GETTING THE WORD OUT

IN BRIEF
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E BRUN
Leaded ink opens
up ancient scrolls
LEAD often gets a bad press. But its
discovery in ancient Graeco-Roman
ink could make it easier to read an
early form of publishing – precious
scrolls buried by the eruption of
Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.
Some 800 scrolls, part of the
classical world’s best-surviving
library, have tantalised scholars
since they were unearthed in a
villa in the ancient Roman city of
Herculaneum in 1752. About 200
are in such a delicate state that they
have never been read. Unrolling the
charred scrolls could destroy them,
so people have been X-raying the
bundles in the hopes of decoding
the writing inside. But progress has
been slow – it is difficult to detect
the difference between the letters
and the papyrus they are written on.
Now physicist Vito Mocella of
the Italian National Research Council
and his colleagues have discovered
lead in the ink on two Herculaneum
papyri fragments held in the
Institute of France in Paris. The
presence of lead means that
imaging techniques could be
recalibrated to pick up the metal,
something X-rays excel at (PNAS,
doi.org/bdn5).
“This really opens up the
possibility of being able to read
these scrolls,” says Graham Davis,
at Queen Mary University of London.
“If this is typical of this scroll or other
scrolls, than that is very good news.”
Violent pirouette spun off the moon’s water
BALLET doesn’t suit everyone.
Molten rock flowing beneath the
moon’s crust billions of years ago
shifted its spin axis by about six
degrees. The pirouette could have
cost the moon most of its water.
We saw the first direct evidence
of water on the moon in 2009,
when a deliberately crashed
satellite found hydrogen – a proxy
for water – in a southern crater.
There was more there than at the
actual pole, a little more than five
degrees away, says Matthew
Siegler of the Planetary Science
Institute in Tucson, Arizona.
Fungi may help
woodpeckers drill
IF A red-cockaded woodpecker
wants a home, it does more than
just knock on wood – it takes some
tiny helpers with it. It seems to
carry spores of wood-rotting fungi
to each new hole.
Red-cockaded woodpeckers
live in the pine forests of the
south-eastern US, where they dig
tree cavities to live in. Each family
has cavities at different stages of
construction. It’s no quick bodge
job–aholecantakeyears to craft.
Michelle Jusino of the US
Forest Service Center for Forest
Mycology Research in Wisconsin
and her colleagues have found a
wide range of fungal spores on the
birds, including many that cause
wood decay and are found in
cavities that woodpeckers dig.
To see whether the birds bring
the fungi to the cavities, the team
drilled holes in 60 trees, covering
half with screens the woodpeckers
can’t get through. After 26 months,
accessible holes had fungal
communities that were more
similar to those found in natural
woodpecker cavities than to
inaccessible holes. This suggests
the birds do disperse fungi,
although any benefit to them is
still unproven (Proceedings of the
Royal Society B, doi.org/bdn7).
While scrutinising maps of
the lunar composition, Siegler
noticed that the highest
concentration of hydrogen at the
north pole is also a few degrees
away from the true pole, but in
the opposite direction.
“They are on exact opposite
sides of the moon from each
other. It’s as if you drew a line
through the centre of the moon
from those two points,” he says.
This indicates that the moon’s
polar axis used to follow that line,
but shifted. Based on its direction,
Siegler and his colleagues think
Parasites, mew give me road rage
CATS can make us angry. Scratching
our furniture, waking us up – and
giving us parasites that may cause
explosive rage.
Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite
carried by cats that lives in the brains
of as many as a third of all people
worldwide. Now the parasite has
been linked to a psychiatric condition
involving disproportionate outbursts
of aggression, like road rage.
Emil Coccaro at the University of
Chicago and his colleagues compared
110 people with intermittent
explosive disorder (IED) with people
who have no psychiatric diagnosis.
the shift was caused when lava
flowing up from the lunar interior
formed the Procellarum region.
The volcanism would have
changed the distribution of the
moon’s mass, spinning it around
(Nature, doi.org/bdn9).
That pirouette could have cost
the moon much of its water. When
the poles shifted, frozen water
would have been exposed to the
sun and evaporated. That helps to
explain why the moon is so dry,
and suggests that much of the
lunar water is leftover from early
in its life.
They found that people with IED
were more than twice as likely to
test positive for exposure to T. gondii.
In both groups, those who tested
positive tended to rank more highly
in tests for aggression (Journal of
Clinical Psychiatry, doi.org/bdpq).
Coccaro thinks the parasite may
be altering neurotransmitters in
the brain. However, the correlation
doesn’t necessarily mean that
T. gondii is causing the explosive
rage. Aggressive people may be
less likely to wash their hands,
making them more likely to catch
the parasite, for example.
NATALIE SHUTTLEWORTH/GETTY
16 | NewScientist | 2 April 2016