“If our hypothesis for Mount Sharp holds up, it challenges the notion that warm and wet conditions were transient, local, or only underground on Mars,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “A more radical explanation is that Mars’ ancient, thicker atmosphere raised temperatures above freezing globally, but so far we don’t know how the atmosphere did that.”

Why this layered mountain sits in a crater has been a challenging question for researchers. Mount Sharp stands about 3 miles (5 kilometers) tall, its lower flanks exposing hundreds of rock layers. The rock layers – alternating between lake, river and wind deposits – bear witness to the repeated filling and evaporation of a Martian lake much larger and longer-lasting than any previously examined close-up.

“We are making headway in solving the mystery of Mount Sharp,” said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “Where there’s now a mountain, there may have once been a series of lakes.”

Curiosity currently is investigating the lowest sedimentary layers of Mount Sharp, a section of rock 500 feet (150 meters) high, dubbed the Murray formation. Rivers carried sand and silt to the lake, depositing the sediments at the mouth of the river to form deltas similar to those found at river mouths on Earth. This cycle occurred over and over again.

“The great thing about a lake that occurs repeatedly, over and over, is that each time it comes back it is another experiment to tell you how the environment works,” Grotzinger said. “As Curiosity climbs higher on Mount Sharp, we will have a series of experiments to show patterns in how the atmosphere and the water and the sediments interact. We may see how the chemistry changed in the lakes over time. This is a hypothesis supported by what we have observed so far, providing a framework for testing in the coming year.”

After the crater filled to a height of at least a few hundred yards, or meters, and the sediments hardened into rock, the accumulated layers of sediment were sculpted over time into a mountainous shape by wind erosion that carved away the material between the crater perimeter and what is now the edge of the mountain.

On the 5-mile (8-kilometer) journey from Curiosity’s 2012 landing site to its current work site at the base of Mount Sharp, the rover uncovered clues about the changing shape of the crater floor during the era of lakes.

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Cyberpunk was originally not a character that we were waiting for, but simply the way the avant garde looked and felt when they started messing around with computers. To try to ethically affect the evolving network of systems in which we find ourselves, is to be political. Not everyone will be a ninja hacker. But if every person who opposed the NSA’s wiretaps spray painted a CCTV camera, that would be something. If every person who thought Facebook is a scum-sucking corporation finally had the nerve to delete their account, that would be something. But we can’t even hack our own desires long enough to cut ourselves off from a social network. Instead, we retweet a link to a story about a DdoS program, put on some boots, load up a soundtrack, and assume that the politics will just happen

FINALLY DELETED MY FACEBOOK ACCOUNT.

FREE AT LAST

thx interdome

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“Khoisan hunter-gatherers in Southern Africa always have perceived themselves as the oldest people” said Stephan Schuster of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and a leader of the research team. 

The group analyzed five study participants from different tribes in Namibia. The study investigated 420,000 genetic variants across 1,462 genomes from 48 ethnic groups in populations worldwide. These analyses reveal that Southern African Khoisans are genetically distinct not only from Europeans and Asians, but also from all other Africans. First author Hie Lim Kim of Nanyang Technological University, said, “It is fascinating to unravel the population history of humankind over the last 150,000 years.”

By conducting extensive computational analyses, the team demonstrated that two of the sequenced individuals showed no signs of having inherited any genetic material from members of other ethnic groups. Interestingly, these individuals are the oldest members of the Ju/‘hoansi tribe, which still live in protected areas of Northwest Namibia. 

“This and previous studies show that the Khoisan peoples and the rest of modern humanity shared their most recent common ancestor approximately 150,000 years ago, so it was entirely unexpected to find that this group apparently did not intermarry with non-Khoisan neighbors for many thousand years,” said Webb Miller, professor of Bioinformatics at Penn State and a member of the research team. “The current Khoisan culture and tradition, where marriage occurs either among Khoisan groups or results in female members leaving their tribes after marrying non-Khoisan men, appears to be long-standing.”

The cultural and genetic persistence of the Ju/’hoansi tribe is intriguing, the researchers say, because genetic and genomic analysis of ancient hominid lineages such as the Neanderthals, as well as non-African humans, have shown that intermarrying does occur frequently in these groups and is traceable over the entire time span of 150,000 history during which anatomically modern humans have lived. 

“We also observed gene flow for some of the other Khoisan groups, as defined by their largely varying language, but a key finding of this study is that, even today, individuals without genes from other communities can be identified within the Ju/’hoansi population and possibly others,” Schuster said.

“Having identified non-admixed Khoisan individuals, we could compare the effective population size of the Khoisan with that of other humans over more than 100,000 years,” said research-team member Aakrosh Ratan, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. “In a twist of fate, the major ethnic groups today in Africa, Asia, and Europe increased in size only after overcoming a population decline about 20,000 years ago.”

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Excerpt from “Nightmares of the Future: Deconstructing TRANSCENDENCE”

An excerpt from my latest at the Daily Grail, Nightmares of the Future: Deconstructing TRANSCENDENCE:

This theme – fear of extinction, fear of erasure and replacement – is common to everything from Warren Ellis’ newuniversal comic to the Brookings Report…

It’s an existential threat; but it’s psychological, not physical. This isn’t an asteroid about to crash into the Earth or a bomb, poison or plague. This is a mental category about to collapse. The most important of all: what it means to be human. It represents the end of everything they know, everything they are, and it scares the shit out of them. And as any amateur student of human psychology will tell you, fear is a hell of a motivator. The transhuman community and their posthuman leader aren’t killing people, aren’t conquering lands or launching missile strikes, they are quite simply being. But their very existence is frightening enough to the regular, baseline folks. The Neanderthal’s in our tale. Faced with this dilemma, they don’t choose to process their feelings, overcome their initial reaction, interbred and in the process merge cultures, as it now looks certain our hominid cousins did. They fight with certainty and conviction that its the only rational thing to do.

Fear of change, fear of loss of control. The idea that the AI could be running things without them even being aware of it…

The Anthropocene is the idea that the planet we inhabit has been completely reshaped by the activities of human civilisation. That no part of our world has been left unchanged. Most obviously, this is climate change; but it’s more than just a change in weather patterns. It’s things like the concentration of CO2 in sea ice we’ve never set foot on and the addition of “plastiglomerate” to geology – rocks made from plastic melted in fires.

Awesome, right? We changed the world. Humans rule! But what if it went all horribly wrong and completely out of control? (You know, worse than climate chaos even.) Overt and undeniable.

That’s the Gray Goo scenario – nanotechnology unleashed on the world, out-competing natural systems…

Another existential threat. Physical, not metaphysical this time. But where the Neanderthal Dilemma is a negative reaction, classic fear of the other, to a change in progress – the coming of a new race – this is the nightmare of an out-of-control technology. What’s frightening isn’t the destruction of Platonic ideals, but the radical transformation of the earthly plane. The Gray Goo is the sentient ooze of an unknowable posthuman world affecting its own agenda on the Earth.

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