A roughly 2,000-year-old woman with a potentially violent streak has emerged from skeletal rubble found on an island off southwestern England’s coast. A jumble of tooth and bone fragments in a Late Iron Age grave belonged to a young woman who was interred with items that include a sword, shield and bronze mirror, researchers report in the December Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. The team used a sex-linked protein extracted from tooth enamel to classify the remains as female. The island grave dates to roughly 100 B.C. to 50 B.C., based on radiocarbon dating of a partial bone and the ..read more

The world is in a climate crisis — and in the waning days of what’s likely to be the world’s hottest year on record, a new United Nations report is weighing the ethics of using technological interventions to try to rein in rising global temperatures. “The current speed at which the effects of global warming are increasingly being manifested is giving new life to the discussion on the kinds of climate action best suited to tackle the catastrophic consequences of environmental changes,” the report states. A broad variety of climate engineering interventions are already in development, from strat ..read more

To snap up fish, bottlenosed dolphins may rely on more than just sharp sight and sonar detection. The creatures might also pick up on the weak electric pulses prey produce each time their hearts beat or air filters through their gills. In a new experiment, two bottlenosed dolphins named Dolly and Donna reliably sensed faint electric fields on the scale of microvolts, says Tim Hüttner, a sensory biologist formerly affiliated with the University of Rostock in Germany. That puts the marine mammals’ Spidey sense on par with egg-laying mammals like platypuses and the Guiana dolphin (Sotalia guianen ..read more

Nesting chinstrap penguins take nodding off to the extreme. The birds briefly dip into a slumber many thousands of times per day, sleeping for only seconds at a time.  The penguins’ breeding colonies are noisy and stressful places, and threats from predatory birds and aggressive neighbor penguins are unrelenting. The extremely disjointed sleep schedule may help the penguins to protect their young while still getting enough shut-eye, researchers report in the Dec. 1 Science.  The findings add to evidence “that avian sleep can be very different from the sleep of land mammals,” says UCL ..read more

How do we adapt to climate change? Can we fight back against Alzheimer’s disease? What will it take to build a more equitable society? The researchers on this year’s SN 10: Scientists to Watch list are tackling slices of these and other grand challenges. For the eighth year, Science News is recognizing 10 early- and mid-career scientists who have innovative ideas and unique skill sets — and are applying their talents to shape our future and our understanding of ourselves. But they aren’t doing it alone. Each credits parents, mentors and colleagues with inspiring their success. Many emphas ..read more

The Great Sphinx of Giza might have been sculpted by desert winds long before it was ever touched by human hands. Mysterious desert landforms called yardangs can bear an uncanny resemblance to seated lions — so much so that some researchers think one lionlike yardang might have had the honor of later being carved into the Sphinx by ancient Egyptians. The basic ingredients for these unusual rock formations might be rather simple, researchers report in the November Physical Review Fluids. Scientists were able to reliably sculpt hand-sized, sphinx-shaped yardangs from clay globs in a water tunnel ..read more

How do you look for an animal you don’t even know exists anymore? The last sighting of the purple-winged ground dove (Paraclaravis geoffroyi) — a small, bamboo-loving dove native to the South American Atlantic Forest in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay — was in 1985. But, researchers wondered, was it possible to capture the elusive bird’s sound in the wild to find out if any individuals are left? It’s not an unheard-of idea. Scientists have used bioacoustics — a subfield of ecology that relies on sound to make environmental analyses — for everything from recording dolphins’ communication pattern ..read more

This summer was the hottest ever recorded on Earth, and 2023 is on track to be the hottest year. Heat waves threatened people’s health across North America, Europe and Asia. Canada had its worst wildfire season ever, and flames devastated the city of Lahaina in Maui. Los Angeles was pounded by an unheard-of summer tropical storm while rains in Libya caused devastating floods that left thousands dead and missing. This extreme weather is a warning sign that we are living in a climate crisis, and a call to action. Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main culprit behind clim ..read more

The tropics are teeming with life, tending to hold far more species than milder environments closer to the poles. But one group of insects, the Darwin wasps, were thought to buck that trend. Researchers who compared wasp diversity in the United Kingdom and the United States with tropical areas in the 1970s and ’80s concluded that these wasps were most diverse at mid-latitudes — say, Kentucky or England. But others thought that people just weren’t looking hard enough in the tropics. It’s easy to look for wasps in a British garden, says Peter Mayhew, but “it’s very hard to do long-term work” in ..read more

The spring 2014 annual reindeer festival in Yar-Sale, a rural town on the Yamal Peninsula in Western Siberia, was a grim affair. A rainstorm followed by a deep freeze the previous November had turned the normally snow-covered tundra into an ice shield. Reindeer could not paw through the thick ice to access lichen, their primary food source. In a region where winter temperatures can plunge below –50° Celsius, that ground remained frozen months later. Tens of thousands of reindeer had already died of starvation. Thousands more were on the brink of death. A prominent reindeer herder named Vasily ..read more