Research Details Prehistoric Mining, Octopus Species, Cat Behavior

Ars Technica compiled five research findings from May that had received limited coverage. The stories span archaeology, neurobiology, marine biology, acoustics, and computational analysis of art.

Prehistoric copper smelting site Spanish archaeologists excavated a cave in the eastern Pyrenees between 2021 and 2023. They identified 23 hearths containing burned green mineral fragments resembling malachite, a copper ore. The hearths date between 4,000 and 5,500 years old.

The team recovered two prehistoric pendants, a human finger bone, and an 11-year-old child's tooth. Researchers published the findings in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

Neural wiring in singing mice Singing mice in Costa Rican cloud forests produce call-and-response duets. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory researchers mapped neuron connections using molecular barcoding. They found roughly three times as many neurons linking mouth-movement and hearing regions compared with related species.

The study appeared in Nature. The authors suggest similar wiring changes could enable ordinary lab mice to produce comparable vocalizations.

New octopus species from Galapagos Researchers collected a small blue octopus at 5,800 feet depth during a 2015 Galapagos expedition. Mini-CT scans revealed short arms, few suckers, no ink sac, smooth skin, and a large rachidian tooth. The specimen was named Microeledone galapagensis and described in Zootaxa.

Acoustic testing of slapsticks Daniel Ludwigsen of Kettering University tested five commercial slapsticks in an anechoic chamber. Smaller models with spring hinges performed best at high frequencies; longer models performed better at low frequencies. Results were presented at the Acoustical Society of America meeting.

Mathematical patterns in abstract art Researchers applied persistent homology analysis to paintings by Jackson Pollock, Wassily Kandinsky, and Mark Rothko. The method distinguished these works from AI-generated images. Eye-tracking and brain-activity measurements showed more stable processing when viewers examined the original artworks. The study was published in PLoS Computational Biology.