July 08, 2019
A murder mystery from the Stone Age has finally been solved thanks to science. A team of researchers put their heads together to investigate who or what was responsible for a Upper Paleolithic man's head injury.
Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.
*-- Scientists solve Stone Age murder mystery --*
The mystery of an ancient fractured skull has been settled. An international team of researchers in Europe ruled foul play was to blame for the Upper Paleolithic man's head injury.
The 33,000-year-old remains of the Stone Age man were found in a Transylvanian cave during World War II. All that was left of him was a skull. Miners turned over the skull to scientists, but their initial documentation failed to mention fracturing.
"Despite good quality photographs of the rest of the cranium, [scientists] only published blurry photos of the side with large fractures," Elena Kranioti, researcher at the University of Crete, told UPI.
"Some scientists identified the trauma as perimortem back in 1979, while others in more recent publications disregarded [the fractures] completely, probably because it was not described in the original report or because they focused on evolutionary questions."
Kranioti and her colleagues decided to re-examine the evidence. Researchers produced a dozen skull-like spheres made of synthetic bone, each filled with ballistic gelatin, and subjected them to a variety of experimental trauma simulations.
"We simulated the most possible scenarios: fall from height, blow with a wooden bat, with a rock, double blows, et cetera," Kranioti said.
Their analysis of the skull showed there were actually two distinct injuries to the right side of the skull. Researchers identified a linear fracture at the base of the skull, as well as a depressed fracture on the right side of the cranial vault. Simulations proved a series of blows by a bat best explained the injuries.
Kranioti and her colleagues shared their findings this week in the journal PLOS One.
The fracturing, scientists concluded, was not caused by an accident or post-mortem damage. Instead, a face-to-face confrontation turned violent some 33,000 years ago -- an Upper Paleolithic murder.
"The Upper Paleolithic is a time period that is usually described as showing rapid cultural and technological innovation, as well as intensified symbolic behavior and artistic expression," We show that Upper Paleolithic humans were also capable of murder," Katerina Harvati, professor at the University of Tübingen, wrote in a related paper.
"Even if it is not necessarily surprising, it shows that violent behavior was also present in early modern human hunter-gatherers, and not only in archaic humans, such as Neanderthals."
*-- Scientists perform world's smallest MRI on single atoms --*
Scientists have successfully measured the spins of a single atom, executing the world's smallest MRI.
Magnetic resonance imaging measures the density of atomic spins, the electromagnetic properties of electrons and protons, inside the human body. Most MRI scans measure millions of spins. For the latest feat, detailed Monday in the journal Nature Physics, scientists detected the spins of individual atoms.
Researchers combined MRI technology with a scanning tunneling microscope to image a single atom. For the experiment, scientists used a tiny sample of iron and titanium.
Using the atomically sharp metal tip of the microscope, scientists successfully isolated a collection of atoms. Researchers were able to create a three-dimensional map of the atoms' magnetic fields.
Scientists attached another spin cluster to the microscope's tip and passed it over the atomic sample. Like magnets, the spins of the atoms and clusters attracted and repelled each other as the cluster passed from one side to the other. By imaging the magnetic interaction, scientists were able to create an MRI of the individual atoms.
"It turns out that the magnetic interaction we measured depends on the properties of both spins, the one on the tip and the one on the sample," Philip Willke, researcher at the Center for Quantum Nanoscience, QNS, at Ewha Womans University, said in a news release. "For example, the signal that we see for iron atoms is vastly different from that for titanium atoms. This allows us to distinguish different kinds of atoms by their magnetic field signature, and makes our technique very powerful."
In followup experiments, Willke and his colleagues plan to create MRIs of more complex atomic structures, capturing the individual spins that make up molecules and unique magnetic materials.
"Many magnetic phenomena take place on the nanoscale, including the recent generation of magnetic storage devices," said QNS researcher Yujeong Bae. "We now plan to study a variety of systems using our microscopic MRI."
Discoveries made using the new microscopic MRI technology could inspire the creation of new nanomaterials and drugs.
"The ability to map spins and their magnetic fields with previously unimaginable precision allows us to gain deeper knowledge about the structure of matter and opens new fields of basic research," said Andreas Heinrich, director of QNS.
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