Tag: Conspiracy

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Resilience, not collapse: What the Easter Island myth gets wrong

By Jennifer Micale

If you didn’t have a brain, could you still figure out where you were and navigate your surroundings? Thanks to new research on slime molds, the answer may be “yes.” Scientists from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University have discovered that a brainless slime mold called Physarum polyce

You probably know this story, or a version of it: On Easter Island, the people cut down every tree, perhaps to make fields for agriculture or to erect giant statues to honor their clans. This foolish decision led to a catastrophic collapse, with only a few thousand remaining to witness the first European boats landing on their remote shores in 1722.

But did the demographic collapse at the core of the Easter Island myth really happen? The answer, according to new research by Binghamton University anthropologists Robert DiNapoli and Carl Lipo, is no.

Their research, “Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island),” was recently published in the journal Nature Communications. Co-authors include Enrico Crema of the University of Cambridge, Timothy Rieth of the International Archaeological Research Institute and Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona.

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui in the native language, has long been a focus of scholarship into questions related to environmental collapse. But to resolve those questions, researchers first need to reconstruct the island’s population levels to ascertain whether such a collapse occurred and, if so, the scale.

“For Rapa Nui, a big part of scholarly and popular discussion about the island has centered around this idea that there was a demographic collapse, and that it’s correlated in time with climate changes and environmental changes,” explained DiNapoli, a postdoctoral research associate in environmental studies and anthropology.

Sometime after it was settled between the 12th to 13th centuries AD, the once-forested island was denuded of trees; most often, scholars point to human-prompted clearing for agriculture and the introduction of invasive species such as rats. These environmental changes, the argument goes, reduced the island’s carrying capacity and led to a demographic decline.

Additionally, around the year 1500, there was a climactic shift in the Southern Oscillation index; that shift led to a dryer climate on Rapa Nui.

“One argument is that changes in the environment had a negative impact. People see that there was a drought and said, ‘Well, the drought caused these changes,’” said Lipo, a professor of anthropology and environmental studies and associate dean of Harpur College. “There are changes. Their population changes and their environment changes; over time, the palm trees were lost and at the end, the climate got drier. But do those changes really explain what we’re seeing in the population data through the radiocarbon dating?”

Reconstructing population changes

Archaeologists have different ways to reconstruct population sizes using proxy measures, such as looking at the different ages of individuals at burial sites or counting ancient house sites. That latter measure can be problematic because it makes assumptions as to the number of people who live in each house, and whether the houses were occupied at the same time, DiNapoli said.

The most common technique, however, uses radiocarbon dating to track the extent of human activity during a moment in time, and extrapolating population changes from that data. But radiocarbon dates can be uncertain, DiNapoli acknowledged.

For the first time, DiNapoli and Lipo have presented a method that is able to both resolve these uncertainties and show how changes in population sizes relate to environmental variables over time.

Standard statistical methods don’t work when it comes to linking the radiocarbon data to environmental and climate changes, and the population shifts connected with them. To do so would involve estimating a “likelihood function,” which is currently difficult to compute. Approximate Bayesian Computation, however, is a form of statistical modeling that doesn’t require a likelihood function, and thus gives researchers a workaround, DiNapoli explained.

Using this technique, the researchers determined that the island experienced steady population growth from its initial settlement until European contact in 1722. After that date, two models show a possible population plateau, while another two models show possible decline.

In short, there is no evidence that the islanders used the now-vanished palm trees for food, a key point of many collapse myths. Current research shows that deforestation was prolonged and didn’t result in catastrophic erosion; the trees were ultimately replaced by gardens mulched with stone that increased agricultural productivity. During times of drought, the people may have relied on freshwater coastal seeps.

Construction of the moai statues, considered by some to be a contributing factor of collapse, actually continued even after European arrival.

In short, the island never had more than a few thousand people prior to European contact, and their numbers were increasing rather than dwindling, their research shows.

“Those resilience strategies were very successful, despite the fact that the climate got drier,” Lipo said. “They are a really good case for resiliency and sustainability.”

Burying the myth

Why, then, does the popular narrative of Easter Island’s collapse persist? It likely has less to do with the ancient Rapa Nui people than ourselves, Lipo explained.

The concept that changes in the environment affect human populations began to take off in the 1960s, Lipo said. Over time, that focus became more intense, as researchers began to consider changes in the environment as a primary driver of cultural shifts and transformations.

But this correlation may derive more from modern concerns with industrialization-driven pollution and climate change, rather than archaeological evidence. Environmental changes, Lipo points out, occur on different time scales and in different magnitudes. How human communities respond to these changes varies.

Take a classic example of the overexploitation of resources: the collapse of the cod fisheries in the American Northeast. While the economies of individual communities may have collapsed, larger harvesting efforts simply switched to the other side of the world.

On an isolated island, however, sustainability is a matter of the community’s very survival and resources tend to be managed conservatively. A misstep in resource management could lead to tangible, catastrophic consequences, such as starvation.

“The consequences of your actions are immediately obvious to you, and everyone else around you,” Lipo said.

Lipo acknowledged that proponents of the Easter Island collapse story tend to see him as a climate-change denier; that’s emphatically not the case. But he cautioned that the ways ancient peoples dealt with climate and environmental changes aren’t necessarily reflective of current global crises and their impact in the modern world. In fact, they may have a good deal to teach us about resilience and sustainability.

“There’s a natural tendency to think that people in the past aren’t as smart as we are and that they somehow made all these mistakes, but it’s really the opposite,” Lipo said. “They produced offspring, and the success that created the present. Even though their technologies might be more simple than ours, there is so much to be learned about the context in which they were able to survive.”

Source: https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/3155/resilience-not-collapse-what-the-easter-island-myth-gets-wrong

 Vindication for Easter Island People
By Martin Ruggles
Atlantis Rising Magazine #126, November/December, 2017

 

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Thinking without a brain

Studies in brainless slime molds reveal that they use physical cues to decide where to grow
By Lindsay Brownell

If you didn’t have a brain, could you still figure out where you were and navigate your surroundings? Thanks to new research on slime molds, the answer may be “yes.” Scientists from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University have discovered that a brainless slime mold called Physarum polycephalum uses its body to sense mechanical cues in its surrounding environment, and performs computations similar to what we call “thinking” to decide in which direction to grow based on that information. Unlike previous studies with Physarum, these results were obtained without giving the organism any food or chemical signals to influence its behavior. The study is published in Advanced Materials.

“People are becoming more interested in Physarum because it doesn’t have a brain but it can still perform a lot of the behaviors that we associate with thinking, like solving mazes, learning new things, and predicting events,” said first author Nirosha Murugan, a former member of the Allen Discovery Center who is now an Assistant Professor at Algoma University in Ontario, Canada. “Figuring out how proto-intelligent life manages to do this type of computation gives us more insight into the underpinnings of animal cognition and behavior, including our own.”

Slimy action at a distance

Slime molds are amoeba-like organisms that can grow to be up to several feet long, and help break down decomposing matter in the environment like rotting logs, mulch, and dead leaves. A single Physarum creature consists of a membrane containing many cellular nuclei floating within a shared cytoplasm, creating a structure called a syncytium. Physarum moves by shuttling its watery cytoplasm back and forth throughout the entire length of its body in regular waves, a unique process known as shuttle streaming.

“With most animals, we can’t see what’s changing inside the brain as the animal makes decisions. Physarum offers a really exciting scientific opportunity because we can observe its decisions about where to move in real-time by watching how its shuttle streaming behavior changes,” said Murugan. While previous studies have shown that Physarum moves in response to chemicals and light, Murugan and her team wanted to know if it could make decisions about where to move based on physical cues in its environment alone.

The researchers placed Physarum specimens in the center of petri dishes coated with a semi-flexible agar gel and placed either one or three small glass discs next to each other atop the gel on opposite sides of each dish. They then allowed the organisms to grow freely in the dark over the course of 24 hours, and tracked their growth patterns. For the first 12 to 14 hours, the Physarum grew outwards evenly in all directions; after that, however, the specimens extended a long branch that grew directly over the surface of the gel toward the three-disc region 70% of the time. Remarkably, the Physarum chose to grow toward the greater mass without first physically exploring the area to confirm that it did indeed contain the larger object.

How did it accomplish this exploration of its surroundings before physically going there? The scientists were determined to find out.

It’s all relative

The researchers experimented with several variables to see how they impacted Physarum’s growth decisions, and noticed something unusual: when they stacked the same three discs on top of each other, the organism seemed to lose its ability to distinguish between the three discs and the single disc. It grew toward both sides of the dish at roughly equal rates, despite the fact that the three stacked discs still had greater mass. Clearly, Physarum was using another factor beyond mass to decide where to grow.

To figure out the missing piece of the puzzle, the scientists used computer modeling to create a simulation of their experiment to explore how changing the mass of the discs would impact the amount of stress (force) and strain (deformation) applied to the semi-flexible gel and the attached growing Physarum. As they expected, larger masses increased the amount of strain, but the simulation revealed that the strain patterns the masses produced changed, depending on the arrangement of the discs.

“Imagine that you are driving on the highway at night and looking for a town to stop at. You see two different arrangements of light on the horizon: a single bright point, and a cluster of less-bright points. While the single point is brighter, the cluster of points lights up a wider area that is more likely to indicate a town, and so you head there,” said co-author Richard Novak, Ph.D., a Lead Staff Engineer at the Wyss Institute. “The patterns of light in this example are analogous to the patterns of mechanical strain produced by different arrangements of mass in our model. Our experiments confirmed that Physarum can physically sense them and make decisions based on patterns rather than simply on signal intensity.”

The team’s research demonstrated that this brainless creature was not simply growing toward the heaviest thing it could sense – it was making a calculated decision about where to grow based on the relative patterns of strain it detected in its environment.

But how was it detecting these strain patterns? The scientists suspected it had to do with Physarum’s ability to rhythmically contract and tug on its substrate, because the pulsing and sensing of the resultant changes in substrate deformation allows the organism to gain information about its surroundings. Other animals have special channel proteins in their cell membranes called TRP-like proteins that detect stretching, and co-author and Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D had previously shown that one of these TRP proteins mediates mechanosensing in human cells. When the team created a potent TRP channel-blocking drug and applied it to Physarum, the organism lost its ability to distinguish between high and low masses, only selecting the high-mass region in 11% of the trials and selecting both high- and low-mass regions in 71% of trials.

“Our discovery of this slime mold’s use of biomechanics to probe and react to its surrounding environment underscores how early this ability evolved in living organisms, and how closely related intelligence, behavior, and morphogenesis are. In this organism, which grows out to interact with the world, its shape change is its behavior. Other research has shown that similar strategies are used by cells in more complex animals, including neurons, stem cells, and cancer cells. This work in Physarum offers a new model in which to explore the ways in which evolution uses physics to implement primitive cognition that drives form and function,” said corresponding author Mike Levin, Ph.D., a Wyss Associate Faculty member who is also the Vannevar Bush Chair and serves and Director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University.

The research team is continuing its work on Physarum, including investigating at what point in time it makes the decision to switch its growth pattern from generalized sampling of its environment to directed growth toward a target. They are also exploring how other physical factors like acceleration and nutrient transport could affect Physarum’s growth and behavior.

“This study confirms once again that mechanical forces play as important a role in the control of cell behavior and development as chemicals and genes, and the process of mechanosensation uncovered in this simple brainless organism is amazingly similar to what is seen in all species, including humans,” said Ingber. “Thus, a deeper understanding how organisms use biomechanical information to make decisions will help us to better understand our our own bodies and brains, and perhaps even provide insight into new bioinspired forms of computation.”  Ingber is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Additional authors of the paper include Daniel Kaltman, Paul Jin, Melanie Chien, and Cuong Nguyen from the Allen Center for Discovery at Tufts University, Ramses Flores from the Wyss Institute, and Anna Kane, Ph.D., from both the Allen Center and the Wyss Institute.

This research was supported by the Allen Discovery Center program through The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Cooperative Agreement Number HR0011-18-2-0022, Lifelong Learning Machines program from DARPA/MTO, and the Wyss Institute at Harvard University.

Source: https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/thinking-without-a-brain/

Beyond the Brain
By Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D.
Atlantis Rising Magazine #131, September/October, 2018

 

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We cannot cheat aging and death

Philosophers, artists and scientists – and probably all the rest of us – have long obsessed over the key to human immortality. Now, a new study gives us evidence for our inevitable death.
By Birgitte Svennevig

A study led by Fernando Colchero, University of Southern Denmark and Susan Alberts, Duke University, North Carolina, that included researchers from 42 institutions across 14 countries, provides new insights into the aging theory “the invariant rate of ageing hypothesis”, which states that every species has a relatively fixed rate of aging.

– Human death is inevitable. No matter how many vitamins we take, how healthy our environment is or how much we exercise, we will eventually age and die, says Fernando Colchero.

He is an expert in applying statistics and mathematics to population biology and an Associate Professor at Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Southern Denmark.

Humans, gorillas chimps and baboons

– We were able to shed light on the invariant rate of ageing hypothesis by combining an unpresented wealth of data and comparing births and deaths patterns on nine human populations with information from 30 non-human primate populations, including gorillas, chimpanzees and baboons living in the wild and in zoos, says Fernando Colchero.

In order to explore this hypothesis, the researchers analyzed the relationship between life expectancy, this is the average age at which individuals die in a population, and lifespan equality, which measures how concentrated deaths are around older ages.

Their results show that, as life expectancy increases, so does lifespan equality.

”

More and more infants, children and young people survive and this brings up the average life expectancy

Fernando Colchero, Associate Professor Share quote

So, lifespan equality is very high when most of the individuals in a population tend to die at around the same age such as observed in modern Japan or Sweden – which is around their 70s or 80s.

However, in the 1800s lifespan equality was very low in those same countries, since deaths were less concentrated at old ages, resulting also in lower life expectancy.

– Life expectancy has increased dramatically and still does in many parts of the world. But this is not because we have slowed our rate of aging; the reason is that more and more infants, children and young people survive and this brings up the average life expectancy, says Fernando Colchero.

Same pattern for our forefathers

Previous research from some of the authors of the study has unraveled the striking regularity between life expectancy and lifespan equality among human populations, from pre-industrial European countries, hunter gatherers, to modern industrialize countries.

However, by exploring these patterns among our closest relatives, this study shows that this pattern might be universal among primates, while it provides unique insights into the mechanisms that produce it.

– We observe that not only humans, but also other primate species exposed to different environments, succeed in living longer by reducing infant and juvenile mortality. However, this relationship only holds if we reduce early mortality, and not by reducing the rate of ageing, says Fernando Colchero.

Will science beat evolution?

Using statistics and mathematics the authors show that even small changes in the rate of ageing would make a population of, say, baboons, to demographically behave as a population of chimpanzees or even humans.

– Not all is lost, says Fernando Colchero, medical science has advanced at an unprecedented pace, so maybe science might succeed in achieving what evolution could not: to reduce the rate of ageing.

This work was supported by National Institute of Aging, Max Planck Institute of Demographic Research and the Duke University Population Research Institute.

The study

The scientific article ”Long Lives of Primates and the ‘Invariant Rate of Ageing Hypothesis” has been published in Nature Communications.

Researchers from 14 countries have contributed. From SDU: Fernando Colchero, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Dalia A. Conde and Johanna Staerk, Department of Biology, and José Manuel Aburto and James W. Vaupel all from the Interdisciplinary Center on Population Dynamics

Living for Centuries
By William B. Stoecker
Should Ancient Tales of Extreme Longevity Be Believed?
Atlantis Rising Magazine #126, November/December, 2017

 

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Ancient 3D Stone Map Excites Archaeologists

A slab of early-bronze-age French stone may be the oldest 3D map in Europe. That, at least, is what a new study from Bournemouth University, in France, reported in April of 2020.

First discovered in 1900 by French archaeologist Paul du Châtellier, the artifact was lost until 2014, when it was rediscovered in a cellar beneath a moat of the museum’s chateau at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, northwest of Paris. Now experts from several French institutions, including Bournemouth have carried out a new study of the slab, and believe it is the real thing. Published in the journal Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française, the study says the slab is indeed “the oldest cartographical representation of a known territory in Europe, and a probable marker of the political power of a principality of the early Bronze Age.” (https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/news/2021-04-06/researchers-discover-oldest-known-map-europe-saint-b-lec-slab).

Believed to represent an area in western Brittany from between 2150 and 1600 BC, the 2.2- x-1.53-meter ‘Saint-Bélec Slab’ is from the same period as the famous Nebra sky disk found in Germany, and thought by many to be the oldest known concrete depiction of the cosmos. The researchers think the new discovery reveals unexpectedly advanced cartographic knowledge in prehistory.

The Saint-Bélec Slab depicts, we are told, the territory of a strongly hierarchical political entity that tightly controlled a territory in the early Bronze Age, and that to break it may have indicated condemnation and deconsecration. The subsequent burial of the slab, is interpreted as an iconoclastic act and may have marked a rejection of the elites who exercised power over the society for several centuries during the early Bronze Age.

Curiously, even though trumpeted in the press as the oldest such 3D map in Europe, a seemingly much older artifact has been touted for years by some Russian researchers as even more remarkable.

In 2002 a scientists at Bashkir State University claimed to have found “infallible proof” of the existence of a highly developed civilization in the very ancient past. His evidence was a one-ton-plus stone slab (about five feet long, by three-and-a-half feet wide, and six inches thick) which he estimated to be, perhaps, millions of years old. The so-called Chandar Slab (aka the Dashka Stone) was located beneath the house of a local community leader in the town of Ufa. The slab’s surface was said to be a precisely detailed 3D relief map, which its discoverer had dubbed “The Map of the Creator,” of the Ural Mountain region.

Physics and mathematics professor Alexander Chuvyrov had been researching evidence of ancient Chinese influence in the area and had heard stories by early-20th-century investigators of several mysterious ancient slabs. Though interested, Chuvyrov had despaired of ever finding one himself, when the chairman of the local agricultural committee directed him to such a stone beneath his own house.

After a difficult recovery operation, Chuvyrov reported being startled to discover that the map accurately revealed many presently existing natural features, plus many which once existed but have now disappeared, including a system of channels, weirs and dams, as well as inscriptions in an unknown language (Chinese has been ruled out).

First discovered in July, 1999 the slab was, said the professor, subjected to numerous tests by Russian scientists. The results, based on radio carbon dating of shells embedded in the material, were baffling, to say the least, and not much could be said with certainty about the origin of the underlying stone. Chuvyrov had originally estimated the slab to be about 3,000 years old but later he came to believe it might be very much older.. The technical difficulty of creating such an accurate relief map, clearly, was far beyond the capability of any ancient culture previously believed to have occupied the region, or, indeed, any place on earth. Such a production would, in fact, be very difficult to replicate even with current technology (https://www.rbth.com/history/331654-russias-most-mysterious-discoveries).

Some investigators believe the slab may be a fragment of a complete map of the earth. A search for the missing pieces was claimed in 2002 to be in progress, but public viewing of the Chandar slab is no longer permitted.

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The Cleopatra Connection

By J. Douglas Kenyon

The lost tomb of Cleopatra VII may not be lost much longer. That, at least, is the hope of archaeologists digging through ancient temple ruins at Taposiris Magna a few miles southwest of Alexandria, Egypt. Discovery there of two gilded mummies—a male and a female of high-rank—was trumpeted in a July television documentary as a “sensational” find, evidence the long-sought tomb of Cleopatra and her lover, Roman renegade Mark Antony, could be nearby.

While no final resting place has yet been confirmed, the pair’s tragic demise in 30 BC has never lacked for public interest. Mark Antony, reportedly, fell on his sword, and Cleopatra allowed herself to be bitten by an Asp. Portrayed by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and by many writers, including Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, the couple’s romance, as well as the search for Cleopatra’s tomb has attracted many curious researchers. Now, according to Dr. Kathleen Martinez, archaeologist from the Dominican Republic, and a 14-year veteran of Taposiris Magna (‘tomb of Osiris’), Cleopatra considered herself an incarnation of Isis, and wanted to reenact the goddess’s heroic reassembly of the dismembered body of her husband Osiris. Not everyone, however, believes Taposiris Magna was her tomb’s location.

In the 1970s and ’80s underwater ruins at Alexandria were investigated, using ‘remote viewing’ techniques like those developed by the U.S. military and the CIA. Parapsychologist Stephan Schwartz claimed to have identified palaces built there by Cleopatra and Mark Antony. Moreover, he thought some sites there might be associated with Ptolemaic landmarks like the Pharos Lighthouse and the Alexandria Library. The Schwartz ‘Alexandria Project’—though ignored by mainstream Egyptology—was cited by many as a great demonstration of intuitive archaeology. That view was somewhat vindicated in 1998, when French archaeologists led by Frank Goddio unveiled spectacular underwater photographs of the ‘ruins of Cleopatra,’ thought to have sunk off Alexandria in a fourth-century earthquake. But even though hopes ran high for a while, no missing royal tombs have yet surfaced, and many mysteries remained unsolved.

Last of the Ptolemaic monarchs, Cleopatra traced her lineage to Alexander the Great, who, after conquering the known world, capped his brief but spectacular career by establishing the great port city at Alexandria and in 305 BC, placing his general and friend Soter on Egypt’s throne as Ptolemy I. The Ptolemaic dynasty would last for almost three centuries, abruptly ending with the death of Cleopatra VII.

The connection with Alexander the Great adds another intriguing dimension to the story. Some researchers have noted surprising and ironic parallels between the lives of Alexander the Great and Jesus the Christ. Black studies researcher Arthur Lewin (Africa is Not a Country) points out (africaunlimited.com) that, like Jesus, Alexander the Great died in his 33rd year and declared that the man married to his mother, was not his father. Alexander, indeed, believed he was the Son of God, claiming that his actual father was Ammon, king of the gods of Egypt. After defeating Persian emperor Darius in 333 BC at the Battle of Issus (a name suggesting ‘Jesus’ to some and ‘Isis’ to others), and freeing Egypt from centuries-old Persian domination, he was declared ruler of Egypt, becoming simultaneously Emperor of Persia, Pharaoh of Egypt and monarch of the entire Greek peninsula. In other words: ‘King of Kings.’

Alexander the Great, Pompeii, circa 100 BC

British author Ralf Ellis (Cleopatra to Christ), thinks there is an even deeper connection between the Ptolemaic line of Egypt and Jesus Christ. Cleopatra VII, he argues, was in fact—through her daughter Queen Thea Muse Ourania—the grandmother of Jesus.

Citing ancient sources like Josephus Flavius and the Jewish Talmud, Ellis, places the events of Jesus life about 30 years later than does standard first-century chronology, and, while dismissing the familiar tale of a poor and illiterate carpenter from Nazareth, as church propaganda, Ellis identifies Jesus the Christ as Jesus of Gamala, a historically documented Jewish high priest and king, whose birth might well have been attended by Persian wise men from the East. ‘Christ,’ or ‘christos’ is Greek for ‘anointed one,’ and refers to the old testament method of choosing the kings of Israel. The city of Gamala, incidentally, is widely considered birthplace of the Zealot movement of rebel Jews seeking to overthrow Rome.

According to historian Josephus Flavius and the Talmud, the First Jewish Revolt of  AD 64-65 was fomented by a group, known as “the Fourth Sect,” led by Joshua (Jesus) ben Gamala, Jewish high priest and a well-educated wealthy descendant of Julius Caesar, Queen Cleopatra, and Phraates IV of Persia. A legitimate heir to the throne of Rome, he was a threat to both Jewish and Roman authorities. Jesus of Gamala and two other leaders of the Fourth Sect, Josephus reported, were condemned to crucifixion in the Kidron Valley in the AD 60s, but, according to Ellis, Jesus survived.

The plot, as they say, thickens.

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Hubble Finds First Water Vapor at Ganymede

This image presents Jupiter’s moon Ganymede as seen by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1996.

For the first time, astronomers have uncovered evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. This water vapor forms when ice from the moon’s surface sublimates — that is, turns from solid to gas.

Scientists used new and archival datasets from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to make the discovery, publish ed in the journal Nature Astronomy. 

Previous research has offered circumstantial evidence that Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, contains more water than all of Earth’s oceans. However, temperatures there are so cold that water on the surface is frozen solid. Ganymede’s ocean would reside roughly 100 miles below the crust; therefore, the water vapor would not represent the evaporation of this ocean.

Astronomers re-examined Hubble observations from the last two decades to find this evidence of water vapor.

In 1998, Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) took the first ultraviolet (UV) images of Ganymede, which revealed in two images colorful ribbo ns of electrified gas called auroral bands, and provided further evidence that Ganymede has a weak magnetic field.

The similarities in these UV observations were explained by the presence of molecular oxygen (O2). But some observed features did not match the expected emissions from a pure O2 atmosphere. At the same time, scientists concluded this discrepancy was likely related to higher concentrations of atomic oxygen (O).

As part of a large observing program to support NASA’s Juno mission in 2018, Lorenz Roth of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden led the team that set out to measure the amount of atomic oxygen with Hubble. The team’s analysis combined the data from two instruments: Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) in 2018 and archival images from the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) from 1998 to 2010.

To their surprise, and contrary to the original interpretations of the data from 1998, they discovered there was hardly any atomic oxygen in Ganymede’s atmosphere. This means there must be another explanation for the apparent differences in these UV aurora images.

Roth and his team then took a closer look at the relative distribution of the aurora in the UV images. Ganymede’s surface temperature varies strongly throughout the day, and around noon near the equator it may become sufficiently warm that the ice surface releases (or sublimates) some small amounts of water molecules. In fact, the perceived differences in the UV images are directly correlated with where water would be expected in the moon’s atmosphere.

“So far only the molecular oxygen had been observed,” explained Roth. “This is produced when charged particles erode the ice surface. The water vapor that we measured now originates from ice sublimation caused by the thermal escape of water vapor from warm icy regions.”

This finding adds anticipation to ESA (European Space Agency)’s upcoming mission, JUICE, which stands for JUpiter ICy moons Explorer. JUICE is the first large-class mission in ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 program. Planned for launch in 2022 and arrival at Jupiter in 2029, it will spend at least three years making detailed observations of Jupiter and three of its largest moons, with particular emphasis on Ganymede as a planetary body and potential habitat.

Ganymede was identified for detailed investigation because it provides a natural laboratory for analysis of the nature, evolution and potential habitability of icy worlds in general, the role it plays within the system of Galilean satellites, and its unique magnetic and plasma interactions with Jupiter and its environment.

“Our results can provide the JUICE instrument teams with valuable information that may be used to refine their observation plans to optimize the use of the spacecraft,” added Roth.

Right now, NASA’s Juno mission is taking a close look at Ganymede and recently released new imagery of the icy moon. Juno has been studying Jupiter and its environment, also known as the Jovian system, since 2016.

Understanding the Jovian system and unravelling its history, from its origin to the possible emergence of habitable environments, will provide us with a better understanding of how gas giant planets and their satellites form and evolve. In addition, new insights will hopefully be found on the habitability of Jupiter-like exoplanetary systems.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.

Credits:

MEDIA CONTACT:

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland

Bethany Downer
ESA/Hubble.org

SCIENCE CONTACT:

Lorenz Roth
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Contact Us: Direct inquiries to the News Team.

Moons Over Mars
By Steven Sora
Atlantis Rising Magazine #107

 

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NASA’s Curiosity Rover Finds Patches of Rock Record Erased, Revealing Clues

Today, Mars is a planet of extremes – it’s bitterly cold, has high radiation, and is bone-dry. But billions of years ago, Mars was home to lake systems that could have sustained microbial life. As the planet’s climate changed, one such lake – in Mars’ Gale Crater – slowly dried out. Scientists have new evidence that super salty water, or brines, seeped deep through the cracks, between grains of soil in the parched lake bottom and altered the clay mineral-rich layers beneath.

The network of cracks in this Martian rock slab called “Old Soaker” may have formed from the drying of a mud layer more than three billion years ago. The view spans about three feet (90 centimeters) left-to-right and combines three images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI, camera on the arm of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

The findings published in the July 9 edition of the journal Science and led by the team in charge of the Chemistry and Mineralogy, or CheMin, instrument – aboard NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover – help add to the understanding of where the rock record preserved or destroyed evidence of Mars’ past and possible signs of ancient life.

“We used to think that once these layers of clay minerals formed at the bottom of the lake in Gale Crater, they stayed that way, preserving the moment in time they formed for billions of years,” said Tom Bristow, CheMin principal investigator and lead author of the paper at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “But later brines broke down these clay minerals in some places – essentially re-setting the rock record.”

Mars: It Goes On Your Permanent Record

Mars has a treasure trove of incredibly ancient rocks and minerals compared with Earth. And with Gale Crater’s undisturbed layers of rocks, scientists knew it would be an excellent site to search for evidence of the planet’s history, and possibly life.

Using CheMin, scientists compared samples taken from two areas about a quarter-mile apart from a layer of mudstone deposited billions of years ago at the bottom of the lake at Gale Crater. Surprisingly, in one area, about half the clay minerals they expected to find were missing. Instead, they found mudstones rich with iron oxides – minerals that give Mars its characteristic rusty red color.

Scientists knew the mudstones sampled were about the same age and started out the same – loaded with clays – in both areas studied. So why then, as Curiosity explored the sedimentary clay deposits along Gale Crater did patches of clay minerals – and the evidence they preserve – “disappear”?

Clays Hold Clues

Minerals are like a time capsule; they provide a record of what the environment was like at the time they formed. Clay minerals have water in their structure and are evidence that the soils and rocks that contain them came into contact with water at some point.

This evenly layered rock imaged in 2014 by the Mastcam on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows a pattern typical of a lake-floor sedimentary deposit near where flowing water entered a lake. Shallow and deep parts of an ancient Martian lake left different clues in mudstone formed from lakebed deposits.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

“Since the minerals we find on Mars also form in some locations on Earth, we can use what we know about how they form on Earth to tell us about how salty or acidic the waters on ancient Mars were,” said Liz Rampe, CheMin deputy principal investigator and co-author at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Previous work revealed that, while Gale Crater’s lakes were present and even after they dried out, groundwater moved below the surface, dissolving and transporting chemicals. After they were deposited and buried, some mudstone pockets experienced different conditions and processes due to interactions with these waters that changed the mineralogy. This process, known as “diagenesis,” often complicates or erases the soil’s previous history and writes a new one.

Diagenesis creates an underground environment that can support microbial life. In fact, some very unique habitats on Earth – in which microbes thrive – are known as “deep biospheres.”

“These are excellent places to look for evidence of ancient life and gauge habitability,” said John Grotzinger, CheMin co-investigator and co-author at Caltech in Pasadena, California. “Even though diagenesis may erase the signs of life in the original lake, it creates the chemical gradients necessary to support subsurface life, so we are really excited to have discovered this.”

By comparing the details of minerals from both samples, the team concluded that briny water filtering down through overlying sediment layers was responsible for the changes. Unlike the relatively freshwater lake present when the mudstones formed, the salty water is suspected to have come from later lakes that existed within an overall drier environment. Scientists believe these results offer further evidence of the impacts of Mars’s climate change billions of years ago. They also provide more detailed information that is then used to guide the Curiosity rover’s investigations into the history of the Red Planet. This information also will be utilized by NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover team as they evaluate and select rock samples for eventual return to Earth.

“We’ve learned something very important: there are some parts of the Martian rock record that aren’t so good at preserving evidence of the planet’s past and possible life,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist and co-author at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The fortunate thing is we find both close together in Gale Crater, and can use mineralogy to tell which is which.”

Curiosity is in the initial phase of investigating the transition to a “sulfate-bearing unit,” or rocks thought to have formed while Mars’s climate dried out.

The mission is managed by JPL, a division of Caltech, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Colleagues in NASA’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division at Johnson and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland also are authors on the paper, as well as other institutions working on Curiosity.

This Martian landscape includes the rocky landmark nicknamed “Knockfarril Hill” at center right and the edge of Vera Rubin Ridge, which runs along the top of the scene. The image was made from a mosaic captured by the Mast Camera aboard NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover as it explored the “clay-bearing unit” on Feb. 3, 2019, during the 2,309th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s work on Mars.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Banner image: A self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity rover taken on June 15, 2018, during the 2,082nd Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s work on Mars. A Martian dust storm has reduced sunlight and visibility at the rover’s location in Gale Crater. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

For news media:
Members of the news media interested in covering this topic should reach out to the NASA Ames newsroom.

Why Is the Martian Sky Blue
And Other Unanswered Questions about Life on the Red Planet
By William B. Stoecker
Atlantis Rising Magazine #118, July/August, 2016

 

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Researchers detect ‘deep fakes’ in geography

Researchers combined satellite images of Tacoma, Washington, with Seattle and Beijing to create a composite image, and then identified differences between the false and true images. Can you trust the map on your smartphone, or the satellite image on your computer screen?

Researchers combined satellite images of Tacoma, Washington, with Seattle and Beijing to create a composite image, and then identified differences between the false and true images. Image Credit: Provided photo. By Jennifer Micale May 18, 2021 3 minute read

So far, yes, but it may only be a matter of time until the growing problem of “deep fakes” converges with geographical information science (GIS). Researchers such as Associate Professor of Geography Chengbin Deng are doing what they can to get ahead of the problem.

Deng and four colleagues — Bo Zhao and Yifan Sun at the University of Washington, and Shaozeng Zhang and Chunxue Xu at Oregon State University — co-authored a recent article in Cartography and Geographic Information Science that explores the problem. In “Deep fake geography? When geospatial data encounter Artificial Intelligence,” they explore how false satellite images could potentially be constructed and detected. News of the research has been picked up by countries around the world, including China, Japan, Germany and France.

“Honestly, we probably are the first to recognize this potential issue,” Deng said.

Geographic information science (GIS) underlays a whole host of applications, from national defense to autonomous cars, a technology that’s currently under development. Artificial intelligence has made a positive impact on the discipline through the development of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI), which uses machine learning — or artificial intelligence (AI) — to extract and analyze geospatial data. But these same methods could potentially be used to fabricate GPS signals, fake locational information on social media posts, fabricate photographs of geographic environments and more.

In short, the same technology that can change the face of an individual in a photo or video can also be used to make fake images of all types, including maps and satellite images.

“We need to keep all of this in accordance with ethics. But at the same time, we researchers also need to pay attention and find a way to differentiate or identify those fake images,” Deng said. “With a lot of data sets, these images can look real to the human eye.”

To figure out how to detect an artificially constructed image, first you need to construct one. To do so, they used a technique common in the creation of deep fakes: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks (CycleGAN), an unsupervised deep learning algorithm that can simulate synthetic media.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are a type of artificial intelligence, but they require training samples — input — of whatever content they are programmed to produce. A black box on a map could, for example, represent any number of different factories or businesses; the various points of information inputted into the network helps determine the possibilities it can generate.

The researchers altered a satellite image of Tacoma, Washington, interspersing elements of Seattle and Beijing and making it look as real as possible. Researchers are not encouraging anyone to try such a thing themselves — quite the opposite, in fact.

“It’s not about the technique; it’s about how human being are using the technology,” Deng said. “We want to use technology for the good, not for bad purposes.”

After creating the altered composite, they compared 26 different image metrics to determine whether there were statistical differences between the true and false images. Statistical differences were registered on 20 of the 26 indicators, or 80%.

Some of the differences, for example, included the color of roofs; while roof colors in each of the real images were uniform, they were mottled in the composite. The fake satellite image was also dimmer and less colorful, but had sharper edges. Those differences, however, depended on the inputs they used to create the fake, Deng cautioned.

This research is just the beginning. In the future, geographers may track different types of neural networks to see how they generate false images and figure out ways to detect them. Ultimately, researchers will need to discover systematic ways to root out deep fakes and verify trustworthy information before they end up in the public view.

“We all want the truth,” Deng said.

source: https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/3067/map-integrity-researchers-explore-ways-to-detect-deep-fakes-in-geography

Searching for Antilia & Hyperborea
By Frank Joseph
Atlantis Was Not the Only Legendary Land of Antiquity
Atlantis Rising Magazine #130, July/August 2018

 

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‘Dragon man’ may replace Neanderthals as closest relative

A near-perfectly preserved ancient human fossil known as the Harbin cranium sits in the Geoscience Museum in Hebei GEO University. The largest of known Homo skulls, scientists now say this skull represents a newly discovered human species named Homo longi or “Dragon Man.” Their findings, appearing in three papers publishing June 25 in the journal The Innovation, suggest that the Homo longi lineage may be our closest relatives — and has the potential to reshape our understanding of human evolution.

“The Harbin fossil is one of the most complete human cranial fossils in the world,” says author Qiang Ji, a professor of paleontology of Hebei GEO University. “This fossil preserved many morphological details that are critical for understanding the evolution of the Homo genus and the origin of Homo sapiens.”

The cranium was reportedly discovered in the 1930s in Harbin City of the Heilongjiang province of China. The massive skull could hold a brain comparable in size to modern humans’ but had larger, almost square eye sockets, thick brow ridges, a wide mouth, and oversized teeth. “While it shows typical archaic human features, the Harbin cranium presents a mosaic combination of primitive and derived characters setting itself apart from all the other previously-named Homo species,” says Ji, leading to its new species designation of Homo longi.

Scientists believe the cranium came from a male individual, approximately 50 years old, living in a forested, floodplain environment as part of a small community. “Like Homo sapiens, they hunted mammals and birds, and gathered fruits and vegetables, and perhaps even caught fish,” remarks author Xijun Ni, a professor of primatology and paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hebei GEO University. Given that the Harbin individual was likely very large in size as well as the location where the skull was found, researchers suggest H. longi may have been adapted for harsh environments, allowing them to disperse throughout Asia.advertisement

Using a series of geochemical analyses, Ji, Ni, and their team dated the Harbin fossil to at least 146,000 years, placing it in the Middle Pleistocene, a dynamic era of human species migration. They hypothesize that H. longi and H. sapiens could have encountered each other during this era.

“We see multiple evolutionary lineages of Homo species and populations co-existing in Asia, Africa, and Europe during that time. So, if Homo sapiens indeed got to East Asia that early, they could have a chance to interact with H. longi, and since we don’t know when the Harbin group disappeared, there could have been later encounters as well,” says author Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Nature History Museum in London.

Looking farther back in time, the researchers also find that Homo longi is one of our closest hominin relatives, even more closely related to us than Neanderthals. “It is widely believed that the Neanderthal belongs to an extinct lineage that is the closest relative of our own species. However, our discovery suggests that the new lineage we identified that includes Homo longi is the actual sister group of H. sapiens,” says Ni.

Their reconstruction of the human tree of life also suggests that the common ancestor we share with Neanderthals existed even further back in time. “The divergence time between H. sapiens and the Neanderthals may be even deeper in evolutionary history than generally believed, over one million years,” says Ni. If true, we likely diverged from Neanderthals roughly 400,000 years earlier than scientists had thought.

The researchers say that findings gathered from the Harbin cranium have the potential to rewrite major elements of human evolution. Their analysis into the life history of Homo longi suggest they were strong, robust humans whose potential interactions with Homo sapiens may have shaped our history in turn. “Altogether, the Harbin cranium provides more evidence for us to understand Homo diversity and evolutionary relationships among these diverse Homo species and populations,” says Ni. “We found our long-lost sister lineage.”

source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210625120419.htm

Denisovan DNA in North America
By Andrew Collins
A Closer Look at the Coming of the ‘Thunder People’
Atlantis Rising Magazine #134, March/April, 2019

 

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Scientists Challenge Darwin

New Type of Prehistoric Human Discovered in Israel

TAU researchers unearth missing link in human evolution

27 June 2021

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New Type of Prehistoric Human Discovered in Israel

TAU’s Dr. Rachel Sarig, Dr. Hila May, and Prof. Israel Hershkovitz holding the Nesher Ramla fossils (photo: Tel Aviv University)

A new discovery by Tel Aviv University researchers may change the story of human evolution. The bones of an early human, unknown to science, were found at an excavation site near the city of Ramla. Researchers believe the remains represent one of the “last survivors” of an ancient human group that lived here at the Levant alongside Homo sapiens (modern humans) between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago. 

Two teams of researchers took part in the dramatic discovery, published in the prestigious Science journal: an anthropology team from Tel Aviv University headed by Prof. Israel Hershkovitz, Dr. Hila May and Dr. Rachel Sarig from the Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Dan David Center for Human Evolution and Biohistory Research and the Shmunis Family Anthropology Institute, situated in the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History at Tel Aviv University; and an archaeological team headed by Dr. Yossi Zaidner from the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Until today, most researchers believed the small groups of Neanderthals  arrived in the Levant from Europe about 70,000 years ago. The discovery of a new human group in this region, which resembles Pre-Neanderthal populations in Europe, challenges the prevailing hypothesis that Neanderthals originated from Europe, suggesting that at least some of the Neanderthals’ ancestors actually came from the Levant. In other words, TAU researchers are now suggesting instead that the famous Neanderthals of Western Europe are only the remnants of a much larger population that lived here in the Levant – and not the other way around. 

Timeline: The Nesher Ramla Homo type was an ancestor of both the Neanderthals in Europe and the archaic Homo populations of Asia.

Another Piece to the Puzzle of Human Evolution

Prof. Israel Hershkovitz explains that the discovery of this new type of prehistoric human is of great scientific importance: “It enables us to make new sense of previously found human fossils, add another piece to the puzzle of human evolution, and understand the migrations of humans in the old world. Even though they lived so long ago, in the late middle Pleistocene (474,000-130,000 years ago), the Nesher Ramla people can tell us a fascinating tale, revealing a great deal about their descendants’ evolution and way of life.”

The important human fossil was found by Dr. Zaidner of the Hebrew University during salvage excavations at the Nesher Ramla prehistoric site, in the mining area of the Nesher cement plant (owned by Len Blavatnik) near the city of Ramla. Digging down about 8 meters, the excavators found large quantities of animal bones, including horses, fallow deer and aurochs, as well as stone tools and human bones. An international team led by the researchers from TAU and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem identified the morphology of the bones as belonging to a new type of earlier species, previously unknown to science. This is the first type of prehistoric human species to be defined in Israel, and according to common practice, it was named after the site where it was discovered – the Nesher Ramla Homo type.

WATCH: Researchers from TAU have identified a new type of early human at the Nesher Ramla site, dated to 140,000 to 120,000 years ago:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OGPKRuyd-5M%3Frel%3D0%26enablejsapi%3D1%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fenglish.tau.ac.il

Neanderthals Made in the Middle East

“This is an extraordinary discovery,” notes Dr. Yossi Zaidner. “We had never imagined that alongside Homo sapiens, archaic Homo roamed the area so late in human history. The archaeological finds associated with human fossils show that Nesher Ramla Homo possessed advanced stone-tool production technologies and most likely interacted with the local Homo sapiens“. The culture, way of life, and behavior of the Nesher Ramla Homo are discussed in a companion paper also published in Science journal. 

Furthermore, Prof. Hershkovitz explains that “Before these new findings, most researchers believed the Neanderthals to be a ‘European story’, in which small groups of Neanderthals were forced to migrate southwards to escape the spreading glaciers, with some arriving in the Land of Israel about 70,000 years ago. The Nesher Ramla fossils make us question this theory, suggesting that the ancestors of European Neanderthals lived in the Levant as early as 400,000 years ago, repeatedly migrating westward to Europe and eastward to Asia. In fact, our findings imply that the famous Neanderthals of Western Europe are only the remnants of a much larger population that lived here in the Levant – and not the other way around.”

Neanderthals and Sapiens Sharing Bed

Despite the absence of DNA in these fossils, the findings from Nesher Ramla offer a solution to a great mystery in the evolution of Homo: How did genes of Homo sapiens penetrate the Neanderthal population that presumably lived in Europe long before the arrival of Homo sapiens? Geneticists who studied the DNA of European Neanderthals have previously suggested the existence of a Neanderthal-like population which they called the ‘missing population’ or the ‘X population’ that had mated with Homo sapiens more than 200,000 years ago. In the anthropological paper now published in Science, the researchers suggest that the Nesher Ramla Homo type might represent this population, heretofore missing from the record of human fossils. Moreover, the researchers propose that the humans from Nesher Ramla are not the only ones of their kind discovered in the region, and that some human fossils found previously in Israel, which have baffled anthropologists for years – like the fossils from the Tabun cave (160,000 years ago), Zuttiyeh cave (250,000), and Qesem cave (400,000) – belong to the same new human group now called the Nesher Ramla Homo type.

“People think in paradigms,” says Dr. Rachel Sarig. “That’s why efforts have been made to ascribe these fossils to known human groups like Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis or the Neanderthals. But now we say: No. This is a group in itself, with distinct features and characteristics. At a later stage small groups of the Nesher Ramla Homo type migrated to Europe – where they evolved into the ‘classic’ Neanderthals that we are familiar with, and also to Asia, where they became archaic populations with Neanderthal-like features. As a crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia, the Land of Israel served as a melting pot where different human populations mixed with one another, to later spread throughout the Old World. The discovery from the Nesher Ramla site writes a new and fascinating chapter in the story of humankind.”

The Nesher Ramla research team (left to right): Prof. Israel Hershkovitz, Marion Prevost, Dr. Hila May, Dr. Rachel Sarig and Dr. Yossi Zaidner. 

Scientists Challenge Darwin
By Atlantis Rising Staff
Why the Advocates for Stock Origin Theories Are on the Defensive
Atlantis Rising Magazine #65, September/October, 2007