The driver for human evolution, an eventful Christmas day and the truth about saber-tooth cats all found their way into our top cool stories in Science this week.
At Olduvai Gorge, where excavations helped to confirm Africa was the cradle of humanity, scientists now find the landscape once fluctuated rapidly, likely guiding early human evolution.These findings suggest that key mental developments within the human lineage may have been linked with a highly variable environment, researchers added. <br><br> Olduvai Gorge is a ravine cut into the eastern margin of the Serengeti Plain in northern Tanzania that holds fossils of hominins — members of the human lineage. Excavations at Olduvai Gorge by Louis and Mary Leakey in the mid-1950s helped to establish the African origin of humanity. <br><br> [Full Story: <a href=http://www.livescience.com/25793-changing-environment-human-evolution.html>Erratic Environment May Be Key to Human Evolution</a>]
As darkness falls on Christmas night, check out the east-southeast sky. Shining brilliantly to the upper left of the bright, nearly full moon will be a silvery "star" with a steady glow.<br><br> But that's not a star, or Santa returning to the North Pole. Rather, it's the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter, serving as a sort of holiday ornament with Earth's nearest neighbor to cap off a year of interesting skwyatching events.<br><br> [Full Story: <a href=http://www.livescience.com/25790-jupiter-moon-christmas-skywatching-watching-treat.html>Jupiter, Moon Align in Christmas Skywatching Treat</a>]
Christmas in orbit might not look exactly like the holidays on Earth, but the astronauts living on the International Space Station this holiday season try to make the orbiting science laboratory as homey as possible.<br><br> The six members of the station's Expedition 34 crew, three of whom just arrived last week, will all be spending Christmas and New Years Day aboard the spacecraft, but that doesn't mean they don't get to celebrate. Hundreds of miles above the Earth's surface, the spaceflyers will eat, exchange gifts, and be merry during Christmas and when welcoming in the New Year. <br><br> [Full Story: <a href=http://www.livescience.com/25807-space-christmas-station-astronauts.html>Astronauts Celebrate Christmas on Space Station</a>]
A giant helium balloon is slowly drifting above Antarctica, about 22 miles (36 kilometers) up. Launched on Tuesday (Dec. 25) from the National Science Foundation's Long Duration Balloon (LDB) facility on Earth's southernmost continent, it carries a sensitive telescope that measures submillimeter light waves from stellar nurseries in our Milky Way.<br><br> "Christmas launch!" wrote officials with NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, which oversees the agency's balloon research program, in a Twitter post yesterday. "BLAST launched today from McMurdo Station, Antarctica."<br><br> [Full Story: <a href=http://www.livescience.com/25808-nasa-telescope-christmas-balloon-launch.html>NASA Launches Telescope-Toting Balloon from Antarctica on Christmas</a>]
First it was the Obamadon, a newly identified (though extinct) toothy lizard from the Late Cretaceous of North America. And now the 44th U.S. president is getting a living creature named after him, too.<br><br> Meet the Barack Obama trapdoor spider, or <i>Aptostichus barackobamai</i>, a species found in California. It's just one of 33 newly identified species in the state among 40 in the <i>Aptostichus</i> genus. Several of the other new-to-science spiders have pop culture-inspired monikers, from <i>A. pennjillettei</i> (for illusionist and comedian Penn Jillette) and <i>A. bonoi</i> (for U2 frontman Bono) to <i>A. sarlacc</i>, named after the fearsome "Star Wars" creature, the Sarlacc, from the fictional desert planet Tatooine.<br><br> [Full Story: <a href=http://www.livescience.com/25812-trapdoor-spider-named-for-obama.html>Trapdoor Spider Named for Obama</a>]
Some of the Nazca Lines, mysterious geoglyphs that span a vast swath of the rugged Peruvian desert, may have once been a labyrinth with a spiritual purpose, a new study suggests.<br><br> The new insight, published in the December issue of the journal Antiquity, came because two archaeologists decided to use a decidedly low-tech method to understand the sand drawing's ancient secrets: by walking it.<br><br> [Full Story: <a href=http://www.livescience.com/25718-nazca-lines-are-a-labyrinth.html>Mysterious Nazca Lines Desert Drawings Form Labyrinth</a>]
Worms are useful in the garden and great for fish bait, but one of their talents has remained hidden — until now. Scientists have discovered that worms can manufacture tiny semiconductors. <br><br> At King's College in London, researchers fed an ordinary red worm, <i>Lumbricus rubellus</i>, soil laced with metals. The worm produced quantum dots, nano-sized semiconductors that are used in imaging, LED technologies and solar cells. The experiment was published in the Dec. 23 issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.<br><br> [Full Story: <a href=http://www.livescience.com/25826-worms-make-metal-semiconductors.html>Worms Turn Metal Into Semiconductors</a>]
Plan your island getaway now: In time, the mountainous tropical paradise of Oahu will erode, according to new research, with the biggest losses coming from within the island itself.<br><br> To be accurate, you do have some time to book that vacation before Hawaii's Oahu flattens from an island into a low-lying seamount. Researchers writing in the upcoming February 15 issue of the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta estimate that the volcanic island will continue to grow, thanks to plate tectonics, for another 75,000 to 1.75 million years. After that, however, the forces working to eat away at Oahu from the inside out will begin to triumph.<br><br> [Full Story: <a href=http://www.livescience.com/25838-hawaiian-island-dissolving.html>Hawaiian Island Dissolving From Within</a>]
Just outside of Jerusalem, archaeologists have discovered a cache of vessels and figurines inside a 2,750-year-old temple that could provide a rare window into religious rituals of the period, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced.<br><br> The finds were uncovered at Tel Motza, an archaeological site being excavated ahead of the expansion of Highway 1, the main road connecting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The dig revealed part of a large building, believed to be a temple, and objects that date back to the era of the First Temple, which, according to the Hebrew Bible, was constructed by King Solomon in the 10th century B.C. and then destroyed 400 years later.<br><br> [Full Story: <a href=http://www.livescience.com/25833-israel-ancient-temple-ritual-figurines.html>Animal Figurines Found in Ancient Israel Temple</a>]
Saber-toothed cats apparently did not go extinct for lack of prey, contradicting a popular explanation for why they died off, fossil evidence now suggests.<br><br> Even near their extinction, saber-toothed cats likely had enough to eat, researchers noted.<br><br> [Full Story: <a href=http://www.livescience.com/25848-starvation-extinction-sabertooth-cats.html>Starvation Didn't Wipe Out Sabertooth Cats</a>]
