The hospital room is air-cooled to feel like a pangolin's burrow. The patient, Lumbi, is syringe-fed with a protein-packed smoothie, given a daily dose of medicine and has his vital signs checked.

Lumbi is being treated for a blood parasite after he was rescued from traffickers during a police sting in South Africa's northern Limpopo province late last year.

Circular mounds of rocks dot the desert landscape at the archaeological site of Tombos in northern Sudan. They reveal tumuli – the underground burial tombs used at least as far back as 2500 B.C. by ancient inhabitants who called this region Kush or Nubia. As a bioarchaeologist who excavates and analyzes human skeletal remains along with their related grave goods, I’ve been working at Tombos for more than 20 years.

Discussions about ancient history in Africa are dominated by the rise of Egypt. But there were several societies that rose to great power in the Nile River Valley since the middle of the third millennium B.C., including this often overshadowed neighbor to Egypt’s south. Even though ancient Kush rivaled and, at times, conquered Egypt, there’s been a relative lack of modern attention paid to this civilization. Early 20th century research expanded scholars’ understandings of ancient Kush, but the interpretations had colonial and racist biases that often obscured this civilization’s strengths and achievements.

As a cybersecurity researcher, I track the threat posed by digital footprints on cybersecurity. Hackers are able to use personal information gathered online to suss out answers to security challenge questions like “in what city did you meet your spouse?” or to hone phishing attacks by posing as a colleague or work associate. When phishing attacks are successful, they give the attackers access to networks and systems the victims are authorized to use.

Following footprints to better bait

Phishing attacks have doubled from early 2020. The success of phishing attacks depends on how authentic the contents of messages appear to the recipient. All phishing attacks require certain information about the targeted people, and this information can be obtained from their digital footprints.

Astronomers see into the deep past when we view distant objects. Light travels at a constant speed (3x10⁸ metres per second) so the further away an object is, the longer it takes for the light to reach us. By the time the light reaches us from very distant stars, the light we are looking at can be billions of years old. So we are looking at events that happened in the past.

When we observe the star’s light, we are looking at light that was emitted from the star 12.9 billion years ago – we call this the lookback time. That is just 900 million years after the Big Bang. But because the universe has also expanded rapidly in the time it took this light to reach us, Earendel is now 28 billion light years away from us.

These animal assisted interventions (AAIs) – which also include a trained human professional – are proving beneficial to people of all ages, leading to significant reductions in physiological responses to stress – such as heart rate – and associated emotions, such as anxiety.

It’s a longstanding and widely accepted fact that people of all ages can benefit from partnerships with animals as pets. From the joy of the human-animal bond, to companionship and improved mental health, there is no doubt that cats, dogs and other pets enhance our lives immeasurably.

If you think back, I’ll bet there’s a good chance that you can remember walking into a grocery store only to find the layout of the shop has been changed. Perhaps the toilet paper was no longer where you expected it to be, or you struggled to find the tomato ketchup.

Why do shops like to move everything around? Well, it’s actually a simple answer. Changing the location of items in a store means that we, the customers, are exposed to different items as we wander around searching for the things we need or want. This ploy can often significantly increase unplanned spending, as we add additional items to our baskets – often on impulse – while spending more time in the shop.

The top predator of the Jurassic and Cretaceous landscapes was usually a species of meat-eating dinosaur. These predators walked on two legs, had powerful jaws lined with sharp teeth and included species from groups known as tyrannosaurs, spinosaurs and carcharodontosaurs.

Tyrannosaurus rex, the goat-eating, jeep-chasing tyrannosaur from the movie Jurassic Park, was the apex predator of North America just before dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Although iconic, T. rex was only one species of many large, meat-eating dinosaurs that dominated various ecosystems at different times over the 130 million years of dinosaur reign.

It’s not as easy being a squirrel as you might think. They live a relatively solitary life guarding hard-won food stores to survive the tough winters here in Canada. The behaviour that my students and I are most interested in is how these squirrels use sounds, or what we refer to as vocal communication, to help them make it through this tough life.

Solitary creatures

The North American red squirrel lives a somewhat solitary life. They spend most of their days in a 50-100 metre territory foraging for pine cones and other food sources like berries and mushrooms.