Science Stories with Joe Johnson

This week, our resident science guy Joe Johnson dives into a trio of surprising and thought-provoking discoveries—from an ancient agricultural marvel buried beneath Michigan forests to the latest in space exploration, and even the mystery behind wrinkly fingers after a swim.

LiDAR Uncovers Massive Indigenous Agricultural Site in Michigan
A new study published in the Journal of Science on June 5 has dramatically altered what researchers thought they knew about Indigenous farming in the Upper Midwest. Using advanced LiDAR technology, scientists mapped the terrain of the “60 Islands” area in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—a site long known to be inhabited by the ancestors of the Menominee Nation.

What the team uncovered was astonishing: an extensive network of raised garden beds spanning 95 hectares—the equivalent of roughly 230 acres. The discovery points to a sophisticated and large-scale farming system that operated between 1000 and 1600 AD.

“These aren’t just remnants of subsistence gardening,” Johnson said. “This was a sustained agricultural operation.”

Researchers confirmed that the gardens were used to cultivate maize, beans, and squash—known as the “Three Sisters” in Indigenous agricultural tradition—as well as melons and sunflowers. Evidence shows that the Menominee enriched their soils with compost and wetland materials, demonstrating advanced environmental management techniques.

The study challenges long-held misconceptions that Indigenous people in this region were primarily hunter-gatherers. It also raises questions about the social organization and trade networks that may have supported such a large farming endeavor.

Notably, the village site where the farmers lived has yet to be discovered.

NASA’s Dragonfly Mission Takes Flight Toward Titan
In space exploration news, NASA’s upcoming Dragonfly mission has cleared a key development hurdle. The nuclear-powered rotorcraft is designed to fly across Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, and explore its surface and atmosphere.

Titan stands out among celestial bodies. It’s about half the diameter of Earth but has just one-seventh of Earth’s gravity and a dense atmosphere, composed largely of nitrogen and methane. Surface temperatures are so cold that methane exists in solid, liquid, and gas forms—creating a weather cycle not unlike Earth’s water cycle, but with natural gas.

“Dragonfly will explore a world where rivers, lakes, and even rain are made of methane,” Johnson said. “It’s unlike anything we’ve seen before.”

The mission builds on data gathered by the Cassini-Huygens probe in 2005, which offered the first images of Titan’s surface and revealed strong evidence of subsurface oceans—potentially composed of water.
Because Titan may resemble early Earth, scientists are hopeful that the mission could offer insights into the chemical building blocks of life.

“There’s even speculation that hydrothermal activity could support microbial life,” Johnson noted. “If there’s heat, water, and the right chemistry—it’s not out of the question.”

Why Our Fingers Wrinkle in Water: A New Look at an Old Mystery
A study published in the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials sheds light on a phenomenon familiar to anyone who’s taken a long bath: pruney fingers. But contrary to popular belief, the wrinkling isn’t caused by skin swelling—it’s the result of vasoconstriction, or the narrowing of blood vessels.

Known formally as Water-Induced Finger Wrinkling (WIFW), the phenomenon occurs when water alters the salt balance in the skin’s outer layers, signaling the brain to constrict blood vessels. This pulls the skin inward, forming wrinkles—particularly on fingertips and toes.

“What’s fascinating,” Johnson said, “is that this response is neurologically controlled. People with damage to the median nerve don’t wrinkle in water.”

The wrinkles, it turns out, are not random. In tests where subjects submerged their hands in warm water on consecutive days, the same wrinkling pattern appeared each time—suggesting consistent vascular structures beneath the skin.

Why do we wrinkle at all? Evolution may have the answer. The wrinkles improve grip in wet conditions, likely helping our ancestors—and us—better grasp slippery surfaces.

Image: Each time someone goes for a dip, their digits wrinkle in the exact same patterns, researchers report in the May Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials. (Credit: BBC)