Led by the University of Bristol, a team of scientists have found infant feeding vessels, which suggest that prehistoric babies were fed animal milk through the use of these, which are the equivalent of modern-day baby bottles.
Possible infant feeding vessels, made from clay, first appear in Europe in the Neolithic (at around 5,000 BC), becoming more commonplace throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages.
The vessels are usually small enough to fit within a baby's hands and have a spout through which liquid could be suckled. Sometimes they have feet and are shaped like imaginary animals. Despite this, in the lack of any direct evidence for their function, it has been suggested they may also be feeding vessels for the sick or infirm.
So how did the researchers conclude that these vessels were, in fact, used to feed babies? Find out on EurekAlert.
(Image Credit: Helena Seidl da Fonseca)
Entombed is an Atari 2600 game, where the player and their team of archaeologists get stuck into a ‘catacombs of zombies’. The game, among many other old releases, are explored by ‘video game archaeologists’ to learn how the early days of video gaming came about, and to find secrets that can help modern programming problems of today. In trying to unearth how this video game was created, video game archaeologists John Aycock and Tara Copplestone stumbled upon a bigger mystery than they expected.
Entombed’s main gameplay mechanisms are the catacombs, a down-ward scrolling and two dimensional maze that players have to navigate to escape zombies. The game generates the maze design randomly and on the fly, where players never traversed the same maze twice. This is where the mystery lies, on how the game decided its maze designs, as BBC detailed:
It turned out that the maze is generated in a sequence. The game needs to decide, as it draws each new square of the maze, whether it should draw a wall or a space for the game characters to move around in. Each square should therefore be “wall” or “no wall” – “1” or “0” in computer bits. The game’s algorithm decides this automatically by analysing a section of the maze. It uses a five-square tile that looks a little like a Tetris piece. This tile determines the nature of the next square in each row.
How? That’s the fascinating part. The fundamental logic that determines the next square is locked in a table of possible values written into the game’s code. Depending on the values of the five-square tile, the table tells the game to deposit either wall, no wall or a random choice between the two.
Aycock and Copplestone have tried retro-engineering the table. They looked for patterns in the values to try and reveal how it was designed, but this was to no avail. Whatever the programmer did, it was a stroke of mild genius. During their research, Aycock and Copplestone were able to interview one of the people involved in the game’s production, Steve Sidley.
He too remembered being confused by the table at the time. “I couldn’t unscramble it,” he told the researchers. And he claimed it had been the work of a programmer who developed it while not entirely sober: “He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain.” Aycock tried to contact the programmer in question but got no response.
image credit: via wikimedia commons
It might look like a bunch of moon craters, but somewhere in this image lies a large piece of metal that carried India’s hopes of lunar science.
This image was captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of NASA on September 17, as it went over the target landing site of the Chandrayaan-2 mission.
That project's lander, dubbed Vikram, fell silent in the final minutes of its touchdown procedure on Sept. 6. The India Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which oversees the mission, spent two weeks trying to establish communications with the lander.
ISRO has said it was able to spot the lander with the orbiter component of the Chandrayaan-2 mission, but the agency has not released those photographs. NASA wanted to help the effort, but LRO's angle on the scene was suboptimal during its first flyover of the targeted landing site after the attempt.
Head over to Space.com to find where the missing moon lander is.
(Image Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University)
This is the Starship Mk1, the orbital-space prototype of the spacecraft that SpaceX plans to use as it aims toward fully reusable commercial spaceflight. It also aims to make Elon Musk’s daring plan come true. The plan? To get humans to Mars and sow the seeds which will help us become an interplanetary species.
See more photos over at TechCrunch.
What are your thoughts on this one?
(Image Credit: Darrell Etherington/ TechCrunch)
Ormia flies find their hosts for their young by listening for cricket calls. When they find their target, the flies deposit their eggs on or near the cricket. Larvae would hatch and burrow inside of the cricket, and it would eventually burst through and kill the host.
But what happens when you factor in noise in the environment? Researchers from California Polytechnic State University looked into how background sounds affect that fly’s eavesdropping capabilities.
The research was published in Royal Society Open Science, and used sticky fly traps near speakers broadcasting cricket calls across a gradient of noise. The results show that fewer parasitoid flies were caught near speakers in noisier locations. Because parasitoids end up killing their hosts, the results suggest that crickets may benefit from calling in noisy areas.
The study also found that both traffic noise and natural ocean noise inhibit fly orientation to sound, suggesting crickets could use sound as a parasite shield across different soundscapes. These results suggest that soundscapes may influence the evolution of tightly co-evolved host-parasitoid relationships.
(Image Credit: Jpaur/ Wikimedia Commons)
Pens clicking, fingers tapping, heels bouncing, and hair being twiddled. These are just some of the movements you’ll see inside an office. But humans aren’t alone in being jittery — mice, too, fidget while they work.
What’s more, this seemingly useless motion has a profound and widespread effect on mice’s brain activity, neuroscientist Anne Churchland of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and colleagues report September 24 in Nature Neuroscience. Scientists don’t yet know what this brain activity means, but one possibility is that body motion may actually shape thinking.
Find out more about the study over at ScienceNews.
(Image Credit: Robert-Owen-Wahl/ Pixabay)
Food is both an art and a science. The way food is presented on a plate can already stimulate our brains and signal that what we are going to eat will be delicious. This visual aspect of food can be expressed through plating. And Martha Ortiz is using this to empower women and make her native Mexican cuisine known to the world.
Ortiz's culinary ascent is anything but straightforward. She encountered roadblocks in her earlier endeavors but didn't admit defeat, instead, she rose to her feet to challenge a system with a male bias.
Equipped with a Political Science degree, Ortiz looks to contextualize each of her dishes with a narrative. "Fairy tale stories" she explains, with fragments that evoke feminine traits that she wants to share with the world.
Read more on Gestalten.
(Image credit: Jean Cazals)
The Olympics is one of the global cultural events that would be great to see up close, especially in order to cheer for competitors from your country or your favorite athletes. However, as with other popular massive events, it's very difficult to get the chance to watch the Olympics live and even just buying tickets for it is a big struggle.
Next year's Olympics which will be held in Tokyo is no different. Organizers held a domestic lottery to see who will have the chance to buy tickets. About 3.2 million tickets were sold. But the organizers revealed that 6,900 tickets were bought with fake IDs.
(Image credit: Tokyo 2020/International Olympic Committee)
Police officers risk their lives every day to ensure the peace and order in their community. They don't always get applause or commendation but that doesn't matter to them, they're just doing their job.
But once in a while, it's nice to show some appreciation for them. So as Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer will be retiring soon, Big Fresno Fair decided to honor him and his 40 years of service by building a metal sculpture inspired by Transformers.
(Image credit: John Walker/screen cap)
Mimi Choi dropped her career as a Montessori pre-school teacher and took the path of being a makeup artist with the goal of doing something that would make her happy. The decision did make her happy, but it was not the traditional makeup that she took. The things she was learning in her special effects classes had a pull on her.
“It was Halloween 2013 and I was a month into my course. I typed in #halloweenmakeup into Instagram and I saw a girl whose face looked like it was broken into pieces,” explained Choi. “I had never done creative makeup before and I recreated it in my parents’ bathroom using two eyeliners, posted on Instagram for the first time, and tagged the girl who I was inspired by. She re-posted my look, saying that I did it better than her. That motivated me. I wanted to explore and wanted to find out more about this style.”
For this years Met Gala, she had the privilege of doing the makeup of Ezra Miller, which featured an iteration of the kaleidoscopic eyes which she did on herself in 2018.
“I was thinking about doing eyes on him anyways because most of my illusions are angle-dependent but eyes are impactful from different angles,” Choi explained.
She ended up doing an iteration of the original kaleidoscope eyes for Miller’s Met Gala red carpet. Because the fitting for his suit took longer than expected, Choi didn’t have time to do a trial run of the look so she “spontaneously painted that look (on Miller) at four in the morning on the Met Gala day.”
Take a look at her interview with Vice's Garage to know more about her works and how her sleep paralysis experiences inspired her as an artist.
Photo Credit: Mimi Choi / Instagram
Eric Bastos Gorgens is a forestry engineering professor at Brazil’s Federal University of Jequitinhonha and Mucuri Valleys. As he and colleagues studied data from satellites about the Amazon forest, something strange caught his eye.
At first it was just a set of numbers on a screen that let the researchers know giants were growing in the Parú State Forest conservation area in the state of Pará. It took time and dedication to figure what the height measurements represented.
“It could have been a bird flying by, a tower, a sensor error,” says Gorgens, the lead author of a recent study about the trees published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. “So we started to look into what could have given us these numbers that were so far from standard. And as we started looking at the data more carefully, we realized they weren’t errors. They were, in fact, giant trees.”
So Gorgens and his team had to go find those trees, of the species Dinizia excelsa, that grew to 80 meters (260 feet) and beyond. The journey was difficult, but they found the grove of giant trees. The very tallest, at 88.5 meters (290 feet) was inaccessible, but a return trip is planned for next year. Read about the Amazon giants, how they were found, and what it means, at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Gorgens)
As we all know there are many types of dashes. There's the hyphen, the figure dash, the em dash, and the en dash. But it's a bit of a stretch to mistake the apostrophe for one of these.
President Trump isn't known for an expansive vocabulary or great English writing skills. But last Friday, Merriam-Webster had to take a bit of a jab at him for confusing his punctuations. His spelling, on the other hand, is another matter entirely.
“For those looking up punctuation early on a Friday morning: A hyphen is a mark – used to divide or to compound words. An apostrophe is a mark ‘ used to indicate the omission of letters or figures,” the Merriam-Webster tweet read.
(Image credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
In designing a house, there are many aspects to consider from the use of space to the different colors and accents for the walls and furniture to the types of materials needed.
But in this particular project called House Bras done by DDM Architectuur, they thought about incorporating the sun's movement as well as the view toward the panoramic garden.
[DDM Architectuur] meticulously studied the sun’s movement and natural light qualities in the lush site, before designing house bras.
[L]ocated in brasschaat, belgium, in the greenery between a small lake and an old plot division, the project’s layout was designed to maximize daylight hours with the change of seasons, and open views towards the panoramic garden.
[C]overed entirely in natural stone slabs, the residence’s roof and facade allow the building’s raw exterior to blend completely into the landscape.
(Image credit: DDM Architectuur)
The former French president Jacques Chirac was a man with rustic tastes and a love for local delicacies. So as a tribute to him, the people of Paris dined on one of his favorite dishes: the tete de veau or calf's head.
There are several places which Chirac frequented and one such place where he would eat tete de veau was the bistro Le Pere Claude.
Dining at Le Pere Claude, close to the Eiffel Tower, has become a rite of passage for French politicians. But with a whiff of nostalgia for the Chirac era, Perraudin lamented how the modern-day politician had become too straight-laced.
“Sometimes Chirac would have a little pastis with a mint syrup, or a Corona beer. Now, the politicians who come here order roast chicken and a glass of water,” Perraudin continued. “It’s sad”.
(Image credit: Instagram via Deccan Chronicle)
