Were the Hobbits’ Ancestors Sailors?
The 2003 discovery of the diminutive Homo floresiensis, better known as the Hobbit, on the Indonesian island of Flores was a shock. Anthropologists never expected to find a 3-foot, 6-inch-tall hominid living in Southeast Asia at the same time as modern humans, as recently as 17,000 years ago. Aside from the controversy over the hominid’s true identity—a diseased Homo sapiens or a member of its own species—another intriguing question was how the ancestors of the Hobbits got to Flores.
One possibility is that the Hobbits’ forefathers sailed over on a raft. Or their arrival might have been an act of nature: A powerful storm or tsunami could have washed a small group of hominids out to sea, and then floating vegetation carried them to Flores. That idea sounds implausible, but it’s also an explanation for how monkeys reached South America.
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Northern lights make for quite a sight — and some odd sounds
The northern lights of Earth are more than just dazzling light shows — they also generate their own strange applause too, a new study reveals.
The same energetic particles that create the dancing, dazzling northern lights high up in Earth's atmosphere also produce strange "clapping" noises just 230 feet (70 meters) from the ground, researchers said.
The results vindicate folk tales and reports by wilderness travelers, which have long described sounds associated with the northern lights (which are also known as the aurora borealis).
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South Pole Neutron Detectors Could Forecast Solar Storms
Solar storms are notoriously difficult to predict, but a new application of the South Pole’s neutron sensors could help humanity take shelter.
These detectors are normally used to estimate the rate at which cosmic rays strike the Earth’s atmosphere, slam into the nuclei of the gas atoms floating around up there, and send the neutrons within spinning towards the surface.
However, a team of space physicists has spotted that they could also be used as an early warning system by detecting incoming protons from solar storms. They compared the detectors’ data with data collected from radiation sensors on an Earth-orbiting satellite during a series of particularly strong solar flares which occurred between 1989 and 2005, and found that they could predict the intensity of the storm.
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Investing in Karma by Doing Good Deeds
For so many important outcomes in life -- applying for jobs, waiting for medical test results -- there comes a point when you just have to sit back and hope for the best. But that doesn't mean we always behave that way. New research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that even when an outcome is out of our control we often act as though we can still get on the good side of fate by doing good deeds.
According to lead researcher Benjamin Converse, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Psychology at the University of Virginia, the research was inspired by the kinds of deals many of us seem to make in which we promise ourselves that, if we can just make it through some trying situation, we'll be better citizens in the future.
How the Weak Inherited the Earth
According to evolutionary biologist Sergey Gavrilets, the modern family might look very different had some scrawny male hominids not found a clever workaround to having to physically compete against strong alpha males for mates. In his latest study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Gavrilets suggests that weaker males, in lieu of being promiscuous, fawned over a single female. By providing her food, a male would earn that female’s trust and sexual fidelity. In this scenario, the pair’s offspring naturally benefited, as they were more likely to survive under the watchful gaze of two parents.
So, let’s start by going back in time. Before monogamy and the nuclear family, how did hominids live?
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Traditional Sexual Values Challenged in Classic Animal Study
The idea that animal evolution is shaped by males boasting and fighting to win female favor is a central biological dogma.
Females pick males whose exaggerated traits suggest virility, thus producing peacock feathers and sage grouse struts. Males compete for female favor, hence a stag’s antlers and fights for territorial domination. These are the main engines of sexual selection, the default explanation for differences between the sexes.
Under closer scrutiny, however, the dogma doesn’t seem to hold. A new replication of English geneticist Angust Bateman’s foundational mid-20th century mate-choice study, a study that reinforced sexual selection assumptions and shaped decades of research, came to very different conclusions than the original.
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In a landmark 2010 study, researchers found that bumblebees were able to figure out the most efficient routes among several computer-controlled "flowers," quickly solving a complex problem that even stumps supercomputers. We already know bees are pretty good at facial recognition, and researchers have shown they can also be effective air-quality monitors.
Bumblebees can solve the classic "traveling salesman" problem, which keeps supercomputers busy for days. They learn to fly the shortest possible route between flowers even if they find the flowers in a different order, according to the British study.
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Man 'dates' virtual pop star using VR goggles
In a slightly creepy but undoubtedly impressive feat of DIY electronics, an evidently lonely Japanese hacker has put together a virtual girlfriend through a combination of motion-tracking hardware, video goggles, and some scavenged 3-D game assets.
A video on YouTube, originally posted at Hack a Day, shows the view through a pair of video goggles that have been augmented with an Asus Xtion motion-tracking tool, essentially an off-brand Microsoft Kinect. This helps track his motion and the environment, and is assisted by some augmented-reality software that places virtual items on the image.
The Fate(s) of Australia’s Mega-Mammals
While in Sydney earlier this year, I stopped in at Australia Museum, the city’s equivalent of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and learned a bit about the continent’s extinct megafauna. Australia didn’t have mammoths or saber-toothed tigers, but there were giant marsupials, such as the bear-like wombat Diprotodon and the thylacine (a.k.a. the Tasmanian tiger). On a tour of the museum, I came across a display that said that most of these mega-mammals had gone extinct tens of thousands of years before, the victims of either changes to the climate that led to drier conditions or human impacts, including hunting and landscape burning. The thylacine was the one exception to the megafauna story–it hung on until British colonization and then it was hunted to extinction.
Pompeii-Style Volcanic Ash Fall Preserved 'Nursery' of Earliest Animals
A volcanic eruption around 579 million years ago buried a 'nursery' of the earliest-known animals under a Pompeii-like deluge of ash, preserving them as fossils in rocks in Newfoundland, new research suggests.
A team from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in collaboration with the Memorial University of Newfoundland, looked for evidence of life from the mysterious Ediacaran period (635-542 million years ago) in which the first 'animals' -- complex multicellular organisms -- appeared.
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Copper making salmon prone to predators
PUYALLUP, Wash.—Minute amounts of copper from brake linings and mining operations can affect salmon to where they are easily eaten by predators, says a Washington State University researcher. Jenifer McIntyre found the metal affects salmon's sense of smell so much that they won't detect a compound that ordinarily alerts them to be still and wary.
Animals Navigate With Magnetic Cells
Salmon, turtles and many birds migrate up to thousands of miles at a time, presumably by sensing the Earth's magnetic field. Now, scientists have identified cells in the nose of trout that respond to magnetism, offering a biological explanation for how animals orient themselves and find their way, even when it's dark or foggy.
The discovery -- and particularly the new method that enabled it -- opens up avenues for all sorts of futuristic applications, including miniaturized GPS systems or gene therapies that would restore sight, hearing or smell to people who have lost those senses.
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Are a Mix of Corpses
The mixing of remains may have been done to combine different ancestries into a single lineage.
Mummies found off the coast of Scotland are Frankenstein-like composites of several corpses, researchers say.
This mixing of remains was perhaps designed to combine different ancestries into a single lineage, archaeologists speculated.
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Pair from Trinity help uncover ancient mosaic
Amid the rocky Israeli hills overlooking the Sea of Galilee, a Trinity University professor and a student have helped researchers excavate an ancient Jewish village and a monumental synagogue possibly dating back 1,700 years.
About two weeks ago, the crew unexpectedly uncovered portions of a colorful mosaic floor on one of the synagogue's aisles, said Chad Spigel, assistant professor of religion at Trinity.
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X-rays reveal secrets of Roman coins
Scientists have used a new x-ray technique to produce spectacular 3D images of Roman coins that were corroded inside pots or blocks of soil.
The rotating images built up from thousands of two-dimensional scans are so clear that individual coins can be identified and dated, without a single battered denarius – the Roman currency – being visible to the naked eye. The advantage of the new method – developed by a unique collaboration between archaeologists and scientists at the British Museum and Southampton University – is that it means coins can be identified and even dated much more quickly and without risking damage to them.
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Royal Armouries Museum stakes a claim on Vampire Kit
A vampire slaying kit – inspired by 19th century folklore and fiction – has been bought at auction by the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds.
The fascinating kit comprises a mahogany casket, packed with everything a vampire hunter might need – including a pistol, crucifix, rosary beads, a bottle labelled holy water and even a mallet, plus four wooden stakes.
The Royal Armouries secured the unusual lot at auction, organised by Tennants Auctioneers in Leyburn, North Yorkshire, after the box was left to a local woman in her uncle’s will.
Higgs boson physicist shunned in Pakistan
In what is perhaps a sign of the growing Islamic extremism in the country, Pakistan's only Nobel laureate, who helped develop the theoretical framework that led to the apparent discovery of the subatomic "God particle" last week, is being largely scorned in his homeland because of his religious affiliation.
Adbus Salam, who died in 1996, was once hailed as a national hero for his pioneering work in physics and his contribution to Pakistan's nuclear programme. Now his name is stricken from school textbooks because he was a member of the Ahmadi sect that has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants, who view them as heretics. |  |
July 10 2012
Solar System's "Grotesque" Twin Found
Astronomers have detected our "grotesque" twin: A planetary system arranged much like our own solar system, a new study says.
Dubbed GJ676A, the system has two rocky planets orbiting close to its host star, and two gas giants orbiting far away. This means the system is arranged like our system—though in GJ676A, everything is much larger. For instance, the smallest rocky planet in GJ676A is at least four times the mass of Earth, while the largest gas giant is five times the size of Jupiter. |  |