ADVENTURE OF DISCOVERYS

First Americans: Underwater Butchering Site Dices Timeline By Gemma Tarlach | May 13, 2016 1:00 pm The challenging Page-Ladson archaeology site, the oldest evidence of humans in the southeastern U.S., is 30 feet underwater with zero visibility. Only a handful of archaeologists across the continent have the skills — and the fortitude — to do the careful, laser-guided excavation work. Credit: S. Joy, courtesy of CSFA. Out of murky water comes a clearer picture of when the Americas were populated. Numerous 14,550-year-old finds from 30 feet underwater in a Florida river represent the oldest archaeological site in the southeastern U.S. — and the latest direct challenge to one archaeo-camp’s long-standing belief about when the first people arrived on the continent. The site yielded stone tools, including a knife-like cutting implement, and a mastodon tusk with cut marks that suggest it was butchered by humans eager to get at the highly nutritious tis...

Rafting Ants Have Designated Stations By soliu seun | MAY 16, 2016 11:28 AM Sometimes at the climax of a  Star Trek  episode, the captain would yell out “Battle stations!” and send the crew scurrying frantically through the corridors. It wasn’t really clear what those battle stations were. Presumably, crew members headed to posts they’d been previously assigned, and this let the whole ship react to the crisis efficiently. Certain ants respond to a crisis by binding their bodies together into floating rafts. And like the  Star Trek  crew, they seem to have designated posts. Formica selysi  ants live in central and southern Europe. Their preferred homes are along rivers, so the ants need to be prepared for floods—and they are. When water rises around them, the ants cling together to make a raft. They load the queen at the raft’s center. Baby ants, being especially buoyant, become flotation devices: the other ants pac...

With SkinTrack, Your Arm is the Touchpad By soliu seun | May 16, 2016 11:18 pm The SkinTrack in action. (Credit: Gierad Laput) When smartwatches started appearing on store shelves, there was one nagging question about the devices: “How can anyone play Angry Birds on this?” A solution is imminent. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Group have made the process of flinging colorful birds at evil pigs as simple as stroking your forearm. The SkinTrack system has two primary components: a signal-emitting ring that’s worn the index finger and a sensing band. The ring sends high-frequency electrical signals through the skin, and electrodes in the sensor band detect the signal’s phase differences to track distance and movement.  Arms the New Iphone As our devices shrink, researchers are looking for new ways for us to interact with a limited amount of real estate. This often means taking the ...

See Earth's Temperature Spiral Toward 2°C The steady rise of Earth’s temperature as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere and trap more and more heat is sending the planet spiraling closer to the point where warming’s catastrophic consequences may be all but assured. That metaphoric spiral has become a literal one in a new graphic drawn up by Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. The animated graphic features a rainbow-colored record of global temperatures spinning outward from the late 19th century to the present as the Earth heats up. Earth Gets Greener As Globe Gets Hotter The graphic is part of Hawkins’s effort to explore new ways to present global temperature data in a way that clearly telegraphs the warming trend. Another climate scientist, Jan Fuglestvedt of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo, suggested the spiral presentation. The graphic displays monthly glob...

Mystery of Bizarre Radar Echoes Solved, 50 Years Later More than 50 years after weird radio echoes were detected coming from Earth's upper atmosphere, two scientists say they've pinpointed the culprit. And it's complicated. In 1962, after the Jicamarca Radio Observatory was built near Lima, Peru, some unexplainable phenomenon was reflecting the radio waves broadcast by the observatory back to the ground to be picked up by its detectors. The mysterious cause of these echoes was sitting at an altitude of between 80 and 100 miles (130 and 160 kilometers) above sea level. "As soon as they turned this radar on, they saw this thing," study researcher Meers Oppenheim, of the Center for Space Physics at Boston University, said, referring to the anomalous echo. "They saw all sorts of interesting phenomena that had never been seen before. Almost all of it was explained within a few years." [In Photos: Mysterious Radar Blob Puzzles Meteorologists] ...