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If you could walk the streets of medieval England, you might feel as unfamiliar as an alien environment.
The culture, landscape and even the languages of Middle English, Anglo-French and Latin would shock you as you enter a world you would expect to understand.
In other words, it probably wouldn’t match what you might have seen in the “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” comic.
Historical accounts share the details of the lives of the royal and wealthy, but everyday people are often missing, making it difficult to imagine what our own lives would have been like if we lived hundreds of years earlier.
The paucity of these clues makes it difficult to truly understand the past, especially over a turbulent period of a thousand years.
But a new project is bringing those stories to light.
We are a family
DNA analysis has provided a personal insight into the lives of 16 people who lived in medieval Cambridge, including survivors of the Black Death.
Scientists carried out a detailed genetic study of hundreds of skeletons recovered from cemeteries across the English city. The research team was able to create “bone biographies” of townspeople, scholars, long-distance travelers and artisans.
The osteobiographies include how the people ate, their activities, whether they suffered physical trauma and sometimes, how they died. To make them more relatable, the researchers Their subjects gave pseudonyms and portraits, such as Anne, who hobbled on a shortened leg after multiple injuries.
Wat survived the plague and died of cancer in his 60s. And he was one of many who stayed in a charity hospital, which provided an early form of welfare system for the poor and sick.
A force of nature
Consequences are expected within hours and days after a major earthquake. But a team of geoscientists think aftershocks from some of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded in the United States are still occurring nearly 200 years later.
Three earthquakes occurred near the Missouri-Kentucky border in 1811 and 1812, with magnitudes ranging from 7.3 to 7.5. They are probably responsible for 30% of the earthquakes that occurred near the area from 1980 to 2016, according to new research.
A 7.0 magnitude earthquake i Charleston, South Carolina, in 1886 also appears to be responsible for 16% of the region’s modern activity.
It is not clear why large earthquakes occurred in these relatively stable regions, but scientists can determine the risks of future disasters in these areas by assessing seismic activity.
Around the globe
Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to peer inside an opaque, dusty box-shaped cloud at the center of our galaxy — and they came up with more questions than answers.
The cloud, known as “the Brick” because of its shape and lack of visibility, was thought to be the center of star formation. But Webb’s keen infrared eye didn’t spot any young stars hidden in the dust.
Instead, the observatory saw a wealth of frozen carbon monoxide.
The research team is not sure why there is solid ice inside the Milky Way instead of stars, but studying this galactic region could change how astronomers understand star formation.
Found
Fossils that were originally thought to be the leaves of an extinct plant are actually the shells of baby turtles that lived among dinosaurs.
When researchers recently looked at the fossils, which were first found between the 1950s and 1970s, their analysis showed that the leaf structure was made of bone.
After solving the mystery, scientists nicknamed the species of turtle “Turtwig” after a half-plant, half-turtle Pokémon, in a nod to the elusive nature of the fossil.
Meanwhile, paleontologists have discovered for the first time a tyrannosaur fossil with its stomach still intact, revealing the dinosaur’s last meal before it died 75 million years ago.
Amazing creatures
Antarctic smigstrap penguins, so named for the distinctive black band that bends under their chin, are experts at “micronaps”.
Breeding chinstrap penguins take more than 10,000 naps a day, each lasting an average of four seconds, according to new research.
Penguins living in the colony observed during the study used micronaps to get about 11 hours of sleep each day while incubating and defending their nests from a bird of prey known as the brown squaw.
Although fragmented sleep patterns are harmful and inadvisable for humans, they appear to be a survival adaptation for the penguins, said the international team of study authors.
Discoveries
These new results will draw your attention to:
— Baboons were revered by the ancient Egyptians, but a new study of baboon mummies shows that the imported primates did not fare well in their new environments.
— The propulsion module that powered India’s Chandrayaan-3 expedition to a historic moon landing is back in Earth orbit and is launching a bonus mission that could help search for life on other worlds.
— The US Food and Drug Administration has approved two gene-based treatments for sickle cell disease, including the first therapy using CRISPR gene editing.
— NASA astronaut Frank Rubio stumbled upon one of the first tomatoes grown in space during a stint aboard the International Space Station. Months later, his colleagues found it, closing the case (and proving Rubio didn’t eat it).
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