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A mysterious low noise regularly heard by residents in South Tampa‚ Florida‚ over the last three years may have an explanation.In 2021‚ residents from Port Tampa to Davis Islands heard what has been described as a "mysterious deep bass sound"."Everyone seems to have their favorite theory‚" resident Sara Healy explained in a crowdfunder to investigate the noise‚ "whether it’s a party boat‚ a club‚ a rager on Beer Can Island‚ a top secret project on MacDill Air Force Base‚ or even aliens."None of those are correct‚ according to Dr James Locascio‚ Program Manager Fisheries Habitat Ecology and Acoustics at the Mote Marine Laboratory &; Aquarium. Locascio provided a possible explanation back in 2022‚ which residents are raising money to confirm with underwater microphones. The expert in underwater sound and fish spawning believes that the noise could be caused by the sounds of mating black drum fish.“This is a pretty uncommon phenomenon‚” Locascio told the Washington Post. “All these people are surprised by it because it’s not well known.”Drum fish are appropriately named‚ given the noise they produce. "A defining characteristic of the drum family is the ability to create throbbing or croaking sounds by using special muscles to vibrate against the swim bladder‚" North Carolina Coastwatch explains. "Each species makes a slightly different sound."  A recording of a banded drum fish from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Macaulay Library.Locascio is now planning to place microphones underwater to find where the noise is coming from‚ with local residents covering the cost of the equipment. Amazingly‚ this isn't the first time Locascio has solved the same fish sex-based mystery. In 2005‚ similar noises were heard off the Gulf Coast in Florida‚ and the city was ready to spend $47‚000 fixing the problem‚ which they believed was due to the municipal utility system. In stepped Locascio to explain they were listening to fish sex.“Black drum have taken a liking to the canal system in Cape Coral‚” Locascio told the New York Times. “Their nightly booming is like a water drip torture that lasts for months.”Locascio explained that the noises produced by the drum fish are low enough in frequency and long enough in wavelength to go through sea walls and into the ground‚ then into seafront homes‚ much like the rumble of passing vehicles. He suspects that the noise is carried in the same way this time‚ explaining why residents can hear it from kilometers away.

Bone fragments found near‚ Ranis‚ central Germany‚ prove Homo sapiens were in the area at least 45‚000 years ago‚ possibly the earliest date for our species in northern Europe. The discovery indicates that modern humans and Neanderthals lived side by side for thousands of years‚ rather than our ancestors’ arrival spelling immediate doom for humanity’s nearest relatives.The question of how humans and Neanderthals interacted is a crucial unresolved part of the story we can tell about ourselves. We know there was enough co-existence for substantial amounts of Neanderthal DNA to end up in the genomes of people of Eurasian descent.However‚ we don’t know if these encounters were consensual or violent‚ if they took place during long periods of coexistence‚ or if the arrival of the newer model of human caused a quick replacement of the old. Knowing the answers might tell us something about humanity’s capacity to live with those who resemble us most closely‚ and therefore perhaps with ourselves.Some of the answers may lie in a cave called Ilsenhöhle at the base of a castle near Ranis‚ where both bones and a type of stone blade known as a leaf point have been found. Leaf points were used all the way from what is now Poland to Great Britain‚ and are thought to be the product of a common culture‚ known as the Lincombian–Ranisian–Jerzmanowician technocomplex‚ or LRJ.Previous studies of the Ilsenhöhle cave demonstrated it was at least 40‚000 years old‚ but failed to answer the question of whether the tools were made by H. sapiens or Neanderthals. It’s assumed the answer to this question would be the same for leaf points throughout their range.This is where Dr Elena Zavala of the University of California‚ Berkeley‚ and co-authors have produced a major advance. They first used bone proteins to show the skeletal remains at the site were from humans. Subsequently‚ they extracted mitochondrial DNA from 13 bones found at the site‚ and showed these came from a group of Homo sapiens that shared common ancestry on the maternal line. The analysis was done on nine bones discovered‚ but not recognized as human‚ in the 1930s‚ and four found more recently by digging deeper into the cave‚ and removing a boulder that stopped the original excavation. The bones and tools were so intermingled the team are confident the owners of one made the other.Archaeology has developed a long way since the 1930s‚ allowing a recent dig to find many things at Ranis by digging 8 meters (26 feet) beneath where the previous excavation stopped.Image Credit: Marcel Weiss‚ License: CC-BY-ND 4.0This proves "Homo sapiens made this technology‚ and that Homo sapiens were this far north at this time period‚ which is 45‚000 years ago‚" Zavala said in a statement. "So these are among the earliest Homo sapiens in Europe."There are signs that Homo sapiens made it to Greece a great deal earlier than this‚ but for whatever reason they didn’t flourish. The true conquest of Europe only came after arrival in southern France around 54‚000 years ago‚ and may have taken a long time to reach northern Europe.If Zavala and co-authors are correct‚ the time to expand into the bitter cold was not so long‚ despite temperatures 7-15°C (13-27°F) colder than today. The leaf points probably helped. On the other hand‚ it indicates that neither warfare nor competition caused Neanderthals to disappear soon after Homo sapiens’ arrival. “Homo sapiens reached northwestern Europe long before Neanderthal disappearance in southwestern Europe‚” said senior author Professor Jean-Jacque Hublin of the Collège de France.These would have been significant advances on their own‚ but the mitochondrial DNA revealed something else. Twelve of the Ranis bones came from a surprisingly close relative of the woman who left behind a skull in a cave at Zlatý k in the Czech Republic a few thousand years later. The other bone was more closely related to an individual around the same time from Italy‚ even further afield."That raises some questions: Was this a single population? What could be the relationship here?" Zavala said. "But with mitochondrial DNA‚ that's only one side of the history. It's only the maternal side. We would need to have nuclear DNA to be able to start looking into this." Nuclear DNA is far harder to capture from bones this old.Most of the DNA at the site wasn’t human at all‚ coming from a mix of prey the humans brought back‚ and cave bears and hyenas who sheltered in the cave when the humans weren’t using it. This was apparently most of the time.The authors conclude these people were highly mobile and well adapted to the cold conditions‚ something that had previously been thought not to occur until much later. Nevertheless‚ despite these capacities‚ they don’t seem to have monopolized the area. Indeed‚ the earlier inhabitants of the continent persisted for a long time even in south-western Europe‚ which being warmer would seem likely to have offered more of an advantage to the recent arrivals from Africa.Who would have thought the story of humanity's arrival in some of the most hostile climates we have ever encountered‚ and our relationship to our nearest relatives‚ lies at the bottom of a fairy tale castle?Image Credit: © Tim Schüler TLDA‚ License: CC-BY-ND 4.0Members of the team responsible for this study have published it along with accompanying papers on the diet and lifestyle of the human inhabitants of Ilsenhöhle‚ and the climatic conditions.There’s a long way to go in unraveling how the two populations behaved toward each other‚ and why the Neanderthals eventually did die out. Nevertheless‚ there is something hopeful in the possibility that we could co-exist for thousands of years with a species so close to us that some consider them a subspecies of our own. Maybe there are lessons on how to get along with others of our own kind.The main study is open access in Nature‚ accompanied by simultaneous publications in Nature Ecology and Evolution on the climate and diet of the inhabitants.

Along the coast of Morocco‚ archaeologists have uncovered the oldest human footprints ever discovered in Northern Africa and the Southern Mediterranean. Dating to some 90‚000 years ago‚ they are also “among the oldest footprints attributed to Homo sapiens worldwide.” An international team of archaeologists recently discovered the footprints near the city of Larache on the Northwest coast of Morocco. While there are older fossilized remains of humans in North Africa at a mountainous site called Jebel Irhoud‚ no evidence has yet been found in the Larache region‚ some 250 kilometers (156 miles) north towards the coast.In total‚ the researchers counted 85 prints along a beach area that spans around 2‚800 square meters (30‚000 square feet) in size. Based on the shape‚ size‚ and location of the impressions‚ the team concluded they were made by the feet of Homo sapiens. The group was made up of at least five individuals‚ including a young child‚ an older child‚ an adolescent or small adult‚ a medium-sized adult‚ and an extremely tall adult. This last individual is believed to have been a male with a height of 189 centimeters (6 feet 2 inches)‚ which is exceptionally tall for a prehistoric human. Spot the big toe: Footprints found at Larache.Image credit: M. Sedrati et al‚ Scientific Reports‚ 2024 (CC BY 4.0)Most archaeological sites like this contain less than a few dozen footprints‚ which makes the 85 impressions at Larache all the more fascinating. To fully appreciate the discovery‚ you must think about the unique circumstances that allowed a human foot to be imprinted into the ground and then preserved for tens of thousands of years. To put a solid date on the tracks‚ the researchers used optically stimulated luminescence. This cutting-edge technique shows how long ago a grain of sand was exposed to sunlight‚ thereby showing how long that section of sediment has been buried.This revealed that the footprints were made approximately 90‚300 years ago‚ with a margin of error of about 7‚600 years either way.  “The Larache footprints represent an important discovery. Indeed‚ no other site in North Africa has yielded footprints dating from the Pleistocene or Pliocene. They are‚ therefore‚ the oldest human footprints in this region and among the oldest footprints attributed to Homo sapiens worldwide‚” the study authors write.The researchers go on to explain that just two other regions have yielded older examples of confirmed Homo sapiens footprints: a set of tracks on the Arabian Peninsula dating to around 120‚000 years old and another collection in South Africa that date back a whopping 153‚000 years.Prior to 2000‚ there were just a handful of sites where you could find ancient human footprints that were more than 50‚000 years old‚ all of which were in East Africa and South Africa. However‚ excavations in the past two decades have revealed many more footprints older than this time. Even in North America‚ where human presence is relatively recent‚ archaeologists have recently uncovered human footprints in present-day New Mexico that could be as old as 23‚000 years.The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Since the 18th century‚ we've known that there are special points around two massive bodies in space as long as one orbits the other. There are places that move with the smaller orbiting object‚ never changing distance from it; they are great places to park spacecraft and telescopes. And it turns out‚ you can copy this setup and even trap light with it.The setup involves the Lagrange points‚ named after the 18th-century Italian mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange who‚ together with Leonhard Euler‚ predicted their existence. Let’s take the Earth-Sun system‚ for instance. The five Lagrange points move around the Sun at the same time as the Earth‚ going around it in one year. The first one‚ L1‚ is located between the Earth and the Sun. The second one‚ L2‚ is located beyond the Earth‚ and it is where we have put some telescopes like JWST. The third‚ L3‚ is located diametrically opposite on Earth’s orbit behind the Sun.The final two points‚ L4 and L5‚ are located in Earth's orbit as well‚ but they precede and follow our planet at a very specific angle – 60 degrees with respect to the line between the Earth and the Sun. In the case of Jupiter‚ those are the locations of the Trojan asteroids.          Researchers considered if something similar could be created in unusual optical systems (made of liquid or gases). The idea was to create a region that beams of light would naturally fall into and a team at the University of Southern California found out how to do it.  The team placed an iron wire inside a tube containing a silicon polymer. Electricity was then applied‚ creating heat and changing the optical properties of the polymer. The wire used was shaped like a helix and created changes that are comparable to the Lagrange points‚ capturing the light. The researchers are calling this trapped light "Trojan beams".“Our work demonstrates that this process can trap light in a way that was not previously imaginable. These findings may have implications beyond standard optical waveguiding schemes and could universally apply to other wave systems such as acoustics and ultracold atoms‚" said Professor Mercedeh Khajavikhan‚ who co-led the research‚ in a statement. "It is always fascinating to see how concepts that emerged in unrelated fields like celestial mechanics can be put in use in other areas like optics.”The study is published in the journal Nature Physics.