Science & TechnologyS


Blue Planet

300,000 year old skull reveals variation and continuity of early humans in Asia

LI Yuan
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Tue, 30 Apr 2019 12:00 UTC
Hualongdong Middle Pleistocene human skull
© WU Xiujie and Erik TrinkausThe Hualongdong Middle Pleistocene human skull and the collapsed cave site, with the fossil-bearing breccia in beige aournd the limestone blocks.
A team of scientists led by LIU Wu and WU Xiujie from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported a new Middle Pleistocene human skull ever found in southeastern China, revealing the variation and continuity in early Asian humans. Their findings were published on April 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Excavations in Middle Pleistocene cave deposits in southeastern China yielded a largely complete skull that exhibits morphological similarities to other East Asian Middle and Late Pleistocene archaic human remains, but also foreshadows later modern human forms.

Fossil evidence for human evolution in East Asia during the Pleistocene is often fragmentary and scattered, which makes evaluating the pattern of archaic human evolution and modern human emergence in the region complicated.

Comment: See also:

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Microscope 1

Chemist Marcos Eberlin advances case for intelligent design in new book endorsed by three Nobel laureates

David Klinghoffer
Evolution News
Mon, 29 Apr 2019 16:55 UTC
eberlin foresight
The case for intelligent design begins with biology and paleontology, pushes onward to cosmology, physics - and now chemistry. Marcos Eberlin is the superstar Brazilian chemist and member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences who founded and for a quarter century headed the Thomson Mass Spectrometry Laboratory. His new book, Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose, is out now from Discovery Institute Press.

Foresight carries endorsements not just from one Nobel Prize-winning scientist. No, not just two either. But three. They are Sir John B. Gurdon (Physiology or Medicine, 2012), Gerhard Ertl (Chemistry, 2007), and Brian D. Josephson (Physics, 1973). Of course, accolades from famous people don't guarantee that the conclusion of the book is right. But at some point the critics need to admit that the accumulating strength of the argument demands, at last, an adequate response.

As Dr. Ertl writes, "Regardless of whether one shares Eberlin's approach, it is definitely becoming clear that nature is still full of secrets which are beyond our rational understanding and force us to humility." Yes, indeed.

Do you want to help celebrate the launch of this latest leading scientific voice in the discussion about design in nature? Join us in Seattle on Tuesday, May 7, at the Woodland Park Zoo, at 7:30 pm. More information is here. Meet and hear from Dr. Eberlin, a dynamic speaker will also be touring the United States in coming weeks with speaking events in Irvine, California (May 2), Dallas, Texas (May 5), and Littleton, Colorado (May 6).
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Info

India-Asia collision changed the world

Liz Fuller-Wright
Princeton University
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 17:53 UTC
When the landmass that is now the Indian subcontinent slammed into Asia about 50 million years ago, the collision changed the configuration of the continents, the landscape, global climate and more. Now a team of Princeton University scientists has identified one more effect: the oxygen in the world's oceans increased, altering the conditions for life.
Ancient World
© Images created by Emma Kast, Princeton University, using paleogeographic reconstructions from Deep Time Maps, with their permissionNeither the continents nor the oceans have always looked the way they do now. These “paleomaps” show how the continents and oceans appeared before (top) and during (bottom) “the collision that changed the world,” when the landmass that is now the Indian subcontinent rammed northward into Asia, closing the Tethys Sea and building the Himalayas. Global ocean levels were higher then, creating salty shallow seas (pale blue) that covered much of North Africa and parts of each of the continents. A team of Princeton researchers, using samples gathered at the three starred locations, created an unprecedented record of ocean nitrogen and oxygen levels from 70 million years ago through 30 million years ago that shows a major shift in ocean chemistry after the India-Asia collision. Another shift came 35 million years ago, when Antarctica began accumulating ice and global sea levels fell.
"These results are different from anything people have previously seen," said Emma Kast, a graduate student in geosciences and the lead author on a paper coming out in Science on April 26. "The magnitude of the reconstructed change took us by surprise."

Kast used microscopic seashells to create a record of ocean nitrogen over a period from 70 million years ago - shortly before the extinction of the dinosaurs - until 30 million years ago. This record is an enormous contribution to the field of global climate studies, said John Higgins, an associate professor of geosciences at Princeton and a co-author on the paper.
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Cassiopaea

Is the upgraded LIGO finding a new black hole merger every week?

Matt Williams
Universe Today
Mon, 29 Apr 2019 10:25 UTC
black holes
In February of 2016, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) announced the first-ever detection of gravitational waves (GWs). Since then, multiple events have been detected, providing insight into a cosmic phenomena that was predicted over a century ago by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.

A little over a year ago, LIGO was taken offline so that upgrades could be made to its instruments, which would allow for detections to take place "weekly or even more often." After completing the upgrades on April 1st, the observatory went back online and performed as expected, detecting two probable gravitational wave events in the space of two weeks.

LIGO announced the first of the two new GW events on April 8th, which was followed by a second announcement on April 12th. The signals were detected thanks to the three-facility collaboration between LIGO and the Virgo Observatory in Italy, and both are believed to have been the result of a pair of black holes merging.

Comment: It's worth remembering that there has been signifcant controversy surrounding the LIGO project, and, as noted in the article, the scientists can't be certain about what they're seeing, just yet: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Galaxy

New study finds universe younger, expanding faster than previously thought

Sinéad Baker
Business Insider
Sun, 28 Apr 2019 22:53 UTC
expanding universe
© Business InsiderScientists are working to calculate how fast the universe is expanding.
We may need new physics as a result

The universe is younger and expanding faster than we thought, a new study found, scientists think we may have to work on new physics as a result.

A new study lead by Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Adam Riess, found that the universe is expanding 9% faster than previous calcultions that were based on studying the aftermath of the Big Bang.

The study by Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, was published in Astrophysical Journal this week, and used new measurements from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to calculate the new expansion rate, which scientist have theorized for years.

Comment:

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Cassiopaea

Life may have evolved before Earth finished forming

Mike Wall
Space.com
Sun, 28 Apr 2019 19:39 UTC
a young sun
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. PyleThe first organisms may have evolved before the rocky planets formed. Artist's concept showing a young sun-like star surrounded by a planet-forming disk of gas and dust.
Planetesimals, the rocky building blocks of planets, likely had all the ingredients necessary for life as we know it way back at the dawn of the solar system, said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University (ASU).

And clement conditions may have persisted inside some planetesimals for tens of millions of years - perhaps long enough for life to emerge, said Elkins-Tanton, the director of ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration and the principal investigator of NASA's upcoming mission to the odd metallic asteroid Psyche.

Some planetesimals survived into and beyond the planet-forming period, raising the possibility that one of these primitive bodies may have seeded Earth with life, she added.

Comment: See also: And for more on the discussion of the origin of life, evolution, and much more, check out SOTT radio's:

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Info

Dark-matter detector picks up radioactive decay of Xenon-124 atom

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Sun, 28 Apr 2019 20:56 UTC
Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso
© Stefano Montesi - Corbis/Corbis via Getty ImagesDeep below a mountain in Italy, in a tank full of liquid xenon, things happen slowly. Very, very, very, very slowly.
A dark-matter detector buried under 1500 metres of Italian mountain has recorded what is arguably the most uncommon phenomenon in the universe - the decay of a Xenon-124 atom.

All radioactive matter is measured by what is commonly called a "half-life", which is defined as the time taken for half the radioactive atoms in any given sample to decay away.

Half-lives vary wildly, depending on the elements involved. Flerovium-289, for instance, has a half-life of just 2.6 seconds, while plutonium-239 takes 24,110 years to lose 50% of its load.

And although 24,000 years is a very long period of time - and one of the reasons the use of plutonium to generate electricity is viewed with caution - it is nothing, it turns out, compared to Xenon-124.

Italy's Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS), deep beneath the Gran Sasso mountains, is a dark-matter detector that comprises a cylindrical tank filed with 3200 kilograms of liquid xenon at a temperature of minus-95 degrees Celsius.
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Jet3

Russia's new surveillance plane flew over two US top nuclear labs and several military facilities

Joseph Trevithick
The Warzone
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 00:00 UTC
Redstar
© Unknown
The route also covered a number of Army and Air Force bases, a major proving ground, and one of America's last chemical weapon storage sites.

One Russia's two Tu-214ON aircraft has conducted what appears to be its first-ever flight over the United States under the Open Skies Treaty. This agreement allows member states to conduct aerial surveillance missions, with certain limitations in hardware and in the presence of monitors from the surveilled country, over each other's territory. Today's sortie took the Russian plane over parts of West Texas, through New Mexico, and into Colorado, including overflights of Fort Bliss, White Sands Missile Range, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, and finally hitting up the Pueblo Chemical Depot.

The Tu-214ON, with the registration number RF-64525, took off from Rosecrans Air National Guard Base in Saint Joseph, Missouri, at around 1:50 PM local time on Apr. 25, 2019. The aircraft arrived at Rosecrans three days earlier and the Russian Ministry of Defense says it will continue flying from the base in Missouri until Apr. 27, 2019.

After leaving Rosecrans, the modified airliner flew a relatively straightforward route south at a constant speed of around 270 knots, or 310 miles per hour, and at altitudes between 5,000 and 7,000 feet. The flight path through Kansas, Oklahoma, and into Texas took the plane over a number of major U.S. military installations, including the U.S. Army's Fort Riley and the U.S. Air Force's McConnell Air Force Base, both in Kansas, Vance Air Force Base and Fort Sill in Oklahoma, and Sheppard Air Force Base and Dyess Air Force Base in Texas.

Comment: A photo documentation of the flight included.

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Microscope 2

Degrees of freedom? Bacteria make individual decisions when navigating a maze


ScienceDaily
Tue, 23 Apr 2019 17:26 UTC
bacteria maze
© ETH ZurichBehavioral experiment with bacteria: a T-maze with a chemical gradient presents bacterial cells with the choice of approaching or avoiding the attractant at each branching.
Although they are considered the simplest of all life forms, even microorganisms sense their environment and are able to actively move within it. This allows them to identify both food and harmful substances and to move towards or away from them, guided by the concentration gradient of the substance in their environment. The journey of many microbes can thus be viewed as a sequence of decisions based on chemical gradients.

The ability of cells to target or avoid particular substances is called chemotaxis. Until now, scientists have generally considered the chemotactic properties of bacteria to be a common feature of a species or population -- as if all cells behaved more or less the same. In this case, average values are sufficient to describe their movement behaviour. Now, researchers at ETH Zurich have observed the chemotaxis of bacteria in a behavioural experiment. "If you look with the appropriate technology, you'll find astonishing behavioural differences even within a population of genetically identical cells," report Mehdi Salek and Francesco Carrara, the lead authors of a study recently published in Nature Communications.

Comment: Even bacteria have some degree of freedom, some iota of spontaneity. Of course, most scientists will interpret this as the researchers above due: strictly in terms of efficient causation and biological/physical determinism. The bacteria don't 'choose' to take the paths with more or fewer nutrients - the number of relevant proteins determine which path they will take. And they may be correct, as far as it goes. But for centuries scientists have excluded final causation from their methodology: nature doesn't have purposes, and lower organisms don't have any kind of experience. This is where they go wrong. Even the bacteria probably have some vague sense that nutrients are good. Even if they don't, their behavior is obviously goal-directed. And as the researchers above point out, even making the 'wrong' choice has its potential advantages. In other words, even at the lowly level of bacteria, there is purpose in taking 'the road less travelled'. Maybe there's more going on here than simply the number of a particular protein.

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Blue Planet

Pacific Ocean: The world's tallest waves are getting taller

Colin Barras
Science
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 20:03 UTC
ocean waves
© iStock.com/BobbushphotoWaves in the stormy Southern Ocean have grown an average of 30 centimeters since 1985.
The frigid Southern Ocean is well known for its brutal storms, which can sink ships and trigger coastal flooding on distant tropical islands. Now, a new study suggests the biggest waves there - already the world's largest - are getting bigger, thanks to faster winds attributed to climate change.

Peter Ruggiero, a geophysicist at Oregon State University in Corvallis who was not involved in the study, calls the increase "substantial," and says he is particularly concerned by evidence that the tallest waves are gaining height at the fastest rate. "If [those waves hit] at high tide, it could be potentially catastrophic."

For the past 33 years, global satellites have been collecting data on ocean waves - and the winds that drive them. By bouncing energy pulses off wave crests and measuring the time those pulses take to come back, instruments called altimeters aboard satellites can measure wave height - the taller the waves, the faster the signal returns. Other satellite instruments monitor changes in the reflectivity of the ocean surface, which is reduced by wind-generated ripples, to estimate the speed of ocean winds. But interpreting the data is difficult: Different satellites can give different estimates of wind speed, for instance.

Comment: More on large waves:

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