The oldest known stone tools in the world were made some 3.3 million years ago, which would make these newly discovered
implements older than modern humans. Archaeologists working in the Kenyan Rift Valley that discovered the tools said the set of 20 stone flakes and anvils are some 700,000 years older than stone tools from Ethiopia that previously held this record. These tools predate the earliest fossils representing our genus, Homo, by 500,000 years. What these tools suggest is that stone tool manufacture didn't begin with Homo as previously held but with a more primitive member of the human family.
Scientists working at the site of Dikika, Ethiopia in 2010 where fossils belonging to Lucy's species had previously turned up said they had recovered 3.4 million year-old animal bones bearing distinctive marks. They argued hominins had made the marks in the course of slicing meat off the bones with stone tools. The claim caused heated debate with some scientists saying the alleged cut marks were instead the result of the bones having been trampled by passing animals. Others suggested they were bite marks from crocodiles.
Worldwide, statistics show that crickets are the most widely cultivated insects for the human diet and are considered the "gateway bug" for people who choose to eat insects. Crickets are readily available in pet stores as food for turtles, frogs, and other pets. They are considered delicacies or snacks for people in many countries. Cricket flour is now commonly found in protein bars, baked goods, and protein powders. Crickets have been touted as much better for the planet-environmentally and financially-than livestock, due to the supposedly more-efficient rate at which they convert feed into body mass. But in reality,
there is very little data to support this.
Researchers measured the biomass output and feed conversion ratios of crickets (Acheta domesticus) that were reared on foods ranging from grain-based to high in cellulose. Crickets fed on processed food waste grew to harvestable size with conversion efficiency similar to industrial-scale production broiler chickens. But over 99 percent of the crickets fed minimally processed, municipal-scale food waste died before reaching a harvestable size. The measurements were made at a much greater population scale and density than any previously reported studies. These feed conversion ratios are much less efficient than those reported from studies conducted at smaller scales and lower population densities.
Naranda Modi (prime minister of India) and Stephen Harper (prime minister of Canada) recently met in Toronto where
they announced a new 5-year agreement for India to purchase uranium from Saskatoon's Cameco corporation to generate nuclear energy in India. In
an article at thehindu.com, Modi is reported as describing India's moves to support the so-called "saffron revolution" in which his administration is growing their commitments to nuclear, solar, wind, biomass and energy saving missions in India. The Hindu article states that: "At the heart of Mr. Modi's speech was his repeated assertion,
jan man badla hai, or "The minds of the people have changed," over his 10 months in office, and that India was finally on the move".
The announcement arrives at the same time that the journal Nature has published
an opinion piece by Alan Rusbridger, editor--in-chief of the Guardian (London), that scientists must increase their professional and personal activism against the search and use of new fossil fuel energy sources. Rusbridger notes that: "the Guardian Media Group has, in the space of two months, moved from not really thinking very much about the issue to announcing that its 800-million (US$1.2-billion) fund will divest from fossil fuels within 2-5 years".
These events beg the question of which countries and technologies will be the winners and losers in the reshaping of the global energy supply in the coming decades and what the economic value of yet-to-be-exploited hydrocarbon resources will be going forward as well?
Astronomers are getting ready to do battle with the iRobot corporation over their new lawn mowing robots. The makers of the Roomba are working on a similar device used to mow lawns. Astronomers are
concerned about potential interference with radio telescopes. In February, iRobot filed a waiver request with the FCC to use part of the radio spectrum to guide the robots. The company wants to use the frequency band between 6240 and 6740 MHz, which is a frequency that several large radio telescopes use to observe methanol, which is plentiful in stellar nurseries.
iRobot has proposed adding a note to the user manual: "consumer use only; use must be limited to residential areas." The NRAO doesn't think the approach will work. Liszt and the NRAO say that they need a 55-mile exclusion zone to protect the data obtained by the radio telescopes. It is possible that the radio telescopes could begin generating bad data, without knowing why and without necessarily knowing that the data is bad, if the product goes ahead as planned.
Popular Science recently
reported on a wearable air quality monitor designed and prototyped by electrician, Kevin Hart, and nurse, Laura Moe. They are targeting a late fall 2015 release at a price point of $100 (US).
From the article, "A fan directly beneath TZOA's triangular cover sucks in air. As pollutants cross a laser, they scatter light onto a sensor that counts them. TZOA then glows a color corresponding to the air safety level. A smartphone app also displays that data, along with daily UV light exposure and crowdsourced pollution maps."
The
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports that two researchers have stepped down from the Science Hall of Fame selection panel over claims that cultural bias is limiting the number of female researchers nominated for the honour. No female researchers have been nominated for two years running and former panelists Judy Illes and Catherine Anderson argue in their resignation statements that the lack of nominations reflects a cultural bias that fails to reflect the contributions women make to science nationally and globally.
Anecdotally, the gender bias claims echo how the work of Rosalind Franklin was rewarded in her lifetime following the discovery of the structure of DNA. As
a Wikipedia summary notes: "Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA while at King's College, London, which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix. According to Francis Crick, her data and research were key in determining the structure. Watson confirmed this opinion in his own statement at the opening of the King's College London Franklin-Wilkins building in 2000 and formulating Crick and James Watson's 1953 model regarding the structure of DNA. Franklin's images of X-ray diffraction, confirming the helical structure of DNA, were imprudently shown to Watson by Wilkins without her permission. Her work was published third, in the series of three DNA Nature articles, led by the paper of Watson and Crick. Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. Watson suggested that Franklin would have ideally been awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Wilkins."
Mark Russinovich, a Microsoft technical fellow and senior engineer, and well-known for his Sysinternals/Winternals products, dropped a bombshell in front of several hundred people during a panel discussion at the ChefCon DevOps conference in the United States. Russinovich told the crowd it was "definitely possible" that Microsoft could, in the future, choose to
open up the Windows source code. "It's a new Microsoft," he said. "Every conversation you can imagine about what should we do with our software -- open versus not-open versus services -- has happened," he said. Almost 20 percent of the the company's Azure cloud computing virtual machines run Linux already.
The prospect is not as surprising as it might once have been. Last November, the company announced plans to open source the full server-side .NET core stack and
bring the open-sourced .NET core to Linux and Mac OS X - with everything happening in plain view on code repository GitHub. The company now has more than 1000 software repositories on GitHub, but until now Windows, a US$4 billion per-quarter cash cow, has looked untouchable.
A
new report out of Canada suggests that high numbers of students at Canadian universities involves the acceptance of too many "marginally talented" students. University of Saskatchewan researcher, Ken Coates,
has proposed reducing Canadian university student populations by 30% -- to be complemented by an increased emphasis on job training programs at technical colleges -- to improve the education and employment outcomes of all student cohorts.
A
Council of Ontario Universities report from 2014, entitled University Works, provides a counter-argument to this narrative, however. According to
a summary article, the earlier report claims that "over 40 years, a university graduate earns an average $915,840 more than a college graduate and $1.4 million more than a high school graduate" reinforcing the long-standing idea of the greater return on investment supplied by a general university degree.
Verizon Wireless said there are a handful of areas in which it had hoped to increase its spectrum holdings, but
will instead use small (or pico) cells to increase
frequency reuse on the network rather than simply using a larger block of spectrum. "We simply have to adjust our plans in certain places where we may have anticipated spectrum." New York and Boston are two markets in which Verizon Wireless did not acquire additional 1.7/2.1 GHz spectrum in the recent auction. Their budget for this year now includes an incremental $500 million for this kind of network densification.
Melone added that as the cost of spectrum has risen, the cost of
small cell technologies has been going down. "The comparison between the two changed dramatically," he said. Verizon also highlighted the improving economics of fiber as one of the reasons that small cells are becoming a more attractive investment.
This seems to support the
FCC's decades-old policy of using auctions as the most efficient way to allocate spectrum resources where they are most needed, in a simply supply & demand model. Never mind the substantial new source of income the US federal government has seen from the process.