Tim Stephens, 8 July 2022.

Excerpt:

>The reaction of narwhals to the loud noise from seismic air guns used in oil exploration involves a disruption of the normal physiological response to intense exercise as the animals try to escape the noise. The overall effect is a large increase in the energetic cost of diving while a paradoxically reduced heart rate alters the circulation of blood and oxygen.

>“They’re swimming as hard as they can to get away, and yet their heart rate is not increasing—we think because of a fear response. This affects how much blood and oxygen can circulate, and that’s going to be problematic,” said Terrie Williams, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz who led the new study.

>Published July 8 in the Journal of Functional Ecology, the study provides the first look at the impact of seismic noise on the physiological responses of a deep-diving cetacean.

> 

>According to Williams, the combination of extremely low heart rates, increased heart rate variability, and high-intensity exercise during deep dives presents a significant physiological challenge for narwhals, especially if the disruptions are prolonged as would be likely during extended oil exploration activities.

>Narwhals live year-round in high Arctic waters where sea ice has helped isolate them from disturbance by humans for millions of years.

>But declines in polar sea ice are making the region more accessible to shipping, natural resource exploration, and other human activities.

Journal of Functional Ecology, 2022. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.14119

Excerpt:

>NASA will provide live coverage of the first spacewalk beginning at 6 a.m. EST on Saturday, Dec. 3 on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website. The spacewalk is scheduled to begin at 7:25 a.m. and last about seven hours.

>NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio will exit the station’s Quest airlock to install an International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array (iROSA) to augment power generation for the 3A power channel on the station’s starboard truss structure.

>This spacewalking task will restore redundancy for affected station systems following unexpected tripping observed on the 1B channel Nov. 26. By isolating a section of the impacted array, which was one of several damaged strings, the goal is to restore 75% of the array’s functionality.

>Cassada and Rubio are scheduled to conduct the next U.S. spacewalk Dec.19, this time to install an iROSA on the 4A power channel on the port truss.

Credits: NASA; editing by Roxana Bardan.

Becky Ferreira, 1 December 2022.

Excerpt:

>A long time ago, a huge asteroid struck a watery planet in our solar system, sparking an enormous megatsunami that reached hundreds of feet into the air and left permanent traces on the landscape.

>You might be picturing the famous space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs on Earth, but scientists have now confirmed that the same story played out on Mars some 3.4 billion years ago, at a time when Mars hosted a huge ocean that might have hosted microbial life.

>After decades of speculation about this ancient extraterrestrial impact and megatsunami, researchers led by Alexis Rodriguez, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, have pinpointed the likely spot, called Pohl crater, where the asteroid collided with the Martian ocean at roughly 24,000 miles per hour.

>This key discovery suggests that Pohl crater, and its surrounding regions, could be important targets in the search for alien life, as they may bear “information on how the ocean’s habitability and possible life evolved,” according to a study published in Scientific Reports on Thursday.

>The team was also able to reconstruct some of the mind-boggling effects of this ancient impact and the subsequent megatsunami, which may have produced 800-foot-high waves.

> 

Alexis Rodriguez, in a call with Vice:

>“I think that we have two distinct and very interesting astrobiological targets that come out of this study,” Rodriguez said. “The first one is obviously the Viking 1 landing site because we have this controversy so it would be good to be able to resolve it.” The second, he added, are the remains of mud volcanoes in this huge dried-up ocean basin.

>“There is a possibility that this mud volcanism was driven by the release of seawater trapped in the sediments, or gasses connected to the evaporation of seawater, and obviously, that has very interesting astrobiological implications,” he concluded. “So, there are lots of targets to understand the evolution of the ocean of Mars, its potential biochemistry, and the way that the environment changed within the ocean over time.”

Scientific Reports, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-18082-2

Excerpt:

>NASA's Orion spacecraft reached the farthest outbound point in its journey from Earth on Monday, a distance of more than 430,000 km from humanity's home world.

>This is nearly double the distance between Earth and the Moon and is farther than the Apollo capsule traveled during NASA's lunar missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

>From this vantage point, on Monday, a camera attached to the solar panels on board Orion's service module snapped photos of the Moon and, just beyond, the Earth. These were lovely, lonely, and evocative images.

>"The imagery was crazy," said the Artemis I mission's lead flight director, Rick LaBrode. "It’s really hard to articulate what the feeling is. It’s really amazing to be here, and see that."

> 

>LaBrode was speaking during a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where he and other NASA officials provided an update on the progress of the mission to test out the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft.

>This uncrewed test flight is a precursor to crewed missions later this decade, including a lunar landing on the Artemis III mission.

>After it completed a successful launch, mission manager Mike Sarafin said the agency now has full confidence in the Space Launch System rocket. "The rocket is proven," he said.

> 

>Orion still has work to do, of course. Its mission will not be complete until the spacecraft maneuvers back around the Moon, returns to Earth, survives reentry into the atmosphere, splashes down into the ocean, and is recovered off the coast near San Diego, California. That is scheduled to occur on December 11.

>Understandably, NASA's engineers are thrilled by the performance of Artemis I so far. It was a long, bumpy, and costly development path to reach this mission with the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft.

>But once the vehicles began flying, their performance has met every expectation and hope of the space agency, increasing confidence in the future of the Artemis program to explore the Moon.

Eric Berger, November 29, 2022.

Excerpt:

>Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin recently received expanded funding from the National Science Foundation to continue their work studying human-robot interactions.

>To do this, the team plans to release four-legged robots around the university campus and collect data on what it finds. The project will begin in 2023 and run for five years.

>“When we deploy robots in the real world, it's not just a technical problem, it's actually a socio-technical problem,” Joydeep Biswas, assistant professor of computer science in the College of Natural Sciences and member of the research team, told Ars.

>The research team will set up a network, and UT Austin community members—students, staff, et cetera—will be able to use an app on their smartphones to deliver goods like hand wipes and sanitizer.

> 

>While deployed, the robots will inevitably run into (possibly literally) pedestrians, cyclists, scooter riders, and larger vehicles. The researchers will watch and study the interactions between these mobile humans and machines.

>The robots will be monitored either in-person or remotely so the researchers can collect data about how the robots interact with the humans they encounter and stop the robots if they act in undesirable ways.

>The team will also create a research database to collect the data from the study and investigate how we can deploy autonomous robots in human environments, “not just for five minutes or for an hour, but for years at a time,” Biswas said.

Doug Johnson for Ars Technica, 12 November 2022.

27 October 2022.

Excerpt:

>The study was carried out during the 2018-2019 Five Deeps Expedition, the first manned descent with the submersible DSV Limiting Factor to the deepest point of each of the world’s five oceans, and focused on the amphipod Bathycallisoma schellenbergi which was unexpectedly found in the traps of nearly every trench of hadal depth (between six and 11 kms).

>“We finally had a global specimen collection to test questions that have been around since the 1950s. This led us to question this paradox and wonder if maybe we were looking at multiple but very similar-looking species.” [said co-author Professor Alan Jamieson].

>The study’s first author, Postdoctoral Scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Johanna Weston, said scientists used a short section of DNA to test if all the populations were the same species.

>“The amphipods at the Atacama Trench are likely a new and undescribed species that is very closely related.”

> 

>“We found that overall populations were not genetically mixed between trenches, indicating they were highly restricted to the trench they were collected from,” Dr Weston said.

>“We did find evidence of limited interbreeding between two closely located and connected trenches, the Kermadec and Tonga trenches, which are separated by just 1000km, so surmised some amphipods could have swum across what are relatively shallow depths.”

>Professor Jamieson said the study advanced the field of hadal science, particularly at the intersection of evolutionary and geologic history, providing evidence to show that each of the hadal areas acted like an island-like habitat with populations on separate evolutionary trajectories.

Science Advances, DOI 10.1126/sciadv.abo6672

From a profile by the Oregon Historical Society:

>Matsuoka was a Japanese diplomat who played a key role in Japan’s foreign relations from the 1900s through the early 1940s. He also happened to have a strong connection to the state of Oregon.

>Matsuoka would go on to have a long, controversial diplomatic career during one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of Japanese foreign relations. He believed that Japan, like the other island empire, Great Britain, was destined to expand outward. “Both must be colonial empires,” he told one reporter, “both must be maritime and naval powers.”

>In 1930, Matsuoka was elected to the Japanese parliament. Three years later he pulled Japan out of the League of Nations while serving as his nation’s chief delegate after the League condemned Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. He went on to serve as foreign minister from 1940-1941, during which time he signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.

Yosuke Matsuoka, https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-records/yosuke-matsuoka/

Excerpt:

A Japanese foreign minister met Pope Pius XII and his secretary of state during World War II to seek mediation in a desperate bid to avert war with the United States, eight months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Vatican documents recently seen by Kyodo News show.

Yosuke Matsuoka wanted the Holy See to speak to President Franklin Roosevelt to try to prevent "a war of mutual destruction," telling Cardinal Luigi Maglione that Tokyo also wanted a cease-fire with China after more than three years of war, according to a summary by the cardinal's office of a meeting on April 2, 1941, between the two.

[Matsuoka] said that the U.S. leader would be able to bring peace to the Far East by mediating on Japan's behalf with Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, according to the documents.

Matsuoka held talks with the pope before he met with the cardinal but what the pope said during the discussions remains unknown to the public.

 

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, leading the United States to declare war against the country the next day and formally enter the conflict.

After his country's surrender in 1945, Matsuoka was arrested and indicted as a Class-A war criminal by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East but died of illness in 1946 before the trial's completion.

According to historian and author Satoshi Hattori, Matsuoka began exploring ways to save Tokyo's relationship with the United States around December 1940 after realizing that the Japanese southward military advance would fail.

The document is a demonstration of Matsuoka's last-minute attempts to prevent war with the United States by using every possible channel, he said.

Kyodo News, 27 November 2022.

Updated November 23, 2022.

>NASA is seeking public comments on a draft environmental impact statement for the agency’s Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign. Comments are due by Monday, Dec. 19.

>NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) are planning to use robotic Mars orbiter and lander missions launched in 2027 and 2028 to retrieve samples of rocks and atmosphere being gathered by NASA’s Perseverance rover and return them to Earth.

>Comments can be submitted online, through the mail, or through participation in a series of virtual and in-person meetings. Advanced registration for meeting options, including in-person meetings in Utah, is not required.

> 

>Two virtual meetings to discuss the Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for the campaign will take place on Wednesday, Nov. 30.

>The in-person meetings will be held at 6 p.m. MST on Tuesday, Dec. 6, at the Wendover Community Center, 112 E Moriah Avenue, Wendover, Utah, and on Wednesday, Dec. 7, at the Clark Planetarium, 110 S 400 W, Salt Lake City, Utah.

> 

>In addition to receiving comments during the public meetings, comments may be sent to NASA in the following ways:

>Federal e-Rulemaking Portal: Follow the online instructions for submitting comments and include Docket No. NASA-2022-0002. Please note that NASA will post all comments online without changes, including any personal information provided.

>By mail to Steve Slaten, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, M/S: 180-801, Pasadena, CA 91109–8099

>Additional information on the agency’s National Environmental Policy Act process [https://www.nasa.gov/agency/nepa/] and the proposed campaign [https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/] is available online.

RELEASE 22-121

David Alire Garcia, updated November 25, 2022 00:00 UTC.

Excerpt:

>Sealed in stone boxes five centuries ago at the foot of the temple, the contents of one box found in the exact center of what was a ceremonial circular stage has shattered records for the number of sea offerings from both the Pacific Ocean and off Mexico's Gulf Coast, including more than 165 once-bright-red starfish and upwards of 180 complete coral branches.

>Archeologists believe Aztec priests carefully layered these offerings in the box within the elevated platform for a ceremony likely attended by thousands of rapt spectators amid the thunder-clap of drums.

> 

>"Pure imperial propaganda," Leonardo Lopez Lujan, lead archeologist at the Proyecto Templo Mayor of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), which is overseeing the dig, said of the likely spectacle.

>In the same box, archeologists previously found a sacrificed jaguar dressed like a warrior associated with the Aztec patron Huitzilopochtli, the war and sun god, before the COVID-19 pandemic forced a more than two-year pause on excavations.

> 

>Previously unreported details include last month's discovery of a sacrificed eagle held in the clutches of the jaguar, along with miniature wooden spears and a reed shield found next to the west-facing feline, which had copper bells tied around its ankles.

>The half-excavated rectangular box, dating to the reign of the Aztec's greatest emperor Ahuitzotl who ruled from 1486 to 1502, now shows a mysterious bulge in the middle under the jaguar's skeleton, indicating something solid below.

>Besides the central offering containing the jaguar, two additional boxes were recently identified adjacent to it, with both set to be opened in the next few weeks.

Reuters

>Lark_Iron_Cloud

>There's an implied "and" in that comma. OP titled it like a newspaper headline.

Title is a facsimile of the news wire headline, in The Cyprus Mail.

November 24, 2022.

>A year-long study of the drainage system under the Colosseum has unearthed fragments of the bones of bears and big cats that were probably used to fight or as prey in hunting games in the ancient Roman arena, archaeologists said on Thursday.

>Other discoveries include more than 50 bronze coins from the late Roman period as well as a silver coin from around 170-171 AD to commemorate 10 years of rule of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, they added in a statement.

>Seeds from fruits such as figs, grapes and melons as well as traces of olives and nuts — thought to indicate what spectators snacked on during shows — were also recovered from the 2,000-year-old stone amphitheatre.

>The study, which began in January, involved the clearance of around 70 metres of drains and sewers under the Colosseum and is seen as shedding light on its later years before it fell into disuse around 523 AD.

Reuters via The Cyprus Mail

Ceren Kabukcu, 23 November 2022.

>My team’s analysis of the oldest charred food remains ever found show that jazzing up your dinner is a human habit dating back at least 70,000 years.

>Imagine ancient people sharing a meal. You would be forgiven for picturing people tearing into raw ingredients or maybe roasting meat over a fire as that is the stereotype.

>But our new study showed both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had complex diets involving several steps of preparation, and took effort with seasoning and using plants with bitter and sharp flavours.

>This degree of culinary complexity has never been documented before for Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers.

> 

>We examined food remains from two late Paleolithic sites, which cover a span of nearly 60,000 years, to look at the diets of early hunter gatherers. Our evidence is based on fragments of prepared plant foods (think burnt pieces of bread, patties and porridge lumps) found in two caves.

>At both sites, we often found ground or pounded pulse seeds such as bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia), grass pea (Lathyrus spp) and wild pea (Pisum spp).

>The people who lived in these caves added the seeds to a mixture that was heated up with water during grinding, pounding or mashing of soaked seeds.

Antiquity, DOI 10.15184/aqy.2022.143