Excerpt:

>The argonaut octopus, of the family Argonautidae, belongs to a group of pale pink-spotted octopuses. Unlike the heroes that sailed the Argo, these octopuses are known for traversing the open ocean by way of a delicate, curved, creamy white vessel—an external casing, often referred to as a “shell,” that gave them their common nickname, the “paper nautilus.”

>These creatures baffled naturalists and philosophers for two millennia, even fooling Aristotle, who believed that they used their large pair of webbed dorsal arms as “a sail” to catch the briny breeze and floated across the ocean’s surface like paper boats.

>“It uses [the thin webs], when a breeze is blowing, for a sail, and lets down some of its feelers alongside as rudder-oars,” Aristotle wrote of the paper nautilus.

>These myths carried weight for centuries, even among naturalists in the 19th century.

> 

>It wasn’t until the early 1830s when self-taught French naturalist, Jeanne Villepreux-Power began researching the Argonauta argo, or the greater argonaut, that we learned the true origins of their “shells.”

>In the 1800s, most scientists believed that the shell was made by another animal—that argonauts lived in them the same way that a hermit crab will go find a snail shell or a mollusk shell to live in, Finn says. Once the octopus grew too large for the shell, it would abandon the shelter and either search, steal, or kill the original inhabitant for a larger shell.

>But, Jeanne Villepreux-Power sided with the opposite side of the debate: The argonauts were the builders of their cases.

Lauren J. Young, June 20, 2018

Eduardo Mayoral, Jérémy Duveau, Ana Santos, Antonio Rodríguez Ramírez, Juan A. Morales, Ricardo Díaz-Delgado, Jorge Rivera-Silva, Asier Gómez-Olivencia & Ignacio Díaz-Martínez; 19 October 2022.

Abstract excerpt:

>In this paper, we report new Optically Stimulated Luminescence dating that places the hominin footprints surface in the range of 295.8 ± 17 ka (MIS 9-MIS 8 transition, Middle Pleistocene).

>This new age implies that the possible track-makers are individuals more likely from the Neandertal evolutionary lineage. Regardless of the taxon attributed to the Matalascañas footprints, they supplement the existing partial fossil record for the European Middle Pleistocene Hominins being notably the first palaeoanthropological evidence (hominin skeleton or footprints) from the MIS 9 and MIS 8 transition discovered in the Iberian Peninsula, a moment of climatic evolution from warm to cool.

>Thus, the Matalascañas footprints represent a crucial record for understanding human occupations in Europe in the Pleistocene.

Scientific Reports, DOI 10.1038/s41598-022-22524-2

Michael Murphy, 11 November 2022 06:00 GMT+11.

Excerpt:

>Our theory of electromagnetism is arguably the best physical theory humans have ever made – but it has no answer for why electromagnetism is as strong as it is.

>Only experiments can tell you electromagnetism’s strength, which is measured by a number called α (aka alpha, or the fine-structure constant).

>The American physicist Richard Feynman, who helped come up with the theory, called this “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics” and urged physicists to “put this number up on their wall and worry about it”.

> 

>In research just published in Science, we decided to test whether α is the same in different places within our galaxy by studying stars that are almost identical twins of our Sun.

>From [spectra of Sun-like stars], we have shown that α was the same in the 17 solar twins to an astonishing precision: just 50 parts per billion.

>That’s like comparing your height to the circumference of Earth. It’s the most precise astronomical test of α ever performed.

Science, DOI 10.1126/science.abi9232

Excerpt:

>The artifact was discovered by a TV documentary crew seeking the wreckage of a World War II-era aircraft. Divers noticed a large humanmade object covered partially by sand on the seafloor.

>The proximity to the Florida Space Coast, along with the item’s modern construction and presence of 8-inch square tiles, led the documentary team to contact NASA.

>“While it has been nearly 37 years since seven daring and brave explorers lost their lives aboard Challenger, this tragedy will forever be seared in the collective memory of our country. For millions around the globe, myself included, Jan. 28, 1986, still feels like yesterday,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

>“This discovery gives us an opportunity to pause once again, to uplift the legacies of the seven pioneers we lost, and to reflect on how this tragedy changed us. At NASA, the core value of safety is – and must forever remain – our top priority, especially as our missions explore more of the cosmos than ever before.”

>A major malfunction 73 seconds after liftoff resulted in the loss of Challenger and the seven astronauts aboard.

ETA:

NASA, November 10, 2022 ~10:00 GMT-5.

Excerpt:

>Markus Oberthaler at Heidelberg University in Germany and his colleagues cooled more than 20,000 potassium atoms in a vacuum, using lasers to slow them down and lower their temperature to about 60 nanokelvin, or 60 billionths of a degree kelvin above absolute zero.

>At this temperature, the atoms formed a cloud about the width of a human hair and, instead of freezing, they became a quantum, fluid-like phase of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate. Atoms in this phase can be controlled by shining light on them – using a tiny projector, the researchers precisely set the atoms’ density, arrangement in space and the forces they exert on each other.

>By changing these properties, the team made the atoms follow an equation called a space-time metric, which, in an actual, full-scale universe, determines how curved it is, how fast light travels and how much light must bend near very massive objects. This is the first experiment that has used cold atoms to simulate a curved and expanding universe, says Oberthaler.

Nature, DOI 10.1038/s41586-022-05313-9

Excerpt:

>GENEVA, Nov 5 (Reuters) - The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, on Saturday issued an open letter to Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter Inc, urging him to "ensure human rights are central to the management of Twitter".

>Twitter Inc laid off half its workforce on Friday and tweets by staff of the social media company said the team responsible for human rights was among those affected, a development which Türk described as not "an encouraging start".

>"Twitter is part of a global revolution that has transformed how we communicate," Türk said in the letter. "But I write with concern and apprehension about our digital public square and Twitter's role in it."

>^Writing ^by ^Paul ^Carrel; ^editing ^by ^Jason ^Neely

Open letter from Volker Türk, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 5 November 2022, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/press/2022-11-05/22-11-05_Letter_HC_to_Mr_Elon_Musk.pdf

João Albuquerque, Jose A. A. Antolínez, Fernando J. Méndez, Giovanni Coco; published 3 November 2022.

Abstract excerpt:

>Wave climatologies from historical and projected simulations of the ACCESS1.0, MIROC5 and CNRM-CM5 Global Circulation Models (GCM) were sourced from the Coordinated Ocean Wave Climate Project (COWCLIP) and downscaled using the SWAN wave model.

>Biases between GCM's historical simulations and a regional hindcast were assessed, and the two best-performing models (ACCESS1.0, MIROC5) had their projections analysed.

>The areas of statistically significant changes are larger in the END21C than in the NEA21C period. The wave direction change is counter-clockwise along the west and clockwise along the east coasts.

>This study is a first assessment of historical and projected GCM-forced waves along New Zealand and the database we generated can be of great value for renewable energy research, risk assessment and the mitigation of future coastal hazards.

New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, DOI 10.1080/00288330.2022.2135116

Thanks. I like this:

>Lorraine Daston

>I think of history as a discipline, one that invented and is still inventing ever new rigorous methods for not only the cross-examination of the sources we have, but even more importantly, the discovery of sources we don’t yet have.

>I look upon the integration of many different strands of evidence braided together into a strong rope of argument in history as identical, philosophically to the practices of any science. This is one of the reasons why the history of science is, of use to science and scholarship.

>All of these methods, which constitute, taken in toto, rigor in any given scholarly or scientific discipline develop at different times under different circumstances.

>Without knowledge of how differently, for example, in medicine, clinical observation and randomized clinical trials developed, you have no clue, no foothold in the next task, which is: how do you weigh these two kinds of evidence? How do you integrate them?

>And that holds, I think, mutatis mutandis, for all scientific disciplines. So that’s one good reason why the history of science is of use to not only the sciences, but all branches of scholarship.

Excerpt:

>Australia's incarceration rate has doubled in the last three decades, and more than doubled among Indigenous Australians, with First Nations children jailed at 20 times the rate of non-First Nations children.

>The rate has risen from one per cent of Indigenous Australians in 1990 to 2.3 per cent in 2022.

>The figure is even higher in states such as WA [Western Australia], where 3.5 per cent of Indigenous adults are behind bars.

>The figures come despite the country's crime rate decreasing in the same period.

>As of this year, the national incarceration rate is 202 prisoners per 100,000 adults, compared to just 96 per 100,000 in 1985.

SBS News

Excerpt:

>While about 2% of the genome of all people descended from those living outside Africa is derived from Neanderthals, there is very little evidence that this process went the other way.

>A new paper, published in the journal PaleoAnthropology, raises the prospect that interbreeding with our ancestors would have reduced the number of Neanderthals breeding with each other, leading to their eventual extinction.

>Though only 32 Neanderthal genomes have been sequenced to date, leaving it possible that the lack of Homo sapiens DNA in their genome is actually a quirk of sampling, the authors hope advances in DNA sequencing technology will be able to resolve this hypothesis by making more genomes available.

> 

>Professor Chris Stringer, the Museum's Research Leader in Human Evolution, authored the new paper alongside colleague Dr Lucile Crété.

>Chris says, 'Our knowledge of the interaction between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals has got more complex in the last few years, but it's still rare to see scientific discussion of how the interbreeding between the groups actually happened.'

>'We propose that this behaviour could have led to the Neanderthals' extinction if they were regularly breeding with Homo sapiens, which could have eroded their population until they disappeared.'

> 

>Neanderthals and Homo sapiens diverged from each other around 600,000 years ago and evolved in very different areas of the world.

>From genetic data, it looks like the two species first encountered each other when Homo sapiens began making occasional forays out of Africa about 250,000 years ago.

>However, the Neanderthal genes we have in us today are not the result of these early sporadic interactions Homo sapiens had when they first left Africa. Instead, they come from the much larger migrations that modern humans undertook around 60,000 years ago.

PaleoAnthropology, 27 October 2022, DOI 10.48738/2022.iss2.130

Excerpt:

>Cities in central China hastily drew up plans to isolate migrant workers fleeing to their hometowns from a vast assembly facility of iPhone maker Foxconn in COVID-hit Zhengzhou, fearing they could trigger coronavirus outbreaks.

>Zhengzhou, capital of central Henan province, reported 167 locally transmitted COVID-19 cases in the seven days to Oct. 29, up from 97 infections in the prior seven-day period.

>Apple supplier Foxconn, based in Taiwan, currently has about 200,000 workers at its Zhengzhou complex and has not disclosed the number of infected workers, but said on Sunday that it would not stop workers from leaving.

>Late on Saturday, cities near Zhengzhou, including Yuzhou, Changge and Qinyang, urged Foxconn workers to report to local authorities in advance before heading home.

>Under China's ultra-strict zero-COVID policy, cities are mandated to act swiftly to quell any outbreaks, with measures that could include full-scale lockdowns.

Swiss Broadcasting Corporation/Reuters