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moves of Asia's dancing apes. Most apes don't know how to dance, but female crested gibbons of the genus Nomascus, the long limbed primates, known for their acrobatics swinging from tree to tree, regularly perform a series of boombents that can only be described as the robot. Scientists recently analyzed dozens of videos of mature, female crested gibbons living in zoos and rescue centers around the world, and interviewed researchers who had observed the dancing in the wilds of China

and Vietnam. Their study, released in the journal Primates, found that the dances follow clear rhythmic patterns. In captivity, the gibbons generally direct their routines at caretakers most likely to socialize in solicit snacks in the wild, they seem to dance as a mating invitation. This is especially puzzling, says zoologists and study co author Kai Kasper of Germany's Heinrich

Heina University Duzeldorff. Most crested gibbons live in small family groups that form around stable monogamous pairs, which means the females don't have to compete for the attention of their partners, says Kaspar, Dancing may just ease the tension. This by Kelsey Noah Kowski. Next. How to photograph a firestorm. Scientists say that the fires ravaging the Western United States are burning differently these days. For one's landscape photographer, documenting the

aftermath requires a new approach as well. This by Brian Resnik. Today's fires are different. Blazes have scarred and scorched the Western United States for ages, but for scientists who study extreme climate events, like UCLA's Daniel Swain, the wild flowers are now defying historic precedent, moving and growing with devastating intensity. As Swain puts it, these new fires are doing seemingly

impossible things. Take northern California's twenty twenty gigafire, the first in the state's modern fire tracking history to burn more than a million acres, a footprint larger than Rhode Island. Its size wasn't unprecedented. The speed of the destruction was two hundred years ago, you probably would have seen million acre fires sometimes in California. Swain says, they wouldn't have burned a million acres in a few days, It would

have taken months. More recently, Swain was monitoring the twenty twenty four Bridge fire raging north of Los Angeles via satellite thermal imagery. On his screen, he could see black splotches on a map that indicated areas burning at temperatures upwards of several hundred year greeze, temperatures so hot that you're either looking at a volcanic eruption or a wildfire. In just as second day, the fire expanded like an ink stain through cotton, running across forty five thousand acres

about seventy square miles. That burn rate isn't unheard of. It occurs with grass fires racing over flat plains, but this was burning forest in some of the steepest mountains of North America. The fire, Swain says, had to burn up Mount Baldy and down Mount Baldy, and then up the next mountain and down the next mountain, and up

and down. Researchers have been tracking fires with precision from satellites for more than forty years, just a small slice of time geographically speaking, but the trends they see are clear. Fires are hotter, burning faster, and destroying more property. Nearly every year for the past decade, there's been at least one town in California or a large part of town

completely decimated by wildfire that didn't use to happen. Swain says, the changes we're seeing in deckscades are changes that would take millennia to many millennia to unfold in a more

typical geological history context. When National Geographic Explorer and photographer Matt Black saw these extraordinary changes happening so close to his home in California's Sierra Nevada, a four hundred plus mile mountain range that stretches along the interior of the state, he took on the challenge of capturing the aftermath of the fires. But as someone who shoots in black and white,

he was concerned about an obvious comparison. Over the past century, no one has taken such iconic black and white images of Sierra Nevada landscapes as ansel Atoms. His work was integral to the modern conservation movement, inspiring generations of people to work together to protect precious wilderness areas, but photographing the landscape in a way reminiscent of the Atoms did

not feel like it was matching the moment. Black says, Adams images convey a post guard perfect vision of imposing permanence, that such places might stay untouched if we protected them, but climate devastation has destroyed that ideal. So Black turned to an unconventional tool. An industrial thermal camera more typically used to inspect steel forging equipment. While a traditional camera uses light to make images, a thermal camera uses heat.

The hottest objects in a thermal image are usually exposed in bright white, the coolest in inky black. Beyond its specialized lens and sensor, Black's hand held camera is fairly conventional, yet when it's trained on the natural world, the thermal images it produces are unexpectedly beautiful, but there's a sinister quality to them too. An ever present reminder of what made them. Our atmospheres holding more heat than it used to, and some portion of the heat could radiate in each image.

They're built out of heat that came from elsewhere. That came from the co two in the skies above, that came from the exhaust pipes in the city below. Black says taking the camera on trucks through burned down forest felt like a revelation. What was amazing to me was the way it reacted to dead trees, He says, The charred black trunk's trap heat, so when you look through the thermal camera, they become the brightest points on the landscape. They appear alive again, but a ghostly kind of life,

shining spectrally among the ruin. Next what do the world's oldest tattoos mean? A new breed of archaeologists wants to unravel some ancient mysteries by studying long overlooked body art. This by Sam Keane. Some years back, a man wandered into Aaron deeeder Wolf's office in Nashville at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology to hand over a two foot portion of a Macedon dusk. The man had spotted the relic poking out of a riverbank and saw it off the

exposed end. Removing the tusk sullied its scientific value, so deeeder Wolf started trotting it out during talks at grade schools, until a kid dropped it and its outer layers shattered. For many archaeologists, that might have marked the end of the tusk's usefulness, but not for deeeder Wolf. He salvaged a few shorts and later transformed them into tattooed needles, carving each with flint and smoothing it on sandstone. But when he tried tattooing a colleague with one, it went poorly.

Microfractures in the ivory snagged skin each time he withdrew the tip it was, he recalls a bloody mess. By day, deeterer Wolf surveys sights to assess the archaeological impacts of new construction, but in his spare hours he's among the foremost experts on ancient tattooing, a field formally discounted but

increasingly recognized as offering vital insight into cultures worldwide. Once an outlier, he's now part of an emerging cohort of researchers showing the practice was more widespread than archaeologists ever knew and helping reveal new meaning in a historically suppressed art. Hostility to tattoo research has colonialist roots, with missionaries and

officials having considered the practice of barbaric. As archaeologisgy emerged as a discipline in the nineteenth century, its practitioners seemed to inherit this disdain, mentioning tattoos in their work rarely and pejoratively a practice of so called savages and deviants, and as Deeeder Wolf learned early in his career, that attitude lingered into the twenty first century now forty nine.

He started as a Mayanist before switching focus to the pre colonial southeastern United States, but personal fondness for tattoos he has a dozen drove his side research. After he organized his first conference session on ancient tattooing in two thousand and nine, an older attendee buttonholed him. The guy told me there are more tattoos of ancient art on graduate students than there ever were tattoos in the ancient world. Deeter Wolf says he was one hundred percent wrong, and

it's not like the evidence was hidden. He just didn't care to engage with it. In that lack of engagement, Dieter Wolf says, has led archaeologists to overlook critical details about those their striving to understand. As tattoos throughout history have helped define group identity, marked rites of passage signaled spiritual power, one way to combat colleagues dismissive stance. Peter Wolf went looking for how best to identify tattoo tools

in the archaeological record. Doing so is tricky, since a pointing instrument from a a dig site might have been used to apply ink to skin, or it might have been an all or a sewing needle. How to tell the difference. Dieter Wulf started by assembling other archaeologists and researchers who shared his interest, and together they launched a series of experiments carried out over the better part of a decade. Some formal and controlled, others were at hack

for each. He made tattoo needles out of materials that ancient closeures may have used, feather shafts, deer bones, fish teeth, cactus thorns, and yes, gastodon tusk shards. They applied either modern tattoo ink or a mix of charcoal's soot and water what most ancient cultures would likely have used. Then he tried the tools out on volunteers and on pigskin, as well as on his own skin. The feather proved

too soft, like tattooing with a sharpie. Deeeder Wolf says he suspects a historical account that mentions tattooing with feathers was mistaken. The tusk was a debacle, but thorn and bone tools worked nicely. The porous structure of bone held ink particularly well, and when Deeter Wulf and his team analyzed some of the tools microscopically, they noted distinct patterns

of wear. Tattooing blunted and smoothed the tips, and drove in tiny charcoal fragments to day, The published bindings helped archaeologists distinguish what is and isn't an ancient tattoo needle, but some insight into millennia old methods can only be gleaned from ancient bodies. Enter Butzi, the fifty three hundred year old ice man discovered in the Alps in nineteen ninety one. Researchers analyzing the sixty one lines and crosses

spread across his body. Initially suggested Botsi's tattoos were applied by slicing his skin with sharp stones, then rubbing soot into the wounds. Decades later, Deeter Wolf designed an experiment that would allow him to test that theory, collaborating with Maya Siluc Koch Madsten, a traditional Inuit tattoo artist from Greenland, and Daniel Ride, a tattoo artist then based in New Zealand.

Using eight techniques, including poking with a needle and the slice and rubbed method, Ride gave himself eight identical tattoos of stacked triangles on his left thigh. He noted how long each took to heel, along with how much pain he felt. The work to grueling twelve hours, though time and pain weren't equally distributed, some methods took minutes. One Inuit technique executed with cock Medisene's guid guidance involved sowing

his skin with ink soaked thread and lasted three agonizing hours. Afterward, Redae says his thighs looked like Swiss cheese. Dieter Wolf later compared magnified images of Otzie's tattoos with Redays. On the latter, he saw line segments for the slice and rubb tattoos tapering into wisps on the needle poked ones segments had blunt, rounded ends that matched Oatzie's. The Iceman's tattoos, Deeterwolf concluded were not sliced in, but carefully strippled with needles.

The study shed light on Ossy's culture and provided the first published reference set of what differing tattoo applications looked like microscopically, now used by archaeologists to analyze tattoos in other mummies. Anne Austin, a co author of Deeeder Wolf's and an egyptologist at the University of Missouri Saint Louis, says tattoos can convey details about societies that aren't found elsewhere. The things you write down on skin, she says, are

different than things you write down on paper. Egyptian texts, for example, have little to say about the role of women in the clergy. But Austin, who has found some of the most extensive evidence of tattooing on Egyptian mummies, has studied a mummified Egyptian woman whose thirty plus tattoos of hieroglyphs, musical instruments, snake deities, and more indicates she

was something like a priestess. Tattoos over the mummy's voice box, Austin says, suggests she had an active speaking or singing role, her voice imbued with sacred power to coach's new information out of old mummies and tools. Tattoo archaeologists are increasingly turning to imagining to imaging technology. Deeter Wolf and a Canadian colleague, Benoi Robitale, recently used infrared sensitive cameras to find hidden ink among one of the world's largest collections

of mummies from coastal Peru. Some specimens date back twenty four hundred years, their tattoos obscured by the darkening and weathering of skin over time, the pair are finding. Robitai says that religious iconography and tattoos stayed consistent over almost two millennia, suggesting the local beliefs persevered even during periods

of invasion and conflict. The frontiers of the discipline likely involve applying such modern techniques to more museum collections, and as new generation of tattoo savvy scholars are reassessing what lies in tombs and sarcophagi, they're also belatedly recognizing and collaborating with indigenous stewards of ancestral tattooing techniques. As indigenous people, we've kind of been taught that there were people before

and then there's us. Cock Medicine says. This science is building a bridge between the two so we can feel connected to our ancestors again. Opportunities for more discovery seem almost limitless, Geter Wolff says, noting that researchers have found more evidence of tattoos on mummies in the past five years than was documented over the previous one hundred and fifty. We've got this outrageous data set, he says, Now, what are we going to do with it next? Searching for

Sleep Mode by Adam Piore. Putting humans into hibernation is a sci fi concept that could revolutionize medicine and transform space travel. It's also a lot closer to becoming real than you might think. The test subject had slipped into what physician Clinton Callaway describes as a twilight kind of sleep eighteen hours after Callaway's team at the University of Pittsburgh's Applied Physiology Lab started the man on a sedative

that suppressed his body's natural shivering response. His internal temperature had sunk from ninety eight point six degrees fahrenheit to ninety five degrees fahrenheit. His heart rate and blood pressure had dropped. His metabolism and along with it, his need for food, oxygen, and carbon dioxide removal had plunged twenty percent.

Yet the subject could still rise from his bed, shuffle to the bathroom to empty his bladder, and when hungry, ring a bell to ask for food or a drink, alleviating the need for a catheter or intravenous lines and ensuring he could still respond and react. The man was one of five exceedingly fit volunteers raging in age from twenty one to fifty four, who quietly doozed in the

semi darkness. Pretend astronauts on a nine month journey to Mars Nassau had tasked Callaway, an expert in cardiac care and induced typothermia, with figuring out a simple way to put human beings into a state that mimics some of the key features of hibernation with out the use of a ventilator or immobilizing drugs and careful dosing of dex metodonomine. Did the trick. His subject. Callaway says now was woozy, dreamy, but still able to function in an emergency if required,

just like a bear. Humans in hibernation mode are a classic staple of space travel and science fiction movies, whether it's Hal nine thousand fatally unplugging a few of his passengers in two thousand and one A Space Odyssey, or Chris Pratt waking up Jennifer Lawrence too soon because he's

lonely in passengers. But NASA has grand ambitions of sending astronauts to Mars for reel as soon as the twenty thirties, and putting humans in hibernation mode for real could be the key to achieving it, which is why both NASA and the European Space Agency are supporting studies like Callaways. A bear like state of hibernation could, in theory, help astronauts snooze through the tum of extended space travel and

limit crew made conflict there. Slowed metabolism could help reduce cargo missions would require less food in oxygen and consequently less fuel. Space Agency funded research is even exploring whether slowing a person's metabolism weakens the health impact of harmful radiation. This would be an encouraging boost for the viability of extended travel through space, where radiation is as much as

two hundred times greater than on Earth. In fact, when it comes to achieving the dream of crew missions to Mars, says ESA's chief exploration scientists, Angelique than Omburgen, space radiation is a big showstopper. Scientists aren't studying hibernation just so we can ship astronauts ever deeper into space, though its

physiological superpowers could save countless lives here on Earth. If we can unlock the secrets to the mysterious molecular level changes that shift animals in and out of a state of hibernation or torpor, a miraculously reversible state of dormancy characterized by extreme lethargy, a lowered body temperature and metabolic rate, and host of other remarkable changes. It's a well established principle.

Calaua explains that at low temperatures, like in hibernating animals, you tolerate lack of oxygen lack of blood flow better and longer. But why why don't bears muscles atrophy when they sleep? How come their blood doesn't clot and what

triggers the process to begin with. In their hunt for answers, scientists are now inching closer to their most ambitious discovery yet, A central switch in the brains of hibernating animals that activates the various beneficial phenomena of hibernation all at once.

Mimicking the colder body temperature of bears during hibernation, for instance, could lessen the severity of reperfusion injuries, the often devastating damage that occurs after cardiac arrest when blood flow is restored to the oxygen deprived tissues of the body, setting off massive inflammation, oxid exeitative stress, and cell death. It could also help extend the narrow window of time that doctors have to provide critical care during strokes and heart attacks.

A clearer understanding of how hibernating bears preserve muscle mass and turned insulin resistance on and off could have other benefits. It might help us treat chronic obesity and diabetes in humans. Ice you patients can lose more than ten percent of their muscle mass in seven days. Could an induced state of hibernation staller even stop the decline. Scientists are searching beyond bears for the answers, because, of course, bears aren't

the only animals that hibernate. A team at Colorado State University is investigating how the thirteen lined ground squirrel can rapidly fatten and then switch off its appetite before hibernation for clues to combating obesity. UCLA research examining the genes of yellow bellied marmots have recently found that epigenic epigenetic aging is essentially stalled during the seven to eight months

they hibernate each year. Experts in Germany are exploring how bats maintain blood circulation at low temperatures with an eye to human hibernation applications, and biologists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks are studying a squirrel that could drop its body temperature by seventy degrees and heart rate down to five beats permitted, and survive eight months in subzero temperatures.

Their goal is to develop a hibernation mimetic drug that might safely allow clinicians to place humans into an immediate state of hibernation without a long prep time in a rural hospital lacking advanced equipment, or even in an ambulance racing through the streets. It would instantly dial down cellular metabolism, slow cell death, and catalyze a whole host of other

biol logical processes associated with hibernation. Callaway's twilight sleep experiment provides a glimpse into what might be possible for humans, but what happens in the lab and in the wild are clearly two different things. Bears don't need drugs to settle in for the winner. They have a natural torpor switch, he says, which is flipped through some process that we

don't fully understand. And though their unruly bears still offer a good comparison for our own potential, they're at least closer to us in size than a rodent, and perhaps most critically, their temperature drop during sleep deep sleep is

well within the range of human survivability. One bright afternoon in late March, biologist Haiko Jansen stood outside of fence dan Pasture at the Washington State University Bear Research, Education and Conservation Center in Pullman and watched as a shaggy, three hundred pound female grizzly bear named Kiyo struggled to eat a marshmallow. Other than a serious case of BedHead

than the glacier pace of quees chewing. There were few visible clothes that the dangerous, disheveled giant with the four inch claws was undergoing a profound metamorphosis. Looking from the outside, little about Hugh's metabolic process seems applicable to humans. Ten days earlier, she rose from her bed of straw and began to slowly work through a feast of bare kibble, apples and elk bones and leg meat. It was her first meal in five months. Her salverary glands were still sluggish.

Then she pooped out a fecal plug composed of plants, dried feces, dead cells, and hair lodged in her glower intestine. Those three key activities rise, eat, poop out the plug seemed to have helped to flip a series of microscopic genetic switches inside her cells, catalyzing the slow motion reversal of a host of bizarre biological cycles her body had

entered into over the winter. Q's metabolism, which had been operated at one quarter its normal speed, kicked into gear more than doubling by the time she was struggling with the marshmallow. Her core body temperature hovering about twelve degrees below normal, began to rise. Two of her heart's four chambers, which had all but shut down for the winter, reopened for business. Her fat cells, for months miraculously resistant to insulin, the hormone that tells the body when to absorb sugars,

started to respond to it again. Her appetite, absent for months, rumbled to life five months earlier, back in November, when Ki lay down and packed it in for the winter, she stopped eating. Her gut entered stasis, her saliva glands shut down, and she began living on her own body fat. Over the following months, she burned roughly twenty percent, or seventy pounds of her body weight. To facilitate this, her body became resistant to insulin, a good thing for hibinator's.

Humans who become insulin resistance often developed diabetes, clearly a bad thing. Bears can switch that resistance and on and off depending on the season, without health consequences. If we could understand how, maybe we could figure out a way for humans to do it too. The notion got a boost of confidence in twenty eighteen when a Canadian group

published the first complete grizzly bear DNA sequence. A year later, Jansen headed up a team that used a technique known as RNA sequencing to identify which genes are activated in beer, muscle, fat, and liver tissue samples before, during, and after hibernation. They found seasonal changes in more than ten thousand of a

grizzly's thirty thousand, seven hundred and twenty three genes. Now, in order to decode how bears switch insulin resistance on and off, Jansen has been extracting stem cells from blood samples collected from Pullman's bears at different times of year, methodically eliminating individual genes, and then growing colonies of fat

cells in peatrie dishes to see what happens. We're not saying that we'll find something that can reverse diabetes, Jansen offers, but at least by looking at a model system the cells that change their sensitivity, we can begin to develop some clues as to what's going on. Q's cardiac function may also yield insights that help treat human blood clotting disorders. While Q was hibernating, her heart rate slowed from eighty to one hundred beats per minute to about ten Normally.

This would cause her blood to clot into dangerous blockages and induce a stroke. If that happened to us, as Jansen, we'd be dead. But hibernating bears also experience a remarkable drop in their blood clotting platelets. It was Q's ability to maintain muscle tone, however, that particularly transfixed some of her researchers. Unlike humans, who began to lose muscle mass within a week of inactivity, Q rose from her hibernation bed as fit as if she'd spent the winter chasing chipmunks.

Up in Alaska, researchers vaudem Fidu Goorov and Anna Goropashnaya are trying to unlock the mystery of how beers do this and test the hypothesis that humans might be able as well. The Russian born husband and wife teams specialized in evolutionary genetics at the University of Alaska's Institute of Arctic Biology IAB in Fairbanks. When they began analyzing gene expression patterns in tissue samples collected from captive black bears

nearly twenty years ago. The results shocked them, seeing as how beers stop eating and slow their metabolism during hibernation. Federov and Gorophashnaya assumed that the gene activity involved in building new muscles would be dialed down to preserve energy. Instead, the genes were just as active and even appeared to ramp up. We checked it several times, says Goropashnaya. We couldn't believe it. The findings were illogical, but somehow correct.

Scores of genes known to be part of muscle protein biosynthesis were turned up in what appear to be a coordinated and metabolically costly frenzy of activity. The two presented their first paper on the phenomenon in twenty eleven. Now, with the aid of newer DNA sequencing technologies, they're able to study twice as many genes and with far more specificity, which is what led them to the m tour pathway, a well known circular dial that also plays a key

role in controlling the rate of cell division. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for to day. Your reader has been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening and have a great day.