Most people, and some animals, are familiar with the whip’s properties. As a material object, it is a little thin stick. In the hands of a human, it can inflict fear and pain. Knowledge about pain qualities is deeply embedded in most human cultures. Its bare presence is often enough to scare and raise concerns about abuse. As such, the whip has tremendous powers – human use through thousands of ...

Population size has increasingly been taken as the driver of past human environmental impact worldwide, and particularly in the Arctic. However, sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA), pollen and archaeological data show that over the last 12,000 years, paleoeconomy and culture determined human impacts on the terrestrial ecology of Arctic Norway. The large Mortensnes site complex (Ceavccagea ¯dgi, 70◦N) ...

Psoroma femsjonense, long considered to be a synonym of P. hypnorum, is shown here to represent a distinct, misunderstood species. The collections seen are from the lowlands of southern Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Czech Republic, and France. In these areas, the species has not been collected since 1945 and may prove to be regionally extinct from these countries. However, a report indicates that ...

Psoroma sphinctrinum var. crispellum has been considered a synonym of Pannaria implexa, but it is a distinct species, recombined here as P. crispella. It forms a thin, filmy thallus on tree trunks, and consists of rounded, confluent squamules surrounded by a distinct black prothallus. The apothecia are initially simple with a well-defined central thalline plug. However, the plug soon expands into ...

The hunter-gatherers that entered the British peninsula after ice-retreat were exploiting a dynamic, rapidly changing environment. Records of vegetation change and human occupation during the Lateglacial to Early Holocene in northern Britain are more commonly found at upland and cave sites. However, recent research highlights many areas of the Swale–Ure Washlands that preserve extensive environmental ...

The article argues that we legitimise the use of nature through cultural nature rationales. We adapt our understanding of nature to how we want to use it in a cultural sense. The material for the discussion is equine husbandry, using a past and contemporary perspective. The treatment of the horses that Robert Falcon Scott brought with him on his south pole expedition in 1910–1912, and the treatment ...

Soft-bodied cephalopods such as octopuses are exceptionally intelligent invertebrates with a highly complex nervous system that evolved independently from vertebrates. Because of elevated RNA editing in their nervous tissues, we hypothesized that RNA regulation may play a major role in the cognitive success of this group. We thus profiled messenger RNAs and small RNAs in three cephalopod species ...

The large and conspicuous keroplatid species Rocetelion humerale (Zetterstedt, 1850) was previously documented with a single record from Norway only, a more than one hundred-year-old record of a male from Erfjord in Rogaland County, published in 1914, for which the voucher specimen has been searched for in vain in museum collections. In the summer of 2020, a new record of an adult male was ...

The European Alps are highly rich in species, but their future may be threatened by ongoing changes in human land use and climate. Here, we reconstructed vegetation, temperature, human impact and livestock over the past ~12,000 years from Lake Sulsseewli, based on sedimentary ancient plant and mammal DNA, pollen, spores, chironomids, and microcharcoal. We assembled a highly-complete local DNA ...

Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene epochs 3.6 to 0.8 million years ago1 had climates resembling those forecasted under future warming2. Palaeoclimatic records show strong polar amplification with mean annual temperatures of 11–19 °C above contemporary values3,4. The biological communities inhabiting the Arctic during this time remain poorly known because fossils are rare5. Here we report an ancient ...