We Are Awake

            The oldest known human footprints, from Africa, are by Australopithecus  Matheusvieeira Researchers have discovered some 50 footprints at Trachilos in Crete that are nearly six million years old. It looks like they may be from a hominin – a member of the human species after separation from the chimpanzee lineage. But, as the authors point out themselves, the findings are highly controversial – suggesting human ancestors may have existed in Crete at the same time as they evolved in Africa. So what should we make of it all? If the footprints are confirmed to be from a hominin – additional studies are needed before we can know for sure – it is unquestionably exciting. The oldest footprints confirmed as hominin are the Laetoli series, which date to 3.65 million years. The Laetoli series, found in Laetoli, Tanzania, are now known to have been made by the early human ancestor Australopithecus. It was up to six feet tall and had a foot function pretty much indistinguish

  A new paper predicts that two of the moons of Uranus are on a collision course with each other. Desdemona and Cressida, two small moons, are on pace for a crash in approximately a million years. The collision was predicted by a study uploaded to  arVix  by two researchers at the University of Idaho and one from Wellesley College. Uranus is the fourth-largest planetary mass in the solar system and has both a ring system and a remarkable 27 moons in orbit. The moons are divided into 13 inner moons, 5 major moons, and 9 irregular moons. Mankind's first real encounter with most of these moons was not until the 1986  Voyager 2 flyby . The researchers were studying the ring system when they noticed an odd orbit. It wasn't round or elliptical, but instead resembled a triangle. The odd shape, according to the study, is because of one of the inner moons, Cressida. Named after a title character in Shakespeare's  Troilus and Cressida,  the moon Cressida's gravitationa