Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    Humans were kissing at least 4500 years ago, reveal ancient texts

    A carving at Luxor Temple in Egypt depicting Pharaoh Ramses and Queen Nefertiti embracingAgung Parameswara/Getty Images
    Sexual kissing was practised in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt at least 4500 years ago, according to a review of ancient texts.
    There is considerable debate about when humans began kissing in a romantic way. Many sources say the earliest evidence of sexual kissing is in Sanskrit texts written in what is now India around 3500 years ago. Some researchers have suggested that sexual kissing spread from there around the world, and the conquests of Alexander the Great are often said to have played a part in this spread.
    The idea that sexual kissing spread around the world from one place has, in turn, been linked to changes in the spread of diseases that can be transmitted orally. For instance, a paper published last year suggested that the herpes simplex virus 1, which causes cold sores, became more much common because of “the advent of sexual-romantic kissing”.Advertisement
    But evidence from Mesopotamia and Egypt suggests sexual kissing arose independently in many places and didn’t suddenly spread around the world, says Troels Pank Arbøll at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. “It shows it was known in a much wider area in the ancient world than the people formulating these theories have considered,” he says.
    This has been known for decades by the few experts who can read the cuneiform writing system used by several ancient civilisations, but not more widely, says Arbøll. “In the general scientific community, people were not aware of this evidence because it’s not cited anywhere.”
    So, Arbøll and his wife, biologist Sophie Lund Rasmussen at the University of Oxford, decided to write a paper describing the overlooked evidence.
    While kissing is rarely referred to in Mesopotamian texts, those mentions show it was considered an ordinary part of romantic intimacy in ancient times, says Arbøll. For instance, one text from around 3800 years ago describes how a married woman came close to being unfaithful after a kiss. Another text from the same time describes an unmarried woman vowing to avoid kissing and having sex with a man.
    “Considering the geographical distribution, I think [sexual kissing] must have had multiple origins,” says Arbøll. “It’s not something that originated in a single place.”
    He and Rasmussen also point out that there is tentative evidence that modern humans and Neanderthals kissed, or at least exchanged saliva in some way. What is more, bonobos also engage in mouth-to-mouth sexual kissing. So it is possible that people have been kissing sexually for much longer than written history suggests. “I think it’s very likely that it goes far back,” says Arbøll.

    However, a 2015 study by William Jankowiak at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his colleagues found no evidence of sexual kissing in hunter-gatherer societies.
    “My hunch is that kissing arose or was discovered amongst the elite in complex societies,” says Jankowiak. The elite were able to pursue pleasure and turn sex into an erotic encounter, he says.
    Jankowiak did find that sexual kissing is more common in cold climes. This may be because in places where people’s bodies are covered in clothes, the face is the sole zone available to touch, he says.

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    in Humans

    Stone Age blueprints are the oldest architectural plans ever found

    Aerial view of a desert kite from Jebel az-Zilliyat, Saudi ArabiaO. Barge, CNRS
    Architects drew up highly precise plans of vast stone-walled hunting traps 9000 years ago, representing the oldest known architectural plans to scale in human history.
    The plans were etched into massive stone tablets that have been recently discovered close to the elaborate traps, known as desert kites, which span such wide distances that their shapes are only recognisable from the sky. The findings confirm that Neolithic humans had an “underestimated mental mastery” of landscapes and space, well before they became literate, says Rémy Crassard at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
    “There’s no doubt that these Homo sapiens had the same degree of intelligence that we do, but this is the first time we actually have concrete proof of their spatial perception – in both these gigantic kites and now also in their very precise corresponding plans,” he says. “It shows to what extent this way of thinking was anchored into their culture.”Advertisement
    Kites in Saudi Arabia and Jordan feature funnelling lines up to 5 kilometres long and up to 10 pointed branches leading to pits as much as 4 metres deep. Named by aeroplane pilots who first discovered them from the air in the 1920s and thought they looked like toy kites, the structures probably lured gazelles or other wild prey into narrower parts of the structure where they would get cornered or fall, says Wael Abu-Azizeh at the French Institute for the Near East.
    A stone at Jibal al-Khashabiyeh, Jordan, engraved with a plan of a desert kiteSEBAP & Crassard et al. 2023 PLOS ONE
    But despite the complexity of these Stone Age structures, the rare artistic representations of them found so far have been nothing more than rough abstract sketches. Scientists believed that the oldest true architectural plans that were at least intended to be to scale dated to Mesopotamian civilisations 2300 years ago.
    In March 2015, Crassard and his colleagues accidentally came across an 80-centimetre-tall, 92-kilogram limestone tablet in an excavated campsite near a 9000-year-old kite in Jordan, with detailed architectural plans etched into it. They could hardly believe it, but, even more surprisingly, they stumbled across a second kite plan only three months later, this time etched into a 3.8-metre-tall sandstone boulder that had fallen from a cliff near a pair of 7500-year-old kites in Saudi Arabia.
    “These were really emotional moments for us in our scientific careers,” says Crassard. “Finding one was already exceptional, but finding two was even more exceptional. We were yelling and dancing around!”
    Recognising similarities with the kites nearby, the researchers used computer modelling to mathematically compare the engraved images with satellite images of 69 kites. They found that the plans etched into stone were “surprisingly realistic and accurate” depictions of actual kites within a distance of 1 to 2 kilometres, says Crassard. The two plans had been created at scales of 1:175 and 1:425 and even included three-dimensional pitting to represent the kites’ pit traps.
    The plans might have helped build the huge, complex structures, but they might also have guided hunters to understand how best to use them, says Abu-Azizeh.

    That seems like the most plausible explanation, says Sam Smith at Oxford Brookes University, UK, who wasn’t involved in the study. Like football coaches drawing their tactics on a white board, members of the Neolithic community may have used the scale images to communicate with each other about group hunting strategies. “I can easily imagine that these engravings would have formed a vital element of planning,” he says.
    The fact that they were engraved in “such a durable medium” suggests they may have been intended to last for future generations, he adds. “New members of the community, or hunting party, would not have any real way to comprehend the kites without depictions such as these,” says Smith.
    How these ancient engineers attained such geometric accuracy without modern tools like GPS or a tacheometer is perplexing, says Olivier Barge, also at the CNRS. “We don’t know how they did it.”

    Topics:archaeology/architecture More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    The first radiation belt outside the solar system has been spotted

    For the first time, astronomers have spotted a band of radiation surrounding an object outside our solar system.

    A belt of energetic electrons encircles a Jupiter-sized body about 18 light-years from Earth, astronomers report May 15 in Nature. As the electrons move, they radiate radio waves. Such radiation belts give insight into the shape of a cosmic object’s magnetic field, its interior structure and maybe even whether it has moons.

    In our solar system, every planet with a worldwide magnetic field has radiation belts. Earth has the Van Allen belts, rings of electrons captured from the sun (SN: 3/19/14). Jupiter’s radiation belts get most of their particles from the volcanic moon Io. In these cases, the planet’s magnetic field traps electrons in a bubble around the planet, like fireflies in a jar.

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    To find similar belts outside the solar system, astronomer Melodie Kao and colleagues observed a Jupiter-sized object called LSR J1835+3259 with a network of 39 radio dishes spanning from Hawaii to Germany. Together, the dishes effectively created a radio telescope about as wide as Earth, letting the team zero in on the object’s environment.

    The team spotted a belt that looks a lot like those of Jupiter’s but 10 million times as bright, says Kao, of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The object is nearly 80 times as massive as Jupiter, making it either a diminutive star or a massive brown dwarf, a dim starlike body not hefty enough to sustain hydrogen fusion.

    One big mystery is where the electrons come from. The object doesn’t orbit a star, and it doesn’t seem to emit flares. A volcanic satellite would fit the bill, Kao says, but that’s still speculative.

    Knowing that LSR J1835+3259 has a radiation belt will help researchers interpret data from exoplanets in the future, even if astronomers can’t see such belts directly.

    “Exoplanet magnetism is truly at its infancy,” Kao says. “Until we can characterize exoplanet magnetic fields, we’ll miss entire segments of their life stories.” More

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    A reappearing supernova offers a new measure of the universe’s expansion

    A cosmic camera hog is helping astronomers figure out the rate of the universe’s expansion.

    Images of the supernova Refsdal have popped up multiple times in the constellation Leo, thanks to light from the stellar explosion wending its way through the gravitational field of a cluster of galaxies. Analyzing delays between Refsdal’s appearances provides a new measurement of the Hubble constant, researchers report online May 11 in Science. That constant describes how quickly galaxies are flying away from each other as the universe expands. The new measurement is now contributing to debate over how fast the universe is expanding.

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    Supernovas are the massive explosions that come at the ends of some stars’ life cycles. They’re among the most violent and brilliant events in the universe. In 2014, astronomer Patrick Kelly of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis discovered the Refsdal supernova in images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

    Instead of a single burst in the sky, Kelly says, “We saw four images of it.” They formed a pattern known as an Einstein Cross. The cross resulted because the gravity of a cluster of galaxies between us and Refsdal distorts space and time to create a gravitational lens that deflects the light on its way to us.

    The location and arrival times of the images we see depend on three things: the distribution of matter in the galaxy cluster that makes up the lens; the distances between Earth, the lens and the supernova; and the Hubble constant. The combined effect on the light from Refsdal is so strong that in 2014, Kelly predicted that one more image from the supernova would be delayed by another year. Sure enough, light from Refsdal showed up in the sky again in 2015 (SN: 1/5/16).

    The new calculations from Kelly and colleagues greatly improve a 2018 measurement of the Hubble constant using Refsdal’s appearances, putting it at about 66.6 kilometers per second per megaparsec, based on gravitational lens models that most closely matched their observations. “The meticulous modeling of the [lens] system, along with the gravitational forces it generates, have allowed [the team] to decrease the margin of error in estimating the Hubble constant by more than a factor of two,” says astronomer Vivian Miranda of Stony Brook University in New York who was not involved in the new study.

    Studies that estimate the Hubble constant in other ways don’t agree well with each other. One method that relies on ancient light left over from early cosmic times suggests that the universe is expanding at about 67 km/s/Mpc. That’s close to the value Kelly’s group found. But an expansion estimate that uses the distances to supernovas based on their brightness comes in around 74 km/s/Mpc (SN 7/30/19).

    “The predicted value of the Hubble constant is highly sensitive to the dynamics of the universe, both in the distant past and the recent present,” Miranda says. “If our understanding of the universe is accurate, all the various methods of measuring the Hubble constant should align.”

    Settling the discrepancy between different values of the Hubble constant is crucial to explaining things like dark energy, which appears to be accelerating the expansion of the universe (SN: 3/21/98).

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    It will take another supernova and lens to make a big leap in precision over the Refsdal study. A recurring image of a supernova in the constellation Cetus that’s expected to appear in 2037 might do the trick (SN: 9/13/21). In the meantime, Kelly says, further refinements in the model of the gravitational lens that caused the multiplied Refsdal images could improve estimates of the Hubble constant somewhat.

    “This is the first example of this kind of measurement,” Kelly says. “It sets the stage for additional measurements and increased precision,” which could deepen astronomers’ insights into our ever-expanding universe. More

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    in Humans

    Your body wash may make you more attractive to mosquitoes

    Mosquitoes may pick up on the fragrances in body washesbrizmaker/iStockphoto/Getty Images
    The body wash you use in the shower may react with your natural odour to make you more attractive to mosquitoes.
    Mosquitoes use various methods to find a target for their next blood meal, such as detecting an animal’s body heat, odour and the carbon dioxide they emit.
    To learn if the body wash we use may have an effect, Clément Vinauger at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and his colleagues selected varieties from the brands Dial, Dove, Native and Simple Truth.Advertisement
    First, they placed two strips of nylon on one of the forearms of four volunteers and wrapped that area in foil, to collect the participants’ natural odour.
    Next, the researchers washed part of each participants’ other forearm with about 1 gram of one of the body washes for 10 seconds, before rinsing it with water for a further 10 seconds. They then similarly applied two strips of nylon and foil to these forearms, to collect the wash’s scent. The researchers repeated this with the three other body washes.
    One hour after each sample was taken, they took two strips – one from each of the body wash-exposed areas and one from the body wash-free areas – for chemical analysis while the other body wash-free and body wash-exposed strips were put in separate cups.
    The researchers placed these inside cages with 16 to 25 female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which can transmit yellow fever, that were free to visit either cup.
    The Simple Truth body wash appeared to increase the attractiveness of all of the participants, measured by the number of times the mosquitoes landed on their body wash-exposed strips compared with their body wash-free strips. The Dove wash had a similar effect, but the increase in attractiveness was only pronounced for three of the participants.
    Dial’s body wash similarly made the participants more attractive to mosquitoes, but to a lesser extent than Simple Truth’s or Dove’s.
    In contrast, the mosquitoes tended to avoid the strips washed in the Native body wash, but displayed a particularly strong aversion towards one participant’s Native-washed strip.
    This suggests the body washes’ fragrances and the participants’ individual odours combined to create a scent that was detectable to the mosquitoes.
    “Our study highlights the importance of the interaction between the specific soap chemicals and the body odour of each person in determining whether a person would become more or less attractive to mosquitoes after applying soap to their skin,” says Vinauger.
    The experiment’s chemical analysis suggests that the compounds benzaldehyde, benzyl benzoate and γ-nonalactone may repel mosquitoes.

    The researchers are planning to repeat their study with a larger group of participants and more body washes, and will investigate how long a wash’s potential mosquito-attracting or mosquito-repelling effects last after it is washed off the skin.
    “The discovery that personal care products may cause mosquitoes to be attracted or repelled by the user opens the door for developing user-friendly mosquito repellents,” says Walter Leal of the University of California, Davis.
    “The chemicals in such products may not directly affect mosquito behaviour, but they may disrupt the specific ratio of human emissions that attract mosquitoes,” he says. “Regardless of the mechanism, reducing human-mosquito interactions mitigates the transmission of vector-borne diseases.”
    New Scientist contacted the four body washes’ manufacturers for comment but received no reply prior to publication.

    Topics:Mosquitoes/Hygiene More

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    in Humans

    What is longtermism and why do its critics think it is dangerous?

    Shutterstock/sumikophoto
    IMAGINE a child, running barefoot through a forest, and a broken glass bottle buried just beneath the soil. What’s worse: that a present-day child steps on the shards, or that a child in 100 years from now does?
    This question, posed by philosopher Derek Parfit in the 1980s, was intended to clarify our moral obligations towards unborn generations. Knowingly risking harm to a future person, he argued, is just as bad whether it is today or in a century.
    Parfit’s ideas inspired a branch of moral philosophy called longtermism. It rests on three premises: future people matter, there could be a lot of them and we have the power to make their lives better or worse. Ensuring the future goes well should therefore be a key moral priority of our time.
    All of which seems reasonable, at first glance: it apparently promotes the universal values of stewardship, the duty to posterity and being a “good ancestor”. But longtermism has proven controversial, with some critics arguing that it is a “dangerous ideology” that permits or even encourages the suffering of people alive today.
    Is that fair? To make up your own mind, the first thing you need to know is that longtermism comes in different flavours. Many of the most strident criticisms focus on the implications of “strong longtermism”, a variant introduced in a 2021 paper by the University of Oxford’s Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill, which says that it should be the top moral priority of our time.
    This would have striking consequences for how money is spent in the real world. Indeed, it is already having an influence. … More

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    in Humans

    The mental tricks you can use in your lifelong pursuit of happiness

    SolStock/Getty Images
    MORE than 2300 years ago, Aristotle argued that happiness was the highest good. Later, the US founding fathers considered its pursuit to be an unalienable human right. These days, you will find countless books promising to reveal the secrets of a happy life. But have millennia of philosophical and scientific enquiry taught us anything about how to achieve that?
    First, let’s look at how people who study happiness measure it. One of the most common strategies is to ask people to rate statements such as “In most ways, my life is close to my ideal” and “If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing”. These aim to capture someone’s overall satisfaction with life, rather than their mood on a specific day.
    That makes sense, says Richard Layard, co-director of the Community Wellbeing Programme at the London School of Economics, because asking people to sum up their general contentment is often more practical than measuring their emotional state over an extended period. The other thing, says Layard, is that general contentment fits better with philosophical definitions of happiness as an overarching quality, as opposed to transient pleasures.
    Using this kind of scale, psychologists have attempted to identify the specific ingredients that contribute to happiness. Contrary to the idea that “money can’t buy happiness”, income does play a role: it is easier to feel pleased with your lot when you don’t have to worry about bills and can treat yourself to luxuries.
    We are also influenced by the riches of others – we are less happy if we know our neighbour is earning more than us. … More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    The James Webb telescope revealed surprise asteroids in the Fomalhaut star system

    The star Fomalhaut is ready for its close-up.

    Rings of dust encircle the young star in stunning new images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The photos offer a clearer view of the star system — already famous for previous images of a purported, now widely disputed, planet. Features in the system include an oddly cockeyed asteroid belt, an expanding cloud of debris from a possible planet collision, and other unidentified bits that hint at a dynamic and crowded environment, researchers report May 8 in Nature Astronomy. 

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    “It’s the first time we’re actually looking at the inner system, and it looks really different than I think anybody expected it to,” says astrophysicist Meredith MacGregor of the University of Colorado Boulder, who was not involved in the study. “The expectation was that there would be something like our solar system,” a place that is relatively mature and stable. “It really starts changing how we think about the dynamics of the [Fomalhaut] system.”

    Fomalhaut, a scant 25 light-years away, is a young star at the center of a rapidly evolving planetary system. It was once thought to host one of the first planets to be photographed outside of our solar system (SN: 11/13/08). However, the existence of the planet — dubbed Dagon — has long been in question (SN: 1/26/12). 

    The new JWST images add to the growing evidence that Dagon is actually a cloud of dust. A collision among planets probably explains the dusty feature, says András Gáspár, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “It is fading, and it is expanding in size,” he says, as it follows a trajectory consistent with dust blowing in the stellar wind from Fomalhaut. Those are all characteristics more indicative of dust clouds than planets.

    But just because Dagon hasn’t seemed to have panned out, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other planets lurking around Fomalhaut.

    Indirect evidence for other worlds comes from an unexpected asteroid belt, seen for the first time in the new images. The belt is tilted at a jaunty 23 degrees from everything else seen in orbit around the star.

    “This is a truly unique aspect of the system,” Gáspár says. The tilted belt, he says, could be the result of as-yet-undiscovered planets stirring up the debris around Fomalhaut.

    MacGregor agrees. “If you see a disk that’s like this, that has an [elongated] outer ring and a bunch of dust that’s getting dragged in, there are probably planets there,” she says. “I think the easiest explanation [for the tilted belt] is there’s a planet in there, and the planet is on an orbit that is not aligned with the disk.” The misaligned planet, in turn, is dragging the asteroid belt off-kilter with respect to the plane of the solar system, she says.

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    The JWST images also turned up a newly identified feature in the outer belt around the star.  It’s a blob that Gáspár and his colleagues call the Great Dust Cloud. It’s not yet clear whether it’s a real feature, or just some bright object shining through from beyond the Fomalhaut system.

    “It could easily be a background galaxy,” Gáspár says, “which would be a really cruel trick by nature.” Follow-up observations with JWST will help them decide, he says. If the object stays put while the Fomalhaut system keeps spinning, then it’s a cosmic photobomber, lurking in the background.

    The latest images answer some questions about Fomalhaut while raising a host of new ones, Gáspár says. “This single observation of Fomalhaut revealed way too many aspects of the system that we need to understand and unpack,” he says. “We set out to spatially resolve the asteroid belt component but ended up opening a much greater box of surprises.” More