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Perseverance makes oxygen on Mars
An instrument on the Perseverance rover has produced breathable oxygen on Mars. The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) synthesized the gas from locally collected CO2, which makes up 96% of Mars’s atmosphere. The proof-of-concept experiment could pave the way for generating breathable air for future Mars explorers or rocket fuel for their trip home.
Bipedalism didn’t stop us climbing
An analysis of the shoulder girdle of a human ancestor that lived millions of years ago suggests that Australopithecus afarensis retained features that helped it to climb in trees, even after developing the ability to walk on two legs. The shoulder blades belong to a near-complete fossil of a specimen dubbed Little Foot, discovered in South Africa in the 1990s. “We see incontrovertible evidence in Little Foot that the arm of our ancestors at 3.67 million years ago was still being used to bear substantial weight during arboreal movements in trees,” says anatomist Kristian Carlson.
Reference: Journal of Human Evolution paper
Features & opinion
Unmasking the trade in human remains
An eighteenth-century skeleton held at the University of Melbourne, posed holding a recorder, was created using bones from several people. The ‘flute boy’ was brought to Australia by the university’s first professor of medicine in the mid-1800s, at a time when human remains were openly sold in parts of Europe. Researchers’ efforts to illuminate the bones’ true provenance sheds light on the European trade in human remains and its treatment of people with unusual bodies.