Month: April 2019

Enlarge (credit: Haslam et al. 2019)

There’s nothing especially remarkable about archaeologists studying stone tools and shell middens—unless they weren’t made by humans. A new study suggests that sea otters create a distinct archaeological record, and it might eventually have a lot to tell us about their evolutionary history.

Sea otters are ingenious—and adorable—tool users. They often pick up small rocks and use them to crack open snails, clams, or mussels; underwater, otters also use rocks to pry abalone loose from the seafloor. Closer to shore, otters whack mussels against protruding boulders until they damage the bivalves’ hinges enough to pry them open. That percussive food preparation leaves behind a unique signature: distinctive marks on the boulder and a pile of broken mussel shells, most cracked in a particular way, piled at the bottom.

“Sea otters have created a distinct, recognizable archaeological record,” wrote Michael Haslam and his colleagues, who claim that by doing a little mustelid marine archaeology, ecologists could track past habitats of sea otter populations and maybe even the evolution and spread of otter tool use.

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  This is the core of the Vector-R B1001 rocket. [credit: Vector ]

Like a lot of companies that aspire to launch rockets, Vector has had its ups and downs along the way to the launch pad. But in an interview with Ars, Vector's co-founder and chief executive, Jim Cantrell, said the micro-launch company is continuing to make progress toward space and intends to launch two rockets this year.

"Basically we’ve had to revise our development plan," said Cantrell, who had previously hoped to see Vector make its first space launch in 2018. "No rocket’s ever been late; we’ll probably be the first one," he added, with a laugh.

Vector's new plan targets the launch of a suborbital rocket, Vector-R B1001, for June. (There is no formal launch date yet set, Cantrell said, because "stuff happens.") This mission will have a customer, but Cantrell isn't ready to say who yet. Then, before the end of the year, the company intends to fly its first orbital rocket, Vector-R B1003, from the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Alaska.

Enlarge / "This is not your mother's natural history series." Host Bear Grylls filming in the Swiss Pennine Alps for the "Mountains" episode of National Geographic's new series, Hostile Planet. (credit: National Geographic/Oliver Clague)

It's more than an hour into a whale-watching excursion organized to promote National Geographic's new six-part series, Hostile Planet, and folks are starting to get restless. We saw our first Pacific gray whale before we'd even left the harbor. It swam right up to the boat to give us a good long look at its telltale gray-white pattern over dark slate-gray skin. But now we're in the open sea with not a whale in sight.

According to executive producer Tom Hugh-Jones (Planet Earth II), it's just the tiniest taste of what it was like shooting this visually arresting series—except the intrepid camera crews and producers weren't sipping mimosas on a balmy 70-degree day in March off the coast of Malibu as they waited for the animals to show themselves. It took months of preparation followed by weeks of tracking various species, all to capture that perfect unexpected shot. They endured the same extreme conditions as the animals, for more than 1,300 days of filming on all seven continents. Out of the resulting 1,800 hours of footage came the six segments of Hostile Planet, each focusing on a distinctive biome: "Mountains," "Oceans," "Grasslands," "Jungles," "Deserts," and "Polar."

(Some spoilers for the series below.)