SCI-TECH

In April 2025, a scientific study went viral online for a particularly wild claim. A forest of Norway spruce trees (Picea abies) in the Dolomites of northern Italy appeared to rapidly synchronize their cellular-level electrical signals—known as electromes—in the hours leading up to a partial solar eclipse in October 2022.

If true, the discovery by the Italian Institute of Technology represented a possibly major development in understanding how plants communicate with one another. Despite many critics’ skepticism, headlines describing a “forest-wide phenomenon” of talking trees spread quickly across the internet. Now, one team of scientists believes they have a far more plausible explanation for the supposedly cosmic event in the Dolomite mountains. In short, the spruce trees were charged up with electricity from a recent thunderstorm. The evidence is laid out in a study recently published in the journal Trends in Plant Science—and the paper’s lead investigator isn’t mincing words about it, either.

“To me, [the April 2025] paper represents the encroachment of pseudoscience into the heart of biological research,” study co-author and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev evolutionary ecologist Ariel Novoplansky said in a statement. “Instead of considering simpler, well-documented environmental factors, like a heavy rainstorm and a cluster of nearby lightning strikes, the authors leaned into the more seductive idea that the trees were anticipating the impending solar eclipse.”

It’s not that plants don’t respond and even prepare environmental shifts—they absolutely do. They can sense shifts in light levels as well as underground factors like salinity and nutritional deficiencies. But these documented instances directly correspond to major existential challenges linked to clear predictive hints.

“In response to slight changes in light levels and spectral composition, plants can anticipate impending light competition long before experiencing meaningful photosynthetic shade from their neighbors,” Novoplansky and his co-authors write in their study.

They often do this by taking in pertinent information from their neighbors. However, a partial solar eclipse does not meet these criteria.

“The eclipse only reduced light by about 10.5 percent for two short hours, during which the level of sunlight was approximately twice what the trees could practically use,” Novoplansky explained. “Frequent fluctuations in cloud cover at the study location change light quality and quantity by much bigger amplitudes.”

Taking their debunking a step further, the team said that even if the reduced light was dramatic enough to induce a preparatory response in the trees, there was no way that they could have seen it coming. The partial solar eclipse in October 2022 was the 53rd in a sequence that takes place every 18 years, 11 days, and eight hours. The original study’s authors alleged larger spruce trees in the Dolomites exhibited larger amounts of electrical activity ahead of the eclipse, and therefore were attempting to warn their younger neighbor trees. But each eclipse follows a unique path, with its own duration and magnitude. So even if the older trees “remembered” a past eclipse, they couldn’t reliably plan for the next one.

As for any gravitational shifts that might give away the eclipse, the fluctuations during that time were no stronger than those that happen during a new moon. And then there’s the sample size. The first study’s authors only cited three living trees and five dead stumps—far from a large enough pool to derive reliable conclusions.

“The electrical activity of trees is a real phenomenon but it’s still a nascent field of inquiry,” said Novoplansky. “The forest is wondrous enough without inventing irrational yet superficially fantastic claims of anticipatory responsiveness or communication based only on correlation.”

The post No, trees can’t anticipate a solar eclipse appeared first on Popular Science.

Archaeologists have spent years puzzling over evidence of severed head rituals among Iron Age communities in the northeast Iberian Peninsula. Multiple groups of the Indigetes and Laietani peoples from present-day Spain and Portugal practiced these violent public displays at least as far back as the first millennium BCE. And sometimes, they did so with elaborate preparation techniques such as driving iron nails through the skulls. 

While researchers previously believed the techniques were restricted to an area north of Catalonia’s Llobregat River, recently examined cranial remains tell a different story. According to a study published in the journal Trabajos de Prehistoria, at least two other Iberian groups further south—the Cessetani and the Ilergetes—observed severed head rituals as early as the 6th century BCE.

“Bioanthropological and waste analyses have allowed us to identify injuries produced with sharp objects at a time close to death. Due to their arrangement, depth and location, they are compatible with the ritual of severed heads,” said Rubén de la Fuente, a study co-author and archaeologist at Spain’s Autonomous University of Barcelona.

De la Fuente and his collaborators analyzed five cranial remains excavated near the municipality of Olèrdola about 25 miles west of Barcelona, as well as 10 previously collected samples from the city of Molí d’Espígol another 60 miles north. In addition to the injury marks, the team confirmed natural materials used for preservation and display. These ranged from vegetable and animal fats, to pine resins, waxes, and oils.

“These are results that force us to rethink the cultural framework of the ritual, which until now was considered to be specific only to the peoples north of the Llobregat River, and point to a wider territorial dispersion than we thought,” added Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology researcher and study co-author Eulàlia Subirà.

At Olèrdola, the skull fragments all belonged to a single male between eight and 15-years-old. Three separate people are linked to the bones recovered from Molí d’Espígol, one of whom was a similarly aged male. On the Olèrdola skull, researchers also noted markings made on the jawbone using needle-like tools similar to those found at other Iberian locations.

“These marks were made to remove the flesh from the skull and indicate that, in addition to the scalp, the skin of the individual’s face was also removed,” said Subirà. “It is an infrequent practice, but it is documented in the ritual in European sites in France and the United Kingdom.”

At both sites, the cranial fragments were all discovered in what were common or public spaces, implying the severed heads possessed symbolic or performative importance. At Olèrdola, the skull was placed on a ground floor in one of the settlement’s entrance wall towers. According to De la Fuente, the Molí d’Espígol bones were housed inside a space of “indeterminate use, but architecturally unique enough to be a prominent or emblematic place of the settlement.”

It’s still unclear who these individuals were in relation to their decapitators, but De la Fuente’s team has their theories. Cremation was the primary burial practice throughout the Iberian region, meaning the careful preparation of severed heads was likely reserved for captured enemies. Because similar rituals were practiced by Gallic peoples of present-day France, there is now a growing body of evidence that indicates a potential cultural link between the Celtic and Gallic worlds.

The post Severed head rituals were more widespread in Iron Age Iberia than we thought appeared first on Popular Science.