A New Middle Pleistocene Human Skull Found in China Reveals the Variation and Continuity in Early Asian Humans

<正>A team of scientists led by LIU Wu and WU Xiujie from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology(IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported a new Middle Pleistocene human skull ever found in southeastern China reveals the variation and continuity in early Asian humans. Their findings were published on April 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS). Excavations in Middle Pleistocene cave deposits in southeastern China yielded a largely complete skull that     

Dental Study of Juvenile Archaic Homo Fossil Gives Clues about Human Development

<正>Most aspects of dental development for a juvenile Homo specimen from the Pleistocene fall within the modern human range, according to research by a group of Chinese and international scientists. The study was recently published in Science Advances.The results are helpful in identifying when modern human-like growth and development first appeared.     

Discovery of Indian summer monsoon dynamics at the glacial-interglacial timescale

Based on a multi-disciplinary analysis of a 666-m long lacustrine sediment core drilled from the Heqing Basin on the southeastern fringe of the Tibetan Plateau, CAS Member Prof. AN Zhisheng’s group at the CAS Institute of Earth Environment successfully reconstructed the changing history of the Indian summer monsoon (ISM) during the Pleistocene (2.6 Ma) and demonstrated the importance of global ice volume and Antarctic temperature in driving ISM variability at the glacial-interglacial timescale.     

Late Ordovician Mass Extinction: Earth,fire and iceOA

The Late Ordovician Mass Extinction was the earliest of the ‘big’ five extinction events and the earliest to affect the trajectory of metazoan life. Two phases have been identified near the start of the Hirnantian period and in the middle. It was a massive taxonomic extinction, a weak phylogenetic extinction and a relatively benign ecological extinction. A rapid cooling, triggering a major ice age that reduced the temperature of surface waters, prompted a drop in sea level of some 100 m and intr...     

Evolution of artificial ion channelsOA

<正>Protein ion channels on a cell membrane generate action potentials for cellular signal transduction, and regulate biological activities during life. Since the discovery of the asymmetric ion transport phenomenon in quartz nanopipettes by Bard and colleagues [1], synthetic nanofluidic materials and devices have attracted a lot of research interests from the scientific community,     

Earliest Modern Humans in Southern China Recast History of Early Human Migration

<正>The hominin record from southern Asia for the early Late Pleistocene epoch is scarce.Well-dated and well-preserved fossils older than 45.000 years that can be unequivocally attributed to H.sapiens are lacking.In a paper published October 15 online in Nature,Dr.LIU Wu from Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology(IVPP).CAS,and his international team announced the discovery of human teeth between 80.000 and120,000 years old from the newly excavated Fuyan Cave in Daoxian.southern China,and provided the earliest evidence     

Mass extinctions,their causes and consequences: an interview with Douglas H.Erwin and Shuzhong ShenOA

<正>‘Mass extinctions’ have been a hot topic for several decades. What triggers a mass extinction? How does a mass extinction impact the evolution of life? How does our ecosystem recover after a mass extinction? These questions attracted the interest of both scientists and the public alike.NSR spoke to two renowned researchers in the field of mass extinctions: Prof. Douglas H. Erwin from the National Museum of Natural History of the USA, and Prof. Shuzhong Shen from Nanjing University, Chin...     

Challenges and opportunities for modeling coupled human and natural systemsOA

<正>The Earth is a very large and complex system that consists of human and natural components interacting bidirectionally with each other,thus forming coupled human and natural systems (CHANS)[1].The increasing dominance of human impacts,especially after the 1950s [2],marked a new era for the Earth,the Anthropocene,which means humans have become the main drivers of the evolution of changes in the Earth system.Therefore,modeling CHANS is essential for understanding the emergent system prope...     

In pursuit of reconstructing missing human handsOA

<正>Human beings are the most intelligent living beings on Earth.Creating reconstructions of missing human limbs that can be naturally integrated into the human body is a lofty ambition and faces challenges in neuroscience,information science,mechanical and electronic engineering,and many other disciplines.Based on the development history of robotic prosthetic hands over the past 70 years,     

Climbing robots for manufacturingOA

Robotized intelligent manufacturing is a growing trend in the manufacturing of large and complex components in aviation,aerospace,marine engineering and other industries.With their expansive workspaces and flexible deployment,climbing manufacturing robots can create a revolutionary manufacturing paradigm for large and complex components.This paper defines the climbing manufacturing robot based on the application status of climbing robots and then analyzes four key technical re quirements:adhesio...     

Data quantity governance for machine learning in materials scienceOA

Data-driven machine learning(ML) is widely employed in the analysis of materials structure-activity relationships,performance optimization and materials design due to its superior ability to reveal latent data patterns and make accurate prediction.However,because of the laborious process of materials data acquisition,ML models encounter the issue of the mismatch between a high dimension of feature space and a small sample size(for traditional ML models) or the mismatch between model parameters a...     

ZKD: A major paleoanthropological and paleolithic site

Zhoukoudian (ZKD), a tiny village, is about 50 kilometers southwest of downtown Beijing. Since ancient times, it has been noted for its abundant trove of mammal fossils, as the hilly area in the vicinity is at the end of a dismembered branch of the Taihang Mountains, where they meet the North China Plain. There are a lot of well-developed and well-preserved Pleistocene sediments with valuable fossilized records in this area. Its great value for the study of human ancestry was first discovered by Western scholars in 1921.     

Revisiting non-linear Thomson scattering with metamaterialsOA

<正>Non-linear optics is a branch of optics that studies the intriguing and sometimes unexpected ways in which light and matter interact at high intensities, when the polarization density does not respond linearly to the electric field of the light. The pursuit of the perfect non-linear optical material has been ongoing ever since the pioneering experiment on second harmonic generation carried out by Franken in 1961 [1]. Indeed,     

Microbes in mass extinction: an accomplice or a savior?OA

<正>Microbes include various types of organisms that are invisible to the naked eye,e.g. bacteria, archaea and microeukaryotes. Although the precise number remains largely unknown, microbes are recognized as the unseen majority of our biosphere [1]. As a group of organisms classified by body size, microbes cover a considerable spectrum of metabolisms,     

How variable progenitor clones construct a largely invariant neocortexOA

The neocortex contains a vast collection of diverse neurons organized into distinct layers. While nearly all neocortical neurons are generated by radial glial progenitors(RGPs), it remains largely unclear how a complex yet organized neocortex is constructed reliably and robustly. Here, we show that the division behavior and neuronal output of RGPs are highly constrained with patterned variabilities to support the reliable and robust construction of the mouse neocortex. The neurogenic process of ...     

Multi-region calcium imaging in freely behaving mice with ultra-compact head-mounted fluorescence microscopesOA

To investigate the circuit-level neural mechanisms of behavior, simultaneous imaging of neuronal activity in multiple cortical and subcortical regions is highly desired. Miniature head-mounted microscopes offer the capability of calcium imaging in freely behaving animals. However, implanting multiple microscopes on a mouse brain remains challenging due to space constraints and the cumbersome weight of the equipment.Here, we present TINIscope, a Tightly Integrated Neuronal Imaging microscope opti...     

Bio-syncretic robots composed of biological and electromechanical systemsOA

<正>After eons of evolution,biological systems have developed excellent performance in terms of sensing,intelligence,and actuation—the three primary robotics elements that are closely related to the overall performance of robot systems.For example,the buccal pits of some snakes,as the necessary sensors for accurate predation,have a high-temperature sensitivity of 0.003 K[1];     

Challenges and opportunities in remote sensing-based crop monitoring: a reviewOA

Building a more resilient food system for sustainable development and reducing uncertainty in global food markets both require concurrent and near-real-time and reliable crop information for decision making.Satellite-driven crop monitoring has become a main method to derive crop information at local, regional,and global scales by revealing the spatial and temporal dimensions of crop growth status and production.However, there is a lack of quantitative, objective, and robust methods to ensure the...     

MAGUS: machine learning and graph theory assisted universal structure searcherOA

Crystal structure predictions based on first-principles calculations have gained great success in materials science and solid state physics.However,the remaining challenges still limit their applications in systems with a large number of atoms,especially the complexity of conformational space and the cost of local optimizations for big systems.Here,we introduce a crystal structure prediction method,MAGUS,based on the evolutionary algorithm,which addresses the above challenges with machine learni...