At 1.2-million-years-old, a newly uncovered Antarctic ice core represents the oldest known ice on the planet. The 1.7 mile-long ice core was recovered from over 9,000 feet (2,800 meters) deep underground, where the Antarctic ice sheet meets bedrock. The drilling was completed earlier this month at a location called Little Dome C near the Concordia Research Station in southeastern Antarctica. An international team of scientists representing 10 countries from the European Union-funded Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice project braved temperatures of -31 degrees Fahrenheit to recover this piece of Earth’s natural history. 

“From preliminary analyses recorded at Little Dome C, we have a strong indication that the uppermost 2,480 meters [8,136 feet] contain a climate record that goes back to 1.2 million years in a high-resolution record where up to 13,000 years are compressed into one meter of ice,” Julien Westhoff, a chief scientist in the field and postdoctoral student at Copenhagen University, said in a statement. 

This newly extracted ice preserved a record of our planet’s climate history, continuous information on atmospheric temperatures, and some clear samples of old air with greenhouse gases. 

“This is the longest continuous record of our past climate from an ice core, and it can reveal the

interlink between the carbon cycle and temperature of our planet,” Carlo Barbante, professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, senior associate member of the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy, and coordinator of Beyond EPICA, said in a statement. 

[ Related: Over 1,700 frozen viruses found in a Tibetan glacier. ]

The team used radio echo sounding technologies and advances in ice flow modeling to pinpoint exactly where to drill. The lowest 688 feet of the ice core above the bedrock is made of older ice that is heavily deformed. The team believes that it is possibly mixed or refrozen and are of unknown origin. Further analysis could help test some previous theories about the behavior of refrozen ice under the Antarctic ice sheet and reveal more about East Antarctica’s glacial history. 

Importantly, peering this deep into the ice could help answer one of our planet’s major climate mysteries–what happened when glacial cycles were disrupted roughly 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago. Some scientists believe that our ancestors came close to extinction during these massive climate shifts. 

Ice cores and other geological samples are a crucial piece of how scientists understand our planet’s history and how the climate is changing. They can trap bubbles of air and particles that show temperature variation and what greenhouse gases were present and even store viruses. This helps scientists chart out how the climate may have changed over time.  

[ Related: See 24,000 years of climate history at a glance. ]

Data from other ice cores already helped scientists link the current rise in temperatures to the greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

This new core will be brought back to Europe aboard an ice breaker that must keep it at -58 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists will then analyze the ice samples, seeing if they can even find records beyond 1.2 million years. Dating the underlying rocks will hopefully give scientists a good idea of the last time that this part of Antarctica was ice free.

The post 1.2-million-year-old ice pulled up from under Antarctica appeared first on Popular Science.

• With a second-generation Ultra Wideband chip, the AirTag 2 is expected to have up to 3× longer range compared to the current AirTag. The chip debuted in the iPhone 15 and the Apple Watch Ultra 2. On the iPhone 15 and iPhone 16 models, there is a Precision Finding for People feature that can help you to find your friends in crowded places, and it offers a range of up to 200 feet/60 meters.


• The new AirTag's built-in speaker is expected to be more difficult to remove, as a stalking-related safety measure.


• The new AirTag is rumored to have improved integration with the Apple Vision Pro, but there are no specific details about this.


• No major design changes or rechargeable battery are expected.

• More aluminum: iPhone 17 Pro models are rumored to have an aluminum frame, whereas the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro models have a titanium frame, and the iPhone X through iPhone 14 Pro have a stainless steel frame. The back of the devices will supposedly have a new "part-aluminum, part-glass" design. The frame could end up using a combination of both aluminimum and titanium.


• Rectangular camera bump: On a related note, the devices are expected to have a "larger rectangular camera bump" made of aluminum. There are conflicting rumors about the camera lenses sticking with a triangular arrangement or being repositioned horizontally or vertically.


• A19 Pro chip: iPhone 17 Pro models are expected to use Apple's next-generation A19 Pro chip, which will reportedly be manufactured with TSMC's newer third-generation 3nm process. Like usual, expect modest year-over-year performance gains and power efficiency improvements compared to the current iPhones.


• Apple-designed Wi-Fi 7 chip: At least one iPhone 17 model is rumored to get a Wi-Fi 7 chip designed by Apple rather than Broadcom. However, another report said the chip will support Wi-Fi 6E like iPhone 16 models.


• 24-megapixel front camera: All four iPhone 17 models are said to feature an upgraded 24-megapixel front-facing camera, whereas all iPhone 16 models are equipped with a 12-megapixel front-facing camera.


• 48-megapixel rear Telephoto camera: An upgraded 48-megapixel Telephoto camera is rumored for the iPhone 17 Pro models, up from the 12-megapixel Telephoto camera on iPhone 16 Pro models.


• 12GB of RAM: An increased 12GB of RAM was initially rumored exclusively for the iPhone 17 Pro Max, but later the iPhone 17 Pro as well. This upgrade should help to improve the performance of Apple Intelligence and multitasking. All four iPhone 16 models have 8GB of RAM.


• A smaller Dynamic Island for iPhone 17 Pro Max: A change rumored exclusively for the iPhone 17 Pro Max is a "much narrowed Dynamic Island," as a result of Apple adopting a "metalens" for the Face ID system.

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The post Protect your whole crew online for just $35 appeared first on Popular Science.

Drone photographs taken of a 3,000-year-old “mega fortress” nestled deep in the Caucasus Mountains reveal the settlement is actually 40 times larger than archaeologists once thought. New aerial images of the Dmanisis Gora settlement, located in present-day Georgia, show a large land area well guarded by steep gorges and plastered with various stone structures and field systems. Though the structure’s inner fortress has been well-documented for several years, new mapping made possible thanks to a simple hobbyist drone helped redraw the Bronze Age monument’s boundaries. Researchers shared their findings this week in the journal Antiquity. 

The Dmanisis Gora is one of several documented fortresses that popped between the Middle East and the Eurasian Steppe sometime between 1,500 and 500 BCE. Until now, most of the archaeological research on this particular fortress focused on its more well preserved inner areas. The fortress is made up of two distinct areas: a core inner fortress that researchers say show signs of year-round residential use and a more sprawling outer area that may have been used more occasionally by roaming pastoral groups. When researchers from Cranfield University began excavating that area in 2018, they quickly saw evidence of outer walls and other structures that suggested the actual border of the fortress could be much larger. But they couldn’t accurately tell just how much larger it was without an aerial view.  

“That was what sparked the idea of using a drone to assess the site from the air,” Cranfield Forensic Institute Senior Lecturer in Architectural Science Erb-Satullo said in a statement.

Erb-Satullo and his colleague acquired a DJI Phantom 4 RTK drone, equipped it with a high-quality camera, and flew it over the area. The drone snapped roughly 11,000 images which were combined together and run through software to create a digital map of the areas filled with elevation models and topographical detail. The new map showed a much larger outer that circled around the inner fortress. Aerial views from the drone revealed a roughly 1-kilometer-long fortification wall snaking around the fortress that wasn’t immediately visible to the naked eye. Previously unobserved graves, field systems, and other structures were also illuminated thanks to the drone. 

“The use of drones has allowed us to understand the significance of the site and document it in a way that simply wouldn’t be possible on the ground,” Erb-Satullo added. 

Researchers then compared their new drone-based map to other aerial photographs of the area captured by a Cold War-era spy plane nearly 50 years ago. Those images had been classified until 2013. Looking at those two images side by side helped the team better understand how the landscape has changed and to what extent parts of it might have eroded as a byproduct of modern agricultural practices. 

[Related: Archaeologists find the 4,000-year-old tomb of an overachieving Egyptian magician]

Drones have become incredibly useful tools in archeologists’ arsenal thanks to their ability to quickly obtain aerial views of areas that might otherwise be obstructed. Falling prices in consumer hobbyist drones, many originating from China, have made the technology far more accessible to a wider swath of researchers. They’ve already yielded spectacular findings. In 2015, a team of researchers from Colorado State University used a drone equipped with LiDAR to help map out a pair of hidden medieval cities in the mountainous area of Uzbekistan. Another drone LiDAR was used several years later to reveal the remains of an ancient island settlement hidden off of the Florida Gulf coast possibly dating back to 1200 CE. Archaeologists similarly used a drone to uncover the eroded remains of a large pre-Columbian earthworks buried beneath a field in southeastern Kansas.

The post Drone reveals ancient fortress is 40x larger than archaeologists once thought appeared first on Popular Science.

In this wide-ranging interview with Shelterforce's Editor-in-Chief Miriam Axel-Lute, Akira Drake Rodriguez, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design, discusses how school closures affect neighborhood stability and how communities are organizing to change school facilities planning processes.

Drawing from her research in Philadelphia, Rodriguez explores how school closures can lead to different outcomes in different neighborhoods — from gentrification to population decline. She examines alternatives to closing underutilized schools, such as co-location with community services, and describes how Philadelphia communities are working to make school facilities planning more participatory and equitable.

The interview highlights the deep connections between educational justice and housing justice, offering insights for planners and community developers about supporting local schools and preserving vital public infrastructure. Rodriguez argues for viewing schools as critical community anchors that provide more than just educational services.

Read the full interview at the source article in Shelterforce.

• Education
• Community Planning
• Schools

The lush forests of Switzerland are not the first place that bioluminescent organisms come to mind. However, a forest in a Zurich neighborhood is home to a bioluminescent mushroom that glows green. The mushroom’s newly discovered bioluminescence is described in a study recently published in the journal Mycoscience.

Bioluminescence is a chemical process where living organisms generate light. Jellyfish, fireflies, fungi, and more are all known to emit their very own glow. The Greek philosopher Aristotle observed bioluminescent fungi over 2,000 years ago, and he called them a “cold fire” emanating from decaying wood. 

Although the biological mechanism behind this glow is now fairly well understood, its ecological function remains elusive. Some glowing mushrooms are believed to attract insects to disperse spores, but bioluminescence occurring in parts of the fungi that are underground does not fit this hypothesis.

“It seems that bioluminescence has been maintained for a long time, so we assume it has some function,” Renate Heinzelmann, a study co-author mycologist at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, said in a statement. “But it’s still a mystery.”

[ Related: Surprise! These sea cucumbers glow. ]

The mushroom was initially spotted by artists and study co-authors Heidy Baggenstos and Andreas Rudolf. The pair have been working with bioluminescent organisms for over a decade.

“We want to show that these bioluminescent mushrooms are present in Swiss forests and that we do not have to travel far to find them,” Baggenstos said in a statement.

Baggenstos and Rudolf were walking through a forest in Zurich’s Albisrieden neighborhood when they spotted some green light through their camera. Similar to the northern lights, fungus’ natural light is sometimes so weak that it can’t be seen with the naked eye and requires a camera to be visible.

“Nowadays we always have our mobile phones or a flashlight, but to see bioluminescence in the forest, it has to be pitch black,” said Rudolf.

They collected some samples of the glowing specimen, originally thinking it was a known bioluminescent species called Mycena haematopus. In their well-lit studio, the artists realized that it was another species called the saffron drop bonnet mushroom (Mycena crocata). While this mushroom is known for its  saffron-coloured milk, it had not previously been described as bioluminescent.

[ Related: A simple experiment revealed the complex ‘thoughts’ of fungi. ]

Baggenstos and Rudolf Heinzelmann to further characterize the discovery. The artists first used long exposure photographs and a luminometer–a device that amplifies weaker light more than a camera does–to measure how much light is emitted by different parts of the mushroom.  

“Most of the experiments were conducted by the artists,” said Heinzelmann. “They collected the samples, took the photographs, and made the light measurements.”

In fungi, the key step towards bioluminescence occurs when the enzyme luciferase converts light-emitting compound called luciferin into an unstable product. This conversion then releases energy in the form of light when it decays. Unlike with fluorescence, this process does not need an external source of light. 

The light measurements showed that the recognizable fruiting body of M. crocata that stands apart from the stipe base, is non-luminous. Instead, the fungi’s mycelium–the underground network of filaments similar to plant roots that absorb nutrients–is the most bioluminescent. As a result, the decaying wood M. crocata grows on can also glow green when it is split open. This green glow can last up to four hours when the wood typically dries. When Baggenstos and Rudolf grew pure mycelia cultures, they remained bioluminescent for up to 164 days in optimal conditions.

Heinzelmann’s Genetic experiments confirmed the species identity and the presence of bioluminescence-related genes in all of the fungi of the Mycena genus that glow.

“There will constantly be more bioluminescent species discovered,” Heinzelmann predicts, “Bioluminescence is under-researched, and the more people look, the more they will find.”

The post Artists find a green, glowing mushroom in a Swiss forest appeared first on Popular Science.