M.J. Rose

How was your eclipse?

 

Experiencing this fluke is even more rare than we can imagine…

 

From “Heard on Morning Edition,”

 

Why Future Earthlings Won’t See Total Solar Eclipses

by Nell Greenfieldboyce

 

“Anyone who gets to see the total solar eclipse on August 21 will be lucky — and humanity is lucky to live on a planet that even has this kind of celestial event.

 

Mercury and Venus, after all, don’t even have moons. Mars has a couple, but they’re too small to completely blot out the sun. Gas giants like Jupiter do have big moons, but they don’t have solid surfaces where you could stand and enjoy an eclipse.

 

And, even with solid land and a moon, Earth only gets its gorgeous total solar eclipses because of a cosmic coincidence.

 

“They appear to be the same size because of their distance away from us,” explains Amber Porter, an astronomer at Clemson University, which is in the path of the upcoming eclipse. The diameter of Earth’s moon is about 400 times smaller than the diameter of the sun, but “even though the moon is about 400 times smaller than the sun, it’s about 400 times closer to us here on Earth, which is how that perfect kind of magic happens.”

Because of this quirk, the tiny moon can obscure the entire face of the sun and reveal its eerie corona, at least right now. In the past, Earth’s eclipses did not look like this.

 

“The size of the sun hasn’t really changed over the age of Earth, but the moon has been moving away from Earth over eons. So in the past it looked bigger,” says Matija Cuk, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute.

 

The moon is still moving away from Earth, he says. Every year, it shifts outward about an inch-and-half…”

 

For the rest, click here.

 

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Consider this: “…people began altering their environments for food and shelter about 30,000 years earlier than we thought.”

 

30,000 years!

 

 

From arstechnica.com,

 

Paleolithic pastimes —
Evidence that ancient farms had very different origins than previously thought
Dramatic new hypothesis could change the way we understand human history.
by Annalee Newitz

 

“It’s an idea that could transform our understanding of how humans went from small bands of hunter-gatherers to farmers and urbanites. Until recently, anthropologists believed cities and farms emerged about 9,000 years ago in the Mediterranean and Middle East. But now a team of interdisciplinary researchers has gathered evidence showing how civilization as we know it may have emerged at the equator, in tropical forests. Not only that, but people began altering their environments for food and shelter about 30,000 years earlier than we thought.

 

For centuries, archaeologists believed that ancient people couldn’t live in tropical jungles. The environment was simply too harsh and challenging, they thought. As a result, scientists simply didn’t look for clues of ancient civilizations in the tropics. Instead, they turned their attention to the Middle East, where we have ample evidence that hunter-gatherers settled down in farming villages 9,000 years ago during a period dubbed the “Neolithic revolution.” Eventually, these farmers’ offspring built the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the great pyramids of Egypt. It seemed certain that city life came from these places and spread from there around the world.

 

But now that story seems increasingly uncertain. In an article published in Nature Plants, Max Planck Institute archaeologist Patrick Roberts and his colleagues explain that cities and farms are far older than we think. Using techniques ranging from genetic sampling of forest ecosystems and isotope analysis of human teeth, to soil analysis and lidar, the researchers have found ample evidence that people at the equator were actively changing the natural world to make it more human-centric.

 

It all started about 45,000 years ago. At that point, people began burning down vegetation to make room for plant resources and homes. Over the next 35,000 years, the simple practice of burning back forest evolved. People mixed specialized soils for growing plants; they drained swamps for agriculture; they domesticated animals like chickens; and they farmed yam, taro, sweet potato, chili pepper, black pepper, mango, and bananas.

 

École française d’Extrême-Orient archaeologist Damian Evans, a co-author on the Nature paper, said that it wasn’t until a recent conference brought international researchers together that they realized they’d discovered a global pattern. Very similar evidence for ancient farming could be seen in equatorial Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Much later, people began building “garden cities” in these same regions, where they lived in low-density neighborhoods surrounded by cultivated land.

 

Evans, Roberts, and their colleagues aren’t just raising questions about where cities originated. More importantly, Roberts told Ars via email, they are challenging the idea of a “Neolithic revolution” in which the shift to city life happened in just a few hundred years…”

 

For the rest, click here.

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Octopuses have a lot to tell us about the nature of consciousness…

 

From qz.com,

 

CEPHALOPODS RISING
Octopus research shows that consciousness isn’t what makes humans special

 

 

“Whether or not octopuses should be viewed as charming or terrifying very much depends on your personal perspective. But it’s hard to deny their intelligence.

 

Octopuses can squirt water at an annoyingly bright bulb until it short-circuits. They can tell humans apart (even those who are wearing the same uniform). And, according to Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosophy professor at University of Sydney and City University of New York, they are the closest creature to an alien here on earth.

 

That’s because octopuses are the most complex animal with the most distant common ancestor to humans. There’s some uncertainty about which precise ancestor was most recently shared by octopuses and humans, but, Godfrey-Smith says, “It was probably an animal about the size of a leech or flatworm with neurons numbering perhaps in the thousands, but not more than that.”

 

This means that octopuses have very little in common with humans, evolution-wise. They have developed eyes, limbs, and brains via a completely separate route, with very different ancestors, from humans. And they seem to have come by their impressive cognitive functioning—and likely consciousness—by different means…”

 

For the rest, click here.

 

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