Up until very recently, humans were thought to be the only animals who made and used stone tools, an era in human development that began roughly 3.3 million years ago. But according to this piece at the BBC, some chimpanzees and monkeys in various places around the globe have been using primitive stone tools for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Boesch and his colleagues had previously studied modern chimpanzee stone tool culture in the region. This research revealed that the chimpanzees have an idiosyncratic way of choosing and using their tools.
For instance, chimpanzees will often deliberately opt for particularly large and heavy stone hammers, between 1kg and 9kg, while humans prefer to use stones that weigh 1kg or less. Many of the 4300-year-old stone tools weighed more than 1kg, suggesting they were used by chimpanzees.
Chimpanzees also use their stone tools to crack open certain types of nuts that humans don’t eat. Starch residues on some of the ancient tools came from these nuts.
Together, these findings led to an obvious conclusion: chimpanzees have been using stone tools in the rainforests of Ivory Coast for at least 4300 years.
Bjorn Jonsson used the photos taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to make an animation of the probe’s flyby of Pluto.
The time covered is 09:35 to 13:35 (closest approach occurred near 11:50). Pluto’s atmosphere is included and should be fairly realistic from about 10 seconds into the animation and to the end. Earlier it is largely just guesswork that can be improved in the future once all data has been downlinked from the spacecraft. Light from Pluto’s satellite Charon illuminates Pluto’s night side but is exaggerated here, in reality it would be only barely visible or not visible at all.
Fantastic…and Pluto’s moons flying about in the background is the cherry on the top. (via @BadAstronomer)
The first step in creating a picture of a field is deciding how to imagine what the field is made of. Keep in mind, of course, that the following picture is mostly just an artistic device. The real fundamental fields of nature aren’t really made of physical things (as far as we can tell); physical things are made of them. But, as is common in science, the analogy is surprisingly instructive.
So let’s imagine, to start with, a ball at the end of a spring.
How massive are they? The Sun is 1 solar mass and as wide as 109 Earths. Sagittarius A, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, weighs 4.3 million solar masses and is as wide as Mercury is far from the Sun. The black hole at the center of the Phoenix Cluster is one of the largest known black holes in the Universe; it’s 73 billion miles across, which is 19 times larger than our entire solar system (from the Sun to Pluto). As for how much it weighs, check this out:
I also like that if you made the Earth into a black hole, it would be the size of a peanut. (thx, reidar)
Emily Lakdawalla provides an update on all of the exploration that’s going on in our solar system this month. Here’s a quick map view of the 20+ spacecraft exploring our solar system beyond Earth:
Mars remains the most active spot beyond Earth in the solar system. This week, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reaches its 10th anniversary of service in space, but it’s far from the oldest spacecraft in orbit at Mars; Mars Express and Mars Odyssey are still at work up there. Mars Orbiter Mission has ventured into an extended mission and is still returning photos, though apparently none of the full-disk images in a variety of phases that I had hoped for from its 4-Megapixel color camera. Even Mars’ newest resident, MAVEN, is three-quarters of the way through its one-year primary science mission, which began on November 16, 2014. MAVEN’s mission will undoubtedly be extended long beyond that, as it will be needed to support surface missions if and when Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter eventually fail.
Both Opportunity and Curiosity have been very active lately. Opportunity has finally reached Marathon Valley, a site identified from orbit to have signs of clay chemistry. The team is excited about the science prospects even though the rover’s memory problems persist.
Artist Sam Van Aken is using grafting to create trees that bear 40 different kinds of fruit. National Geographic recently featured Van Aken’s Tree of 40 Fruit project:
The grafting process involves slicing a bit of a branch with a bud from a tree of one of the varieties and inserting it into a slit in a branch on the “working tree,” then wrapping the wound with tape until it heals and the bud starts to grow into a new branch. Over several years he adds slices of branches from other varieties to the working tree. In the spring the “Tree of 40 Fruit” has blossoms in many hues of pink and purple, and in the summer it begins to bear the fruits in sequence — Van Aken says it’s both a work of art and a time line of the varieties’ blossoming and fruiting. He’s created more than a dozen of the trees that have been planted at sites such as museums around the U.S., which he sees as a way to spread diversity on a small scale.
No hunger. No pollution. No disease. Wired’s Amy Maxmen welcomes you to the age of copy and paste DNA editing and the end of life as we know it.
Genome editing started with just a few big labs putting in lots of effort, trying something 1,000 times for one or two successes. Now it’s something that someone with a BS and a couple thousand dollars’ worth of equipment can do. What was impractical is now almost everyday. That’s a big deal.
A company called Oxitec has genetically modified mosquito eggs so that the mosquitos born from them pass along a gene to their offspring that prohibits the mosquitos from reaching sexual maturity and mating. They release the mosquitos into the wild, they mate with the local population of mosquitos, and those born from those matings will die before mating themselves. Voila! Pest control.
Oxitec has conducted trials with its modified mosquito in dengue-ridden regions of Panama, Brazil, Malaysia, and the Cayman Islands. The results show population suppression rates above 90 percent-far greater than the typical 30 percent achieved with insecticides.
The company is currently planning a trial in Florida using this technique to curb an influx of mosquito-borne illness.
This morning, the New Horizons probe zinged safely1 past Pluto. Before it did, it transmitted the best photo we’ve seen of Pluto so far…the last one we’ll get before we get the really good stuff. Look at this:
The probe’s “I’m OK!” message will reach Earth around 9pm ET tonight and we’ll start seeing photos from the flyby Wednesday afternoon…there’s a NASA press conference scheduled for 3pm ET on July 15. So exciting!
Update: The photo above is also the best full-disk image of Pluto that we will get…the rest will be close-ups and such. So that’s the official Pluto portrait from now on, folks.
Well, hopefully. The probe is due to transmit a “I’m OK!” message back to Earth later today (at around 9pm ET). *fingers crossed*↩
“The pentaquark is not just any new particle,” said LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson. “It represents a way to aggregate quarks, namely the fundamental constituents of ordinary protons and neutrons, in a pattern that has never been observed before in over fifty years of experimental searches. Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we’re all made, is constituted.”
Here’s the paper, with more than 680 authors. Between New Horizons zipping past Pluto earlier today (look at this pic!) and this, what a day for science.
Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman served as scientific consultants during the production of Pixar’s Inside Out. Keltner studies the origins of human emotion and Ekman pioneered research of microexpressions. In this NY Times piece, they discuss the science behind the movie.
Those quibbles aside, however, the movie’s portrayal of sadness successfully dramatizes two central insights from the science of emotion.
First, emotions organize — rather than disrupt — rational thinking. Traditionally, in the history of Western thought, the prevailing view has been that emotions are enemies of rationality and disruptive of cooperative social relations.
…
Second, emotions organize — rather than disrupt — our social lives. Studies have found, for example, that emotions structure (not just color) such disparate social interactions as attachment between parents and children, sibling conflicts, flirtations between young courters and negotiations between rivals.
I’ve thought about Inside Out every day since I saw it. Pixar clearly did their homework on the emotional stuff and it paid off.
As the New Horizons probe nears Pluto, I’ve been reading a bit more about how it’s going to work and what sort of photos we’re going to get. Emily Lakdawalla has a comprehensive post about what to expect when you’re expecting a flyby of Pluto. The post contains an image of approximations of the photos New Horizon will take, using Voyager images of Jovian and Saturnian moons as stand-ins. The highest resolution photo of Pluto will be 0.4 km/pixel…it’ll have this approximate level of detail:
Which is pretty amazing and exciting considering that before the mission started this was our best view of Pluto:
NASA’s Eyes app lets you see a simulation of the probe as it approaches Pluto, but if you don’t want to download anything, you can watch this video of the flyby instead:
I had no idea the probe spun around so much as it grabs photos & scans and then beams them back to Earth. And the flyby is so fast! New Horizons is currently moving at 32,500 mph relative to the Sun…it’s travelling just over 9 miles every second. (via @Tim_Meyer_ & @badastronomer)
New Horizons will reach its closest approach to Pluto in just under 6 days, on July 14. The probe will pass within 7,800 miles of the surface…I can’t wait to find out what that day’s photos look like.
Update: You don’t even need to wait until tomorrow for that better image…here’s one that NASA released just a short while ago. Tune in tomorrow for an even better view.
New Horizons’ imaging capability of Pluto surpassed Hubble’s on May 15, 2015. So every picture since then has been better than what we’ve had previously.↩
Unlike the Earth, Mars and the Moon don’t have strong directional magnetic fields, which means traditional compasses don’t work. So how did the Apollo rovers and current Mars rovers navigate their way around? By using manually set directional gyroscope and wheel odometers.
While current un-crewed rovers don’t have to return to the comfort of a lunar module, some aspects of the Apollo systems live on in their design. Four U.S. Martian rovers have used wheel odometers that account for slippage to calculate distance traveled. They’ve also employed gyroscopes (in the form of an inertial measurement units) to determine heading and pitch/roll information.
One of the fun things about reading The Martian is you get to learn a little bit about this sort of thing. Here’s a passage about navigation on Mars where astronaut Mark Watney is trying to get to a landmark several days’ drive away.
Navigation is tricky.
The Hab’s nav beacon only reaches 40 kilometers, so it’s useless to me out here. I knew that’d be an issue when I was planning this little road trip, so I came up with a brilliant plan that didn’t work.
The computer has detailed maps, so I figured I could navigate by landmarks. I was wrong. Turns out you can’t navigate by landmarks if you can’t find any god damned landmarks.
Our landing site is at the delta of a long-gone river . NASA chose it because if there are any microscopic fossils to be had, it’s a good place to look. Also, the water would have dragged rock and soil samples from thousands of kilometers away. With some digging, we could get a broad geological history.
That’s great for science, but it means the Hab’s in a featureless wasteland.
I considered making a compass. The rover has plenty of electricity, and the med kit has a needle. Only one problem: Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field.
So I navigate by Phobos. It whips around Mars so fast it actually rises and sets twice a day, running west to east. It isn’t the most accurate system, but it works.
Here’s something that I knew as a kid but had forgotten about: if you get a bike going on its own at sufficient speed, it will essentially ride itself. MinutePhysics investigates why that happens.
Interesting that the bike seems to do much of the work of staying upright when it seems like the rider is the thing that makes it work. (via devour)
While reading this otherwise excellent article written by US soccer player Christie Rampone, I discovered a type of diet I’d never heard of before, the blood type diet (italics mine).
Age and parenting make me think about longevity. I definitely believe one big reason for my longevity has to do with the dietary and fitness changes I made after being diagnosed with auto-immune conditions after giving birth to my youngest daughter Reece in 2011. For example, I’ve gone gluten-free and have started to eat to my blood-type. Also, a friend introduced me to a natural ingredient called EpiCor to help strengthen my immune system. I have taken EpiCor daily for the past three years and it has become a beneficial part of my daily routine of rest, recovery, working out, eating healthy, and being in airports and hotels more than my own house.
The underlying theory of blood type diets is that people with different blood types digest lectins differently, and that if people eat food that is not compatible with their blood type, they will experience many health problems. On the other hand, if a person eats food that is compatible, they will be healthier.
That theory is, in turn, based on an assumption that each blood type represents a different evolutionary heritage. “Based on the ‘Blood-Type’ diet theory, group O is considered the ancestral blood group in humans so their optimal diet should resemble the high animal protein diets typical of the hunter-gatherer era. In contrast, those with group A should thrive on a vegetarian diet as this blood group was believed to have evolved when humans settled down into agrarian societies. Following the same rationale, individuals with blood group B are considered to benefit from consumption of dairy products because this blood group was believed to originate in nomadic tribes. Finally, individuals with an AB blood group are believed to benefit from a diet that is intermediate to those proposed for group A and group B.”
As you might have already guessed, there is no evidence that eating your blood type is beneficial nor do the claims of differing lectin digestion have scientific merit. Homeopathic nonsense.
Tasha Sturm, a lab technician at Cabrillo College, had her 8-year-old son put his handprint on a prepared petri dish and then incubated it for several days. This was the result:
If you’ll excuse me, I have to go wash my hands about 4,000 times. Bacteria is cooooool though:
Because of climate change and other activities caused by humans (invasive species, habitat loss), hybridization of species is resulting in things like super-sized coyotes, pizzly bears (grizzly/polar bear hybrids), and other animals that may not be ideally suited to survive.
Some scientists and conservationists see the coywolf as a nightmare of the Anthropocene — a poster child of mongrelization as plants and animals reshuffle in response to habitat loss, climate change and invasive species. Golden-winged warblers increasingly cross with blue-winged warblers in the U.S. Northeast and eastern Canada. Southern flying squirrels hybridize with northern flying squirrels as the southern species presses northward in Ontario. Polar bears mate with grizzlies in the Canadian Arctic along the Beaufort Sea to produce “pizzly bears.”
All of this interbreeding upsets the conventional notion of species as discrete, inviolable entities. Moreover, some scientists and conservationists warn that hybridization will degrade biodiversity as unusual species are lost to genetic homogenization.
Partly scientists fear hybrids will be less fit than organisms that have evolved in place over eons. And often that is true, but the problem solves itself over time as hybrids lose out in the competitive race for survival.
University of Minnesota student Daniel Crawford and geography professor Scott St. George have collaborated on a piece of music called Planetary Bands, Warming World. Composed for a string quartet, the piece uses climate change data to determine the musical notes — the pitch of each note is tuned to the average annual temperature, which means as the piece goes on, the musical notes get higher and higher.
“If the Milky Way is a sea of stars, then these newly discovered galaxies are like wisps of clouds”, said van Dokkum. “We are beginning to form some ideas about how they were born and it’s remarkable they have survived at all. They are found in a dense, violent region of space filled with dark matter and galaxies whizzing around, so we think they must be cloaked in their own invisible dark matter ‘shields’ that are protecting them from this intergalactic assault.”
The night sky in such galaxies would look a lot like our skies do in large cities:
“If there are any aliens living on a planet in an ultra-diffuse galaxy, they would have no band of light across the sky, like our own Milky Way, to tell them they were living in a galaxy. The night sky would be much emptier of stars,” said team member Aaron Romanowsky, of San Jose State University.
If you hold a lit match an inch or two over the smoking wick of a recently extinguished candle, the candle will light again. If you record that happening with a high speed camera and then slow it way down, it gives you some clues to how that happens:
Hint: wax is a candle’s fuel and smoke is wax vapor… (via digg)
Here’s a video of a titanium bar being anodized…it cycles through several different colors before settling on a pinkish hue.
Ok neat, but why does it do that? Anodizing is an adjustment of the oxide levels on the surface of the titanium. The colors are caused by the interference of the light traveling through the oxide and reflecting off the shiny metal surface underneath…different thicknesses produce different colors.1 As the voltage is applied to the metal, more and more oxide builds up, producing the color cycling even shown. Pretty cool!
I don’t think the color is due to Raleigh scattering, but it’s definitely a similar principle.↩
From juice cleanses to vaccines to gluten to exercise to, uh, vagina steaming, celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Gwyneth Paltrow are often found making claims that have little or no scientific evidence behind them. Timothy Caulfield recently wrote a book exploring the world of celebrity pseudoscience called Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?
But while much has been written about the cause of our obsession with the rich and famous, Caulfield argues that not enough has been done to debunk celebrity messages and promises about health, diet, beauty, or the secret to happiness. From the obvious dangers, to body image of super-thin models and actors, or Gwyneth Paltrow’s enthusiastic endorsement of a gluten free-diet for almost everyone, or Jenny McCarthy’s ill-informed claims of the risks associated with vaccines, celebrity opinions have the power to dominate our conversations and outlooks on our lives and ourselves.
JB: So is Gwyneth actually wrong about everything?
TC: It’s incredible how much she is wrong about. Even when she is right about stuff — like telling people to eat more fruits and vegetables — there is always a bit of a tinge of wrongness. She’ll say, “It has to be organic,” for example. She is still distracting us with these untrue details, as opposed to just pushing the honest truth.
Update: I had forgotten about this book, so I was pleased to be reminded of it by this recent interview with Caulfield about celebrity health advice.
Colon cleanse: There is no evidence we need to cleanse our colons or detoxify our bodies. Vagina steaming to detoxify and increase fertility: again, absolutely ridiculous. Getting stung by bees is her latest thing for anti-aging — because, yes, anaphylaxis is so revitalizing. Goop, her website, suggested wearing a bra can cause cancer. This is raising fears, completely science free. I could go on and on and on.
But what’s at the heart of Paltrow’s empire? Is she just a dedicated health-seeker taking us on her path for utmost physical and spiritual well-being? No. Paltrow’s Goop is pure, unadulterated, blood-diamond free, organic-certified, biodynamic, moon-dusted bullshit. And you should avoid it at all costs. Here’s why.
Do you think you could ride a bicycle that steers backwards…aka it turns left when you turn right and vice versa? It sounds easy but years of normal bike riding experience makes it almost impossible. Destin Sandlin of Smarter Everyday taught himself how to ride the backwards-steering bike; it took months. Then he tried riding a normal bicycle again…
Very broadly, their tree confirmed established ideas about the evolutionary relationships among diplodocids. But the scientists also concluded that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were different enough to belong in their own genera. Many of the anatomical differences between the two dinosaurs are obscure, Tschopp says, but Apatosaurus’s stouter neck is an obvious one. “Even though both are very robust and massive animals, Apatosaurus is even more so,” he adds.
Tschopp and his team thought very carefully about their decision to reinstate Brontosaurus, and they expect some pushback. “We knew it would be a major finding because Brontosaurus is such a popular name,” he says. “I’m pretty sure there will be a scientific discussion around this. I hope there will be. That’s how science works.”
Huzzah! Now reinstate Pluto to full planetary status and we’ll be all set. See also The Kindly Brontosaurus. (via @coudal)
In 1983, the BBC aired a six-part series called Fun to Imagine with a simple premise: put physicist Richard Feynman in front of a camera and have him explain everyday things. In this clip from one of the episodes, Feynman explains in very simple terms what fire is:
Rarely do I have a Kentucky student who learned about human evolution in high school biology. Those who did usually attended high schools in large urban centers like Louisville or Lexington. Given how easily it can provoke parents, the teaching of human evolution is a rarity in high school, so much so in Kentucky that it startled me when I first arrived.
The story of our evolutionary history captivates many of my students, while infuriating some. During one lecture, a student stood up in the back row and shouted the length of the auditorium that Darwin denounced evolution on his deathbed — a myth intentionally spread by creationists. The student then made it known that everything I was teaching was a lie and stomped out of the auditorium, slamming the door behind him. A few years later during the same lecture, another student also shouted out from the back row that I was lying. She said that no transitional fossil forms had ever been found — despite my having shared images of many transitional forms during the semester. Many of her fellow students were shocked by her combativeness, particularly when she stormed out, also slamming the door behind her. Most semesters, a significant number of students abruptly leave as soon as they realize the topic is human evolution.
I personally don’t understand the compatibility of evolutionary biology and Christianity Krupa emphasizes in his class, but I guess it helps to meet people halfway?
This article on the science of free diving is fascinating. Boyle’s Law predicted that the human body couldn’t survive depths past 100 feet — after which, the lungs would rupture — but millions of years of evolution has equipped the human body with all sorts of tricks to survive at depths of over 900 feet.
Lundgren, among others, demonstrated how these phenomena might counteract Boyle’s law. He recruited volunteer firemen from a fire brigade in the Swedish city of Malmo, submerged them up to the neck in water, and used a heart catheter to measure the increase in blood circulation in the chest. Lundgren discovered the body was able to counteract the increased outside water pressure by reinforcing vessels in the walls of the lungs with more blood, in much the same way we increase tire pressure by adding more volume of oxygen to the inside of a tire.
Boyle’s Law had not been overturned. Scientists simply hadn’t taken into account the effect this counterforce could exert to allow survival underwater. “A lot of blood, much more than was usually thought, can be transferred from the blood circulation out in the tissues into the blood vessels of the lung,” Lundgren said, placing that amount at about half a gallon. The extra, densely packed blood can act as a bulwark, exerting a counterforce against the increased pressure pushing inward by the water.
A group of astronomy enthusiasts rented a plane and flew through the shadow cast by the recent eclipse of the Sun. One passenger took the following video. Look at that shadow creeping across the cloud cover! So cool.
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