Denisovan radius discovered for first time in Southwest China

Chinese Academy of Sciences Headquarters

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

The geographical location of the Bianfu Cave and the morphology of the two human teeth and three newly discovered Denisovan bones.

view more 

Credit: Image by IVPP

Scientists recently discovered various Denisovan remains in Southwest China dating back to the late Middle Pleistocene, including the first Denisovan radius—one of two long bones in the forearm.

Denisovans are a genetically identified archaic hominin group believed to have been widely distributed across Asia. However, due to the limited number of fossil remains, especially postcranial bones—those below the skull—a distribution gap has long existed in Southwest China. Therefore, little is known about the physical traits that allowed Denisovans to adapt to different environments.

In a new study, researchers employed a novel proteomic strategy to identify additional hominin bones from a Paleolithic site called Bianfu Cave in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province. Paleoproteomic analysis confirmed five hominin remains as Denisovans, helping fill the distribution gap of Denisovans in Southwest China.

According to the researchers, the discovery of the first Denisovan radius provides crucial insights into Denisovan postcranial phenotype.

The study, published in Nature on September 9, was conducted by a research team led by Professor FU Qiaomei from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with multiple institutions.

New Strategy

ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) has recently become an important tool for large-scale screening of hominin fossils due to its advantages of micro-invasive sampling, methodological simplicity, rapid identification, and low cost. However, the recovery rate of hominin fossils has been extremely low—only 0.1% at sites such as Denisova Cave and Baishiya Karst Cave. Given that Bianfu Cave yielded more than 60,000 bone fragments, conducting ZooMS analysis on all specimens would be both costly and inefficient.

To overcome this challenge, the researchers developed a novel “morphological pre-screening + ZooMS identification” strategy. This combined approach significantly improved screening efficiency and provided a replicable methodological framework for discovering hominin remains at similar Paleolithic sites with abundant bone fragments.

Through morphological pre-screening, the researchers selected 22 potential hominin remains from the large assemblage of bone fragments. Subsequent ZooMS analysis confirmed that two parietal bone fragments (BFD767 and BFD769) and one proximal radial fragment (BFD771) were derived from hominins.

Among the three newly identified hominin specimens, BFD767 and BFD771 originated from Layer 7, which also contained four hominin teeth. This layer was dated to approximately 148,000–134,000 years ago. BFD769 came from the older Layer 9, dated to approximately 167,000–150,000 years ago.

In addition to the three hominin bones, the research team also analyzed two hominin teeth excavated from Layer 7, including a lower fourth premolar (YHB3518) and a lower second molar (YHB3075).

To obtain comprehensive proteomic profiles of the five specimens, the team extracted and analyzed proteins from multiple fractions of different tissues, including bone, dentine, and enamel. Six to 16 endogenous proteins were identified from each specimen, covering 1,972 to 4,076 amino acid residues. Notably, abundant specific peptides from the amelogenin Y isoform were identified in the enamel of the two teeth, indicating that both teeth belonged to male individuals.

Population Assignment

To determine the population assignment of these hominin specimens, the research team systematically screened for single amino acid polymorphisms (SAPs) within the endogenous proteomes.

They found that all five samples carried the Denisovan-specific variant COL1A2 R996K, indicating their Denisovan identity. Three additional informative SAPs were identified in the enamel of two Bianfu Cave teeth: the Denisovan-related variant AMBN M273V; AMELY 179L, a variant shared by modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans; and AMBN 253A, a variant that distinguishes the Bianfu Cave individuals from Middle Pleistocene Homo erectus in East Asia.

Using the consensus sequences of endogenous proteins from each sample, the researchers constructed Bayesian phylogenetic trees with topologies highly consistent with those obtained from nuclear genome studies. The trees placed modern humans as the sister group to the Neanderthal-Denisovan clade. Each Bianfu Cave sample formed a monophyletic clade with Denisova 3, with a posterior probability of 100 percent. This result aligns with the SAP assignments, supporting the reliable attribution of these specimens as Denisovans.

Morphological Phenotype

Comprehensive morphological analysis was conducted on the two Denisovan parietal bones (BFD767 and BFD769) and one partial radius (BFD771). The cranial vault thickness pattern of Bianfu Cave hominins is most similar to that of H. heidelbergensis and East Asian late Middle Pleistocene archaic Homo.

Notably, BFD771 is the only confirmed Denisovan radius to date. Although it has large proximal dimensions and a likely medially oriented radial tuberosity, similar to Neanderthal radii, its overall external shape and mid-neck cross-sectional geometry align more closely with modern humans. According to the researchers, the first identified Denisovan radius fragment is of exceptional importance. Its mosaic features indicate unique biomechanical demands and behavioral adaptations in Denisovans, differing from those inferred for Neanderthals and modern humans.

Based on their results, Bianfu Cave has the richest Denisovan fossil record currently known outside Denisova Cave. The study fills a critical geographical gap in the known distribution of Denisovans. The Denisovan remains were derived from two different stratigraphic layers dating to Marine Isotope Stage 6. During this glacial period, the relatively warmer climate and abundant food resources may have enabled the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau to serve as a favorable habitat for hominins and supported the long-term survival of the Bianfu Cave population.

---

Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-026-10976-9 

Article Title

Ancient proteins identify various Denisovan remains from Southwest China

Article Publication Date

9-Sep-2026

 

White is more than a color: How nature inspired a new sustainable way to make white, water-repellent materials

Researchers at Kyoto University’s iCeMS have developed a foam-based technology that mimics nature to make brilliant white materials and control water repellency—without TiO₂ or PFAS. It offers a new platform for packaging, printed materials, and tex

Kyoto University

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Biomimetic structures transform light into colour, revealing hidden material potential.
Blender 3D and Photoshop compositing.
 

view more 

Credit: © Claudia Rosa

Look closely at Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, one of Japan's most iconic masterpieces. The brilliant white of the waves, the snow on Mount Fuji and the clouds above contain no white pigment. Instead, their whiteness comes from the way light scatters off the unprinted fibers of the washi paper itself. 

This optical phenomenon—known as structural whiteness—is the same mechanism that makes sea spray, snow, and clouds appear bright white in nature. Throughout nature, from plant tissues to protective frog nests, foamed structures made mostly of air scatter light with extraordinary efficiency, creating intense whiteness without the need for pigments.

This natural phenomenon inspired an international research team—led by Professor Easan Sivaniah of Kyoto University’s Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS), alongside collaborators from Tokyo Metropolitan University and Donghua University—to develop a new foam-based materials platform that solves two major industrial challenges in everyday materials.

Today, white packaging, films and coatings rely heavily on titanium dioxide (TiO₂) to provide brightness and opacity in creating white materials, but safety concerns recently led the European Union to ban its use as a food additive. Meanwhile, fluorinated materials known as PFAS are widely used to provide water and oil repellency, but growing concerns about their persistence and potential environmental and health impacts are driving efforts around the world to develop alternatives.

To address these challenges, the team developed a technology that generates whiteness and controls water repellency through precisely engineered porous structures that reproduce the light-scattering behavior of natural foams, drawing inspiration from natural surfaces such as leaves and flower petals. 

“A key challenge faced by biomimetic science is realizing environmentally friendly material designs inspired by nature at the scale and cost of existing materials.”
— Assoc. Prof. Taiki Yanagishima, Tokyo Metropolitan University

The fabrication process is remarkably simple. It uses light followed by treatment with a mild solvent. Light first breaks the polymer into smaller molecular fragments. These fragments interact with the solvent, causing the material to swell and form an open, porous structure. Through this single process, the material achieves two distinct functions. Internally, the porous structure scatters light to create intense whiteness without added pigments. On the surface, the foam transforms into an extremely rough structure with strong water-repellent properties, similar to those found on a lotus leaf.

The research team named this technology Deep Foam Photolithography (DFP).

Working with textile researchers at Donghua University, one of China’s leading institutions for textile science and engineering, the team demonstrated that the process can be applied not only to printable polymer films but also to fabrics. Importantly, the process does not require the development of entirely new specialty chemicals and has already been demonstrated with several commercially available polymers.

The result is a new printable materials platform, capable of ultrahigh resolution (20,000 DPI), that combines structural whiteness with water-management functionality—without titanium dioxide and without PFAS.

The technology opens new opportunities by enabling lighter materials and reducing dependence on mined mineral pigments and persistent fluorinated chemicals. By generating color and surface functionality from the physical structure of the material itself, rather than relying on added pigments or persistent chemical coatings, the approach offers a fundamentally different, sustainable way to engineer everyday materials—delivering function through structure rather than chemistry.

 

Einstein portrait created with DFP technology, transforming light into matter.

Canon EOS 1200D and Photoshop compositing.

 

Traditional Shoji created with DFP technology.

Credit

© Claudia Rosa

---

Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-026-10968-9 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Foaming photopolymers as a high-resolution biomimetic printing platform

Article Publication Date

9-Sep-2026

 

University of Central Florida researchers receive NEH grant to preserve Noah Webster’s dictionaries online

The project will engage undergraduate and graduate students to transform the dictionaries into searchable digital editions, preserving the texts that helped define and document American English

University of Central Florida

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

UCF Associate Professor of English Beth Young leads the project to preserve Noah Webster's dictionaries online.

view more 

Credit: UCF

Long before spell check and online dictionaries made definitions a click away, Noah Webster set out to document American English, which was still taking shape. More than two centuries later, UCF researchers are helping preserve his work for a new generation.

Researchers in UCF’s Department of English and Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) are slated to receive nearly $350,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to create searchable digital editions of Webster’s historic dictionaries, giving scholars, educators and the public unprecedented access to foundational texts that helped shape American English.

The two-year grant will support Noah Webster’s Dictionary Online: Preserving America’s Revolutionary Language Heritage. The project is led by Beth Young, associate professor of English, with co-principal investigators CHDR Associate Director Brook Miller and Professor of English Mark Kamrath, who is co-director of CHDR.

The project will also expand educational opportunities for UCF students.

Undergraduate and graduate students will contribute to proofreading, digital editing and semantic text tagging while gaining internship and research experience across several academic programs. Postdoctoral fellow Abigail Moreshead will help conduct research and supervise the student team, and XML (extensible markup language) Specialist William Dorner  will oversee the technical encoding.

Bringing Webster’s Words Into the Digital Age

The project builds on two previous NEH-funded digital humanities initiatives. Drawing on the experience of creating Johnson’s Dictionary Online, the team will create comprehensive digital editions of Webster’s The Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806) and An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).

“Noah Webster believed that our new nation needed its own language, not just its own government,” says Young, an affiliate scholar with CHDR. “He correctly predicted that American English would one day be spoken by ‘300 millions’ of people. This grant enables us to provide digital editions of Webster’s dictionaries that are as reliable, accurate and searchable as today’s scholarship demands.”

Unlike existing online versions, which primarily consist of scanned pages or basic text transcriptions, the new editions will include advanced search capabilities, complete transcriptions, high-quality images and scholarly annotations.

The team aims to complete the searchable 1828 edition in time for its 200th anniversary in 2028, followed by the 1806 edition.

Together, the dictionaries capture American English as it was developing during the nation’s formative years, preserving the language used in early American law, politics, education and everyday life.

The project also builds on the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition, an initiative led by Mark Kamrath that aims to identify, transcribe, organize and ultimately edit the post-revolutionary author’s uncollected writings, making them searchable in an electronic environment. Webster’s dictionaries are from the same era and provide a bridge to understanding Brockden’s texts.

More Than a Dictionary

Webster’s dictionaries remain valuable resources for literary, historical and legal scholarship more than two centuries after their publication. According to the project proposal, courts continue to reference the dictionaries when interpreting the original meaning of constitutional and legal terms, while educators use them to help students understand the language of America’s founding era. The UCF team has already seen evidence of this type of use with Johnson’s Dictionary Online, with the resource being cited by The Atlantic, The New York Times, and U.S. federal and district courts.

By making the texts easier to search and study, the project will enable users to explore Webster’s work in ways that scans can’t.

CHDR’s Susan Xiao will serve as the project’s lead programmer, overseeing development of the digital platform that will power the searchable editions. The website currently hosts full-page images and will ultimately feature advanced search tools, scholarly annotations, and high-resolution entry images designed to make Webster’s landmark dictionaries more accessible to researchers, educators, and the public.

CHDR will host and maintain the project, building on its experience supporting digital humanities initiatives.

 

Noah Webster’s Dictionary Online: Preserving America’s Revolutionary Language Heritage will be made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

 

Genomic evidence identifies the origin of goosegrass on Nishinoshima, a newly emerged volcanic island

University of Tsukuba

Faceboo

XLinkedIn

 

image: 

Population of Eleusine indica (goosegrass, known in Japan as “ohishiba”) on Nishinoshima Island (photographed on September 4, 2019). The green and straw-colored plants visible in the foreground and background are E. indica.

view more 

Credit: Takashi Kamijo, University of Tsukuba

Tsukuba, Japan—Opportunities to directly observe how life colonizes newly formed land and how ecosystems subsequently develop are exceedingly rare. In this study, researchers used genetic analyses to investigate the origin of Eleusine indica, a grass species, found on Nishinoshima, an active volcanic island in the northwestern Pacific, south of mainland Japan. Having newly emerged, the island offers a unique natural laboratory for understanding the earliest stages of biological colonization and ecosystem development.

Since new land emerged during volcanic activity in 1973, Nishinoshima has been continuously expanding, yet only a small number of its plant species have been recorded. During a survey conducted in 2019, three plant species, including E. indica, were found surviving within a small, 0.5-ha remnant of the original island surface. Because human access to Nishinoshima is strictly restricted, how these plants established populations on such a remote oceanic island without human assistance was unknown.

The research team analyzed DNA samples of E. indica collected from Nishinoshima, mainland Japan, the Ogasawara Islands, the Ryukyu Islands, Indonesia, and other locations using advanced genetic techniques. The results indicated that the Nishinoshima population is most closely related to populations from the Ogasawara Islands, Okinawa, and Indonesia, suggesting dispersal from tropical regions through Okinawa and the Ogasawara Islands. Additionally, the analyses revealed extremely low genetic diversity within the Nishinoshima population, suggesting that it likely originated from a single seed or only a few seeds. Seabirds, including the brown booby (Sula leucogaster), commonly breed on and around Nishinoshima. Thus, the researchers propose that seeds were transported over long distances by birds and subsequently established on the island.

This study provides rare genetic evidence of how plants colonize newly formed volcanic islands and offers important insights into the earliest stages of ecosystem establishment in isolated oceanic environments. The findings also highlight the potential importance of seabirds in connecting distant island ecosystems via long-distance seed dispersal.

###
This paper was partly supported by the JSPS KAKENHI program (grant no. 24H00055).

 

Original Paper

Title of original paper:
Origin of the Eleusine indica population on the active volcanic Nishinoshima Island, Japan

Journal:
Journal of Plant Research

DOI:
10.1007/s10265-026-01738-9

Correspondence

Professor Emeritus TSUMURA, Yoshihiko
Professor KAMIJO, Takashi
Institute of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Tsukuba

Chief UCHIYAMA, Kentaro
Tree Genetics Laboratory, Department of Forest Molecular Genetics and Biotechnology, Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute

Related Link

Institute of Life and Environmental Sciences

---

Journal

Journal of Plant Research

DOI

10.1007/s10265-026-01738-9 

Article Title

Origin of the Eleusine indica population on the active volcanic Nishinoshima Island, Japan

Article Publication Date

7-Aug-2026

Distracted dog walkers may be putting wildlife and livestock at risk, study finds

Dog walkers distracted by their phones, conversations or other demands can miss their pets fouling, disturbing wildlife or approaching livestock, according to new research from the University of Surrey.

University of Surrey

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

Dog walkers distracted by their phones, conversations or other demands can miss their pets fouling, disturbing wildlife or approaching livestock, according to new research from the University of Surrey. 

The study, published in Society & Natural Resources, found that environmental problems associated with dog walking were often linked to divided attention and poorly placed infrastructure rather than deliberate irresponsibility. 

Researchers carried out 40 hours of observation at Puttenham Common, the Chantries and St Martha’s Hill, Norbury Park and Denbies Wine Estate. They also held a workshop with 15 farmers, land managers, countryside business owners and conservation professionals. 

Across the observation periods, researchers recorded 11 occasions when dog fouling was missed. Waste was heavily concentrated within 50 to 100 metres of car parks and along busy paths, reflecting dogs’ tendency to toilet near the beginning of a walk. 

Walkers using phones or headphones sometimes failed to notice their dogs fouling, leaving paths or entering sensitive habitats. People walking socially could also become absorbed in conversation, while professional dog walkers had to divide their attention between several animals. 

The researchers also observed off-lead dogs entering undergrowth, disturbing birds and approaching livestock. However, the majority of walkers consistently picked up after their dogs, with some even collecting waste left by other animals. 

Dr Tom Roberts, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Sociology at the University of Surrey, said: 

“Dog walkers are often portrayed as either responsible or irresponsible, but our research shows that the reality is far more complicated. Most people care deeply about their dogs and the countryside. Problems frequently arise because their attention is divided or because facilities do not match how dog walking actually happens.” 

Workshop participants suggested placing bins where dogs commonly toilet rather than only at entrances. They also supported dedicated off-lead areas away from sensitive habitats, community-led stewardship and short, friendly signs placed at junctions or other points where walkers make decisions. 

Researchers observed that seasonal signs explaining the vulnerability of ground-nesting birds attracted more attention than generic instructions to keep dogs on leads. However, engagement appeared to fall as the signs became familiar. 

Haeyoung Eun, Innovation Lead at the University of Surrey, said: 

“Simply giving people more rules is unlikely to solve these problems. Land managers need to work with the routines, relationships and practical realities of dog walking. Well-placed bins, timely messages and suitable spaces for off-lead exercise could make responsible choices much easier.” 

The researchers argue that dog walking should be recognised as an important source of exercise, wellbeing, social interaction and connection with nature, while acknowledging that these same qualities can sometimes create unintended environmental pressures. 

 

ENDS 

Notes to editors 

• For interviews with Dr Tom Roberts and Haeyoung Eun, please contact: mediarelations@surrey.ac.uk 
• The full study has been published in: Society & Natural Resources

---

Journal

Society & Natural Resources

DOI

10.1080/08941920.2026.2724506 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Love Dogs, Love Nature: Rethinking Environmental Responsibility Through Everyday Dog-Walking Practices