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A massive pink diamond ring with ties to French royalty has broken an auction record, selling for nearly $14 million. Estimates had indicated the ring would sell for between $5 and $7 million.

The ring’s pink gemstone has a historic and intriguing legacy, having once belonged to Marie-Antoinette of France, the country’s last queen before the French Revolution of 1789. How the gem survived the Revolution is still a mystery, but it went to Marie-Antoinette’s daughter, Marie-Thérèse. As a result, the diamond is called the Marie-Thérèse Pink.

Marie-Antoinette was the queen consort of King Louis XVI. In the years leading up to the Revolution, there was growing unrest and anger with the royals and aristocracy for extravagant spending and restricting the rights of the people. With the start of the Revolution on July 14, 1789, the people sought to change the country, set up a constitution, and restrict the monarchy’s rule. Marie-Antoinette urged her husband to resist these changes, which made her deeply unpopular among the common people. This is part of the sentiment behind the infamous legend that when Marie-Antoinette was told the people had no bread to eat, she responded, “Let them eat cake!”

Eventually Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were imprisoned and executed in Paris.

While the sequence of events surrounding the diamond is uncertain, experts think Marie-Antoinette sent the diamond and other jewels with a trusted coiffeur, or hairdresser, one night when the royals had tried to escape Paris before imprisonment. The escape attempt failed, but the pink jewel made its way out. It was reunited with Marie-Antoinette’s only surviving child, Marie-Thérèse, after the Revolution.

Marie-Thérèse passed the diamond on to other family members before it was sold in 1996. The buyer had the gem turned into a ring by well-known jewelry designer Joel Arthur Rosenthal, who is known as JAR. The diamond stayed out of public view until Christie’s New York’s Magnificent Jewels auction this summer.

“It has everything you could want in a piece of jewelry,” says Rahul Kadakia, Christie’s international head of jewelry. “The stone—likely from the prized Indian region of Golconda—has several shades of soft colors, flashing purple and pink from different angles. And it’s been transformed into a masterpiece by JAR, all while carrying the splendor of royal provenance.”

Conservationists in Mexico are celebrating the early success of a program that may help save one of Earth’s rarest salamanders, the axolotl. The axolotl (ak-SUH-lah-tul) is a salamander with frilly gills and a mouth that appears to be smiling. This cute amphibian is considered critically endangered, and wildlife experts are racing to protect the wild population from extinction.

Axolotls once thrived in the abundant lakes and wetlands in the area that became Mexico City, Mexico. At that time, the area was the center of the powerful Aztec empire and the location of a body of water called Lake Texcoco. The Aztecs built a city in the middle of Lake Texcoco called Tenochtitlán. The people of this island city utilized and developed the natural waterways for transportation, food, and fishing. But after the Spanish took over Tenochtitlán in the 1500s, they drained the lake and, with it, much of the axolotl’s habitat. Urbanization of Mexico City and the surrounding area has further degraded the remaining wetlands.

Today, wild axolotls can be found only in the city’s Lake Xochimilco, where there may be as few as 50 to 1,000 individuals. Conservationists like Alejandra Ramos are hoping to save this rare animal from extinction with a captive breeding program that releases captive axolotls into the wild. Ramos leads a team of researchers who are breeding axolotls in captivity with the hopes of reviving the wild population.

When you hear the term “lab rat,” you may picture a rat running through a maze while scientists in lab coats take notes for research. Specially trained lab rats in Tanzania and Mozambique have a different job. They help their human colleagues detect a deadly infectious disease.

The African giant pouched rat isn’t just the largest rat species in the world. It also has a keen sense of smell, which people have realized could be useful for detecting things that humans and machines cannot. An organization called APOPO has trained some of these rats to detect tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial disease that affects the lungs and causes coughing, difficulty breathing, and chest pains.

TB spreads quickly and can be deadly if left untreated. The World Health Organization says that 10 million people around the world get sick with TB each year. Fortunately, medicine and antibiotics can treat TB if it is caught in time. This is where the helpful lab rats, which APOPO calls HeroRATs, come in.

An area of Alberta, Canada, is so rich with fossilized dinosaur bones that it’s been named Dinosaur Provincial Park. The park has been a key location for fossil hunters for about 100 years. But in a recent study, drones and GPS technology helped to reveal that the method scientists have been using to estimate the age of the bones isn’t always accurate.

Paleontologists had been dating the park’s fossils by measuring their location relative to a boundary where two sedimentary rock layers meet. Since this type of rock forms in layers, scientists often conclude that the fossils found in lower layers are older than those found in upper layers. 

To test this method, scientists at McGill University in Canada had drones fly over a section of the park and take about 1,000 high-resolution images. Using the images and GPS coordinates, scientists were able to create a 3D model of the landscape. They learned that the rock boundary they’d been using to date fossils fluctuates, or varies, in elevation by up to 39 feet (12 meters) within a short distance, suggesting that it doesn’t give very accurate information.

“We’ve essentially shown that the dating method used for decades in Dinosaur Provincial Park may not be as reliable as previously thought,” Alexandre Demers-Potvin, the study’s lead author, told McGill University.

You may have heard the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but what if you discovered a rare and magical story being used as the cover for a completely different book? This is what happened at the Cambridge University Library in England: researchers pulled a rare manuscript depicting the magical tale of King Arthur from the binding of another book. 

The manuscript, called Suite Vulgate du Merlin, was written about 700 years ago in Old French and is one of about 40 copies that have survived to this day. It depicts part of the legend of King Arthur, a story that comes from Wales in the United Kingdom and is about a king and his magician, called Merlin, as well as his Knights of the Round Table.

As the story goes, Arthur becomes king when he pulls an embedded sword from a stone. With help from an advisor named Merlin, the king leads a group of warriors called the Knights of the Round Table. The legend has captured imaginations since it first appeared in the 9th century.

Prior to the 1970s, ambulances weren’t the standard for transporting sick or injured people to hospitals. Police cars, or even hearses—cars used to transport coffins during funerals—would help in an emergency, but the patients would not receive treatment on the way. As a result, many people died on the way to the nearest hospital. 

The situation was even worse in the Hill District, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The city’s police force frequently ignored or delayed calls for emergency transportation to the hospital, leaving Black patients without swift care. So in the 1960s, the community decided to start an ambulance service. Called the Freedom House Ambulance Service, it was the first emergency medical service (EMS) in the United States.  

In 1967, a nonprofit organization called Freedom House Enterprises partnered with the hospital to create a paramedic training course and ambulance service to respond to emergencies in the Hill District. The program had five ambulances and recruited new emergency responders to take an eight-month course where they learned how to provide life-saving care on the way to the hospital. 

It’s estimated that in Freedom House’s first year of service, the paramedics transported more than 4,600 patients and saved about 200 lives, according to data from Peter Safar, the Pittsburgh doctor who designed the training program.

When a pair of hikers discovered a box of treasures in the Czech Republic, they had no idea what its origins might be. But even experts have yet to unravel the mysteries tied to the treasure. They wonder who buried the box and why.

The metal box, which was embedded in a stone wall, contained 10 gold bracelets, a comb, and other items. The most eye-popping part of the treasure was 598 gold coins estimated to be worth about $340,000. The hikers immediately took the box to the nearby Museum of Eastern Bohemia in the town of Hradec Králové. 

When museum experts looked for clues to the origin of the treasure, they noted that the newest coin was dated 1921. This indicated that the box could not have been buried more than 104 years ago. Experts also noticed that none of the coins were local. Some were from France, while others were from the Balkan region of Europe, which is south of the Czech Republic. 

Experts believe that the treasure was buried during one of many periods of unrest in Europe. During the 20th century, the continent saw two world wars, as well as other conflicts. Both world wars involved several countries and forced many people to leave their homes. It’s possible that a wealthy family hid their valuables while fleeing to safety. Another theory is that soldiers looted (stole) the items from one or more abandoned homes.

If you got stung by a scorpion or bitten by a poisonous snake, you’d hurry to the hospital for treatment. It turns out ancient Egyptians also had at least one doctor who could treat wounds caused by poisonous animals—and more.

Archaeologists have uncovered a vibrantly painted 4,100-year-old tomb belonging to an Egyptian doctor. Based on the clues in the tomb, the doctor cared for Egyptian royals and specialized in treating snake bites and scorpion stings. 

The well-preserved tomb bears the doctor’s name, Tetinebefou, and professional titles in hieroglyphs. These titles, combined with brightly colored artwork, help paint a picture of the doctor’s life thousands of years ago.

Humans have been mapping the cosmos for thousands of years, and now a teenager in India has added a new feature to our expanding space map.

Daksh Malik, a 14-year-old from the city of Noida in northern India, has discovered a new asteroid floating between Mars and Jupiter. Asteroids are rocky space objects that orbit the Sun. Daksh, who has been hunting for asteroids for years through an international astronomy program, will get to name the asteroid when it’s officially added to the asteroid and comet database.

“I thought maybe I could call it ‘Destroyer of the World’,” Daksh jokingly told the Economic Times. “Or since it’s an asteroid, maybe ‘Countdown’ would be a catchy yet ominous-sounding name,” he said more seriously.

NASA, a U.S. agency responsible for space research, is completing a process to verify the new asteroid before Daksh can officially name it. For now, the asteroid is temporarily called “2023 OG40.”

Asteroid Hunting

Daksh’s astronomy journey began in 2022 when his class at school joined a citizen science program under the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC). The IASC is an international group that encourages people to search for moving objects in space. Citizen science is when people who are not scientists participate in scientific research.

Through the program, people like Daksh learn to use astronomical software to analyze NASA data and time-lapse images from telescopes to hunt asteroids. The program participants comb through the data and track bright, moving objects.

A baseball field with a painful past is getting a historic revival. In October 2024, baseball players from across the West Coast of the United States gathered to play on the restored field at Manzanar, California, where thousands of Japanese American citizens were once imprisoned. Despite the baseball field’s dark history, many people consider it to be a symbol of strength and resilience.

During World War II, the U.S. government forced 120,000 Japanese Americans to relocate to prison camps. The government justified this by claiming that Americans of Japanese descent might be reporting U.S. secrets to Japan, which was then an enemy nation. Despite their loyalty to the U.S., these Americans swiftly lost their rights. Whole families were forced to move into camps. These prison camps became known as Japanese American internment camps.

One of these camps was at Manzanar. The camp was located near Death Valley, a desolate place where temperatures range from severely hot to very cold. People lived in barracks behind barbed wire fences. Guards watched them and would not let them leave.