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Over the past few years, competing countries have turned the Moon into a hotspot for activities not witnessed since Apollo 17 astronauts departed the lunar surface in 1972.
In a lunar region, Japan’s “Moon Sniper” mission has beaten all odds and survived three long, cold lunar nights since its side landing on January 19.
Engineers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency didn’t design the spacecraft to last through a lunar night, a two-week period of freezing darkness, but Moon Sniper continues to thrive amid lunar extremes and send back new images of its landing site. .
Elsewhere, an international team of astronomers believes it is located in a crater created a few million years ago when something huge crashed into the lunar surface – and sent a chunk crashing to the far side of the Moon, or the side facing away. from Earth, hurtling into space. The chunk of moon has become a rare quasi-satellite, or asteroid that orbits close to Earth.
The Tianwen-2 mission will visit the space rock later this decade. But first, China intends to return to the “far side” of the Moon.
NASA
An illustration shows the far side of the moon, with Earth behind it.
The Chang’e-6 mission, launched Friday, aims to bring back the first samples from the South Pole-Aitken basin, or the oldest and largest crater on the moon. Since the Chang’e 4 mission in 2019, China remains the only country to have landed on the far side of the Moon, sometimes called the “dark side” of the Moon.
The “dark side” of the Moon is actually a misnomer, experts say, and the remote lunar hemisphere receives illumination – scientists simply don’t know as much about the region as they would like.
The far side, with its thicker crust, is very different from the near side that was explored during the Apollo missions.
Scientists hope that returning samples from the far side could solve some of the biggest remaining lunar mysteries, including the true origin of the moon.
Papyrologists studying the Herculaneum scrolls have deciphered revealing details about Plato’s last night and final resting place.
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, volcanic ash charred and buried the papyrus scrolls, but experts gleaned information from the fragile artifacts using innovative technology.
The Greek philosopher’s burial site was likely a secret garden near the sacred sanctuary of the Muses within the Platonic Academy in Athens, according to Graziano Ranocchia, professor of papyrology at the University of Pisa.
And the translated text, Ranocchia added, indicated that Plato was not a fan of the flute music played as he languished on his deathbed, noting that he commented to a guest about his “poor sense of rhythm.”
Courtesy Netflix
Researchers have recreated the face of a Neanderthal woman, who would have been around 40 years old when she died 75,000 years ago.
About 75,000 years ago, a Neanderthal woman was buried in a cave with a stone under her head as a cushion.
Now scientists have reassembled his skull using 200 bone fragments in a “high-stakes 3D puzzle” to recreate the face of Shanidar Z, named after the cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where paleoanthropologist Dr. Emma Pomeroy found the remains in 2018.
“She actually has a rather large face for her size,” said Pomeroy, associate professor of archeology at the University of Cambridge. “She has really big eyebrows, which you wouldn’t normally see, but I think dressed in modern clothes you probably wouldn’t look twice.”
Amateur archaeologists have discovered a baffling 1,700-year-old artifact that represents “one of archaeology’s great enigmas,” according to the Norton Disney History and Archeology Group.
The 12-sided object is 8 centimeters in diameter, hollow and covered in holes. It is one of the largest Roman dodecahedrons ever found and there are only around 130 in the world.
No one knows what they were used for, and dodecahedrons remain absent from Roman literature and mosaics. But it is possible that the objects played a role in ritualistic or religious rites.
Weapons
The male Sumatran orangutan treated a facial wound by chewing leaves from a climbing plant and repeatedly applying the juice to it, scientists say.
Rakus, a Sumatran orangutan living in Gunung Leuser National Park in southern Aceh, Indonesia, surprised scientists when they saw him intentionally treat a wound on his face using a medicinal plant.
This is the first time that researchers have documented such behavior in great apes.
Rakus, probably injured by another male orangutan, chewed leaves of a plant known locally as akar kuning, used in traditional medicine to treat dysentery, malaria and diabetes.
He then applied juice from the leaves to his wound, leaving researchers to wonder whether the pain-relieving treatment was accidental or a behavior learned from other wild orangutans.
Take a deep dive into these intriguing reads:
— A new analysis of hunter-gatherer remains from a cave in Morocco has revealed the true “paleo” diet and what was really on the Stone Age menu 13,000 years ago.
— Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, carrying astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore on a test flight, now has the green light from NASA to attempt a Monday night launch to the International Space Station.
– Remember the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”? Scientists have identified what they call the “degrees of Kevin Bacon” gene, which could provide a genetic basis that determines how central you are to your social network.
— Here comes that sound! Learn all about periodic cicadas in a visual guide to 2024’s rare double emergence.
And don’t forget to look up in the predawn hours of Sunday and Monday to see the Eta Aquariid meteor shower shining in the night sky.
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