Carl Sagan said we're made of star-stuff

This is so cool!

Ancient Star Dust May Point to Human Origins

Thu Oct 28,12:24 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Star dust found deep beneath the Pacific Ocean has led German scientists to speculate that a supernova explosion 3 million years ago might possibly have helped bring about human evolution.

Gunther Korschinek and colleagues at the Technical University of Munich in Germany reported on Wednesday they found debris from an exploding supernova that could have changed the climate on Earth around the time that humanity's ancestors first began to walk.

Depending on how far away the supernova was, it might have caused an increase in cosmic rays for about 300,000 years that in turn could have heated up the Earth, they wrote in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters.

The timing of the star explosion coincides with a change in the climate in Africa, when drier conditions caused forests to retreat and the savannah to emerge. Anthropologists and other experts believe this change brought early hominids out of the trees, forcing them to walk upright.

The most famous pre-human, a skeleton nicknamed "Lucy," dates back just about 3 million years. Lucy and her Australopithecus afarensis kin would have walked upright.

Korschinek's team was the first, five years ago, to find real matter from a star on Earth, in Pacific sediments.

This time they looked for star dust at a site much deeper, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean near the equator and away from land roughly south of the Hawaiian islands.

There, 15,750 feet below the surface, they found a layer of iron-60, stable layers under the sea that are easy to date. This one can be dated to about 2.8 million years ago, they said.

Iron-60 is an isotope or chemical variant of iron that is rare on Earth and which scientists believe is unlikely to have come from anything other than a supernova.

It has a decay rate or half-life of about 1.5 million years, which can help pinpoint when the star exploded, sending out not only solid matter in the form of iron and other elements, but cosmic rays.

Korschinek and colleagues noted that other scientists have suggested a cosmic ray bombardment could affect the ozone layer, letting in more of the Sun's ultraviolet rays.

This in turn could make it hotter and drier in places.

"It has not yet been established that such an increase of the cosmic ray intensity could have had a significant influence on the Earth's climate," they wrote.

But they do note a coincidence.

"The African climate shifted toward more arid conditions about 2.8 million years ago," they wrote, adding, "some of the major events in early hominid evolution appear to be coeval with the African climate changes."

As a Hungarian, I can say that this sucks

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungary plunged into a national culinary crisis on Thursday as its beloved paprika powder -- and any products containing the hot red spice -- vanished from shop shelves because of a contamination scare.

Thousands of Hungarians flooded a telephone hotline to inquire about food safety after the authorities said on Wednesday they had discovered traces of a toxin in some paprika samples at warehouses.

Retailers were ordered to clear the shelves of any paprika-containing products until further notice while consumers were told to abstain from eating them until further notice.

The announcement caused a shock in a country where the average citizen consumes a pound of paprika -- the defining flavor of goulash, the national dish -- each year.

"This shakes the foundations of Hungarian cooking because we can't cook without paprika," said Eszter Molnar, a 27-year-old office worker in the southern town of Kalocsa.

"I'll have to throw out all the paprika I have, I don't know what I can trust any more."

Okay, I'm a geek

I find this stuff fascinating!

Titan Rich in Carbons That Gave Life to Earth --NASA

Thu Oct 28, 5:53 PM ET
Science - Reuters
By Gina Keating

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Saturn's mysterious moon Titan appears to have an environment rich in the carbon-based molecules that spawned life on Earth and winds that etched streaks into its icy surface, NASA scientists said on Thursday.

Most exciting to scientists who hoped to unlock the origins of life by studying chemical reactions in Titan's soil and atmosphere were apparent signs of large amounts of a sort of primordial slush on its frozen surface.

"On early Earth there was organic material and something happened to those molecules that gave rise to life," scientist Jonathan Lunine said. "We had to find a place elsewhere in the system where that process is being replicated ... and it seems to be happening on Titan."

Images returned by the spaceship Cassini also suggested "an enormous amount of geology going on" on Titan including past eruptions of water-vapor-spewing volcanoes and "eggshell cracking" on its surface, Lunine said.

During a 44-hour flyby that ended on Tuesday, Cassini collected hundreds of images and radar data that pierced the veil of smog surrounding Titan for the first time.

The radar images showed streaks that resembled lava flows on Venus, triangular upthrusts that could be rocks, and what could be a chain of frozen lakes containing organic matter, JPL director Charles Elachi, who heads the radar team, said.

The radar data, covering just 1 percent of Titan's surface, also showed a deep surface layer of something that appears to be organic material rather than a rocky face, Elachi said.

"We are seeing a place that is alive ... geologically speaking," Elachi said. "We have read a couple of pages of the mystery book."

Although Titan's equatorial temperature stays far below freezing, the water ice at its core may be mixed with ammonia, whose lower freezing point may allow it to thaw and flow across the moon's surface in volcanic eruptions, scientists said.

The resulting streaks and flows observed around Titan's midsection also could have been caused by the movement of its heavy atmosphere, scientists said.

Cassini, which carries a piggyback probe called Huygens, is expected to fly by Titan 44 more times during its four-year mission to explore Saturn and its rings and moon.

In January, Huygens will parachute to Titan's surface to take readings of its dense atmosphere and soil.

The $3-billion mission, launched in 1997, is a joint project of NASA and the European and Italian
space agencies.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&e=14&u=/nm/space_cassini_dc

Hobbitses!

Well, okay, not really hobbitses, but still, pretty damn amazing...

MSNBC.com
Ancient hobbit-sized human species discoveredFind 'rewrites knowledge of human evolution,' scientists say

The Associated Press
Updated: 4:33 p.m. ET Oct. 27, 2004

In an astonishing discovery that could rewrite the history of human evolution, scientists say they have found the skeleton of a new human species, a dwarf, marooned for eons in a tropical Lost World while modern humans rapidly colonized the rest of the planet.

The finding on a remote Indonesian island has stunned anthropologists like no other in recent memory. It is a fundamentally new creature that bears more of a resemblance to fictional, barefooted hobbits than modern humans.

Yet biologically speaking, it may have been closely related to us and perhaps even shared its caves with our ancestors.

18,000-year-old specimen

The 3-foot-tall (90-centimeter-tall) adult female skeleton found in a cave is believed 18,000 years old. It smashes the long-cherished scientific belief that our species, Homo sapiens, systematically crowded out other upright-walking human cousins beginning 160,000 years ago and that we’ve had Earth to ourselves for tens of thousands of years.

Instead, it suggests recent evolution was more complex than previously thought.
And it demonstrates that Africa, the acknowledged cradle of humanity, does not hold all the answers to persistent questions of how — and where — we came to be.

“This finding really does rewrite our knowledge of human evolution,” said Chris Stringer, who directs human origins studies at the Natural History Museum in London. “And to have them present less than 20,000 years ago is frankly astonishing.”

Shortest member of human familyScientists called the dwarf skeleton “the most extreme” figure to be included in the extended human family. Certainly, she is the shortest.

She is the best example of a trove of fragmented bones that account for as many as seven of these primitive individuals that lived on the equatorial island of Flores, located east of Java and northwest of Australia. The mostly intact female skeleton was found in September 2003.

Scientists have named the extinct species Homo floresiensis, or Flores Man, and details appear in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The specimens’ ages range from 95,000 to 12,000 years old, meaning they lived until the threshold of recorded human history and perhaps crossed paths with the ancestors of today’s islanders.

Flores Man was hardly formidable. His grapefruit-sized brain was two-thirds smaller than ours, and closer to the brains of today’s chimpanzees and transitional prehuman species in Africa than vanished 2 million years ago.

Yet Flores Man made stone tools, lit fires and organized group hunts for meat. Bones of fish, birds and rodents found near the skeleton were charred, suggesting they were cooked.
All this suggests Flores Man lived communally and communicated effectively, perhaps even verbally.

“It is arguably the most significant discovery concerning our own genus in my lifetime,” said anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University, who reviewed the research independently.

Discoveries simply “don’t get any better than that,” proclaimed Robert Foley and Marta Mirazon Lahr of Cambridge University in a written analysis.

Questions over classification

To others, the species’ baffling combination of slight dimensions and coarse features bears almost no meaningful comparison either to modern humans or to our larger, archaic cousins.

They suggest that Flores Man doesn’t belong in the genus Homo at all, even if it was a recent contemporary. But they are unsure where to classify it.

“I don’t think anybody can pigeonhole this into the very simple-minded theories of what is human,” anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh. “There is no biological reason to call it Homo. We have to rethink what it is.”

For now, most researchers have been limited to examining digital photographs of the specimens. The female partial skeleton and other fragments are stored in a laboratory in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Researchers from Australia and Indonesia found the partial skeleton 13 months ago in a shallow limestone cave known as Liang Bua. The cave, which extends into a hillside for about 130 feet (40 meters), has been the subject of scientific analysis since 1964. Fenced off and patrolled by guards, it is surrounded by coffee farms.

Older stone tools and other artifacts previously found on the island suggest that Flores Man is part of a substantial archaic human lineage.

“So the 18,000-year-old skeleton cannot be some kind of ’freak’ that we just happened to stumble across,” said one of the discoverers, radiocarbon dating expert Richard G. Roberts of the University of Wollongong in Australia.

Peculiar environment

But the environment in which Flores Man lived was indeed peculiar, and scientists say it probably contributed to the specimen’s unusually small dimensions.

Millennia ago, Flores was a kind of a looking-glass world, a real-life Middle-earth inhabited by a menagerie of fantastical creatures like giant tortoises, elephants as small as ponies and rats as big as hunting dogs.

It even had a dragon, although they were giant lizards like today’s carnivorous Komodo dragons rather than the treasure-hoarding Smaug described by novelist J.R.R. Tolkien in his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Artifacts suggest that a big-boned human cousin, Homo erectus, migrated from Java to Flores and other islands, perhaps by bamboo raft, nearly 1 million years ago.

Researchers suspect that Flores Man probably is a descendant of Homo erectus that was squeezed by the pressures of natural selection.

Dwarfism in nature

Nature is full of mammals — deer, squirrels and pigs, for example — living in marginal, isolated environments that gradually dwarf when food isn’t plentiful and predators aren’t threatening.

This is the first time that the evolution of dwarfism has been recorded in a human relative, said the study’s lead author, Peter Brown of the University of New England in Australia.

Just how this primitive, remnant species managed to hang on is uncertain. Inbreeding certainly would have been a danger. Geologic evidence suggests a massive volcanic eruption sealed its fate 12,000 years ago, along with other unusual island species like the dwarf elephant species, stegodon.

Now, scientists are more puzzled by the specimen’s jumble of features that appear to be borrowed from different human ancestors.

Clues from the skeleton

This much is clear: Its worn teeth and fused skull show it was an adult. The shape of the pelvis is female. The skull is wide like that of Homo erectus. But the sides are rounder and the crown traces an arc from ear to ear. The skull of Homo erectus has straight sides and a pointed crown, they said.

The lower jaw contains large, blunt teeth and roots like Australopithecus, a prehuman ancestor in Africa more than 3 million years ago. The front teeth are smaller and more like modern human teeth.

The eye sockets are big and round, but unlike other members of the Homo genus, it has hardly any chin or browline.

The rest of the skeleton looks as if it walked upright, but the pelvis and the shinbone have primitive, even apelike features.

Bones from the species’ feet and hands have not yet been found. Delicate artifacts found in the cave were described as “toy-sized” versions of stone tools made by Homo erectus. They suggest that Flores Man retained intelligence and dexterity to flake small weapons with sharp edges, even if its body shrunk over time.

“I’ve spent a sleepless night trying to figure out what to do with this thing,” said Schwartz. “It’s a mind-blower. It makes me think of nothing else in this world.”

Even more speculative is whether Flores Man met with modern humans, and what might have happened.

Folklore experts have reported persistent legends of little people living on Flores and nearby islands. Islanders called the creature “Ebu Gogo” and say it was about 3 feet tall.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6346939/

Magnum Opus

In the 1980s, Berke Breathed lived in Evergreen, CO, and I once saw him getting a ticket on the side of the road with his motorcycle. I adore this man's comics, always have, always will.

Cartoonist delivers his magnum 'Opus'

Mon Oct 25, 7:12 AM ET By Kathy Balog Special for USA TODAY

In a country underscored by 15-second celebrity and bizarre political twists, few fictional characters have channeled our collective out-of-control insecurities better than Opus, the beleaguered, lumpy-billed Everypenguin at the center of Berkeley Breathed's comic parallel universe Bloom County.

When the landmark cartoon strip burst onto comics pages in 1981, the Cold War still raged, an ex-movie star occupied the Oval Office, and Donald Trump was a rising star. That's why today's release of the retrospective Opus: 25 years of His Sunday Best (Little, Brown, $29.95), which includes 215 strips, lends itself to wicked comparisons of what was then and what is now.

Consider: The strip's oddball cast of characters, who skipped between reality and the surreal, foreshadowed today's mainstream mix of fiction and truth, even down to their 1989 exit. Prophetically, the original comic strip ended when Trump, the future star of NBC reality show The Apprentice, buys the comic strip and tells Bloom County's cast: "You're fired."

Back then, pop culture references to current events were scarce, says Breathed, 47: "For topical humor in the media, you essentially had Doonesbury, Saturday Night Live and Johnny Carson's monologue. Today, we are tush-deep in snarky commentary on things that happened not last week, but a few minutes ago."

Breathed (rhymes with method) is no stranger to snarky. Few news events escaped mention in Bloom County. The arms race and religion in the classroom drew big story lines, public condemnation and a huge cult following. "Humor comes from confrontation not conciliation," says Breathed, something he sees mushrooming to nuclear proportions, courtesy of the Internet and cable TV's "instant punditry."

Eventually, Breathed says he "grew weary of looking for the negative in everything," and concentrated instead on other projects, including a less-demanding spinoff Sunday-only strip Outland, published collections of his early strips and a string of children's picture books. There are 8 million copies in print of Breathed's 19 books, and he has signed a Hollywood deal to bring Opus to the big screen, a project still in development.

When he returned to newspapers a year ago with his reinvented Sundays-only Opus, carried by 185 newspapers, about half the number of Bloom County at its height, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist found little innovation in the comics section. "It's hard to push the envelope anymore. If Bloom County were starting now, I could never get away with what I did then. I'm getting my hand slapped more than I ever was in the '80s. It's a genre that doesn't want to get shook up."

Asked to name a scandal he'd like to pounce on, he becomes circumspect. "Bill O'Reilly and his loofah mitt in the shower. Or the one where we invade the wrong country after being lied to, and it costs tens of thousands of lives. Either is just as fun, but people seem oddly more concerned with the former."

And while he continues to lob satire-laced bombs via Opus, Breathed concedes that "today's political environment is less an 'easy target' than it is one shot to living hell. I can't - don't want to - compete with this, especially only appearing weekly. So it's been a pleasure stepping back a bit. Not that Donald Trump gags don't live forever."

Asked to name his favorite strip, Breathed says, "The image that never fails to make me giggle like a Catholic school girl giggling at a dirty book" is from a recent strip: Opus dreams of meeting a beautiful island girl on a tropical beach, and it turns out to be Michael Jackson, who starts chasing him demanding "A snuggle." Opus runs for the hills screaming, "I'M SORRY I'VE GOT A WAFFLE BURNING!"

Says Breathed: "I put that image on the endpapers of the book, just to remind me that to an embarrassing extent, I can still manage to amuse myself."

Man who found "Iceman" found dead

VIENNA (Reuters) - The man who 13 years ago discovered the frozen remains of a prehistoric iceman in an Alpine glacier was found dead in the Austrian Alps on Saturday, eight days after he went missing, rescue authorities said.

Helmut Simon, the German who found the 5,300-year-old mummified body while hiking on the border of Austria and Italy in 1991, disappeared on Oct. 15 after setting off alone on an expedition in the Bad Hofgastein region in southwestern Austria.

"He was found at an altitude of around 2,200 meters (7,220 ft), apparently having fallen around 100 meters," a member of the Bad Hofgastein mountain rescue team told Reuters.

Rescue officials found and recovered the body of the experienced 67-year-old mountaineer after a local hunter notified them of a mysterious red spot high up on the 2,300-meter Gaiskarkogel mountain.

Simon, 67, and his wife, Erika, from Nuremberg in Germany found the neolithic iceman on the 3,000-meter (9,000-feet) high Similaun glacier in the Tyrolean Oetz Valley. The mummy was named "Oetzi" after the valley.