Fields of opium poppies once bloomed where the Zurich Opera House underground garage now stands. Through a new analysis of archaeological seeds, researchers at the University of Basel have been able to bolster the hypothesis that prehistoric farmers throughout the Alps participated in domesticating the opium poppy. Although known today primarily as the source of opium and opiates, the poppy is also a valuable food and medicinal plant. Its seeds can be used to make porridge and cooking oil. Unlike all other previously domesticated crops, which are assumed to have been domesticated in south-west Asia (various grains, legumes and flax), experts believe that the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum L.) was domesticated in the western Mediterranean, where its presumed progenitor Papaver somniferum subsp. setigerum (DC.) Arcang is native and still grows wild today.

US military planners pushed for nuclear strikes on mainland China in 1958 to protect Taiwan from an invasion by Communist forces, classified documents posted online by Daniel Ellsberg of "Pentagon Papers" fame show.

US planners also assumed that the Soviet Union would aid China and retaliate with nuclear weapons — a price they deemed worth paying to protect Taiwan, according to the document, first reported by the New York Times.


Former military analyst Ellsberg posted online the classified portion of a top-secret document on the crisis that had been only partially declassified in 1975.

Ellsberg, now 90, is famous for his 1971 leak to US media of a top-secret Pentagon study on the Vietnam war known as the Pentagon Papers.

Guillem Pérez Jordà and Salvador Pardo Gordó, researchers from the Department of Prehistory, Archaeology and Ancient History of the University of València, sign an article in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports that looks into the arrival of fruit crops to the Iberian Peninsula by studying archaeobotanical remains. It is estimated that the cultivation of these species began in the current Valencian Community about 3,000 years ago, coinciding with significant social and economic development.

In places like Fonteta (Guardamar del Segura), Barranc de Beniteixir (Piles), Peña Negra (Crevillent) or L'Alt de Benimaquia (Dénia), it has been possible to date the cultivation of fruittrees such as grapes (Vinis vinifera), olive trees (Olea europaea) or the pomegranate (Punica granatum), among others, about 3,000 years ago. This new form of agriculture allowed the economic and cultural exchange of the peoples of the eastern peninsula with others of eastern origin who founded colonies on these coasts, such as the Phoenicians.

The Minoan language known as "Linear A" may finally be deciphered with the help of the internet, which can be used to uncover previously-hidden links to the much-better understood Linear B language, which developed later in the prehistoric period.

The puzzle of Linear A has tormented linguists for many decades, as they attempted to link it somehow to Linear B, which was translated successfully for the first time in the 1950s. Linear B was used on the Greek mainland and Crete 50-150 years later than Linear A.

In the 1950s and 60s, hundreds of nuclear tests were carried out at Maralinga in western South Australia, releasing radioactive plutonium and uranium particles that can still be detected in the area today.

A study from Monash University in Melbourne has now examined plutonium particles from the blasts to find they're more complicated than initially thought. This has implications for how they behave in the environment, although these implications are still unclear.

"The British detonated nine nuclear bombs and conducted hundreds of nuclear tests in outback South Australia between 1953 and 1963," says Megan Cook, a PhD student at Monash and lead author on a paper describing the research, published in Scientific Reports.

"The resulting radioactive contamination and cover-up continues to haunt us."

But the effects of radioactive particles in the environment are still poorly understood. Study of these particles is "one of those things we don't have an international best practice for," Cook says.

As violence escalates in Israel and Palestine, we take readers through the expanding military relationship between the UK and Israel, which has been erased by the British media. The deepening alliance involves UK military training of Israel for combat, joint exercises, arms deals, as well as intelligence cooperation.

The UK's new military strategy, released in March, states clearly that "Israel remains a key strategic partner".

Months before the importance of the relationship was spelled out, the military chiefs of the two states signed a cooperation agreement "to formalise and enhance our defence relationship, and support the growing Israel-UK partnership", according to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Following the agreement, Britain's ambassador to Israel, Neil Wigan, tweeted he was "delighted", saying it would "further deepen our military cooperation".

What is in that agreement is secret and has not even been formally acknowledged by the UK government. But Israel lobby group Bicom (the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre) has written that the two militaries are "integrating their multi-domain capabilities in maritime, land, air, space, and cyber and electromagnetic".

This is an extraordinary development and follows recent visits to Israel by two UK chiefs of the defence staff, General Sir Nick Carter in 2019 and his predecessor, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach in 2017.

For the first time, researchers have successfully sequenced the entire genome from the skull of Peştera Muierii 1, a woman who lived in today's Romania 35,000 years ago. Her high genetic diversity shows that the out of Africa migration was not the great bottleneck in human development but rather this occurred during and after the most recent Ice Age. This is the finding of a new study led by Mattias Jakobsson at Uppsala University and being published in Current Biology.

"She is a bit more like modern-day Europeans than the individuals in Europe 5,000 years earlier, but the difference is much less than we had thought. We can see that she is not a direct ancestor of modern Europeans, but she is a predecessor of the hunter-gathers that lived in Europe until the end of the last Ice Age," says Mattias Jakobsson, professor at the Department of Organismal Biology at Uppsala University and the head of the study.

Very few complete genomes older than 30,000 years have been sequenced. Now that the research team can read the entire genome from Peştera Muierii 1, they can see similarities with modern humans in Europe while also seeing that she is not a direct ancestor. In previous studies, other researchers observed that the shape of her cranium has similarities with both modern humans and Neanderthals. For this reason, they assumed that she had a greater fraction of Neanderthal ancestry than other contemporaries, making her stand out from the norm. But the genetic analysis in the current study shows that she has the same low level of Neanderthal DNA as most other individuals living in her time. Compared with the remains from some individuals who lived 5,000 years earlier, such as Peştera Oase 1, she had only half as much Neanderthal ancestry.

The arrest of Viktor Medvedchuk, the leader of Kiev's largest opposition party, shows US interference in Ukraine is all about winning a standoff with Russia and has nothing to do with promoting democracy or advancing human rights.

America often likes to insist that its approach to foreign policy is one of championing liberty and defeating authoritarianism. In the minds of many of Washington's officials, US hegemony is synonymous with the cause of liberal democracy. They have done an excellent job in framing the Ukraine crisis through this lens - but is it rooted in reality?

The narrative put forward by Western commentators and politicians is that Kiev's aspirations for democracy and freedom necessitate its turn toward the EU and US, but are continuously undermined by Moscow's belligerence and desire to assert imperial-style control over the nation. The West, supposedly motivated solely by the altruistic values of democracy and human rights, "stands by" the country against the Russian aggressor.

Once the audience believes that premise, reporting on all events in the region ends up being seen in that light alone. However, to what extent does the US actually support Ukraine? Washington has gone against the democratic will and interest of its citizens at every turn, leaving it profoundly divided, with American oversight only granting political legitimacy to a certain group of Ukrainians.

One of the first things that struck me while reading the cables from the US embassy to Israel in Tel Aviv was how worried the Israeli government seems to be about the Goldstone Report into war crimes committed during Israel's 2008-2009 attack on the people of Gaza. In cable 09TELAVIV2777 of December 2009, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is said to have named the report as one of three "principal threats" facing Israel — the other two being Iran's alleged nuclear programme and "missile proliferation".

Second, there are important insights into the high level of collaboration between Israel and forces that have been called the "Palestinian Contras" in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Indeed, the first "cablegate" headline on Palestine was sourced from cable 09TELAVIV1177, in which Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak is reported to have said he "had consulted with Egypt and Fatah prior to Operation Cast Lead, asking if they were willing to assume control of Gaza once Israel defeated Hamas". In other words, Fateh leader Mahmoud Abbas (whose term as PA president expired in January 2009) knew the massive Israeli onslaught was coming but said nothing. This was widely suspected, but to read confirmation of it from a confidential US government source is something new.

Aqueducts are very impressive examples of the art of construction in the Roman Empire. Even today, they still provide us with new insights into aesthetic, practical, and technical aspects of construction and use. Scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) investigated the longest aqueduct of the time, the 426-kilometer-long Aqueduct of Valens supplying Constantinople, and revealed new insights into how this structure was maintained back in time. It appears that the channels had been cleaned of carbonate deposits just a few decades before the site was abandoned.