Een bestuurder van een bestelbus heeft op de N470 ter hoogte van Pijnacker een lantaarnpaal volledig uit de grond gereden. Door de harde klap raakten zowel de bestelbus als de lantaarnpaal zwaar beschadigd. Ook een personenauto liep schade op.

Een bestuurder van een bestelbus heeft op de N470 ter hoogte van Pijnacker een lantaarnpaal volledig uit de grond gereden. Door de harde klap raakten zowel de bestelbus als de lantaarnpaal zwaar beschadigd. Ook een personenauto liep schade op.

Terwijl sterren over de rode loper van het Filmfestival van Cannes paraderen, verzamelen zich daarbuiten duizenden festivalgangers in de hoop een glimp van hen op te vangen. AP-fotografen John Locher en Andreea Alexandru richten hun lens op de wereld buiten de beroemde catwalk.

GRONINGEN (ANP) - Het Rode Kruis gaat 175 bedden klaarzetten in congrescentrum Hanzeplaza in Groningen. Dat meldt een woordvoerder van de organisatie. Rond 16.00 uur zal de opbouw van de opvanglocatie beginnen.

Zaterdagochtend maakte de gemeente Groningen bekend zaterdag, zondag en maandag nachtopvang te bieden aan asielzoekers voor wie geen plek is in het opvangcentrum in Ter Apel. Burgemeester Roelien Kamminga heeft daarvoor een verzoek ontvangen van asielminister Bart van den Brink.

Hoeveel asielzoekers daar de nacht gaan doorbrengen is nog niet bekend; dat is afhankelijk van de instroom, laat de gemeente weten. "Dat wij 175 bedden regelen, wil niet zeggen dat er ook echt zoveel mensen komen", zegt de woordvoerder van het Rode Kruis. "Maar dit is wat we gaan klaarzetten."

De organisatie regelt ook handdoeken, naast de reguliere hygiënepakketjes met onder meer een tandenborstel. "Er zijn op deze locatie douches aanwezig", zegt de woordvoerder. "Daar kunnen mensen zich wassen. Dat is hard nodig, want veel mensen hebben dat al dagen niet kunnen doen, terwijl ze een lange reis achter de rug hebben en nu al langere tijd in de warmte buiten zitten."

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that felt the heat, left their mark, survived a cataclysm, and watched cows watch TV.

First, the bones of long-dead whalers are spilling out their Arctic graves due to human-driven climate change. Then: a trip to “where the snakes lost life,” an ur-moon in the ashes, and the facial recognition abilities of cows.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

The thaw at “Corpse Point”

Loktu, Lise, and Brødholt, Elin Therese. “Skeletons in the permafrost: Exploring climate-driven heritage loss and occupational health at the early modern whaling burial site of Likneset, Svalbard.” PLOS One.

The battered bones of beleaguered whalers buried centuries ago in the Arctic are melting out of their permafrost graves due to human-driven climate change, according to a new study. The remains of these men, who lived in the 17th and 18th centuries, reveal the physical toll of whaling on sailors, and highlight the urgent need to preserve cultural heritage as global temperatures rise.

Climate change is an obvious danger to future generations, but it also threatens our link to the past by accelerating the erosion and degradation of its material remains. This problem affects all kinds of different archaeological sites, from ancient artifacts preserved in vanishing Mongolian glaciers to the oldest rock art on record in Indonesia, which is rapidly decaying in the heat 45,000 years after it was painted.

Nowhere is more affected by warming trends than the Arctic, where temperatures are rising nearly four times faster than the global average. Now, a pair of researchers has examined the remains of European whalers at the Likneset whaling burial site on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, also known as “Corpse Point.” The team discovered significant degradation of many burials since they were first documented in the 1970s, a loss that has been sped up by climate change. 

“The site has been excavated repeatedly over more than three decades, providing a rare opportunity to examine both preservation change and human skeletal evidence through time and across contrasting burial environments within a single site,” said authors Lise Loktu of the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research and Elin Therese Brødholt of Oslo University Hospital.

“In several cases, coffin lids had collapsed and sideboards were displaced, resulting in partial disturbance of skeletal remains and textiles,” the team said. “One grave (Grave 214) is classified as completely destroyed, with coffin elements and skeletal remains dispersed downslope.” 

These whalers just can’t get any peace, even in death. Their lives were short and filled with physical hardships, according to the team’s re-examination of the bones. Many individuals endured physical trauma due to chronic strain, and 18 out of 19 of the studied sailors suffered from scurvy. Most of the bones belong to men who died in their 20s or early 30s.

“The predominance of healed injuries indicates survival after traumatic events and suggests that mortality within the assemblage was more closely related to cumulative physiological stress than to acute fatal trauma,” according to the study. 

“The results from Likneset…call into question the long-term viability of in situ preservation and managed decay under warming permafrost conditions,” the team concluded. Future work to address this problem “should be guided by clearly defined knowledge priorities: which information must be documented and analysed before it is irretrievably lost?”

In other news…

The mystery of Ndalambiri

Mesfin, Isis et al. "A new archaeological chrono-cultural sequence for the rock art site of Ndalambiri, Cuanza Sul, Angola" Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

For at least 45,000 years, humans have gathered at Ndalambiri, a rockshelter in Angola thought to be named for an Umbundu phrase that means, “This is where snakes lost life.” Its interior wall is adorned with an immense fresco of roughly 1,200 figures painted in white, red, and black, including many anthropomorphic and geometric designs left over the past 2,000 years. 

Now, researchers report the first comprehensive excavation of the site in partnership with local communities, an effort that unearthed thousands of artifacts, such as pottery shards, tools, and botanical and faunal remains.

“The archaeological content of this central rock art and heritage site in Angola has remained poorly documented until now,” said researchers led by Isis Mesfin of the French Museum of Natural History in Paris. “The diversity of archaeological materials discovered at the Ndalambiri shelter makes it a strategic site for raising awareness about heritage preservation and field archaeology training.”

The team discovered the earliest evidence of iron production in Angola in the layers, dating back to the 5th century CE, and speculated that Ndalambiri was often a crossroads of diverse cultural interactions. But despite the wealth of new finds from the excavation, the study noted that “the identity of Ndalambiri’s occupants and painters remains uncertain.” 

Though it’s not clear yet who adorned its walls or sought refuge in its space, the rockshelter was clearly a storied gathering place that preserves eerie remnants of untold generations.

Last moon standing 

Belyakov, Matthew et al. “Nereid as a regular satellite of Neptune.” Science Advances.

Let’s dispense with human timescales and wind the clock way back to the early solar system, some four billion years ago. There was Neptune, minding its own business, when a pair of Pluto-sized dwarf planets suddenly barged into its way, causing complete orbital chaos. 

Neptune gravitationally captured one of the interlopers, which became the moon Triton. But in the fallout of the encounter, Neptune’s original moons were catapulted into deep space or torn into pieces and left to coalesce into a new set of irregular objects.

All, that is, except Nereid. Scientists have discovered that this Neptunian moon, which is about 200 miles in diameter, is likely the sole survivor of this ancient collision of worlds. Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, a team found that Nereid doesn’t spectrally match the rest of Neptune’s moons.

“Our proposed regular satellite genesis story for the moon leaves Nereid as the singular intact original satellite of Neptune—Neptune’s innermost moons, such as Proteus, are reaccreted pieces of satellites destroyed by Triton’s capture,” said researchers led by Matthew Belyakov at Caltech. “Future spacecraft exploration of the Neptunian system should search for signs of an early geologic history on Nereid consistent with formation as a regular satellite.”

Talk about a lunar loner. Nereid may offer a rare glimpse of a fleeting era before Triton came crashing into its captured orbit, upending the Neptunian moon system forever.

Cows can tell people apart 

Amichaud, Océane et al. “Cows visually discriminate and cross-modally recognise familiar and unfamiliar human faces in videos.” PLOS One.

We’ll end, as all things should, with cows watching TV. To determine whether these animals can recognize human faces, or match voices to faces, scientists played a series of videos for 32 Prim’Holstein cows. 

In one experiment, the cows watched a series of muted videos of familiar and unfamiliar male faces. In a second session, the cows watched videos of familiar caretakers speaking in their own voice, or a dubbed version with a different voice. The heart rates of the cows were monitored throughout both experiments.

The results revealed that “cows looked significantly longer at the unfamiliar person, suggesting that they are able to discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar individuals using only a video of their faces as a cue,” said researchers led by Océane Amichaud of the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment in France. “Cows looked significantly longer at the face that matched the voice, indicating that they are able to associate familiar and unfamiliar voices with the corresponding face.”

While the cows were able to distinguish between individuals, there was no difference in their heart rates when presented with familiar caretakers and strangers. The researchers suggested that future work should explore whether any other bovine behaviors are dependent on their human companions. This has been “cows watching TV” news. 

Thanks for reading! See you next week. 

Threat of jihadism continues to lurk along borders with Mali and Burkina Faso

These days, when she is not organising the annual International Day of Reggae celebrations in Côte d’Ivoire, Rose Ebirim picks up litter scattered on the beach in the historic port town of Grand Bassam, 25 miles east of Abidjan. Both activities have become a form of therapy since the time she saw someone die.

“13 March 2016 was a Black Sunday for me,” she said.

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Firefighters are racing to douse flames on Santa Rosa Island as experts express concern for survival of its unique habitat

On the south-eastern corner of Santa Rosa Island lies a grove of a few thousand Torrey pine trees, some of them more than 250 years old. The only other place on earth where these gnarled pines exist is in San Diego county, but biologists classify the two groves as different subspecies. So when a rare wildfire broke out on Santa Rosa Island late last week, firefighters raced to keep it from spreading into the grove, where it threatened to consign the island’s Torrey pines to extinction.

So far, they appear to be succeeding – even as the 18,000-acre fire has torched nearly one-third of the island’s surface. But biologists who have studied Santa Rosa Island’s unique ecology are watching anxiously as the fire continues to burn a part of the island that is home to six plants found nowhere else on the planet.

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Natuurhandhavers. Wij weten niet wat ze doen naast een beetje in de bosjes rondhangen en kabouter Spillebeen bekeuren als hij ergens illegaal heen en weer aan het wippen is, maar ze bestaan dus. Een groepje wildernisboa's in Oss had een behoorlijk wilde nachtdienst toen ze een groep van 11 beschonken mensen tegenkwamen die bij een natuurgebied vuurtje aan het stoken was, daarbij veel lawaai maakte en 'zich schuldig maakte aan meerdere strafbare feiten'. Toen de groep hierop werd aangesproken begon een van de dronken vrouwen in het gezelschap de mannelijke boa's ineens bij hun billen en hun kruis te BETASTEN. Nadat de groep gesommeerd was om weg te gaan werd het nog grimmiger: 'De groep vond het nodig om te gaan provoceren, intimideren en uitdagend gedrag richting ons te uiten.' Per slot van rekening bewoog de groep zich ook nog richting de dienstauto's van de boa's, om er vervolgens op- en in te klimmen. Toen werd het echt KNOKKEN. Wapenstokken en pepperspray versus tassen en barbecue's (daarmee werd dus naar de boa's GEGOOID). Met hulp van een grote politiemacht lukte het uiteindelijk om 4 van de bezopen oproerkraaiers in de boeien te slaan. Eindstand: GeenStijl teambuilding in de bossen bij Oss prima geslaagd.

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Een bericht gedeeld door 🔰 Inspecteur Milieu, Welzijn & Infrastructuur (@groenebrigade)