Philippa Kaur

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  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Humans

    The unique, vanishing languages that hold secrets about how we think

    The Chimané people have provided insights into the power of number wordsREUTERS/David Mercado
    LAST February, amid the fjords of southern Chile, an elderly woman died – and a language fell silent. Cristina CalderÓn, a much-loved 93-year-old, was the last known native speaker of Yaghan, which could at one time be heard across the Tierra del Fuego – the Land of Fire – that forms the jagged tip of South America. The loss of any tongue is a tragedy, but Yaghan’s extinction will be felt particularly keenly because this was no ordinary language. It was an “isolate”: a language utterly distinct from those used anywhere else in the world.
    Language isolates comprise about 200 of the estimated 7400 languages in use today and many are dangerously close to following Yaghan into oblivion. Estimates suggest that 30 per cent of all languages will have vanished by the end of the century. Isolates – some used by just a few hundred people – are particularly vulnerable.
    But as their vulnerability has risen, so has an awareness that isolates can tell us a lot about human communication and cognition. In the past few years alone, they have offered us fresh insight into the interplay between cultural and linguistic evolution and provided support for a controversial hypothesis that links our understanding of reality with the language we use. “Each of these isolates is a… whole different window on the mind,” says Lyle Campbell at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
    What’s more, there is new hope that the research might also identify better strategies to help us save them from extinction. … More

  • 163 Shares169 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    The Parker Solar Probe may have spotted the origin of high-speed solar winds

    A spacecraft plunging into the sun’s atmosphere has revealed the likely source of powerful blasts of plasma in fast solar winds.

    Far from the sun, the solar wind is a nebulous, turbulent plasma. But when NASA’s Parker Solar Probe dipped within about 8 million kilometers of the sun’s surface, it detected narrow plasma streams (SN: 12/15/21). The streams appear to be guided by magnetic fields tracing back to two relatively cool regions of the sun’s atmosphere known as coronal holes, researchers report June 7 in Nature.

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    The solar wind — the steady stream of charged particles flowing from the sun — has two distinct speeds, dubbed as “slow” and “fast.” Until now, it wasn’t clear what was speeding the fast solar wind along. The plasma in most of the solar wind consists of protons, electrons and the nuclei of atoms blowing at hundreds of kilometers a second. But plasma from the area above the coronal holes can travel more than 10 times as fast.

    The fast plasma streams were associated with events known as switchbacks, in which portions of the magnetic fields near the sun reverse direction (SN: 1/15/21). Switchbacks can result when magnetic field loops close to the sun’s surface connect to long field lines extending away from the sun. The reconnection leads to a sharp switchback kink that kicks the plasma on its way into space as the kink straightens out.

    Higher energy streams, the researchers propose, are the result of newly reconnected field lines with sharply kinked switchbacks, while lower energy streams come from field lines with older kinks that had become more smoothed out.

    Although the evidence that the fast solar wind is due to magnetic reconnections is compelling, it’s still circumstantial, says astrophysicist Stuart Bale of the University of California, Berkeley. “Our results suggest that the solar wind can be accelerated to high speeds very close to the sun,” Bale says. “This is somewhat different [than the] standard scenario of wind energization,” where the acceleration takes place farther from the sun.

    Getting a handle on processes like the origin of the fast solar wind is important for practical reasons, Bale says. “We also believe that magnetic reconnection is responsible for solar flares and is involved in the release of coronal mass ejections, which have a major impact in space weather.” Solar flares and the space weather they create have led to electrical grid disruptions on Earth and interrupted radio communications, and they may threaten astronauts (SN: 7/30/2020).

    The findings are also an important clue in the enduring mystery of why the sun’s atmosphere is millions of degrees Celsius hotter than its surface, says astrophysicist Gary Zank, who was not involved in the study (SN: 8/20/17). “But they do not identify the heating mechanism.”

    The observations identify the importance of magnetic reconnection close to the sun, says Zank, of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “The next step is to link that to the dissipation of the magnetic energy in determining the actual heating process.”

    Another interesting aspect of the study is how the structure of the solar surface seems to be imprinted on the solar wind near the sun despite the presence of turbulence, says Amitava Bhattacharjee, a Princeton University astrophysicist who was not involved with the study. Other researchers have proposed that it can happen, he says, but in the new study, “the experimental and simulation evidence is more convincing.”

    Parker’s ever closer encounters with the sun could confirm the source of the fast solar wind more definitively. And future passes will come as the sun heads into a phase with increasing numbers of sunspots and more solar wind, on the way to peak solar activity around July 2025.  “As we move into solar maximum,” Bale says, “we expect some serious surprises.” More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    A simulation of a dying star shows how it could create gravitational waves

    Cocoons of debris around dying stars could shake ripples in spacetime unlike any astronomers have ever seen.

    “This is a potential source of gravitational waves that has never been investigated before,” astrophysicist Ore Gottlieb of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., said June 5 in a news conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Albuquerque.

    The waves could potentially be picked up in the latest run of LIGO, which began on May 24.

    Since LIGO’s first detection in 2015, all the gravitational waves seen thus far have been from the spiraling death dance of two compact objects — black holes, neutron stars or both (SN: 2/11/16). These events give off what are called coherent gravitational waves. “You can think of it as an orchestra playing harmonically,” Gottlieb said.

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    A second type, incoherent waves, are expected to come from stellar explosions like supernovas (SN: 5/6/19). Because those bursts are spherically symmetrical and relatively slow, their waves are difficult for LIGO to detect. They’re more analogous to individual instruments playing different songs at the same time.

    Gottlieb and colleagues considered another type of stellar death called a collapsar. When massive stars collapse into a black hole, they can emit jets of material traveling close to the speed of light. Computer simulations of how those jets form revealed a cocoon of material surrounding the jet, full of hot, turbulent gas and debris that expand in an asymmetric bubble around the dying star, says Gottlieb, who presented the research June 6.

    As the bubble expands and pushes its way through the star, it could bump spacetime enough to produce incoherent gravitational waves, Gottlieb and colleagues concluded.

    [embedded content]
    As a massive star collapses, it emits jets of material (red) and a cocoon of other debris around the jets (yellow and green). This simulation shows how the turbulence in the jets and cocoon could shake spacetime, and translates the gravitational waves they might emit into sound.

    LIGO and its fellow detectors — Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan — currently have about a 1 percent chance of detecting cocoon gravitational waves. In future runs with improved detectors, that chance will go up.

    Catching these waves could give astronomers a glimpse into the innermost parts of dying stars, which can’t be studied any other way, Gottlieb said. More

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    in Humans

    Homo naledi may have made etchings on cave walls and buried its dead

    Fossils of Homo nalediRobert Clark, National Geographic
    A species of ancient human with a brain the size of a chimpanzee’s may have engraved symbols on cave walls and deliberately buried its dead. These new discoveries about Homo naledi, a supposedly primitive hominin, could potentially prompt a rethink of the origins of complex behaviours once thought to be only the domain of large-brained humans like us.
    “It’s a remarkable thing. My mind is blown,” says Lee Berger at the National Geographic Society in Washington DC, who led the research. “Much of what we thought about the origin of intelligence and the cognitive powers of having a big brain clearly just died,” he says, though other researchers who spoke to New Scientist question this view. 

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    H. naledi was discovered in 2013 in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa when two cavers squeezed through an incredibly tight passage into a hitherto-unexplored chamber littered with fossil bones. In 2015, it was declared that these belonged to a new species. We now know that this hominin was around 144 centimetres tall and had a mix of primitive and modern features, with a brain a third of the size of ours.
    It isn’t yet known how H. naledi fits in the hominin family tree, but its morphology suggests that its common ancestor with Neanderthals and modern humans dates back a million years or more. Dating of its fossil remains in 2017 showed that it lived relatively … recently, from 335,000 to at least 241,000 years ago, so might have met Homo sapiens, which evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago.
    In 2021, the discovery of an infant skull in a narrow fissure that is almost impossible to access indicated that this hominin deliberately interred its dead. The finding also implied that H. naledi must have been able to control fire in order to navigate through the labyrinth of dark passages and, in December last year, Berger announced evidence of extensive use of fire in the Rising Star cave system, such as soot, hearths and burnt bones.
    Now, Berger and his colleagues have published more remarkable findings from the Rising Star caves.
    Crosshatch engravings thought to have been made by Homo nalediBerger et al., 2023.
    The team only discovered engravings in the caves in July last year, when Berger entered them for the first time. He had to lose 25 kilograms of weight in order to squeeze through passages in the rock as narrow as 17.5 centimetres wide.  “It was incredibly hard to get in, and I wasn’t sure I could get back out,” he says.
    To his amazement, Berger spotted some engravings on a natural pillar that forms the entrance to a passage connecting the Dinaledi chamber – where H. naledi fossils were first discovered – and the Hill antechamber, where other remains had been found.
    In three different areas of the walls, he saw geometric shapes, mainly composed of lines 5 to 15 centimetres long, deeply engraved into the dolomite stone. This is an incredibly hard rock, so the engravings would have taken considerable effort to make. Many of these lines intersect to form geometric patterns, such as squares, triangles, crosses and ladder shapes.
    “There was this moment of awe and surprise in seeing these highly recognisable symbols carved into the wall,” says Berger. “Seeing these symbols was entirely unexpected.”
    Aside from the 47 people who had recently accessed the caves, there is no evidence that anyone else except H. naledi had ever been inside, so the researchers argue that these extinct hominins must have carved the marks. However, this is only a preliminary report of the findings and the team hasn’t dated them yet.

    We know that Neanderthals created similar symbols more than 64,000 years ago, as did modern humans in southern Africa from around 80,000 years ago. If the symbols in the Rising Star caves were indeed made by H. naledi, they could be far older.
    Berger argues that to go to the effort of engraving this incredibly hard rock “in what appear to be important positions within these extraordinarily remote places, the interpretation is that they must have some meaning”.

    Others are more cautious. “It is premature to conclude that symbolic markings were made by small-brained hominins, specifically H. naledi,” says Emma Pomeroy at the University of Cambridge. “While intriguing, exciting and suggestive, these findings require more evidence and analysis to support the substantial claims being made about them.”
    Berger’s team has also detailed new evidence of what could be deliberate burials in the ground – a different mortuary practice to the internment of corpses in niches, such as the infant skull discovered in 2021. At one place in the Dinaledi chamber, the researchers found 83 bone fragments and teeth, seemingly from a single body, in an oval-shaped area of disturbed soil.
    Artist’s reconstruction of the burial of an adult Homo naledi found in the Dinaledi ChamberBerger et al., 2023
    They also found another possible burial site in the Hill antechamber. In this instance, they encased an area of debris with a high concentration of bone fragments in plaster, allowing them to remove it from the cave system intact and use a CT scanner to reveal its contents.
    This showed many bone and teeth fragments, mainly from one juvenile that seemed to have been in a fetal position, an arrangement also found in prehistoric H. sapiens burials, along with some fragmented remains of three other juveniles. Intriguingly, a single stone artefact – a distinctive crescent-shaped stone, 14 cm long, with striations on its surface – was found close to the hand of one of the bodies.
    Although these analyses are only preliminary, the researchers argue that the orientation of the bones and patterns of soil disturbance indicate that bodies were interred in pits that had been deliberately dug out, then covered in sediment. If confirmed, these burials would predate the earliest known human burial in Africa by at least 160,000 years.
    Other experts aren’t yet convinced. “This is an admirable attempt to demonstrate that the corpses of at least two individuals were deliberately buried in shallow pits, and one can certainly not rule this out,” says Paul Pettitt at the University of Durham, UK. “I’m not convinced that the team have demonstrated that this was a deliberate burial. Let’s walk before we can run.”
    Silvia Bello at the Natural History Museum in London points out that the bones are fragmented, while skeletons that are deliberately buried usually show better preservation.

    Remarkable behaviour
    Further analysis, such as a more detailed scan of the Hill feature, should help clear up this issue. Nevertheless, the new studies are already building an ever-richer picture of H. naledi and its behaviour. “The evidence is impressive,” says Chris Stringer, also at the Natural History Museum.
    “These humans were taking carcasses, bodies of fellow naledis, down deep into the cave, and they must have had artificial lighting,” he says. “This is remarkable behaviour for a creature that’s got an ape-sized brain. It suggests organisation, because this is not something a single individual would have done, it must have been a group activity. And it’s obviously happened multiple times. That implies the existence of what we might call a culture – a different species, not closely related to us.”
    “There’s a lot of very intentional behaviour in that cave complex,” says Genevieve von Petzinger at the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, Portugal. “It’s not like a bunch of people fell in a hole and scraped some marks.”
    These kinds of sophisticated behaviours were only thought to be possible in hominins with large brains, such as Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. “These are challenging finds, and they certainly make us think about what it is to be human,” says Stringer, raising questions about why we developed such large brains.
    In the meantime, further research at the Rising Star cave system will be limited while the researchers work out how best to investigate this site without destroying it.
    “Homo naledi altered almost every single space. That has caused me to become incredibly cautious about allowing people into that space until we decide exactly how we’re going to approach it,” says Berger, who wants to engage the world’s scientific community in addressing this question. “We, as humans, have to decide how we’re going to approach the space of another species that they clearly saw as critically important to them.”
    Reference: bioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/2023.06.01.543133 and 10.1101/2023.06.01.543127

    Topics:Homo naledi More

  • 163 Shares199 Views

    in Humans

    Why our brain uses up more energy than that of any other animal

    Magnetic resonance imaging scans showing healthy human brainsSIMON FRASER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
    The human brain has greater energy demands than that of any other animal, especially in certain important regions, which may have been key to the evolution of our complex cognition. Knowing how energy use differs across the brain could also help us better understand and treat certain conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease and depression.
    Some mammals have bigger brains and more nerve cells, or neurons, than humans, making it unclear how we evolved a uniquely advanced ability to think critically … More

  • 138 Shares139 Views

    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.

    Topics: More

  • 125 Shares179 Views

    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

  • 138 Shares179 Views

    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