TLW Science Thread

[Lee909]

I follow a page on facebook thats pretty interesting for science articles aswell as the NASA page which puts out some good stuff.

 

So thought id start a thread for similar things

 

Confirm Homo Erectus Walked Like Modern Humans 1.9 Million Years Ago

 

By Robin Andrews

 

13/07/2016, 15:48

 

The excavation of the 2-million-year-old Homo naledi, our most recently discovered human ancestor, shocked the anthropological world when it was revealed that it appeared to bury its dead – a trait previously thought to be exclusive to humans.

 

Now, it looks like another ancient ancestor has just let slip a secret that will change our understanding of our own evolution yet again. As revealed by fossilized footprints, Homo erectus walked just like modern humans, which suggests our walking style evolved as long as 1.9 million years ago, around the time this species evolved.

 

H. erectus once lived across much of Africa and Asia, and was still around 143,000 years ago, about 57,000 years after H. sapiens, our own species, first appeared. It is generally recognized as being the oldest human ancestor to have modern human-like body proportions, elongated legs, and the ability to walk upright to a degree and even trek long distances – as opposed to climbing trees, as its close ancestors and cousins did. Despite these similarities, scientists still tend to consider H. erectus still quite different from ourselves.

This new study in the journal Scientific Reports confirms that H. erectus was more like us than previously thought. Back in 2006, a series of 1.5-million-year-old footprints were found in Kenya, and they were identified as clearly belonging to H. erectus. Since then, a team of researchers have been reconstructing how these footprints were made, and they are confident that not only did their owners walk upright, but that they were fully bipedal.

 

Although evidence of walking on two feet dates back to 6-7 million years ago, a sparse fossil record means that ascertaining just how efficiently bipedal and human-like our ancestors’ gaits is often very difficult. These well-preserved 97 tracks, created by at least 20 individual members of H. erectus, allowed researchers to create digital models of them, before comparing them to habitually barefoot members of local tribespeople.

 

Without a doubt, these ancient footprints are indistinguishable from the modern equivalent. “Our analyses of these footprints provide some of the only direct evidence to support the common assumption that at least one of our fossil relatives 1.5 million years ago walked in much the same way as we do today,” Kevin Hatala, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and The George Washington University and lead author of the study, said in a statement.The authors of this paper note that the footprint sizes indicate that multiple males were walking together in the group, which implies a sense of cooperation and a move away from the sole male dominated hierarchies seen in other primate species. So not only did they have similar walking styles, but similar social styles to contemporary humans.

The big question, though, is what happened to allow such a swift transition from tree-climbing adaptations to efficient walking mechanisms? Some have suggested that the need to use hands for food gathering or tool-wielding prompted the change, whereas others think that it simply requires less energy compared to scampering around on all fours. Perhaps it simply made co-operation easier somehow – either way, it’ll always be difficult to really know what triggered it.

 

Along with a recent, dramatic re-dating of the revelatory H. naledi fossils, this definitive discovery regarding H. erectus makes it very clear that each new discovery brings with it more questions than answers. Just when we think we know exactly how our species arose from our past, another new piece of information highlights just how much more we’ve got left to understand.

 

[Lee909]

Monkeys In Brazil Entered The Stone Age 700 Years Ago

 

By Robin Andrews

 

12/07/2016, 12:48

 

Humanity is no longer the only species on Earth that has entered the Stone Age. It’s been known for some time now that various other primates use stone tools, including chimpanzees, capuchins, and macaques. Just recently, a study revealed that there was enough archaeological evidence to prove that macaques in Thailand have been crafting geological tools for at least half a century.

 

Now, it seems that capuchins have them beat. Tools in Brazil, undoubtedly made by capuchin hands, have been dated to be at least 700 years old. This means that just as the Renaissance was beginning in Italy, capuchins were crafting little chisels and hammers out of various stones in South America – although, in all likelihood, they had entered the Stone Age long before this.

 

As the study in the journal Current Biology notes, the field of primate archaeology is relatively nascent. Michael Haslam, the lead author of this research and the head of the Primate Archaeology (Primarch) project at the University of Oxford, is a pioneer in the field. He’s previously uncovered evidence of stone tool use in Thailand by macaques, but this new discovery is far more of a game-changer.

 

“Until now, the only archaeological record of pre-modern, non-human animal tool use comes from a study of three chimpanzee sites in Cote d'Ivoire in Africa, where tools were dated to between 4,300 and 1,300 years old,” Haslam said in a statement. “Here, we have new evidence that suggests monkeys and other primates out of Africa were also using tools for hundreds, possibly thousands of years.”

 

 

 

Capuchins are indubitably clever monkeys. Researchers have long observed them using stones as hand-held hammers and anvils to break open hard, shelled food like cashews and seeds, while younglings watch their elders hammer away and learn from observation.

 

Their geological knowledge was found to be quite astute – anvils were four times heavier than the hammers, and the hammers were four times heavier than the average stones nearby. The anvils tended to be made of layered, flat sandstones, whereas the hammers were forged from pointed, angular quartzite.

 

Whenever a capuchin is full of delicious nuts, it tends to leave its stone tools by a cache of discarded shells, which over time gets buried by sand and soil. After waiting for the capuchins to scuttle off, the researchers sauntered over to these sites and dug into the ground to see if they could find any older tools.

 

Using distinctive identifying marks on the tools made by the grinding, slamming, hammering action of long-gone capuchins, 69 tools were successfully excavated from a depth of up to 0.7 meters (2.3 feet), and radiocarbon dated using small pieces of charcoal. The oldest tools were 600 to 700 years of age, which means that 100 generations of capuchins – at least – have been using stone tools. They think it’s only a matter of time until older tools are found.

 

There is an even more tantalizing prospect to this discovery. The European invasion didn’t occur until the year 1500, so the capuchin Stone Age predates this by around 200 years. The indigenous populations of Brazil, therefore, may have come across capuchins breaking open cashew nuts native to this particular area.

 

“It is possible,” Haslam notes, “that the first humans to arrive here learned about this unknown food through watching the monkeys and their primate cashew-processing industry.” So instead of monkeys or apes mimicking humans, in this case, it may have been the other way around.

[Bjornebye]

I set fire to my mates jumper with a bunsen burner once.

[Lee909]

Pictures from British Astronaut Tim Peake

 

1. The volcanoes of Kamchatka, Russia, covered in snow. They form part of the Ring of Fire, one of the most volcanically active tracts on Earth.

 

 

2. The southern coast of Florida.

 

3. The Aurora Australis. The lesser-known version of the Northern Lights.

 

 

4. Mount Etna having a cheeky smoke. This volcano is one of the most active and dangerous in the world.

 

5. Sweeping section of an unnamed stretch of African desert. Peake compares this image to the surface of Mars, and rightly so!

 

6. The Bahamas: 50 shades of blue. The reefs in this part of the world are particularly beautiful.

 

 

7. London at midnight on a Saturday. "I'd rather be up here...but only just! #toughcall," Peake notes.

 

 

8. US National Parks. Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and the Grand Canyon are all visible in this photograph.

 

 

9. Watching the Milky Way rise over the horizon.

 

 

 

10. Canada's 210-million-year-old Manicouagan impact crater.

 

[setreal]

I set fire to my mates jumper with a bunsen burner once.

 

Science.

[Jenson]

I for one welcome our jellyfish overlords.

 

Jellymageddon: Can we stop the rise of the jellyfish?

 

ANDREW Sweetman has spent a lot of time throwing dead jellyfish into the sea. At the bottom of the Sognefjord, Norway’s largest fjord, a time-lapse camera recorded their fate. He’s trying to answer a simple question: does anything eat jellyfish?

That neatly sums up how little we really know about those alien creatures. Jellyfish carrion carpets the seabed, suggesting it is not a favourite food.”Why would you eat a jellyfish?” asks Sweetman, who now works at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. “A jellyfish is 96 per cent water. You might as well just swim with your mouth open.”

For a long time, it didn’t matter that we knew so little about these animals. They were just a mucous mess that washed up on beaches, or a painful nuisance for swimmers. But then huge invading swarms – jellyfish blooms – started making the news. In their millions, jellyfish are capable of spectacular acts of sabotage. Yet nobody knows where these blooms come from or how to get rid of them. Time to ask more questions beyond whether anything eats them. Are numbers really going up? If so, why? More importantly, what can we do about it?

 

Jellyfish blooms can cause chaos. When the power went out on the island of Luzon in the Philippines in 1999, locals thought a long-feared military coup was under way. They were wrong. Sucked into water intakes, jellyfish had taken out vital services from power stations to data centres and water treatment plants. In 2006, a jellyfish bloom temporarily disabled the Ronald Reagan, one of the US navy’s flagship nuclear-powered supercarriers. Gelatinous bodies had clogged up the water intake for cooling the ship’s reactor. And in 2009 a Japanese fishing boat capsized when its crew tried to haul in a net filled with dozens of huge Nomura’s jellyfish (Nemopilema nomurai) – each 2 metres wide and weighing in at 200 kilograms.

 

What’s certain is that they can suck the life out of the sea. Jellyfish eat fish larvae as well as the plankton they live on, damaging already fragile fish stocks. Wild fish are hit hardest, but once a bloom gets its tentacles through the nets of an open-ocean fishery, it may as well shut up shop. South Korean researchers estimate that jellyfish are costing their country $70 million to $200 million a year in lost fish-related revenue.

 

[Mook]

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

[Strontium]

Ocean sunfish eat jellyfish. They are bizarre creatures themselves. I saw one at Lisbon Oceanarium, one of only a handful in captivity.

 

I am sure it's only a matter of time before Heston comes up with a jellyfish-based dish.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

This is one of my favourite things - spiders that build model spiders.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8135000/8135844.stm

 

I think there are only two known species.  Helpfully enough, one is on an island near Taiwan, the other is in Peru, 

[cochyn]

Cyborgs are here: A light-sensitive 'ray' made from rat cells and gold:

 

Amazing.

[Sugar Ape]

Some really good Twitter accounts for stuff like this and animals etc...

 

Human granulocytes killing cervical cancer cells

 

 

 

 

Human granulocytes killing cervical cancer cells pic.twitter.com/hY4v5EmLZ6

— Science GIFs (@Learn_Things) July 4, 2016

[Sugar Ape]

This is how mosquitoes saws you open when they bite

 

 

 

This is how mosquitoes saws you open when they bite pic.twitter.com/VxnQlXd3nH

— Science GIFs (@Learn_Things) July 4, 2016

[Sugar Ape]

How dogs drink water.

 

 

[Sugar Ape]

Smokers lungs .vs healthy lungs

 

 

 

[Sugar Ape]

Gladiator spiders hunt using there webs in a non-traditional way

[Sugar Ape]

This is how beer is canned

 

 

 

This is how beer is canned pic.twitter.com/7k6b5k78zs

— Science GIFs (@Learn_Things) July 14, 2016

[VladimirIlyich]

Great thread.

Best channel on Sky by miles is Eden and I was watching a programme recently about a mega Tsunami which will originate in La Palma(Canary Islands) and create waves over 50m high and devastate most of the US Eastern Seaboard including some parts of Boston,New York and probably all Miami and will push around 30km inland.

La Palma is an island of two volcanoes,one inactive,one active and its last eruption was 1949 and caused a 3m movement towards the ocean. A scary scenario.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

I fucking love I Fucking Love Science.

[Sugar Ape]

X-Rays show a human swallowing liquid

 

 

[VladimirIlyich]

X-Rays show a human swallowing liquid

 

 

Yer ma'.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

I keep thinking about the Big Bang and the start of time.  It's one of those scientific things where I can say the words, I can even get my brain to accept the words make sense as a logically consistent statement, but I struggle to stop my brain instinctively rejecting a concept that feels so alien to everyone's lived experience: because time started with the Big bang, there was no "before the Big bang", so the question "what came before the Big bang" makes as much sense as "what is north of the North Pole".

 

Similarly, the concept of space-time is one that my brain refuses to hold on to.

[Dougie Do'ins]

Apparently this is going to help predict the weather with more accuracy and a few other things.

 

Aeolus space laser catches a following wind

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37133834

[jimmycase]

Hunting the start of the Anthropocene

 

Humans have tipped the planet into a new era - and scientists want to find out exactly when it happened.

Later this month they will reveal their initial findings - and begin work on pinpointing the the moment in the geological record, known as a 'golden spike' that shows where one epoch changed to another.

The expert working group will present its latest findings to the 35th International Geological Congress (IGC) in South Africa later this month.

Scroll down for video 

 

 

WHAT IS THE ANTHROPOCENE? 

The Anthropocene is the name of a proposed geological epoch that may soon enter the official Geologic Time Scale.

It refers to a time in which human permanently changed the planet.

According to the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), we are officially in the Holocene epoch, which began 11,700 years ago after the last major ice age.

Some experts argue we should now change the name to 'Anthropocene'. 

This is from from anthropo, for 'man,' and cene, for 'new'.

Experts remain divided on when mankind caused a lasting impact on the Earth's geology but seem to have settled on a time near 1950.

The atomic bomb is a popular marker. 

It then plans to search for what is known as a 'golden spike' – a physical point in the geological record that shows where one epoch changed to another. 

This would begin the process of a formal declaration that we are living in the Anthropocene by the International Union of Geological Sciences - which could happen in just two years.

Dr Colin Waters, secretary of the Anthropocene Working Group who will address the IGC, told The Independent: 'The key thing to us is the scale of the changes that have happened.

'It's of comparable scale with what happened with the Holocene and the transition from the last ice age.'  

In a paper in the journal Science earlier this year, Dr Waters and others said an age range of 1945 to 1964 had been proposed for the start of the Anthropocene. 

'The feeling is that it would be better, most geologists would be more comfortable, if there was a 'golden spike' a physical reference point in the strata,' the working group’s convener, Professor Jan Zalasiewicz, a palaeobiologist at Leicester University, said. 

'We'll suggest [to the Congress] that we begin the process of looking around the world for a set of sections that could be sediments in lake beds, peat bogs, glaciers … where there are a set of signals to show the beginning of the Anthropocene.

'And then we'll choose one of these to say 'this is the reference point, this marks the beginning of the Anthropocene'.'

 

Writing in the journal Nature on Wednesday, Professor Clive Hamilton, an ethicist at Charles Sturt University in Australia, spelled out how drastic the changes were that were prompting scientists to think about declaring a new epoch.

'The Anthropocene was conceived by Earth-system scientists to capture the very recent rupture in Earth's history arising from the impact of human activity on the Earth system as a whole. Read that again. Take special note of the phrases 'very recent rupture' and 'the Earth system as a whole'. Understanding the Anthropocene, and what humanity now confronts, depends on a firm grasp of these concepts,' he wrote. 

Earlier this year researchers said humans had created a 'striking new pattern' in the planet's global energy flow.

That's according to new research that reveals how unprecedented human consumption and production has transformed our planet.

These dramatic changes in the Earth's biosphere, caused by human activity, are now starting to become evident in rock and soil strata, geologists claim.

 

+5

Humans have created a 'striking new pattern' in the planet's global energy flow, according to new research. Pictured is the produced energy and the pattern of human population growth from 1750. Dark blue, shows coal; dark brown, oil; green is natural gas; purple shows nuclear; light blue is hydro; orange brown is biomass. 

A previous study published in the journal Earth's Future, was also led by Professors Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester.

Researchers spotted the pattern when studying the Anthropocene phenomenon - a proposed epoch where humans dominate the Earth's surface geology.

When measured against the billion-year old patterns of planet Earth, human activity forms a striking new pattern, the found.

Professor Zalasiewicz said: 'Very big changes in our planet's pattern of biological production and consumption do not happen very often.

'The appearance of photosynthesis was one, about two and a half billion years ago.

'Then, a little over half a billion years ago, animals like trilobites appeared, to add scavengers and predators into a food web of increasing complexity.

'Other major events have happened since, such as five major mass extinctions, but even measured against these events, human-driven changes to production and consumption are distinctly new.'

Dr Carys Bennett, co-author, added: 'It is without precedent to have a single species appropriating something like one quarter of the net primary biological production of the planet and to become effectively the top predator both on land and at sea.'

Humans are accelerating the trend by digging phosphorus out of the ground and by fixing nitrogen out of the air to make fertilizers.

As a result, we are increasing productivity well above natural levels - and directing much of it towards animals that have been re-engineered to suit our purposes.

Professor Zalasiewicz added: 'This refashioning of the relationship between Earth's production and consumption is leaving signals in strata now forming, and this helps characterise the Anthropocene as a geological time unit.

 

+5

Examples of fossils that provide evidence for the evolution of production and consumption over geological time. A shows Stromatolites, an early example of ecosystem engineering from the late Mesoproterozoic Era. B is fossil arthropod from the 525 million-year-old deposits in China

 

 

 

'It also has wider and more fundamental importance in signaling a new biological stage in this planet's evolution'.

The latest research follows a study earlier this year that claimed humans have tipped the Earth into a new chapter of geological history that began around 1950.

It is the latest date considered for the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch.

Geoscientists say they have gathered 'overwhelming evidence' for the proposed epoch, when they say humans didn't just leave traces of their actions, but began to alter the whole Earth system. 

Dr Colin Waters of the British Geological Survey said: 'Humans have long affected the environment, but recently there has been a rapid global spread of novel materials including aluminium, concrete and plastics, which are leaving their mark in sediments.

'Fossil-fuel combustion has dispersed fly ash particles worldwide, pretty well coincident with the peak distribution of the 'bomb spike' of radionuclides generated by atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.'

The starting date for the Anthropocene is still under review by the working group and suggestions of when it began have varied widely, from the 18th century when the Industrial Revolution began, to around 300 years later. 

 

+5

Pictured is the pattern of global migration exhibited by Homo sapiens from the Paleolithic culture to present. The latest research follows a study earlier this year that claimed humans have tipped the Earth into a new chapter of geological history that began around 1950

Last year the working group suggested the date of the first atomic bomb test in July 16, 1945 should be the beginning of the Anthropocene.

The proposal was signed by 26 members of the group, created by the body that oversees changes to the geological timeline.

The beginning of the nuclear age marks the historic turning point when humans first accessed an enormous new energy source - and is also a time level that can be effectively tracked within geological strata – layers of rocks and soil.

Speaking this time last year, Dr Zalasiewicz said: 'Like any geological boundary, it is not a perfect marker – levels of global radiation really rose in the early 1950s, as salvoes of bomb tests took place.

'But it may be the optimal way to resolve the multiple lines of evidence on human-driven planetary change. Time - and much more discussion - will tell.'

Previous 'divisions' between geological eras have been marked by 'spikes' in the geological records, caused by global catastrophes such as the asteroid strike thought to be responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs, or a wave of volcanic eruptions. 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3747872/The-hunt-golden-spike-Scientists-search-moment-humanity-changed-planet-forever-triggered-Anthropocene-era.html#ixzz4I0kMAJjT
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

[Bobby Hundreds]

Watching stuff about computer advancement and AI, it's startling how fast it's moving along and how it's getting even quicker an example given was imagine last year's generation of computing power could travel from new York to Los Angeles in 40.5 hrs then this year's advancement can do it in .29 of a second. It's advancing that quickly.