Archaeologists identify a medieval war-horse graveyard near Buckingham Palace 

We know knights in shining armor rode powerful horses, but remains of those horses are rare. Now, researchers studying equine remains from a site near Buckingham Palace have built a case, based on evidence from their bones, that these animals were likely used in jousting tournaments and battle. Archeologist Katherine Kanne says the bone analysis also revealed a complex, continent-crossing medieval horse trading network that supplied the British elites with sturdy stallions. This paper was published in Science Advances.

In an ice-free Arctic, Polar bears are dining on duck eggs — and gulls are taking advantage

Researchers using drones to study ground-nesting birds in the Arctic have observed entire colonies being devastated by marauding polar bears who would normally be out on the ice hunting seals – except the ice isn’t there. What’s more, now they’re enabling a second predator – hungry gulls who raid the nests in the bears’ wake. Andrew Barnas made the observations of this “gull tornado” following around polar bears in East Bay Island in Nunavut. The research was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

A NASA mission might have the tools to detect life on Europa from space

NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, due to launch this fall, is set to explore the jewel of our solar system: Jupiter’s moon, Europa. The mission’s focus is to determine if the icy moon, thought to harbour an ocean with more water than all of the water on Earth, is amenable to life. However, postdoctoral researcher Fabian Klenner, now at the University of Washington, led a study published in the journal Science Advances that demonstrated how the spacecraft may be able to detect fragments of bacterial life in a single grain of ice ejected from the surface of the moon. 

Pollution is preventing pollinators from finding plants by scent

Our polluted air is transforming floral scents so pollinators that spread their pollen can no longer recognize them. In a new study in the journal Science, researchers found that a certain compound in air pollution reacts with the flower’s scent molecules so pollinators — like the hummingbird hawk-moths that pollinate at night — fail to recognize them. Jeremy Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Naples, said the change in scent made the flowers smell “less fruity and less fresh.”

An Australian Atlantis and underwater archeological remains in the Baltic 

During the last ice age sea levels were more than 100 metres lower than they are today, which means vast tracts of what are currently coastal seafloor were dry land. Geologists and archaeologists are searching for these lost landscapes to identify places prehistoric humans might have occupied. These included a country sized area of Australia that could have been home to half a million people. Archaeologist Kasih Norman and her colleagues published their study of this now-drowned landscape in Quaternary Science Reviews. 

Another example is an undersea wall off the coast of Northern Germany that preserves an underwater reindeer hunting ground, described in research led by Jacob Geersen, published in the journal PNAS.