Gold tongues in ancient tombs usually mean one thing: the dead are expected to speak.
For the ancient Egyptians, gold was literally the flesh of gods. Putting it in the mouth wasn’t just decoration. It was a functional requirement for the afterlife. But this week, a fresh discovery has thrown archaeologists into a minor tangle of confusion.
Researchers uncovered eighteen ancient tombs in Egypt. Inside, they found dozens of gold tongues. Or what look like tongues. One artifact might actually be a wheat ear—a fertility symbol, not a vocal tool. The line between sacred relic and agricultural metaphor is thinner than we like to think.
It is the headline grabber. But is it the most confusing part of this week’s science round-up? Probably not.
The real drama isn’t just the gold. It’s the debate over who these people were. Analysis of skeletal remains from nearly 4,00 years ago suggests these weren’t just royal women resting in peace. Some might have hunted. Some might have trained with military units. Other experts are pushing back hard. They don’t buy the physical evidence as proof of martial prowess. It remains unresolved.
“Gold was the flesh of the gods.”
Why do we still argue about 4,00-year-old bones?
Identity in ancient societies was rarely fixed. It was performative.
When DNA tells you something about who you are, it is just one piece of the puzzle. That puzzle gets more complex when new studies reveal DNA can survive in Africa for up to 500 years. Fifty millennia is a long time. It opens up entire lineages we thought were erased by time or climate.
This genetic endurance explains why researchers can now trace the origins of over 150 enslaved Africans left to die on St. Helena by the British Navy. It also helped correct the record on a Bronze Age shaman previously identified as male. She was female.
Context changes everything.
Even modern experimental archaeologists are getting their hands dirty—literally. By using ancient techniques to mummify volunteers today, they are trying to understand the smell, the feel, the process. It is part of a broader effort to recreate lost civilizations. Not just see them, but taste and smell them. Author Sam Kean explores this in “Dinner with King Tut,” arguing that sensory details matter just as much as bone measurements.
If you want to know why ancient people did what they did, you have to stop looking only at the skeletons. You have to look at what they ate, what they burned, and how they died.
Speaking of burning.
In one mystery society, inhabitants didn’t just leave. They burned their own buildings down first. Then vanished. Archaeologists found an ancient chariot amidst the ashes. A chariot in a burned village says nothing if you ignore the context. It screams it.
Space has sugar too—and why it matters
Let’s leave Egypt. Go to space.
Astrochemists detected erythrulose near the center of the Milky Way. Erythrulose is a sugar. It is also in raspberries.
Finding a molecule in space isn’t exactly new. But finding this sugar, with four carbon atoms arranged in a way that hints at prebiotic chemistry, feels significant. It suggests the building blocks of life are not rare. They are common. If life is simple enough to form here, and the ingredients are everywhere, maybe we are not special.
Maybe aliens have a sweet tooth too.
This discovery sits alongside other strange physics. Physicists created a black hole out of light to test Hawking radiation. It’s smaller than the smallest scale in nature, yet it behaved like a black hole.
Meanwhile, the James Webb Space Telescope showed us the battle wounds of the “Centaur” galaxy. The Artemis II crew flew 250,00 miles from Earth to prove the Moon doesn’t always look right through a window.
Why does space care about sugar? It doesn’t. But we do. We need patterns. A sugar molecule in the void is a pattern we can hold onto.
The amateur astronomer who guessed right on Google Maps
Geoguessing is a game. Players look at a static image and guess where it is. Usually it is Europe.
Joël Lapointe used it to plan a hike in Quebec’s Côte-Nord region. He saw an indentation. A pit. It didn’t look like a lake. It didn’t look like normal erosion.
He guessed it was a crater.
He was right.
Scientists confirmed it is a 15-mile-wide meteor crater. It is 390 million years old. This was not an educated guess by a geologist. It was an amateur with a map app and an eye for shapes.
“This is one of the rare examples that shows this is possible,” Gordon Osinski told Live Science.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people message scientists thinking they found a crater. They are wrong. A pothole isn’t a crater. A sinkhole isn’t a crater. This time, it was.
Why did it take this long to notice? Because we weren’t looking with the right lens. We expected science to come from labs, not hiking trips planned via satellite imagery.
Lapointe found what he calls one of the most ardu expeditions he has ever undertaken, all from his screen. He didn’t need boots on the ground. He needed eyes in the sky.
Where biology hides: Congo, climate, and round animals
Back to Earth. And back to things hiding.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, deep in the rainforest, a new monkey appeared. It is called Colobus congoensis. It has orange lips. It roars and snorts in unique frequencies.
Finding a new primate in Africa is incredibly rare. Only five new ones have been found here in 75 years. This one is relatively large. Pinning it down required years of tracking and collaboration with eight local villages. They knew the animal existed. We just hadn’t named it yet.
The existence of Colobus congoensis suggests the rainforest holds more secrets than we have cataloged. Undiscovered mammals, reptiles, fish, and plants are out there, waiting for someone to listen closely.
Speaking of listening, the climate isn’t listening to us.
Tropical forests usually absorb carbon dioxide. During El Niño events, they stop. This year might be the worst. Super El Niños are becoming more likely, threatening to bring humanitarian crises to regions least equipped to handle them. Venezuela’s recent “earthquake doublet” sent warning tremors toward California’s San Andreas Fault. Nature is rewriting its own schedule.
And what about the roundest animal?
It sounds like a trivial question. It is not. Perfect spheres evolve for specific reasons—buoyancy, surface area, hydrodynamics. The quest for the “roughest” or “roundest” creature forces biologists to examine evolution at the most microscopic structural level. Shape is not arbitrary. It is a survival strategy.
Is your weekend science or doom-scrolling?
The week ends with choices.
You can read about 5,230-year-old iron shackles found in France, proving Celtic slavery existed far longer than we documented. You can see how a Nobel laureate used AI to solve a decades-old math problem. You can watch robot dogs navigate forests and stairs because their AI learned to move like animals.
Scientists are deep-freezing koala reproductive cells. Extinction prevention is a cold business, quite literally. China’s Heaven Lake, sitting atop a volcano shared with North Korea, remains mostly unmapped by the public.
If you are looking for things to do, Live Science offered crosswords, diagnostic dilemmas, and op-eds on nicotine pouches being marketed to teens. The sea-level researcher noted that floods happening once a century will soon happen annually. It changes daily life, suddenly.
We often wait for grand discoveries to change how we think. The gold tongues in Egypt might change how we see Egyptian priesthoods. The sugar in space might change our odds of finding alien life.
But maybe the bigger shift is simpler. It happens when an amateur astronomer looks at a map and sees something invisible to everyone else. It happens when we stop assuming we have found everything there is to find.
The crater is there. The monkey is there. The sugar is there.
Are we actually looking?
