The copper fangs of these feisty marine worms could inspire future sustainable manufacturing processes.
Deep in a damp cave in northern Alabama, archaeologists have made a giant discovery. On a subterranean ceiling just half a meter high, researchers have uncovered the largest cave art discovered in North America: intricate etchings of humanlike figures and a serpent, carved by Native Americans more than 1,000 years ago.
“It’s exemplary and important work,” says Carla Klehm, an archaeologist at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (UAF).
Continue reading “Largest Native American cave art revealed by 3D scans” »
But I am a visionary by the most grounded, neutral definition of the word (and so are you, undoubtedly):
By this definition, a “visionary” is just a person who regularly envisions the future and feels a deep need to design it with care, at times with such compulsive passion that it risks defining one on a core level and consuming one with endless details of a reality which has yet to formally occur.
In my inner midnight rambles, when this archetype is in full moonlit bloom, I envision our little enclave of ultra-talented, idiosyncratic, fun-loving Austin artist family winding up in some kind of post-apocalyptic village together, almost as if we’ve been training our entire lives for this…
The giant bee was first discovered in 1,859, but since has only officially sighted once. Now, researchers have found a specimen alive and well.
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Science Fiction often shows us alien civilizations so advanced they are godlike, but how realistic are they, and what would such entities be like?
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With its clementine-colored wings bordered with black lines and white spots, the monarch, also known as Danaus Plexippus, is a widely recognizable insect. As the weather changes and gets cooler, the monarchs migrate from their breeding grounds in Canada and the northern United States and fly to central Mexico, where they form clustered colonies on oyamel fir trees to conserve heat until the days grow longer and they migrate north once again.
In this spectacular clip filmed by the PBS series Spy in the Wild, a mechanical “spy hummingbird” flies over a swarm of resting monarchs. Creators chose the flying creature because it feeds on nectar and thus isn’t seen as a threat. As the sun warms the butterflies’ wings to 50 degrees, the insects wake and start to flutter and move. The hummingbird spy finds itself within the very heart of the swarm and captures a spectacular scene in which millions of butterflies take to the sky once more in a mesmerizing confetti-like cloud. (via Laughing Squid)
A new paper documents the first-ever known case of a congenitally blind person who has synesthesia.
“If one made a research grant application to work on time travel it would be dismissed immediately,” writes the physicist Stephen Hawking in his posthumous book Brief Answers to the Big Questions. He was right. But he was also right that asking whether time travel is possible is a “very serious question” that can still be approached scientifically.
Arguing that our current understanding cannot rule it out, Hawking, it seems, was cautiously optimistic. So where does this leave us? We cannot build a time machine today, but could we in the future?
Let’s start with our everyday experience. We take for granted the ability to call our friends and family wherever they are in the world to find out what they are up to right now. But this is something we can never actually know. The signals carrying their voices and images travel incomprehensibly fast, but it still takes a finite time for those signals to reach us.
