Amazing Science

It has been commonly accepted that human ancestors managed to tame the power of fire around 350,000 years ago, after Neanderthal tribes migrated from Africa into Europe. It was believed that Neanderthals had been in Europe for 600,000 years prior to harnessing fire. However, in South Africa researchers have found evidence that humans had used fire much earlier than that. Francesco Berna, from the University of Boston, filed a reportabout his team's findings at a North Cape excavation, which uncovered blocks of sediment one million years old that contained traces of burnt plant matter and animal bones. When submitted to an infrared microspectroscopy, the molecular evidence showed that the bones had been heated to over 500 degrees Celsius.

The disappearance roughly 40,000 years ago of dozens of large mammals in Australia — including rhinoceros-sized wombats and tapir-like marsupials — was caused by human hunting and not by climate change, according to a new study by Australian scientists.

Details here: http://tinyurl.com/73nzzs9

FOSSIL feathers provided the definitive proof that birds descended from dinosaurs. There is one extinct beast that doesn't fit the picture, though. It is called Longisquama insignis, and it lived 230 to 240 million years ago - just before the dinosaurs evolved, and 70 to 80 million years before the first fossils of feathered dinobirds. Why, then, did Longisquama sport what look suspiciously like feathers?

http://tinyurl.com/6rrzgcx

Bacteria found on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean might have the longest life-cycle on Earth, surviving for as much as 100 million years in hibernation while waiting for the ice to thaw enough for them to be viable again.

Sediments from an ancient lake indicate both halves of the Rift Valley formed at about the same time, 25 million years ago. We now believe that the western portion of the rift formed about 25 million years ago, and is approximately as old as the eastern part, instead of much younger as other studies have maintained,” said Michael Gottfried, a Michigan State University geologist, in a press release.

This octopus from the Arctic tweaks its RNA to make nervous system proteins that work better in the cold. The Antarctic octopus edits its RNA at nine sites that change the amino acid sequence of the potassium channel, the researchers report online today in Science. One of these sites, known as I321V, was particularly important for adapting to the cold: The change more than doubles the potassium channel's closing speed.

An extinct primitive marine vertebrate had the sharpest dental structures ever known — with tips just one-twentieth of the width of a human hair, but able to apply pressures that could compete easily with those from human jaws.

The razor-sharp teeth belonged to conodonts, jawless vertebrates that evolved some 500 million years ago in the Precambrian eon and went extinct during the Triassic period, around 200 million years ago. The creatures roamed the planet for longer than any other vertebrate so far–– and despite their lack of jaws, they were the first creatures to evolve teeth.

http://tinyurl.com/7qelmlr

Paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara is looking to print out some robot dinosaurs.

He wants to use a 3-D printer to create dinosaur bones, based on real fossils, to use in scaled-down robo-saurs. In the same way that document programs can shrink a page to 50 or 20 or 2 percent of its original size, a 3-D printing program can shrink a blueprint for 100-foot-long skeletons to a more manageable size for study.

The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, has completed the genome sequence of a Denisovan, a representative of an Asian group of extinct humans related to Neandertals.

As sequencing source, 10 milligram of a small finger bone fragment that was used, found in the Denisova-Cave in Southern Sibiria.