GNR Wednesday 11-12-25: News that is Good
Good morning, good morning, good morning! Welcome to this second Tuesday of November!
Welcome to your monthly science, history, and other neat stuff break.
Courtesy of the GNR Discord server:
“We Couldn’t Believe How Weird It Was” – The World’s Strangest Dinosaur Just Got Weirder
A new study published in Nature reveals that Spicomellus afer possessed a tail weapon more than 30 million years earlier than any other known ankylosaur. It also featured a distinctive bony collar lined with meter-long spikes extending outward from each side of its neck.
Spicomellus is recognized as the oldest ankylosaur ever discovered, dating back over 165 million years to the Middle Jurassic period. It lived near what is now the Moroccan town of Boulemane and represents the first ankylosaur found on the African continent.
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Prof Susannah Maidment of Natural History Museum, London, and the University of Birmingham, who co-led the team of researchers said, “To find such elaborate armor in an early ankylosaur changes our understanding of how these dinosaurs evolved. It shows just how significant Africa’s dinosaurs are, and how important it is to improve our understanding of them.”
“Spicomellus had a diversity of plates and spikes extending from all over its body, including meter-long neck spikes, huge upwards-projecting spikes over the hips, and a whole range of long, blade-like spikes, pieces of armor made up of two long spikes, and plates down the shoulder. We’ve never seen anything like this in any animal before.”
“It’s particularly strange as this is the oldest known ankylosaur, so we might expect that a later species might have inherited similar features, but they haven’t.”
Artist’s impressions through the link, and they are wild.
Want a younger brain? Learn another language
Speaking multiple languages could slow down brain ageing and help to prevent cognitive decline, a study of more than 80,000 people has found.
The work, published in Nature Aging on 10 November1, suggests that people who are multilingual are half as likely to show signs of accelerated biological ageing as are those who speak just one language.
“We wanted to address one of the most persistent gaps in ageing research, which is if multilingualism can actually delay ageing,” says study co-author Agustín Ibáñez, a neuroscientist at the Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago, Chile. Previous research in this area has suggested that speaking multiple languages can improve cognitive functions such memory and attention2, which boosts brain health as we get older. But many of these studies rely on small sample sizes and use unreliable methods of measuring ageing, which leads to results that are inconsistent and not generalizable.
“The effects of multilingualism on ageing have always been controversial, but I don’t think there has been a study of this scale before, which seems to demonstrate them quite decisively,” says Christos Pliatsikas, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Reading, UK. The paper’s results could “bring a step change to the field”, he adds.
Man, I would love to visit this museum. I love museums, and this one sounds awesome.
After 2-decade wait, Grand Egyptian Museum opens with thousands of treasures from King Tutankhamun’s tomb
It’s been over a century since the nearly-intact tomb of the boy King Tutankhamun was discovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter. Now, the wait to see contents from the famed Egyptian king’s tomb is official over.
More than 5,300 relics from the young king’s tomb, such as his gold mask, throne and chariots, will be showcased for the first time alongside 100,000 Egyptian artifacts at the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum — making it the world’s largest archaeological museum, per Forbes.
Following a partial opening in late 2024, the Grand Egyptian Museum completely opened on Saturday after years of setbacks. Located near the pyramids of Giza, just outside of Cairo, the museum’s elaborate opening hosted delegates from more than 70 countries, including royal families, presidents and prime ministers.
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“We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said during a press conference, per Reuters. He then called the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a country whose history goes back more than 7,000 years.”
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Tourism in Egypt, which suffered during regional crisis, is expected to enjoy a boost, largely in thanks to the museum, which experts anticipate will help to attract 18 million visitors to Egypt in the next year, and hope will bring 30 million visitors to the country annually by 2032, according to The Associated Press.
You’ll have to click through for the whole story. I think my ability to suspend disbelief would be challenged if it were the makings of a movie. I certainly can’t do it justice here!
Concealed for 100 Years by Empress Who Defied Hitler, Royal Jewels Thought Lost are Set for Public Exhibit
A collection of jewels belonging to arguably Europe’s greatest ever royal dynasty is now set to go on display to the public for the first time in over 100 years.
The jewels, including one of the largest cut diamonds in the world when it was set, had been thought lost or stolen, but had in fact been kept in such secrecy, that even the patriarch of the dynasty himself didn’t know of their existence.
The House of Habsburg of Austria had existed as undisputed rulers of Austria since 1278, and provided crown-heads, empresses—kings and queens of all sorts—to Europe for centuries.
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Inside these and other treasures sat in the vault and faded virtually out of all knowledge, until in 2022, upon the 100th anniversary of Emperor Karl’s death, his grandson Karl, who doesn’t use the succession moniker in his position as a member of the European Parliament for Austria, learned not only of the existence of the jewelry, but of the wishes of Empress Zita to reveal them to the world.
“As descendants of Emperor Karl I and Empress Zita, we are proud to share these culturally and historically significant pieces with the public,” Karl, recognized as the head of the current, defunct royal house, said in a statement.
Allergies are one of my personal favorite things to see new developments against; I’m not allergic to peanuts, but I had life-threatening milk allergies as a young child, and I have family members who are severely allergic to other things.
Phase 3 Trial Shows Peanut Patch Treatment Helps Toddlers Build Tolerance to Deadly Allergy
Toddlers safely built a tolerance to small amounts of peanut proteins thanks to a simple skin patch, which helped prevent the progression of a potentially deadly allergy.
More than 70% of these toddlers could tolerate 3 or 4 peanut kernels after a 3-year course of treatment, say American scientists working to commercialize the skin patch.
The findings, from an FDA-registered, long-term, phase 3 clinical trial offer encouraging news for parents of the one child in 50 born every year with the susceptibility to peanut allergies.
The study found that a peanut patch treatment—called epicutaneous immunotherapy, or EPIT—continued to help toddlers safely build tolerance to peanuts over three years. It used the DBV Technologies Viaskin Peanut Patch, which delivers small amounts of peanut protein through the skin.
The goal is to train the immune system to tolerate peanut exposure and reduce the risk of severe allergic reactions from accidental ingestion.
That’s it for me this week!
And now, the weather.
I swear my name is still not Cecil Baldwin.
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