Caroline Steel

Do we have to feel really sorry for Neanderthal mothers, or do we think they're growing faster? It seems likely that they're growing faster. When I first read this, I was like, hang on a second, maybe they've just found a record-breaking Neanderthal baby, but actually this was then repeated with two further infants, the same trend was found. So it's basically looking likely that Neanderthals grow much, much faster than humans when they're really young. And

Ehdottomasti neandertalit elävät ympäriäisempiä ja kylmiä ympäriäisempiä kuin homo sapiens. Lopulta pienempi osa kylmiä ympäriäisempiä on vaikeampi, koska kylmiä tulee nopeammin. Lopulta enemmän määrää on parempi kylmiä ympäriäisempiä, joten ehkä se on sellaista adaptatiivisuutta, jotta enää ei ole pieni lapsi.

It's fascinating to think about what this means for the life history of a Neanderthal. Were they walking sooner? Were they at all sooner? What were their milestones like ours? We just don't know so much because we have so few young Neanderthal skeletons. Some scientists are saying they think the difference in development probably stopped at about seven years old, so they grow much faster, but then

Homo sapiens ja neandertalaiset saivat samaa tasoa 7-vuotiaana, mutta emme oikein tiedä varmasti. Mutta se on myös mielenkiintoista miettiä, koska homo sapiens ja neandertalaiset voivat syödä ja saada syödä yhdessä. Olimme ludokuisesti kohti genetisesti ja silti tämä on mahtava ero.

Ajattele, jos olet homo sapien naisen, ja lapsi kasvaa todella nopeasti. Ehkä olisit menossa NCT-versionissa, jossa kaikilla puhutaan, kuinka hyvin lapset ovat olleet. Minulla näyttää, että olen vuosi vanhempi, ja se on vain viisi kuukautta.

I was really shocked and fascinated by that one. Another bit of exciting news. Astronomers at Princeton have identified more than 10,000 candidate planets in data from a NASA telescope. 10,000! That's more than ever in a single hall. All these planets come from NASA's transiting exoplanet survey satellite, lovely name, which was launched in 2018. Its job is basically to look for planets outside of our solar system, so

Is it looking at dimming of stars? Exactly. So what it's looking for is light coming to Earth from stars, and then you look for a dip in the light, and that happens because a planet that's orbiting the star gets in the way and blocks some of the light from the star. So far this telescope has been used to find 750 confirmed exoplanets. But basically astronomers have reanalyzed this data using machine learning and have found 10,000 further candidates

So we need to work out if they're real planets basically by confirming it using other telescopes. So far this particular telescope has a false positive rate of about 50%, so we can expect about 5,000 further planets to be confirmed, which is huge because we only know of 6,000 exoplanets. Also it's not that long ago that we discovered the first exoplanet. Each one of these on their own was...

It was a big deal. I know. And now I'm being like, oh, you know, 5000 or so. So, yeah, this could almost double the number of known exoplanets, which, you know, is exciting in itself. It's also really important in terms of understanding what kind of stars produce what kind of planets, which helps us better understand the evolution of our own solar system, how life came to be on Earth. And also, if you're someone like me who gets excited about thinking of life on other planets, the more exoplanets we know of, the more likely we are to find aliens. So, yeah.