Cuts in the cranium, which is more than 4,000 years old, hint that people in the ancient civilization attempted to treat a scourge that persists today.Fluctuating disease rates, innovative treatments and talk of “moonshots” in the White House may make cancer seem like a modern scourge. But a new discovery highlights how humans dealt with the illness and hunted for cures as far back as the time of the ancient Egyptians.Scientists led by Edgard Camarós, a paleopathologist at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain were studying an approximately 4,600-year-old Egyptian skull when they found signs of brain cancer and its treatment.“There was an uncomfortable silence in the room, because we knew what we had just discovered,” Dr. Camarós said.Using a microscope, he and Tatiana Tondini of the University of Tübingen in Germany and Albert Isidro of the University Hospital Sagrat Cor in Spain, the study’s other authors, found cut marks around the skull’s edges surrounding dozens of lesions that earlier researchers had linked to metastasized brain cancer. The shape of the cuts indicated that they had been made with a metal tool. This discovery, reported in a study published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, suggests that ancient Egyptians studied brain cancer using surgery. If the cuts were made while the person was alive, they may have even attempted to treat it.The new discovery not only expands scientific knowledge of Egyptian medicine, it may also push back the timeline of humanity’s documented attempts to treat cancer by up to 1,000 years.Cancer has bedeviled humans for as long as we have existed, and it even afflicted life on Earth long before.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

If spiders use their webs like a large external eardrum, researchers reasoned, perhaps spider silk could be the basis for a powerful listening device.Engineers and scientists have an enduring fascination with spider silk. Similar to typical worm silk that makes for comfy bedsheets, but much tougher, the material has inspired the invention of lighter and more breathable body armor and materials that could make airplane components stronger without adding weight. Researchers are even using examples drawn from spider webs to design sensitive microphones that can one day be used to treat hearing loss and deafness and to improve other listening devices.Spiders use their webs like enormous external eardrums. A team of scientists from Binghamton University and Cornell University reported in 2022 that webs allow arachnids to detect sound from 10 feet away.When you hear a sound through your ear, what you’re really experiencing are changes in air pressure that cause your eardrum to vibrate. This is how microphones work: by mimicking the human ear and vibrating in response to pressure.Spider webs serve a similar purpose but use a different mechanism.A spider moves its body in response to sounds moving through particular parts of its web.Zhou et al.Instead of vibrating when hit by a wave of pressure like a stick hitting a drumhead, they move with the flow of the air being displaced. Air is a fluid medium “like honey,” said Ronald Miles, a professor of mechanical engineering at Binghamton. Humans navigate this environment without noticing much resistance, but silk fibers are buffeted about by the velocity of the viscous forces in air.Dr. Miles couldn’t help but wonder if this principle could lead to a new kind of microphone.“Humans are kind of arrogant animals,” he said. “They make devices that work like they do.” But he wondered about building a device to be more like a spider and sense “sound with the motion of the air.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.