Apparently the car didn't have a horn

NBC News

A man driving a full-size bull named Howdy Doody in the passenger seat of his car was pulled over by police in Nebraska on Wednesday after a stunned onlooker reported the odd sight, authorities said.

Officers in Norfolk, about 120 miles northwest of Omaha, were dispatched at 10:05 a.m. CDT answering a call for a "vehicle with a cow inside" rolling through town, police records showed.

Police assumed the bovine passenger would be a small calf, but what they came upon near the corner of West Norfolk Avenue and North 13th Street was a full-size bull riding shotgun in a Ford Crown Victoria.

The car's roof on the passenger side had been removed so the animal could fit.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/car-bull-named-howdy-doody-crammed-passenger-seat-pulled-nebraska-poli-rcna102719

Science Hub



The brick analyzed by the researchers

For the first time, researchers have been able to extract DNA fragments from an ancient clay brick, demonstrating how these building blocks from times long past could be used to catalog flora found in the environment at the time.

When this brick was made some 2,900 years ago in what is now northern Iraq, the process would have involved mixing mud from the banks of the Tigris river, with materials such as chaff, straw, or animal dung.

Small plant particles amid the animal waste and straw can remain protected inside the brick for millennia – as has now been demonstrated by the team from the University of Oxford in the UK and the National Museum of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Having extracted a sample of the brick, the researchers used an analytical technique previously used on other forms of porous material, such as bone. This gave them the ability to sequence (or decode) the DNA in the plant matter, identifying 34 distinct taxonomic groups of plants.

https://www.scihb.com/2023/08/ancient-brick-from-2900-years-ago-turns.html

August 2, 2023

The arrowhead in question, which is 39 millimetres long and weighs 2.9 grammess, is preserved at the Museum of History in Bern. It was found in the 19th century during excavations at a Paleolithic site dating from 900-800 BC, according to a statement issued by the Museum of Natural History in Bern, which conducted the research.

Such metal objects from meteorites dating from before the beginning of the Iron Age (800 B.C.) are very rare. There are only 55 of them in Eurasia and the African continent. The scientists set out to find out whether the arrowhead came from the dispersal area of the Douanne Mountain meteorite, just a few kilometers away

To the researchers' surprise, the arrowhead was not made from one of the 2,000 fragments of the iron meteorite that fell on the Douanne Moutain 170,000 years ago. It contained almost twice as much nickel compared to those fragments.

The most likely origin, given the composition of the metal, is the Kaalijarv meteorite. The latter fell around 1500 BC in Estonia and produced several craters up to 100 metres in diameter. This suggests that a trade in these fragments had developed.



https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/swiss-scientists-revel-in-meteoric-arrowhead-with-roots-in-estonia-/48706950

Nature
Ewen Callaway

In the mid-2000s, archaeologists excavating a burial site in France uncovered a 6,500-year-old mystery. Among the remains of more than 120 individuals, one grave stood out. It contained a nearly complete female skeleton alongside a few assorted bones that looked like they had been dug up and moved from another grave.

Ancient DNA from the enigmatic relocated remains now shows that they belonged to the male ancestor of dozens of the other people buried nearby. This insight comes from a study that used ancient genomics to build the largest-ever genealogy of a prehistoric family, providing a snapshot of life in an early farming community. The study was published on 26 July in Nature.

Western Europe is littered with monuments that served as burying grounds for high-status individuals from a period, roughly 7,000 to 4,000 years ago, called the Neolithic. The dozens of burials at Gurgy ‘Les Noisats’, located about 150 kilometres southeast of Paris, lack any signs of such monuments or rich grave goods, indicating that they might have belonged to commoners, says study co-author Wolfgang Haak, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

His team analysed the genomes of 94 of the 128 individuals recovered from the site, and used the data to determine how they were related to one another. The researchers expected some individuals to be related, based on the composition of other Neolithic sites.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02402-1?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=nature&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1690387285

NBC News
July 25, 2023, 1:23 PM EDT
By Aria Bendix

Quartz countertops have skyrocketed in popularity over the last decade, but new research suggests the material poses a deadly health risk to the workers who make it.

A study published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine identified 52 cases of an irreversible, potentially life-threatening lung disease among workers in California who fabricate quartz slabs. Ten of those workers died, and three received lung transplants.

Although quartz is a naturally occurring mineral, the version found in homes is an artificial mixture of silica — a chemical compound — and other materials including resins and dyes. Breathing in large amounts of silica dust can cause inflammation or scarring, also called fibrosis, in the lungs.

This can lead to silicosis, a disease that results in permanent lung damage and sometimes death due to respiratory failure. Patients may start off with a cough or shortness of breath, then eventually require oxygen therapy or a lung transplant.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/quartz-countertops-deadly-lung-disease-workers-rcna95959

Curry may have been introduced to south-east Asia 2,000 years ago, suggest scientists who have unearthed the earliest known evidence of the dish’s preparation in the region.

Analysing plant remains from 12 ancient stone grinding tools found in Óc Eo, southern Vietnam, researchers discovered traces of rice and turmeric, ginger, fingerroot, sand ginger, galangal, clove, nutmeg and cinnamon.

“We discovered a wide variety of spices that had travelled from different locations to Óc Eo,” said Dr Hsiao-chun Hung of the Australian National University, who led the excavation and research. “All of these spices reached Vietnam 2,000 years ago, contributing to the creation of delightful dishes that must have been enjoyed by the people of that time.”

The researchers were “rather surprised” to discover that nutmeg seeds they had excavated at the site were still aromatic two millennia later.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/22/2000-year-old-curry-scientists-discover-evidence-of-ancient-recipe-in-south-east-asia