Images of Pluto returned by New Horizons. Click image for background on mission
This week more images of Pluto were released by the New Horizons team showing what appear to be polar caps. We'll
know more soon!
As you can see, surface features are getting easier to discern (note that a different part of Pluto was seen by the probe on each day, so you're seeing different features). It’s not just light and dark patches, but they have some shape to them as well. It actually reminds me a bit of seeing Mars through a small ‘scope. Note that on the May 10 image there appears to be a dark chunk taken out of Pluto’s side; that’s an illusion due to that spot being particularly dark; it blends in with the blackness of space and fools your eye into thinking Pluto’s missing a piece.
- Climate change could strip the Himalayas of ice and snow.
- If only robots could heal themselves ...
Scientists claimed that they have invented a robot which is able to recover itself when damaged. This is an ideal creation in a world of machines that impersonate the incredible adaptive powers of both humans and animals. ... Jean-Baptiste Mouret of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris said “The idea is to have robots that can survive in hostile environments such as a Fukushima-type nuclear disaster.”
- A new study finds, in my view anyway, that dinos might have made great deep space astronauts: they were warm-blooded enough to sprint like a cheetah, but they could also rest like a turtle, and possibly even hibernate or close to it.
- Move over A. afarensis also known as Lucy. Paleo-anthropologists have found another possible human ancestor which lived at about the same time and place as the most famous human fossil ever uncovered:
Anthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie and his team have named the new species Australopithecus deyiremeda. They found fossilized upper and lower jaw fossils at a paleontological dig site in the Afar region of central Ethiopia in 2011, and after four years of study, they’ve published their findings in the journal Nature.
