This Medieval Italian Man Replaced His Amputated Hand With A Weapon

Most Intact Australopithecus Unveiled

After 20 years of painstaking excavation, cleaning, and reassembling, the virtually intact skeleton of the Australopithecus hominid known as Little Foot has been revealed to the world.

Bones from the 3.67-million-year-old human ancestor were first identified in the 1990s within the Sterkfontein caves northwest of Johannesburg, in South Africa. Little Foot represents the most complete Australopithecus ever discovered.

Help Explore Your Own Solar Neighborhood

We’re always making amazing discoveries about the farthest reaches of our universe, but there’s also plenty of unexplored territory much closer to home.

Our “Backyard Worlds: Planet 9” is a citizen science project that asks curious people like you — yes, you there! — to help us spot objects in the area around our own solar system like brown dwarfs. You could even help us figure out if our solar system hosts a mysterious Planet 9!

In 2009, we launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Infrared radiation is a form of light that humans can’t see, but WISE could. It scans the sky for infrared light, looking for galaxies, stars and asteroids. Later on, scientists started using it to search for near-Earth objects (NEOWISE) like comets and asteroids.

These searches have already turned up so much data that researchers have trouble hunting through all of it. They can’t do it on their own. That’s why we asked everyone to chip in. If you join Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, you’ll learn how to look at noisy images of space and spot previously unidentified objects. 

You’ll figure out how to tell the difference between real objects, like planets and stars, and artifacts. Artifacts are blurry blobs of light that got scattered around in WISE’s instruments while it was looking at the sky. These “optical ghosts” sometimes look like real objects.

Why can’t we use computers to do this, you ask? Well, computers are good at lots of things, like crunching numbers. But when it comes to recognizing when something’s a ghostly artifact and when it’s a real object, humans beat software all the time. After some practice, you’ll be able to recognize which objects are real and which aren’t just by watching them move!

One of the things our citizen scientists look for are brown dwarfs, which are balls of gas too big to be planets and too small to be stars. These objects are some of our nearest neighbors, and scientists think there’s probably a bunch of them floating around nearby, we just haven’t been able to find all of them yet. 

But since Backyard Worlds launched on February 15, 2016, our volunteers have spotted 432 candidate brown dwarfs. We’ve been able to follow up 20 of these with ground-based telescopes so far, and 17 have turned out to be real!

Image Credit: Ryan Trainor, Franklin and Marshall College

How do we know for sure that we’ve spotted actual, bona fide, authentic brown dwarfs? Well, like with any discovery in science, we followed up with more observation. Our team gets time on ground-based observatories like the InfraRed Telescope Facility in Hawaii, the Magellan Telescope in Chile (pictured above) and the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico and takes a closer look at our candidates. And sure enough, our participants found 17 brown dwarfs!

But we’re not done! There’s still lots of data to go through. In particular, we want your help looking for a potential addition to our solar system’s census: Planet 9. Some scientists think it’s circling somewhere out there past Pluto. No one has seen anything yet, but it could be you! Or drop by and contribute to our other citizen science projects like Disk Detective.

Congratulations to the citizen scientists who spotted these 17 brown dwarfs: Dan Caselden, Rosa Castro, Guillaume Colin, Sam Deen, Bob Fletcher, Sam Goodman, Les Hamlet, Khasan Mokaev, Jörg Schümann and Tamara Stajic.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

The deep sea feather star may not have the fastest form of locomotion—but it’s possibly the prettiest!

Thank you to our colleagues at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) for this beautiful footage! Find out more about the life in the deep sea of Monterey Bay: https://mbayaq.co/2sAzy5e

How 250 Siberians Became the First Native Americans

The Americas are a big place, but the Native American group that first settled it was small — just about 250 people, according to a new genetic study.

These people, known as a founding group because they “founded” the first population, migrated from Siberia to the Americas by about 15,000 years ago, said study co-lead researcher Nelson Fagundes, a professor in the Department of Genetics at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil.

Figuring out the size of founding groups is key, because it determines the amount of genetic diversity that gets passed on to the group’s descendants, Fagundes said.

That, in turn, could alter how effectively natural selection weeds out bad genes, Fagundes said.

“Large populations have very efficient selection, while in small populations, mildly deleterious alleles [versions of genes] can spread, which may increase genetic susceptibility to some diseases,” Read more.

I’ll have to look into that next time I’m near Lantern!

just woke up from one hell of a nightmare i need a distraction…

So I stumbled onto the Etsy shop of this academic who–in real life–is an expert on cuneiform–and on the side, makes little trinkets with Sumerian on them and OH MAN THIS SHOP HAS MADE MY ENTIRE WEEK For the price of about thirty bucks, you too can have a clay necklace that says “Like a farting butt, the mouth brings forth too many words” in the oldest written language on earth https://www.etsy.com/listing/537034173/choose-your-words-carefully-like-a?ref=shop_home_active_23

Or a necklace that declares “I have ferocious features that exude sexiness” https://www.etsy.com/listing/540406774/i-have-ferocious-features-that-exude?ref=shop_home_active_54 Or be the ultimate hipster and anti-capitalist before capitalism even existed with “Wanting more riches when already wealthy offends the gods”  https://www.etsy.com/listing/543598245/wanting-more-riches-when-already-wealthy?ref=shop_home_active_6

Sumerian erotic poetry? Got it. Sumerian drinking songs? Yep. A little something for everyone on your Akitu gift list.

hey you wouldnt happen to know a large, dashing, incredibly strong but also musically talented goliath or harbor any feelings for anyone fitting that description...

oh, I think I have an inkling of who you mean, anonymous. They seem very capable! I believe they were the first to establish communications with the Entity of Song we encountered together (I may have been a little preoccupied taking notes but it was so new and strange and frightening...) and that did take a considerable degree of musical skill and quick intellect! I feel they will be a very helpful co-worker in the HDC should they join up when all this is over!

X-ray binary (black hole devouring a star)

X-ray binaries are a class of binary stars that are luminous in X-rays. The X-rays are produced by matter falling from one component, called the donor (usually a relatively normal star), to the other component, called the accretor, which is very compact: a neutron star or black hole. The infalling matter releases gravitational potential energy, up to several tenths of its rest mass, as X-rays. (Hydrogen fusion releases only about 0.7 percent of rest mass.) The lifetime and the mass-transfer rate in an X-ray binary depends on the evolutionary status of the donor star, the mass ratio between the stellar components, and their orbital separation.

An estimated 1041 positrons escape per second from a typical low-mass X-ray binary.

source

animation

I said I was sorry.

I may be awkward sometimes But

at least i did not say “neat”