ERIK MARTIN WILLÈN: May 2025

Saturday, May 31, 2025

Messier 2 - UNIVERSE

After the Crab Nebula, this giant star cluster is the second entry in 18th century astronomer Charles Messier’s famous list of things that are not comets. M2 is one of the largest globular star clusters now known to roam the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Though Messier originally described it as a nebula without stars, this stunning Hubble image resolves stars across the cluster’s central 40 light-years. Its population of stars numbers close to 150,000, concentrated within a total diameter of around 175 light-years. About 55,000 light-years distant toward the constellation Aquarius, this ancient denizen of the Milky Way, also known as NGC 7089, is 13 billion years old. An extended stellar debris stream, a signature of past gravitational tidal disruption, was recently found to be associated with Messier 2.

Image & info via APOD

Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, G. Piotto et al.

Source: Messier 2 – Scents of Science

Ancient Maya burial study challenges human sacrifice theory, points to acts of placemaking - Archeology - phys.org

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

A recent study by Dr. Angelina Locker published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology implemented bioarchaeological methods to determine if the secondary burial remains found within a non-elite Late Preclassic (300 BCE–250 CE) could relate to ancestry, placemaking, and movement beliefs.

Typically, secondary burials of skulls, arm bones, and teeth are viewed through a lens of violence and sacrifice in ancient Mesoamerican societies in which such practices were prevalent. However, from ethnohistoric and historical accounts, we also know that the pre-Columbian societies had complex beliefs about the soul, ancestors, and the afterlife.

In the Maya belief system, specifically, the soul could be divided into four separate parts. "Baah," which means the self represented by the head, and represents one's life force. "Ik'" represented the breath of the soul and was associated with wind, jade, and teeth. "Ch'ulel" was the essence which resided in the heart and blood, and finally, "wahy" were companion spirits, typically animals, who would die after their human counterpart passed on.

Since an ancestor's soul did not necessitate their entire body to be present, parts of it could be used to communicate with their descendants, such as the skull, mandible, teeth, or arm.

However, typically when such remains are found secondary to a primary burial, they were interpreted as evidence of ritual violence, offerings, and sacrifices either for the primary deceased, gods, or buildings.

However, Dr. Locker's study contributes to discussions contesting all such findings as being the result of violence or sacrifice.

"There is a lot of variability in the Maya era. There are many examples of tooth caches (of lots of teeth, often a collection of premolars), extra mandibles, or skulls included in graves. Individuals missing their skulls, of burials with just bundled long bones (like leg bones or arm bones), or of just finger bones.

"Many bioarcheologists have contested using sacrifice as a catch-all to explain the placement of secondary burials. This paper contributes to that discussion and focuses on the placement of mandibles and teeth."

To do this, Dr. Locker examined the non-elite burial recovered on the periphery of the Dos Hombres site, Belize. The site was once a major urban center with a population of 10,000 to 15,000 people.

Archaeological site of Dos Hombres and location of the RBCMA in northwest Belize. Credit: Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.jaa.2025.101681

Archaeological excavations, however, only revealed 21 burials, belonging to a total of 35 individuals. Of these, 17 were recovered outside the core settlement, including a burial containing three individuals forming part of the Dancer Group. The Dancer Group was a rural commoner household around 1,55km west of Dos Hombres.

"There were three bundled burials within the Dancer Group—Burial Episodes 1, 2, and 3. My paper focused on Burial Episode 2. Episodes 1 and 3 were not included, unfortunately, because I did not have access to them. When I sampled the ancestral burials for my dissertation research, I sampled burials that were available to me and curated at the University of Texas," says Dr. Locker.

Initially, this grave had been interpreted as a primary burial containing the sacrificial remains of other individuals.

However, Dr. Locker offers an alternative explanation based on the bioarchaeological results and context of the burial.

The primary remains belonged to a young woman, buried together with a grave marker and the remains of mussel feasting deposits. Two additional individuals were placed in her grave, represented by teeth; these were a 20- to 34-year-old individual and a 30- to 40-year-old individual.

by Sandee Oster, Phys.org

edited by Gaby Clark, reviewed by Robert Egan

Source: Ancient Maya burial study challenges human sacrifice theory, points to acts of placemaking

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Friday, May 30, 2025

Hubble Comes Face-to-Face with Spiral’s Arms - UNIVERSE

This Hubble Space Telescope image showcases the spiral galaxy NGC 3596.

ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker

The spiral galaxy NGC 3596 is on display in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image that incorporates six different wavelengths of light. NGC 3596 is situated 90 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo, the Lion. British astronomer Sir William Herschel first documented the galaxy in 1784.

NGC 3596 appears almost perfectly face-on when viewed from Earth, showcasing the galaxy’s neatly wound spiral arms. These bright arms hold concentrations of stars, gas, and dust that mark the area where star formation is most active, illustrated by the brilliant pink star-forming regions and young blue stars tracing NGC 3596’s arms.

What causes these spiral arms to form? It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer, partly because spiral galaxies are so diverse. Some have clear spiral arms, while others have patchy, feathery arms. Some have prominent bars across their centers, while others have compact, circular nuclei. Some have close neighbors, while others are isolated.

Early ideas of how spiral arms formed stumped astronomers with the ‘winding problem’. If a galaxy’s spiral arms are coherent structures, its arms would wind tighter and tighter as the galaxy spins, until the arms are no longer visible. Now, researchers believe that spiral arms represent a pattern of high-density and low-density areas rather than a physical structure. As stars, gas, and dust orbit within a galaxy’s disk, they pass in and out of the spiral arms. Much like cars moving through a traffic jam, these materials slow down and bunch up as they enter a spiral arm, before emerging and continuing their journey through the galaxy.

Source: Hubble Comes Face-to-Face with Spiral’s Arms - NASA Science

Flexible implant detects pain levels and delivers targeted electrical stimulation wirelessly - Neuroscience - phys.org

An UIWI stimulator. Credit: Nature Electronics (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-025-01374-6.

Chronic pain conditions, characterized by persistent or recurrent pain in specific parts of the body, can be highly debilitating and often significantly reduce the quality of life of the individuals experiencing them. Statistics suggest that approximately 20.9% of adults living in the United States have experienced chronic pain at some point in their lives, while 6.9% have experienced severe chronic pain that significantly impacted their daily functioning and well-being.

Currently, chronic pain is primarily treated using pain-relief medications, many of which are based on opioids. Yet many of these pharmaceutical drugs are highly addictive and have severe side effects, so they often end up causing more harm than good.

In recent years, some scientists and engineers have been trying to devise alternative pain-management strategies that do not rely on opioids and can ease the pain of patients without adversely impacting their health. One proposed solution entails the use of implantable electrical stimulators, devices that can be surgically inserted into a patient's body, delivering electrical signals to their nerves or spinal cord to reduce the pain they are experiencing.

Despite their potential for the treatment of chronic pain conditions, most existing implantable electrical stimulators have significant limitations. In fact, these devices can damage a patient's body during the surgeries needed to implant them. Moreover, they are often expensive, and the battery powering them needs to be periodically changed.

Researchers at the University of Southern California and other institutes recently developed a new flexible, wireless and battery-free implantable stimulator that could overcome some of the limitations of previously introduced pain-management solutions. This device, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, is powered via an external wearable ultrasound transmitter and also incorporates machine learning algorithms that can classify a patient's pain levels, adjusting the intensity of the electrical stimulation that it delivers accordingly.

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"Chronic pain management typically involves opioids, which are associated with severe side effects such as addiction," Yushun Zeng, Chen Gong, and their colleagues wrote in their paper.

"Implantable percutaneous electrical stimulators are a promising alternative approach to pain management. However, they are expensive, can cause damage during surgery and often rely on a battery power supply that must be periodically replaced."

The key objective of this recent study was to devise a less invasive implantable electrical stimulator that can reduce the pain of patients, and that does not need to be periodically removed to change its batteries. The ultrasonic wireless implant developed by the researchers is comprised of a composite piezoelectric receiver, micro-electronic components, and stimulating electrodes integrated into a flexible printed circuit board.

"We report an integrated, flexible ultrasound-induced wireless implantable stimulator combined with a pain detection and management system for personalized chronic pain management," wrote Zeng, Gong and their colleagues.

"Power is supplied to the stimulator by a wearable ultrasound transmitter. We classify pain stimuli from brain recordings by developing a machine learning model and program the acoustic energy from the ultrasound transmitter and, therefore, the intensity of electrical stimulation."

The researchers tested their proposed pain management system in a series of tests involving rodents that were experiencing varying levels of pain. They found that their device accurately predicted the levels of stress experienced by the animal and adapted the electrical stimulations it delivered accordingly, ultimately easing most of the animal's pain.

"We show that the implant can generate targeted, self-adaptive and quantitative electrical stimulations to the spinal cord according to the classified pain levels for chronic pain management in free-moving animal models," wrote Zeng, Gong and their colleagues.

In the future, the ultrasonic wireless implant developed by this team of researchers could soon be improved and tested in experiments involving other animals, then eventually in human clinical trials. Moreover, its underlying design could inspire the development of other devices that rely on ultrasound technology for the mitigation of chronic pain.

by Ingrid Fadelli, Phys.org

edited by Gaby Clark, reviewed by Robert Egan

Source: Flexible implant detects pain levels and delivers targeted electrical stimulation wirelessly