Spanning The Globe March 2026
- marketingc8
- Mar 18
- 3 min read
It’s time to go spanning the globe for anatomy news and notes!
Picture This
SciTech Daily reports a newly developed imaging method sees inside the human body using new technology that blends “ultrasound and photoacoustics” to capture both tissue structure and blood-vessel function in 3D.
Researchers from Caltech and USC “have developed a new way to see inside the human body with unprecedented speed and detail. The technique produces three-dimensional, full-color images that show not only the shape of soft tissues but also how blood vessels are functioning in real time,” the article states. The researchers’ work was originally reported in a publication called Nature Biomedical Engineering.
The new technology is called RUS-PAT—rotational ultrasound tomography (RUST) combined with photoacoustic tomography (PAT). In PAT, molecules that absorb light respond to short laser pulses by vibrating, which generates acoustic signals. These signals can then be detected and processed to form detailed, high-resolution images.
“This combined imaging method could significantly improve how doctors detect and study disease,” the article states. “Potential applications include more precise breast tumor imaging, new ways to track nerve damage caused by diabetes, and advanced tools for observing brain structure alongside blood flow. The work suggests a path toward medical scans that are both more informative and easier to repeat over time.”
Medical imaging has come a long way in the past 130 years since the discovery of X-rays (1895), ultrasound in the 1940s and 1950s, the CT (Computed Tomography) Scan in the1970s followed by the PET-CT Fusion (Positron Emission Technology combined with CT) in the 1990s and 2000s.
Stitch in Time
According to an article in Science Times, two small scraps of elk hide have been found in Cougar Mountain Cave in Oregon’s high desert. The scraps have been preserved for roughly 12,400 years. What’s particularly unusual is that the scraps were joined “by a cord of twisted fibers.” In other words, the scraps may be “the world’s oldest pieces of clothing.” Richard Rosencrance, an archaeologist with the University of Nevada, says the pieces were definitely sewn “because we have cordage sewn into a hide that comes right out and goes into another piece of hide.”
Radiocarbon dating places the hides at the end of the last Ice Age and (here’s a twist) were found in the 1950s. The material has been in private hands but were recently made available to scientists for analysis.
The Science Times article notes that artifacts made of biological material typically don’t survive for so long, but the region’s ultradry air was crucial to their preservation. What were our ancestors doing and when did they develop certain skills? Congratulations to all the scientists who are working to figure it out.
Nutcracker Man
If we only had a nickel for every time we saw a headline saying that a new discovery could “fundamentally change” our grasp on human evolution. Well, we’d have a lot of nickels. And that’s good. The story is, well, evolving. (We’re not going to apologize for that one.)
Now a recently discovered fossil—some 2.6 million years old—may put end a “long standing mystery.”
The fossil belongs to the early hominin Paranthropus genus. It was discovered in Ethiopia’s Afar region (northeastern Ethiopia, near Eritrea). The fossil is the piece of the lower jaw and the key is that it was found a long way (1,000 kilometers) from any previously known specimen of these ancient relatives, according to article in GBNews. “The findings suggest Paranthropus populations occupied a far more extensive range across the African continent than researchers had previously believed,” the article states.
The Paranthropus genus is known as “Nutcracker Man” thanks to distinctive cranial features, including “considerably enlarged jaws and molar teeth” that might have been due to the requirements of chewing tough plants in its diet. Scientists had long assumed Paranthropus had not traveled so far north to the Afar territory.
This particular jaw fragment was examined by Dr Fred Spoor, a human palaeontologist, working alongside Zeresenay Alemseged from the University of Chicago. The jawbone fragment was recovered from research within the Afar region that is known for yielding an exceptional diversity of hominin remains.
Including, it turns out, Nutcracker Man.
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