BEACON TRANSCRIPT  –  In a series of somewhat strange experiments, scientists have uncovered an entirely new form of vision after placing 3D glasses onto praying mantis specimens.

Why the Praying Mantis?

 

The praying mantis is unique among insects as it is the only bug known to humanity that has the ability to see in three dimensions just like people can. While scientists have been able to identify this detail, however, exactly how a mantis sees the world has remained a mystery for some time.

Recently, though, tests conducted at Newcastle University by Vivek Nityananda have begun to find answers. Using several mantises and a collection of tiny 3D lenses fitted to their faces, Nityananda and his team planned to run experiments to try and locate what the insects do to distinguish distances.

Using glasses designed to emulate the old style of 3D glasses (two different color lenses on each eye), the mantises were placed into small theaters. These showed different abstract patterns playing on the screens.

Utilizing the glasses, the scientists intended to make the mantises believe that the 2D screen was actually three dimensional. They did so to try and determine how the mantises judged distance as they interacted with it.

What the team found was that mantises were able to correctly identify the distance between anything that appeared to be three dimensional and moving. They were able to do so regardless of which eye took in the image.

With humans, our eyes must merge two separate yet similar images to create a single complete vision. Drastic differences between what both eyes see can cause significant confusion and discomfort.

The praying mantis did not appear to have this problem, being able to process two distinct images at once while blocking out unnecessary background elements. Thanks to this, the team began to suspect that the praying mantis’ entire vision system was built around motion.

If this is found to be true in subsequent tests, it could drastically change what we now know about vision and how the eyes of different creatures work.

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BEACON TRANSCRIPT  – How strange is it to see two scientists in spacesuits, standing out against the auburn terrain? Apparently, it won’t be so bizarre or rare from now on, since scientists are planning to conduct some Mars simulation tests with a geo-radar.

 

The following step would be to map Mars with it. Scientists will do it by using the flat box across the rocky sand found in the Dhofar desert, in the south of Oman.

 

Our Own Mars

 

It so happens that the desert area in southern Oman resembles Mars, a lot. This area is situated next to Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and it currently hosts over 200 scientists coming from 25 nations.

The researchers chose it as the location for the tests meant to be carried out the following four weeks. They are doing this as part of a field testing process for new technology. Its ultimate aim is to help turn to reality a manned mission to Mars.

The interest in Mars is still very much on the rise. More public and private ventures are heading its way. For example, both former US President Barack Obama and Elon Musk declared that people would be able to walk on the Red Planet sometime in the following decades. Moreover, China and Russia are joining the U.S. in its attempt to send ships to Mars.

 

But Why this Desert for the Mars Simulation Tests?

 

Analog astronaut, Kartik Kumar, declared that the desert in Oman resembles Mars completely. If you look at it from space, the Dhofar Desert looks like a flat brown stain. Only a limited number of animals and plants can survive there.

The temperatures reach an astounding 125 degrees Fahrenheit (51 degrees Celsius). On the eastern side of a dune, one can notice the Oman Mars Base. It’s a 2.4-ton habitat that was inflated and set up there.

It is surrounded by shipping containers, which were turned into labs and crew quarters. Moreover, the geomorphology, salt domes, wadis, riverbeds, and structures in the area all resemble Mars. As such, no wonder scientists are interested in conducting more Mars simulation tests in the future.

 

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BEACON TRANSCRIPT – It is a commonly accepted theory that the cradle of humanity was right from the start the African continent. However, one major question scientists have been trying to answer is how humankind got out of there.

Now, scientists have recently discovered some ancient Indian stone tools that might help shed some light on the story of humanity’s beginnings.

 

A Fascinating Breakthrough

 

The researcher team at Attirampakkam in Tamil Nadu published a study in the journal Nature. According to them, they uncovered more than 7,000 ancient stone tools.

Among these, the scientists found points and scrapers, as well as advanced and sophisticated blades. They hope that, with some help from the tools, science might establish the exact moment when modern humans left Africa and settled somewhere else.

It is known that the Homo sapiens appeared in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Then, this left the African continent and eventually colonized the entire world.

Some scientists believe that there were various dispersals of humans from Africa, and not all of them were successful.

A report issued last week brought the results of a human jaw analysis. This latter showed that some humans reached Israel sometime between 177,000 and 194,000 years ago.

Now, these recently uncovered Indian stone tools were established to have been crafted between 385,000 to 172,000 years ago.

The style of the Indian stone tools resembled the one attributed to Neanderthals and maybe other species as well. As such, researchers can’t say for sure whether they belong to Homo sapiens or some other of their evolutionary cousins.

 

So What Do These Indian Stone Tools Mean?

 

For now, there is no sure answer to this question. It is indeed a great accomplishment to date these ancient Indian stone tools. However, some scientists don’t believe them to be of great help in identifying the period in which humans left Africa for India.

The problem, or one of them, lies in the fact that the group of humans who crafted these tools may have changed their style on their own. Even so, it is still a step forward in shedding some light on a yet unknown part of humanity’s history.

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BEACON TRANSCRIPT – Despite them looking like the offspring of a drunken Nosferatu, the naked mole rats have managed to surprise the scientific community with each occasion. A new study featuring the wrinkly rodents have revealed that they do not age like other mammalian species and that their chances of death don’t increase with age.

Naked Mole Rats Don’t Know the Meaning of Growing Old

Although far from being immortal, the naked more rats do display an unusual quality – they hardly feel all the ‘wonderful’ things that come with old age. According to a new study from Calico, Google’s anti-aging institute, as they get older, the naked mole rat’s chance of planting daisies doesn’t increase, as in the case of other mammals.

If you think that this quality in naked mole rats is amazing, think again. Previous studies have revealed that these desert dwellers are immune to all forms of cancer and, as a plus, they can live deprived of oxygen for approximately 20 minutes.

Rochelle Buffenstein, the senior researcher of the project, has spent the past 30 years studying these rather ugly rodents. Buffenstein, who is a biogerontologist with the University of South California, declared that not a day goes by without discovering something amazing about these wrinkly desert rats.

After analyzing the medical records of over 3,200 naked mole rats, Buffenstein and her colleagues discovered that older rodents have basically the same chances of dying as rats who have reached sexual maturity.

According to the numbers, the mortality remains constant at 1 in 10,000 for the rest of their lives. What it all boils down to is that these desert rodents could very well be key to a longer and healthier life.

Buffenstein’s study was recently published in the online journal eLife.

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BEACON TRANSCRIPT – Geologists at Curtin University have found that a part of what is now Canada collided with Australia about 1.7 billion years ago. This likely happened after its breaking away from the rest of North America.

A study paper, which was published in the journal Geology, helped provide more evidence about the formation of a supercontinent known as Nuna.

More Evidence For the Existence of Supercontinent Nuna

The scientific theory of plate tectonics includes continental drift or the movement of the continents over geological time. Various landmasses gradually reorganize themselves into different combinations.

A supercontinent, like Nuna or the better-known and more geologically recent Pangaea, is the result of practically all of the landmasses forming a single gigantic continent.

The geologists behind this new study examined rocks found in two areas in Queensland: Georgetown and Mount Isa. While the Mount Isa rocks were typical Australian ones, the Georgetown rocks differed greatly. These presented traits were more commonly seen in rocks found in Canada.

This seems to indicate that the rocks had originated in a part of North America that had broken away from the rest of the continent and smashed into Australia.

According to the study’s lead author, Adam Nordsvan, the rocks had been at the bottom of a shallow sea when Georgetown was part of North America.

Around 1.7 billion years ago, Georgetown detached from the rest of North America and collided with northern Australia 100 million years later. After Nuna began breaking up 300 million years later, the Georgetown rocks remained where they were.

The study also enabled the researchers to learn more about the development of the mountains in the region. This collision most likely led to their formation as well. Unlike the Himalayas, which were also produced by the collision of two landmasses, the Australian mountains are comparatively small.

Scientists are looking to continue their research on the formation of supercontinents.

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BEACON TRANSCRIPT – Ever since Pluto’s demotion from planet to dwarf planet, the debate has raged as to what the actual definition for “planet” should be.

However, one intrepid astrophysicist has proposed a new definition for such space objects that might clear up this confusion.

With the discovery of numerous exoplanets outside our own solar system, a better classification system for what planets truly are has been in need for some time.

Astrophysicist Proposes New Definition for Planet

According to International Astronomical Union regulations, planets are defined as space bodies orbiting our Sun. They also have to be spherical in shape and to have a clear surrounding orbit.

This, of course, would not apply to any exoplanets, as they orbit other stars. Some planet-like objects are even in orbit outside of solar systems entirely. Additionally, objects smaller than stars but big enough to perform deuterium fusion would be classed as brown dwarfs, not planets.

Because of all this, a revised definition is a necessity as humanity continues to explore the universe. Kevin Schlaufman, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, may have a solution, however.

He advocates observing an object’s surroundings to figure out what to classify it as. Seeing what surrounds an object could offer clues as to what it’s made from. It might also reveal how it was formed (core accretion for planets and gravitational collapse for stars). This would help distinguish between planets and brown dwarfs.

Additionally, Schlaufman outlined in the same paper in which he proposed these identification keys that observing the central star in a solar system could also reveal key details about what orbits them. This could be achieved based on the materials that make them up.

Through intense observation of numerous space objects, Schlaufman found that objects with a mass ten times that of Jupiter were unlikely to be planets. Typically, they turn out to be brown dwarfs. Though not a perfect rule, he concluded that this was the most common cutoff point between brown dwarfs and planets.

While more research will be required before any official definitions can be presented, Professor Schlaufman’s work is nonetheless helping relieve some of the uncertainty with what to classify objects in space as.

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