She takes their blood: Wearing thick leather gloves and holding fine-mesh, long-handled nets, Supaporn Wacharapluesadee has captured bats and taken their blood for several diseases. She’s a go-to researcher for Thailand when new diseases strike—and she’s trying to prepare for the next deadly virus. Fran Smith, reporting for Nat Geo, tracks Wacharapluesadee and her colleagues as they investigate some of the estimated 1.6 million viruses we know little about. The researchers know funding for their work often is precarious—until it’s too late for one pandemic.
Surviving rainforests: Researchers have found human gear dating back 48,000 years, including the earliest bow-and-arrow technology discovered outside Africa. The haul was found in a cave in Sri Lanka and has been seen as survival tools for humans in the jungles and rainforests there, Tim Vernimmen writes for Nat Geo. The humans needed arrows to capture agile animals in the dense forests, researchers say. “Most of these tools were made out of monkey bone, and many of them appear to have been carefully shaped into arrowheads,” says archaeologist Michelle Langley. “They are too small and light to have been spearheads, which need some weight to gain force, and too heavy and blunt to have been blow darts.”
High smoke: A massive puff of smoke from the wildfires that tore across Australia in December and January made it up to 20 miles in the atmosphere. In an unusual occurrence, the smoke wrapped itself around rotating winds, and it has not yet fully dissipated. In one week, the fire-fueled thunderstorms in Australia put between 300,000 and 900,000 metric tons of smoke into the stratosphere, more than any seen from a previous inferno, Science News reports.
A cosmic iceberg: The mysterious 1,000-foot-long, cigar-shaped object that traveled through our solar system in 2017 was neither a comet nor an asteroid. Two astronomers say the object, called Oumuamua, was a chunk of frozen hydrogen.from an interstellar cloud that predated stars and planets. Tens of thousands of suns can fit inside one of these interstellar clouds, the New York Times reports.
The truth is out there: But where, exactly, do intelligent civilizations exist in the universe? Oh, in about 36 other places, according to calculations by an astrophysics team. The new research is based on one huge assumption, co-author Christopher Conselice tells the Guardian. “Basically, we made the assumption that intelligent life would form on other [Earth-like] planets like it has on Earth, so within a few billion years life would automatically form as a natural part of evolution.” OK, OK—but what’s the coffee like there? | |
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