Month: September 2018

The Nasca Boy's remains are now on display in the National Museum of Ica, Peru. (credit: Tilley et al. 2018)

Most Peruvian mummies come bundled in cloth, with their legs folded up to their chests and their arms around their knees. But the young boy we now know only as the Nasca Boy was buried in a position he probably occupied in life: on a contoured, cushioned adobe stool, with his lower legs tucked beneath his seat. It’s the only burial of its kind that archaeologists have ever seen, and it immediately suggests two very important things about this child: he lived with a disability that would have required additional care and resources, and he was well-cared for and valued by the people around him, even during a period of their history when food was scarce and life was uncertain.

That’s the conclusion of a new study, which revisits the original 1973 research on the mummified remains of the young boy, who died around 700 CE. The original archaeologists, led by the late Marvin Allison, focused on identifying evidence of tuberculosis in the boy’s remains; they provided the first evidence that the disease had stalked South American populations long before Europeans arrived.

Archaeologist Lorna Tilley and her colleagues have taken a second look at that study in an effort to reconstruct details of the child’s experience with his illness and disability, the kind of care he probably received, and what that reveals about the culture in which he lived. “I rely on taking the information available from the work of other archaeologists and synthesizing it, hoping that I've understood their research results and providing copious references so that readers can go to the sources themselves,” Tilley told Ars Technica.

Enlarge / In May, Vector launched a full-scale prototype of the Vector-R rocket. (credit: Vector)

For a long time Rocket Propellant-1, or RP-1, reigned supreme as the fuel of choice for the first stage of rockets. This highly refined form of kerosene, which was derived from jet fuel, powered the Saturn, Delta, Atlas, Soyuz rockets throughout the 20th century. It even served as fuel for modern rockets like the Falcon 9.

RP-1 has the benefit of being dense, which means a lot of fuel can be packed into a relatively small tank. However, RP-1 isn't the most effective fuel at creating thrust, a measurement known as specific impulse. Liquid hydrogen, by contrast, has a really high specific impulse. But because it is not at all dense, it can't efficiently be used as a first stage fuel.

This is one reason why a number of major new rocket engines developed during the last decade, including SpaceX's Raptor and Blue Origin's BE-4 engines, have been designed to use methane as a fuel. It represents a compromise between RP-1 and hydrogen—not quite as dense as the former, and with not quite as high a specific impulse as the latter. Methane is also useful if you want to go to Mars, because it is relatively abundant in the red planet's thin atmosphere and could be used to refuel an ascent vehicle.