Monthly Archives: December 2008

But We Don’t Look a Day Over 175,000!

We learned a while back that dogs have been around for quite a bit longer than was originally thought. So it should come as no surprise to learn that we may have also been around longer than was originally estimated.

Using argon-argon dating—a technique that compares different isotopes of the element argon—researchers determined that the volcanic ash layers entombing the tools at Gademotta date back at least 276,000 years.

Many of the tools found are small blades, made using a technique that is thought to require complex cognitive abilities and nimble fingers, according to study co-author and Berkeley Geochronology Center director Paul Renne.

Some archaeologists believe that these tools and similar ones found elsewhere are associated with the emergence of the modern human species, Homo sapiens.

Bottom line: either that was us 275,000 years ago — 80,000 years earlier than the supposed emergence of homo sapiens –or there was another species of human during that period capable of doing then what we would be doing a few dozen millennia later.

Way back then it could have been neanderthals (our possibly their ancestors, homo heidelbergensis, assuming either of these species were ever present in Africa, which I’m not sure about.) Or it could have been homo erectus, which would indicate that these early humans were more sophisticated than we’ve given them credit for. Or it could have been some dead-end offshoot from homo ergaster — Africa would be the right place to look for that. Or, again, it could have been us.

The problem is that there are no human bones, just artifacts suggesting human beings more sophisticated than any humans that were supposed to be around at that early date.

Very interesting.

Where No Bear Has Gone Before

I’ve often thought about trying something like this:

Out of this world: British teddy bears strapped to helium weather balloon
reach the edge of space

It’s not often that Britain can claim a win in the space race. But these teddy bears drifting nearly 20 miles above Earth have become the first soft toys to take part in extra-vehicular activity (to use correct NASA jargon) at such an altitude.

The soft toys MAT and KMS were named after the first initials of the pupils who helped make their space suits.

Along with their two intrepid colleagues, they were strapped to a beam attached to a foam-padded box containing instrumentation and cameras on Monday.

astrobears.jpg

After rising to an altitude of around 100,000ft, a webcam caught their ‘space-walk’ for posterity before the helium balloon burst.

They then fell to Earth before a parachute opened automatically to provide a soft landing.

I’m impressed that school kids could pull this off — albeit with some help. This is just more evidence of powerful capabilities finding their way into the hands of regular people.

We don’t usually think of weather balloons as spacecraft, but what these kids managed to create for the stuffed animals is a fairly good prototype for a manned sub-orbital mission. I would certainly like to take a balloon up and have a look at the view those bears were posed in front of. I bet others would, too. And I have a feeling that lighter-than-air missions to these heights can be done for a fraction of the cost of rocket-propelled missions. Sure, you won’t go fast, but if we’re talking sub-orbital flights with the rockets anyway, what difference does it make?

If space tourism really does take off as a business model, look for ballooning to provide the low end of the market. I have a feeling it will be quite popular.

What Tycho Saw

It’s a little bit of time travel and a whole lot of cool astronomy:

Ancient Supernova Explosion Glimpsed Anew

A supernova explosion first seen from Earth 436 years ago has come back to life for astronomers in a time-travel-like astronomical twist.

By observing light from supernova SN 1572 that was slowed on its trip to Earth by dust particles, scientists can watch the outburst now as it would have looked originally.

When the explosion first appeared in the sky in 1572, Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe named it “Stella Nova” or “New Star” because it looked like an extremely bright star that hadn’t been there before. Astronomers today call it Tycho’s supernova.

So today astronomers get an up-close look at the cosmic phenomenon that Tycho Brahe observed hundreds of years ago. We’re only getting a glimmer, a reflection of the original. And yet I think we’re now seeing more than Tycho did…

whattychosaw.jpg

Amazing.

A well-placed and highly reflective dust cloud bounced the image of the supernova back towards earth, giving us this latter-day shot at seeing the event. This video shows how that worked:

Of course, every time we look into the night sky, we are looking looking at either the recent past (e.g., the moon) or the very distant past (e.g., the Andromeda galaxy.) But it’s one thing to see these objects just sitting there, as it were, and quite another to see something happen.

This makes me wonder…are there other past events that we might get a second shot at observing? If a well-placed dust cloud can bring back an event from nearly half a millennium ago, what other options might exist for retrieving visual information on events long since past? I think we’d all have to agree that a dust cloud is a fairly low-tech approach to viewing the past, although clearly it was aided by a high-tech telescope and imaging technology. Still, it makes you wonder.

We discussed on a recent FastForward Radio whether the technology for traveling back in time is possible, and if so whether it is reasonable to expect that it will ever exist. Perhaps going back in time is not in the cards. But seeing the past is a real possibility, as the above image demonstrates.

One Step Closer to True VR

One of the questions associated with developing true virtual reality technology is whether a human brain would ever accept a virtual body as its own. Can we experience things happening to a body substitute as though they were actually happening to us? Apparently, yes:

Shaking hands with yourself is an amusing out-of-body experience. The illusion of having your stomach slashed with a kitchen knife, not so much.

Both sensations, however, felt real to most participants in a Swedish science project exploring how people can be tricked into the false perception of owning another body.

In a study presented Tuesday, neuroscientists at Stockholm’s renowned Karolinska Institute show how they got volunteers wearing virtual reality goggles to experience the illusion of swapping bodies with a mannequin and a real person.

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We observed a while back that the human brain seems to be highly adept at claiming as its own what ought to be its own, so it’s no surprise that a test subject can “sense” something happening to his or her body when there is, in fact, no nerve infrastructure in place to allow the sensation to happen. It would appear that virtually reality, when we have it, will be something that it is more or less “all in your head.” You just have to persuade your brain that there’s a body there, and that it is attached to that body, and the brain begins to take care of the rest.

Surely having the brain so eager and willing to help create the illusion can only help virtual reality arrive sooner. We might not need elaborately realistic worlds — maybe they just need to be real enough to kickstart the brain. In that case, our coming virtual worlds will be exactly where the old ones always were: right between our ears.