Health for the Ages 

The plants pictured on this page might add up to a tossed salad. They might also be used to make remedies for serious intestinal disorders—just as they did in antiquity.
 
Medical historian Alain Touwaide says new DNA analysis of clay-bound pills from a Roman shipwreck confirms traces of the same dried plants (including carrot, radish, cabbage, celery, wild onion,* and parsley) described in ancient Greek medical texts. The brownish, coin-size pills—preserved in tin boxes for two millennia—are the first proof that the writings were “not just theoretical but actually applied.”
 
Could such knowledge inform today’s research? Touwaide says the second-century physician Galen referred to broccoli, a relative of cabbage, as an intestinal cancer treatment. Studies today confirm the plant’s anticancer properties—making “eat your vegetables” a timeless prescription. —Jeremy Berlin
 
 
 

Used by a physician around 140 to 120 B.C., this boxwood vial (left) was among the medical artifacts found 22 years ago on a Roman shipwreck off Italy’s coast.

 *LEEK, A DESCENDANT OF WILD ONION, IS SHOWN.

domesticated rice at around 8,200 years ago in China. • Turkey announced plans to build Canal Istanbul, a roughly 30-mile waterway that will bypass the Bosporus, linking the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara. • A fossil found in Wyoming shows a giant queen ant that was the size of a small hummingbird.

A new species of unisexual lizard has been bred by Kansas City researchers. The all-female population reproduces by cloning. • A study of the rice genome puts the origin of

A Perfect Mummy In the Chinese city of Taizhou, workers digging a new roadbed recently uncovered a remarkable burial from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The deceased was a five-foot-three-inch-tall woman whose skin, hair, eyebrows, and more than 20 items of cotton clothing were all fully preserved. Three thick layers of plaster sealed her wooden coffin, keeping out oxygen and bacteria. When she was found, she lay in a mysterious fluid, which may have served to further stave off decay. Once the mummy is stabilized and studied, the city’s museum plans to make her one of the star attractions of a new exhibit. —A. R. Williams
 
Dressed to prevent contamination, staff from the Taizhou Museum prepare to ease ropes under a quilt-wrapped mummy to lift her from her coffin.
 

 
 

That Stinks

They are resilient through winter, latch skillfully on to vehicles, and have few natural checks on their U.S. population. These factors have enabled an Asian native, the brown marmorated stinkbug, to thrive in the eastern U.S. First noted in 1996 in Allentown, Pennsylvania—and since spotted in 33 other states—the tenacious insect feasts on crops and creeps into homes, particularly in Maryland and Virginia. Squashing it unleashes a pungent odor. Now researchers hope a tiny wasp can help by attacking stinkbug eggs, but safety tests will take a few years. Smells like trouble in the meantime.  —Catherine Zuckerman

Shake It OffIt all begins with a twist of the head—one so powerful it leads to full-body, high-speed oscillations that whip water in all directions. Although hazardous to nearby humans, the wet-dog shake is an elegant, effective drying mechanism, says Andrew Dickerson, an engineering student at Georgia Tech who analyzed the mechanics of this everyday canine act. In taking less than a second to disperse half the water in a hound’s fur, the motion is “more efficient than a washing machine’s spin cycle,” he says.

Using slow-motion video, Dickerson measured rates of oscillation in other animals too and found that the smaller they are, the faster they shake. Being wet adds weight, notes veterinarian Nicholas Dodman, and that makes it harder to run—perhaps one reason speed drying evolved.—Hannah Bloch

 

 

Girl Power

The developing world holds an overlooked resource: millions of adolescent girls. Often forced to leave school and start families by their mid-teens, many fall prey to violence, disease, and complications of childbirth. Studies show that keeping these girls in school and delaying marriage benefits both them and their communities by reducing infant mortality, increasing family income, and slowing the spread of HIV. Groups including the World Bank, the UN Adolescent Girls Task Force, and movements such as the Girl Effect are looking at ways to make girls more valuable to their families as breadwinners than as child brides. —Margaret G. Zackowitz

Eva Nkirote, a student at Saint Annmona School in rural eastern Kenya, participates in a tree-planting program at the school. Says Esther Muthoni, Saint Annmona’s founder, “If you educate a girl, you educate a nation.”

Shark Sanctuary

The warm waters of the Raja Ampat archipelago have long been a hot spot for biodiversity. Now they’re Indonesia’s first refuge for sharks. The big fish are key to its ecosystem and to the diver-focused ecotourism that supports conservation efforts and the local economy. So last year Raja Ampat joined Palau and the Maldives as a top-predator protectorate. The 17,760-square-mile haven is now safe for all sharks, as well as manta rays, dugongs, and turtles. Fishing practices like reef dynamiting are also banned. While enforcement is a work in progress, one local resort pays villagers to patrol the waters—including their own traditional fishing grounds, which had been hurt by shark finning and industrial trawling. —Noy Thrupkaew

SARK IS THE NIGHT They say on a clear day you can see forever. What about a clear night? If you’re on the isle of Sark (right), meteors, constellations, and a horizon-spanning Milky Way are on view. The tiny, rustic Channel Island—2.1 square miles, 600-some residents, no cars or public lighting— has long been a haven for naked-eye astronomy. This year it became the first island in the world deemed a Dark Sky Place by the International Dark-Sky Association, a U.S.-based nonprofit promoting solutions to light pollution. Sark joins about a dozen places worldwide recognized by the group for their commitment to night-sky clarity. Steve Owens, the astronomer who led Sark’s application process, says the designation came after a six-month “light audit” led to the retrofitting of 30 fixtures causing an orange glow. For midwinter stargazers, that means 12 hours of darkest night await. —Jeremy Berlin

Sky Rivers A forecaster points to a bright weather system on a map and warns of torrential rain and flooding. But it’s no hurricane. It’s an atmospheric river, or Ar, first seen clearly via satellite data in the 1990s. “We now know that Ars are the primary cause of flooding in the West Coast states,” says NOAA’s Marty Ralph. Water-vapor superhighways 300 miles wide and more than a thousand miles long, Ars can, in a single day, move up to 20 times the Mississippi river’s daily discharge. last winter one stalled in California. Six days later 26 inches of rain and 15 feet of snow had fallen. Now experts are working ahead. A recent what-if test, in which an Ar swamped California, predicted $735 billion in losses. Says Ralph, “We’re preparing for the Katrina of the West.” —Juli Berwald

CHIMPS AND DOLLS In a Ugandan forest, primatologists Sonya Kahlenberg and Richard Wrangham see chimpanzees toting sticks—for fun. “Usually when a chimp carries an object,” says Kahlenberg, “it has a function.” Yet new analysis of 14 years of observations suggests these apes are playing with dolls. Such stick carrying has been seen regularly only in this community, so it’s likely a learned behavior. The game is passed from one juvenile to another—social networking, chimp-youth style. —JB

Pieces of wood used as dolls are thicker than pieces used to probe for honey.

Dolls

Tools

MAP: JEROME N. COOKSON, NGM STAFF. SOURCE: NOAA. PHOTO: SONYA KAHLENBERG