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Research Examines How Past Communities Coped With Climate Change


Science Daily
Thu, 28 May 2009 01:39 UTC
Image
© Jago Cooper
Jago Cooper and Nelson Torna, who originally uncovered the excavation site.
Research led by the University of Leicester suggests people today and in future generations should look to the past in order to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

The dangers of rising sea levels, crop failures and extreme weather were all faced by our ancestors who learnt to adapt and survive in the face of climate change.

Dr Jago Cooper, of the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester, has been studying the archaeology of climate change in the Caribbean as part of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.

The international study involvess researchers from Britain, Cuba and Canada. Dr Cooper said: "Populations in the Caribbean, from 5000 BC to AD 1492, successfully lived through a 5m rise in relative sea levels, marked variation in annual rainfall and periodic intensification of hurricane activity.
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Gypsum Cave holds important glimpses of the past

David Bly
Desert Valley Times
Thu, 28 May 2009 01:15 UTC
Image
© (Courtesy Amy Gilreath, Far West Anthropological
Work at the mouth of Gypsum Cave in 2004
When he excavated Gypsum Cave in the 1930s, archeologist Mark Harrington concluded that humans and Late Pleistocene animals used the cave around the same time.It was an astounding theory, because it would have made the cave, which is in the Frenchman Mountains east of Las Vegas, one of the oldest human habitation sites in North America.

More recently technology indicates the humans came much later than Harrington supposed, but the cave is still an important archeological and paleontological site, members of Friends of Gold Butte heard last Tuesday,

Amy Gilreath of Far West Anthropological Research Group spoke to the group about the research she and colleague D. Craig Young carried out in 2004.

Gypsum Cave is about 10 miles east of Las Vegas, and a popular site. It is also adjacent to a utility corridor. When another power line was proposed through the area, the Bureau of Land Management required an assessment of the cave's value and the risk posed by increased traffic.
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Control Panel

KOBIAN: Emotional Humanoid Robot

Edo
pinktentacle.com
Wed, 27 May 2009 08:34 UTC
Researchers from Waseda University have teamed up with Kyushu-based robot manufacturer tmsuk to develop a humanoid robot that uses its entire body to express a variety of emotions.
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Binoculars

Why We Stare, Even When We Don't Want To

DeAnne Musolf
Wired
Mon, 25 May 2009 04:00 UTC
The stares of strangers endured by Connie Culp, recent face transplant recipient, might have little to do with cruelty or lack of empathy. These responses are likely a result of neurologic, biologic and evolutionary factors.

Schematic of Culp's transplant procedure
© Unknown
Schematic of Culp's transplant procedure
Prior to her operation, the center of Culp's face was blank skin traversed by a single raw scar where she once had a nose, upper lip and cheeks. The disfigurement made her the target of something perhaps even less fixable: millions of years of evolutionary uncouth. When she went out in public, people gaped at her. After her operation, her face still looks unusual and the stares continue.

"We stare. Even if you don't want to, even if your better judgment tells you 'I need to be nice to this person. They've obviously suffered a tragedy,' there's something so alien and uncomfortable - it just doesn't look like us," said facial expression expert Erika Rosenberg, who focuses on evolution at UC Davis' Center for the Mind and Brain. "It goes back to a very primal thing."
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Saturn

How Did the Brown Dwarf Get Its Spots?

Johannes Hirn
Sky and Telescope
Tue, 26 May 2009 23:50 UTC
Image
© NASA / JPL / HST / David James
The location of the brown-dwarf binary 2MASS J05352184-0546085 in the Orion Nebula, the closest big, hot star nursery. The two closely-orbiting objects appear as a single point in these infrared images
A pair of nearly identical brown dwarfs - dim, low-mass substars - seems more and more to defy basic models of star formation. But researchers have found a way out.

Just as sociologists and biologists study twins to understand how people with the same origin can differ, astronomers study binary and multiple stars knowing that they formed at the same time and place. The most valuable binary stars are eclipsing binaries. As the stars cross each other, the depths, shapes, period, and colors of their eclipses, combined with spectroscopy showing the stars' radial velocities, can give very accurate readings of the stars' masses, temperatures, surface brightnesses, and physical sizes.
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Sherlock

Acheulian human remains found in Morocco


Xinhua
Tue, 26 May 2009 23:44 UTC
Rabat -- A Moroccan-French archaeology team has discovered the rear part of a human mandible that dates back to the prehistoric Acheulian phase, local MAP news agency reported on Monday.

The mandible, which belongs to a young human, holds a premolar and a molar, the report said.

The fossil was uncovered on May 14 in the Thomas I quarry site in Casablanca, along with stone tools "that characterize the Acheulian civilization" and remnants of gazelles, antelopes, warthogs, bears, monkeys, said the report.
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Ship Over 2,000 Years Old Found in Novalja


Javno
Tue, 26 May 2009 23:35 UTC
Novalja, Croatia - In the Caska Bay on the Island of Pag, near Novalja, an ancient sewn ship over 2,000 years old was found. This is the result of research done by the city of Novalja and the Zadar University, in cooperation with the French institute for scientific research (CNRS-CCJ University in Marseille) and numerous other foreign associates.

Archaeologists have found a ancient sewn ship more than 2000 years old in Pag's Caska Bay, reports ezadar.hr.
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Better Earth

Microfossils Challenge Prevailing Views Of 'Snowball Earth' Glaciations On Life


Science Daily
Tue, 26 May 2009 21:48 UTC
Image
© Carol Dehler
This is an exposure of the Chuar Group in Carbon Canyon, Grand Canyon.
New fossil findings discovered by scientists at UC Santa Barbara challenge prevailing views about the effects of "Snowball Earth" glaciations on life, according to an article in the June issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

By analyzing microfossils in rocks from the bottom of the Grand Canyon, the authors have challenged the view that has been generally assumed to be correct for the widespread die-off of early life on Earth.

"Snowball Earth" is the popular term for glaciations that occurred between approximately 726 and 635 million years ago and are hypothesized to have entombed the planet in ice, explained co-author Susannah Porter, assistant professor of earth science at UCSB. It has long been noted that these glaciations are associated with a big drop in the fossil diversity, suggesting a mass die-off at this time, perhaps due to the severity of the glaciations. However, the authors of the study found evidence suggesting that this drop in diversity occurred some 16 million or more years before the glaciations. And, they offer an alternative reason for the drop.
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Telescope

Sunset Moon


Space Weather
Tue, 26 May 2009 21:44 UTC
Image
© Marek Nikodem
When the sun goes down tonight, step outside and look west. Marek Nikodem of Szubin, Poland, took the picture last night using a Nikon D700. "The Moon was only 31 hours past new," he says. "It was a lovely crescent!"

Only one day older and a few percent wider, the crescent Moon will be back again this evening.
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Telescope

Space Station Flares


Space Weather
Tue, 26 May 2009 21:41 UTC
Image
© Quintus Oostendorp
Lately, a growing number of observers are reporting intense "flares" coming from the International Space Station (ISS). A typical sighting begins with a normal, sedate flyby: The station soars overhead, cutting silently through the stars with no hint that something extraordinary is about to happen. Then, a startling explosion of light boosts the station's luminosity 10-fold or more. Some observers have witnessed flares of magnitude -8 or twenty-five times brighter than Venus.

On May 22nd, Dutch amateur astronomer Quintus Oostendorp watched a flare through his backyard telescope. A movie he recorded using his Canon 1000D shows what happened.
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