New Scientist – June 10 2017

UPFRONT
JEAN-JACQUESHUBLIN,MPI-EVA,LEIPZIG
SpaceX flies again
ON 3 June, SpaceX sent a used
Dragon cargo capsule back to the
International Space Station, the
first time a private company has
twice put the same craft into orbit.
It first flew to the ISS in 2014
and was recovered after splashing
down in the Pacific. To return to
space, it got a new heat shield,
parachutes and minor repairs.
The recycled capsule ferried
the first Chinese experiment to
join the US-led portion of the ISS.
It will study the effects of space
radiation on DNA and will be
confined to a platform run by
NanoRacks, the company hired by
Chinese scientists to perform the
experiment. This set-up skirts a
2011 ban on NASA working with
“The Dragon capsule’s trip
to the ISS makes SpaceX
the first firm to put the
same craft back into orbit”
Wow! 350,000 years old
FOSSILS found in Morocco suggest found at the site in the 1960s. But
our species began to appear as early their odd mix of ancient and modern
as 350,000 years ago – adding as features meant they were initially
much as 150,000 years toHomo mistaken for an African version of
sapiens history.
Neanderthals.
It was a big wow moment, says
But the fresh excavations found
Jean-Jacques Hublin at the Max
stone tools and more hominin bone
Planck Institute for Evolutionary fragments, including pieces from an
Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, adult skull. An analysis of the new
one of the leaders of the work.
fossils, and of those found at the
Conventional thinking suggests site in the 1960s, confirms that
thatH.sapiens emerged in East
these hominins had a primitive,
Africa some 200,000 years ago. elongated braincase. But the new
But some suspect that our roots run adult skull combines this ancient
deeper, given that fossils from South feature with a small, lightly built
Africa resembling modern humans “modern” face – one the team says
have been tentatively dated at
is indistinguishable from our own
260,000 years old.
(Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature22335.)
The new evidence provides solid Shannon McPherron, also at the
support for those suspicions. It
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
comes from a Moroccan site called Anthropology, and his team dated
Jebel Irhoud. Hominin remains were both the stone tools and the hominin
bones to somewhere between
250,000 and 350,000 years ago
(Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature22336)
The researchers suggest that
modern humans had begun to
emerge – literally face-first – at this
time. Although other features of
their anatomy still looked primitive,
the Jebel Irhoud hominins should be
considered the earliest known
members of our species, they say.
Not everyone agrees with this
assessment, but Aida Gómez-Robles
at University College London thinks
it makes sense given that we already
know our lineage became distinct
from the Neanderthal line at
least 500,000 years ago. “I would
predict that we will find in the
future even older transitional forms
for both Neanderthals and modern
humans,” she says.
the Chinese government.
Dragon also carried items for
more than 200 other projects
on the ISS, including fruit flies
that will be used to test how
weightlessness affects the heart,
and the Neutron Star Interior
Composition Explorer (NICER).
This will take the most precise
measurements yet of neutron
stars, and test how to use these
dense stellar corpses as beacons
for interstellar navigation.
Cancer successes
A FLURRY of promising results
in the fight against cancer were
presented at the annual meeting
of the American Society of Clinical
Oncology in Chicago this week.
Two studies suggest the drug
abiraterone dramatically
improves prostate cancer survival.
Together, the studies followed
3200 men, and found that those
who received abiraterone alongside
standard hormone therapy were
38 per cent less likely to die within
around 30 months of treatment,
6 | NewScientist | 10 June 2017