James Frey's Blog, page 14

Juluren

from StudyFinds

The ‘large head’ people: Scientists uncover a lost human species in Asia

Reviewed by Chris Melore

Posterior views of select Chinese Pleistocene hominin crania. Hypothetical evolutionary position of the Xujiayao hominin and more broadly, the Julurens. The blue connecting lines means a likely source or close relationship. (Credit: PaleoAnthropology)

HONOLULU — Could another group of ancient humans have lived alongside Homo sapiens? Scientists have identified fossils of a new species of ancient human that once roamed Eastern Asia with an extraordinarily large brain. The fossils, found at the Xujiayao site in northern China, represent a previously unknown group of humans that scientists have dubbed “Juluren” – meaning “large head people” – who lived between 200,000 and 160,000 years ago.

The story begins in the 1970s when researchers unearthed a collection of 21 fossil fragments representing 16 different individuals at the Xujiayao site. But it wasn’t until recent comprehensive analysis that scientists realized just how unique these remains were. The most striking feature? A cranial capacity of approximately 1,700 milliliters – significantly larger than both their predecessors and many modern humans.

[ click to continue reading at StudyFinds ]

Another One

from The Daily Mail

NASA detects asteroid that’s due to hit Earth’s atmosphereThe asteroids are also called Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) because they come within 120 million miles of the sun

A newly discovered asteroid is on a collision course for Earth and will hit our atmosphere in just a matter of hours.

The asteroid, designated COWECP5, is forecasted to streak through the sky over Eastern Siberia at 11:14am ET. 

Scientists say the small space rock, measuring 27 inches in diameter, is expected to burn up in the atmosphere and poses no threat to humans on the ground. 

The asteroid was spotted by NASA’s Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, which was designed to provide scientists with up to a week’s notice of impending asteroids. 

[ click to continue reading at The Daily Mail ]

The Vera Rubin Risk

from The Atlantic

When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk

How do you know what you’re not allowed to see?

By Ross Andersen

Olivier Bonin / SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

In the early months of 2023, the astronomer Željko Ivezić found himself taking part in a highly unusual negotiation. Ivezić is the 59-year-old director of the Vera Rubin Observatory, a $1 billion telescope that the United States has been developing in the Chilean high desert for more than 20 years. He was trying to reach an agreement that would keep his telescope from compromising America’s national security when it starts stargazing next year.

This task was odd enough for any scientist, and it was made more so by the fact that Ivezić had no idea with whom he was negotiating. “I didn’t even know which agency I was talking to,” he told me on a recent video call from his field office in Chile. Whoever it was would communicate with him only through intermediaries at the National Science Foundation. Ivezić didn’t even know whether one person or several people were on the other side of the exchange. All he knew was that they were very security-minded. Also, they seemed to know a great deal about astronomy.

[ click to continue reading at The Atlantic ]

Tootsies Rock!

from Real Clear History

Tootsie Rolls: Wartime Snack

By Lawrence C. Bostic

I was emptying the remaining candy from our Halloween bowl a few days ago, intending to fill the community bowl at work with it. At the bottom of the bowl, there were quite a few Tootsie Rolls left over – more than any other candy. Perhaps the kids just don’t care for Tootsie Rolls. 

In fact, I made a sour face myself. I don’t fancy them either. To me, they are too sweet, hard to chew, and just…. boring. Lord knows, I have eaten so many of them in my life. Often, during my service, I opened Meals-Ready-To Eat, or MREs, and found Tootsie Rolls as part of the contents.

Despite my dislike, I never threw them away. As a Marine, I know their value.

Although the candy may not seem exciting, its wartime history is anything but boring. During World War II, the company that produced the “Tootsie Roll” was one of the few candy companies to thrive during the war. They were a recipient of an early form of what we call “government contracting” today.

[ click to continue reading at Real Clear History ]

Trader Arts

from artnet

Grocery Giant Trader Joe’s Hides Art in Its Aisles. This New Book Reveals Just Where to Look

Julie Averbach spent four years visiting more than 150 Trader Joe’s stores and hunting down the retailer’s art-historical sources.

by Min Chen

Signs and murals in a Trader Joe’s store. Photo: Julie Averbach.

One day, at a Trader Joe’s grocery store, Julie Averbach picked up a box of caesar salad and was immediately struck by its label. Besides announcing the package’s contents, it contained an image of Augustus of Prima Porta, the first-ever sculpture carved of the Roman emperor. The lid of a plastic salad bowl was an unlikely (if admittedly witty) place to slap on a 1st-century C.E. statue, but Averbach soon discovered that elsewhere in Trader Joe’s—across its products, signs, and murals—were countless other nods to art. “The entire store,” she told me over email, “was a trove of art.”

That revelation sent Averbach on a mission. Over the course of nearly four years, the art history major visited more than 150 Trader Joe’s stores across the country to uncover how they deploy visual art in packaging and marketing. What she found was enough to fill a book: The Art of Trader Joe’s, which identifies and unpacks an abundance of iconic works featured in the stores—from the detail of the Birth of Venus on a tin of Italian Roast to a sign in Chicago that references Starry Night with the superb slogan “Your Gogh-To Neighborhood Store.”

[ click to continue reading at artnet ]

Deep Deep Thermal

from BBC

The hunt for heat: Drilling the deepest holes on Earth

by Norman Miller

Tapping into the heat emitted by the Earth is relatively easy in places such as Iceland where it is close to the surface (Credit: Getty Images)

Beneath our feet is an almost limitless source of energy, but while a few lucky locations have geothermal heat close to the surface, the rest of the world will need to dig a lot deeper. The challenge is how to get deep enough.

There are some spots around the world where energy literally bubbles to the surface. In Iceland, home to more than 200 volcanoes and dozens of natural hot springs, tapping into this energy isn’t hard. Dotted around the country are steaming pools of water, heated by the geothermal fires that burn just below the crust. Boiling jets of water and steam are thrown into the air by geysers.

Iceland now heats 85% of its houses with this geothermal energy, while 25% of the country’s electricity also comes from power stations that harness this heat from underground. It’s an appealing prospect – an almost limitless supply of energy waiting to be tapped.  

[ click to continue reading at BBC ]

The Abandoned World

from The Guardian

The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear?

Across the globe, vast swathes of land are being left to be reclaimed by nature. To see what could be coming, look to Bulgaria

By Tess McClure

An abandoned house in Kreslyuvtsi village, Bulgaria.Photograph: Ivo Danchev/The Guardian

Abandonment, when it came, crept in from the outskirts. Homes at the edge of town were first to go, then the peripheral grocery stores. It moved inward, slow but inexorable. The petrol station closed, and creeper vines climbed the pumps, amassing on the roof until it buckled under the strain. It swallowed the outer bus shelters, the pharmacies, the cinema, the cafe. The school shut down.

Today, one of the last institutions sustaining human occupation in Tyurkmen, a village in central Bulgaria, is the post office. Dimitrinka Dimcheva, a 56-year-old post officer, still keeps it open two days a week, bringing in packages of goods that local shops no longer exist to sell. Once a thriving town of more than 1,200, Tyurkmen is now home to fewer than 200 people.

On a warm spring afternoon, Dimcheva stood in the town square. “The weddings took place here, all of the folk dances, the volleyball. There were lots of young people. A pool,” she said. She gazed around, pointing to ruins or now-empty spaces where buildings once stood, remembering. There, the building that housed a small cinema. Behind it, the space for a school that burned down, was rebuilt, then closed. “Life was bubbling.” Now, she said, “life in the villages is dying”.

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian ]

Yankees’ Fans Rule!

The Genesis of Warhol’s Sex

from Observer

Curator Greg Pierce On How the Museum of Sex’s Warhol Show Came to Be

“Warhol was a radical Queer filmmaker because he didn’t pretend to be anyone but who he was, even when he was playing the part of the great pretender.”

By Christa Terry

Andy Warhol’s obsession with celebrity was one of the defining aspects of his career, and analyses of that career, not to mention of his life, often fixate on it—he gets blamed for everything from our own celebrity obsessions to the narcissism that has become the ugly hallmark of the social media age. What’s lost in that narrative is any attention that might otherwise be paid to his overtly political work and experiments in abstraction (his Piss, Oxidation and Cum series works were both more boring and more beautiful than you might imagine), not to mention any exploration into the person, particularly the queer person, behind the prints and the persona.

In his quest to edge as close as possible to fame and glamor, Warhol surrounded himself with celebrities and documented the comings and goings of The Factory crowd in photos and film. His portrait series, in particular, portrayed the faces of celebrity, capturing the vulnerability beneath fame’s facade. But what lurked behind his facade? “Looking at Andy Looking,” which opened at New York’s Museum of Sex during Armory Week, offers some clue. Organized by the museum in partnership with The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, it considers both voyeuristic elements of Warhol’s work and the complexities of identity and self-perception that can be gleaned therefrom.

[ click to continue reading at Observer ]

Albert Serra is “balls”

from Real Clear Books

The Loneliness of the Bullfighter

On ‘Afternoons of Solitude’

By Jennifer May Reiland

The most frequently used word in the new film by director Albert Serra is “balls,” but almost as frequently used is “truth.” Following the killing of a bull in which the subject of the film, the young Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, took near-insane risks with his own life, a member of his team approaches to embrace him. As the crowd roars in the background, we hear the teammate shout with emotion to Roca Rey, “La vida no vale nada! La vida no vale nada! Nada! Que cojones tienes!”

I found this moment a perfect encapsulation of the world of bullfighting as I have come to understand it: unique masculine intimacy; admiration for suicidal risk and disregard for life itself; and a preoccupation with balls. I, myself, have heard men in the stands at bullfights point to bullfighters in the ring and remark approvingly, “This guy wants to die!” to express their satisfaction many times–but not as many times as I’ve heard them talk about cojones.

Later, in the van which transports the bullfighter and his team–his cuadrilla–to their respective hotels, the cuadrilla continually repeats to Roca Rey that he showed “truth” in the ring and killed the bull “truly.” It’s a word we will hear again and again–but not as many times as we will hear cojones.

The film in question is Afternoons of Solitude, a documentary directed by Catalan director Albert Serra. Having previously won prizes at Locarno and Cannes for his fictional films, Serra has now won the Golden Shell, the top award at the San Sebastián film festival for his first documentary. 

[ click to continue reading at Real Clear Books }