July 16, 2023: Our weekly roundup of the latest science in the news, as well as a few fascinating articles to keep you entertained over the weekend.
There’s gold in them thar hills! Or at least in the farmlands of Kentucky, if you’re the lucky farmer who discovered a haul of more than 700 Civil War-era coins buried in his cornfield. The “Great Kentucky Hoard” includes hundreds of U.S. gold pieces dating to between 1840 and 1863, in addition to a handful of silver coins. But that’s not the only thing we unearthed this week — there was a giant 300,000-year-old hand ax, a World War II aircraft in Ukraine, an opulent Bronze Age tomb and an elite Roman man who may have come to a grisly death. As if that weren’t enough, a hidden “underworld” linked to the Zapotec “cult of the dead” was discovered beneath a church in Mexico.
Back aboveground, we had a baby volcano emerging in Iceland, spiders with bizarre feeding behaviors, a “gravity hole” in the Indian Ocean and a $500,000 chunk of “floating gold.”
Even farther up, the moon has been delighting us with more mysteries, such as “What, exactly, is the heat-emitting blob on the far side?” and “How old is the man in the moon? Both answers are a little clearer this week, unlike the night skies, which are being photobombed by Starlink satellites.
As ever, there was plenty more. Did you miss the male monkeys having sex with each other in Puerto Rico, or the “seemingly impossible” number identified after a 32-year search? What about the fuzzy caterpillar with a hideous sting, or this unfortunate person’s furry green tongue? If so, make sure you head over to Live Science for the latest science news, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
