Four Chinese University students have begun a 200-day experiment in which they will live in a simulated space station, isolated from the rest of the world and forced to survive using only the resources that they would find while living on another world, according to media reports.

Dubbed Lunar Palace 365, the experiment is taking place in Beijing and will force the students to obtain oxygen from plants grown in the facility, recycle their own urine into drinkable water, and to complete daily tasks in a station completely devoid of sunlight, explained Engadget.

“We’ve designed it so the oxygen (produced by plants at the station) is exactly enough to satisfy the humans, the animals, and the organisms that break down the waste materials,” Liu Hong, a professor at the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Beihang University) and the coordinator of the Lunar Palace 365 project, told Reuters on Sunday.

However, while preparations were made to ensure that the students’ physical needs were taken care of, Liu emphasized that it was important to make sure that their emotional health was also taken into consideration. “They can become a bit depressed,” the professor noted. “If you spend a long time in this type of environment it can create some psychological problems.”

While participants will be given a series of daily tasks to complete in order to keep them happy, students who were involved with a similar, shorter-length experiment to concluded recently told Reuters that they sometimes felt “a bit low” after finishing up their work for a given day.

Similar experiments also ongoing in Hawaii, according to reports

Last August, a similar project, the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) came to an end after participants spent a full year living in a simulated space station, according to Engadget. That NASA-backed initiative was deemed to be a success, showing that a group could continue to work together and be productive during an extended off-world stay.

Conducted atop the dome on  Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, HI-SEAS was designed to show that astronauts could survive the mental and physical rigors of a mission to Mars. The crew members could only leave their living facility if they wore spacesuits, and they could only eat simple foods such as canned or powdered goods. It was like camping, but for a much longer period of time.

Experiments like these are “vital when it comes to picking crews, figuring out how people are going to actually work on different kinds of missions, and… the human factors element of space travel [and] colonization,” Tristan Bassingthwaighte, a University of Hawaii at Manoa student who served as the architect for the HI-SEAS crew, said in a statement last August.

“I can give you my personal impression which is that a mission to Mars in the close future is realistic. I think the technological and psychological obstacles can be overcome,” said Cyprien Verseux, a HI-SEAS crew member from France. Another HI-SEAS experiment began back in January but is only expected to last eight months, according to a university press release, and one has also been scheduled to take place in 2018.

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Image credit: Getty Images

A giant crocodile-like creature that lived in Madagascar more than 150 million years ago had a large jaw and serrated teeth similar to those of the Tyrannosaurus rex, suggesting that it, like the predatory dinosaur, fed on bones and other hard animal tissues, a new study has revealed.

The species, whose scientific name is Razanandrongobe sakalavae (“giant lizard ancestor from Sakalava region”), had straight legs and a skull unlike those of modern-day crocodiles, according to BBC News. It is thought to be the earliest and largest member of a group of early crocodilians known as Notosuchians – a clade which lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

In fact, in a press release, lead author Cristiano Dal Sasso from the Natural History Museum of Milan and his colleagues reported that Razanandrongobe sakalavae (Razana, for short) predates what had been the earliest-known Notosuchians by around 42 million years.

Based on the shape of the skull and an analysis of the creature’s anatomical features, Dal Sasso and his colleagues identified Razana as a relative of South American baurusuchids and sebecids, a group of predators that had deep skulls and powerful erect limbs. Razana was reportedly about 7 meters long and weighed between 800 and 1,000 kilograms (about 1,700 to 2,200 pounds).

Creature walked upright, was capable of challenging dinosaurs

Like its relatives, Razana “could outcompete even theropod dinosaurs, at the top of the food chain,” Dal Sasso said in a statement. While the creature was previously known to scientists, it could not be officially classified until the discovery of new fossils that helped fill in gaps about the creature’s lineage.

What those fossils revealed, according to USA Today, is that Razana was roughly the same size as a pick-up truck and had 46 to 48 serrated teeth – which, according to the wear and tear found on those dental fossils, were used to devour the bones and tendons of its prey. In fact, Dal Sasso told the newspaper, even dinosaurs sometimes found their way onto the creature’s menu.

Razana “was really a bone-cruncher” and “could challenge a theropod dinosaur,” he explained. Its teeth had even larger serrations than the T. rex, which allowed the primitive crocodile to even consume theropods and pterosaurs. It likely stood at or near the top of the Middle Jurassic food chain and is believed to have been both a scavenger and an ambush predator.

Furthermore, Razana probably walked upright and was most likely capable of achieving speeds of up to 20 mph in short bursts, Joe Sertich, a researcher from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science who was not involved with the new study, told USA Today. The discovery of the fossils also indicates that Notosuchians most likely originated in southern Gondwana – a supercontinent comprised of Madagascar, Africa, Australia and South America, according to BBC News.

“Its geographic position during the period when Madagascar was separating from other landmasses is strongly suggestive of an endemic lineage. At the same time, it represents a further signal that the Notosuchia originated in southern Gondwana” study co-author Simone Maganuco, also from the Natural History Museum of Milan, added in a statement.

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Image credit: Milan Natural History Museum

Bones recently discovered at a series of graves in East China’s Shandong province suggest that people living in the region were once significantly taller than those who currently call the nation home, a team of archaeologists leading an ongoing excavation in the area have revealed.

Led by Fang Hui, head of the Shandong University school of history and culture, the researchers have unearthed the remnants of 104 houses, 205 graves, and 20 sacrificial pits at Jiaojia village in Zhangqiu District, Jinan City, the capital of Shandong, Xinhua News reported earlier this week.

Among their discoveries, IFL Science added were the bones of at least one male who was 1.9 meters (6.2 feet) tall, as well as several others who were at least 1.8 meters (about 5.9 feet) tall. While that might not seem all that tall, the website also pointed out that the average height of a modern Chinese man is just 1.72 meters (5.64 feet).

Some of the bodies were dated to around 5,000 years ago, and the taller men had been laid to rest in larger tombs than their shorter counterparts, the archaeologists said. They believe that this was because the taller men were members of a higher social class (possibly due at least in part to their height) and were able to acquire better food than the smaller citizens.

“Already agricultural at that time, people had diverse and rich food resources,” Fang told Xinhua News, “and thus their physique changed.” While the primary crop of the era was millet, some of the graves were also found to contain pig bones and teeth, the professor added.

Evidence of power struggle amongst the elite also discovered

The discovery of the remains of taller men in Shandong province should not come as a complete surprise, Xinhua News said, considering that modern residents consider height to be one of their distinguishing characteristics. In fact, as of 2015, the average height of 18-year-old men living there was 1.753 meters, while the national average in China was just 1.72 meters.

As for the ruins themselves, the houses suggest that the residents lived “quite comfortable” lives, with separate kitchens and bedrooms, the news service said. The region is thought to have been a political, cultural and economic hub some 5,000 years ago, according to the researchers, and clay embankments, colorful pottery, and items made from jade were also found.

The new excavations at Jiaojia provide new insight into the culture of those living in the lower reaches of the Yellow River between 4,500 and 5,000 years ago, Wang Yongbo of the Shandong Provincial Institute of Archeology told Xinhua. The researchers also reported finding damage to some of the head and leg bones, as well as to some of the artifacts, suggesting that there had been a power struggle amongst the higher-ranking citizens of the region.

Work at the site has recently been expanded from an initial area of 240,000 square meters to one square kilometer, the news service said. Only 2,000 square meters of that have been excavated so far, and “further study and excavation of the site is of great value to our understanding of the origin of culture in east China,” said Zhou Xiaobo, deputy head of Shandong’s provincial bureau of cultural heritage.

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Image credit:  Xinhua News

Techniques used by Roman architects approximately 2,000 years ago could be used to create longer-lasting buildings and sea walls capable of withstanding the rising ocean levels expected due to global climate change, according to the authors of a newly-published study.

Writing in the latest edition of journal American Mineralogist, University of Utah geology and geophysics professor Marie Jackson and her colleagues revealed that they used X-ray technology to study samples of Roman concrete made from volcanic ash, baked limestone and seawater.

Their analysis revealed that the concrete contains tiny growing crystals which, according to the Washington Post, appears to interact with the environment to prevent the building material from fracturing. The concrete, they explained, undergoes a rare chemical reaction in which crystals of aluminous tobermorite grow out of a second mineral known as phillipsite.

Furthermore, the authors found that the driving force behind this reaction was seawater, which permeated through cracks in the concrete, reacted with phillipsite (a hydrated potassium, calcium and aluminum silicate) found in the volcanic rock used in the building material and caused it to become more durable.

“Contrary to the principles of modern cement-based concrete, the Romans created a rock-like concrete that thrives in open chemical exchange with seawater,” Jackson, lead author of the new study, said earlier this week in a statement. “This is a concrete that apparently grows aluminum-tobermorite mineral cements over millennia.”

Technique could be used to prevent damage from rising seas

Jackson and her colleagues used imaging equipment at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to analyze concrete from an ancient harbors and breakwater sites, according to the Post. They hoped to discover the techniques used by Romans to create such long-lasting structures so that those methods could be replicated.

Roman concrete is “an extraordinarily rich material in terms of scientific possibility,” Philip Brune, a DuPont Pioneer scientist who has previously analyzed the engineering properties of Roman monuments but who was not involved in the new study, told the newspaper. “It’s the most durable building material in human history, and I say that as an engineer not prone to hyperbole.”

Jackson’s research, Brune added, is a “significant accomplishment” towards unlocking the secrets of this long-lasting construction material. The concrete, the researchers behind the new study said, behaves similarly to volcanic deposits found in underwater environments. Even more surprising, it appears to be stronger now than it was when it was originally building, indicating that the interactions with the seawater have increased the substance’s durability.

Currently, Jackson’s team is attempting to replicate the Romans’ results, but doing so has been challenging. As the study author explained to the Post, aluminous tobermorite is very difficult to produce, as extremely high temperatures are needed to synthesize small quantities. While Roman builders used a specific type of volcanic ash from an Italian quarry in their concrete, Jackson and her colleagues hope to replicate their results using volcanic rocks and California seawater.

They have already created several samples that are awaiting testing, the newspaper said, and if their efforts prove fruitful, they could lead to a material which could be used to build better sea walls in order to protect communities threatened by rising ocean levels. Unlike modern concrete, Roman concrete would grow stronger – not weaker – when exposed to ocean waves.

“[The research] opens up a completely new perspective on how concrete can be made – that what we consider corrosion processes can actually produce extremely beneficial mineral cement and lead to continued resilience, in fact, enhanced perhaps resilience over time,” Jackson told The Guardian. “ There are many applications but further work is needed to create those mixes. We’ve started but there is a lot of fine-tuning that needs to happen. The challenge is to develop methods that use common volcanic products.”

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Image credit: J.P. Oleson

Climate change is causing ocean temperatures to rise at a rapid rate, no matter which group of statistics are used to gauge the increase, according to a new analysis published this week in the journal Climate Dynamics that used three unique sets of data to confirm the discovery.

In their new paper, Dr. Gonjgie Wang from the Institute of Meteorology and Oceanography at China’s PLA University of Science and Technology, University of St. Thomas thermal and fluid sciences professor John Abraham and their colleagues reviewed three distinct ocean temperature measurements collected by different groups and found that each confirmed ocean warming.

“Although there’s some uncertainty in the distribution among Earth’s ocean basins, there’s no question that the ocean is heating rapidly,” Thomas wrote in an article published Monday by The Guardian. He added that the findings represented “a significant advancement” in such research, which reached the conclusion that “regardless of how you measure, who does the measurements, when or where the measurements are taken, we are warming.”

Calling ocean temperatures “the most important measurement of global warming,” the professor explained that scientists need to use data collected by several sensors spread out across the globe and placed at various depths. Furthermore, he said, these measurements need to be collected over several decades so that the researchers can establish long-term climate-related trends.

Study authors explain why climate data is not always in agreement

In the new study, Thomas said that he and his colleagues examined the three main factors which can impact the accuracy of ocean temperature data: “hot” or “cold” biases inherent in the sensors used to gather data, the lack of sensors in all locations at any given time, and the selection of the climate “baseline” used by experts for the sake of comparison to current heating trends.

Sensor biases, he explained, can depend on how the water is tested. For instance, water collected in buckets for measurements tended to be slightly cooler than water that was tested using sensors placed directly on a ship’s hull (which were closer to the vessel’s engines). Similar biases can be seen throughout the years when oceanographers obtain new technology, Thomas said. In order to obtain an accurate measurement of water temperature change, such biases must be removed.

In terms of coverage, much of the current climate data comes from the ARGO fleet – a group of around 3,800 devices spread out throughout the ocean. However, Thomas noted, this information only dates back to the fleet’s launch in 2005. Before then, ocean temperature measurements were not uniform, and scientists were forced to fill in the gaps using a “mapping” strategy. Finally, the choice of baseline climatology is essential to determining how much temperatures have increased and over how long of a period of time, he wrote.

In their study, Thomas said that he and his colleagues “looked at the different ways that three groups make decisions about mapping, bias, and climatology. We not only asked how much the oceans are warming, but how the warming differs for various areas (ocean basins) and various depths. We found that each ocean basin has warmed significantly.” While there were differences amongst the three groups, he said, each dataset agrees that ocean temperatures are on the rise.

“Our study confirms again a robust global ocean warming since 1970,” Dr. Wang explained. “However, there is substantial uncertainty in decadal scale ocean heat redistribution, which explains the contradictory results related to the ocean heat changes during the ‘slowdown’ of global warming in the recent decade. Therefore, we recommend a comprehensive evaluation in the future for the existing ocean subsurface temperature datasets.”

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Image credit: Unsplash/Martin Dorch

“Sex sells” – it’s an advertising phrase that’s well known and widely accepted, and a lot of the ads we’re presented with appear to support the idea. But this conventional wisdom is more complex than it seems.

According to a major study, sex gets attention but doesn’t necessarily sell.

The research analyzed almost 80 advertising studies from a span of more than three decades.

“We found that people remember ads with sexual appeals more than those without, but that effect doesn’t extend to the brands or products that are featured in the ads,” said University of Illinois advertising professor John Wirtz, the lead author of the research.

Participants in the 78 peer-reviewed studies examined were no more likely to remember brands that used sex to sell products. They were also no more motivated to purchase the relevant products.

In fact, there was a high probability that participants would have a negative attitude towards such ads.

“We found literally zero effect on participants’ intention to buy products in ads with a sexual appeal,” Wirtz said. “This assumption that sex sells – well, no, according to our study, it doesn’t. There’s no indication that there’s a positive effect.”

The research, published in the International Journal of Advertising, also involved Johnny V. Sparks, a professor of journalism at Ball State University, and Thais M. Zimbres, a doctoral student at the University of California, Davis.

A big difference between men and women

Despite the surprising findings, some things we think we know about the world are simple truths – and sexual content appealing to men more than women is one of them.

“The strongest finding was probably the least surprising, which is that males, on average, like ads with sexual appeals, and females dislike them,” Wirtz said. “However, we were surprised at how negative female attitudes were toward these ads.”

The authors pointed out that analysis of the collated studies gave a very large sample and therefore highly reliable results.

The findings are a reminder for advertisers of a problem which applies to ads with and without sexual content. That making an ad memorable does not necessarily make people want to buy the product more.

Sometimes, a really good ad can make viewers remember the ad more than the product it is selling, and sometimes, even if they remember the product, the fact that its ad was funny, poignant or sexy doesn’t necessarily make them want to buy.

As to whether advertisers will continue to rely on sexual content, the University of Illinois News Bureau, which carried the story, pointed to the example of a national restaurant chain who for a long time advertised its food using half-dressed models in suggestive poses. The chain made a major departure from that in a commercial made for the most recent Super Bowl.

“If the ‘sexy ads’ had been effective, it’s unlikely the company or ad agency would have made such a drastic change,” he said. “When a product is moving, people don’t make changes.”

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Image credit: Unsplash/Throng Vo

An autonomous targeting system originally announced by NASA last summer has allowed the Mars Curiosity rover to drastically increase the number of times per day it blasts rocks with its laser instrument, allowing it to collect more data than ever before, the agency has revealed.

Known as the Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS), the program allows Curiosity to select its own targets for its ChemCam instrument, then zap those rocks with its onboard laser instrument so that it can analyze the resulting gases, The Verge explained.

Before the software was uploaded last May, the rover was firing its laser an average of 256 times per day, the website said. From May 2016 to April 2017, however, that number spiked to 327 times per day, which will provide more information about the composition of Martian rocks.

AEGIS, which NASA confirms will also be used on its upcoming Mars 2020 mission, allows the rover to continue working when the ground team is unable to contact it, according to a new study published this week in the journal Science Robotics. The software, the agency said, is used nearly every time there is enough power to do so, and thus far, it is paying dividends.

“Time is precious on Mars, lead author Raymond Francis, lead system engineer for the program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, explained in a statement. “AEGIS allows us to make use of time that otherwise wasn’t available because we were waiting for someone on Earth to make a decision.”

Target selection success rate has nearly quadrupled, says NASA

During its first year of service, AEGIS directed the ChemCam instrument 54 times, the authors reported in their study. This has enabled scientists to discover several interesting minerals, such as higher silica and chlorine quantities in nearby rocks, and helped them determine what course of action the spacecraft would take the following day, according to NASA.

“The goal is to provide more information for the science team,” said JPL’s Tara Estlin, study co-author and AEGIS team leader. “AEGIS has increased the total data coming from ChemCam by operating during times when the rover would otherwise just be waiting for a command.”

Before the new software was deployed, it would take ground-based engineers up to 20 minutes to send or receive signals to or from Mars, and that’s assuming that the Earth’s constant rotation did not prevent communication with the Red Planet at a given time. Not only does the program allow scientists to save time during the day, it allows Curiosity to continue working while they sleep.

“You’ve got all this science time after [each] drive, and often you have a few hours of daylight left, but Earth has not yet seen this new place that the rover is in,” Francis told The Verge. “And there’s no ability for people on the Earth to make decisions about what to target. That decision has to be made on Mars, and now we can make it on Mars. So that makes use of those hours that otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to do these kinds of measurements.”

Prior to AEGIS, rover operators were only around 24% successful at finding the kind of rocks they were searching for using a technique known as “blind targeting,” in which Curiosity would be instructed to fire its laser at a specific angle with no visual confirmation of what was there. In the year since the vehicle started selecting its own targets, however, the success rate increased to 93%, according to The Verge.

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Image credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech

While dogs are believed to be the first animal to be domesticated, cats – as one might expect from a feline – took their sweet time trying to decide whether or not they wanted to bond with humans, according to a new, comprehensive genetic analysis published this week.

The authors of the study, which appeared in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, looked at the DNA of around 200 feline species representing more than 9,000 years, including mummified Egyptian cats and modern-day African wildcats, National Geographic reported on Monday.

Based on that analysis, the researchers concluded that felines lived alongside humans for several thousand years before actually becoming domesticated, and that the earliest ancestors of  today’s housecats came to Europe from southwest Asia as early as 4400 BC, the publication added.

Lead author Claudio Ottoni, a paleogeneticist from the University of Leuven, and his colleagues analyzed DNA from the bones, teeth, skin and hair of 100 to 9,000-year-old felines discovered at archeological sites in Western Asia, Europe and Africa. They found that all modern-day cats can be traced back genetically to the African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica), a subspecies of wildcat found in North Africa and the Near East, according to a press release.

Furthermore, as Ottoni told Nat Geo, the first encounter between humans and felines most likely took place between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, as cats opted to enter into a mutually-beneficial partnership as the unofficial rodent-hunter for humans. In short, people did not domesticate cats – cats decided to allow themselves to become domesticated, he said.

Trait-specific breeding doesn’t show up until the 19th century

The researchers also found that a second feline lineage comprised of African cats found all over Egypt spread into the Mediterranean and throughout most of the Old World by around 1500 BC, according to Nat Geo. This lineage, the study authors said, likely were tame and social, traits that would have made them appealing companions for humans as they traveled.

Unlike dogs, which were extensively bred to alter their appearance and body shape, the genes of cats have changed very little throughout the course of history, the researchers found. The notable exception is the distinctive dots and stripes of the tabby cat, which the DNA analysis showed had first appeared in Turkey in the 1300s, according to NBC News.

While the genes for the tabby cat coat can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire, Nat Geo said that the analysis found that they did not become common on domesticated felines until the 18th century. The first selective breeding among cats did not appear until the 1800s, they noted. This marked a seminal point in the human-feline relationship, said Ars Technica: it was the first time that people assumed control of cat breeding, as they had done with other domestic species.

“The comprehensive aDNA [ancient DNA] genetic study of cats across time and space that we present, provides answers to longstanding questions concerning the domestication process of the cat and contributes to a better understanding of how humans have reshaped global biodiversity through species translocations,” Ottoni and his colleagues explained in their paper.

“By revealing the original phylogeographic distribution of wildcats and its profound modification through human-mediated dispersal of tamed cats through time, we show that both Near Eastern and Egyptian cat lineages contributed at different times to the maternal genetic pool of domestic cats,” the study authors wrote. Feline domestication, they added, was “a complex, long-term process featuring extensive translocations that allowed admixture events between geographically separated cat populations at different points in time.”

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Image credit: Erike Leong/Unsplash