Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    People feel more creative after using cannabis – they aren’t

    Users may feel cannabis boosts their creativityShutterstock/Agave Photo Studio
    “Write drunk, edit sober,” goes the famous saying that is often – probably apocryphally – attributed to Ernest Hemingway. It is debatable whether that is sound advice with any substance, but when that notion is applied to cannabis use, it is almost certainly a bad idea.
    Research into the connection between cannabis and creativity has found no evidence that the drug boosts ingenuity. But it does make people who use it feel good, which in turn makes them perceive their ideas – and others’ –… More

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    A rare, extremely energetic cosmic ray has mysterious origins

    The “Oh-My-God” particle has a new companion.

    In 1991, physicists spotted a particle from space that crashed into Earth with so much energy that it warranted an “OMG!” With 320 quintillion electron volts, or exaelectron volts, it had the kinetic energy of a baseball zipping along at about 100 kilometers per hour.

    Now, a new particle of comparable energy has been found, researchers report in the Nov. 24 Science. Detected in 2021 by the Telescope Array experiment near Delta, Utah, the particle had an energy of about 240 exaelectron volts. And mysteriously, scientists are unable to pinpoint any cosmic source for the particle.

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    “It’s a huge, huge amount of energy but in a tiny, tiny, tiny object,” says astroparticle physicist John Matthews of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, co-spokesperson of the Telescope Array collaboration.

    Cosmic rays consist of protons and atomic nuclei that zip through space at wide range of energies. Particles with energies over 100 exaelectron volts are exceedingly rare: On average, scientists estimate, one such particle falls on a square kilometer of Earth’s surface each century. And particles over 200 exaelectron volts are even rarer — only a few such particles have previously been detected.

    When a cosmic ray hits Earth, it collides with a nucleus of an atom in the atmosphere, creating a cascade of other particles that can be detected on Earth’s surface.

    To catch the rarest, highest-energy particles, scientists build giant arrays of detectors. The Telescope Array monitors an area of 700 square kilometers using more than 500 detectors made of plastic scintillator, material that emits light when hit by a charged particle. Additional detectors measure ultraviolet light produced in the sky by the shower of particles (although those detectors weren’t operating during the newly reported particle’s arrival). Based on the times that individual scintillator detectors were hit by the cascade of particles, scientists can determine the direction of the incoming cosmic ray and use that information to trace it back to its origins.

    Extremely high-energy cosmic rays come from outside the Milky Way, but their exact sources are unknown (SN: 9/21/17). Most scientists think they are accelerated in violent cosmic environments, such as the jets of radiation that blast out of the areas around certain supermassive black holes, or starburst galaxies that form stars at a frenetic pace. 

    Whatever their origins, the particles must come from the relatively nearby cosmic neighborhood. That’s because the highest-energy cosmic rays lose energy as they travel, by interacting with the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang (SN: 7/24/18).

    Tracing back the particle’s location is complicated. “The issue is that when you detect a high-energy cosmic ray at Earth, the arrival direction that you get will not point to the source because it will be deflected by … any magnetic field that would be in the way,” says Telescope Array collaborator Noémie Globus, an astroparticle physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the RIKEN research institute in Japan.  

    The magnetic fields present in the Milky Way and its environs scatter the cosmic rays like fog scatters light. To trace the particle to its home, scientists must take that scattering into account. But that backtracking pinpointed a cosmic void, a region of space with few galaxies at all, much less ones with violent processes going on. 

    That makes this particle particularly interesting, says astrophysicist Vasiliki Pavlidou of the University of Crete in Heraklion, Greece. “It’s actually pointing towards nothing at all, absolutely in the middle of nowhere.”

    That might hint that scientist are missing something. For example, researchers may need to better understand the magnetic fields of the galaxy, says Pavlidou, who was not involved with the research. 

    “Every time you have one of these very high-energy events, just because they are so rare, it’s a big deal.” More

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    in Humans

    Did Homo naledi bury its dead? Debate rages over human relative

    Homo naledi coexisted with Homo sapiens, but had a smaller brainXinhua/Shutterstock
    The much-publicised claim that a species of small-brained ancient human buried its dead and produced rock art is completely unfounded, according to a group of researchers.
    “The evidence for burial and rock art is non-existent,” says Michael Petraglia at Griffith University in Nathan, Australia.
    However, the researchers behind the original claim say they are hard at work gathering more evidence to build their case. They also contend that their studies are caught up in a wider debate over how scientific… More

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    in Humans

    Cannabis derails train of thought, but may not affect long-term memory

    Cannabis has complicated effects on memoryMarkusBeck/iStockphoto
    The stereotype of a stoner – someone who uses copious amounts of cannabis – is that they are scatterbrained and absent-minded. But how cannabis affects memory is more complicated than this caricature lets on.
    For starters, memory is a complex, multi-faceted process. There is long-term memory – the information we retain for months or years – and short-term memory, which lasts only a few minutes. Then there is working memory, which is where we hold information in mind and manipulate it. Working memory allows us to do… More

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    in Humans

    How did Paranthropus, the last of the ape-people, survive for so long?

    P.PLAILLY/E.DAYNES/SCIEN​CE PHOTO LIBRARY
    IT ISN’T often that an esteemed professor sets out to investigate a scientific discovery made by a 15-year-old boy, but in 1938 Robert Broom made an exception. The British-born palaeontologist was keenly aware that 1930s South Africa was gaining a reputation for its exceptionally primitive-looking hominin fossils. So, when he heard that schoolchild Gert Terblanche had discovered fragments of a hominin skull in a cave there, he tracked him down immediately. Broom’s visit to the boy’s school paid off – he later recalled that the teenager was sauntering around with “four of what are perhaps the most valuable teeth in the world in his trouser pocket”.
    Within months, Broom had finished analysing the fossils. Deciding they were unlike anything discovered before, he gave the ancient hominin a new name: Paranthropus.
    But despite his confidence that the remains were valuable, Paranthropus never became famous. Perhaps that is because it was a misfit: it resembled one of our small-brained ancestors, but it was present on Earth long after other ape-like hominins had given way to big-brained humans. Even among palaeoanthropologists, Paranthropus is described as the “forgotten” hominin.
    Perhaps not for much longer. Spurred on by the discovery of more fossils, researchers are finally reassessing this addition to our evolutionary tree – and their work suggests it was one of the oddest. Paranthropus may have been a skilled tool-maker, but it also potentially grazed grass like a cow and communicated with low rumbles like an elephant. The question now is, can the research bring us closer to understanding how the last of the ape-people survived in a world that was dominated… More

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    Why so many prehistoric monuments were painted red

    Dolmen of menga, a megalithic burial mound in SpainimageBROKER.com GmbH & Co. KG/Alamy
    This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox for free every month.
    Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: ancient Greek statues weren’t always plain white marble. Many of these sculptures were actually painted in vivid colours. However, most of the pigments have either eroded away or been scraped off by overzealous museum curators, leaving us with just the underlying white stone.
    For example,… More

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    How archaeologists can decide if prehistoric artefacts count as art

    Esteban De Armas/Alamy
    IN HIS poem The Conundrum of the Workshops, Rudyard Kipling imagined an early human pausing to admire a drawing he had scratched in the dirt, only to hear a voice whispering: “It’s pretty, but is it Art?”
    Archaeologists know a bit about scratching in the dirt, and when their excavations reveal a beautiful ancient object, they find themselves asking the very same question. They are motivated by a desire to step inside the minds of our prehistoric ancestors. In many cases, they want to understand if and when ancient hominins began to create art, as we explore in… More

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    The archaeological finds that show art is far older than our species

    Antonio Sortino
    IF YOU have ever marvelled at the accomplishment of Stone Age cave artists, you are in good company. In 1940, on visiting Lascaux cave in southern France, Pablo Picasso supposedly said: “Since Lascaux, we have invented nothing.” Perspective, movement, impressionism, abstraction, pointillism – it is all there. And these artworks are some 17,000 years old.
    Picasso’s remark may be apocryphal. It was certainly premature. In 1994, hundreds of paintings twice the age of those at Lascaux were discovered at Chauvet cave, also in France. The Chauvet paintings are, quite simply, stunning: prowling lions and galloping horses are captured so vividly that the remote Stone Age world becomes almost tangible. Even more astonishingly, this art was created shortly after the dawn of the “cultural explosion”, an event archaeologists have long recognised as marking a surge in creativity that seems to have come out of nowhere. How could these first artists have already been so good?
    We now have an answer: the Chauvet artists weren’t the first. Discoveries in recent decades have shattered the assumption that art was invented by our species some 40,000 years ago. Instead, we have increasingly compelling evidence of artistry in other ancient hominins.
    Needless to say, this challenges our beliefs about who invented art. But it does more besides. It offers an insight into our forerunners’ appreciation for aesthetics and the value they placed on objects that seem, at first glance, unnecessary for survival. In so doing, it also provides tantalising hints that art has been a vital component of hominin life for millions of years.
    To say that humans are the only living artists… More