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Scientific tools are tracing the evolution of ancient biblical manuscripts

Dr Robert Turnbull
University of Melbourne
Fri, 01 Aug 2025 03:25 UTC
Ancient Manuscript
© Colt Collection/The Morgan Library & Museum
Our knowledge of ancient literature comes to us through the hands of scribes. The works of Aristotle, Galen and Ptolemy survived only because generations of copyists reproduced them by hand.

But copying was not a straightforward process.
Copy Old Manuscript
© Getty ImagesWorks like those of Ptolemy survived only because generations of copyists reproduced them.
Scribes sometimes edited as they copied - smoothing out contradictions, inserting interpretations, merging readings from different sources and, sometimes, just making mistakes.

Over time, these small changes accumulate.

In order to trace how a text evolved, modern-day researchers use a kind of reconstructed manuscript family tree, known as a stemma.

This tree not only helps us approximate the earliest recoverable version of a text; it also reveals how that text was read, reshaped and reimagined across centuries and cultures.

The larger the tradition, the harder the puzzle - and the New Testament Bible is one of the most complex traditions to survive.

Thousands of manuscripts still exist in the original language of Greek, alongside thousands more in translation - Latin, Syriac, Arabic and others - each with their own patterns of variation.

One recent estimate suggests the New Testament manuscript tradition contains half a million textual variants which works out on average of three or four for every single word.
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Microscope 2

Scientists speculate humans may have untapped 'superpowers' from genes related to hibernation

Christoph Schwaiger
Live Science
Mon, 04 Aug 2025 22:04 UTC
DNA strand
© screenshotThere are genes that help to regulate metabolic changes tied to hibernation. This DNA, if targeted, could be beneficial to human health, some scientists think.
Scientists pinpointed key "regulators" that help control the metabolisms of hibernators, and say the same genes might hold untapped benefits for humans.

Hibernating mammals rely on particular genes to adjust their metabolisms as they enter that unique, low-energy state — and humans actually carry that same hibernation-related DNA. Now, early research hints that leveraging this particular DNA could help treat medical conditions in people, scientists say.

Hibernation offers "a whole bunch of different biometrically important superpowers," senior study author Christopher Gregg, a human genetics professor at the University of Utah, told Live Science.

For example, ground squirrels can develop reversible insulin resistance that helps them rapidly gain weight before they hibernate but starts fading as hibernation gets underway. A better understanding of how hibernators flip this switch could be useful for tackling the insulin resistance that characterizes type 2 diabetes, Gregg suggested.
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Brain

When your mind goes 'blank,' your brain activity resembles deep sleep, scans reveal

Roberta McLain
Live Science
Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00 UTC
Brain stuff
© Grafissimo/Getty ImagesScientists uses two brain-scan methods to see what happens when your mind goes totally blank.
Neuroscientists think moments of "mind blanking" could be a way for the brain to protect itself.

You look up from your phone screen and suddenly realize you weren't thinking about anything. It's not a lapse in memory or a daydream; it's literally a moment when you're not thinking of anything at all.

Neuroscientists have a term for it — mind blanking — which they define as a brief, waking state when conscious thought simply stops.

Scientists used to think our waking minds were always generating thoughts, but recent research shows that's not the case. Mind blanking is now recognized as a distinct conscious state associated with changes in arousal, which in neuroscience refers to alertness and responsiveness to stimuli. Studying this curious state could shed light on how consciousness works, some researchers think.

"For some, it's kind of a blip in the mind, and suddenly there's nothing," Thomas Andrillon, a neuroscience researcher at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research and the Paris Brain Institute, told Live Science. "But not with that feeling, 'There was something that I forgot.'"

Often, people are unaware of the lapse until they are prompted to answer "What were you just thinking about?"

"When we interrupt them randomly," Andrillon continued, "it's clear it's more frequent than what people realize." Although the frequency of this phenomenon varies among individuals, various studies suggest about 5% to 20% of a person's waking hours may be spent in this state.
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Cloud Lightning

Spanning eastern Texas to west-central Missouri, 515-mile-long 'megaflash' of lightning sets new world record


Smithsonian Magazine
Thu, 31 Jul 2025 19:17 UTC
horizontal lightning
© PexelsMegaflashes travel horizontally, but they also produce five to seven cloud-to-ground bolts, on average.
In October 2017, lightning stretched across multiple Great Plains states, and a weather satellite captured the event

In October 2017, lightning flashed across the sky in America's heartland. But this wasn't your average storm. The single, enormous bolt — known as a "megaflash" — stretched across multiple states, from eastern Texas to west-central Missouri, covering a total distance of 515 miles.

Now, experts say that lightning flash was the longest ever documented. The World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations agency that maintains official records of global, hemispheric and regional extremes, announced the new world record in a July 31 paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

The October 2017 flash beat the previous world record — a 477-mile-long bolt above the Great Plains in April 2020 — by 38 miles. It lit up the sky across an area that's five times larger than the state of Massachusetts, illuminating parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri at the same time, reports the Washington Post's Matthew Cappucci.

Comment: It seems there are changes afoot in the earth's atmosphere that are conducive to larger and more frequent lighting strikes. Pierre Lescadron's Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection discusses the possible reasons.

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Blue Planet

Sinkites: Strange bodies of undersea sand that break the laws of geology

Sam Walters
Discover Magazine
Fri, 01 Aug 2025 21:34 UTC
ocean water sea waves
Hundreds of "sinkites," all around a kilometer across, are altering the strata in the North Sea.

Earth's layers of rock are typically superimposed, or laid one on top of another, meaning that the oldest layers tend to be buried beneath the youngest layers. But researchers recently confirmed that this isn't always the case, as strange bodies of sand can cause stratigraphic inversion — the interruption of the ordinary order of rock layers — at the bottom of the sea.

Revealing their results in Communications Earth and Environment, the researchers say that these bodies of sand, or "sinkites," appear beneath the North Sea and date back to the Miocene and Pliocene epochs, between around 20 million and 2.6 million years ago. Though stratigraphic inversions have been detected in layers of rock in the past, they haven't been detected at this scale or size, as there are hundreds of North Sea sinkholes that measure around a kilometer (over half a mile) across or more.
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Dig

Tomatoes' ancient accidental cross with another plant gave the world potatoes

Sascha Pare
Live Science
Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:09 UTC
potatoes tomatoes ancient hybred
© brightstars/Getty ImagesPotatoes and tomatoes are more closely related than they look.
Random mating between wild tomato plants and potato-like species 8 million to 9 million years ago may have given rise to one of our favorite carbs: the potato.

Together with 107 extant, wild potato species, the cultivated potatoes we know today (Solanum tuberosum) belong to the lineage Petota. New research suggests that this lineage, or group of closely related species, emerged from interbreeding between the ancestors of two other lineages: Tomato, which consists of 17 living species, including the salad essential Solanum lycopersicum, and Etuberosum, which has three living species native to South America.

"From an evolutionary perspective, we had an unresolved [disagreement] in the relationships between Tomato, Petota and Etuberosum lineages," Sandra Knapp, a research botanist at the Natural History Museum in London and co-author of the new study, told Live Science in an email.
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Bizarro Earth

Canada is breaking apart: Geologists reveal hidden fault line that could unleash devastating quakes

Arezki Amiri
Daily Galaxy
Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:17 UTC
A hidden seismic threat is awakening beneath Canada's Yukon Territory. The Tintina fault, long thought to be inactive, now shows signs of significant movement, suggesting it could unleash massive earthquakes.
Aerial Photograph of Geological Landform, Mersin – Turkey.
© iStockAerial Photograph of Geological Landform, Mersin – Turkey.
What Is the Tintina Fault, and Why Does It Matter?

Stretching over 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) from the Yukon into Alaska, the Tintina fault is one of the major geological features in western North America. It runs parallel to the Yukon River, marking a significant divide in the Earth's crust where two tectonic plates meet. Over its history, the fault has shifted laterally by a remarkable 450 kilometers (280 miles), making it an essential player in understanding the region's seismic landscape.

For a long time, scientists believed the fault had been inactive for at least 40 million years, largely because there had been no significant seismic events associated with it during recorded history. This view began to shift when recent research uncovered new evidence that the fault may still be capable of large ruptures, potentially putting the area at risk for powerful earthquakes in the future.
Yukon Territory Fault Line
© Geophysical Research LettersPhysiography and seismotectonics of the Yukon Territory. Quaternary scarps along the Tintina fault in this study are highlighted with a red line.
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Info

2,300-year-old arm tats on mummified woman reveal new insights about tattooing technique in ancient Siberia

Kristina Killgrove
Live Science
Wed, 30 Jul 2025 23:09 UTC
A new analysis used near-infrared photography to shed light on the methods and tools for creating tattoos in the Early Iron Age Pazyryk culture.
Female Mummy
© M. Vavulin / Antiquity Publications Ltd.A 3D model created from photographs of the female mummy from Pazyryk tomb 5 in Siberia.
Fantastical animal imagery on the forearms of a 2,300-year-old mummified woman is revealing new information about the art of tattooing in ancient Siberia.

Thanks to cutting-edge photography, archaeologists have discovered that a virtuoso artist used a previously unknown tattoo tool to "hand-poke" the designs in multiple stages.

The new findings are detailed in a study published Thursday (July 31) in the journal Antiquity.

The Pazyryk ice mummies are well known for their preserved body decorations that depict animal fight scenes and mythical creatures, including an animal resembling a griffin. The nomadic Pazyryk culture, which was part of the ancient Scythian world, flourished in the Iron Age (sixth to second centuries B.C.). The Pazyryk buried their dead in huge mounds called kurgans, which were cut into the Siberian permafrost. This burial style, along with early embalming techniques, preserved the bodies of several nobles.

But when the first Pazyryk mummies were found in the 1940s, archaeologists did not notice some of the more subtle tattoos. Infrared imaging in the early 2000s led to the discovery of previously unseen tattoos on four Pazyryk mummies.
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Pi

Quantum scientists have built a new math of cryptography

Ben Brubaker
Quanta Magazine
Fri, 25 Jul 2025 19:11 UTC
quantum crytography fortress graphic
© Wei-An Jin/Quanta Magazine
In theory, quantum physics can bypass the hard mathematical problems at the root of modern encryption. A new proof shows how.

Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That's because certain hard math problems underpin the security of modern encryption. Any clever trick for solving them will doom most forms of cryptography.

Several years ago, researchers found a radically new approach to encryption that lacks this potential weak spot. The approach exploits the peculiar features of quantum physics. But unlike earlier quantum encryption schemes, which only work for a few special tasks, the new approach can accomplish a much wider range of tasks. And it could work even if all the problems at the heart of ordinary "classical" cryptography turn out to be easily solvable.

But this striking discovery relied on unrealistic assumptions. The result was "more of a proof of concept," said Fermi Ma, a cryptography researcher at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in Berkeley, California. "It is not a statement about the real world."

Comment: Further reading on quantum cryptography developments:

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Galaxy

3I/ATLAS is 7 miles wide — the largest interstellar object ever seen — new photos from Vera C. Rubin Observatory reveal

Harry Baker
Live Science
Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00 UTC
comet w circle
© Darryl Seligman et al.3I/ATLAS is an interstellar comet that is currently shooting toward the sun on a one-way trip through the solar system.
The alien comet 3I/ATLAS is roughly 7 miles (11.2 kilometers) wide, making it the largest interstellar object ever spotted, according to newly revealed photos from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

The detailed images, which were captured before the extrasolar entity was officially discovered, highlight the immense power of the record-breaking telescope and demonstrate how valuable it will be for finding future interstellar interlopers, researchers say.

3I/ATLAS was discovered on July 1, barrelling toward the sun at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h). Less than 24 hours later, NASA had confirmed that it was the third known interstellar object (ISO) — an ejected piece of an alien star system that is shooting clean through our solar system. It quickly became clear that 3I/ATLAS was a comet, and computer simulations tracing back its likely region of origin hint that it could be up to 3 billion years older than Earth, potentially making it the oldest comet ever detected.
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