A clump of grass grows on an outcrop of shale 33,000 years ago. An ostrich pecks at the grass, and atoms taken up from the shale and into the grass become part of the eggshell the ostrich lays.

A member of a hunter-gatherer group living in southern Africa’s Karoo Desert finds the egg. She eats it, and cracks the shell into dozens of pieces. Drilling a hole, she strings the fragments onto a piece of sinew and files them into a string of beads.

She gifts the ornaments to friends who live to the east, where rainfall is higher, to reaffirm those important relationships. They, in turn, do the same, until the beads eventually end up with distant groups living high in the eastern mountains.

Thirty-three thousand years later, a University of Michigan researcher finds the beads in what is now Lesotho, and by measuring atoms in the beads, provides new evidence for where these beads were made, and just how long hunter-gatherers used them as a kind of social currency.

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, U-M paleolithic archeologist Brian Stewart and colleagues establish that the practice of exchanging these ornaments over long distances spans a much longer period of time than previously thought.

“Humans are just outlandishly social animals, and that goes back to these deep forces that selected for maximizing information, information that would have been useful for living in a hunter-gatherer society 30,000 years ago and earlier,” said Stewart, assistant professor of anthropology and assistant curator of the U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology.

“Ostrich eggshell beads and the jewelry made from them basically acted like Stone Age versions of Facebook or Twitter ‘likes,’ simultaneously affirming connections to exchange partners while alerting others to the status of those relationships.”

Lesotho is a small country of mountain ranges and rivers. It has the highest average of elevation in the continent and would have been a formidable place for hunter-gatherers to live, Stewart says. But the fresh water coursing through the country and belts of resources, stratified by the region’s elevation, provided protection against swings in climate for those who lived there, as early as 85,000 years ago.

Anthropologists have long known that contemporary hunter-gatherers use ostrich eggshell beads to establish relationships with others. In Lesotho, archeologists began finding small ornaments made of ostrich eggshell. But ostriches don’t typically live in that environment, and the archeologists didn’t find evidence of those ornaments being made in that region—no fragments of unworked eggshell, or beads in various stages of production.

So when archeologists began discovering eggshell beads without evidence of production, they suspected the beads arrived in Lesotho through these exchange networks. Testing the beads using strontium isotope analysis would allow the archeologists to pinpoint where they were made.

Strontium-87 is the daughter isotope of the radioactive element rubidium-87. When rubidium-87 decays it produces strontium-87. Older rocks such as granite and gneiss have more strontium than younger rocks such as basalt. When animals forage from a landscape, these strontium isotopes are incorporated into their tissues.

Lesotho is roughly at the center of a bullseye-shaped geologic formation called the Karoo Supergroup. The supergroup’s mountainous center is basalt, from relatively recent volcanic eruptions that formed the highlands of Lesotho. Encircling Lesotho are bands of much older sedimentary rocks. The outermost ring of the formation ranges between 325 and 1,000 kilometers away from the Lesotho sites.

To assess where the ostrich eggshell beads were made, the research team established a baseline of strontium isotope ratios—that is, how much strontium is available in a given location—using vegetation and soil samples as well samples from modern rodent tooth enamel from museum specimens collected from across Lesotho and surrounding areas.

According to their analysis, nearly 80% of the beads the researchers found in Lesotho could not have originated from ostriches living near where the beads were found in highland Lesotho.

“These ornaments were consistently coming from very long distances,” Stewart said. “The oldest bead in our sample had the third highest strontium isotope value, so it is also one of the most exotic.”

Stewart found that some beads could not have come from closer than 325 kilometers from Lesotho, and may have been made as far as 1,000 kilometers away. His findings also establish that these beads were exchanged during a time of climactic upheaval, about 59 to 25 thousand years ago. Using these beads to establish relationships between hunter-gatherer groups ensured one group access to others’ resources when a region’s weather took a turn for the worse.

“What happened 50,000 years ago was that the climate was going through enormous swings, so it might be no coincidence that that’s exactly when you get this technology coming in,” Stewart said. “These exchange networks could be used for information on resources, the condition of landscapes, of animals, plant foods, other people and perhaps marriage partners.”

Stewart says while archeologists have long accepted that these exchange items bond people over landscapes in the ethnographic Kalahari, they now have firm evidence that these beads were exchanged over huge distances not only in the past, but for over a long period of time. This study places another piece in the puzzle of how we persisted longer than all other humans, and why we became the globe’s dominant species.

The last full moon of winter will light up the sky this weekend.

According to Old Farmer’s Almanac, March’s supermoon is called the Super Worm Moon.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac says the moon will appear full from Sunday night, March 8 but will officially peak Monday, March 9 at 1:48 p.m.

According to NASA, the moon got its name from native tribes in the northern and eastern United States.

NASA says the Worm Moon is the most widely-used name, but it’s also known as the Lenten Moon, Crow Moon, Crust Moon, Sap Moon and Sugar Moon.

The space agency says a supermoon occurs when the moon is closest to the Earth in its elliptical orbit, which makes the moon appear brighter and larger than usual.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac says this full moon will be the first of three supermoons in 2020. The other two will occur in April and May.

NASA on Thursday announced the name of its next Mars rover: Perseverance.

It will be the fifth exploratory vehicle on the Red Planet following in the tire tracks of the similarly augustly titled Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity.

The name was announced at an event at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia, to congratulate Alex Mather, the seventh grade student who picked it.

“Alex’s entry captured the spirit of exploration,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

“Like every exploration mission before, our rover is going to face challenges, and it’s going to make amazing discoveries.”

Following its forebears, Perseverance was named by school-age children in nationwide contests – starting from Sojourner in 1997 to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed on Mars in 2004, to Curiosity, which has been exploring Mars since 2012.

The latest contest began last August, with 4,700 volunteer judges including teachers and space enthusiasts whittling down the pool to 155 semifinalists, before nine names were put to the public on NASA’s website.

More than 770,000 votes were cast online before the space agency decided the winner.

He will receive an invitation to travel with his family to Cape Canaveral in Florida to witness the rover begin its journey, when it launches between July 17 and August 5 this year.

This window was chosen because the Earth and Mars are in good positions relative to each other at that point.

Perserverance is projected to land in February 2021.

The mission has two new objectives: To seek out signs of ancient life, and then sample materials and prepare a cache that can be returned to Earth on a return trip.

It builds on the same technology platform used by Curiosity, but will be able to land more precisely and has an onboard system to avoid hazardous terrain on descent.

It also has an improved wheel design, and carries a drill for coring samples from the Martian rocks and soil as it scours for signs of ancient microbial life.

PORTLAND, Ore. – For the first time, Oregon Health & Science University researchers performed a procedure to edit human genes within the body, using CRISPR.

Scientists are working to repair a gene mutation that causes a rare form of inherited blindness called Leber congenital amaurosis type 10, also known as LCA10 and CEP290-related retinal dystrophy. Most people with this gene mutation are either born blind or become blind before they turn 10 years old.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a genome editing method.

OHSU says the gene edit is designed to be permanent, but will not be passed on to the offspring of those who receive the treatment.

“Being able to edit genes inside the human body is incredibly profound,” said Mark Pennesi, M.D., Ph.D., who leads OHSU’s involvement in the BRILLIANCE clinical trial.

Pennesi said editing genes inside the body could allow doctors and scientists to treat a much wider range of diseases.

In a major advance in mind-controlled prosthetics for amputees, University of Michigan researchers have tapped faint, latent signals from arm nerves and amplified them to enable real-time, intuitive, finger-level control of a robotic hand.

To achieve this, the researchers developed a way to tame temperamental nerve endings, separate thick nerve bundles into smaller fibers that enable more precise control, and amplify the signals coming through those nerves. The approach involves tiny muscle grafts and machine learning algorithms borrowed from the brain-machine interface field.

“This is the biggest advance in motor control for people with amputations in many years,” said Paul Cederna, who is the Robert Oneal Collegiate Professor of Plastic Surgery at the U-M Medical School, as well as a professor of biomedical engineering.

“We have developed a technique to provide individual finger control of prosthetic devices using the nerves in a patient’s residual limb. With it, we have been able to provide some of the most advanced prosthetic control that the world has seen.”

Cederna co-leads the research with Cindy Chestek, associate professor of biomedical engineering at the U-M College of Engineering. In a paper published March 4 in Science Translational Medicine, they describe results with four study participants using the Mobius Bionics LUKE arm.

Intuitive prosthetic control works on the first try

“You can make a prosthetic hand do a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean that the person is intuitively controlling it. The difference is when it works on the first try just by thinking about it, and that’s what our approach offers,” Chestek said. “This worked the very first time we tried it. There’s no learning for the participants. All of the learning happens in our algorithms. That’s different from other approaches.”

While study participants aren’t yet allowed to take the arm home, in the lab, they were able to pick up blocks with a pincer grasp; move their thumb in a continuous motion, rather than have to choose from two positions; lift spherically shaped objects; and even play in a version of Rock, Paper, Scissors called Rock, Paper, Pliers.

“It’s like you have a hand again,” said study participant Joe Hamilton, who lost his arm in a fireworks accident in 2013. “You can pretty much do anything you can do with a real hand with that hand. It brings you back to a sense of normalcy.”

Turning a tiny muscle graft into a nerve signal amplifier

One of the biggest hurdles in mind-controlled prosthetics is tapping into a strong and stable nerve signal to feed the bionic limb. Some research groups—those working in the brain-machine interface field—go all the way to the primary source, the brain. This is necessary when working with people who are paralyzed. But it’s invasive and high-risk.

For people with amputations, peripheral nerves—the network that fans out from the brain and spinal cord—have been interesting, but they hadn’t yet led to a long-term solution for a couple of reasons: The nerve signals they carry are small. And other approaches to picking up those signals involved probes that eavesdropped by force. These “nails in nerves,” as researchers sometimes refer to them, lead to scar tissue, which muddles that already faint signal over time.

The U-M team came up with a better way. They wrapped tiny muscle grafts around the nerve endings in the participants’ arms. These “regenerative peripheral nerve interfaces,” or RPNIs, offer severed nerves new tissue to latch on to. This prevents the growth of nerve masses called neuromas that lead to phantom limb pain. And it gives the nerves a megaphone. The muscle grafts amplify the nerve signals. Two patients had electrodes implanted in their muscle grafts, and the electrodes were able to record these nerve signals and pass them on to a prosthetic hand in real time.

“To my knowledge, we’ve seen the largest voltage recorded from a nerve compared to all previous results,” Chestek said. “In previous approaches, you might get 5 microvolts or 50 microvolts—very very small signals. We’ve seen the first ever millivolt signals.

“So now we can access the signals associated with individual thumb movement, multidegree of freedom thumb movement, individual fingers. This opens up a whole new world for people who are upper limb prosthesis users.”

And their interface has already lasted years. Others degrade within months due to scar tissue.

The future of prosthetics research and industry

The findings also open up new possibilities for the field, said Chestek, whose expertise is on real-time machine learning algorithms to translate neural signals into movement intent.

“What we found is now the nerve signals are good enough to apply the whole world of things we learned in brain control algorithms to nerve control,” she said.

The approach generates signals for finer movements than what today’s prosthetic hands are capable of.

“Other research groups have contributed to this as well, but we’ve leapfrogged the capabilities of the prosthetic hands that are currently available. I think this is strong motivation for further developments from prosthetic hand companies,” said Philip Vu, a research fellow in biomedical engineering and first author of the paper.

A clinical trial is ongoing. The team is looking for participants.

“So many times, the things we do in a research lab add to the knowledge in the field, but you never actually get a chance to see how that impacts a person,” Cederna said. “When you can sit and watch one person with a prosthetic device do something that was unthinkable 10 years ago, it is so gratifying. I’m so happy for our participants, and even more happy for all the people in the future that this will help.”

Added Chestek, “It’s going to be a ways from here, but we’re not going to stop working on this until we can completely restore able-bodied hand movements. That’s the dream of neuroprosthetics.”

The paper is titled, “A regenerative peripheral nerve interface allows real-time control of an artificial hand in upper limb amputees.”

DETROIT — Toyota is adding 1.2 million vehicles to a major recall in the U.S. to fix possible fuel pump failures that can cause engines to stall.

The company said Wednesday that the added vehicles bring the total to 1.8 million.

In January Toyota recalled nearly 700,000 vehicles in the U.S. for the same problems. Engine stalling can increase the risk of a crash, although the company wouldn’t say if there have been any. The automaker said Wednesday that about 118,000 vehicles in the January recall shouldn’t have been included.

The vehicles include trucks, SUVs, minivans and cars across the model lineups of Toyota and its Lexus luxury vehicle brand.

The company says owners of vehicles not involved in the January recall will be notified in early May about when to make a service appointment. Dealers will replace the fuel pump with an improved one.

Models now included in the recall are certain 2018 and 2019 Toyota Avalon, Camry, Corolla, Highlander, Sequoia, Tacoma and Tundra vehicles, as well as the 2018 and 2019 Lexus ES 350, GS 350, IS 300, IS 350, LC 500, LC 500h, LS 500, LS 500h, RC 300, RC 350, RX 350L.

Also covered are the 2013-2015 Lexus LS 460, the 2013-2014 Lexus GS 350, the 2014 Toyota FJ Cruiser and Lexus IS-F, the 2014-2015 Toyota 4Runner and Land Cruiser and Lexus GX 460, IS 350 and LX 570. Other vehicles include the 2015 Lexus NX 200t and RC 350, the 2017 Lexus IS 200t and RC 200t, the 2017-2019 Toyota Sienna and Lexus RX 350, and the 2018 Lexus GS 300.