Science

For the first time since the Apollo era, an American spaceship has landed on the Moon: an uncrewed commercial robot, funded by NASA to pave the way for US astronauts to return to Earth's cosmic neighbor later this decade.

Odysseus, built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, touched down near the lunar south pole Thursday at 2323 GMT, after a nail-biting final descent where flight controllers had to switch to an experimental landing system and took several minutes to establish radio contact with the lander after it came to rest.

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) asserted without evidence that more people had died from wind turbines than nuclear power.

Donalds made the remarks Thursday during a speech at CPAC.

Why do men strongly outperform women at “mindsports” such as chess and bridge? Mindsports mainly use the brain and require skills such as memory, critical thinking, problem solving, strategic planning, mental discipline and judgment. Without physical differences in strength, how do we explain why the top level of such games tends to be dominated by men?

A defining characteristic of bridge, which I study, is that it is always played in partnership. Each game consists of four players divided into two pairs who compete against each other to win tricks. Major bridge events have open and women’s categories, often held concurrently, with very few women playing in the open.

American humorist and writer Mark Twain is believed to have once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

I’ve been working as a historian and complexity scientist for the better part of a decade, and I often think about this phrase as I follow different strands of the historical record and notice the same patterns over and over.

My background is in ancient history. As a young researcher, I tried to understand why the Roman Empire became so big and what ultimately led to its downfall. Then, during my doctoral studies, I met the evolutionary biologist turned historian Peter Turchin, and that meeting had a profound impact on my work.

I joined Turchin and a few others who were establishing a new field – a new way to investigate history. It was called cliodynamics after Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history, and dynamics, the study of how complex systems change over time. Cliodynamics marshals scientific and statistical tools to better understand the past.

The aim is to treat history as a “natural” science, using statistical methods, computational simulations and other tools adapted from evolutionary theory, physics and complexity science to understand why things happened the way that they did.

Mosaic representing the Greek muse Clio from the Severian period, coming from the villa located near the Baccano woods, and exhibited at the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome. Jean-PolGRANDMONT/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

By turning historical knowledge into scientific “data”, we can run analyses and test hypotheses about historical processes, just like any other science.

The databank of history

Since 2011, my colleagues and I have been compiling an enormous amount of information about the past and storing it in a unique collection called the Seshat: Global History Databank. Seshat involves the contribution of over 100 researchers from around the world.

We create structured, analysable information by surveying the huge amount of scholarship available about the past. For instance, we can record a society’s population as a number, or answer questions about whether something was present or absent. Like, did a society have professional bureaucrats? Or, did it maintain public irrigation works?

These questions get turned into numerical data – a present can become a “1” and absent a “0” – in a way that allows us to examine these data points with a host of analytical tools. Critically, we always combine this “hard” quantitative data with more qualitative descriptions, explaining why the answers were given, providing nuance and marking uncertainty when the research is unclear, and citing relevant published literature.

We’re focused on gathering as many examples of past crises as we can. These are periods of social unrest that often result in major devastation — things like famine, disease outbreaks, civil wars and even complete collapse.

Our goal is to find out what drove these societies into crisis, and then what factors seem to have determined whether people could course-correct to stave off devastation.

But why? Right now, we are living in an age of polycrisis – a state where social, political, economic, environmental and other systems are not only deeply interrelated, but nearly all of them are under strain or experiencing some kind of disaster or extreme upheaval.

Across large parts of the UK, the native red squirrel has been replaced by the grey squirrel, a North American species. As well as endangering reds, grey squirrels pose a threat to our woodlands because of the damage they cause to trees.

New research from my colleagues and I compared the gut bacteria of red and grey squirrels. We found that differences between the two may explain their competition and red squirrel decline, as well as why grey squirrels are so destructive to woodland.

Nina is a Japanese macaque, one of the red-faced monkeys famous for sitting in hot springs in Japan. Nina lives wild in the forest, but most days, along with her group, she visits the Awajishima Monkey Center to eat the food people provide for the monkeys.

Nina was born without hands, an unusually common occurrence in this group of macaques. While no one knows for sure why these malformations of the limbs and digits occur, many researchers have suggested a potential link to pesticides or other environmental contaminants.

An Alabama university temporarily halted in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments on Wednesday after the high court in the southern US state ruled that frozen embryos outside the womb are children.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) said it had paused IVF treatments "as it evaluates the Alabama Supreme Court's decision that a cryopreserved embryo is a human being."

Baleen whales have evolved a special voice box to help them to sing underwater -- but this could also make them uniquely vulnerable to being drowned out by human noise pollution, according to new research published Wednesday.

Complex whale melodies, first recorded some 50 years ago, are known to play a key role in the social and reproductive communication of these massive marine mammals.

Exercise has long been recognized by clinicians, scientists and public health officials as an important way to maintain health throughout a person’s lifespan. It improves overall fitness, helps build strong muscles and bones, reduces the risk of chronic disease, improves mood and slows physical decline.

Exercise can also significantly reduce the risk of developing conditions that negatively affect heart heath, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and obesity. But large amounts of exercise throughout life may also harm the heart, leading to the development of a condition called athletic heart.

The Australian continent is now geologically stable. But volcanic rocks, lava flows and a contemporary landscape dotted with extinct volcanoes show this wasn’t always the case.

Between 40 and 20 million years ago – during the Eocene to Miocene epochs – there was widespread volcano activity across eastern Australia. In places such as western Victoria and the Atherton Tablelands in Queensland, it was even more recent.

Erupting volcanoes can have devastating consequences for human settlements, as we know from Pompeii in Italy, which was buried by ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. But ash falls and lava flows can also entomb entire forests, or at least many of the plants within them.

Our studies of these rare and unique plant time capsules are revealing exquisitely preserved fossil floras and new insights into Australia’s botanical history. This new work is published in the journal Gondwana Research.

This is what volcanoes can do to landscapes – super-heated gasses from the 2011–12 eruption of Puyehue-Cordon Caulle Volcano in Argentina killed the forest. After ten years, the forest has started to regrow. Andrew Rozefelds

Remarkable preservation

The most common volcanic rocks are basalts. The rich red soils derived from them are among the most fertile in Australia.

But the rocks in which fossils occur are buried under basalts or other volcanic rock, and are called silcretes – the name indicates their origins are from silica-rich groundwaters. Silica is the major constituent of sand, and familiar to most of us as quartz.

What makes the silcrete plant fossils so fascinating is the superfine preservation of plant material. This includes fine roots and root nodules, uncurling fern fronds and their underground stems, the soft outer bark of wood, feeding traces and frass (powdery droppings) of insects, and even the delicate tissues and anatomy of fruits and seeds.

The foliage of a Pteridium fern, preserved in silcrete in exceptional detail. Geoff Thompson/Queensland Museum

For this fine preservation to occur, first there needs to be a rapid burial, like that from a volcanic eruption. Then, there has to be an abundant source of silica — a condition met when the volcanic rocks began to weather.

The process where silica infills and preserves plant structures is referred to as “silicification” or “permineralisation”. When plant material is buried, it provides acidic conditions that are ideal for this to happen.

And the process need not take millions of years. Overseas studies of plants in hot springs or undertaken in the laboratory have shown that some types of silica will quickly infiltrate wood and plant tissues.

This is a cross-section of the stem (rhizome) of a silicified fern, showing its characteristic anatomy. Geoff Thompson/Queensland Museum

Why are these plant fossils significant?

Because of their rapid entombment by the volcanoes, we can be sure the plants were in situ (that is, their original location) and were actively growing. This means we can gain detailed information about the make-up of these past plant communities.

In other areas where plant fossils might accumulate – such as river deltas – we can never be sure how far the bits of plants were carried, and whether they were from different types of vegetation.

Silicification not only preserves plants, but also leaf litter on the forest floor and even the underlying soil containing roots and root nodules. The fossil plants that are preserved at different sites varies, indicating the presence of distinct plant communities.

The abundance of seeds and fruits at one site near Capella, in central Queensland, even indicated to us that the local volcanic eruptions are likely to have occurred in summer or early autumn during the fruiting season.

This cross-section of a silicified native grape seed shows its complex internal structure which is typical of the seeds of this family. Geoff Thompson/Queensland Museum

The extraordinary preservation of these fossils allows us to compare them with modern plants. In turn, this means we can accurately identify them.

The ferns include fronds and underground stems (rhizomes) of the familiar bracken fern (Pteridium). We have also found the distinctive seeds and lianas of the grape family (Vitaceae), along with evidence of insect damage in the wood. Two sites also had evidence of palms.

While there have been few previous studies on silcrete plants, we have revealed new insights into the history of the modern Australian flora.

A modern bracken fern found in Queensland – the clear successor of the ferns found in the silcrete rocks. AustralianCamera/Shutterstock

Volcanoes shaped plant communities

Volcanic activity both destroys and modifies existing plant communities. It also provides new substrates for plants to colonise.

Several sites contained ferns – this may be because they are among the first living plants to colonise new volcanic terrains via their tiny wind-borne spores. For instance, it has been documented that bracken ferns were pioneer plants of the barren cone of the famous Krakatoa volcano after its eruption in 1883.

But the diversity of seeds and fruits at another site suggests that an existing forest was buried by volcanic activity.

This star-shaped fruit, seen in cross section here, is currently being studied and is likely to be a species new to science. Geoff Thompson/Queensland Museum

Researchers have suggested that the key factors responsible for the evolution of the Australian fauna and flora during the Cenozoic period (the last 66 million years) were predominantly climate and environmental change. It happened, in part, due to the movement of the Australian continental plate northwards.

But the broad-scale volcano activity that occurred in eastern Australia during the Cenozoic has rarely been invoked as a key driver of such changes.

So remarkably preserved, the silcrete plant fossils are now providing startling new insights into the history of some groups of Australian plants and the vegetation types in which they grew.