The US publisher of a study that challenged scientific orthodoxy by claiming an archaeological site in Indonesia may be the world’s “oldest pyramid” says it has been retracted.

The October 2023 study in the journal Archaeological Prospection made the explosive claim that the deepest layer of the site, Gunung Padang, appears to have been ‘sculpted’ by humans up to 27,000 years ago.

The study’s critics say human presence in Gunung Padang has been incorrectly dated based on soil radiocarbon measurements from drilling samples, not artifacts. The magazine’s American publisher, Wiley, cited that exact reasoning in the notice of withdrawal it was released on Monday.

Gunung Padang is widely considered a dormant volcano, and archaeologists say ceramics recovered so far indicate people have been using it for hundreds of years or more – not anything close to 27,000 years. The Pyramids of Giza in Egypt are only about 4,500 years old.

The retraction, based on a months-long investigation, said the research was flawed because the soil samples were “unrelated to artifacts or features that could be reliably interpreted as anthropogenic or ‘man-made’.”

Some archaeologists said in interviews that they welcomed the repeal. But the study’s authors called it “unjust.” He wrote this in a statement on Wednesday that their soil samples were “unequivocally identified as man-made structures or archaeological features,” in part because the soil layers contained artifacts.

“We urge the academic community, scientific organizations and concerned individuals to support us in challenging this decision and upholding the principles of integrity, transparency and honesty in scientific research and publishing,” the authors wrote.

The studyThe paper’s lead author, Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, an earthquake geologist, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither do Wiley and Archaeological Prospection editors Eileen Ernenwein and Gregory Tsokas.

A prominent supporter of Mr. Natawidjaja’s research, the journalist Graham Hancock, said in a statement that he did not view the retraction as “fair, justified or good science.” He said that instead of issuing a retraction, the magazine should have published criticism of the paper, a move he said would have allowed readers to make up their own minds.

“Science should not be about oppression,” said Mr. Hancock, who interviewed Mr. Natawidjaja for an episode about Gunung Padang on “Ancient Apocalypse,‘his 2022 Netflix documentary series.

The Society for American Archeology has done that said that Mr. Hancock’s Netflix show “devalues ​​the archaeological profession based on false claims and disinformation.” He has powerful turned down that argument, arguing that archaeologists should be more open to theories that challenge academic orthodoxy. Netflix did not respond to a request for comment on the withdrawal.

People from Indonesia have long traveled to Gunung Padang, a hilltop dotted with stone terraces, to hold Islamic and Hindu rituals. A domestic narrative portraying the pyramid as a very, very old pyramid received support and funding from the central government during the administration of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who left office in 2014. His successor, President Joko Widodo, stopped funding.

Archaeologists said in interviews Wednesday that they welcomed the repeal.

One of them, Noel Hidalgo Tan, an archaeologist in Bangkok who relayed his concerns about the study to Wiley, said he thought the retraction was “completely appropriate” because the study’s evidence did not support its conclusions.

“It was a shame that the article had to get to this stage,” says Dr. Tan, who works at the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Archeology and Fine Arts. “But it was better to be withdrawn than not have anything said about it at all.”

Dwi Ratna Nurhajarini, head of the Cultural Heritage Conservation Bureau in West Java province, the site of the site, said the study’s conclusions should be reexamined in light of the withdrawal.

“The structures in Gunung Padang are indeed layered and terraced, reminiscent of civilizations from Indonesia’s distant past,” she said by phone on Wednesday. “But their age may not be as old as suggested.”

Rin Hindryati reporting contributed.

Winter was strangely warm for half the world’s population, caused in many places by the burning of fossil fuels, according to an analysis of temperature data from hundreds of locations around the world.

That ties in with the findings published late Wednesday by the European Union’s climate monitoring organization Copernicus: The world as a whole experienced the warmest February on record, marking the ninth month in a row with record temperatures. Even more startling, global ocean temperatures in February were at a record high for any time of year, Copernicus said.

Taken together, the two sets of figures offer a portrait of an undeniably warming world that, combined with a natural El Niño weather pattern this year, has made winter unrecognizable in some places.

The first analysis, carried out by Climate Central, an independent research group based in New Jersey found that in several cities in North America, Europe and Asia, winters were not only unusually warm, but that climate change played a clearly identifiable role.

Climate Central looked at anomalies in December and January temperature data in 678 cities around the world and asked: How important are the fingerprints of climate change for these unusual temperatures? That is, the researchers tried to isolate the usual variability of weather from the influence of climate change.

“There’s the temperature,” says Andrew Pershing, Climate Central’s vice president for science, “and then there’s our ability to really detect that climate signal in the data.”

Cities in the Midwestern United States stood out for experiencing an unusually warm winter and for the impact of climate change, which is mainly caused by the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. “Really off the charts,” said Dr. Pershing. “There is no ice on most of the great lakes. That is remarkable.”

For example, Minneapolis was almost 5.6 degrees Celsius warmer than average between December and February. The fingerprints of climate change could be detected for 33 days, which amounts to a third of the winter season.

Tehran was an average of 4.2 degrees Celsius warmer in the same three-month period. The effects of human-induced climate change could be observed over 68 winter days.

The average winter temperature in Milan was about 2 degrees Celsius higher, but there was a strong signal of climate change for 55 days.

Elsewhere, average winter temperatures did not vary greatly, although there were some significantly warm days, and the climate signal was less pronounced.

The Climate Central report, also published Wednesday, concluded that 4.8 billion people worldwide “experienced at least one day of temperatures that would be virtually impossible without the impact of carbon pollution.”

In some parts of the world, unusually warm winter weather was overshadowed by other crises, such as war. Several cities in Ukraine were significantly warmer than normal, showing the fingerprints of climate change there too. Kiev, for example, was almost 3 degrees Celsius warmer on average this winter, and climate change played a role for 33 days. The same goes for several cities in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the tropical belt, where temperatures tend to be much hotter on average, climate signals are easier to detect, although temperature increases may be smaller. For example, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur were barely 1 degree Celsius warmer on average. But the effects of climate change could be observed for almost the entire three-month period.

It’s not just individual cities that are setting records this winter. According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, February 2024 was the warmest February on record worldwide. It was 1.77 degrees Celsius above the average February temperature in the recent pre-industrial era of 1850-1900.

This is the ninth month in a row in which the temperature record for that month has been broken. All told, the past twelve months were the warmest twelve consecutive months on record: 1.56 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 average.

“A year ago, the fact that global temperatures would rise 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels during a given month would have been considered exceptional,” Julien Nicolas, a senior scientist at Copernicus, said via email. Now it has happened repeatedly.

This does not mean that we have exceeded the Paris Agreement’s international target of halting global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. For that to happen, the planet would have to be 1.5 degrees warmer for several years, long enough to reflect a more permanent change.

For now, the ocean has been exceptionally hot in the short term. Earth’s average sea surface temperature in February was the warmest on record, surpassing the previous record set in August 2023.

Spinosaurus was one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs and ate fish. Many paleontologists agree on this.

But did he just wade into the rivers and yank them out of the water like a grizzly bear? Or did he dive after his prey like a penguin or a sea lion?

This has become a matter of keen debate among dinosaur experts.

One group is increasingly convinced that Spinosaurus was a rarity among dinosaurs: one that stuck its head underwater and swam beneath the surface. Others say no.

The latest salvopublished Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, comes from the Spinosaurus-couldn’t-swim contingent to counter a pro-swimming article published a few years ago. The previous work, published in the journal Nature, claimed that animals that spend much of their time in the water, such as penguins, tend to have denser bones that provide ballast and make diving easier. Spinosaurus also had dense bones and was therefore most likely a swimmer, the Nature article concluded.

But that bone density analysis was “statistically absurd,” says Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft chief technology officer and amateur paleontologist who led the new study with Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Myhrvold and Dr. Sereno have also argued that Spinosaurus’s clumsy body shape would have made it a poor swimmer, if it could swim at all. The dinosaur’s weight distribution would have made it top-heavy and unstable, said Dr. Myhrvold.

“It’s clear why it can’t swim,” he said.

The giant sail on its back would make it difficult for a swimming Spinosaurus to stay upright, said Dr. Myhrvold. “If it tips even the smallest amount, it will keep tipping.”

In other words, the Spinosaurus would capsize and have difficulty pulling its sail out of the water.

There are points of agreement in this dispute. Spinosaurus may have been longer and heavier than Tyrannosaurus rex. It lived about 95 million years ago in what is now Western Sahara, but was then a lush environment with deep-flowing rivers. It was also a strange-looking dinosaur, with elongated vertebrae that formed a huge sail on its back.

Interest in Spinosaurus has increased over the past decade after a new fossil was discovered in Morocco by Nazir Ibrahim, who also authored the earlier bone density study and is now a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth in England. The only other fossil was found in 1915 by Ernst Stromer, a German paleontologist, and destroyed during an aerial bombardment of Munich in 1944.

In the latest study, Dr. Myhrvold and colleagues that the paleontologists who made the bone density claims used a sophisticated statistical technique without understanding its limitations.

“It’s being completely misapplied here,” said Dr. Myhrvold. “Unfortunately, when you have something that involves a lot of dense statistics, most paleontologists’ eyes glaze over.”

Dr. Myhrvold is not a traditional academic. Since leaving Microsoft in 1999, he is perhaps best known for leading the development of the encyclopedic Modernist Cuisine cookbooks. But he has sparked esoteric statistical battles before, criticizing findings on dinosaur growth rates and claiming that a NASA trove of asteroid data is flawed and unreliable.

Previous research by other researchers has shown that diving mammals tend to have denser bones than mammals that stay on land. But other mammals have dense bones for other reasons too. Elephants, for example, need stronger bones to support their weight.

In 2022, researchers led by Matteo Fabbri, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, argued in their paper that bone density was a reliable predictor of whether an animal lived in water or on land for a much wider range creatures, including extinct species.

“We thought, oh, are these just mammals and or are these also reptiles?” said dr. Fabbri in an interview. “And if this is true, can we infer the ecology of extinct animals, including strange-looking dinosaurs like Spinosaurus?”

Dr. Fabbri said the analysis showed that “very high bone density is correlated with the likelihood of going underwater.”

Spinosaurus and a Baryonyx, a relative of Spinosaurus, did dive, while another related dinosaur, Suchomimus, did not, the team of scientists concluded.

Dr. However, Myhrvold argues that bone density cannot be neatly divided into two groups. There are many aquatic animals whose bones are less dense than many land animals, and vice versa. “If the two distributions are close to each other, you can’t draw a valid conclusion, or at least one that has any statistical power,” he said.

He gives an example: in humans, men are generally heavier than women, but not every man is heavier than every woman. So if someone tells you that a person weighs 135 pounds, you can tell whether that person is a man or a woman.

Although Dr. Myhrvold and Dr. Sereno now disagree with Dr. Fabbri and Dr. Ibrahim, they were once all on the same side as the co-authors of the 2014 article describing the Spinosaurus discovered in Morocco.

Dr. Fabbri is currently in the same department as Dr. Sereno, although he will become a professor at Johns Hopkins University this summer.

“We say hello in this hallway,” said Dr. Fabbri. “It’s okay. Obviously we’re not killing each other.”

Dr. Ibrahim, who is conducting additional studies in Morocco, said further findings would provide even more compelling evidence that Spinosaurus lived in water.

He also rejected the biomechanical arguments of Dr. Myhrvold explains why Spinosaurus couldn’t swim, and said much remains unknown. He compared Dr. Myhrvold’s findings to paleontologists who once argued that tyrannosaurs must have been scavengers because they could not run fast enough to catch small, fast prey. But tyrannosaurs didn’t have to be fast to take down a large, slow-moving triceratops.

Likewise, prehistoric African rivers were filled with giant, slow-moving fish, said Dr. Ibrahim. Spinosaurus didn’t have to be a skilled swimmer to catch them.

“I can’t reveal too much,” he said. “But we have new material. We have some very exciting ongoing projects.”

Jennifer Caldwell was active and energetic, working two jobs and caring for her daughter and her parents, when she developed a bacterial infection that was followed by intense dizziness, fatigue and memory problems.

That was almost a decade ago, and since then she has struggled with the condition known as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS. Ms. Caldwell, 56, of Hillsborough, N.C., said she could no longer ski, dance and work two jobs as a clinical research coordinator and caterer, but had to stay in bed most of the day.

“I haven't been right since, and I haven't worked a day since,” said Ms. Caldwell, whose symptoms include severe dizziness when her legs are not raised.

The condition has also left me “cognitively confused,” she said. “I can't read or understand something properly, I can't remember new things. It's like being in a limbo state. That's how I describe it, lost in limbo.”

Seven years ago, the National Institutes of Health began a study of patients with ME/CFS, and Ms. Caldwell became one of 17 participants who took part in a series of tests and evaluations of their blood, body and brain.

Findings from the studypublished Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications, showed remarkable physiological differences in the immune system, cardio-respiratory function, gut microbiome and brain activity of the ME/CFS patients compared to a group of 21 healthy study participants.

Medical experts said that even though the study was a snapshot of a small number of patients, it was valuable, in part because ME/CFS has long been dismissed or misdiagnosed. The findings confirm that “it's biological, not psychological,” said Dr. Avindra Nath, chief of nervous system infections at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, who led the study.

The findings could have implications for patients with a long Covid-19 epidemic, which often includes symptoms similar or identical to those of ME/CFS. Although the study participants were recruited before the pandemic, they all had a form of ME/CFS that is preceded by an infection, just as long as Covid is preceded by a coronavirus infection.

“Whatever we learn from ME/CFS will benefit long Covid patients, and whatever we learn from long Covid will benefit ME/CFS patients, I think,” said Dr. Nath, who said the infections experienced by patients in the study varied. (No one had Lyme disease; Mrs. Caldwell's infection was C. diff.)

The differences in the immune system were among the clearest findings, said Dr. Anthony Komaroff, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the study but served as a reviewer of the study for the journal. “They discovered chronic activation of the immune system, as if the immune system was engaged in a long war against a foreign microbe, a war that it could not completely win and therefore had to keep fighting,” he said.

Dr. Nath said his theory is that, in both long-term Covid-19 and post-infectious ME/CFS, “either bits and pieces of that pathogen are hanging around and driving this thing” or “the pathogen is gone, but whatever it has done is immune system, it just never settled down.”

Another striking finding was that when participants were asked to perform tasks measuring their grip strength, a part of their brain involved in coordinating and controlling actions showed reduced activation – while in healthy people it showed increased activation.

That area of ​​the brain, the right temporal-parietal junction, is involved in “telling the legs to move, telling the mouth to open and eat – it's kind of telling you to do something,” said Dr. . Komaroff. “If it doesn't light up properly, it's harder to get the body to make that effort,” he continued, adding that the NIH researchers “speculate that the chronic immune stimulation they found and the changes in the gut microbiome they found could lead to these brain changes, which then lead to symptoms.”

Experts warned that the results of the small study may not reflect the experience of the many people who have ME/CFS.

The condition can also develop in people who have not had infections. And while ME/CFS is often characterized by severe energy depletion after physical or cognitive exertion (a phenomenon called post-exertional malaise), the study participants had to be functional enough to undergo intensive evaluation during day-long visits to the NIH in Maryland.

“They selected fairly healthy patients,” says Dr. Carmen Scheibenbogen, professor of immunology at the Institute for Medical Immunology at Charité Hospital in Berlin, who was not involved in the study. “I think there are a lot of interesting findings, but it's just disappointing because it was such a invasive approach and they selected patients who are not very representative.”

Beth Pollack, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noted that in the years after participating, four of the seventeen patients “spontaneously recovered” from the condition, which she said is “not typical of ME/CFS.”

Both she and Dr. Scheibenboog also pointed out that the study did not find any medical signature of the condition that has been documented by other research. For example, patients were not found to perform worse on cognitive tests or to have neuroinflammation.

“These are well-established pathologies and are really critical to ME/CFS,” Ms Pollack said, adding: “So this hasn't addressed everything, and it contradicts some of the things we know.”

Dr. Scheibenboog said the key findings are that the condition is caused by dysregulation of the immune system, and that the researchers are clear that it is a physiological condition “not a psychosomatic disease.”

Experts said the study, which is the NIH's first detailed look at ME/CFS, should be viewed as just one step in understanding the condition, its severity and possible remedies. “We need to make progress toward research into treatments,” Ms. Pollack said.

For Ms. Caldwell, some aspects of the study participant experience were sobering, such as when she scored a 15 on a 100-point scale for physical functioning, and a 6.25 on a 100-point “vitality” scale measuring energy levels and measures fatigue. and feelings of well-being.

Her main hope for the study, she said, is that it will encourage doctors and others to recognize ME/CFS and take it seriously.

“We are on the cusp of being understood, so this study is a big deal,” she said. “I've been vilified, dismissed, invalidated and belittled for so long,” she added, “so the validation is huge for me.”

A Chinese influence campaign that has sought for years to advance Beijing's interests is now using artificial intelligence and a network of social media accounts to deepen American discontent and division ahead of the U.S. presidential election, a new report says.

The campaign, known as Spamouflage, hopes to stoke disenchantment among voters by vilifying the United States as a country rife with urban decay, homelessness, fentanyl abuse, gun violence and crumbling infrastructure, according to the report published Thursday by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a non-profit research organization in London.

An additional goal, the report said, is to convince the international public that the United States is in a state of chaos.

Artificially generated images, some of which have also been edited with tools such as Photoshop, have given rise to the idea that the November elections will damage and possibly even destroy the country.

A post on Other images showed the two men facing each other, cracks in the White House or Statue of Liberty, and terminology such as “CIVIL WAR,” “INTERNAL STRIFE” and “THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.”

The stories did not appear to have an overtly partisan slant, although Mr. Biden was the target of multiple negative portrayals, including references to his son Hunter Biden's legal troubles and claims that the president is a drug user. Spamouflage's attitude toward Mr. Trump was more ambiguous; posts claiming that his “anti-hero status makes him unstoppable” could be interpreted as flattering. Both men were portrayed as too old to rule.

In America's “hyper-polarized division,” China sensed an opportunity, said Elise Thomas, a senior analyst at the institute that wrote the report. Spamouflage's focus on social conflict and antagonism in the US presidential race could also indicate how Beijing hopes to shape the many other major elections taking place around the world this year.

“In this narrative universe, American democracy is portrayed as a source of disunity and weakness,” Thomas said in a statement. “They are trying to create a sense of a hardened superpower in disarray, unable to solve its internal problems and unfit to act as a leader on the international stage.”

Spamouflage has been active since 2017, Ms. Thomas wrote in the report, adding that the campaign is “notorious among researchers both for its sheer size and for its inability to generate any significant engagement from real social media users.” Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said last summer it had removed thousands of social media accounts and hundreds of pages linked to the campaign. Meta researchers linked the campaign to Chinese law enforcement.

Thursday's report focused on spammy posts on on X.

Researchers at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights warned in their report on digital risks to this year's elections that the main threat in the 2024 election came less from AI-generated content and more to do with the dissemination of false, hateful and violent material. The reportpublished Wednesday, said such content has become more common because numerous social media platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, had backed away from some of their previous commitments regarding election integrity.

The researchers picked to be reduced.

The researchers also noted that political polarization in the United States was likely to entice China and others to sow confusion among voters.