Month: April 2022

Enlarge (credit: Wagner et al. 2022)

With the help of an expert weaver, archaeologists have unraveled the design secrets behind the world’s oldest pants. The 3,000-year-old wool trousers belonged to a man buried between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four different techniques to create a garment specially engineered for fighting on horseback, with flexibility in some places and sturdiness in others.

The softer side of materials science

Most of us don’t think much about pants these days, except to lament having to put them on in the morning. But trousers were actually a technological breakthrough. Mounted herders and warriors needed their leg coverings to be flexible enough to let the wearer swing a leg across a horse without ripping the fabric or feeling constricted. At the same time, they needed some added reinforcement at crucial areas like the knees. It became, to some extent, a materials-science problem. Where do you want something elastic, and where do you want something strong? And how do you make fabric that will accomplish both?

For the makers of the world’s oldest pants, produced in China around 3,000 years ago, the answer was apparently to use different weaving techniques to produce fabric with specific properties in certain areas, despite weaving the whole garment out of the same spun wool fiber.

Enlarge / Wright Mons, at center. Note the lumpy nature of its flanks extends to other nearby areas. (credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Institute)

When we look at the features on other bodies in our Solar System, there are often obvious analogs much closer to home. For example, sets of parallel ridges on Pluto appear to be the equivalent of snow features we call penitentes here on Earth. After all, a lot of geology is the product of physics, and if the same physics apply elsewhere, you can expect similar features.

But there are many times when the same physics don't apply, and that can leave scientists scratching their heads. One of those cases was described last week when researchers found that all the easy explanations for why some features have formed on Pluto don't actually work that well.

Cool story, bro

The feature in question is called Wright Mons, a bit of elevated terrain named after the Wright Brothers. There's a similar feature nearby called Piccard Mons, and when the features were first seen in photographs sent back from New Horizons, scientists described them as cryovolcanoes. In terms of their shape, both looked a lot like volcanoes on Earth, with an elevated peak and a crater-like feature in the center.