12,000-Year-Old Shaman's Elaborate Funeral Had 6 Stages

 Posted on September 28, 2022  |  4 minutes  |  679 words  |  Mittie Cheatwood

A diminutive woman buried in a cave in Israel 12,000 years ago was likely a person of importance and was interred with great ceremony, including a feast of 86 tortoises, archaeological evidence suggests. After years of analysis, experts have reconstructed the stages of a funeral ritual performed as the body was laid to rest, piecing together the chain of events with the help of unusual objects that were found at the burial site. [Read More]

2,000-Year-Old Treasure Discovered In Black Sea Fortress

 Posted on September 28, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  608 words  |  Fernande Dalal

Residents of a town under siege by the Roman army about 2,000 years ago buried two hoards of treasure in the town's citadel — treasure recently excavated by archaeologists. More than 200 coins, mainly bronze, were found along with "various items of gold, silver and bronze jewelry and glass vessels" inside an ancient fortress within the Artezian settlement in the Crimea (in Ukraine), the researchers wrote in the most recent edition of the journal Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia. [Read More]

Frog Fake-Out: Gallery of Real & Decoy Amphibians

 Posted on September 28, 2022  |  1 minutes  |  143 words  |  Patria Henriques

Poison Dart FrogR. imitator, a species of poison dart frog found in Peru, warns predators of its toxicity with a colorful giraffe-like pattern. Striped Poison Dart FrogIn nearby regions, the same species of frog sports yellow stripes rather than yellow-green squiggles. Mock FrogResearchers made fake frogs out of clay and painted them to mimic R. imitator patterns. This fake frog shows evidence of a predator attack. Fake Frog on a LeafReal or fake? [Read More]

How Big Would an 'Alien Megastructure' Have to Be?

 Posted on September 28, 2022  |  7 minutes  |  1349 words  |  Trudie Dory

A bizarre flicker of light from space led to the discovery of a still-mysterious star called KIC 8462852, otherwise known as "Tabby's Star," "Boyajian's Star" or the star surrounded by an "alien megastructure." The star and its weird flicker have been generating headlines since 2015, when the object was first observed. That year, the Kepler Space Telescope, which trails Earth as the planet orbits the sun, was looking for Earth-like planets around thousands of stars when it spotted KIC 8462852. [Read More]

How the Cleverbot Computer Chats Like a Human

 Posted on September 28, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  549 words  |  Trudie Dory

Last week, an artificial intelligence computer named Cleverbot stunned the world with a stellar performance on the Turing Test — an IQ test of sorts for "chatbots," or conversational robots. Cleverbot, it seems, can carry on a conversation as well as any human can. In the Turing Test — conceived by British computer scientist Alan Turing in the 1950s — chatbots engage in typed conversations with humans, and try to fool them into thinking they're humans, too. [Read More]

Melting Ice Floods Greenland River, Satellite Photo Shows

 Posted on September 28, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  487 words  |  Trudie Dory

Melting ice in Greenland has swelled the island's rivers with water. A NASA satellite snapped a photo of meltwater overflowing the banks of the Watson River near Kangerlussuaq, a key air transportation hub, on July 12. Two weeks later, however, river levels have receded somewhat, according to a release from the NASA Earth Observatory. "Water rises every year, but I've never before observed it at this level of discharge," said Richard Forster, a University of Utah researcher who has done extensive fieldwork in Greenland, in a statement. [Read More]

Neanderthals and Humans Were Hooking Up Way More Than Anyone Thought

 Posted on September 28, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  512 words  |  Arica Deslauriers

Way more sex happened between Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans across Europe and Asia than scientists originally thought, a new study finds. Scientists initially thought that interbreeding among the two groups was more isolated to a particular place and time — specifically, when they encountered each other in western Eurasia shortly after modern humans left Africa. This idea stemmed from the fact that the genomes of modern humans from outside Africa are only about 2 percent Neanderthal, on average. [Read More]

Scary Faces Terrify Woman with Unusual Condition

 Posted on September 28, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  471 words  |  Arica Deslauriers

When the 67-year-old woman came to the hospital, she was deeply afraid of two things — the visions of odd-looking faces that appeared hovering before her, and that the hallucinations might mean she was losing her mind. But this retired teacher wasn't going crazy, and laboratory tests also ruled out two common culprits of hallucinations — infection and drug interactions. "She was absolutely terrified by what she was seeing," said Dr. [Read More]

Scientists Put Shrimp on a Treadmill

 Posted on September 28, 2022  |  2 minutes  |  313 words  |  Fernande Dalal

A sluggish, sick human is easy to spot. But it's harder to tell when a shrimp is under the weather. So one scientist put the little crustaceans on a tiny treadmill to examine how diseases impact their performance. Humans fighting an infection typically sleep more and are not at top physical performance. "The situation is much more critical for a sick marine crustacean, such as a shrimp, where a decrease in performance may mean the difference between life and death," [Read More]

The Chipotle Outbreak That Sickened Nearly 650 People Was Caused by This Bacteria

 Posted on September 28, 2022  |  2 minutes  |  334 words  |  Mittie Cheatwood

The source of the outbreak that sickened nearly 650 people at a Chipotle in Ohio last month has been identified. Stool samples taken from sick customers tested positive for Clostridium perfringens, a bacterium that can cause food poisoning when food is stored at unsafe temperatures, according to the Delaware General Health District, the public health department in Delaware, Ohio. Although cooking kills C. perfringens cells, it doesn't necessarily kill bacterial spores that can grow into new cells, according to the U. [Read More]