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- World’s first desktop computers unearthed in London house clearance Interesting Engineering
- Talk about a blast from the past! Two of the world’s first desktop computers dating back over 50 years are dis Daily Mail
Tag Archives: rediscovered
Only filmed interview with Georges Lemaître, ‘father of the Big Bang,’ rediscovered after 60 years
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The only known video interview with Belgian physicist Georges Lemaître, widely considered the “father of the Big Bang,” talking about the birth of the universe has been rediscovered almost 60 years after it was lost.
Lemaître (1894-1966) was a professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and a practicing Catholic priest. In 1927, he was the first person to propose that the movement of galaxies away from Earth was a sign that the universe was expanding, which was later observationally confirmed by the American astronomer Edwin Hubble.
Lemaître was also the first to derive Hubble’s law, which states that galaxies are moving away from Earth at speeds proportional to their distance, even though Hubble received all the credit at the time. (The International Astronomical Union renamed the idea the Hubble-Lemaître law (opens in new tab) in 2018.) In 1931, Lemaître proposed his “hypothesis of the primeval atom” to account for the universe’s expansion, which stated that the universe began from a single point, and later inspired what we now know as the Big Bang theory.
The rediscovered video (opens in new tab) features Lemaître discussing his ideas with journalist Jérôme Verhaeghe during a Belgian TV interview, which was broadcast on Feb. 14, 1964. A small clip of the interview, around two minutes long, has been widely available for decades, but the full 20-minute video was considered to be lost after the film reel containing the footage disappeared shortly after the interview aired.
But this reel, it turns out, was simply misplaced.
Related: Long-lost copy of Newton’s famous book ‘Opticks’ to be auctioned for half a million dollars
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On Dec. 29, 2022, Belgium’s national service broadcaster for the country’s Flemish-speaking community, Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie (VRT), rereleased (opens in new tab) the video after it was discovered in the broadcaster’s archives. The film reel had been lost because it was miscategorized and because Lemaître’s name was misspelled on the label, which made searching for it like “looking for a needle in a haystack,” VRT representatives wrote in a translated statement. (Flemish, also known as Dutch Flemish, is one of the three official languages of Belgium; it is spoken by people living in the Flanders region in the north of the country.)
In the interview, Lemaître speaks in French, with Flemish subtitles added to the video. In a new paper, uploaded Jan. 19 to the preprint server arXiv (opens in new tab), a team of researchers translated the interview into English to make it accessible to a wider audience.
“To our knowledge, it is the only video interview of Georges Lemaître in existence,” the researchers wrote in the paper.
Expansive interview
The video starts with Lemaître answering an unknown question that was likely asked by Verhaeghe during the interview’s introduction. While it’s unclear what these opening remarks refer to, Lemaître soon dives into how his hypothesis of the primeval atom differed from the Steady State model — the idea that the universe is always expanding but maintaining a constant average density, with no start or end — which was the preferred view of the cosmos at the time.
Lemaître talks in great length about his rival Sir Fred Hoyle, an English physicist who was one of the best-known and fierce proponents of the Steady State model but who also accidentally coined the term “Big Bang.” Although he repeatedly calls out Hoyle for being wrong during the interview, Lemaître remarks that he has the “greatest admiration” for his colleague’s work.
Lemaître explains that the Steady State model could work only if the hydrogen required to make stars appeared “like a ghost” from nowhere, which he argued would go against the principle of conservation of energy, the idea that energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed from one type to another, which he described as “basically the most secure and solid thing in physics.”
Instead, Lemaître argues in the video, the expansion could be traced back to the “disintegration of all existing matter into an atom,” which created “an expanding space filled by a plasma” via a “process that we can vaguely imagine.”
Related: How was the universe created?
Lemaître also discusses the work and ideas of several renowned academics, including French mathematician Élie Cartan, English astrophysicist Edward Arthur Milne, and Sir James Hopwood Jeans, an English physicist, astronomer and mathematician who was another champion of the Steady State model.
During the interview, Lemaître notes that detecting cosmic rays — high-energy particles or particle clusters that move through space at nearly the speed of light, which Lemaître poetically described as “rays of the primeval fireworks” — would play an important role in proving his theory. (Lemaître died shortly after learning about the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, which occurred two years after the interview and was the first major piece of evidence that he was correct.)
The priest-turned-physicist was also asked whether his theories contradicted his religious views, but he explained that his research involved no “religious ulterior motive” and that “the beginning [of the universe] is so unimaginable” and “so different from the present state of the world” that he saw no reason why it disproved God’s involvement in creation.
The researchers who translated the French transcript to English are pleased to have played a role in making Lemaître’s only filmed interview more accessible to the astronomical community and the public.
“Of all the people who came up with the framework of cosmology that we’re working with now, there’s very few recordings of how they talked about their work,” lead study author Satya Gontcho A Gontcho (opens in new tab), a physicist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in a statement (opens in new tab). “To hear the turns of phrase and how things were discussed … It feels like peeking through time.”
Long-lost pigeon species ‘rediscovered’ in Papua New Guinea
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A bird thought to be extinct for 140 years has been rediscovered in the forests of Papua New Guinea.
The black-naped pheasant-pigeon was documented by scientists for the first and last time in 1882, according to a news release from nonprofit Re:wild, which helped fund the search effort.
Rediscovering the bird required an expedition team to spend a grueling month on Fergusson, a rugged island in the D’Entrecasteaux Archipelago off eastern Papua New Guinea where the bird was originally documented. The team consisted of local staff at the Papua New Guinea National Museum as well as international scientists from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the American Bird Conservancy.
Fergusson Island is covered in rugged, mountainous terrain – making the expedition especially challenging for the scientists. Many members of the community told the team that they hadn’t seen the black-naped pheasant-pigeon in decades, says the news release.
But just two days before the researchers were scheduled to leave the island, a camera trap captured footage of the exceptionally rare bird.
“After a month of searching, seeing those first photos of the pheasant-pigeon felt like finding a unicorn,” John C. Mittermeier, director of the lost birds program at American Bird Conservancy and co-leader of the expedition, said in the release. “It is the kind of moment you dream about your entire life as a conservationist and birdwatcher.”
The black-naped pheasant-pigeon is a large, ground-dwelling pigeon with a broad tail, according to the release. Scientists still know little about the species and believe the population is small and decreasing.
Insight from local residents was crucial for the scientists to track down the elusive bird.
“It wasn’t until we reached villages on the western slope of Mt. Kilkerran that we started meeting hunters who had seen and heard the pheasant-pigeon,” Jason Gregg, a conservation biologist and co-leader of the expedition team, said in the release. “We became more confident about the local name of the bird, which is ‘Auwo,’ and felt like we were getting closer to the core habitat of where the black-naped pheasant-pigeon lives.”
They placed a total of 12 camera traps on the slopes of Mt. Kilkerran, which is the island’s highest mountain. And they placed another eight cameras in locations where local hunters reported seeing the bird in the past.
A hunter named Augustin Gregory, based in the mountain village Duda Ununa, provided the final breakthrough that helped scientists locate the pheasant-pigeon.
Gregory told the team that he had seen the black-naped pheasant-pigeon in an area with “steep ridges and valleys,” says the news release. And he had heard the bird’s distinctive calls.
So the expedition team placed a camera on a 3,200-foot high ridge near the Kwama River above Duda Ununa, according to the release. And finally, just as their trip was ending, they captured footage of the bird walking on the forest floor.
The discovery was a shock for the scientists and the local community alike.
“The communities were very excited when they saw the survey results, because many people hadn’t seen or heard of the bird until we began our project and got the camera trap photos,” said Serena Ketaloya, a conservationist from Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea, in the news release. “They are now looking forward to working with us to try to protect the pheasant-pigeon.”
It’s still not clear just how many of the black-naped pheasant-pigeon are left, and the rugged terrain will make identifying the population difficult. A two-week survey in 2019 failed to find any proof of the bird, although it did discover some reports from hunters that helped determine the locations for the 2022 expedition.
And the discovery might provide hope that other bird species thought extinct are still out there somewhere.
“This rediscovery is an incredible beacon of hope for other birds that have been lost for a half century or more,” said Christina Biggs, the manager for the Search for Lost Species at Re:wild, in the release. “The terrain the team searched was incredibly difficult, but their determination never wavered, even though so few people could remember seeing the pheasant-pigeon in recent decades.”
A Forgotten Continent From 40 Million Years Ago May Have Just Been Rediscovered
A low-lying continent that existed some 40 million years ago and was home to exotic fauna may have “paved the way” for Asian mammals to colonize southern Europe, new research suggests.
Wedged between Europe, Africa and Asia, this forgotten continent – which researchers have dubbed “Balkanatolia” – became a gateway between Asia and Europe when sea levels dropped and a land bridge formed, around 34 million years ago.
“When and how the first wave of Asian mammals made it to south-eastern Europe remains poorly understood,” palaeogeologist Alexis Licht and colleagues write in their new study.
But the result was nothing short of dramatic. Around 34 million years ago, at the end of the Eocene epoch, huge numbers of native mammals disappeared from Western Europe as new Asian mammals emerged, in a sudden extinction event now known as the Grande Coupure.
Recent fossil findings in the Balkans, however, have upended that timeline, pointing towards a ‘peculiar’ bioregion that appears to have enabled Asian mammals to colonize southeastern Europe as much as 5 to 10 million years before the Grande Coupure occurred.
To investigate, Licht, of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, and colleagues re-examined the evidence from all known fossil sites in the area, which covers the present-day Balkan peninsula and Anatolia, the westernmost protrusion of Asia.
The age of these sites was revised based on current geological data, and the team reconstructed paleogeographic changes that transpired in the region, which has a “complex history of episodic drowning and re-emergence”.
What they found suggests Balkanatolia served as a stepping stone for animals to move from Asia into western Europe, with the transformation of the ancient landmass from standalone continent to land bridge – and subsequent invasion with Asian mammals – coinciding with some “dramatic paleogeographic changes”.
Balkanatolia, 40 million years ago, and at the present day. (Alexis Licht, Grégoire Métais/CNRS)
Around 50 million years ago, Balkanatolia was an isolated archipelago, separate from the neighboring continents, where a unique collection of animals distinct from those of Europe and eastern Asia thrived, the analysis found.
Then a combination of falling sea levels, growing Antarctic ice sheets and tectonic shifts connected the Balkanatolia continent to Western Europe, between 40 to 34 million years ago.
This allowed Asian mammals including rodents and four-legged hoofed mammals (aka ungulates) to adventure westward and invade Balkanatolia, the fossil record shows.
Adding to that record, Licht and colleagues also discovered fragments of a jawbone belonging to a rhinoceros-like animal at a new fossil site in Turkey, which they dated to around 38 to 35 million years ago.
The fossil is, arguably, the oldest Asian-like ungulate discovered in Anatolia to date and predates the Grande Coupure by at least 1.5 million years, suggesting that Asian mammals were well on their way to Europe via Balkanatolia.
This southern pathway to Europe across Balkanatolia was perhaps more favorable for adventurous animals than traversing higher-latitude routes through Central Asia which at the time were drier, cooler, desert steppes, Licht and colleagues also suggest.
However, they point out in their paper that the “past connectivity between individual Balkanatolian islands and the existence of this southern dispersal route remain debated”, and that the story pieced together thus far “is only built on mammalian fossils and a more complete picture of past Balkanatolian biodiversity remains to be drawn”.
Many of the geological changes that gave rise to Balkanatolia have yet to be fully understood, and it’s important to note that this review is just one team’s interpretation of the fossil record.
That said, the fossil record of mammals and other vertebrates living on islands is usually sparse and patchy, whereas the rich terrestrial fossil record of Balkanatolia “provides a unique opportunity to document the evolution and demise of island biotas in deep time,” the team concludes.
The study was published in Earth-Science Reviews.
Bill Onus: rediscovered footage casts new light on a groundbreaking life and legacy | Movies
The late Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta activist William Townsend “Bill” Onus Jr was a larger-than-life activist, boomerang champion and theatrical entrepreneur.
But Onus might also have become as famous for the cinematic portrayal of the plight of his people, had his documentary film work ever seen the light of day.
In 1939, Bill Onus was a leader of the Aboriginal mass strike at Cummeragunja in New South Wales, the reserve he was born on, in 1906. Ten years after his birth, he fled with his mother and siblings, after they were warned welfare would take children away. Towards the end of his life, he was a key campaign figure in the successful 1967 referendum that amended the constitution to count Indigenous people as Australian citizens for the first time.
“Ongoing mythologies have sprung up around Bill,” says his grandson Tiriki Onus. Born 12 years after Bill’s 1968 death, Tiriki would be “constantly told growing up how much I looked like him”; one aunt even approvingly informed him he had a “Bill-shaped head”. A bass-baritone, Tiriki was cast by Deborah Cheetham to play his grandfather in the 2010 opera, Pecan Summer.
Tiriki knew his grandfather made films, but had no idea to what depth and extent. One day, he was rifling through an old suitcase in his mother’s basement, which contained photographs of Bill – including some taken by Bill’s wife, Mary, who had married Bill against her wealthy white family’s wishes. One photo showed three Aboriginal boys in ceremonial paint looking at a Bell and Howell 32mm movie camera, on location in Heidelberg, Melbourne, in 1946.
Some time later the film-maker Alec Morgan, known for the 1983 documentary Lousy Little Sixpence, rang Tiriki to introduce himself, and to ask: “Do you know your grandfather was the first Aboriginal film-maker?” Onus replied: “I know he filmed stuff, but all those films were burned, they were lost.”
Morgan countered: “I’ve found this film in the archives that I think belonged to Bill.”
While Bill Onus had appeared as an extra in Charles Chauvel’s Uncivilised of 1936 and Harry Watt’s The Overlanders a decade later (gaining little credit for his cultural advisory role with Watt), family lore held that he had also made his own films, which had been destroyed in a caravan fire in the late 1950s. Tiriki is unsure of the films’ content, but there were stories of him filming proceedings of “significant meetings of Aboriginal activists up and down the east coast”.
Now here was a black-and-white silent film, rediscovered in a tin at the National Film and Sound Archive, which some bygone archivist had simply marked “Aborigines in the community” – showing the same boys from the suitcase photos dancing around a gum tree and Bill throwing a boomerang, recalling his youth performing in a travelling show.
The story of this rediscovered, though untitled, nine-and-a-half minute piece of postwar footage – footage from a possibly longer documentary, or a newsreel film – is told in Alec Morgan and Tiriki Onus’s documentary Ablaze, which will premiere at the Melbourne international film festival in August.
The rediscovered film also shows Tiriki’s great-aunt Wynne and great-uncle Eric acting in a dance drama called White Justice in 1946 at the New Theatre in Flinders Street, Melbourne, in which Aboriginal performers reenacted the Pilbara strike of hundreds of Aboriginal pastoral workers earlier that year.
At one point, the stage performers are chained to one another by the neck, which Bill Onus himself reported seeing while filming The Overlanders in northern Australia that same decade. Other scenes were filmed in slum terraces of Fitzroy, and on a Melbourne tram.
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Tiriki Onus and Alec Morgan saw the strong political nature of Bill Onus’s film-making. It was clear Bill wanted to take his film to a cinema audience, to tell the story of Indigenous Australians’ impoverished lives and fight for equal rights. They learned he had even lined up a deal with a distribution company for a theatrical release.
“He was directing stuff designed to function in a very specific way for the causes he was fighting for,” says his grandson. “This wasn’t a hobby; this was a powerful tool in Bill’s arsenal.”
The documentary postulates that political pressure was applied to the film company to drop Onus’s film, for which he had likely recorded a voiceover narrative that is now lost. His activism and his 1947 marriage to Mary McLintock Kelly, whom he met at a Communist party rally, attracted the attention of Australia’s security agencies: Mary was a party member, although Onus was not.
Later, when Onus wanted to travel to the United States to speak about the Indigenous Australian plight as part of the burgeoning US civil rights movement, his passport was suddenly cancelled. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, it transpired, had handed his surveillance file to the US embassy.
“There’s solid evidence for the cancelling of the passport, and for the things being done to suppress Bill,” says Tiriki. “This is one of the great gifts that Asio has given us: they kept really good records … Bill has got a weighty Asio tome.”
Onus pursued Indigenous equality by other means. In 1951, for instance, he helped produce and performed in the successful Out of the Dark: an Aboriginal Moomba at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre – groundbreaking for using Indigenous performers in an era of blackface. He established a shop in the Dandenong Ranges in which he sold boomerangs and other souvenirs, drawing visitors by demonstrating his boomerang skills.
But Onus was soon drawn back to the city for one final campaign, lending his elder status to the yes campaign for the 1967 referendum, by this time as the first Aboriginal president of the Aborigines Advancement League, as well as its representative on the Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board. Onus lived to see 90.77% of Australians vote in support of Indigenous people being included in the national census, and to allow the federal government to make laws that included Aboriginal people. He died of a coronary occlusion in 1968, age 61.
Can he be definitively called Australia’s first Aboriginal film-maker?
“As the record stands at the moment, yes it would seem that Bill is the first Aboriginal film-maker,” says Tiriki Onus, who sings the Yorta Yorta-language song Ngarra Burra Ferra while cloaked in possum skin at the end of documentary.
“But it doesn’t particularly excite or interest me that much, the idea of [his] being first. What really does excite me is the way that [his legacy] has grown – the fact that now here I am as his grandson, 70 years later, being able to tell his story, to carry on in his footsteps.
“There’s something exciting for me about being in much broader company like that, to be a grain of sand on the beach.”
NASA Shares Stunning Image from ‘Rediscovered’ Star Cluster
Since the dawn of nerdom, all nerds have known there are two great escapes in life: anything from the mind of J.R.R. Tolkien, and deep space. Plus some that engage both like Star Wars, Star Trek, and many more. Now, to get your nerdy imagination going, NASA has shared an image of a “rediscovered” star cluster 35,000 light-years from Earth. Coincidentally, it’s exactly the right distance one needs to travel to forget their problems.
NASA / ESA
Mashable reported on the image NASA recently released online to kick off Hubble’s Deep Field Week. The space agencies used NASA’s Hubble telescope to capture the globular cluster, NGC 6380. NASA engineers recently brought Hubble back online, which snapped the picture. However, it’s unclear when exactly the space telescope took the dynamic photo.
Despite its unromantic name—NGC means it’s a part of the New General Catalogue, an astronomical catalog of deep-space objects—NGC 6380 is brilliant beyond words. As NASA notes, NGC 6380 is a globose collection of stars held in their spherical shape by the force of gravity. And the result of the physics dance is a Jackson Pollock of twinkling specks; each its own fiery nuclear-fusion reactor flying through space.
The image is a “wide-field” view of NGC 6380. The wide-field view means it captures a relatively large area of the sky in enormous detail. The cluster itself is in the constellation, Scorpio (in the image below), which viewers can see in the southern hemisphere. It hangs out near the center of our galaxy, much closer to the Milky Way’s axle: a supermassive black hole by the name of Sagittarius A*.
Note that the most brilliant ball of light in the image, the dazzling bluish-white diamond in the upper left-hand corner, is not a part of NGC 6380. It is, in fact, a singular star: HD 159073. And it’s far, far closer to we Earthlings at only 4,000 light-years away. Which is still far enough into space, we imagine, for a good escape.
ESO / B. Tafreshi
The post NASA Shares Stunning Image from ‘Rediscovered’ Star Cluster appeared first on Nerdist.
Vampire squid fossil ‘lost’ during the Hungarian Revolution rediscovered
Vampire squid have been lurking in the dark corners of the ocean for 30 million years, a new analysis of a long-lost fossil finds.
Modern-day vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) can thrive in deep, oxygen-poor ocean water, unlike many other squid species that require shallower habitat along continental shelves. Few fossil ancestors of today’s vampire squid survive, though, so scientists aren’t sure when these elusive cephalopods evolved the ability to live with little oxygen.
The new fossil analysis helps to fill a 120-million-year gap in vampire squid evolution, revealing that the ancestors of modern-day vampire squid already lived in the deep oceans during the Oligocene, 23 million to 34 million years ago. These squid probably evolved adaptations to low-oxygen water during the Jurassic, said study co-author Martin Košťák, a paleontologist at Charles University in Prague.
Related: Photos of the vampire squid from hell
“Life in stable low-oxygen levels brings evolutionary advantages — low predation pressure and less competition,” Košťák wrote in an email to Live Science.
A rediscovered fossil
Košťák and his colleagues found the long-lost fossil in the collections of the Hungarian Natural History Museum in 2019 while looking for fossils of cuttlefish ancestors. The fossil was originally discovered in 1942 by Hungarian paleontologist Miklós Kretzoi, who identified it as a squid dating back around 30 million years and named it Necroteuthis hungarica. Later researchers, though, argued that it was a cuttlefish ancestor. In 1956, during the Hungarian Revolution, the museum was burned, and the fossil was thought to be destroyed. The rediscovery was a happy surprise.
“It was a great moment,” Košťák said of the rediscovery, “to see something previously suggested to be definitely lost.”
Košťák and his colleagues studied the fossil with scanning electron microscopy and conducted a geochemical analysis. They first found that Kretzoi’s initial identification was right: The fossil is from a squid, not a cuttlefish ancestor. The animal’s internal shell, or gladius, which forms the backbone of its body, was about 6 inches (15 centimeters) long, suggesting the squid grew to about 13.7 inches (35 cm) long with arms included. That’s just a bit bigger than modern vampire squid, which reach about 11 inches (28 cm) in total body length.
The sediments surrounding the fossil showed no traces of microfossils often found on the seafloor, suggesting that the squid was not living in shallow waters. The researchers also analyzed levels of variations in carbon in the sediment and found that the sediment likely came from an anoxic, or low-oxygen, environment.
Those conditions are characteristic of the deep ocean floor. By looking at rock layers above where the fossil was deposited outside of what is today Budapest, the researchers were also able to show that the squid probably couldn’t have survived in the shallower seas of the time. The shallow-sea deposits showed very high levels of a particular plankton that blooms in low-salt, high-nutrient environments — conditions that modern-day vampire squid can’t tolerate.
(Researchers from the Monterey Bay Research Institute discovered that while lurking in the deep sea, these squid don’t behave like the nightmare predators their name suggests; rather, they wait in their dark habitats for crumbs of organic matter to flutter down. Then, they capture those bits with mucus-covered suckers, MBARI found.)
Adapting to the deep
The new research, published Thursday (Feb. 18) in the journal Communications Biology, hints at how vampire squid ancestors learned to live where other squids couldn’t. Looking deeper in the fossil record, the oldest fossils from this group of squid are found in the Jurassic period, between 201 million and 174 million years ago, Košťák said, and they are typically found in anoxic sediments.
“The major differences is that these oxygen-depleted conditions were established in the shelf, [a] shallow water environment,” he said. “This means that the ancestors were inhabitants of shallow-water environs, but they were already adapted to low-oxygen conditions.”
There’s a gap in the fossil record in the Lower Cretaceous, starting about 145 million years ago. The squid may have already shifted to the deeper ocean by this point, Košťák said, primed by their experiences with anoxic conditions in the Jurassic. This deep-water lifestyle might explain why the squid survived the crisis that killed the nonavian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, he added.
The deep-living squid from 30 million years ago helps link recent history with the deep past, Košťák said. He and his colleagues are now attempting to make similar connections for cuttlefish, a group of cute, color-changing cephalopods whose origins are similarly murky.
Originally published on Live Science.