COVID-19 vaccine: Britain today became the first nation to inoculate people with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine outside of trials, CNN reports. The vaccine is easier to transport and to store than the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which was approved for use in Britain last month, making it easier to deliver outside of hospital settings. More than 20.6 million coronavirus cases have been reported worldwide, and more than 1.8 million deaths, according to Johns Hopkins researchers.
Speaking of which: The coronavirus dominated the list of Nat Geo’s most popular stories of 2020, but murder hornets and fake animal reports also swarmed our Top 10. Here’s the list.
Before the Spanish invasion: Early Caribbean settlers may have been nearly wiped out by South American invaders about 1,000 years before the Spaniards landed on the islands. That’s from DNA recovered from 174 individuals excavated at sites from Venezuela to the Bahamas, Andrew Lawler reports. Two recent studies also indicate the number of indigenous people on Puerto Rico and Hispaniola was smaller when the Spaniards arrived than previously thought.
Ancient soy sauce: Forget Marco Polo. People in the Mediterranean 3,500 years ago had access to soy, tumeric, bananas, and other foods from south Asia. How do we know? A new study of fossilized dental plaque from more than a dozen skeletons from what is present-day Israel, Andrew Curry writes for Nat Geo. Once routinely scraped away, dental plaque now is considered valuable by scientists. “If you would stop brushing your teeth, in 2,000 years I could tell what you were eating,” says archaeologist Philipp Stockhammer.
‘Whispering’ bats: Rare photos of the endangered gray big-eared bat have caused a stir. As few as 1,000 of the bats still live in England, writes Cordilia James. The bats have their nickname because they evolved to make have evolved to make softer and less occasional sounds than other bats. That helps them hunt, but means that researches have a harder time picking up the calls and converting them into frequencies humans can hear.
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