Science & TechnologyS


Cow Skull

Early humans evolved in ecosystems unlike any found today

University of Utah
Phys.org
Mon, 07 Oct 2019 12:00 UTC
Miocene
© Heinrich HarderArtist Heinrich Harder's illustration of the extinct Deinotherium, an ancient relative to modern-day elephants that appeared in the Middle Miocene 20 million years ago and lived until the Early Pleistocene, around 2 million years ago. Harder completed the illustration in the early 1900s using fossils as his model.
To understand the environmental pressures that shaped human evolution, scientists must first piece together the details of the ancient plant and animal communities that our fossil ancestors lived in over the past 7 million years. Because putting together the puzzle of millions-of-years-old ecosystems is a difficult task, many studies have reconstructed the environments by drawing analogies with present-day African ecosystems, such as the Serengeti. A study led by a University of Utah scientist calls into question such approaches and suggests that the vast majority of human evolution occurred in ecosystems unlike any found today. The paper was published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
House

Wave of the future? Company builds 3D printed hemp houses

John Vibes
Truth Theory
Sun, 06 Oct 2019 14:12 UTC
Hemp houses
© Project Milestone
More architects and builders are turning to hemp as a sustainable material to use when building homes, and with 3D-printing technology, hemp is going to become even more of a realistic alternative to traditional materials, which are not environmentally friendly and in very short supply.

An Australian based biotechnology company called Mirreco, has recently unveiled plans for 3D printed hemp homes. The company cites environmental concerns as some of their primary motivations.

The company has developed hemp panels that can be used in both residential and commercial building projects. Furthermore, the panels can be manufactured directly through a 3D-printer, and then used to build the structure of the home.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Hammer

Pigs recorded using tools for the first time

Christine Dell'Amore
National Geographic
Fri, 04 Oct 2019 12:00 UTC
Visayan warty pigs
© Joel SartoreOnly about 300 Visayan warty pigs exist in captivity (pictured, an animal at the Minnesota Zoo). Their wild population is unknown.
On an October day in 2015, ecologist Meredith Root-Bernstein was watching a family of rare pigs at a Parisian zoo when something caught her eye.

One of the Visayan warty pigs — a critically endangered species native to the Philippines — picked up a piece of bark in its mouth and started digging with it, pushing the soil around. "I said, Whoa, that's pretty cool," says Root-Bernstein, a visiting researcher at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris and a National Geographic Explorer. "When I looked up tool use in pigs, there was nothing."

Intrigued, the scientist returned to the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes frequently over the following months to try to observe the behavior again, to no avail. She hypothesized that what she'd seen was related to nest-building, which Visayan warty pigs generally do every six months to prepare for the arrival of piglets. Sure enough, the next spring, a colleague returned to the warty pig enclosure and recorded three of the four animals using tools to complete their nest, an earthen pit filled with leaves.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

Read More...
Mars

Mars Curiosity Rover finds evidence of ancient oasis

Jonathan Shieber
Tech Crunch
Mon, 07 Oct 2019 16:06 UTC
Mars Rover
On its latest trek through the Gale Crater on Mars, the Curiosity Rover has discovered evidence that's leading scientists to believe there was an oasis at the base of that 150-kilometer-wide crater.

Curiosity scientists described the scene in an article in "Nature Geoscience" published earlier this week. Researchers analyzing data from the Rover are extrapolating from the data that rocks enriched by mineral salts are evidence of briny ponds that went through periods of drying out and overflowing. Those deposits serve as a watermark made by climate fluctuations as Mars' climate changed from a wet one to the current frigid ice desert it is today.
Read More...
Better Earth

Mystery of the last mam­moths that died suddenly 4,000 years ago

Laura Arppe and University of Tübingen
Helsinki.fr
Tue, 24 Sep 2019 12:00 UTC
mammoth
Isolation, extreme weather, and the possible arrival of humans may have killed off the holocene herbivores just 4,000 years ago.
The last woolly mammoths lived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean; they died out 4,000 years ago within a very short time. An international research team from the Universities of Helsinki and Tübingen and the Russian Academy of Sciences has now reconstructed the scenario that could have led to the mammoths' extinction. The researchers believe a combination of isolated habitat and extreme weather events, and even the spread of prehistoric man may have sealed the ancient giants' fate. The study has been published in the latest edition of Quaternary Science Reviews.

During the last ice age - some 100,000 to 15,000 years ago - mammoths were widespread in the northern hemisphere from Spain to Alaska. Due to the global warming that began 15,000 years ago, their habitat in Northern Siberia and Alaska shrank. On Wrangel Island, some mammoths were cut off from the mainland by rising sea levels; that population survived another 7000 years.

Comment: The theories these researchers have about mammoths will be significantly hampered by their misunderstanding of the biology and environment of mammoths; as noted in Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes:
Mammoths remains are usually found piled up with other animals, like tiger, antelope, camel, horse, reindeer, giant beaver, giant ox, musk sheep, musk ox, donkey, badger, ibex, woolly rhinoceros, fox, giant bison, lynx, leopard, wolverine, hare, lion, elk, giant wolf, ground squirrel, cave hyena, bear, and many types of birds. Most of those animals could not survive the arctic climate. This is an extra indication that woolly mammoths were not polar creatures.

French prehistorian Henry Neuville conducted the most detailed study of mammoth skin and hair. At the end of his thorough analysis, he wrote the following:
"It appears to me impossible to find, in the anatomical examination of the skin and [hair], any argument in favor of adaptation to the cold."

- H. Neuville, On the Extinction of the Mammoth, Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1919, p. 332.
Last, but not least, the mammoth's diet argues against the creature existing in a polar climate. How could the woolly mammoth sustain its vegetarian diet of hundreds of pounds of daily intake in an arctic region devoid of vegetation for most of the year? How could woolly mammoths find the gallons of water that they had to drink everyday?

To make things worse, the woolly mammoth lived during the ice age, when temperatures were colder than today. Mammoths could not have survived the harsh northern Siberia climate of today, even less so 13,000 years ago when the Siberian climate should have been significantly colder.

The evidence above strongly suggests that the woolly mammoth was not a polar creature but a temperate one. Consequently, at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, 13,000 years ago, Siberia was not an arctic region but a temperate one.
See also:

Read More...
Arrow Up

Saturn surpasses Jupiter after discovery of 20 new moons


Carnegie Science
Mon, 07 Oct 2019 18:58 UTC
Washington, DC -- Move over Jupiter; Saturn is the new moon king.
Saturn's New Moons
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute. Starry background courtesy of Paolo Sartorio/ShutterstockAn artist’s conception of the 20 newly discovered moons orbiting Saturn. These discoveries bring the planet’s total moon count to 82, surpassing Jupiter for the most in our Solar System. Studying these moons can reveal information about their formation and about the conditions around Saturn at the time. Illustration is courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
A team led by Carnegie's Scott S. Sheppard has found 20 new moons orbiting Saturn. This brings the ringed planet's total number of moons to 82, surpassing Jupiter, which has 79. The discovery was announced Monday by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center.

Each of the newly discovered moons is about five kilometers, or three miles, in diameter. Seventeen of them orbit the planet backwards, or in a retrograde direction, meaning their movement is opposite of the planet's rotation around its axis. The other three moons orbit in the prograde--the same direction as Saturn rotates.

Two of the prograde moons are closer to the planet and take about two years to travel once around Saturn. The more-distant retrograde moons and one of the prograde moons each take more than three years to complete an orbit.

"Studying the orbits of these moons can reveal their origins, as well as information about the conditions surrounding Saturn at the time of its formation," Sheppard explained.
Read More...
Frog

A wormy excuse to sneak evolution into the Cambrian Explosion


Evolution News
Mon, 07 Oct 2019 17:44 UTC
Yilingia spiciformis worm evolution cambrian explosion
© Nanjing Institute of Geology and PaleontologyYilingia spiciformis body fossil (left), trace (right), and artist’s reconstruction (middle).
It's dated at 540 million years old. A worm-like bilaterian animal left a track in mud, and this time its body was preserved along with the trail. Is this the proof Darwin needed to show precursors before the Cambrian explosion? Does it show that diversification into bilaterian animals was underway at the end of the Ediacaran? Is Darwin's doubt becoming less dubious?

"Ancient worm fossil rolls back origins of animal life," according to Nature. "Half-a-billion-year-old creature challenges theory that animals burst onto the scene in an abrupt event known as the Cambrian explosion." [Emphasis added.]

"Death march of a segmented and trilobate bilaterian elucidates early animal evolution." This is the primary paper in Nature.

Comment:

Read More...
Microscope 2

2,000 atoms exist in two places at once in unprecedented quantum experiment

Rafi Letzter
Live Science
Fri, 04 Oct 2019 12:32 UTC
molecules
© Yaakov Fein, Universität WienAn illustration suggests the behavior of big, complex molecules spreading out like ripples across space.
The new experiment demonstrated a bizarre quantum effect from the double-slit experiment at an unprecedented scale.

Giant molecules can be in two places at once, thanks to quantum physics.

That's something that scientists have long known is theoretically true based on a few facts: Every particle or group of particles in the universe is also a wave — even large particles, even bacteria, even human beings, even planets and stars. And waves occupy multiple places in space at once. So any chunk of matter can also occupy two places at once. Physicists call this phenomenon "quantum superposition," and for decades, they have demonstrated it using small particles.

But in recent years, physicists have scaled up their experiments, demonstrating quantum superposition using larger and larger particles. Now, in a paper published Sept. 23 in the journal Nature Physics, an international team of researchers has caused molecule made up of up to 2,000 atoms to occupy two places at the same time.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Attention

Air pollution able to reach the placenta around a developing baby

Aimee Cunningham
Science News
Tue, 17 Sep 2019 04:57 UTC
Womb shots
© Jovannig/ISTOCK/Getty Images PlusThe soot in polluted air may get as far as the inside of the womb, a small study suggests.
Breathing in polluted air may send soot far beyond a pregnant woman's lungs, all the way to the womb surrounding her developing baby.

Samples of placenta collected, after women in Belgium gave birth, revealed soot, or black carbon, embedded within the tissue on the side that faces the baby, researchers report online September 17 in Nature Communications. The amount of black carbon in the placenta correlated with a woman's air pollution exposure, estimated based on emissions of black carbon near her home.

"There's no doubt that air pollution harms a developing baby," says Amy Kalkbrenner, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who was not involved in the new work. Mothers who encounter air pollution regularly may have babies born prematurely or with low birth weight (SN: 5/13/15).

These developmental problems have been tied to an inflammatory response to air pollution in a mother's body, including inflammation within the uterus. But the new study, Kalkbrenner says, suggests that "air pollution itself is getting into the developing baby."
Read More...
Pocket Knife

Paralysed man walks using mind-controlled exoskeleton


The Guardian
Fri, 04 Oct 2019 00:00 UTC
French patient's breakthrough could lead to brain-controlled wheelchairs, say experts
paralyzed man walking with exoskeleton
© Clinatech/AFP/GettyThibault walks using the exoskeleton.
A French man paralysed in a nightclub accident has walked again thanks to a brain-controlled exoskeleton, providing hope to tetraplegics seeking to regain movement.

The patient trained for months, harnessing his brain signals to control a computer-simulated avatar to perform basic movements before using the robot device to walk. Scientists described the trial results as a breakthrough.

Comment: See also:

Read More...