The most interesting things that happened in the last 12 hours, on Earth and off it.
Meanwhile, near Stirling Castle…
A skeleton from Edward I's 1304 siege of Stirling Castle has more than 160 fractures, an injury pattern an archaeologist recognized from modern high-speed car crash victims. The culprit was a trebuchet stone. It is the first time a bone assemblage has been read as the signature of a siege engine hit.
Meanwhile, in the early universe…
The "little red dots" that have baffled astronomers since JWST switched on in 2022 may be a class of object nobody had catalogued: enormous black holes wrapped in enough hot gas to behave partly like stars. If confirmed, black hole stars would explain how the early universe assembled giants far faster than models allow.
Some male spiders finish mating by somersaulting directly into the female's fangs, and it turns out this elaborate suicide takes surprisingly little genetic machinery to encode. The finding suggests baroque animal behaviors can hang on very few switches.
Meanwhile, above the Moon's far side…
A satellite the size of a carry-on bag will park where the Moon blocks Earth's radio noise, then listen for the faint hydrogen hum of the cosmic dark ages — the 150 million years before the first stars lit. The far side is the only radio-quiet place in the neighborhood.
Meanwhile, on cliffs in southern China…
Thousands of figures painted on river cliffs in southern China have held their color for at least 2,000 years, and analysis suggests the pigment was mixed with human blood. Proteins in the blood appear to have acted as a binder, gluing the paint to the rock.
A bacterium that has been assumed for a century to be a passive lung resident turns out to have a very different biology than the textbooks describe. The reversal changes how researchers should read the lung microbiome's role in health and disease.
Meanwhile, in a lab at Rockefeller University…
Reading the molecular signatures of millions of mouse cells suggests aging isn't accumulated damage so much as a reorganization — a "remodeling of the cell society," with cell types shifting proportions on something like a schedule. If aging is a program, it is in principle a program that could be edited.
Meanwhile, in a Belgian cellar wall…
Workers drilling for sewage pipes in a Belgian cellar broke into a wall cavity holding roughly €9 million in gold. Somebody sealed it in there and, apparently, never came back for it.
Meanwhile, on the Golden Gate Bridge…
Harbor porpoises vanished from San Francisco Bay for decades, returned in 2008, and have now been watched mating from the walkway of the Golden Gate Bridge — the first close look at how the notoriously shy animals actually do it. The vantage point solved a question boats and tags could not.
Meanwhile, in Brazil's Atlantic forest…
A severe drought may have driven thirsty monkeys and mosquitoes out of the forest and into Brazilian cities, seeding the country's first yellow fever outbreak in decades. The chain runs from rainfall to animal movement to human infection.