This is based on eyewitness accounts, not a painstaking forensic reconstruction (which will take months), but it's pretty good. It shows the sequence of events. Structural engineers will eventually report why it happened.



(The extremely sensitive might want to stop at 3:50)

That's similar to what scientists found in the early 1950s, when the body was first unearthed in what is now modern Denmark. But unlike past analyses, this one has also noticed a few new ingredients, like the fatty proteins of fish as well as remnants of threshing waste, which comes from separating grain.

That's an intriguing discovery, as a recent analysis of another bog body, known as the Grauballe Man, has also turned up a surprisingly large quantity of threshing waste no noticed before.

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-reconstruct-the-last-meal-of-a-man-mummified-2400-years-ago

I've always though this was a ritual killing because of the way the body was arranged. Criminals were bludgeoned, stabbed, and/or garroted and dumped face down, often with willow sticks making sure they wouldn't come back up. Tollund Man was arranged on his side in a fetal position, as though he was asleep.

I do rather cut to the chase on the threshing waste, though. It was most likely an indication of a very poor harvest, the waste added into the porridge to supply bulk to starving people. It would also explain his death and the reverent way his body was arranged.

Along with mass testing campaigns in February and March of 2020, scientists tested the majority of Vo's population for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies again in May 2020. They found that around 3.5 percent of the population (around 100 people) had been infected at some point in the past.

In November 2020 they followed up again, and they asked all those who had tested positive to either the antibody or swab test to get another antibody test to see who still had antibodies to the virus.

The team found that 98.8 percent of the people who had tested positive in May 2020 still reacted to at least one type of antigen in November, meaning that antibodies were sticking around for at least six months – more likely closer to nine from when they were first infected.

https://www.sciencealert.com/study-of-italian-village-suggests-antibodies-probably-persist-at-least-9-months-after-infection

Great news for those of us who survived the bugger and most likely applies to the vaccines, also.

The team in Tuesday's study used an enzyme, CRISPR-Cas13b, that binds to relevant RNA sequences on the novel coronavirus and degrades the genome it needs to replicate inside human cells.

Lead author Sharon Lewin from Australia's Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity told AFP that the team had designed the CRISPR tool to recognize SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19.

"Once the virus is recognized, the CRISPR enzyme is activated and chops up the virus," she said.

https://www.sciencealert.com/cell-study-suggests-we-might-be-able-to-stop-sars-cov-2-from-replicating

Kind of a badly written article that confuses transmissiion with replication among other things, but this looks like it might provide a viable treatment down the line. It might even arrive in time for a deadlier coronavirus epidemic.

A cup of mud that has been buried beneath the floor of a cave for millennia has just yielded up the genome of an ancient human.

Analysis reveals traces of a woman who lived 25,000 years ago, before the last Ice Age; and, although we don't know much about her, she represents a significant scientific achievement: the feasibility of identifying ancient human populations even when there are no bones to recover
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First, the woman. Only a tiny fraction of her genome was recovered, but from that, the researchers were able to infer that she was a member of a previously unknown group of modern humans. That group is now extinct, but it contributed to present day populations in Europe and Asia, as discovered when the ancient genome was compared to current human genomes.

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-human-genome-has-been-recovered-from-cave-dirt

I knew they'd found ancient DNA fragments in habitation layers. Sequencing them this far is a massive achievement.

As the world gets hotter with climate change, one of the ongoing challenges humans will face is simply surviving worsening heat, with projected temperature increases expected to bring increasingly deadly heatwaves, even rendering some parts of the world uninhabitable.

Against such harsh heat, a new material developed by scientists in China could have the potential to help keep human bodies much cooler, thanks to a fabric that reflects light and heat away to a remarkable degree.

https://www.sciencealert.com/new-metafabric-could-passively-cool-the-human-body-by-almost-5-degrees-celsius

OK, this is timely. Yes, I live out west.

Back in 2009, archaeologists at Eleutherna—an ancient city-state located on the Greek island of Crete—discovered a woman’s skeleton that showed unusual signs of wear. As Michael Price writes for Science magazine, in comparison to the other females at the site, the muscles on the right side of her body were notably developed, while the cartilage on her knee and hip joints was worn away, leaving the bones smooth and ivory-like.
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Then, as Cara Giaimo reports for Atlas Obscura, the team chanced upon a master ceramicist who lived near the Eleutherna site. The woman demonstrated how she created her large artisan vases—describing the sets of muscles used and subsequent strain experienced—and provided researchers with a key breakthough in the frustrating case. Her movements and the physical toll exacted by the process, Giaimo writes, closely mirrored that of her 3,000-year-old predecessor.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/her-3-000-year-old-bones-showed-unusual-signs-of-wear-it-turns-out-she-was-a-master-ceramicist?utm_source=pocket-newtab

The rest of the article is interesting, too.

For four years between 2015 and 2019, roughly 2,500 Icelanders were involved in two major experiments to see how a shorter working week would affect productivity. Now the results are in – and the experiments seem to have been a resounding success.

Some key points: reducing a 40-hour working week to 35 or 36 hours didn't lead to any drop in productivity or the provision of services, while worker wellbeing improved substantially across a range of metrics, including perceived stress and burnout.

https://www.sciencealert.com/iceland-s-experiment-with-a-shorter-working-week-actually-went-really-well

Long-ish article but well worth the read, detailing improvements in creativity and worker cooperation, as well as well being metrics.

Anybody who thinks he's getting the best out of his employees by having them work long hours is fooling himself.

Fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) is one of the most common chronic pain conditions out there, yet we still know shockingly little about it.

For decades, the debilitating condition - marked by widespread pain and fatigue - has been vastly understudied, and while it's commonly thought to originate in the brain, no one really knows how fibromyalgia starts or what can be done to treat it. Some physicians maintain it doesn't even exist, and many patients report feeling gaslit by the medical community.

New research on mice has now found further evidence that fibromyalgia is not only real, but may involve an autoimmune response as a driver for the illness.

https://www.sciencealert.com/mouse-study-suggests-fibromyalgia-really-is-an-autoimmune-disorder

This is great news, now they need to find a marker for it. Once they can assign numbers in a lab test to something, they finally admit it's real and start looking for treatment.