Science News
500,000-Year-Old Homo erectus Engraving Discovered
A multinational group of scientists led by Prof Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands has discovered the earliest known engraving on a fossilized shell from the famous Homo erectus site of Trinil, on the Indonesian island of Java.
by Sci-News.com
While cataloging hundreds of freshwater mussel shells collected at the end of the 19th century by the Dutch anatomist and geologist Eugene Dubois – the discoverer of Java man, the first known fossil of Homo erectus – on the banks of the Bengawan Solo river in East Java, Prof Roebroeks and his colleagues noticed that one of the specimens was engraved.
“It was a Eureka moment. I could see immediately that they were man-made engravings. There was no other explanation,” said team member Dr Stephen Munro from the Australian National University and the National Museum of Australia.
“It’s fantastic that this engraved shell has been discovered in a museum collection where it has been held for more than a hundred years,” said Prof Roebroeks, who is the senior author of the paper published in the journal Nature.
Following the discovery, the scientists worked to establish the exact date of the shell, using two different methods to arrive at the final result of between 430,000 and 540,000 years old.
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Electric eels 'remotely control their prey'
By Victoria Gill
A jolt from an electric eel does more than stun its prey, scientists say.
A study, reported in the journal Science, has now shown that eels can use their electric organs to remotely control the fish they hunt.
A researcher from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Texas, found that the electric discharges from eels made the muscles of their prey twitch.
This makes the fish easier to capture either by immobilising it or making it "jump" to show where it's hiding.
Kenneth Catania, who led the study, set up small aquatic arenas to test the eels' hunting abilities - putting an eel and an unfortunate fish into the same tank.
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Technology News
Apple defended iPod from hackers, iTunes chief says in antitrust trial
In a trial questioning Apple's use of software updates, iTunes chief Eddy Cue says they were necessary because hackers wanted to break apart the company's digital-music ecosystem.
by Nick Statt
OAKLAND, Calif. -- iTunes chief Eddy Cue rebutted claims that Apple tried to undermine iPod competitors nearly a decade ago, saying Apple was fighting a "never ending battle" against hackers to protect its digital media player and popularize its then nascent music business.
"Steve was mighty upset with me and the team whenever we got hacked," Cue, testifying in a class-action lawsuit against Apple, said Thursday in reference to former CEO Steve Jobs, who died in 2011. "If a hack happened, we had to remedy that hack within a certain time period or they [the record labels] would remove all their music from the store."
Apple was also trying to prevent others from breaking the ecosystem it had created between its iTunes software, iPod MP3 music player and iTunes online music store. "All these other guys that tried the approach of trying to be open failed because it broke," he said. "There's no way for us to have done that and have the success that we had."
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A Two-Day Battle to Charge My Car Convinced Me We’re Not Ready for EVs
By Alex Davies
When I set up a weeklong test drive1 with an electric Nissan Leaf last month, I didn’t expect a 35-mile trip from San Francisco to Mountain View to lead to two of the most stressful days I’ve experienced this year. And I didn’t expect to walk away from the experience convinced that, although electric vehicles are great to drive and slowly overcoming their range shortcomings, the infrastructure needed for owners to keep them charged is woefully inadequate—even in EV-lovin’ San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where Teslas are as common as pigeons.
The problem is not a lack of places to plug in: There are at least 20,000 stations in the US, and that number is quickly growing. But they’re no help unless they’re both easy to find and available. In my case, they were neither.
Before I tell my tale, there’s a big caveat: I live in an apartment in San Francisco, and I don’t have anywhere to charge an electric vehicle overnight. Many EV advocates argue we will charge our cars like we charge our phones: At night while we sleep, during the day while we work, and any other time we don’t need to be moving. It’s a “grazing,” rather than “gorging,” mentality, and it makes a lot of sense.
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Environmental News
West Antarctica Losing Mt. Everest of Ice Every Two Years – Study
According to a new NASA-led study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the melt rate of glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment, West Antarctica, has tripled during the past decade, causing the loss of a Mt. Everest-sized amount of ice every two years.
by Sci-News.com
The 21-year study is the first to evaluate and reconcile observations from four different measurement techniques – NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites, laser altimetry from NASA’s Operation IceBridge airborne campaign and the earlier ICESat satellite, radar altimetry from the ESA’s Envisat satellite, and mass budget analyses using radars and the University of Utrecht’s Regional Atmospheric Climate Model – to produce an authoritative estimate of the amount and the rate of loss over the last two decades.
“Previous studies had suggested that the Amundsen Sea Embayment is starting to change very dramatically since the 1990s, and we wanted to see how all the different techniques compared. The remarkable agreement among the techniques gave us confidence that we are getting this right,” said study lead author Dr Tyler Sutterley of the University of California, Irvine.
Dr Sutterley and his co-authors reconciled measurements of the mass balance of glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea Embayment. Mass balance is a measure of how much ice the glaciers gain and lose over time from accumulating or melting snow, discharges of ice as icebergs, and other causes.
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'Future Earth' platform outlines global change strategy
By Mark Kinver
A global initiative bringing together scientists across different disciplines has launched its strategy to identify key priorities for sustainability.
The document outlines what Future Earth, launched at the 2012 Rio +20 Summit, hopes to contribute towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
It has identified eight global challenges, including "water, energy and food for all" and decarbonisation.
The strategy also focuses on the roles of policymakers and funding bodies.
"Future Earth is a global research platform aimed at connecting the world's scientists across the regions and across disciplines to work on the problems of sustainable development and the solutions to move us towards sustainable development," explained Future Earth science committee vice-chairwoman Belinda Reyers.
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Medical News
Humans Can See Infrared Light, Scientists Say
by Sci-News.com
Human eyes can detect light at wavelengths in the visual spectrum; other wavelengths, such as infrared and ultraviolet, are supposed to be invisible, but an international group of scientists from Poland, Switzerland, Norway and the United States, has found that under certain conditions, it’s possible for humans to see infrared light. Using cells from the retinas of mice and people, and infrared lasers, the group found that when laser light pulses rapidly, light-sensing cells in the retina sometimes get a double hit of infrared energy. When that happens, the eye is able to detect light that falls outside the visible spectrum.
The new study was initiated after the scientists reported seeing occasional flashes of green light while working with an infrared laser. Unlike the laser pointers used in lecture halls or as toys, the powerful infrared laser they worked with emits light waves thought to be invisible to the human eye.
“They were able to see the laser light, which was outside of the normal visible range, and we really wanted to figure out how they were able to sense light that was supposed to be invisible,” said Dr Frans Vinberg of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who is a co-author of the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Goodbye Y: Men Who Smoke Have Missing Male Chromosomes
by Stephanie Pappas
Add another troubling side effect to the list of health issues caused by cigarettes: Smoking may cause the Y chromosome to disappear from men's blood cells.
A new study finds that men who smoke lose the Y chromosome in blood cells more frequently than nonsmokers — and the heavier their cigarette use is, the fewer Y chromosomes they have.
This Y chromosome loss could explain why male smokers are at higher risk of cancer than female smokers, the researchers said in their study, published today (Dec. 4) in the journal Science.
"The cells that lose the Y chromosome … They don't die," said study co-author Lars Forsberg, of the Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology at Uppsala University in Sweden. "But we think that they would have a disrupted biological function."
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Space News
Orion 'Mars ship' launch postponed
By Jonathan Amos
Thursday's first test flight of the US space agency's Orion "Mars ship" has been postponed because of weather and technical issues.
The capsule had been due to launch atop a Delta rocket on a short journey above the Earth to prove key technologies.
Its maiden voyage was to have taken place from Cape Canaveral in Florida between 12:05 GMT and 14:44 GMT.
But the countdown was interrupted by gusty winds and by sluggish fuel valves in the Delta's big boosters.
Engineers will try again on Friday. The launch window will be exactly the same as on Thursday, with the aim as ever to try to get away right at the start of the window at 12:05 GMT (07:05 local Florida time).
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Is Jupiter's Great Red Spot a Sunburn?
NASA
Nov 28, 2014: The ruddy color of Jupiter's Great Red Spot is likely a product of simple chemicals being broken apart by sunlight in the planet's upper atmosphere, according to a new analysis of data from NASA's Cassini mission. The results contradict the other leading theory for the origin of the spot's striking color -- that the reddish chemicals come from beneath Jupiter's clouds.
The results were presented earlier this month by Kevin Baines, a Cassini team scientist based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Science Meeting in Tucson, Arizona. Baines and JPL colleagues Bob Carlson and Tom Momary arrived at their conclusions using a combination of data from Cassini's December 2000 Jupiter flyby and laboratory experiments.
In the lab, the researchers blasted ammonia and acetylene gases -- chemicals known to exist on Jupiter -- with ultraviolet light, to simulate the sun's effects on these materials at the extreme heights of clouds in the Great Red Spot. This produced a reddish material, which the team compared to the Great Red Spot as observed by Cassini's Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS). They found that the light-scattering properties of their red concoction nicely matched a model of the Great Red Spot in which the red-colored material is confined to the uppermost reaches of the giant cyclone-like feature.
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Odd News
US chimpanzee Tommy 'has no human rights' - court
BBC.com
A chimpanzee is not entitled to the same rights as people and does not have be freed from captivity by its owner, a US court has ruled.
The appeals court in New York state said caged chimpanzee Tommy could not be recognised as a "legal person" as it "cannot bear any legal duties".
The Nonhuman Rights Project had argued that chimps who had such similar characteristics to the humans deserved basic rights, including freedom.
The rights group said it would appeal.
Owner pleased
In its ruling, the judges wrote: "So far as legal theory is concerned, a person is any being whom the law regards as capable of rights and duties.
"Needless to say, unlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their actions.''
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