Month: June 2020

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The figurine is a small songbird, about 19.2mm (0.75 inches) long, standing on a pedestal. It's carved from a burned, blackened fragment of animal bone. Whoever created it was probably a hunter-gatherer living at Lingjing, in northern China, near the end of the last Ice Age; their culture also made simple pottery and shaped black chert into small, sharp blades. To modern eyes, the carving looks pretty simple, but it’s the work of an artist who knew how to combine several techniques (and work with multiple tools) to shape a figure out of bone. And that means that by the time the ancient artist put tool to bone 13,300 years ago, people in northern China had already developed a long and unique tradition of carved bone art.

The songbird in the well

In 1958, a few years before archaeologists realized how much of the past lay buried at Lingjing, construction crews dug a well about 5 meters (16.4 feet) down, scooping out sediment that had accumulated during the end of the last Ice Age. The well-diggers piled all the dirt up nearby without paying much attention to the ancient potsherds, stone tools, and other artifacts mixed in with it.

When Shandong University archaeologist Zhanyang Li and colleagues found the pile in 2005, they realized that they’d been quite lucky; normally, the well-digging would have mixed together artifacts from different layers, making it impossible to tell when anything had come from. But the 1958 crew happened to dig their well in a part of the site where nothing had been buried since the Paleolithic. The only artifacts in their pile of discarded dirt were small black chert blades and coarsely made pottery—distinctive objects very similar to those found in a layer at Lingjing dating to between 14,000 and 13,000 years ago. Those were mixed with charcoal and burned animal bones that radiocarbon dated to around 13,300 years ago.

Enlarge / Technicians work on the James Webb Space Telescope. (credit: NASA)

On Wednesday, the chief of NASA's science programs said the James Webb Space Telescope will not meet its current schedule of launching in March 2021.

"We will not launch in March," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the space agency's associate administrator for science. "Absolutely we will not launch in March. That is not in the cards right now. That's not because they did anything wrong. It's not anyone's fault or mismanagement."

Zurbuchen made these comments at a virtual meeting of the National Academies' Space Studies Board. He said the telescope was already cutting it close on its schedule before the COVID-19 pandemic struck the agency and that the virus had led to additional lost work time.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino)

The Federal Communications Commission has reversed course on whether to let SpaceX and other satellite providers apply for rural-broadband funding as low-latency providers. But Chairman Ajit Pai said companies like SpaceX will have to prove they can offer low latencies, as the FCC does not plan to "fund untested technologies."

Pai's original proposal classified SpaceX and all other satellite operators as high-latency providers for purposes of the funding distribution, saying the companies haven't proven they can deliver latencies below the FCC standard of 100ms. Pai's plan to shut satellite companies out of the low-latency category would have put them at a disadvantage in a reverse auction that will distribute $16 billion from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).

But SpaceX is launching low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites in altitudes ranging from 540km to 570km, a fraction of the 35,000km used with geostationary satellites, providing much lower latency than traditional satellite service. SpaceX told the FCC that its Starlink service will easily clear the 100ms cutoff, and FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly urged Pai to let LEO companies apply in the low-latency tier.