It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. April's list includes new research on tattooed tardigrades, the first live image of a colossal baby squid, the digital unfolding of a recently discovered Merlin manuscript, and an ancient Roman gladiator whose skeleton shows signs of being gnawed by a lion.

Gladiator vs. lion?

Puncture injuries by large felid scavenging. Credit: Thompson et al., 2025/PLOS One/CC-BY 4.0

Popular depictions of Roman gladiators in combat invariably include battling not just human adversaries but wild animals. We know from surviving texts, imagery, and artifacts that such battles likely took place. But hard physical evidence is much more limited. Archaeologists have now found the first direct osteological evidence: the skeleton of a Roman gladiator who encountered a wild animal in the arena, most likely a lion, based on bite marks evident on the pelvic bone, according to a paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

The skeleton in question was that of a young man, age 26 to 35, buried between 200–300 CE near what is now York, England, formerly the Roman city of Eboracum. It's one of several such skeletons, mostly young men whose remains showed signs of trauma—hence the suggestion that it could be a gladiator burial site. "We used a method called structured light scanning [to study the skeleton]," co-author Tim Thompson of Maynooth University told Ars. "It's a method of creating a 3D model using grids of light. It's not like X-ray or CT, in that it only records the surface (not internal) features, but since it uses light and not X-rays etc, it is much safer, cheaper, and more portable. We have published a fair bit on this and shown its use in both archaeological and forensic contexts."

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© Schmidt Ocean Institute

It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection of such stories. March's list includes fascinating papers on such topics as how the brain responds to speaking Klingon (or Dothraki, or Navi), the discovery of creepy preclassic Salvadoran puppets, the effectiveness of "dazzle camouflage," and how male blue-lined octopuses manage not to be cannibalized by their chosen mates.

Wind Cave’s rocks fluoresce under black light

Several fluorescence measurements of a zebra calcite in Wind Cave were taken using portable spectrometers. Credit: Joshua Sebree

South Dakota's Wind Cave gets its name from the flow of air moving continually through its many passages and equalizing the atmospheric pressure between the air inside and outside—almost like the cave is "breathing." Its rock and mineral formations also boast a unique chemistry that fluoresces when exposed to black light, according to talks presented at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego. That fluorescence could shed light on how life can thrive in extreme environments, including that of Jupiter's moon, Europa.

University of Northern Iowa astrobiologist Joshua Sebree and several students have been mapping new areas of Wind Cave (as well as other caves in the US), recording the passages, rock formations, minerals, and lifeforms they encounter in the process. They noticed that under UV light, certain parts of Wind Cave took on otherworldly hues, thanks to different concentrations of organic and inorganic fossilized chemical compounds. Those areas seem to indicate where water once flowed, carrying minerals into the cave from the surface 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, according to their analysis of the fluorescent spectra. Sebree et al. found that Wind Cave was likely carved out by waters rich in manganese, producing zebra stripes that glow pink under UV light, revealing the calcites that grew within as a result of those waters.

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© J. Przedwojewska-Szymańska/PASI

It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. February's list includes dancing sea turtles, the secret to a perfectly boiled egg, the latest breakthrough in deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls, the discovery of an Egyptian pharaoh's tomb, and more.

Dancing sea turtles

There is growing evidence that certain migratory animal species (turtles, birds, some species of fish) are able to exploit the Earth's magnetic field for navigation, using it both as a compass to determine direction and as a kind of "map" to track their geographical position while migrating. A paper published in the journal Nature offers evidence of a possible mechanism for this unusual ability, at least in loggerhead sea turtles, who perform an energetic "dance" when they follow magnetic fields to a tasty snack.

Sea turtles make impressive 8,000-mile migrations across oceans and tend to return to the same feeding and nesting sites. The authors believe they achieve this through their ability to remember the magnetic signature of those areas and store them in a mental map. To test that hypothesis, the scientists placed juvenile sea turtles into two large tanks of water outfitted with large coils to create magnetic signatures at specific locations within the tanks. One tank features such a location that had food; the other had a similar location without food.

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