Waterpower may have given a big lift to builders of Egypts oldest known pyramid, the nearly 4,700-year-old Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara. Ancient architects built a hydraulic system for hoisting stone blocks that were used to assemble King Djosers six-tiered, roughly 62-meter-tall pyramid, scientists propose August 5 in PLOS ONE. Controlled flows of water … Read more
Stonehenge had a hard Scottish heart, a new study suggests. The ancient sites central stone, a large slab known as the Altar Stone, consists of rock transported at least 750 kilometers from northeastern Scotland to southern England, say geoscientist Anthony Clarke of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and colleagues. An analysis of the age and … Read more
Reading peoples faces can literally give you a hint of how they are feeling on the inside. Mapping the faces hot and cool spots can provide clues to a persons biological age that is, how fast their cells are aging and even detect signs of chronic diseases as such as diabetes and high blood pressure, … Read more
An appetite-stimulating protein can reverse anorexia in mice. Mice with lack of appetite and weight loss symptoms similar to people with anorexia that were genetically tweaked to secrete a protein called ACBP ate more food and weighed more than anorexic animals with an ACBP deficit, researchers report August 14 in Science Translational Medicine. The finding … Read more
For the second time, the World Health Organization has declared that mpox, formerly called monkeypox, is a global health emergency. In 2022, global spread of the virus, which causes rashes, fevers, muscle aches and other symptoms, led to the first emergency declaration (SN: 7/22/22). That version of the virus, called clade II, is still causing … Read more
Access to clean water is a human right one that half of the world may not have. Out of the roughly 8 billion people on Earth, more than 4.4 billion lack access to safely managed drinking water, researchers report August 15 in Science. The estimate, based on computer simulations of data from low- and middle-income … Read more