Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Study reveals how prehistoric coastal flooding shaped the Northern Adriatic

University of Southampton

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Aerial image of Venice Lagoon
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Credit: S Ongaro

Researchers have shown how dramatic sea level rise, over a 5,000 year period, profoundly changed the coasts of northern Italy, Slovenia and northern Croatia.

Successive shaping and reshaping of coastal features influenced the lives of Mesolithic and Neolithic people, and the development of local communities. Land once roamed by hunter-gathers and later tended by farmers, now lies deep beneath the sea.

Led by the University of Southampton, UK with the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (OGS), Italy, the study reconstructs the evolution of the region’s landscape between 9,000 and 4,000 BC.

It shows how, over millennia, staggered rises in sea level – at times up to 25 millimetres per year – transformed the landscape and progressively submerged plains to create wetlands and lagoons. As the sea rose, pushing inland, it swallowed up features it had previously formed, shaped new ones, and eventually formed the origins of the coast we see today.

The present-day Venice Lagoon, famous for its island city built on marshy, muddy ground, was once dry land that lay kilometres from coast. The same can be said of other towns in the lagoons further east, such as Grado, and even present day coastal cities like Trieste would once have been located in hills overlooking swamps and lagoons below.

The study findings are published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

Archaeologist Samuele Ongaro, lead author and PhD researcher at the University of Southampton, says "Submerged landscapes are an important missing piece in the study of prehistory, especially in the Northern Adriatic. They hold many secrets about how our ancestors lived and how they were connected to the land.

“The results of this research allow us to reconstruct these lost landscapes, what environments they hosted, how they changed over time, and what significance they might have held for prehistoric populations – a fundamental step for future archaeological research in the area.”

The researchers combined existing data from the analysis of sediment cores with new, high-resolution geophysical data from OGS. By identifying different types of sediments, and modelling successive flooding, the team revealed the backward shifting of coastal barriers (deposits parallel to the shore) and back-barrier systems (the marshy areas beyond).

Different stages across the 5,000 year timeline include:

A rapid rise in sea level around 8,400 BC, creating tidal channels, marshes, sandbanks and large lagoons – followed by a more stable phase.
A large rise for a total of eight metres in the 1,200 years to 6,600 BC, with the sea repeatedly creating, subsuming, and recreating lagoons and marshes – pushing kilometres inland.
A major rise of up to five metres post 6,000 BC, again shifting coastal features.
The formation, post 5,800 BC, of the origins of the lagoons and landscape we see today.

The findings highlight the constantly changing environment that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had to cope with, altering habitats, resources and the availability of food, such as plants, fish and animal prey.

The team hope further study will reveal more about how communities shifted activities in response to coastal flooding and how eventually this affected the advent of farming in the region by Neolithic people.

“The variety of coastal environments – lagoons, river deltas, marshes and swamps – would have been an attractive landscape for foragers and hunters, but the flat nature of the landscape also made it prone to significant land loss. Communities were forced to adapt over time, choosing where to hunt, fish, and settle,” comments Samuele Ongaro.

Dr Federica Donda, a marine geologist from the Geophysics section of OGS and co-author of the paper, comments: “This study demonstrates how integrating geological and geophysical data makes it possible to reconstruct the environmental evolution of areas that are now submerged, while highlighting how the seabed is an integral part of our archaeological heritage.

“A significant portion of the areas frequented by ancient populations is now underwater, and their history and evolution cannot be understood through terrestrial archaeology alone.”

The paper highlights the potential of paleogeographic reconstructions for studying the evolution of past societies, returning to archaeological research a piece of territory that is no longer visible today, but which for thousands of years was part of the European landscape.

Ends

Notes to editors

The paper ‘Palaeolandscape reconstructions for the Northern Adriatic: Inundation models, depositional environments, and potential archaeological implications’ is published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, and can be viewed here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2026.110206
For interviews, please contact Peter Franklin, Media Manager, University of Southampton. press@soton.ac.uk +44 23 8059 3212
For an aerial photo of Venice Lagoon visit: https://safesend.soton.ac.uk/pickup?claimID=fvHuqkEEmqz5pDov&claimPasscode=2tat8mn3Q5y5QYmT&emailAddr=290146
The University of Southampton drives original thinking, turns knowledge into action and impact, and creates solutions to the world’s challenges. Our academics are leaders in their fields, forging links with high-profile international businesses and organisations, and inspiring a 25,000-strong community of exceptional students, from over 135 countries worldwide. Through our high-quality education, the University helps students on a journey of discovery to realise their potential and join our global network of over 300,000 alumni. www.southampton.ac.uk
For more on Archaeology at the University of Southampton visit: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/about/faculties-schools-departments/school-of-humanities/department-of-archaeology
For more on the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (OGS), Italy, visit: https://www.ogs.it/en

Journal

Quaternary Science Reviews

DOI

10.1016/j.quascirev.2026.110206

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Palaeolandscape reconstructions for the Northern Adriatic: Inundation models, depositional environments, and potential archaeological implications

Raising kids in a digital world with less fear, more strategy

Experts offer parents advice for navigating screens, social media, artificial intelligence

University of California - Irvine

By Mimi Ko Cruz

In the late 1800s, newspapers ran alarming headlines about a dangerous new technology corrupting the nation’s youth. Books. Kids were sneaking off to libraries to read Horatio Alger, and parents were convinced it would ruin them.

More than a century later, the medium has changed dramatically. But the fear, experts say, has not.

The tension between panic and practicality was at the heart of a packed panel discussion Sept. 8 at UC Irvine, the third installment of the “Raising the Next Generation in the Age of AI” series. Co-presented by UCI’s School of Social Ecology, the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, the Office of Research, the Connected Learning Lab, and CERES (Connecting the EdTech Research EcoSystem), the event brought together researchers, a tech industry leader and a youth advocate for a candid, research-grounded conversation about helping families navigate the challenges of raising children in an increasingly digital world.

Moderated by Candice Odgers, UCI Chancellor’s Professor of psychology and informatics, the discussion featured Yalda Uhls, founder and CEO of the Center for Scholars and Storytellers at UCLA; Melissa Mazmanian, UCI professor of informatics and organization and management; Vani Henderson, head of UX Research, Youth, Trust and Safety at YouTube; and Larz May, founder of #HalfTheStory and co-founder and CEO of Ginko.

The panelists steered the conversation toward empowerment, offering parents concrete strategies they could act on immediately.

Uhls reminded the audience that parental anxiety over new media is nothing new — from novels in the 1800s to Pac-Man in the 1980s, every generation has feared the latest technology would corrupt its children. The research, she argued, often tells a more nuanced story.

“What hasn’t changed is parental fear,” Uhls said. “A truly unique brain and a unique way of thinking is never going to be able to be replaced by technology. Help young people understand that.”

Uhls also drew on decades of parenting research to argue that what works offline works online, too: children thrive with a combination of reasonable rules and genuine warmth.

“Trust Your Gut”

“The trust-your-gut thing is really, really important,” she said, describing how she ultimately allowed her own daughter to spend significant time on video games despite her own anxiety — a decision she said paid off. Her daughter went on to be her class valedictorian and received two job offers out of college.

She added that navigating today's media landscape requires teaching children how to evaluate what they consume.

“It’s really important to help your children understand media literacy,” Uhls said, noting that while young people may outpace their parents on certain tools, they still need guidance in recognizing misinformation and understanding how content is produced and by whom.

Mazmanian, whose research involved spending up to 100 hours inside nine different family homes, found that the media rules that actually stuck weren’t the ones handed down by schools or parenting groups, they were the ones that came from a parent’s instincts about their specific child.

“Ask yourself, what am I scared of? Really, truly, what am I scared of? And why?” she said. “Am I scared because I’ve been watching the news? Because my school told me to be? Or, because I’m seeing something really concrete happen with my child? Those are really different reasons, and they call for really different answers.”

Mazmanian’s study of 100 parent-teen pairs revealed that teens are significantly more forgiving of their parents’ screen time than parents are of theirs.

More importantly, she said, the families with the most conflict were those where teens felt their parents simply didn’t understand what they were doing online — whether socializing, creating or exploring hobbies.

YouTube Tricks

Henderson shared that many parents don’t realize how many controls already exist within YouTube’s ecosystem:

The YouTube Kids app lets parents select the right content level for their child and offers options to set a timer, block specific videos or channels, or limit their child to watching only hand-picked channels
Kid Accounts on regular YouTube allow parents to link their account to a child’s and select content settings that limit what their child can watch.
YouTube Shorts can be set to a timer, or turned off entirely.
Parents and teens also have the option to link accounts to share teen channel activity; and parents can set digital wellbeing tools for their teen.

“I take my role as somebody who works at YouTube with a great sense of responsibility,” Henderson said, “because I’m helping to build products not only for my kids and my neighbors’ kids, but for your kids and kids all over the world.”

Panelists agreed that bans alone — whether on phones or AI tools — are a starting line, not a solution.

May, who works directly with students and schools across the country, was direct about the reality on the ground.

“Whether you want to hear it or not, your kids are using AI,” she said. “It might not be happening in the school walls, but when they go home, it’s happening.”

She warned that fear-based approaches are driving teens toward apathy, which she called the real risk, greater than any single technology.

She pointed to one student so anxious about his school’s murky AI policy that he now records himself doing homework every night, just in case he needs to prove he didn’t cheat.

“Behind every screen is a child’s superpower,” May said, “and AI should be used to amplify that superpower, not replace it.”

May argued that the antidote to screen overuse isn’t more restriction — it’s genuine engagement.

“The opposite of AI is social connection,” she said, urging parents to invest in the real-world interests and relationships that can meaningfully compete with the pull of devices.

May also turned the anxiety conversation back on the adults in the room.

“The real anxious generation is you,” she told the audience, challenging parents to examine whether their fears are truly about their children or about their own discomfort with a world they don’t fully understand.

Rather than coming from a place of anxiety and fear, May encouraged parents to use technology as a window into their child’s interests. For example, she suggested asking a reluctant writer to narrate their essay aloud on a walk, then using AI to help shape that voice into a written draft, a way of letting the child’s authentic voice lead, with technology in a supporting role.

Expert Tips

“We’re seeing from many countries that the bans aren’t working; that many of the cell phone policies might not be delivering on the promises they were made on, and so, we want to be here to find that solution space with all of you,” Odgers said before asking the panel to provide actionable advice for parents. These are their tips:

Be positive about your child’s tech use. Ask what they love online and let them be the expert. You might be surprised.
Walk the walk. Kids notice when parents scroll through dinner or check phones during bedtime stories.
Start with yourself. Before addressing your child’s screen use, examine what is driving your own fear.
Give teens a seat at the table. Involving young people in family tech conversations, and even school policy discussions, builds trust and better outcomes.
Put your phone to bed before your child. Guarantee them your full, undivided attention at the end of the day.
Remember Henderson’s reminder that “there’s no one-size-fits-all parenting.” Use the tools available on platforms like YouTube to set boundaries that reflect your family’s specific values, your child’s age and your own comfort level — not someone else’s rulebook.
Take May’s advice to heart: “Find your joy” and help your child find theirs. When children are deeply engaged in something that excites them, whether cooking, historical costuming or building communities around shared passions, screens become a springboard rather than an escape.
Forgive yourself. As Odgers put it: “So much of the time we look at the screen and think we can solve the problems our kids face there, but the solutions are much deeper.”

CERES also offers resources for parents, including:

The full panel discussion is available on YouTube. Videos and resources from other panels in the series can be found on the CERES website.

The final panel discussion in the “Raising the Next Generation in the Age of AI” series will be held Nov. 18 and will focus on AI, the future of work, and how to prepare children for a rapidly evolving landscape. The event is free and open to the public.

Oxford physicists help uncover ‘spooky’ quantum effect in the Large Hadron Collider

University of Oxford

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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator in the tunnel at CERN. © 2009-2026 CERN
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Credit: © 2009-2026 CERN

Physicists at the University of Oxford have helped confirm that one of the strangest phenomena in physics - quantum entanglement - occurs even among some of the heaviest and most fleeting particles ever created. The discovery, made using the world’s most powerful particle collider at CERN, has been published in Physical Review Letters.

Entanglement is the phenomenon in which two particles from the same origin remain connected, even if they move far apart in time and space. If something affects one particle, it will also affect all the particles with which it is entangled. This means that measuring a property of one particle instantly tells you something about its entangled partner/s, no matter how distant they are.

Albert Einstein famously called entanglement ‘spooky action at a distance,’ and the phenomenon has been demonstrated in a range of systems, including photons, electrons and trapped ions. Today, entanglement is no longer just a curiosity: it underpins emerging technologies such as quantum computers, ultra-secure quantum communication networks and next-generation sensors. For instance, in quantum computing, entanglement is used to manipulate multiple qubits in a single operation, rather than individually. This allows multiple calculations to be performed simultaneously.

However, it was unknown whether quantum entanglement remains intact under more extreme conditions – such as the short-lived particles produced during highly energetic collisions. To test this, an international collaboration used the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. The team looked for entanglement in an entirely new setting: pairs of Z bosons that exist for only a fraction of a second before decaying.

The Z bosons studied were produced in the decay of a Higgs boson - the particle discovered at the LHC in 2012 - which briefly splits into two Z bosons before each one decays further into pairs of electrons or muons. The Higgs bosons are generated by smashing together protons travelling at 99.99% the speed of light: collisions that have energies of thirteen trillion electron volts.

Although the Z bosons vanish almost instantly, the ATLAS detector can precisely track the electrons and muons they leave behind. By reconstructing the angles at which these particles were emitted, the researchers could infer the spins of the original Z bosons and test whether they were linked by quantum entanglement. The results showed strong evidence that they were. This makes it one of the highest-energy confirmations of quantum entanglement ever recorded.

Study co-author Professor Alan Barr, at Oxford’s Department of Physics, was one of the first to propose that particle colliders could be used to investigate quantum entanglement at vastly higher energy levels than all previous tests. Having been involved in the construction of the LHC, he realised that the colossal apparatus could be used for more than discovering new particles. His ideas informed a 2023 experiment, also using the ATLAS detector, which demonstrated entanglement between pairs of top quarks, the heaviest known elementary particle.

Professor Barr said: ‘We’re used to thinking of entanglement as something delicate, seen in laboratory experiments with single photons. Finding it alive and well among particles as heavy and short-lived as Z bosons, created in some of the most violent collisions we can produce on Earth, shows just how fundamental and robust this quantum effect really is. It’s a nice reminder that the same strange rules of quantum mechanics that may one day power quantum computers are at work everywhere in nature, even at the extreme energies of the Large Hadron Collider.’

Beyond its fundamental significance, the research adds to a growing effort by physicists to borrow tools and ideas from quantum information science (the field behind quantum computing) and apply them to particle physics. This cross-pollination is helping scientists develop new, more sensitive ways of analysing collider data, with the potential to reveal subtle effects that might point to physics beyond our current understanding of the universe.

At Oxford University, Professor Barr co-leads a major interdisciplinary project exploring the foundations of quantum mechanics at high energies. Besides empirically testing quantum effects at the smallest possible scales and highest energies, the project is also investigating the philosophical implications of these measurements and what they may tell us about the fundamental nature of reality.

Project co-PI Professor Chris Timpson (Faculty of Philosophy) said: ‘Entanglement is both the most promising and the most puzzling aspect of quantum reality; these collider experiments detecting entanglement present a new frontier in investigations of the foundations of quantum mechanics.’

Oxford University researchers are also involved in the upgrade currently taking place on the ATLAS detector. Combined with the upgraded High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, this will allow researchers to undertake even more profound explorations of quantum phenomena and apply novel quantum information techniques to exploit the huge data sets that this machine will deliver.

Professor Daniela Bortoletto (Department of Physics, University of Oxford), who is the UK coordinator for producing the modules for the upgraded ATLAS detector’s pixel system, said: ‘This measurement demonstrates the scientific power of the ATLAS collaboration and the unique capabilities of CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Oxford researchers have played a leading role in developing these new approaches to studying quantum phenomena at the highest energies, and we are proud to contribute to an international effort that is opening new ways to explore the fundamental laws of nature.’

The study ‘Measurements of Z-boson pair entanglement in decays of Higgs bosons at the ATLAS experiment’ has been published in Physical Review Letters.

For media enquiries and interview requests, contact caroline.wood@admin.ox.ac.uk

About the University of Oxford

Oxford University has been placed number 1 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for the tenth year running, and number 3 in the QS World Rankings 2024. At the heart of this success are the twin-pillars of our ground-breaking research and innovation and our distinctive educational offer.

Oxford is world-famous for research and teaching excellence and home to some of the most talented people from across the globe. Our work helps the lives of millions, solving real-world problems through a huge network of partnerships and collaborations. The breadth and interdisciplinary nature of our research alongside our personalised approach to teaching sparks imaginative and inventive insights and solutions.

Through its research commercialisation arm, Oxford University Innovation, Oxford is the highest university patent filer in the UK and is ranked first in the UK for university spinouts, having created more than 300 new companies since 1988. Over a third of these companies have been created in the past five years. The university is a catalyst for prosperity in Oxfordshire and the United Kingdom, contributing around £16.9 billion to the UK economy in 2021/22, and supports more than 90,400 full time jobs.

Journal

Physical Review Letters

DOI

10.1103/y1nh-1b82

Article Title

Measurements of 𝑍-Boson Pair Entanglement in Decays of Higgs Bosons at the ATLAS Experiment

Credit

Physicists recreate particles from outer space to advance understanding of the universe’s mysteries

International team uses CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to model how high-energy cosmic rays enter the Earth’s atmosphere

New York University

The Northern Lights, which occur when particles from the Sun enter the Earth’s atmosphere, generate brilliant sky displays in our Northern Hemisphere, offering an occasional cosmic show enjoyed by millions.

But how collisions between these particles, or low-energy cosmic rays, and the Earth’s gases result in the Northern Lights are less well-understood.

Even more puzzling are collisions involving high-energy cosmic rays, which possess more than one million times the energy than those from the Sun and emanate from exploding stars, or supernovae. Scientists have typically relied on computer simulations to unpack their collision with Earth’s atmosphere, but these methods have produced varied, and sometimes conflicting, results.

New research by an international team of physicists takes an unprecedented approach that offers a clearer understanding of these interstellar wonders.

Using CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the scientists have recreated how high-energy cosmic rays enter the Earth’s atmosphere and collide with our planet’s gases.

The results, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, help decipher the origins of interstellar particles from the cosmos.

“We now have a better understanding of how particles from objects more exotic than the Sun interact with our atmosphere,” says Jesse Liu, a New York University assistant professor of physics who led the research. “By advancing our knowledge of high-energy cosmic collisions in the Earth’s atmosphere, we have taken another step to unraveling the many mysteries of our universe.”

“The published results are indeed something special because these data are unique, and in our measurements, we were able to show that our previous models for this type of interaction are actually very inaccurate,” adds Cigdem Issever, a physicist at Humboldt-University of Berlin and one of the paper’s authors.

Recognizing the limitations of computer simulations, Liu, Issever, and their colleagues, who included scientists from Hamburg’s DESY Research Center, turned to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the world’s most powerful particle physics machine, located outside of Geneva—to devise an innovative experiment that mimics how high-energy cosmic rays collide with the Earth’s atmosphere.

Focusing on oxygen’s foundational role in Earth’s atmosphere, the scientists introduced oxygen beams for the first time in the LHC and collided them with LHC-generated proton beams, which replicate the cosmic rays that emanate from supernovae. The results constituted the world’s first measurements of cosmic rainstorms recreated in controlled-lab conditions.

The researchers took millions of closeup photos of these outcomes using a 100-million-pixel camera that captures the aftermath of proton collisions that occur up to 40 million times per second.

Part of CERN’s ATLAS collaboration, which is exploring the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape the universe, the sophisticated device measured the number, energies, and angles of particles made in the proton-oxygen collision to offer precise portraits of the birth of these cosmic rainstorms.

“These new results significantly sharpen our knowledge of these subatomic interactions and will help us further explore the nature of cosmic particles raining from the sky,” concludes Liu.

# # #

Journal

Physical Review Letters

DOI

10.1103/f3nk-5lt9

Article Title

Measurement of Charged-Particle Production in √𝑠NN =9.62 TeV Proton-Oxygen Collisions as a Probe of Cosmic-Ray Air Showers with the ATLAS Detector

Article Publication Date

14-Sep-2026

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Study reveals how prehistoric coastal flooding shaped the Northern Adriatic

Journal

DOI

Method of Research

Subject of Research

Article Title

Raising kids in a digital world with less fear, more strategy

“Trust Your Gut”

YouTube Tricks

Expert Tips

Oxford physicists help uncover ‘spooky’ quantum effect in the Large Hadron Collider

Journal

DOI

Article Title

The ATLAS detector at CERN. © 2007-2026 CERN

Credit

Physicists recreate particles from outer space to advance understanding of the universe’s mysteries

Journal

DOI

Article Title

Article Publication Date

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