A new study uses digital tools to analyze nearly 1,000 Syriac manuscripts from the British Library, focusing on how scribes and editors selected and rearranged parts of texts—a practice known as excerpting. The researcher introduces a new measurement called Excerpts Per Manuscript (EPM) to track how often this happened. This approach reveals that the people who copied and compiled these manuscripts were not just preserving texts—they were actively shaping what future generations would read and remember. By highlighting these editorial choices, the study shifts attention away from authors alone and shows that scribes played a key role in organizing knowledge, adapting texts for new purposes, and influencing how Syriac literary culture developed over time.

In the Amazon, gold mining is a thriving business, pushing deep into the rainforest and indigenous lands. Small-scale operations set up primarily illicitly and operated in the shadows use mercury, a substance with neurotoxic properties, for gold extraction. Now, a team of researchers examined if trees native to the Peruvian Amazon could be used as biomonitors for gold mining activities. By examining mercury concentrations in tree rings, they concluded that some species could bear witness to illegal mining activities.

An archaeological study of human settlement during the Final Palaeolithic revealed that populations in Europe did not decrease homogenously during the last cold phase of the Ice Age. Significant variation in regional population sizes indicate differentiated reactions nested in an overall shift of settlement areas towards the east / publication in PLOS One

Dozens of amphibians perished together on an ancient floodplain around 230 million years ago, according to a study published April 2, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Aaron M. Kufner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, and colleagues.

Scientists uncover the first clear evidence of air sacs in the fossilized bones of alvarezsaurian dinosaurs: the "hollow bones" which help modern day birds to fly