New Find Pushes Age of Stone Tools Back A Million Years


The genus Homo is no longer the sole primate lineage known to have used stone tools to consume the meat of large mammals. New research pushes that skill back nearly a million years.

Large fossilized animal bones with ends shattered for sucking out marrow and cut marks deliberately made with sharp stone tools have been found just a few hundred feet from a previously uncovered Australopithecus afarensis skeleton. The bones are roughly 3.4 million years old, and connect the earliest evidence for using stone tools and eating large game to our Lucy-like ancestors.

Previously, the earliest evidence for using tools to cut the meat off large animals was attributed to early Homo in the Gona region of Ethiopia around 2.5 million years ago. This find from a different region in Dikika, Ethiopia, , shows the behavior was around at least a million years earlier.

“It means almost everything to be able to use stone tools,” said paleontologist Zeray Alemseged of the California Academy of Sciences, co-author of the discovery announced Aug. 12 in Nature. “The picture that we’re going to paint of Australopithecus is being transformed completely. We can now imagine them walking around carrying their tools. Tools that were the precursor of every tool that we have today.”

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Mystery of Honeycomb Cloud Formation Solved

Easily spotted by their honeycomb shape, open-cell clouds are one of the most common cloud formations, found on the backside of low pressure systems and skirting the edges of every continent. Yet for all their ubiquity, they are among the more mysterious cloud formations known, and rules guiding the formation of open-cell clouds have not been quantified — until now.

Starting with a computer model of cloud formation developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, climate physicists refined and reconfigured its internal dynamics until they matched patterns seen in the real world. The math is complicated in detail, but simple in principle.

“Imagine you had a hosepipe, pointed it at the ground, and turned it on. The water rushes out hard, hits the ground and is forced to diverge. Now imagine you’ve got not just one hosepipe, but many. All these diverging flows start hitting each other. The water has to go somewhere, and the only place it can go is upwards,” said Graham Feingold, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration physicist.

To fit the analogy to open-cell cloud formation, replace the water with air that’s pulled downwards by raindrops that cool as they evaporate. The jets of air hit the ocean, split into streams flowing across the water, and collide with other jets, driving them back up into the atmosphere. Once there, water droplets form around tiny particles of dust and biological debris, eventually coalescing into clouds. Their pattern is dictated by geometries of airstream collision far below.

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Inexplicable Superconductor Fractals Hint at Higher Universal Laws

What seemed to be flaws in the structure of a mystery metal may have given physicists a glimpse into as-yet-undiscovered laws of the universe.

The qualities of a high-temperature superconductor — a compound in which electrons obey the spooky laws of quantum physics, and flow in perfect synchrony, without friction — appear linked to the fractal arrangements of seemingly random oxygen atoms.

Those atoms weren’t thought to matter, especially not in relation to the behavior of individual electrons, which exist at a scale thousands of times smaller. The findings, published Aug. 12 in Nature, are a physics equivalent of discovering a link between two utterly separate dimensions.

“We don’t know the theory for this,” said physicist Antonio Bianconi of Rome’s Sapienza University. “We just make the experimental observation that the two worlds seem to interfere.”

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Asteroid Crater Hunting From Your Home

Just days after a Google Earth–aided discovery of a meteor impact was announced in Science, yet another crater has been found using Google Maps and open-access software. The age of armchair crater hunting has arrived.

Physicist Amelia Sparavigna of Politecnico di Torino in Italy found a 6-mile-wide crater in the Bayuda desert in Sudan using Google Maps, a free astronomical image-processing program she helped develop called AstroFracTool, and open source image-processing tool GIMP. The work appeared on ArXiv Aug. 3.

While no one has gone to the Bayuda crater site to confirm that it was formed by a meteor impact, the discovery demonstrates that with freely available software and a lot of spare time, anyone can become part of the search for craters. Continue Reading “Asteroid Crater Hunting From Your Home” »

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Russian Heat, Asian Floods May Be Linked

Russia’s killer heat wave and monster South Asian monsoon floods could be more than isolated examples of extreme weather. Though separated by a continent, they could be linked.

Monsoon rains drive air upward, and that air has to come down somewhere. It usually comes down over the Mediterranean, producing the region’s hot, dry climate. This year, some of that air seems to have gone north to Russia.

“We haven’t done the studies, but there’s very good reason to suspect that there’s a relationship,” said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It’s simply related to the idea that there is a monsoon with very large circulation. There’s an upwards branch of it. There has to be a downwards branch somewhere else.”

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Russian Fires Approach Nuclear Plants

Russia is, at the time of writing, being consumed by wildfires caused by the worst heat wave the country has endured in a millennia. A state of emergency has been declared in 35 regions of the country — seven for the fires themselves, and another 28 for crop failures caused by the drought and heat wave.

UK media has largely ignored the disaster, but the web is alive with eye-witness accounts, photographs, videos and maps of how the flames are spreading. Most of the information is coming through blogging site LiveJournal, which has a large Russian population.

Following the July heat wave in the country, peat fires — which can smoulder for years underground — ignited forest fires in the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, the Voronezh Oblast, and across central and western Russia. A few days later, an area of 500,000 hectares was ablaze, with Moscow shrouded in a dense, thick smoke.

Since then, the area of the fires has been brought under control, with now only about 200,000 hectares ablaze, but there are much bigger problems looming. The fires have approached the Red Forest, an area that suffered the worst of Chernobyl’s fallout in 1986, with the soil still heavily contaminated by cesium-137 and strontium-90.

Similarly, the Mayak nuclear fuel reprocessing facility in Chelyabinsk Oblast is also threatened by the flames, as is a nuclear research center in Sarov, which was formerly known as the secret town Arzamas-16. If any of the structures succumb, then radionuclides could be spread widely afield, generating new zones of radioactive pollution and displacing the population of those areas.

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Removing a Barrier to Regrowing Organs

Disabling an evolutionary backup plan for protecting against cancer could be part of a future means to regrow lost limbs or regenerate damaged organs.

sciencenewsA protein called ARF, which acts as a fail-safe mechanism to protect against cancer, also prevents regeneration in mammals, a study published Aug. 6 in Cell Stem Cell suggests. ARF backs up Rb, an important anticancer protein, by limiting the ability of mature cells to divide and replicate. But researchers in California have discovered that blocking ARF and Rb allowed mature muscle cells taken from mice to proliferate, something the cells normally cannot do.

The discovery is an important step in learning why mammals, including people, can’t regrow or replace lost limbs and organs the way animals such as salamanders and zebrafish can. Such work may one day lead to new treatments for injuries.

Scientists have known for many years that some animals, including some fish and amphibians, can regenerate organs and limbs, but mammals can’t. Therefore, at some point in evolution, mammals must have acquired proteins that halt regeneration, reasoned researchers led by Helen Blau of Stanford University and Jason Pomerantz of the University of California, San Francisco.

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Science + Geek + Beer = Awesomely Geeky Science Beer

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SAN FRANCISCO — What do you get if you cross a beer geek with a science geek? Really good beers with really geeky names.

I’ve already proven the connection between beer and geologists, but the number of brews out there with awesomely geeky science names suggests that the beer-science link is even more primordial. After stumbling across a few of these, like Shale Ale (named for the Burgess Shale, a famously fossiliferous outcrop) and Homo Erectus (an IPA made by Walking Man Brewing), I decided the matter required further investigation.

With the help of my friends and Twitteronia, I tracked down a bunch more science-geek beers, and a few with super-geeky tech themes (this is Wired, after all). I managed to get seven of them into Wired HQ, because, let’s be honest, this was all just another elaborate excuse to make drinking beer part of my job.

Sadly, I couldn’t get my hands on some of the geekiest beers. A few were short runs for special occasions, like The Empire Strikes Back All-English IPA and Galileo’s Astronomical Ale (tagline: Theoretically the best beer in the universe), brewed by astronomy geek Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the telescope. And some are seasonal, like 21st Amendment’s Spring Tweet, a beer brewed for Twitter (which brings up the obvious question: Where’s Wired’s beer?)

Others are only available to lucky local geeks, like the beers from Atomic Ale Brewpub in Richland, Washington, including Plutonium Porter, Half-Life Hefeweizen, Oppenheimer Oatmeal Stout and Dysprosium Dunkelweisen.

The seven beers I did obtain came to Wired in the mail from breweries and friends, on a plane in my suitcase, and one was even hand-delivered right to our doorstep. I then gathered some of the other beer lovers at Wired, and we tasted the beers. Each brew was given two scores (out of 10 balls, just like everything else we review here): one for taste and one for the geekiness of its name. The highly scientific results, based on the combined score, continue on the following pages.

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Finch Duets About More Than Getting the Girl


Plenty of birds sing duets when they’ve only just met and are still trying to impress each other. But once they’ve mated, the singing stops. Or so scientists thought.

Zebra finches, at least, know how to keep the magic alive. Only after becoming a couple, in the intimacy of their nest, do they start singing to each other. That hasn’t been seen in other birds. Then again, maybe we’re just not looking.

“We had no idea that we would discover these private duets,” said Clementine Vignal, a sensory ecologist at France’s Université Jean Monnet. “Until now, only three to four percent of birds have been reported to duet. But we think that a lot of species may have been overlooked. These private duets may be common in monogamous speices.”

Curious about how zebra finches communicated in nature rather than a lab, Vignal’s team put microphones inside nest boxes made for wild birds. Duets were not on their mind; zebra finches don’t even duet during courtship, and only males sing songs. But they soon heard the birds exchanging synchronized clicks and trills (mp3), performed when one left or returned to the nest, or was nearby while the partner remained.

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The Brain’s Secret to Sleeping Like a Log

In this clamorous modern world, heavy sleepers have an advantage: They can snooze despite noisy neighbors and car alarms, and they’re capable of conking out on a red-eye flight to awake refreshed and smiling.

But how do these sound sleepers do it? According to a neuroscience study published today in Current Biology, they’re blessed with a type of brain activity that may essentially block out noise.

Sleep researchers from Harvard Medical School performed a slightly torturous experiment on 12 healthy volunteers. On their first night at the sleep lab, the subjects’ brain waves were monitored via electroencephalography (EEG), but they were otherwise left in peace. That night, the researchers measured one particular sleep phenomenon: the brief bursts of high-frequency waves known as “sleep spindles.” On the following two nights, the researchers did their best to replicate a really irritating night’s sleep.

“The volunteers would come in and we’d show them this luxury environment with a queen bed and comfy sheets, but there are these four very large speakers pointed straight at their heads,” said study coauthor Jeffrey Ellenbogen.

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