Ancient DNA pulls back the curtain on the mysterious empire

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From a piece of bone, scientists can extract surprising information about the past.

Analysis of ancient DNA recovered from human remains has illuminated the characteristics and ancestry of historic individuals – whether a mummified ice man, Chinese emperor or legendary composer.

As techniques improve, researchers are leveraging this invaluable tool to investigate remains from multiple cemeteries, resulting in large data sets that help them better understand the dynamics of entire communities.

The results are particularly exciting when applied to obscure empires of people like the Avars, who had no written records.

Dig this

Known mainly from the accounts of their Byzantine adversaries, the Avars were formidable horse-riding warriors who arrived in Central and Eastern Europe in the 6th century, seemingly out of nowhere.

The origins of the empire and its people remained unclear until an April 2022 historical study found that they hailed from the steppes of Mongolia.

Now, a new analysis of the unearthed remains of 424 individuals in cemeteries in Hungary has provided details about Avar family and social life and how the newcomers interacted with the population of their adopted homeland.

The findings revealed a close-knit population with marriage practices that are not common today.

All over the universe

Humanity’s most distant spacecraft is back in contact with Earth. For the first time in five months, NASA engineers have received coherent data from Voyager 1.

It is currently around 24 billion kilometers away and, at 46 years old, the probe has shown multiple peculiarities and signs of aging in recent years.

The latest problem facing Voyager 1 first arose in November 2023, when the flight data system’s telemetry modulation unit began sending an indecipherable repeating code pattern.

The correction was the result of a clever bit of trial and error and the unraveling of a mystery that led the team to a single chip.

Lunar update

The closest flyby of Jupiter’s moon Io in more than 20 years captured high-resolution images that showed the celestial body’s volcanic plumes, mountain peaks and a glass-smooth lake of icy lava.

NASA’s Juno probe, which first arrived to study Jupiter and its moons in 2016, flew within 1,500 kilometers of the lava world’s surface in December and February to capture the first detailed images of Io’s northern latitudes.

“Io is simply packed with volcanoes, and we captured some of them in action,” Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement.

Bolton described Io as “Jupiter’s tortured moon” because of the fierce forces you regularly encounter.

Explorations

On June 8, 1924, a teammate spotted George Mallory and fellow climber Andrew Irvine in the distance as the men were on their way to the summit of Mount Everest; no one ever saw them alive again.

Mallory’s Mountain Words, however, is now available to read online in its entirety for the first time. Hundreds of pages of correspondence and other documents written and received by Mallory were recently digitized by Magdalene College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, where she studied.

The letters describe Mallory’s meticulous preparations and testing of equipment, and his optimism about prospects. But the letters also show the dark side of mountaineering: bad weather, health problems, setbacks and doubts.

Days before her disappearance, Mallory wrote that the odds were “50 to 1 against us” in his last letter to his wife, Ruth, dated May 27, 1924.

Once upon a time there was a planet

Naturalists spotted the first arrivals in the cicadas’ historic double emergence this spring.

The insects will infiltrate a much larger geographic area than similar occurrences in other years because they are part of the synchronized emergence of two specific periodic broods of cicadas that have not appeared together since 1803.

More than a dozen states in the South and Midwest will experience the glorious and mysterious natural phenomenon when it reaches its peak.

Experts offer some tips on what to expect and how to prepare. And, most importantly, for those who view cicadas as a noisy, anxiety-inducing nuisance, here are steps to follow if you are not a fan of bugs.

Discoveries

Check out these mind-expanding stories.

— Boeing and NASA decided to move forward with a historic manned launch of a new spacecraft after long delays.

— Surgeons completed the first transplant to combine a mechanical heart pump and a gene-edited pig kidney.

— Which foods have the most plastic? You might be surprised.

– The Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a bright nebula ejected from a dying star that may also show evidence of stellar cannibalism.

Did you like what you read? Oh, but there’s more. Sign here to get the next issue of Wonder Theory delivered to your inbox, brought to you by CNN Space and Science writers Ashley Strickland It is Katie Hunt. They find wonders on planets beyond our solar system and in discoveries from the ancient world.

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