Remote tribe has social networks like ours
The Hadza are one of few hunter-gatherer groups in Africa. Scientists hope they will give clues about why humans share.
January 25th, 2012
01:00 PM ET

Remote tribe has social networks like ours

It was 2006 when a man approached anthropologist Coren Apicella and asked, “Have you heard about this man, Osama bin Laden? I just heard about him, and I heard he sets fire to things. I heard he’s hiding and he’s a very dangerous man.”

The man is from a society called the Hadza, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer populations in Africa and one of the closest remaining approximations to how the earliest humans lived. This community in Tanzania is so cut off from modernity that news of bin Laden’s existence hadn’t reached this man until five years after 9/11.

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Filed under: Human ancestors • On Earth
Opportunity's Eighth Anniversary View From 'Greeley Haven' (False Color)
January 25th, 2012
11:06 AM ET

Opportunity's Eighth Anniversary View From 'Greeley Haven' (False Color)

"This mosaic of images taken in mid-January 2012 shows the windswept vista northward (left) to northeastward (right) from the location where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is spending its fifth Martian winter, an outcrop informally named "Greeley Haven."

Opportunity's Panoramic Camera (Pancam) took the component images as part of full-circle view being assembled from Greeley Haven.

The view includes sand ripples and other wind-sculpted features in the foreground and mid-field. The northern edge of the the "Cape York" segment of the rim of Endeavour Crater forms an arc across the upper half of the scene.

Opportunity landed on Mars on Jan. 25, 2004, Universal Time and EST (Jan. 24, PST). It has driven 21.4 miles (34.4 kilometers) as of its eighth anniversary on the planet. In late 2011, the rover team drove Opportunity up onto Greeley Haven to take advantage of the outcrop's sun-facing slope to boost output from the rover's dusty solar panels during the Martian winter.

Research activities while at Greeley Haven include a radio-science investigation of the interior of Mars, inspections of mineral compositions and textures on the outcrop, and monitoring of wind-caused changes on scales from dunes to individual soil particles.

The image combines exposures taken through Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers (near infrared), 535 nanometers (green) and 432 nanometers (violet). The view is presented in false color to make some differences between materials easier to see."

Source: NASA

Filed under: Light up the screen

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