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Take a look through the eyes of a dog, a spider and three other creatures.

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Do we really know the full story?

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The Origin of Consciousness – How Unaware Things Became Aware

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What Did A Soviet Probe Find On Venus? First Real Images Of Venus

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What Did A Soviet Probe Find On Venus? First Real Images Of Venus

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What Did A Soviet Probe Find On Venus? First Real Images Of Venus

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How a parasitic fungus turns ants into 'zombies'

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How a parasitic fungus turns ants into 'zombies'

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They walk among us: insects hijacked by parasitic fungi that control their every move.

The Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus has just one goal: self-propagation and dispersal. Researchers think the fungus, found in tropical forests, infects a foraging ant through spores that attach and penetrate the exoskeleton and slowly takes over its behavior.

As the infection advances, the enthralled ant is compelled to leave its nest for a more humid microclimate that's favorable to the fungus's growth. The ant is compelled to descend to a vantage point about 10 inches off the ground, sink its jaws into a leaf vein on the north side of a plant, and wait for death.

(We know cordyceps infects ants-but could it evolve to control humans?)

Meanwhile, the fungus feeds on its victim's innards until it's ready for the final stage. Several days after the ant has died, the fungus sends a fruiting body out through the base of the ant's head, turning its shriveled corpse into a launchpad from which it can jettison its spores and infect new ants.

"It definitely speaks to the imagination of both scientists and the general public," says Charissa de Bekker, a University of Central Florida professor who studies parasite-host interactions that lead to behavioral manipulations.

As in zombie lore, there's an incubation period where infected ants appear perfectly normal and go about their business undetected by the rest of the colony. That's unusual because social insects like ants usually have something called social immunity: Sick members get kicked out of the group to prevent the rest from getting sick too. "We think the ants don't really have a mechanism to get rid of Ophiocordyceps," de Bekker says.

While the infection is 100 percent lethal, the goal isn't to convert all the ants into the walking dead. For ecosystems to stay balanced, fungi have to keep host populations in check. In fact, only a few ants in a colony are infected at any given time.

"It's almost like a chronic cold," de Bekker says.

And perhaps in the biggest deviation from the zombie playbook, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis don't seem to invade the brain.

Using a type of fluorescent microscopy, researchers from Pennsylvania State University watched fungal colonization in ants from the gaster, the rear end of the abdomen, to the head-and found no trace of fungal cells in the brain. They coupled that information with computer algorithms to chart the movement of fungi as they formed a sort of tubular scaffolding within and around ants' muscle bundles.

This suggests the fungus casts its mind control through bioactive compounds that interfere with the ant's nervous system and control hosts directly at the muscles, de Bekker says.

Researchers in Thailand and the United States are studying different Ophiocordyceps species that infect other species of ants to compare their control mechanisms. In all, researchers have identified over 200 species of Ophiocordyceps that can infect hosts from 10 insect orders, as well as spiders, though not all lead to behavioral manipulation.

One related species, O. sinensis,colonizes ghost moth caterpillars and erupts from their head like a unicorn horn. The fungus-caterpillar husk combination is prized in traditional Tibetan and Chinese medicine as an immune booster, cancer treatment, and aphrodisiac. In a bizarre twist, Ophiocordyceps species that inhabitat Japanese cicadas may have even replaced symbiotic bacteria to help their hosts process nutrients from sap.

Much like the microbiome in our own guts, insects contain a whole array of fungal species, says Barrett Klein, an entomologist at the University of Wisconsin in La Crosse. But because not all fungi can be grown in the lab, only a couple have been closely studied, much less flagged for causing behavioral manipulations.

Scientists do know of a few though. There's Entomophthora muscae, which literally means "insect destroyer of the fly" in Greek. It causes infected flies to climb a certain height, glue themselves at the mouth to a plant, and assume an abdomen-up "death pose" that's optimal for spore dispersal. ( Watch the flies turn into zombies here.)

And there's Massospora cicadina, whichpumps its cicada hosts full of hallucinogenic drugs and causes part of their abdomens to fall off. The bare-bottomed cicada then wiggles its way towards death-again in the interest of spore dispersal. ( Read about more mind-controlling parasites.)

"It's exciting terrain at the fringes of our understanding to look at the extent of how parasites control their host," Klein says. "If animals are so easily manipulated, what does that mean about us?"

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How a parasitic fungus turns ants into 'zombies'

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The deadly parasite's grand finale involves sending toxic spores blooming from the dead ant's head.

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32 of the new species discovered in 2022

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32 of the new species discovered in 2022

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32 of the new species discovered in 2022 | Discover Wildlife

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From a millipede named after Taylor Swift and a tree named after Leonardo DiCaprio, discover some of the new species described by scientists in 2022.

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We're just over a month into 2023, and already there are plenty of newly described species. We share some of our favourites.

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The Most Extreme Things that are not Black Holes

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The Most Extreme Things that are not Black Holes

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Neutron Stars – The Most Extreme Things that are not Black Holes

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About 3.5 billion years ago, two of the planets that orbited the sun may have had biospheres of similar bulk. One, Earth, evolved in a way that allowed life to flourish and splinter into endless forms most beautiful. Mars, the other world, followed a different path.

Today the Martian surface is hostile to life as we know it, but as this scientific story goes, Mars may have once hosted a rich abundance of microbes. Residing in the planet's briny underworld and shielded from the lethal radiation that bathes the surface, these organisms could have grown in nooks and fissures, multiplying until their collective heft rivaled Earth's cache of life. Called methanogens, Mars's microbes would have inhaled atmospheric hydrogen and carbon dioxide and exhaled methane gas-and in a twist, they may have turned out to be their own worst enemy.

Over time, their growing, insatiable appetite would have robbed the Martian atmosphere of hydrogen-a powerful greenhouse gas during the planet's early days-ultimately casting a deadly freeze over the planet and driving microbial populations into deeper, warmer crannies. How long those burrowing microbes could have survived in the deep is unknown. It's possible they were only a short-lived flash of life on an otherwise sterile world.

"Maybe extinction is the cosmic default of life in the universe," says Boris Sauterey of the Institut de Biologie de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. "It's not the process of life appearing that is limiting; it's life maintaining itself that is limiting."

But perhaps, more than 30 feet beneath the surface and encased in ice, these ancient single-celled organisms achieved a state of dormancy-a sort of cryopreserved slumber, ready to perk up when more life-friendly conditions arise.

The Martian interior may not be as lifeless as its face. It could host a world of alien organisms that are capable of waiting thousands of years between each turn of their metabolic engines.

This scenario may sound farfetched, but recent results from scientists modelling the habitability of ancient Mars and studying the hardiness of microbes in labs and beneath our own planet's surface all point in the same direction: It's a long shot, but it's possible life evolved on Mars and still exists. And scientists may just find signs of that life when meteors barrel into Mars and excavate buried layers of ice, or when new spacecraft arrive to plumb this underground realm.

"I wouldn't put it past the Martian microbe to beat the odds and survive for an extended period," says Amy Williams of the University of Florida. "Whether it's still there today, I can't hazard a guess. But as an astrobiologist, my hope is that it is, and that maybe that knowledge can help us have a deeper appreciation for our place in the universe."

A temperate Mars of the past

Dry and irradiated, the Martian surface would challenge even the hardiest of Earth's microbes to survive for more than a moment.

Billions of years ago, though, the planet was warmer and more watery. It's not clear how long those temperate conditions persisted or exactly how much water there was, but it is clear that ancient Mars contained all the ingredients for life as we know it, including water, carbon-containing organic compounds, and active chemical reactions that provide energy.

Which is why Sauterey, a computational ecologist, decided to see just how habitable early Mars might have been. Previously, his team developed models to characterise how Earth's early life influenced the planet's surface conditions some 3.5 billion years ago, when Mars may have been habitable as well.

As described in a paper published in Nature Astronomy, Sauterey and his colleagues considered multiple models of Mars with different atmospheres, surface temperatures, and types of brine, which have different freezing points. They assumed that any organisms populating the planet would have been the sort of hydrogen-gobbling, methane-producing microbes that also populated early Earth-and they assumed that such microbes would be limited to environments at least 10 feet beneath the Martian surface, where life-sustaining brines are plentiful and radiation is not.

The team found that both surface temperature and the type of brine play a crucial role in determining the likelihood of habitability. In the team's simulations, habitable subsurface environments were less likely to exist on a colder, more ice-covered planet because glaciers limit the amount of hydrogen gas that can reach the subsurface to fuel alien metabolisms. But on a warmer and less icy world-in its most life-friendly form-Sauterey found there was at least a 50 percent chance that swaths of the shallow subsurface were habitable billions of years ago.

"Our result is that Mars, if it was not fully ice-covered, was likely habitable," he says. "That does not mean it was probably inhabited, because we don't know how you switch from habitability to inhabitation."

The team also mapped the most likely habitable subsurface sites on the planet and found that Hellas Planitia-a sweeping impact basin in the planet's southern hemisphere-could support life in all but the worst of circumstances. Isidis Planitia and neighbouring Jezero Crater, where NASA's Perseverance rover is currently collecting samples for return to Earth, were also among the more habitable locations.

Sauterey and the team then simulated how the burgeoning Martian methanogens might have impacted their environment. They were surprised to find that life on Mars could have been a casualty of its own existence, draining the atmosphere of planet-warming hydrogen; Earth escaped that fate because of the different mix of gases in its atmosphere.

"To an extent, we expected to find that Mars was habitable to these types of organisms," Sauterey says. "We did not expect to find the opposite influence of life on planetary habitability-that, if that type of life existed on Mars, it would have actually deteriorated the habitability of the planet."

Sauterey and his colleagues suggest that as they altered the planet's climate, these doomed Martian microbes may have moved even farther underground, where it's warmer and more hospitable, but less energy-rich.

Jackie Goordial, a microbiologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario who studies microbes in the permafrost at Earth's poles, says that life may have been even more likely to exist than the models suggest because Sauterey and his colleagues used somewhat conservative definitions of habitability.

For example, the team used minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit) as the lowest temperature at which life could survive; on Earth, Goordial says, scientists have observed microbes surviving at colder temperatures. Sauterey's team also assumed that ice cover would limit the extent of habitable environments by limiting access to atmospheric gases, but on Earth, microbes can feed on hydrogen produced underground, suggesting Martian microbes could exist farther underground than the simulations assume.

"There's a whole community of scientists who do nothing but look at life being cut off from the atmospheres-and it exists," Goordial says. "It's weird life. It's really cool and it's certainly applicable to Mars."

Hardy microbes

Another team of researchers approached the question of Martian life in a different way: by seeing how long microbes could survive in conditions mimicking those roughly 30 feet beneath the surface. At that depth, the level of incoming solar and cosmic radiation is about the same as the dose sustained on Earth's surface-but the soils are frozen and dry.

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About 3.5 billion years ago, two of the planets that orbited the sun may have had biospheres of similar bulk. One, Earth, evolved in a way that allowed life to flourish and splinter into endless forms most beautiful. Mars, the other world, followed a different path.

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Each year, researchers around the world contribute to humanity's accumulation of knowledge. Paleontologists and archaeologists uncover traces of the past, revealing ecosystems and civilizations lost to time. Astronomers seek to explain the mysteries of other worlds, while biologists and Earth scientists unravel the workings of our own planet and the life it harbors. And medical researchers study the intricacies of the human body and the diseases that threaten it, developing new tools to safeguard our species.

The revelations that come from our ceaseless exploration and experimentation are often unexpected and extraordinary. Here are some of the year's most remarkable discoveries.

Spectacular fossils reveal a prehistoric rainforest

In January 2022, researchers unveiled a site in southeastern Australia where the rocks contain an astonishing record of life in an ancient rainforest. The fossils at McGraths Flat are between 11 million and 16 million years old, representing some of the only known rainforest ecosystems dating back to the Miocene epoch. Small, soft-bodied creatures are preserved in extraordinary detail, including spiders fossilized down to their leg hairs and fish with bellies full of midges. The researchers could even see the pores in fossilized leaves that once took in carbon dioxide. "Because of the quality of preservation, we can see into these ecosystems like never before," says Matthew McCurry, a paleontologist at the Australian Museum Research Institute in Sydney and co-lead author of a study about the find.

Perseverance rover explores the Martian landscape

NASA's newest Mars rover continued its hunt for signs of ancient life this year in Jezero crater-a 28-mile-wide impact basin that was likely once filled with water. The rover spotted a few surprising features as it trekked across the crater's floor, such as thin purple coatings on some rocks that are reminiscent of a kind of rock varnish formed on Earth by microbes. The rover has also been making steady progress on its rock collection, scooping up 14 samples that will be cached on Mars's surface for a future mission to collect. In September, the rover embarked on the much-anticipated exploration of an ancient river delta at the crater's edge. NASA and the European Space Agency are continuing to develop plans for returning the samples, which will require multiple spacecraft, including a pair of helicopters.

Legendary Spanish shipwreck discovered on Oregon coast

Remains from a 17th-century Spanish galleon were identified on Oregon's northern coast. They likely belong to Santo Cristo de Burgos, a ship that was sailing from the Philippines to Mexico in 1693 when it veered off course and vanished.

Known as the "Beeswax Wreck" for the blocks of beeswax carried by the vessel that still occasionally wash up on shore, the lost galleon has been a part of local lore for centuries. Remnants of the ship's hull, however, remained unidentified until researchers analyzed timbers found in a sea cave near Astoria and revealed that they were crafted from a type of hardwood used to build ships in Asia during the 17th century: a perfect match for the missing Santo Cristo de Burgos.

Resurrecting dying organs

In a medical first, scientists at Yale University preserved the function of multiple pig organs including the brain, heart, liver, and kidneys a full hour after the animals had died. The research could one day help extend the viability of human organs intended for life-saving transplants, thousands of which are discarded annually because they aren't immediately preserved.

Normally organs must be harvested right after the heart stops pumping blood for them to be viable. But a sapphire-blue solution called OrganEx developed by neuroscientist Nenad Sestan and his team allowed them to restore basic organ functions well after the tissues had last received fresh blood. The researchers induced cardiac arrest in pigs and left the dead bodies at room temperature for an hour before infusing their blood with OrganEx, which contains amino acids, vitamins, metabolites, and 13 additional compounds. Using a machine, they circulated the mix for six hours and noticed signs of revival in the dying organs-heart cells began beating, liver cells absorbed glucose from blood, and DNA repair resumed.

Still, Sestan urges caution. "We can say that the heart is beating, but to what extent it's beating like a healthy heart-that will require more studies." The next steps will include transplanting OrganEx-treated organs into live pigs to see how well they function.

Tonga volcano erupts with surprising intensity

In January, a submarine volcano in the Kingdom of Tonga, known as Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, unleashed an eruption unlike any seen in recent decades. The blast sent a pressure wave around the globe multiple times and caused towering tsunami waves to crash on shores near and far. Even before the volcanic dust settled, scientists were racing to gather data about the eruption's oddities with the hope of better understanding the mechanism behind this surprisingly powerful blast and cascade of effects. "Everything so far about this eruption is off-the-scale weird," says volcanologist Janine Krippner, who was with the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program when the event occurred.

The eruption excavated some 2.3 cubic miles of rock from the seafloor, making it the largest volcanic blast in a century. The explosion also unleashed avalanches of hot ash and volcanic rubble known as pyroclastic flows that raced along the seafloor for at least 50 miles.

New snail species are the world's smallest

While searching for animals in the soil in two spots in Southeast Asia, scientists discovered a handful of new snail species, two of them smaller than any seen before. They dubbed one Angustopila psammion, a fitting name, as "psammion" derives from the ancient Greek word for "grain of sand." This species lives within the walls of Vietnamese caves and measures only 0.6 millimeters in diameter. Many hundreds could fit on a single U.S. quarter.

The other snail is ever-so-slightly larger and was unearthed in a Laotian limestone gorge. It has a shell with pointy projections adorned with mud-like beads, which are likely fecal pellets, hence its name, A. coprologos, from the Greek for "dung gatherer."

UN report reveals climate change's toll on our health

For decades, scientists have warned of the coming risks of climate change. But some of the dangers we face are already here, including a direct impact on human health, according to a landmark report released by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. By 2100, three-quarters of all humans on Earth could regularly suffer extreme heat stress, the report found. People also face increased lung damage from air pollution and more vector-borne diseases from blood-feeding bugs, such as mosquitos and ticks, as they spread to new areas. The report's authors stress the need to quickly and aggressively cut emissions and adapt to a hotter world before climate-related health threats get even worse.

A bobcat eating python eggs shows 'Everglades fighting back'

Burmese pythons have been overrunning the Florida Everglades for decades. These invasive animals are so ecologically destructive in part because they have no native predators-or so scientists thought.

For the first time, biologists have observed a native species, a bobcat, raiding a python nest and eating its eggs. Later, when the bobcat returned to find the snake guarding its nest, the cat took a swipe at the reptile. "When you get interactions like this and see the native wildlife fighting back, it's like a ray of sunshine for us," says Ian Bartoszek, an ecologist with the Conservancy of Southwest Florida. "In 10 years of tracking snakes, I can count on one hand the number of observations" of native animals standing up to the reptiles. The confrontation could represent a step toward restoring ecological balance in the python-troubled Everglades.

A new space telescope achieves the deepest view of the universe

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the giant infrared instrument now parked a million miles from Earth, spent half of 2022 getting ready to take its first images. In July, those images were finally presented, revealing an unprecedentedly detailed view of the cosmos. One image of distant galaxies magnified by the gravity of other galaxies in the foreground represents "the deepest view of the universe ever," says Thomas Zurbuchen, an associate administrator at NASA. JWST's other breathtaking images include a now-iconic view of the Carina Nebula and a striking picture of Neptune's rings. The telescope is now busily working through a long list of planned observations, exploring everything from the oldest galaxies to the atmospheres of distant exoplanets.

Antarctica's ice shelves unexpectedly fracture

West Antarctica, the wedge of the continent that sits directly south of Argentina, holds enough ice to raise sea levels by 10 feet. Some of that ice is bound to melt as climate change bakes the South Pole, but climate scientists still don't know how much will melt-or how fast. But early this year, researchers saw ominous hints that a large collapse could happen soon. A major ice shelf-a protrusion of ice floating on the sea that prevents the ice sheet above from slipping into the ocean and melting-cracked suddenly and unexpectedly. The rupture could kick off a destructive chain reaction causing the ice shelf to "shatter into hundreds of icebergs, just like your car window," the first step in a major collapse, says researcher Erin Pettit.

Ancient tooth adds to the story of mysterious human relative

All the confirmed remains of Denisovan, a mysterious relative to the Neanderthals, could easily fit in a sandwich bag: a few teeth, a pinky bone, a fragment of skull, and a partial jaw. And until recently, they were all from just two sites, one in Siberia and another in Tibet. But in May, scientists announced the discovery of a likely Denisovan molar from a cave in Laos, thousands of miles from all other Denisovan finds. The find reveals the hominin's stunningly varied range and ability to survive in a variety of climates. "It kind of makes me think about how similar they are to us," says study author Laura Shackelford, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "We're incredibly flexible-that's sort of the hallmark of modern humans."

Enormous stingray sets record for largest freshwater fish

Since 2005, National Geographic Explorer Zeb Hogan has been searching the world to find the world's largest fish. In mid-June, a team he leads in Cambodia got a call from a fisherman named Moul Thun who was fishing in the Mekong River when he accidentally snagged a giant freshwater stingray "much bigger" than any he had previously seen.

Upon arrival, the researchers found this female ray measured 13 feet from snout to tail and weighed in at a whopping 661 pounds, making it the largest freshwater fish ever recorded, certified by Guinness World Records on June 24.

New details of the dino-killing impact

Sixty-six million years ago, the trajectory of life took a sudden, violent turn when a 6.5-mile-wide asteroid slammed into the waters off Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. The apocalyptic blow ushered in a mass extinction that felled more than three-fourths of all species, including all the dinosaurs except birds. It left behind a gigantic undersea crater known as Chicxulub.

In February, researchers studying a set of fossil fish that died in the blast concluded the asteroid struck during spring in the Northern Hemisphere. In March, scientists provided another glimpse of the asteroid's devastation: Within minutes of the impact, rocks that formed in the extreme temperatures rained down more than a thousand miles from the crater's center. And in August, researchers announced that they had found signs of another possible undersea crater off the coast of West Africa that is about the same age as Chicxulub-perhaps evidence that a fragment of the incoming asteroid broke off and smashed into Earth separately.

Microplastics found in the human body

Plastic fragments have been found at the heights of Mount Everest and in the deepest depths of the ocean-and now, for the first time, within the blood and lungs of the human body. In donated blood, researchers found nanoplastics, less than one micrometer across, which could have been inhaled or eaten. They also found plastic fibers as long as two millimeters in the lungs of surgical patients. It's still not clear how, or even whether, these plastic bits can harm our health-but "yes, we should be concerned," says ecotoxicologist Dick Vethaak. "Plastics should not be in your blood."

Volcanic eruption in Iceland heralds decades of activity

For nearly 800 years, the volcanoes of Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula had slumbered. But they awoke in 2021, spewing lava for six months-and this year they began yet another fiery fit. Volcanism in this region sleeps and wakes in cycles, and the second outpouring of lava in less than a year suggests the island nation may be in for decades of volcanic activity.

Each new eruption is like a window into our planet's inner workings, and scientists have already begun to explore the depths beneath Iceland, one of the few places in the world where part of the mid-ocean ridge stands above the sea. Along this boundary, tectonic plates pull apart, causing bits of hot mantle to well up and erupt at the surface. The island also sits atop a searing hot plume of rock that helps drive eruptions. By studying these phenomena, researchers hope to better understand the forces that shaped the country's landscape.

New evidence suggests spiders can dream

Daniela Roessler, an ecologist the University of Konstanz, normally does field research in the Amazon rainforest. But during the coronavirus lockdowns of 2020, she turned her attention to the jumping spiders that inhabit a field near her home in Trier, Germany. She noticed that sometimes when the little arachnids snooze, they dangle from a thread of silk with legs curled-and occasionally jerk as if in the throes of a revery.

"The way they twitched just made me think of dogs and cats dreaming," Roessler says. So she set up a lab to observe them, and the resulting study published this year reveals that jumping spiders experience a sleep-like state with rapid eye movements similar to those observed in dreaming humans.

Africa's oldest dinosaur fossil discovered

In August, a research team funded by the National Geographic Society unveiled a remarkable fossil: the oldest definitive dinosaur discovered in Africa. The ancient creature, known as Mbiresaurus raathi, lived about 230 million years ago during the Triassic period, and it was found within rocks in Zimbabwe known as the Pebbly Arkose Formation. Though Mbiresaurus is one of the earliest known ancestors to sauropods, the group that includes the iconic long-necked giants such as Brontosaurus, it was itself no giant. Experts estimate the animal would have been less than two feet tall at the hip, revealing the humble evolutionary beginnings of a group of animals that would later include the largest creatures ever to walk on land.

A synthetic human microbiome built from scratch

Stanford University researchers revealed a complex synthetic microbiome that they constructed from scratch. When transplanted into mice free of microorganisms, the 119 species of bacteria, all of which can be found in the human gut, remained stable and even resisted pathogens.

Scientists' knowledge about gut microbiota has mainly come from transplanting the full microbial community in human feces to animals or other humans. But there are no tools to manipulate the species in stool samples, which each contain hundreds if not thousands of microbial species that vary widely between individuals.

The new synthetic microbiome is broadly representative of the human gut microbiota, according to the Stanford team. And scientists can modify this microbial community by adding or removing species to understand how they influence human health-a complex process that could result in new ways to treat diseases. Additional iterations of the synthetic microbiome may be coming as other researchers tinker with this colony, adding or eliminating species to study different disorders and to design new therapeutics.

'Miracle plant' thought to have been eaten into extinction possibly rediscovered

The plant was literally worth its weight in gold, stored alongside precious metals in the imperial treasury of ancient Rome. Silphion, a flowering plant thought to cure illness and make food taste extraordinary, was so popular in the ancient Mediterranean world that it was likely eaten into extinction nearly 2,000 years ago. Or was it?

Mahmut Miski, a professor of pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from natural sources) at Istanbul University believes he's rediscovered the storied plant in a small stone enclosure in the Turkish countryside. And while its propagation and appearance are consistent with ancient descriptions of the plant, the true test came when the modern plant was used as an ingredient in ancient recipes calling for silphion, resulting in pleasant flavors that may have indeed delighted the Romans. "Finding the original silphion, and experiencing ancient recipes afresh with it, is a kind of Holy Grail," says ancient cooking expert Sally Grainger.

Three new snake species discovered in graveyards

Biologist Alejandro Arteaga and his colleagues were traveling through the cloud forests of Ecuador in November 2021 looking for toads. They stopped in a small town and were welcomed in by a friendly woman whom they learned had seen odd snakes slithering around a graveyard.

The researchers, intrigued by the sightings, searched the area and discovered three new colorful snake species-two within the soft soil of the hillside graveyard and a third nearby. All three species, described in a scientific paper this year, are ground snakes of the genus Atractus, a group of secretive soil-dwellers that remains little understood. The biologists plan to name the new species as follows: A. discovery, which has especially small eyes and a yellow belly with a black line; A. zgap, which has a yellow belly with no line; and A. michaelsabini, which is "the chubbiest of the lot," Arteaga says.

Stunning ancient artwork found at site attacked by ISIS

Archaeologists digging in the ruins of an ancient palatial gate destroyed by ISIS discovered stunning artworks behind a sealed door last opened some 2,600 years ago. A joint Iraqi-American team found seven carved stone panels dating to roughly 700 B.C. Believed to have originally come from the Southwest Palace of the ancient city of Nineveh, near modern Mosul in northern Iraq, the panels likely depict the Assyrian king Sennacherib's military campaigns. Similar panels from the palace are considered a turning point in the history of art and are a highlight of the British Museum's collections.

"The land is just full of antiquities," says Zainab Bahrani of Columbia University. "It's full of ancient sites. And there is no way that you can erase all that history."

Unraveling the 'dark matter' of the protein universe

Big tech companies took major steps this year to reveal the building blocks of life. Facebook's parent company Meta and DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet, both released databases of hundreds of millions of protein structures-many of them previously unknown to science. The companies used artificial intelligence to predict the shapes of these proteins, a tool that could help scientists understand their functions and aid the development of new drugs.

Researchers supplied the models with sequences of known proteins so the AI systems could learn patterns and generate accurate 3D structures. Meta also used models to fill in the blanks in protein sequences that were missing amino acid units before predicting their structures.

In just two weeks, Meta's system predicted the structures of more than 600 million proteins from viruses, bacteria, and other microbes. The protein data are publicly accessible via Meta's ESM Metagenomic Atlas. Meanwhile, DeepMind predicted the structure of about 220 million proteins found in about a million different species, including plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria.

Michael Greshko, Maya Wei-Haas, Priyanka Runwal, Kristin Romey, Alejandra Borunda, Douglas Main, and Jay Bennett contributed to this story.

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New clues from the day the dinosaurs died. A mysterious ancient human tooth. Primordial galaxies. See how the past year expanded our knowledge of the cosmos and our own backyard.

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‘Alien’ minerals never found on Earth identified in meteorite

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‘Alien’ minerals never found on Earth identified in meteorite

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While generations of camel herders had known about the meteorite, which is the ninth largest ever found, it wasn't scientifically documented until a few years ago. The oddly smooth boulder caught the eye of prospectors, and when they hit it with a hammer, a metallic tone resounded. They suspected it was an iron meteorite-an object from space largely made of iron and nickel, many of which are believed to have come from the cores of smashed asteroids or planetesimals, similar to our own planet's metallic centre.

The prospectors sent small samples of the meteorite to scientists for confirmation and further analysis, and a piece fell into the hands of Chris Herd, curator of the meteorite collection at the University of Alberta.

While studying the slice of rock, he noticed several crystals with unusual compositions. Later analysis, including a comparison to synthetically created minerals, confirmed his hunch: the composition and structure of the minerals had never been seen before in nature. Herd named one mineral elaliite, after the meteorite itself, and the second elkinstantonite, after Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and principal investigator of NASA's upcoming Psyche mission that will explore a metallic asteroid.

Elkins-Tanton learned of Herd's plan for the mineral's name soon after the Psyche mission missed its launch date because of issues during software testing, and her morale was low. "To say it lifted my spirits-" she says, pausing. "I was just so touched."

CalTech's Ma, who has previously discovered dozens of new minerals, identified the third mineral, calling it Olsenite to honour the late Edward Olsen, a former curator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago who had postulated the existence of the mineral that now bears his name.

Mineral memoirs

Our planet has roughly 5,800 minerals, while only about 480 have been found in meteorites. Many of those meteoritic minerals are truly alien-some 30 percent don't form naturally on Earth.

The newly discovered minerals were found in inclusions, which look like microscopic polka dots scattered across the sample slices of the meteorite. The team is still working out the precise conditions in which they formed, Herd says, but the presence of the new minerals within the polka dots gives clues to the timing of their growth.

As the molten metal of a meteorite slowly cools and solidifies, different minerals crystallise at different times, which leaves behind certain "incompatible" elements that concentrate in the dwindling pool of liquid. The new minerals formed when almost all the metal had already cooled and just tiny molten blobs remained, eventually crystallising to form the inclusions.

The overall chemistry of the rock reveals that this cooling process likely didn't happen in the core of an asteroid, as is believed happened for most other iron meteorites. Instead, the metal likely crystallised near the surface of a planetary body after a high-speed collision turned solid surfaces molten.

These colliding bodies may have been the cores of destroyed asteroids, or perhaps they were primitive space rocks known as chondrites, which have a significant amount of metal mixed with rock. Either way, they likely smashed together at stunning speeds-these collisions happen in the asteroid belt today with objects speeding faster than 11,000 mph.

Studying the mineralogy of meteorites is "armchair solar system exploration, in a lot of ways," Herd says. "We're trying to constrain the variety of conditions that have existed within different planetary bodies."

Meanwhile, on Earth, the debate about the meteorite's future continues. If the meteorite does sell to a third party, part of the money will be given to the local government, according to Hussein. But he adds that many Somalis find the solution unsatisfactory and believe it shouldn't have been moved out of the country in the first place. "It should be at home."

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