A lost environment reveals itself by oldest environmental genetic material

The Harpole Treasure of a High-Ranking Anglo-Saxon Woman during the 630 – 670 Renaissance: Life, But Greener

It’s fitting that so many revelations are being shared during this time of reflection as 2022 comes to a close — even as we anticipate the wonder yet to be uncovered when a new year dawns.

The polar region used to be filled with plants and animals 2 million years ago. Mastodons, reindeer, geese, lemmings and hares lived in an ecosystem that was a mix of temperate and Arctic flora and fauna.

The genetic material, shed by all of the living organisms in the environment so long ago, tells a more complete story of prehistoric life than the fossil record.

This unparalleled ancient ecosystem has no modern equivalent, but it could provide a genetic road map for how some species could adapt to the climate crisis.

CNN offers a limited newsletter series, called Life, But Greener, that offers ideas on how to minimize one’s role in the climate crisis.

At the site marked for a UK housing development, there was a trove that belonged to a powerful Anglo-Saxon woman.

The Harpole treasure contains a necklace, a large silver cross, decorated pots, and a copper dish, and it is 1,300 years old.

These items were the grave goods of a high-ranking woman who died between 630 and 670. She might have been a princess or held a position of power in the early Christian church.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/world/oldest-dna-science-newsletter-wt-scn/index.html

The Artemis mission to Baja California: discovery of the remains of a juvenile long-necked plesiosaur and 55 Cancri e

Other monumental Anglo- Saxon discoveries have been made across England in the past century.

The view from the globe was one of the first visions of the planet as a globe. The image is linked to the environmental movements, as well as a planetary consciousness of our place in the universe.

The Artemis program hopes to take humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars in 50 years, after 50 years after the Apollo mission.

After traversing around the moon, the mission’s uncrewed capsule will hit the water near Baja California on Sunday.

A group of amateur paleontologists called the Rock Chicks were excavating on a cattle ranch in the Australian outback when they found what’s been likened to the Rosetta stone of marine reptile fossils.

The sleuths uncovered the remains of a juvenile long-necked plesiosaur spanning 19 feet (about 6 meters) that lived 100 million years ago. During the early days of dinosaurs, the Eromanga Sea was an area of what is now inland Australia.

The scorching surface of exoplanet 55 Cancri e, also known as Janssen, is an ocean of lava that reaches 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,982 degrees Celsius).

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/world/oldest-dna-science-newsletter-wt-scn/index.html

The Discovery of Oldowan Tools in Kenya, the First Known Examples of a Dynamical Movement in the Earth’s Early History

The ankylosaur was able to hit its prey with its sledgehammer-like tail club. The armored dinosaurs might have fought one another as well, based on the discovery of a banged-up fossil.

— The intrepid Ingenuity helicopter just set a new record for flying on Mars. It is speculated that NASA’s Viking 1 landed at the site of an ancient megatsuki on the red planet.

After an 81% death toll in marine species 251.9 million years ago, life rebounded quickly. More than 1,000 fossils uncovered in southern China show fish, ancient lobsters and prehistoric crab-like creatures existed just a million years after volcanic activity heated the atmosphere and acidified the oceans. It challenges the idea that taking millions of years to recover from self-sufficient organisms to apex predator is really all that it takes.

Archaeologists in Kenya have unearthed dozens of stone tools scattered around the butchered bones of ancient hippopotamus-like creatures. The site dates to between 2.5 and 3 million years ago and pushes back the start of large- animal butchering by Human relatives by 600,000 years. The tools are the earliest known example — by around 700,000 years — of Oldowan tools, which became widespread across Africa and Asia. The tools were found next to the teeth of a relative of Paranthropus, making it possible that Paranthropus used the tools at the same time as Homo.

Why should we care about preserving and restoring the mammoth? The role of genetics in the evolution of zebras and Nicobar pigeons

The unique whorls, arches and loops of fingerprints are created during fetal development when fine ridges on the skin form and crash into each other. There are waves of ridges in the tip of the finger, the middle of the fingertip and the center of the fingertip, discovered by researchers studying mouse toes. When they collide, patterns form through a self-organizing mechanism called a Turing reaction–diffusion system, first proposed by codebreaker Alan Turing in 1952. The processes behind the formation of a zebra’s stripes are similar to those behind a Cheetah’s spots.

Colossal, the US genetic engineering company that said it plans to bring the mammoth back from extinction, now wants to revive the dodo. It says it will look at the genetics of Raphuscullatus and the Nicobar pigeon in order to find a way to de-exctrue it. The person who works to save species in the former home of the dodo says that if we could have that amount of money, it is better spent on preventing species from going extinct. 5 min read.

Almost 70% of people who responded to a poll said no, after we asked whether we should resurrect extinct species.

Even if technology existed to bring back a single animal, creating a viable population with the required genetic diversity wouldn’t be easy. The consequences of introducing the mammoth into a modern environment would be difficult to predict.

Others note that de-extinction and conservation science can exist side by side. As Briefing reader and pathologist Jacqueline Bentel put it: “Sometimes, the pursuit of seemingly frivolous scientific pursuits has facilitated the development of technologies or understanding of basic processes that benefit other areas of scientific knowledge.”

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00422-5

Detecting a ring: the Bodleian Library of Europe’s oldest archival collection of images and art of the ancient Scottish Isles

Researchers are revealing invisible details of the documents and art held in one of Europe’s oldest libraries: the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. They use lasers and cameras that can take pictures of tiny differences in relief to make discoveries, such as the nun’s scratched doodling in the margins of a religious book. Thousands of pinpricks on the earliest map of the British Isles suggest that the layout was copied from an earlier map.

“This ring should not be there, this ring should not exist,” astronomer Bruno Morgado tells the Nature Podcast about what his team discovered around a rock in the outer Solar System, about half the size of Pluto. The chunks of rock, ice and dust that make up the ring are at a distance far outside their supposed stability limit — yet they haven’t coalesced into a moon, as would be expected. It is challenging for scientists to understand planetary rings when it is not obvious what is causing the ring to spin.