NASA Asteroid Analog Mission Tackles Surface Mobility

HOUSTON — NASA’s undersea analog missions — elaborate dress rehearsals that unite astronauts, scientists and engineers on the ocean floor to test hardware and mission operations strategies — are playing a crucial role in preparations for the next wave of human deep-space exploration, according to Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover mission and the current chair of the NASA Advisory Council.
Squyres is scheduled to surface June 22 from his second visit to the Aquarius Reef Base off Key Largo, Fla., an undersea habitat chosen by NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations (Neemo) to simulate a 12-day mission to a small asteroid.
“I feel what we are doing is extremely valuable,” Squyres said in a June 21 interview. “The problem we face is how do you do field work in microgravity. Asteroids are effectively a zero-g environment. No one knows how to do that. Hit a rock with a hammer and you will go flying. So we need completely new techniques for getting around and stabilizing yourself at a worksite.”

This Is China's Response To The US Navy's Struggling Coastal Warship Program

The fact that China's been building up its military with speed and agility recently is nothing new, but Beijing is now going head-to-head with one of the U.S. Navy's most troubled programs.
The Navy's Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is meant to be part of the fleet being moved to the Pacific, and though a couple versions of the ship were put to sea four years ago, the program is still beset by problems and nowhere near combat ready.
Michael Fabey at Aviation Week acquired Navy documents that show the following components had issues on the LCS USS Freedom's recent voyage:

Were Neanderthals Europe's First Cave Artists?

Paintings on cave walls in Spain are far older than previously thought.

THE GIST

• Some researchers think the paintings may predate European Homo sapiens.
• The study suggests that the art may not be the work of modern humans at all.
• Neanderthals have been portrayed as brutish, animalistic cavemen, but the archaeological evidence suggests they weren't dummies.

A series of cave paintings in Spain are thousands of years older than scientists realized, raising speculation — but no proof — that Neanderthals could have been the earliest wall artists in Europe.
The oldest image, a large red disk on the wall of El Castillo cave in northern Spain, is more than 40,800 years old, according to an advanced method that uses natural deposits on the surfaces of the paintings to date their creation. The new findings, detailed in the June 15 issue of the journal Science, make the paintings the oldest reliably dated wall paintings ever.