It’s been busy lately in science with many new discoveries from many different fields.
So here is this month’s list of 10 Unusual Scientific Discoveries for August of 2023.
Number 10. Ancient Flutes Might Have Had Another Purpose
One thing we know from many archeological sites across the globe is that the idea of a flute is
extremely old. The earliest ones typically made from animal bones, specifically birds of prey,
these flutes are surprisingly modern bearing drilled holes for the fingers to adjust the sound,
not unlike modern instruments like the tin whistle. It’s always been assumed that the use of
these flutes is the same today as it was then, for music. Someone, or may people, long ago realized
that sounds can be made by blowing into tubes, and that can be controlled by drilling holes.
But new evidence from 12,000 year old flutes found at a site called Eynan-Mallaha in Israel
shows that maybe there was another reason. The flutes come from the wing bones of waterfowl
known to exist at a lake at this site, and the flutes appear to be human altered and drilled,
rather than the work of mice or scavengers. Scientists were able to create replicas of
these flutes, and they didn’t quite match up with flute reconstructions made from European examples
that seem to have had a musical function. These flutes however appear to have been
more intended as bird calls, perhaps to manipulate the very birds of prey the flutes were made from.
We know also from this sight that the bird’s talons were also used as tools,
and potentially as jewelry. In a way this should perhaps not be surprising,
we modern humans make both musical instruments but also completely separate bird calls for hunting
ducks to this day. So it may be a case where there were two types of flutes for different reasons,
but also that maybe they were dual use as both calls and instruments. You could play
with an interesting idea here, it may be that the lines between making birdsong, and human music,
were once rather blurred and that long ago the two may have had some early relation.
Number 9. The Weird Physics of the Monarch Butterfly
Few members of the insect world are as majestic and beautiful as the butterflies,
the monarch being among the most amazing. But what’s even stranger about the monarch butterfly
is that it’s actually a migratory insect, with some populations of them traveling as far as
4000 kilometers between Canada and forests in the mountains of Mexico,
where they spend winter. But there’s an oddity here, in that monarchs have white spots on their
wings that closely related species do not and it seems to play a role in migration.
Studies of migrating monarchs showed that in a sampling of 400 individuals,
the most successful in migrating had 3 percent more white on their wings,
than black. This seemingly makes little biological sense, though it might as studies
continue. But what might be going on is physics instead of biology. The monarchs with more white
limit the absorption of the sun’s radiation, whereas the black areas absorb it. There may
be a difference there that changes airflow and makes them slightly better at flight. If so,
one has to wonder if there is some active natural selection at work in some monarch populations.
Number 8. Don’t Be a Long Necked Reptile
Sometimes biology can go in a wrong direction, but for the right reason. During the Triassic
period there was a large population of species of marine reptiles that had unusually long necks,
some up to two meters. The reason for this is unknown, but one idea is that
a very long neck might have made for better fishing. You hide your body deep in the dark
or on that ocean floor itself, an adaptation that seems to have been successful as these
species lasted for at least 175 million years in the fossil record. But it came at a cost.
Recently two fossilized skeletons from two different species were studied, both of the genus
Tanystropheus, both being about 242 million years old. Both showed brutal neck wounds, one’s spine
was shortened by three vertebrae, and the other by five with ample evidence of bite marks and one a
broken neck. These seem to indicate an attack by a predator that severed the neck, though the skulls
were found. Why they weren’t disassociated is unknown, but they were prey to something
and with such long necks may not have known anything was happening until it was too late.
Number 7. The Gravity Hole in the Ocean Floor
One enduring mystery about planet earth is a huge relative drop in gravity at a
geographic point just south of India in the Indian ocean. It’s a relative drop,
you don’t notice a difference other than by measurement but there are variations in earth’s
gravity due to the density of matter underlying it. This actually distorts earth’s shape slightly,
and the differences actually cause depressions in the ocean, and this dip in the Indian ocean
actually causes the water to dip over 100 meters below normal average sea level.
What’s causing this is unknown and has ranged from meteorite craters to other explanations,
but more recent work shows that might actually be due to low density magma
plumes deep below the earth creating a kind of low density hole brought on by the subduction
of plates and the geology surrounding it, rather than what’s directly underneath.
Number 6. Shark Tooth Eaters
One widely known fact about sharks is that some of them have very different teeth than
much of the rest of the animal kingdom. They can routinely lose them either to
getting caught in prey only for a new tooth to rotate into place as a replacement. And
lots of sharks teeth end up on the ocean floor, especially when sharks die. But
lots of things die and fall to the ocean floor, including whale carcasses and many other things.
In 2002 a type of worm known as an Osedax was discovered that possesses no digestive tract as
we know it, rather relying on symbiotic bacteria contained within their bodies to absorb collagen
from whale bones. Their name translates to bone eater, and they’re often termed zombie worms,
but researchers recently wondered if they could go further than whale bones.
Turns out they can, and recent fossil evidence shows that these worms have been around longer
than whales have existed in the fossil record. So what exactly did they eat before the whales
came along? Researchers wondered if it was cartilaginous fish, some of the oldest fish still
around, so they took some shark jaws and immersed them into the deep ocean at depths where the worms
exist. All remains of the sharks were quickly gone except the teeth, but It turns out that the worms
could colonize and secret acid and get inside the shark’s teeth to get at the soft dentine within.
It may well be that when whale bones are scarce, these worms can resort to shark teeth to get by.
Number 5, The Fastest Free Star in the Milky Way
There are several different types of supernova, but one is known as Type
1a. Usually what happens here is that you have two stars orbiting each other,
one a white dwarf. The white dwarf robs the other star of material until it becomes massive
enough to explode. It’s thought however that it’s possible for a variant of this to happen, where
you have two white dwarfs orbiting very tightly, and thus very rapidly until they collide or one
explodes. Because of the speeds involved, stars can get launched at very high speed as a result.
Evidence from the GAIA star catalog shows evidence of white dwarfs moving at these kinds of speeds,
with little other explanation than this scenario and one in particular is moving
at a brisk 2285 kilometers per second, which breaks a record for a free moving star in the
galaxy that isn’t stuck whipping around a black hole. Interestingly, this allows for one avenue
for studying stars from other nearby galaxies, as at those speeds they could conceivably join
the milky way and get trapped here and examples may lurk out there somewhere.
Number 4. Early Neanderthal Art
In the Loire valley region of France there is a cave known as La Roche-Cotard that
presents an interesting mystery. This cave shows evidence of having been sealed at a minimum of
57,000 years ago based on sediment dating. This is interesting, because there is what appears to be
hominid artwork inside, but done at a time before homo sapiens is known to have been in the area,
which occurred around 45,000 years ago, least en masse, there is some evidence of
earlier incursions. There are also distinctive tools known as Mousterian tools that have been
linked with neanderthal sites in Europe, and neanderthals have, as of only 2018,
been linked to cave artwork. But this particular site is very old for that.
The artwork appears as handprints and scrapes on the cave wall done in soft rock, along with lines,
ovals and circles that do seem arranged in patterns, along with dots, which as we
know from recent work with homo sapiens cave paintings may have deep meanings. Some of the
work also appears to have been done with bone, antler or stone tools. In addition to that,
artifacts from the cave have been interpreted as symbols, one of which being a face which would
be rare if it were an anatomically modern human site. We know that the neanderthals
interbred with homo sapiens sapiens, they were also homo sapiens, but neanderthalensis, so it’s
probably not all that surprising that in many ways they would act like us,
and interchange ideas with us, including ideas about cave art. Perhaps had we never shown up,
they might be the ones launching rockets and going to space today.
Number 3. Bats and the Magnetic Field
It’s been shown that a number of animals make use of the earth’s magnetic field for navigation,
including some reptiles, some arthropods and birds. This sense,
known as magnetoreception, is not at all well understood and there are several hypotheses,
and none are proven. One mundane possibility is something to do with iron based receptors,
but more intriguingly are experiments done with birds. Caged migratory birds will become restless
at migration time and orient themselves in the direction they would normally migrate.
When certain fields are applied, it confuses this, and would not do so in an iron based
system. This opens up the possibility that it’s actually due to a quantum mechanical effect,
meaning that birds may be navigating by quantum magnetoreception. Rather unsettling indeed.
But so far this had never been seen in migratory mammals until now. It was formerly a mystery as
to just how bats migrate, since they are nocturnal and can’t do it from landmarks,
and they also can’t use their echolocation abilities due to distances. A group of bats
were exposed to magnetic fields before being released, when the field was oriented one way
the bats went in one direction, the other way they went in the opposite direction, and when
both were applied there was much confusion showing that bats seem to be capable of magnetoreception.
Number 2. Humans Make Seagulls Hungry
Birds known as Herring Gulls native to Europe are problematic. They are seen in Britain and
are known to act as kleptoparacites, in other words they snatch food.
This is actually a complex behavior that suggests the birds are intelligent,
and can plan out their heists. This also means that they must be watching their potential
victims very carefully. As it turns out, they were watching much closer than anyone knew.
Researchers studying the birds would put food items in different colored bags and see if the
gulls reacted to the difference. It turns out, they gulls favored the bag that was the same
color as the one the observer was snacking out of, meaning that the gulls knew the human was eating
a certain type of snack, and chose that as well, meaning they knew what the researcher was eating
and thought they needed to as well. So apparently you can convince a seagull to eat what you eat,
at least within reason, suggesting a high level of observation skills and social skills in the birds.
Number 1. Unidentified Sounds in the Stratosphere
The atmosphere is obviously full of sound. It’s the palette that everything we hear is painted
upon, and indeed can make sound on its own. This cacophony however doesn’t really end near
the surface of the earth, but continues upward into the stratosphere. Scientists exploring the
stratosphere with high altitude balloons wanted to see what they’d hear if they attached microphones
to them. They expected to hear meteorite entries, aircraft, sounds from below, storms and so on. And
they did. But throughout they would also hear sounds they couldn’t readily identify. This led
to further experiments with specialized balloons that could float in the stratosphere for hours and
listen to very low frequency infrasound. Launching over 50 of them over seven years, they were able
to determine that the stratosphere is different in infrasound than it is on the surface of the earth.
This worked in some ways as a kind of filter, sound from the ground would get reflected back
downward, leaving a different profile that high. They were able to identify some of the sounds, but
many very low frequency sounds remain unexplained and of unknown origin. The best bet is that it’s
atmospheric turbulence somehow generating them, or a mix of causes, but further study is needed.
Oddly however, these balloons have an interesting origin in their own right, they descend back to
the US Army Air Force's mysterious Project Mogul balloons, where were highly classified
for decades after the program ceased. They were designed to listen for infrasound signals from
nuclear tests in the Soviet Union, during the early days of their testing. A crash of one of
these balloons remains the official government story for the purported UFO crash at Roswell,
New Mexico in 1947. Further development of this technology could eventually allow for the
deployment of such balloons in the atmosphere of Venus to study its volcanic activity.
Thanks for listening! I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently with
a rather full month. You’ll note that there was only one entry on this for space science,
and that’s because I’ll soon be doing a separate ten list for astronomy. There have been a lot of
new discoveries recently. Look for it later this month and be sure to check out my books at your
favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into
the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.