In 2010, a Japanese mission called Hayabusa returned to Earth from a seven-year space journey. It brought back not only images and data from its adventure, but also actual samples, small grains of rock from its target, the asteroid Itokawa. Just a handful of space missions have ever returned to Earth at all, let alone brought back pieces of their destinations. So Hayabusa’s samples are highly prized, and have been studied by many teams across the world.
Now, researchers from Ari ...read more
A largely complete, roughly 300,000-year-old skull from southeastern China appears to be the latest evidence challenging the dominant model of human evolution. The Hualongdong skull's unique combination of features make the fossil a tantalizing clue to East Asia's diverse hominin history.
Researchers excavating a collapsed cave site unearthed the skull, formally known as Hualongdong 6 (HLD 6), along with additional partial fossils of archaic humans and animals, plus assorted sto ...read more
On the mountainous Tibetan Plateau, small groups of nomadic herders still make a living two miles or more above sea level. Most of us would be poorly-equipped to deal with that altitude for long periods of time, but the Tibetans there have unique genetic adaptations that let their bodies function in the thin air.
Mysteriously, those genes seem to come from another species of human, the Denisovans, a little-understood group of hominins who died out tens of thousands of years ago. ...read more
The Earth has always been in the path of rocks from space. When the solar system was forming, the early Earth was pelted with rocks so frequently that it left the surface molten. In fact, the creation of the Moon was caused by a massive impact of a "rock", albeit a Mars-sized rock. These days, there are many fewer impacts (thankfully) but the threat still remains that an asteroid we might not even know about yet could strike the planet. This week, as part of the 2019 Planetary Defense Confer ...read more
We've reached another "will they or won't they?" cliffhanger in the long-running soap opera, When Will Humans Return to the Moon? Last May, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine promised that a crew would be landing there by 2028. "To many, this may sound similar to our previous attempts to get to the Moon," he admitted. "However, times have changed. This will not be Lucy and the football again." A month ago, Vice President Pence added a big plot twist, now declaring that "it is the stated pol ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine