We typically think of Homo erectus as the first of our hominin ancestors to expand beyond Africa, along routes that our own species would retread 1.5 million years later. More to the point, many paleoanthropologists think of them as the first hominin that could have adapted to so many different environments, each with its own ..
Tag : Science
Does “bouba” sound round to you? How about “maluma”? Neither are real words, but we’ve known for decades that people who hear them tend to associate them with round objects. There have been plenty of ideas put forward about why that would be the case, and most of them have turned out to be wrong. ..
This time around, the group recruited 10 GWL dogs and 21 non-GWL dogs, all border collies, since this is the most common breed to fall into the GWL category. They compiled a list of eight toys: two labeled, two unlabeled, and four that were new to each dog. What’s their motivation? Roy is playing with ..
To read the data back, there are several options. We’ve already had great success using lasers to read data from optical disks, albeit slowly. But anything that can pick up the small features etched into the glass could conceivably work. With the above considerations in mind, everything was in place on a theoretical level for ..
A spongy nanostructure Scanning a Qing dynasty screen with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy Northwestern University Scanning a Qing dynasty screen with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy Northwestern University China Cap, Qing dynasty (1644–1912), 18th–19th century, Gold wire, kingfisher feathers, amber, coral, jadeite, ivory, glass and silk courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago China Cap, Qing dynasty (1644–1912), ..
Many European nations have their own satellite projects. Historically, their preference for launching on European rockets has not been as strong as it is for pan-European programs managed by ESA and the EU. So it has never been unusual to see a British, German, Spanish, or Italian satellite launching on a foreign rocket. This posture ..
Heating accounts for nearly half of the global energy demand, and two-thirds of that is met by burning fossil fuels like natural gas, oil, and coal. Solar energy is a possible alternative, but while we have become reasonably good at storing solar electricity in lithium-ion batteries, we’re not nearly as good at storing heat. To ..
This is important because it means these rocks were less likely to have been altered in a hydrothermal environment, where scalding hot water was temporarily released by melting ice caused by volcanism or a meteorite impact. Instead, they appear to have been altered under modest temperatures and persistent heavy rainfall. The authors found distinct similarities ..
It was the image that launched a cultural icon. In 1967, in the Northern California woods, a 7-foot-tall, ape-like creature covered in black fur and walking upright was captured on camera, at one point turning around to look straight down the lens. The image is endlessly copied in popular culture—it’s even become an emoji. But ..
John Honeycutt, chair of NASA’s Artemis II mission management team, said the decision to relax the safety limit between Artemis I and Artemis II was grounded in test data. “The SLS program, they came up with a test campaign that actually looked at that cavity, the characteristics of the cavity, the purge in the cavity ..
