When England industrialized during the late 18th- and early 19th centuries, an extended period of cooling – the Little Ice Age, marked by volcanic activity and cooler temperatures – came toward its end. Poor working and living conditions drove disease and deficiencies – but climate factors may have played a role, too, a new study has shown. To examine the impact of climate on vitamin D deficiencies during Industrial Revolution childhoods, scientists used excavated teeth and the burial register from a Quaker cemetery in north-east England. Their findings showed that many people buried at the cemetery had been born shortly after periods of high volcanic and low solar activity. The scientists said these findings point to climate as a possible additional driver of disease in the past and shows the importance of considering the full picture of factors impacting human health.

An 88-year-old murder mystery surrounding British archaeologist James Leslie Starkey, who was shot dead in 1938 while traveling from the ancient city of Lachish to Jerusalem, has gained new clarity now. Building on a 2016 study, new research combines previously overlooked archival documents, British intelligence records and Palestinian oral testimonies to reveal that the killing was likely a targeted assassination linked to bitter land disputes between the archaeological expedition and local villagers. The findings identify a Palestinian rebel commander as the likely perpetrator and shed new light on the complex relationship between archaeology, land ownership and political violence during the British Mandate.

A new study from Tel Aviv University reveals how plants, despite having neither a brain nor a nervous system,

integrate light coming from multiple directions to determine where to grow. The researchers show how this process emerges from local sensing across the stem, without the need for centralized information processing.

Light receptors scattered around the stem sense the light sources locally, convert their intensities into biological signals that “encode” the information, and only then add them together. In certain cases, this mechanism may cause the plant to lean in a direction slightly different from the most intense illumination - a phenomenon the researchers define as a kind of “optical illusion.”

The 'Little Ice Age' in Transylvania demonstrated far-reaching, intertwined environmental and societal impacts of climate variability, as unearthed by diaries and other historical sources from the 17th century.

An international study led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE, CSIC-UPF) in Barcelona, the Natural Sciences Museum of Barcelona, Harvard University and the University of the Basque Country (EHU) has reconstructed the genetic history of the Iberian Peninsula between the 1st and 8th centuries CE using 243 ancient genomes from 31 archaeological sites. By combining genetic and archaeological evidence, the new study published in Cell has concluded that the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula produced a large-scale demographic change. In contrast, the Suebi, Vandal, Alan and Visigoth migrations in Late Antiquity had a more limited impact on the genetic makeup of Hispania.