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The 3.2-million-year-old human ancestor known as Lucy sparked a revolution in scientists’ understanding of the origins of clever hands and stone tools

The discoveries at Oldupai dominated scientists’ understanding of the early hominin hand and tool behaviors for decades. When the partial skeleton of the 3.2-million-year-old human ancestor known as Lucy was discovered in November 1974, no one initially considered whether she might have made or used stone tools. This may have been in part because Lucy’s skeleton only preserved two hand bones—a bone at the center of the wrist, called the capitate, and a finger bone called a proximal phalanx.

But even the discovery of a trove of fossils of Lucy’s species at the nearby site A.L. 333 the following year—a find that included numerous hand bones—did not elicit discussion about tool behaviors in Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy’s species.

Not only was stone tool technology still considered unique to Homo, but also, at an age of 3.2 million years, Lucy was 1.5 million years older than the earliest stone tools known at the time.

The mystery of why life uses molecules with specific orientations has deepened with a discovery that RNA—a key molecule thought to have potentially held the instructions for life before DNA emerged—can favor making the building blocks of proteins in either the left-hand or the right-hand orientation.

Source:

Prebiotic chiral transfer from self-aminoacylating ribozymes may favor either handedness

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52362-x

Highlights

• Neanderthal hearth discovered in the excavation area of Vanguard Cave (VC).

• The structure is a primary result of heating of rockroses (Cistaceae).

• The oldest evidence of Levoglucosan and retene in an archaeological context.

• The studied hearth structure is highly polleniferous

• Neanderthal abilities to organize fire use activities for specific tecnological objectives.

Here we present multiproxy evidence of a new type of Neanderthal hearth discovered in Vanguard Cave (VC) (Gibraltar), which is dated ∼ 65 kyr, and associated with Middle Paleolithic stone artefacts.

The hearth structure coincides with predictions from theoretical studies which require the use of heating structures for obtaining birch tar, commonly used in hafting. We propose that the structure was used for heating rockroses (Cistaceae) under anoxic conditions by burning herbs and shrubs, over a guano mixed with sand layer. We tested this hypothesis experimentally with success.

The presence of levoglucosan and retene in the structure's matrix points to combustion of higher resinous plant-derived material.

Our results advance our understanding of Neanderthal behaviour, as the ability to organize activities related with the use of fire.

The Tuesday afternoon gathering featured testimony from Dr. Jon Kosloski, who serves as the director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). While he largely echoed the findings presented in last week's AARO annual report, the hearing did include a few fresh insights that would undoubtedly be of interest to UFO enthusiasts.

Specifically, Kosloski spoke about three yet-to-be-resolved cases that have proven to be a challenge for the group. The first fantastic incident saw a police officer observe a "large orange orb" that he approached to investigate. As the cop got closer to the anomaly, "he saw a blacker than black object" that he likened to "the size of a Prius." The puzzling anomaly subsequently "tilted up about 45 degrees and then it shot up vertically" at a speed "ten to a hundred times faster than any drone he has ever seen before." As the silent craft departed, the officer recalled the object emitting strange "red and blue lights" that he compared to fireworks.

Recent research indicates that paranormal belief, in the absence of allied cognitive-perceptual and psychopathology-related factors, is not associated with negative wellbeing outcomes. However, investigators have historically reported relationships between specific facets of belief (e.g., superstition) and stress vulnerability. These typically derive from the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale (RPBS), which has questionable psychometric integrity.

Nonetheless, the two-factor RPBS model provides useful clinical insights for practitioners working with clients who report religious, spiritual, and supernatural problems. Explicitly, TPB and NAP suggest the possible origin of issues and the starting point of therapy/treatment. Specifically, they advise that individuals with elevated levels of TPB and stress would benefit from exposure to approach coping strategies.

These together with techniques that promote an internal locus of control may enhance coping and reduce distress. Certainly, follow-up work should investigate relationships between these factors. This is vital because although paranormal belief may not itself be predictive of lower well-being, it may indirectly reflect reduced psychological functioning.

From this perspective, like conspiracy theory endorsement, in extreme instances heightened endorsement of paranormal belief could be symptomatic of non-adaptive coping.

Paranormal investigators use the devices to show presence of ghosts – or give their claims a gloss of plausibility

Years ago, weather stations were static installations, but these days all the necessary instrumentation can be packed into an electronic device no larger than a smartphone, providing a handy scientific device for meteorologists – and for spirit seekers.

Paranormal investigators associate cold spots or sudden drops in temperature with the presence of ghosts, and have long used wind chimes to detect drafts supposedly generated by spirits. Modern ghost hunters use devices such as the handheld Kestrel 3500NV, which measures temperature, pressure, relative humidity and wind speed. There is even a backlight for night-time use.

Twenty years after the Bridey Murphy sensation, a much more impressive case of past-lives startled the public. The Bloxham tapes were first presented as a BBC television documentary produced by Jeffrey Iverson. Then they were included and enlarged on in Iverson’s book More Lives Than One? The tapes were regarded as ‘the most staggering evidence for reincarnation ever recorded… amazingly detailed accounts of past lives – accounts so authentic that they can only be explained by the certainty of reincarnation.’ Inevitably they achieved international renown.

The tapes themselves had been accumulated for years by an elderly Cardiff-based hypnotherapist named Arnll Bloxham. Bloxham had been unable to study as a doctor and had turned to hypnotherapy. He was a life-long believer in reincarnation, but his interest in past-life regressions did not emerge until quite late in his career. Despite that, he managed to accumulate a cupboard full of tapes of his experiments with more than four hundred people.

Are past-life regressions really evidence for reincarnation? Or could they be glimpses of ancestral memories? Both theories have their followers. Yet rigorous research provides a distinctly different answer. These regressions are fascinating examples of cryptomnesia.

Pollen coating their muzzles suggests the endangered canids may act as furry pollinators

With fewer than 500 individuals believed to be alive today, Ethiopian wolves (Canis simensis) are the world’s rarest wild canid and Africa’s most endangered carnivore. But when they’re not chowing down on rodents, these lanky, alpine wolf relatives have a bit of a sweet tooth: Researchers report this week in Ecology that the animals enjoy licking nectar from red hot poker flowers (Kniphofia foliosa, seen in the video above), documenting this behavior for the first time in a large predator.

Madyson Barber, a grad student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was researching young transiting systems in space when she made a remarkable discovery.

Barber used data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite to observe the brightness of stars over time. During the observations, Barber noticed some "little dips" in brightness, indicating that a "transiting" planet may be passing near Earth.

The planet, named IRAS 04125+2902 b, is estimated to be 3 million years old, which is considered "young" for planets, Barber said. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and took an estimated 10 million to 20 millions to form. The next youngest known planet is about 10 million years old, Barber said.

"It's about the same as a 10-day-old baby in human timescale," she added. "So, super, super young in comparison to our home."

Nicknamed "TIDYE-1b" by researchers, the new planet has been shown to have an orbital period of 8.83 days, according to a paper published Thursday in Nature. It has a radius about 10.7 times larger than Earth and has approximately 30% of the mass of Jupiter.

Source:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08123-3.epdf?sharing_token=UleQMtkgxs0Ip5nifzDB19RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NoPEXRamYBiiVP35gaOdXS9V_699B5agz3qq431PQTpYHGXPhRpzu84UT9XCrT7Aamjvs_Jwc-4VFuYoI0e7LlCMXkaXMT3sMuG0ftNnD-1rb0eEJwEuJ6MgMjMlnHWFUCEkefiHN5IJLpv0zhvcA6WP0PsFCPv7vaSsCc_2TU-umi-4Cp1rR21ITAPraO42s%3D&tracking_referrer=abcnews.go.com

Birds exhibit controlled gliding flight without a vertical tail, unlike the necessary rudders on airplanes that damp Dutch roll oscillations.

To accomplish rudderless flight, Chang et al. developed a bioinspired aerial robot with morphing wings and tail named PigeonBot II.

The robot consists of a biomimetic skeleton and real pigeon feathers that form wings that can spread and a tail that can spread, elevate, tilt, and deviate side to side like a bird.

Initial experiments in a turbulent wind tunnel showed that reflexive tail tilting and deviation combined with wing morphing enabled stable flight by damping Dutch roll.

Outdoor flight tests further demonstrated that the autonomous reflexive controller provided stability to the robot during take-off, cruise, and landing.

Highlights

• New option to make Mars proto-satellite disk: partial capture of a disrupted asteroid

• Combine SPH tidal-disruption simulations with orbital evolution of captured fragments

• Tens of percent of an unbound asteroid can be captured beyond collisional timescales

• A smaller asteroid could make the moons via this scenario than a giant impact

• Each scenario predicts different properties of the moons upcoming missions will test

The origin of Mars’s small moons, Phobos and Deimos, remains unknown. They are typically thought either to be captured asteroids or to have accreted from a debris disk produced by a giant impact. Here, we present an alternative scenario wherein fragments of a tidally disrupted asteroid are captured and evolve into a collisional proto-satellite disk.

Lepraria species are diversified chemically and morphologically, and they maintain distinct species across broad distributions, something usually thought to involve sexuality.

Furthermore, an obligate parasexuality of Lepraria explains how it has survived without sex for over 30 M years. Perhaps the Lepraria lineage adopted an alternative life history strategy as it diverged from Stereocaulon.

Where Stereocaulon maintained obligate sexual development, Lepraria instead goes “all in” on the production of soredia and uses meiosis machinery for mitotic recombination instead, reaping the benefits of asexuality without paying the costs.

Collecting is a form of leisure, and even a passion, consisting of collecting, preserving and displaying objects. When we look for its origin in the literature, we are taken back to “the appearance of writing and the fixing of knowledge”, specifically with the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal (7th century BC, Mesopotamia), and his fondness for collecting books, which in his case were in the form of clay tablets. This is not, however, a true reflection, for we have evidence of much earlier collectors.

In the N4 Mousterian level of the Prado Vargas cave site, 15 Upper Cretaceous marine fossils have been recovered, which were brought to the cave by Neanderthal groups, and only one of them shows traces of having been used as a hammer.

The rest do not present modifications that indicate their practical use as tools; so, they could be interpreted as the product of collection activities.

This would indicate that Neanderthals had psychological and behavioral characteristics similar to those of our species, for which collecting is a common and complex practice motivated by numerous tangible and intangible causes, including competition, cooperation, symbolism, selfishness, selflessness, a sense of continuity, marketing, or addiction, among others.

The Neanderthals’ motivation for bringing this set of fossils to the Prado Vargas cave might have been complex, and we have no valid hypothesis that can explain it.

However, we should not forget the presence of children in the cave, for the collecting instinct characteristic of children could have had a relevant role in the set’s existence. In any case, the Upper Cretaceous fossil collection of the Prado Vargas cave site suggests that collecting, and the abstract thought that it entails, characterized Neanderthals before the arrival of Homo sapiens.

What appears to be evidence of the oldest alphabetic writing in human history is etched onto finger-length, clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in Syria by a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers.

The writing, which is dated to around 2400 BCE, precedes other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years, upending what archaeologists know about where alphabets came from, how they are shared across societies, and what that could mean for early urban civilizations.

Using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) located in the Atacama desert region of Northern Chile, astronomers have revealed five stunning portraits of galaxies in the local universe.

The images of these galaxies show their shapes, structures and distributions of stars in stunning and colorful detail. Some of the galaxies are located at the edge of the so-called "local group," a galactic collection that includes our home, the Milky Way, while others are more distant.

The observations could help astronomers better understand cosmic evolution and how galaxies form stars as well as snatch other stellar bodies, gas and dust from neighboring galaxies via gravitational interactions.

The nearby star Vega holds a special place in human culture. Located just 25 light-years away, this shining beacon—about twice the mass of the sun and 40 times as bright—is so prominent in Earth’s skies that it captivated ancient astronomers across the globe. A few thousand years ago it was also our planet’s North Star, until Polaris took its place as Earth’s axis wobbled. (Vega is set to reclaim the North Star crown in 12,000 years). As such, many have considered this iconic star an intriguing place to look for life, none more so than the astronomer Carl Sagan, who imagined signals from an intelligent civilization arriving from Vega in his 1985 novel Contact, which was adapted into a blockbuster movie in 1997.

So there was some disappointment earlier this month when astronomers announced a baffling discovery about this star.

The star, despite being about halfway through its one-billion-year lifetime, does not seem to have formed any large worlds.

She explains why the image was subsequently interpreted as depicting Capricornus, stating, "There is nothing like the goat-fish in pharaonic animal iconography… The Egyptians didn't create hybrid animals willy-nilly; instead, they drew together the features of animals that shared certain qualities, such as the Seth animal, which combines the physical features of a range of aggressive predators to create a truly powerful being. The el-Hosh creature also resembles the zodiac goat-fish so closely that we felt it is more likely the latter than evidence of a new type of hybrid animal."

The first occurrence of something resembling Capricornus occurred in Mesopotamia, where the Sumerian god Enki and the Akkadian equivalent Ea were usually depicted as bearded men with horned caps, wearing gowns. At the shoulders of these gowns, water streams filled with fish would spout. This later evolved into the first recognizable depiction of a goat-fish hybrid at the feet of the god on cylinder seals dating to ca. 2112–2004 BCE.

Astronomers have analyzed the chemical signatures of millions of stars and noticed that many have evidence of surprisingly heavy metals in their upper atmospheres. These heavier metals should have sunk down into the star during formation, so they must have been deposited later. A new paper calculates that up to 30% of Sun-like stars have engulfed rocky planets during their lifetimes. This would explain why ultra-short-period planets are extremely rare. They were eaten.

The system was built by the lab, along with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD, for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which will use it to model and simulate capabilities for nuclear weapons, helping to ensure the agency doesn’t need to actually explode bombs to test them.

You interact with about two-thirds of the elements of the periodic table every day. Some, like carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, make up our bodies and the air we breathe.

Yet there is also a class of elements so unstable they can only be made in a lab.

These superheavy elements are the purview of a small group stretching the boundaries of chemistry. Can they extend the periodic table beyond the 118 in it now?

Find out scientists are using particle accelerators to create element 120 and why they’ve skipped over element 119.

Plus, if an element exists for only a fraction of a second in the lab, can we still say that counts as existing?

Here we present evidence for a two-phase accumulation of the Mediterranean salt layer based on the chlorine stable isotope composition of halite.

During the first phase, lasting approximately 35 kyr, halite deposition occurred only in the eastern Mediterranean, triggered by the restriction of Mediterranean outflow to the Atlantic, in an otherwise brine-filled Mediterranean basin.

During the second phase, halite accumulation occurred across the entire Mediterranean, driven by a rapid (<10 kyr) evaporative drawdown event during which sea-level dropped 1.7–2.1 km and ~ 0.85 km in the eastern and western Mediterranean, respectively. During this extreme drawdown event, the eastern Mediterranean basin lost up to 83% of its water volume, and large parts of its margins were desiccated, while its deep Ionian and Herodotus sub-basins remained filled with >1 km-deep brine.

Pig Pen, glowing tails and shooting stars

Comet Encke is the so-called parent comet of the Taurid meteors. It’s relatively small, just over 3 miles (almost 5 kilometers) in diameter, and crosses inside Earth’s orbit and back out every 3.3 years.

As Encke moves, it sheds dust wherever it goes, like the Peanuts character Pig Pen. A meteor shower occurs when that dust and debris light up while entering Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds. Ultimately, they vanish into an incandescent puff of vapor with a glowing tail, creating the illusion of a “shooting star.”

But dust isn’t all that breaks off the comet. So do bigger chunks, the size of pebbles and stones. When they collide with the air, they create the much brighter fireballs, which sometimes explode.

As our planet warms up and rain patterns shift, the feathers and skin of many species are changing colors, often getting lighter. Snails in the Netherlands are going from brown to yellow. In a species of tropical bee in Costa Rica, the proportion of orange to blue individuals is increasing. Lizards in France are turning lighter, and so are many insects and birds across the globe.

The Greater Antillean islands (Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico) are a natural laboratory for studying speciation. Although these islands were once connected and share many geographical characteristics, they have been separated for millions of years. This prolonged isolation with natural barriers allows each island's species to evolve in their own unique directions.

These conditions have led to explosive diversification in various groups, resulting in highly endemic species with unique adaptations. Spiders, particularly tarantulas, show remarkable diversification in this region.

Skull whistle sounds attract mental attention by affectively mimicking other aversive and startling sounds produced by nature and technology. They were psychoacoustically classified as a hybrid mix of being voice- and scream-like but also originating from technical mechanisms. Using human neuroimaging, we furthermore found that skull whistle sounds received a specific decoding of the affective significance in the neural auditory system of human listeners, accompanied by higher-order auditory cognition and symbolic evaluations in fronto-insular-parietal brain systems. Skull whistles thus seem unique sound tools with specific psycho-affective effects on listeners, and Aztec communities might have capitalized on the scary and scream-like nature of skull whistles.