Fossil DNA hints at mysterious Toalean Culture

The 7,000-year-old skeleton of a teenage hunter-gatherer from Sulawesi in Indonesia might be the first remains found from a mysterious, ancient culture known as the Toaleans. Sulawesi has some of the world’s oldest cave art, but ancient human remains have been scarce on the island. The largely complete fossil of a roughly 18-year-old Stone Age woman was found in 2015, buried in the fœtal position in a limestone cave. DNA extracted from the skull suggests that she shared ancestry with New Guineans and Aboriginal Australians, as well with the extinct Denisovan subspecies of ancient human. The Toalean people, known only from scant archæological evidence, such as distinctively notched stone tools, were thought to have lived in Sulawesi at around the same time.

Saturn might have a fluid, sloshy core

Saturn’s core might be a slushy mixture of ice and rock, rather than a compact solid made of mostly one or the other material, as is generally thought. The diffuse core extends to approximately 60% of the planet’s radius — much bigger than the 10–20% of a planet’s radius that would be occupied by the expected core. Researchers gleaned the surprising discovery by analysing gravitational perturbations in the planet’s rings caused by the oscillating core.

Pi calculated to the 62.8 trillionth digit

Researchers have broken a world record by calculating the mathematical constant pi to 62.8 trillion digits, beating the previous record of 50 trillion digits. The calculation took a supercomputer 108 days to complete. Researchers say the effort was an important benchmarking exercise for computational hardware and software.

Baby bats babble like human infants

Pups of the greater sac-winged bat develop their vocal skills by babbling in a similar way to human babies — a discovery that could help researchers to explore the underlying neuroscience of how mammals learn to communicate. Human infants babble to practise speech sounds, which require precise motor control over their voice boxes, research suggests. Young songbirds also babble, but there are very few other recorded examples of babbling behaviour among animals — the bat research is the first to identify baby babble produced by a mammal that isn’t a primate.

Cuttlefish Memory Abilities

Cuttlefish can remember what, when and where information about specific things that happened — right up to their final days. Researchers taught six older common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) that a seafood snack in their tanks changed location depending on the time of day. The old cuttlefish learnt to associate the time and location just as well as six young cuttlefish did.

Mammoth’s epic travels preserved in tusk

Researchers have reconstructed the detailed movements of a single woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) from one of its tusks. Every place on Earth has a distinct chemical signature based on geological differences. The ratios of various isotopes of elements, such as strontium and oxygen in the bedrock and water, create a unique profile specific to that location that remains consistent over millennia, and is incorporated into soil and plants. As mammoths grazed on the Arctic plains, these isotopic signatures were integrated into their ever-growing tusks, creating a permanent record of the animals’ whereabouts from birth to death, with almost daily resolution.

Exotic four-quark particle spotted at Large Hadron Collider

Scientists using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — which memorably revealed the Higgs boson in 2012 — have discovered a previously unknown exotic particle made of four quarks. The new ‘tetraquark’, Tcc+, is extremely unusual: most known hadrons, including protons and neutrons, are made of two or three quarks. This brings the LHC’s bounty of new hadrons — non-elementary particles that are made of quarks — up to 62.