Holotype specimens of Homo naledi
From a cave in Southern Africa that had been thought to yield all its gifts decades ago, comes a treasure trove of fossil hominid material buried way, way in the back of long, sinuous passages. And this isn't an accident: these early humans were intentionally placing their dead in a sinkhole or crack of what would become embedded in a
large cave system:
Tucker and Hunter worked their way through a constriction called Superman’s Crawl—because most people can fit through only by holding one arm tightly against the body ... Crossing a large chamber, they climbed a jagged wall of rock called the Dragon’s Back. At the top they found themselves in a pretty little cavity decorated with stalactites. Hunter got out his video camera, and to remove himself from the frame, Tucker eased himself into a fissure in the cave floor. His foot found a finger of rock, then another below it, then—empty space. Dropping down, he found himself in a narrow, vertical chute, in some places less than eight inches wide. He called to Hunter to follow him. Both men have hyper-slender frames, all bone and wiry muscle. Had their torsos been just a little bigger, they would not have fit in the chute, and what is arguably the most astonishing human fossil discovery in half a century ...
- The Southern Ocean absorbs huge amounts of CO2, the number one global warming gas emitted by humans, industry, and a bunch of other things, but that saturation point had been reached years ago. And yet somehow, that ocean is continuing to take in CO2, which might help buy us a tiny bit of time from the more dire future climate scenarios.
- Human beings have unusual ... er ... hobbies.
- The fight against cancer (Die Cancer, Die!) marches on. With killer nano terminators and simple blood tests in development.
- NASA's New Horizons is many millions of miles beyond Pluto now, but it can only send back data at a few kilobits/s. But it has just completed a long data dump, there are dazzling new images, and the spacecraft has a future in the years ahead:
That should be plenty of time to clear the hard drives before New Horizons does its next flyby. Did you hear? The little probe will reach Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69 in January 2019.