"(BBC)Scientists have obtained a fascinating new insight into the evolution of humans and our ability to walk. It comes from the fossilised bones of a foot that were discovered in Ethiopia and dated to be 3.4 million years old.

The researchers say they do not have enough remains to identify the species of hominin, or human ancestor, from which the right foot came.

But they tell Nature journal that just the shape of the bones shows the creature could walk upright at times.

The fossil haul consists of eight elements from the forefoot - bones such as metatarsals and phalanges.

The specimens were pulled from clay sediments at Burtele in the central Afar region, about 520km north-east of the capital Addis Ababa.

It is a significant discovery because it demonstrates there was more than one pre-human species living in East Africa between three and four million years ago, each with its own method of moving around.

The other creature was the famous "Lucy" animal (Australopithecus afarensis), whose remains were first identified in the Afar in the 1970s.

Lucy's body was built for walking. Her big toe was aligned with the other four digits of the foot, and she had a human-like arch that allowed for very efficient locomotion.

The owner of the partial foot from Burtele was not afarensis; that can be said definitively.

The fossils indicate it had no arch and the big toe was opposed to the other digits, enabling the animal to grasp branches in a tree.

But the fact this creature could and would walk on the ground is evidenced by the nature of the bone joints. These were arranged such that the foot could push off, or toe-off - something only humans do as they walk, and something flat-footed apes cannot achieve.

"If you look at the lateral metatarsal head along with the proximal toe bone, the phalanx - that particular joint is really unique in hominids," explained team member Dr Bruce Latimer of Case Western Reserve University, US.

"You can see it's a very different kind of a joint, because when you toe-off and push forward in that last phase of walking, your toes are highly flexed. In order to achieve that, you have to change the base of the phalanx and the metatarsal head - you have to change both sides of the joint. And it's a highly characteristic type of change that we can pick out immediately," he told the BBC.

The scientists can only speculate as to identity of the Burtele species. Without skull and teeth elements, a formal classification is impossible.

The team says the animal's morphology is reminiscent in some respects to a 4.4-million-year-old creature known as Ardipithecus ramidus. Although, again, it is not ramidus.

"It may be a relic species that was lingering around until 3.4 or 3.3 million years ago, and which had its origins way back in Ardipithecus ramidus times," suggested team leader Dr Yohannes Haile-Selassie.

"But obviously we cannot put it into the Ardipithecus genus or call it a ramidus species because we do not have any craniodental elements associated with this foot.

"We've kept digging at the Burtele site; we have a few isolated teeth, but that's all," the Cleveland Museum of Natural History curator told BBC News.

It is, though, a remarkable thought that there were these two very distinct species effectively rubbing shoulders with each other 3.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia.

The landmark Lucy specimen unearthed in 1974 was found at Hadar, about 50km from Burtele. Other remains of afarensis have been discovered closer still.

Dr Isabelle De Groote is a palaeoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum.

"I think this is really exciting," she said.

"We have so few foot remains, they so rarely preserve, that we tend to take great leaps through evolution where there are no specimens at all representing long periods of time," she commented.

"This new foot helps elucidate the process of how the bi-pedal foot evolved. We can see something of the sequence in how changes to bones occurred.""

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“The overheated, underappreciated runt of the solar system is finally getting some attention.

Mostly ignored since a brief fly-by in the 1970s, Mercury, our solar system’s smallest, swiftest planet, received a longer house call last March: NASA’s $450 million Messenger probe, which achieved orbit, a tricky feat never before attempted.

Now, after poring over 100,000 images and reams of other Messenger data, space scientists have achieved consensus: Mercury is one weird world.

It is radically unlike the other rocky bodies of our solar system — Venus, Mars, Earth, the moon, and the moons of other planets. Its core is too big; its surface too scrunched. It looks shriveled, like a liposuction patient left with too much skin. It contains too much iron. Its internal structure — how the planet is built — is confounding. Its magnetic field is out of whack, asymmetrical. And its surface is strange, a jagged, ragged landscape of soaring escarpments, snaking faults, half-buried “ghost craters,” dead volcanos and mysterious pit-marked “hollows.”

“It’s been really spectacularly baffling,” said MIT’s Maria Zuber, of the Messenger data, which scientists reported on in two scientific articles and 57 presentations at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last week.

Mercury was long viewed as an inert lump, but Zuber and her colleagues now say it is still cooling and still shrinking, pushing up scarps — steep cliffs — that run for hundreds of miles. Not long ago (geologically speaking), volcanoes threw up showers of magma, which hardened into huge plains. There’s also evidence of mysterious explosions of interior gases that rocked the surface and left strange, pitted scars.

Massive interior forces have pushed and tilted huge stretches of the surface. Mercury’s biggest crater — the Caloris Basin, some 900 miles wide — has been so uplifted that much of its floor is taller than its rim. No other crater in the solar system looks like it.

“Everything is intriguing on the surface of Mercury,” said Nancy Chabot of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, which built Messenger. “It has landforms that we’ve never seen on the rest of the terrestrial planets.”

Mercury might even experience Mercury-quakes. “I would bet some of those faults are still active,” said Messenger’s lead scientist, Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution for Science.

And despite being the closest planet to the sun, it apparently has buried water ice surviving beneath permanent shadows thrown by craters. “We’re almost certain of it,” Solomon said.

‘Back to the drawing board’

Just how Mercury was formed is another baffler. It is heavy with iron and sulfur — much more than Earth contains. But all of the rocky inner planets coalesced from the same disk of material. So why is Mercury so strange? “It’s like children in the same family,” Zuber said. “Same genes, same environment, yet they turn out so different.”

Some theorists say a giant space rock smashed into Mercury early on, ripping off a thick outer layer. But Messenger data throw that theory into chaos. Sulfur and other “volatiles” survive on the surface; a huge collision should have wiped them clear…”

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This is a kind of lovely example of how different cultures are, and yet how similar individuals are no matter where they're from.

-- Follow the link for the rest of the photos. =)

SEE HERE

You don't like me - The Sonixx (official music video) from Brokenwood Prod on Vimeo.

"(BBC) Tiny shrimp-like creatures called copepods break through the ocean's surface and leap through the air to escape predators, US scientists say.

They have been investigating how the brightly-coloured Pontellid copepods, which live close to the surface, are so abundant yet so conspicuous to fish.

Writing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the scientists say copepods travel further in air than in water.

Predators are also left confused about where they will land, they say.

Almost all commercially important fish, including cod, pollock and whiting, feed on copepods.

There are reports from the late-19th Century of copepods breaking through the water surface but observers at the time thought this was to allow them to moult.

A later report proposed jumping was part of an escape from predators but was not confirmed.

Dr Brad Gemmell of the University of Texas in Austin, who is behind the new study, said there had been little research on predator-prey interaction around the few millimetres below the ocean's surface, a "unique and important habitat".

He said he found it "paradoxical" that Pontellid copepods, in particular, were so abundant yet lived where they ought to be an easy target for fish.

Unlike other species of copepods, they do not migrate down to darker waters where they can hide during daylight hours.

Instead, they stay close to the surface and are often bright blue or green to protect them from UV radiation. They are also 3mm (0.1 inches) long, larger than other species.

This, said Dr Gemmell, would suggest they should have a poor survival rate.

However, his research shows they have the ability to jump out of the water, often travelling 10 to 20 times their own body length through the air, to escape hungry fish and get out of their perspective field.

The team's calculations show copepods use up to 39% of their kinetic energy to break through the surface tension of the water. Flying fish, by comparison, use less than 0.07%.

This means copepods have to balance the risk of being eaten with the cost to their fitness by avoiding unnecessary escapes, the paper suggests.

They also have to make sure they travel far enough to avoid being chased or coming under another attack.

It is suggested in the paper that certain species of copepods may have special adaptations to make it easier for them to jump out of the water, although further investigation is needed.

One suggestion is that the body surface of jumping copepods is more resistant to water than species that stay underwater.

Another is that they are able to inject chemicals to reduce the surface tension of the water by three to six times."

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-- DO WANT to see. Aliens similarities, or not.

-- Damn! That's why I always try and stay away from traveling in packs on a highway. Always try and have tons of space around me, but this nobody could see coming, or do anything about.

“(BBC) The remains of what may be a previously unknown human species have been identified in southern China.

The bones, which represent at least five individuals, have been dated to between 11,500 and 14,500 years ago.

But scientists are calling them simply the Red Deer Cave people, after one of the sites where they were unearthed.

The team has told the PLoS One journal that far more detailed analysis of the fossils is required before they can be ascribed to a new human lineage.

"We're trying to be very careful at this stage about definitely classifying them," said study co-leader Darren Curnoe from the University of New South Wales, Australia.

"One of the reasons for that is that in the science of human evolution or palaeoanthropology, we presently don't have a generally agreed, biological definition for our own species (Homo sapiens), believe it or not. And so this is a highly contentious area," he told BBC News.

Much of the material has been in Chinese collections for some time but has only recently been subjected to intense investigation.

The remains of some of the individuals come from Maludong (or Red Deer Cave), near the city of Mengzi in Yunnan Province. A further skeleton was discovered at Longlin, in neighbouring Guangxi Province.

The skulls and teeth from the two locations are very similar to each other, suggesting they are from the same population.

But their features are quite distinct from what you might call a fully modern human, says the team. Instead, the Red Deer Cave people have a mix of archaic and modern characteristics.

In general, the individuals had rounded brain cases with prominent brow ridges. Their skull bones were quite thick. Their faces were quite short and flat and tucked under the brain, and they had broad noses.

Their jaws jutted forward but they lacked a modern-human-like chin. Computed Tomography (X-ray) scans of their brain cavities indicate they had modern-looking frontal lobes but quite archaic-looking anterior, or parietal, lobes. They also had large molar teeth.

Dr Curnoe and colleagues put forward two possible scenarios in their PLoS One paper for the origin of the Red Deer Cave population.

One posits that they represent a very early migration of a primitive-looking Homo sapiens that lived separately from other forms in Asia before dying out…”

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“(Nat. Geo.) China's energy use, production, and ambitions are best captured by superlatives: The country is the world's largest energy consumer, and leading source of greenhouse gas emissions.

To power its tremendous economic growth, China has called on every fuel, every technology. It is the largest producer of coal and its greatest consumer, and yet China has more nuclear reactors under construction than any other nation. Its growing appetite for oil has kept gasoline prices high around the globe. And yet China's commitment to wind and solar power is so outsized that its young industries are now among the largest in the world.

When China's expected next president, Vice President Xi Jinping, meets this week in Washington, D.C. with President Barack Obama, energy disputes—solar industry subsidies, China's oil imports from Iran—may well be on the agenda.

But what does China's rapidly growing and changing energy landscape really look like?

Photographer Toby Smith of London spent two years working to gain access to China's new world of energy, in an effort to capture images rarely seen in the West. He sought to document not only the sources of the pollution that darkens the skies of Beijing and other cities, but the efforts to forge a cleaner energy future.

This blast furnace within a Baogang Group steel plant in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, is emblematic of China's emissions problems as the world leader in steelmaking, one of the most energy-intensive industries. In the past decade, China's steel industry has grown at the breakneck pace of 17 percent per year. Yet efficiency has improved since the 1990s, thanks in part to adoption of waste-heat recovery technology and a process known as top-pressure recovery for blast furnaces, which involves recycling fuel to produce electricity.

China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao pledged to use an "iron hand" to push efficiency improvements further, not least of all by forcing the closure of many small, inefficient steel mills. The country's latest five-year plan, for 2011-2015, estimates the Chinese steel industry will see annual growth slow to 5 to 6 percent.

—Josie Garthwaite”

-- Great slide-show. Follow the link for the rest of the images!

SEE HERE

“Thousands of normally solitary wolf spiders have blanketed an Australian farm after fleeing a rising flood.

Reuters reports that the flooding has forced more than 8,000 Australian (human) residents from their homes in the city of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. But for every temporarily displaced person, it appears several spiders have moved in to fill the void.

"What we've seen here is a type of wolf spider," Owen Seeman, an arachnid expert at Queensland Museum, told Reuters. "They are trying to hide away (from the waters)."

The Australian Museum's entomology collections manager Graham Milledge told Reuters that there's even a term for the phenomenon, "ballooning," and that it is typical behavior for spiders forced to escape rising waters.

You can watch a video here of researchers on the hunt for ballooning spiders from the safety of a hot air balloon.

Thankfully for local residents, the occupying arachnids are not likely to set up permanent residence, a la the 1977 William Shatner clunker "Kingdom of the Spiders." Weather reports say the flood waters in Wagga Wagga have begun receding, meaning that locals will soon be returning to their homes and the wolf spiders will also be returning to their natural underground habitats.

And it turns out the spiders are actually doing quite a bit of good while setting up shop above ground. The spiders are feasting on mosquitoes and other insect populations that have boomed with the increased moisture brought about by the rising waters.

"The amount of mosquitoes around would be incredible because of all this water," Taronga Zoo spider keeper Brett Finlayson told the Sydney Morning Herald. "The spiders don't pose any harm at all. They are doing us a favor. They are actually helping us out."

As amazing as this display may be, it's not the first time photographers have captured massive displaced spider migrations. One of the most famous pictures of 2011, above, showed millions of spiders and other insects in Pakistan that had formed massive web clusters in trees to escape rising floodwaters.

"It was largely spiders," Russell Watkins, U.K. Department for International Development, told National Geographic. "Certainly, when we were there working, if you stood under one of these trees, dozens of small, very, very tiny spiders would just be dropping down onto your head."”

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“For the first time, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have detected all phases of thermonuclear burning in a neutron star. The star, located close to the center of the galaxy in the globular cluster Terzan 5, is a “model burster,” says Manuel Linares, a postdoc at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Linares and his colleagues from MIT, McGill University, the University of Minnesota and the University of Amsterdam analyzed X-ray observations from NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite, and discovered the star is the first of its kind to burst the way that models predict. What’s more, the discovery may help explain why such a model star has not been detected until now. A paper to be published in the March 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal details the group’s findings.

“These are extreme laboratories,” Linares says. “We can study fundamental physics by looking at what happens on and around the surface of neutron stars.”

A white-hot environment

Neutron stars typically arise from the collapse of massive stars. These stellar remnants are made almost entirely of neutrons, and are incredibly dense — about the mass of the sun, but squeezed into a sphere just a few miles wide. For the past three decades, astrophysicists have studied neutron stars to understand how ultradense matter behaves.

In particular, researchers have focused on the extremely volatile surfaces of neutron stars. In a process called accretion, white-hot plasma pulled from a neighboring star rains down on the surface of a neutron star with incredible force — equivalent to 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of matter slamming into an area the size of a coin every second. As more plasma falls, it forms a layer of fuel on the neutron star’s surface that builds to a certain level, then explodes in a thermonuclear fusion reaction. This explosion can be detected as X-rays in space: The bigger the explosion, the greater the X-ray intensity, which can be measured as a spike in satellite data.

Researchers have developed models to predict how a neutron star should burst, based on how much plasma the star is attracting to its surface. For example, as more and more plasma falls on a neutron star, explosions should occur more frequently, resulting in more X-ray spikes. Models have predicted that at the highest mass-accretion rates, plasma falls at such a high rate that thermonuclear fusion is stable, and occurs continuously, without giant explosions.

However, in the last several decades, X-ray observations from nearly 100 exploding neutron stars have failed to validate these theoretical predictions.

“Since the late 1970s, we mostly saw bursts at low mass-accretion rates, and few or no bursts at all at high mass-accretion rates,” Linares says. “It should be happening, but for three decades, we didn’t see it. That’s the puzzle.”

Spikes in the data

In late 2010, the RXTE satellite detected X-ray spikes from a binary star system — two stars bound by gravity and orbiting close to each other — in Terzan 5. Linares and his colleagues obtained data from the satellite and analyzed the data for characteristic spikes…”

READ HERE

-- That is all. Enjoy.

From the blog of Raul Oaida, who is behind this project:“2001: A Brick Odyssey

This is the full story on how the Space Shuttle took flight once more.

I've always been profoundly inspired by spaceflight, the Lego Shuttle was the only space program I could afford.

The story begins in mid-November 2011 with me trying to find someone to support a rocketry project of mine entitled 'October Sky', I found Steve Sammartino on twitter one night and asked and for his Skype in a PM, him thinking I was another person from the business world accepted my request.

We chated a bit and he wasn't too sure about my October Sky, then I mentioned one of the things in my 'to-do' list would be a high altitude balloon experiment.

I showed him my previous work (steam engines, a jet engine and and some rocketry)he was impressed by my passion & determination and decided to fund my cosmic experience.

We had to send something up, so after some debate Steve came up with the Lego Space Shuttle as a payload, which was a brilliant idea!. He is also teaching me valuable skills and we are progressing from something small (the Lego Shuttle), to something way bigger (Top Secret), so stay tunned!

The biggest problem was getting a flight clearance, in my country (Romania) there is A LOT of bureaucracy and a 45 day (minimum) waiting period and even then there would be next to no chance for me, a teenager getting such a thing.

After some research I found out every EU country has different regulations for this things, Germany was by far the best with my father being there for work.

I only got all the equipment through mail right before Christmas, on the 21st-22nd I built the rig and on the 23rd left for Germany.

The first days had terrible conditions, the jet streams kept dropping my shuttle into the Czech Republic, and on one particular day the prediction software was indicating a 350km Est landing site (far far away!).

On 31st of December things looked better (250km S-E), it was a now or never moment!

We got everything in the car and found a small muddy field near Lauda-Königshofen to deploy our gear.

We were in a big hurry to launch within the flight window appointed so we quickly filled the balloon, tied the parachute, payload and released it into the heavens.

After this I checked with my laptop in the chase-car to see if it's sending data and we started getting the first position reports (every 10 minutes). After about 30 minutes we headed off in the general direction of the balloon losing contact at 18000m (GPS signal limit). I waited anxiously to re-gain contact which happened in about 1 hour from the loss of contact, only it was 200km away by now.

A couple more position reports and it was on the ground 240km S-E in a very remote densely forested area of S-E Germany (2-3 houses here and there).

We passed by the shuttle a couple of times before noticing it in the snow, it was undamaged.

After playing the video we were in total awe, I still find it hard to belive that it was actually up there!

Equipment used:

1600g Weather Ballon.

Rocketmodel parachute - slowing things down on the descent.

Spot GPS - for recovery.

GoPro Hero - video camera.

Kodak Zx1 - video camera which took shit images I couldn't even use.

New Trent - external battery for the GoPro (broke down before leaving for Germany) .

Handwarmers - keepin' it warm at -50 Celsius.

40mm Sytrofoam - building the box.

Fishingwire - attached the shuttle by 5 wires.

LED Beacon - in case of night recovery.

Balsa wood - made the camera arm from it to obtain that filming angle.

And of course: Lego Shuttle model 3367.”

READ HERE

“(BBC) A collection of fossils described as a breakthrough in the study of evolution is set to be unveiled.

The fossils, discovered in the Borders, are going on display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

The find is said to unearth a "missing chapter" of the evolution story and overturn a long-held theory about evolution on Earth.

Scientist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough described the discovery as "wonderful and exciting".

Romer's Gap, named after the American palaeontologist Alfred Sherwood Romer, is a gap in the fossil record, showing little evidence of life on land between around 345 and 360 million years ago.

The gap led some palaeontologists to conclude that there were low levels of oxygen during that time, which limited evolution on land.

However, the newly-unveiled fossils suggest that a wide diversity of amphibians, plants, fish and invertebrates all existed during the 15 million-year period and are said to shed light on a period that previously had been almost blank.

The fossils were unearthed by palaeontologist Stan Wood following a 20-year search.

One notable amphibian specimen has been nicknamed Ribbo due to its prominent and well-preserved vertebrate structure.

It has provided scientists with enough information to interpret what the creature may have looked like as it roamed the Tweed basin around 350 million years ago.

Nick Fraser, keeper of natural sciences at National Museums Scotland, said: "This is a real 'eureka' moment in palaeontology.

"These fossils aren't much to look at in and of themselves, but they may prove to be profoundly important in advancing our understanding of the earliest development of land-dwelling life as we know it today.

"For that reason, we are tremendously excited to be able to give people the chance to see these fascinating objects first-hand."

Evolution's Missing Chapter runs from Tuesday until 29 April.

Sir David Attenborough said: "One is accustomed these days to hear of sensational new fossil finds being made in (other) parts of the world.

"But to learn of a site in this country, which must surely be counted among the most extensively explored, in geological terms, is wonderful and exciting."”

READ HERE

“(BBC) A Nasa spacecraft has detected oxygen around one of Saturn's icy moons, Dione.

The discovery supports a theory that suggests all of the moons near Saturn and Jupiter might have oxygen around them.

Researchers say that their finding increases the likelihood of finding the ingredients for life on one of the moons orbiting gas giants.

The study has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

According to co-author Andrew Coates of University College London, Dione has no liquid water and so does not have the conditions to support life. But it is possible that other moons of Jupiter and Saturn do.

"Some of the other moons have liquid oceans and so it is worth looking more closely at them for signs of life," Prof Coates said.

The discovery was made using the Cassini spacecraft, which flew by Dione nearly two years ago. Instruments on board the unmanned probe detected a thin layer of oxygen around the moon, so thin that scientists prefer to call it an "exosphere" rather than an atmosphere.

But the discovery is important because it suggests there is a process at work around the solar system's gas giants, Saturn and Jupiter, in which oxygen is released from their icy satellites.

It seems that highly charged particles from the planets' powerful radiation belts split the water in the ice into hydrogen and oxygen.

Dione's sister moon, Enceladus is thought to harbour a liquid ocean below its icy surface. The same is thought to be true of Europa, Callisto and Ganymede which orbit Jupiter.

Prof Coates is among a group of scientists lobbying the European Space Agency to send an orbiter to explore Jupiter's icy moons - known as the Juice mission.

"These are fascinating places to look for signs of life," he said.

As is Titan, Saturn's largest satellite. Its nitrogen and methane atmosphere is reminiscent of the early Earth, according to Prof Coates.

"It may be an Earth waiting to happen as the outer Solar System warms up," he said.

Nasa is developing a proposal to send a landing craft, or lander, to float on one of the planet's oily lakes.”

READ HERE