Category: 7. Science

A recent study led by researchers at SapienCE has revealed that ochre—previously considered primarily a symbolic pigment—played a crucial role in the production of sophisticated stone tools by early modern humans in Blombos Cave, South Africa, during the Middle Stone Age (MSA), between 90,000 and 70,000 years ago.

While examining previously excavated artifacts at the SapienCE laboratory in Cape Town, archaeologist Elizabeth Velliky discovered an ochre fragment bearing wear patterns distinct from the typical grinding marks used for pigment production. Intrigued, she presented the artifact to colleagues Francesco d’Errico, Karen van Niekerk, and Christopher Henshilwood. Their examination confirmed the fragment had been deliberately shaped and used in a previously undescribed way. As they continued to sort through more discoveries, further ochre artifacts with the same marks appeared—seven in total—resulting in a reassessment of the use of ochre in early human life.

Published in Science Advances, the study reports the initial direct archaeological evidence that ochre was specifically crafted into retouching tools for lithic implements. Experimental research and replication studies by d’Errico and colleagues revealed that these ochre “retouchers” were used for pressure flaking and direct percussion—advanced methods in shaping stone tools. These methods are highly dexterous and mentally demanding, especially for the production of the Still Bay points: bifacial tools renowned for their symmetry and refined forms.

Notably, the ochre artifacts show signs of rejuvenation, indicating that they were maintained in good condition over time, a characteristic typical of personal or curated tools. “The sophistication of these pressure flakers implies that they were the personal property of expert toolmakers,” d’Errico said. “They may have functioned not only as practical instruments but also as indicators of identity and technical prowess.”

This discovery contradicts common assumptions that ochre’s primary role in the cultures of ancient people was symbolic—ritual, or body painting. Instead, it speaks to the pigment’s functional versatility. Earlier ethnographic and experimental studies had hinted at ochre’s use in such processes as hide tanning or hafting adhesives, but definitive archaeological evidence had remained elusive—until now.

Henshilwood, director of SapienCE, emphasized the significance of the find: “We now have evidence that ochre was not only a medium for symbolic expression but also a key material in specialized tool production, reflecting a level of technological sophistication previously associated with much later periods.”

Van Niekerk, a co-author and director of the Blombos Cave excavations, commented that this discovery adds another piece of evidence to how early Homo sapiens were behaviorally modern. “This discovery will add another layer to our understanding of the behavioral modernity of early Homo sapiens in southern Africa,” she said.

Far beneath the Pacific, where the Philippine Sea Plate dives under Japan, researchers have finally caught a peculiar kind of earthquake in the act.

Instead of lurching violently, the shallow end of the Nankai Trough crept for weeks, shifting only millimeters at a time while instruments buried in the seabed recorded every move.

“It’s like a ripple moving across the plate interface,” said Josh Edgington, who analyzed the data while completing his PhD at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).

The event – technically a slow-slip earthquake – was first spotted in autumn 2015 and repeated in 2020. Each episode unzipped roughly 20 miles of the fault in slow motion, starting about 30 miles off Japan’s Kii Peninsula and migrating seaward toward the ocean trench.

Onshore seismometers and GPS receivers were oblivious. Only a new network of borehole observatories, drilled hundreds of feet into the seabed, was sensitive enough to detect motion so subtle.

Detecting earthquakes from below

Those boreholes are part of Japan’s ambitious scientific-drilling program, which set out to plug the blind spot in global earthquake monitoring.

Land-based arrays can pinpoint sudden jolts but cannot “listen” to the shallows of subduction zones – precisely the places where tsunami-spawning ruptures begin. Installed sensors measure fluid pressure, strain and tilt with exquisite precision, allowing scientists to see how strain accumulates and releases in real time.

For UTIG director Demian Saffer, who led the study, the advantage is obvious. Slow-slip signals, he said, give researchers a direct view of how the shallow plate boundary behaves between major quakes.

If this creeping zone regularly releases stress, it could limit the size of future tsunamis. If not, the locked portion of the fault farther down-dip might still be primed for a magnitude-8 or 9 shock, similar to 1946, when a great Nankai earthquake leveled towns and killed more than 1,300 people.

Water helps faults slip

Both slow-slip events tracked by the borehole array unfolded in regions where pore-fluid pressures are unusually high.

That correlation supports a popular but difficult-to-prove theory: overpressured fluids lubricate faults, allowing sections to move quietly rather than break catastrophically.

In the Nankai data, the link is as clear as it has ever been, offering a new metric for judging the tsunami potential of similar faults worldwide.

Tsunami signs from afar

While parts of Nankai appear to “creak and groan” in slow motion, the equivalent shallow segment off the Pacific Northwest known as Cascadia may be silent.

That worries scientists, because a silent, locked interface stores energy that can unleash one of Earth’s rare magnitude-9 megathrusts and the devastating tsunamis that follow.

“This is a place that we know has hosted magnitude 9 earthquakes and can spawn deadly tsunamis,” Saffer said.

“Are there creaks and groans that indicate the release of accumulated strain, or is fault near the trench deadly silent? Cascadia is a clear top-priority area for the kind of high-precision monitoring approach that we’ve demonstrated is so valuable at Nankai.”

Installing similar borehole observatories along Cascadia, Chile, and Indonesia – other corners of the Pacific “Ring of Fire” – could reveal whether those margins harbor their own stealthy slow quakes or remain locked tight to the trench.

The answer would refine tsunami-hazard forecasts and perhaps buy coastal communities critical minutes of warning.

Creeping fault limits big earthquakes

Taken together, the 2015 and 2020 Nankai slow-slip episodes suggest the shallow fault functions more like a tectonic shock absorber than a ticking bomb. By periodically releasing energy, it might reduce how much strain transfers to deeper, more dangerous segments.

Yet the scientists caution against complacency. The deeper Nankai interface and neighboring segments could still fail suddenly, as history shows.

For now, geophysicists are analyzing the rich new dataset to model how fluids, temperature, and rock composition govern the transition from silent creep to violent rupture.

Each slow-slip event is another frame in an expanding time-lapse of the earthquake cycle – one that could eventually reveal when the next big snap is likely to occur.

Hearing earthquakes before they roar

Catch a fault in the middle of a slow-motion glide and you learn a simple truth: not every earthquake shouts. Some only whisper, rippling quietly through kilometres of rock.

By wiring the seabed for sound, scientists have begun to hear those whispers and, with them, the hidden conversations that decide when Earth decides to roar.

The study is published in the journal Science.

Image Credit: Japan Meteorological Agency

—–

Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates. 

Check us out on EarthSnap, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

—–

Newswise — COLUMBUS, Ohio – As glaciers retreat due to a rise in global temperatures, one study shows detailed 3D elevation models could drastically improve predictions about how they react to Earth’s warming climate.  

While only 10% of Earth is covered in glacial ice, these masses have far-reaching impacts on all the world’s ecosystems. Rapid melting can trigger natural disasters, and glaciers help to regulate the planet’s temperature and sea level and are sources of pristine fresh drinking water.

To better differentiate between seasonal ice loss and that caused by long-term climate trends, researchers studied the fluctuating heights of three glaciers: the La Perouse Glacier in North America, the Viedma Glacier in South America and the Skamri Glacier located in Central Asia.

Their analysis revealed that between 2019 and 2023, the Viedma Glacier (Argentina) and the La Perouse Glacier (Alaska) experienced consistent thinning, but the Skamri Glacier (Pakistan)  had been stable enough to experience a small net gain of ice, said Rongjun Qin, co-author of the study and an associate professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University.

Measurements in this study were made using daily high-resolution images gathered by the PlanetScope satellite constellation, which researchers then used to create 3D reconstructions of how glacial ice flows evolved over time. By incorporating local and global climate data into these models to explore seasonal variations of glacier melt, the team essentially designed a way to monitor the behavior of glaciers across diverse regions.

“This is something that we’ve been thinking about for a long time, because existing glacier studies have such sparse seasonal observations since it’s difficult to get data out of remote areas,” said Qin, who is also a core faculty member of Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics Institute. “What we wanted to do is to use medium-to-high resolution data to broaden those capabilities and improve the accuracy of the 3D models generated from that data.”

The study was recently published in the journal GIScience & Remote Sensing.

According to the study, while many modern 2D tracking techniques can provide valuable insights into glacier flow, previous studies tend to capture only short-term snapshots or else offer observations without in-depth motion analysis or high-resolution 3D data. This team’s work may help scientists keep better track of seasonal climate issues like glacier melt and expand long-term observations of these masses, and their 3D model method also reveals new data about how quickly the glaciers react to changes in the weather.

The Viedma and Skamri Glaciers, for example, exhibit a 45-day lag time in response to changes in local climate conditions like rain or snow. The La Perouse Glacier, however, was shown to react to changes almost immediately, meaning that its flow can very quickly become faster or slower based on how much precipitation it has accumulated.

In another finding, researchers concluded that behavior differences in all three are driven by distinct environmental and climatic conditions, but suggest that both local and global factors, rather than any single one, are responsible for patterns in glacier motion dynamics worldwide.

Such observations are vital to deepening our global understanding of glacier science, and with further improvements, this study’s algorithm could also be a useful tool for future disaster prediction and management, said Qin. Already, scientists have used similar systems to warn communities of natural disasters that would have led to tragedy.

In all, researchers hope that supporting modeling works like this one will inspire more scientists to utilize satellite data to investigate other types of important environmental research questions.

“Hopefully we can build on all sorts of applications that people are interested in with this,” said Qin.

Shengxi Gui of Ohio State was a co-author. This work’s data was provided by PlanetScope.

#

Contact: Rongjun Qin, [email protected]

Written by: Tatyana Woodall, [email protected]

By Dean Murray

The world’s largest digital camera has revealed its first images.

The size of a small car, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera weighs nearly 2,800 kilograms and boasts an extraordinary 3,200-megapixel resolution.

Located at the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory atop the Cerro Pachón mountain in Chile, the camera has already captured millions of galaxies and stars in the Milky Way, as well as thousands of asteroids in just over 10 hours of initial test observations.

The images offer a preview of the observatory’s ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which aims to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the Universe by scanning the sky nightly.

Each image from the LSST Camera covers an area as large as 45 full Moons and is so detailed that displaying one at full scale would require 400 ultra-high-definition televisions.

Over the next decade, the observatory is expected to catalog around 20 billion galaxies and discover millions of new asteroids, dramatically expanding our understanding of the cosmos.

The unprecedented data gathered will help scientists investigate some of the Universe’s most profound mysteries, including the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the structure of the Milky Way, and the evolution of our Solar System.

During its ten-year survey, Rubin will generate approximately 20 terabytes of data per night, plus an additional 15 petabytes of catalog database. In 10 years, Rubin data processing will generate around 500 petabytes, and the final dataset will contain billions of objects with trillions of measurements.

Today’s Image of the Day from the European Space Agency features the Eagle Nebula, also known as Messier 16, which is located about 7,000 light-years away in the constellation Serpens.

The Eagle Nebula is one of the most iconic star-forming regions in our galaxy. It’s a vast cloud of gas and dust stretching roughly 70 light-years across. 

Pillars of Creation 

What makes it especially famous is a portion of the nebula captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 – an area called the “Pillars of Creation.” 

Some of these towering columns of gas are several light-years tall. The towers resemble sculpted fingers reaching out into space. Inside these pillars, new stars are being born as gravity pulls material together into dense cores that eventually ignite nuclear fusion.

The Pillars of Creation are often cited as a poetic example of the cosmic cycle of birth and destruction – where new stars are born even as the surrounding material is slowly destroyed by radiation.

Hubble image of the Eagle Nebula 

“This towering structure of billowing gas and dark, obscuring dust might only be a small portion of the Eagle Nebula, but it is no less majestic in appearance for it,” said ESA.

“The new Hubble image is part of ESA/Hubble’s 35th anniversary celebrations. The cosmic cloud shown here is made of cold hydrogen gas, like the rest of the Eagle Nebula. In such regions of space new stars are born among the collapsing clouds.” 

The hot, energetic stars emit intense ultraviolet light and powerful stellar winds that erode and sculpt the surrounding gas. The result is the creation of fantastical structures – like the narrow pillar with a blossoming head featured in the new image.

Light and shadow in the Eagle Nebula

The thick material in the pillar blocks most light, appearing dark and heavy against the backdrop. However, its edges glow where light from the more distant nebula shines through. 

The striking colors reflect the chemistry and physics at play: blues signal ionized oxygen, reds indicate glowing hydrogen, and orange shows where starlight has managed to pierce the dust.

A structure under siege

Just out of frame lie the very stars responsible for shaping this dramatic pillar. Their radiation and winds continue to batter the cloud, compressing the gas and potentially triggering the birth of even more stars within.

For now, the pillar holds firm, but this stability is temporary. Over time, the relentless energy from newly formed stars will eventually erode the entire structure.

“While the starry pillar has withstood these forces well so far, cutting an impressive shape against the background, eventually it will be totally eroded by the multitude of new stars that form in the Eagle Nebula,” explained ESA.

Life cycle of the Milky Way

The nebula’s location in the Sagittarius Arm – one of the Milky Way’s major spiral arms – places it in a zone bustling with similar star-forming regions. This highlights the role of the Eagle Nebula in shaping the structure and the future of our galaxy.

Studies of the Eagle Nebula have revealed that the region is rich in young, hot stars – some of which are only a few million years old. These stars are in various stages of development, providing a natural laboratory for astronomers to study stellar life cycles. 

Evolution of the Eagle Nebula 

Within the Eagle Nebula, there is a variety of stellar processes occurring in close proximity. Some stars are still forming within dense clouds of gas, while others have already matured and begun to emit powerful ultraviolet radiation. 

The ongoing interaction between young stars and their environment drives the evolution of the nebula itself. 

As newly formed stars heat and disperse the gas and dust around them, they trigger further waves of star formation – or in some cases, halt it altogether. 

This feedback loop not only influences the pace of star birth in the Eagle Nebula but also contributes to the broader life cycle of matter within the Milky Way, enriching the galaxy with heavier elements forged in stellar cores.

Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, K. Noll

—–

Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.

Check us out on EarthSnap, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

—–

Skip to main content

Credit: Elizabeth Hénaff

A group of researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine and Genspace canoe on the Gowanus Canal, with boats and arm power provided by the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, on Dec. 12, 2014, to collect samples of the black sludge at the bottom of the canal. Microbes living in extreme environments like the Gowanus Canal have adapted to make use of environmental pollutants. Those same microbes could be used to clean up similar sites in the future, in a process known as bioremediation.

A microbial history lesson

Credit: Castle Light Images/Alamy Stock Photo

The K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant campus, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 2019 during the demolition process. The site is contaminated with the common industrial solvent trichloroethylene.

Credit: US Environmental Protection Agency

Acid rock drainage carries sulfides in the Ely Brook to the Schoolhouse Brook on May 7, 2025, in Vershire, Vermont. Lesley-Ann Giddings hopes to find bioactive compounds by studying the microbial community in the hyperacidic environment of the Ely Brook at the Ely Copper Mine site.

Breathing, eating, and immobilizing pollutants

Microbes tasked with cleanup

The untapped potential of microbes