A new biological mashup just dropped.

“Pikobodies,” bioengineered immune system proteins that are part plant and part animal, could help flora better fend off diseases, researchers report in the March 3 Science. The protein hybrids exploit animals’ uniquely flexible immune systems, loaning plants the ability to fight off emerging pathogens.

Flora typically rely on physical barriers to keep disease-causing microbes at bay. If something unusual makes it inside the plants, internal sensors sound the alarm and infected cells die. But as pathogens evolve ways to dodge these defenses, plants can’t adapt in real time. Animals’ adaptive immune systems can, making a wealth of antibodies in a matter of weeks when exposed to a pathogen.、
In a proof-of-concept study, scientists genetically modified one plant’s internal sensor to sport animal antibodies. The approach harnesses the adaptive immune system’s power to make almost unlimited adjustments to target invaders and lends it to plants, says plant immunologist Xinnian Dong, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Duke University who was not involved in the work.

Crops especially could benefit from having more adaptable immune systems, since many farms grow fields full of just one type of plant, says Dong. In nature, diversity can help protect vulnerable plants from disease-spreading pathogens and pests. A farm is more like a buffet.

Researchers have had success fine-tuning plant genes to be disease-resistant, but finding the right genes and editing them can take more than a decade, says plant pathologist Sophien Kamoun of the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, England. He and colleagues wanted to know if plant protection could get an additional boost from animal-inspired solutions.

To create the pikobodies, the team fused small antibodies from llamas and alpacas with a protein called Pik-1 that’s found on the cells of Nicotiana benthamiana, a close relative of tobacco plants. Pik-1 typically detects a protein that helps a deadly blast fungus infect plants (SN: 7/10/17). For this test, the animal antibodies had been engineered to target fluorescent proteins

Plants with the pikobodies killed cells exposed to the fluorescent proteins, resulting in dead patches on leaves, the team found. Of 11 tested versions, four were not toxic to the leaves and triggered cell death only when the pikobodies attached to the specific protein that they had been designed bind.

What’s more, pikobodies can be combined to give plants more than one way to attack a foreign invader. That tactic could be useful to hit pathogens with the nimble ability to dodge some immune responses from multiple angles.

Theoretically, it’s possible to make pikobodies “against virtually any pathogen we study,” Kamoun says. But not all pikobody combos worked together in tests. “It’s a bit hit or miss,” he says. “We need some more basic knowledge to improve the bioengineering.”

Whales are known for belting out sounds in the deep. But they may also whisper.

Southern right whale moms steer their calves to shallow waters, where newborns are less likely to be picked off by an orca. There, crashing waves mask the occasional quiet calls that the pairs make. That may help the whales stick together without broadcasting their location to predators, researchers report July 11 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

While most whale calls are meant to be long-range, “this shows us that whales have a sort of intimate communication as well,” says Mia Nielsen, a behavioral biologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. “It’s only meant for the whale right next to you.”

Nielsen and colleagues tagged nine momma whales with audio recorders and sensors to measure motion and water pressure, and also recorded ambient noise in the nearshore environment. When the whales were submerged, below the noisy waves, the scientists could pick up the hushed calls, soft enough to fade into the background noise roughly 200 meters away.
An orca, or killer whale, “would have to get quite close in the big ocean to be able to detect them,” says biologist Peter Tyack at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Tyack was not involved with the study, but collaborates with one of the coauthors on other projects.

The whispers were associated with times when the whales were moving, rather than when mothers were stationary and possibly suckling their calves. Using hushed tones could make it harder for the pair to reunite if separated. But the observed whales tended to stay close to one another, about one body length apart, the team found.

Eavesdropping biologists have generally focused on the loud noises animals make, Tyack says. “There may be a repertoire among the calls of lots of animals that are specifically designed only to be audible to a partner who’s close by,” he says.

Artificial intelligence has passed the last major milestone in mastering poker: six-player no-limit Texas Hold’em.

Games like poker, with hidden cards and players who bluff, present a greater challenge to AI than games where every player can see the whole board. Over the last few years, computers have become aces at increasingly complicated forms of one-on-one poker, but multiplayer games take that complexity to the next level (SN Online: 5/13/15).

Now, a card shark AI dubbed Pluribus has outplayed more than a dozen elite professionals at six-player Texas Hold’em, researchers report online July 11 in Science. Algorithms that can plot against several adversaries using such spotty information could make savvy business negotiators, political strategists or cybersecurity watchdogs.
Pluribus honed its initial strategy by playing against copies of itself, starting from scratch and gradually learning which actions helped to win. Then, the AI used that intuition for when to hold and when to fold during the first betting round of each hand against five human players.

During subsequent betting rounds, Pluribus fine-tuned its strategy by imagining how the game might play out if it took different actions. Unlike artificial intelligence trained for two-player poker, Pluribus didn’t speculate all the way to the end of the game — which would require too many computations when dealing with so many players (SN: 4/1/17, p. 12). Instead, the AI imagined several moves ahead and decided what to do based on those hypothetical futures and different strategies that players could adopt.

In 10,000 hands of Texas Hold’em, Pluribus competed against five contestants from a pool of 13 professionals, all of whom had won more than $1 million playing poker. Every 100 hands, Pluribus raked in, on average, about $480 from its human competitors.
“This is roughly the amount that elite human professionals aspire to beat weaker players by,” implying that Pluribus was a savvier player than its human opponents, says Noam Brown of Facebook AI Research in New York City. Brown, along with Tuomas Sandholm of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, created Pluribus.

Now that AI has poker in the bag, algorithms could test their strategic reasoning in games with more complex hidden information, says computer scientist Viliam Lisý of the Czech Technical University in Prague, who was not involved in the work. In games like Kriegspiel — a chess spin-off where players can’t see each other’s pieces — the unknowns can become far more complicated than a few cards held close to opponents’ chests, Lisý says.

Video games like StarCraft, which allow many more types of moves and free players from rigid, turn-based play, could also serve as new tests of AI cleverness (SN: 5/11/19, p. 34).

No one has ever probed a particle more stringently than this.

In a new experiment, scientists measured a magnetic property of the electron more carefully than ever before, making the most precise measurement of any property of an elementary particle, ever. Known as the electron magnetic moment, it’s a measure of the strength of the magnetic field carried by the particle.

That property is predicted by the standard model of particle physics, the theory that describes particles and forces on a subatomic level. In fact, it’s the most precise prediction made by that theory.
By comparing the new ultraprecise measurement and the prediction, scientists gave the theory one of its strictest tests yet. The new measurement agrees with the standard model’s prediction to about 1 part in a trillion, or 0.1 billionths of a percent, physicists report in the February 17 Physical Review Letters.

When a theory makes a prediction at high precision, it’s like a physicist’s Bat Signal, calling out for researchers to test it. “It’s irresistible to some of us,” says physicist Gerald Gabrielse of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

To measure the magnetic moment, Gabrielse and colleagues studied a single electron for months on end, trapping it in a magnetic field and observing how it responded when tweaked with microwaves. The team determined the electron magnetic moment to 0.13 parts per trillion, or 0.000000000013 percent.

A measurement that exacting is a complicated task. “It’s so challenging that nobody except the Gabrielse team dares to do it,” says physicist Holger Müller of the University of California, Berkeley.
The new result is more than twice as precise as the previous measurement, which stood for over 14 years, and which was also made by Gabrielse’s team. Now the researchers have finally outdone themselves. “When I saw the [paper] I said, ‘Wow, they did it,’” says Stefano Laporta, a theoretical physicist affiliated with University of Padua in Italy, who works on calculating the electron magnetic moment according to the standard model.

The new test of the standard model would be even more impressive if it weren’t for a conundrum in another painstaking measurement. Two recent experiments, one led by physicist Saïda Guellati-Khélifa of Kastler Brossel Laboratory in Paris and the other by Müller, disagree on the value of a number called the fine-structure constant, which characterizes the strength of electromagnetic interactions (SN: 4/12/18). That number is an input to the standard model’s prediction of the electron magnetic moment. So the disagreement limits the new test’s precision. If that discrepancy were sorted out, the test would become 10 times as precise as it is now.
The stalwart standard model has stood up to a barrage of experimental tests for decades. But scientists don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all. That’s in part because it doesn’t explain observations such as the existence of dark matter, an invisible substance that exerts gravitational influence on the cosmos. And it doesn’t say why the universe contains more matter than antimatter (SN: 9/22/22). So physicists keep looking for cases where the standard model breaks down.

One of the most tantalizing hints of a failure of the standard model is the magnetic moment not of the electron, but of the muon, a heavy relative of the electron. In 2021, a measurement of this property hinted at a possible mismatch with standard model predictions (SN: 4/7/21).

“Some people believe that this discrepancy could be the signature of new physics beyond the standard model,” says Guellati-Khélifa, who wrote a commentary on the new electron magnetic moment paper in Physics magazine. If so, any new physics affecting the muon could also affect the electron. So future measurements of the electron magnetic moment might also deviate from the prediction, finally revealing the standard model’s flaws.

Homo sapiens who reached Europe around 54,000 years ago introduced bows and arrows to that continent, a new study suggests.

Researchers examined tiny triangular stone points and other artifacts excavated at a rock-shelter in southern France called Grotte Mandrin. H. sapiens on the move probably brought archery techniques from Africa to Europe, archaeologist Laure Metz of Aix-Marseille University in France and colleagues report February 22 in Science Advances.

“Metz and colleagues demonstrate bow hunting [at Grotte Mandrin] as convincingly as possible without being caught bow-in-hand,” says archaeologist Marlize Lombard of the University of Johannesburg, who did not participate in the new study.
No bows were found at the site. Wooden items such as bows preserve poorly. The oldest intact bows, found in northern European bogs, date to around 11,000 years ago, Metz says.

Previous stone and bone point discoveries suggest that bow-and-arrow hunting originated in Africa between about 80,000 and 60,000 years ago. And previously recovered fossil teeth indicate that H. sapiens visited Grotte Mandrin as early as 56,800 years ago, well before Neandertals’ demise around 40,000 years ago and much earlier than researchers had thought that H. sapiens first reached Europe (SN: 2/9/22).

“We’ve shown that the earliest known Homo sapiens to migrate into Neandertal territories had mastered the use of the bow,” Metz says.

No evidence suggests that Neandertals already present in Europe at that time launched arrows at prey. It’s also unclear whether archery provided any substantial hunting advantages to H. sapiens relative to spears that were thrust or thrown by Neandertals.
Among 852 stone artifacts excavated in a H. sapiens sediment layer at Grotte Mandrin dated to about 54,000 years ago, 196 triangular stone points displayed high-impact damage. Another 15 stone points showed signs of both high-impact damage and alterations caused by butchery activities, such as cutting.

Comparisons of those finds were made to damage on stone replicas of the artifacts that the researchers used as arrowheads shot from bows and as the tips of spears inserted in handheld throwing devices. Additional comparative evidence came from stone and bone arrowheads used by recent and present-day hunting groups.

Impact damage along the edges of stone points from the French site indicated that these implements had been attached at the bottom to shafts.

The smallest Grotte Mandrin points, many with a maximum width of no more than 10 millimeters, could have pierced animals’ hides only when shot from bows as the business ends of arrows, the researchers say. Experiments they conducted with replicas of the ancient stone points found that stone points less than 10 millimeters wide reach effective hunting speeds only when attached to arrow shafts propelled by a bow.

Larger stone points, some of them several times the size of the smaller points, could have been arrowheads or might have tipped spears that were thrown or thrust by hand or launched from handheld spear throwers, the researchers conclude.

Lombard, the University of Johannesburg archaeologist, suspects that the first H. sapiens at the French rock-shelter hunted with bows and arrows as well as with spears, depending on where and what they were hunting. Earlier studies directed by Lombard indicated that sub-Saharan Africans similarly alternated between these two types of hunting weapons starting between about 70,000 and 58,000 years ago.

H. sapiens newcomers to Europe may have learned from Neandertals that spear hunting in large groups takes precedence on frigid landscapes, where bow strings can easily snap and long-distance pursuit of prey is not energy efficient, Lombard says.

But learning about archery from H. sapiens may not have been in the cards for Neandertals. Based on prior analyses of brain impressions on the inside surfaces of fossil skulls, Lombard suspects that Neandertals’ brains did not enable the enhanced visual and spatial abilities that H. sapiens exploited to hunt with bows and arrows.

That’s a possibility, though other controversial evidence suggests that Neandertals behaved no differently from Stone Age H. sapiens (SN: 3/26/20).If Grotte Mandrin Neandertals never hunted with bows and arrows but still survived just fine alongside H. sapiens archers for roughly 14,000 years, reasons for Neandertals’ ultimate demise remain as mysterious as ever.

Whether it’s Katy Perry poaching dancers from once-BFF Taylor Swift or Clytemnestra orchestrating the murder of her husband Agamemnon, betrayal is a dark, persistent part of the human condition. Unlike garden-variety deception, betrayal happens in established relationships, destroying trust that has developed over time. It’s usually unexpected, and it yields a unique, often irreparable, wound. In fact, betrayers have a special place in hell, literarily: In Dante’s Inferno, they occupy the ninth and final circle; mere fraudsters dwell in the eighth.

While most of us are familiar with betrayal, investigating it is really hard. (Consider all the complications of a study that asks people in trusted relationships to betray each other.) Case studies of real betrayals can provide insight after-the-fact, but without a time machine, finding studies that reveal big picture patterns about the lead-up to treachery are scarce.

“We all know betrayal exists,” says Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, a computer scientist at Cornell University who spends a lot of time thinking about what language reveals about relationships. “But finding relevant data is really hard.”

So when Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil heard about a Diplomacy, a strategy game rife with betrayal, he figured it might serve as a good proxy for real life treachery. And he was right: Studying the patterns of communication between the players revealed that betrayal is sometimes foreseeable. But like many relationships that collapse in betrayal, teasing out what goes wrong and who is at fault isn’t so easy.
Unlike Risk and other war games, Diplomacy is all about, well, diplomacy (John F. Kennedy and Henry Kissinger reportedly were fans). Set in Europe before World War I, the nations/players have to form alliances to win. But chance is removed from the equation; players don’t roll dice or take turns. There’s only diplomacy: a negotiation phase where players converse, form alliances and gather intelligence (these days, typically online), and a movement phase where everyone’s decisions are revealed and executed all at once. Betrayal is so integral to Diplomacy that, as noted on a “This American Life” episode, stabbing an ally in the back is referred to by the shorthand “stabbing.”

Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, colleague and fan-of-the-game Jordan Boyd-Graber, and colleagues examined 249 games of Diplomacy with a total of 145,000 messages among players. When they used a computer program to compare exchanges between players whose relationships ended in betrayal with those whose relationships lasted, the computer discerned subtle signals of impending betrayal.

One harbinger was a shift in politeness. Players who were excessively polite in general were more likely to betray, and people who were suddenly more polite were more likely to become victims of betrayal, study coauthor and Cornell graduate student Vlad Niculae reportedJuly 29 at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Beijing. Consider this exchange from one round:

Germany: Can I suggest you move your armies east and then I will support you? Then next year you move [there] and dismantle Turkey. I will deal with England and France, you take out Italy.

Austria: Sounds like a perfect plan! Happy to follow through. And—thank you Bruder!

Austria’s next move was invading German territory. Bam! Betrayal.

An increase planning-related language by the soon-to-be victim also indicated impending betrayal, a signal that emerges a few rounds before the treachery ensues. And correspondence of soon-to-be betrayers had an uptick in positive sentiment in the lead-up to their breach.
Working from these linguistic cues, a computer program could peg future betrayal 57 percent of the time. That might not sound like much, but it was better than the accuracy of the human players, who never saw it coming. And remember that by definition, a betrayer conceals the intention to betray; the breach is unexpected (that whole trust thing). Given that inherent deceit, 57 percent isn’t so bad.

When I spoke to Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, he said that more important than the clues themselves is the shift in the balance of behavior in the relationship. Positive or negative sentiment of one player isn’t what matters, it’s the asymmetry of the behavior of the two people in the relationship. He likens the linguistic tells to body language: While you wouldn’t use it as a sole basis for decision-making, if you know how to interpret it, it might give you an advantage.

More work is needed to explore whether these patterns exist in real life. And while the research did reveal some patterns, it can’t say anything about cause and effect or who is at fault. Perhaps, for example, the extensive planning of the eventual victims came off as super bossy and frustrating to the eventual betrayer. After all, Clytemnestra’s betrayal of Agamemnon came after he killed their daughter Iphigenia. That kind of bad blood may be unforgivable.

HONOLULU — Perhaps most supermassive black holes — dark giants in the centers of galaxies — are just shy when they’re young.

“We have this weird problem, where on the one hand the universe makes really supermassive black holes very shortly after the Big Bang,” says Kevin Schawinski, an astrophysicist at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. “But when we look at more typical galaxies, we find no evidence for growing black holes.”

The feeding zones around voracious black holes create quasars, blazing furnaces of X-rays and other light. And yet the Chandra space telescope detects no X-rays from a cache of galaxies in the constellation Fornax that researchers think should be nourishing young black holes, Schawinski reported August 6 at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union.
Over the past several years, astronomers have found a handful of very bright quasars that lit up within the first billion years of cosmic history. These quasars are probably powered by unusually hefty supermassive black holes — ones that gobbled down gas as fast as physically possible (or even faster) for hundreds of millions of years.

“If this happens all over the universe,” says Schawinski, “then if we look at more normal-mass galaxies, we should be seeing their supermassive black holes pop out in the early universe to the same degree.”

But they don’t.
Maybe the more run-of-the-mill black holes are there but they’re not actively feeding, he says. Or perhaps something is blocking the X-rays from getting out.

Or maybe — just maybe — these black holes haven’t been born yet.

“It’s a very interesting suggestion,” says Andrea Comastri, an astronomer at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna in Italy, says of the not-yet-born scenario. “But I’m not convinced.”

These images capture a relatively tiny volume of space, he says, so perhaps the researchers aren’t casting a wide enough net. The distances to these galaxies are also notoriously difficult to pin down. Many could be much closer and seen during a time when black holes have formed but quieted down a bit.

If the universe can make monstrous black holes in under a billion years, then making the relatively little guys should be straightforward and they should be everywhere, Comastri says. “It should be easier to make smaller black holes because you don’t have to work that much. They are there somewhere.”

If the black holes are confirmed to be missing, “it’s going to shake up a lot of what we think about the growth of quasars,” says Tiziana Di Matteo, an astrophysicist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “But I’m very skeptical of it.”

These cosmic no-shows probably don’t suck down gas as fast as the researchers assume, she says. If these black holes only nibble at the surrounding gas — as opposed to their obese cousins who gorge themselves — then X-rays would only trickle from their dinner plates and might not be detected.

Much like with humans, black hole obesity is influenced by environment. Most galaxies need some time to build up enough mass to efficiently feed their black holes, Di Matteo says. Tiny galaxies easily lose gas every time a cluster of new stars is born or whenever a dying star explodes. “It’s only in extreme environments,” she says, at the junctions of cosmic filaments that become interstellar dumping grounds, “where gas could plunge through and not care about anything else that’s going on.” Here, fledgling black holes aren’t as reliant on their galaxy’s feeble gravity to grab food; the incoming rivers of gas are like intergalactic fire hoses.

Those unusually massive black hole starter kits are probably responsible for the dazzling quasars that switch on during the first billion years after the Big Bang. Computer simulations show that in the younger, more intimate universe, when everything was squished together a lot more than today, there are the oddball places where gas funnels onto ancestral galaxies at astounding rates, providing fast-growing black holes with an all-you-can-eat buffet.

The other less showy black holes, the ones Schawinski and colleagues are hunting for, probably spend the next several billion years quietly catching up. Finding these black holes when they’re young and struggling to grow might require searching a wider area or getting more sensitive observations.

“It’s exciting,” Schawinski says. “It’s the last major category of astrophysical objects of whose origin we know nothing about.” Planets, stars and galaxies are pretty well understood, he says. “But we have no idea how supermassive black holes form.”

Schawinski’s team plans to spend the next year or two repeating their experiment over a wider volume of space, hoping to find at least one youthful black hole in a moderate-sized galaxy. “Once you go from zero to one you have something to work with,” he says. “Right now we’ve got nothing.”

Particles of twisted light that have been entangled using quantum mechanics offer a new approach to dense and secure data storage.

Holograms that produce 3-D images and serve as security features on credit cards are usually made with patterns laid down with beams of laser light. In recent years, physicists have found ways to create holograms with entangled photons instead. Now there is, literally, a new twist to the technology.

Entangled photons that travel in corkscrew paths have resulted in holograms that offer the possibility of dense and ultrasecure data encryption, researchers report in a study to appear in Physical Review Letters.
Light can move in a variety of ways, including the up-and-down and side-to-side patterns of polarized light. But when it carries a type of rotation known as orbital angular momentum, it can also propagate in spirals that resemble twisted rotini pasta.

Like any other photons, the twisted versions can be entangled so that they essentially act as one entity. Something that affects one of an entangled photon pair instantly affects the other, even if they are very far apart.

In previous experiments, researchers have sent data through the air in entangled pairs of twisted photons (SN: 8/5/15). The approach should allow high-speed data transmission because light can come with different amounts of twist, with each twist serving as a different channel of communication.

Now the same approach has been applied to record data in holograms. Instead of transmitting information on multiple, twisted light channels, photon pairs with different amounts of twist create distinct sets of data in a single hologram. The more orbital angular momentum states involved, each with different amounts of twist, the more data researchers can pack into a hologram.

In addition to cramming more data into holograms, increasing the variety of twists used to record the data boosts security. Anyone who wants to read the information out needs to know, or guess, how the light that recorded it was twisted.

For a hologram relying on two types of twist, says physicist Xiangdong Zhang of the Beijing Institute of Technology, you would have to pick the right combination of the twists from about 80 possibilities to decode the data. Bumping that up to combinations of seven distinct twists leads to millions of possibilities. That, Zhang says, “should be enough to ensure our quantum holographic encryption system has enough security level.”
The researchers demonstrated their technique by encoding words and letters in holograms and reading the data back out again with twisted light. Although the researchers produced images from the holographic data, says physicist Hugo Defienne of the Paris Institute of Nanosciences, the storage itself should not be confused with holographic images.

Defienne, who was not involved with the new research, says that other quantum holography schemes, such as his efforts with polarized photons, produce direct images of objects including microscopic structures.

“[Their] idea there is very different . . . from our approach in this sense,” Defrienne says. “They’re using holography to store information,” rather than creating the familiar 3-D images that most people associate with holograms.

The twisted light data storage that Zhang and his colleagues demonstrated is slow, requiring nearly 20 minutes to decode an image of the acronym “BIT,” for the Beijing Institute of Technology where the experiments were performed. And the security that the researchers have demonstrated is still relatively low because they included only up to six forms of twisted light in their experiments.

Zhang is confident that both limitations can be overcome with technical improvements. “We think that our technology has potential application in quantum information encryption,” he says, “especially quantum image encryption.”

The existing boundaries of national parks and other habitat preserves aren’t enough to protect more than three-quarters of the world’s well-studied insects.

The finding, reported February 1 in One Earth, shows that people who design nature preserves “don’t really think about insects that much,” says coauthor Shawan Chowdhury, an ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig.

That’s a problem because insect populations around the globe are plummeting, a growing body of research suggests, probably due to climate change and human development (SN: 4/26/22). For instance, insect abundance in Puerto Rico has dropped by up to 98 percent over the last 35 years.
Threats to insect survival could have ripple effects on plants and other animals. Insects help form the foundation for many ecosystems: They pollinate around 80 percent of all plant species and serve as a staple in the diets of hundreds of thousands of animals (and the occasional carnivorous plant).

One way to avert insect extinctions is to set aside the land they need to survive. But scientists know the ranges for only about 100,000 of the estimated 5.5 million insect species. To determine how well existing protected areas may be aiding insect conservation, Chowdhury and colleagues mapped the known habitats of about 89,000 of those species and compared the ranges with the boundaries of preserves from the World Database on Protected Areas.

Overall, these spaces don’t safeguard enough habitat for 67,384 insect species — about 76 percent of the species included in the study — the team found. Roughly 2 percent of species do not overlap with protected areas at all.

Conserving insects, Chowdhury says, will mean setting aside more insect-friendly spaces in the years ahead.

Scientists have unwrapped long-sought details of embalming practices that ancient Egyptians used to preserve dead bodies.

Clues came from analyses of chemical residue inside vessels from the only known Egyptian embalming workshop and nearby burial chambers. Mummification specialists who worked there concocted specific mixtures to embalm the head, wash the body, treat the liver and stomach, and prepare bandages that swathed the body, researchers report February 1 in Nature.

“Ancient Egyptian embalmers had extensive chemical knowledge and knew what substances to put on the skin to preserve it, even without knowing about bacteria and other microorganisms,” Philipp Stockhammer, an archaeologist at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, said at a January 31 news conference.
The findings come courtesy of chemical residue inside 31 vessels found in an Egyptian embalming workshop and four vessels discovered in an adjacent pair of burial chambers. Writing on workshop vessels named embalming substances, provided embalming instructions (such as “to put on his head”) or both. All the artifacts — dating from Egypt’s 26th dynasty which rose to power between 664 B.C. and 525 B.C. — were excavated at a cemetery site called Saqqara in 2016. Archaeologist and study coauthor Ramadan Hussein, who died in 2022, led that project.

Newfound mummy embalming mixtures
Five of the vessels had the label antiu. The substance was thought to have been a fragrant resin called myrrh. The antiu at Saqqara, however, consisted of oil or tar from cedar and juniper or cypress trees mixed with animal fats. Writing on these jars indicates that antiu could have been used alone or combined with another substance called sefet.

Three vessels from the embalming workshop bore the label sefet, which researchers have usually described as an unidentified oil. At Saqqara, sefet was a scented, fat-based ointment with added ingredients from plants. Two sefet pots contained animal fats mixed with oil or tar from juniper or cypress trees. A third container held animal fats and elemi, a fragrant resin from tropical trees.

Clarification of the ingredients in antiu and sefet at Saqqara “takes mummification studies further than before,” says Egyptologist Bob Brier of Long Island University in Brookville, N.Y., who was not part of the research.

Egyptians may have started mummifying their dead as early as 6,330 years ago (SN: 8/18/14). Mummification procedures and rituals focused on keeping the body fresh so the deceased could enter what was believed to be an eternal afterlife.
Embalming and mummification procedures likely changed over time, says team member Maxime Rageot, a biomolecular archaeologist also at Ludwig Maximilians University. Embalmers’ mixtures at Saqqara may not correspond, say, to those used around 700 years earlier for King Tutankhamun (SN: 11/2/22).

Mummy embalming instructions
Outside surfaces of other vessels from the Saqqara embalming workshop and burial chambers sported labels and, in some cases, instructions for treatment of the head, preparation of linen mummy bandages, washing the body and treating the liver and stomach. Inscriptions on one jar referred to an administrator who performed embalming procedures, mainly on the head.

Chemical residue inside these pots consisted of mixtures specific to each embalming procedure. Ingredients included oils or tars of cedar and juniper or cypress trees, pistachio resin, castor oil, animal fats, heated beeswax, bitumen (a dense, oily substance), elemi and a resin called dammar.

Most of those substances have been identified in earlier studies of chemical residues from Egyptian mummies and embalming vessels in individual tombs, says Egyptologist Margaret Serpico of University College London. But elemi and dammar resins have not previously been linked to ancient Egyptian embalming practices and are “highly unexpected,” notes Serpico, who did not participate in the new study.

Elemi was an ingredient in the workshop mixtures used to treat the head, the liver and bandages wrapped around the body. Chemical signs of dammar appeared in a vessel from one of the burial chambers that included remnants of a range of substances, indicating that the container had been used to blend several different mixtures, the researchers say.

Specific properties of elemi and dammar that aided in preserving dead bodies have yet to be investigated, Stockhammer said.

A far-flung trade network for mummy embalming ingredients
Elemi resin reached Egypt from tropical parts of Africa or Southeast Asia, while dammar originated in Southeast Asia or Indonesia, Rageot says. Other embalming substances detected at Saqqara came from Southwest Asia and parts of southern Europe and northern Africa bordering the Mediterranean Sea. These findings provide the first evidence that ancient Egyptian embalmers depended on substances transported across vast trade networks.

Egyptian embalmers at Saqqara took advantage of a trade network that already connected Egypt to sites in Southeast Asia, Stockhammer said. Other Mediterranean and Asian societies also engaged in long-distance trade during ancient Egypt’s heyday (SN: 1/9/23).

It’s no surprise that ancient Egyptians imported embalming ingredients from distant lands, Brier says. “They were great traders, had limited [local] wood products and really wanted these substances to achieve immortality.”