BROADCASTS.com

b'

Archaeologists identify a medieval war-horse graveyard near Buckingham Palace 

We know knights in shining armor rode powerful horses, but remains of those horses are rare. Now, researchers studying equine remains from a site near Buckingham Palace have built a case, based on evidence from their bones, that these animals were likely used in jousting tournaments and battle. Archeologist Katherine Kanne says the bone analysis also revealed a complex, continent-crossing medieval horse trading network that supplied the British elites with sturdy stallions. This paper was published in Science Advances.

In an ice-free Arctic, Polar bears are dining on duck eggs \\u2014 and gulls are taking advantage

Researchers using drones to study ground-nesting birds in the Arctic have observed entire colonies being devastated by marauding polar bears who would normally be out on the ice hunting seals \\u2013 except the ice isn\\u2019t there. What\\u2019s more, now they\\u2019re enabling a second predator \\u2013 hungry gulls who raid the nests in the bears\\u2019 wake. Andrew Barnas made the observations of this \\u201cgull tornado\\u201d following around polar bears in East Bay Island in Nunavut. The research was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

A NASA mission might have the tools to detect life on Europa from space

NASA\\u2019s Europa Clipper mission, due to launch this fall, is set to explore the jewel of our solar system: Jupiter\\u2019s moon, Europa. The mission\\u2019s focus is to determine if the icy moon, thought to harbour an ocean with more water than all of the water on Earth, is amenable to life. However, postdoctoral researcher Fabian Klenner, now at the University of Washington, led a study published in the journal Science Advances that demonstrated how the spacecraft may be able to detect fragments of bacterial life in a single grain of ice ejected from the surface of the moon. 

Pollution is preventing pollinators from finding plants by scent

Our polluted air is transforming floral scents so pollinators that spread their pollen can no longer recognize them. In a new study in the journal Science, researchers found that a certain compound in air pollution reacts with the flower\\u2019s scent molecules so pollinators \\u2014 like the hummingbird hawk-moths that pollinate at night \\u2014 fail to recognize them. Jeremy Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Naples, said the change in scent made the flowers smell \\u201cless fruity and less fresh.\\u201d

An Australian Atlantis and underwater archeological remains in the Baltic 

During the last ice age sea levels were more than 100 metres lower than they are today, which means vast tracts of what are currently coastal seafloor were dry land. Geologists and archaeologists are searching for these lost landscapes to identify places prehistoric humans might have occupied. These included a country sized area of Australia that could have been home to half a million people. Archaeologist Kasih Norman and her colleagues published their study of this now-drowned landscape in Quaternary Science Reviews. 

Another example is an undersea wall off the coast of Northern Germany that preserves an underwater reindeer hunting ground, described in research led by Jacob Geersen, published in the journal PNAS.