Archaeologists recently confirmed that the Tarkhan Dress (which has decayed to just being a shirt at this point) is between 5,100 and 5,500 years old. This dates it to near the beginning of Egyptian society. Of course, it was a shock to find a (mostly) intact garment of such an age, since normally linen is destroyed by the ravages of time fairly quickly. (Fun fact, one of the major forces contributing to clothing falling apart over long spans of time is the friction caused by particles of dust coming into contact with it.)
The Dress was originally found in an Egyptian cemetery in the early 1900’s. Its significance was largely overlooked by the academic community, until 1977, when it was sent to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The long sleeved garment was found inside-out, and had significant creasing, suggesting that it had been actually worn, likely by one of the tomb’s occupants. At the moment, the dress stops at the midriff, but evidence such as similar, slightly younger garments, and images on nearby tombstones indicate that it would originally have been floor-length.
The Dress has long been suspected to date back to the time of Egypt’s First Dynasty, but this was recently confirmed by radiocarbon dating. Radiocarbon dating is a process that we’ve only known about for around a century. It uses the decay of a certain Carbon isotope (isotopes are a type of particle that share chemical properties with each other, but slightly differ in mass) to measure how much time has passed. Carbon-14 is the one carbon isotope that is radioactive — which doesn’t mean it’s dangerous, just that it emits energy — and by finding the amount of it in a substance, we can tell how old it is. Since we have lots of evidence from very old things, like trees, we can use those as reference points to get very accurate dates, to within a few centuries.
What would the ancient Incans have needed with thousands of holes, all around three feet wide, and two to three feet deep? This question has plagued archaeologists ever since an aerial photograph, pictured above, publicized the phenomenon in 1931. When archaeologists got there in person, they found that the holes had been constructed by people, either by creating a pile of soil and digging a hole in that, or by piling stones in a circle. While this dispelled the rumor that the holes had been created by ancient aliens, it provided absolutely no hint as to who did make them, and why.
One of the earliest theories was that they were in fact all empty graves, and that the bodies had been destroyed by various natural phenomena over hundreds of years, but another man named Charles Stanish, an archaeologist working at the University of California, Los Angeles, wasn’t convinced by this explanation.
In 2015, Charles Stanish took a team down to the Band of Holes, where they created a more detailed map of the holes, numbering 6,000, and became increasingly convinced that the holes dated to the time when the Incans conquered the Chinchan people. Based off of that belief, he hypothesized that the holes were actually a way of measuring the tax a Chinchan family would have to pay to their new overlords. There is circumstantial evidence for this — Monte Sierpe, the location of the Band of Holes, lies close to an administrative center of the Incan Empire, the place where taxes would have been collected, and the Incans had used similar schemes in other locations. They have yet to find conclusive proof, but Stanish plans to return, and look for microscopic evidence that would have been left behind. For the time being, the Band of Holes remains mysterious.
Horseshoe crabs. The living fossils who have barely evolved since before the age of the dinosaurs likely aren’t a constant presence in your mind, but they play an important role in the medicine that keeps you healthy.
These crabs have lived on Earth in their present form for over 450 million years, living long before the dinosaurs were born, and long after the last of them died. They’ve played a fairly substantial role in human life, as they make excellent bait, and have edible eggs.
However, an alternate use for them was recently (by the crabs’ standards) discovered by Fred Bang in 1956, who found that a cell in the blood of horseshoe crabs would cause it to harden when exposed to bacteria. This cell is called an amebocyte, and serves a similar role as white blood cells do in humans. This reaction naturally serves to insulate the crabs from bacteria, but Bang realized that it could be used as an easy way to detect the presence of bacteria in medicine. This allows scientists to easily determine which batches of a product pose health risks to humans, replacing a much slower practice of experimenting on rabbits to achieve the same results.
This blood is extracted by scientists who trap crabs on the shore and extract some of their blood, before releasing them back into the waters they were taken from. Currently, there is some debate on whether this method is humane enough, as the species is considered at risk and this method unavoidably leads to death in a small number of the crabs.
Today NASA announced its plans to contract with SpaceX, a private company headed by Elon Musk, to transport astronauts to the International Space Station for the second time. This signals the beginning of a new age of space travel, as private companies begin to take on a role previously held exclusively by government agencies such as NASA, with SpaceX leading the pack.
SpaceX made headlines in 2012 when it became the first private company to make a manned trip into space, two years after it became the first private company to successfully return a rocket from low-Earth orbit. Its CEO, Elon Musk, is famous for his goal of getting humans living on Mars sometime in the next two decades, a timetable far ahead of most other feasible projects.
Getting a human colony on Mars has been a tenet of science fiction ever since the genre began, but it’s finally starting to seem like it could become a reality in the future, as SpaceX recently announced plans to begin its program by landing its Dragon module on Mars by 2018. Its collaboration with NASA is also seen as a good sign, with scientists such as Philip Metzger saying that “I believe it is completely feasible. No miracle inventions are required. No new physics. Just straightforward engineering and a modest budget for the development cost.”
As SpaceX continues to expand its manned missions, we should look forwards to beginning to see how feasible this quintessential human dream might become in the near future.
It was long a well known truth that our solar system had nine planets, until scientists realized that Pluto was, in fact, a dwarf planet. Dwarf planets are planetoids which meet two of the criteria for a planet — being an object large enough to crush itself into a sphere, but not large enough to cause thermonuclear fission — but has failed to clear its domain of space debris. For a few years after our conception of the solar system was shocked, all was well and stable, but then astronomers started noticing a strange attribute of five objects in the far reaches of our universe: they all had strangely eccentric — meaning elliptical instead of circular — orbits which aligned into a plane, and they all orbited in the same direction.
Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology and the leader of the team who discovered these objects, came to the conclusion that there was less than a one percent chance that all five orbits would align without some outside force influencing them. To solve the mystery, he enlisted the help of Theoretical Astrophysicist Konstantin Batygin.
The answer they came up with was that there must be some massive object in the solar system that affects their orbits. The thing is, when they started to look at possible orbital paths that would allow them to interact and cause that pattern, they realized that this hypothetical Planet Nine would only be close enough to these five objects every 50,000 years or so. If this is the case, then Planet Nine would have to be truly huge — at least ten times the size of Earth.
While the scientific community has generally been skeptical about claims to have found a new planet in the solar system, for obvious reasons, it seems like this time is different. This time, the math actually checks out, and it points astronomers to the supposed location of this new planet. As of now, the two scientists are using a telescope named Subaru to scan swathes of the sky, but it could still take over five years for them to scan all of the potential ninth planet’s expected location. Keep an eye on your favorite source of science news, and wait to see if this pans out!