The Ed's Up #189
Tiny Jumping Spiders Can See the Moon
I'm not going to do the usual thing of quoting from this piece. I just urge you to read it--even if you're an arachnophobe. Of all the things I've written this year, this is my favourite. It features lasers, space, spiders, hockey, Twitter, and a little bit of joyful magic. (Image: Dvs)
Scientists Have Found the Oldest Known Human Fossils
"Hundreds of thousands of years ago, around 62 miles west of what would eventually become Marrakesh, a group of people lived in a cave overlooking a lush Moroccan landscape. At the time, there would have been nothing particularly notable about these cave-dwellers. They were yet more Homo sapiens, members of a nascent ape species that had spread across Africa. But in their death, they have become singularly important. That cave is now called Jebel Irhoud, and bones of its former occupants have been recently unearthed by an international team of scientists. They mark the earliest fossilized remains of Homo sapiens ever found. Until now, that honor belonged to two Ethiopian fossils that are 160,000 and 195,000 years old respectively. But the Jebel Irhoud bones, and the stone tools that were uncovered with them, are far older—around 315,000 years old, with a possible range of 280,000 to 350,000 years." (Image: Shannon McPherron)
Scientists Pit Sourdough Against White Bread—With Surprising Results
"The acids produced by the microbes in sourdough have another purported benefit. According to The Guardian, they “slow down the rate at which glucose is released into the blood-stream.” But according to a team of Israeli scientists led by Eran Segal and Eran Elinav at the Weizmann Institute of Science, this common claim is wrong—or, at least, not universally right. In a small but thorough study, they put volunteers on week-long stints of eating either white bread or sourdough. All the while, they performed a wide battery of blood tests, and they analyzed the community of microbes that live in their guts. “To our great shock and surprise,” says Segal, “we found no significant differences between the two breads on any of the parameters that we collected.”" (Image: Eric Risberg)
Fetuses Prefer Face-Like Images Even in the Womb
"It is dark in the womb—but not that dark. Human flesh isn’t fully opaque, so some measure of light will always pass through it. This means that even an enclosed space like a uterus can be surprisingly bright. “It’s analogous to being in a room where the lights are switched off and the curtains are drawn, but it’s bright outside,” says Vincent Reid from the University of Lancaster. “That’s still enough light to see easily.” But what exactly do fetuses see? And how do they react to those images? To find out, Reid shone patterns of red dots into the wombs of women in the third trimester of their pregnancies, and monitored the babies within using high-definition ultrasound. By looking at how the babies turned around, Reid showed that they have a preference for dots arranged in a face-like pattern—just as newborn infants do." (Image: Lucy Nicholson)
"When I procrastinate, I don't get sent into space."
At a recent conference, I got to interview Kate Rubins--a virologist who has studied HIV, Ebola, and smallpox; a NASA astronaut; and the first person to sequence DNA in space. She was a total joy, and she rightly got a standing ovation at the end of this. More good reads: science and technology
- NASA received more than 18,300 astronaut applications, 3 times more than its last round of hiring. By Marina Koren
- “There’s no life, nothing. Just a pure mineral world." Sarah Zhang on the tough little drone that explored an acid lake.
- This is a glorious personal essay from Meehan Crist on traumatic brain injury, family, and ancient Rome.
- Rich Vietnamese businessmen are drinking rhino horns to *avoid hangovers*, reports Sandy Ong. Excuse me while I flip this ****ing table over>
- Printers create a code of small dots that I had no idea about, and that could have been used to arrest NSA leaker Reality Winner. Alexis Madrigal explains.
- Defying Trump, Hawaii became the first state to pass a law committing to the Paris climate accord.
More good reads: politics and society
- James Comey, the former FBI director whom Trump fired, testified before Congress. Amy Zegart writes that “by any normal reckoning, his account “should have been stunning, but Americans have grown far too used to abnormal behavior.” Here’s a good summary of what we know about Trump’s attempts to curtail the FBI’s investigation so far. And Adam Serwer notes that Republican senators are trying to suggest that Trump is innocent of obstructing justice because… “he didn’t try very hard… or because he was bad at it.”
- The UK had an election, and… well! Here’s James Ball on “WTF happens now”, Samuel Earle on how May screwed up so badly, and Ian Dunt on why Brexit played such a small role in the election.
- This video of a mansplaining moderator steamrolling string theorist Veronika Hubeny (full story here) is just cringeworthy, partly for how common this behavior is. And here’s the account from Marilee Talkington, the woman who said, “Let her speak, please”—something more audience members might consider.
- "Trump could not have more directly undermined [the defence of his travel ban] if he had been trying to.” How the President’s tweets are undermining his own agenda.
- How Trump shifted charity money for childhood cancer into his business
- And finally… some beautiful balloon sculptures
And that's it. Thanks for reading.
- Ed