by This week, evidence has been revealed of a city that existed 5,400 to 4,900 years ago in what is now Morocco; Scientists have discovered that a strange winged fish uses its “legs” like tongues to taste the seabed, and a 1,000-year-old fish Biblical tree has been brought to life from a seed found in a Judean cave. Finally, we wonder whether the Hubble tension has been resolved as astronomers rush to save the Standard Model of cosmology.
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The world’s oldest cheese has been found… rubbed on a bunch of mummies
About twenty years ago, a group of archaeologists made a curious discovery: something had been smeared on the heads and necks of several mummies at the Xiaohe Cemetery in the Tarim Basin in northwest China. It was a whitish substance and clearly very old, but no one knew exactly what it was. Now a new study has solved the mystery: They looked at the world’s oldest known cheese sample. Read the full story here
Five thousand years ago, Africa had a great civilization that we had forgotten
Evidence has been revealed of a city that existed 5,400 to 4,900 years ago in what is now Morocco, and which its discoverers claim was the largest city of that era in Africa outside the Nile Basin. There are signs that the region had extensive trading links with settlements across the Strait of Gibraltar on the Iberian Peninsula, and that its influence may have extended much further around the Mediterranean. Read the full story here
The latest idea to fend off menacing asteroids? X-ray pulses
A powerful pulse of X-rays could vaporize part of an incoming asteroid, altering its trajectory, a new study suggests. Whether the approach would be more cost-effective than the alternatives being considered remains to be seen, but questions also need to be asked about the safety of building a suitable instrument that could destroy an asteroid in the first place. Read the full story here
This winged fish uses strange tongue-like ‘legs’ to taste the seabed – yes, really
Scientists have just discovered the mechanism by which a winged fish uses its ‘legs’ to taste the seabed. The peculiar fish is so good at tasting the seabed that other animals follow it looking for clues about where to find food. Isn’t the ocean just absurd? Read the full story here
Scientists bring 1,000-year-old biblical tree to life from seed found in a cave in Judea
Researchers have revived a strange seed discovered in a cave in the Judean Desert in the 1980s. According to radiocarbon dating, the seed was more than 1,000 years old when it was found, and DNA links it to a tree species that, although lost today, was mentioned in the Bible. Read the full story here
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Feature of the week:
Hubble tension resolved? Astronomers are rushing to save the standard model of cosmology
The universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, but the nature of this expansion – why it is expanding and why it is doing so at such an accelerated rate – is uncertain. One culprit is called “dark energy,” a hypothetical form of energy that can be thought of as anti-gravity. Although what exactly dark energy is remains unknown, astronomers can roughly agree on its effects as a cosmological constant on measuring the expansion rate of the universe, known as Hubble’s constant. But not anymore. Read the full story here
More content:
Have you seen our e-magazine, CURIOUS? Issue September 26, 2024 is available now. This month we asked, “Should we all keep a journal?” – check it out for exclusive interviews, book excerpts, long reads and more.
PLUS, Season 4 of IFLScience’s The Big Questions podcast continues. So far we have asked:
The We Have Questions podcast – an audio version of our coveted CURIOUS e-magazine column – has begun. In episode 1 we ask ourselves: How do sunken cities end up underwater?
