6-12 June 2014
Neanderthals not inferior to modern humans { Boulder, Colorado / DPA }
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wo researchers have disputed the widely-held hypothesis that Neanderthals, a human species thought to have lived in Eurasia between 350,000 and 40,000 years ago, became extinct because they were intellectually inferior to modern humans. Paola Villa, a Curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in the United States, and Wil Roebroeks, an Archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, have argued that the reason for the Neanderthals’ demise was likely more complex. It would have included interbreeding with anatomically modern humans - who were much more numerous - followed by ‘genetic swamping and assimilation’. Their study was published in the US-based scientific journal PLOS ONE. The disappearance of Neanderthals from the fossil records coincides with the migration of modern humans, Homo Sapiens, from Africa to Europe and Western Asia. That the two hominin groups interbred was recently proven by genetic data - the Neanderthal inheritance making up an estimated 2 per cent of the genomes of people outside Africa. Upto now many scientists have used the archaeological finds of Neanderthals and their modern human contemporaries to suggest that the newcomers were superior in a wide range of areas - including language, weaponry, hunting skills, subsistence strategies, the capacity for innovation and the extent of social networks. And that this led to the demise of Neanderthals. But following what they termed a ‘systematic review of the archaeological records’, Villa and Roebroeks have said they had found ‘no data in support of the supposed technological, social and cognitive inferiority of Neanderthals;. They have noted, for example, that while art and body ornaments had been found at archaeological sites of both Neanderthals and modern humans, only in the case of the latter had this been interpreted as indirect evidence of a complex language. They also disputed the notion that Neanderthals were not skilled hunters, saying that the early humans were by all means accomplished large game hunters, who survived in a wide range of environments and hunted a wide range of animals in a variety of topographical settings. The ‘flawed’ explanations for the Neanderthals’ extinction, they have said, were due to the much smaller amount of data available to previous researchers and, at least in part, a long tradition of how we have thought and internalised the differences between Neanderthals and modern humans. “Researchers were comparing Neanderthals not to their contemporaries on other continents but to their successors,” the University of Colorado quoted Villa as having said. “It would be like comparing the performance of Model T Fords, widely used in America and Europe in the early part of the last century, to the performance of a modern-day Ferrari, and concluding that Henry Ford was cognitively inferior to Enzo Ferrari!” u
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he Earth was struck by 26 asteroids ranging in explosive power from 1 to 600 kilotons of TNT between 2000 and 2013, says a private US foundation that is soliciting donations for a space mission to protect the planet from such impacts. For comparison, the atomic bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 had the power of 15 kilotons. The impacts were monitored by a network of sensors (put up for detecting nuclear detonations) operated by the international Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization. The Earth is continuously colliding with fragments of asteroids, the California-based B612 Foundation notes. It says that thankfully most of them exploded very high in the atmosphere and so there was no serious damage on the ground. In addition to the 600-kiloton impact in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, there have been asteroid impacts of greater than 20 kilotons in Indonesia, the Southern Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, since the turn of the millennium. “While most large asteroids, which with the potential to destroy an entire country or continent, have been detected, fewer than 10,000 of the more than 1 million
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Waking up a 36-year-old probe {Christina Horsten/New York/ DPA }
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group of selfproclaimed space nerds are excited at the prospect that they might be able to revive a 1970s era space probe whose mission ended years ago. Within a few weeks the scientists will try to contact and take over the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) when it passes by the earth. NASA announced recently that it had given a green light to a group of ‘citizen scientists’ who want to ‘breathe new scientific life’ into ICE. The group’s plan is to contact the spacecraft, command it to fire its engines and enter an orbit near earth, and then resume its original mission - which began in 1978. The NASA announcement said that the Agency signed an agreement with Skycorp of Los Gatos, California, allowing the Company to attempt to contact, and possibly command and control, the probe. The Agency said it was the first time it had negotiated an agreement for the use of a spacecraft that it is no longer using or ever plans to use again. ICE was originally called the International Sun Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3). It was launched
Large asteroid impacts not rare { Seattle / DPA }
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dangerous asteroids - with the potential to destroy an entire major metropolitan area have been found (by the combined might of all the existing space or terrestrially operated observatories),” says former US astronaut Ed Lu, the B612 Foundation’s CEO and co-founder. “Because we don’t know where or when the next major impact will occur, the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a ‘citykiller’-sized asteroid, has been blind luck,” he adds. To change that, the B612 Foundation is planning the Sentinel Space Telescope Mission, an early-warning infra-red space telescope, expected to discover about 500,000 near-Earth asteroids and identify their trajectories - during its 6.5 years of operation. According to the Group, asteroid deflection is possible with current technology, so long as it is carried out decades before a projected impact. The launch of the telescope aboard a Falcon 9 rocket - designed and built by the private, California-based spaceflight company SpaceX - is scheduled for 2018. It would be the world’s first privately funded deep-space mission. The B612 Foundation is named after the asteroid home of the protagonist in The Little Prince, a story by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. u
to study the constant flow of solar wind streaming towards earth, a mission it successfully completed in 1981. With fuel remaining, and with its instruments functioning, it then was redirected to observe two comets and was renamed the International Cometary Explorer. Since completing that mission it has continued in orbit around the sun. NASA says that in June it will make its closest approach to earth in more than 30 years. That’s when the space nerds will swing into action. Thilo Elsner, Director of the observatory in Bochum, Germany, said that the first indications that ICE would fly close to earth came at the beginning of the year. That prompted the observatory to erect an antenna to listen for signals from the probe. Whether the spaceship’s instruments are still functioning can be determined only after they are switched on. Presently the probe is sending only minimal signals. “It’s in sleep mode,” Elsner said. The citizen scientists have received no funds from NASA for their efforts. The group started raising money in April and said that as of May 15 it had surpassed its initial goal of 125,000 dollars. It is now hoping to collect some more money, to pay for some time on NASA’s Deep Space Network, to quickly estimate the location of the spacecraft. “The funding we seek will be used for things we have not already obtained from volunteers,” the ISEE Reboot Project said on its website. The scientists said that they will have just a brief window, in which they will attempt to communicate with the vintage spacecraft and put it back to work. The advance in technology that has occurred since 1978 is posing a challenge, said Kieth Cowing,
an editor at NASAWatch. com. “It has a processor that is hardwired to do certain things,” he told the technology website Motherboard. “It doesn’t remember anything. You just tell it to do a task and that’s it. Your toaster is smarter than this thing.” Should the citizen scientists succeed in commandeering the probe and find that its instruments are intact and functioning, ICE could soon begin sending data again. This would be posted on the Internet for the benefit of the general public and students learning about space. The 36-year-old spacecraft could also reveal what kind of wear and tear it has experienced while on its sojourn. If efforts to reach it fail, it will resume its orbit around the sun. u