Month: April 2020

The excavation was a mixture of spelunking expedition and paleontology field trip yet provided enough power to run lights and computers. (credit: National Geographic)

A Homo naledi child’s skeleton could shed some light on the evolutionary origins of our own species’ lengthy childhoods. Humans take much longer to grow up than other great apes, which may be related to our larger brains and more complex cognitive skills. Anthropologists are still trying to understand exactly when and how that reality came about. To do so, they’ve been working with juvenile skeletons from just a handful of species besides our own: Neanderthals, Homo erectus, Australopithecus afarensis, A. sediba. But now they can also look at Homo naledi.

In 2013 and 2014, paleoanthropologists unearthed the partial skeleton of a Homo naledi child dating from 335,000 to 226,000 years ago. Now called DH7, the skeleton has most of a left leg with the bones still articulated—even several of the tarsals, the small bones that make up the ankle. The bones also included a right thighbone (femur) and hipbone (ischium), a right arm, and part of a lower right jaw and a few teeth. The shafts of the long bones hadn’t completely fused with their ends, or epiphyses, which is a sign that the young hominin was still growing when they died.

It’s hard to say exactly how old DH7 was, though, since we don’t know how quickly Homo naledi children matured. If child development was fairly quick, like in earlier hominin species, then DH7 was probably between eight and 11 years old. But if Homo naledi children developed more slowly, like Neanderthals and modern humans, the bones could look the same at 11 to 15 years old.

Enlarge / The Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft is seen after it landed in White Sands, New Mexico, Sunday, Dec. 22, 2019. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Much has been made of Boeing's difficulties in aviation, most notably with the 737 Max. This airplane has been grounded for a year after two crashes that killed 346 people between them, collectively making for the worst air disaster since September 11, 2001.

Then there are the issues with the company's KC-146 Pegasus tanker program, which is $3 billion over budget, three years behind schedule, and beset by technical issues. Most recently, in March, the Air Force revealed that it had upgraded chronic leaks in the aircraft's fuel system Category I deficiency. This is a problem for an aircraft that is supposed to perform aerial refueling.

Since December, the company's space issues have also become more widely known following the failure of the company's Starliner capsule to successfully carry out a test flight to the International Space Station. NASA labelled this aborted mission, during which the spacecraft was nearly lost two times, a "high visibility close call." The company has agreed to perform a second test flight without crew to assure NASA of Starliner's safety.

Enlarge / The Oakland Municipal Auditorium in use as a temporary hospital during the 1918 flu pandemic.

The lockdown measures being taken in response to the coronavirus pandemic are causing economic turmoil. Faced with this, President Donald Trump balked at the prospect of continuing those measures long-term, tweeting, "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF."

But in reality, the best economic medicine may be the dreaded lockdown. A working paper by economists at the Federal Reserve and MIT digs into data from the 1918 flu pandemic and finds that cities that reacted quickly and aggressively to the pandemic also had stronger economic growth after the crisis was over.

Looking backward

An armchair economist could happily predict the economic effects of a lockdown. Intuitively, freezing the economy of a city, state, or country by forcing everyone to stay home seems like it would be an unambiguously bad thing for that economy.

Enlarge / A man performs a test at a ventilator manufacturing workshop at the offices of Formon, a 3D printer manufacturer in Pristina, Kosovo on April 5, 2020. (credit: Armend Nimani | Getty Images)

Company fails to deliver promised cheap ventilators, now charging 4x the price

The Dutch company that received millions of taxpayer dollars to develop an affordable ventilator for pandemics but never delivered them has struck a much more lucrative deal with the federal government to make 43,000 ventilators at four times the price.

The US Department of Health and Human Services announced Wednesday that it plans to pay Royal Philips N.V. $646.7 million for the new ventilators—paying more than $15,000 each. The first 2,500 units are to arrive before the end of May, HHS said, and the rest by the end of December.

Enlarge / This lede image is a bit of a spoiler—but Linux fans might not want to rush out and buy a Zephyrus G14 just yet. (credit: Jim Salter)

The Zephyrus G14 is a dual-GPU gaming laptop, and Linux tends not to fare well with that setup. But it's the only Ryzen 4000 equipped laptop I have available—so it was obviously going to get Linux on it, whether it liked it or not.

Since brand-new hardware generally calls for brand-new distro versions, I grabbed a fresh copy of the Ubuntu Focal Fossa beta and gave it a whirl. I have the sad duty of reporting that the results were mediocre at best.

Installation

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  Oh look! An Ubuntu animation splash under the ROG logo! This is going great! (No it isn't.) [credit: Jim Salter ]

The first step in installation on a new laptop is everybody's favorite game: which key do I press to get to BIOS? It took a couple tries, but on the Zephyrus G14, the correct answer is Esc. Pressing escape gets you to a boot selection menu, with an additional option to go into the BIOS/UEFI setup.

Enlarge (credit: bfishadow)

Citing the misrouting of US Internet traffic, malicious hacking and control by the Chinese government, a group of US executive agencies are recommending the FCC revoke the license authorizing China Telecom to provide international telecommunications services to and from the United States.

The recommendation comes amid an escalation in tensions between the US and China over a host of issues, including trade, disagreements about the handling of the novel coronavirus, and hacking. Thursday's move comes as part of a review the FCC disclosed last year, when the agency barred China Mobile Limited from the US market. The federal government has also designated both Huawei and ZTE as national security threats.

“The security of our government and professional communications, as well as of our most private data, depends on our use of trusted partners from nations that share our values and our aspirations for humanity,” John C. Demers, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a release. “Today’s action is but our next step in ensuring the integrity of America’s telecommunications systems.”