Despite the challenges posed by limited preservation of archaeological assemblages and organic remains in arid environments, these discoveries are reshaping our understanding of the region’s rich cultural heritage.

One such breakthrough led by Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), in collaboration with international partners, comes from the exploration of underground settings, including caves and lava tubes, which have remained largely untapped reservoirs of archaeological abundance in Arabia.

Through meticulous excavation and analysis, researchers have uncovered a wealth of evidence at Umm Jirsan, spanning from the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic/Bronze Age periods (~10,000-3,500 years ago).

“Our findings at Umm Jirsan provide a rare glimpse into the lives of ancient peoples in Arabia, revealing repeated phases of human occupation and shedding light on the pastoralist activities that once thrived in this landscape,” said Dr Mathew Stewart, the lead researcher and a Research Fellow at ARCHE.

“This site likely served as a crucial waypoint along pastoral routes, linking key oases and facilitating cultural exchange and trade.”

Rock art and faunal records attest to the pastoralist use of the lava tube and surrounding areas, painting a vivid picture of ancient lifeways.

Depictions of cattle, sheep, goat and dogs corroborate the prehistoric livestock practices and herd composition of the region.

Isotopic analysis of animal remains indicates that livestock primarily grazed on wild grasses and shrubs, while humans maintained a diet rich in protein, with a notable increase in the consumption of C3 plants over time, suggesting the emergence of oasis agriculture.

“While underground localities are globally significant in archaeology and Quaternary science, our research represents the first comprehensive study of its kind in Saudi Arabia,” added Professor Michael Petraglia, Director of ARCHE.

“These findings underscore the immense potential for interdisciplinary investigations in caves and lava tubes, offering a unique window into Arabia’s ancient past.”

The research at Umm Jirsan underscores the importance of collaborative, multidisciplinary approaches to archaeological inquiry and highlights the significance of Arabia’s archaeological heritage on the global stage.

Researchers involved in this study work in close partnership with the Heritage Commission, Saudi Ministry of Culture, and the Saudi Geological Survey. Additional partners include King Saud University and key institutions in the UK, the USA, and Germany.

The emergence of pandemic epidemics like COVID-19 has emphasized the necessity for rapid and precise analytical methods to prepare for potential future virus outbreaks. Raman spectroscopy, using gold nanostructures, offers information about the internal structure and chemical properties of materials by analyzing the distinct vibrations of molecules known as “molecular fingerprints,” using light with remarkable sensitivity. Therefore, it could play a crucial role in determining the positivity of a virus.

However, conventional high-sensitivity Raman spectroscopy sensors detect only one type of virus with a single device, thus posing limitations in terms of productivity, detection speed, and cost when considering clinical applications.

The research team successfully fabricated a one-dimensional structure at the millimeter scale, featuring gold nanogaps accommodating only a single molecule with a tight fit. This advancement enables large-area, high-sensitivity Raman spectroscopic sensing. Furthermore, they effectively integrated flexible materials onto the substrate of the gold nanogap spectroscopic sensor. Finally, the team developed a source technology for a broadband active nano-spectral sensor, allowing tailored detection of specific substances using a single device, by widening the nanogap to the size of a virus and freely adjusting its width to suit the size and type of materials, including viruses.

Furthermore, they improved the sensitivity and controllability of the sensor by combining adaptive optics technology used in fields such as space optics, such as the James Webb Telescope. Additionally, they established a conceptual model for extending the fabricated one-dimensional structure into a two-dimensional spectroscopic sensor, theoretically confirming the ability to amplify Raman spectroscopic signals by up to several billion times. In other words, it becomes possible to confirm the positivity of viruses in real-time within seconds, a process that previously took days for verification.

The achievements of the research team, currently pending patent approval, are expected to be utilized for the rapid response through high-sensitivity real-time testing in the event of unexpected infectious diseases such as COVID-19, to prevent indiscriminate spread. Taeyoung Moon, lead author of the paper, emphasized the significance of their achievement by stating, “This not only advances basic scientific research in identifying unique properties of materials from molecules to viruses but also facilitates practical applications, enabling rapid detection of a broad spectrum of emerging viruses using a single, tailored sensor.”

The collaborative research was jointly conducted with Professor Dai-Sik Kim’s team from UNIST’s Department of Physics and a team led by Professor Yung Doug Suh from UNIST’s Department of Chemistry who is Deputy Director of Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS). Additionally, Yeonjeong Koo, Mingu Kang, and Hyeongwoo Lee from POSTECH’s Department of Physics carried out measurements. The research findings have recently been published in the international journal Nano Letters.

Aiming to shorten recovery times, an Osaka Metropolitan University-led research group is focusing on plasma irradiation as a treatment method to speed up bone healing.

The Department of Orthopedic Surgery’s Kosuke Saito, a graduate student in the Graduate School of Medicine, Associate Professor Hiromitsu Toyoda, and Professor Hiroaki Nakamura, and Graduate School of Engineering Professor Jun-Seok Oh were among the researchers who used laboratory rats for their experiment.

The researchers broke the legs of the rats in two ways. One group of 24 rats had normal fractures that are generally easy to heal. The other group of 20 rats had fractures known as non-union ones where healing is usually prolonged or does not happen. Some were then irradiated with non-thermal atmospheric-pressure plasma, which didn’t offer the normal fracture group any significant advantages but boosted the healing and recovery time of the rats with non-union fractures. The strength of the healed areas of the irradiated non-union rats was also about 3.5 times stronger than that of the nonirradiated ones.

Furthermore, in vitro study of pre-osteoblastic cells irradiated with the plasma for 5 to 15 seconds showed that the activity of a protein that is an indicator of osteoblast differentiation increased, indicating that maturation of these bone-forming cells was progressing.

“Collaboration between the medical and engineering fields creates new medical technologies that have never before existed,” Professor Toyoda declared. “In the future, combining this treatment method with current fracture treatments is expected to contribute to more reliable bone fusion and shorter recovery times.”

Their findings are set for publication inPLOS ONEon April 16, 2024.

The research team, led by scientists at the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR), used satellite observations and machine learning techniques to produce a unique database of WUI areas and fires worldwide, dating back about two decades.

The overall number of all fires worldwide has declined, as has the total area burned.

However, the scientists found that the fraction of global fires that occur in WUI areas increased by about 23% from 2005 to 2020. Even more significantly, the global area burned by WUI fires during the same time increased by about 35% as a fraction of all burned areas.

The research found that WUI areas are expanding worldwide, especially in rapidly urbanizing regions in Africa. As newly constructed developments move into areas of wild vegetation, the risk of fires increases. The paper did not focus on the role of climate change, although the authors said the database can help scientists better fingerprint the role of climate change in fires.

WUI areas are generally defined as the location where urban land use and wildland vegetation come into contact or intermingle. Fires in such areas are especially dangerous, both because they imperil large numbers of people and structures and because, by burning manufactured materials instead of vegetation, they emit far more toxins than forest and grassland fires.

“Wildland-urban interface fires are a major concern for many people in the United States and globally, and through this study we now know they have increased in recent years and will likely continue doing so in the future,” said NSF NCAR scientist Wenfu Tang, the lead author of the new paper. “This is important as a first step to looking at emissions from these fires and their impacts on human health.”

Funding for the research came from NOAA. The study was published in Environmental Research Letters.

Constructing a global database

WUI fires have caused catastrophic destruction in recent years, sometimes burning down thousands of buildings and killing 100 or more people. Especially destructive fires include the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Australia, which left 173 dead, and the 2017 Pedrosa Grande Fire in Portugal, which killed 66 people. Last year’s Lahaina Fire in Hawaii was the deadliest in the United States in more than a century, killing 100 people and destroying more than 2,200 structures.

To understand more about trends in WUI fires, Tang and her colleagues turned to a global high-resolution map of WUI fires in 2020, which had been created by Franz Schug of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They also analyzed data about Earth’s surface from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite instrument.

By applying machine learning techniques to the map and satellite data, they quantified the relationship of fires with such variables as land cover and population density. They then used those quantitative relationships to generate a global database of WUI areas and WUI fires, going back 20 years at a resolution of 9 kilometers (5.6 miles).

The researchers successfully confirmed the accuracy of the database by comparing it with independent WUI datasets previously developed for a few years within the same time period, including for the continental United States and globally.

In analyzing the new database, the researchers found that WUI areas have grown in all populated continents by 24% from 2001 to 2020, with the largest increase occurring in Africa.

Largely as a result, fires in WUI areas have also become more common. Since 2005, they have increased from 3.5% to 4.3% of all fires. In North America, the WUI fraction of all fire counts is even higher (up to 9%), with WUI fires in 2015-2020 becoming particularly large and more destructive.

“This is the first map of its kind that enables us to look at how WUI fires have been evolving globally over the past two decades,” said NSF NCAR scientist Cenlin He, a co-author of the study. “It shows that WUI fires have increased on every populated continent.”

Even as WUI blazes loom as a greater threat, the scientists noted that fires overall have been on the decline. Since 2005, the total number of fires worldwide decreased by 10%, and the amount of burned areas decreased by 22%, according to satellite observations analyzed in their research.

Tang and her colleagues then turned to the future. They integrated the WUI database with the NSF NCAR-based Community Earth System Model, which simulates global climate and fires, to determine the likely trends in WUI fires through 2030 and 2040.

If WUI areas continue to expand and greenhouse gases continue to be emitted at a high rate, they found that the WUI fraction of burned areas worldwide will likely increase by about 2.6-3.2% by 2040. However, the picture can change somewhat depending on changes in WUI areas and greenhouse gas emissions under different future scenarios, according to their analysis.

“This study is an important step in quantifying WUI fires and how they are changing worldwide,” Tang said. “As WUI areas rapidly expand and WUI fires become more frequent, it is critical to understand the interactions between WUI fires and human activities as well as the impacts of the fires on air quality, human health, and the environment.”