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Federal Reserve GDPNow tracking at 5.4% real GDP growth – Up from first week of January, holding between 5.1-5.4% – Historically within 0.5% accuracy of official BEA numbers – Late 90s had similar growth from telecom/fiber capex spending – Current AI data center buildout creating parallel infrastructure investment Sustained growth potential – AI spending: $400B ...

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Greenland framework, announced by President Trump on January 21, 2026, following a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is described as a preliminary outline or concept of a deal for future negotiations concerning Greenland and broader Arctic security. It is not a finalized agreement but sets ...

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In our standard model of natural selection, organisms encode stable behavioral strategies, and pass those encodings on to their kids, only some of whom manage to make more kids, causing a drift over time toward strategies that tend to promote successful reproduction. In our standard model of decision theory, agents have fixed preferences, start with “prior” beliefs, update those beliefs based on info observed, and then pick the actions that max expected preferences.

Culture is humanity’s superpower, and in our best models of culture, humans combine these two approaches. DNA encodes brains that act much like standard decision theory agents for decisions of small to modest scale and scope. Larger decisions are handled by agent preferences and priors, which are encoded in culture. That culture is given in childhood by parents and teachers, but such transfer also continues through our lives. For example, we continue to assimilate to the culture of our elites as they change, to cultures of those who conqueror our places, and to cultures of cities, firms, clubs, and families to which we choose to expose ourselves. For example, over the last few centuries much of the world copied a great many features of successful rich West cultures, including their Christian religion.

I’ve continued to ponder how best to combine deliberate decision strategies with cultural inheritance. And in this post I want to prod such thoughts by focusing on an especially dramatic case:

Consider someone who, like me, now expects descendants of today’s Amish, Haredim, and other insular fertile fundamentalist religious cultures to, in a few centuries, “win” by becoming much more culturally influential than descendants of today’s dominant world monoculture. Such a person might today plausibly try to respect those future winning cultures similar to how they’d respect a culture that had recently conquered their place. So they might try to make themselves open to assimilating into that future winning culture, such as by believing in the Judeo-Christian God. The reasoning is similar; in both cases a “winning” culture has shown substantial evidence of its adaptive superiority.

The general idea is that if natural selection is going to continue, and if you want to influence the longer-term future, you will have to find a way to combine the features you love with other adaptive features, to create a package with a better chance of success, to give your loved features their best chance to survive and thrive.

The reason I expect the Amish, etc. to win is that they have grown fast and maintained insularity for over a century, and survived many big change challenges in that time, while the leaders of our decaying world monoculture have far less incentive, knowledge, and power to change that culture, compared to CEOs re firm cultures, yet such CEOs consistently fail to stop firm cultures from decaying and killing firms.

Nine counter arguments:

1) What if I don’t care about influencing our long term future?

Then you are excused. But do expect people with your attitude here, and those with correlated features, to decline over time in the future.

2) Natural selection should not encourage a culture to have members promote the death of that culture, compared to others.

Cultural assimilation usually isn’t all or nothing; you retain something of your origin. Sometimes the best way to promote your culture is to merge a part of it into another more adaptive culture. While you can’t save all of your culture this way, this might still be your best shot.

3) We often try to resist, not assimilate into, a conquering culture.

Yes, when we think there’s a decent chance such resistance could succeed, getting our entire culture back seems better than having a modest influence over an invading culture. But when the chance of successful resistance falls too low, abject submission seems a better strategy.

4) Our current habits are largely of copying cultures that have recently been clearly successful, not ones that seem likely to succeed in the far future.

But the logic of copying success doesn’t care when exactly the success will be achieved, only when such success becomes sufficiently clear.

5) We can’t actually choose to believe something just because we think it would be good to believe it.

Yes, beliefs aren’t simple dials to turn in our head. But we can deliberately change many influential aspects of the contexts of our belief changes. Otherwise there would be little point to the vast literature on the rationality of beliefs.

6) But don’t we need culture to evaluate which cultures “win”?

Sure, cultures tell you which virtues to count how much in estimating cultural success, and that may influence your estimate of a culture’s adaptive success. But in most cases, including this case, that doesn’t change the answer much.

7) There’s no particular evidence that the Judeo-Christian religions of those societies is what would make them win.

We usually don’t know that much about which particular cultural features are more responsible for a culture’s success. Which is why we evolved the habit of copying culture packages wholesale.

8) How could the adaptive success of a culture count as evidence that its religion is true?

It seems that on average, all else equal, cultures that believe more true things are more likely to succeed. To bet otherwise, you’d need particular evidence that this particular claim is an exception to this general trend.

9) But if the correlation between a cultural feature and cultural success is low, success is only weak evidence re that feature.

Yes, but as we typically have great uncertainty over the future adaptiveness of cultural features, usually most of our evidence is weak. Nevertheless, if we care enough about adaptiveness, then even weak evidence will be enough to tip our actions in the direction of our best clues so far, even if those clues remain weak.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio is expected to prepare a proposal to buy Greenland for $700 billion, NBC reports. January 14, 2026 Meeting, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and Greenland’s Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt at the White House. No deal was ...

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GE and Lockheed ground tested a new air-breathing hypersonic jet engine capable of powering missiles to speeds well in excess of Mach 5 in a smaller, cheaper, lighter, and more efficient package than the most advanced scramjets in testing today. It is a rotating detonating engine. They did ground tests of a liquid-fueled rotating detonation ...

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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a trio of young stars in the process of becoming their best selves in the constellation Scorpius. Posted to the agency’s site on January 16 as part of its Hubble Stellar Construction Zones series, the three T Tauri stars—seen at the bottom right, upper center, and left along with many other stellar objects in the background—are forming inside the hazy Lupus 3 cloud about 500 light-years from Earth. While the image appears somewhat serene, the interior forces at play are anything but tranquil. 

A T Tauri star is a young star, usually less than 10 million years old. During this phase, the still-growing stellar object sees the dust and gas surrounding it begin to disappear as stellar winds, radiation, and other ionized particles bombard it. This dynamic environment is reflected in the star’s brightness, which randomly fluctuates depending on the material interactions underway in its accretion disk. More regular shifts in brightness can also occur as sunspots move in and out of view to astronomers here on Earth.

The T Tauri examples seen in Hubble’s image have a long way to go before they resemble the stars most observers recognize. Gravity will continue to bear down on the object until it forces hydrogen and helium elements to fuse in the star’s core, at which point it will finally become a main sequence stellar object.

The stars in Scorpius are further along in their growth than the protostars highlighted by NASA on January 14, however. About 1,300 light-years away, protostars in the “sword” of Orion are getting their start inside the constellation’s Orion Molecular Cloud complex. Astronomers aimed Hubble toward this area of the sky to better understand outflow cavities—areas where a protostar’s gas and dust is shaved away by nearby stellar winds.

The post Hubble spots three young stars going through growth spurts appeared first on Popular Science.

A 7,000-year-old grave site in present-day Oman indicates that the region’s Neolithic communities sometimes turned to an unexpected trade to not only survive, but thrive in the harsh desert landscape. According to findings published in the journal Antiquity, the people of southern Arabia actually hunted sharks and even stingrays.

Since 2020, researchers from the Archaeological Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague (ARÚ) have investigated Wadi Nafūn, an ancient grave site megalith (a structure built with large stones) used by Neolithic locals during the 5th century BCE. Amid their excavations, researchers found the skeletal remains of over 70 men, women, and children. But this wasn’t a single generation of people. The crypt’s size and subsequent radiocarbon dating indicate that Wadi Nafūn was built and maintained communally for over 300 years. 

“This monument was not built by a single small group. It represents cooperation, shared beliefs, and repeated return to a common ceremonial landscape,” project director lžběta Danielisová recently told Arkeonews.

Neolithic hunters likely also wore shark teeth as pendants. Credit: ARÚ Prague

However, Danielisová and collaborators faced an immediate challenge. Biological materials like teeth and skeletal fragments usually do not retain many organic components after being exposed to Oman’s arid climate for thousands of years. To properly understand their discoveries, the team needed to ship the materials back to the Czech Republic. There, they utilized isotopic analysis to examine a mineralized substance called bioapatite that remains on bones even after collagen disappears.

They particularly focused on traces of carbon, oxygen, and strontium to pinpoint some of each Neolithic person’s dietary sources of protein. But it was the discovery of certain nitrogen isotopes that surprised them most, as these compounds are only found in very specific marine animals.

“We know that these were not just ordinary proteins, but proteins from the top of the food chain,” Danielisová said in a university statement.

For hundreds of years, it appears the Neolithic communities of southern Arabia regularly hunted and consumed sharks. They didn’t only eat the apex predators, either. Throughout Wadi Nafūn, archaeologists excavated shark tooth pendants, additional tiger shark teeth, fishing tools, and stingray barbs. In order to harvest all these materials, the Neolithic hunters appear to have even used their own teeth to help process and prepare their catches.

“The teeth of this community have an interesting pattern. This indicates a specific diet and also that people used their teeth as tools,” explained ARÚ Prague anthropologist Jiří Šneberger.

Additional evidence gleaned from the isotopic analysis also showed that some of the individuals buried at Wadi Nafūn weren’t technically locals. Strontium and oxygen levels suggest certain adults buried here at least spent their childhoods over 30 miles inland. Taken altogether, the shark and human evidence illustrate a highly dynamic, resourceful, and collaborative region that used everything at their disposal to flourish.

“For the very first time, we were able to use natural science data to document specialized hunting of marine predators, directly by analyzing the local buried community,” said Danielisová. “The connection of this burial community with sharks is very interesting and is a new finding not only in prehistoric Arabia, but in the area of ​​all Neolithic cultures of the arid zone.”

The post In ancient Arabia, people dined on sharks and stingrays appeared first on Popular Science.

Cloudflare operates as a content delivery network and distributed DNS (domain name server) and it is down this morning. This is causing many other sites to be down like X. Its services protect website owners from peak loads, comment spam attacks and DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. UPDATE: Some systems are recovering. You can ...

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In Florida, giant invasive pythons, the state’s signature alligators, and bears that sometimes roam around theme parks are typically among the most upfront wildlife in the news. But when the temperatures drop, one reptile stands ready to take the limelight and also drop—iguanas. 

When air temperatures get cold enough, the reptiles will get stunned (or freeze) and fall from trees. Today, morning temperatures in Jacksonville and Tallahassee dipped as low as 20 degrees Fahrenheit overnight, while Orlando hit the mid-30s, and Miami fell to the upper 40s. All temperatures that are cold enough to temporarily freeze an iguana. 

Reptiles like iguanas are cold-blooded—or ectothermic—reptiles that rely on external environmental conditions to regulate their body temperature. By comparison, warm-blooded or endothermic animals like humans and other mammals have a more consistent body temperature. Since the outside temperature has such a drastic effect on their bodies, cold-blooded animals often adapt their behavior as a response. They may bask in the sun to warm up or find shade to cool down and achieve a more balanced body temperature. 

CREDIT: Florida Lad.

When it gets cold, iguanas may also enter a dormant state called cold-stunning or freezing since they are not adapted to life in colder temperatures. Iguanas can start to slow down if the temperature gets below 50 degrees, and stun once they hit the 40s or 30s. 

“When that happens, they may lose their grip and fall from the trees,” said AccuWeather Meteorologist Brandon Buckingham. “It’s a unique cold-weather hazard in Florida.”

After they fall from a tree, they may appear to be dead. However, their critical body functions will all still be working and they will continue to breathe. Once temperatures rise, they can jump back into action as if nothing happened. 

Iguanas can grow up to seven feet long and weigh upwards of 30 pounds, so it is best to be cautious when walking under palm trees in colder weather. Getting hit by a reptile of that size could be dangerous. 

If you see a frozen iguana on the ground, do not rush in to warm them up. Joe Gonzalez from the Iguana Police told WPTV in West Palm Beach that relocating or interfering with an iguana can lead to more problems.

“If you capture an iguana in your own yard and don’t move it anywhere else, that’s fine,” Gonzalez said. “But if you relocate it, you’re essentially taking your problem and dumping it somewhere else. This can have legal consequences, including fines.”

Instead, it’s best to just leave the iguana alone. It will usually be fine once it gets over 50 degrees again. 

The post Don’t pick up frozen iguanas appeared first on Popular Science.

If you’ve ever been around a cat, you know they can get the sudden urge to groom themselves at just about any moment. You’re petting them on the couch. They’re purring. Everything seems lovely and content. Then, they lose all interest in you and start licking their butt. 

But some felines don’t just lick themselves: They also lick you. A cat will be busy grooming themselves. Then, without warning, they’ll turn their spiky tongues on their unsuspecting humans. Other cats can’t be bothered and won’t ever groom or lick their human friends, or other kitty friends for that matter. 

So, why do some cats lick their owners? Are they trying to clean you, too? We asked an animal behaviorist and cat expert to help us sort out exactly what is going on when your cat licks you.

Mama cats regularly groom their babies

For a mother cat, grooming is an important part of child rearing. When a mama cat licks her kittens it serves two important purposes: keeping her kittens clean and promoting social bonds, Kristyn Vitale, an animal behaviorist at Maueyes Cat Science and Education tells Popular Science. 

On the one hand, “mother cats are going to groom their kittens to help keep them clean and healthy,” says Vitale. Kittens can be especially susceptible to diseases, and “anybody who’s raised young kittens knows how dirty they can get, and a mother cat is not going to obviously bathe their kitten in a tub. They’re going to use their tongue to clean them.”

Cats learn to groom from their mothers. Image: DepositPhotos

But grooming also helps a mother cat strengthen her relationship with her kittens, says Vitale. A mother licking her babies is “one of the kitten’s first forms of social interaction.” 

It’s essentially a way for mothers to say, “I love you and I care for you.”

How grooming shifts for cats in adulthood

Kittens learn to groom from their mom, and usually start grooming themselves when they’re around four weeks old. Pretty soon after that, some cats “begin to reciprocate [their mother’s] grooming and they’ll groom their siblings or other unrelated cats and also preferred people in the house,” says Vitale. 

If your cat grooms other cats, animal behaviorists like Vitale call those cats their “preferred associates.” For instance, bonded cats often groom each other as a way to reinforce their bestie status. For cats, grooming other cats becomes “a very important social behavior that helps build bonds between the individuals.”

Wild cats lick each other, too

We also see the same behavior in wild cats where mothers groom their cubs to keep them clean and strengthen their connection, says Vitale. In adulthood, wild cats might continue to groom others. You don’t have to search hard to find adorable videos online of lions and tigers licking their besties.

Like domestic cats, lions will lick their feline buddies. Video: Lions Cuddling and Licking Each Other/ DerpDerp

But Vitale says there is one big difference here. A lot of wild cats, like tigers or even the closest relative of domestic cats, the African wild cat, “don’t live in social groups the same way the domestic cat does.” So they don’t always have the same opportunities to shower their buddies with love, because, well, they just don’t really have many buddies.

Cats lick humans to strengthen your relationship

So why, then, do some cats licks their owners? In general, if your cat licks you, it’s them saying (in so many licks) that they love you. 

Vitale says when her cat licks her, she sees it as them “engaging in a social behavior with me” that’s strengthening our relationship. “I’m thinking in my mind that they’re just in a happy mood and looking to hang out together and interact a little bit.” 

What if your cat doesn’t lick you?

While all cats groom themselves (which is why you don’t really need to worry about baths for most cats), not all cats groom other cats or their human friends. But should you feel bad if your cat doesn’t lick you? Does it mean they don’t love you? “No!” says Vitale. 

“Licking’s just one social behavior they could engage in. If your cat just sits on your lap, or sits near you, or your cat’s rubbing up against you, or your cat plays with you, those are all other social behaviors that show there’s a bond,” she says. Cats show love for their owners in all sorts of ways, she emphasizes. “Licking is just one thing a cat could do.”

Vitale has three cats, and of the three she says only one licks her, “very, very sparingly, like once or twice a month.” 

So, don’t worry, whether they’re a licker or not, your cat loves you. They might just have a different way of showing it. 

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post Why do cats lick you? An expert explains. appeared first on Popular Science.

XAI has created Grokipedia and Grokipedia has a Nextbigfuture article. Nextbigfuture provided early coverage of Companies that Become deep tech Unicorns. Dozens of top Nucleqr fission and Fusion, quantum computer and Space Companies before They Became Billion $ Unicorns. There has been a surge in Grokipedia traffic to approximately 3.5 million daily visits, representing a ...

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Exlumina’s EVERLIGHT delivers wireless laser power to satellites and spacecraft, enabling longer missions, lower costs, and sustainable exploration in LEO, lunar, and deep-space environments. They will try to make the planned AI data centers in Space more efficient.

To study perceptions of causes of cultural change, I started with this posted list of the top 240 novels ever. I then asked (paid versions of) three LLMs to, for each novel, see if a main character is shown to have a stance of support or opposition to some social movement, and if so to pick the most central character like this. Re this set of novel characters, I ask what %-political (vs cultural) was the movement, how the character’s stance re it changed in the novel, and to pick from 8 possible causes of change.

Out of the 240 novels, ChatGPT found 9, Gemini found 35, and Claude found 99 where characters took a stance re a social movement. Of these, 5, 15, and 61, respectively, characters changed their stance. So the LLMs had rather different standards re how to decide those.

Their median movement-%-politics estimate was 85%, 80%, and 58%, respectively. For novels where the character changed their stance, those medians were 90%, 100% and 54%. The fraction of novels with a movement where it was <20% political is 0%, 3%, and 6%. That 3% is one novel, Don Quixote, while the 6% are On the Road, The Age of Innocence, Confessions, Brideshead Revisited, The End of the Affair, and The House of Mirth.

The fraction of characters whose stance changed who came more to support their movement was 80%, 40%, 34%. And “seeing unexpected events or facts in the world” was said to cause their stance change in 100%, 77%, and 82% of cases where a cause was identified. The next most common cause was “Change resolved inconsistency in prior norms”, at 0%, 15%, 7%. Here are the other 4 possible specific causes that LLMs rarely thought described novels:

• Saw opportunity to gain power, status, attention

• Saw prior associate or prestigious model change, copied them,

• Gained new associates or prestigious models, copied them

• It just felt right

Thus top novels are overwhelmingly focused on political, not cultural, change, and on change driven by characters seeing unexpected things in the world, and not driven by feelings, consistency, or copying associates. Typical real process of cultural change seem largely invisible to top novel authors.

A supermassive black hole is reawakening inside a distant galaxy cluster—and after almost 100 million years of slumber, astronomers now say it’s making up for lost time. According to a study published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, J1007+3540 is erupting like a volcano and spewing plasma across interstellar space.

A black hole isn’t constantly devouring its unfortunate galactic neighbors. In fact, it can lay dormant for eons. But when one of these gargantuan entities finally reawakens, the resulting display isn’t only impressive—it illustrates the chaotic battle between its own cosmic forces and the pressures of the universe around it.

One of the most striking glimpses of such an event was recently captured by a team led by Shobha Kumari at India’s Midnapore City College. Supermassive black holes rarely emit magnetized, radio-emitting plasma, but according to Kumari, J1007+3540 is especially unique. After analyzing data collected by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) in the Netherlands and India’s Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (uGMRT), researchers say there is undeniable evidence of multiple eruptions stretching deep into the universe’s past.

“It’s like watching a cosmic volcano erupt again after ages of calm—except this one is big enough to carve out structures stretching nearly a million light-years across space,” Kumari said in a statement.

The same images with labels showing the compressed northern lobe, curved backflow signature of plasma and the inner jet of the black hole. Credit: LOFAR / Pan-STARRS / Kumari et al.

Radio imaging revealed a small, bright interior jet indicative of J1007+3540’s internal forces revving back up. But surrounding this illumination is an older layer of fading, distorted plasma from previous active eras.

“This dramatic layering of young jets inside older, exhausted lobes is the signature of an episodic [active galactic nucleus]—a galaxy whose central engine keeps turning on and off over cosmic timescales,” added Kumari.

The supermassive black hole’s forces are unfathomably strong, but the influences of the giant galaxy cluster around it can’t be ignored either. The surrounding plumes of incredibly hot gas exert their own pressure, in this case even higher than most other radio galaxies. These cosmic regions then mangle and distort J1007+3540’s plasma jets as they race outward. For example, LOFAR’s imaging depicts a compressed northern lobe that is curving to one side due to the galactic gas. Complimentary data from uGMRT reveals a very steep radio spectrum indicative of old, weakened plasma particles.

“J1007+3540 is one of the clearest and most spectacular examples of episodic AGN with jet-cluster interaction, where the surrounding hot gas bends, compresses, and distorts the jets,” added Surajit Paul, a study coauthor and astronomer at the Manipal Center for Natural Sciences in India.

Moving forward, Kumari, Paul, and their collaborators hope to employ higher-resolution equipment to peer into J1007+3540’s core. In doing so, researchers can better chart how the black hole’s reignited jets travel through the galaxy cluster, as well as how often such events actually occur.

The post Black hole space volcano erupts after 100 million year nap appeared first on Popular Science.

a16z cofounders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz join a16z general partner Erik Torenberg and Not Boring founder Packy McCormick for a discussion on the evolution of the media and information ecosystem over the past decade. The conversation explores shifts toward open, decentralized speech, the rise of creator-led platforms like Substack, and the decline of centralized ...

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A Mathematician with early access to XAI Grok 4.20, found a new Bellman function for one of the problems he had been working on with my student N. Alpay. Not an Erdős problem, but original research. Demonstrates AI generating novel math objects (Bellman functions for optimal control) quickly, linking to isoperimetric profiles and Takagi function ...

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I’ve read a bit about cultural change both in corporations and in our larger macro cultures. And one thing I’ve noticed is that firm culture change less often involves youth movements. Yes, when there are larger cultural youth movements, that does influence behavior in firms. But we don’t so much see youth movements particular to specific firms. Why?

I see four main explanations. The first is that most corporations just don’t last very long. As business change is often enacted via old firms falling and new firms rising, there is less need for youth to visibly fight for change there. Youths can instead just switch to other firms, or wait for new firms to arise. Macro cultures, in contrast, will only change if folks push for change, and youths can be more sure to win eventually if they just wait til the old are gone.

A second explanation is that, compared to larger societies, the hierarchical nature of a firm more structures its communication and choices. So young people with ideas for change tend to privately persuade supervisors to adopt them, supervisors who then become the face of such changes. Both because youths have more access to firm leaders, and because they can face stronger retribution for visibly opposing leaders. In macro cultures, it is harder for youths to meet and persuade leaders to support changes. Plausibly firm leaders, compared to macro leaders, have stronger incentives to adopt changes even when they are hard or threaten prior leader investments.

A third explanation is that different cultural units use somewhat different status markers. In a firm, it is easier to demonstrate concrete achievement influencing firm success, achievement reflected in hierarchical position. We are less sure who contributed how much to a macro culture’s success, less confident that rank there reflects achievement, and so are more willing to listen to people with more indirect markers of quality, like education, articulation, popularity, and energy.

A fourth explanation is that art, intellect, and morality abilities are more influential re macro culture changes, and in those areas we more have a myth of the genius who is visible early in life via their impressive public opposition to the old. So in those areas of life org leaders and supporting personnel take backseats to the foregrounded youthful geniuses, who become leaders of youth movements.

Each of these explanations suggests a corresponding approach to reducing the influence of youth movements in our macro cultures. We could make it easier to switch macro-cultures, give macro leaders better incentives and make their contributions clearer, and deconstruct the myth of genius.

Seven naturally-mummified cheetahs are more than just an exciting paleontological find. The specimens discovered in five caves near the city of Arar in northern Saudi Arabia offer a glimpse of hope for reintroducing the species to the Arabian Peninsula. The findings are described in a study published today in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Cheetahs once lived in much of Africa, and Western and Southern Asia, but their range in Asia has decreased by 98 percent over the past several thousand years. As a whole, cheetahs only occupy nine percent of the territory they used to. On the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait) cheetahs were found as recently as 1977, when a hunter in Oman killed an adult female cheetah. However, the animals are now considered locally extinct in the region. There are five cheetah subspecies, and the Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus) is believed to have been the only subspecies that lived in present-day Saudi Arabia. The Asiatic cheetah is currently considered critically endangered, with only one small wild population remaining in Iran. Whether or not cheetahs could be reintroduced in the area is debated, largely due to continued habitat destruction.

During digs in five caves in 2022 and 2023, field biologist Ahmed Boug from Saudi Arabia’s National Center for Wildlife and his team uncovered skeletal remains of 54 other cats and seven naturally-mummified cheetahs. In desert regions, natural mummification is common due to the dry conditions where fungi and bacteria can’t thrive on a decomposing corpse. Deserts also have the right mineral content in the sand for preservation.

The oldest of the cat skeletal remains date back about 4,000 years ago. The mummified cheetah remains were much younger—ranging from only 130 to 1,870 years ago. 

They also extracted complete genome sequences from three of the seven mummified cheetahs. According to the team, this is the first time that this kind of genetic material extraction has been done on naturally-mummified big cats. While the most recent specimen is genetically closest to the Asiatic cheetah, the two older specimens are more similar to the Northwest African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus hecki). This critically endangered species is found in the Sahara and several countries in northwestern Africa.

One of the mummified cheetahs as it was found in situ in a cave in northern Saudi Arabia. Image: National Center for Wildlife – Saudi Arabia

The authors say that their results indicate that cheetah subspecies could support the re-establishment of cheetahs in Saudi Arabia. An increased available genetic pool from other subspecies would make rewilding efforts more feasible, as subspecies can generally interbreed and create fertile offspring that further the population. The team also suggests that their method shows that ancient DNA records from similar specimens can inform future reintroduction plans for other endangered species.

The post Mummified cheetahs could help save the critically endangered big cats appeared first on Popular Science.

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