Cassini captures evolution of mysterious feature in Titan sea - Video

These three images, created from Cassini Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, show the appearance and evolution of a mysterious feature in Ligeia Mare, one of the largest hydrocarbon seas on Saturn's moon Titan. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell



NASA's Cassini spacecraft is monitoring the evolution of a mysterious feature in a large hydrocarbon sea on Saturn's moon Titan.

The feature covers an area of about 100 square miles (260 square kilometers) in Ligeia Mare, one of the largest seas on Titan.

It has now been observed twice by Cassinis radar experiment, but its appearance changed between the two apparitions.

The mysterious feature, which appears bright in radar images against the dark background of the liquid sea, was first spotted during Cassini's July 2013 Titan flyby.

Ligeia Mare on Titan. 

Credit: NASA Cassini

Previous observations showed no sign of bright features in that part of Ligeia Mare.

Scientists were perplexed to find the feature had vanished when they looked again, over several months, with low-resolution radar and Cassini's infrared imager (VIMS).

This led some team members to suggest it might have been a transient feature, but during Cassini's flyby on August 21, 2014, the feature was again visible, and its appearance had changed during the 11 months since it was last seen.

Scientists on the radar team are confident that the feature is not an artifact, or flaw, in their data, which would have been one of the simplest explanations.

They also do not see evidence that its appearance results from evaporation in the sea, as the overall shoreline of Ligeia Mare has not changed noticeably.

The team has suggested the feature could be surface waves, rising bubbles, floating solids, solids suspended just below the surface, or perhaps something more exotic.

The researchers suspect that the appearance of this feature could be related to changing seasons on Titan, as summer draws near in the moon's northern hemisphere.

Monitoring such changes is a major goal for Cassini's current extended mission.

"Science loves a mystery, and with this enigmatic feature, we have a thrilling example of ongoing change on Titan," said Stephen Wall, the deputy team lead of Cassini's radar team, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"We're hopeful that we'll be able to continue watching the changes unfold and gain insights about what's going on in that alien sea."

More information: Images of the feature taken during the Cassini flybys are available at: photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA18430

Ultracold Big Bang Experiment Simulates Evolution of Early Universe

Scientists created this detailed, all-sky picture of the infant universe from nine years of data from the orbiting Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. 

The image reveals 13.77 billion year old temperature fluctuations—shown as color differences—that correspond to the seeds that grew to become the galaxies. 

Physicists now are using clouds of ultracold atoms in a vacuum chamber to simulate the growth of structure in the early universe. 

Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

Physicists have reproduced a pattern resembling the cosmic microwave background radiation in a laboratory simulation of the big bang, using ultracold cesium atoms in a vacuum chamber at the University of Chicago.

"This is the first time an experiment like this has simulated the evolution of structure in the early universe," said Cheng Chin, professor in physics.

Cheng Chin

Chin and his associates reported their feat in the Aug. 1 edition of Science Express, and it will appear soon in the print edition of Science.

Chin pursued the project with lead author Chen-Lung Hung, PhD'11, now at the California Institute of Technology, and Victor Gurarie of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Their goal was to harness ultracold atoms for simulations of the big bang to better understand how structure evolved in the infant universe.

The cosmic microwave background is the echo of the big bang. Extensive measurements of the CMB have come from the orbiting Cosmic Background Explorer in the 1990s, and later by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and various ground-based observatories, including the UChicago-led South Pole Telescope collaboration.

These tools have provided cosmologists with a snapshot of how the universe appeared approximately 380,000 years following the Big Bang, which marked the beginning of the universe.

It turns out that under certain conditions, a cloud of atoms chilled to a billionth of a degree above absolute zero (-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit) in a vacuum chamber displays phenomena similar to those that unfolded following the big bang, Hung said.

"At this ultracold temperature, atoms get excited collectively. They act as if they are sound waves in air," he said.

The dense package of matter and radiation that existed in the very early universe generated similar sound-wave excitations, as revealed by COBE, WMAP and the other experiments.

The synchronized generation of sound waves correlates with cosmologists' speculations about inflation in the early universe.

"Inflation set out the initial conditions for the early universe to create similar sound waves in the cosmic fluid formed by matter and radiation," Hung said.

Journal Reference:
C.-L. Hung, V. Gurarie, C. Chin. From Cosmology to Cold Atoms: Observation of Sakharov Oscillations in a Quenched Atomic Superfluid. Science, 2013; DOI: 10.1126/science.1237557

NASA Mars Curiosity Rover: Could Life Have Evolved on Mars Before Earth?

This set of images compares rocks seen by NASA's Opportunity rover and Curiosity rover at two different parts of Mars. 

On the left is " Wopmay" rock, in Endurance Crater, Meridiani Planum, as studied by the Opportunity rover. 

On the right are the rocks of the "Sheepbed" unit in Yellowknife Bay, in Gale Crater, as seen by Curiosity. Image released March 12, 2013.

CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/MSSS

The discovery that ancient Mars could have supported microbes raises the tantalizing possibility that life may have evolved on the Red Planet before it took root on Earth.

New observations by NASA's Curiosity rover suggest that microbial life could have survived on Mars in the distant past, when the Red Planet was a warmer and wetter place, scientists announced Tuesday (March 12).

It's unclear exactly how long ago Mars' habitability window opened up, researchers said. But the timing may be comparable to that of Earth, where life first appeared around 3.8 billion years ago.



"We're talking about older than 3 billion years ago, and we're probably looking at a situation where, plus or minus a couple hundred million years, it's about the time that we start seeing the first record of life preserved on Earth," Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, said during a press conference Tuesday.

The Curiosity team's conclusions are based on the rover's study of material collected from the interior of a Martian rock. Last month, Curiosity used its hammering drill to bore 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) into part of a Red Planet outcrop dubbed "John Klein" — deeper than any Mars robot had ever gone before.

The discovery that ancient Mars could have supported microbes raises the tantalizing possibility that life may have evolved on the Red Planet before it took root on Earth.

New observations by NASA's Curiosity rover suggest that microbial life could have survived on Mars in the distant past, when the Red Planet was a warmer and wetter place, scientists announced Tuesday (March 12).

Curiosity's analyses show that the John Klein area was once a benign aqueous environment, such as a neutral-pH lake, researchers said. Further, the rover's instruments detected many of the chemical ingredients necessary for life as we know it, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon.

Mission scientists aren't claiming that life has ever existed on the Red Planet. They have found no signs of Martian microbes, which is no surprise since the car-size Curiosity rover carries no life-detection instruments among its scientific gear.

But the advanced age of the John Klein deposits does open the door to some interesting speculation. If life ever flourished on Mars — a very big if — did it pre-date life on Earth? And if so, could Earth life trace its lineage back to Mars?

NASA Astronomers Discover Monster Black Hole Gulping Down A Star [VIDEO]

Astronomers witnessed a massive black hole gulping down a star rich in helium gas through Nasa's Galaxy Evolution Explorer, a space-based observatory supported by several ground telescopes.

Super massive black holes which weigh millions to billions times more than the sun, lurk in the centre of most galaxies.

These hefty monsters are just like carnivorous animals - tigers or lions. They wait quietly until an unsuspecting victim, such as a star, wanders close enough to get ripped apart by their powerful gravitational clutches.

Astronomers found that the star which was gulped down by the huge black hole resided in a galaxy that is 2.7 billion light-years away from earth. They claim that the star was looping around the black hole in a highly elliptical orbit, which is similar to a comet's elongated orbit around the sun.

Astronomers believe that on one of its close approaches, the star was stripped of its puffed-up atmosphere by the black hole's powerful gravity. The stellar remains continued the journey around the centre, until it ventured even closer to the black hole to face its ultimate end.

"When the star is ripped apart by the gravitational forces of the black hole, some part of the star's remains falls into the black hole while the rest is ejected at high speeds," said Suvi Gezari, astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University.

"We are seeing the glow from the stellar gas falling into the black hole over time. We're also witnessing the spectral signature of the ejected gas, which we find to be mostly helium. It is like we are gathering evidence from a crime scene. Because there is very little hydrogen and mostly helium in the gas, we detect from the carnage that the slaughtered star had to have been the helium-rich core of a stripped star."

The study claims that by just measuring the increase in brightness, they could calculate the black hole's mass to be several million suns.

"The longer the event lasted, the more excited we got, because we realised this is either a very unusual supernova or an entirely different type of event, such as a star being ripped apart by a black hole," said Armin Rest, astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer: UV image of the Cygnus Loop Nebula

Wispy tendrils of hot dust and gas glow in this ultraviolet image of the Cygnus Loop Nebula, taken by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer.

The nebula lies about 1,500 light-years away, and is a supernova remnant, left over from a massive stellar explosion that occurred 5,000-8,000 years ago.

Picture: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/AFP/Getty

MARS HiRISE: Landscape Evolution

A review of existing images of Mars reveals a diverse landscape.

In some instances, such as around volcanoes and in valleys, a casual glance suggests the features are much like those here on Earth.

Closer inspection, however, often confirms differences in scale and or subtle characteristics relative to their more familiar terrestrial counterparts.

These same images also reveal a Mars that is often very different form the Earth. Some locations are marked by huge jumbles of blocks forming chaotic terrain, whereas others are buried beneath blankets of dust. Bizarre “thumbprint,” “Swiss cheese,” and other surface textures also occur.

Current limits on the resolution of Mars images often preclude distinguishing the of processes responsible for shaping a landscape.

The geomorphic thresholds that influence the efficiency and intensity of surface modification by different processes can often be hard to define. Indeed, different processes can sometimes produce very similar appearing landforms.

Detecting the subtle, diagnostic signatures of past water erosion versus wind or other processes often requires the high resolution imagery that will be obtained by HiRISE.

It is the analysis of HiRISE images that may provide some of the clues for a better understanding of the evolving Martian landscape.

See more of the Feb 1st HiRise Images

Astronomers release unprecedented data set on celestial objects that brighten and dim

This is an image of a dwarf nova, which is a star system where material flows from a red giant star to a dense, compact star called a white dwarf. 

The flowing material triggers explosions that cause the system to flare up as seen from Earth.

The graph shows the change in brightness of this system over a period of seven years. 

The images at the top show the nova at its brightest and dimmest, as indicated in the plot. 

Such systems are important for understanding stellar evolution, and the CRTS team has discovered nearly a thousand of them‑‑more than any other survey. 

Credit: The CRTS Survey Team, Caltech

Christopher Stringer: Rethinking "Out Of Africa"

CHRISTOPHER STRINGER: is one of the world's foremost paleoanthropologists.

He is a founder and most powerful advocate of the leading theory concerning our evolution: Recent African Origin or "Out of Africa".

He has worked at The Natural History Museum, London since 1973, collaborating with scientists across all the disciplines of paleoanthropology, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, with over 200 papers and books to his name.

"At the moment, I'm looking again at the whole question of a recent African origin for modern humans—the leading idea over the last 20 years.

This argues that we had a recent African origin, that we came out of Africa, and that we replaced all of the other human forms that were outside of Africa.

But we're having to re-evaluate that now because genetic data suggest that the modern humans who came out of Africa about 60,000 years ago probably interbred with Neanderthals, first of all, and then some of them later on interbred with another group of people called the Denisovans, over in south eastern Asia.

If this is so, then we are not purely of recent African origin. We're mostly of recent African origin, but there was contact with these other so-called species.

We're having to re-evaluate the Out-of-Africa theory, and we're having to re-evaluate the species concepts we apply, because in one view of thinking, species should be self-contained units.

They don't interbreed with other species. However, for me, the whole idea of Neanderthals as a different species is really a recognition of their separate evolutionary history—the fact that we can show that they evolved through time in a particular direction, distinct from modern humans, and they separated maybe 400,000 years ago from our lineage

Morphologically we can distinguish a relatively complete Neanderthal fossil from any recent human.

You could argue that they're an extreme variant of Homo sapiens, but a very different 'race' from anyone alive today, or, as I prefer to argue, they're a separate species, with a separate evolutionary history.

I've never actually said that that meant they were completely reproductively isolated from us. We know that many closely related species in primates, for example, can interbreed.

Various species of monkey can interbreed and have fertile offspring, and so can our closest living relatives, Bonobos and common chimpanzees.

In my view the Neanderthals were closely related and probably potentially able to interbreed with modern humans, but until recently I considered that while there could have been interbreeding forty or fifty thousand years ago, it was on such a small scale that all trace of it vanished in the intervening years.

It now seems from Neanderthal genome studies that that was not so. We do have a bit of Neanderthal in us, you and I, it's a small amount, but certainly not negligible.

Does that mean Neanderthals are a different species or does it mean we should include them in Homo sapiens?

Well, they are still only a small part of our makeup now, reflecting something like a 2.5% input of their DNA. Physically, however, they went extinct about 30,000 years ago.

They had distinct behaviour and they evolved under different conditions from us, so I still think it's useful to keep them as a separate species, even if we remember that that doesn't necessarily preclude interbreeding."

Read more of this fascinating article here at EDGE: Rethinking 'Out of Africa' - Includes a Video and audio transcript.

Talkbox: visual language for autistic children

Talkbox Presentation

The number of children diagnosed as autistic has been growing.

The reasons as to why are unclear: is the disease simply more prevalent than it was, are newer definitions of the condition including a wider spectrum of children, or both?

As numbers rise, and technology advances, designers have been looking for ways to help autistic children communicate.

The focus has been especially on those with severe speech impairment. For instance, therapists have been experimenting with iPad applications that focus on improving communication, behaviour modeling and activity planning.

Most communication systems that have been developed in the past are text or voice based.

This is where Talkbox, a new concept that is being developed, seeks to change the current methods of communication, delivering a personalized visual language to the kids using it.

Talkbox’s aim is to facilitate an autistic child to interact and communicate with others in a language that they know and understand.

To do this, Talkbox will take the repetitive behaviors seen in autistic patients and create an organized “connection list” as well as a time or place based dictionary and vocabulary.

The concept features a speech processing engine that works with a system that finds and recognizes different objects.

It uses a multitouch screen for animation playback, and a simple button to take pictures of things and people that surround the child.

A panel displays photos of people a child may need to communicate with, and the child can communicate from Talkbox to a smartphone via the Internet, and the phones can be used to respond by accessing the vocabulary online.

The images taken by the child can be printed out to serve as what Talkbox calls “story makers,” to help the child connect the images they see.

The creators of this system see this as a way to let children interact directly with others by building stories.

Talkbox uses this “visual vocabulary” to connect the child to others, but also to help the parents of autistic children form a new sort of community.

They can upload videos and images of the new vocabulary to the Talkbox website to help connect to and learn from each other.

Read more at DesignBuzz 

NASA CalTech:ExoPlanets Under a Red Dwarf Sun

This artist's concept illustrates a young, red dwarf star surrounded by three planets.

Such stars are dimmer and smaller than yellow stars like our sun, which makes them ideal targets for astronomers wishing to take images of planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets.

NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) is helping to identify young, red dwarf stars that are close to us by detecting their ultraviolet light (stars give off a lot of ultraviolet light in their youth).

Full story of NASA/Caltech's Galaxy Evo Explorer and the hunt for Red Dwarf Stars here. Also check out their other stories and galleries at Caltech's GALEX.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Robot Evolution means crawling before learning to walk

Roboticists are applying the way we learn to walk as humans to robots, hoping to improve their movement and behaviours by enabling them to change their form as they learn to move.


Just as babies learn to crawl before they walk, a new line of robots at the University of Vermont are able to walk by learning from successful movements. This happens because their unique design makes it possible for them to change form as they learn to walk.

In the study, the robots wear a brace that gradually tilts their body and bends the legs, while the robot’s controller searches for successful movements. The robots begin in a crawl-like state and squirm around like a lizard on floor until they can figure out how to properly walk.

They have lots of moving parts. And their brains, like our brains, have lots of distributed materials: there’s neurons and there’s sensors and motors and they’re all turning on and off in parallel.. -Josh Bongard

Josh Bongard, leading the study on these evolving robots, is a roboticist at the University of Vermont. He released his discoveries earlier this month to the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We’re copying nature, we’re copying evolution, we’re copying neural science when we’re building artificial brains into these robots.

Bongard’s work, funded by the National Science Foundation is aiming to produce robots that will perform simple tasks with the ability to be adaptable in unstructured or outdoor environments and instead of programming the robots the traditional way, the team at UVM are creating computer programs to help them develop the desired behaviours, while equipping them with tools to change their body.

Bondgard says the reason this hasn’t been done before is because “it is really hard to change a robot’s body… it’s much easier to change the programming inside its head”.

Read more here

Are We Entering an Era of Self-Directed Evolution?

In the past decade, we’ve examined our Solar System’s orbit through the Milky Way to ask whether there may be clues to periodic mass extinctions on our planet.

We've launched missions seeking out habitable Alien Earths and the existence of dark energy and have migrated from wondering if there's life on Mars to searching out and studying myriads of exo planets in the Milky Way and infinite galaxies beyond.

Our incredible advances have also underscored own, very human limitations — our eyes, notes astronomer James Kaler in his new book, Heaven’s Touch: From Killer Stars to the Seeds of Life, How We Are Connected to the Universe, see wavelengths between 0.00004 and 0.00008 of a centimeter.

Kaler calls our visual spectrum “…but one octave on an imaginary electromagnetic piano with a keyboard hundreds of kilometers long.”

Physicist Stephen Hawking believes that we have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information."

But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.

"I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said.

In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, "an external transmission phase," where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. "But the external record, in books, and other long lasting forms of storage," Hawking says, "has grown enormously. Some people would use the term, evolution, only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes."

The time scale for evolution, in the external transmission period, has collapsed to about 50 years, or less.

Labrador Retriever-Sized Herbivore Shakes up Theories of Dino Evolution

Labrador Retriever-Sized Herbivore Shakes up Theories of Dino Evolution

In this week’s Nature, researchers say they’ve analysed a near-complete skeleton of one of the closest relatives to early dinosaurs, a silesaur called Asilisaurus.

The fossil is more than 240 million years old, which is ten million years older than the earliest known fossils of true dinosaurs.

The finding of this dino relative therefore suggests that dinosaurs emerged earlier than we previously believed, and it throws another surprise into the debate over their origins.

From the remains of 14 different individuals, the scientists managed to piece together what a whole skeleton looked like.

However, the finished product didn’t look quite like they expected. After studying the bones for 3 years, the team concludes that Asilisaurus was about the size of a Labrador retriever.

The animal walked on four legs, and the shape of its teeth suggests that it ate plants and maybe a little meat.

That conflicted with the expectation of the study's co-author Randy Irmis, who said the team would’ve thought small carnivores, and not mostly plant eaters walking on four legs, were the closest relatives to the dinosaurs.

Indeed, that question remains open. According to the Nature editor’s summary, Asilisaurus is an early member of the Ornithodira line, the “avian” group that broke off from the crocodile group during the time before dinosaur emergence.

What does that mean for the dinosaur ancestry? The balance of opinion has alternated between more reptilian ancestors, which walked on all fours, and two-legged animals that had bird-shaped bodies but couldn’t fly.

Recently, the idea of two-legged dino ancestors had been winning out, but the new find draws the trend back toward quadrupeds.

Paul Barrett of London’s Natural History Museum says: “The creatures share a lot of features with dinosaurs,” he said. “They show us an intermediate step between more primitive reptiles and the more specialised dinosaurs”.

While dinos hung around for 165 million years or so, the Silesaurs like Asilisaurus lived only 45 million years before extinction.

However, since Ssilesaurs and true dinosaurs diverged from a common ancestor, the two groups should have existed during the same time frame.

Thus, the earliest emerging dinos might stretch back even to the time frame of this Asilisaurus, more than 240 million years ago.

Estrogen, Puberty and Autism | Neurodiversity

Estrogen, Puberty and Autism Neurodiversity

To what degree have high and low-fat diets influenced human evolution? If low fat delays puberty and results in more brain growth, might this be because more synapses are useful for finding more fat?

When there is more fat in diets and puberty rates drop, for a woman there is a greater number of children produced over a single lifetime. Less fat in diet, fewer children produced. This seems like an evolutionary process.

Do thin males with less fat have less estrogen, reach puberty later, have bigger brains and exhibit more neotenous features?

Should autistic males be on extremely low-fat diets so that they reach puberty later, thus allowing more time for their brains to mature?

Is the degree of brain synapse pruning that occurs in infancy related to the estrogen levels in the mother or the child? High mother testosterone levels encourage higher rates of autism, which may be directly related to less pervasive synapse pruning. Is it possible that a high mother estrogen level results in low male baby estrogen levels that prolong or diminish the testosterone prunings?

In other words, the Simon Baron-Cohen research regarding mother testosterone levels and autism may be related to mother estrogen levels. If low estrogen at puberty translates to delayed puberty, delayed testosterone surges and increased brain growth, then the same process may be engaged during the first testosterone surges that compel a diminution of the right cerebral hemisphere during infancy. Low estrogen levels as an embryo, infant and toddler may have a direct impact on cerebral lateralization and synapse production.

Another interesting article 'Introduction to Neotenty' Here ............

Today's Lecture: Why is Space Black and the sky Blue?

A simple enough question but it is actually quite difficult to answer! It is a question that many scientists pondered for many centuries - including Johannes Kepler, Edmond Halley , and German physician-astronomer Wilhelm Olbers.

Let's take the easy one first and ask "why is the daytime sky blue here on Earth?"

That is a question we can answer. The daytime sky is blue because light from the nearby Sun hits molecules in the Earth's atmosphere and scatters off in all directions. The blue color of the sky is a result of this scattering process.

At night, when that part of Earth is facing away from the Sun, space looks black because there is no nearby bright source of light, like the Sun, to be scattered. If you were on the Moon, which has no atmosphere, the sky would be black both night and day. You can see this in photographs taken during the Apollo Moon landings.

So, now on to the harder part - if the Universe is full of stars, why doesn't the light from all of them add up to make the whole sky bright all the time?

It turns out that if the Universe was infinitely large and infinitely old, then we would expect the night sky to be bright from the light of all those stars. Every direction you looked in space you would be looking at a star. Yet we know from experience that space is black!

This paradox is known as Olbers' Paradox. It is a paradox because of the apparent contradiction between our expectation that the night sky be bright and our experience that it is black.

Many different explanations have been put forward to resolve Olbers' Paradox. The best solution at present is that the Universe is not infinitely old; it is somewhere around 15 billion years old. That means we can only see objects as far away as the distance light can travel in 15 billion years. The light from stars farther away than that has not yet had time to reach us and so can't contribute to making the sky bright.

Another reason that the sky may not be bright with the visible light of all the stars is because when a source of light is moving away from you, the wavelength of that light is made longer. This lengthening of the wavelength makes the light appear more red than blue.

This means that the light from stars that are moving away from us will become shifted towards red, and may shift so far that it is no longer visible at all. This is called the Doppler Effect or Dopler Shift.

The Human Eye

All living creatures on our planet have a limited range of light that they can detect and tolerate. There is an upper and lower threshold. If you look at it from the simple Goldilocks selectiveness perspective; some frequencies are too low, some are too high and some are just right.

Many birds, animals and insects can see very well in low light because they spend most of their time out of the sun. Therefore there ability to detect a fixed range of light is limited to the light that they most often hunt, live and work in, low light. This range selection will be part of their evolutionary development, allowing the animal to thrive, breed and prosper.

Equally, we humans exist mainly in the bright light of day, therefore the range or intensity of light that our eyes can detect are limited to the brighter end of the spectrum. We cannot and need not, detect low light ranges, we have devised other ways of penetrating the darkness. Our eyes have developed in such a way as to attenuate and normalise the intensity of light that we can detect, allowing us to function at our best, during the appropriate time of day.

What we cannot do, is to detect all light ranges and neither can other living creatures on the planet. There is no evolutionary 'advantage' to be gain from this. Therefore if the sky appears black to us, it is because there is simply not a high enough intensity or frequency of light entering the eye receptors, to stimulate a detectable reaction. It is not because there is no light present.

Artificial detection

We believe from science, astrophysics and our academic studies that the full range of light frequencies can be detected artificially by the use of intervening filters, attenuators and sensitive materials. We have enhanced our human vision by the use of these 'systems' and can penetrate the darkness and extend our perception of the universe and the night sky.

The night sky is not black it is simply bathed in a low frequency light that is difficult for us to detect, through the clouds and polluted atmosphere of our only planet.

Memes: Replace Genes as Engine driving Human Evolution

The idea of memes as a cultural analogue of genes has been much maligned, and most biologists still reject it. Yet memetics has much to offer in explaining human nature.

MemeTheory
According to meme theory, humans are radically different from all other species because we alone are meme machines.

Human intelligence is not just a bit more or a bit better than other kinds of intelligence, it is something completely different, based on a new evolutionary process and a new kind of information.

Differentiating
The main difference between conventional theories and memetics is this: most biologists assume that culture and language evolved because they helped humans survive and pass on their genes, and that genes retain ultimate control.

Memetics challenges that assumption. Although the capacity for imitation must once have been adaptive for the apes who started it, evolution has no foresight and could not have predicted the consequences of letting loose a new evolutionary process. Nor could it have retained control of memes once they began evolving in their own right.

Proliferation
So memes began to proliferate. What began as an adaptation soon became like a parasite - a new evolving entity that changed the apes and their world forever. Once memes were proliferating, individuals benefited from copying the latest and most successful ones, and then passed on any genes that helped them do so.

Memetic Drive
This "memetic drive" forced their brains to get bigger and bigger, and to become adept at copying the most successful memes, eventually leading to language, art, music, ritual and religion - the successful designs of human culture.

Clickety Click here for the full Article from New Scientist

Becoming Human: A Timeline of Anthropology