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Science
Friday > Archives
> 1999
> September
> September 10, 1999:
Hour One: NASA Budget / Skull in a Shop
| Congressional budget committees seeking ways to stay under mandatory budget caps have proposed cutting NASA's budget by over a billion dollars to help make ends meet. Understandably, NASA officials are outraged, saying that the proposed cuts will throw a planet-sized wrench into their plans for space exploration. | 
Night shuttle landing, June 6 1999.
NASA image. | Others, however, point out that NASA has made a point of touting its ability to work "faster, smaller, cheaper" in space - and say that the space agency should have to deal with fiscal realities in a world where there's never enough money for all programs. What's the scoop on the budget and its potential effects on NASA? We'll find out...
We'll also go on an paleontological expedition - not to the African rifts that the Leakeys combed, but to a small shop near Manhattan's Central Park. The store, Maxilla and Mandible, sells shells, horns, bones, and other pieces of natural history. But one bone that recently passed through the shop, a skull thought to be from a Homo erectus, has caught the eye of scientists. The skull has unusual features not seen before in other Homo erectus samples. Those features have scientists wondering whether the original owner of the skull was developing more modern abilities, like language, than his Homo erectus brethren.
The skull is being studied now, and will be returned to scientists in Indonesia, where it is thought to have originated. But what's the saga of the skull - and what can it tell us about early man? We'll find out on this hour of Science Friday.
Guests:
Edward Stone
Director
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Pasadena, California
Eric Delson
Research Associate, Vertebrate Paleontology
American Museum of Natural History
Professor, Anthropology
Lehman College, City University of New York
Bronx, New York
Doug Broadfield
Ph.D. Candidate, Physical Anthropology
City University of New York Graduate School
New York, New York
Sam Marquez
Ph.D. Candidate, Physical Anthropology
City University of New York Graduate School
New York, New York
Books/Articles Discussed:
Related Links:
NASA
JPL
US House of Representatives
MAXILLA & MANDIBLE
Dept of Anth: Skull Module
Lehman College Home Page
RealAudio: Science Friday, May 9 1997: Human Origins
- This segment produced by:
Karin Vergoth
Web producer:
Charles Bergquist
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