For several decades, paleontologists have described Miracinonyx trumani -- an extinct species of cheetah-like felid that roamed the North American prairies and steppe terrains more than 13,000 years ago -- as North America’s answer to the African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus).
The post Ancient DNA Rewrites Story of Enigmatic ‘American Cheetah’ appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Researchers have identified more than 1,200 locations in the human genome associated with personality traits, offering the most detailed look yet at the biological underpinnings of traits like sociability, anxiety and curiosity.
The post Scientists Map Genetics of Personality across Million People appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
In 2022, when archaeologists uncovered the grave of a young woman buried in 17th-century Pień, Poland, they were confronted with a bizarre scene. Hanging from the big toe of her left foot was an iron padlock. Across her neck lay a large sickle, its blade positioned directly toward her throat.
The strange arrangement suggested that whoever buried her may have feared that, like the vampires of European folklore, she might somehow rise from the grave.
In the four years since “Grave 75” was discovered, scientists have subjected the young woman’s remains, clothing, grave, and the mysterious objects buried with her to an unusually extensive forensic investigation involving ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating, isotope chemistry, X-ray imaging, and microscopic analysis.
Published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, the findings are beginning to reveal who the mysterious woman was. She was only around 17 to 19 years old when she died, appears to have come from a wealthy or high-status family, and probably spent her childhood in the surrounding region.
Most strikingly, the evidence suggests that local fears surrounding the young woman may have grown after she was already buried.
Researchers believe the padlock was placed on her toe during the first burial. Sometime later, the grave was apparently reopened and the sickle positioned across her neck as an additional safeguard.
The circumstances surrounding the young woman’s death, and why the community apparently feared her enough to take such extraordinary precautions against her trying to return to the land of the living, remain a mystery.
“The burial, uncovered and later disturbed, is distinguished by the co-occurrence of a sickle and a padlock within a single grave, a combination not previously reported in the published archaeological literature,” researchers write. “Ongoing palaeopathological research may shed new light on the cause of death of this young female, which remains a mystery today.”
The grave represents what archaeologists describe as an “anti-demonic” or “anti-vampiric” burial. However, the researchers caution that applying the familiar label of “vampire” to such graves can be misleading.
Although versions of the term vampire can be traced as far back as the Middle Ages, it did not become widespread across Europe until around the 18th century. Earlier Slavic cultures used terms including upiór and strzyga to describe people who, after death, were believed capable of becoming dangerous supernatural beings that could threaten the living.
Researchers have identified several hundred suspected anti-vampire burials dating from the post-medieval period onward across Central and Southeastern Europe.
“Grave 75” was discovered at a cemetery in Pień overlooking the Vistula Valley, where archaeologists have uncovered more than 100 post-medieval graves. Researchers believe the cemetery may have served a Protestant community, and its unusual location away from the village raises the possibility that it was also used to bury people considered social outsiders. Several dozen graves contain unusual features, including deliberately placed stones, coins, sickles, and padlocks.
Sickles and padlocks have both been associated with old European burial practices intended to prevent potentially dangerous dead from returning to harm the living. But finding the two together in one “vampire grave” was unprecedented. No previously published archaeological account had documented a burial containing both a sickle and a padlock.
The woman lay on her back with her legs extended. Around her neck was a 14-inch-long serrated sickle, positioned with its cutting edge toward her throat. Hanging from the big toe of her left foot was a triangular iron padlock. Archaeologists also recovered fragments of an elaborate textile near her skull.
Microscopic analysis showed the material was silk decorated with metal threads made from silver and gilded silver. Such expensive trimmings were generally associated with aristocrats, nobility, and wealthy townspeople. Researchers, therefore, conclude that the teenager likely came from a relatively high social class, making her apparent treatment after death particularly unusual.
Analysis of her skeleton offered few indications about how she died. Researchers estimated that she stood roughly 5 feet 5 inches tall and found no evidence of fatal trauma or skeletal disease that might explain her death. Without any surviving soft tissue, however, determining a definitive cause of death may be impossible.
DNA confirmed the remains belonged to a female and placed her mitochondrial lineage within haplogroup J1c2c1, a lineage found particularly among ancient and modern Scandinavian populations.
Isotope measurements suggest she probably spent her childhood around Pień. One possibility is that she belonged to a family with more distant Scandinavian ancestry, although the researchers caution that genetics and isotopes cannot establish geographic origin with certainty.
More intriguing is evidence that the precautions surrounding her body were not all taken at the same time.
The padlock appears to have been attached when she was originally buried. The sickle may have come later.
Disturbed soil around the vampire grave suggests somebody subsequently reopened it. Because the skeleton remained articulated, researchers believe that, if it were reopened, it probably happened before the body had completely decomposed. At that point, someone may have placed or driven the sickle across her neck as an additional safeguard.
That raises a disturbing possibility that the community already regarded the young woman as potentially dangerous when she died. Yet, for unknown reasons, they became even more frightened of her after her burial.
Historical traditions provide some context. In parts of Poland, a sickle placed across the throat was believed to prevent a strzyga from returning. Birch, one possible wood identified in the sickle’s deteriorated handle, was itself associated with protection against demons and witchcraft.
There may have even been yet another precaution. Extensive green discoloration inside the skull suggests that an object containing copper could have been placed in her mouth. Chemical analysis could not determine what it was, although researchers say it was unlikely to be a coin. Objects inserted into the mouths of suspected revenants are known from other “anti-vampiric” burials.
None of this means the woman was literally considered a “vampire” in the modern Dracula sense. Instead, the evidence points toward a wider fear that certain dead people could return or somehow cause harm.
Why this particular teenager inspired such fear is still a mystery. Researchers suggest her ancestry, young age, an unusual or socially troubling death, disease, or behavior during life could all have contributed.
In periods of epidemic, famine, and other disasters, communities sometimes blamed supposedly dangerous dead people for otherwise inexplicable misfortune. Researchers stress that these explanations remain hypotheses, not proof of what her contemporaries believed.
For now, the only thing that seems certain is that the local community feared this young woman enough to secure her body not only once, but returned to her grave to secure it again.
“Grave 75, as well as other non-normative graves in the cemetery in Pien, demonstrate practices of a protective/anti-demonic nature,” researchers write. “[They] vividly illustrate superstitions, including the tendency to blame the deceased for misfortunes and the fear of the unknown in the 17th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.”
The recent study, “A unique, non-normative burial of a young adult female from a 17th-century cemetery in Pień, north-central Poland. A multidisciplinary approach,” appeared in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
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
Diseases that cause nerve cells in the brain to die over time are known as neurodegenerative diseases. These cells, known as neurons, are vulnerable to DNA damage because they are highly active cells that require large amounts of energy. Neural DNA damage is a normal part of aging as changes to the DNA sequence, called mutations, build up over time.
Previous scientists have shown that neurons from people with the neurodegenerative diseases Alzheimer’s disease (AD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) accumulate unusually high numbers of changes in the DNA sequence, called somatic mutations. However, researchers don’t know what causes the high number of mutations or whether the same process causes them in all 3 diseases.
To answer these questions, researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School analyzed brain tissue from people who died with and without AD, FTD, or ALS. They compared the processes that cause DNA mutations in the 3 diseases by first accessing the DNA inside individual neurons from healthy and diseased postmortem brain tissue.
To do this, they broke apart the brain tissue and added a fluorescent marker that identified the center of each neuronal cell where DNA is housed, called its nucleus. They used a sorting machine to separate the nuclei from the rest of the cell material to access the neuron’s DNA. Using a DNA sequencing method called single-cell whole genome sequencing, the team then sequenced each neuron’s DNA to identify mutations.
They analyzed 159 neurons from people with AD, 61 neurons from people with FTD, 77 neurons from people with ALS, and 232 neurons from healthy individuals. This allowed the team to compare the number and types of DNA mutations between diseased and control (non-diseased) neurons. The researchers found that compared to the control neurons, which typically accumulate only 200 to 300 mutations over an 80-year lifespan, neurons from all 3 diseases contained an unusually high number of 2-base-pair deletions, often exceeding 1,000 mutations per cell.
When a biological process damages DNA, it leaves behind its own unique signature. By identifying these signatures, scientists can identify the biological process that likely caused the damage. Since these 2-base-pair deletions were so frequent in diseased neurons, the researchers wanted to know whether they were left behind by a biological process. The researchers used a machine learning algorithm to scan DNA sequences for recurring mutation patterns and identified a signature in neuronal DNA, which they named ID-4.
When the researchers compared the ID-4 signature with a database of previously characterized signatures, they found that it was associated with a DNA repair protein called TOP1. TOP1 temporarily cuts and rejoins DNA to relieve the tension that builds up during normal cellular activity. TOP1 typically detaches from the DNA after completing this process. However, if TOP1 fails to detach, it breaks one of the two DNA strands.
To test whether abnormal TOP1 activity was breaking the DNA, the researchers isolated DNA from control and diseased neurons. They visualized the DNA on a gel, where intact DNA forms bands while broken DNA spreads out into smears. The more fragmented the DNA is, the more intense the smear appears. Using a machine that quantified the intensity of smears, the researchers found that DNA from diseased neurons produced smears that were up to 3.2 times more intense than those from control neurons. They also found that neurons with more DNA fragmentation had more ID-4 signatures.
Based on these findings, the researchers concluded that abnormal TOP1 activity created frequent single-strand DNA breaks. They proposed that some of these breaks are repaired incorrectly, eventually leading to widespread DNA breaks in all 3 neurodegenerative diseases.
Overall, the researchers found that neurons from these 3 neurodegenerative diseases accumulated excessive DNA mutations despite differences in the disease symptoms and underlying causes. Their findings also provided evidence that abnormal TOP1 activity contributes to this mutation accumulation. Based on these findings, they stated that preventing TOP1 from becoming trapped on DNA, or improving the DNA repair process that removes trapped TOP1, could be a promising way to treat a wide range of neurodegenerative diseases.
The post Common DNA damage could cause neurodegenerative diseases appeared first on Sciworthy.
Bat DNA may hold clues to a long and healthy life, according to an international team of researchers.
These small creatures grace the night skies with extremely long lifespans and low cancer rates—traits that may ultimately benefit humanity if scientists can figure out how bats achieve them. Now, in a recent paper published in Nature, scientists from the University of Vermont and Penn State University led an international team investigating bats’ immune systems.
The paper’s crucial discovery was that bat DNA reveals the creatures encode genomic changes to handle exposure to environmental pathogens.
“Pathogen adaptation, longevity, and cancer resistance—they are fundamentally linked,” explained co-lead author Elise Lauterbur, an assistant professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Vermont. “Many of the genes that have adapted to viruses in bats are genes that are also involved in longevity and cancer resistance.”
Bats make an ideal study subject as they are only second to rodents in diversity, allowing scientists to study a wide variety of features in a single order.
“If you look at two bats, the same size, one lives 3 years the other lives 30 years and they are very closely related, like humans and Neanderthals, you can essentially find a very small number of genetic changes that leads to a very big change in their lifespan,” said co-lead author Juan Manuel “Manny” Vazquez, an assistant professor at Penn State University. “And that is kind of the Holy Grail for evolutionary medicine.”
The work focused on Myotis, one of the largest bat genera, whose members are found across much of the globe outside Antarctica. Eight Myotis species came under the microscope, with the team experimenting on cultured cells and analyzing their genomes. Among the species sampled were little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus), known both for their long lifespans, even among bats, and their susceptibility to the deadly white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease.
Even the researchers’ sample-collection methods were novel. They developed a technique akin to ear-piercing to collect small tissue samples from bat wings, which were then used to establish cell cultures. The team says this both spared the animals’ lives and produced more scientifically useful samples.
In their detailed examination, the researchers identified evidence of past events in which Myotis bats encountered pathogens and how adaptations to those viruses were selected for during their evolution.
Their work identified specific genomic changes, including the duplication or deletion of genes, associated with adaptation to environmental pathogens. This illuminated important differences in bats’ responses to DNA and RNA viruses compared with humans and other primates, potentially contributing to bats’ long, healthy lifespans.
Comparatively, human evolution shows stronger selection involving proteins that interact with RNA viruses like influenza, while bats show stronger selection involving proteins that interact with DNA viruses such as herpesviruses. These differences may help explain the distinct ways bats and primates have adapted to viral threats.
The team also identified genetic mechanisms that could help explain bats’ resistance to cancer and other age-related diseases. In some cases, duplicated genes can diversify their functions, allowing different copies to perform distinct roles. According to the researchers, this may provide immune advantages that help bats combat multiple viruses while also contributing to pathways associated with longevity.
Another important finding was that while most mammals contain one copy of the immune-related gene PRKN, some bat species contain two or even three copies, suggesting that additional copies may offer evolutionary advantages. The team says this could provide important insights for future cancer research, given bats’ unusual ability to repair or eliminate damaged cells.
The research doesn’t point to immediate treatments for humans, but it does provide starting points for reconsidering human illness in the context of bat immunology and evolution.
“Everything is connected,” Vazquez concluded. “Everything uses the same shared set of biology. … We don’t have to treat all of these different problems as silos. We can now start focusing on systems like bats to understand how we can solve multiple human age-related diseases.”
The paper, “Insights into Longevity and Virus-Driven Adaptation from Myotis Bat Genomes,” appeared in Nature on August 26, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
A thousand years ago, feasts in what’s now northern Georgia state included cacao from Central America.
Potsherds discarded after an 11th-century feast at Etowah—an Indigenous city just north of what’s now Atlanta—contained traces of cacao, a raw ingredient of chocolate. The chemical residue and ancient DNA reveal that not only did the Mississippian people who built the city have excellent taste, they also had trade connections that reached at least 3,000 kilometers to Central America. And in a sense, chocolate may have helped build the Mississippian mounds.
University of South Carolina archaeologist Adam King and his colleagues found fragments of ancient DNA from Theobroma cacao in the inner surfaces of potsherds from long-ago feasts at Etowah. Fruit from the cacao tree contains beans that, when dried and roasted, produce chocolate in all its glorious forms. Cacao only grows in the tropics, which means the nearest actual cacao trees would have been at least a 3,000-kilometer trek away from the woodlands of the eastern US. And that means the Mississippian people who lived in Etowah must have had continent-spanning trade connections.
© Georgia Department of Natural Resources
New research involving tiny aquatic animals known as rotifers is providing scientists with a unique look at how information about maternal age may be passed from one generation to its offspring.
The findings offer insights into the ways a mother’s age can influence factors that range from health and lifespan to the behavior and even reproductive success of her offspring. This phenomenon, known as maternal age effects, has been documented throughout the animal kingdom—observed in everything from invertebrates to large land mammals like elephants, and even humans.
While advanced maternal age has often been associated with negative effects in offspring in past studies, questions remain about exactly how those effects are transmitted.
“Nearly all forms of life show some level of maternal age effect, and most are negative effects caused by advanced maternal age,” said Kristin Gribble, an associate scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory’s Bay Paul Center, in a statement.
For their research, Gribble and her colleagues have focused on Brachionus manjavacas rotifers, a variety of microscopic aquatic creatures whose rapid reproduction abilities allow scientists a unique opportunity to study biological changes that occur across multiple generations.
Now, Gribble and her team’s findings point to something novel: that rather than being influenced primarily by accumulated DNA mutations, or even cellular damage, some maternal age effects appear to be epigenetic.
The new findings resulted from work undertaken in Gribble’s laboratory by researcher Alyssa Liguori, which looked at two different genotypes within a single species of rotifer.
The premise was simple: if mutations or cellular damage were what was behind maternal age effects, the consequences would likely be shown to worsen progressively across generations.
However, what the team found instead was that such effects could be reversed, and in some cases, within a single generation. The fact that this can occur so rapidly seems to imply that the underlying mechanism at play involves changes in the way genes are expressed, as opposed to alterations in the actual genetic code, as suggested in the past.
Based on this, one possibility the team is now exploring is that what are called histone modifications—essentially chemical changes that impact proteins that are encased with DNA, which can influence whether particular genes become activated, or suppressed.
Additionally, the researchers are now looking at whether mitochondrial DNA (mDNA), known to generally be inherited from an offspring’s mother, could play a key role in helping transmit information about maternal age from one generation to the next.
Further, genetic differences may influence how much an offspring is affected. One intriguing aspect of the recent research that Gribble emphasizes involves how one rotifer strain seemed to produce offspring from older mothers, which actually exhibited longer lifespans. This may suggest that some genetic variants could help to protect against, or possibly even reverse, factors that are generally negatively associated with advanced maternal age.
Still, a few mysteries remain, such as what exactly causes maternal age effects to remain so widespread, especially if they often reduce an offspring’s evolutionary fitness.
Gribble has an idea: she suspects that natural selection may provide at least part of the answer, since reproduction in rotifers occurs relatively early in life. This could mean that evolutionary pressures that eliminate harmful effects that may arise from reproduction at advanced ages could be comparatively weak.
Ultimately, the team believes their research may help to illuminate a much broader question: how the experiences and biological state of one generation influence those that follow.
“It’s not just about what’s in your genome as an individual,” Gribble said, adding that this is mainly because “your health potentially depends on the health and environment of your mom and grandmother and great-grandmother.”
Fundamentally, if researchers can identify the mechanisms behind maternal age effects in rotifers, these unassuming aquatic creatures could help to significantly advance our understanding of the ways biological information is carried across generations, potentially offering new insights into human health and precision medicine.
The team’s findings were detailed in a new paper, “Transgenerational and Intergenerational Maternal Age Effects Exhibit Complex, Genotype-Specific Patterns of Inheritance,” which appeared in The American Naturalist.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
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