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The Dream Chaser would allow NASA to reclaim some of its space shuttle heritage. (credit: Sierra Nevada Corporation)

Today, NASA awarded a new round of contracts to supply the International Space Station with food, water, and scientific research from late 2019 through 2024.

The space agency both expanded the number of companies providing services from two to three, and more than doubled the potential value of awards to as much as $14 billion over about five years. “This is the next chapter,” said Ellen Ochoa, director of Johnson Space Center, which manages the Space Station program.

Both Orbital ATK, with its Cygnus vehicle, and SpaceX, with its Dragon, won new contracts. Sierra Nevada Corporation joined them with its Dream Chaser. Unlike the other two capsules, the Dream Chaser is a winged vehicle that resembles the space shuttle and lands on a runway. Each of the companies is guaranteed to fly at least six supply missions to the station.

(credit: Texas A&M University)

Standing desks—most often installed in efforts to improve physical activity and health—may help get your noggin in shape, too, according to a pilot study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Following 27 high school freshman over one school year, researchers found that using a standing desk generally improved the kids’ neurocognitive test scores by seven to 14 percent. The tests, given both at the beginning and end of the school year, evaluated cognitive processes such as reasoning and working memory.

“These findings provide the first preliminary evidence on the neurocognitive benefits of standing desks, which to date have focused largely on energy expenditure,” the authors conclude. If the results are backed up in further studies, it could mean that a simple furniture swap to standing desks could lead to a rise in outstanding students.

Netflix is aiming to block unblocking services like this one. (credit: TVUnblock)

Netflix says it will step up enforcement against subscribers who use VPNs, proxies, and unblocking services to mask their locations. This will help Netflix prevent customers from watching video that isn't licensed for viewing in their country, but it may also affect people who use location-spoofing services for security or privacy reasons.

"Some members use proxies or 'unblockers' to access titles available outside their territory," Content Delivery Architecture VP David Fullagar wrote in a post today. "To address this, we employ the same or similar measures other firms do. This technology continues to evolve and we are evolving with it. That means in coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are. We are confident this change won’t impact members not using proxies."

Luckily, Netflix is now available almost worldwide. But not every show is available everywhere.

NEW YORK—Today, the American Museum of Natural History dropped the curtain to reveal one of the biggest paleontological finds of recent years. Everything in that sentence is literal—the museum lowered a curtain to reveal a full-sized cast of the Titanosaur, a species that may be the largest dinosaur ever discovered.

The find itself made news when images came out of paleontologist Diego Pol lying on the femur of the skeleton, which is roughly the size of a sofa (though far less comfortable). Since then, the team from the Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio (MPEF) have excavated over 200 bones, representing 70 percent of the skeleton. Four of those bones (each over a meter long) are also on display at the exhibit. The skeleton on display is made of lightweight fiberglass casts, as the actual bones would weigh far too much to support—the femur alone is roughly 500kg. It's the first outside of the MPEF.

The partnership between MPE and the AMNH was a natural one, as Pol got his PhD there. And he was back on hand for the Titanosaur's unveiling.

A few of the hundreds of stone tools that researchers found at the Talepu excavation in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Camera lens cap is included for size comparison. (credit: Erick Setiabudi)

Over 118,000 years ago, on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, a group of humans settled down and made a home. The only evidence of their existence is a large collection of stone tools, carefully crafted, preserved in the sediment at the edge of a river. A group of archaeologists recently spent several years excavating in the area and dating what remains they found. Astonishingly, their work suggests that humans may have arrived on this island as early as 195,000 years ago. And it's extremely unlikely they were Homo sapiens.

Sulawesi is part of the Indonesian island chain that forms a gentle curve in the waters between Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and Australia. But at the time these early humans were arriving during the Pleistocene, Australia and New Guinea were one continent, called Sahul, and many of the Indonesian islands were connected by land. Sea levels were often much lower than today due to glaciation, which locks water up into polar ice. Previous research has shown that early human groups crossed over to the islands during this time, before Homo sapiens evolved. Indeed, Sulawesi's neighboring island Flores was home to the recently discovered Homo floresiensis, or Hobbit people, a group of unusually small hominins who arrived on the island roughly 1 million years ago.

Here you can see the region where the tools were found. Exposed land during periods of low sea level (−120 m) during the Pleistocene is lightly shaded. Talepu Area indicated by an arrow. (credit: Nature)

The researchers published their findings this week in Nature, detailing the stone tools they found and explaining how they determined their age. The tools were typical of hominins during the Pleistocene, which is to say they were simple stone slivers called flakes made from banging one rock against another to produce small, sharp-edged pieces that could be used as knives, scrapers, weapons, and more. "There is patterning in the flaking techniques," write the researchers, but "there is little evidence that the stoneworkers were creating tools of specific form." So these were general purpose tools.