Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers can roughly project what autistic children’s lives will look like years down the road. But how good is their crystal ball — and what are its benefits?

An “unusually large” meteor illuminated the night sky over southern Scandinavia early Sunday morning before at least some of it came rumbling down near Oslo, the capital of Norway.

The meteor “lit up the sky for a brief time as if broad daylight,” just after 1 a.m., Steinar Midtskogen, a spokesperson for the Norwegian Meteor Network, told CNN.

“A minute later or more a loud rumbling sound could be heard over a large area, perhaps up to 100 km (about 62 miles) away from where the meteor was seen straight overhead,” Midtskogen said in an email.

The Pacific basin is thought to contain more than 30 billion tons of so-called polymetallic nodules, rocks that are rich with cobalt, copper, manganese, nickel, rare-earth elements and titanium. Scientists and entrepreneurs have been researching methods of extracting them since the 1960s. In 1994, the International Seabed Authority was established to regulate mining efforts and protect the seabed environment. Any of the group’s 167 member-states can stake claims to mining concessions on the ocean floor and sponsor private companies to explore them. But the ISA has not yet completed, much less approved, any regulations. So far, it’s only handed out permits for exploration.

Despite the potential riches, more time is needed to study the potential impact on the least resilient ecosystem on the planet.

Continue reading “A Startup Plans to Mine the Ocean Floor. It Could Be a Disaster” »

When Alder Lake arrives, if 12th-gen CPUs are as good as rumors suggest, could supply issues be a concern?

We can all learn from how today’s young people evaluate truth online.

Members of Gen Z are presumably more digitally savvy than their predecessors, but influencer culture perpetuates their sharing of misinformation.

The TikTok-famous dog appears to communicate her nightmare, raising profound questions about animal cognition.

“Continents are sort of like icebergs,” says study author Keith Klepeis, a structural geologist at the University of Vermont. “What you see at the surface is not really the full extent of the beast.”

The discovery, described in the journal Geology, may help solve a riddle that’s long perplexed scientists. Most continents contain a core of rock known as a craton, a sort of geologic nucleus at least a billion years old that acts like a stable base upon which continents build. Until now, though, the oldest continental crust found on Zealandia was dated to roughly 500 million years ago—relatively youthful in geologic terms. So if Zealandia is a continent, why did its craton seem to be missing?

This newfound fragment of ancient rock may be part of the missing piece for Zealandia. The discovery “ticks the final box,” Turnbull says. “We are sitting on a continent.”

Continue reading “Chunk of an ancient supercontinent discovered under New Zealand” »

German automaker targets BEVs in all segments by 2022 and will launch electric-only models from 2025.

The search for life beyond Earth is on.

NASA’s newest Mars rover is getting ready to collect its first rock sample from the surface of Mars and stow it away for a future return mission to Earth, where NASA will test it for signs of ancient microbial life.

Continue reading “Perseverance’s hunt for ancient life reveals 2 Red Planet discoveries” »