Month: February 2017

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  This is Sam. He lived in America.

Sam the rhesus monkey had already experienced one hell of a ride to the edge of space when he splashed down into the Atlantic Ocean—but his adventure didn’t end there. Although the dry, original accounts of Sam's 1959 flight offer scant detail about the journey, mainly confirming that NASA’s new Mercury capsule kept him alive, Bob Thompson tells a more colorful story.

Now in his early 90s, Thompson can still dominate a room with his commanding voice. And on a recent January morning, standing in his kitchen, Thompson did just that as he recounted the landing of Sam nearly six decades ago. In doing so, he offered a parable for NASA as it considers rescue operations for its Orion spacecraft at sea.

Back in December 1959, NASA was 18 months away from Alan Shepard’s flight into space. The agency still had rockets and spacecraft to test. And scientists knew almost nothing about the effect of weightlessness on humans or how to keep them alive. More immediately, they wondered about the safety of a new launch-abort system, needed to get the crew capsule quickly away from the rocket in case of an accident. Rockets blew up a lot back then.

MNP - Ph. Jugie

We know little about the early Homo sapiens who migrated to Europe from Africa and the Middle East more than 70,000 years ago, but we've just found a new piece of the puzzle. A group of archaeologists has just described the discovery of a distinctive rock carving of an aurochs, a kind of extinct ox, its thick body peppered with dozens of carefully created, shallow holes called "punctuations." What's truly fascinating is that the markings on this limestone slab, carbon dated to 38,000 years old, strongly resemble other rock carvings from the same era scattered across France and Germany.

No, it's not aliens. New York University anthropologist Randall White, who worked on the excavation that revealed the slab at the Abri Blanchard site in southwestern France, said that it's simply a sign that many of these new arrivals in Europe shared some common cultural symbols. "Following their arrival from Africa, groups of modern humans settled into western and Central Europe, showing a broad commonality in graphic expression,” he said in a release. “This pattern fits well with social geography models that see art and personal ornamentation as markers of social identity at regional, group, and individual levels.”

Enlarge / As reviewers, women are a smaller slice of the pie. (credit: Cory Lerback)

Although women make up the majority of students in many fields of science, they're underrepresented in terms of things like faculty hiring, invitations to conferences, grant awards, and nominations for professional awards. Another professional activity important for career advancement is participating in the peer review process, but, since that's generally anonymous, it's harder to track.

A new comment paper published in Nature shows that women are disproportionately underutilized as reviewers. This bias likely results from authors and editors who suggest female reviewers less often.

The authors of this paper analyzed a large dataset from the American Geophysical Union (AGU), which publishes 20 journals that collectively release nearly 6,000 papers per year. The AGU is the largest society publisher of earth science and space science. The data included more than 106,000 authors; the demographics of this group were similar to the science and technology demographics of the United States. For example, from 2013 to 2015, approximately 28 percent of AGU members were women, which is close to the ratio of female scientists and engineers who were employed during those same years.