Autistic children showed earlier and less age-related refinement in the brain signals involved in processing faces. A child looks at a face, and within milliseconds the brain begins sorting its features, expression, and identity. Researchers have now traced that process across the entire scalp in one of the most comprehensive studies of face perception in [...]
A joint expedition to the ancient Egyptian city of Elkab has unearthed several previously unknown ancient rock art inscriptions, including what the team believes are the earliest known monumental Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Written over 1,000 years before the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed, these ancient Egyptian writings, discovered by archaeologists from Yale University and the Royal Museums of Art and History (Brussels), laid the foundation for the later, better-known hieroglyphic writing system.
Yale Professor John Coleman Darnell, the expedition’s leader and the co-director of the Elkab Desert Survey Project, said the newly discovered inscriptions, which were not recorded by any previous scientific expedition, include samples as far back as 4,000 BCE.
Although the team concedes that these are not the first examples of this specific style of rock art, they are the first of this ancient age and “monumental” scale, making them of great significance in the history of ancient Egyptian writing systems.
“This was not what I was expecting to find when I set out on this period of work on the expedition,” Professor Darnell said of the historic find. “It was completely shocking to me.”
In a Yale news story announcing the discovery, Professor Darnell noted that the newly discovered rock art site of El-Khawy preserved some of the earliest and largest signs “from the formative stages of the hieroglyphic script.” The professor added that the discovery includes “rare” evidence for how this enigmatic ancient society invented its internationally recognized ancient writing system.
The expedition, which was directed by Darnell and Dirk Huyge, was undertaken in cooperation with the Ministry of Antiquities and the Aswan and Edfu inspectorates.
After photographing the newly discovered inscription, Darnell and Alberto Urcia, a digital archaeologist and associate research scientist in the University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, created a series of three-dimensional (3D) images. Darnell said the new technology allows archaeologists to record ancient sites and artworks “at a level of accuracy and detail that was absolutely impossible before.”
“It also means that we can record the site as a place, or a location, and not just as a series of inscriptions,” the professor added.
One of the more noteworthy examples of ancient monumental hieroglyphs, carved sometime between 4,000 and 3,500 BCE, depicted a herd of elephants. A closer examination also revealed that one of the elephants had an image of a smaller elephant inside of it, which Professor Darnell described as “an incredibly rare way of representing a pregnant female animal.”
A second discovery detailed by the joint expedition, which consists of four separate panels, was likely created sometime around 3,250 BCE. Written right to left, which ultimately became the dominant writing form in later Egyptian hieroglyphic languages, the panels show animal images of a bull’s head on a short pole, followed by two back-to-back saddlebill storks with a bald ‘ibis’ bird above and between them.
The research team said this arrangement of symbols is common in Egyptian representations created centuries after the newly discovered panels depicting the solar cycle. These same depictions typically include imagery of luminosity. Darnell suggested that the images may also express “the concept of royal authority over the ordered cosmos.”
When discussing the importance of the new find, Professor Darnell noted the immense size of the individual tableaus and their elements. For example, each individual hieroglyph identified by the Yale-led team measures over half a meter in height. The professor also noted that the entire tableau “is about 70 centimeters (27.5 inches) in height,” whereas previously discovered signs of early Egyptian hieroglyphs were “only one or two centimeters in size.”
“This discovery isn’t new in the sense that this is the first time that anyone has seen these hieroglyphs,” Darnell explained, “this is the first time that anyone has seen them on such a massive scale.”
To offer a perspective on the discovery’s significance, the professor said a modern-world equivalent would be seeing smaller text displayed on your computer screen, “and then suddenly seeing very large ones made the same way,” only displayed up on a highway billboard.
When discussing the site’s location in the northeastern desert hinterland of Elkab, Darnell noted that it was a “very important” center in ancient Egypt, which demonstrates that the area’s budding communicative system “is not limited to the more commonly found small tokens or labels.”
The professor also said the study shows that ancient writing did not develop slowly “for bureaucratic use,” as researchers had previously believed. Instead, Darnell suggested that the discovery shows hieroglyphic-style writing “was more geographically widespread and topically diverse at the time of or shortly after its development.”
“This also suggests that there is a much more expansive use of the early writing system than is indicated from other surviving archaeological material,” the professor added.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.
A Yale-led study uncovered unexpected communication between retinal visual pathways that were thought to operate separately. Researchers at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) have discovered unexpected insights into how the eye handles visual information. When we view a scene, the visual system quickly separates different features, including color, contrast, and motion, and processes them independently. [...]
Researchers developed a brain-controlled gaming system that learns from the brain’s natural wiring, enabling fast BCI training and potentially transforming medicine, mental health, and human-computer interaction. It may not be long before video game controllers become optional. Researchers at Yale University have developed a new brain-computer interface (BCI) that allows people to play video games [...]
The discovery of Typhlichthys styx shows that cave-adapted species can continue evolving and splitting into new species, with underground aquifers playing a crucial role in that process. Researchers at Yale have identified a previously unknown species of eyeless cavefish, a finding that challenges the long-standing view that caves and other underground habitats are evolutionary dead [...]
A multi-institutional team of researchers led by University of Connecticut Professor Zhe Zhu has developed a method for measuring the dynamic, real-time activity of urban environments from space, which they are calling an “Urban Pulse.”
The research team behind the novel urban activity metric said that monitoring a city’s Urban Pulse could help mitigate uncontrolled urban sprawl or decay and enable environmentalists and urban planners to intervene before disasters become unavoidable.
Although environmentalists and urban planners have a wide range of tools to measure the activities within a city, Zhu notes that scientists have spent decades merely capturing the “outcome of urbanization,” such as a finished road or a newly completed home. However, the researcher and lead author of a study detailing the Urban Pulse methodology added that, even with all the current tools, “you don’t really see the dynamics within an urban area.”
According to a statement detailing the new approach, a city’s pulse is determined by all construction activity within it. Along with new construction, the metric includes repairs, infrastructure improvements, or expansion into previously undeveloped green spaces. When used correctly, the researchers said that it can help determine “if and where their city is not doing well.”
“This would allow (authorities) to be proactive rather than conducting a metaphorical autopsy after the decay of an area is evident,” the team explained.
To test their approach, the team evaluated the Urban Pulse of six cities: Seattle, Shenzhen, Lagos, Mumbai, Dubai, and Mexico City. This involved a deep examination of what the team termed “decades of dense time-series data” collected by NASA’s Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) satellites for physical transformations in an urban environment, such as new construction, measurable infrastructure improvements, and demolition.
Instead of analyzing each city’s changes manually, the team evaluated the above changes on what they called “the neighborhood level” using a deep-learning and time-series-analysis approach called CAPES, developed by former UConn postdoctoral researcher Ji Won Suh. The team said that, by observing these “high-frequency rhythms of development” from a broad ‘outer space’ perspective, their approach “bridges the gap between abstract urban theories and measurable, real-world data.”
After examining CAPES’ results, the team found several key markers within the Urban Pulse. For example, the view from space revealed that growth within cities is not smooth and steady. Instead, Zhu and colleagues said that development happens in “abrupt, intense, and episodic bursts of construction.”
CAPES also revealed that the rhythms of an urban environment are cyclical. For example, while a city may show relatively steady growth on a broader level, individual neighborhoods go through “dramatic boom-and-rest cycles” of expansion and dormancy that don’t appear to follow predictable annual seasons.
The third pattern revealed by measuring the six cities’ Urban Pulse from space was that cities are “asynchronous,” meaning a single city does not ‘beat’ in unison. The team noted that neighborhoods “pulse at completely different times.” When it functions properly, this “uncoordinated rhythm” helps prevent the city’s infrastructure and labor markets from “overheating.”
Unlike previous methods for tracking a city’s evolution, the team noted that their Urban Pulse approach can help researchers “visualize a city’s reaction to global shocks.” For example, the team said that their analysis captured “the exact moment the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a widespread, synchronized ‘cardiac arrest’ in urban development worldwide.”
However, their new tool also revealed what the researchers termed “profound inequalities” in how individual cities recovered from the dramatic halt to urban growth. For example, the team said that the Urban Pulse of Shenzhen revealed synchronized ‘dips’ in activity, followed almost immediately by “rapid, policy-driven rebounds.” However, the same Orban Pulse analysis showed that the reactions in Mumbai and Mexico City were much more “muted.”
“It’s like in human beings,” Zhu explained. “When you get a disease, it’s not going to show up exactly the same in different people.”
Although the Urban Pulse metric offers a tantalizing tool for academics, the team noted real-world benefits for global policymakers, urban planners, and environmentalists, adding that “it serves as an early warning system.”
“By monitoring the rhythm, rate, and amplitude of neighborhood pulses, governments can identify early signs of urban decay or unsustainable sprawl and intervene before crises become entrenched,” they explained.
The team also suggested that making Urban Pulse data publicly available could “revolutionize how everyday people interact with their cities.” For example, an urban family considering a move to a new city or a new part of their current city could track a target neighborhood’s pulse to spot early warning signs of decay or early indicators of positive-trending growth. The same data could help business owners plan new locations or expanded service routes, depending on the business profile and the local Urban Pulse trends.
“This is going to be a very impactful tool influencing not only top-down policy decisions from governments but also bottom-up decisions from everyday people navigating their cities,” Zhu explained.
In a recent study, “The Urban Pulse: Diagnosing the urbanization process as spiky, cyclical, and asynchronous” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.
A newly identified prehistoric crocodile relative, Eosphorosuchus lacrimosa, was discovered alongside another croc species in New Mexico fossils dating back 210 million years. Around 210 million years ago, two crocodile relatives about the size of modern jackals stood together along a humid riverbank in what is now northern New Mexico. One of them, Hesperosuchus agilis, [...] 
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