Spanning The Globe February 2026
- marketingc8
- Feb 25
- 3 min read
It’s time to go spanning the globe for anatomy news and notes!
Clean-Up Hub
Can’t say we ever stopped to think about the brain in this way, but a recent article in SciTechDaily caught our attention: how does the brain clear away waste? The article was about a study published in iScience by researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina.
The task of clearing away waste is managed by the brain’s lymphatic drainage system. Attempts to understand how that system operates has long been of interest. New brain imaging work has discovered the center of that lymphatic drainage system, the middle meningeal artery (MMA).
The scientists collaborated with NASA, which gave them access to “real-time MRI tools,” according to the SciTechDaily article, “originally designed to study how spaceflight alters fluid movement in the brain.” The scientists tracked movement of “cerebrospinal and interstitial fluids” along the MMA in five volunteers over a six-hour span.
“We saw a flow pattern that didn’t behave like blood moving through an artery; it was slower, more like drainage, showing that this vessel is part of the brain’s cleanup system,” said Onder Albayram, an associate professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at MUSC.
As the article pointed out, a clearer picture of how fluids move between the brain and the periphery will help expand strategies for preventing and treating neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Examples of “brain waste” include amyloid-beta proteins (protein fragments that build up and form plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease); tau proteins (which form neurofibrillary tangles and disrupt signal transmission); and lactic acid (a byproduct of brain metabolism), among others.
Ancient Tools
According to this article in Futura, archaeologists working in Kenya have discovered stone tools that are estimated to be some 3 million years old. They might be the oldest of their kind, but the big twist is that they were fashioned by Paranthropus, a distant relative of modern humans.
“For decades, researchers believed that only early Homo species—such as Homo habilis—were capable of making and using stone tools. Paranthropus, known for its massive jaws and teeth, was thought to rely on raw strength rather than tools for food processing. But (this) find tells a different story,” stated the article. “This finding complicates earlier ideas about early human ancestors, who were once believed too primitive to hunt or butcher large animals.”
Keep on exploring, archaeologists! We admire your tenacity and your ongoing quest to figure it all out! We know you will.
Elephant Bone Tools
Fast forward about 2.5 million years to a recent discovery that found early hominins who fashioned tools from elephant bones. The research, conducted by University College London and the Natural History Museum, and reported in BrighterSide, shows that these early hominins were not only scavenging and butchering these massive mammals, “but were deliberately creating tools from the bones.”
The finding comes from a site called “Boxgrove” in southern England that is approximately 480,000 years old.
“This discovery supports the notion that early hominins utilized elephant bones for more than just food,” stated the article. “They were used as tools in the process of creating stone tools through the use of soft bones, specifically in the process of producing sharpened flint tools.”
In case you’re wondering, several species of elephants, including straight-tusked elephants and mammoths, inhabited prehistoric Britain during warmer interglacial periods over the last 500,000 years. These massive creatures roamed alongside early humans, with remains found in locations like Trafalgar Square and the Ebbsfleet Valley, about 30 miles east of London along the southern banks of the River Thames.
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