Science News Thread (for articles that don't relate to ongoing discussions)

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

cave paintings

Old school TV.  Except the light is in front and the story changes as you move the torch around. 

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/atxurra-cave-art-experimental-archaeology

 

[steve9728]

Question: Bow came first or the sling came first?

[kerbiloid]

8 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

1.4mn years ago the cutting edge of technology was a rock with a cutting edge. A sling would have been several steps too advanced for them because it would include preserving hide and turning it into leather, which involves soaking the hide for quite some time in noxious substances, which you have collected despite their non-obvious utility, then cutting the leather to the right shape, then practicing flinging rocks at stuff until you could consistently hit something, while slings are not known for their accuracy. The suggestion that the rocks might be art seem similarly unlikely, but at least would not be beyond their means. 

If they were having flinternet, they could watch the flintube videos, and make it from fibers.

https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2015/11/27/sling/

Spoiler

 

 

P.S.
Though, 1.4 mln years ago they had neither proper brains, nor proper hands for it.
So, it's probably water. Or it's not 1.4 mln years old.

[magnemoe]

15 hours ago, steve9728 said:

Question: Bow came first or the sling came first?

Good question, and probably very hard to say, You can date bows because of stone arrow tips who is much smaller than that practical for spears.
Bow and arrows dates back 60-72.000 years who is way earlier than I imagined.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_and_arrow
It was late to Europe for some reason. 
Sling ammo is harder to predict unless found in an cache but even then it could have other uses like in a game. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sling_(weapon) dates it to Neolithic so 6 time younger but it might be hard to date it. 
Still I think its more likely that some toyed around with an prototype bow than a sling.  

[kerbiloid]

The sling is just a flexible spear-thrower, so it's much more primitive than a bow.

Probably, the spear-throwers and slings had appeared much earlier.

[steve9728]

11 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The sling is just a flexible spear-thrower, so it's much more primitive than a bow.

Probably, the spear-throwers and slings had appeared much earlier.

... yeah

[magnemoe]

39 minutes ago, steve9728 said:

... yeah

Is I the only one thinking of Spinlaunch seeing that image

Never heard of anybody launching arrows from an sling, only stones, but I guess it work. 

And the spear-throwers is old, however oldest finding is younger than the bow from the Wikipedia page I linked. 
Now this is likely some bias here as arrowheads would be common as you would use many of them and stone arrowheads last forever while you only need one spear thrower , bone also don't preserve so well, slings is way worse off here. 

[kerbiloid]

The simplest sling is a wooden stick, splitted at one end.
You stick a stone in the stick, and make a flap(?) towards the target. The stone releases and flies.

The next step is a spear-thrower. A wooden stick with a knot or a notch at one end.
You put a spear on it, with its end in the knot/notch, and make a flap(?).

The next step is using a rope instead of the stick. It's a sling.

If you tied the rope too much, it's a bolas.

2 hours ago, magnemoe said:

And the spear-throwers is old, however oldest finding is younger than the bow from the Wikipedia page I linked. 

Because it's just a stick. Nobody thinks that it's a spear-thrower.

Spoiler

 

 

Edited September 12, 2023 by kerbiloid

[steve9728]

3 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Is I the only one thinking of Spinlaunch seeing that image

For thousand years, we the humankind only working on two things: how to boiling water faster and how to throwing something out further.

Edited September 12, 2023 by steve9728

[farmerben]

Maybe the spheres were toys.  Kids run around kicking the stones.

[kerbiloid]

from the found elephant kidneys.

[darthgently]

4 hours ago, steve9728 said:

For thousand years, we the humankind only working on two things: how to boiling water faster and how to throwing something out further.

I still think that perfecting the simple throwing of rocks was likely a very long phase in primate history for small game hunting.  It requires only found rocks at its simplest and no tool fabrication at all.  I mean, chimps and monkeys throw stuff.

Just watch people in mobs and riots when things get crazy.  Throwing things is for all practical purposes innate martial behavior just after shouting, pushing, shoving, and fisticuffs

[steve9728]

https://news.sky.com/story/libya-flooding-more-than-5-300-feared-dead-after-dams-burst-12959679

I've seen some weather enthusiasts talk about an unprecedented 400, maybe even 600 mm of precipitation in the desert areas around here - that's almost two or even ten years' worth of total precipitation in the area all at once.

More than 400mm of precipitation (in 6 hours) is enough for the coastal city with subtropical monsoon climate where I live to pump three to four days of water out of the metro stations and underground parking lots. It is hard to imagine how this happened in desert cities.

Whatever you think about climate change, there's really something happening in every corner of this planet.

Edited September 13, 2023 by steve9728

[kerbiloid]

Risking to disappoint you all, but the monkeys were throwing craps at each other long before taking stones.

Thorny and tortuous was the way to the space.

On the other hand, it makes the human race to the space pretty natural.

Instinctive, one could say.

Edited September 13, 2023 by kerbiloid

[AckSed]

On 9/13/2023 at 3:48 PM, kerbiloid said:

Risking to disappoint you all, but the monkeys were throwing craps at each other long before taking stones.

Thorny and tortuous was the way to the space.

On the other hand, it makes the human race to the space pretty natural.

Instinctive, one could say.

insert image of spinning turd flying up and becoming a space station

[kerbiloid]

12 hours ago, AckSed said:

insert image of spinning turd flying up and becoming a space station

Station?
Take it higher! Interstellar.

[Superluminal Gremlin]

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler anybody?

 

[FleshJeb]

On 9/15/2023 at 3:36 AM, kerbiloid said:

Station?
Take it higher! Interstellar.

That's interSTOOLer, sir.

[kerbiloid]

When a sci-fi artist is painting an arm, extended towards the stars, he should keep in mind, that its hand was not always empty.

[DDE]

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2307149120

Quote

We report a significant advance to one of the most important problems in astrobiology—the development of a simple, reliable, and practical method for determining the biogenicity of organic materials in planetary samples, both on other worlds and for the earliest traces of life on Earth. We have developed a robust method that combines pyrolysis GC-MS measurements of a wide variety of terrestrial and extraterrestrial carbonaceous materials with machine-learning-based classification to achieve ~90% accuracy in the differentiation between samples of abiotic origins vs. biotic specimens, including highly-degraded, ancient, biologically-derived samples. Such discrimination points to underlying “rules of biochemistry” that reflect the Darwinian imperative of biomolecular selection for function.

 

[kerbiloid]

"We even have built a diagram of the data we used for the regression analysis."

Spoiler

 

Edited September 29, 2023 by kerbiloid

[kerbiloid]

https://naked--science-ru.translate.goog/article/astronomy/galaktika-bednoi?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=ru&_x_tr_hl=ru&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Either 

Spoiler

is overestimated,

or

Spoiler

is broken.

[steve9728]

Nature Reviews Chemistry: Modern chemistry is rubbish

Although it's about something environmental protection but have to say, the author really knows how to engage the reader

 

Xinhua: Chinese scientists collect snow, ice samples from Mt. Cho Oyu for 1st time

Spoiler

Link

China's FAST telescope discovers 76 new faint pulsars

Spoiler

I bought a copy of "China's Astronomy 2035 Development Strategy" by CAS. In the list of "Facilities in the pipeline", there is something called FASTA: it will be an array of 5 radio telescopes of the same aperture as FAST. It is used to carry out research on dense stars with high sensitivity as well as neutral hydrogen surveys.

Man, 5 more FAST incoming and according to the list, the project has already cost more than a billion RMB!

Add: found an article of FASTA about why those radio astronomers need that and how it can bring to us: Pulsar discovery prospect of FASTA

Edited October 2, 2023 by steve9728

[steve9728]

You can't have a science news thread without Nobel Prize news!

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter"

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023 was awarded jointly to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman "for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19"

Edited October 3, 2023 by steve9728

[darthgently]

16 hours ago, steve9728 said:

You can't have a science news thread without Nobel Prize news!

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter"

The mind boggles a bit when considering what AlphaFold(n) will be capable of after digesting a million results of attosecond measurements of protein nudges.  I'm guessing >98% accuracy.  A complete "call my bookie" guess, no solid basis for it