The Spanish-Mexican team has found that the boundary between those objects which destroy lithium and those which preserve it lies at 51.5 times the mass of Jupiter. The brown dwarf Reid 1B is a major deposti fo lithium which will never be destroyed. Planets such as Jupiter and the Earth are even less massive and do not destroy their lithium. The Sun has destroyed all the lithium that was in its nucleus and preserves some in its upper layers, which are slowly mixing with its interior. Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC)

A team of researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE), Mexico, has discovered lithium in the oldest and coldest brown dwarf where the presence of this valuable element has been confirmed so far. This substellar object, called Reid 1B, preserves intact the earliest known lithium deposit in our cosmic neighborhood, dating back to a time before the formation of the binary system to which it belongs. The discovery was made using the OSIRIS spectrograph on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma), in the Canary Islands. The study has just been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Brown dwarfs, also known as “coffee colored dwarfs” or “failed stars” are the natural link between stars and planets. They are more massive than (function(d, s, id){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.6"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

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Science

Researchers announce discovery of ancient mammoth tusk found 10,000 feet deep in the ocean – USA TODAY

November 28, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

Researchers announce discovery of ancient mammoth tusk found 10,000 feet deep in the ocean USA TODAY
An ancient mammoth tusk buried deep in Pacific Ocean & ‘newcomer’ dwarf galaxies in Milky Way ThePrint
A 100,000-Year-Old Mammoth Tusk Has Been Discovered Off The Coast of California ScienceAlert
Mammoth tusk found at bottom of Pacific Ocean off California coast; Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute studying rare find KABC-TV
‘Remarkable’ 100,000-year-old mammoth tusk found by accident during deep-sea mission Daily Express
View Full Coverage on Google News

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Health

Raw meat led to ancient animal-to-human disease spillover

November 26, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

Hacking up raw meat ended so poorly for this Neanderthal that it’s significant to humanity’s evolutionary history.

Scientists have confirmed one of the earliest known instances of a disease jumping from an animal to a human, an event formally known as “spillover.” HIV and COVID-19 are also both examples of spillover disease.

The fossilized bones of a Neanderthal man have revealed “the earliest secure evidence” of an animal infecting a person with a “zoonotic disease,” according to a study published last month.

The man, known as the “Old Man of La Chapelle,” was discovered in a cave near the French village of La Chapelle-aux-Saints in 1908, CNN reported. His remains have proven a goldmine to researchers over the decades, and his bones continue to reveal new information.

The first ever near-complete Neanderthal skeleton to be found, he is believed to have passed away approximately 50,000 years ago, either in his 60s or late 50s. While a 2019 study put forth evidence that he’d had advanced osteoarthritis in his hip and spine at the time of his death, the new research shows that in fact he was suffering from a disease passed on to him from an animal, likely while he was either cooking or butchering raw meat.

The new findings confirm one of the oldest instances of a disease jumping from an animal to a human.

De Agostini via Getty Images

“Rather, we found that some of these pathological changes must be due to inflammatory processes,” the head of the University of Zurich’s Evolutionary Morphology and Adaptation Group and internal medicine specialist Dr. Martin Haeusler told CNN. “A comparison of the entire pattern of the pathological changes found in the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton with many different diseases led us then to the diagnosis of brucellosis.”

Today, brucellosis is a widespread disease, generally contracted via contaminated animal products (including unpasteurized milk), airborne agents or direct contact with an infected animal.

More recent, 5,000-year-old human skeletons have also shown evidence of the disease, but the Old Man of La Chapelle represents, for now, the oldest known case of it.

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World

Egypt reopens ancient “Avenue of Sphinxes” centuries after it hosted parades for the gods

November 26, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

The Avenue of Sphinxes, flanked by sphinxes and ram statues, connects the temples of Luxor and Karnak in Egypt.

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Cairo — As Americans settled down to enjoy the time-honored tradition of the Thanksgiving Day Parade, almost 6,000 miles away, Egypt set out to revive a tradition of its own that likely hadn’t been seen in a couple thousand years. The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities held a grand ceremony on Thursday evening to mark the reopening of the ancient Avenue of Sphinxes in the city of Luxor.

The sacred road, once named “The Path of God,” connects the Temples of Karnak in the north with Luxor in the south. Paved in sandstone blocks, the 1.7-mile-long road is lined on both sides with more than 1,050 statues of sphinxes and rams. They’ve spent centuries buried under the desert sands, but slowly, over many years, Egypt’s renowned archaeologists are bringing them back into the light of day.

The Grand Opening of the Sphinx Avenue in Luxor | افتتاح طريق الكباش بالاقصر by
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So far 309 statues have been excavated in good condition, but that number may increase as excavation work continues, Dr. Mustafa Al-Saghir, director general of the Karnak monuments, told CBS News.

Who built it?

Like much from the ancient world, the Avenue of Sphinxes hasn’t given up all its secrets.

It isn’t certain who started building the road. Some scientists have suggested that it could date back all the way to Queen Hatshepsut, about 3,500 years ago, but Dr. Al-Saghir says researchers haven’t found “any archaeological evidence on the road to back this theory.”

Others believe it was built under King Amenhotep III, a couple hundred years later, but Dr. Al-Saghir says the artifacts on the road relating to that pharaoh were moved there later. He believes it may have been Egypt’s most famous ancient ruler, who sat on the throne about 3,000 years ago, who started the Avenue of Sphinxes.

“The oldest monument we discovered of the road goes back to King Tutankhamun, who made the first 300 meters from the 10th pylon of the Karnak Temple to the gate of the Mut Temple,” he told CBS News.

The Avenue of the Sphinxes leads toward the ancient Egyptian Colossi at the entrance to the Court of Ramses II, Luxor Temple, Luxor, Nile Valley, Egypt.

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Whoever kicked the project off, there’s broad agreement that most of the road, a span roughly 2,400 yards long, was built during the reign of King Nectanebo I, founder of the 30th and last native dynasty in Egypt, about 2,400 years ago.

Parade route

Every year, ancient Egyptians would hold a festival called “Opet” in the second month of the Nile flooding season to celebrate the fertility of the gods and the pharaoh. Priests would carry three divine boats on their shoulders, transporting statues of the Theban Triad — the deities of Amun-Re, his consort Mut and their son Khonsu — from Karnak to Luxor.

The trip was made by foot along the Avenue of Sphinxes, or sometimes by boat along the Nile River.

The festival lasted from days to weeks depending on the ruler at the time, and then the statues were carried back to Karnak.

The ancient Avenue of Sphinxes is seen in Luxor, Egypt.

Getty/iStockphoto

Over time the road was abandoned and buried under the sand. But in 1949, the first eight sphinx statues were discovered in front of the Luxor Temple by Egyptian archaeologist Dr. Zakaria Ghoneim.

The excavations have continued for years, on and off, as archaeologists uncover and map the ancient road. They’ve had to demolish some buildings, including mosques, a church and many homes, that sprung up along the route over the ensuing millennia.

The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities was lauded for the spectacle it put on last April, when royal mummies were paraded down a thoroughfare to a new museum home, and the government organized Thursday’s ceremony on the same scale to promote the city of Luxor as one of the largest open museums in the world.

The event tried to recreate the spirit of the ancient Opet festival, and included music, dancing and light shows.

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Science

Two New Ancient Galaxies Have Been Discovered

November 25, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

Artist’s impression of an ancient galaxy.

Image: University of Copenhagen/NASA

The presence of two previously undetected galaxies some 29 billion light years away suggests our understanding of the early universe is upsettingly deficient.

Introducing REBELS-12-2 and REBELS-29-2—two galaxies that, until very recently, we didn’t even know existed. The light from these galaxies took 13 billion years to get here, as these objects formed shortly after the Big Bang. The ongoing expansion of the universe places these ancient galaxies at roughly 29 billion light years from Earth.

New research published in Nature suggests REBELS-12-2 and REBELS-29-2 had escaped detection up until this point because our view of these galaxies is clouded by thick layers of cosmic dust. The Hubble Space Telescope, as mighty as it is, could not peer through the celestial haze. It took the ultra-sensitive ALMA radio telescope in Chile to spot the galaxies, in what turned out to be a fortuitous accident.

“We were looking at a sample of very distant galaxies, which we already knew existed from the Hubble Space Telescope. And then we noticed that two of them had a neighbor that we didn’t expect to be there at all,” Pascal Oesch, an astronomer from the Cosmic Dawn Center at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, explained in a statement. “As both of these neighboring galaxies are surrounded by dust, some of their light is blocked, making them invisible to Hubble.”

Oesch is an expert at finding some of universe’s farthest galaxies. Back in 2016, he and his colleagues detected the 13.4 billion-year-old GN-z11 galaxy, setting a cosmic distance record. GN-z11 formed a mere 400 million years after the Big Bang.

The ALMA radio telescope made the discovery possible.

Image: University of Copenhagen/NASA

The new paper describes how ALMA and the new observing technique developed by Oesch and his colleagues might be able to spot similarly obscured ancient galaxies. And there’s apparently many more awaiting discovery. The astronomers compared the two newly detected galaxies to previously known galactic sources in the early universe, leading them to suspect that “up to one in five of the earliest galaxies may have been missing from our map of the heavens,” Oesch said.

To which he added: “Before we can start to understand when and how galaxies formed in the Universe, we first need a proper accounting.” Indeed, the new paper asserts that more ancient galaxies existed in the early universe than previously believed. This is significant because the earliest galaxies formed the building blocks of subsequent galaxies. So until we have a “proper accounting,” as Oesch put it, astronomers could be working with a deficient or otherwise inaccurate model of the early universe.

The task now will be to find these missing galaxies, and thankfully an upcoming instrument promises to make this job considerably easier: the Webb Space Telescope. This next-gen observatory, said Oesch, “will be much more sensitive than Hubble and able to investigate longer wavelengths, which ought to allow us to see these hidden galaxies with ease.”

The new paper is thus testable, as observations made by Webb are likely to confirm, negate, or further refine the predictions made by the researchers. The space telescope is scheduled to launch from French Guiana on Wednesday December 22 7:20 a.m. ET (4:30 a.m. PT).

More: Webb Telescope Not Damaged Following Mounting Incident, NASA Says.

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Science

Loss of ancient grazers triggered a global rise in fires

November 25, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

Woolly mammoth. Credit: Tracy O (Flickr) via Wikimedia Commons

From 50,000 years to 6,000 years ago, many of the world’s largest animals, including such iconic grassland grazers as the woolly mammoth, giant bison, and ancient horses, went extinct. The loss of these grazing species triggered a dramatic increase in fire activity in the world’s grasslands, according to a new Yale-led study published Nov. 26 in the journal Science.

In collaboration with the Utah Natural History Museum, Yale scientists compiled lists of extinct large mammals and their approximate dates of extinctions across four continents. The data showed that South America lost the most grazers (83% of all species), followed by North America (68%). These losses were significantly higher than in Australia (44%) and Africa (22%).

They then compared these findings with records of fire activity as revealed in lake sediments. Using charcoal records from 410 global sites, which provided a historical record of regional fire activity across continents, they found that fire activity increased after the megagrazer extinctions. Continents that lost more grazers (South America, then North America) saw larger increases in fire extent, whereas continents that saw lower rates of extinction (Australia and Africa) saw little change in grassland fire activity.

“These extinctions led to a cascade of consequences,” said Allison Karp, a postdoctoral associate in Yale’s Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and corresponding author of the paper. “Studying these effects helps us understand how herbivores shape global ecology today.”

Widespread megaherbivore extinctions had major impacts on ecosystems—ranging from predator collapse to loss of fruit-bearing trees that once depended on herbivores for dispersal. But Karp and senior author Carla Staver, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, wondered if there was also an increase in fire activity in the world’s ecosystems, specifically due to a buildup of dry grass, leaves, or wood caused by the loss of giant herbivores. They found that, in grasslands, grass-fueled fires increased.

However, Karp and Staver note that many ancient browser species—such as mastodons, diprotodons, and giant sloths, which foraged on shrubs and trees in wooded areas—also went extinct during the same period but that their losses had less impact on fires in wooded areas.

Grassland ecosystems across the world were transformed after the loss of grazing-tolerant grasses due to the loss of herbivores and increase in fires. New grazers, including livestock, eventually adapted to the new ecosystems.

That’s why scientists should consider the role of grazing livestock and wild grazers in fire mitigation and climate change, the authors said. “This work really highlights how important grazers may be for shaping fire activity,” Staver said. “We need to pay close attention to these interactions if we want to accurately predict the future of fires.”

Creative management of grazing through the use small fires

More information:
Allison Karp, Global response of fire activity to late Quaternary grazer extinctions, Science (2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.abj1580. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj1580

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Loss of ancient grazers triggered a global rise in fires (2021, November 25)
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Egypt to reopen ancient Avenue of Sphinxes in with Luxor parade

November 25, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

CAIRO — As Americans feast their eyes on a full-blown Thanksgiving Day parade after a two-year Covid absence, nearly 6,000 miles away Egypt is set to revive a very different cultural tradition that has not been seen for several thousand years.

The country is set to open the 3,000-year-old Avenue of Sphinxes to the public Thursday in an elaborate ceremony in the southern city of Luxor that follows decades of excavation efforts.

The ancient walkway, nearly two miles long and about 250 feet wide, was once named “The Path of God.” It connects the Temple of Luxor with the Temple of Karnak, just up the Nile river to the north.

The sphinxes at Egypt’s Luxor Temple. Mosa’ab Elshamy / AP file

A spectacular parade expected to begin after at 12:30 p.m. ET will proceed along the length of the avenue, which is lined on either side by over 600 ram-headed statues and traditional sphinxes, statues with a lion’s body and a human’s head.

The extravagant march is expected to include participants in pharaonic dress, a symphony orchestra, lighting effects, professional dancers, boats on the Nile, horse drawn carriages and more.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi is expected to attend the city-wide spectacle.

The road was buried under sand for centuries until Egyptian archaeologist Zakaria Ghineim discovered the first eight sphinx statues in front of the Luxor Temple in 1949.

The effort to excavate and restore the site persisted over the next seven decades and was interrupted numerous times by political upheaval, like the 2011 Arab Spring uprising which overthrew the country’s longtime autocratic ruler Hosni Mubarak and led to several years of civil unrest.

“Tonight I will be witnessing one of the greatest events that has ever happened in my lifetime,” Ahmed Hammam, a Luxor tour guide, told NBC News.

Hammam, 47, said that witnessing the restoration of the Avenue of Sphinxes after years of effort was “like a dream.”

“Today will be a day we will talk about for a hundred years to come,” said Hammam. “I hope everybody will enjoy it. Not just here in my hometown city, but in the whole of Egypt, and the whole of the world as well.”

The road is believed to have been built to celebrate the annual Opet Festival in the ancient city of Thebes, now known as Luxor. The festival promoted fertility and included a procession that carried a statue of ceremonial gods from Karnak Temple to Luxor Temple.

Ali Abu Dashish stands by ram-headed sphinxes in Luxor. Courtesy Ali Abu Dashish

“The Opet festival will be held, as it was in the past at the time of the Pharaohs,” said Ali Abu Dashish, an Egyptian archaeologist and member of the Archaeological Union, ahead of Thursday’s event.

Dashish said the event should send a message from Egypt to the world that, “we preserve and restore antiquities.” He added: “I expect it to be a dazzling party on a global level.”

Thursday’s festivities are part of an ongoing push to promote archeological discoveries as Egypt tries to revive its flagging tourism industry.

Part of that effort has included staging spectacular public events like the one set to take place Thursday.

In April Cairo held an elaborate procession, dubbed the Golden Parade, to move 22 ancient Egyptian royal mummies across the capital to a new museum.

Zahi Hawass, an Egyptian archaeologist, called the Luxor site “the largest open [air] museum, the largest archeological site in the world” that tells the history of Egypt from the 2,000 BC era — known as the Dynasty XI — until the Roman Period.

Hawass worked on the restoration of the Avenue of Sphinxes from 2005-2011, when work was stopped by the uprising. He said that Thursday’s festival sends an important message to the world that “Egypt is safe and we invite everyone to come back to Egypt.”

El-Sissi, 63, led the military overthrow of Egypt’s first democratically elected president in 2013 and was re-elected to a second, four-year term in 2018.

He has sought to restore stability to the key U.S. ally and worked hard to bring tourist dollars back to the country, whose economy has been further hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. Critics say he has muzzled opponents, activists and independent media in doing so.

Charlene Gubash reported from Cairo, and Petra Cahill reported from London.

Charlene Gubash

Charlene Gubash is an NBC News producer based in Cairo. Gubash, a native Minnesotan, has lived and worked in the Egyptian capital since 1985.

Petra Cahill is a senior editor and writer for NBC News Digital. She writes NBC News’ Morning Rundown newsletter.

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Health

Ancient case of disease spillover discovered in Neanderthal man who got sick butchering raw meat

November 25, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

Researchers were reexamining the fossilized bones of a Neanderthal who was found in a cave near the French village of La Chapelle-aux-Saints in 1908. The “Old Man of La Chapelle,” as he became known, was the first relatively complete Neanderthal skeleton to be unearthed and is one of the best studied.

More than a century after his discovery, his bones are still yielding new information about the lives of Neanderthals, the heavily built Stone Age hominins that lived in Europe and parts of Asia before disappearing about 40,000 years ago.

The man, thought to be in his late 50s or 60s when he died about 50,000 years ago, had advanced osteoarthritis in his spinal column and hip joint, a study from 2019 had confirmed.

However, during that reanalysis, Dr. Martin Haeusler — a specialist in internal medicine and head of the University of Zurich’s Evolutionary Morphology and Adaptation Group at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine — realized that not all the changes in the bones could be explained by the wear and tear of osteoarthritis.

“Rather, we found that some of these pathological changes must be due to inflammatory processes,” he said.

“A comparison of the entire pattern of the pathological changes found in the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton with many different diseases led us then to the diagnosis of brucellosis.”

The study with those findings was published in the journal Scientific Reports last month.

Zoonotic disease

Brucellosis is a disease that’s still widespread today. Humans generally acquire the disease through direct contact with infected animals, by eating or drinking contaminated animal products, or by inhaling airborne agents, according to the World Health Organization. Most cases are caused by unpasteurized milk or cheese from infected goats or sheep.

It’s also one of the most common zoonotic diseases — illnesses that are transmitted from animals to humans. They include viruses like HIV and the coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic.

Brucella has a wide range of symptoms, including fever, muscular pain and night sweats, Haeusler said. It can last from a few weeks to many months or even years. Long-term problems resulting from the disease are variable but can include arthritis pain, back pain, inflammation of the testes — which can lead to infertility — and inflammation of the heart valves known as endocarditis, which Haeusler said was the most common cause of death from the disease.

The paper said the case was “the earliest secure evidence of this zoonotic disease in hominin evolution.”

The disease has also been found in Bronze Age Homo sapiens skeletons, which date back to around 5,000 years ago.

Diet

Brucellosis is found in many wild animals today, and Haeusler said that the Neanderthal man likely caught the disease from butchering or cooking an animal that had been hunted as prey. Possible sources include wild sheep, goats, wild cattle, bison, reindeer, hares and marmots — all of which were components of the Neanderthal diet. However, the paper said that the two large animals Neanderthals hunted, mammoths and woolly rhinoceros, were unlikely to be the disease reservoir — at least based on the animals’ living relatives, in which brucellosis has been largely undetected.

Given the man lived to what must have been a very old age for the period, Haeusler suspected that the Neanderthal may have had a milder version of the disease.

The “Old Man of Chapelle” played a significant role in misconceptions about Neanderthals being primitive Stone Age brutes, according to the Smithsonian. More recent research suggests that they were just as smart as we are.

An early reconstruction of the skeleton depicted the man with a slouching posture, bent knees and the head jutted forward. It was only later that scientists realized the skeleton had a deforming kind of osteoarthritis and perhaps was not a typical Neanderthal.

Haeusler said the study he published in 2019 showed that, even with the wear and tear from degenerative osteoarthritis, the “Old Man of Chapelle” would have walked upright. The man also had lost most of his teeth and may have had to have been fed by other members of his group.

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Health

Ancient case of disease spillover discovered in Neanderthal man who got sick butchering raw meat

November 25, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

The man, thought to be in his late 50s or 60s when he died about 50,000 years ago, had advanced osteoarthritis in his spinal column and hip joint, a study from 2019 had confirmed.

“Rather, we found that some of these pathological changes must be due to inflammatory processes,” he said.

“A comparison of the entire pattern of the pathological changes found in the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton with many different diseases led us then to the diagnosis of brucellosis.”

The study with those findings was published in the journal Scientific Reports last month.

Zoonotic disease

It’s also one of the most common zoonotic diseases — illnesses that are transmitted from animals to humans. They include viruses like HIV and the coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic.

The paper said the case was “the earliest secure evidence of this zoonotic disease in hominin evolution.”

The disease has also been found in Bronze Age Homo sapiens skeletons, which date back to around 5,000 years ago.

Diet

Given the man lived to what must have been a very old age for the period, Haeusler suspected that the Neanderthal may have had a milder version of the disease.

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Ancient mammoth tusk discovered 10,000 feet deep in ocean off California coast

Astronomers Discover Ancient “Failed Star” With Lithium Deposits Intact

Researchers announce discovery of ancient mammoth tusk found 10,000 feet deep in the ocean – USA TODAY

Raw meat led to ancient animal-to-human disease spillover

Egypt reopens ancient “Avenue of Sphinxes” centuries after it hosted parades for the gods

Who built it?

Parade route

Two New Ancient Galaxies Have Been Discovered

Loss of ancient grazers triggered a global rise in fires

Egypt to reopen ancient Avenue of Sphinxes in with Luxor parade

Ancient case of disease spillover discovered in Neanderthal man who got sick butchering raw meat

Zoonotic disease

Diet

Ancient case of disease spillover discovered in Neanderthal man who got sick butchering raw meat

Zoonotic disease

Diet

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Who built it?

Parade route

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