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If you could walk the streets of medieval England, it might feel as unfamiliar as an alien environment.
The culture, landscape and even the languages of Middle English, Anglo-French and Latin would be a shock as you entered a world you might have expected to understand.
In other words, it probably wouldn't match what you might have seen in the comedy "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
Historical accounts share the details of royal and prosperous life, but those of commoners are often missing, making it difficult to imagine what our own lives would have been like if we had been born centuries earlier.
The scarcity of these clues makes it difficult to get a good idea of the past, especially for a turbulent period of a thousand years.
But a new project is bringing these stories to light.
We are family
DNA analysis has provided an intimate glimpse into the lives of sixteen people who lived in medieval Cambridge, including some who survived the Black Death.
Scientists have carried out a detailed genetic study on hundreds of skeletons recovered from cemeteries in the English city. The research team was able to create "bone biographies" of city dwellers, scientists, long-distance travelers and artisans.
The osteobiographies include how the people ate, their activities, whether they suffered physical trauma, and sometimes how they died. To make them more recognizable, the researchers saidgave their subjects pseudonyms and illustrated portraits, such as Anne, who hobbled on a shortened leg after multiple injuries.
Some survived the plague and died of cancer at the age of sixty. And he was one of many who stayed in a charity hospital, which provided an early kind of benefit system for the poor and sick.
Power of nature
Aftershocks are expected within the hours and days after a major earthquake. But a team of geoscientists believe the aftershocks of some of the strongest earthquakes recorded in the United States are still lingering nearly 200 years later.
The story continues
A trio of earthquakes occurred near the Missouri-Kentucky border in 1811 and 1812, with magnitudes between 7.3 and 7.5. They are likely responsible for 30% of the earthquakes that occurred near the area between 1980 and 2016, according to new research.
An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 inCharleston, South Carolina, also appears to be responsible for 16% of the region's modern activity in 1886.
It is unclear why large earthquakes occurred in these relatively stable regions, but assessing the seismic activity can help scientists determine the future disaster risks of these areas.
Throughout the universe
Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to peer into an opaque, dusty box-shaped cloud at the center of our Milky Way - and came away with more questions than answers.
The cloud, dubbed 'the Stone' because of its shape and lack of visibility, was thought to be a center of star formation. But Webb's sharp infrared gaze didn't detect any young stars hidden by the dust.
Instead, the observatory discovered a trove of frozen carbon monoxide.
The research team isn't sure why there is solid ice in the Brick instead of stars, but studying this galactic region could change the way astronomers understand star formation.
Excavated
Fossils originally thought to be the leaves of an extinct plant are actually the shells of baby turtles that lived among dinosaurs.
When researchers recently took a closer look at the fossils, which were initially found between the 1950s and 1970s, their analysis revealed that the leaf-like structure was made of bone.
After solving the mystery, the scientists nicknamed the turtle species "Turtwig," after a half-plant, half-turtle Pokémon, as a nod to the fossil's enigmatic nature.
Meanwhile, paleontologists discovered for the first time a fossil of a tyrannosaur with its stomach contents still intact, revealing the dinosaur's last meal before dying 75 million years ago.
Fantastic creatures
Antarctica's chinstrap penguins, so named for the distinctive black band that runs under their chin, are experts when it comes to 'micronaps'.
According to new research, breeding chinstrap penguins take more than 10,000 naps a day, each lasting an average of four seconds.
Penguins living in the colony observed during the study used micronaps to get about 11 hours of sleep every day while they hatched and protected their nests from a bird of prey called the brown skua.
While fragmented sleep patterns are harmful and inadvisable for humans, they appear to be a survival adaptation for the penguins, the international team of study authors said.
Discoveries
These new findings will grab your attention:
- The ancient Egyptians revered baboons, but a new study of baboon mummies has shown that the imported primates did not fare well in their new environment.
- The propulsion module that powered India's Chandrayaan-3 journey to a historic moon landing is back in Earth's orbit, carrying out a bonus mission that could help in the search for life on other worlds.
- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved two gene-based treatments for sickle cell disease, including the first therapy using CRISPR gene editing.
- NASA astronaut Frank Rubio lost one of the first space-grown tomatoes during a stay aboard the International Space Station. Months later, his colleagues found it, closing the case (and proving that Rubio didn't eat it).
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