Category: futurism – Page 277
A rancher in Converse County discovered at least seven fossilized gar fish believed to be between 50 — 55 million years old. After hundreds of hours of work, the specimens are on display at the Tate Museum in Casper.
A team of chemists at McGill University, working with a colleague from Charité-Universitätsmedizin, in Germany, has uncovered part of the process used by mussels to bind to rocks and to quickly release from them when conditions warrant.
In their project, reported in the journal Science, the group studied the interface between mussel tissue and the bundle of filaments that mussels use to anchor themselves to rocks and other objects. Guoqing Pan and Bin Li, with Jiangsu University and Soochow University, both in China, have published a Perspective article in the same journal issue outlining the work done by the team on this new effort.
Mussels are bivalve mollusks that live in both fresh and saltwater environments. They have hinged shells that are joined by a ligament. Muscles ensure a tight seal when the shell is closed. Mussels use byssus threads (known commonly as a beard) to attach themselves to solid objects such as rocks.
Elizaveta Kovaleva, Hassan Helmy, Said Belkacim, Anja Schreiber, Franziska D.H. Wilke, Richard Wirth;American Mineralogist 2023;; 108 (10): 1906–1923. doi: https://doi.org/10.2138/am-2022-8759
Download citation file:
Craig Walker is the founder and CEO of cloud communications software company Dialpad, which was most recently valued at $2.2 billion.
Are you ready for a cell phone with a medium-format-sized sensor?
It’s science time. New research tells us how, with the help of metalenses and spaceplates, we don’t need conventional lenses anymore. Furthermore, that will allow manufacturers to develop tiny cameras with bigger sensors. Read the highlights of the research below.
New research has found a solution for reducing the size of cameras, by combining both metalenses and spaceplates. That combination allows a significant reduction of the glass and the length from the camera sensor. The result can be a lens-free camera and a bigger sensor. Furthermore, it’s a whole new approach for how light can be focused, and utilized, that can result in manufacturing facilitation of both cameras and lenses.
Adding a spaceplate to an imaging system such as a standard camera will shorten the camera. An ultra-thin monolithic imaging system can be formed by integrating a metalens and a spaceplate directly on a sensor.
British architecture studio Foster + Partners has released visuals of its design for the Saudi Arabia pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, which will be modelled on the kingdom’s traditional villages.
It will be among the national pavilions at the upcoming World Expo, for which Sou Fujimoto Architects is developing the masterplan on the artificial island Yumeshima in Osaka Bay, Japan.
Foster + Partners said its aim for the pavilion is to offer visitors “a spatial experience that echoes the exploration of Saudi Arabian towns and cities”
When speaking to one another, much of the communication occurs nonverbally – through body posture, hand gestures, and the eyes. Our eye gaze during conversations therefore reveals a wealth of information about our attention, intention, or psychological states. But, there remains little scientific knowledge about the information that human eyes convey in interactions – is looking at others’ faces enough, or does our communication require eye-to-eye contact?
Researchers from McGill University and Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) have studied the prevalence of eye contact by recording the eye gazing behavior in face-to-face dyadic interactions and found that although eye-to-eye contact occurred rarely, it communicated important messages which are vital for subsequent successful social behavior.
The study participants, who did not know each other beforehand, were paired and presented with an imaginary survival scenario which required the pairs to rank a list of items in order of their usefulness for survival, all while wearing mobile eye-tracking glasses. The researchers analyzed how often the participants looked at each other’s eye and mouth regions. The researchers also tested each participant individually for gaze following and linked the prevalence of different types of mutual looks during the interaction (i.e., eye-to-eye vs. eye-to-mouth) with the tendency to follow their partner’s gaze.