Geochemical analysis of 780,000-year-old stone tools from Israel suggests Acheulean (or Acheulian) hominins repeatedly sought specific basalt sources, revealing sophisticated planning and deep knowledge of their landscape.
The post Acheulean Toolmakers Chose Their Stone with Surprising Precision appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Airbus Helicopters has officially unveiled the U145 unmanned helicopter, developed on the basis of the widely used civilian and military Airbus Helicopters H145. A full-scale mock-up of the new platform was presented ahead of the ILA 2026 international aerospace exhibition in Berlin, scheduled to begin on June 10, 2026. The use of the proven airframe […]
The post Airbus converts the Airbus Helicopters H145 into an unmanned platform for operations in high-intensity environments appeared first on AERONAUT.media.
For patients with disorders of consciousness such as coma, vegetative states, or unresponsive wakefulness, clinicians face a longstanding challenge of determining whether any awareness remains. While surface brain recordings can measure general electrical activity, they do not reveal what is happening deep within the brain.
Now, a new study from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München may bring clinicians closer to a measurable indicator of brain states in these conditions.
Researchers at LMU have found a new type of electrical rhythm in the central thalamus, a small area deep inside the brain. Published in Nature Human Behaviour, the study suggests that this rhythm could serve as a biological indicator of conscious states.
The signal does more than just appear with consciousness. It also changes as the brain moves between different states. For example, the rhythm becomes stronger during REM sleep, which lets researchers see small shifts in awareness even within the same stage of sleep.
“Our results show that the central thalamus plays an important role in regulating brain states,” said Dr. Aditya Chowdhury, lead author of the study. “In the context of existing research, our results show that this small deep-lying brain structure could actively influence our states of consciousness.”
Professor Tobias Staudigl, who led the research team, argues the signal’s consistency makes it more than just an interesting discovery. “These characteristic rhythm patterns can be reliably attributed to specific states and thus have the potential to serve as a measurable biological signature of states of consciousness,” Staudigl said.
Recording electrical activity from deep brain structures is one of neuroscience’s most persistent technical problems. Standard surface EEG can detect general patterns from the brain’s outer layers, but it misses details from deeper areas. Since the thalamus sits at the center of the brain, it has remained largely inaccessible through non-invasive methods.
The LMU team had a rare chance to study this. Their research involved patients already undergoing deep-brain stimulation therapy for epilepsy, which uses electrodes in the thalamus to help control seizures. These electrodes let the researchers record signals directly from inside the thalamus, something that is almost never possible otherwise.
The team combined these recordings with surface EEG, eye-tracking, and detailed sleep-stage analysis. This approach allowed them to see how thalamic activity changes as patients transition between wakefulness and different sleep stages. Their findings offer the most detailed picture yet of what the thalamus actually does as consciousness changes.
Disorders of consciousness, like coma, vegetative state, and minimally conscious state, are some of the hardest problems in neurology. One reason is that doctors have lacked reliable biological markers to assess patients’ awareness. The thalamic rhythm found in this study could help solve that problem.
If this signal truly tracks brain states linked to consciousness, it could help doctors evaluate awareness in patients who cannot communicate, guide treatment choices, and monitor how patients respond to care over time. The researchers believe it could also be used to improve deep brain stimulation therapy by allowing doctors to adjust treatment based on real-time thalamic activity rather than general clinical signs.
Staudigl was recently awarded funding by the European Research Council to explore the clinical potential of this discovery and to develop applications for treating neurological disease.
Understanding consciousness has always been one of science’s most difficult challenges. While the study does not answer the fundamental question of what consciousness is, these findings provide a consistent, measurable signal that indicates how the brain moves between conscious and unconscious states.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
An analysis of dental tartar containing traces of human diets dating back over 33,000 years has revealed that ancient Europeans and many early Asian populations likely only ate insects by accident, perhaps as larvae in the carcasses of dead animals.
Conversely, the new study found that intentional insect consumption, called entomophagy, was more common in tropical regions and among Neanderthal populations.
Although the difference has some cultural and religious roots, the team found evidence that the abundance of insects in the tropics and the decreasing ability of humans migrating away from the tropics to digest insects likely led to the modern-day separation over thousands of years.
The Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), research team behind the new findings suggests their research could help explain why some modern populations still consume insects as food while other parts of the world consider it gross or taboo, especially given the increasing food demands of a rising world population.
According to a statement announcing the new research, hundreds of millions of people currently include insects in their diet. However, they also note that most of the Western world continues to “show an aversion” to including any of the more than 1,611 insect species designated as edible by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in theirs. Although some theories suggest the difference is almost purely cultural, the team concedes that “its origin remains unknown.”
To explore the origins of human entomophagy, the IBE analyzed 745 samples of ancient human dental tartar dating back to 33,000 before present. According to the team’s results published in the journal Science Advances, dental tartar (sometimes called dental ‘calculus’) is a critical archaeological tool because it preserves the DNA of the species these human ancestors consumed during their lifetimes.
Although the analysis found evidence for entomophagy amongst virtually all ancient populations sampled in the study, the levels varied dramatically. Notably, the evidence suggested that ancient humans in northern Eurasia did not routinely eat insects in measurable quantities. Instead, any consumption was likely incidental, including consumption of insect larvae in rotting food.
Curious whether the lack of entomophagy in ancient European and Central and Northern Asian populations was purely cultural or whether genetic and geographic factors were involved, the team studied human genes involved in chitin digestion. Chitin, which can be found in some marine animal shells, is also part of an insect’s hard exoskeleton.
According to the study authors, the analysis revealed that the ‘chitinase’ genes in North Eurasian human populations “carry mutations that confer a reduced capacity to digest insect exoskeletons.” Their analysis revealed that this reduced capacity to digest insect exoskeletons has persisted in the genomes of modern Eurasian populations “for the last 9,000 years,” which would coincide with the widely accepted date for the origin of agriculture.
Pablo Librado, study leader and a principal investigator at the IBE, said the “scarce presence of insects in the diet of northern Eurasians” suggests that the cause may not lie solely in more recent cultural factors but also in ecological and evolutionary components dating back several millennia.
When the team compared data from ancient human tartar with that of ancient Neanderthals, they found that Neanderthals engaged in much higher levels of entomophagy than humans living in the same regions. According to the study authors, Neanderthal insect consumption levels were similar to those found in western chimpanzee populations, which the researchers note “rely on entomophagy to supplement their diet on the savanna, especially during periods of drought.”
Further analysis of the extracted insect DNA showed that the group most commonly consumed by the Neanderthal specimens included flies and mosquitoes. Although the team only analyzed the DNA, they noted that a recent hypothesis suggests Neanderthals ate carcasses laden with mosquito larvae.
“The abundance of mosquito remains reinforces the possibility that the carcasses of their prey were kept in ponds and marshy areas, where mosquitoes lay their eggs,” the team’s statement explained.
An analysis of the Neanderthal DNA and the DNA from the lone Denisovan study subject revealed that both ancient hominid populations could digest chitin. This result reinforced the genetic basis for increased or reduced entomophagy beyond cultural factors.
One geographic component identified by the chitinase DNA analysis showed higher levels of digestive enzyme expression among humans living in or near the tropics. However, the expression of these enzymes gradually decreased as populations moved away from tropical regions. The team said this variation, which has been maintained for at least the last 9,000 years, “reflects the abandonment of entomophagy in European populations.”
Manuel Piñero, a predoctoral researcher at the IBE and first author of the study, noted that large numbers of insects must be consumed to offset the “high caloric cost” of collecting them, which might explain the higher levels of entomophagy in this region.
“In the tropics, there is a greater availability of social insects, such as termites and locusts,” Piñero explained, adding that the biomass and diversity of tropical edible insects enable “sustainable exploitation throughout the year.” The researcher also noted that insect consumption “adds to pest control.”
When discussing the implications of their findings, Librado highlighted the DNA and geographic factors the IBE team uncovered.
“Beyond cultural or religious factors, our results suggest that the reduced availability of insects in non-tropical areas may have been a key factor in the abandonment of entomophagy, leading to a reduced capacity to digest insect exoskeletons,” the researcher explained.
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.
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