Archeologists have recovered over 200 small, spoonlike objects next to warfare-related artifacts at Roman era dig sites across Europe. And while the accessories probably didn’t directly help defend against enemy combatants, the researchers have a theory about their purpose: According to the team, “barbarian” warriors across central Europe may have battled the Roman Empire with a little help from stimulants. 

Researchers at Poland’s Maria Curie-Sklodowska University laid out their hypothesis in a study recently published in the journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift. Their paper details 241 small objects excavated from 116 archeological sites throughout the country, as well as from locations in Scandinavia and Germany. This region falls within a vast area of central and northern Europe often referred to as Barbaricum by the Roman empire, and was home to the ancient cultures often collectively referred to as “barbarians.”

The relics are mostly dated between 0-150 CE, and were made from wood or antler. Their handles generally measure between 40 and 70 mm long (roughly 1.57-2.75 inches), and are topped by a flat disk or shallow bowl 10-20 mm (0.39-0.78 inches) in diameter. Many of the accessories also included holes drilled into the handles that allowed users to strap them to their belts.

As an accompanying announcement explains, archeologists have long known that Greek and Roman cultures widely used narcotics such as opium, but until now, many experts believed drug use in Germanic peoples almost exclusively extended only to alcohol. The number of spoons and the large area in which they were found, however, point to a potential need to revise the historical record.

After documenting each artifact, the researchers then surveyed the variety of stimulants that could have been available to barbarian tribes at the time. The list, while not exhaustive, is large enough to give Germanic warriors plenty of options—belladonna, multiple fungi varieties, poppy, hops, hemp, and henbane, among others. While some of these could be consumed after dissolving them in alcohol, many could be inhaled in dry, powdered form. Because of this, researchers theorize barbarians used their belt accessories to precisely portion out their stimulant of choice so as to avoid overdosing, either before or during combat.

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“These spoons were part of a warrior’s standard kit, enabling them to measure and consume stimulants in the heat of battle,” the authors write in their paper. The team also believes that, if their theory is true, then it’s unlikely Germanic peoples reserved drug use for only during times of war.

“It is likely that this knowledge was also applied to the collection and storage of wild plants…,” they write. “… It seems that the awareness of the effects of various types of natural preparations on the human body entailed knowledge of their occurrence, methods of application, and the desire to consciously use this wealth for medicinal and ritual purpose.”

The post Roman-era Barbarians snorted stimulants in battle, tiny spoons suggest appeared first on Popular Science.

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An obscure federal program known as the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program (GRRP) is helping nonprofit housing developers in Denver stay afloat by providing grants to support the renovation of affordable housing properties.

As Robert Davis explains in a piece for Next City, the little-known program, administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), was created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and has paid out over $1.4 billion. “HUD-supported affordable housing providers can apply for up to $80,000 per unit in funding. The money must be used on upgrades that make the properties more resilient to climate hazards and improve residents’ quality of life.”

According to Michelle Diller, the senior program director for Building Resilient Futures at Enterprise Community Partners, “GRRP is the only HUD program to combine climate resiliency with green energy retrofits” and is “a forward-looking program that seeks to extend the lifetime of affordable housing units instead of simply repairing damages.” The program provides a key financial lifeline to offset rising operating costs for affordable housing providers and offers the chance to install retrofits that reduce future operating costs.

• Green and Resilient Retrofit Program
• Department of Housing and Urban Development
• HUD
• Retrofits
• Resilience
• Affordable Housing
• Housing Supply

Fort Worth’s Trinity Metro transit agency is shutting down its current bike share system with the promise of launching a new system in January, reports Eric E. Garcia for KERA News. The new system will include roughly 90 percent electric bikes.

As Garcia explains, “Fort Worth Bike Sharing kicked off in 2013 with 300 bikes at 30 stations, but grew steadily within a decade. The system had more than 400 bikes, including electric and classic models, available to rent through day passes or long-term memberships at about 59 stations.”

The program saw soaring ridership during the Covid-19 pandemic. The system logged 84,073 rides in 2021, compared with 56,348 in 2019.

• Fort Worth
• Trinity Metro
• bike share
• Bikeshare
• Shared Mobility
• Bikes
• E-Bikes
• Cycling
• Bike Infrastructure
• Trinity Metro Bikes

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Between humans, a kiss on the mouth or cheek is a clear signal of warm feelings. But what’s going on in a dog’s brain when it plants a slobbery lick on a person’s face or hands? There’s no single definitive answer, though canine cognition experts have theories. 

“If we want to distill it down to one thing, it’s communication,” says Ellen Furlong, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Transylvania University in Kentucky, where she studies dog behavior. Dogs are highly social and well-attuned to humans. If a pup is interacting with you, it’s often with purpose. “But there are lots of different things that [dogs might be] communicating through a lick,” she adds. 

To discern the intent and meaning behind a dog’s actions, “I always suggest that people look at the entire context,” Furlong says. For instance, if a familiar dog approaches you energetically, with repeated licks and loose “wiggly” posture, then a lick on the face or hand is likely an expression of greeting or enthusiasm. 

Similarly, it may be “an attempt at creating affiliation or reaffirming affiliation,” suggests Zachary Silver, a professor of psychology at Occidental College where he leads the Canine Intelligence Lab. Arousal and over-stimulation probably play a role, he adds. “Dogs lick things when they’re excited,” says Silver. Though he points out that most dogs don’t lick indiscriminately, and that, anecdotally, “the behavior is disproportionately directed towards people they’re familiar with.” If a dog doesn’t greet everyone with the same licks, then the action likely has a social meaning– reinforcing “pack” relations. 

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Social hierarchy may also be involved as, among dogs, sometimes one animal will briefly lick another in a show of deference and pre-emptive placation. Puppies more often lick older dogs, says Furlong. “It’s like, ‘hey you’re the boss, and I know you’re the boss,’” she says. With human-dog interactions, too, the gesture could carry an aspect of appeasement and submission–depending on the situation. 

Yet other kisses might not be quite so conciliatory. A lick, “might be communicating that they’re seeking closeness and affection, or they could be communicating the exact opposite: that they want some distance and space,” Furlong notes. The “lick to dismiss” she says, is a well-known behavior among canine researchers and trainers that signals a pet is trying to redirect someone or escape unwanted attention. A perfunctory lick or two on the face or hand, coupled with signs of stress like a rigid body, attempts to turn or move away, and visible eye whites are all signs of dismissal over greeting. 

“People miss a lot in their dog’s behavior,” she says. “I think we tend to pick up really well on cues that a dog is happy and we tend to miss cues that dogs are stressed or looking for disengagement.” 

[ Related: Humans gave dogs treats 12,000 years ago, new archeological evidence suggests ]

And going one level deeper, even the apparently happy licks may be more nuanced than just a dog’s keen hello. Behavior is complicated and often driven by multiple factors, says Furlong. In addition to eager greetings, there could be a component of curiosity or even flavor involved in licking–especially after a dog and its human come together after time apart. “They’re going to lick to taste things. They might lick to explore. They might lick because you’ve come home from a run and you’re very salty,” she says.

Among wolves, the wild ancestors of our pets, pups will often lick their mother’s face when she returns to the den, begging for regurgitated food. Some dog cognition researchers, like Alexandra Horowitz, a Barnard College psychology professor, interpret domestic dog licks through the same instinctual lens. “Your dog’s lick of you when you come home is absolutely a greeting, they’re happy to see you, but also it’s a little bit of a request for whatever you just ate,” Horowitz explained in an October CBS Morning appearance.

Even if we’re not throwing up lunch for our furry friends to eat, dogs do get something out of licking us. For one, there’s the unintentionally reinforcing feedback of squeals, pets, and writhing that a bout of fervent canine kisses generally induces in a human recipient. “We have such strong reactions to it,” says Furlong. Given that attention may be just what a tongue-trigger-happy dog is looking for, that outsized response probably encourages more and future licking, she says.

[ Related: Why wet dogs shake so much ]

Another bonus for dogs: licking relieves stress, says Furlong. Dogs will repeatedly lick surfaces (or their own paws) to self-soothe when they don’t feel well, she says, in a related behavior to animal wound licking. And at least one 2014 study found that licking, along with other types of “affiliative behaviors” raises dogs’ levels of oxytocin, a hormone associated with social bonding and positive emotions. Some online sources further claim that licking releases endorphins like dopamine in dogs’ brains–activating the classic neural reward system. 

So there you have it. Why do dogs lick? Ultimately, “we don’t know,” says Silver, because the question hasn’t been well-studied. To get a firm answer or rule out any of the above hypotheses, researchers would have to conduct empirically controlled experiments “where we see exactly when dogs lick people and in what context,” he explains. In lieu of definitive explanations, we have “informed guesses,” he adds. 

Yet the research Silver has conducted has revealed dogs to be deeply attached to their owners and aware of subtle social cues. An August 2023 study that he co-authored found that dogs were friendlier to strangers who helped their owners on a task than those who didn’t. “Dogs are really keyed into what the main humans in their lives are doing… They’re perhaps a bit more perceptive to social relationships than we previously thought,” he says. If dogs care enough to observe our human-to-human interactions and shift their behavior accordingly, then you can bet that their kisses aren’t without consideration. 

[ Related: Your dog can probably smell your stress ]

This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post Why do dogs lick humans? It could be a sign of affection. appeared first on Popular Science.

In 2016, Kansas City, Missouri became a pioneer in ‘microtransit,’ on-demand transportation services used to supplement or — in some cases — replace public transit.

In a piece for Bloomberg CityLab, David Zipper describes the city’s experiment and interviews Kansas City Area Transportation Authority CEO Frank White III, who says the original goal of introducing microtransit was to get more people to ride transit.

White admits that the public subsidy for the city’s current on-demand transit service is between $20 and $25 per passenger — roughly ten times as much as a fixed-bus route. But White asserts that “It works best in less dense areas. You could use it in rural areas where there is no fixed route service at all, or you could use it as a feeder system to nearby buses — but then the whole system has to be correlated, which can be challenging.”

For White, microtransit can also be a tool for gauging public interest in transit to pave the way for future fixed-route service and serving areas with no other options. “I think we’ll see more strategic use of microtransit, focusing on less dense areas and connecting with our fixed-route buses.”

• Kansas City
• Kansas City Area Transportation Authority
• On-Demand Transit
• Microtransit
• Public Transit
• Transit Subsidies

Mayors and other local leaders in central in Ohio are creating a regional housing coalition to address the region’s housing needs in the hopes of “maximizing resources” and ensuring residents can access affordable housing where they need it.

“Regional partners, stakeholders and leaders will further develop the coalition in the coming months and create a business plan for the new entity,” explains Ysabelle Kempe in Smart Cities Dive. “According to Redfin Realty, a homebuyer needs to make at least $90,000 annually to buy a home in the region — almost $15,000 more than the median household income of $76,000 per year, according to Columbus.” 

The coalition, which will work to implement a series of recommendations made by task forces convened in 2021 and focused on supply, affordability, coordination, and equity and advocacy, aims to leverage public-private partnerships to support housing projects to meet the region’s estimated need of 200,000 new homes in the next decade. 

• Central Ohio
• Housing Supply
• housing affordability
• Housing Crisis
• Housing Costs

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Get ready to geek out. This pocket-sized microscope will make you feel like a kid again—or it’ll be the best gift a kid in your life has ever gotten from you. It allows curious minds to zoom in 80x closer to the world, sort of like the inverse of binoculars.

During Cyber Week, you can order this handheld microscope for only $62.97 (reg. $100). This 37 percent discount ends on December 8, but we might sell out before then!

Remember high school biology? This little microscope isn’t quite like the one you used then, but the concept is similar. Except, now you can bring the magic anywhere—without the awkwardness of being a teenager.

Head outside and start exploring the great outdoors in microform. Zoom in 80 times closer on insect wings and eyes, plant leaves, flower blossoms, and rocks. You already know any kid in your life would get a kick out of exploring with you, and the 4-inch LCD screen makes viewing effortless.

Think they’d like their own as a gift? Check out now before our Cyber Week sale ends.

When your inner child—or the literal child—finds something camera-worthy, use the microscope itself to get a close-up. Take 2MP photos and record 1080p photos while getting impressive lighting with eight adjustable LED lights.

All your snapshots are saved to the included SD card, but you could also hook the microscope directly up to your PC or Mac computer to transfer them over. You already know you want to brag—we mean, share—your photos online.

Head to checkout to get your pocket microscope with a camera for $62.97 (reg. $100) during Cyber Week. The sale ends on December 8 at 11:59 p.m. and no coupon is needed to get this price.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

The post This camera microscope is 80x better than your eyes! Get it during Cyber Week appeared first on Popular Science.