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'Hobbit' Fossils Represent A New Species, Concludes Anthropologist


Science Daily
Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:36 UTC
Homo floresiensis
© Karen L. Baab and Kieran P. McNulty.Data collected from the LB1 cranium (superimposed on the original photo) of Homo floresiensis. Size, shape, and asymmetry in fossil hominins: The status of the LB1 cranium based on 3D morphometric analyses.
University of Minnesota anthropology professor Kieran McNulty (along with colleague Karen Baab of Stony Brook University in New York) has made an important contribution toward solving one of the greatest paleoanthropological mysteries in recent history -- that fossilized skeletons resembling a mythical "hobbit" creature represent an entirely new species in humanity's evolutionary chain.

Discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, controversy has surrounded the fossilized hominid skeletons of the so-called "hobbit people," or Homo floresiensis ever since. Experts are still debating whether the 18,000-year-old remains merely belong to a diminutive population of modern-day humans (with one individual exhibiting "microcephaly," an abnormally small head) or represent a previously unrecognized branch in humanity's family tree.

Using 3D modeling methods, McNulty and his fellow researchers compared the cranial features of this real-life "hobbit" to those of a simulated fossil human (of similar stature) to determine whether or not such a species was distinct from modern humans.
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Display

Scientists use PlayStations to create supercomputer

Paul Jay
CBC News
Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:21 UTC
Computer hobbyists and researchers take note: two U.S. scientists have created a step-by-step guide on how to build a supercomputer using multiple PlayStation 3 video-game consoles.

The instructional guide, posted this week online at ps3cluster.org, allows users with some programming knowledge to install a version of the open-source operating system Linux on the video consoles and connect a number of consoles into a computing cluster or grid.

The two researchers say the guide could provide scientists with another, cheaper alternative to renting time on supercomputers to run their simulations.

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth physics professor Gaurav Khanna first built the cluster a year ago to run his simulations estimating the gravitational waves produced when two black holes merged.
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Einstein

Intelligent soldiers most likely to die in battle

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:28 UTC
Being dumb has its benefits. Scottish soldiers who survived the second world war were less intelligent than men who gave their lives defeating the Third Reich, a new study of British government records concludes.

The 491 Scots who died and had taken IQ tests at age 11 achieved an average IQ score of 100.8. Several thousand survivors who had taken the same test - which was administered to all Scottish children born in 1921 - averaged 97.4.

The unprecedented demands of the second world war - fought more with brains than with brawn compared with previous wars - might account for the skew, says Ian Deary, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, who led the study. Dozens of other studies have shown that smart people normally live longer than their less intelligent peers.
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Satellite

Mars lander updates Twitter users with 'tweets'


Agence France-Presse
Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:56 UTC
If the Phoenix Lander comes back to life on Mars, Twitter users could be among the first to know.

NASA gave the historic Space Age mission an Internet Age spin by adding a Twitter page, enabling the robotic interplanetary explorer to answer the hot micro-blogging website's trademark query: "What are you doing?"

Twitter rocketed to popularity with technology that lets people use mobile telephones or personal computers to continually keep friends updated on their activities with "tweets," text messages of no more than 140 characters.
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Satellite

Mars had climate change


InTheNews.co.uk
Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:51 UTC
Mars
© NASA
Mars has been through major climate changes, similar to the Earth's ice age, scientists have discovered. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) found evidence of ancient climate change on Mars caused by regular variation in the planet's tilt, or obliquity.

On Earth, a similar astronomical effect drives ice-age cycles.

The researchers used a high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to measure the layering on rock outcrops in four craters on the planet. Based on the analysis, the scientists concluded each layer was formed over a period of about 100,000 years and was produced by the same cyclical climate changes.
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Telescope

Burrowing black holes devoured first stars from within

David Shiga
New Scientist
Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:28 UTC
Image
© SPL
Swarms of tiny black holes forged in the big bang may have killed off the universe's first stars by devouring them from within. The digested end-products could then have grown into the colossal black holesMovie Camera now lurking in the centres of galaxies, whose origins have long been a mystery.

Some physicists speculate that minuscule black holes may have been forged in the very dense soup of matter and radiation that prevailed in the first moments of the universe's existence. If so, these might account for at least some of the invisible dark matter that pervades the universe.

Now Cosimo Bambi of the University of Tokyo in Japan and colleagues have shown that these black holes could also have destroyed the universe's first stars by eating them from the inside out.

The first stars are thought to have formed around 200 million years after the big bang, in the centres of the universe's densest dark matter clumps. Stars would have been most likely to ignite there because the dark matter's gravity would have pulled in the gas necessary for them to form.
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Info

Habitable Planets: Four Types Proposed

Lee Pullen
Astrobiology Magazine
Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:54 UTC
Planet
© Unknown
The origin of life and the habitability of worlds other than Earth are two of the biggest mysteries facing science today. Much research has been dedicated to these topics, but there is still a lack of definite answers.

Jan Hendrik Bredehöft from the UK's Open University has been considering habitability on other worlds. "I'm one of those guys who takes a piece of meteorite, grinds it up and finds out what the organic chemistry is in there," said Bredehöft.

Based on these types of studies, he has come to believe that habitable worlds can be split into four categories, each with varying likelihoods of being home to extraterrestrial organisms. This has great potential for assisting the search for life in the universe, particularly as technology is now progressing to the stage where direct imaging of extrasolar planets is possible. Bredehöft presented his ideas at Europlanet's latest Planetary Science Congress.
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Satellite

Discovery Indicates Mars Was Habitable

Andrea Thompson
Space.com
Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:46 UTC
Evidence of a key mineral on Mars has been found at several locations on the planet's surface, suggesting that any microbial life that might have been there back when the planet was wetter could have lived comfortably.

The findings offer up intriguing new sites for future missions to probe, researchers said.

Observations made by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which just completed its primary mission and started a second two-year shift, found evidence of carbonates, which don't survive in conditions hostile to life, indicating that not all of the planet's ancient watery environments were as harsh as previously thought.
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Better Earth

Earth Not Center Of The Universe, Surrounded By 'Dark Energy'


Science Daily
Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:47 UTC
Earth's location in the Universe is utterly unremarkable, despite recent theories that propose toppling a foundation of modern cosmology, according to a team of University of British Columbia researchers.

Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus's 1543 book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, moved Earth from being the centre of the Universe to just another planet orbiting the Sun. Since then, astronomers have extended the idea and formed the Copernican Principle, which says that our place in the Universe as a whole is completely ordinary. Although the Copernican Principle has become a pillar of modern cosmology, finding conclusive evidence that our neighbourhood of the Universe really isn't special has proven difficult.
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Ark

Ancient Mass Graves of Soldiers, Babies Found in Italy

Maria Cristina Valsecchi
National Geographic News
Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:22 UTC
mass grave
© National Geographic

More than 10,000 graves containing ancient amphorae, "baby bottles," and the bodies of soldiers who fought the Carthaginians were found near the ancient Greek colony of Himera, in Italy, archaeologists announced recently. (See photos.)

"It's probably the largest Greek necropolis in Sicily," said Stefano Vassallo, the lead archaeologist of the team that made the discoveries, in September.
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