Martin Aircraft in New Zealand built the prototype that’s closest to allowing you to jet to work. A fan-propelled, rotary-engine-powered jetpack with 200 horsepower, the Martin Jetpack (not pictured) keeps steady altitude even if riders’ hands leave the controls for a sip of coffee. “It’s ridiculously easy to fly,” says Mike Read, VP of sales at Martin. Its range? Thirty miles. Martin plans for the military to test it before consumers whiz it around.
Want to know if your fantasy invention could become a reality? Tweet @PopSci or tell us on Facebook. This question came from Popular Science reader Stuart Harwood via Facebook.
This article was originally published in the January/February 2017 issue of Popular Science, under the title “I Wish Someone Would Invent...A Long-Distance Jetpack.”
For thousands of years, explorers have navigated by following the natural world: the sun, stars, prevailing winds, and even moss.
Common wisdom says __that moss grows only on the north side of trees, which means you can use it to find your bearings if you’re lost in the woods. This is generally true, says Caitlin Fong, an ecologist at California State University in Northridge. To thrive, moss requires damp and shady environments __that prevent it from drying out. And as you move north, away from the equator, the sun’s rays strike Earth at a southern angle rather than directly overhead, so the north side of an object will receive less sunlight.
This rule, however, applies only in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the opposite: The sun’s rays will always be a little north of directly overhead because of the tilt of Earth on its axis. So in Australia, moss grows comfortably on the shadier south side of trees. Architects also take this principle into consideration when they’re designing buildings and deciding where to place windows, says Fong.
Still, don’t toss your compass just yet. Moss is a primitive plant called a bryophyte. Bryophytes don’t have roots or a vascular system for circulating water and minerals the way trees and grass do. That means mosses can lose moisture extremely quickly, which is one of the reasons they grow only in cool and shady places, says Fong. And lots of things can create the shady conditions that moss prefers, including the cracks in rocks and boulders and in trees’ shadows in a dense forest. So if you look closely enough, you’ll see moss growing in all directions.
Fong recommends always using a compass. But in a pinch, she says hikers can note where moss grows in multiple different locations and form a consensus. “And try to do it in a sunnier area, because if you’re already in a shady area, there are a lot of different factors at play.”
This article was originally published in the January/February 2017 issue of Popular Science.
Have a burning question? Email it to askanything@popsci.com or tweet it to @PopSci with #AskAnything
Image caption The illegal trade in ivory has seen elephant numbers plummet
Elephant populations in Africa have declined by around 111,000 over the past 10 years according to a new study.
The African Elephant Status report says __that poaching is the main driver of the fall, the worst losses in 25 years.
However the authors say __that long-term issues such as the loss of habitat also pose a significant threat.
The report has been presented at the Cites meeting which is considering new proposals on elephant protection.
War on elephants - Alastair Leithead, Africa correspondent
Image caption The growing demand for ivory in Asian markets means the illegal trade continues to threaten the future of elephants in Africa
Every year in Africa between 30,000 and 40,000 elephants are poached for their ivory, and it's thought there are only 400,000 left.
Even accounting for the newborns, this rate of killing calls into question whether these amazing creatures will still be around in a generation, especially as Africa's ever-increasing population is reducing the space for them.
Organised crime runs the ivory industry.
Extract from The War on Elephants; article on how the very existence of Africa's elephants is threatened by poachers
More from Alastair:
Why elephants are seeking refuge in Botswana
Shocking reduction in Africa's elephant numbers
Wide range of sources
Figures published earlier this year in the Great Elephant Census indicated that African elephant populations had declined by around 30% over the past seven years.
This new study from conservation group IUCN incorporates this information but also uses data from elephant dung counts and individual observations amongst other sources.
The authors say the overall total for elephants in Africa is now around 415,000, although there may be an additional 117,000 to 135,000 in areas not systematically surveyed.
This represents a decline of some 111,000 from the report carried out in 2006.
Annual elephant population change, 2010-14
Poaching is the main driver of the drop. East Africa, the region most affected by killings for ivory, has experienced around a 50% reduction in numbers.
However it is not the only cause of concern to the authors.
"We are particularly concerned about major infrastructure projects that are cutting up the elephant ranges, this is a particular problem for road development in central and east Africa," said Dr Chris Thouless, one of the report's authors.
"These are all major issues that will have to be dealt with once the poaching crisis is over."
Community conservation
While report highlights the losses there are also some gains.
Elephant populations in South Africa, Namibia and Uganda have all increased. Elephant ranges have expanded in Kenya and Botswana, with community based conservation showing real success in Northern Kenya.
While these are positives, the overall picture is one of dramatic decline, fuelled by criminal activity that would decimate these giant creatures, if continued.
"Larger quantities of illegal ivory are leaving Africa than ever before," said Ginette Hemley from WWF.
"The transnational crime syndicates driving the slaughter must be dismantled, and consumer demand for ivory cannot persist if we hope to secure a safe future for elephants."
The report comes as the Cites meeting here in Johannesburg is facing significant division on how to handle the poaching crisis.
Talks on extra protections for elephants will begin on Monday with a number of countries led by Kenya seeking extra protection.
Others, including Namibia and Zimbabwe, are seeking to liberalise the safeguards and open up a trade in ivory. Another proposal here, which might garner more support, is aimed at ending all domestic markets in ivory. The meeting continues until 5 October.
Follow Matt on Twitter @mattmcgrathbbc and on Facebook.
Image copyrightReutersImage caption The tusks of some 6,700 elephants have been piled in pyramids ready to be set alight on Saturday
The largest ever pile of ivory will be set alight in Kenya on Saturday. But will it actually burn?
The fire will be seven times bigger than any previous ivory fires - 105 tonnes of tusks have been piled in pyramids, some three metres high (10 feet).
The idea is __that this will help tackle the illegal ivory trade and curb poaching, which is killing some 30,000 elephants a year.
The practice of burning ivory goes back to July 1989 when Kenya's then-President Daniel arap Moi ignited a pile of 12 tonnes of elephant tusks and helped change global policy on ivory exports.
After that, the trade was banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
This was a "desperate measure meant to send a message to the world about the destruction through poaching of Kenya's elephants," says Paul Udoto from the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS).
Since then many countries have followed suit but does setting fire to ivory actually destroy it?
Image copyrightAFPImage caption The first time ivory was burnt in public was in 1989 by Kenya's then-President Daniel arap Moi
The US chose to crush, rather than burn, one tonne of its ivory stockpile in public last year because ivory "doesn't catch fire the way you might imagine but rather just chars on the outside", says Gavin Shire from the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).
Other countries have also opted for the crushing method.
One week to burn a tusk
The FWS forensic laboratory carried out an experiment in 2008 where it set fire to a piece of ivory at an ultra-high temperature.
The results, quoted by National Geographic online, showed __that burning ivory at 1,000C led to it losing just 7g per minute - meaning that it would take around a week to destroy an average male elephant tusk.
Image copyrightPaul Udoto/KWSImage caption If the ivory is left to burn for long enough at a high temperature it does get reduced to ashes
Kenya has become something of an expert in the field of burning ivory, having done it three times, and is well aware of the time and effort needed to destroy the tusks.
According to the KWS, after the dignitaries have driven off the pyre continues burning for at least a week.
Jet oil
Kuki Gallmann was one of those behind the 1989 fire and knew, from an experiment with some ivory in a domestic fire, that a high temperature was needed.
She helped devise a method using jet oil and a network of pipes under the tusks, which has been used on the other two occasions that Kenya has set fire to ivory, said Mr Udoto.
Image copyrightKWS/Paul UdotoImage caption The ash pile from Kenya's 1989 fire can still be seen in the spot where it was burned
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says that 14 countries have carried out ivory destructions through either burning or crushing - or sometimes a mixture of both.
But there is a wider debate about how effective these acts are when it comes to ending the illicit ivory trade and reducing poaching.
"The destruction of ivory is a political mechanism to signal the government's commitment to curbing elephant poaching," says Tom Milliken from Traffic, which monitors the trade in wildlife.
"But there is no proof that destroying supply leads to a decline in demand."
The WWF argues that destruction should be combined with greater efforts on the ground to combat poaching.
Even though it may be difficult to actually destroy 16,000 tusks through burning, as the KWS's Mr Udoto says, it has been a way "to get the world to listen to its message" about the dangers of wildlife poaching.
Yeah. No. Not going to happen. To instantaneously transport across space, our bodies would need to convert to energy and back without mishap. Even if we combined the storages of every computer available today, __that would hold just a fraction of the data for one human, says Caltech physicist Philip Hopkins. The energy isn’t anything to scoff at either. He says, “It’d be like launching all of the U.S.’s and Russia’s nukes in one spot and trying to contain that.”
Want to know if your fantasy invention could become a reality? Tweet @PopSci or tell us on Facebook.
This article was originally published in the January/February 2017 issue of Popular Science, under the title “I Wish Someone Would Invent...A Teleportation Device.”
Image copyrightMarkus Vareavuo/naturepl.comImage caption Species __that migrate huge distances - such as the swallow were included in the research
Migrating birds are arriving at their breeding grounds earlier as global temperatures rise, a study has found.
Birds have reached their summer breeding grounds on average about one day earlier per degree of increasing global temperatures, according to the research by Edinburgh University.
The study looked at hundreds of species across five continents.
It is hoped it will help scientists predict how different species may respond to future environmental change.
Reaching their summer breeding grounds at the wrong time - even by a few days - may cause birds to miss out on maximum availability of vital resources such as food and nesting places.
Late arrival to breeding grounds may, in turn, affect the timing of offspring hatching and their chances of survival.
Long-distance migrants, which are shown to be less responsive to rising temperatures, may suffer most as other birds gain advantage by arriving at breeding grounds ahead of them.
Flowering and breeding
Takuji Usui, of Edinburgh University's school of biological sciences, said: "Many plant and animal species are altering the timing of activities associated with the start of spring, such as flowering and breeding.
"Now we have detailed insights into how the timing of migration is changing and how this change varies across species.
"These insights may help us predict how well migratory birds keep up with changing conditions on their breeding grounds."
The study examined how various species, which take flight in response to cues such as changing seasonal temperatures and food availability, have altered their behaviour over time and with increasing temperatures.
The researchers examined records of migrating bird species dating back almost 300 years.
The study drew upon records from amateur enthusiasts and scientists, including notes from 19th-century American naturalist Henry David Thoreau.
Species __that migrate huge distances - such as the swallow and pied flycatcher - and those with shorter migrations - such as the lapwing and pied wagtail - were included in the research.
The study, published in Journal of Animal Ecology, was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council.
Image caption The number of bumblebees in parts of Somerset dropped by 85%
Bumblebees and butterflies have seen their numbers plummet after another year of unsettled weather, according to a National Trust study.
The 10th annual wildlife report from the trust said mild winters and bad weather in summer created bad conditions for small plants.
But whilst insects suffered, grass growth rose, meaning a good year for livestock farmers.
Conservationists and farmers must work together, the trust said.
Warmer winter months and bad summers have become the norm, according to the report, which said the UK has not had a good summer since 2006.
Nature and wildlife specialist for the Trust, Matthew Oates, said: "2016 comes on top of an unsettled decade, with many species struggling in the face of climate change and more intensive farming practices.
"When you do get good weather during the brighter months of the year, it's almost inevitably short-lived and finished with something nasty.
"During the brightest months, we do seem to be getting more extreme weather events, most of which aren't nice."
Image copyrightPAImage caption Volunteers recording sightings for the Trust have seen 23% fewer common blue butterflies
Specific sites have now seen a big change in their wildlife, especially due to the surge in grass growth.
Observations at Lytes Cary, in Somerset, showed the number of bumblebees had fallen by 85% on the previous year as wildflowers __that attract the bees in field margins were outgrown by grass.
At Purbeck, in Dorset, meadow butterflies also saw a drop in numbers, with volunteers recording a fall in sightings of marbled white numbers by 73% and 23% fewer common blue butterflies.
But the grass growth meant good hay and silage harvests for tenant farmers on Trust sites and improvements on other sites.
Among birds, in Cornwall and Devon rare cirl buntings saw a rise in numbers by 800% since 1989.
And the grazing conditions for rare-breed Longhorn cattle in the Lake District's Ennerdale Valley led to the right wet grassland habitat for marsh fritillary butterflies, with larvae numbers up 560% in 10 years.
Mr Oates said the effect of grazing on rare species signalled the need for conservationists and farmers to work together when it comes to managing the land.
Other areas saw mixed results for their wildlife.
Image copyrightPAImage caption Grey seals were one species not suffering due to the weather
At Blakeney Point, on the north Norfolk coast, the grey seal population went from 100 pups being born in 2004, to 2,342 born by January this year. The Farne Islands also saw 1,879 pups born in 2016, which was up on last year.
There was also a larger apple crop, especially in the south west, because of the warm autumn and rain late in the season. The extended growing season also saw better conditions for damsons, acorns and hazelnuts.
However, there were falls in the number of field voles, which could lead to problems for barn owls and kestrels who feed on them.
And whilst slugs have benefited from the mild and wet weather, gardeners have had to suffer the effects on their plants.
Today we remember Carrie Fisher. In a decades-long career she left many indelible marks, but none so great as her portrayal of Princess Leia in Star Wars. She filmed the first movie at age 19 and died on Tuesday morning at age 60, having just completed filming on her fifth Star Wars movie.
Fisher’s Princess Leia was—like the rest of the Star Wars franchise—an inspiration to countless young science geeks. Here was a world filled with heroes and explorers, flying spaceships to unknown worlds and battling evil wherever they went. And it all depended on the futuristic technology __that George Lucas invented. A generation of children grew up wanting to make Star Wars a reality. They became mechanical engineers and astrophysicists. They thought science was cool. And they made it cool in the process.
This is true of nearly all science fiction. It inspires us to create things __that only the strangest among us could imagine. So strange, they made up elaborate, fantastical worlds to house their ideas and called it sci-fi. Cloaking devices, virtual worlds, and rocket ships—they were all science fiction before they were fact.
And it’s characters like Princess Leia that inspire young women to go beyond what society tells them they can be, to be explorers and Generals and rebels, to travel to strange new worlds. Engineer Holly Griffith got all the way to NASA Mission Control on her mission to be just like Leia. Fisher’s Leia was empowered, intelligent, and brave. She was a princess, but she didn't need rescuing.
Fisher battled drug addictions and bipolar disorder, but she turned struggle into strength. She spoke honestly about her mental health problems, helping to de-stigmatize the diseases she dealt with for many years. She was an outspoken feminist, even when she was playing an outdated hippie on 30 Rock. She set a standard for empowered female figures in a science-fiction world that badly needed it (and that the Star Wars movies are finally living up to). She was an inspiration to millions of science geeks—men and women alike—who wanted to bring a galaxy far, far away a little closer to home.
We’ll miss you, Carrie Fisher. Thank you for giving us hope.
Image copyrightZSLImage caption Protected parks and reserves for cheetahs are not sufficient as the animal ranges far beyond these areas
The sleek, speedy cheetah is rapidly heading towards extinction according to a new study into declining numbers.
The report estimates __that there are just 7,100 of the world's fastest mammals now left in the wild.
Cheetahs are in trouble because they range far beyond protected areas and are coming increasingly into conflict with humans.
The authors are calling for an urgent re-categorisation of the species from vulnerable to endangered.
Wiped out
According to the study, more than half the world's surviving cheetahs live in one population __that ranges across six countries in southern Africa.
Cheetahs in Asia have been essentially wiped out. A group estimated to number fewer than 50 individuals clings on in Iran.
Because the cheetah is one of the widest-ranging carnivores, it roams across lands far outside protected areas. Some 77% of their habitat falls outside these parks and reserves.
As a result, the animal struggles because these lands are increasingly being developed by farmers and the cheetah's prey is declining because of bushmeat hunting.
In Zimbabwe, the cheetah population has fallen from around 1,200 to just 170 animals in 16 years, with the main cause being major changes in land tenure.
Image copyrightZSLImage caption The illegal trade in cheetah cubs has been driven by their status as a fashion icon in the Gulf states
Researchers involved with the study say that the threats facing the fabled predator have gone unnoticed for far too long.
"Given the secretive nature of this elusive cat, it has been difficult to gather hard information on the species, leading to its plight being overlooked," said Dr Sarah Durant, from the Zoological Society of London, UK, and the report's lead author.
"Our findings show that the large space requirements for the cheetah, coupled with the complex range of threats faced by the species in the wild, mean that it is likely to be much more vulnerable to extinction than was previously thought."
Another of the big concerns about cheetahs has been the illegal trafficking of cubs, fuelled by demand from the Gulf states, as reported by the BBC earlier this year.
The young cats can fetch up to $10,000 on the black market. According to the Cheetah Conservation Fund, some 1,200 cheetah cubs are known to have been trafficked out of Africa over the past 10 years but around 85% of them died during the journey.
At the recent CITES conference in South Africa, governments agreed to put new measures in place to tackle this issue, clamping down on the use of social media to advertise cheetahs for sale.
Image copyrightZSLImage caption The cheetah has lost 91% of its traditional ranges as it comes increasingly into conflict with humans
However if the species is to survive long term then urgent efforts must be made to tackle the wider question of protected areas and ranges.
The new study argues for a "paradigm shift in conservation", moving away from the idea of just declaring an area to be protected and towards incorporating "incentive-based approaches". This, in essence, means paying local communities to protect a species that many see as a dangerous predator.
"The take-away from this pinnacle study is that securing protected areas alone is not enough," said Dr Kim Young-Overton from Panthera, another author on the report.
"We must think bigger, conserving across the mosaic of protected and unprotected landscapes that these far-reaching cats inhabit, if we are to avert the otherwise certain loss of the cheetah forever."
To fully recognise the scale of the threat that the cheetah now faces, the report is calling on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to change the categorisation of the fastest animal on its Red List from vulnerable to endangered.
This would help focus international conservation support on a species that the authors fear is heading for extinction at an increasing pace.
The report has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Image copyrightUniversity of Maine/ ClimateReanalyzer.orgImage caption Temperatures on Christmas Eve at the North Pole could reach close to freezing on Christmas Eve 2016
Temperatures at the North Pole could be up to 20 degrees higher than average this Christmas Eve, in what scientists say is a record-breaking heatwave.
Climate scientists say these unseasonably warm weather patterns in the Arctic region are directly linked to man-made climate change.
Temperatures throughout November and December were 5C higher than average.
It follows a summer during which Arctic sea ice reached the second-lowest extent ever recorded by satellites.
Image copyrightESA/CPOM/LEEDS UNIImage caption Arctic sea ice extent is monitored and measured by satellite imaging
Dr Friederike Otto, a senior researcher at Oxford's Environmental Change Institute told BBC News __that in pre-industrial times "a heatwave like this would have been extremely rare - we would expect it to occur about every 1,000 years".
Dr Otto added __that scientists are "very confident" that the weather patterns were linked to anthropogenic climate change.
"We have used several different climate modelling approaches and observations," she told BBC News.
"And in all our methods, we find the same thing; we cannot model a heatwave like this without the anthropogenic signal."
Temperatures are forecast to peak on Christmas Eve around the North Pole - at near-freezing.
The warm air from the North Atlantic is forecast to flow all the way to the North Pole via Spitsbergen, giving rise to clouds that prevent heat from escaping.
And, as Dr Otto explained to BBC News, the reduction in sea ice is contributing to this "feedback loop".
"If the globe is warming, then the sea ice and ice on land [shrinks] then the darker water and land is exposed," she said.
"Then the sunlight is absorbed rather than reflected as it would be by the ice."
Forecasting models show that there is about a 2% chance of a heatwave event occurring every year.
"But if temperatures continue to increase further as they are now," said Dr Otto, "we would expect a heatwave like this to occur every year and that will be a huge stress on the ecosystem."
Dr Thorsten Markus, chief of NASA's Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory, said the heatwave was "very, very unusual".
"The eerie thing is that we saw something quite similar (temperatures at the North Pole of about 0C in December) almost exactly a year ago," he told BBC News.
The freeze and thaw conditions are already making it difficult for reindeer to find food - as the moss they feed on is covered by hard ice, rather than soft, penetrable snow.
Asked if the conditions on Christmas Eve were likely to affect Santa's all-important journey, Dr Markus said he was confident that his sled would cope with the conditions.
He added: "Santa is most likely overdressed though. Maybe in the future we'll see him in a light jacket or plastic mac."
At present, it is the only way to monitor sea-ice volume across the entire Arctic basin.
What is interesting in its new data is __that average sea-ice thickness stands today at roughly 130cm.
This represents the 5th thickest November in the Cryosat record, meaning the low volume is pretty much all down to the low extent.
This is most evident at southerly latitudes in the Beaufort, East Siberian and Kara seas, where the warm October/November conditions have been very keenly felt.
"When the Autumn freeze-up occurs, it is the low latitudes that would normally see the fastest growth in ice, in areas of open water or over thin floes. But because of the warm autumn, these regions simply haven't been able to build this volume," said Dr Rachel Tilling from the Nerc Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at Leeds University, UK.
Cryosat's volume determination on Monday was for 10,200 cu km.
Scientists expect perhaps 300 cu km to be added to floes in the last days of the month.
The resulting 10,500 cu km would then match what was seen in November 2011 and 2012, taking account of the errors that exist in such measurements.
"There is no doubt that sea-ice growth this Autumn has been sluggish and with Cryosat we've witnessed the smallest November growth on record," explained Dr Tilling.
"Usually, it grows by about 160 cu km per day, but this November it's been 139 cu km per day - just under 10% lower."
Volume is really the key metric when considering the status of Arctic sea-ice.
Only thinking about extent, or area, can hide the fact that winds will sometimes spread out the floes and sometimes pile them up.
Talking in terms of volume captures more of the overall behaviour in the Arctic system.
Cryosat gauges volume by first measuring the difference in height between the top of the floating part of the sea-ice and the sea surface.
Knowing the size of this "freeboard" enables scientists to estimate the overall thickness of the ice. Multiplying by the area then gives gives the volume.
"Being able to measure sea-ice thickness means that we can be sure how much is actually there, because changes in melting, snowfall, and drift all affect how thick the ice pack is and this is hidden in maps of extent alone," emphasised Leeds' Prof Andrew Shepherd, the principal scientific adviser to the Cryosat mission.
"It's also of interest for ships attempting to navigate the Arctic's ice-infested waters. Because Cryosat is the only sensor able to do this, it's an essential tool for climate scientists and maritime operators alike."
Follow-on mission
Launched in 2010, Cryosat is now operating beyond its design lifetime.
How long the spacecraft can continue working is anyone's guess.
It has enough fuel to sustain itself into the early 2020s but component failure in the harsh environment of its orbit, 720km above the Earth, is an ever-present risk.
Europe's research ministers meeting in Lucerne, Switzerland, on Thursday have been asked to consider funding R&D for a replacement satellite.
This Cryosat follow-on spacecraft - if eventually approved for full development - would likely carry an even more sophisticated radar altimeter than the present mission.
It would be multi-frequency in operation and able better to discern the depth of snow sitting on top of the ice. This is one of the factors that adds uncertainty to the calculation of sea-ice thickness and ultimately volume.
Cryosat's radar has the resolution to see the Arctic's floes and leads
Some 7/8 of the ice tends to sit below the waterline - the draft
The aim is to measure the freeboard - the ice part above the waterline
Knowing this 1/8th figure allows Cryosat to work out sea-ice thickness
The thickness multiplied by the area of ice cover produces a volume
Volume - not area - is the best guide to the status of Arctic sea ice
Cryosat's measurement technique works in autumn, winter and spring
Melt ponds on the ice make a mid-summer assessment very difficult
Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos
Cindy Lee Van Dover holds membership in a most exclusive boy’s club: Of the 42 gearheads, engineers, and former Navy commanders who have piloted the submersible Alvin—the stubby, cramped, three-crew midget research sub __that discovered the Titanic—she is the first and only woman. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she says, “was to become an Alvin pilot.”
It’s a feat __that takes months of training, learning the arcane language of check valves, autoclaves, ballast systems, oxygen monitors, electrical systems, and a Rube-Goldberg system of mechanical levers and knobs. And you have to be able to execute it with the concentration of a Space Shuttle pilot, 2 miles deep. In fact, there are fewer Alvin pilots than Shuttle pilots (135).
Since Van Dover’s first gender-breaking piloted dive in 1990, she has descended to the ocean floor 93 times inside the 32-foot-long three-person sub. During that time, she has discovered dozens of exotic species living off hydrothermal vents, which is now her specialty. She studies their reproductive habits, their food webs, and even invented a now widely used vacuum technology to capture and further study the creatures.
Which seems just about right for someone who spent her childhood summers scrambling along the beach, flipping over horseshoe crabs and inspecting snail eggs. Most kids her age just wished “for a train set,” she says. “I just wished to see these animals living on the seafloor.”
She went on to earn a Ph.D. in biological oceanography in 1989, and that same year landed a spot on an Alvin mission exploring vents. From that first dive, she wanted to get behind the controls. Back then, most pilots had mechanical backgrounds from long Naval careers. “I was just a scientist, and a biologist at that,” she says. “I had to learn a whole new vocabulary.”
After each day of working on board one of her research ships, she’d retreat to her cabin to memorize thick manuals and schematics, including, “this one diagram that starts from the big batteries all the way to making one little finger move on the manipulator,” she says. Nine months later she had her certification, one that allowed her a coveted front-row seat to underwater exploration. Most biologists like her can wait up to three years to get a research project written, funded, and green-lit for a seat on Alvin. But a pilot can dive nearly every other day. “It was quite a strategic move on her part and one that took a lot of guts” says Dan Fornari, a marine geologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and a colleague of 30 years.
These days, Van Dover’s exploring is conducted at a desk dominated by two large computer screens. There she organizes expeditions and writes recommendations for promising students in her eponymous lab at the Duke University Marine Laboratory, where she became the first female director in 2006. But she’ll always remember her last dive.
A mile underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, she was helping test Alvin after a scheduled overhaul, when the carbon-dioxide scrubber failed. Oxygen levels plunged. She and her crew members had to drop ballast weights, strap on oxygen masks, fire the thrusters, and ascend. But she never panicked. “I know that submarine so well,” she says. “I knew we’d get back up.”
Despite being a few dives shy of a century (that coveted 100 mark) that will likely be her last.
“It was such a memorable one,” she says. “I might just leave it at that.”
Depth Gauge
1982 Part of the first expedition to explore hydrothermal vents in the East Pacific Rise, a line running from Antarctica to the Gulf of California where tectonic plates are pulling apart
1990 First (and only) female Alvin pilot
1993 Helped explore and characterize Lucky Strike, one of the largest-known and most biologically unique hydrothermal-vent areas
2006 First female director of the Duke University Marine Laboratory
2015 Co-developed a first of its kind robotic sub that can vacuum up huge volumes of plankton to study
Read about how other ocean explorers are solving the planet’s mysteries in the rest of our Deep Sea Six feature from the January/February 2017 issue of Popular Science.
You might not expect an oceanographer to be high on NASA’s speed dial, but when the space agency needed help mounting a mission to Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa, it called one: Chris German. Ever since the geochemist found hydrothermal vents teeming with life in the Atlantic Ocean in 1997, he’s been an Indiana Jones in the search for vents, creatures, and the origins of life.
A senior scientist at Woods Hole, German was among the first to use programmable underwater robots to explore the seafloor. The skill to operate them in difficult conditions—15,000 feet deep and under 10-foot-thick ice—is what NASA likes about him. Last September, they teamed up for a two-month Arctic expedition, a dry run for what NASA might one day try on Europa.
Geochemists theorize __that the ocean’s hydrothermal vents—which spew heat, gas, rocks, and chemicals __that sustain life—may have birthed all life on this planet. Can the same be true in other watery worlds? That’s what NASA hopes to find in Europa’s abyssal seafloor: evidence of life—or life’s chemicals—embedded in the top of the ice. “Wouldn’t it be great,” asks German, “if we could fly around the outside of Europa, look down, and detect that stuff? Or land there and scrape up ice samples that could give us an answer?”
For years, no one thought life-sustaining ocean vents existed beyond active volcanoes, until German found a vent field in the Atlantic, miles from any active volcano. “He’s a genius at finding life and working at abyssal depths,” says Adam Soule, chief science officer at the Woods Hole National Deep Submergence Facility.
German’s work in the Arctic could help NASA decide where and what to look for when it sends the Europa Clipper to take flyby pictures, thermal images, and magnetic soundings of the frozen moon in 2022. Exploring extreme worlds on Earth, he says, will help us search in nearly any ocean habitat. “That’s where I come in,” he says. “We’re going to look pretty dumb if we get up there and find something we didn’t plan for.”
Depth Gauge
1986 Goes to sea for the first time, visiting the site of the first “black smokers”—vents that spew iron-sulfide clouds—discovered in the Atlantic Ocean
1997 Discovers the first tectonically controlled hydrothermal vent to exist away from an active volcano zone
1999 Discovers the first sites of active venting in the Antarctic, on the East Scotia Ridge
2004 First to use an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to search for, locate, and photograph seafloor hydrothermal vents robotically
2011 Discovers the first live tube worms in the Atlantic, previously thought to exist only in the Pacific
2014 Leads mission using a fiber-optic tether to send a remotely programmable sub under the Arctic ice
Read about how other ocean explorers are solving the planet’s mysteries in the rest of our Deep Sea Six feature from the January/February 2017 issue of Popular Science.
Colin Devey launched his deep-dive career on land, studying a 66-million-year-old lava flow __that once covered half of India. But a year later, in 1987, he found himself on a research cruise to Tahiti, joining a bunch of fellow volcanologists and geochemists looking for volcanic rocks on the ocean floor. Though hard to see down there, he found the geology simple. “The continents are complicated because they’ve been around for billions of years and they’re messed up,” Devey says, “like a billboard covered in 150 advertisements. The oceans are like a new billboard.”
For the past three decades, Devey has busied himself at the bottom of the sea, reading those billboards and hauling news of their movement to the surface. In the process, he has altered what we know about plate tectonics and how our continents push away from (and toward) each other.
For years, geologists believed __that the underwater volcanoes that make up the mid-Atlantic ridge (a 37,000-mile chain that goes straight up the ocean’s center) were equally active and therefore pushing North America away from Eurasia with equal force and speed. Devey found a much more asymmetrical process. He discovered patches of extremely active volcanoes that created new ocean crust and pushed the plates (and continents) apart faster than other areas. Because of him, we now know the south is spreading slowly and the north is spreading fast. “Colin has been really involved in characterizing these important differences,” says Lynne Elkins, a marine volcanologist at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. But it’s not just the volcanoes’ force.
It’s also the mineral deposits that form around the volcanoes and the way the volcanoes constantly circulate chemicals, and magma, through the ocean, that pushes the continents. “The seafloor is where most of our planet’s volcanic activity takes place,” says Devey, a U.K. native whose work for the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, in Germany, has put that institution on the map. “We want to understand why they are there and what they do.”
Devey has made more than 550 deep-sea dives and led more than 30 expeditions to map and analyze seafloor volcanism around the planet. But one of his most famous finds had nothing to do with volcanoes. In 2015, his research ship, Sonne, accidentally discovered the largest cache of manganese nodules in the Atlantic. Inky black mineral deposits they are a source of rare earth elements for electronics. They littered the seafloor, some as big as bowling balls and 10 million years old. “It’s surprising how many and how big they were,” he says. “It looked rather weird.”
Devey is now focusing on the geochemistry of an even less well-known area of the Atlantic.
His next stop: the volcanically active Reykjanes Ridge, south of Iceland, where he will drop an ROV to study fresh lava for clues to the ridge’s spread rate of about 2.5 centimeters a year. No matter what he finds, his curiosity will be intact. “This planet is fascinating and we know almost nothing about it,” Devey says. And the only way to learn, he says, is “go out there and do it.”
Depth Gauge
1994 Achieves his deepest dive: 11,483 feet, in the Pacific Ocean. During the dive, a squid rockets past his submersible and explodes a cloud of black ink. "I would have jumped out of the submersible if I could, it was so scary."
2004-2006 Co-chairs the InterRidge program, an international co-operative for studying midocean ridges and oceanic spreading
2015 While searching for deep-sea organisms off Brazil, discovers the largest cache of round, black manganese deposits ever found in the Atlantic Ocean, some as big as bowling balls and 10 million years old
2016 Studying new volcanic rock in the South Pacific, found that the magma held recycled Archean sediment that had been stored deep in the earth for over 2.5 billion years before rising to the surface as magma
Read about how other ocean explorers are solving the planet’s mysteries in the rest of our Deep Sea Six feature from the January/February 2017 issue of Popular Science.
Image copyrightMark Witton/National Museums ScotlandImage caption Artist's impression of how the animals might have looked
Fossils of what may be the earliest four-legged backboned animals to walk on land have been discovered in Scotland.
The lizard-like creatures lived about 355 million years ago, when the ancestors of modern reptiles, birds and mammals emerged from swamps.
The discovery plugs a 15 million-year gap in the fossil record.
There are five complete fossils and many more fragments of bones __that have yet to be classified.
Some resemble lizards or newts, while others are larger, with almost crocodile-like proportions.
"We're lifting the lid on a key part of the evolutionary story of life on land," said Prof Jennifer Clack of the University of Cambridge.
"What happened then affects everything __that happens subsequently - so it affects the fact that we are here and which other animals live with us today."
Critical step
The fossils suggest that the first backboned animals to crawl around on land may have lived in what is now the Scottish borders.
Alternatively, there may be many more similar fossils in other parts of the world that have yet to be discovered.
Dr Nick Fraser, of National Museums Scotland, who worked on the fossils, said they represent a "critical step in the evolution of life on Earth".
"Without this step of vertebrates - animals with backbones - coming on to land, we wouldn't be here, birds wouldn't be here, crocodiles wouldn't be here, lizards, frogs, dinosaurs would never have roamed the Earth - all these things would not have evolved," he told BBC News.
Image copyrightR ClackImage caption Fossils have also been found in Burnmouth on the east coast of Scotland
Around 360 million years ago, many life forms, including early fish, were wiped out in a mass extinction.
For the next 15 million years or so, a key time in tetrapod evolution, there is a gap in the fossil record.
This means we know very little about how fish-like animals grew the limbs that could support them on land.
Dr Fraser said the focus of attention is on Scotland, as it may be the place where these animals "first colonised land".
"These are the oldest animals with four legs that were able to move around on land," he said.
"If you want to draw the analogy to Neil Armstrong's first step on the Moon - it was one small step for man but a giant leap for mankind, well, this in some ways is a small step out of the water for these animals but it's a giant leap forward for the future evolution of life on land."
Image copyrightNMSImage caption The fossils were found in a river near Chirnside in Berwickshire, Scotland
Only a handful of sites in the world have yielded similar fossils from this time period.
One is in Scotland - in Dumbarton, west of Glasgow, where only a single fossil (Pederpes) has been unearthed.
Fragments of fossils have been found in the US and Canada.
Details of the latest discoveries are published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Dr Per Ahlberg, of Uppsala University, Sweden, said the fossils "substantially change our picture of early tetrapod evolution".
And Dr Mike Coates, of the University of Chicago, said "they predict more diversity, earlier in the fossil record" and suggest "a greater range of extinction survivors among the early tetrapods".
Dr Jason Anderson, of the University of Calgary, said the fossils show that the apparent gap in the fossil record "is due to a lack of fossil collection, and not because there were no fossils because of low atmospheric oxygen".
Image copyrightYu ChenImage caption The young ate meat while adults dined on plants
Some dinosaurs lost their teeth as they grew up, according to fossil evidence.
The hatchlings ate meat with their teeth, then used beaks to peck at plants as adults, say scientists.
The discovery is a surprise and has not been seen in any other reptile.
Limusaurus inextricabilis lived in China around 150 million years ago. The first fossilised remains of the animal were discovered about a decade ago.
"Initially, we believed __that we found two different ceratosaurian dinosaurs from the Wucaiwan area, one toothed and the other toothless, and we even started to describe them separately," said Shuo Wang of Capital Normal University in Beijing, China, who led the research.
The palaeontologists then realised __that the dinosaurs looked remarkably similar, except for the presence of teeth.
They found that the dinosaur lost its teeth over time, making it the first known reptile to do this.
Life cycle change
Dr Stephen Brusatte, of the University of Edinburgh, who was not part of the research team, said it was a stunning discovery.
"Up until now, who would have thought that there were dinosaurs that had teeth as babies, started to lose them as they grew up and then ended up as toothless adults with beaks?" he told BBC News.
"Nothing like this is seen in any other fossil vertebrate and the platypus is the only modern land-living vertebrate that does anything similar."
The dinosaurs were switching from one sort of feeding type that required teeth to one in which teeth were a disadvantage, and a beak was better, said Dr Stig Walsh of National Museums Scotland.
"Other theropod dinosaurs in the group to which Limusaurus belongs are carnivores and I can't help wondering whether the driver for such a life cycle change was to allow Limusaurus to capitalise on a more abundant food source as they became larger," he added.
Platypus
Limusaurus (mud lizard) was a fairly old and primitive theropod dinosaur.
It belongs to the same group as well-known carnivores like T. rex and Velociraptor.
The researchers think the toothed juveniles were probably omnivorous meat-eaters. The adults, which had beaks, moved on to a plant-based diet.
The discovery will help explain how the beak, which is so important in the bird kingdom, evolved.
Tooth loss is more common in modern animals.
Some fish and amphibians lose teeth as they grow, as do platypuses.
The research is published in the journal Current Biology.
The Office of Managment and Budget might seem like a less prominent position than, for example, the head of the EPA or the Department of Energy, but it’s a vitally important job.
From the OMB’s website:
The core mission of OMB is to serve the President of the United States in implementing his vision across the Executive Branch. OMB is the largest component of the Executive Office of the President. It reports directly to the President and helps a wide range of executive departments and agencies across the Federal Government to implement the commitments and priorities of the President.
The person __that takes the job will have a significant impact on budgets throughout the federal government, so it’s worth learning more about their views. President-elect Donald Trump's pick is Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, and he doesn’t really see the need for government-funded science research.
In a now cached Facebook post from September, when a debate was raging in Congress as to whether or not we should fund research into Zika Mulvaney writes:
“I have received all sorts of emails and FB comments this week on Zika. Some people want me to pass a "clean" bill (which I suppose means not paying for it with spending reductions elsewhere). Other folks want us to fund more research if we can find a way to pay for it.
No one has written me yet, though, to ask what might be the best question: do we really need government-funded research at all.”
He goes on to suggest __that because a preliminary study found no wave of birth defects linked to Zika infections in Columbia, government funded research into Zika and its link to birth defects might not be necessary.
As Julia Belluz points out at Vox, the research that Mulvaney cited was supplanted months later by another study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which showed that there was a link between Zika and birth defects in the United States. The data in both studies was gathered by researchers from around the country and the world, including federally-funded researchers from the CDC.
Research—and the federal money to fund it—was needed to adequately inform pregnant women in the U.S. about a disease that remains stubbornly mysterious, is spreading across the world, and for which there is currently no cure or approved vaccine.
Though Mulvaney has not yet been confirmed, his appointment and his own words can give the public an idea of “the commitments and priorities of the President.”
Questioning whether science research should be funded isn’t a new viewpoint for the incoming administration. Other plans espousing similar theories have been floated, including a suggestion to cut climate change research at NASA.
Image copyrightScience Photo LibraryImage caption When a connection between two nerve cells is busy, it gets stronger
Three British researchers have won a prize worth one million euros, awarded each year for an "outstanding contribution to European neuroscience".
Tim Bliss, Graham Collingridge and Richard Morris revealed how strengthened connections between brain cells can store our memories.
Our present understanding of memory is built on their work, which unpicked the mechanisms and molecules involved.
This is the first time the Brain Prize has been won by an entirely UK team.
It is awarded by a Danish charitable foundation and the 2016 winners were announced in London on Tuesday.
Speaking to journalists at a media conference, Prof Morris explained it was the "chemistry of memory" __that he and his colleagues had managed to illuminate.
Fire together, wire together
"Before this team got going, we had some idea about particular areas of the brain __that might be involved in memory… but what we didn't have was any real understanding of how it worked," explained the professor, who works at the University of Edinburgh.
The "team" of three winners never worked together in the same laboratory, but they have collaborated over the years.
Image copyrightPAImage caption Prof Bliss (L) and Prof Morris spoke at a media conference, where the mood was celebratory
"Memories change the brain - the brain is plastic," said Prof Bliss, who worked for many years at the National Institute of Medical Research in London and is now affiliated with the Francis Crick Institute.
Those changes occur at the junctions between nerve cells - synapses - and were described in a pioneering study by Bliss and a Norwegian colleague, Terje Lømo, in the 1970s.
They recorded brain cells in anaesthetised rabbits and found that repeatedly stimulating two connected neurons caused their connection to get stronger.
"If nerve cell A is connected to nerve cell B, and A takes part in firing B, then the synapse - the connection between A and B - will be strengthened," Prof Bliss explained.
I immediately recognised that this was a phenomenally interesting property... and decided that this was going to be my career
This paradigm, sometimes summarised as "neurons that fire together, wire together", was suggested by the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb in the 1940s, but Bliss and Lømo were the first to glimpse it happening inside the brain.
Subsequently, Prof Collingridge - a researcher at the University of Bristol - worked on finding the specific molecules responsible.
Currently working at the University of Toronto in Canada, he spoke to journalists by telephone and paid tribute to the original Bliss and Lømo study.
Their paper was an inspiration to him as a young researcher, Prof Collingridge said.
"I immediately recognised that this was a phenomenally interesting property, which gave us the opportunity to understand the mechanisms of learning and memory in the brain - and decided that this was going to be my career."
Finally, it was Prof Morris who demonstrated that the molecular systems identified by Prof Collingridge and his colleagues were, in fact, crucial for memories to form.
If those systems are disrupted, for example, rats and mice have difficulty learning to navigate a new environment.
Image copyrightScience Photo LibraryImage caption The most critical connections are made in part of the brain called the hippocampus
The Brain Prize is awarded by the Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Foundation, based in Copenhagen; a committee of eight neuroscientists makes the decision.
Billed as "the world's most valuable prize for brain research", its one million-euro value - to be shared by the three winners - marginally exceeds that of the biennial US $1m neuroscience prize awarded by the Kavli Foundation.
It will be presented in Copenhagen on 1 July by Denmark's Crown Prince Frederik.
The first British winner was geneticist Prof Karen Steel of King's College London, who shared the prize in 2012 for her work on deafness; Cambridge psychologist Trevor Robbins was one of three recipients in 2014.
Direct recordings have revealed what is happening in our brains as we make sense of speech in a noisy room.
Focusing on one conversation in a loud, distracting environment is called "the cocktail party effect".
It is a common festive phenomenon and of interest to researchers seeking to improve speech recognition technology.
Neuroscientists recorded from people's brains during a test __that recreated the moment when unintelligible speech suddenly makes sense.
A team measured people's brain activity as the words of a previously unintelligible sentence suddenly became clear when a subject was told the meaning of the "garbled speech".
The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.
Lead researcher Christopher Holdgraf from the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues were able to work with epilepsy patients, who had had a portion of their skull removed and electrodes placed on the brain surface to track their seizures.
Seven of these subjects took part in the scientists' auditory test.
Filtering the noise
Media captionCan you understand these phrases? Researchers used this audio to work out what happens in our brains when we suddenly make sense of speech
First, the researchers played a very distorted, garbled sentence to each subject, which almost no-one was able to understand. They then played a normal, easy to understand version of the same sentence and immediately repeated the garbled version.
"After hearing the intact sentence" the researchers explained in their paper, all the subjects understood the subsequent "noisy version".
The brain recordings showed this moment of recognition as brain activity patterns in the areas of the brain __that are known to be associated with processing sound and understanding speech.
When the subjects heard the very garbled sentence, the scientists reported that they saw little activity in those parts of the brain.
Hearing the clearly understandable sentence then triggered patterns of activity in those brain areas.
The scientific revelation was seeing how that then altered the nature of the brain's response when the subject heard the distorted, garbled phrase again. Auditory and speech processing areas then "lit up" and changed their pattern of activity over time, apparently tuning in to the words among the distortion.
"The brain actually changes the way it focuses on different parts of the sound," explained the researchers. "When patients heard the clear sentences first, the auditory cortex (the part of the brain associated with processing sound) enhanced the speech signal."
Mr Holdgraf said: "We're starting to look for more subtle or complex relationships between the brain activity and the sound.
"Rather than just looking at 'up or down', it's looking at the details of how the brain activity changes across time, and how that activity relates to features in the sound.
This, he added, gets closer to the mechanisms behind perception.
"By understanding the ways in which our brains filter out noise in the world, the researcher concluded, "we hope to be able to create devices that help people with speech and hearing impediments accomplish the same thing."
"It is unbelievable how fast and plastic the brain is," added co-author Prof Robert Knight. "[And] this is the first time we have any evidence on how it actually works in humans."
Prof Knight and his colleagues are aiming to use the findings to develop a speech decoder, a brain implant to interpret people's imagined speech, which could help those with certain neurodegenerative diseases that affect their ability to speak.
Before humans travel to another planet—and __that day may be coming soon—a question will need to be answered: How will astronauts spend their time on a months- or years-long interplanetary voyage?
In the movie Passengers, which hits theaters today, more than 5,000 people board the starship Avalon on a 120-year journey to a new world called Homestead II. Prior to launch they each enter a “hibernation pod,” which, through drugs and environmental controls, puts them into a suspended animation. Essentially, they're meant to sleep through all but four months of the century-long trek.
Currently, humanity is nowhere near ready for the interstellar journey __that Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) and Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) undertake, but this sci-fi hibernation technology is actually grounded in today's reality. NASA is helping to fund the research of SpaceWorks Enterprises, a company that aims to put astronauts into artificial hibernation through a process similar to that depicted in Passengers.
NASA's "Journey to Mars" has the space agency aiming for a crewed mission to Mars in the 2030s, and SpaceWorks President/COO John Bradford thinks the hibernation technology can be ready for that first mission.
How It Works
To set this artificial hibernation in motion (or, rather, not in motion), SpaceWorks would lower a person's core temperature to 32 degrees Celsius, then sedate her to stop the body's natural defense against the cold—shivering. Hospitals use this practice, called "therapeutic hypothermia" or "targeted temperature management," when a patient with a traumatic injury, such as cardiac arrest, needs extra time to heal due to lack of blood flow. The lowered temperature sets the patient into an unconscious-like state and acts as a neuroprotectant, slowing down his metabolic rate and lowering his risk of ischemic injury (tissue damage from lack of oxygen and other nutrients due to low blood flow). Once he's recovered, doctors can warm him back up and address other injuries.
However, patients are usually kept in this state for only a few days; the longest it has ever been tested was a 14-day study in China, which showed no lasting or negative side effects on the patient. Bradford thinks SpaceWorks can advance the current technology to extend that timeframe for a healthy person.
"It's closer to reality than it sounds, but there's still a lot of questions, and a lot of development that needs to occur," he admits.
Instead of one long hibernation, like in Passengers, crew would go through staggered two-week stasis periods, says Bradford. After two weeks of hibernation, a crew member would be resuscitated, recover for a few days, and then go back into hibernation for another cycle. "Our medical team is more concerned about the duration of any one cycle versus repeat cycles," says Bradford, "because there doesn't seem to be any lasting or long-term impacts on the recovery period."
In Passengers, a computer monitors the functions of the ship and those aboard it. But in real life, Bradford says there would always be at least one person who is awake to take care of the crew and systems during the initial trials. As the technology gets better, though, SpaceWorks would like to extend the duration incrementally until it is able to suspend astronauts for the entirety of the transit to Mars. An IV line filled with a nutrient-packed liquid (called "Total Parenteral Nutrition") would sustain the astronauts while they're unconscious.
Unlike the Homestead Company (which manufactures and runs the Avalon in Passengers), SpaceWorks won't stop the aging process and prolong human life. So the Avalon's passengers would have arrived at the new colony 120 years older than when they left Earth.
But the technology could make long-duration spaceflight a lot more efficient. While the Avalon has drawn comparisons to the Titanic for its size and glamour (and to the movie Titanic for a love story set on a sinking ship), SpaceWorks is actively working to reduce the amount of space each person needs on the spaceship.
If astronauts are asleep, fewer resources need to be invested in living quarters, accommodations, food, etc., and more can be spent on finding technologies to speed up the trip and protect the crew, such as thicker radiation shielding. "We're doing it for the purposes of reducing how much food and consumables people need, and to be able to package people in a small space," says Bradford. SpaceWorks thinks it can reduce the mass of a NASA vehicle by 52 to 68 percent, depending on the configuration.
Smaller spacecraft could make exploring the cosmos a lot cheaper, which, in turn, brings us that much closer to real-life interplanetary exploration.
10,000 years ago, early humans were doing more than just gathering plants. They were putting them in pots. Not to grow indoors—the ubiquitous office ficus wouldn’t be around for thousands of years—but to grind up, cook, and eat.
The ficuses found at one of the two Libyan Saharan archaeological sites were of a more ancient form, preserved alongside the pottery they were prepared in. Scientists have long known __that humans used pottery to cook animal products, but this new finding suggests __that early humans relied much more on plant nutrition than we thought. Researchers at the Uan Afuda cave and the Takarkori rock shelter sites gathered 110 pottery shards and analyzed the residues left on the inside to figure out what food stuffs early humans were mashing up inside. They published their findings in *Nature Plants * on Monday.
These two North African sites yielded the earliest direct evidence that humans processed plants for food. Pottery may even have been invented in this region specifically for this purpose—just over half of the pottery shards had mainly plant residues. The rest had either mostly animal fats or a combination of plant and animal.
Unlike the modern fruits and veggies we eat today, wild, ancient plants weren’t exactly easy to collect and eat. Domesticated plants tend to be easier to gather, have larger edible parts, and have fewer defense mechanisms—because we bred them that way. Big fruit on thornless branches that stays there growing big and ripe is pretty easy to harvest. Small seeds on spiny branches that disperse into the wind are not.
That means a plant-heavy diet would have been surprisingly sophisticated for early foragers. They were still thousands of years away from domesticating plants and animals, yet they were using grindstones to process their food. They even ate aquatic plants like cattails. Being able to get nutrition from plant sources may have helped the hunter-gatherers through the transition to a food-producing society. It would have provided food for early domesticated animals as well as an improved diet for humans. The authors also note that being able to cook food soft enough for babies to eat would help wean them earlier, freeing up ancient moms to have more kids. And fertility is a big plus when you’re growing all your own meals.
Image copyrightAFP / Getty Images Image caption Exxon Mobil chief Rex Tillerson has been appointed as the next US secretary of state
Rex Tillerson, nominated by US President-elect Donald Trump to be secretary of state, runs the world's most valuable, publicly traded oil company.
The 64-year-old, Texas-born head of Exxon Mobil has worked for the company in the US, Yemen and Russia, and is known for his close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But Mr Tillerson's links to the Kremlin, which awarded him the Order of Friendship in 2013, and his lack of experience have drawn criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, setting up a potential battle in his confirmation hearings in the Senate early next year.
The Texas oil chief is likely to come under intense scrutiny for the potential benefits Exxon might receive in US foreign policy he would preside over at the State Department.
While critics raise concern about his ability to trade in his corporate interest for a national one, some supporters suggest his background as a global dealmaker may bring fresh perspective to the nation's top diplomatic post.
Image copyrightEPAImage caption Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson (left) with Russian President Vladimir Putin (right)
Mr Trump's transitional team said Mr Tillerson would "help reverse years of misguided foreign policies and actions __that have weakened" the country's global standing.
The Texan said he shared Mr Trump's vision "for restoring the credibility of the United States' foreign relations and advancing our country's national security".
In Putin's pocket?
Mr Tillerson's nomination follows revelations __that US intelligence agencies believe Russia acted covertly to help Mr Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the election, leaving some critics unnerved by his close relations with Moscow.
During his time at Exxon, Mr Tillerson has forged multibillion-dollar deals with Russia's state oil company, Rosneft, including an agreement to explore underground resources in Siberia that could be worth billions of dollars.
He is also known to be a friend of Igor Sechin, Rosneft's executive chairman who was formerly Mr Putin's deputy prime minister. Mr Sechin has been called Russia's second most powerful man.
Mr Tillerson has publicly spoken out against international sanctions placed on Russia over its annexation of Crimea.
In 2014, Exxon filed a report saying the US government and European Union's sanctions cost the company a maximum of $1bn (£790m) in damage to joint ventures.
Republican Florida Senator Marco Rubio expressed "serious concerns" about Mr Tillerson's nomination, noting that the post needed to go to "someone who views the world with moral clarity, is free of potential conflicts of interest, has a clear sense of America's interests, and will be a forceful advocate for America's foreign policy goals to the president, within the administration, and on the world stage".
Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona also voiced his scepticism, asking "what kinds of business we do with a butcher, a murderer, a thug, which is exactly what Vladimir Putin is".
But Mr Tillerson is also known to be a supporter of free trade, a departure from the anti-trade views held by Mr Trump, who has decried the existing US agreements as a hindrance to the American economy.
Political outsider
Mr Tillerson has spent his entire career, more than 40 years, working for Exxon. He joined the company as a production engineer, fresh from University of Texas, Austin, and worked his way up to take the top job in 2006.
He had been expected to retire next year.
The lifelong Exxon employee beat a long list of seasoned candidates in the running for the post, including former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney; Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and former CIA chief David Petraeus.
To counter concerns over his lack of experience, former Secretary of Defence Robert Gates hailed Mr Tillerson as "a global champion of the best values of our country" while former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shared similar sentiment.
But as Mr Gates noted, Exxon is a client of his and Ms Rice's consultancy firm RiceHadleyGates.
Though Mr Tillerson appears to fit with Mr Trump's right-wing cabinet, he has stirred controversy among some social conservatives who condemn his more liberal policies.
As president of the Boy Scouts of America from 2010-2012, Mr Tillerson was part of the push to allow gay scouts and leaders into the organisation, although a ban on openly gay adult scout leaders remained in place until 2015.
Evangelical leader Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, slammed Mr Tillerson's nomination, noting Exxon's history of donating to family-planning organisation Planned Parenthood.
Mr Tillerson is also a former director of the United Negro College Fund, a US organisation that funds scholarships for black students and supports historically black colleges and universities.
Fossil fuel advocate
Exxon, which has about 75,000 employees around the world, has been accused of trying to cover up the risks of climate change and lying to the public.
The company has dealt with a series of state investigations into how much it knew about climate science, leaving many environmental activists concerned about his nomination.
"He and other company executives led Exxon Mobil in funding outside groups to create an illusion of scientific uncertainty around the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change," said Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress and a Clinton ally.
Yet Mr Tillerson accepts climate change is real and has spoken of "catastrophic" consequences if it were left unchecked.
"For many years, Exxon Mobil has held the view that the risks of climate change are serious and do warrant action. We believe that addressing the risk of climate change is a global issue," he said last May.
Though he is so far the only member of Trump's candidate to acknowledge the existence of climate change, Mr Tillerson remains committed to the continued use of fossil fuels.
"The reality is there is no alternative energy source known on the planet or available to us today to replace the pervasiveness of fossil fuels in our global economy, in our very quality of life, and I would go beyond that and say our very survival," he said.
He is, however, open to the idea of a carbon tax to reduce emissions, a view likely to clash with those held by new colleagues in government.
Image copyrightESAImage caption Artwork: A depiction of where the jet is moving - in the outer core. The Swarm satellites fly a few hundred km above the planet and sense its magnetic field
Scientists say they have identified a remarkable new feature in Earth’s molten outer core.
They describe it as a kind of "jet stream" - a fast-flowing river of liquid iron __that is surging westwards under Alaska and Siberia.
The moving mass of metal has been inferred from measurements made by Europe’s Swarm satellites.
This trio of spacecraft are currently mapping Earth's magnetic field to try to understand its fundamental workings.
The scientists say the jet is the best explanation for the patches of concentrated field strength __that the satellites observe in the northern hemisphere.
"This jet of liquid iron is moving at about fifty kilometres per year," explained Dr Chris Finlay from the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Space).
“That might not sound like a lot to you on Earth's surface, but you have to remember this a very dense liquid metal and it takes a huge amount of energy to move this thing around and that's probably the fastest motion we have anywhere within the solid Earth,” he told BBC News.
Dr Finlay was speaking here at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco, just ahead of the official publication of the research in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Image copyrightESAImage caption Artwork: The Swarm satellites were launched in 2013 to study Earth's magnetic field
Most people will be familiar with the atmospheric jet stream - the high-altitude, rapidly flowing belt of air on which aeroplanes ride to get to their destination more quickly.
Dr Finlay and colleagues want us to envision something similar but made of metal and 3,000km down, under our feet.
They assess the jet to be about 420km wide, and say it wraps half-way around the planet.
Its behaviour will be critical to the generation and maintenance of the global magnetic field, they add.
“It's likely that the jet stream has been in play for hundreds of millions of years," said Dr Phil Livermore from Leeds University, UK, and the lead author on the journal paper.
In the paper, the team puts forward a model to explain the jet.
Image copyrightESAImage caption The major part of Earth’s magnetic field is generated via convection of molten iron in the outer core. The field protects all life from damaging space radiation
The scientists say the feature probably aligns to a boundary between two different regions in the core.
They call this boundary the "tangent cylinder". They imagine this as a tube sitting around the solid inner core, running along Earth’s rotation axis.
When liquid iron approaches the boundary from both sides, it gets squeezed out sideways to form the jet, which then hugs the imaginary tube.
"Of course, you need a force to move fluid towards the tangent cylinder," said Prof Rainer Hollerbach, also from Leeds and another co-author on the paper.
"This could be provided by buoyancy, or perhaps more likely from changes in the magnetic field within the core."
Although the team believes it understands how wide and how long the jet is, the depth to which it descends is far from certain.
Dr Livermore told BBC News: "It currently wraps about 180 degrees around the tangent cylinder. Although observations only constrain the jet stream on the edge of the core, our theoretical understanding suggests that the jet could in principle go very deep indeed - possibly in fact all the way down to the edge of the core in the southern hemisphere (i.e. at the other end of the tangent cylinder)."
That the team can make such inferences speaks to the impressive capabilities of the Swarm constellation.
Launched in November 2013, the European Space Agency satellites are providing unparalleled insights into the structure and behaviour of Earth's magnetic field.
With their highly sensitive instruments, they are gradually teasing apart the field's various components - from the dominant signal coming from the movement of iron in the outer core to the almost imperceptible contribution made by ocean currents.
It is hoped the Swarm satellites’ data could ultimately tell us why Earth’s magnetic field has been weakening in recent centuries.
Scientists have speculated we could be on the cusp of a polarity reversal, which would see North become South, and South become North.
This occurs every few hundred thousand years.
Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos
A drum-based game of telephone has revealed how rhythm might have taken shape in human music. When people tried to imitate random drumming sequences and pass them on to new listeners, mistakes added up and transformed the patterns, scientists reported Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. Over time, the random noises become more structured and easier to learn, emulating how real music might have evolved.
“Things __that are evolving culturally adapt to the brains of the people who are passing __that culture on,” says coauthor Simon Kirby, a cognitive scientist at the University of Edinburgh. “Random starting points change to become structured as they are kind of washed through the brains of our participants.”
There are certain features that crop up in all types of human music. Among these are a steady underlying pulse and the habit of arranging beats into groups of two (as in a march) or three (as in a waltz). “There’s a tendency to produce these repeating motifs, little riffs, rhythmic little subsequences of patterns that repeat,” Kirby says. “Although musical cultures vary greatly, you’ll find these patterns again and again.”
He and his colleagues designed an experiment to simulate how these rhythms grow out of chaotic noise. The team randomly generated 32 brief drum sequences with no perceptible rhythm; there was no logic to how loud each tap was or how time elapsed between taps. “It just sounds like nonsense…not something a human would produce,” Kirby says.
He and his team asked one person to hear and copy the patterns as best they could. Then the next learner listened to the first person’s efforts and tried to reproduce them. This continued for a total of eight rounds, with six different chains of drummers.
Though the participants tried to reproduce the drum taps faithfully, each round introduced new errors. Over time, these accumulated mistakes made the patterns start to sound more like actual music, which made them easier for novices to imitate. “In each generation, little bits of structure and little bits of regularity start to creep into the patterns that are being copied,” Kirby says. Gradually, they gained universal qualities found in music around the world.
These patterns had adapted to suit human learning and memory. So the ways that music evolves as it is passed from person to person—in the lab or larger societies—is likely shaped by our own constraints.
“By the end, these 32 rhythms had changed as they been passed through the brains of all of our participants, so they shared common patterns and little riffs so they now sounded like a coherent musical culture,” Kirby says.
Though nobody who participated in the experiment was a musician, they had all been exposed to music. People’s previous experiences might have shaped the patterns. “The cultural system in the lab adapts, it evolves to fit the biases of our participants…are those biases fundamental, underlying cognitive biases, or are they acquired biases? Do they come from learning western music?” Kirby says. “It’s very hard to tease those apart.”
However, the patterns blossomed into unique sets of motifs in each of the six chains of drummers. “Although there’s commonalities across them, there are differences that arise form having different histories,” Kirby says. “So it’s not the case that the participants are just reproducing some kind of shared common template of western musical rhythms. So that at least suggests that something more than that is going on here.”
To understand what that might be, he says, researchers will have to introduce the drumming game to people from many different musical traditions, and to young children.
