Pribek

There’s new information about the Guitar Pulsar, a stellar corpse that leaves a guitar shaped wake. From New Scientist…

To hunt for the pulsar’s birthplace, Nina Tetzlaff at the University of Jena in Germany and colleagues projected the paths of 140 nearby groups of stars backwards in time over 5 million years.

Previous work suggests the star was ejected at over 1500 kilometres per second. The team says the pulsar’s path indicates that 800,000 years ago it was fired from a cluster of massive stars that now lies about 6500 light years away from Earth (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol 400, p L99).

It’s a puzzle why the pulsar is moving so fast. Speeds greater than 1000 kilometres per second are hard to account for with current astronomy models, says James Cordes of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The object’s distance is not known for sure, he points out, which could mean the pulsar’s speed and its position have been misjudged.

So, we know where it came from and we know it’s really fast (faster than “Flight Of The Bumblebee” at 320 BPM!) but, we don’t really know where it is.

Perhaps, the Royal Astronomical Society should consult Astrophysicist/Guitarist, Brian May.

huh…looks like an acoustic guitar really. Cool flames though. I had it pictured as a Hendrix Strat or a Gibson Explorer or a Randy Rhoads Jackson, something like that. Go figure.

Archaeologists in Germany have found a 35,000-year-old flute. From the NY Times…

Archaeologists Wednesday reported the discovery last fall of a bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes that they said represented the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture. They said the bone flute with five finger holes, found at Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, was “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves” in a region where pieces of other flutes have been turning up in recent years.

So, music has been a part of the culture since the early days of civilization. But, what role did music play for these ancients? This next bit offers up some clues…

It so happens that the Hohle Fels flute was uncovered in sediments a few feet away from the carved figurine of a busty, nude woman, also around 35,000 years old, noted Dr. Conard and his co-authors, Susanne C. Münzel of Tübingen and Maria Malina of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. That discovery was announced in May by Dr. Conard.

Well, well. well; some things never change, do they? Musicians get the chicks. Even cave flautists.

The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany has done a study on chimpanzee behavior. From Reuters…

“Our results strongly suggest that wild chimpanzees exchange meat for sex, and do so on a long-term basis,”

“Males who shared meat with females doubled their mating success, whereas females, who had difficulty obtaining meat on their own, increased their caloric intake without suffering the energetic costs and potential risk of injury related to hunting.”

So, males doubled their chances with meat. Double…that’s substantial.

“The meat for-sex hypothesis is a plausible explanation for male-female meat sharing in this species, as chimpanzees are highly promiscuous, they have a certain degree of female choice and hunters can usually control the sharing of their catch,”

In other words, for chimps, it’s a real meat market. Basically, the guy who has the meat, gets the pick of the meat tramps.

What is the point, you ask?…

“These findings are bound to have an impact on our current knowledge about relationships between men and women; and similar studies will determine if the direct nutritional benefits that women receive from hunters in human hunter-gatherer societies could also be driving the relationship between reproductive success and good hunting skills,”

It’s all a “women who like men, who like women who like meat”, sort of thing.

And, it’s pretty easy to over think this kind of thing and ask too many questions. How would the results differ among a group of vegan chimps? Are we really a human hunter gatherer society?

All in all, it’s probably a good idea to stop off at the butcher shop and pick up a couple of rib eyes on the way home, in the interest of science and just to be on the safe side.