Month: December 2018

Enlarge / This Google Earth image shows two large Scythian burial mounds, each over 20 meters (65.6 feet) wide. (credit: Caspari et al. 2018)

Around 900 BCE, a group of nomads from Siberia called Scythians began spreading across the central Asian steppe, their mounted archers sweeping across huge swaths of territory. Today the steppe from the Black Sea to northern China is dotted with thousands of their tombs—deep grave pits, covered with mounds of stone or soil. Centuries of looters have ransacked the burial mounds for the ornate gold art and jewelry, as well as the finely crafted weapons and horse gear buried with the Scythian dead. Satellite imagery sheds light on the extent of the destruction, and it may eventually help protect the ancient graves from modern looters.

University of Sydney archaeologist Gino Caspari and his colleagues searched for Scythian burial mounds, or kurgans, in high-resolution satellite images of a 110 square kilometer (68.4 square mile) area of the Xinjiang province in northwestern China. They mapped their findings and noted how many of the burial mounds looked like they’d been disturbed by looters. When looters dig up the contents of the grave pit, the center of the mound usually collapses. Observers who know what they’re looking for can spot that from above; imagine looking at a sheet of bubble wrap to see which ones have been popped.  Although the satellite images weren’t as precise as a detailed ground survey, they offered a pretty accurate estimate of the general situation on the ground—and the news wasn’t good.

Nearly three-quarters of the burial mounds in northern Xinjiang have been looted. That came as a grim surprise for Caspari and his colleagues. “We assumed that, due to the remoteness and the heavy presence of security forces in the region, we would find a higher proportion of intact tombs,” he said in a statement.

Enlarge / The Apple Watch series 4. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Farewell, 2018. You brought us Facebook scandal after Facebook scandal, vastly more devices with Alexa and Google Assistant than anyone needs, a nosedive for net neutrality, endless political and regulatory challenges for Chinese smartphone makers, and oh so many notch-equipped smartphones.

We're ready for about two months of accidentally writing "2018" every time we're supposed to write 2019 in our first drafts—the adjustment always takes a while. And since our minds aren't quite out of 2018 yet, let's take this opportunity to look back on the year—specifically, our favorite and least-favorite products from the year.

Every member of the Ars Technica reviews team—Ron Amadeo, Peter Bright, Jeff Dunn, Valentina Palladino, and Samuel Axon—chimed in with personal picks and a little bit of explanation for why we picked what we did.

Enlarge / Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) tells her kids (Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex) to get their shoes on and be ready to run in Us. (credit: YouTube/Universal)

This Christmas Day, we get our first look at the trailer for Us, Jordan Peele's much-anticipated follow-up to his 2017 film Get Out. And it looks viscerally terrifying in a way his first film, which opted for muted subtlety, was not.

Get Out was one of our favorite films of 2017, a subtle exploration of racial tensions that quietly builds to reveal its horrifying premise and inevitably bloody conclusion. It was a surprise box office hit, raking in more than $250 million globally, and snagging multiple Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture. Peele won the Oscar for best original screenplay—the first time the award has gone to a black recipient.

Us looks like more of a standard horror film, in the "home invasion by strange creatures" category. Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) and Gabe (Winston Duke) Wilson take their two kids (Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex) to the beach to relax and unwind with friends (one of whom is played by Elizabeth Moss). Their young son, Jason, encounters a strange figure on the beach, and that night the figure shows up at the house with three others. They break in, and that's when the real terror begins. Because those figures are creepy doppelgängers of each family member. (Peele calls them "the Tethered.")

Enlarge / The 1861 notebook of Sir William Crookes, containing all his data on thallium samples. (credit: SSPL/Getty Images)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science story that comes our way. So this year, we're running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one story that fell through the cracks each day, from December 25 through January 5. First up: a tale of attempted murder and the geologist who hopes he can help solve the case.

A new trace analysis of the victim's hair sheds fresh light on a famous unsolved cold case by establishing a timeline for the thallium poisoning of Chinese college student Zhu Ling in 1994. Published in October in the journal Forensic Science International, the work could one day lead to catching the culprit, and could help solve future heavy-metal poisonings.

Zhu Ling was a sophomore majoring in physical chemistry at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, when she mysteriously began losing hair, with accompanying stomach pain and muscle paralysis, sinking into a coma four months later. Doctors were initially baffled, but friends posted her symptoms to a Usenet group, drawing attention to Zhu Ling's plight—likely the first telemedicine trial. Physicians around the world agreed the likely cause was thallium poisoning (a toxic heavy metal sometimes used in rat poison), and her doctors treated her with the commercial dye Prussian blue, the most common antidote.