10,000-Year-Old ‘Chewing Gum’ Sheds Fascinating Light On The Diet Of Stone Age Teens
Hey, welcome back. I'm mixed strange. This is Crazy Strange News episode fifty news bite. Good morning. You can now buy gene hacked houseplants that glow in the dark. Bioluminescent houseplants are now a thing, and they're gonna put those old chia pets to shame. In a press release, the synthetic biology startup light Bio announced that the It's a bioluminescent offering, dubbed firefly petunias, are now available for pre order in the US. Our petunias for I thought they'd like you guys, correct me if I'm wrong, But don't petunias like attract ants and stuff. I don't know if you have those in the house, don't you put those outside? That'd be cool though you look out the backyard, everything's glowing. So they're dubbed firefly patunias. They're now available for pre order in the US, and honestly, the twenty nine dollars the twenty nine bucks the company is charging seems like a steal for how novel they are. The science behind bioengineering glowing plants has come a long way since the nineteen eighties, when scientists first injected firefly genes into plants to make them glow. Wow. When we were young, the girls would we catch fireflies and all the little girls would make rings out of their their butts. They're glowing butts. Kind of gross if you think about it, but that's what we used to do. Light bios firefly patunias instead build on scientific discoveries gleaned from naturally occurring bio luminescent fungi. Okay, While glowing mushrooms have long been a documented thing, it wasn't until recently that scientists figured out not only how to isolate the genes that make them glow, but also how to inject them into plants and now how to make them even brighter. In a study published last month in the journal Nature's Methods, a consortium of Russian scientists explained how they were able to enhance the self sustained luminescence of fact first glean from Neo Nthampen panas Nampi got that people, man me the Russian. Russian scientists are always doing wacky stuff. Man. So that is otherwise known as the poisonous league glowing puffball mushroom found in South America, initially used to create glowing tobacco plants. Odd put that in your pipe and smoke it. Back in twenty twenty, the luminescence from the n namby has been used in labs to make all kinds of glowing plants, but only barely. In the newer research, however, scientists managed to further gene hack plants using the fun guys ureco wrotes to glow up to one hundred times brighter than those first efforts from just a few years ago, resulting in the gorgeous and seemingly quite luminous petunias. Light Bio is now selling light Bio. CEO ken Wood brag that the magical experi variance we are bringing to people across the country is one that's we've been at it for decades. He's right to do so, considering that he worked on the team that created the glowing plants from the eighties, and the firefly genes used in those experiments seem likely to have inspired the branded name of his company's patented petunias. Naturally, the press release also contains some goofy accolades as well Light those from j like well as it's say light those A like those from Jason Kelly, the CEO and founder of Ginko Bioworks, which helped fund Light Bio, and who said that firefly petunias are bringing us leaps and bounds closer to our solar punk dream of living in Avatar's Pandora. Mm hm, yes, it's cringe, but if you'd made glowing plants, you'd probably have some embarrassingly earnest things to say about it too, hm nerds. All right, heading over to all That's Interesting dot Com. Ten thousand year old chewing gum sheds fascinating light on the diet of Stone age teens. Ten thousand years ago, a group of Stone age adolescents in Sweden chomped down on a tar like black resin made of birch bark, Much like modern day teenagers. They spat the chewing gum out when they were done with it, oblivious to the fact that researchers far in the future would use the glob of sticky resin to better understand their diet and or oral health. Oral the chunks of chewing gum, who were found thirty years ago at the husby Klev archaeological site near the Swedish city of Gothenburg, Anders Gothard storm Strom Viking Dude Gotherstrom, the co author of a new study about the gum and scientific reports, told CBS News that the teenagers probably masticated the resins so it could be used to assemble tools and weapons, like an epoxy. I guess maybe even waterproofing. This is a most likely hypothesis, Gotherstrom added, explaining they could of course have been chewed just because they liked them, or because they thought that they had some medicinal purposes. I'd imagine what was that each beachwood or birch. Yeah, so like birch beer. Maybe they had a birch flavor. I don't know if the resin would, but makes sense it tastes good, and in doing so they left behind tantalizing clues about their lives. There's a richness of DNA sequences in the chewed mastic from Hosby klev Emera Kurdoc of Merson University Department of Biotechnology, and the studies lead author said in a statement. Though researchers in twenty nineteen used the gum to map the genetic profiles of the Stone Age teenagers, Kurdock and his team look specifically at what the gum could reveal about the teenager's diets and oral health. They found that Stone Age teenage, before popping the resins in their mouths and starting to chew, had enjoyed a meal of deer trout and hazelnuts. That don't sound too bad. They also found uh trace DNA of bird species including mallard, tofted duck and European robin, as well as other animals like the red fox, Arctic fox, and wolf. The researchers suspect that the teenagers use their teeth to prepare the bird bones and the canid pelts as tools are clothing. This provides a snapshot of the life of a small group of hunter gatherers on the Scandinavian West coast. I think it is amazing. There are other well established methods to work out what nutral and diet relates to the Stone Age, but here we know that these teenagers were eating deer trout and hazel nuts nine seven hundred years ago on the west coast of Scandinavia. He says that wasn't all the researchers found out, As gothers Strom noted, they also discovered that one of the teenagers had severe problems with his teeth. Their study revealed that one of the teenagers had a number of bacteria, indicating a severe case of perioditis. Where did that go? This gum infection would have been painful and gother's. Strom explained that the teenager probably started losing their teeth shortly after chewing the resin that sucks. I mean, hygiene was not up the par obviously, you know it's ten thousand years ago. The chewing gum has thus revealed what stone age teenagers ate and some of the health problems they experienced. But they also noted that the discovery has even deeper implications and draws a fascinating link between the adolescence in Sweden and people living today. You have the imprint from the teenager's mouth who chewed it thousands of years ago, he said, if you want to put some kind of philosophical layer into it, but for us, it connects artifacts, the DNA and humans. Al Right, guys, tell me how you like these news segments. These, I mean they're ten to fifteen minutes. You know, a couple of articles, some interesting things going on in the world every day, some strange so fascinating. Shoot me an email at Crazy Strange Days and Days is spelled d a z E, not d A y s at gmail dot com. Let me know, give me your heads up. If you like it, please subscribe first, tell a friend five star, rate and review. I'm gonna get some more coffee in me. It's early morning. Hope you enjoyed it. I've been mixed strange, and I am out of here.