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Scientists create world’s biggest family tree linking 27 million people! The breakthrough is a major step towards mapping the entirety of human relationships, with a single lineage that traces the ancestry of all people on Earth. The family tree also has widespread implications for medical research, identifying genetic predictors of disease. “We have basically built a huge family tree, a genealogy for all of
humanity that models as exactly as we can the history that generated
all the genetic variation we find in humans today. This genealogy allows
us to see how every person’s genetic sequence relates to every other,
along all the points of the genome,” says principal author Dr. Yan Wong
in a university release.
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NASA's Perseverance Rover Captures Video of Solar Eclipse on Mars Captured with Perseverance’s next-generation Mastcam-Z camera on April
2, the 397th Martian day, or sol, of the mission, the eclipse lasted
a little over 40 seconds – much shorter than a typical solar eclipse
involving Earth’s Moon. (Phobos is about 157 times smaller than Earth’s
Moon. Mars’ other moon, Deimos, is even smaller.)
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Love it or hate it, licorice might just hold the key to curing cancer Gnanasekar Munirathinam, an associate professor in the department
of biomedical sciences at the College of Medicine Rockford, authored
these remarkable findings while studying substances derived from the
licorice plant Glycyrrhiza glabra. At that time, Prof. Munirathinam
and his team were focusing specifically on the effect of licorice on
prostate cancer.
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30-second COVID test proves just as accurate as a PCR test Their study reveals that the new device is just as accurate as a PCR test, which has become the gold standard during the pandemic — but takes up to 24 hours for results to arrive. Moreover, researchers say the new device costs just $50 to build and
is reusable — unlike similar rapid testing devices which are trying
to cut down waiting times for COVID patients. “There is nothing available
like it,” says Josephine Esquivel-Upshaw, D.M.D., a professor in the
UF College of Dentistry, in a university release. “It’s true point of
care. It’s access to care. We think it will revolutionize diagnostics.”
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First ever recording of the moment someone dies reveals how our lives really do flash before us
This meant the 15 minutes around his death was recorded on the EEG. In the 30 seconds either side of the patient's final heartbeat, an increase in very specific brain waves were spotted. These waves, known as gamma oscillations, are linked to things like
memory retrieval, meditation and dreaming. This could mean - although
many more studies would need to take place - we might see a sort of
film reel of our best memories as we die.
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NRAO and Optisys Partner Up to Produce 3D Devices for Radio Astronomy A new partnership between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory,
headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Optisys, LLC, headquartered
in West Valley City, Utah, will explore the potential for leveraging
this technology for radio astronomy applications. In radio astronomy,
the performance of antennas, waveguides, and other electromagnetic parts
help determine the capability and sensitivity of radio telescopes and
the quality of scientific data they deliver to researchers. The more
capable and sensitive the antenna and other devices, the more scientists
can learn about the Universe. NRAO’s Central Development Laboratory
(CDL) is continuously testing new technologies in pursuit of building
better telescopes.
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Chinese scientists create AI nanny to look after embryos in artificial womb All within the realm of possibility, say Chinese scientists, in what could be a breakthrough for the future of childbearing in a country facing its lowest birth rates in decades. That is, once the law allows the use of such technology. Researchers in Suzhou, in China’s eastern Jiangsu province, say they
have developed an artificial intelligence system that can monitor and
take care of embryos as they grow into fetuses in an artificial womb
environment. This AI nanny is looking after a large number of animal
embryos for now, they said in findings published in the domestic peer-reviewed
Journal of Biomedical Engineering last month.
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Mystery surrounding Tutankhamun’s ‘space dagger’ made of metal from a METEORITE finally solved The artefact's origins and the way it was manufactured remain one of the great mysteries surrounding Tut's grave goods. It's unusual in that it was made using a metal that the Egyptians would not begin to smelt for another 500 years: Iron. In 2016, scientists determined that the chemical makeup of the 13-inch
blade show that it was expertly crafted from an iron meteorite. Now
an analysis from a team at the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan
has revealed that the object was likely made outside of Egypt.
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Water vapor detected on a 'super Neptune' planet According to the agency, the planet, named TOI-674 b, is a bit bigger than Neptune and orbits a red-dwarf star about 150 light-years away — which is considered nearby in astronomical terms. TOI-674 b is considered an exoplanet, or a planet around other stars,
known to have water vapor in their atmospheres. The water vapor was
discovered by an international team of scientists, led by Jonathan Brande
of the University of Kansas, and included researchers from the NASA
Ames Research Center and from IPAC and other research centers at Caltech.
The discovery has been submitted to an academic journal.
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Our Language Has Gotten More Emotional. Why? The researchers looked at the language used in millions of English-
and Spanish-language books published between 1850 and 2019, analyzing
the use of 5,000 frequently used words. The rise of reasoning words
like determine and conclusion and the decline of intuitive words like
feel and believe could be seen starting around 1850 and lasting until
the late 20th century. But over the past 40 years, this trend reversed,
as words associated with intuition and emotion were used more frequently
and words associated with fact-based arguments were used less frequently.
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Did Your Catalytic Converter Get Stolen? The Pandemic--and Rhodium--Could Share Some Blame More valuable than silver, gold, platinum, or even this jewelry. It’s this powder right here. This jewelry is being treated with a thin coating of rhodium—a chemically inert, corrosion resistant metal. It protects the silver and gives it a nice shiny finish. But you probably use rhodium, every single day, for another reason.
Rhodium is a key ingredient in every car sold in the United States since
around 1975.
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Scientists Have Captured Footage Of A Rare Fish That Can See Through Its Own Transparent Head The barreleye fish (Macropinna microstoma) is a strange organism that
is rarely seen. Despite sending their remotely operated vehicles (ROV)
on more than 5,600 dives in the fish’s habitat, researchers from the
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) have only sighted the
species nine times, MBARI tweeted on Dec. 9.
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What The Matrix Got Wrong About Cities of the Future By a long margin, the water came first. Earthen conduits moved stormwater
in Xi'an, China, millennia ago; lead tubes led drinking water under
the stone-paved streets of classical Rome. In response to the waterborne
pandemics of the 19th century, the modern European and North American
city became defined by sewers and drains so extensive as to be beyond
imagining. Today, when water tumbles out of the tap into your sink,
it is but a cameo turn in an epic journey from faraway reservoir through
final sewage treatment, across dozens—even hundreds—of miles, and months
or years of time.
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NASA’s ‘Eyes on Asteroids’ Reveals Our Near-Earth Object Neighborhood Thousands of asteroids and dozens of comets are discovered every single year, some of which – called near-Earth objects (NEOs) – follow orbits that pass through the inner solar system. Now totaling about 28,000, their numbers rising daily, these objects are tracked carefully by NASA-funded astronomers in case any might pose an impact threat to our planet. The new web-based app depicts the orbits of every known NEO, providing
detailed information on those objects. Using the slider at the bottom
of the screen, you can travel quickly forward and backward through time
to see their orbital motions.
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Cryptocurrency faces a quantum computing problem Here's the problem: The blockchain accounting technology that powers cryptocurrencies could be vulnerable to sophisticated attacks and forged transactions if quantum computing matures faster than efforts to future-proof digital money. Cryptocurrencies are secured by a technology called public key cryptography.
The system is ubiquitous, protecting your online purchases and scrambling
your communications for anyone other than the intended recipient. The
technology works by combining a public key, one that anyone can see,
with a private key that's for your eyes only.
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These Algorithms Look at X-Rays—and Somehow Detect Your Race The study authors and other medical AI experts say the results make it more crucial than ever to check that health algorithms perform fairly on people with different racial identities. Complicating that task: The authors themselves aren’t sure what cues the algorithms they created use to predict a person’s race. Evidence that algorithms can read race from a person’s medical scans
emerged from tests on five types of imagery used in radiology research,
including chest and hand x-rays and mammograms. The images included
patients who identified as Black, white, and Asian. For each type of
scan, the researchers trained algorithms using images labeled with a
patient’s self-reported race. Then they challenged the algorithms to
predict the race of patients in different, unlabeled images.
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Grow and eat your own vaccines? Messenger RNA or mRNA technology, used in COVID-19 vaccines, works by teaching our cells to recognize and protect us against infectious diseases. One of the challenges with this new technology is that it must be
kept cold to maintain stability during transport and storage. If this
new project is successful, plant-based mRNA vaccines — which can be
eaten — could overcome this challenge with the ability to be stored
at room temperature.
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Lock of Sitting Bull’s hair confirms great-grandson’s identity Now, researchers have used badly fragmented DNA from Sitting Bull’s scalp lock—a short braid kept for ceremonial purposes—to confirm that a Sioux man from South Dakota is the storied chief’s great-grandson. But the work, more than 10 years in the making, has raised questions
among scientists who worry about how Indigenous data are used in research.
“It’s cool from a forensic point of view,” says Keolu Fox, a Kanaka
Maoli, or Native Hawaiian, geneticist at the University of California
(UC), San Diego, who was not involved in the research. “But the real
question is, would Sitting Bull have been comfortable with this?”
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Evidence Indicates There’s Another Planet the Size of Mars in Our Solar System The eight official planets aren't the only ones that survived the formation of our solar system, and the Earth might have another sister planet lurking somewhere in interstellar space, in a "third zone" of the solar system, according to a recent paper published in the journal Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. This means that, if Planet 9 is out there, it might have a Mars-sized
company.
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Human Footprints Found in New Mexico Are 23,000 Years Old – Long Before the Ice Age Glaciers Melted “These incredible discoveries illustrate that White Sands National
Park is not only a world-class destination for recreation but is also
a wonderful scientific laboratory that has yielded groundbreaking, fundamental
research,” said Superintendent Marie Sauter.
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China wants to build a mega spaceship that’s nearly a mile long The project is part of a wider call for research proposals from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, a funding agency managed by the country's Ministry of Science and Technology. A research outline posted on the foundation's website described such enormous spaceships as "major strategic aerospace equipment for the future use of space resources, exploration of the mysteries of the universe, and long-term living in orbit." The foundation wants scientists to conduct research into new, lightweight
design methods that could limit the amount of construction material
that has to be lofted into orbit, and new techniques for safely assembling
such massive structures in space. If funded, the feasibility study would
run for five years and have a budget of 15 million yuan ($2.3 million).
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In Argentina, giant rodents vie with the rich for top real estate Nordelta is a 1,600 hectare (3,950 acre) luxury private urban complex
built on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, on a wetland from the Parana
river that is the capybara's natural habitat. Many Nordelta residents
have complained about capybara's ruining manicured lawns, biting pets
and causing traffic accidents.
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A billionaire wants to build a utopia in the US desert. Seems like this could go wrong Telosa will eventually house 5 million people, according to its website,
and benefit from a halo of utopian promises: avant-garde architecture,
drought resistance, minimal environmental impact, communal resources.
This hypothetical metropolis promises to take some of the most cutting-edge
ideas about sustainability and urban design and make them reality.
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Rattlesnake rattles use auditory illusion to trick human brains Scientists think that rattlesnakes "rattle" the keratin structure on their tails to warn off predators, gradually increasing the frequency as a possible attacker gets closer. But now they've found the snake may have another trick in its arsenal — a sudden frequency jump in the rattling sound that it uses to fool its listener. "Our data show that the acoustic display of rattlesnakes, which has
been interpreted for decades as a simple acoustic warning signal about
the presence of the snake, is in fact a far more intricate interspecies
communication signal," senior study author Boris Chagnaud, a professor
of neurobiology at Karl-Franzens-University Graz in Austria, said in
a statement.
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Tesla May Be About To Open Up Its Superchargers For Other EVs In Europe There is a need for better roads, infrastructure, and facilities like
charging stations if the transition towards electric vehicles is expected
to go without any obstructions.Owing to this explanation, Tesla will
be opening its charging station in Europe soon. This charging station
will be open to cars other than Tesla’s as well. This is the special
feature of this station. The charging station will be made available
to all the vehicles belonging to all the companies by next month.
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High-tech virtual wall is the latest defense at the US-Mexico border The high-tech watch poles known as Autonomous Surveillance Towers are powered by solar energy and use artificial intelligence to detect movement along a two-mile radius, sending the information in real-time to agents patrolling the area. And they’re now being installed at different points along the nearly 2,000 miles of the US-Mexico border. “The ASTs are in remote locations that are difficult to reach,” Border
Patrol agent Joel Freeland recently told The Post. “They operate 24-hours
a day and are environmentally friendly because they rely entirely on
solar power.”
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Hummingbirds Know How to Thwart Male Harassers Falk, a biologist at the University of Washington, is deeply fond
of the birds, who are gorgeous and clever and sassy. Sometimes, they’re
brave enough to flit right up to him and inspect what he’s holding in
his hand. But jacobins are also bullies, especially when they spot one
of the species’ more modestly colored females, which sport green backs
and mottled gray chests. These dull-feathered gals can’t even seek out
a meal without being catcalled, pecked, or body slammed by their kin—acts
that are sometimes about sex, sometimes about rudeness, and perhaps
quite often about both.
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WHO issues new recommendations on human genome editing for the advancement of public health The forward-looking new reports result from the first broad, global consultation looking at somatic, germline and heritable human genome editing. The consultation, which spanned over two years, involved hundreds of participants representing diverse perspectives from around the world, including scientists and researchers, patient groups, faith leaders and indigenous peoples. “Human genome editing has the potential to advance our ability to treat
and cure disease, but the full impact will only be realized if we deploy
it for the benefit of all people, instead of fueling more health inequity
between and within countries,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO
Director-General.
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Our Genes Shape Our Gut Bacteria, New Research Shows In the study, published recently in Science, researchers discovered
that most bacteria in the gut microbiome are heritable after looking
at more than 16,000 gut microbiome profiles collected over 14 years
from a long-studied population of baboons in Kenya's Amboseli National
Park. However, this heritability changes over time, across seasons and
with age. The team also found that several of the microbiome traits
heritable in baboons are also heritable in humans.
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How do scientists calculate the age of a star? “The sun is the only star we know the age of,” says astronomer David
Soderblom of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “Everything
else is bootstrapped up from there.” Even well-studied stars surprise
scientists every now and then. In 2019 when the red supergiant star
Betelgeuse dimmed, astronomers weren’t sure if it was just going through
a phase or if a supernova explosion was imminent. (Turns out it was
just a phase.) The sun also shook things up when scientists noticed
that it wasn’t behaving like other middle-aged stars.
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Rats prefer to help their own kind The findings, published on July 13, in the journal eLife, suggest
that altruism, whether in rodents or humans, is motivated by social
bonding and familiarity rather than sympathy or guilt.
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This device harvests power from your sweaty fingertips while you sleep To date, the device is the most efficient on-body energy harvester
ever invented, producing 300 millijoules (mJ) of energy per square centimeter
without any mechanical energy input during a 10-hour sleep and an additional
30 mJ of energy with a single press of a finger. The authors say the
device represents a significant step forward for self-sustainable wearable
electronics.
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Indonesian Hunter-Gatherers Were Making Tiny Point Tools Thousands of Years Ago “The Toaleans lived in southernmost Sulawesi around 1,500-8,000 years ago,” said lead author Yinika Perston, a Ph.D. student in the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University. “During this time, they produced several distinctive small tools that
have not been found elsewhere on the island, including the so-called
Maros points, which were possibly used as arrowheads and have fine tooth-like
serrations.”
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Curiosity Spots Carbon Dioxide-Ice Clouds in Martian Skies Clouds are typically found at the equator of Mars in the coldest time of year, when the planet is the farthest from the Sun in its oval-shaped orbit. But two Earth years ago, the Curiosity team members spotted clouds
in the Martian atmosphere earlier than expected. This year, they were
ready to start documenting these early clouds from the moment they first
appeared in January.
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First-known pregnant mummy discovered The mummy was donated to the University of Warsaw in Poland in 1826; only recently did archaeologists with the Warsaw Mummy Project conduct a detailed analysis of the mummy while studying the National Museum in Warsaw's collection of animal and human mummies. X-ray and CT scans of the mummy revealed that the remains inside belonged
to a female and did not match the coffin and cartonnage case that was
made for a male. The mummy was obviously not the remains of a priest
named Hor-Djehuty from ancient Thebes, whose name was inscribed onto
the coffin, the researchers said.
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VW Will Design Its Own Chips For Self-Driving Cars As Reuters (via Autoblog) reports, company chief Herbert Diess told Handelsblatt in an interview that VW will design its own high-performance chips for autonomous vehicles. It was a matter of eking out the best possible hardware, Diess said — much like Apple and Tesla, the move would give VW “higher competence” in defining its processors. The automaker wouldn’t build the chips themselves, but did want to
own patents. The company’s software division, Cariad, would expand to
develop relevant expertise. A move like this might be key to VW’s goal
of becoming a more agile, tech-savvy brand. Tesla relied on standard
NVIDIA hardware for earlier cars, but has shifted to custom chips that
give it more control over how Full Self-Driving and Autopilot will develop.
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These mysterious stone structures in Saudi Arabia are older than the pyramids A study published Thursday in the journal Antiquity shows that the mysterious structures dotted around the desert in northwestern Saudi Arabia – called "mustatils" from the Arabic word for "rectangle" – are about 7,000 years old. That’s much older than expected, and about 2,000 years older than either Stonehenge in England or the oldest Egyptian pyramid. “We think of them as a monumental landscape,” said Melissa Kennedy,
an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth and
an author of the study. “We are talking about over 1,000 mustatils.”
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Stars made of antimatter could lurk in the Milky Way These antistar candidates seem to give off the kind of gamma rays that are produced when antimatter — matter’s oppositely charged counterpart — meets normal matter and annihilates. This could happen on the surfaces of antistars as their gravity draws in normal matter from interstellar space, researchers report online April 20 in Physical Review D. “If, by any chance, one can prove the existence of the antistars …
that would be a major blow for the standard cosmological model,” says
Pierre Salati, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Annecy-le-Vieux Laboratory
of Theoretical Physics in France not involved in the work. It “would
really imply a significant change in our understanding of what happened
in the early universe.”
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The Story of the Soviet Z80 Processor These included analogs of various western parts, some with additional
enhancements, as well as domestically designed parts. In some ways these
institutions competed, it was a matter of pride, and funding to come
out with new and better designs, all within the confines of the Soviet
system. There were also the various Warsaw Pact countries (Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania), that were
aligned with the USSR but not part of it. These countries had their
own IC production, outside of the auspices and direction of the USSR.
They mainly supplied their own local markets (or within other Warsaw
Pact countries) but also on occasion provided ICs to the USSR proper,
though one would assume an assortment of bureaucratic paperwork was
needed for such transfers.
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Neanderthals had the capacity to perceive and produce human speech "This is one of the most important studies I have been involved in
during my career," said Quam. "The results are solid and clearly show
the Neanderthals had the capacity to perceive and produce human speech.
This is one of the very few current, ongoing research lines relying
on fossil evidence to study the evolution of language, a notoriously
tricky subject in anthropology."
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NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity’s first official flight rescheduled for early Monday The 4-pound helicopter named Ingenuity is now scheduled for approximately 12:30 a.m. PDT Monday. A livestream will begin at 3:15 a.m. PDT as the helicopter team prepares to receive the data downlink in the Space Flight Operations Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, NASA said Saturday, April 17. Ingenuity was designed and built at JPL. Simi Valley-based AeroVironment
designed most of the hardware.
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100-Million-Year-Old Seafloor Sediment Bacteria Have Been Resuscitated The gyre is a marine desert more barren than all but the aridest places on Earth. Ocean currents swirl around it, but within the gyre, the water stills and life struggles because few nutrients enter. Near the center is both the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility (made famous by H.P. Lovecraft as the home of the be-tentacled Cthulhu) and the South Pacific garbage patch. At times the closest people are astronauts passing above on the International Space Station. The sea here is so miserly that it takes one million years for a meter
of marine “snow”—corpses, poo and dust—to accumulate on the bottom.
The tale of all that time can total as little as 10 centimeters. It
is the least productive patch of water on the planet. More
Perseverance rover flexes its arm on Mars for the 1st time Perseverance touched down on the Red Planet on Feb. 18 to begin work looking for traces of ancient life and selecting rock samples for a future mission to carry to Earth's laboratories for much more thorough examination. But before "Percy" sets off on those scientific adventures, the car-sized robot must first warm up, so to speak, testing its components and confirming nothing was damaged during the perilous landing. "This week I’ve been doing lots of health checkouts, getting ready
to get to work," NASA officials wrote in an update from the rover's
Twitter account posted on March 3. "I’ve checked many tasks off my list,
including instrument tests, imaging, and getting my arm moving."
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Part Robot, Part Frog: Xenobots Are the First Robots Made From Living Cells Xenobots are the first robots made completely of living materials.
They’re designed on a supercomputer running software that emulates natural
selection: Algorithms determine possible effective tissue configurations
for a xenobot to perform a specified task, such as moving through fluids
or carrying a payload. The most promising designs are sculpted with
tiny forceps and cauterizing irons, then set free in petri dishes, where
the specks of amphibian flesh live for about a week before decomposing.
There are no electronics involved.
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Life after death: Physicist Michio Kaku says digital immortality is 'within reach' Michio Kaku, best-selling author and professor at The City College of New York, believes life after death can be achieved through digital means. This does not mean science will one day allow us to stand before the
Pearly Gates but, rather, technology will be able to immortalise our
memories, personalities and quirks in a way that will be accessible
for future generations.
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The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations That's the takeaway of a new study, published Dec. 14 to the arXiv
database, which used modern astronomy and statistical modeling to map
the emergence and death of intelligent life in time and space across
the Milky Way. Their results amount to a more precise 2020 update of
a famous equation that Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence founder
Frank Drake wrote in 1961. The Drake equation, popularized by physicist
Carl Sagan in his "Cosmos" miniseries, relied on a number of mystery
variables — like the prevalence of planets in the universe, then an
open question.
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Study: Birds Are Linked to Happiness Levels The study, published in Ecological Economics, focused on European residents, and determined that happiness correlated with a specific number of bird species. "According to our findings, the happiest Europeans are those who can
experience numerous different bird species in their daily life, or who
live in near-natural surroundings that are home to many species," says
lead author Joel Methorst, a doctoral researcher at the Senckenberg
Biodiversity and Climate Research Center, the iDiv and the Goethe University
in Frankfurt.
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This Smart Toilet Will Know You by the Shape of Your Asshole At least, that's the crux of a new scientific paper outlining the mechanisms for a smart toilet that identifies poopers based on video clips of their unique anuses. Stanford researchers have created the panopticon of looking up your
own ass, with a "smart toilet" that monitors your health by analyzing
your stool, urine, and the timing of both, using four cameras and an
array of sensors and identification systems. The paper, "A mountable
toilet system for personalized health monitoring via the analysis of
excreta," was published Monday in the journal Nature.
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How one MILLION people could live on the Red Planet The winning entries were hand picked from the huge array of futuristic-looking, idealistic city designs - which had to show how they could support up to one million residents. The competition challenged participants to “reinvent life on Mars”
for the next giant leapt of mankind – Martian colonisation. Organised
by tech company HP, the initiative pulled in architects, designers,
artists and engineers from all over the globe.
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Cave Paintings Discovered Deep in Amazon Forest: The Sistine Chapel of Ancients Hailed as the “Sistine Chapel of the Ancients,” it’s the kind of discovery that changes the world of archaeology. Believed to be 12,500 years old, the art is extremely detailed, and
includes handprints and depictions of Ice Age megafauna like the mastodon,
a relative of the mammoth, Ice Age horses, and giant ground sloths.
More
Solar power stations in space could be the answer to our energy needs A century later, however, scientists are making huge strides in turning
the concept into reality. The European Space Agency has realised the
potential of these efforts and is now looking to fund such projects,
predicting that the first industrial resource we will get from space
is “beamed power”
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Natural Organisms in Soil Can Power Lights With This Bio Battery In 2016, Google named Bioo (bee-oh) the most disruptive start-up of the year. The Spanish company created a bio battery that uses microbes in the soil that feed on decaying plant matter to generate enough electricity to turn on a light and power small appliances. This is the most sustainable form of energy yet, as these microbes
never stop working, never run out, and the product requires none of
the potentially harmful chemicals and materials that traditional solar
panels require.
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Smile, wave: Some exoplanets may be able to see us too Some exoplanets—planets from beyond our own solar system—have a direct line of sight to observe Earth's biological qualities from far, far away. Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy in the College
of Arts and Sciences and director of Cornell's Carl Sagan Institute;
and Joshua Pepper, associate professor of physics at Lehigh University,
have identified 1,004 main-sequence stars (similar to our sun) that
might contain Earth-like planets in their own habitable zones—all within
about 300 light-years of Earth—and which should be able to detect Earth's
chemical traces of life.
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Why bat scientists are socially distancing from their subjects For months, though, Frick has avoided research that would put her
within spitting distance of bats. Her only projects to persist through
the pandemic have been conducted from afar, like using acoustic monitors
to eavesdrop on the animals’ squeaks and swooshes. In an era of COVID-19,
that “hands-off” approach and other precautions are crucial to protect
both bats and people, Frick, a biologist at the University of California,
Santa Cruz, and over two dozen other scientists argue online September
3 in PLOS Pathogens.
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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx survived its risky mission to grab a piece of an asteroid “The spacecraft did everything it was supposed to do,” said mission
principal investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona in
Tucson on October 20 on a NASA TV webcast. “I can’t believe we actually
pulled this off.”
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Beaked whales can hold their breath for over 3 hours (and possibly longer) These whales were already known to dive deeper and longer than any other mammal, but new research shows that their marathon dives can last even longer than once thought. When scientists recently examined data from thousands of whale dives,
they found that one of these extreme divers held its breath for more
than 3 hours, shattering the previously reported record — also held
by the Cuvier's beaked whale (Ziphius cavirostris) — by over an hour.
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Futuristic ‘Flying-V’ Airplane Makes Successful Maiden Flight, to Be Tweaked for Passenger Use The Flying-V’s unique design places the passenger cabin, the cargo
hold, and the fuel tanks in the wings, and experts hope that the plane’s
aerodynamic shape will cut fuel consumption by 20 percent compared to
today’s aircraft. Researchers have conducted a successful maiden flight
of the Flying-V, a futuristic and fuel-efficient airplane that could
one day carry passengers in its wings.
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Scientists Sequence Y Chromosome DNA of Denisovans and Neanderthals However, ancient nuclear and mtDNA sequences revealed phylogenetic discrepancies between the three groups that are hard to explain. For example, autosomal genomes show that Neanderthals and Denisovans
are sister groups that split from modern humans more than 550,000 years
ago.
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Paradox-Free Time Travel is Mathematically Possible “This has a wide range of applications, from allowing us to send rockets to other planets and modeling how fluids flow.” “For example, if I know the current position and velocity of an object
falling under the force of gravity, I can calculate where it will be
at any time.” “However, Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts
the existence of time loops or time travel — where an event can be both
in the past and future of itself — theoretically turning the study of
dynamics on its head.”
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Why Tokyo’s New Transparent Public Restrooms Are A Stroke Of Genius Around the world, public toilets get a foul rap. Even in Japan, where restrooms have a higher standard of hygiene than in much of the rest of the world, residents harbor a fear that public toilets are dark, dirty, smelly and scary. To cure the public’s phobia, the non-profit Nippon Foundation launched
“The Tokyo Toilet Project,” tasking 16 well-known architects to renovate
17 public toilets located in the public parks of Shibuya, one of the
busiest commercial areas of Tokyo.
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Microbial Life on Venus? Here's What You Really Need to Know About The Major Discovery Based on our understanding of life on Earth, Venus would be among the last places in the Solar System you'd look to find living creatures. But an international team of scientists has just made a detection that might - just might - be a biosignature. Conversely, it might be the sign of an abiotic chemical process that
we don't yet know of. Or there might be some poorly understood geological
process occurring on Venus. Either way, this discovery is the harbinger
of one heck of a learning experience.
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Eerily realistic sex doll can smile, moan — and even hold a conversation A new, eerily realistic “sex robot” that can blink, smile, moan, get goosebumps and hold a conversation has been flying off the shelves since the coronavirus struck. The dolls, sold by Sex Doll Genie and manufactured by Gynoid, are silicone-based and, according to SGD founders Janet Stevenson and her husband Amit, look and feel like a real human. “There are lonely middle-aged men who don’t necessarily want to stroll
through the dating minefield again, there are handicapped and disabled
folks for whom sex dolls are convenient and non-judgmental companions,
then there are couples like us who wanna add another dimension to their
love-life without additional emotional baggage,” according to the website.
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U.S. Military To Replace 1970s Floppy Disks Controlling Nuclear Missiles The SACCS messaging system has been used with the Minuteman intercontinental
ballistic missile (ICBM) system, the land-based nuclear option operated
by the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command. It is a network of hidden
underground missile silos connected by endless secure cabling. All of
which has been controlled by a 1970s computer system and those disks.
“This is how we would conduct nuclear war,” one senior USAF operator
explains, “on eight-inch floppy disks.”
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Humans Take a Step Closer to ‘Flying Cars’ The company, SkyDrive, said in a news release on Friday that it had
completed a flight test using “the world’s first manned testing machine,”
its SD-03 model, an electrical vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL)
vehicle. The flight time was four minutes, the company said. The aircraft
has one seat and operates with eight motors and two propellers on each
corner. It lifted about 3 meters (or about 10 feet) into the air and
was operated by a pilot, the company said.
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Amber Fossil Shows ‘Hell Ant’ Was Unlike Anything Alive Today Now, new research based on this amber-tinted window into the Cretaceous
confirms that so-called “hell ants” made a killing with the help of
recurved mandibles that swung upward, pinning or even impaling prey
against a horn-like protrusion sticking out of its forehead.
More
Tesla Prepares for Hiring Boom as Elon Musk Targets Manufacturing Expansion The chief executive’s announcement Wednesday that work has already
begun to prepare building a factory on more than 2,000 acres outside
of Austin, Texas, marks one of the few new major car assembly plants
to be built in the U.S. in the past decade, and comes while the rest
of the auto industry is navigating through a global pandemic and fears
of a prolonged recession.
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Norway Scientist Claims Report Proves Coronavirus Was Lab-Made They also highlight the lack of mutation since its discovery, which
suggests it was already fully adapted to humans. The study goes on to
explain the rationale for the development of Biovacc-19, a candidate
vaccine for COVID-19 that is now in advanced pre-clinical development.
More
First asteroid found within Venus’s orbit could be a clue to missing ‘mantle’ asteroids “It’s improbable that we look at this new population and an olivine-dominated
object is the first type we see,” says Francesca DeMeo, an asteroid
hunter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not part
of the discovery team. “That’s what makes this a cool result.”
More
Just 50% of Americans plan to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Here’s how to win over the rest Nearly half a year later, scientists around the world are rushing
to create a COVID-19 vaccine. An approved product is still months, if
not years, away and public health agencies have not yet mounted campaigns
to promote it. But health communication experts say they need to start
to lay the groundwork for acceptance now, because the flood of misinformation
from antivaccine activists has surged.
More
SpaceX: Why Elon Musk is saying ‘your GPS just got slightly better’ On Tuesday, the company launched a Falcon 9 rocket for its first United States Space Force mission. The rocket took off at 4:10 p.m. Eastern time from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Staton in Florida. On board was a Global Positioning System satellite, more commonly known as GPS. The mission sent up the third satellite for the new GPS III project, a major upgrade to the constellation used by people around the world to find their way. "Your GPS just got slightly better," Musk wrote on Twitter moments
after the GPS III satellite was deployed. The Falcon 9 used to send
up the satellite, the first flight for this specific booster, landed
on the droneship Just Read the Instructions after launch.
More
Archaeologists find largest-ever Mayan complex hiding in plain sight The site, known as Aguada Fénix, was discovered in the state of Tabasco,
near the Gulf of Mexico. The complex, likely used as a ceremonial center
and a place of gathering, was essentially hiding under the feet of modern-day
Mexicans who live above the massive structure. It's 4,600 feet (1,400
meters) long and likely dates to between 1000 and 800 BCE. That time
period, specifically, the year 950 BCE, also produced another Mayan
site, known as Ceibal, which was previously considered the oldest-ever
ceremonial center.
More
Taiwan’s Pokemon Go Grandpa upgrades array to 64 phones Chen San-yuan was featured in a BBC report August 2018 after being
spotted with an array of 11 smartphones mounted to the handlebars of
his bicycle. At the time, Chen was planning to add 4 more phones, BBC
reported. Chen was 70 years old at the time. By November that year,
Chen had increased his array to 15 phones, according to a Japan Times
report.
More
It Turns Out That Owls Have Long Skinny Legs Under All Their Feathers For those who have ever wondered what is hidden beneath an owl’s feathers, wonder no more. The pictures have already gone viral, and as it turns out, it’s not what you may think. As it turns out, owls have really long, and really skinny legs. And that is a surprise to many, as there have been plenty of people reacting to the pictures online. The reactions were mixed, with some people unable to stop giggling,
and others unable to erase the mental image of the owl’s long and spindly
legs.
More
Researchers reveal an evolutionary basis for the female orgasm Apart from vestigial organs, there are few structures in the body
we don't know the function of. It seems that the clitoris is there merely
for pleasure. But would evolution invest so much in such a fanciful
aim? Over the years, dozens of theories have been posited and hotly
debated.
More
300,000-Year-Old Wooden Throwing Stick Found in Germany The newly-found throwing stick originates from the best-known of the sites, Schöningen 13 II-4, from which well-preserved throwing spears, a push lance and wooden tools of unknown function were unearthed in the 1990s. “The chances of finding Paleolithic artifacts made of wood are normally
zero,” said Professor Nicholas Conard, a researcher in the Department
of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology and the Senckenberg Centre
for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen.
More
Coronavirus: People-tracking wristbands tested to enforce lockdown Up to 50 residents in Sofia will be given a device that can record their movements using GPS satellite location data. Several nations are testing similar wristbands to make sure people are obeying orders to stay at home. South Korea and Hong Kong have also been using electronic trackers to help enforce quarantine. The trial in Bulgaria will use Comarch LifeWristbands, developed in
Poland.
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Is There a Parallel Universe That's Moving Backwards in Time? In the 1920s, British astronomer Arthur Eddington coined the term
“arrow of time” (sometimes “time’s arrow”), which describes the asymmetrical,
one-way direction of time. Many physicists today accept that time moves
in the direction of increasing entropy—or disorder, randomness, and
even chaos—in an effort to approach some equilibrium among all of the
things. According to this thermodynamic arrow of time, things increasingly
fall apart. If that’s the case, then our universe must have began in
a low-entropy, highly ordered initial state.
More
The Greenest Diet: Bacteria Switch to Eating Carbon Dioxide The study began by identifying crucial genes for the process of carbon
fixation – the way plants take carbon from CO2 for the purpose of turning
it into such biological molecules as protein, DNA, etc. The research
team added and rewired the needed genes. They found that many of the
“parts” for the machinery that were already present in the bacterial
genome could be used as is.
More
Humans are still evolving: 3 examples of recent adaptations What we eat, how we use our bodies, and who we choose to have kids
with are just some of the many factors that can cause the human body
to change. Genetic mutations lead to new traits — and with the world
population now above 7 billion and rising, the chances of genetic mutations
that natural selection can potentially act on is only increasing.
More
Humans aren't the only species that rely on grandmothers to watch the kids: Orca grannies ensure baby whales live longer Anthropologists refer to the high survival rate of post-menopausal women as "the grandmother effect," since the presence of grandmothers boosts the chances that their kin will survive (and pass on their genetic information to future generations). That's because these older women help their children care for and feed their grandchildren. A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences reveals that another species benefits from the grandmother
effect, too: orcas.
More
Neandertals Dove Underwater to Collect Clam Shells to Use as Tools Neandertals are known to have used tools, but the extent to which they were able to exploit coastal resources has been questioned. In this study, Villa and colleagues explored artifacts from the Neandertal archaeological cave site of Grotta dei Moscerini in Italy, one of two Neandertal sites in the country with an abundance of hand-modified clam shells, dating back to around 100,000 years ago. The authors examined 171 modified shells, most of which had be retouched
to be used as scrapers. All of these shells belonged to the Mediterranean
smooth clam species Callista chione.
More
Elon Musk’s Grandfather Was Head Of Canada’s Technocracy Movement While technologists often rail that politicians just do not “get”
technology, politicians counter that technologists all too rarely grasp
politics. One fascinating example of both sides of the debate was the
history of the technocracy movement that briefly flourished in North
America in the 1930s. The “revolt of the engineers”, as it was called,
holds some interesting lessons for today.
More
China's sci-tech weapons in COVID-19 fight -Routine medical services provided online -Real-time, long-distance contact, support, investigation between experts, researchers on 5G platform China "turbo-charged it (classic approach for infectious disease control)
with modern science and modern technology in a way that was unimaginable
even a few years ago," Aylward told the press on Monday.
More
NASA’s 10 Ways to Celebrate Pi Day on March 14 And it’s not just for mathematicians and rocket scientists. National
Pi Day is widely celebrated among students, teachers and science fans,
too. Read on to find out what makes pi so special, how it’s used to
explore space and how you can join the celebration with resources from
NASA.
More
Elon Musk says he plans to send 1 million people to Mars by 2050 Musk said he hoped to build 1,000 Starships — the towering and ostensibly fully reusable spaceship that SpaceX is developing in South Texas — over 10 years. That's 100 Starships per year. Eventually, Musk added, the goal is to launch an average of three Starships per day and make the trip to Mars available to anybody. "Needs to be such that anyone can go if they want, with loans available
for those who don't have money," Musk wrote.
More
NSW mobile phone cameras to switch on: Everything drivers need to know However, drivers captured flouting the law will initially be spared punishment during a three-month grace period which will see them receive a warning letter only. Transport Minister Andrew Constance says the world-first technology
targeting phone use via fixed and mobile trailer-mounted cameras would
roll out from Sunday, December 1.
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Ancient humans procreated with at least four other species The discovery was made after scientists used previous studies to create
“mixing maps” — aka when and where mating between humans and other hominid
species happened. Turns out that these cross-species liaisons happened
at times in Europe, and at other times in Asia.
More
Top 4 candidates in our solar system for terraforming Trouble is, our neighboring celestial bodies are constantly bombarded
by deadly radiation, lack water or oxygen, rain sulfuric acid, swing
from extreme heat to cold, and possess many other inhospitable characteristics.
No matter where we go in our solar system, we'll have to engage in one
of the largest projects imaginable: terraforming. Depending on the environment
we want to transform into a more Earth-like one, the nature of this
project will vary tremendously. Here's some examples from some of the
most likely candidates for terraforming in our solar system.
More
Pentagon is investigating how it can use FISH as spies to detect underwater drones By harnessing marine organisms' ability to sense even the most minute disturbances in their environments, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) -- the U.S. Department of Defense's experimental research arm -- says it could be able to preemptively discover even the smallest autonomous vehicles. Among the potential enlistees of the program called The Persistent
Aquatic Living Sensors (PALS), are goliath grouper, black sea bass,
snapping shrimp, and other even smaller organisms like bioluminescent
plankton and other microorganisms.
More
Flushing away time: tilted toilet aims to increase employee productivity That’s right: for £150-£500 ($196-$654) you can subject your staff
to having to sit at a 13-degree angle on the toilet, in the hope of
getting them off it quicker. Developers at StandardToilet have determined
that 13 degrees is exactly the right tilt to make your employee feel
miserable on the toilet without causing any lasting pain.
More
The 2010s were supposed to bring the ebook revolution. It never quite came. The Amazon Kindle, which was introduced in 2007, effectively mainstreamed
ebooks. By 2010, it was clear that ebooks weren’t just a passing fad,
but were here to stay. They appeared poised to disrupt the publishing
industry on a fundamental level. Analysts confidently predicted that
millennials would embrace ebooks with open arms and abandon print books,
that ebook sales would keep rising to take up more and more market share,
that the price of ebooks would continue to fall, and that publishing
would be forever changed.
More
Does Certified Organic Mean What We Think It Does? On the other side are purists who feel that the spirit of organic—building healthy soil, promoting biodiversity, focusing on small producers and distributing regionally—is no longer represented by the USDA certified organic label (hence the various alternative organic labels popping up). The USDA certification has never explicitly required any of those
things, however. Instead, organic rules focus primarily on substituting
natural fertilizers and pest control methods for chemical ones. But
even here things aren’t quite as they seem.
More
Relearning The Star Stories Of Indigenous Peoples It’s a freezing cold night on the shore of Lake Winnipeg in rural Manitoba, Canada, and we are waiting for the stars. It’s early May, but I’m wearing three sweaters and huddled next to a crackling, popping campfire, listening to Buck tell us the stories behind constellations I’ve never heard of until tonight. “Right below the grandmother spider is the Pleiades, the seven sisters,”
says Buck. “And that’s called Pakone Kisik. The hole in the sky. And
the hole in the sky is where we come from.”
More
The last mammoths died on a remote island The team of researchers from Finland, Germany and Russia examined the isotope compositions of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and strontium from a large set of mammoth bones and teeth from Northern Siberia, Alaska, the Yukon, and Wrangel Island, ranging from 40,000 to 4,000 years in age. The aim was to document possible changes in the diet of the mammoths
and their habitat and find evidence of a disturbance in their environment.
The results showed that Wrangel Island mammoths' collagen carbon and
nitrogen isotope compositions did not shift as the climate warmed up
some 10,000 years ago. The values remained unchanged until the mammoths
disappeared, seemingly from the midst of stable, favorable living conditions.
More
Mars Once Had Salt Lakes Similar to Earth – “Key Ingredient of Microbial Life” Marion Nachon, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Texas A&M, and colleagues have had their work published in the current issue of Nature Geoscience. The team examined Mars’ geological terrains from Gale Crater, an immense
95-mile-wide rocky basin that is being explored with the NASA Curiosity
rover since 2012 as part of the MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) mission.
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Researchers “Translate” Bat Talk. Turns Out, They Argue—A Lot According to Ramin Skibba at Nature, neuroecologist Yossi Yovel and his colleagues recorded a group of 22 Egyptian fruit bats, Rousettus aegyptiacus, for 75 days. Using a modified machine learning algorithm originally designed for
recognizing human voices, they fed 15,000 calls into the software. They
then analyzed the corresponding video to see if they could match the
calls to certain activities.
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40,000-year-old bracelet made by extinct human species found This makes it the oldest piece of jewelry ever discovered, and archeologists have been taken aback by the level of its sophistication. The bracelet was discovered in a site called the Denisova Cave in Siberia, close to Russia's border with China and Mongolia. It was found next to the bones of extinct animals, such as the wooly mammoth, and other artifacts dating back 125,000 years. The cave is named after the Denisovan people — a mysterious species
of hominins from the Homo genus, who are genetically different from
both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
More
The Future Looks Like Salt Reactors There are several varieties of nuclear fission, which are broken down
by the materials they use to moderate and/or cool the intense heat given
off by the process. One of these is called a molten salt reactor (MSR),
which is moderated and cooled by circulating a molten salt. It's not
typical table salt, but usually a mixture of lithium fluoride and beryllium
fluoride.
More
Scientists discover way to ‘grow’ tooth enamel Though enamel is the hardest tissue in the body, it cannot self-repair. Now scientists have discovered a method by which its complex structure can be reproduced and the enamel essentially “grown” back. The team behind the research say the materials are cheap and can be
prepared on a large scale. “After intensive discussion with dentists,
we believe that this new method can be widely used in future,” said
Dr Zhaoming Liu, co-author of the research from Zhejiang University
in China.
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Thanks to Student’s Hunch, Seniors With Dementia Are ‘Coming Alive’ Again With the ‘Magic’ of Virtual Reality The man sat slouched in his wheelchair, unmoving, his eyes barely open. Hayes had enrolled in MIT’s Sloan School of Management with the idea of helping older adults overcome depression and isolation through the immersive world of virtual reality. Now he needed to test his idea. Hayes turned on a virtual reality experience featuring a three-dimensional
painting by Vincent Van Gogh and a classical piano playing in the background.
Nervously, he placed the headset on the man. What happened next stunned
everyone in the room.
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First human-monkey chimera raises concern among scientists A chimera is an organism whose cells come from two or more “individuals”, with recent work looking at combinations from different species. The word comes from a beast from Greek mythology which was said to be part lion, part goat and part snake. The latest report, published in the Spanish newspaper El País, claims
a team of researchers led by Prof Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte from
the Salk Institute in the US have produced monkey-human chimeras. The
research was conducted in China “to avoid legal issues”, according to
the report.
More
Alien planets could be better suited for life than Earth The study suggests that exoplanets that have “favorable ocean circulation patterns” could be better suited to support a wider range of life than Earth. “This is a surprising conclusion,” said lead researcher Stephanie
Olson of the University of Chicago in a statement. “It shows us that
conditions on some exoplanets with favorable ocean circulation patterns
could be better suited to support life that is more abundant or more
active than life on Earth.”
More
Swedes are getting implants in their hands to replace cash, credit cards More than 4,000 people have already had the sci-fi-ish chips, about the size of a grain of rice, inserted into their hands — with the pioneers predicting millions will soon join them as they hope to take it global. “It’s very ‘Black Mirror,’” Swedish scientist Ben Libberton told The
Post of the similarity to the TV series highlighting futuristic scenarios.
Like glorified smartwatches, the chips help Swedes monitor their health
and even replace keycards to allow them to enter offices and buildings.
More
Should the Rich Be Allowed to Buy the Best Genes? Many of the star pioneers are here, including Berkeley’s Jennifer
Doudna, who in 2012 co-discovered how to combine two snippets of RNA
with an enzyme to make a programmable scissors that could cut DNA at
a precise location, and Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute, who raced
her to show how the tool could edit genes in humans and is now in a
battle with her for patents to the technology.
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A Trip to North America's Galapagos The foxes weigh the same as two AA batteries when they are born, I told my children. And the pups can fit in the palm of your hand. The Channel Islands, or "North America's Galapagos," as Santa Rosa
and its neighboring islands are sometimes called, are home to that fox
and several other rare and unique plant and animal species. It's one
of the more difficult national parks to access -- a long and often choppy
two-hour boat ride from Ventura.
More
Facebook “Internet of Money” to Control Bill Pay, Access to Public Transportation The system, called Calibra wallet, will give the world’s population access to the “internet of money”, as well as controlling access to transportation and goods. Facebook “… intends to open the Calibra Wallet up to additional services, so that people can pay bills, buy goods by scanning a code or accessing public transport”. The service will reportedly allow individuals to use public transport
“without the need for cash or travel passes”.
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Robots thrive in the forest on jobs that humans find too boring Packaging maker BillerudKorsnas has been an early adopter of artificial intelligence by using the technology to analyze thousands of diagrams to determine just how long it needs to cook its wood chips before they turn into pulp. While that process could be done manually, it says it would be difficult to find any human who'd be willing to spend all day just looking at such charts. "A machine can review large data quantities and find patterns in ways
we humans just find too boring," Olle Steffner, director of intellectual
property management, said. "Tasks such as monitoring processes or analyzing
diagrams will hardly be missed by anybody. Our staff is needed for other
things."
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Your Hair Mites Are So Loyal Their DNA Reflects Your Ancestry Demodex folliculorum is a species of mite that lives in and around
the hair follicles of humans and other mammals. Bowdoin College evolutionary
geneticist Michael Palopoli and his colleagues sampled the DNA of these
mites living on a diverse group of 70 human hosts.
More
Marijuana Farms Have Found a Way to Keep Their Stink From Irking the Neighbors Working with her business partner, Shelton discovered the Bloomington,
Indiana-based Byers Scientific. The company had already built odor-capture
solutions for waste water treatment plants, landfills, and livestock
feedlots, but cannabis was a new sector for them. Researchers at Byers
were able to develop a customized version of their waterless vapor-phase
system that specifically addressed the needs of marijuana farms.
More
Neanderthals and modern humans diverged at least 800,000 years ago The research, published in Science Advances, analysed dental evolutionary rates across different hominin species, focusing on early Neanderthals. It shows that the teeth of hominins from Sima de los Huesos, Spain—ancestors of the Neanderthals—diverged from the modern human lineage earlier than previously assumed. Sima de los Huesos is a cave site in Atapuerca Mountains, Spain, where
archaeologists have recovered fossils of almost 30 people. Previous
studies date the site to around 430,000 years ago, making it one of
the oldest and largest collections of human remains discovered to date.
More
Our Moon Is Shrinking and Wrinkling, Study Claims A survey of more than 12,000 images revealed that lunar basin Mare Frigoris near the Moon's north pole - one of many vast basins long assumed to be dead sites from a geological point of view - has been cracking and shifting. Unlike our planet, the Moon doesn't have tectonic plates; instead,
its tectonic activity occurs as it slowly loses heat from when it was
formed 4.5 billion years ago. This in turn causes its surface to wrinkle,
similar to a grape that shrivels into a raisin.
More
Dolphin ancestor's hearing was more like hoofed mammals than today's sea creatures The team, one of the first in the world to examine the ability's origins,
used a small CT scanner to look inside a 30-million-year-old ear bone
fossil from a specimen resembling Olympicetus avitus. This member of
the toothed whale family, in a branch that died out before modern dolphins
and porpoises appeared, lived in what is now the state of Washington.
The CT scan revealed cochlear coiling with more turns than in animals
with echolocation, indicating hearing more similar to the cloven-hoofed,
terrestrial mammals dolphins came from than the sleek sea creatures
they are today.
More
With New Tech, Treadmills Are Getting Trendy While Ewens' evening workout sounds like what running groups around the world do several nights a week, she was actually in her home, live-streaming a treadmill class, complete with motivational instructor, music and leader board, to a monitor on her screen. "Sometimes you know you're not going to motivate yourself during a
workout and you need someone to set the bar for you," the 49-year old
California attorney says.
More
Secret feuds and heartbreak at the centre of the historic first landing on the moon "It was the only time anyone saw him smoke anything but the occasional cigar," says author Jim Donovan, whose new book Shoot For The Moon contains the definitive account of that momentous mission. It seemed that Armstrong needed the fortification.
More
Curiosity Captured Two Solar Eclipses on Mars Phobos, which is as wide as 16 miles (26 kilometers) across, was imaged on March 26, 2019 (the 2,359th sol, or Martian day, of Curiosity's mission); Deimos, which is as wide as 10 miles (16 kilometers) across, was photographed on March 17, 2019 (Sol 2350). Phobos doesn't completely cover the Sun, so it would be considered
an annular eclipse. Because Deimos is so small compared to the disk
of the Sun, scientists say it's transiting the Sun.
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Massive U.S. Machines That Hunt For Ripples In Space-Time Just Got An Upgrade Einstein realized that when massive objects such as black holes collide, the impact sends shock waves through space-time that are like the ripples in water created by tossing a pebble in a pond. In 2015, researchers made history by detecting gravitational waves
from colliding black holes for the first time — and this was such a
milestone that three U.S. physicists almost immediately won the Nobel
Prize for their work on the project.
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Scientists claim to have 'reversed time' with quantum computer By using electrons and quantum mechanics researchers claim they were able to turn back time in an experiment likened to causing a broken rack of pool balls to roll back into place. The experiment used quantum computer programs to ‘rewind’ scattered quantum bits or qubits back to their starting points. Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, helped
by colleagues in Switzerland and the U.S., expect the technique to become
more efficient. More
Study blames YouTube for rise in number of Flat Earthers Their suspicion was raised when they attended the world’s largest gatherings of Flat Earthers at the movement’s annual conference in Rayleigh, North Carolina, in 2017, and then in Denver, Colorado, last year. Interviews with 30 attendees revealed a pattern in the stories people
told about how they came to be convinced that the Earth was not a large
round rock spinning through space but a large flat disc doing much the
same thing.
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People Are Finding Cameras on Some American Airlines and Singapore Airlines Planes — Here's What That's About Recently, however, a few eagle-eyed travelers have noticed that while we watch the screens, they could be watching us. This week, one passenger aboard a Singapore Airlines flightthis link opens in a new tab noticed a camera built into his IFE screen. Another passenger noticed a similar camera aboard his American Airlines flightthis link opens in a new tab. Is someone spying on us? According to the airlines, no.
More
Drug giant Glaxo teams up with DNA testing company 23andMe It’s the biggest partnership yet aimed at leveraging the increasingly popular home genetic testing market, in which customers pay for mail-in saliva tests that are analyzed by various companies. 23andMe dominates the market. “By working with GSK, we believe we will accelerate the development
of breakthroughs,” 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki wrote in a blog post.
More
SpaceX to Shift Starship Work From California to Texas In a statement, SpaceX said it was now planning to build prototypes
of its Starship vehicle, the upper stage of its next-generation reusable
launch system, at its site in South Texas originally designed to serve
as a launch site. An initial prototype version of that vehicle has been
taking shape in recent weeks at the site in advance of "hopper" tests
that could begin in the next one to two months.
More
Watch Scientists Accidentally Blow Up Their Lab With The Strongest Indoor Magnetic Field Ever As detailed in a paper recently published in the Review of Scientific
Instruments, the researchers produced the magnetic field to test the
material properties of a new generator system. They were expecting to
reach peak magnetic field intensities of around 700 Teslas, but the
machine instead produced a peak of 1,200 Teslas. (For the sake of comparison,
a refrigerator magnet has about 0.01 Tesla)
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Israeli Scientists Claim They're On The Path To A Cure For Cancer “We believe we will offer in a year’s time a complete cure for cancer,” said Dan Aridor, of a new treatment being developed by his company, Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd. (AEBi), which was founded in 2000 in the ITEK incubator. AEBi developed the SoAP platform, which provides functional leads to very difficult targets. “Our cancer cure will be effective from day one, will last a duration
of a few weeks and will have no or minimal side-effects at a much lower
cost than most other treatments on the market,” Aridor said. “Our solution
will be both generic and personal.”
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15 accidental inventions that changed the world Others, we didn’t know we couldn’t live without. They may not crucial for our survival, but life just wouldn’t be the same without them. A favorite childhood toy, America’s favorite beverage, a life-saving
medication — we traced the down sixteen modern commodities that not
only created a foundation for our life, but in some cases, keep us alive.
Some of the world’s most recognizable or important discoveries were
stumbled upon by accident.
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Why Do I Keep Waking Up In The Middle Of The Night? You're tired, you have no idea what's going on, and you don't know how to prevent it from happening. To figure out how to fall asleep and stay asleep (at least until your alarm clock goes off in the morning), you first need to figure out what your body is trying to tell you when you keep waking up in the middle of the night. There are likely plenty of reasons you're having trouble staying asleep.
If you're lucky, it can be an easy fix — like, something in your sleep
environment that you can adjust. If you're not lucky, though, it could
be something that requires outside help or maybe even medical attention.
More
This Artist Made a Radio Out of a Kitchen Sink For decades, shortwave was the only way to reach a global audience in real time. Broadcasters such as the BBC World Service and Voice of America used it to project “soft power.” But as the Internet grew, interest in shortwave diminished. Christie’s art draws from shortwave’s history, representing it in
sculpture, performance, photography, and film. Her focus is the life
of the Radio Canada International (RCI) transmitter complex, located
in Sackville, New Brunswick, near Christie’s hometown. The transmitter
was in operation from the 1940s until 2012. “Those towers were always
just a part of the landscape that I grew up around,” says Christie.
It took a radio-building workshop to spark her interest: “I built a
radio out of a toilet-paper tube.... I thought I did a great job because
I picked up Italian radio. It turned out I did not—I was just really
close to this international shortwave site.”
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We Have More Evidence That Two Earth-Like Exoplanets Have Stable Climates And Seasons Just Like Us This means it's the proper distance from its host star for liquid water to pool on the surface. The study, which appears in the Astronomical Journal , used simulations
to analyze and identify the exoplanet's spin axis dynamics. Those dynamics
determine how much a planet tilts on its axis and how that tilt angle
evolves over time. Axial tilt contributes to seasons and climate because
it affects how sunlight strikes the planet's surface.
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Scottish GPs to begin prescribing rambling and birdwatching From Friday, doctors working in the 10 GP surgeries on the islands will be authorised by the archipelago’s health board, NHS Shetland, to issue “nature prescriptions” to patients to help treat mental illness, diabetes, heart disease, stress and other conditions. Patients will be given calendars and lists of walks drawn up by the
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds showing them particular bird
species and plants, and suitable routes to take. The leaflets are to
be available at surgeries.
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The Physics of a Spinning Spacecraft in The Expanse In a recent episode, one of the large spaceships (the Navoo) rotates in order to create artificial gravity (that's not really a spoiler). How about some questions and answers about this giant spinning spaceship? How do you make artificial gravity? Let me get right to it. You are probably somewhere near the surface
of the Earth and there is a gravitational force between you and the
Earth pulling you down. But here is the crazy part—you don't really
feel this gravitational force. Since the gravitational force pulls on
all parts of your body, you don't feel it. What you actually feel as
"weight" is the force from the floor (or seat) pushing up on you. We
call this the "apparent" weight.
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Helium temporarily bricks iPhones and Apple Watches in Chicago hospital, Android devices immune They mystery started when a new MRI machine was being installed at
Morris Hospital, outside Chicago. Systems Specialist, Erik Wooldridge
said that he started hearing that smartphones had stopped working in
the building.
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BlackFly electric personal VTOL ultralight aircraft is USA-qualified It is speed limited in the US to 62mph. The FAA requires no licensing
for the use of ultralight qualified vehicles in the US. OPENER says
that it will require all operators to complete the FAA Private Pilot
written exam and complete a mandated vehicle familiarization and operator
training. The vehicle is zero emissions and has eight propulsion systems
spread across two wings.
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Why have humans never found aliens? Fermi’s argument ran as follows. The laws of nature supported the emergence of intelligent life on Earth. Those laws are the same throughout the universe. The universe contains zillions of stars and planets. So, even if life is unlikely to arise on any particular astronomical
body, the sheer abundance of creation suggests the night sky should
be full of alien civilisations. Fermi wondered why aliens had never
visited Earth. Today, the paradox is more usually cast in light of the
inability of radio-telescope searches to detect the equivalent of the
radio waves that leak from Earth into the cosmos, and have done for
the past century.
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Anomalies in The Large Hadron Collider's Data Are Still Stubbornly Pointing to New Physics That means one of two things – our predictions are wrong, or the numbers are out. And a new approach makes it less likely that the observations are a mere coincidence, making it's nearly enough for scientists to start getting excited. A small group of physicists took the collider's data on beauty meson
(or b meson for short) disintegration, and investigated what might happen
if they swapped one assumption regarding its decay for another that
assumed interactions were still occurring after they transformed.
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Ancient Girl's Parents Were Two Different Human Species The data was telling her that the roughly 90,000-year-old flake of bone she had tested was from a teenager that had a Neanderthal mom and Denisovan dad. Researchers had long suspected that these two groups of ancient human
relatives interbred, finding whiffs of both their genes in ancient and
modern human genomes. But no one had ever found the direct offspring
from such a pairing.
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New Horizons Just Found Hints of a Huge Structure at The Edge of Our Solar System An ultraviolet glow picked up by the probe's Alice UV spectrometer could be evidence of the 'hydrogen wall', a region of dense hydrogen on the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space. "We're seeing the threshold between being in the solar neighborhood
and being in the galaxy," astronomer Leslie Young of the Southwest Research
Institute and New Horizons team told Science News. Although space has
extremely low pressure, it still exists, and the solar wind exerts an
outward pressure. At a certain point that wind is no longer strong enough
to push back against interstellar space.
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Scientists Have an Interesting Theory on Why Some People Are Left-Handed "The research — by Sebastian Ocklenburg, Judith Schmitz, and Onur
Gunturkun from Ruhr University Bochum, along with other colleagues from
the Netherlands and South Africa — found that gene activity in the spinal
cord was asymmetrical in the womb and could be what causes a person
to be left- or right-handed," explains an article by Lindsay Dodgson
on Business Insider, citing research from a study published in the journal
eLife in 2017.
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The Next Big Discovery in Astronomy? We Probably Found It Years Ago — But Don't Know It Yet The X-ray images that enabled this discovery weren't from some state-of-the-art new telescope. Nor were they even recently taken – some of the data was collected nearly 20 years ago. No, the researchers discovered the black holes by digging through old, long-archived data. Discoveries like this will only become more common, as the era of "big data" changes how science is done. Astronomers are gathering an exponentially greater amount of data
every day – so much that it will take years to uncover all the hidden
signals buried in the archives.
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The next major innovation in batteries might be here Dave Eaglesham, the CEO of Pellion Technologies, a Massachusetts-based
startup, believes his company has made the leap beyond lithium-ion that
will bring the battery industry to the next stage of technological disruption.
He and his colleagues have accomplished something researchers have been
struggling with for decades: they’ve built a reliable rechargeable lithium-metal
battery.
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We Might Finally Know What Smacked Uranus Sideways For whatever reason, the seventh planet from the sun has always rolled on its side, throwing off all sorts of strange magnetic activity in the meantime. It's unlikely Uranus was tilted when it formed, and astronomers have struggled to understand the cause. New research published today in the Astrophysical Journal suggests
that Uranus got hit by a planet twice the size of Earth long ago. This
collision could have radically changed the planet, resulting in its
telltale tilt and making it relatively frigid compared to farther-out
Neptune. Uranus is about 14 times the mass of Earth and around four
times larger in radius. Whatever hit Uranus is thought to have been
between two or three Earth-masses.
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The Vanishing City The disappearing act is by design. It’s one of the core attributes
of Black Rock City, guided by the tenets of the event for which this
temporary metropolis is built: the annual pyrotechnic extravaganza known
as Burning Man. Yet the weeklong festival’s leave-no-trace ethos has
not stopped archaeologist Carolyn White from studying the city as she
would any other vanished civilization. In fact, the cyclicality is one
of the qualities that draws her here year after year.
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Science Explains What Happens To Someone’s Brain From Complaining Every Day Within the last 20 years, thanks to rapid development in the spheres of brain imaging and neuroscience, we can now say for certain that the brain is capable of re-engineering – and that we are the engineers. In many ways, neuroplasticity – an umbrella term describing lasting
change to the brain throughout a person’s life – is a wonderful thing.
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Engage Warp Drive! Why Interstellar Travel's Harder Than It Looks Almost 50 years ago, humans were walking on the moon. But we stopped
going in 1972 and never ventured any farther, except by sending robotic
probes. Humans have never gone to Jupiter, as the book and movie "2001:
A Space Odyssey" promised us, or even to Mars. What is it that makes
travel far away so difficult? Besides the obvious human health concerns
(living in microgravity tends to weaken a body over time) and budgetary
issues, there are vast technological problems with traveling to faraway
places.
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First-ever colour X-ray on a human The new device, based on the traditional black-and-white X-ray, incorporates particle-tracking technology developed for CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which in 2012 discovered the elusive Higgs Boson particle. "This colour X-ray imaging technique could produce clearer and more
accurate pictures and help doctors give their patients more accurate
diagnoses," said a CERN statement.
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Andromeda may have eaten the Milky Way’s long-lost sibling In a study published today in Nature Astronomy, researchers showed
that about 2 billion years ago, the Andromeda Galaxy cannibalized one
of the largest galaxies in the Local Group, turning it into the strange
compact galaxy known as M32 that we see bound to Andromeda today. This
massive collision stripped M32’s progenitor galaxy (dubbed M32p) of
most of its mass – taking it from a hefty 25 billion solar masses to
just a few billion solar masses.
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5,300-year-old Iceman's last meal reveals remarkably high-fat diet Among other things, their findings show that the Iceman's last meal
was heavy on the fat. The findings offer important insights into the
nutritional habits of European individuals, going back more than 5,000
years to the Copper Age. They also offer clues as to how our ancient
ancestors handled food preparation.
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Tesla bursts into flames after fatal crash in Switzerland A 48-year-German driver died on Thursday when his car hit a barrier
on a motorway in the canton of Ticino, southern Switzerland. The car
burst into flames and was attended to by Bellinzona firefighters, who
say the blaze may have been caused by the Tesla battery.
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Hyderabad radio ham receives world recognition On Friday, the international magazine CQ Amateur Radio inducted Farhan along with 11 others to its 2018 Hall of Fame, with Farhan being the only living Indian on the list. The other Indian name was Kalpana Chawla, the NASA astronaut killed
in 2003. Apart from Chawla, Farhan shares space in the Hall of Fame
with prominent personalities such as Hollywood actor Marlon Brando,
NASA astronaut David Brown, cybersecurity expert Mark Pecen and World
War II photographer Ed Westcott.
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Tech companies scramble as sweeping data rules take effect Companies like Google, Twitter, Yelp and Uber have in recent weeks sent notices to their users about updates to privacy policies and user agreements aimed at making their data collection practices more transparent. The moves are part of an industry-wide effort to prepare for the General
Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect on Friday
and forces companies to give full disclosure about what they do with
the digital data they collect and offer their users more control over
their information.
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Life inside hidden ’uncontacted’ Amazonian tribes REVEALED They are, however, considered to be people who have no peaceful contact with anyone in mainstream society. Survival International, a group that aims to protect the rights of tribal people, estimates there are about 100 uncontacted tribes across the globe. Many groups who live in isolation from larger society carve out an
existence in hunter-gatherers or bartering communities. They live in
communal groups that rely heavily on the rainforest where they hunt,
fish and harvest food.
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Facebook Disabled 1 Billion Fake Accounts in the Last Year The first-ever “Community Standards Enforcement Report,” a robust
81 pages, details the company’s efforts to weed out unsavory content,
including violence and terrorist propaganda. The report accounted for
the fourth quarter of 2017 and first quarter of 2018.
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Tesla owner who turned on car's autopilot then sat in passenger seat while banned from driving The court heard that at 7.40pm on May 21, 2017, Patel was driving his white Tesla S 60 along the northbound carriageway of the M1, between junctions 8 and 9 near Hemel Hempstead. While the £70,000 car was in motion, he chose to switch on the supercar's
autopilot function before moving across to the passenger seat and leaving
the steering wheel and foot controls completely unmanned.
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Is Facebook secretly building an internet satellite? Signs point to yes The possible move comes just a few months after SpaceX launched its first two prototype satellites for an internet constellation it hopes may one day be over 11,000 strong. A partially redacted FCC application obtained by IEEE Spectrum outlines
a plan for an experimental satellite from a mysterious company called
PointView Tech LLC, which IEEE goes on to connect to Facebook.
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Star Wars Rebel Alliance symbol on an insect? Bee-lieve it Joseph Wilson, co-writer of The Bees in Your Backyard field guide, is celebrating May the 4th, Star Wars Day, with a photo of Triepeolus remigatus, a cuckoo bee with a distinctive marking that makes it look like it should be battling the Imperial forces alongside a bunch of Jedi and rebels. But this particular bee has a dark side. Wilson said it "sneaks into
the nests of squash bees and hides its egg. When its baby hatches, it
kills the baby squash bee and eats the pollen that was left for the
squash bee." That sounds a lot more Sith than Jedi.
More
Police using 'drone killers' to disable flying devices in emergency situations They have dropped drugs into prison yards, scouted out illegal border crossings and grounded lifesaving efforts by accidentally wandering into the flight paths of firefighting aircraft. The sky may be the limit for drones, but local law enforcement agencies
are looking for a way to bring them back to earth. A new electronic
device called a "drone killer" could be the answer.
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Why Asparagus Makes Your Urine Smell Distinguished thinkers as varied as Scottish mathematician and physician John Arbuthnot (who wrote in a 1731 book that “asparagus…affects the urine with a foetid smell”) and Marcel Proust (who wrote how the vegetable “transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume”) have commented on the phenomenon. Even Benjamin Franklin took note, stating in a 1781 letter to the
Royal Academy of Brussels that “A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall
give our Urine a disagreable Odour” (he was trying to convince the academy
to “To discover some Drug…that shall render the natural Discharges of
Wind from our Bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreable as Perfumes”
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In Smart Cities of the Future, Posters and Street Signs Can Talk Allow Vikram Iyer to explain. “We think this is a technique that can really be used in smart cities
to provide people with information when they’re outdoors,” he says.
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DARPA Is Researching Time Crystals, And Their Reasons Are 'Classified' But in an unexpected twist, it turns out they're also interested in pushing the limits of quantum mechanics. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced it's funding research into one of the strangest scientific breakthroughs in recent memory - time crystals. In case you missed it, time crystals made headlines last year when
scientists finally made the bizarre objects in the lab, four years after
they were first proposed.
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Flowering Plants Originated Between 149 and 256 Million Years Ago “The discrepancy between estimates of angiosperm evolution from molecular data and fossil records has caused much debate,” said co-author Dr. Jose Barba-Montoya, of University College London. “Even Darwin described the origin of this group as an ‘abominable
mystery’.”
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Autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder share molecular traits, study finds "These findings provide a molecular, pathological signature of these disorders, which is a large step forward," said senior author Daniel Geschwind, a distinguished professor of neurology, psychiatry and human genetics and director of the UCLA Center for Autism Research and Treatment. "The major challenge now is to understand how these changes arose." Researchers know that certain variations in genetic material put people
at risk for psychiatric disorders, but DNA alone doesn't tell the whole
story. Every cell in the body contains the same DNA; RNA molecules,
on the other hand, play a role in gene expression in different parts
of the body, by "reading" the instructions contained within DNA.
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Opportunity will celebrate its 14th year on Mars As of January 16, 2018, Opportunity has been operational for 4,970
sols and driven 28.02 miles (45.09 kilometers) on the martian surface.
On January 25, 2018, Opportunity turns 14 — in Earth years. In Mars
years (which last about 687 Earth days, or 669 sols), she turns 7.4.
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Scientists warn we may be creating a 'digital dark age' Unlike in previous decades, no physical record exists these days for much of the digital material we own. Your old CDs, for example, will not last more than a couple of decades. This worries archivists and archaeologists and presents a knotty technological challenge. “We may [one day] know less about the early 21st century than we do
about the early 20th century,” says Rick West, who manages data at Google.
“The early 20th century is still largely based on things like paper
and film formats that are still accessible to a large extent; whereas,
much of what we're doing now — the things we're putting into the cloud,
our digital content — is born digital.”
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In the Bones of a Buried Child, Signs of a Massive Human Migration to the Americas Archaeologists discovered her in an ancient burial pit in Alaska in 2010, and on Wednesday an international team of scientists reported they had retrieved the child’s genome from her remains. The second-oldest human genome ever found in North America, it sheds new light on how people — among them the ancestors of living Native Americans — first arrived in the Western Hemisphere. The analysis, published in the journal Nature, shows that the child
belonged to a hitherto unknown human lineage, a group that split off
from other Native Americans just after — or perhaps just before — they
arrived in North America.
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New Horizons' Target Could Be Two Objects and Might Have a Moon The mystery speaks to how little is currently known about KBOs. "We
really won't know what MU69 looks like until we fly past it, or even
gain a full understanding of it until after the encounter," said New
Horizons science team member Marc Buie, speaking at the American Geophysical
Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in New Orleans. "But even from afar, the more
we examine it, the more interesting and amazing this little world becomes."
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Why people don't work on their cars anymore But the company asked customers what's keeping from getting under the hood — the survey was "informal" — and the answer wasn't surprising. That hunk of plastic covering the engine. "You won't fix what you can't see," J Haynes, CEO of Haynes Publishing said in a statement. "Most people don't realize that removing a few simple screws will
provide easy access to undercover workings of their engine and allow
them to work on their own cars and save lots of hard-earned money,"
he added. "We say there's no need to fear the plastic engine cover."
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Bright Spots on Ceres May Be Evidence of Aliens, Says NASA Among the surface features of Ceres are hundreds of bright, reflective areas that stand out from its otherwise dark face. "The mysterious bright spots on Ceres, which have captivated both the
Dawn science team and the public, reveal evidence of Ceres' past subsurface
ocean, and indicate that, far from being a dead world, Ceres is surprisingly
active," said Carol Raymond, Manager of the Small Bodies Program at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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Are 'Flatliners' Really Conscious After Death? They quickly discover that there are unexpected and terrible consequences of dallying with death — but not everything they experience after "dying" is in the realm of science fiction. A growing body of research is charting the processes that occur after death, suggesting that human consciousness doesn't immediately wink out after the heart stops, experts say. But what really happens in the body and brain in the moments after
cardiac arrest?
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A group of scientists just discovered 20 new planets you might eventually be able to move to The discovery was made through Kepler, a space telescope that was launched back in 2009. Although the contraption broke down in 2013, Kepler garnered so much
data during its four working years that scientists are still rummaging
through it. This time around, they scoured through a list of 4,034 exoplanets
(basically, planets capable of sustaining life) to find those closest
to Earth. Working off that shorter list, they then singled out 20 planets
that most readily resembled Earth's defining properties.
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Meet the Brits who promised the world a $25 PC, and delivered a revolution Earlier this year, it passed the 12.5 million mark in sales, taking its place as the third highest selling general purpose computer ever built. When the project got underway, though, its primary objective wasn’t to sell millions of units. The Raspberry Pi was conceived as an educational device. Its enormous popularity is proof of how well it executed upon that vision. In just five year’s time, the hardware went from a promising idea
to a globally recognized brand – and we’re only going to see the full
effect of how it makes computing more accessible as the next generation
of programmers mature and flourish.
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Europe’s Famed Bog Bodies Are Starting to Reveal Their Secrets I drove here on a damp March day with Ole Nielsen, director of the Silkeborg Museum. We tramped out to a desolate stretch of bog, trying to keep to the clumps of ocher-colored grass and avoid the clingy muck between them. A wooden post was planted to mark the spot where two brothers, Viggo and Emil Hojgaard, along with Viggo’s wife, Grethe, all from the nearby village of Tollund, struck the body of an adult man while they cut peat with their spades on May 6, 1950. The dead man wore a belt and an odd cap made of skin, but nothing else. Oh yes, there was also a plaited leather thong wrapped tightly around
his neck. This is the thing that killed him. His skin was tanned a deep
chestnut, and his body appeared rubbery and deflated. Otherwise, Tollund
Man, as he would be called, looked pretty much like you and me, which
is astonishing considering he lived some 2,300 years ago.
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Conspiracy Theorists Have a Fundamental Cognitive Problem, Say Scientists But as scientists report in a new paper published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, sometimes people sense danger even when there is no pattern to recognize — and so their brains create their own. This phenomenon, called illusory pattern perception, they write, is
what drives people who believe in conspiracy theories, like climate
change deniers, 9/11 truthers, and “Pizzagate” believers.
More Beluga Living with Dolphins Swaps Her Calls for Theirs “The first appearance of the beluga in the dolphinarium caused a fright
in the dolphins,” write Elena Panova and Alexandr Agafonov of the Russian
Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The bottlenose dolphins included one
adult male, two adult females and a young female. But the animals soon
got along, er, swimmingly. In August 2016, one of the adult female dolphins
gave birth to a calf that regularly swam alongside the beluga.
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The Closest Star to Our Own Solar System Just Got a Lot More Interesting This finding means that the star, which is also home to the nearest Earth-like planet discovered just last year, hosts what could be a more elaborate planetary system than we previously thought. Using data from the ALMA Observatory in Chile, a team of researchers
has detected the faint glow of what appears to be a belt of dust surrounding
Proxima Centauri several hundred million kilometres out from the star.
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More Accurate World Map Wins Prestigious Design Award You probably don’t realize it, but virtually every world map you’ve ever seen is wrong. And while the new AuthaGraph World Map may look strange, it is in fact the most accurate map you’ve ever seen.
The world maps we’re all used to operate off of the Mercator projection, a cartographic technique developed by Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. This imperfect technique gave us a map that was “right side up,” orderly, and useful for ship navigation — but also one that distorted both the size of many landmasses and the distances between them. To correct these distortions, Tokyo-based architect and artist Hajime
Narukawa created the AuthaGraph map over the course of several years
using a complex process that essentially amounts to taking the globe
(more accurate than any Mercator map) and flattening it out.
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The ghostly radio station that no one claims to run It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, “MDZhB”, that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues. Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian,
such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. Anyone, anywhere
in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency
4625 kHz.
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Trump officials have no clue how to rebuild Puerto Rico’s grid. But we do. Microgrids built around cheap renewable power and battery storage are now the fastest and cheapest way to restore power — while at the same time building resilience into the grid against the next disaster. That’s been proven by Florida after Hurricane Irma, Japan after the
tsunami that caused the Fukushima meltdown, and India after recent monsoons.
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The Cult of Amiga Is Bringing an Obsolete Computer Into the 21st Century In the mid-1980s, Commodore released the Amiga 1000, a beast of a machine whose specs blew away the hardware of its day, and which became a cult favorite. But by 1995, after several iterations of Amiga and years of questionable
decisions by the Commodore company, the Amiga brand closed up shop.
In the two decades since then, the rights to the computer and its software
suite have been sold off and stuck in legal purgatory. And yet now,
a group of hardware enthusiasts are trying to bring the revered 1980s
computer into the 21st century.
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Researchers Think They've Figured Out What Mysterious Scottish Stone Circles Were Used For The study has also revealed how the area was a melting pot of different social groups and communities, a mix that eventually caused enough political tension for the groups to go their separate ways. Part of a broader investigation into Neolithic living called The Times
of their Lives, led by Historic England, the new analysis examines more
than 600 radiocarbon dates, giving researchers a clearer view of the
timing and duration of events between 3200 BC and 2500 BC on the islands.
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World’s Most Powerful Laser Is 2,000 Trillion Watts – But What’s It For? Values this large are difficult to grasp, but we can think of it as
a billion times more powerful than a typical stadium floodlight or as
the overall power of all of the sun’s solar energy that falls on London.
Imagine focusing all that solar power onto a surface as wide as a human
hair for the duration of a trillionth of a second: that’s essentially
the LFEX laser.
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The brain on DMT: mapping the psychedelic drug's effects McKenna, not really a scientist so much as a roving DMT performance poet, helped popularise the drug in the 70s, along with his own intuitive theories that the entities were evidence of alien life, or that DMT facilitated trans-dimensional travel. “They’re really amazing, spine-tingling ideas,” says Robin Carhart-Harris,
head of psychedelic research at Imperial College, London. “But, you
know, arguably they’re bullshit.”
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Secrets of ‘lost eighth continent’ Zealandia to be unlocked as scientists set sail to explore underwater landmass It was originally part of the gigantic super-continent Gondwana, which was made up of many of the continents which now exist in the southern hemisphere. Covering 1.9 million square miles, it extends from south of New Zealand northward to New Caledonia and west to the Kenn Plateau off Australia's east coast. Drill ship Joides Resolution will recover sediments and rocks lying deep beneath the sea bed in a bid to discover how the region has behaved over the past tens of millions of years. The recovered cores will be studied onboard, allowing scientists to
address issues such as oceanographic history, extreme climates, sub-seafloor
life, plate tectonics and earthquake-generating zones.
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The Asteroid That Just Came Close to Earth Is So Huge It Has Its Own Moons It's so big, in fact, that it has two tiny moons of its very own, according to radar images obtained by NASA when Florence was at its closest on 31 August and 1 September. "While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth than Florence
... all of those were estimated to be smaller," said JPL-NASA's Paul
Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.
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How did Tesla make some of its cars travel further during Hurricane Irma? The move, confirmed by Tesla, followed the request of one Florida
driver for a limit on his car’s battery to be lifted. Tesla’s cheaper
models, introduced last year, have the same 75KwH battery as its more
costly cars, but software limits it to 80% of range. Owners can otherwise
buy an upgrade for several thousands of dollars. And because Tesla’s
software updates are online, the company can make the changes with the
flick of a virtual switch.
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Why can't monkeys talk? Scientists rumble over a curious question Scientists figured there were two likely sticking points. Either the brain was not wired for speech in nonhuman primates, or their windpipes were shaped the wrong way. Lieberman, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Brown University
in Rhode Island, got out of the tub and took the puzzle with him. In
groundbreaking experiments with rhesus macaques in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, Lieberman and his colleagues pinned the problem to monkey
throats. They concluded that macaques lacked a sufficient supralaryngeal
vocal tract, the space in humans that begins in the mouth and follows
the hump of the tongue into the throat. Even if a monkey brain had the
correct wiring for speech, the monkey vocal tract simply couldn't produce
adequate sounds to talk.
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First Object Teleported from Earth to Orbit Micius is a highly sensitive photon receiver that can detect the quantum states of single photons fired from the ground. That’s important because it should allow scientists to test the technological building blocks for various quantum feats such as entanglement, cryptography, and teleportation. Today, the Micius team announced the results of its first experiments.
The team created the first satellite-to-ground quantum network, in the
process smashing the record for the longest distance over which entanglement
has been measured. And they’ve used this quantum network to teleport
the first object from the ground to orbit.
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Apple is still selling very old and expensive computers – these are the ones you shouldn't buy While these computers will work fine, they have outdated specs that don't warrant their high price tags. You should steer your wallet well clear of them. I've listed the Apple computers you shouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole, and added suggestions of computers you should consider instead. Some of these computers are part of Apple's recent back-to-school
promotion, where you can get a free pair of $300 Beats Solo3 Wireless
headphones. Yet, even with the free pair of headphones, some computers
aren't worth your time or money.
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Water exists as two different liquids The results are based on experimental studies using X-rays, which are now published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (US). Most of us know that water is essential for our existence on planet
Earth. It is less well-known that water has many strange or anomalous
properties and behaves very differently from all other liquids. Some
examples are the melting point, the density, the heat capacity, and
all-in-all there are more than 70 properties of water that differ from
most liquids. These anomalous properties of water are a prerequisite
for life as we know it.
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DNA scientists claim that Cherokees are from the Middle East In his famous book, “The History of the America Indians” eighteenth
century explorer and trader, John Adair stated that several hundred
Cherokees, living in the North Carolina Mountains, spoke an ancient
Jewish language that was nearly unintelligible to Jews from England
and Holland. From this observation, Adair extrapolated a belief that
all Native Americans were the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of
Israel.
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Groundbreaking discovery confirms existence of orbiting supermassive black holes UNM Department of Physics & Astronomy graduate student Karishma Bansal
is the first-author on the paper, 'Constraining the Orbit of the Supermassive
Black Hole Binary 0402+379', recently published in The Astrophysical
Journal. She, along with UNM Professor Greg Taylor and colleagues at
Stanford, the U.S. Naval Observatory and the Gemini Observatory, have
been studying the interaction between these black holes for 12 years.
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Snapchat launches location-sharing feature Snap Map “We’ve built a whole new way to explore the world! See what’s happening,
find your friends, and get inspired to go on an adventure!,” Snap writes
on its blog.
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Feminist researcher invents ‘intersectional quantum physics’ to fight ‘oppression’ of Newton Whitney Stark argues in support of “combining intersectionality and quantum physics” to better understand “marginalized people” and to create “safer spaces” for them, in the latest issue of The Minnesota Review. Because traditional quantum physics theory has influenced humanity’s understanding of the world, it has also helped lend credence to the ongoing regime of racism, sexism and classism that hurts minorities, Stark writes in “Assembled Bodies: Reconfiguring Quantum Identities.” Konchinsky's suit alleges that the officers' actions violated her First
Amendment right to freedom of speech.
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Uranus Is Even Freakier Than We Thought New research from Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that Uranus’
unusual spin axis could be responsible for another one of the planet’s
oddities. Uranus’ magnetosphere, the magnetic field that surrounds it,
gets flipped on and off every day as it rotates along with the planet.
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How the Roland TR-808 revolutionized music Over the weekend, Kakehashi died at the age of 87, leaving behind
a legacy of creations that had an immeasurable impact on music all over
the world. Born in Osaka, Japan, Kakehashi got his start repairing broken
watches and clocks when he was 16, and later obtained a degree in mechanical
engineering. In 1960, he found his way to electronic instruments at
Ace Electronic Industries. He solidified a name for himself in 1972,
when he founded Roland Corporation, and spearheaded the creation of
synthesizers and drum machines, including the TR-808.
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Scientists Use CRISPR-Cas9 to Create Red-Eyed Mutant Wasps “No one knows how that selfish genetic element in some male wasps can somehow kill the female embryos and create only males,” said Dr. Omar Akbari, an assistant professor of entomology at the Institute for Integrative Genome Biology at the University of California, Riverside. “To understand that, we need to pursue their paternal sex ratio (PSR)
chromosomes, perhaps by mutating regions of the PSR chromosome to determine
which genes are essential for its functionality,” added Dr. Akbari,
who is the lead co-author of a paper describing the research, published
this week in the journal Scientific Reports.
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"Period Emoji" Could Be Coming To Your Phone Pretty Soon The organisation has created five emoji and is urging supporters to vote on their favourite. From there, the emoji with the most votes will be submitted to the Unicode Consortium – the group that standardises characters across devices. The CEO of Plan International Australia, Susanne Legena, said the
inclusion of a "period emoji" could help change the taboo surrounding
menstruation in many parts of the world.
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DNA Study Sheds Light on Evolution of Dog Breeds The team, led by NHGRI dog geneticist Dr. Elaine Ostrander, examined
genomic data from the largest and most diverse group of breeds studied
to date, amassing a dataset of 1,346 dogs representing 161 breeds. Included
are populations with vastly different breed histories, originating from
all continents except Antarctica, and sampled from North America, Europe,
Africa, and Asia.
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Epsilon Eridani System is Remarkably Similar to Our Own The star’s temperature of 5,116 degrees Kelvin (almost 700 Kelvin cooler than the Sun) and low luminosity (34% solar) tell of a lower mass, approximately 83% that of the Sun. Though its rotation speed appears similar to that of the Sun, the
star is much younger, some 800 million years old, or one-fifth the age
of the Sun. The Epsilon Eridani system is the closest planetary system
around a star similar to the young Sun and is a prime location to research
how planets form around Sun-like stars.
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First Humans Arrived in North America 116,000 Years Earlier than Thought: Evidence from Cerutti Mastodon Site This site preserves 131,000-year-old hammerstones, stone anvils, and fragmentary remains — bones, tusks and molars — of a mastodon (Mammut americanum) that show evidence of modification by early humans. An analysis of these finds ‘substantially revises the timing of arrival of Homo into the Americas,’ according to a paper published this week in the journal Nature. “This discovery is rewriting our understanding of when humans reached
the New World,” said Dr. Judy Gradwohl, president and chief executive
officer of the San Diego Natural History Museum.
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Is Diagnosing Your Car Problems With Your SmartPhone the Future of Car Tech? I was able to get home without issues, but I was assuming that I would need to bring the car in to get it fixed. Before I went too far, however, I went online to do some research on the specific issue my car was having… When your check engine light comes on, it’s important to get it checked
out right away. The light could be an indication that there is a serious
problem like a major engine issue (that could be a safety issue), or
it could be something simple like tightening your gas cap (which my
wife had to do one time). The point is, until you get it checked, you
just don’t know. So get it checked.
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“Super Agers” Have Brains That Look Young Researchers believe that studying what makes super agers different could help unlock the secrets to healthy brain aging and improve our understanding of what happens when that process goes awry. “Looking at successful aging could provide us with biomarkers for
predicting resilience and for things that might go wrong in people with
age-related diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia,” says study co-author
Alexandra Touroutoglou, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School.
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Volcano On Mars Continuously Erupted For Two Billion Years Mars has been host to several volcanoes and also houses the largest volcano of our solar system, the Olympus Mons'Study of the meteorite led the researchers to believe that a volcano did exist on the Red Planet, which erupted continuously for 2 billion years. "Even though we've never had astronauts walk on Mars, we still have
pieces of the Martian surface to study, thanks to these meteorites,"
shared Marc Caffee, member of the meteorite research team and professor
of physics and astronomy at Purdue.
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US Army asks for biodegradable ammo So the Department of Defense (DoD) decided to do something about it, and is requesting environmentally friendly ammunition for use during training exercises. The request was made via the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)
program. Specifically, the DoD wants "biodegradable training ammunition
loaded with specialized seeds to grow environmentally beneficial plants
that eliminate ammunition debris and contaminants."
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Octopuses Are ‘the Closest We Will Come to Meeting an Intelligent Alien’ This is the thrust of Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep
Origins of Consciousness, a new book by the scuba-diving, biology-specializing
philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith, originally of Australia and now a distinguished
professor at the City University of New York’s graduate center. The
book was written up by Olivia Judson in The Atlantic, and you should
read the whole thing, but what I find mesmerizing is how categorically
other the eight-tentacled ink-squirters are, and how their very nature
challenges our conceptualizations of intelligence.
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Study Finds Most Government Workers Could be Replaced by Robots The study, published this week, says that robots are “more efficient” at collecting data, processing paperwork, and doing the routine tasks that now fall to low-level government employees. Even nurses and doctors, who are government employees in the UK, could
be relieved of some duties by mechanical assistants. There are “few
complex roles” in civil service, it seems, that require a human being
to handle.
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Power Company Sends Fire-Spewing Drone to Burn Trash Off High-Voltage Wires Just in case you were worried that the robot uprising was delayed,
fear no more. It appears to be right on time, as these fire-spewing
drones are sent to burn off trash that gets stuck on high-voltage wires.
The drones are being used by an electric power maintenance company in
China to get rid of plastic bags and other debris that get caught in
places that are hard to reach with a human in a cherrypicker.
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Even Cavemen Brushed Their Teeth — and They Probably Had Better Teeth Than You In a paper recently published in the journal Science of Nature, archaeologist
Karen Hardy, a researcher at the Catalan Institution for Research and
Advanced Studies, analyzed the remains of a million-year-old jawbone
taken from an archaeological site in northern Spain. The bone, one of
the oldest human remains ever found in Europe, was too incomplete for
researchers to determine the hominid species it belonged to – but luckily
for Hardy, there was still plenty of plaque preserved on the teeth,
waiting to be examined. “Once it’s there it stays there,” Hardy told
the Post. “It’s kind of like a tattoo of biological information — a
personal time capsule.”
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Warming up your car engine on cold mornings may be a bad idea And the best way to do that is to warm your ride up by letting the engine idle for 10 minutes or more, right? Not so fast... A lot of people think that a cold engine needs to warm up in the morning.
But the engineers at Road & Track magazine believe otherwise. The idea
that engines need to warm up to a certain operating temperature dates
back to the time of carburetors. But today's fuel-injected engines can
warm up quickly even in the coldest weather.
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Sharks wary of SMS patterned wetsuit says UWA UWA put Shark Mitigation Systems’ claim that their uniquely patterned wetsuits that mimic the colour spectrum of water can deter shark attacks to the test and the results are quite stunning. In a live scientific trial conducted in June and reported this week,
the University of W.A says it took on average 400% longer for sharks
to engage with the patterned wetsuits that contained the “SAMS” technology
when compared to an ordinary black wetsuit.
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Parallel worlds exist and interact with our world, say physicists Now there's a new theory on the block, called the "many interacting
worlds" hypothesis (MIW), and the idea is just as profound as it sounds.
The theory suggests not only that parallel worlds exist, but that they
interact with our world on the quantum level and are thus detectable.
Though still speculative, the theory may help to finally explain some
of the bizarre consequences inherent in quantum mechanics, reports RT.com.
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Vera Rubin, Who Confirmed Existence Of Dark Matter, Dies At 88 Rubin did much of her revelatory work at Carnegie. The organization's president calls her a "national treasure." In the 1960s and 1970s, Rubin was working with astronomer Kent Ford,
studying the behavior of spiral galaxies, when they discovered something
entirely unexpected — the stars at the outside of the galaxy were moving
as fast as the ones in the middle, which didn't fit with Newtonian gravitational
theory.
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Time travellers could use parallel dimensions to visit the past, scientists claim The sensational claim was made by a team of physicists, who believe that the parallel universes can all affect one another. Professor Howard Wiseman and Dr Michael Hall, from Griffith University’s
Centre for Quantum Dynamics, claim that the idea of parallel universes
is more than just science fiction. Fellow researcher Dr Dirk-Andre Deckert,
from the University of California, helped further the researchers’ theory,
which goes against almost all conventional understanding of space and
time.
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Is Your GPS Scrambling Your Brain? What could go wrong? The dream had been with him since April 14, 2010, when he watched TV news coverage of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption. Dark haired, clean-cut, with a youthful face and thick eyebrows, he
had never traveled beyond the United States and his native Mexico. But
something about the fiery gray clouds of tephra and ash captured his
imagination. I want to see this through my own eyes, he thought as he
sat on his couch watching the ash spread.
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Female monkeys use wile to rally troops As in humans, it turns out, social incentives can be just as big a driver for male monkeys to go to war as the resources they stand to gain from fighting, whether it be territory or food. "Ours is the first study to demonstrate that any non-human species use manipulative tactics, such as punishment or rewards, to promote participation in intergroup fights," study co-author Jean Arseneau, a primate specialist of the University of Zurich, told AFP. Arseneau and a team studied four vervet monkey groups at a game reserve
in South Africa for two years. They observed that after a skirmish with
a rival gang, usually over food, females would groom males that had
fought hardest, while snapping at those that abstained.
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What It Feels Like to Die My mother and I sat across from the hospice nurse in my parents’ Colorado home. It was 2005, and my mother had reached the end of treatments for metastatic breast cancer. A month or two earlier, she’d been able to take the dog for daily walks in the mountains and travel to Australia with my father. Now, she was weak, exhausted from the disease and chemotherapy and pain medication. My mother had been the one to decide, with her doctor’s blessing,
to stop pursuing the dwindling chemo options, and she had been the one
to ask her doctor to call hospice. Still, we weren’t prepared for the
nurse’s question. My mother and I exchanged glances, a little shocked.
But what we felt most was a sense of relief.
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Alien Star Passed Through Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago Our wandering ancestors probably never noticed. Scholz's star, as the red dwarf star is nicknamed, is so faint that, despite being just 20 light-years away, it was only discovered in 2013. Even when 25 times closer, and therefore 600 times brighter, the star officially known as WISE J072003.20-084651.2 would have required binoculars to detect (had they existed at the time). However, magnetically active stars like Scholz's can flare and it's possible that it may have occasionally become bright enough to puzzle an observant early human. Scholz's star almost certainly passed through the Oort cloud, where
most comets dwell, but probably didn't reach the inner cloud where a
gravitational disturbance can trigger a cascade of comets into the inner
solar system.
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Want Power? Fire Up the Tomatoes and Potatoes That matters because figuring out which foods turn into fuel efficiently makes it easier to reuse waste where it starts: in the fields and supermarkets. Every year, more than half the fruits and vegetables produced in North
America and Ocenania end up in the garbage heap, and a full 20 percent
of produce grown fails to even make it off the farm.
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