Month: May 2022

Enlarge (credit: IVPP)

An extraordinarily well-preserved fossil owl was described in PNAS this past March. Owls are not new to the fossil record; evidence of their existence has been found in scattered limbs and fragments from the Pleistocene to the Paleocene (approximately 11,700 years to 65 million years ago). What makes this fossil unique is not only the rare preservation of its near-complete articulated skeleton but that it provides the first evidence of diurnal behavior millions of years earlier than previously thought. 

In other words, this ancient owl didn’t stalk its prey under the cloak of darkness. Instead, the bird was active under the rays of the Miocene sun.

Seeing the light

Its eye socket was key to making this determination. Dr. Zhiheng Li is the lead author on the paper and a vertebrate paleontologist who focuses on fossil birds at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in China. He explained in an email that the large bones around the eyes of birds (but not mammals) known as the scleral ossicles offer information about the size of the pupil they surround. In this case, the pupils of this fossil owl were small. And if the pupil is small, he wrote, it “means they can obtain good vision with a smaller eye opening.”

Enlarge / This is a “pink” case after a few months. (credit: A_Giant_Baguette)

Google Hardware’s products aim to bring the best of Google’s software prowess to the market, but the division sure does have a lot of quality control issues. The latest weird Google Hardware defect is yellowing, warping phone cases. As The Verge reports, Google’s pricey, translucent plastic cases aren’t living up to their $30 price tag.

Numerous reports on Amazon and Reddit list all kinds of problems with these cases. One post on Reddit, titled “Pixel 6 case Made by Google is trash,” has 500 upvotes and contains several pictures of what these official cases look like after a few months. The cases apparently quickly turn yellow or brown from UV degradation. That’s a common problem with cheap transparent cases, but it’s not something you would expect from an official $30 case from a major manufacturer.

Another continually cited problem is that the cases don’t fit correctly, either straight from the factory or due to warping over time. Images show waggly edges around the power and volume buttons.

Enlarge / Cotoca, a 125 hectare settlement, sits at the center of a network of causeways linking it to smaller communities.

An airborne lidar survey recently revealed the long-hidden ruins of 11 pre-Columbian Indigenous towns in what is now northern Bolivia. The survey also revealed previously unseen details of defensive walls and complex ceremonial buildings at 17 other settlements in the area, built by a culture about which archaeologists still know very little: the Casarabe.

In the last few years, lidar—which uses infrared beams to see what lies beneath dense foliage—has helped archaeologists map a long-hidden, long-forgotten landscape of towns, fortresses, causeways, canals, terraced fields, and ceremonial sites left behind by the Maya and Olmec civilizations across a huge swath of modern Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico. Those cultures are fairly well-known to archaeologists and historians, but lidar surveys have still revealed some huge surprises. And we know far less about the Casarabe culture, as it hasn’t been the subject of as many surveys and excavations as bigger, more famous civilizations like the Maya.

But a recent lidar survey, led by Heiko Prümers of the German Archaeological Institute, shed more light (infrared, specifically) on the Casarabe culture’s network of towns and cities, linked by hundreds of kilometers of causeways and canals. The survey also revealed a thriving urban culture in an area where historians once assumed very few people lived before Spanish colonization.

Enlarge / Dyson is trying to get a grasp on home robotics. (credit: Dyson)

Dyson today shared its ambitious plans to sell robots that can do your household chores. The company best known for vacuums is in the midst of a massive hiring push as it looks to make consumer robots that roam homes and do more than suck up dust. The company wants to put these robots in homes within 10 years.

For 20 years, Dyson has been making puck-format robot vacuums that move around homes sucking up dust and dirt. But for the last 10 years, Dyson has also been researching autonomous robots with grasping hands.

In a video, Dyson showed robot prototypes performing house tasks, including putting away dishes and helpfully placing bleach on a countertop.