First, after a couple of decades of believing that the underseas crater near Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula was the lingering remnant of the asteroid impact that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, it seems we may now have a new crater to blame:
A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a new study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago.
Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of researchers took a close look at the massive Shiva basin, a submerged depression west of India that is intensely mined for its oil and gas resources. Some complex craters are among the most productive hydrocarbon sites on the planet. Chatterjee will present his research at this month's Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon.
“If we are right, this is the largest crater known on our planet,” Chatterjee said. “A bolide of this size, perhaps 40 kilometers (25 miles) in diameter creates its own tectonics.”
By contrast, the object that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, and is commonly thought to have killed the dinosaurs was between 8 and 10 kilometers (5 and 6.2 miles) wide.
Whether it was near India or near Mexico -- or somewhere else altogether -- something dramatic seems to have occurred about 65 million years ago that cleared the planet of dinosaurs and made room for the eventual ascent of mammals. Which leads us to this:
Chimpanzees may be our closest living relatives, but that doesn’t mean that our common ancestor with them looked precisely like a chimp. In fact, a lot of what makes a chimpanzee a chimpanzee evolved after our two lineages split roughly 7 million years ago.
Meet Ardipithecus.
This introduction has been a long time coming. Some 4.4 million years ago, a hominid now known as Ardipithecus ramidus lived in what were then forests in Ethiopia. Fifteen years ago, Tim White of Berkeley and a team of Ethiopian and American scientists published the first account of Ardipithecus, which they had just discovered. But it was just a preliminary report, and White promised more details later, once he and his colleagues had carefully prepared and analyzed all the fossils they had unearthed. “Later,” it turned out, meant 15 years.
Chimpanzees may be our closest living relatives, but that doesn’t mean that our common ancestor with them looked precisely like a chimp. In fact, a lot of what makes a chimpanzee a chimpanzee evolved after our two lineages split roughly 7 million years ago. This discovery, however, is so valuable and so significant that it was well worth the wait to get all the facts right.
Like to learn more about it? Thanks to a remarkably generous offer from Science magazine, you can:
In its 2 October 2009 issue, Science presents 11 papers, authored by a diverse international team, describing an early hominid species, Ardipithecus ramidus, and its environment. These 4.4 million year old hominid fossils sit within a critical early part of human evolution, and cast new and sometimes surprising light on the evolution of human limbs and locomotion, the habitats occupied by early hominids, and the nature of our last common ancestor with chimps.
Science is making access to this extraordinary set of materials FREE (non-subscribers require a simple registration). The complete collection, and abridged versions, are available FREE as PDF downloads for AAAS members, or may be purchased as reprints.
It's an amazing find and a testament to the value of a commitment to good hard basic science.
So, that's a little bit today about where we came from and how we got here, but where are we going? What might the future look like?
A staple of science fiction stories is domed cities, whole metropoli covered by glass or plastic or even diamond, to allow light in while controlling the weather and providing a certain amount of protection. Cool idea, for sure, but how realistic of a concept is it?
Realistic enough, apparently, for city planners in Winooski, Vermont (USA), to spend significant time and money into exploring the idea -- and this happened back in the 1970s!
Vermont, the saying goes, is nine months of winter and three months of bad skiing. Winooski’s January lows are -20 Fahrenheit or lower, and winters see 75 or more inches of snow. Residents shovel the stuff for months, and then unshovel it in the spring, spreading the high piles across their driveways to encourage melting. Getting from your car to the store can at times feel like the Iditarod.
In the late 1970s the U.S was in its second energy crisis of the decade and roiled by double-digit inflation. Oil was at a then-shocking $38 a barrel ($107 in today’s dollars), having risen eightfold in the previous ten years, and Jimmy Carter went on television in a Cardigan sweater to urge Americans to turn down their thermostats. Few towns were hurting more than frigid Winooski, whose residents spent about $4 million a year to stay thawed.
One night in 1979 a group of its creative young city planners went to dinner and Mark Tigan, then the city’s 32-year-old director of community development and planning, decided that not enough attention was being paid to energy conservation. Then, in the way that only a few glasses of wine can facilitate brainstorming, someone said, half tongue-in-cheek, they should put a dome over the city.
Tigan contracted with John Anderson, a Vermont conceptual architect, to produce drawings of the Dome. Anderson’s vision was not a hemispheric shape, but more like the top half of a hamburger bun. He colored it whiteish yellow and eschewed any inside support structures.
Anderson’s picture was the first tangible view of the Dome. Thinking ahead, he envisioned a vinyl-like material attached over a network of metal cables, ranging from transparent (on the southern side, to allow in sunlight) to opaque on the northern side. Air would be brought inside by large fans and heated or cooled as necessary. The Dome would be held up by air pressure just slightly above atmospheric pressure. Entrances and exits would consist of double doors, akin to an airlock. The homes inside would require no individual heating or cooling -- “you could grow tomatoes all year-round” he said.
Well, the Winooski Dome never happened, of course. Too expensive, too controversial, and too risky. It was, and still is, an idea too far ahead of its time. We simply don't have the technology to make it feasible. Not yet anyway.
But what we do have now is the technology to enable the blind to see:
Blindness first began creeping up on Barbara Campbell when she was a teenager, and by her late 30s, her eye disease had stolen what was left of her sight.
Reliant on a talking computer for reading and a cane for navigating New York City, where she lives and works, Ms. Campbell, now 56, would have been thrilled to see something. Anything.
Now, as part of a striking experiment, she can. So far, she can detect burners on her stove when making a grilled cheese, her mirror frame, and whether her computer monitor is on.
She is beginning an intensive three-year research project involving electrodes surgically implanted in her eye, a camera on the bridge of her nose and a video processor strapped to her waist.
The project, involving patients in the United States, Mexico and Europe, is part of a burst of recent research aimed at one of science’s most-sought-after holy grails: making the blind see.
Some of the 37 other participants further along in the project can differentiate plates from cups, tell grass from sidewalk, sort white socks from dark, distinguish doors and windows, identify large letters of the alphabet, and see where people are, albeit not details about them.
Amazing. Fabulous. And real.
This is the sort of technological wonder I'd like to see technoprogressives championing, instead of spending time and energy on so many other fantastic but unlikely dream ideas that seem to capture our attention.
The world of science and technology is astonishing enough -- and the challenge of encouraging ethically responsible use of such powers is important enough -- that we need not look to things that are now out of reach. What we need is to concentrate on what's happening today, both scientifically and politically, so that we can have a real impact on bringing about a better tomorrow.