Stone Age Animal

Urine Could Solve a

Mystery about
Technological
Development
thien nhien ki
Millennia of a rodentlike animal’s urine preserve
chu yeu
crucial data that could help scientists understand
nhay vot
early humans’ leap forward
• By Elise Cutts on April 1, 2023
Scientific American April 2023 Issue

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Rock hyrax e xcrement over ten s of thousands of yea rs h old s crucial c lim ate clues. Credit: D SPhot ographyC PT/Getty Ima ges

High on a sheer cliff in South Africa's Swartberg mountain range last

nha co khi hau hoc
September, University of Utah paleoclimatologist Tyler Faith finally
reached something he hoped might solve one of anthropology's
muc tieu ri ra
stickiest mysteries. His target looked like goo that had oozed from the
sandstone cliff and hardened into a foot-thick slab of black amber. Gas
 deo,duc
mask on, Faith got to work hewing away a 70-pound chunk; dust flung
from his chainsaw quickly filled the air with a yellow-gold haze.

lo chan long
“It just gets in your pores,” Faith says. “The second you jump in the
shower and that stuff finally rehydrates, it's like: Imagine the most
ngo hem
stinky alleyway where people have been peeing. It's awesome. But
yeah. All my gear now smells like pee.”

chat
The substance is fossilized urine from untold generations of
gong nhu loai soc
marmotlike critters called rock hyraxes—and it acts as an excellent
record of the ancient climate. Sticky and viscous like molasses, hyrax
urine hardens quickly in air. It traps pollen grains and charcoal, telling
scientists when particular plants grew and wildfires raged. It also
preserves chemical isotopes indicating precipitation and temperature.
And the neat layers of the urine mounds or “middens,” which form
where the animals habitually relieve themselves, can be
precisely radiocarbon-dated.
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Faith and his colleagues are using these clues to investigate

controversial links between ancient climate change and a dramatic
technological leap that occurred between 66,000 and 25,000 years ago,
from the Middle to the Later Stone Age: that's when our early ancestors
developed new tools and cultural strategies that modern hunter-
gatherers still use today. The researchers are using hyrax middens to
build a high-resolution regional climate history for South Africa, where
a team of students and scientists from across the continent is also re-
excavating Boomplaas Cave—one of very few places with a rich
archaeological record of humans' transition into the Later Stone Age.

“It's really a period where the lights get turned on in terms of complex
social and technological behavior,” says the team's excavation leader
Justin Pargeter, an archaeologist at New York University and the
University of Johannesburg. “The behavioral innovations across this
transition were highly successful. And they led to our species really
starting to dominate the ecosystems that they lived in.”

Later Stone Age people seem to have started making a priority of

“economizing something,” says University of Michigan anthropologist
Brian Stewart, who is not involved in the research. Whether limited by
raw materials, time or perhaps their tool kit's weight, people of this
time began crafting smaller, more modular stone tools whose
“bladelets” could be swapped out like today's replaceable drill bits.
Symbolism and social organization advanced, too: Pargeter notes that
Later Stone Age sites are full of beads, which could be used to signal
belonging and identity, as well as ocher, a clay pigment used to paint
bodies and add identifying symbols to objects.

The Later Stone Age began in the run-up to the peak of the last Ice Age,
and many researchers think the period's climate could have
contributed to humans' technological and behavioral changes. Some
propose that an increasingly volatile climate may have forced our
ancestors to get more creative at effectively exploiting resources. But
this is tricky to rigorously prove, particularly because in much of Africa
the transition began just beyond the limit of radiocarbon dating—
which doesn't work well for samples more than 50,000 years old.
Without accurately dated archaeological material, it's impossible to
draw clear lines between climate events and technology.
Brian Chase sampling a hyrax midden in the Kordiersrivier Valley in
South Africa. Credit: Tyler Faith

Boomplaas Cave offers a way around this problem. The transition out
of the Middle Stone Age began later there, so the cave's artifacts are
within reach of accurate radiocarbon dating. And Boomplaas is one of
few archaeological sites on Earth with a continuous record that spans
the transition. But researchers here face another challenge: South
Africa's sparse climate history.
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“We don't have traditional archives like ice cores or [cave deposits] and
lake records,” says the research team's pollen expert, paleoecologist
Lynne Quick of Nelson Mandela University. “So before the hyrax
midden stuff, we had very limited and discontinuous records.”

Most attempts to link climate change to the Later Stone Age transition
have focused on measurements from polar ice cores and deep-sea
sediments. But these materials primarily reveal general, global climate
trends. As with anthropogenic climate change today, ancient climate
change affected different areas in different ways. Faith says South
Africa's paleoclimate is still so little known that it's unclear whether the
region was dry and harsh or wet and lush at the peak of the last Ice
Age.

Team member Brian Chase, a paleoclimatologist at the University of

Montpellier in France, saw a possible solution to this puzzle in hyrax
middens, where these small mammals—which look like rodents but are
more closely related to elephants—have dutifully returned to do their
business for millennia. Chase has devoted his career to unlocking these
overlooked data troves and has collected hundreds of samples from
southern Africa. “Personally, I think they're the best
paleoenvironmental archives on the planet,” Chase says. “It is a
uniquely rich resource.”

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These middens are “beautiful” archives, Stewart says, because they can
be radiocarbon-dated along with the nearby Later Stone Age transition
artifacts. “These are continuous records, and that's an amazing thing to
have—just like the ice cores, but they're right next to your site.”

“This is the way we're going to actually move forward,” he adds,

“instead of making these kind of wavy pronouncements about what the
climate is doing at a global level.”
ADVERTISEMENT

Faith, Chase and Quick sampled middens near Boomplaas Cave last
September and received the first radiocarbon dates from the samples
earlier this year. Combining the continuing Boomplaas excavations
with their unconventional climate record, the researchers say, offers a
real shot at finally unraveling the contentious links between climate
and technological change in the Later Stone Age—and beyond.

“There's this whole other sphere of questions that we're going to be

able to jump into by having those giant blocks of pee to play around
with,” Faith says. “We hope it'll be useful to a lot of people.”
Editor’s Note (3/21/23): This article was edited after posting to
correct the spelling of Justin Pargeter’s name.
This article was originally published with the title "Urine Luck" in
Scientific American 328, 4, 10-13 (April 2023)
MIND & BRAIN

Tough Choices: How

Making Decisions
Tires Your Brain can kiet
The brain is like a muscle: when it gets depleted, it

becomes less effective.

• By On Amir on July 22, 2008

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The human mind is a remarkable device. Nevertheless, it is not without
limits. Recently, a growing body of research has focused on a particular
mental limitation, which has to do with our ability to use a mental trait
dieu hanh
known as executive function. When you focus on a specific task for an
thay vi
extended period of time or choose to eat a salad instead of a piece of
cake, you are flexing your executive function muscles. Both thought
khang cu
processes require conscious effort-you have to resist the temptation to
let your mind wander or to indulge in the sweet dessert. It turns out,
however, that use of executive function—a talent we all rely on
khap
throughout the day—draws upon a single resource of limited capacity in
the brain. When this resource is exhausted by one activity, our mental
can tro
capacity may be severely hindered in another, seemingly unrelated
activity. (See here and here.)

Imagine, for a moment, that you are facing a very difficult decision
about which of two job offers to accept. One position offers good pay
and job security, but is pretty mundane, whereas the other job is really
interesting and offers reasonable pay, but has questionable job
tinh trang kho xu
security. Clearly you can go about resolving this dilemma in many ways.
Few people, however, would say that your decision should be affected
or influenced by whether or not you resisted the urge to eat cookies
prior to contemplating the job offers. A decade of psychology research
suggests otherwise. Unrelated activities that tax the executive function
have important lingering effects, and may disrupt your ability to make
such an important decision. In other words, you might choose the
wrong job because you didn't eat a cookie.

Taxing Tasks

But what types of actions exhaust executive function and affect

tiep theo
subsequent decision-making? Until recently, researchers focused on
activities that involved the exertion of self-control or the regulation of
vat va
attention. For instance, it's long been recognized that strenuous
cognitive tasks—such as taking the SAT—can make it harder to focus
later on. But recent results suggests that these taxing mental activities
 rong hon pham vi
may be much broader in scope-and may even involve the very common
activity of making choices itself. In a series of experiments and field
studies, University of Minnesota psychologist Kathleen Vohs and
chi la
colleagues repeatedly demonstrate that the mere act of making a
selection may deplete executive resources. For example, in one study
the researchers found that participants who made more choices in a
kien tri so hoc
mall were less likely to persist and do well in solving simple algebra
problems. In another task in the same study, students who had to mark
preferences about the courses they would take to satisfy their degree
requirements were much more likely to procrastinate on preparing for
an important test. Instead of studying, these "tired" minds engaged in
distracting leisure activities.

Why is making a determination so taxing? Evidence implicates two

su cam ket danh doi
important components: commitment and tradeoff resolution. The first
is predicated on the notion that committing to a given course requires
switching from a state of deliberation to one of implementation. In
other words, you have to make a transition from thinking about
options to actually following through on a decision. This switch,
according to Vohs, requires executive resources. In a parallel
investigation, Yale University professor Nathan Novemsky and his
colleagues suggest that the mere act of resolving tradeoffs may be
depleting. For example, in one study, the scientists show that people
who had to rate the attractiveness of different options were much less
depleted than those who had to actually make choices between the very
same options.
ken chon
Choosy about Choices
ngu y
These findings have important real world implications. If making
choices depletes executive resources, then "downstream" decisions
might be affected adversely when we are forced to choose with a
fatigued brain. Indeed, University of Maryland psychologist Anastasiya
Pocheptsova and colleagues found exactly this effect: individuals who
had to regulate their attention—which requires executive control—
made significantly different choices than people who did not. These
 khuan mau
different choices follow a very specific pattern: they become reliant on
more a more simplistic, and often inferior, thought process, and can
thus fall prey to perceptual decoys. For example, in one experiment
participants who were asked to ignore interesting subtitles in an
otherwise boring film clip were much more likely to choose an option
moi nhu
that stood next to a clearly inferior "decoy"—an option that was similar
to one of the good choices, but was obviously not quite as good—than
participants who watched the same clip but were not asked to ignore
anything. Presumably, trying to control one's attention and to ignore
an interesting cue exhausted the limited resource of the executive
functions, making it significantly more difficult to ignore the existence
of the otherwise irrelevant inferior decoy. Subjects with overtaxed
brains made worse decisions.

These experimental insights suggest that the brain works like a muscle:
when depleted, it becomes less effective. Furthermore, we should take
this knowledge into account when making decisions. If we've just spent
lots of time focusing on a particular task, exercising self-control or even
if we've just made lots of seemingly minor choices, then we probably
shouldn't try to make a major decision. These deleterious carryover
effects from a tired brain may have a strong shaping effect on our lives.
Mind Matters is edited by Jonah Lehrer, the science writer behind the
blog The Frontal Cortex and the book Proust was a Neuroscientist.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

On Am ir is a ssist ant professor of m arketing at the Rady Sch ool of Management at the Un iversity of California at San D iego.

The First Picture of

the Black Hole at the
Milky Way’s Heart tiet lo

Has Been Revealed

The historic image of Sagittarius A* is the
dinh cao
culmination of a decades-long astronomical quest—

and a crucial step toward a new understanding of

black holes, gravity and spacetime

• By Seth Fletcher on May 12, 2022
• ‫أعرض هذا باللغة العربية‬

•
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•
•
•
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First ima ge of Sagitta riu s A*, the superma ssive blac k hole at the center of the Milky Way, a s captured by the Event Horizon Tele scope. Credit: EHT Colla boration
The mystery at the heart of the Milky Way has finally been solved. This
hop bao dong loat
morning, at simultaneous press conferences around the world, the
astronomers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) revealed the first
image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of
the Milky Way. It’s not the first picture of a black hole this
collaboration has given us—that was the iconic image of M87*, which
they revealed on April 10, 2019. But it’s the one they wanted most.
sieu lon
Sagittarius A* is our own private supermassive black hole, the still
xoay quanh
point around which our galaxy revolves.
think
Scientists have long thought that a supermassive black hole hidden
deep in the chaotic central region of our galaxy was the only possible
ki di
explanation for the bizarre things that happen there—such as giant
stars slingshotting around an invisible something in space at an
phan luong lu
appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Yet they’ve been hesitant to
say that outright. For example, when astronomers Reinhard Genzel
and Andrea Ghez shared a portion of the 2020 Nobel Prize in
Physics for their work on Sagittarius A*, their citation specified that
gon nhe su vat
they were awarded for “the discovery of a supermassive compact object
at the centre of our galaxy,” not the revelation of a “black hole.” The
time for that sort of caution has expired.

At the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., this morning, Feryal

Özel, a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Arizona
and a member of the EHT Science Council, introduced the picture, a
dark ring framed by three shining knots of trillion-degree gas. “I met
[Sagittarius A*] 20 years ago and have loved it and tried to understand
it since,” Özel said. “But until now, we didn’t have the direct picture.”
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Black holes trap everything that falls in, including light, so they are, in
a very real sense, unseeable. But they warp spacetime around them so
chieu sang
severely that, when they are illuminated by glowing streams of infalling
cat vun
matter shredded in their gravitational grip, they cast a “shadow.” The
shadow is about two and a half times larger than a black hole’s event
horizon: its boundary and its defining feature, the line in spacetime
through which nothing that passes can ever return.
The EHT captures images of this shadow using a technique called very
long baseline interferometry (VLBI), which combines radio
luc dia
observatories on multiple continents to form a virtual Earth-size
telescope, an instrument with the highest resolution in all of
astronomy. In April 2017 the EHT collaboration spent several nights
pointing that virtual instrument at Sagittarius A* and other
supermassive black holes. We’ve already seen the first finished product
from that effort: M87*. The team also captured the raw data for the
chien dich chuyen doi
Sagittarius A* image in the same campaign, but converting those
observations into an actual picture took much longer.

That’s because Sagittarius A* is constantly changing. M87*, the black

hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87, or M87, is so huge that the
xoay quy dao
matter swirling around it takes many hours to complete a full orbit.
Practically speaking, that means you can stare at it for a long time, and
it will scarcely change. Sagittarius A* is more than 1,000 times less
massive, so it changes about 1,000 times faster, as matter moves in
tighter, quicker orbits around the black hole. Katie Bouman, a
California Institute of Technology computer scientist and astronomer
who co-leads the EHT’s imaging working group, said that matter orbits
Sagittarius A* so quickly that it changes “minute to minute.” Imagine
troi di
taking a time-lapse photograph of a speeding bullet—doing so isn’t
easy. That’s why extracting a clear image of Sagittarius A* from the
data collected in the 2017 observing run has been the work of several
years.

khong kien dinh

If Sagittarius A*’s mercurial nature made it hard to see, it also makes it
an exciting laboratory for future studies of black holes and Einstein’s
general theory of relativity, his hallowed theory of gravity. Through
decades of study with all manner of telescopes, astronomers already
knew Sagittarius A*’s basic measurements (its mass, diameter and
distance from Earth) to great accuracy. Now, at last, they’ve gained the
ability to watch it evolve—to watch as it feeds on flaring, flashing
streams of matter—in real time.
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 LIFTING A MANY-LAYERED VEIL

nghi ngo
Scientists started to suspect that a black hole lurked in the heart of the
Milky Way in the early 1960s, not long after the discovery of active
galactic nuclei—extremely bright regions at the cores of some galaxies
ngau nghien
illuminated by voraciously feeding supermassive black holes. From our
perspective here on Earth, active galactic nuclei are a thing of the
past—we only see them in the distant universe. Where did they all go?
In 1969 English astrophysicist Donald Lynden-Bell argued that they
didn’t go anywhere. Instead, he said, they just went to sleep after their
heavy meals—dormant supermassive black holes, he predicted, are
slumbering all around us in the hearts of spiral galaxies, including our
own.

In 1974 American astronomers Bruce Balick and Robert Brown pointed

radio telescopes in Green Bank, W. Va., at the center of the Milky Way
dom mo
and discovered a dim speck they suspected was our galaxy’s central
black hole. They found the speck in a slice of sky known as Sagittarius
A. Radiation from the new source was lighting up—or “exciting”—
surrounding clouds of hydrogen. Brown borrowed from the
danh phap nguyen tu
nomenclature of atomic physics, in which excited atoms are marked
with an asterisk, and named the newfound speck Sagittarius A*.

For the next two decades, radio astronomers kept gradually improving
their view of Sagittarius A*, but they were limited by a lack of suitable
telescopes, relatively primitive technology (think reel-to-reel magnetic
tape) and the inherent difficulty of looking into the galactic center.

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 nhieu lop che phu
Sagittarius A* is concealed by a multilayered veil. The first layer is the
galactic plane—26,000 light-years’ worth of gas and dust that blocks
thien ha
visible light. Radio waves sail through the galactic plane unimpeded,
but they’re obscured by the veil’s second layer—the scattering screen, a
turbulent patch of space where density variations in the interstellar
medium knock radio waves slightly off course. The final layer
concealing Sagittarius A* is the obliterated matter surrounding the
black hole itself. Peering through that barrier is a bit like peeling off an
onion’s skins. The outer layers emit longer-wavelength light, so making
VLBI work with shorter-wavelength light would enable closer-in views
approaching the black hole’s event horizon. That, however, was a major
technological challenge.

Astronomers using other techniques besides VLBI initially had more

success, steadily gathering indirect evidence that Sagittarius A*’s
“speck” was actually a seething supermassive black hole. In the 1980s
physicist Charles Townes and his colleagues showed that gas clouds in
the galactic center were moving in ways that only made sense if they
were under the influence of some great, unseen gravitating mass. And
in the 1990s Ghez and Genzel independently began tracking the orbits
of giant blue stars in the galactic center, mapping their motion around
a heavy but hidden pivot point.
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Meanwhile the situation for radio astronomers improved. In the late
1990s and early 2000s a new generation of high-frequency radio
telescopes started to come online—telescopes that, if augmented with
lots of bespoke equipment, could participate in VLBI observations at
the microwave frequencies thought to shine from the edge of
Sagittarius A*’s shadow. At the same time, the computing revolution
that led to solid-state hard drives and smartphones in every pocket
vastly increased the amount of data that each observatory in a network
of radio telescopes could record and process.
In 2007 a small precursor for the EHT took advantage of these trends
and used a trio of telescopes in Hawaii, California and New Mexico to
pierce the veil surrounding Sagittarius A*. They were far from making
an image, but they saw something.
Scientists had known for a while that a black hole should, in certain
circumstances, cast visible shadows. In 1973 physicist James Bardeen
predicted that a black hole in front of a bright background would show
its silhouette, although he decided that “there seems to be no hope of
observing this effect.” And in 2000 astrophysicists Heino Falcke,
Fulvio Melia and Eric Agol had shown that a microwave-gathering,
Earth-size radio telescope should be able to see the shadow of
Sagittarius A* against the glow of its surrounding ring of shattered
matter.

Half a decade afterward, a few dozen of the astronomers and

astrophysicists laboring in this obscure corner of astronomy agreed on
the formal goal of building a virtual planet-scale radio telescope to
observe that shadow. The first official kickoff meeting for the project
occurred in January 2012, and the EHT was born.
Five years later, after growing into a collaboration of more than 200
scientists with eight participating observatories across the globe, the
team took its first realistic shot at seeing the shadow of Sagittarius A*.
Over the course of 10 days in April 2017, telescopes in North America,
South America, Hawaii, Europe and Antarctica collectively zoomed in
on the galactic center and other black holes, gathering 65 hours of data
on 1,024 eight-terabyte hard drives, which were shipped to
supercomputer banks in Massachusetts and Germany for correlation.
Five years after that, the elated EHT researchers showed the world that
their experiment worked. “We’ve been working on this for so long that,
every once in a while, you have to pinch yourself,” Bouman said this
morning. “This is the black hole at the center of our galaxy!”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Seth Fletcher is chief features editor at Scientific American. His book Einstein's Shadow (Ecco, 2018) is
about the Event Horizon Telescope and the quest to take the first picture of a black hole.
 may bay khong nguoi lai

Drones Sample Rare

Specimens from
Cliffs and Other
Dangerous Places
Flying robots help researchers identify and protect

threatened plants and other species in places that are

inaccessible to humans
• By Susan Cosier on October 12, 2022

•
•
•
•
•
•

A Wilkesia hobdyi sa mple collected with the Ma mba, a drone sampling tool. Credit: Ben Nybe rg, National T ropica l Botanica l Garden

On a knife-edge ridge on Kauai, a delicate little plant with a tuft of

yellow flowers sprouts from the rock. The only sounds are the wind, the
thi tham ngam nga
murmur of waves far below—and the hum of drone propellers. The
ren ri
whine gets louder as another drone suspended from the first encloses
thiet bi
the plant with two arms, a blade slicing through the stem. The device
then gently lifts the plant, a member of the genus Schiedea, part of the
hoa cam chuong
carnation family. As the tiny specimen’s leaves flutter in the air, the
drone descends and delivers it directly to researchers waiting below.
This scene—repeated dozens of times with various plants on the
Hawaiian island’s tropical cliffsides as part of a new study—shows
how drones can help scientists pluck rare and endangered plants from
spots that would otherwise be dangerous, if not impossible, for humans
to reach. Collecting samples is often necessary to better understand the
canh ngo
plights of these species, and how to save them. “It’s a fabulous
development and use of technology to get a lot more information than
a person trudging around,” says Warren Wagner, a research botanist at
the Smithsonian Institution. He was not part of the study but serves as
a research associate at the National Tropical Botanical Garden, one of
the institutions involved.*
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Credit: Outreach Robotics

The study, published recently in Nature Scientific Reports, builds on
decades of botanical investigations on Kauai, which has more than 250
native plant species. Historically, botanists have rappelled down the
island’s sheer rock faces to reach specific plants, going to extremes for
samples that they can raise in a nursery to perpetuate species at risk of
extinction. Ben Nyberg, a geographer and drone specialist at the
National Tropical Botanical Garden, wanted to try using remote-
controlled flying robots in places that are difficult to access.

thuong mai nang

Nyberg and his team used a commercially available drone to heft a
separate robotic unit that they built from scratch and named the
Mamba. When conceptualizing the device, the researchers had first
tried to figure out how plant-picking arms could be made to reach out
horizontally from a hovering drone itself. This idea quickly got
complicated, says study co-author Guillaume Charron, an engineer
from Outreach Robotics. “That’s when we started brainstorming and
we came up with the idea of suspending a remote-controlled robotic
ben duoi
arm” on cables beneath a drone. Because the Mamba doesn’t have to
lift itself, an operator can use its propellers to keep it steady and
maneuver it sideways precisely enough.
The Mamba handing off a sample of Lysimachia iniki to team member Scott
Heintzman. Credit: Ben Nyberg, National Tropical Botanical Garden
 lay mau
The Mamba’s sampling components include a foam-padded grasping
co tay
arm that can move like a wrist, and a hook that draws a plant’s stem
toward a blade. The team is now considering how to equip the Mamba
may hut but
with other tools, such as a vacuum that could suck in plant material or
phun
a nozzle that could spray a slurry of seeds and growing medium onto a
cliffside for replanting.
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Similar drone systems could help researchers reach other forbidding

areas such as the tabletop mountains that jut above the Amazon jungle,
or the sky islands (isolated mountain ranges rising abruptly from the
desert) of the southwestern U.S. “The drone system could be used in a
variety of additional applications like tree canopy studies, depositing
and [data-collecting devices] in a range of environments, or even
planting trees,” says Nyberg, a study co-author who is completing a
Ph.D. at the University of Copenhagen. “Basically, this allows users to
reach completely inaccessible areas, wherever they may be.”
The carnation species plucked from Kauai’s high ridges appears to be
a Schiedea never identified there before. Its seeds are now growing at
the University of California, Irvine, with help from botanists Ann Sakai
and Steve Weller—a married couple who have studied Schiedea for
more than three decades and were impressed by the information
gleaned from the drone’s sampling. “They have been able to map in
detail the population in a way that we could just never do by
rappelling,” Weller says. “I’m impressed, and I certainly think that it’s a
really nice new tool to be able to know more about these plants.”
*Editor’s Note (10/13/22): This sentence was edited after posting to
correct the description of Warren Wagner’s position at the National
Tropical Botanical Garden.

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A version of this article with the title “A Daring Collection” was
adapted for inclusion in the February 2023 issue of Scientific
American.