Editor’s note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.The Mary Rose was a royal favorite when it first set sail as the flagship of King Henry VIII’s fleet in 1512.Nearly 500 years after the vessel sank in 1545 during a battle with a French fleet, the shipwreck is revealing what life was like in Tudor England.After the Mary Rose came to rest at the bottom of a strait in the English Channel, a layer of silt cloaked the ship and the hundreds of crew who died on board. The sediment preserved everything it covered. Underwater archaeologists carefully collected items and remains from the warship before raising the hull in 1982 and putting it on display in a museum in Portsmouth, England.Now, researchers are studying the objects and bones from the wreck to better understand who the men were and how they lived.Ocean secretsThe wreckage of the Mary Rose is on display at The Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England. – The Mary Rose TrustScientists now see how the tasks of life on a ship shaped the bone chemistry of 12 crew members from the Mary Rose by analyzing their collarbones. Collarbones capture information about age, development and growth as well as handedness, or which hand crew members favored.The clavicles showed that all the men relied on their right hand, but they may have done so due to left-handedness being associated with witchcraft at the time, researchers said.The findings of this new study are not only opening a window into the lives of the sailors but contributing to modern medical research by providing a better understanding of age-related changes in human bones.Dig thisAt first glance, the ancient fossil of a previously unknown arthropod uncovered in New York state looks like a glittering piece of jewelry. But the 450 million-year-old fossil of Lomankus edgecombei, which resembles a shrimp, is preserved in fool’s gold, or iron pyrite.“Preservation in pyrite of this kind is extremely rare. In the last half a billion years there are only a handful of examples of places where this occurs,” said Luke Parry, associate professor of paleobiology at the University of Oxford.Researchers were able to conduct CT scans of the fossil, which revealed insights into the arthropod’s adaptable head and appendages. The latter acted as a “biological Swiss army knife” enabling survival, Parry said.Across the universeThe explosion of a star spotted in the night sky in 1181 was so bright that astronomers recorded it as a “g …
