Month: December 2018

Enlarge / Norman Tindale, pictured here in 1927 with members of a local Aboriginal group, led a mission to gather precise ethnographic and geographic data from many different Aboriginal groups. He also gathered hair from the people he interviewed, which provided DNA samples for earlier studies. The group here is at Rockshelter at Bathurst Head (Thartali) in eastern Cape York Peninsula. (credit: Photo by Herbert Hale, via South Australian Museum Archives Norman Tindale Collection)

Since they arrived in Australia in 1788, Europeans have gathered the remains of Aboriginal Australians for museum and research collections, digging up graves ranging from relatively recent in age to 1500 years old. Aboriginal Australian communities have lobbied long and hard for the return of their ancestors, and many Australian museums have in recent years made a concerted effort to repatriate Aboriginal Australian remains.

Before the dead can return home, the living must figure out where "home" originally was. Most of the remains unearthed earlier in Australia’s colonial history arrived in museum collections with no record of where they came from or which group they once belonged to. A new study suggests that DNA sequencing may be able to help the bones of the Aboriginal Australian dead speak for themselves.

Evolutionary biologist Joanne Wright of Griffith University and her colleagues sequenced DNA from 10 Aboriginal Australians who lived before European contact, some as long as 1,540 years ago. While these were among the rare cases where museum curators know the remains’ origin, the researchers wanted to know whether they could find the closest living relatives of these ancient people. Consistently, the ancient genomes most closely matched those of Aboriginal people now living in the same region where the ancient remains had once been buried. In other words, DNA linked the ancient remains to modern communities that still live in the same place, sometimes over a thousand years later. And that could help with efforts to repatriate Aboriginal Australian remains that museums haven’t been able to trace.

Enlarge / The more people who are on Facebook, the more valuable it becomes for its users. But that's not the same thing as its market value or GDP contribution. (credit: CCO)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science story that comes our way. So this year, we're running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one story that fell through the cracks each day, from December 25 through January 5. Today: evaluating the true value of Facebook to its users.

A series of auctions revealed that Facebook users value the company's service so highly that it would take on average more than $1,000 to convince them to deactivate their accounts for a year, according to a recent paper published in PLOS One. This doesn't mean much for the company's stock market valuation, but it's a good indicator that people find value in Facebook regardless of the many concerns raised recently.

The paper started out as two separate studies. Jay Corrigan, an economist at Kenyon College, and his collaborator, Matt Rousu of Susquehanna University, were interested in a session on this topic at an upcoming conference. They discovered that Sean Cash (Tufts University) and Saleem Alhabash (Michigan State University) were doing something very similar.

Enlarge (credit: Marvel Studios/Universal Pictures/Sony)

Before we begin talking about films in 2018, we've already saved you some trouble by snapping once and making the year's disappointing films disappear. Adios, Avengers Infinity War. So long, Solo. Arrivederci, Ready Player One.

Agree or disagree all you want, but our list of favorite 2018 films already has a ton of quality fare without those big-ticket entries. Like last year, we're mostly skipping the numbered list, especially since we are not a comprehensive film-review site. Our list, like our usual coverage, blends Ars' love of science, tech, data, research, huge beasts, faithful comic adaptations, and lasers. Let's dig in. (Thanks to Ars' Nathan Mattise for contributing to this list.)

Killer docs

We begin with a category that can get lost in the year-end shuffle: documentaries. Some of the nation's best tech conferences and festivals include documentary screenings, so we were fortunate to catch quite a few stellar non-fiction films throughout 2018.