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Tiny new species of human unearthed
Posted: Wednesday, October 27, 2004
NewScientist.com news service
The remains of a tiny and hitherto unknown species of human that lived as recently as 13,000 years ago have been discovered on an Indonesian island.
The discovery has been heralded as the most important palaeoanthropological find for 50 years, and has radically altered the accepted picture of human evolution.
The skull and bones of one adult female, and fragments from up to six other specimens, were found in the Liang Bua limestone caves on Flores Island, which lies at the eastern tip of Java.
The female skeleton, known as LB1 - or by the nickname "Ebu" - has been assigned to a new species within the genus Homo - Homo floresiensis. Examination of the remains shows members of the species stood just 1 metre tall and had a brain no bigger than a grapefruit.
A handful of stone tools from the same period were also found in the caves, along with the bones and teeth of several dwarf stegodons, an ancestor of the modern elephant. Other animal remains, including rats, bats and fish, show signs that they were cooked around the time H. floresiensis inhabited in the caves.
Full Article : newscientist.com
Ancient, Tiny Humans Shed New Light on Evolution
In a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, scientists have unearthed the bones of a species of human never seen before. About three-feet-tall when fully grown, Homo floresiensis resembles some of our most primitive ancestors -- but lived as recently as 13,000 years ago. They made tools and hunted dwarf elephants, but were physically unlike modern pygmies.
Scientists say it's possible h. florensiensis mingled with modern humans; they were both in the region around Indonesia around the same time. The discovery suggests we shared the planet with other species of humanity until quite recently in evolutionary terms. The findings, published in this week's issue of the British scientific journal Nature, also suggest that humans may be subject to the same evolutionary pressures as other mammals, shrinking to dwarf size when isolated in a resource-poor area. NPR's Christopher Joyce reports.
Full Article : npr.org
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Posted: Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Source: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Just when astronomers thought they might have dug up the last of our galaxy's "fossils," they've discovered a new one in the galactic equivalent of our own backyard.
Called globular clusters, these ancient bundles of stars date back to the birth of our Milky Way galaxy, 13 or so billion years ago. They are sprinkled around the center of the galaxy like seeds in a pumpkin. Astronomers use clusters as tools for studying the Milky Way's age and formation.
New infrared images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the University of Wyoming Infrared Observatory reveal a never-before-seen globular cluster within the dusty confines of the Milky Way. The findings will be reported in an upcoming issue of the Astronomical Journal.
"It's like finding a long-lost cousin," said Dr. Chip Kobulnicky, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, and lead author of the report. "We thought all the galaxy's globular clusters had already been found."
"I couldn't believe what I was seeing," said Andrew Monson, a graduate student at the University of Wyoming, who first spotted the cluster. "I certainly wasn't expecting to find such a cluster."
The newfound cluster is one of about 150 known to orbit the center of the Milky Way. These tightly packed knots of stars are among the oldest objects in our galaxy, having formed about 10 to 13 billion years ago. They contain several hundred thousand stars, most of which are older and less massive than our Sun.
Monson first noticed the cluster while scanning data from the Spitzer Space Telescope's Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire - a survey to find objects hidden within the dusty mid-plane of our galaxy. He then searched archival data for a match and found only one undocumented image of the cluster from a previous NASA-funded infrared survey of the sky, called the Two Micron All-Sky Survey. "The cluster was there in the data but nobody had found it," said Monson.
"This discovery demonstrates why Spitzer is so powerful - it can see objects that are completely hidden in visible light," said Dr. Michael Werner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., project scientist for Spitzer. "This is particularly relevant to the study of the plane of our galaxy, where dust blocks most visible light."
Follow-up observations with the University of Wyoming Infrared Observatory helped set the distance of the new cluster at about 9,000 light-years from Earth - closer than most clusters -- and set the mass at the equivalent of 300,000 Suns. The cluster's apparent size, as viewed from Earth, is comparable to a grain of rice held at arm's length. It is located in the constellation Aquila.
The research team consists of astronomers from the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Boston University, Boston, Mass.; the University of Maryland, College Park, Md.; the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.; and the Spitzer Science Center, Pasadena, Calif. The Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire is managed by the University of Wisconsin and led by Dr. Ed Churchwell.
JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. JPL is a division of Caltech. Spitzer's infrared array camera, which captured the new cluster, was built by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The camera's development was led by Dr. Giovanni Fazio of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.
Additional information about the Spitzer Space Telescope is available at www.spitzer.caltech.edu. Additional information about the University of Wyoming Infrared Observatory is available at physics.uwyo.edu/~mpierce/WIRO/.
Reproduced from:
www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2004-254
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Hunting cosmic explosions Posted: Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Gamma-ray bursts are the most violent and energetic explosions in the universe, each emitting as much energy as 100 million billion Suns. Astronomers now think that these awesome explosions occur when stars die
There is a Persian fairytale about the three princes of Serendip -- the island in the Indian Ocean that is now known as Sri Lanka. The princes were seasoned travellers who made a series of astonishing discoveries through good fortune alone. Their luck was so amazing that we now use the word "serendipity" to describe what happens when we find something unexpectedly. As the discovery of gamma-ray bursts makes clear, serendipity often plays a key role in science.
The story began in 1963 when the world's leading nations signed the nuclear test-ban treaty, which sought to prevent nuclear bombs from being exploded underwater or above ground. That year the US also launched the first of a series of satellites called the Velas -- named after the Spanish for "watchmen" -- that were designed to monitor radiation from clandestine nuclear explosions. Like the legendary princes of Serendip, the Velas made an unexpected discovery.
Full Article : physicsweb.org
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