The fourth to join the lunar-landing club and the first to land near the moon's south pole, India's Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft notched a historic milestone on Wednesday as it softly touched down on the lunar surface, drawing enthusiastic applause from stargazers across the world. 

Chinese experts hailed the feat as representing the growing significance of developing countries in space and called for India to abandon involving geopolitical schemes in the pursuit of scientific advancement, as the spirit of science transcends national boundaries and should be pursued in collaboration with players worldwide.

A small, solar-powered rover called Pragyan is expected to roll off the lander and spend one lunar day (about 14 Earth days) exploring its new home, with the goal of collecting scientific data about the moon's makeup, CNN reported.

"This success belongs to all of humanity and it will help moon missions by other countries in the future," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is currently in South Africa for the BRICS Summit, said in a speech on livestream. 

Chinese experts reached by the Global Times expressed their sincere congratulations on Wednesday, saying that given the two countries are both emerging economies and member states of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, there is vast room for cooperation between the two sides both in deep-space exploration and manned missions, such as data sharing, experience sharing and astronaut training. 

"The spirit of science transcends national boundaries, as it ultimately strives for the well-being and progress of all humanity. We appreciate every effort in this course, regardless of whether it's successful," Hu Shisheng, director of the Institute for South Asian Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said on Thursday. 

Landing on the moon is a challenging endeavor. Only a few days ago, Russia's Luna-25 probe crashed into the moon, ending the country's first such attempt in half a century. India's first attempt at a lunar touchdown also failed in September 2019. 

The lunar south pole has remained a largely uncharted region of immense interest to scientists worldwide, as it is believed to harbor large amounts of water ice, which, if accessible, could be mined for rocket fuel and life support for future crewed missions, according to space.com.

China is also eyeing the region as it presses ahead with its lunar exploration project. The Chang'e-7 mission is intended to land on the moon's south pole around 2026 and conduct detailed surveys to explore for traces of water, according to the program's chief designer. 

Around 2028, the basic structure of International Lunar Research Station co-built by China and Russia will be completed at the south pole region with the launch of the Chang'e-8 mission.

Comparing Chinese tech with the Indian side, Pang Zhihao, a Beijing-based senior space expert, told the Global Times on Thursday that China is far more advanced in various aspects. For one thing, China has been capable of sending orbiters and landers directly into Earth-Moon transfer orbit since the launch of Chang'e-2 in 2010, a maneuver that India has yet to deliver given the limited capacity of its launch vehicles. Therefore, China's technology has allowed moon missions to save a significant amount of time and fuel. The engine that China used is also far more advanced, as it can vary its thrust from 1,500 to 7,500 Newtons.

Furthermore, China's lunar rover is much bigger, weighing 140 kilograms compared to India's 26 kilograms, Pang noted. Additionally, India's Pragyan cannot withstand the lunar nights and has a lifespan of only one lunar day. By contrast, China's Yutu-2 rover holds the record for working the longest time on the lunar surface, as it is equipped with nuclear power, allowing for long-duration operations. 

While China has opened its arms to embrace all interested parties to join the country's space program and has received large amounts of applications from across the world, geopolitical factors have emerged to hinder such cooperation. 

In a recent exclusive interview, the Global Times learned from a project manager from India that their project, which was expected to be the first international payload to go to the China Space Station, has hit a roadblock with the key equipment produced by India waiting for export clearance from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs indefinitely.

Taiwan billionaire and Foxconn founder Terry Gou Tai-ming announced on Monday that he will run in the 2024 elections for Taiwan's regional leader, making next year's vote a complicated four-way race. Analysts said that this is likely to further divide the island's opposition camp in favor of secessionist ruling party candidate Lai Ching-te. 

According to the latest polls conducted in mid August by Taiwan media outlets and institutions, without Gou's participation, ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Lai, who is currently the deputy leader of the island, is now the front-runner with 37 to 42 percent, while Taiwan People's Party candidate Ko Wen-je ranks second with 25 to 28 percent, and Hou Yu-ih of the major opposition party Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) getting 20-22 percent. 

According to Taiwan polls that include Gou,  with Gou's participation, Lai's front-runner position is virtually unaffected while the opposition candidates are impacted significantly, as Ko gets only about 16-17 percent, KMT's Hou gets 15-16 percent, and Gou has only 12 percent. 

Analysts said this doesn't mean the DPP is popular, as most polls show that Taiwan residents who want to end the DPP rule are in the majority, as the combined support of opposition candidates is more than Lai's, but the problem is that the opposition camp is becoming divided due to the power struggle between the two opposition parties, and now the independent candidate Gou is dividing the field further. 

The three opposition candidates are yet to reach a consensus on forming an alliance to run in the elections. Even if they do reach agreement on running together, which is very unlikely as they all refuse to give in and serve as deputy candidate, Lai is very likely to win, and unfortunately, the will of the majority on the island to end the DPP rule might not be realized, Li Fei, a professor at the Taiwan Research Center at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Monday.

"If Lai gets elected, cross-Taiwan Straits relations will be in danger, so the mainland is preparing for any possible scenario, including the worst one," Li noted. "But there are still a few months to go, and it would still be too early to say who can win eventually." 

In an apparent response to Gou's announcement to run, the KMT said in a post on its Facebook account Monday, after his announcement without mentioning him, that "if we share similar values, then we can work together," but vowed that mainstream public opinion will not accept any act that "hurts comrades and favors adversaries." 

Gou has been labeled by Taiwan media as a pro-mainland figure who has deep business relations in the mainland, and in order to preserve and resume cross-Straits cooperation that significantly benefit Taiwan, he also supports peace and opposes secessionism. However, experts said that his decision driven by political ambition is in fact helping the DPP authorities.

However, many Chinese mainland netizens and pro-reunification Taiwan residents have an interesting theory: If the DPP's Lai wins next year, this could speed up the reunification process, as the mainland will find it easy to completely abandon "the illusion of peaceful reunification" and make tough decisions to solve the Taiwan question immediately. Therefore, these people welcome Gou's act to run for the election, as they believe this will consolidate Lai's advantage.

Zheng Bo-yu, manager of the Vstartup Station of Taiwan, a company serving Taiwan youth seeking to study, work and launch startups on the mainland, said, "Many friends of mine in Taiwan who support cross-Straits cooperation and exchanges made a joke about the current election: Why don't we just vote for Lai and let the DPP win, so that the mainland will have an easier time making the decision to solve the Taiwan question once and for all, so that we don't need to be worried about the uncertain cross-Straits tension and US intervention anymore."

Li said the Chinese mainland has enough measures available to deter and counter secessionists and foreign interference forces, but the mainland is still making great efforts and showing great patience to seek peaceful reunification. 

"But it's possible that, if Lai eventually wins, deeper and more reckless collusion between the DPP and the US will wipe out the possibility of peaceful reunification, and the mainland will be forced to take action," Li warned.

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.

Monitoring the innards of Yellowstone’s gurgling geysers, scientists report in two new studies that carbonation helps the geysers erupt like shaken cans of soda.

During the buildup to an eruption of Yellowstone’s Spouter Geyser, carbon dioxide accumulates in the geyser water, researchers report online March 7 in Geology. The dissolved gas lowers the water’s boiling point and triggers an eruption. This phenomenon may occur elsewhere in Yellowstone. Several of the park’s other geysers, including Old Faithful, also contain abundant CO2 and other dissolved gases, a separate research team reports in the March Geology.
The findings overturn the 150-year-old explanation that hot water alone fuels geyser eruptions, says Jacob Lowenstern, a volcanologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., who was not involved in either study. “People always assumed that water was the end of the story,” he says. “If CO2 was completely absent, many of these geysers would still erupt. But they erupt more regularly and frequently because of the dissolved CO2 gas.”

Geysers can spew thousands of liters of water tens of meters into the air. For geysers in Yellowstone National Park in the western United States, the heat from underground magma fuels these spritzers (SN: 5/16/15, p. 16). Measurements in the 1970s, however, revealed that many Yellowstone geysers, including Old Faithful, aren’t hot enough to boil pure water.

Uncovering what’s going on inside Yellowstone’s geysers is challenging. The geyser water is scorching hot and often acidic. Hydrogeologists Bethany Ladd and Cathryn Ryan of the University of Calgary in Canada, authors of the March 7 study, lost equipment to these harsh conditions while attempting to monitor several of Yellowstone’s geysers. At the nonacidic Spouter Geyser, the researchers had better luck. Using special glass jars, the researchers sampled the geyser’s water every 10 to 20 minutes from a side vent that branches off the geyser’s main channel. The measurements allowed the researchers to track the amount of dissolved CO2 in the geyser over the course of several eruptions.
The abundance of CO2 in the geyser starts low, the researchers found. During the one- to two-hour interval between eruptions, however, CO2 levels steadily increase as gases from Yellowstone’s magma enter the geyser water through permeable rocks. As CO2 increases, the gas lowers the water’s boiling point. Eventually the boiling point drops below the water’s actual temperature and bubbles of steam and CO2 form. As these bubbles climb the geyser column toward the surface, they expand, displacing water and lowering the pressure inside the geyser. That pressure drop lowers the boiling point even further, causing a runaway reaction that triggers a full-blown eruption similar to that of a shaken soda can. These eruptions can last for hours. When the eruption finally fizzles, CO2 levels have dropped to about half their peak value just before eruption and the cycle begins anew.

“People typically think of geysers as hot-water features that only emit water and steam,” Ladd says. “But there are other things in the water such as CO2 that have huge implications for geyser eruptions.”

In the other study, Shaul Hurwitz, a hydrogeologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, and colleagues discovered CO2 and other dissolved gases such as nitrogen in many of Yellowstone’s other geysers. Understanding the role gas plays in steam eruptions is also important, Hurwitz says, because geysers aren’t the only way water erupts. The rapid boiling of an enclosed underground water reservoir can generate an explosive blast. In September 2014, a steam eruption rocked Japan’s Mount Ontake volcano without warning and killed 57 people. If CO2 helps fuel steam eruptions, then monitoring gas levels in groundwater could provide early warning, Hurwitz says.

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.

Multiple sclerosis clue significant — A possible link between environment and multiple sclerosis (MS) could be a valuable tool in searching for the cause and cure of the disease…. Cases of MS seem to appear in clusters, and there is apparently some as yet unknown environmental factor that is distributed in the same way, reported Dr. John F. Kurtzke.… The highest frequency of MS is found in northern United States, southern Canada and northern Europe, where there are 30 to 60 cases per 100,000 population. — Science News, April 16, 1966

Update
Researchers still aren’t sure what causes MS, a debilitating disease in which the body’s immune system attacks the insulation around nerve cell fibers. But research suggests that people who grow up farther from the equator, with reduced sun exposure, may have increased disease risk. The human body produces vitamin D in response to sunlight, and studies show that lower levels of vitamin D lead to higher MS risk (SN Online: 9/10/15). But other factors, including genetics and infections, may also play a role in disease development. Today, an estimated 90 MS cases occur for every 100,000 people in the United States.

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.”