Venus figurine sheds light on origins of art by early humans

The figurine, found in 2008 in a cave in Schelklingen, southern Germany is thought to be the world's oldest reproduction of a human. Daniel Maurer / Associated Press

From The L.A. Times:

The 40,000-year-old carved figure of a voluptuous woman was excavated in Germany. It 'radically changes our views of the context and meaning of the earliest Paleolithic art,' its discoverer says.

A 40,000-year-old figurine of a voluptuous woman carved from mammoth ivory and excavated from a cave in southwestern Germany is the oldest known example of three-dimensional or figurative representation of humans and sheds new light on the origins of art, researchers reported Wednesday.

The intricately carved headless figure is at least 5,000 years older than previous examples and dates from shortly after the arrival of modern humans in Europe. It exhibits many of the characteristics of fertility, or Venus, figurines carved millenniums later.

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My Comment: It is hard to believe that such a small carving is 45,000 years old. How did it survive? Was it carved by Homo Sapien or Neanderthal?

Growing Old With Autism

Noah Greenfeld, 42, who spent 15 years in a state mental facility, is now in an assisted living home near his parents in Los Angeles. Max S. Gerber for TIME

From Time Magazine:

Noah, my younger brother, does not talk. Nor can he dress himself, prepare a meal for himself or wipe himself. He is a 42-year-old man, balding, gaunt, angry and, literally, crazy. And having spent 15 years at the Fairview Developmental Center in Costa Mesa, Calif., a state facility, Noah has picked up the con's trick of lashing out before anyone could take a shot at him.

Noah's autism has been marked by "three identified high priority maladaptive behaviors that interfere with his adaptive programming. These include banging his head against solid surfaces, pinching himself and grabbing others," according to his 2004 California Department of Developmental Services individual program plan (IPP). Remarkably, that clinical language actually portrays Noah more favorably than the impression one would get from a face-to-face meeting.

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Space Station Module Handed Over

From The BBC:

Europe has rolled out its last major module for the space station.

The cylindrical Node 3 - to be known as "Tranquility" - was constructed by Thales Alenia Space in Turin, Italy.

Once attached to the station, it will house life support gear as well as being home to the Cupola, a giant "bay" window that was also built in Europe.

Node 3 will be shipped shortly to the Kennedy Space Center in the US, from where it will catch a ride to the station in the back of a shuttle.

The Endeavour orbiter flight, which will take up the Cupola as a co-passenger, is currently scheduled to lift-off in February 2010.

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Scientists Put Psychic's Paranormal Claims To The Test

Arch-sceptic, conjuror and debunker James Randi first offered a cash prize in the 1960s to anyone who could prove a paranormal claim under controlled conditions. Photograph: Public Domain

From The Guardian:

The young female volunteer in front of me could not suppress an embarrassed giggle as she sat there wearing a ski mask, wraparound sunglasses, an oversized graduation gown and a pair of white socks, a large laminated sheet hung around her neck displaying her participant number.

Then things got even weirder. Professor Richard Wiseman knocked on the door to collect our volunteer. He accompanied her into a large room where she was instructed to sit in a chair facing the wall and do nothing for 15 minutes or so. Professional medium Mrs Patricia Putt was then brought into the room and sat down at a small table around 12 feet away. Sometimes Mrs Putt would request that a volunteer read a pre-specified short passage, as she had found from past experience that often "the Spirit enters and makes contact through the sound of the sitter's voice". After that, no talking was allowed whatsoever as our medium wrote down a "reading" describing the volunteer using her alleged paranormal abilities. At the end of the reading, Mrs Putt left the room and the volunteer was allowed to change back into somewhat more conventional garb and given a reminder to return later in the day for the all-important judging phase.

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17 Steps To The Moon And Back: Anatomy Of A Moonshot

Buzz Aldrin explores the lunar surface.

From Popular Mechanics:

The most remarkable thing about Apollo 11—considering the uncertainties of manned spaceflight and the mishaps that bedeviled NASA on previous and subsequent missions—was its nearly flawless execution, from liftoff to splashdown. “I had the sense that surely something would go awry sooner or later,” flight director Glynn Lunney says. “It was pretty much by the book.” Here are the critical events that had to go right, and what would have happened had they gone wrong.

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Deep-Sea Eruption, Odd Animals Seen

© 2009 National Geographic; Video © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

From National Geographic:

May 7, 2009—Scientists have caught a fast-growing, 12-story underwater volcano erupting—along with odd creatures evolved to survive its toxic emissions.

Scientists, witnessing and videotaping for the first time the eruption of an undersea volcano in the Pacific Ocean in the Northern Mariana Islands near Guam.

(onscreen: Video: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

The researchers, using the remotely operated vehicle, Jason, recorded the video in April, and sampled the eruption plume with an intake in one of its manipulator arms.

The deep-sea volcano, called NW Rota-1, was first observed erupting in 2004. Its been continuously spewing lava and highly acidic molten sulfur.

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Inexpensive Plastic Used In CDs Could Improve Aircraft, Computer Electronics

CDs. The inexpensive plastic now used to manufacture CDs and DVDs may one day soon be put to use in improving the integrity of electronics in aircraft, computers and iPhones. (Credit: iStockphoto/José Luis Gutiérrez)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 17, 2009) — If one University of Houston professor has his way, the inexpensive plastic now used to manufacture CDs and DVDs will one day soon be put to use in improving the integrity of electronics in aircraft, computers and iPhones.

Thanks to a pair of grants from the U.S. Air Force, Shay Curran, associate professor of physics at UH, and his research team have demonstrated ultra-high electrical conductive properties in plastics, called polycarbonates, by mixing them with just the right amount and type of carbon nanotubes.

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Is Wind The Next Ethanol? -- A Commentary

A picture taken in May 2001 shows the world's largest offshore windmill farm, Middelgrunden Windmill Farm, located in the Oeresund, three km from Copenhagen harbour. (AFP/Getty Images)

From The Washington Times:

Subsidizing this source could mandate a hefty consumer cost.

Repeating past mistakes has long been a part of Washington's energy policy, but Congress used to wait a while before making the same blunder again. Not anymore. New legislation requiring wind energy closely resembles the ethanol mandate that sparked a backlash just last year.

For many years, wind has benefited from generous tax credits and subsidies, but it still provides less than 2 percent of the nation's electricity. By comparison, coal supplies around 50 percent (and with considerably fewer federal incentives). Natural gas and nuclear, meanwhile, account for about 20 percent each.

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How Sand Dunes Grow Huge

Giant dunes in Grand Erg Oriental, Algeria. Credit: Bruno Andreotti

From Live Science:

Anyone who has seen giant sand dunes, the tall ones stretching many hundreds, even thousands, of feet across the desert floor, has surely wondered how they get to be so big. Scientists, too, have deliberated the question for years.

The sandy behemoths form in China, the Sahara, Namibia, and Iran, among other desert areas, and they come in ridge, star, or crescent shapes.

Bruno Andreotti and Philippe Claudin of the Laboratory of the Physics and Mechanics of Heterogeneous Media in Paris and colleagues now have some answers. The team studied giant-dune fields on-site, analyzed aerial and satellite photos and meteorological data, and ran aerodynamic models to investigate dune growth.

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The First 43 Years And Next 43 Years Of Star Trek And Our World

From The Next Big Future:

The First 43 Years from 1966 to 2009

We start just a little before 1966 (when the first show of the TV series was aired, which would technically be the first 45 years) to get a sense of technology and the world while the Star Trek show was in its development phase through to today.

In 1964, Roddenberry secured a three-year development deal with leading independent TV production company Desilu (founded by comedy stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz). In Roddenberry's original concept, the protagonist was named Captain Robert April of the "S.S. Yorktown". Eventually, this character became Captain Christopher Pike. The first pilot episode, "The Cage", was made in 1964, with actor Jeffrey Hunter in the role of Pike after Roddenberry's first choice, Lloyd Bridges had reportedly turned it down.

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The Future Of 5 Telescopes In Space

(Photograph by NASA/AFP/Getty Images)

From Popular Mechanics:

This week has been an active one for earthlings' quest to understand the universe. Here is the big news on five telescopes in the sky.

On what is supposed to be the last space shuttle visit ever to the Hubble Space Telescope, astronauts successfully installed a new camera.

Mission specialists John Grunsfeld and Drew Feustel installed the Wide Field Camera 3, an upgraded system that will produce larger, more detailed photos over a wide range of colors, according to NASA. The old camera, responsible for some of the most images of the cosmos since its installation in 1993, will be brought down for display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

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Is David Attenborough Set To Reveal The Missing Link In Human Evolution?

From The Daily Mail:

The BBC has made an extraordinary new documentary, presented by Sir David Attenborough, which will reveal the discovery of a fossilised skeleton that may be a vital ‘missing link’ in human evolution.

The 90-minute programme is top secret but The Mail on Sunday has learned from sources in America that the results of the study on which it is based will be revealed by a team of scientists and broadcasters in New York on May 19.

The centrepiece of the programme is the unveiling of the first-ever complete skeleton of an extinct animal called an adapid.

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Melting Threat From West Antarctic Ice Sheet May Be Less Than Expected; But U.S. Coastal Cities At Risk

Iceberg in Paradise Bay, West Antarctica. (Credit: iStockphoto/Micheal O Fiachra)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 15, 2009) — While a total or partial collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet as a result of warming would not raise global sea levels as high as some predict, levels on the U.S. seaboards would rise 25 percent more than the global average and threaten cities like New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, according to a new study.

Long thought of as the sleeping giant with respect to sea level rise, Antarctica holds about nine times the volume of ice of Greenland. Its western ice sheet, known as WAIS, is of particular interest to scientists due to its inherent instability, a result of large areas of the continent's bedrock lying below sea level. But the ice sheet's potential contribution to sea level rise has been greatly overestimated, according to new calculations.

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Lessons From Earth's Most Murderous People

This photo and caption released by Survival International on May 29, 2008, caused a stir: Uncontacted Indians in Brazil seen from the air, May 2008 © Gleison Miranda/FUNAI

From Live Science:

Decades ago, when I was a bright-eyed undergraduate student, I saw a documentary called "Dead Birds" in my cultural anthropology class about the Dani of New Guinea, and it changed my life.

Brought up in a nice, middle-class, white American family, I had no idea that there were people in the world who still lived in huts, kept pigs, and spent their days on high, swaying platforms looking for the enemy. And when the enemy came screaming over the hill, wearing elaborate feathered headdresses and carrying spears, I was stunned into becoming an anthropologist, right then and there.

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Color E-Paper That Rivals the Real Thing

Color scheme: A prototype in-plane electrophoretic display consisting of 1,000 pixels. Credit: Philips

From Technology Review:

Turning pixels on their side may finally mean high-quality color electronic paper.

Despite Amazon's promise to reinvent the newspaper and magazine industry with its new, large-screen Kindle DX electronic reader, some people may be reluctant to embrace the technology until full-color displays are possible. A new approach developed by Philips now offers fresh hope for color e-paper displays that are so bright and clear that even traditional liquid crystal displays (LCDs) will pale in comparison.

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Wolfram Alpha Search Engine Is Now Online

The Wolfram Alpha Search Engine is now online, and can be found here.

Heavy use of the search engine has caused it to send back a message that it has exceeded its "user limits" .... but otherwise it appears to be a cool and practical search engine.

Telescopes Poised To Spot Air-Breathing Aliens

Image: The next generation of space telescopes will be capable of detecting "biosignatures" in the light from planets orbiting other stars (Image: G. Bacon STSCI / ESA / NASA)

From New Scientist:

SIGNS of life on planets beyond our own solar system may soon be in our sights. Experiments and calculations presented at an astrobiology meeting last week reveal how the coming generation of space telescopes will for the first time be capable of detecting "biosignatures" in the light from planets orbiting other stars.

Any clues about life on these exoplanets will have to come from the tiny fraction of the parent star's light that interacts with the planet on its journey towards Earth. The Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have both detected gases such as carbon dioxide and water vapour in the atmospheres of a handful of gas-giant exoplanets as they pass in front of their parent stars. The gas molecules absorb light at characteristic wavelengths, and this shows up as dark lines in the spectrum of the starlight which has been filtered through the planet's atmosphere. But seeing evidence of life - so-called biosignatures - in the spectrum of worlds small enough to be rocky like Earth is beyond the sensitivity of these instruments.

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Sleep Can Improve Your Word Power

From The Telegraph:

Reading bedtime stories to children could help to improve their vocabulary, new research suggests.

Psychologists have discovered that a good night's sleep plays a crucial role in allowing the brain to store and remember new words learned during the day.

People who were asked to learn a set of fictitious words were better at remembering them after they had spent time asleep than if they were asked to recall the words just a few hours after being taught them.

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Melting Ice Could Cause Gravity Shift

The disintegration of the Antarctic ice sheet could cause catastrophic flooding on the east and west coasts of America. AFP

From The Independent:

The melting of one of the world's largest ice sheets would alter the Earth's field of gravity and even its rotation in space so much that it would cause sea levels along some coasts to rise faster than the global average, scientists said yesterday.

The rise in sea levels would be highest on the west and east coasts of North America where increases of 25 per cent more than the global average would cause catastrophic flooding in cities such as New York, Washington DC and San Francisco.

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Star Crust Is Ten Billion Times Stronger Than Steel

The outer crusts of so-called neutron stars (above, a neutron star in an artist's conception) are ten billion times stronger than steel—making it the strongest known material in the universe, scientists said in May 2009. Image by Casey Reed, courtesy of Penn State

From National Geographic News:

Move over, Superman.

The Man of Steel has nothing on the collapsed cores of massive snuffed-out stars, scientists say.

A new computer model suggests that the outer crusts of so-called neutron stars are the strongest known material in the universe.

To determine the breaking point of a neutron star's crust, the team modeled magnetic field stresses and crust deformation for a small region of the star's surface.

The results showed that the crust of a neutron star can withstand a breaking strain up to ten billion times the pressure it would take to snap steel.

"It sounds dramatic, but it's true," said study team member Charles Horowitz of Indiana University.

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