For centuries, along the entire northern border of the Roman Empire, local inhabitants coexisted with Roman citizens and their slaves, as well as the legionaries who guarded the Roman Limes, the imperial frontier. But there is no evidence that they mixed extensively. However, everything changed with the fall of Rome: a study of bodies buried in some 20 cemeteries in Germania shows that, without the rule of lex romana, local inhabitants, citizens, slaves, and legionaries began to intermingle. The study, published in Nature, also describes the families of these groups, their life expectancy, and the prevalence of orphanhood among young children at the beginning of the Middle Ages.

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In nature, the Barbary macaque has a nearly vegetarian diet based on fruits, tender leaves, roots and an insect here and there. But on the Rock of Gibraltar, they also eat chocolate cookies, ice cream cones, M&M’s and potato chips. The result? A study published in Nature shows that the monkeys are eating dirt to purge the sugars, fats, and dairy products from this junk food tourists give them.

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Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were more than just sister species. Differing by only a few dozen genes, they had sex and produced offspring repeatedly — a fact that, for some researchers, even calls into question how distinct they truly were. Yet a detailed analysis of the remains of a Neanderthal baby shows that from a very young age, they were already different, at least in their bones. The study, published in Current Biology, also suggests that Homo neanderthalensis children developed at a faster rate than Homo sapiens. The harsher environmental conditions they faced may explain this crucial difference.

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Light pollution continues to increase. This is nothing new; Earth’s nights have been getting brighter for some time now. But a new study published in Nature, which confirms this trend, has also found that artificial light is receding in parts of the planet. In some areas, this is due to conflicts or crises, such as in Ukraine, Syria, or Venezuela. But in others, such as Europe, thanks to technological transition and increased awareness of the damage this pollution causes to ecosystems and humans themselves, the night is recovering.

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Cats, along with dogs, are the animals that spend the most time with humans. They share spaces, routines, and even illnesses. They are exposed to almost all the same environmental stressors that induce tumors in people. However, unlike what happens with dogs, cancer research in felines is very limited. Now, a huge study published in Science, using hundreds of tumor samples, has obtained the most complete oncogenome of the domestic cat. Among its findings, two are closely related: cats and humans suffer from almost the same types of cancer, and this opens the door for the possibility that advances in the fight against cancer in one species could be applied to the other.

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