A gang of grave robbers in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from 10 months to 20 months after three people died of carbon monoxide poisoning, a local court ruled on August 11.

On the eve of the Dragon Boat Festival in 2022, Chen and five others gathered together and brought tools such as shovels and pickaxes to illegally excavate ancient tombs on a mountainside in Aohan Banner in Chifeng in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. They stopped two days later due to rain.

Chen and others were unwilling to give up. Several days later, they gathered again adding several members to their group. However, they harbored ulterior motives and were unwilling to pay for the tools needed, which led to an internal conflict, resulting in the disbandment, according to an official from the People's Court of Aohan Banner.

More than a month later, Chen still couldn't accept what had happened and organized a group of eight people to dig up the cave at night. They bought gasoline pumping equipment to drain the accumulated water from the cave to keep digging.

However, the gasoline pumping equipment generated a large amount of carbon monoxide gas inside the cave, resulting in the poisoning and death of three people. According to the local court official, the incident of robbing grave was then exposed, and the other five people voluntarily turned themselves over to the police.

According to the local court, the defendants have violated the national cultural relics management system by secretly excavating ancient tombs with historical and scientific value. Their actions constituted the crime of grave robbery and are considered joint offenders.

The six defendants were sentenced to imprisonment ranging from 10 months to 20 months, with fines also being imposed on each member of the group.

The Aohan Banner has a rich historical and cultural heritage. According to the local court, over 4,000 ancient cultural sites and tombs from different periods have been discovered within the Aohan Banner, making it the leader in China. In recent years, the local court has been handling criminal acts related to the protection of cultural relics and cultural heritage in accordance with the law, as stated by local court officials.

When Columbus discovered America, European culture hadn’t yet grasped the concept of discovery. Various languages had verbs that could be translated as discover, but only in the sense of discovering things like a worm under a rock. Scholars operated within a worldview that all knowledge had been articulated by the ancients, such as Ptolemy, the astronomer who compiled the mathematical details of the Earth-centered universe. As it happened, Ptolemy was also the greatest of ancient geographers. So when Columbus showed that Ptolemy’s grasp on geography was flawed, it opened the way for Copernicus to challenge Ptolemy on his picture of the cosmos as well. Deep thinkers who were paying attention then realized that nature possessed secrets for humankind to “discover.”
“The existence of the idea of discovery is a necessary precondition for science,” writes historian David Wootton. “The discovery of America in 1492 created a new enterprise that intellectuals could engage in: the discovery of new knowledge.”

Appreciating the concept of discovery was not enough to instigate the invention of science. The arrival of the printing press in the mid-15th century was also especially essential. It standardized and magnified the ability of scholars to disseminate knowledge, enabling the growth of communities, cooperation and competition. Late medieval artists’ development of geometrical principles underlying perspective in paintings also provided important mathematical insights. Other key concepts (like discovery) required labeling and clarifying, among them the idea of “evidence.”

And modern science’s birth required a trigger, a good candidate being the supernova observed by Tycho Brahe in 1572. Suddenly, the heavens became changeable, contradicting the Aristotelian dogma of eternal changeless perfection in the sky. Tycho’s exploding star did not cause the scientific revolution, Wootton avers, but it did announce the revolution’s beginning.

In The Invention of Science, Wootton incorporates these insights into an idiosyncratic but deeply thoughtful account of the rise of science, disagreeing frequently with mainstream science historians and philosophers. He especially scorns the relativists who contend that different scientific views are all mere social constructions such that no one is better than any other. Wootton agrees that approaches to science may be socially influenced in their construction, but nevertheless the real world constrains the success of any given approach.

Wootton’s book offers a fresh approach to the history of science with details not usually encountered in the standard accounts. It might not be the last or even best word in understanding modern science’s origins or practice, but it certainly has identified aspects that, if ignored, would leave an inadequate picture, lacking important perspective.

As the weather warms, watch for falling rocks. While monitoring a cracked cliff in Yosemite National Park, researchers watched the fissure widen as temperatures rose. The risk of rockfalls could increase as climate change cranks the thermostat, one scientist predicts.

For three and a half years, geologists Brian Collins of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., and Greg Stock of the National Park Service in Yosemite monitored a 19-meter-long crack in one of the park’s cliffs. The crack had a maximum width of about 12 centimeters. A measuring device anchored to both sides of the crack recorded changes in its size. The gap grew and shrank by as much as a centimeter daily as temperature changes caused the rock to expand and contract, the researchers report online March 28 in Nature Geoscience. Some effects lingered, however: The gap widened over the course of several summers and the constant size fluctuations further weakened the rock, the researchers say.

Around 25,000 tons of rocks and debris slipped down Yosemite’s slopes in 2015 — enough to fill more than three Olympic-sized swimming pools. About 15 percent of rockfalls from Yosemite’s granite cliffs occur during summer and at the hottest times of day. The rockfall risk could grow along with the cracks as the climate warms, geoscientist Valentin Gischig of ETH Zurich in Switzerland proposes in a perspective piece on the new finding.

The pale arch of light from the plane of our galaxy can be a humbling sight on a clear, dark night. But it’s just a sliver of all the treasures lurking in the Milky Way. Dense clouds of interstellar dust block visible light from remote regions of the galaxy but allow longer wavelengths to pass through. In February, astronomers completed a new map of our galaxy as seen in submillimeter light, which is shorter than radio waves but longer than infrared waves.

Submillimeter light can penetrate dust clouds, revealing details at the center of the galaxy and in stellar nurseries not visible at other wavelengths. The map was produced by ATLASGAL, a project using the APEX telescope in northern Chile to map part of the Milky Way. The project charted one-third of the band of galactic light that encircles our solar system; the images below show a narrow slice toward the constellation Sagittarius.
Combined with images from the Spitzer and Planck satellites, the ATLASGAL map (top row) creates a detailed atlas of some of the cold structures in our galaxy. Dust clouds in places like the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas (circled, left), both a few thousand light-years away, glow faintly, as do filaments of detritus in the center of the galaxy (circled, right), 28,000 light-years from Earth. At near-infrared wave-lengths (center row), these regions nearly vanish behind obscuring curtains of dust. The galactic center remains hidden in visible light (bottom row) as well, though hot stars in Trifid and Lagoon radiate pools of hydrogen gas, making them glow.

A sugar that freshens air in rooms may also clean cholesterol out of hardened arteries.

The sugar, cyclodextrin, removed cholesterol that had built up in the arteries of mice fed a high-fat diet, researchers report April 6 in Science Translational Medicine. The sugar enhances a natural cholesterol-removal process and persuades immune cells to soothe inflammation instead of provoking it, say immunologist Eicke Latz and colleagues.

Cyclodextrin, more formally known as 2-hydroxypropyl-beta-cyclodextrin, is the active ingredient in the air freshener Febreze. It is also used in a wide variety of drugs; it helps make hormones, antifungal chemicals, steroids and other compounds soluble. If the new results hold up in human studies, the sugar may also one day be used to liquefy cholesterol that clogs arteries.
Other researchers say the approach is promising, but must be tested in clinical trials. The sweet molecule is generally considered safe, but injecting it may raise the risk of liver damage or hearing loss, says Elena Aikawa, a vascular biologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Mice taking cyclodextrin in the study did not exhibit side effects from the treatment, but previous work has indicated that the sugar may damage hearing in mice and cats. The molecule shunts cholesterol through the liver, so large cholesterol influxes might cause fat to build up in the liver, impairing its function. “Overall, cyclodextrin seems worth exploring as a therapeutic, although caution should be taken,” Aikawa says.

Cyclodextrin works by flipping a master switch, a gene called LXR, Latz and colleagues found. LXR’s protein turns on other genes involved in processing cholesterol and ushering it out of the body. The sugar also activated the LXR genes in human arteries examined in the lab and turned on inflammation-calming processes, Latz’s team discovered.

Latz, of the University Hospital Bonn in Germany, credits Nevada businesswoman Chris Hempel with the idea to use cyclodextrin to treat atherosclerosis. In people with the condition, cholesterol, calcium, immune cells and other substances form plaques inside arteries, hardening them. Plaques block blood flow and can break away and cause heart attacks and strokes (SN: 2/20/16, p. 32).

Hempel has twin daughters with a rare genetic disease known as Niemann-Pick Type C, in which cholesterol crystals clog organs, especially the brain. In 2009, the girls got special permission from the Food and Drug Administration for their doctor to give them infusions of cyclodextrin to dissolve the cholesterol crystals.
Hempel later read a paper by Latz and colleagues in which the researchers described how cholesterol crystals irritate macrophages and provoke them to cause inflammation and heart disease. Macrophages normally patrol the body and help kill invading bacteria, viruses and other pathogens. The immune cells also gobble up cholesterol and deliver it to the liver where it can be made into bile and escorted out of the body in feces.

Hempel e-mailed Latz and suggested that cyclodextrin might melt the cholesterol crystals in arteries. Latz and his colleagues tested the idea by feeding mice genetically prone to atherosclerosis a high-fat diet and giving the animals regular injections of cyclodextrin under the skin. The sugar kept cholesterol plaques from building up in the rodents’ arteries. The scientists also found that cyclodextrin reduced already established plaques in mice by about 45 percent, even though the animals were still eating a high-fat diet.

Cyclodextrin could be used in combination with other drugs, such as statins, says Eran Elinav, an immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Statins and other drugs inhibit cholesterol production. “Potentially, combining cholesterol lowering with dissolution of preformed cholesterol in plaques could be additive,” Elinav says, “but this option needs to be explored in clinical trials.”

Although cyclodextrin is already approved by the FDA for use in people, it may be years before it’s known whether injecting the sugar will soften people’s hardened arteries. The sugar is not patentable, so no pharmaceutical companies have come forward to sponsor expensive clinical trials needed to get approval for this specific use, Latz says.

In the brain, language pops up everywhere.

All across the wrinkly expanse of the brain’s outer layer, a constellation of different regions handle the meaning of language, scientists report online April 27 in Nature.

One region that responds to “family,” “home” and “mother,” for example, rests in a tiny chunk of tissue on the right side of the brain, above and behind the ear. That region and others were revealed by an intricate new map that charts the location of hundreds of areas that respond to words with related meanings.
Such a detailed map hints that humans comprehend language in a way that’s much more complicated — and involves many more brain areas — than scientists previously thought, says Stanford University neuroscientist Russell Poldrack, who was not involved in the work.

In fact, he says, “these data suggest we need to rethink how the brain organizes meaning.”

Scientists knew that different concepts roused action in different parts of the brain, says study coauthor Jack Gallant, a computational neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley. But people generally thought that big hunks of the brain each dealt with different concepts separately: one region for concepts related to vision, for example, another for concepts related to emotion. And conventional wisdom said the left hemisphere was most important.

Previous studies, though, tested just single words or sentences, and made only rough estimates of where meaning showed up in the brain, Gallant says. That’s like looking at the world’s countries in Google maps, instead of zooming in to the street view.

So he and colleagues mapped the activity of some 60,000 to 80,000 pea-sized regions across the brain’s outer layer, or cerebral cortex, as people lay in a functional MRI machine and listened to stories from The Moth Radio Hour. (The program features people telling personal, narrative tales to a live audience.)
“People actually love this experiment,” Gallant says.

It stands out from others because the authors use “real life, complicated stories,” says Princeton University neuroscientist Uri Hasson. “That’s really meaningful to see how the brain operates.”

Gallant’s team used a computer program to decipher the meaning of every 1- to 2-second snippet of the stories and then cataloged where 985 concepts showed up in the brain. Meanings conveyed by different words didn’t just engage the left hemisphere, the team found, but instead switched on groups of nerve cells spread broadly across the brain’s surface. After mapping where meaning, or semantic content, was represented in the brain, the researchers figured out where individual words might show up. Often, the same word appeared in different locations. For instance, the word “top” turned up in a spot with clothing words, as well as in an area related to numbers and measurements.

The brain maps of the seven participants in the study looked remarkably similar, Gallant says. That could be due to common life experiences: All seven were raised and educated in Western societies. With so few people, the researchers can’t pick out any gender differences, he says, but ideally he’d like to repeat the experiment with 50 or 100 people.

For now, Gallant hopes the map can serve as a resource for other researchers. One day, the work could potentially help those with ALS or locked-in syndrome communicate ­— by decoding the words in a person’s thoughts. But that’s just one piece of the puzzle, Gallant says. Researchers would also need to devise a method for measuring brain activity that’s portable, unlike MRI machines.

Surgery has some surprisingly ritual roots.

Between around 6,000 and 4,000 years ago, skilled surgeons in southwestern Russia cut holes the size of silver dollars, or larger, out of the backs of people’s skulls. But the risky procedure wasn’t performed for medical reasons: These skull surgeries fulfilled purely ritual needs, a new study suggests. And those on the cutting end of the procedure usually lived.

Skulls of 13 people previously excavated at seven ancient sites in this region contain surgical holes in the same spot, in the middle of the back of the head, say archaeologist Julia Gresky of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin and her colleagues. That’s a particularly dangerous location for this kind of skull surgery, also known as trepanation, the scientists report online April 21 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. It’s not an area of the skull typically targeted in ancient trepanations, which go back roughly 11,000 years in West Asia.
“There may have been an original medical purpose for these trepanations, which over time changed to a symbolic treatment,” Gresky says.

Archaeologist Maria Mednikova of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow agrees that skulls in Gresky’s new study probably represent cases of ritual trepanation. She previously examined some of the same skulls. Trepanation may have been used in some ancient cultures as part of a rite of passage for people taking on new social roles, Mednikova speculates.

Carving a center hole in the back of peoples’ heads was a potentially fatal procedure. Surgeons would have needed to know precisely how deep to scrape or grind bone to avoid penetrating a blood-drainage cavity for the brain. They also had to know how to stop potentially fatal bleeding of veins nicked during surgery. The procedure must have been performed as fast as possible to minimize bleeding, the researchers suspect.

Yet 11 of 13 skull openings show signs of healing and bone regrowth, indicating that these individuals survived the operation and often lived for years after. The researchers identify six males and six females in the skull sample. One specimen’s sex couldn’t be determined from skull features.

Most individuals died between ages 20 and 40. One female with a layer of bone that had regrown from the inside border of a trepanation hole died between ages 14 and 16, suggesting her skull surgery had occurred as young as age 10, the researchers estimate.

CT scans, X-rays and analyses of bone surfaces produced no evidence of injuries or brain tumors that could have motivated surgery. Ancient skull surgery intended as a medical treatment often involved holes on the side of the head, near fractures from some type of blow to the head (SN Online: 4/25/08). It’s impossible to determine from bones whether trepanations were aimed at treating chronic headaches, epilepsy, psychological problems or difficulties attributed to evil spirits.

Other evidence, in addition to the risky and unusual location of trepanation holes, points to ritual skull surgeries in southern Russia, Gresky says. Many of these individuals were interred according to special customs, suggesting they ranked high in their societies. For instance, the skulls of seven people buried in a pit at one site had been grouped together near bundled fragments of limb bones in a special display. Incisions on the limb bones indicate that bodies had been dismembered after death before being ritually buried. Of the seven skulls, five display surgical openings at the back of the head. Another contains scrapes from a partial trepanation. Partial trepanations were probably intentional rather than unfinished, with their own cultural significance, Mednikova says.

Trepanation holes on the sides of another six skulls found at the same southern Russian sites were probably made to treat medical conditions, Gresky says. Surgical openings on several of these skulls are located near bone fractures.

Rituals and meanings attached to ancient trepanations in southern Russia will remain mysterious, Mednikova predicts. “We don’t know the myths and religions of tribes that lived there 6,000 years ago.”

Physicists of all stripes seem to have one thing in common: They love smashing things together. This time-honored tradition has now been expanded from familiar particles like electrons, protons, and atomic nuclei to quasiparticles, which act like particles, but aren’t.

Quasiparticles are formed from groups of particles in a solid material that collectively behave like a unified particle (SN: 10/18/14, p. 22). The first quasiparticle collider, described May 11 in Nature, allows scientists to probe the faux-particles’ behavior. It’s a tool that could potentially lead researchers to improved materials for solar cells and electronics applications.
“Colliding particles is really something that has taught us so much,” says physicist Peter Hommelhoff of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, who was not involved with the research. Colliding quasiparticles “is really interesting and it’s really new and pretty fantastic.”

It’s a challenge to control these fleeting faux-particles. “They are very short-lived and you cannot take them out of their natural habitat,” says physicist Rupert Huber of University of Regensburg in Germany, a coauthor of the study. But quasiparticles are a useful way for physicists to understand how large numbers of particles interact in a solid.

One quasiparticle, known as a hole, results from a missing electron that produces a void in a sea of electrons. The hole moves around the material, behaving like a positively charged particle. Its apparent movement is the result of many jostling electrons.

The new quasiparticle collider works by slamming holes into electrons. Using a short pulse of light, the researchers created pairs of electrons and holes in a material called tungsten diselenide. Then, using an infrared pulse of light to produce an oscillating electric field, the researchers ripped the electrons and holes apart and slammed them back together again at speeds of thousands of kilometers per second — all within about 10 millionths of a billionth of a second.

The smashup left its imprint in light emitted in the aftermath, which researchers analyzed to study the properties of the collision. For example, when holes get together with electrons, they can bind into an atomlike state known as an exciton. The researchers used their collider to estimate the excitons’ binding energy — a measure of the effort required to separate the pair.
The collider could be useful for understanding how quasiparticles behave in materials — how they move, interact and collide. Such quasiparticle properties are particularly pertinent for materials used in solar cells, Huber says. When sunlight is absorbed in solar cells, it produces pairs of electrons and holes that must be separated and harvested to produce electricity.

The researchers also hope to study quasiparticles in other materials, like graphene, a sheet of carbon one atom thick (SN: 08/13/11, p. 26). Scientists hope to use graphene to create superthin, flexible electronics, among other applications. Graphene has a wealth of unusual properties, not least of which is that its electrons can be thought of as quasiparticles; unlike typical electrons, they behave like they are massless.

Obliterating bacteria in the gut may hurt the brain, too.

In mice, a long course of antibiotics that wiped out gut bacteria slowed the birth of new brain cells and impaired memory, scientists write May 19 in Cell Reports. The results reinforce evidence for a powerful connection between bacteria in the gut and the brain (SN: 4/2/16, p. 23).

After seven weeks of drinking water spiked with a cocktail of antibiotics, mice had fewer newborn nerve cells in a part of the hippocampus, a brain structure important for memory. The mice’s ability to remember previously seen objects also suffered.
Further experiments revealed one way bacteria can influence brain cell growth and memory. Injections of immune cells called Ly6Chi monocytes boosted the number of new nerve cells. Themonocytes appear to carry messages from gut to brain, Susanne Wolf of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin and colleagues found.

Exercise and probiotic treatment with eight types of live bacteria also increased the number of newborn nerve cells and improved memory in mice treated with antibiotics. The results help clarify the toll of prolonged antibiotic treatment, and hint at ways to fight back, the authors write.

When molecular biologist Kate Rubins blasts off from Kazakhstan on June 24, strapped into the Soyuz spacecraft bound for the International Space Station, the trip will cap off seven years of preparing — and 30 years of hoping.

As a child, Rubins plastered her Napa, Calif., bedroom with pictures of the space shuttle, proudly announcing her intention to be an astronaut. A week at Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala., in seventh grade cemented her vision. But by high school, she concluded that astronaut wasn’t “a realistic job,” she says.
Flash forward to 2009: Rubins is running a lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., focusing on virus-host interactions and viral genomics. A friend points out a NASA ad seeking astronaut candidates, and Rubins’ long-dormant obsession awakens. Since then, she has learned how to fly a T-38 jet, speak Russian to communicate with her cosmo-naut crewmates, conduct a spacewalk, operate the robotic arm on the ISS and even fix the habitable satellite’s toilet.

Joining NASA meant leaving her 14-person lab behind. But Rubins gained the rare opportunity to collaborate with dozens of scientists in fields as diverse as cell biology and astrophysics. On the space station, she’ll be “their hands, eyes and ears,” conducting about 100 experiments over five months.

She will, for instance, probe how heart cells behave when gravity doesn’t get in the way. And she’ll test a hand-held DNA sequencer, which reads out the genetic information stored in DNA and will be important to future missions looking for signatures of life on Mars.

At times, Rubins will be both experimenter and subject. In one study, she will observe bone cells in a lab dish, comparing their behavior with what happens in a simulated gravity-free environment on the ground. Because astronauts in space are vulnerable to rapid bone loss, CT scanning before and after the mission will also document changes in Rubins’ own hip bone.

Rubins is particularly eager to examine how liquid behaves in microgravity on a molecular scale. In 2013, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield created an Internet sensation when he demonstrated that wringing out a wet washcloth in space caused water to form a bubble that enveloped the cloth and his hands. “It’s incredibly bizarre,” Rubins says. Understanding how fluids move in test tubes in space will help NASA plan for Mars exploration, among other applications.
Before any of the research can begin, Rubins has to get off the ground. As treacherous as accelerating to 17,500 miles per hour may sound, she’s not worried.

“An important part of the training experience is making all the information and skills routine,” she says. She predicts that sitting down in the Soyuz spacecraft, pulling out her procedures and getting ready to launch will feel a lot like going into the lab and picking up a pipette — “a normal day at the office.”

Until the engines turn on, anyway. “I think it’s going to feel different when there’s a rocket underneath.”