Sponging up sea water pollution

Good news! This is very preliminary, but promising research!

"... Sponges filter water through their pores, removing heavy metals, organics and bacteria while recycling nutrients.

Since shipping ports suffer from high concentrations of oil and toxins, researchers thought hardy sponges might provide a natural cleaning service. A team collected members of five sponge species for introduction to the Mediterranean port Marina Palamós. They began by growing the sponges on ceramic plates in the lab, then transplanted 42 specimens onto metal grids coated in calcium carbonate which were located within the port. ...

But the chicken liver sponge, Chondrosia reniformis, had a 92% survival rate over 455 days, even reproducing asexually. The sponge also showed an ability to “creep” away from threats such as pollution and UV radiation to more hidden crevices. ..."

"... “Here we show that some sponge species have exceptional potential for use in the restoration of degraded harbor habitats,” ...

“Unlike many sponges, the chicken kidney sponge can ‘creep’ away if local conditions deteriorate – for example, when nearby organisms compete. It can also relocate from the exposed upper surface of a rock, where it is subjected to UV radiation, polluted sediments, and predators, to sheltered crevices where these stresses are greatly reduced.

It also reproduces asexually by fission: this allows populations to expand rapidly and later reproduce sexually, increasing the chances of successful fertilization.” ..."

From the abstract:

"Harbor infrastructures impose strong environmental stress on coastal marine communities, limiting the persistence of many native species and hindering ecological restoration.

Identifying resilient habitat-engineering organisms is therefore key to developing effective and affordable renaturalization strategies. In this study, we evaluated the suitability of five Mediterranean sponge species to withstand the process of collection, laboratory manipulation, and transplantation to a recreational harbor, where they were monitored over 455 days using image-based morphometric analyses coupled with computational modeling.

Among the species tested, only Chondrosia reniformis showed high resilience under harbor conditions, with 91.7% survival. In contrast, all individuals of Corticium candelabrum, Crambe crambe, Scalarispongia scalaris, and Ircinia oros died during laboratory preparation or shortly after deployment in the harbor. Individuals of C. reniformis initially underwent a moderate size reduction but subsequently stabilized their biomass.

The sponges demonstrated remarkable morphological plasticity, including continuous substrate crawling (up to 12.7 cm of total displacement) and the capacity to recover from disease.

Some individuals underwent body fission [asexual reproduction?] during warm months, generating clonal offspring that nearly doubled the size of the experimental population in the harbor.

Collectively, the results indicate that the high survival of this species in the degraded harbor environment, together with its resistance to disease, its ability to proliferate clonally, and its capacity to reposition itself for improved environmental adaption, makes C. reniformis a highly suitable candidate as putative habitat engineer in future multitrophic approaches aimed at enhancing biodiversity and renaturalizing degraded harbor environments and other anthropogenically impacted coastal habitats."

ScienceAdviser

Chicken kidney sponge could be ‘outstanding’ at cleaning up polluted ports "Hardy sea sponge shows great promise as an ecosystem engineer to clean up and rewild degraded harbors"

In search of resilient sponges as candidate habitat engineers for the renaturalization of polluted harbor environments (open access)

Specimen of the chicken kidney sponge Chondrosia reniformis transplanted into the harbor

Odysseus journey

What the eponymous movie may not show! 

Source

Libya and Syria join Turkey’s flagship military exercise in historic firsts

Turkey, a NATO member, run by Ottoman sultan Erdogan!

"In a pair of milestones that underscore Ankara’s growing ambitions as a regional military player, Libya and Syria have deployed forces to Turkey’s EFES-2026 Combined Joint Live-Fire Field Exercise — the first time either country has participated in a military exercise on foreign soil.

The live-fire phase of EFES-2026 ran through May 21 along the Aegean coast near İzmir, making it one of Turkey’s largest combined and joint exercises to date. Conducted under the Aegean Army Command, the drill spanned two phases — a computer-assisted command post phase in April and the live-fire field phase — drawing over 10,000 personnel from 50 nations to the İzmir Gulf and Doğanbey training ranges.

The Libyan participation carries particular symbolic weight. A total of 502 Libyan troops — 331 from the country’s eastern forces and 171 from the west — are training side by side under a single Libyan flag. It is the first time the two rival factions have jointly deployed abroad. ...

Syria’s participation is smaller but arguably more important diplomatically. Approximately 50 Syrian military personnel took part, making the newly reconstituted Syrian army’s first-ever exercise outside Syrian territory. ..."

Libya and Syria join Turkey’s flagship military exercise in historic firsts

More mysteries about the Phoenicians

Amazing stuff!

"Scholars have long assumed the Phoenicians—famed for their maritime prowess and the invention of an alphabet ... descended from the Canaanites mentioned in the Bible. But a study of hundreds of ancient genomes finds that, although Phoenician culture and language may have originated in the land of Canaan, most Phoenician people did not.

Phoenician culture began to spread westward across the Mediterranean beginning around 1000 B.C.E. From Sicily to Spain and across North Africa, new coastal towns were built in the Phoenician style, with Phoenician artifacts and agricultural practices in evidence. ...

To find out more, geneticists worked with archaeologists in Europe and North Africa to analyze more than 200 skeletons excavated from Phoenician-style graves. In a twist, the skeletons’ DNA shows that most of them lacked Levantine ancestry, drawing from a mix of Mediterranean populations instead. The finding supports the idea that whenever small groups of Phoenician settlers founded colonies, locals eagerly joined them and adopted their way of life.

The study also affirms that Phoenicians traveled widely. In every cemetery the researchers looked at, none of the men shared similar Y chromosomes, suggesting that Phoenician men didn’t stay in one place for multiple generations. The team even found two second cousins who lived a sea apart, with one buried in Sicily and the other in North Africa. “This was a culture that was constantly integrating people,” ..."

From the abstract:

"The maritime Phoenician civilization from the Levant transformed the entire Mediterranean during the first millennium bce However, the extent of human movement between the Levantine Phoenician homeland and Phoenician–Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean has been unclear in the absence of comprehensive ancient DNA studies.

Here, we generated genome-wide data for 210 individuals, including 196 from 14 sites traditionally identified as Phoenician and Punic in the Levant, North Africa, Iberia, Sicily, Sardinia and Ibiza, and an early Iron Age individual from Algeria. Levantine Phoenicians made little genetic contribution to Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean between the sixth and second centuries bce, despite abundant archaeological evidence of cultural, historical, linguistic and religious links.

Instead, these inheritors of Levantine Phoenician culture derived most of their ancestry from a genetic profile similar to that of Sicily and the Aegean. Much of the remaining ancestry originated from North Africa, reflecting the growing influence of Carthage. However, this was a minority contributor of ancestry in all of the sampled sites, including in Carthage itself.

Different Punic sites across the central and western Mediterranean show similar patterns of high genetic diversity. We also detect genetic relationships across the Mediterranean, reflecting shared demographic processes that shaped the Punic world."

ScienceAdviser

Most Phoenicians did not come from the land of Canaan, challenging historical assumptions

Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors (no public access)

A cosmic neutrino of unknown origins smashes energy records detected by the new deep-sea neutrino telescope KM3Net

Amazing stuff!

"Packing a punch of some 220 million billion electron volts, this particle was around 20 times as energetic as the highest energy cosmic neutrinos seen before ... The particle was glimpsed by the partially built Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope, or KM3NeT. ..."

From the abstract:

"The detection of cosmic neutrinos with energies above a teraelectronvolt (TeV) offers a unique exploration into astrophysical phenomena. Electrically neutral and interacting only by means of the weak interaction, neutrinos are not deflected by magnetic fields and are rarely absorbed by interstellar matter: their direction indicates that their cosmic origin might be from the farthest reaches of the Universe.

High-energy neutrinos can be produced when ultra-relativistic cosmic-ray protons or nuclei interact with other matter or photons, and their observation could be a signature of these processes.

Here we report an exceptionally high-energy event observed by KM3NeT, the deep-sea neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean Sea, which we associate with a cosmic neutrino detection.

We detect a muon with an estimated energy of 120 petaelectronvolts (PeV). In light of its enormous energy and near-horizontal direction, the muon most probably originated from the interaction of a neutrino of even higher energy in the vicinity of the detector.

The cosmic neutrino energy spectrum measured up to now falls steeply with energy. However, the energy of this event is much larger than that of any neutrino detected so far.

This suggests that the neutrino may have originated in a different cosmic accelerator than the lower-energy neutrinos, or this may be the first detection of a cosmogenic neutrino, resulting from the interactions of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays with background photons in the Universe."

A cosmic neutrino of unknown origins smashes energy records "Such high-energy neutrinos could offer insight into the universe’s most cataclysmic phenomena"

Observation of an ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrino with KM3NeT (open access)

Fig. 1: Views of the event.

World's oldest mammalian ancestor discovered on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca

Apparently, Mallorca is not only a favorite tourist destination for snowbirds!

"An international research team ... have described a fossil animal that lived between 270 and 280 million years ago in present-day Mallorca. ...

The discovery is exceptional, not only because of the number of fossil remains found, but also because it is the oldest known gorgonopsian on the planet, the lineage of saber-toothed predators that would eventually give rise to mammals. ...

"The large number of bone remains is surprising. We have found everything from fragments of skull, vertebrae, and ribs to a very well-preserved femur. In fact, when we started this excavation, we never thought we would find so many remains of an animal of this type in Mallorca," ..."

From the abstract:

"Therapsids were a dominant component of middle–late Permian terrestrial ecosystems worldwide, eventually giving rise to mammals during the early Mesozoic. However, little is currently known about the time and place of origin of Therapsida. Here we describe a definitive therapsid from the lower–?middle Permian palaeotropics, a partial skeleton of a gorgonopsian from the island of Mallorca, western Mediterranean.

This specimen represents, to our knowledge, the oldest gorgonopsian record worldwide, and possibly the oldest known therapsid. Using emerging relaxed clock models, we provide a quantitative timeline for the origin and early diversification of therapsids, indicating a long ghost lineage leading to the evolutionary radiation of all major therapsid clades within less than 10 Myr, in the aftermath of Olson’s Extinction. Our findings place this unambiguous early therapsid in an ancient summer wet biome of equatorial Pangaea, thus suggesting that the group originated in tropical rather than temperate regions."

World's oldest mammalian ancestor discovered in Mallorca

Early–middle Permian Mediterranean gorgonopsian suggests an equatorial origin of therapsids (open access)

Fig. 1: Geological context of the gorgonopsian from Mallorca.

Fig. 3: Most relevant elements of DA21/17-01-01 and silhouette showing their positions

Ancient sunken cargo ship found 90 km off of Israel's coast about 1.8 km deep and about 3,300 years old

Amazing stuff!

"The cargo, containing hundreds of containers still intact, was found during a standard survey executed by Energean, the natural gas company that operates the Karish, Karish North, Katlan, and Tanin gas rigs off the coast of Israel. ...
“This is both the first and the oldest ship found in the Eastern Mediterranean’s deep sea, ninety kilometers from the nearest shore.” ...

“This is a world-class, historical-altering discovery,” he continued. “This find reveals to us as never before the ancient mariners’ navigational skills – capable of traversing the Mediterranean Sea without a line of sight of any coast.” ...

A special tool was built specifically to extract artifacts without harming the entire assemblage.

“The robot’s survey and mapping of the site clarified this to be a sunken ship, ca. 12-14 meters long, which was transporting hundreds of vessels, of which only some are visible above the ocean floor,” ... “The muddy bottom conceals a second layer of vessels, and it seems that the wooden beams of the ship are also buried within the mud.” ...

Only two other shipwrecks carrying cargo from the Late Bronze Age have been discovered in the Mediterranean Sea: the Cape Gelidonya boat and the Uluburun boat, both located off the coast of Turkey. However, both were found near the shore and were “accessible using normal diving equipment,”  ..."

Ancient sunken ship found off of Israel's Mediterranean coast - The Jerusalem Post The ancient shipwreck was carrying hundreds of intact containers from 3,300-3,400 years ago, and revealed advanced navigation skills and significant trade connections.

EU Parliament President Roberta Metsola Tells Kyiv Post: ‘Ukraine is Top Priority For Us’

Bravo! The lady is from the island of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea!

"... "...  It is a clear sign of our support to Ukraine and of a global effort to end the unjustified Russian war against peaceful Ukraine." ..."

Roberta Metsola Tells Kyiv Post: ‘Ukraine is Top Priority For Us’

The First Neolithic Boats in the Mediterranean about 7000 years ago

 Amazing stuff! 

"More than 7,000 years ago, people navigated the Mediterranean Sea using technologically sophisticated boats ...

Many of the most important civilizations in Europe originated on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. During the Neolithic, communities clearly traveled and traded across the water, as evidenced by watercraft in the archeological record and the presence of settlements on coasts and islands. In this study, ... provide new insights into the history of seafaring technology through analysis of canoes at the Neolithic lakeshore village of La Marmotta, near Rome, Italy.

Excavation at this site has recovered five canoes built from hollowed-out trees (dugout canoes) dating between 5700-5100BC. Analysis of these boats reveals that they are built from four different types of wood, unusual among similar sites, and that they include advanced construction techniques such as transverse reinforcements. One canoe is also associated with three T-shaped wooden objects, each with a series of holes that were likely used to fasten ropes tied to sails or other nautical elements. These features, along with previous reconstruction experiments, indicate these were seaworthy vessels, a conclusion supported by the presence at the site of stone tools linked to nearby islands."

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0299765 (This article is embargoed until 3/20/2024)

Canoe Marmotta 1. On display in the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.