Curiosity - 2026-07-23

The find

Someone unwrapping a 1,600-year-old mummy in Egypt found a papyrus scrap tucked into the wrappings, and when researchers finally read it, it wasn't a spell or a prayer, it was Homer. A fragment of the Iliad, repurposed as embalming material. Whoever wrapped that body reached for whatever paper was lying around, and it happened to be Greek epic poetry, seven or eight centuries after Homer supposedly composed it, in a place he never wrote about.

It's a good reminder that "sacred text" and "scrap paper" were sometimes the same object to the people using them. Nobody involved thought they were preserving anything for us. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260713084918.htm

Also

• Ancient DNA from China's 4,000-year-old Shimao city shows the settlement's population was more genetically stratified than expected, hinting at how early complex societies actually organized themselves. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260721000828.htm
• Fossils from Queensland point to a marsupial order nobody had recognized before, quietly surviving in Australia for roughly 35 million years. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260715083546.htm
• The Sun has a "switch-off" point in its 11-year cycle that scientists say could let us predict solar storms up to seven years out. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260721000818.htm
• Fern savannahs may have turned parts of Triassic Europe into a wildfire-prone hellscape right as a mass extinction was underway. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260722032105.htm

From the archive

In 1995, two amateur astronomers hundreds of miles apart, Alan Hale in New Mexico and Thomas Bopp in Arizona, were both just looking up on the same night, neither one a professional, neither one expecting anything. They spotted the same faint smudge near a star cluster within minutes of each other and both reported it before anyone realized it was the same object. That smudge turned out to be Hale-Bopp, one of the brightest, most widely watched comets of the century, discovered not by an observatory but by two people who happened to be looking at the right patch of sky at the right time.