Forensic artist Hew Morrison created the likeness using measurements of the woman’s skull and tissue depth data for Caucasian females. Without DNA analysis, Morrison could not be sure of her precise eye and hair colour, but the image offers a strong indication of her appearance shortly before she died.

Hew Morrison said: “It was interesting to see her face developing. Her left eye was slightly lower, about half a centimetre, than her right eye. This would have been quite noticeable in life.”

New “you are what you eat” isotopic analysis of the young woman’s bones and teeth conducted by bioarchaeologists Dr Sam Leggett and Dr Alice Rose, and archaeologist Dr Emma Brownlee, during PhD research at the University of Cambridge also reveals that she moved to England from somewhere near the Alps, perhaps southern Germany, sometime after she turned 7 years old.

Leggett and Rose also found that once the girl had arrived in England, the proportion of protein in her diet decreased by a small but significant amount. This change occurred close to the end of her young life, showing that the period between her migration and burial near Cambridge was tragically short.

Dr Leggett, now at the University of Edinburgh, said: “She was quite a young girl when she moved, likely from part of southern Germany, close to the Alps, to a very flat part of England. She was probably quite unwell and she travelled a long way to somewhere completely unfamiliar — even the food was different. It must have been scary.”

Previous analysis indicated that the young woman had suffered from illness but her cause of death remains unknown. She was buried in a remarkable way — lying on a carved wooden bed wearing the cross, gold pins (also on display) and fine clothing.

Hers is one of only 18 bed burials ever uncovered in the UK. Her ornate cross, combining gold and garnets (third quarter of the 7^th century), is one of only five of its kind ever found in Britain and identifies her as one of England’s earliest converts to Christianity and as a member of the aristocracy if not royalty. The best known example of such a cross was found in the coffin of St Cuthbert.

In 597 AD, the pope dispatched St Augustine to England on a mission to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxon kings, a process which continued for many decades.

Dr Leggett said: “She must have known that she was important and she had to carry that on her shoulders. Her isotopic results match those of two other women who were similarly buried on beds in this period in Cambridgeshire.

“So it seems that she was part of an elite group of women who probably travelled from mainland Europe, most likely Germany, in the 7^th century, but they remain a bit of a mystery. Were they political brides or perhaps brides of Christ? The fact that her diet changed once she arrived in England suggests that her lifestyle may have changed quite significantly.”

Dr Sam Lucy, a specialist in Anglo-Saxon burial from Newnham College, Cambridge, who published the Anglo-Saxon excavations at Trumpington**, said:

“These are intriguing findings, and it is wonderful to see this collaborative research adding to our knowledge of this period. Combining the new isotopic results with Emma Brownlee’s research into European bed burials really does seem to suggest the movement of a small group of young elite women from a mountainous area in continental Europe to the Cambridge region in the third quarter of the seventh century.

“Southern Germany is a distinct possibility owing to the bed burial tradition known there. Given the increasingly certain association between bed burial, such cross-shaped jewellery, and early Anglo-Saxon Christianity, it is possible that their movement related to pan-European networks of elite women who were heavily involved in the early Church.”

Dr Jody Joy, the exhibition’s co-curator, said: “The story of this young woman goes to the very heart of what our exhibition is all about — new research making visible the lives of people at pivotal moments of Cambridgeshire’s history. MAA holds one of Britain’s most important collections of Early Medieval archaeology and the Trumpington bed burial is so important. It looks like it still has much more to teach us.”

In the exhibition, the ‘Trumpington Cross’ will be displayed together with the delicate gold and garnet pins connected by a gold chain, which were found near the teenager’s neck. These pins probably secured a long veil to an outer garment of fine linen. The pins would have caught the light as she moved.The burial bed’s decorativeheadboard will also be exhibited.

* The image and artefacts from the mysterious woman’s burial — discovered in 2012 by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit at Trumpington Meadows on Cambridge’s southern limits — including her famous cross will be unveiled in a major new exhibition at Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA). ‘Beneath Our Feet: Archaeology of the Cambridge Region’ will run from 21^st June to 14^th April 2024.

**C. Evans, S. Lucy & R. Patten, Riversides: Neolithic Barrows, a Beaker Grave, Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon Burials and Settlement at Trumpington, Cambridge (2018); and S. Lucy, ‘The Trumpington Cross in context’, Anglo-Saxon England (2016).

The research could help improve the utility of robots in the home, allowing them to assist people with tasks like cooking and cleaning. Two robots successfully learned 12 tasks including opening a drawer, oven door and lid; taking a pot off the stove; and picking up a telephone, vegetable or can of soup.

“The robot can learn where and how humans interact with different objects through watching videos,” said Deepak Pathak, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute at CMU’s School of Computer Science. “From this knowledge, we can train a model that enables two robots to complete similar tasks in varied environments.”

Current methods of training robots require either the manual demonstration of tasks by humans or extensive training in a simulated environment. Both are time consuming and prone to failure. Past research by Pathak and his students demonstrated a novel method in which robots learn from observing humans complete tasks. However, WHIRL, short for In-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning, required the human to complete the task in the same environment as the robot.

Pathak’s latest work, Vision-Robotics Bridge, or VRB for short, builds on and improves WHIRL. The new model eliminates the necessity of human demonstrations as well as the need for the robot to operate within an identical environment. Like WHIRL, the robot still requires practice to master a task. The team’s research showed it can learn a new task in as little as 25 minutes.

“We were able to take robots around campus and do all sorts of tasks,” said Shikhar Bahl, a Ph.D. student in robotics. “Robots can use this model to curiously explore the world around them. Instead of just flailing its arms, a robot can be more direct with how it interacts.”

To teach the robot how to interact with an object, the team applied the concept of affordances. Affordances have their roots in psychology and refer to what an environment offers an individual. The concept has been extended to design and human-computer interaction to refer to potential actions perceived by an individual.

For VRB, affordances define where and how a robot might interact with an object based on human behavior. For example, as a robot watches a human open a drawer, it identifies the contact points — the handle — and the direction of the drawer’s movement — straight out from the starting location. After watching several videos of humans opening drawers, the robot can determine how to open any drawer.

The team used videos from large datasets such as Ego4D and Epic Kitchens. Ego4D has nearly 4,000 hours of egocentric videos of daily activities from across the world. Researchers at CMU helped collect some of these videos. Epic Kitchens features similar videos capturing cooking, cleaning and other kitchen tasks. Both datasets are intended to help train computer vision models.

“We are using these datasets in a new and different way,” Bahl said. “This work could enable robots to learn from the vast amount of internet and YouTube videos available.”

More information is available on the project’s website and in a paper presented in June at the Conference on Vision and Pattern Recognition.

Amid the Jovian system, Europa is of particular interest to scientists because of the strong evidence for nutrients, water and energy to potentially provide a habitable environment for some form of life beyond Earth. In addition, Europa is believed to be made up into four layers (from surface to center): an ice shell, salt water ocean, rocky mantle, and metallic core.

Like Earth, Europa’s ocean touches the rocky seafloor, which may allow for rock-water chemistry favorable for life. Some scientists also believe that the seafloor may host volcanoes, which can provide more energy and nutrients for a potential biosphere.

ASU scientists Kevin Trinh, Carver Bierson and Joe O’Rourke of the School of Earth and Space Exploration investigated the consequences of Europa forming with low initial temperatures, using computer code that Trinh wrote. Their findings have been recently published in Science Advances.

Hydrated rocks may be a key ingredient

Europa may have a metamorphic origin for the ocean. While some scientists speculated this, Trinh and his team show that if Europa indeed formed from hydrated rocks (i.e., rocks have hydrogen and oxygen), then enough of Europa’s interior should get hot enough to release water directly from the hydrated rocks to form the ocean and ice shell.

“The origin of Europa’s ocean is important because the moon’s potential to support life ultimately depends on the chemical ingredients and physical conditions during the ocean formation process,” said Kevin Trinh, graduate associate at ASU’s School Of Earth and Space Exploration.

Metallic core formation requires high temperatures

Many scientists studying this icy moon assumed that Europa formed with a metallic core during or shortly after accretion. This ASU study contradicts that prediction, instead arguing that Europa may not have started forming its metallic core until billions of years after accretion (if it happened at all).

“For most worlds in the solar system we tend to think of their internal structure as being set shortly after they finish forming. This work is very exciting because it reframes Europa as a world whose interior has been slowly evolving over its whole lifetime. This opens doors for future research to understand how these changes might be observed in the Europa we see today,” said Carver Bierson, postdoctoral research scholar at ASU’s School Of Earth and Space Exploration.

The existence of a metallic core is deeply tied to Europa’s internal heat, which may also be used to drive seafloor volcanism and contribute to a habitable seafloor environment. However, it is unclear whether Europa generated enough heat to form such a core. Trinh’s code calculates how heat is generated and distributed throughout a moon, which uses the same governing equations that many geodynamicists used for decades. The team’s novel result, however, comes from challenging the assumptions common to Europa modeling: A small moon like Europa could form as a cold mixture of ice, rock, and metal.

However, all of these processes require a hot interior. A small moon like Europa (~1% of Earth’s mass) may not have enough energy to trigger or sustain Earth-like processes — metallic core formation, seafloor volcanism, and ongoing rock-water geochemistry — which implies that Europa’s habitable potential is uncertain. The exact time at which Europa formed determines how much heat is available from the radioactive decay of a short-lived isotope of aluminum. Tidal heating (from gravitational interactions with Jupiter and other moons) also governs how quickly Europa’s interior separates into distinct layers.

Europa’s seafloor may be cool, hydrated, and experience limited (if any) seafloor volcanism

This study implies that there may be limited hydrothermal activity and seafloor volcanism at Europa, which may hinder habitability. However, confident predictions require more data.

“Europa is not just a wet, baby Earth. It is its own special world, full of mysteries to unravel,” said Joseph O’Rourke, Assistant Professor at ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. In October 2024, NASA plans to launch a spacecraft called Europa Clipper, which should arrive at Europa in April 2030. With the recent work by Trinh, Bierson and O’Rourke, scientists will be better equipped to interpret incoming data from Europa Clipper, whose main objective is to evaluate Jupiter’s icy moon Europa for the potential conditions to host life.