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Two marble statues representing Aphrodite/Venus, the Greco-Roman goddess of love, were found recently at Petra, an ancient desert city in Jordan. The statues, which date to the second century A.D., are nearly intact and are remarkably well preserved, retaining traces of the paint applied to them centuries ago. They were discovered by archaeologists and graduate students from the U.S. working in collaboration with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan. Carved in a distinctly Roman style, the statues hint at ways in which Rome influenced local culture in Petra, following its annexation of Nabataea — the Arabic kingdom that included Petra — in A. [Read More]

This story seems like it's on its way to a happy ending: The youth soccer team and its coach in Thailand that had gone missing in the Tham Luang caves for more than a week have been found. The team had been on an outing, exploring the cave, when heavy rains hit and flooded the subterranean space. But on Monday (July 2), rescue teams located the soccer players and their coach huddled in an air pocket in the cave, according to the BBC. [Read More]

What would persuade you to sell a kidney to a stranger? For the 33 Bangladeshi kidney sellers interviewed by anthropologist Monir Moniruzzaman, the answer was simple: poverty. An illegal organ trade in Bangladesh connects wealthy transplant seekers with poor people enticed, often with false promises, to sell parts of their bodies. Moniruzzaman uses the phrase "bioviolence" to describe the exploitation he found during his research. He linked it to the history of medical exploitation of the disenfranchised, from the Tuskegee syphilis studies, in which treatment was withheld from black study subjects, to the surrogacy market in which foreigners hire wombs in India to carry their babies. [Read More]

Arthritis is generally thought to be caused by wear and tear on the joints with age, but malnutrition early in life might also contribute to the condition, a new study on animals suggests. The work did not involve the usual lab rats or mice, but rather much larger creatures: wild moose. The 50-year study reveals how moose suffer from a nearly identical form of human osteoarthritis — the breakdown of cartilage in joints, which can lead to bone rubbing on bone, causing pain. [Read More]

Nut-cracking monkeys don't just use tools. They use tools with skill. That's the conclusion of a new study that finds similar tool-use strategies between humans and Brazil's bearded capuchin monkeys, which use rocks to smash nuts for snacks. Both monkeys and humans given the nut-smashing task take the time to place the nuts in their most stable position on a stone "anvil," the study found, keeping the tasty morsels from rolling away. [Read More]

Firefighters and police officers are less likely to know they have high blood pressure and to take medicine to treat the condition compared with workers in many other occupations, a recent study suggests. Researchers looked at whether a person’s occupation played a role in high blood pressure. Out of nearly 7,000 U.S. workers, 1 in 5 had high blood pressure. Among police officers and firefighters, 25 percent had high blood pressure, but only about 50 percent of those knew it. [Read More]

Iconic animalsThe great American West has many symbolic icons, ranging from endless horizons and spectacular sunsets, to the lonely cowboy riding his horse through immeasurable miles of sagebrush and the stately saguaro cactus silhouetted in the light of dusk against the western sky. Yet, arguably another remarkable icon native to North America could be added to this emblematic list — that is the three species of bighorn sheep. From historyZoologists believe that the ancestors of the modern bighorn sheep crossed into North America from Siberia using the Bering Land Bridge, shown here, during the Pleistocene epoch some 750,000 years ago. [Read More]

Giant carnivorous hermaphrodite snails are on the rise in New Zealand, according to a recent wildlife conservation survey. Officially listed as endangered in the country, powelliphanta snails can grow as big as a man's fist. A recent survey by New Zealand's Department of Conservation (DOC) revealed that the snail population in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand, has increased since the last survey was conducted six years ago. During the 2011 survey, researchers found 75 live snails, compared with 51 live snails from the 2005 survey. [Read More]

If you want to send a message through a wormhole, you better make it brief.  Under certain circumstances,  a message could be passed through a theoretical wormhole connecting black holes in different universes, physicists have found in a new study. Unfortunately, their results show that only a tiny amount of information (measured in quantum bits, or qubits) could be exchanged.  "In our specific setup, we found disappointing results in the sense that it's only on the order of one or two qubits, or a few bits of information, that you can send through the wormhole," [Read More]

One thousand years before the first Fourth of July, the first fireworks exploded. It didn't rain twinkling stars or light up the night sky — but to the complete surprise and misfortune of one Chinese chemist, it did go "bang." This "bang" was the product of an ancient quest for immortality, according to Gunpowder, Explosives and the State: A History (Routledge, 2016) . In early-ninth-century China, alchemy was all the rage. [Read More]