And humans appear to have adapted those uses to their needs. At Middle Stone Age sites in South Africa, where ochre use was already complex about 100,000 years ago, different types of ochre were rubbed, ground or crumbled depending on the intended application and the individual rock’s hardness, which varies widely.
One of the obstacles to resolving how and why the rocks were used is in their very nature. “Ochre use by definition is destructive,” Zipkin says. “Generally wh ...read more
11. As for the Hope Diamond’s “curse”? Sorry, it was a made-up marketing ploy. On the topic of making things up, the first recorded attempt at synthesizing diamonds was back in 1880, when Scottish chemist J.B. Hannay heated sealed wrought-iron tubes that had been filled with a mix of oils and lithium.
12. Alas, the tubes were prone to exploding. Think of it as the first diamond boom! that was also a bust.
13. In 1955, however, labs at General Electric built on earlier research ...read more
(Credit: Turi et al., eLife, 7:e32399, 2018)
You probably see a cylinder when you look at the illusion above. But how our brains translate two intersecting sheets of moving dots into a 3D image reveals telling differences in visual perception that could perhaps help diagnose autism spectrum disorder.
It’s been shown that people with autism are better at picking out the details of complex images, at the cost of understanding what all those details mean when put together. This can mea ...read more
Artifacts from Olorgesailie, Kenya, record the evolution of human behavior. On the left, Acheulean handaxes represent an earlier, less advanced tool technology. On the right, hand-worked pieces of ochre and smaller, more precise tools point to innovation and the development of more sophisticated cognition much earlier than once believed. (Credit Human Origins Program, Smithsonian Institution)
Three papers, published together in Science today, add up to a paradigm-shoving conclusion: K ...read more
Genetic analysis reveals new evidence of Homo sapiens interbreeding with Denisovans, an extinct species closely related to Neanderthals and known from a handful of fossils, such as this toe bone. (Credit Bence Viola/Wikimedia Commons)
Hey, sex happens. And apparently, whenever our ancestors met up with other members of the genus Homo, it happened a lot. New genetic analysis published today reveals previously unidentified evidence of interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Denisovans, a branch of ...read more
A researcher investigating how the stress levels of people in non-industrialized societies differ from those of modern Americans found himself in a different kind of stressful situation when he came face-to-face with a killer.
Biological anthropologist Samuel Urlacher left the urban jungle of Boston, where he was a graduate student at Harvard University, for the actual jungle of Papua New Guinea. Since 2013, he’s worked among the Garisakang, an isolated clan of about 500 foragers and garde ...read more
More than a decade ago, Discover reported on an $85 million project to restore what was formerly one of the world’s biggest inland bodies of water: the Aral Sea.
An oasis on the Silk Road trading route, the sea once covered more than 26,000 square miles across the heart of Central Asia, including parts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. This all changed in the 1950s, when a Soviet irrigation project diverted river water to rice and cotton fields miles away. The system leaked, and the sea began ...read more
United States Geological Survey photo of the 1982 eruption of Indonesia’s Galunggung. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
When a volcano erupts, it can spew a cloud of ash miles into the stratosphere. It makes for an impressive sight, and an even more impressive amount of sheer material — large eruptions can loft cubic miles of rock and ash skyward.
And, to add to the wow factor, the clouds sometimes spawn their own lightning. As the cloud swirls chaotically in its journey s ...read more
