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KANO  -  Five men have been sentenced to death by hanging in Nigeria’s Kano state for the 2023 murder of a woman they accused of witchcraft. The convicted men attacked Dahare Abubakar, 67, as she was working on her farm, beating and stabbing her to death. 

The court heard that the victim was murdered after the sick wife of one of the accused, Abdulaziz Yahaya, had a dream that she was being pursued by Ms Abubakar, who was holding a knife.

Yahaya then organised a group to confront Ms Abubakar, which resulted in her murder.

"There have been similar cases like this but this is the first time we are seeing up to five people sentenced to death for murder over wrongful witchcraft accusation," Mr Sorondiki told the BBC.

The mysterious grunts and moans of the humpback whale have long captivated humans—so much so that we put recordings of them onto the Voyager spacecraft to convey the sounds of Earth to other life forms. A new study published today in Science reveals an unexpected similarity between human and humpback vocalizations: The songs have a statistical structure similar to that of human language.....

Some animals, such as dogs, make their vocalizations instinctively—they don’t need to learn how to bark. But like human language, humpback whale song is culturally transmitted. Male humpbacks learn the songs, thought to be used to attract mates, from other males. Also like language, humpback whale songs have patterns and structure—individual “elements,” such as a single grunt, combine to form phrases, strung together into “themes” that make up a song, which can last 30 minutes.

One leading theory on the origins of life on Earth proposes that simple chemical molecules gradually became more complex, ultimately forming protocells—primitive, non-living structures that were precursors of modern cells.

A promising candidate for protocells is polyester microdroplets, which form through the simple polymerization of alpha-hydroxy acids (αHAs), compounds believed to have accumulated on early Earth possibly formed by lightning strikes or delivered via meteorites, into protocells, followed by simple rehydration in aqueous medium......

The team found that polyester microdroplets could form even in salt-rich environments, at low αHA concentrations, and in small reaction volumes.

This expands on previous research, which primarily considered their formation at high concentrations or in larger bodies of water such as coastal areas of lakes or hot springs.

The findings suggest instead that polyester protocells were likely more widespread than previously thought, potentially forming in confined spaces like rock pores or even in high-salt environments such as briny pools or oceanic environments.

Finding life in outer space is one of the great endeavors of humankind. One approach is to find motile microorganisms that can move independently, an ability that is a solid hint for life. If movement is induced by a chemical and an organism moves in response, it is known as chemotaxis.

Now, researchers in Germany have developed a new and simplified method for inducing chemotactic motility in some of Earth's smallest life forms.

Source:

Application of chemotactic behavior for life detection

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/astronomy-and-space-sciences/articles/10.3389/fspas.2024.1490090/full

“There’s no doubt it’s a case of cannibalism.” Combined with evidence from other sites, the find shows cannibalism may have been a widespread practice among these early Europeans.

A handful of Magdalenian sites far to the west have also yielded hints of cannibalism. But what explains the practice?

Ethnographers have recorded more recent societies where family members consume their relatives after death to absorb their wisdom or spare them from decomposing in the ground. So-called “funerary cannibalism” wasn’t necessarily “a symbol of violence.”

Dr. Jon T. Kosloski, the director of AARO, during the hearing, discussed several intriguing incidents. One case involved a police officer who described an object as “blacker-than-black,” suggesting its peculiar visibility or perhaps invisibility to the naked eye. Another incident saw military air crews reporting being trailed or shadowed by UAP. Despite these encounters, no conclusive link to foreign adversaries was found, leaving these cases as genuinely anomalous.

NEWS HARD TO SHARE - Simon Holland evokes a probable past psionics experiment in Suffolk

Medieval pubs were more than just places to drink—they were hubs of gambling, crime, and deadly brawls. From barroom assassinations to drunken feuds that ended in murder, these rowdy establishments were as dangerous as they were lively.

There were a lot of manslaughter cases arising from a trip to the pub. Many men carried knives. Arguments between armed men might, not coincidentally, escalate quickly and end in an accidental, or at least unintended, death. The tiny fines that were often exacted as punishment and the quick departure of an unpursued perpetrator from a village show just how common such incidents were—although formal cases of murder might be relatively rare in the Middle Ages, unlawful death and manslaughter were not.

The scan allowed the team to confirm the skull belonged to a specimen of V. iaai. It had a long, narrow, toothless beak, with a large bone at the tip of the upper jaw—a premaxilla—that is characteristic of modern waterfowl, which confirmed that this bird was an ancient relative of modern ducks and geese. But unlike those modern relatives, Vegavis’s beak and the structure of its jaw muscles suggest it was a skilled underwater predator, capable of snapping its beak shut and snatching prey beneath the surface, more like today’s loons and grebes.

Its braincase revealed an enlarged forebrain, which is a feature shared by modern birds.

Today, half the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language, whose descendant tongues include English, Russian, Greek, Bengali, and dozens more. So it’s no surprise that generations of scholars have obsessed over the mystery of where Indo-European originated and who spoke it first.

A pair of papers published today in Nature offer some of the starkest clues yet: DNA evidence suggesting an early form of Indo-European was first spoken between 4400 and 4000 B.C.E. in central Eurasia, then spread widely 1000 years later.....

The Yamnaya were cattle and sheep herders who adopted wheels and wagons around 3300 B.C.E. Within a few centuries, their genes appear across Eurasia, from Mongolia to the grasslands of Eastern Europe. “It’s the largest migration into Europe in the last 5000 years,” says David Anthony, an archaeologist at Harvard University who co-authored both new studies.

But Indo-European predates the Yamnaya, according to one of the new papers. It marshals data from archaeology, linguistics, and genetics—including more than 400 newly sequenced genomes from people living in the region—to argue the language family first emerged about 6400 years ago on the grassy plains north of the Black Sea, where a colorful mix of ancient people intermingled. This late Stone Age melting pot included fishers living along the river valleys, hunter-gatherers migrating from farther north along the catchments of the Volga, Don, and Dnipro rivers, and farmers from the foothills of the Caucasus.

Why Earth and Mars are depleted in moderately volatile elements (MVEs).

MVEs like copper and zinc play a crucial role in planetary chemistry, often accompanying life-essential elements such as water, carbon, and nitrogen. Understanding their origin provides vital clues about why Earth became a habitable world. Earth and Mars contain significantly fewer MVEs than primitive meteorites (chondrites), raising fundamental questions about planetary formation.....

Surprisingly, the team found that many inner solar system planetesimals retained chondrite-like MVE abundances, showing that they accreted and preserved MVEs despite undergoing differentiation.

This suggests that the progenitors of Earth and Mars did not start out depleted in these elements, but instead, their loss occurred over a prolonged history of collisional growth rather than incomplete condensation in the solar nebula or planetesimal differentiation.

Reports of proteins in fossilized bones have been a subject of controversy in the scientific literature because it is assumed that fossilization results in the destruction of all organic components.

In this paper, a novel combination of analytical techniques is used to address this question for an exceptionally well-preserved Edmontosaurus sacrum excavated from the Upper Cretaceous strata of the South Dakota Hell Creek Formation.

Cross-polarized light microscopy (XPol) shows birefringence consistent with collagen presence.

Tandem LC-MS unambiguously identified, and for the first time quantified, hydroxyproline, a unique collagen-indicator amino acid, in acid-digested samples from the Edmontosaurus. 

LC-MS/MS bottom-up proteomics shows identical collagen peptide sequences previously identified and reported for another hadrosaur and a T. rex sample.

Detection of soft tissues (e.g., proteins) in fossil bones is a growing field of study and this paper contributes to the list of such findings. Corroborating results from a novel combination of three independent analytical techniques are presented which taken together provide experimental evidence for the conclusion that collagenous protein remnants in some dinosaur bones are original (endogenous) to the fossils and thus providing further evidence addressing this long-standing controversy in the scientific literature.

Three converging lines of evidence show that variation in usage of signal forms reflects dialects. While chimpanzees are thought to have a biologically inherited set of gestural signals, our results suggest that the dialects observed are likely to be socially influenced.

Whether these signals are conventionalized (i.e., where arbitrary forms are socially learned and have a common shared meaning) within each community remains to be tested.

Finally, we uniquely documented cultural loss for over a generation, linked to demographic decline driven by human activity, emphasizing the significance of a stable social environment for cultural retention in chimpanzees. Our evidence highlights the urgent need to integrate chimpanzee cultural preservation with conservation strategies.

The ancient remains of the Australopithecus afarensis were discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. The find was, at the time, the most complete ever found, and revolutionized the understanding of humanity's ancestors.

In a 2016 study, researchers said Lucy had strong upper arms, suggesting she regularly climbed trees and nested in branches at night.

She also had relatively weak legs that were not used for climbing and were inefficient for walking, the study concluded.

An analysis of a fracture on one of Lucy's bones in the same year suggested that she probably died from a fall from a tall tree.

Long considered the longest living human relative, Lucy was dethroned of her status in 1994 following the discovery -— also in Ethiopia -— of Ardi, a female Ardipithecus ramidus who lived 4.5 million years ago.

Testing showed that SUPER could safely fly through an obstacle course at 20 meters per second. The research team also found that it could follow a target, such as a human being, as it made its way through a forest, successfully avoiding trees, branches and other obstacles it met. They also found that because it is based on LiDAR, it can operate in low-light conditions as well.

Meteorites are rocks from space that have entered our atmosphere. Most were once part of asteroids – the rocky, airless remnants left over from the formation of our solar system 4.6bn years ago. Almost all of them are what collectors call “finds”, meaning that the stone has been discovered by searching the ground, having fallen earlier – in most cases several thousand years earlier. A “fall”, a meteorite that is seen in flight and then recovered, is very, very rare. Worldwide, typically only about 10 such rocks are picked up each year. Before 2021, the last reported UK fall was a rock the size of a cricket ball that landed in a hedge in Glatton in Cambridgeshire in May 1991.

To get treats, apes eagerly pointed them out to humans who didn't know where they were, a seemingly simple experiment that demonstrated for the first time that apes will communicate unknown information in the name of teamwork. The study also provides the clearest evidence to date that apes can intuit another's ignorance, an ability thought to be uniquely human.

Because this so-called theory of mind supports many of the capacities that make humans unique, like teaching and language, many believe it is absent from animals. But this work demonstrates the rich mental foundations that humans and other apes share—and suggests that these abilities evolved millions of years ago in our common ancestors.

While parallel universes are a staple of science fiction, there are some real scientific theories to support them. But if parallel universes do exist, could we ever travel to them? It certainly wouldn't be easy, but let's explore this possibility.

Parallel universes crop up in two places in physical theories. One is in our conception of inflation, the theory of the extremely early universe. In those tumultuous times, many universes may have inflated all at once (and kept going) and branched out into a tremendous number of individual universes, each with their own kinds of physics and arrangements of matter. But traveling to the other universes wouldn't be easy, because they're far beyond our observable horizon and moving away faster than the speed of light. That would take a lot of frequent flyer miles.

The other potential multiverse is in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. This interpretation says that when some random quantum process occurs, one "universe" gets one of the possible results, while other universes get the others. Thus, the multiverse is constantly being filled with every possible quantum possibility.

A new study debunks claims that a magnitude 4.5 earthquake in Iran was a covert nuclear weapons test, as widely alleged on social media and some mainstream news outlets in October 2024, a period of heightened geopolitical tensions in the Middle East.

"There was a concerted misinformation and disinformation campaign around this event that promoted the idea this was a nuclear test, which is not something you often see happen with an earthquake."

Using publicly available data from seismic monitoring stations, the researchers concluded that the earthquake originated along a gently sloping fault where Earth's crust was being deformed by the collision between Arabia and Eurasia. The process aligns with the geophysical forces that characterize the region's tectonically active interior and rules out any connection to a particularly unusual source or nuclear test, the study concludes.

Conclusion

In this paper, we investigated the distances at which technosignatures of the modern-day Earth could be detected with the astronomical instrumentation of the modern-day Earth in a formulation we called "Earth detecting Earth." This paradigm focuses on limiting extrapolation to unknown technologies to understand the detectability of Earth by its constellation of technosignatures. We put various technosignatures across the electromagnetic spectrum onto a quantified "detectability" distance scale, including radio transmissions from different scales of radio transmitters, optical emission from nightside city lights, focusing lasers for AO, heat islands from cities, free-floating objects that could be pinged with radar, the belt of satellites around the planet, and objects such as rovers on non-Earth planetary surfaces.

The results of this investigation are shown in Figure 1 and summarized as follows.

1.  Radio remains the way that Earth is most detectable at ι = 1.

2.  Investment in atmospheric biosignature searches has opened up the door for atmospheric technosignature searches.

3.  Humanity's remotely detectable impacts on Earth and the solar system span 12 orders of magnitude.

4.  Our modern-day planetary-scale impacts are modest compared to what is assumed in many technosignature papers.

5.  We have a multiwavelength constellation of technosignatures, with more of the constellation becoming visible the closer the observer becomes.

This should not be the only way of characterizing and sorting a portfolio of technosignature approaches but will be complemented by future work emphasizing aspects perpendicular to the minimal-extrapolation approach taken here.

Gold coins and jewellery were deposited there at regular intervals over a period of about 100 years.

Based on the phosphate analysis, it is likely that animals were sacrificed there as well.

Use of the site ceased around the year ad 700, at least half a century earlier than the formal Christianisation of the area. This could indicate that the local elite, with whom the site seems to have been associated, had become Christians at an earlier date, or had at least moved away from collective expressions of paganism.

The cult site was probably linked to a nearby high-status settlement with an enclosed cult house or ceremonial building.

A paradox at the heart of quantum physics has been tested in an extraordinary fashion, pushing the boundaries of human intuition beyond breaking point by measuring a pulse of light in 37 dimensions.

Their findings clarify how quantum weirdness operates on a fundamental level, potentially informing future applications in quantum technology. Not to mention reaffirming just how useless our brains are at understanding the operations manual for our Universe's engine.

Source:

https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.abd8080

Instead of relying on traditional rocket fuel, SpinLaunch uses a massive rotating arm to propel satellites into low Earth orbit, powered solely by electricity. This approach could significantly reduce the cost and environmental impact of satellite launches.

The company has already completed multiple successful test flights. “This is not a rocket, and clearly our ability to perform in just 11 months this many tests and have them all function as planned really is a testament to the nature of our technology,” said SpinLaunch founder and CEO Jonathan Yaney following the company’s 10th successful launch. SpinLaunch aims to deploy satellite constellations into orbits below 600 miles by 2026.

Defining life

Defining life is surprisingly challenging. While we intuitively recognize living organisms as having life, a precise definition remains elusive. Dictionaries offer various descriptions, such as the ability to grow, reproduce and respond to stimuli.

But even these definitions can be ambiguous.

A more comprehensive definition considers life as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of processing information and maintaining a state of low entropy, with little disorder or randomness.

Living things constantly require energy to sustain their molecular organization and maintain their highly organized structures and functions. Without this energy, life would quickly descend into chaos and disrepair. This definition encompasses the dynamic and complex nature of life, emphasizing its ability to adapt and evolve.

Asteroid samples fetched by NASA hold not only the pristine building blocks for life but also the salty remains of an ancient water world, scientists reported Wednesday.

The findings provide the strongest evidence yet that asteroids may have planted the seeds of life on Earth and that these ingredients were mingling with water almost right from the start.