Underwater Hebrew Tablet Reveals Biblical-Era Ruler of Judea

A stone slab found off the coast of Israel has finally revealed the name of the ruler during one of the most iconic moments in Jewish history: the Bar Kokhba revolt.

The slab dates to the second century A.D., a bloody time in Jewish history when a fiery leader named Simon bar Kokhba led a failed revolt against Roman rulers. The huge chunk of stone was found at an underwater site called Tel Dor, located about 18 miles (30 kilometers) south of the city of Haifa. [Photos: 5,000-Year-Old Stone Monument in Israel]

The area once housed the Biblical city of Dor, which was occupied until the fourth century. Over the last 70 years, the site has yielded a treasure trove of pottery, anchors and other artifacts from ancient Israel. Ehud Arkin-Shalev and Michelle Kreiser, researchers from the Coastal Archaeology Laboratory at the University of Haifa, uncovered the giant slab while looking in the water of the Dor Nature Reserve.

The inscription was clearly visible, even beneath the water, the researchers said. The team eventually decided to bring the slab out of the water, to prevent damage to the inscription. Researchers discovered that the massive, 1,300-lb. (600 kilograms) slab had seven lines of ancient Greek inscribed upon it.

"The stone probably formed the base of a sculpture from the Roman period. As far as we know, this is the longest inscription found underwater in Israel," Assaf Yasur-Landau, the University of Haifa archaeologist who led the excavation, said in a statement.

Although the researchers have not completely deciphered the text, they have already made two discoveries: The inscription identified the Roman prefect in charge of Judea as Gargilius Antiques. Though researchers had found one other inscription bearing this name, that artifact did not mention the region Antiques ruled. In addition, the inscription confirms the name of the province involved in the revolt as Judea, which, until now, no inscription immediately preceding the Bar Kokhba revolt had stated, the researchers said.

The inscription dates from a tumultuous time in Jewish history. The second temple was destroyed in A.D. 70, and around A.D. 132, tensions simmering between the Roman rulers of the province and the Jewish inhabitants boiled over once again. At that point, the Jewish leader Simon bar Kokhba led a revolt against the Romans. During the four years of fighting, both sides sustained heavy casualties, and many Jews were ultimately sold into slavery or scattered.

"Immediately after the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Romans decided to abolish the province of Judea and to obliterate any mention of its name. The province was united with Syria to form a single province called Syria-Palestine," Yasur-Landau said. "So what we have here is an inscription dated to just before Judea ceased to exist as a province under that name. Of the two inscriptions mentioning the name Judea, this is the latest, of course. Because such findings are so rare, it is unlikely that we will find many later inscriptions including the name Judea,"

Do Hair and Nails Keep Growing After a Person Dies

Here's a creepy question to ponder: Do hair and fingernails continue to grow after a person dies?

The short answer is no, though it may not seem that way to the casual observer. That's because after death, the human body dehydrates, causing the skin to shrink. This shrinking exposes the parts of the nails and hair that were once under the skin, causing them to appear longer than before, said Dr. Doris Day, a dermatologist in New York City and an attending physician at Lenox Hill Hospital, also in New York.

Typically, fingernails grow about 0.1 millimeters (0.004 inches) a day. But in order to grow, they need glucose — a simple sugar that helps to power the body. 

"Once your body dies, there's no more glucose," Day told Live Science. "So skin cells, hair cells and nail cells no longer turn over and produce new cells."

Moreover, a complex hormonal regulation directs the growth of hair and nails, none of which is possible once a person perishes, according to a 2007 study in the journal The BMJ.

Regardless, popular culture often gets this fact wrong. In the book "All Quiet on the Western Front," the protagonist imagines his dead friend's nails growing in corkscrews after death, the researchers of the study said. They also noted that even Johnny Carson got his facts wrong when he joked about it, saying, "For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.

Aging May Be Reversible: Researchers Rejuvenate Older Mice

Getting old may not be inevitable — scientists have found a way to turn back the clock on human and animal cells, making them look and behave like younger versions of themselves.

The researchers also used the method to treat mice with a rare disease that causes them to age prematurely and die early, and found that the method increased the animals' lifespan by 30 percent. And, when normal mice received the treatment, they appeared to be rejuvenated, with some of their cells healing faster than normal in response to injury.

The researchers said that their findings may help scientists better understand the process of aging. One day, it may be possible to use a similar approach to ward off age-related diseases in humans, and thus improve people's health and increase their lifespan, they said.

"Our study shows that aging may not have to proceed in one single direction," study researcher Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a professor in Salk Institute's Gene Expression Laboratory in La Jolla, California, said in a statement. [Extending Life: 7 Ways to Live Past 100]

"Obviously, mice are not humans and we know it will be much more complex to rejuvenate a person," Izpisua Belmonte said. "But this study shows that aging is a very dynamic and plastic process, and therefore will be more amenable to therapeutic interventions than what we previously thought."

Scientists already knew that by "turning on" four genes (known as the Yamanaka factors) inside human cells growing in lab dishes, they could convert the cells back to a state that is seen in human embryos. Cells that have undergone this procedure are known as induced pluripotent stem cells, and are capable of becoming any cell type inside the body, and they can divide indefinitely.

But previous studies have found that when this method is used on live animals, they develop cancer.

In the new study, the researchers devised a way to turn on the Yamanaka factors, but only for short periods of time.

They started with mice that had a disease called progeria, which causes them to age faster than normal. They genetically engineered these mice so that their cells would turn on the Yamanaka factors when the mice were treated with a certain compound (in this case, the antibiotic doxycycline).

The researchers started the treatment in progeria mice when the animals were eight weeks old and then repeated the treatment, in short bouts, throughout the animals' lives. The researchers saw striking results: The mice looked younger inside and out — they showed less curvature of their spine with age, and their organ function improved. Their cells also appeared to have fewer molecular signs of aging than did those of untreated mice.

"The mice treated with these reprogramming factors had tissues that were better-looking, they were more healthy and they didn't accumulate the aging hallmarks," Pradeep Reddy, a research associate at the Salk Institute, said in a video from Salk.

When the researchers treated normal mice that had reached an old age, they saw that some of their cells had an improved capacity for regeneration — the cells in their muscles and pancreas healed more quickly after an injury, compared with older mice that didn't receive the anti-aging treatment.

The researchers also studied human cells that had been genetically tweaked so that they could "turn on" the Yamanaka factors after treatment with a chemical. When they treated these cells, the signs of aging in them were reversed, and the cells appeared younger on a molecular level.

One day, researchers might be able to come up with a way to substitute these four genes with a chemical compound that could be given to people in clinical trials, Izpisua Belmonte said. But the development of such a compound is likely many years away.

Mysterious 'Crater' in Antarctica Has Ominous Cause

A "crater" in Antarctica once thought to be the work of a meteorite impact is actually the result of ice melt, new research finds.

The hole, which is in the Roi Baudouin ice shelf in East Antarctica, is a collapsed lake — a cavity formed when a lake of meltwater drained — with a "moulin," a nearly vertical drainage passage through the ice, beneath it, researchers found on a field trip to the area in January 2016.

"That was a huge surprise," Stef Lhermitte, an earth science researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and at the University of Leuven in Belgium, said in a statement. "Moulins typically are observed on Greenland. And we definitely never see them on an ice shelf.

Surprising melt

Combining their fieldwork with satellite data and climate modeling, the researchers found that East Antarctica is more vulnerable to melt than was previously realized. Warm winds to the region blow away the snow cover, which darkens the surface of the ice, the team reported Dec. 12 in the journal Nature Climate Change. Darker surfaces absorb more heat from the sun than lighter surfaces, so they are more prone to melt. These floating ice sheets don't contribute much to sea level rise ­— as they're already in the ocean — but they provide an important backstop against the flowing of land-based ice from continental Antarctica into the ocean.

East Antarctica has been a mysterious place when it comes to climate change. The region has been gaining ice due to increases in snow accumulation, according to 2015 research. Global warming can increase snowfall by boosting the amount of moisture in the air (warm air holds more moisture than cold).

The Roi Baudouin crater was more mysterious still. It's existed on satellite images going back to at least 1989, researchers said, but was first noted widely in January 2015. Scientists initially reported it to be a meteorite crater, perhaps the result of a space rock that exploded over Antarctica in 2004. But scientists quickly questioned whether the 2-mile-wide (3 kilometers) circle was really from a meteorite. Many suspected it was the result of melting ice.

Jan Lenaerts, a climate researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and at the University of Leuven, was one of the meteorite skeptics.

"My response was: 'In that area? Then it's definitely not a meteorite; it's proof of strong melting,'" he said in a statement.

Vulnerable ice

The new study confirms that hunch. During their fieldwork on the southernmost continent, researchers also discovered many other meltwater lakes beneath the surface of the Roi Baudouin ice sheet.

"The amount of meltwater differs immensely from year to year, but it clearly increases during warm years," Lhermitte said.

Earlier research had shown that West Antarctica is very sensitive to climate change, Lenaerts said in the statement.

"Our research now suggests that the much larger East Antarctica ice sheet is also very vulnerable," Lenaerts said.