ARAB TIMES, THURSDAY, JUNE 9, 2016
INTERNATIONAL
18
World News Roundup
Palaentology
Age of dinos
Mammals big
hit ‘survivors’
PARIS, June 8, (AFP): The
prevailing theory that mammals only flourished after an
asteroid strike wiped out the
dinosaurs 66 million years ago
is doubly wrong, according to a
study published Wednesday.
Our warm-blooded predecessors thrived and spread over
millions of
years even as
Tyrannosaurus and other
flesh-ripping
monsters
lorded over
the planet,
researchers
reported.
Moreover,
Grossnickle
these mammals took a big hit when the
asteroid slammed into Earth,
creating a hemispheric firestorm followed by a prolonged,
bone-chilling drop in global
temperatures.
“The traditional view is that
mammals were suppressed
during the ‘age of dinosaurs’,”
and thus held in check, said coauthor Elis Newham, a doctoral
student in evolutionary biology
at the University of Chicago.
“However, our findings
were that therian mammals —
the ancestors of most modern
mammals — were already diversifying considerably before
the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event,” also known as the
K-Pg boundary.
The researchers pulled together dozens of studies that
challenged and chipped away
at the old theory.
But key to the new conclusion, they said, was teeth.
Shapes
An analysis of hundreds of
molars from mammals alive
during the 20 million years
before the K-Pg boundary revealed a huge variety of shapes
— a telltale sign of varied diets
and species diversity.
The scientists were surprised
to find a sharp decline in the
number of mammals after the
asteroid crash.
“I didn’t expect to see any
sort of drop,” said lead author
David Grossnickle, also of the
University of Chicago.
“It didn’t match the traditional view that after the extinction,
mammals hit the ground running.”
Once again, teeth told a story, this time revealing which
mammals made it across the
K-Pg boundary, and which
did not.
Those with molars indicating
a specialised diet — only bugs
or only plants, for example —
were less likely to weather the
disaster than those with allpurpose chompers ready to eat
whatever was available.
The findings, published in
Proceedings of the Royal Society B, may hold a lesson for today’s world, Grossnickle said.
Extinction
Scientists say Earth is experiencing another mass extinction
event, driven mainly by climate
change — only the sixth in the
last half billion years, he pointed out.
“The types of survivors that
made it 66 million years ago,
mostly generalists, might be indicative of what will survive in
the next hundred years, or the
next thousand,” Grossnickle
said in a statement.
The
Cretaceous-Tertiary
extinction wiped out threequarters of the plant and animal species on Earth, including all dinosaurs which could
not fly.
With the exception of a few
crocodiles and sea turtles,
there is no evidence that tetrapods — four-limbed vertebrates — weighing more than
25 kilos (55 pounds) survived.
The discovery in the 1990s
of the 180-km (110-mile)
wide Chicxulub crater straddling the Yucatan Peninsula
and the Gulf of Mexico, pinpointed the likely spot where
the asteroid hit.
After the K-Pg event, new
forms of mammals such as
horses, whales, bats, and primates emerged and spread in a
dinosaur-free world.
Former astronaut, Dan Tani, Senior Director, Mission and Cargo Operations, Orbital ATK, gestures as he stands in front of the Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft in the payload preparation facility at the Wallops
Island NASA Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia on June 7. The OA-5 mission is Orbital-ATK’s sixth mission to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. The spacecraft has been named for former
astronaut Allan Poindexter. (AP)
Space
LISA Pathfinder on mission to observe gravitational waves
Space feat opens window onto Universe
A handout photo released on June 7,
2016, by the European Southern Observatory shows the cosmic weather report, as illustrated in this artist’s concept,
calling for condensing clouds of cold
molecular gas around the Abell 2597
Brightest Cluster Galaxy. The clouds
condense out of the hot, ionised gas that
suffuses the space between the galaxies in this cluster. New ALMA data show
that these clouds are raining in on the
galaxy, plunging toward the supermassive black hole at its centre. (AFP)
Lefranc
Lambert
Discovery
France finds massacre bones:
Archaeologists said Tuesday they had
discovered the remains of victims from
a 6,000-year-old massacre in Alsace in
eastern France that was likely carried out
by “furious ritualised warriors”.
The corpses of 10 people were found
outside Strasbourg in one of 300 ancient
“silos” used to store grain and other food,
a team from France’s National Institute
for Preventive Archaeological Research
(Inrap) told reporters.
The Neolithic group appeared to have
died violent deaths, with multiple injuries
to their legs, hands and skulls.
The way in which the bodies were piled
on top of each other suggested they had
been killed together and dumped in the
silo.
“They were very brutally executed
and received violent blows, almost certainly from a stone axe,” said Philippe
Lefranc, an Inrap specialist on the
period.
The skeletons of five adults and one
adolescent were found, as well as four
arms from different individuals.
The arms were likely “war trophies”
like those found at a nearby burial site of
Bergheim in 2012, said Lefranc.
He said the mutilations indicated a society of “furious ritualised warriors”, while
the silos were stored within a defence wall
that pointed towards “a troubled time, a
period of insecurity”.
It is hoped that genetic testing on the
bones will reveal more information about
the killings, but Lefranc said one theory
was that a local tribe had clashed with a
new group arriving from the area around
modern-day Paris.
PARIS, June 8, (Agencies): A
ground-breaking physics mission has
opened up space as the next frontier
for exploring a ubiquitous, invisible
force predicted by Albert Einstein
a century ago, project leaders said
Tuesday.
A demonstration probe dubbed
LISA Pathfinder was launched by
Europe last December on the first
stage of a decades-long mission to
observe gravitational waves from
space.
Pathfinder was designed to test
technologies to be fitted into a massive space lab, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), sketched
for launch in 18 years’ time.
Announcing early results, delighted scientists said Pathfinder’s
performance raised hopes that LISA
will contribute to proving core predictions of Einstein’s theory.
“We now know that we have sufficient sensitivity to observe them
(gravitational waves) from space,”
Fabio Favata of the European Space
Agency’s science directorate told
journalists by webcast from Madrid.
“A new window to the Universe
has been opened.”
In his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein theorised in 1916 that
space and time are interwoven into
a fourth dimension called spacetime.
He predicted the acceleration of
objects with mass would warp spacetime and create ripples known as
“It appears that a warrior raid by people
from the Parisian basin went wrong for
the assailants, and the Alsatians of the era
massacred them,” he said.
However, in the long run, it was the
“Parisians” who had the last laugh.
The local tribe appear to have been
supplanted by the newcomers around 4,200
BC, as demonstrated by new funeral rites,
gravitational waves.
Theoretically, the strongest waves
would be caused by the most cataclysmic processes in the Universe
— black holes coalescing, massive
stars exploding, or the very birth of
the Universe some 13.8 billion years
ago.
Interact
Gravitational waves do not interact
with matter, and thus travel through
the Universe unimpeded.
They are so small — less than the
radius of an atom — as to be almost
undetectible.
In February, scientists using Earthbased instruments announced they
had detected a gravitational wave for
the first time ever.
The US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observator
(LIGO) caught a glimpse of a spacetime ripple emitted by the merging
of two black holes some 1.3 billion
years ago.
Now, European scientists hope
to be able to equal and improve on
this feat, using the advantage of
space.
With LISA, its free-floating detectors stretched out over millions of
kilometres in space, the team hopes
to observe waves from black holes
“which are millions of solar masses,”
project scientist Paul McNamara told
AFP.
Ground-based experiments, with
limited lab space and less stabilpottery and hamlets. (AFP)
❑
❑
❑
Aborigines were the 1st Aussies:
New scientific research confirms that
Aborigines were the first inhabitants of
Australia, refuting theories that others of
possible European origin were the first
humans on the continent.
ity because of Earth vibrations, can
measure objects only about one to 10
times the mass of our Sun.
The study of gravitational waves
opens exciting new avenues in astronomy, allowing measurements
of faraway stars, galaxies and black
holes based on the waves they make.
Indirectly, it builds on the evidence that black holes — never directly observed — do actually exist.
“With gravitational wave astronomy coming into full bloom with
space-based detectors, we will be
able to study merging black holes,
which are such a fundamental part...
of the evolution of our Universe,”
said Favata.
Satellite
The ESA said Pathfinder, a freefloating, demo detector enclosed in
a satellite some 1.5 million kilometres (930,000 miles) from Earth, surpassed its scientific objective.
It was meant to show it could pick
up motion changes representing
gravitational waves at the picometre
level — a millionth of a millionth of
a metre.
Even better, “we were able to see
femtometre motions” — at the scale
of a quadrillionth of a metre — “really, really small motions,” said project member Martin Hewitson of the
University of Hanover.
With the demo project, “we have
not only learnt to walk, but actually
to jog pretty well,” added Favata.
Work published in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences journal
on Monday puts to rest a controversy over
the first Australians that has lingered for
more than 150 years.
The research refutes an earlier study
claiming DNA sequences were recovered
from the remains of the Mungo Man, the
oldest human remains on the continent,
Wildlife phone apps
cause Kruger chaos
This handout picture received from the French National Institute of Archaeological
Research (INRAP) on June 7 shows a member of the team working to uncover fossilized skeletons at the site of an archaeological dig at Achenheim, Northeastern
France. Archaeologists have unearthed remains at the site of a massacre over
6,000 years ago at Achenheim in Alsace, archaeologists announced. (AFP)
JOHANNESBURG, June 8,
(AFP): Mobile telephone apps
that track wildlife sightings in
South Africa’s Kruger Park have
caused a rise in road rage, roadkills and speeding as tourists rush
to viewing spots, officials said
Wednesday.
South African National Parks
(SANParks) said it was exploring how to restrict use of the
apps, saying that they “induce an
unhealthy sense of eagerness for
visitors to break the rules”.
The apps share information
between tourists on where elephants, lions, leopards and other
animals have been found, allowing other users to drive quickly to
the scene.
“So now we are ready for the marathon, we are ready to jump and to do
the big race.”
The main wave-detecting project
was provisionally set for launch in
2034.
“But with the wonderful results
of Pathfinder, maybe that can be
advanced, we don’t know yet,” said
McNamara.
Like light, gravity travels in waves.
Unlike light, gravitational waves
bend the interwoven fabric of space
and time, a phenomenon conceptualized by physicist Albert Einstein a
century ago. Before Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravity was
seen as a force between two bodies.
In the pre-Einstein view of physics, if the sun disappeared one day,
people on Earth would feel it instantly. In Einstein’s view, the effects
would not be felt for eight minutes,
the time both light waves and gravitational waves take to travel from the
sun to Earth.
So far, attempts to detect gravitational waves using Earth-based detectors have been unsuccessful.
Massive objects such as black
holes bend space and time more than
smaller bodies like the sun, similar to
how a bowling ball warps the surface
of a trampoline more than a baseball.
“There’s a whole spectrum of gravitational waves, just like there’s a whole
spectrum of electromagnetic waves,”
said astrophysicist Ira Thorpe of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
and allegedly showing that he came from
an extinct lineage that lived on the continent before Aboriginal Australians.
However, researchers at Australia’s
Griffith University in South East Queensland used new DNA sequencing methods
to re-analyze the remains.
The earlier test “contained sequences
from five different European people
suggesting that these all represent contamination,” said David Lambert at the
university’s Research Centre for Human
Evolution.
“By going back and reanalyzing the
samples with more advanced technology,
we have found compelling support for the
argument that Aboriginal Australians were
the first inhabitants of Australia,” Lambert
said.
Mungo Man was a Pleistocene-era
human that lived in the Willandra Lakes
region, in far western New South Wales.
Archaeological evidence shows that
humans lived in the area some 60,000 to
45,000 years ago.
Scientists also re-analyzed “more
than 20 of the other ancient people
from Willandra. We were successful in
recovering the genomic sequence of one
of the early inhabitants of Lake Mungo,
a man buried very close to the location where Mungo Man was originally
interred.”
There has been debate over the origins
of the first Australians since the 1863
publication of “Man’s Place in Nature” by
British scientist Thomas Henry Huxley.
(AFP)