When Homo sapiens hit upon the power of art
Rail engineer Peccadeau de l’Isle was supervising track construction outside Toulouse in 1866 when he decided to take time off to indulge his hobby, archaeology. With a crew of helpers, he began excavating below a cliff near Montastruc, where he dug up an extraordinary prehistoric sculpture. It is known today as the Swimming Reindeer of Montastruc.
Made from the 8in tip of a mammoth tusk, the carving, which is at least 13,000 years old, depicts two deer crossing a river. Their chins are raised and their antlers tipped back exactly as they would be when swimming. At least four different techniques were used to create this masterpiece: an axe trimmed the tusk, scrapers shaped its contours; iron oxide powder was used to polish it; and an engraving tool incised its eyes and other details.
Made from the 8in tip of a mammoth tusk, the carving, which is at least 13,000 years old, depicts two deer crossing a river. Their chins are raised and their antlers tipped back exactly as they would be when swimming. At least four different techniques were used to create this masterpiece: an axe trimmed the tusk, scrapers shaped its contours; iron oxide powder was used to polish it; and an engraving tool incised its eyes and other details.
Cave Artists Had Leg Up on Moderns
Who was the better artist, a caveman or Leonardo da Vinci?
It turns out that early depictions of four-legged animals walking are more accurate in some ways than modern ones—even those crafted by the Renaissance master. The study is in the journal PLoS ONE.
Without fancy cameras, we two-leggers can have trouble visualizing the sequence of leg motion in a quadruped's gait.
It turns out that early depictions of four-legged animals walking are more accurate in some ways than modern ones—even those crafted by the Renaissance master. The study is in the journal PLoS ONE.
Without fancy cameras, we two-leggers can have trouble visualizing the sequence of leg motion in a quadruped's gait.
Will automated agriculture help meet the world's food demand?
Australia's potential to become the 'food bowl' of Asia has triggered a drive to develop robots for use in farming and agriculture and University of Sydney mechatronics experts are leading the way.
Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems Salah Sukkarieh at the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies leads a team that is developing robotic devices with the ability to autonomously sense, analyse and respond to their own surroundings. |  |
Researchers reveal scary news for corals from the Ice Age
There is growing scientific concern that corals could retreat from equatorial seas and oceans as the Earth continues to warm, a team of international marine researchers warned today.
Working on clues in the fossil coral record from the last major episode of global warming, the period between the last two ice ages about 125,000 years ago, the researchers found evidence of a sharp decline in coral diversity near the equator.
Working on clues in the fossil coral record from the last major episode of global warming, the period between the last two ice ages about 125,000 years ago, the researchers found evidence of a sharp decline in coral diversity near the equator.
Drilling deep below the Antarctic for new life
Braving temperatures of minus 40 degrees, a small team of British researchers today starts drilling through three kilometres of the Antarctic in search of life-forms new to science.
Their target is Lake Ellsworth - similar in size to Windemere in England but isolated from the rest of the planet by a vast covering of ice for hundreds of thousands of years, writes Channel 4 News Science Editor Tom Clarke. |  |
Can Your Smartphone See Through Walls?
Engineers Make Tiny, Low-Cost, Terahertz Imager Chip
A secret agent is racing against time. He knows a bomb is nearby. He rounds a corner, spots a pile of suspicious boxes in the alleyway, and pulls out his cell phone. As he scans it over the packages, their contents appear onscreen. In the nick of time, his handy smartphone application reveals an explosive device, and the agent saves the day.
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3-D Printer Makes Drugs with Drag-and-Drop DNA
The new technology, which was in part funded by the National Science Foundation, is called the Parabon Essemblix Drug Development Platform, and it combines computer-aided design (CAD) software called inSçquio with nanoscale fabrication technology.
"What differentiates our nanotechnology from others is our ability to rapidly, and precisely, specify the placement of every atom in a compound that we design, " said lead investigator Steven Armentrout through the NSF's official release. |  |
Porcupine quills inspire medical devices
The tip of a single quill on a porcupine holds as many as 700 backwards-facing barbs that can lodge into the flesh of any animal that wanders too close.
For the first time, scientists have figured out how those barbs work together to make it is so easy for quills to penetrate tissue but so hard to pull them out. The discovery could inspire a slew of useful medical devices, including needles that hurt less going in or adhesive patches that would prevent gut leakage after gastric bypass surgeries and related procedures. Already, the researchers have created model quills that work like their natural counterparts. |  |
Why Human-Neanderthal Sex Is Tricky to Prove
A bundle of recent genetic studies have suggested modern humans had sex with Neanderthals thousands of years ago when the two populations roamed the planet alongside each other. However, the bones left behind by the two species don't bear any obvious traces of interbreeding, and a new study of monkeys in Mexico shows why we shouldn't expect them to.
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A 110-Million-Year-Old Trash Collector
In a group of insects called green lacewings, larvae often make a habit of decorating themselves with bits of vegetation, insect carcasses, or whatever else the young pick up from their surroundings to use as a disguise as they sneak up on prey and to hide from predators such as birds.
Researchers had long speculated that this was an ancient behavior, but just how ancient was difficult to say until a recent find in Spain. There, in a forest 110 million years ago, a lacewing larvae was encased in amber along with its collection of fern pieces tangled on protrusions on its back. |  |
Earliest known dino relative found
The dawn of the dinosaur era was thought to start around 230 million years ago, but a new discovery moves their origin 15 million years further back in time.
Palaeontologists have long sought the earliest dinosaurs. Now, skeletal fragments from a pair of specimens indicate that dinosaurs emerged in the wake of the largest mass extinction of all time — the crash that occurred around the transition from the Permian to the Triassic period about 252 million years ago. |  |
Lizards 'nearly wiped out' with dinosaurs
Contrary to previous understanding, lizards and snakes were nearly wiped out along with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, say researchers.
Palaeontologist Dr Nicholas Longrich, of Yale University, and colleagues, report their findings today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. |  |
Flood of protest hits Indian dams
The days when the gigantic Indian rivers — the Ganges, Indus and Brahmaputra — roar freely down the steep slopes of the Himalayas may be numbered.
Roughly 300 dams are proposed or under construction in the deeply cut valleys of India’s mountainous north, part of a massive effort to meet the country’s spiralling energy demands. But the projects are facing fierce resistance from local communities, as well as from scientists who predict that the dams’ ecological impacts will be much greater than official environmental assessments suggest. “The magnitude of dam building in the Himalayas is overwhelming,” says Kamaljit Bawa, a conservation biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. “They are moving too fast without properly assessing the risks and alternatives.”. |  |
Peru's Mysterious ‘Lot Fitzcarrald’ Threatens Uncontacted Tribes
Peru is set to embark on a major expansion of gas operations in the Camisea region in the Amazon - a move which could decimate Indigenous peoples, both those in ‘voluntary isolation’ and others in the early stages of contact. David Hill reports
Operations in Camisea - in a concession known as Lot 88 in the Cusco region in south-east Peru - are run by a consortium headed by Pluspetrol and including Repsol-YPF and Hunt Oil. The bulk of this Lot (74% ) overlaps the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti Reserve, which was created in 1990 for ‘isolated’ peoples and in a bid supposedly intended to prohibit companies from operating there. |  |
Loss of ancient, big trees becoming a global issue
Big trees are vanishing around the world and often are not being replaced. The loss of these trees can be devastating to other species.
It's not news to Northwesterners that most of the giant firs and cedars that once dominated the region's forests are long gone, felled by decades of logging.
But a review of ecosystems around the world finds that big trees are vanishing almost everywhere — and aren't being replaced.
It's not news to Northwesterners that most of the giant firs and cedars that once dominated the region's forests are long gone, felled by decades of logging.
But a review of ecosystems around the world finds that big trees are vanishing almost everywhere — and aren't being replaced.
Christmas lectures to call for end to helium balloons
The presenter of the Royal Institution's 2012 Christmas Lectures, Peter Wothers, will use the series to argue against wasting valuable helium gas in party balloons.
In a number of lectures entitled The Modern Alchemist, Wothers, a chemist at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, warns that frivolous uses of our diminishing supplies of helium are a great concern. "The scarcity of helium is a really serious issue," Wothers will say. "I can imagine that in 50 years time our children will be saying 'I can't believe they used such a precious material to fill balloons'. |  |
Farmer builds survival pod to save him (and 13 others) from tsunami,
earthquake...and Mayan doomsday
With just ten days to go before the Mayan apocalypse supposedly spells the end of the world, many believers may be looking for ways to dodge doomsday.
But one farmer in China believes he is ready for any eventuality after building seven emergency survival pods. Liu Qiyuan created the fibreglass shells - dubbed Noah's Ark - after being inspired by the apocalyptic Hollywood movie 2012. Building them around a steel frame in a yard at his home in the village of Qiantun, Hebei province, south of Beijing, he says the pods can offer life-saving shelter during natural disasters such as tsunamis and hurricanes. |  |
Authorities reassure Russians over Mayan Armageddon
prophecy amid reports of 'unusual behaviour'
Some parts of Russia, which is often said to have a penchant for mystical thinking, appear to have been spooked by the Mayan predictions.
As the 21st of December nears, Russian authorities are attempting to quell fears that the world will come to end amid panic over what some experts claim are the predictions of the Mayan Calendar. According to the New York Times, there have been scattered reports of unusual behaviour from across Russia, reportedly prompted by predictions of Armageddon. The reports include "collective mass psychosis" in a women's prison on the Chinese border, panic buying of matches, kerosene, sugar and candles, and the building, out of ice, of a Mayan-style archway in Chelyabinsk in the south. |  |
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