The paper was authored by three scientists in China, edited by a researcher in India, reviewed by two people from the U.S. and India, and published in the open access journal Frontiers in Cell Development and Biology on Monday. Despite undergoing multiple checks, the paper was published with AI-generated figures that went viral on social media because of their absurdity. One figure featured a rat with a massive dissected dick and balls and garbled labels such as “iollotte sserotgomar cell” and “testtomcels.” The authors said they used the generative AI tool Midjourney to create the images. 

On Thursday afternoon, Frontiers added a notice saying that the paper had been corrected and a new version would be published soon. The journal later updated the notice to say that it was retracting the study entirely because “the article does not meet [Frontiers’] standards of editorial and scientific rigor.”

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Frontiers directed Motherboard to a statement posted to the journal’s web page on Thursday apologizing to the scientific community and explaining that, in fact, a reviewer of the paper had raised concerns about the AI-generated images that were ignored. 

“Our investigation revealed that one of the reviewers raised valid concerns about the figures and requested author revisions,” Frontiers’ statement reads. “The authors failed to respond to these requests. We are investigating how our processes failed to act on the lack of author compliance with the reviewers’ requirements. We sincerely apologize to the scientific community for this mistake and thank our readers who quickly brought this to our attention.”

The paper had two reviewers, one in India and one based in the U.S. Motherboard contacted the U.S.-based reviewer who said that they evaluated the study based solely on its scientific merits and that it was up to Frontiers whether or not to publish the AI-generated images since the authors disclosed that they used Midjourney. Frontiers’ policies allow the use of generative AI as long as it is disclosed but, crucially, the images must also be accurate. 

The embarrassing incident is an example of how the issues surrounding generative AI more broadly have seeped into academia, in ways that are sometimes concerning to scientists. Science integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik wrote on her personal blog that it was “a sad example of how scientific journals, editors, and peer reviewers can be naive—or possibly even in the loop—in terms of accepting and publishing AI-generated crap.”

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The donut-shaped Joint European Torus (JET) reactor managed to squeeze out 69 megajoules of output at the end of 2023, in a reaction lasting 5.2 seconds. That’s about as much as burning two kilograms of coal and is better than the 59 megajoules the reactor produced in 2021. Since then, the reactor has been decommissioned. 

It’s the last hurrah for a multi-nation experiment that’s been described as “the heart of global fusion research”, dating all the way back to 1983. “Beyond setting a new record, we achieved things we’ve never done before and deepened our understanding of fusion physics,” said Ambrogio Fasoli, Programme Manager at EUROfusion, the consortium of research institutions that ran JET. 

JET is a tokamak reactor, which restrains plasma (superheated matter) inside a ring using magnetic fields. It’s one of the two favorite designs when it comes to practical fusion tech—along with the similar ring-shaped stellarator—because they keep plasma particles confined and constantly spinning around to create a lasting reaction.

Like many other fusion reactors, JET combines two types of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, to make helium and energy. It’s hoped this reaction could be the cornerstone of fusion power plants in the future—plants that could provide massive amounts of energy without all the radioactive waste.

That ultimate goal of powering the planet using fusion tech is still a long way off, even as records are smashed. In September 2023, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California generated 3.88 megajoules using a different technique of blasting a ball of hydrogen with lasers. 

A boasting point for this and other fusion reactions is that the reaction creates more energy than it takes in. This definition, however, only applies to the reaction itself and not the vast amounts of energy needed to power the lasers or heat the plasma to a whopping 150 million degrees celsius—the hottest thing in the solar system at that time. NIF’s lasers for example used 322 megajoules of energy and JET uses between 700–800 megajoules when it runs.

So, for now, experiments like JET are just that. Experiments designed to yield data. The move from lab to commercial plant will come down to overcoming engineering challenges, experts say, such as making sure the swirling plasma doesn’t come in contact with any solid material as it whirls around its donut enclosure.

JET’s final few experiments brought researchers one step closer to meeting those challenges. “Not only did we demonstrate how to soften the intense heat flowing from the plasma to the exhaust, we also showed in JET how we can get the plasma edge into a stable state thus preventing bursts of energy reaching the wall,” said Emmanuel Joffrin, EUROfusion Tokamak Exploitation task force leader in a press statement. “Both techniques are intended to protect the integrity of the walls of future machines. This is the first time that we’ve ever been able to test those scenarios in a deuterium-tritium environment.”

The reactor will now be decommissioned and repurposed to make way for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER—a larger fusion project run by 37 countries, scheduled to get underway in late 2025. 

“Our successful demonstration of operational scenarios for future fusion machines like ITER and DEMO [The DEMOnstration power plant], validated by the new energy record, instill greater confidence in the development of fusion energy,” said Fasoli. 

“JET has operated as close to powerplant conditions as is possible with today’s facilities, and its legacy will be pervasive in all future power plants,” added UK Atomic Energy Authority CEO, Sir Ian Chapman. “It has a critical role in bringing us closer to a safe and sustainable future.”

The post Scientists Have Made a Record-Setting Fusion Energy Breakthrough appeared first on VICE.

That shift has mostly been attributed to a dramatic and sudden “revolution” called the Middle-Upper Paleolithic cultural transition, where modern humans improved their tool-making, found new and different sources of food, took to the seas, and expressed themselves through ornaments and cave art. Now, a study published Wednesday in Nature Communications has challenged this narrative, instead implying that this “revolution” was more of a gradual and complex process.

Researchers came to this conclusion by analyzing how productive ancient humans were when it came to turning rocks into tools during a 50,000-year span between the Late Middle Paleolithic (69,000 years ago), through the Upper Paleolithic, to the Epipaleolithic period (15,000 years ago). The tools came from five sites across the western Hisma Basin in southern Jordan.

Specifically, researchers quantified the ratio between the length of a particular stone tool’s cutting edge with the mass of the stone as a whole. The more cutting-edge length per mass of stone, the more efficiently early humans used the raw stone material. “Stone raw material, like flint, is not everywhere. It needs to be procured from certain sources,” the study’s lead author, Seiji Kadowaki from Nagoya University in Japan, told Motherboard in an email. “So, more economical consumption of stone raw material reduces the cost for the procurement of raw material.”

Kadowaki said they chose this metric because they needed a way to compare very different types of stone tools in a systematic way. “Because stone tool forms and their production technology changed and varied from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic, the classification system for stone tools differs between the two periods. Thus, it is difficult to have consistent criteria for comparison of the two periods,” he told Motherboard in an email.

He and his colleagues noticed that modern humans became more productive not before or at the beginning of the Middle-Upper Paleolithic cultural transition, but after they’d already started to spread out into new geographical areas in the Early Upper Paleolithic. “In terms of the productivity of cutting-edge length, its development does not simply coincide with the timing of the dispersal of modern humans.”

Much of this shift came down to the stones humans used to make tools becoming smaller and lighter. This was probably because around the same time, humans started developing bladelets—small, long, symmetrical stone tools probably used as spear- or arrowheads.

These technological changes came with a shift from humans being more mobile hunter-gatherers to having slightly more stable base camps. Many of the sites researchers looked at were small, with a few hearths—typical for more wandering groups. Some however were “more intensive occupations” where people would stay for longer periods of time. Under this new system, people may have carried around smaller, more portable blades or partially-made ones that they could use to cut up food stored at these base camps.

The latest findings agree with other studies that have been published in recent years, which also argue that the so-called revolution was actually a slower, multi-step process.

Although the latest study is specific to archeological finds in Jordan, the authors say it serves as a working hypothesis for other places worldwide, including Europe and Central-North Asia where archeologists have seen similar patterns in tool evolution.

Kadowaki also says they need more evidence from other sources before they can definitively paint a new picture of how stone tools evolved. “We need to look at other aspects of stone tools as well as other archaeological records to better understand the technological behaviors and their development at the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition.”

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As reported by Popular Mechanics last week, the University of Bradford in the U.K. recently received a grant worth roughly $12 million from the European Council to, as a press release put it, “hunt for lost civilizations beneath [the] Baltic and North Sea.” Researchers plan on using the latest technology, including AI, to map the seabed and search for prehistoric settlements that were submerged thousands of years ago when sea levels rose due to climate factors.

“Twenty-thousand years ago, the global sea level was 130 meters lower than at present,” Professor Vincent Gaffney, an archaeologist from the University of Bradford, said in a statement. “With progressive global warming and sea-level rise, unique landscapes, home to human societies for millennia, disappeared. We know almost nothing about the people who lived on these great plains.”

Using the latest tech, researchers in Europe have recently discovered numerous underwater signs of prehistoric peoples. An underwater Stonehenge made up of 170 stone cairns was discovered under Lake Constance, which lies between Germany, Austria, and Switzerland; scientists now believe it was made by humans roughly 5,500 years ago. In the Bay of Gradina, on the western coast of the Croatian island of Korčula, scientists found a 7,000-year-old road.

It’s these kinds of discoveries that University of Bradford researchers hope to uncover as part of SUBNORDICA, a collaboration between institutions in Denmark, Germany, and the U.K. that has received over $16 million in funding to date. Their work has become more urgent as coastal development ramps up to build out green energy solutions such as wind farms.

“As Europe and the world approaches net zero, development of the coastal shelves is now a strategic priority,” Gaffney said. “SUBNORDICA will use the latest technologies to explore these lands and support sustainable development.”

One site of interest to researchers is Doggerland, which a University of Bradford web page explains “would have been a heartland of human occupation and central to the process of re-settlement and colonization of north Western Europe during the Mesolithic and the Neolithic.”

“Within this submerged landscape lies fragmentary yet valuable evidence for the lifestyles of its inhabitants including the changes resulting from both the encroaching sea and the introduction of Neolithic technologies,” it continues.

With more funding and field work, we may soon learn even more about the ancient peoples whose societies were lost beneath the rising seas.

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The Planet Nine hypothesis proposes that there’s an undiscovered planet lurking at the far reaches of our solar system, and that this could explain the strange orbits of around half a dozen objects at its outer edges. These Extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs) mostly tend to cluster together as they get closer to the sun and their orbits are all oddly tilted. The gravitational pull of another, massive planet could explain these observations. 

No one’s actually seen this mysterious ninth planet, but a preprint published on arXiv has significantly narrowed the search field and explains that Planet Nine existing is still the researchers’ preferred hypothesis. 

Astrophysicists have been slowly ruling out sections of space where they might find Planet Nine. Previous analyses using data from the Zwicky Transient Facilities archive and The Dark Energy Survey excluded 61 percent of that space. This latest work—by Planet Nine-searchers Michael Brown, Konstantin Batygin from CalTech and Matthew Holman from Harvard University—brings that up to 78 percent.

While it may seem small, that trimming of space represents a trimming of potential objects that could be Planet Nine from 1.2 billion to 244 million, with researchers hesitant to trim the fat further. “While searching for Planet Nine through this large data set remains a formidable task,

we could find no additional filters that appeared to safely further reduce the data set,” the preprint authors write. “Any one of these cuts in the data has the possibility of removing real detections of Planet Nine. Our calibration method must by necessity take this possibility into account.”

Study co-author Michael Brown explained the grueling work that went into narrowing the search. “It’s basically a brute force method of computer simulations,” he told Motherboard. The team simulates objects in the outer solar system, plug in varying specific parameters for a potential Planet Nine then watch gravity at work over four billion years to see how the orbits of those objects change. “You put all that together to get a probabilistic distribution of where the planet might be.”

But the existence of a mysterious planet isn’t the only way to explain the bizarre phenomenon in our neighborhood of space. One is that a set of distant objects—including other dwarf planets, comets, and moons—might collectively be messing with the orbits of ETNOs. Others say that it’s a far-off disk of ice and rock, or a small black hole. 

Some researchers, including theoretical physicist Harsh Mathur, say that an adjusted law of gravity—called Modified Newtonian dynamics, or simply MOND—could rule out both Planet Nine and dark matter. 

Mathur and his collaborator hadn’t sought to discount Planet Nine when they published their 2023 study, but were interested in what effects this theory would have on a solar-system level. 

“We’re taking this theory of gravity that already exists and explaining something else which is galaxy dynamics. It’s an alternative to dark matter that works very well in the galactic realm,” Mathur, from Case Western Reserve University, told Motherboard.

In fact, Mathur describes his view towards the Planet Nine hunt as “agnostic.” “If we find Planet Nine I think that would be the coolest thing because how often do you discover a new planet in the solar system? But for us it’s interesting either way. If Planet Nine is found that means the MOND explanation isn’t working and that tells us something about gravity, and if it’s not found then the evidence for MOND begins to pile up, which is very exciting too because it’s a new law of gravity.” 

Brown favors some alternate explanations over others but says that, ultimately, Planet Nine makes the most sense. “Having a planet out there is the most mundane explanation there could be. We see planets like that around other stars on these distant, eccentric orbits. There are good reasons to think our solar system made more planets and may have ejected them. There’s nothing profound about the idea that we have something else out there.” 

An alternative “flavor” of the Planet Nine hypothesis that Brown concedes is that it’s actually a much bigger, much more distant planet sitting somewhere in the Oort Cloud some 3.2 lightyears away.

The other big—and potentially disappointing—explanation for ETNOs that comes up often is that the orientation and clustering astronomers are seeing is simply observational bias. Mathus explains that for objects that are this far away, we can only really see them when they venture close to the sun and therefore by nature cluster together. Or that it’s from using data from only one survey or telescope, which only scans a certain portion of the sky.

It’s a critique one that Brown says they took into account from the moment they proposed Planet Nine some eight years ago. However, through extensive statistical analysis—which Brown and Batygin have detailed in on X and blog posts—they’ve concluded it’s unlikely to explain what they’re seeing. “It is the most important question to ask when we see something like this. Therefore we asked it the very first time.”

And they aren’t blinded by their quest for the mysterious planet. “So far, we have not found a reason to discard the Planet Nine hypothesis. Will one some day? Perhaps. If the evidence for the existence of Planet Nine were to unravel we would be sad, but we would have to give up the idea. We have been prepared for that moment since the day we first proposed Planet Nine,” Brown and Batygin wrote in one post.

Finally observing Planet Nine might come down to some of the latest generation telescopes and observatories, says planetary astrophysicist Malena Rice. “We actually have to stack together all of the data for about a month with the TESS [Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite] dataset to try and find something that is both moving at right speed to be in the outer solar system and that’s bright enough that it would have to be a planet,” she told Motherboard. “There shouldn’t be anything else besides Planet Nine that would fall within that intersection.” 

“There’s one game in town that’s really going to make a huge difference that’s the LSST [Legacy Survey of Space and Time],” echoes Brown, referring to the sky survey about to get underway at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. “It’s a big telescope with the biggest camera on a telescope in the world and they take pictures of the sky night after night after night.” This telescope images the entire sky every three nights, compared to the telescope data Brown and colleagues were using, which only did so 10 to 15 times over a five year period.   

And even though Brown has been saying it for the past ten years, he’s confident that this time around someone will spot Planet Nine in the next couple of years. “But this time it’s true!” he jokes.

Rice says that, in the search for Planet Nine, we may end up finding other planets in the far reaches of our solar system, similar to how Pluto was discovered. “I’d be quite surprised if we found exactly the planet that was predicted but that doesn’t mean we won’t find something.” 

She adds that, although she hasn’t yet reviewed the latest preprint, that she’s excited to read more. “It looks like a really nice way to use an existing dataset and just do innovative science with it.”

The post Scientists Are Now Close to Finding a Mysterious Planet That Explains Strange Cosmic Phenomena, Study Reports appeared first on VICE.

Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger created a series of machine learning algorithms to digitally unfurl and read 15 panels of a Herculaneum papyrus, revealing ancient reflections on life, food, and music. The papyrus is a part of an ancient library of scrolls in Naples, Italy that was buried when the neighboring volcano Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. The eruption carbonized the works and made them impossible to open.

Their achievement has earned them the $700,000 grand prize in the Vesuvius Challenge—a contest conceived in March 2023 by US tech executive Nat Friedman, entrepreneur Daniel Gross, and computer scientist Brent Seales. The win was announced on Monday.

The team, led by Freie Universität Berlin PhD student Nader, used 3D scan data provided by the contest’s organizers and developed several machine learning algorithms that virtually unfurled and spliced different parts of the parchment together in a process called segmentation, then detected ink on the parchment to read it. 21-year-old computer science major Farritor and ETH Zürich robotics student Schilliger handled segmentation, while Nader developed the ink detection model.

Farritor and Schilliger were able to piece together large chunks of the papyri from several scrolls, validating previous writings and revealing totally new segments from other parts of the scroll, including the damaged and notoriously-tricky to read outermost wrap.  

Meanwhile, the final ink detection model revealed 11 columns of text containing more than 2,000 characters of ancient writing—well above the four passages of 140 characters needed for the grand prize win.

Nader explained to Motherboard the secret of the model’s success, which lay in treating the 3D scans like a stack of 2D images, and then running the data through a string of three AI architectures. “This model, by treating it just as a sequence and looking at the shape of the sequences and how they vary, becomes very efficient and very powerful in learning the structure of ink on the scroll,” Nader said. Vesuvius Challenge judges called the model “unparalleled.” 

All three winners are veterans of the competition. Last October, Farritor became the first person in history to read an entire word from inside the scroll, winning him the First Letters prize. Nader won second place for the same prize, reading the same word with even more clarity. Meanwhile, Schilliger  had won three Segmentation Tooling prizes. 

The scale of the challenge and drive to be the first to complete the task urged Nader to form the team. “I needed to find strong team-mates to push this through,” he said. “I was trying to portray my vision of how we should approach this and obviously we had a lot of discussions.”

It took less than a year since the challenge’s inception for them to read the passages, but was by no means a breezy process. “It was quite tiring but extremely rewarding,” said Nader. “It was like an adrenaline rush. Even if I only slept four hours I’d wake up really excited to see what my AI model was up to.”

Nader said that feeling of excitement only grew as they worked for longer on the project. He said he started to notice ink deposits and how certain letters were thicker in parts than others, showing him where the scribe had started writing. “I started to feel a connection with the ancient scribe. It was really fun to work on this.”

Now a separate panel of papyrologists has begun transcribing what Nader and his team uncovered. They think the scrolls were written by Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, who was residing at the library at the time. He writes about food, music and how to enjoy life’s pleasures akin to a “2000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life.” According to a social media post by Friedman, the philosopher even “throws shade at unnamed ideological adversaries.” 

The win of the grand prize doesn’t mean that the quest to uncover more about these timeworn scrolls is over. Roughly 95 percent of these particular scrolls remain to be read, and they are just four out of more than 800 surviving documents. The challenge will award $100,000 in 2024 to whoever can read 90 percent of each of their four scrolls. 

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The researchers reported collecting the first evidence that an outpouring of gas from some of the brightest and most powerful objects in the universe can curb new stars from forming. The finding adds to our fundamental understanding of how stars and galaxies came into being in the celestial moments after the dawn of time.   

They observed this star-suppressing phenomenon using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, and reported the findings in The Astrophysical Journal. 

The research focussed on a quasar—a super dense region of space powered by a supermassive black hole—called J2054-0005. This particular quasar is moving away from Earth at tremendous speeds in a region of space when the universe was less than a billion years old. 

They used ALMA to show how molecular gas—the stuff stars feed on to form—pours out from the quasar. It’s these powerful outflows that push molecular gas out into space faster than potential stars can use it, thereby suppressing their birth.

“Quasars are especially energetic sources, so we expected that they may be able to generate powerful outflows,” said study co-author, observational astronomer Dragan Salak, in a press release.

Astrophysicists have previously theorized that quasars might quash the ability for stars to form and therefore influence the evolution of galaxies. Other studies have provided more indirect evidence of this too, such as observing ionized gas pouring out of quasars that represent a more recent cosmic age. 

“Even if ionized gas is outflowing, it is not direct evidence that star formation will be immediately affected, because star formation requires molecular gas,” Salak told Motherboard in an email. He said their work is the first “strong direct evidence”.

Detecting this torrent of molecular gas required measuring how the stream absorbed radiation coming out of the quasar. “We can observe a very bright source of light—microwave radiation in this case—such as a quasar. If the space between that light source and us is empty, we would see all the light coming out of the quasar. However, if we see that light at some specific wavelengths is missing, something must have absorbed it on the way from the light source to us,” explained Salak. Specific wavelengths correspond to different footprints of molecular gas pouring out of the quasar, and these footprints are what ALMA picked up. 

The way stars and galaxies form is a complex dance, and black holes can either promote or hinder those processes. Scientists are constantly testing theories, and uncovering new evidence, of how this works. As their ability to image distant objects, like J2054-0005, gets better, more evidence will be revealed. 

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Dubbed “obelisks,” these tiny rings of RNA can fold into a structure that looks more like a rod, hence the name. They’re also surprisingly commonplace in our microbiomes—the community of viruses, bacteria, fungi, and their genes that live in our bodies. Yet, they’ve gone undetected until now and represent the latest discovery in an ever-growing list of mysterious “genetic agents” hiding in plain sight. Indeed, the researchers who discovered them report that their function, if they have one, is a mystery.

The obelisks were discovered by a team lead by Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and pathologist, Andrew Fire, who shared their findings in a preprint.

Using a genome-hunting filter they developed, researchers found just shy of 30,000 obelisks by scouring the Integrative Human Microbiome Project database, a dataset of microbiomes used by researchers worldwide to study human health and disease. When they searched other microbiome datasets from all over the world, they uncovered even more. In one dataset, 6.6 percent of gut samples and a whopping 53 percent of mouth samples contained obelisks.

“The prevalence and apparent novelty of these elements implies more is yet to be learned about their interplay with microbial and human life,” the authors write. Fire has previously declined to be interviewed, given that the finding still needs to be scrutinized by the scientific community in peer review.

Obelisks represent their own class of organism (if you can even call them that—the paper refers to them as “biological entities”). They lie somewhere between viruses and viroids—single-stranded, circular RNA that were thought to mostly infect plants, including wreaking havoc on weed crops.

Although they look pretty similar, viroids can’t make proteins of their own, whereas researchers discovered that obelisks can. These obelisk-made proteins aren’t like any proteins we know about today, which is why Fire’s team named them “oblins.” Exactly what these oblins do for obelisks is just one of a plethora of questions researchers now have.

Viruses, too, can make their own proteins, but they have a protective shell surrounding their genetic material, unlike obelisks.

Obelisks, therefore, need some kind of host. The researchers managed to identify one: A bacterium called Streptococcus sanguinis that lives mostly in dental plaque in our mouths. Exactly which other hosts obelisks inhabit is yet another mystery, as are what they do to their host and how they spread.

In the past three years scientists have discovered tens of thousands of new viroid-like entities. It’s made them completely re-evaluate how they classify the microscopic world, how these things evolved, and just how small and basic reproducing entities can be. It’s still debatable whether viruses are alive, let alone something smaller and simpler.

“It’s insane,” Mark Peifer, a cell and developmental biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Science. “The more we look, the more crazy things we see.”

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Now, new research shows that jewelry was just as important for distinguishing different cultures in ancient Europe as it is for signaling your allegiance to a particular group today. 

The study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, reveals the existence of nine distinct groups that were lost to time and haven’t conclusively shown up in genetic data. Through the study of ancient artifacts, researchers were able to identify previously-unknown cultures living across Europe between 34,000 and 24,000 years ago, showing the power of these artifacts in writing our complex human histories.

The research focused on people who archeologists had previously thought all belonged to a single group called the Gravettians—Ice Age hunter-gatherers who braved the bitter cold and created some of the most iconic artifacts we know about today, including voluptuous sculptures like the Venus of Willendorf.

In the study, researchers from France created and analyzed a database of more than 130 personal ornaments from Gravettian burial and housing sites across Europe. The pieces ranged from carved ivory or amber pendants, to beads made from coral or human bone, to barnacle, bear or bison bone adornments.

They first grouped the ornaments based on shared visual characteristics, then looked at where they’d found the objects and put them into subsets. Finally, they ran two different mathematical analyses to confirm that their groupings were valid.

The researchers saw that particular pieces of jewelry clustered together in different locations, representing nine distinct cultural groups, not just one homogenous population. There was a particularly clear split between eastern Europeans—who preferred to wear jewelry made from ivory, stone, or teeth—and western Europeans—who liked shells and teeth, study co-author Jack Baker told Motherboard in an email. 

Other recent DNA and archeological evidence had hinted that Gravettians may in fact be a number of different people groups, representing different populations or technical abilities; this latest study puts the proverbial nail in the ancient coffin. “Our results are similar to the DNA evidence but we have shown that sometimes different genetic groups wore the same things and that sometimes the same genetic groups wore the same thing,” said Baker.

“The findings of the study actually fit quite well with the growing number of studies showing that the Gravettian is actually much more culturally diversified than was previously thought,” said Anaïs Vignoles, an archaeologist who specializes in the Gravettian period but who wasn’t involved in the study.

“There are some discrepancies between the genetic data and cultural data associated with ornaments,” said Cosimo Posth, an archeologist from Universität Tübingen who wasn’t involved in the study. For example, he points out that the southern Europe Gravettian groups were more similar to the western European groups than to the eastern ones, according to the ornament analysis, whereas the DNA evidence he and his team collected says the opposite. “This is to be expected because obviously different peoples can wear similar ornaments and similar peoples can wear different ornaments, as we see in this case.”

In Posth’s study, he compared DNA evidence with mortuary practices and found good agreement between the two. He says this is a sign that different aspects of culture may have stronger or weaker connections with genetic data. “It seems that certain aspects of a population’s culture are more dictated by fashion such as ornaments and others are more related to biological connections such as mortuary practices.”

Some experts say that archeology has come to over-rely on genetic evidence when it comes to painting a picture of our historic past. The authors emphasize the importance of including both personal adornments and biological data when trying to understand paleolithic cultures.

Vignoles says one of the big shortcomings of the latest study is that it’s not clear how contextual data, such as other cultural artifacts, were used to date the ornaments. “Most of the occurrences used in the data set were recovered by old excavations, which have not necessarily been revised, and this can have huge implications on the chronological attribution of the ornaments.” She adds that there’s not enough information from the study alone to assess whether this affected the author’s interpretations. 

Jewelry doesn’t serve any survival function, unlike other ancient artifacts like spearheads or pottery, so archeologists think it was purely to communicate traits or milestones like reaching a certain age or family ties. “Jewelry was used to transmit social and cultural information, much like today,” Baker, currently a PhD researcher at the Université de Bordeaux, said. “What you wear and how you wear it is a clear and unambiguous signal to others showing which group you belong to. Also, within groups it could show social status—again much like today!” 

The messages people communicated by wearing ornaments changed over time, but some symbols that represented the human body remained relatively unchanged, the study found. 

The findings confirmed a theoretical framework known as isolation-by-distance, where people who are closer together geographically will share the same culture by sharing or trading artifacts. The theory therefore predicts that other factors like language, topography, or the environment played a minor role in creating long lasting boundaries between groups.

Of course, what these ornaments were made of comes down to what materials were available wherever people were living. But ultimately, it was culture driving which items they picked from the environment, not the environment dictating what they wore. 

“The hypothesis that cultural ornaments diversity is probably the result of multiple factors including ecology, raw material availability and a certain sense of identity, is quite reasonable,” said Vignoles. “I personally believe that the relationship between humans and their environment is profoundly cultural.”

 Update: This article was updated to include comment from archaeologist Anaïs Vignoles.

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In a study published Friday in Science Advances, scientists used ground-penetrating radar —which allows them to peer through layers of rock 20 meters below the surface of the crater’s western delta—to paint a picture of the crater’s geological history.

At some point in the past, parts of the crater wore away before it filled with water, forming a lake. That water later subsided again before flooding back in, each time either carrying sediment in or taking it out of the crater. This pattern of deposition and erosion showed up as regular, horizontal bands on the radar’s images.

The patterns match up with earlier images taken by cameras on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Previous studies that analyzed those images taken from space had concluded that the sediment layers came from erupting Martian volcanoes rather than water flow.

“This fits our expectations or hopes about what these layers might be like. The fact that we see this in the radar images is exciting,” David Paige, lead author on the latest study and who’s team had previously theorized the layers came from a lake, told Motherboard.

Figuring out how the sediment got to the crater is important, said Paige, because it will help scientists more accurately analyze the rock and dust samples that the Perseverance Rover is currently collecting. “The rover observations are more reconnaissance. They’re not going to provide any definitive answers on their own,” he said.

So far, Perseverance has collected 23 out of a planned 38 samples from the Jezero crater, which will be brought back to Earth in a joint effort by NASA and the ESA. The ultimate goal is to look for ancient signs of microbial life in the rocks as well as other geological evidence about how the planet evolved.

“We don’t know if there’s life on Mars but the fact that we can see these lake bed sediments means that it might be a reasonable place to look for it. The fact that we’re seeing these layers keeps hope alive that there might be something,” said Paige.

He added that it’s possible to store the samples for many years, meaning future scientists, armed with yet-undiscovered technology, could analyze the rocks and dust in ways we can’t even imagine yet.

This study is the first in what Paige says will be an ongoing string of discoveries coming out of Perseverance, which has so far spent more than a thousand sols (Martian days) on the Red Planet. “We’re just the first to get our results published so we’ll hear a lot more about the unfolding story here.”

Perseverance’s robotic teammate, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, ended its journey on Thursday after three years when one of its rotor blades sustained damage on landing. Scientists are now downloading the final images and data from the copter.

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