discovered

In 1994 archaeologists discovered a sunken 17th century ship with more than 400 gold coins. They have finally solved their great mystery

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The surprise came in the mid 90s. A group of British divers explored the waters of the salcombe bayin Devon, when they came across the remains of a 17th century boat. At first glance, the wreck was very degraded by the passage of time, but it hid a real treasure: hundreds of coins of gold, jewelry and ceramics, among other pieces, most preserved today in the British Museum. Once the initial surprise was overcome, a mystery remained: What was the name of the boat? Where did it start from and where was it going? We already have the answer. What has happened? That archaeologists have finally solved a mystery that had gone unanswered for three decades: the identity of the merchant ship located in 1994 facing Salcombe Bay, England. We knew it hid valuable treasures, including 400 gold coinsbut until now no one had been able to clarify what the ship was called, its voyage and why its remains have spent centuries rotting in the English Channel. There, resting on the seabed, was the culmination of a story; the beginning was missing. Do we already have an answer? Yes. In a publication launched by the British Museum, a group of researchers has finally revealed the identity of the ship: it is the Dom van Keulena Dutch merchant ship that set sail from Morocco around the fall of 1633. Its destination was the Netherlands, but the trip became complicated when it was sailing with its valuable cargo off the southern coast of England. The weather was not favorable, the ship suffered a fatal leak and ended up capsizing. How did they find out? Diving. Although in this case the researchers have not immersed themselves in the cold waters of the Atlantic. The exploration has been carried out by historian Ian Frield among files from the British National Archives. There he located a series of documents that tell us about the voyage of the Dom van Keulen at the beginning of the 17th century, the storms it had to face and its unfortunate end, which ended with the ship at the bottom of the sea. The story of the merchant, however, was not as tragic as it could have been. We know that his crew managed to survive the shipwreck, and experts like Dave Parham, a professor at Boston University and one of the book’s editors, believe that “most of the load” He ended up recovering around the same time. “Most of it”? Exact. If Parham and his colleagues are correct, the treasures that the ship carried inside were recovered long ago; but neither the shipowners of the Dom van Keulen nor the generations that followed them were able to remove all the traveling items stacked in the holds. There they stayed for centuries, among the mud and oblivion, until in 1994 SWMAG divers located what remained of the wreck. The rest is the history of marine archeology: when exploring the site, the divers found a part of the cargo. Most are preserved in the British Museum. Did you transport that much? Yes. Parham is pretty clear in this regard: “Among their cargo were 150 bags of gum arabic, 64 bags of saltpeter, 320 goat skins and 9,000 Barbary ducats, Moroccan gold coins.” Its considerable value explains why the majority of this cargo ended up being extracted from the merchant ship’s holds, but for one reason or another more than 400 coins remained hidden until the SWMAG divers arrived in the 1990s. Did you find anything else? Those hundreds and hundreds of gold coins from Africa probably represent the largest treasure extracted from the shipwreck, but they are not the only thing that archaeologists have found. During your research They have also recovered a bowl, a pewter spoon, gold jewelry, a fish-shaped weight, a seal, ceramics and a piece of cast gold like a finger. Regarding the Dutch merchant ship, although no portraits of the period are preserved (or at least known), Parham explains that the wreck measures 30 meters long, includes cannons and anchors and rests about 18 meters deep. Why is it important? There are several reasons. The main one is that we finally know the identity of the merchant. Not only do we know that he was Dutch and transported valuable cargo. Now we know his name, career and complete history. As remember the SWMAGIn the area, remains of wood, rope, lead, dishes and other pieces were also found that tell us about life aboard the Dutch ships that covered that route at the beginning of the 17th century. If that were not enough, the wreck tells us about the traffic between North Africa and Europe and the trade in precious metals. “It provides an important context for the richness and architecture of the sharif Saadian trade, the African gold trade, and tangible evidence of the flourishing 17th-century maritime trade connecting Morocco, the Netherlands, and Britain,” Dave comments.. What was your relationship like? Intense. Bournemouth University (BU) remember that between the 16th and 17th centuries the Dutch traded actively, exchanging manufactures for pure gold from West Africa. In fact, some of the Berber ducats that were imported ended up being melted down to make Dutch gold coins with their metal, which was widely accepted at the time. The Dom van Keulen has given maritime archaeologists something else: the opportunity to examine 16th and 17th century Moroccan jewelry in a dateable contexta historical clue that is not often found. Images | Bournemouth University In Xataka | We finally know what sailors ate on the high seas in the 16th century. Thanks to the CSIC and a sunken galleon

2,000 years ago someone screwed up in a foundry. Thanks to her we have discovered a Roman workshop hidden in Germany

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When a piece of metal goes wrong, the normal thing in an artisan workshop is that it ends up being discarded. Well, something like this must have happened 2,000 years ago and that chance discovery of a lead ingot at an excavation in Rothaargebirgein the German region of Sauerland, has helped discover, understand and reconstruct how this metal was produced in the Roman Empire. The discovery. It all started with a large cast lead ingot, with a characteristic workmanship from the Roman imperial period, which found Brilon resident and metal prospector Peter Hoffman. Then he notified the authorities: the ingot was not a unit lost in transit, but a casting failure that was probably left there with the idea of ​​remelting it to use it, something that fortunately (for archaeology) never happened. With that clue, the archeology team of the Westphalia-Lippe Regional Association (LWL) The excavation campaign began in June on an elevation of the Rothaargebirge massif, near Brilon. What they found there confirmed his suspicions: There was a lead processing area from Roman times, something unique until now in southwest Westphalia. Why is it important. It may not be as spectacular as tombs or treasures, but this defective lead ingot serves to fill a gap in history: it is the first solid archaeological evidence that a metallurgical production chain existed in Sauerland, something that until now was not known. This is how he fills in a piece to better explain how the Roman economy worked. Furthermore, since ingots are direct products of mining and are marked with seals or engravings, they allow their distribution chain to be traced: the place of origin (the manufacturing workshop is close to the mine), their trade and distribution networks. In fact, there is a corpus which brings together some 2,250 Roman ingots documented from Scotland to Morocco and from Portugal to Israel. Context. As explains the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochumlead was a metal widely used in Roman times for all kinds of things: pipes, weights, sling projectiles or sarcophagus linings… and sometimes it was linked to the extraction of silver, so it is common to find the production of both together. Precisely this relationship between lead and silver is essential to explain Brilon. According to the doctor in archeology of the LWL Manuel Zeilerrelatively small amounts of lead were found at the site, which suggests that the objective was to produce lead efficiently and not generate waste derived from silver exploitation, an important detail because in many ancient sites both activities go hand in hand. Previous works by LWL already indicated that in the area around Brilon there were deposits rich in mineral and that Roman metallurgists had visited the area with the interest of obtaining lead, but it was not clear how. In detail. The team, led by Sebastian Magnus Sonntag, documented that there were ceramic fragments of pre-Roman tradition and numerous small fragments of lead related to the process of obtaining the metal, in addition to a base built with carefully arranged stone slabs. Both these slabs and the clay soil beneath showed signs of fire and heat and in the gaps between stones there were remains of charcoal, still to be analyzed, but the team’s hypothesis points because that place was a roasting point: there the galena (the most common lead sulfide in the region) was heated along with charcoal to reduce its sulfur content and then melt the resulting metal and pour it into molds and obtain ingots like the one found. Yes, but. The excavation only lasted a couple of weeks and the conclusions are still preliminary, but there are some things that still do not add up: the ceramic fragments probably point to the beginning of the Roman imperial era, but it is a relative and not an absolute dating. The key will be in the dating of the vegetal carbon remains. But the big underlying question was who worked the metal there: whether they were Romans, Germans or local artisans in contact with Roman technology. In Xataka | “For 2,000 years they have been inaccessible. Finally we can read them”: archaeologists now know how to decipher the Herculaneum papyri In Xataka | The “Mud Rome” of Hispania loved board games and wine. We know it thanks to a mysterious site in Aragon Cover | LWL and Jebulon

In 2019 we discovered fungi that metabolize gold. There are already those who want to turn them into the key to space mining

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The story started more than five years ago in Boddington, south of the Australian city of Perth. Over there, among killer animals and gold mines, a team of researchers from the Australian CSIRO discovered something really strange: that certain strains of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum Not only could they extract gold from their surroundings and integrate it into their structure, but by doing so they managed to spread faster than the rest. It seemed like a curiosity, but in recent years the situation has begun to change. But wait, why is this something so “weird”? Good question. After all, we know for a fact that fungi “play an essential role in the degradation and recycling of all types of organic material (like leaves or bark), but also in the cycle of certain metals such as aluminum, iron, manganese and calcium.” Why would it be different with gold? Because, as Tsing Bohu, researcher in charge of the project, explained, “gold is so inactive (chemically speaking) that these types of interactions are unusual and surprising, I had to see it to believe it.” And he saw it. In fact, it published in Nature Communications. It was the first solid evidence that fungi could play a relevant role in the gold cycle in the Earth’s crust. The “mushroom” of the golden eggs. The mining industry quickly turned its attention to the investigation. Especially right there in Australia. The island continent is the world’s third largest gold producer, but the consensus among analysts was that without new deposits production was going to fall (a lot) in a short time. The direct consequence is that this has made marginal deposits profitable. Initially, the industry thought that the CSIRO investigation could be used to locate these new deposits. As we explained years agoIn Australia it is relatively common to prospect in forests of the aucalyptus family or near termite areas because they have a close relationship with the precious metal. Why not test the soil for those strains of Fusarium oxysporum? But there is one more possibility. As Eduardo Bazo explained to Eugenio Fernández in a very interesting interviewin recent years companies have appeared that work in what we could call “metabolic mining“That is, using organisms to extract gold. “And why do they want that?”, you might ask. “Isn’t it easier to identify where the gold is and extract it with industrial methods?” Yes, here on Earth, yes. But these companies have their sights set a little further: on space mining. For years we have talked about the existence of huge mineral deposits in the Solar System and, during almost the same period, we have fantasized about being able to exploit them. The problem is that, beyond current technological limitationss, to the danger of normal mining, is added the fact that we are talking about processing metal in space. But what if we use ‘metabolic mining’? The idea of ​​sending modified strains of these fungi (or other types of microorganisms) that They will process the mineral for useverything would become simpler. I don’t know if it’s more viable, but it is simpler. It is much less rare than it seems (we use this type of approach to countless products we use regularly), however taking it to the world of mining seems a little more complex for pure efficiency. However, that is ‘now’. Because there are already experiments in this sense generating platinum in microgravity conditions and ‘metabolic’ copper is moving a lot of money. What’s more, while I write (and while the era of cheap materials is over) several research groups They are growing all kinds of microorganisms with the idea of ​​being able to grow gold sooner rather than later. They are getting it. Image | Dominic Vanyi | Jaap Straydo In Xataka | The next richest person in the world will come from space: the future millionaire of space mining

A Catalan city council fined an individual for “cutting down some trees.” They have discovered an international network of illegal garbage trafficking

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The Civil Guard, Europol and the French Gendarmerie They just arrested four people for illegally bringing at least 46,000 tons of French waste into Catalonia. And the case has a crumb. Because when you talk about ‘international garbage trafficking’ you imagine trucks passing in the dark through lost ports in the Pyrenees and ships unloading in the middle of the night. But the truth is that no truck had to hide: they crossed the border between France and Spain without any problems. The papers were, “in theory”, in order. In theory? There was the kid of the matter and what confused the authorities. It made no sense to bring garbage into Catalonia from France because the Catalan fee (75 euros) is higher than the French one (69): although the overall costs are higher, the savings would be very small. The key was something else: that the trucks moved around Europe declaring that what they were carrying in their vats was “soil.” And that was what was new. The network had gone one step further and was no longer “selling” cheap landfills, it was selling completely reclassifying the waste. In this way, the garbage traveled to Spain as material and ended up buried in a fruit field. By using the term “land” everything was radically simplified: no one got paid, no file was activated. Do we have a legal loophole? Not exactly: the legislation is not only clear, but even in this case, the alerts were activated. Sant Esteve Sesrovires detected the irregular actions, opened a file, informed the Prosecutor’s Office and proposed a fine of 814,900 euros. Why concept? Due to land spills and felling of trees. It was when investigating the matter that the bottom of the matter was discovered. Why is it important? Because it is the third episode of the same pattern in four months: in March, a European macro operation with 337 detainees; in April, 167,000 tons of rubble and asbestos in Axarquía; now, this. And, above all, because Spanish legislation continues to be very lax. Our management requires “seriously damaging the balance of natural systems.” It must be modified (it is a European requirement), but we have not done so yet. Therefore, this case will be judged in terms of document falsification, tax crime, money laundering. That is to say, although environmental crimes are among the crimes charged, recent experience suggests that the conviction, if it comes, will come because of the paperwork. It is a good metaphor for a country that has built one of the most expensive tax systems in Europebut we have left it entirely in the hands of responsible self-declaration. Image | Zibik In Xataka | Europe has a problem with waste management, to the point that there are mafias illegally “exporting” it from Italy to Cuenca

A Ryanair passenger already knows what a seat belt is for. And he discovered him with half his body outside the plane

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Memmingen is a German city about an hour and a half drive from Munich. In the south of Germany and north of Lake Constance, the city is in a perfect location to receive flights from those traveling to the Bavarian city or Switzerland. Therefore, it is perfect for low-cost airlines like Ryanair. One of its flights originating in Greece, however, has not arrived after a tremendous scare. Outside the plane. It is, according to sources who have offered their testimony to media such as Bloomberg either Reutersthe state in which a passenger on a Ryanair flight departing from Thessaloniki (Greece) to Memmingen (Germany) was found during takeoff. According to the information collected, a man was sucked out of the plane window and half his body was left outside the fuselage. Luckily, the seat belt and the help of the passengers themselves prevented the damage. (he was taken to the hospital with burns) were older. What has happened? They explain the Greek media as the local version of cnn that during a flight to Germany, passengers heard a sound similar to a tire bursting. Immediately afterwards, a passenger found himself with his head and shoulders outside the plane. This was caused because a part of an engine broke and hit the window, breaking it instantly. Immediately, the window itself sucked in the passenger who was traveling right in that seat and the cabin depressurized. The emergency led the pilot to make an emergency landing in the city of Thessaloniki (Greece) where the rest of the travelers were transferred on a new plane to the German city. How did they act? They explain in Flight Radar that the incident occurred when the plane had reached 15,000 feet in altitude in the middle of a takeoff maneuver, they say in The World. That is, the plane at that time exceeded 4,500 meters in altitude. That’s when the accident happened. The plane even had to burn fuel before landing with the cabin depressurized. When the cabin is depressurized, the oxygen inside the aircraft cabin is lost since at the altitude at which it is flown there is little of it. At that moment, as happened in this case, masks fall from the upper area of ​​the seats and passengers must put them on immediately to breathe normally. Why was he fired? In order to keep us alive at this altitude, airplanes hermetically seal their cabins. Inside they simulate similar pressure conditions at 1,500 meters highvery far from the real low pressure outside. This pressure difference prevents, for example, a human being by himself can open the door of an airplane while flying because it has to exert a force that is impossible to achieve. The problem occurs when, as in this case, an external agent breaks a window and the cabin suddenly suffers a sudden change in pressure. In that case, as in that of Aloha Airlines when a man was ejected for not wearing a seat belt. It is the change in pressure itself that causes the air to leave the plane with such force that it drags the objects in its path. And among the objects there may be a person who does not have a seat belt fastened. Investigating. Now, the air authorities will have to study why the window broke and, as everything indicates, it was due to the breakage of a part of the engine. The affected aircraft is a Boeing 737-800 which was manufactured in the United States. Ryanair only uses Boeing aircraft, with a fleet of more than 600 aircraft of this type. The North Macedonian authorities will be the ones to lead the investigations since when the accident happened the plane was already in its territory. Photo | Burak Sahin and Dan Barrett In Xataka | Boeing needs the 787 Dreamliner to run like clockwork. Two problems threaten his plans

We have been fleeing the heat for years to play sports. Science has discovered that we were losing a superpower

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Summer is coming, temperatures are rising and going for a run or cycling becomes an act of bravery. In this situation, common sense tells us that we should avoid the middle hours of the day, hydrate ourselves more and slow down, even though there is a possibility of falling into the sedentary lifestyle. This is why it is vital to adapt our exercise and rest to the high temperatures we are facing. The thermal shock. When we exercise, our muscles generate energy, but only 20-25% is translated into mechanical movement and the rest is released as heat. If we add to this a hot environment, the body faces a double thermoregulatory challenge. As detailed in an exhaustive review published in 2021Under heat stress, the body diverts a large flow of blood to the skin to dissipate heat through sweat. This means there is less blood available to working muscles and the heart. The result? The heart rate skyrockets to try to compensate and exhaustion comes much sooner. Acclimatization. The good news is that our body is an extraordinarily adaptable heat machine, and that is why if we expose ourselves to heat progressively, we activate what is known as acclimatization. Here, a study published in 2024 quantified this adaptation and it was seen that, after a period of repeated exposure to heat, the participants managed to reduce their core temperature at rest by 0.19 ºC and their heart rate by 6 beats per minute. That is, follow a process of adaptation 8 to 14 days Heat training consistently improves performance and thermoregulation. In fact, from the fifth day onwards, cardiac adaptations begin to be noticed. The physiology. Something that has been seen is that in the first week of heat training, the body retains more water and sodium in order to increase the blood volume that runs through the arteries and veins with the aim of improving cardiac output and the supply of oxygen to the muscles. The good thing is that if we maintain the thermal stimulus long term, the body responds by creating more hemoglobin, which is the protein that transports oxygen through the blood. This makes the system much more efficient when training, since the muscle will have a greater amount of oxygen. Train with heat. Just because the heat offers physiological advantages does not mean that we should go running at three in the afternoon during the heat wave in August, since there are serious complications such as heat stroke. Here the recommendation states that exposure to heat should be progressive, with short sessions at low intensity and increasing the duration over two weeks. Logically, hydration must be maintained according to physical activity, since dehydration of more than 2% of body weight nullifies many of the advantages of acclimatization and dangerously increases internal temperature. In short, training in the heat is hard but little by little it is possible to adapt as long as common sense prevails, changing the training schedule also to times with lower temperatures. Image | Unsplash In Xataka | Drink water right before going to sleep? Science has finally clarified whether it is a good idea or a terrible enemy of sleep

We have just discovered that the lethal weapon to hunt mammoths was not what we thought

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More than a century ago, archaeologists were convinced that the so-called Piltdown Man It was the “missing link” in human evolution. It took more than 40 years to prove that it was a fraud built with a human skull and the jaw of an orangutan. Since then, archeology has learned an uncomfortable lesson: even theories that seem indisputable can crumble when new evidence appears. The great certainty that falters. For decades, archeology books have presented the Clovis culture like the great mammoth hunters of North America. The image was simple: groups of hunters armed with spear propellers, known as atlatlcapable of taking down huge animals from a relatively safe distance. However, two studies published recently They question this reconstruction and force us to reconsider one of the most iconic scenes in American prehistory. The weapon that never appeared. He first study puts the focus on the atlatl, that kind of extension of the arm that multiplies the speed and range of a spear. For years it was assumed that the Clovis used it to hunt mammoths, although there was a surprising detail: A single atlatl has never been found at a Clovis site. Using statistical models, researchers they conclude now that this technology probably did not appear in America until about 4,000 years later before this culture disappeared, a gap too great to continue supporting the traditional theory. Without direction. The consequence of this archaeological gap is so striking that the author of the study, the archaeologist Metin Eren, summarizes it with a sincerity unusual in a scientific article: “We have no idea what the hell they used.” Because if the Clovis did not use atlatls, only hypotheses remain. Perhaps they hunted with javelins or thrust spears, which would have forced them to get much closer to animals weighing several tons and take an enormous risk. Paradoxically, the more research is done on one of the best-known cultures in America, there are fewer certainties about the weapon with which he survived. Or they were not so “hunters”. He ssecond study takes that review even further. After analyzing the fifteen sites where Clovis points have appeared along with remains of mammoths, mastodons or gomphotheres, the researchers they conclude that none demonstrates unequivocally that these animals were killed by human beings. The same marks on the bones and the same broken tips can occur both after a hunt and when using the carcass of an animal that had already died, a problem known in archeology as equifinality. Hunters… or scavengers. Of course, the authors do not maintain that the Clovis never hunted mammoths. What they affirm is that current evidence does not allow us to rule out that, on many occasions, they acted rather as opportunistic scavengers. In fact, remember that a Clovis point has never been found embedded in a mammoth bone, evidence that does exist in much older Eurasian sites. They even reinterpret a famous isotopic study on a Clovis child, proposing that the elevated nitrogen levels could be explained due to the consumption of larvae coming from corpses and not necessarily from a diet based almost exclusively on mammoth meat. Archeology exchanges certainties for questions. Both jobs They reflect a change of trend in research on prehistory. For decades, it was enough for an explanation to be reasonable to become the dominant narrative. Today researchers demand much stronger evidence and are revising some of the ideas that seemed best established, from the weapons used by the first Americans to the role they played in the disappearance of the megafauna of the end of the Ice Age. Sometimes the greatest scientific advance is not in finding a new answer, but in recognizing that the old one was never there. really proven. Image | BioS. In Xataka | The company that is resurrecting the mammoth is creating the Noah’s Ark of the 21st century. And he is doing it in Dubai, of course In Xataka | The crater known as “the door to hell” hid a surprise: a 50,000-year-old mammoth calf

New York has discovered that its highest paid employee is not the mayor, it’s a plumber. It seemed impossible until they checked their schedule.

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In 1927, Al Capone’s accountants were not the ones who ended up putting him in court. They did it own financial records. When investigators began to review income, schedules and money movements, they discovered that the accounts told a very different story than the official one. Because many of the most striking investigations did not begin with a complaint, but with something simpler: carefully looking at a time sheet. The highest paid employee. The story begins last yeara time when, to everyone’s surprise, the highest-paid municipal employee in New York was not the mayor, nor the police chief, nor the head of the firefighters. No, it was Jakub Markowskia plumbing supervisor for the municipal public housing authority who entered $465,000. The figure immediately attracted attention because it practically placed him at the top of a workforce of some 350,000 public employees. A possible explanation and something more. The first investigations confirmed that a good part of that salary came from the crazy figure of almost 2,560 overtime hours accumulated during a single fiscal year. Translated into practice, it represents an average close to seven extra hours a day for an entire year, an extraordinary workload even for a service used to dealing with urgent breakdowns. However, when reviewing the municipal documentation an unexpected detail appeared: during that same period there was also at the head of two private companies plumbing workers who worked on dozens of jobs spread across some of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city. It’s not the salary, it’s the time. That discovery completely changed the focus of the case. The New York Department of Buildings is now investigating whether the compatibility between both activities respected the regulations municipal and whether Markowski had the necessary authorization after being promoted in 2024 to a supervisory position related to fire safety. Not only that. Investigators are also analyzing whether he could exercise the direct supervision required by law in especially sensitive jobs, such as gas installations, while accumulating such a volume of activity. More and more doubts in the hours worked. The investigation also tries to clarify how their companies really worked. counted the new york times that, although Markowski was listed as a licensed plumber, several contractors recalled dealing primarily with another businessman, Robert Tarnawa, whose exact relationship to the work remains under scrutiny. Precisely this point is especially relevant because New York legislation requires that certain works be supervised directly and continuously by a licensed plumber. A case at the worst moment. The context doesn’t help either. The New York Housing Authority manages more than 240 residential complexes where nearly 300,000 people live and has a huge investment deficit for repair badly damaged buildings. In recent years, furthermore, the organization has been involved several scandals related to bribery, extortion and fraud overtime, which has increased scrutiny over any possible irregularities in the management of its resources. More questions than answers. To date, Markowski has not been formally accused of any wrongdoing and authorities insist that the investigation remains open. Nor has the details of the specific tasks that justified his thousands of overtime hours been made public, information requested by the own The New York Times through transparency legislation. What has become clear is that the story of New York’s highest-paid public employee has ceased to be that of an exceptional salary and has become that of an agenda that the authorities are examining minute by minute. As shared in the Times Attorney April McIver: “Allowing a single person to run a private plumbing company while serving as a city supervisor and logging more overtime than any other city employee is not only wasteful, it raises serious questions about the integrity, safety and oversight of the New York Housing Authority’s operations.” Image | sam valadi In Xataka | New York has launched its new and revolutionary garbage containers. Spain has been using them for years In Xataka | For decades we climbed this New York skyscraper without knowing that the screws that held it in place could not hold.

Scientists threw a cow into the depths of the China Sea. They discovered eight unexpected guests at the feast

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The ocean is full of surprises. Sometimes, as happened several years ago in Canada, enigmas appear floating in a of human feet adrift. However, in others, the majority, you have to go down to the depths to try to solve the mysteries. That was precisely what a group of researchers proposed. It all started by throwing the carcass of a cow. A cow at 1,600 meters. In one of the most unusual marine experiments in recent years, a group of scientists threw a dead cow 1,629 meters deep on a continental slope of the South China Sea, off the Chinese island of Hainan, with the aim of simulating the sinking of a whale and studying the scavenger behavior of deep waters. What they found surprised even the most experienced researchers: eight sleeper sharks of the Pacific (Somniosus pacificus) appeared at the site, marking the first documented observation of this species in the region. The discovery not only unexpectedly expands the distribution map of this elusive shark, but also provides valuable information about its behavioral patterns, feeding hierarchies, physiological adaptations and its possible geographical expansion. An unexpected visitor. Although the Pacific sleeper shark is a species with a wide distribution in the northern Pacific Ocean (from Japan to Alaska and south to Baja California), its detection in waters off southern China was not only unexpected, but raises questions about the actual extent of its habitatits possible displacement due to the effect of climate change or even the existence of a stable and not yet registered population in that region. Food label. The recorded images The underwater cameras not only confirmed its presence, but also revealed unusual behavior for large predators: a kind of shift systemin which the sharks lined up to feed on the corpse, giving way to other individuals that approached from behind. This type of “food label”rarely observed in predatory species, suggests that feeding order could be determined by the competitive intensity of each individual, rather than a chaotic struggle for resources, which would indicate a more complex level of social organization than previously suspected in these animals. New clues. He study also documented variations in behavior depending on body size. The specimens that exceeded 2.7 meters in length were very more aggressive and direct in attacking the carrion, while the smaller sharks opted for cautious movements, circling the carcass before approaching. The pattern suggests that even in an environment where food is scarce and opportunities are random, sleeper sharks could have developed a coexistence strategy with hierarchical ranks that minimize direct conflict. One more thing. Another notable finding was a behavior of eye retraction observed during feeding. Since this species lacks nictitating membrane (the protective “third eyelash” that other vertebrates such as cats or certain reptiles have), researchers believe that this retraction reflects a evolutionary adaptation to protect the eyes during bites or struggles, which provides new information about the defensive physiology of these sharks in their natural environment. The unknown. And more, since the recordings also showed other revealing aspects. To wit: several sharks carried visible parasites in his eyes, identified like copepodsalthough it was not possible to accurately classify the species. This detail reinforces the biological parallel between Pacific sleeper sharks and their better-known relatives, the Greenland sharkswhich also tend to harbor parasites in their visual organs. Aside from sharks, the experiment attracted a surprising variety of deep-sea fauna, such as snail fish and numerous amphipodsall attracted to the source of decaying organic matter. These records confirm that the deep areas of the South China Sea not only host a biodiversity that is still poorly documented, but could be more productive than previously believed, contrary to the idea that the tropical depths are biologically poorer than their polar counterparts. The great unknown. Ultimately, the presence of these sharks raises a crucial question: is this a recent expansion of their range due to global warming, or has it always been part of their habitat and simply never been observed? The species is known to have occasionally appeared in such remote regions like Palau or the Solomon Islandssuggesting that there could be more southern populations than the scientific literature indicates. However, the “frequent occurrence” in the southwest China Sea, according to the team itself researcher led by Han Tian, ​​suggests rather a structural lack of data in an underexplored region rather than a recent change in the distribution pattern. In that sense, the experiment with the cow corpse has not only provided a specific observation, but has also opened a way to review key concepts about the marine biogeography of abyssal species. The new discovery. In February 2026, it was documented, for first time in historya shark (of the sleeper family, possibly a southern sleeper shark, a very close relative of the Pacific sleeper shark) off the South Shetland Islands, in Antarctic waters, 490 meters deep. This is the first time that an elasmobranch has been filmed in the Southern Ocean, and several experts suggest that warming waters could be facilitating the movement of this family of sharks to areas where they were not previously expected, although they also warn that they could have been there for a long time without having been detected. Know the depths. All these findings They highlight the usefulness of simple but carefully designed experiments to obtain data about remote, inaccessible and often poorly understood environments. The idea of ​​simulating a whale sinking with a cow not only proved effective, it proved to be a powerful ecological magnet capable of revealing complex biological interactions. In a context where the climate change and human activity are altering ecosystems even at great depth, this type of research is crucial to understanding the invisible functioning of the deep ocean. The appearance of eight sleeper sharks where no one expected them, behaving with order, measured aggression and sophisticated adaptive mechanisms, is further proof that the deep sea they keep secrets that we are only beginning to understand. A version of this article was published in July … Read more

archaeologists have discovered an unexpected link between petroglyphs from Galicia and Scandinavia

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If you travel to Galicia or the north of Portugal and observe carefully some of its petroglyphs From the Bronze Age you will find representations of ships. Back in the day, thousands of years ago, someone carved them into the rock to show the silhouette of ships, sometimes with decorations, crew members, oars and even something resembling sails. The really surprising thing about these pieces is that, deep down, they have little of ‘surprising’ about them. In the southern region of Scandinavia (Denmark and Sweden) archaeologists have documented thousands of engravings similar, which leaves one question: How the hell do you explain this coincidence? Now at last we have answers. Connecting dots. Recently a group of researchers led by Marta Díaz-Guardaminofrom the University of Durham, embarked on a peculiar project: analyzing the rock art samples located in a dozen deposits distributed throughout the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, more specifically in Galicia and the north of Portugal. They then compared them with other engravings located in Denmark and Sweden. It was not a capricious or random job. All the pieces shared a common link: they showed representations of ships. What did they find out? That beyond representing boats, the two samples (both the Scandinavian and the Iberian) have certain details in common, “design characteristics” that are repeated despite the hundreds of kilometers that separate Sweden from the Galician coast. Which is it? The archaeologists mainly identified decorations located at the ends of the boats with birds or ‘S’-shaped layouts, as well as representations of rigging, oars and sails. “The study identifies important typological and iconographic parallels between images from the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula and the Nordic ones,” they detail in the article that have been published in Plos One with their conclusions and in which they highlight the existence of “numerous and surprising” coincidences between the samples. “While several of the carved images of ships identified at coastal and river sites on the Atlantic coast of the peninsula are very rudimentary and difficult to interpret, there is no doubt that there are parallels with ships that can be dated within Scandinavian chronologies. In addition to the decorations on the ends of the ships (such as birds and ‘S’ drawings), they include shapes similar to ‘mushrooms’, ‘cult axes’ or ‘sails’ located in the center of the ship or that decorate the ends or knobs of bronze knives”. Old-fashioned globalization. With his analysis, Díaz-Guardamino pursued two objectives: to understand whether the engravings were related to each other and, if so, what that tells us about the Bronze Age. Now researchers believe they have valuable proof that “ideas and technologies were shared across Europe” millennia ago through maritime connections and cultural ties. Not only that. They believe that the engravings reveal something to us much more important: that ships were not a simple means of transportation with which to cross seas. They also had a “symbolic importance linked to rituals and beliefs.” “The shared iconography supports hypotheses about long-distance connectivity and maritime trade networks in Atlantic Europe, particularly regarding the movement of metals such as copper and tin,” abound the authors of the article before remembering that almost all the deposits in Iberia share another peculiarity: they are close to navigable waterways, whether rivers or the sea. Specifically, they have studied carvings from Viana, Caminha, Monterrei and Oia. Experienced sailors. In the opinion of experts, the “high level of technical detail” they have documented provides a new perspective on navigation capacity in the Bronze Age. Especially since in the engravings you can see boats that include oars, crew, masts, rigging and curved hulls, a detail that supports the hypothesis that the use of ships with sail was widespread on the Atlantic coast. The presence of cosmological symbols also tells us about a “shared concern” for solar mythology and travel. Fine-tuning the chronological shot. The research is not interesting only for what it reveals about the parallels between both regions. It is also because it helps us better understand the Iberian petroglyphs. More than 20,000 representations of Bronze Age ships have been discovered in Scandinavia, but in the northwest of the peninsula experts have struggled to date them. Thanks to their comparison and examination with high-resolution laser scanning, three-dimensional photogrammetry, RTI and GIS, the researchers believe that the Galicia and northern Portugal samples can be dated to the Late Bronze Age, around 1300-800 BC, a framework consistent with known Scandinavian maritime technologies. “Sea travel covered great distances and helped share cultural ideas across thousands of miles.” For researchers, it does not matter whether the Iberian petroglyphs were recorded by local sailors who assimilated foreign naval technology or were created by navigators who came from abroad and were passing through what is now Galicia and northern Portugal. The key, in his view, is that coastal communities “were actively involved in extensive long-distance maritime networks.” Images | Plos One-Marta Díaz-Guardamino et al. In Xataka | “For 2,000 years they have been inaccessible. Finally we can read them”: archaeologists now know how to decipher the Herculaneum papyri

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