The upper hand: study points to early tool use by human ancestors

	Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News
	The upper hand: study points to early tool use by human ancestors Scientists said on Thursday an analysis of fossil hand bones of the species Australopithecus africanus that lived in southern Africa about 3 million to 2 million years ago indicated this human forerunner could use its hands in ways very much like modern people. "Forceful precision grips have been linked specifically to stone tool use and tool making, and so it is possible that Australopithecus africanus was using stone tools as well," said Tracy Kivell of Britain's University of Kent, who helped lead the study published in the journal Science with fellow University of Kent paleoanthropologist Matthew Skinner. This species appeared roughly a half million years before the first evidence of stone tools. The traditional view of scientists is that a species called Homo habilis that appeared about 2.4 million years ago was the pioneer in stone tool use in the human lineage. Read More » Mountain-Size Asteroid to Fly by Earth Monday: How NASA Will Watch A mountain-size asteroid will zoom past Earth Monday (Jan. 26), marking the closest pass by such a large space rock until 2027. Asteroid 2004 BL86, which is about 1,800 feet (550 meters) wide, will come within 745,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) of our planet Monday — about three times the distance between Earth and the moon. While this flyby poses no threat to Earth, it does present a rare opportunity to get a good look at a near-Earth asteroid, NASA officials say. The plan is to track the fast-moving asteroid using the 230-foot (70 m) dish-shaped Goldstone antenna at NASA's Deep Space Network in California, as well as the 1,000-foot (305 m) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Read More » In a first, sea otter pup conceived in wild born in California lab A baby sea otter has made history as the first pup born in captivity to a mother impregnated in the wild, and is healthy and developing normally, researchers in California said on Friday. The bundle of joy was born in November at the Long Marine Laboratory on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz, said Nicole Thometz, a researcher in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. To better the otter's chance of survival off the Central California shoreline, researchers are limiting their interaction with the pup, who was not named and whose sex is not known, she said. Read More » Football Physics: Why Deflated Balls Are Easier to Catch After an inspection revealed that some of the footballs used during Sunday's NFL playoff game were slightly deflated, many people are asking whether the balls gave the New England Patriots an unfair advantage over the Indianapolis Colts. Last Sunday (Jan. 18), the Patriots landed a spot at the Super Bowl after beating the Colts 45 to 7. A ball that is less inflated is easier to deform and grip, said Miguel Morales, an associate professor of physics at the University of Washington. "Ideally, the way people are taught to catch it is to put their hands around the nose of the ball," Morales told Live Science. Read More » Google Maps Takes Landlubbers on a Visit to Old Ironsides Now, users can tour the USS Constitution using Google Maps' Street View. Google published the 360-degree virtual tour Tuesday (Jan. 20), using pictures taken in the fall of 2014. The ship, nicknamed Old Ironsides, launched in 1797 and was named by President George Washington himself. The USS Constitution became famous during the War of 1812, when it defeated the British ship HMS Guerriere. Read More » Why Your Next Fitness Tracker Will Be Smarter The newest fitness trackers are going beyond just a simple accelerometer to carry a host of new sensors, from devices that measure the electrical properties of your skin to optical sensors that can measure your heartbeat. The new devices do provide an incremental improvement over the earlier ones, but the real breakthroughs are still a few years off, said Jason Heikenfeld, an electrical engineer and the director of the Novel Devices Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati. Most of the new devices still don't go beyond providing raw data for users to interpret, and are still far from making health predictions and prescriptions, said Dan Ledger, who researches wearables and health technologies at Endeavour Partners, a digital technology consulting company in Massachusetts. The new devices, however, are increasingly packed with much more sophisticated sensors. Read More »