Science News Briefs from around the World: January 2024

By Lori Youmshajekian

ANTARCTICA

Ice-penetrating radar has revealed a landscape of valleys and ridges hidden below practically two miles of ice in East Antarctica. Earlier than the continent froze over about 34 million years in the past, the area might need hosted tropical-like forests and wildlife.

CHINA

Geologists have found a new ore called niobobaotite close to the town of Baotou in Interior Mongolia. The ore accommodates the rare-earth steel niobium, which is utilized in metal manufacturing and turns into a superconductor when cooled to low temperatures.

ETHIOPIA

A toddler’s jawbone uncovered a long time in the past within the Ethiopian Highlands has been recognized as a two-million-year-old Homo erectus fossil. Found greater than 6,500 toes above sea stage, the discover means that larger-bodied H. erectus might need been higher tailored to greater altitudes than different early hominins had been.

FRANCE

Critics gave greater scores to Bordeaux wine made in years with greater temperature extremes and a better imply temperature. However the space’s local weather may change into too sizzling and too dry for grapes to develop in any respect, and vineyards are more and more impacted by floods, wildfires, and different extreme occasions.

INDONESIA

Indonesians who survived the area’s devastating 2004 tsunami have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol than those that did not immediately expertise the catastrophe. This “hormonal burnout” demonstrates how traumatic occasions can have an effect on folks for many years afterward.

ITALY

For the primary time, an artificial-intelligence program has deciphered a phrase from a badly scorched scroll from Herculaneum, one of many cities buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius about 2,000 years in the past. By distinguishing ink from the background of blackened papyrus, the method uncovered the phrase “porphyras”—historic Greek for “purple.”