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I don't like Brussels sprouts. For years people tried to convince me I just hadn't tried the right recipe. The only right Brussels sprouts recipe is to prep the sprouts, sprinkle with sea salt and flush them down the toilet. 4 stars. Or ... there's this one. On an unusually cool night in September of...nautilus_feedYou’ve likely stepped on an unlikely crime solver: Mosses may be low-profile, but they can offer a huge help in closing classes. The mat-like plants and their relatives have previously been used to gauge the timing of people’s deaths and tie suspects to the scene of a crime, among other crucial forensic insights.
Mosses and other members of the bryophytes plant group have served as helpful pieces of evidence in forensic investigations for a few reasons—they dwell in many different habitats, can be linked to specific locations, and easily stick to people’s clothing, vehicles, or other personal items. They’re also easily preserved, and only a wee bit of a bryophyte sample is needed to narrow down the main group the specimen is from.
Despite the valuable secrets they harbor, bryophytes have only been documented in aiding a few reported forensic cases around the world, according to a paper recently published in the journal Forensic Sciences Research.
“We reviewed 150 years of scientific literature to see how these plants have been used in investigations,” said study co-author Matt von Konrat, head of botanical collections at the Field Museum in Chicago, in a statement. “Well, it turns out, the answer was, ‘Not that much.’”
Along with his collaborators, von Konrat encountered several cases where bryophytes were used to calculate the postmortem interval of remains—the time that has passed between one’s death and the discovery of their body—based on these plants’ growth rates. Investigators have also analyzed bryophyte fragments taken from suspects. When investigating a 2001 homicide in Finland, officials there “used recovered bryophyte fragments to link suspects to the scene of the crime where human remains were discovered,” according to the paper.
Read more: “The Curious Case of the Bog Bodies”
During the investigation of the 2011 abduction and homicide of a 4-month-old baby in Michigan, dried mud on a suspect’s shoe contained Sphagnum moss and a collection of other plants that don’t typically grow near each other, leading officials to a specific area to search for the victim’s body. Several of the new paper’s authors were involved in that case. Though the body has not been found, “the analysis and identification of the botanical samples recovered from Phillips’ shoes greatly narrowed down investigators’ search radius.”
Outside of these few examples, the authors note that plants are “underused” in forensic investigations. In fact, few law enforcement professionals are trained to identify and collect any type of botanical samples.
“Plants, and specifically bryophytes, represent an overlooked yet powerful source of forensic evidence that can help investigators link people, places, and events,” study co-author Jenna Merkel, who was pursuing her master’s degree in forensic science at George Washington University during this research, said in the statement. “Through this paper, we aim to raise awareness of forensic botany and encourage law enforcement to recognize the value of even the smallest plant fragments during investigations.” 
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Lead image: Des_Callaghan / Wikimedia Commons
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torachan
musesfool
nautilus_feedNow this is what I call a long-distance call. This image depicts a powerful laser beam shot from a mountaintop in California to a NASA spacecraft flying through the cosmos, about 143 million miles from Earth.
The laser sent 1.4 kilowatts of power to the Deep Space Optical Communications transceiver, which was aboard the space agency’s Psyche spacecraft earlier this year. The experiment was designed to test the ability of the receiver to capture information-laden photons from such an impressive distance and then decode them, a handy thing if Mars missions are to become reality.
Read more: “If You Meet ET in Space, Kill Him”
And no, that purple crescent shape in the image isn’t a UFO. It’s just lens flare from an out-of-frame light.
More recently, the test was repeated, with Psyche receiving a signal from 218 million miles away. Read more about the experiments, conducted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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Lead image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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ursamajor
nautilus_feedHumans are social animals. We depend on our friends, partners, and family members to steer through troubled waters and cheer us on when we shine. One popular school of psychology known as attachment theory suggests that these close relationships tend to follow established patterns that differ from one person to the next: Some of us feel secure in our relationships, while others are more anxious about abandonment, less willing to trust even those we hold most dear.
Now a large, new, 30-year study has found that our earliest friendships may have the biggest impact on how well we “attach” to friends and romantic partners in adulthood. If true this finding would upend conventional wisdom that our relationships with our parents leave the biggest mark on our attachment styles later in life. The team of researchers found that, in fact, mothers come second, and fathers, at least in the cohort studied, had little influence. The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, followed 705 people and their families over three decades, starting in the 1990s.
British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby developed attachment theory in the 1970s and early ’80s, and it entered into the popular discourse in the intervening decades. The theory evolved, with subsequent research suggesting that our attachment styles are shaped across our lifetimes by multiple relationships, not just those with our parents, as Bowlby had initially proposed.
But until now, few studies had experimentally tested, over a person’s lifetime, the fundamental assumptions underlying attachment theory. To do this, Keely Dugan, an assistant professor of social personality psychology at the University of Missouri and her colleagues, analyzed data from one landmark longitudinal study of 1,364 children and their families that started in 1991 and stretched over 15 years. They then followed up with 705 of the original study participants, who were now 26 to 31 years of age.
Read more: “Love Is Biological Bribery”
The data for the original study came from a variety of sources: The authors periodically videotaped mothers and fathers interacting with their young children and made notes about their sensitivity to their children’s needs. They analyzed parent-child conflicts and closeness through reports from the parents and measured parents’ warmth and hostility through reports from the children. They also examined how the children rated their friendship quality and collected teacher and parent reports about their social competence with peers.
In the follow up, Dugan and her team evaluated the attachment styles and relationship quality of the now-adult participants, with their romantic partners, friends, and family members. They controlled for family income-to-needs ratio, maternal education, race and ethnicity, and sex assigned at birth.
Dugan and her colleagues found that a person’s relationship with their mother does shape their general attachment style and their specific individual relationships with friends, romantic partners, and fathers, accounting for 2 to 3 percent of differences in anxiety and avoidance. So, for example, people whose mothers were less warm and fuzzy during their younger years tended to feel more insecure in their adult relationships. The more recent the interaction with the mother, the more influence it potentially seemed to have. But early friendship bonds played an even bigger part than maternal relationships in the ways people navigated adult friendships and romantic partnerships, accounting for 4 percent of the variance in adults’ romantic partner- and best friend-specific attachment anxiety, and 10 to 11 percent in their partner- and best friend-specific avoidance.
“In general, if you had high-quality friendships and felt connected to your friends in childhood, then you felt more secure in romantic relationships and friendships at age 30,” Dugani told Scientific American. “When you have those first friendships at school, that’s when you practice give-and-take dynamics,” she added. “Relationships in adulthood then mirror those dynamics.”
Even more reason to choose your schoolyard friends wisely.
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Lead image: Ihnatovich Maryia / Shutterstock
nautilus_feedOn Christmas morning in 1950, four students who were members of a Scottish nationalist political party carried out a legendary heist. They broke into Westminster Abbey in London and nabbed a 335-pound Medieval relic called the Stone of Scone. This scheme sparked a political border closing and a decades-long mystery, as bits of the stone have remained missing. One archeologist spent years trying to track them down, and has now revealed her findings.
The students behind the hefty theft were avenging a theft that transpired six centuries earlier, which has long been viewed as a symbol of Scottish subjugation under England: This block of red sandstone had been used by Scottish rulers in coronation ceremonies sometime during the 13th century, until it was stolen by English troops under the direction of King Edward I in 1296. From then on, the stone became a fixture in British coronation ceremonies.
During the mid-20th-century heist, the thieves dropped the Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny, onto the floor of Westminster Abbey—and it cracked into two pieces. People involved with this plot crudely repaired the stone before it was returned to authorities in 1951.
But not all of the stone made it back. Some bits stayed in Scotland, others were scattered far afield, many of their whereabouts largely unknown until recently.
Read more: “The Curse of the Unlucky Mummy”
Sally Foster, an archeologist at the University of Stirling in Scotland has been on this case and reports her findings in a new Antiquaries Journal paper on the storied stone. A mastermind behind the stone’s clandestine repair was Robert, or Bertie, Gray. He was a sculptor and politician involved in the movement for self-governance of Scotland, which had unified with England in 1707, disbanding its own parliament in the process to send members to London as part of the new Parliament of Great Britain.
In the process of piecing the stone back together, Gray kept 34 fragments that he numbered, curated, and gave out over a period of 24 years.
In her recent research, Foster reported her adventures in hunting down these fragments and tracing their journeys as they secretly switched hands. While on this quest, she dug through archives, collaborated with curators and experts, and asked the public for information. Foster also conducted detailed ethnographic research, including interviews with families associated with fragments of the stone.
Ultimately, Foster learned that “Gray traded on styling himself as the man who repaired the Stone, so we see him employing the fragments as a form of personal capital in his social and political networks,” she wrote.
Recipients of the stone include those involved in the robbery, people from as far as Canada and Australia, and politicians Gray respected. Some recipients even fashioned their fragments into jewelry, safeguarding them as family heirlooms. Pieces were also sent out for scientific testing to learn about the stone’s origins.
Ultimately, Foster located half of the 34 fragments, but the remaining pieces remain a mystery—she hopes that increasing public attention could lead her to tantalizing new clues.
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Lead image: Firebrace / Wikimedia Commons
thewaynethewaynenautilus_feedThe deep sea is a foreboding, almost impenetrable, place for us surface dwellers; darkness prevents photosynthesis, and animals at great depths must withstand extremely low temperatures, high pressures, and scarce nutrients. Yet, ecosystems just beneath the seafloor contain an estimated 15 percent of Earth’s living biomass—in the form of wildly resourceful microbes that make do in the abyss.
Hardy communities of microbes inhabit the ocean’s crust, clustered around hydrothermal vents, which spew life-giving minerals in superheated streams of water. Now, a study in Communications Earth & Environment announces marine microbial life that even further pushes the limits of environmental tolerance.
University of Bremen researchers and colleagues searched for evidence of microbes in two sediment cores extracted from mud volcanoes near the Mariana Trench. The cores, which were drilled from seafloor more than 9,800 feet down, contained mud from up to 5.4 feet below the seafloor, down into what’s called serpentinite, a sediment layer that is tinged a bright blue.
In that blue mud, the pH is a startlingly alkaline 12, the same as some household bleaches, oven cleaners, and hair relaxers. But the scientists, using lipid analysis, detected, in that punishing mud, fat molecules that could only have resulted from biological activity.
Read more: “The Bacteria That Revolutionized the World”
The conditions are more alkaline than is known for any other ecosystem on Earth. “What is fascinating about these findings is that life under these extreme conditions, such as high pH and low organic carbon concentrations is even possible,” said organic geochemist at the University of Bremen’s Center for Marine Environmental Sciences and co-author Florence Shubotz in a statement.
Add to those challenges the virtual lack of oxygen at such depths, and life has to find unique ways of making it. Known deep-sea microbes gain their energy through chemosynthesis, exploiting minerals in rocks and gaseous hydrocarbons from vents. The same appears to be true of these newly discovered organisms.
The lipid molecules detected in the study are from the cell membranes of either bacteria or archaea, an ancient domain of organisms that resemble bacteria. In the cell membranes of those microbes, fats provide a barrier against the alkaline conditions. Their condition indicates whether the microbes are living or long-dead. Intact lipid molecules indicate a living community, whereas degraded lipid molecules could be from fossil organisms. The results showed both types of lipids in the sediment cores—a community of contemporary microbes and evidence of ancient microbial populations.
These extremophile organisms could also provide a window to how life first started on Earth. “We suspect that primordial life could have originated at precisely such sites,” Shubotz added. Furthermore, the core samples just scratched the surface of a habitat that could extend much farther below the seafloor, harboring even deeper insights into the earliest life here on Earth—and potentially beyond.
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Lead image: Ethan Daniels / Shutterstock
squirmelia
asakiyume
nautilus_feedThe sheer magnitude of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is difficult for the human mind to fully grasp. Its 105,700 light-year width also makes it just about as difficult to capture with a camera. But recently, researchers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research achieved an important milestone in this gigantic effort.
The team, led by doctoral student Silvia Mantovanini, collected images of the southern sky taken by the Murchison Widefield Array telescope in Australia over 141 nights spanning seven years. Rather than relying on visible light, which can be blocked by clouds of gas and dust, they recorded images using low-frequency radio waves capable of illuminating all manner of cosmic phenomena.
Each image captured a section of the sky sliced into 20 different radio wavelengths with a corresponding color—red for longer wavelengths, blue for shorter. Then, with the help of roughly 1 million computing hours, they stacked the images and connected them together into one giant cosmic portrait. The results are stunning, and you can explore a zoomable version of their finished product here.
Read more: “Can Dark Energy Kill Galaxies?”
The image shows a radiant edge-on perspective of the Milky Way, rippling with stellar activity. It also offers a glimpse into our galaxy’s distant past. “You can clearly identify remnants of exploded stars, represented by large red circles,” Mantovanini said in a statement. “The smaller blue regions indicate stellar nurseries where new stars are actively forming.”
Capturing some 60,000 light-years, it’s the largest low-frequency radio color image of the Milky Way ever recorded, twice the size and twice the resolution of the next largest, which was compiled in 2019. It will remain the most detailed view of the Milky Way until the new largest low-frequency radio telescope array—the Square Kilometre Array Observatory—completes its survey in the next decade.
Until then, this cosmic masterpiece will offer researchers plenty of data to dig into as they explore the place in the cosmos we call home.
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Lead image: Silvia Mantovanini and the GLEAM-X Team
