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This week, the world of science was able to provide us a few indications on key questions, like when art and tool production developed in humans and how the zebra got its stripes, but created many more questions on even more fundamental issues - like why anything exists in the universe at all.
Biology:
How the zebra got its stripes - Scientists from California and Hong Kong have created a gene that tells bacteria to grow in concentrc rings. An incredible variety of patterns can be discerend in the natural world, but knowing how precisely these patterns emerge from simple genes has been something of a challenge.
Now, these researchers can create various patterns of concentric rings by simply turning on and off a gene that controls the production of a single protein. This could be an impoirtant step in understanding how larger, multicellular organisms develop patterns - like stripes on a zebra, for instance.
Physics:****The dizzy universe - There is a principle in physics, called the conservation of parity, that says the universe as a whole should not favor processes that go in one direction over any other direction, things like spinning, for instance. The only problem is that new research from Michael Longo at the University of Michigan actually does show a deep preference for one direction over another.
Longo looked at the of rotation of hundreds of thousands of galaxies, and realized that along a particular axis, there is a preference for galaxies to rotate in one direction over the other. This seems to indicate that the universe was born with intrinsic angular momentum, which could both explain a whole lot about why matter exists rather than antimatter, or even why something exists rather than nothing.
It also lines up with unexplained anomalies in the temperature of microwave backgroud radiation, the so called "axis of evil." This radiation is leftover from the birth of the universe, and a spinning universe could explain these temperature variations that should not be there.
Dark matter mystery gets even darker - Matt Walker, a Hubble Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has challenged the common understanding of how dark matter works.
Dark matter is thought to accumulate densely in the center of galaxies, and be "cold" - that is, slow moving and less energetic. This is about as much as modern science understands about the undetectable, invisible matter that is mathematically required to keep the universe from flying apart.
Walker's research, published in The Astrophysical Journal, indicates that dark matter is ditributed far more evenly throughout galaxies, indicating a "hot" or more fast moving and energetic. In other words, we now know less about something we knew practically nothing about before, and which we need to know a whole lot more about in order to prove that the universe even exists. Yikes.
Archeology:
100,000-year-old artist's studio - In an out-of-the-way cave in South Africa, he undisturbed remains of a fantastically old studio used to produce ochre paint - a pigment made from crushed stones, bone, and charcoal. The discovery was made by a team from the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand.
The site contains grindstones, bones, charcoal, and evidence indicateing a complex production process, meaning that long ago, humans had the cognative capacity to produce the materials needed for some kind of symbolic endeavor. The paint could have been applied to the body or clothing in a symbolic manner.
The earliest known cave paintings come from about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. Anatomically modern humans appear in the fossil record about 200,000 years ago.
Early tool production - New evidence suggests that the production line techniques of Henry ford predated him by a couple hundred thousand years. A site outside of Tel Aviv in Israel shows indicatins of a "production line," producing, of course, stone blades, as early as 400,000 years ago.
While older stone tools are known, this site is intersting because it has relatively little waste material, and production was so efficient that the tools were treated almost like disposable razors. The site also indicates that labor was divided into specific areas, with tool production in one area, animal butchering in another and hide processing in yet another.
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