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When the Tudor warship the Mary Rose sank off the south coast of England in 1545, it may have taken an international crew with it. An analysis of the remains of eight mariners from the vessel suggests that some may have come from as far away as North Africa.
The Mary Rose served King Henry VIII for 34 years, before sinking during the Battle of the Solent against France. The ship, including the remains of its drowned crew, was raised from the seafloor in 1982 near the Isle of Wight in one of the most complex salvage projects in history.
Jessica Scorrer at Cardiff University, UK, and her colleagues have examined the ancestral origins and diets of eight of the ship’s crew members. Previous analyses of these remains predicted their professions according to the belongings they were found with. They were identified as a cook, carpenter, officer, gentleman, purser, young mariner and two archers.
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E. Lundgren
Feral horses and donkeys in the Sonoran desert in North America dig their own wells, inadvertently providing a water source for other animals and increasing biodiversity in the area.
Erick Lundgren at Aarhus University in Denmark and his colleagues monitored four separate streams in part of the Sonoran desert in Arizona. The streams are usually supplied by groundwater but dry up in the summer. The team surveyed each stream every few weeks over the summers of 2015, 2016 and 2018, and found that horses and donkeys in the area dig wells there to access the groundwater.
“It’s a very hot, dry desert and you’ll get these pretty magical spots where suddenly there is surface water,” says Lundgren.
Stefan Huwiler/imageBROKER/Alamy
Fossil pollen records from the Amazon hint at a surge of regrowth in forests of the Amazon basin around 300 to 600 years before European colonisation of South America, suggesting that Indigenous peoples may have been leaving the region at that time.
Following European arrival in South America in the mid-16th century AD, millions of Indigenous people lost their lives in the face of unfamiliar disease, slavery and warfare in an event known as The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.
Previous studies have shown a dip in carbon dioxide levels in the region in 1610, known as the Orbis spike. This has been associated with the population decline that occurred after Europeans landed in South America, as forests regrew on land previously inhabited by Indigenous people, decreasing carbon dioxide levels.
DusanBartolovic/Getty Images
When beer is poured into a 500-millimetre glass, somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million bubbles rise to the surface to form the foamy head.
This estimate was made by Gérard Liger-Belair and Clara Cilindre at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne in France, who calculated the number of tiny bubbles that form before a lager goes flat.
The team first measured the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in 250 millilitres of lager after it was all poured into a tilted glass. They … Continue reading Subscribe now for unlimited access
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