for Paranthropus boisei had previously assumed the species was much smaller than the modern human ancestor and contemporary hominin, Homo erectus.
For example, the researchers explain, the “overwhelming majority” of previously identified Paranthropus boisei fossils were skulls with massive jaws and teeth. However, they add, little is known about this ancient hominin’s anatomy from the neck down.
Although indirect evidence compared to actual bones, the team notes that fossilized footprints form “very quickly.” This rapid formation helps preserve critical movement and anatomy data that the team notes “can be a useful window into hominin behavior and group dynamics.”
“The fact that eight, mostly adult male, Paranthropus boisei individuals seemingly traveled together as a group, without females or children, hints at a complex social structure in this species”, explained study co-author Neil Roach of Harvard University.
For example, Roach said the ancient footprint makers may have lived in large groups, “where males competed for mates.” However, he notes, the same footprints suggest these competing males “also tolerated each other at times for safety in a dangerous environment.”
“This discovery adds an important behavioral dimension to the fossil record of Paranthropus boisei, a species that lived alongside early members of the genus Homo, yet took a different evolutionary path,” they explain.
Although the study focused on the 1.4-million-year-old footprints found on the shore of an ancient Kenyan lake, the work joins a growing catalog of ancient hominin footprints left on equally ancient lake shores. To date, the team has documented hundreds of hominin footprints across more than a half-dozen sites in the local region.
When discussing the significance of their findings, the team noted that these 1.4-million-year-old footprints join this larger group in supporting ancient lakes as an “important habitat with critical resources” that our now-extinct relatives relied on for survival. Study co-author Kay Behrensmeyer of the Smithsonian Institution also highlighted the unexpected nature of the discovery of ancient footprint fossils so close to others from a similarly ancient time.
“To me, it is amazing that we have the same kind of lake margin deposits in two areas of East Turkana that are 40 kilometers apart, at about the same age”, the researcher explained.
Study co-author Anna K. Behrensmeyer from the Department of Paleobiology and Human Origins Program, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, said understanding the environment and local conditions when the footprints were left could fill in even more missing pieces about this enigmatic ancient hominin.
“If we can understand what geological conditions allowed these tracks to be preserved, we should know more about why hominins continued to return to the lake shore environment over more than 100,000 years,” Behrensmeyer said.
When detailing the significance of the new analysis, study co-author Purity Kiura of the National Museums of Kenya said finding these fossilized prints along the margins of Lake Turkana “reinforces the region’s global importance in understanding human evolution, preserving remarkable evidence of how our ancient relatives lived 1.4 million years ago.”
“It further strengthens Kenya’s position as one of the world’s leading paleoanthropological landscapes and highlights our responsibility to protect this irreplaceable heritage,” Kiura added.
From a methodology standpoint, the team noted the benefit of combining new analytical approaches with “exceptional” fossil footprints. They also point out that ancient tracks like the 1.4 million-year-old footprints found in Kenya “can reveal the anatomy and movement of extinct human relatives, while also providing rare insights into their social lives and environments.”
To follow up on their findings, the research team said they plan to return to Kenya later this year and conduct more analysis of the footprints. According to Hatala, this work will help archaeologists and anthropologists fill in missing pieces of hominin history, especially those extinct branches of the evolutionary tree.
“Each site represents a snapshot of our past, and we are quickly building a photo album with several different windows to hominin anatomy, locomotion, behavior, and environments during the Early Pleistocene,” the researcher explained.
The study “Insights into hominin body size, locomotion, and behavior from Early Pleistocene trackways in northern Kenya” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org
On July 27, 1955, Joanna Hoffman, a marketing executive who will become Steve Jobs' first right-hand woman, was born in Poland.
(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)
On July 26, 2005, Apple debuted the final iBook before switching to the MacBook product line. Here's a look at the opaque white iBook G4.
(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)
A newly published study reports that tropical cyclones were far more common during the Late Paleozoic Ice Age than many climate reconstructions have suggested. Led by Yan, Macarewich, Jiang, and colleagues, the work appears in Nature Communications (2026) and reframes how Earth’s cold interval coexisted with warm-water storm systems.
The researchers investigated geological signatures linked to extreme marine events, combining stratigraphic evidence with climate-model constraints. Their goal was to distinguish ordinary seasonal variability from the kind of widespread, repeated disturbances that characterize tropical cyclone belts.
A key technical advance in the study is the integration of paleoclimate boundary conditions with storm-resolving dynamical reasoning. Instead of treating cyclone activity as a simple function of temperature alone, the team considered large-scale patterns that govern where warm oceans can persist long enough to power rotating storms.
The results point to an expanded region of conditions favorable for cyclogenesis. Even though the planet was globally in an ice-age mode, ocean–atmosphere coupling—driven by uneven heat storage, changing circulation, and shifting storm tracks—likely enabled tropical systems to form across parts of the tropics more frequently than expected.
The authors describe “widespread” activity, implying that cyclone impacts were not limited to rare episodes. This interpretation aligns with the idea that cooling did not fully suppress tropical cyclone energetics; rather, it altered the geography and intensity distribution of storm-prone environments.
Using the preserved sedimentary record, the study connects storm activity to repeated depositional pulses. Those pulses, they argue, reflect basin-scale disturbance rather than local weather anomalies, strengthening the case for frequent tropical cyclone events during this interval.
From a broader perspective, the findings have implications for how we understand resilience and feedbacks in past climates. If cyclones continued to thrive under ice-age background states, then tropical extremes may persist through major global reorganizations.
The study’s viral potential is clear: it challenges an intuitive narrative that “ice ages mean calm tropics,” and replaces it with a more nuanced picture in which warm-water dynamics and circulation shifts can sustain storminess despite global cooling.
Below are the details available from the provided text:
Subject of Research: Tropical cyclone activity during the Late Paleozoic Ice Age.
Article Title: Widespread tropical cyclone activity during the Late Paleozoic Ice Age.
Article References: Yan, Q., Macarewich, S., Jiang, N. et al. Widespread tropical cyclone activity during the Late Paleozoic Ice Age. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-75609-1
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-75609-1
Login