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Category: futurism – Page 549

Meta what?

When in 2015, Eileen Brown looked at the ETER9 Project (crazy for many, visionary for few) and wrote an interesting article for ZDNET with the title “New social network ETER9 brings AI to your interactions”, it ensured a worldwide projection of something the world was not expecting.

Someone, in a lost world (outside the United States), was risking, with everything he had in his possession (very little or less than nothing), a vision worthy of the American dream. At that time, Facebook was already beginning to annoy the cleaner minds that were looking for a difference and a more innovative world.

Today, after that test bench, we see that Facebook (Meta or whatever) is nothing but an illusion, or, I dare say, a big disappointment. No, no, no! I am not now bad-mouthing Facebook just because I have a project in hand that is seen as a potential competitor.

I was even a big fan of the “original” Facebook; but then I realized, it took me a few years, that Mark Zuckerberg is nothing more than a simple kid, now a man, who against everything and everyone, gave in to whims. Of him, initially, and now, perforce, of what his big investors, deluded by himself, of what his “metaverse” would be.

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‘Conan the Bacterium’ Has What It Takes to Survive on Mars

“If Martian life ever existed, even if viable lifeforms are not now present on Mars, their macromolecules and viruses would survive much, much longer,” says study lead author Michael Daly, a pathologist at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, in a statement. “That strengthens the probability that, if life ever evolved on Mars, this will be revealed in future missions.”

Mars is an exceedingly hostile place. The planet’s surface is dry and frozen, and cosmic radiation and solar protons are constantly bombarding it. But that may not have always been the case—scientists believe water flowed on Mars between 2 and 2.5 billion years ago, which would’ve made the planet slightly more hospitable.

Researchers were curious to know what kind of life might have evolved—and, potentially, survived into the present—on the Red Planet. To attempt to answer that question, they mimicked the cold, arid conditions of Mars here on Earth with six species of microorganisms.

We Thought These Animals Were Silent. Scientists Just Found Their Voices

Commonly assumed to be silent, 53 animals have had their ‘voices’ added to a family tree of vocalizations in an effort to determine when acoustic communication emerged in evolutionary history.

The species that are finally being heard come from four different animal clades, including 50 turtle species, the South American lungfish (Lepidosiren paradoxa), a limbless amphibian called Cayenne caecilian (Typhlonectes compressicauda), and a reptile from New Zealand known as a tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus).

“All recorded species were found to possess a varied acoustic repertoire comprising a number of different sounds,” the authors conclude.

New Discovery Expands Tree of Life

Scientists have discovered several elusive species of microorganisms.

Researchers have found a number of very rare species of microorganisms, some of which have never been observed before and others which have eluded the attention of researchers for more than a century.

Professor Genoveva Esteban of Bournemouth University and James Weiss, an independent researcher working in his own lab in Warsaw, Poland, with his two cats, made the discovery of these elusive species and published their findings in the scientific journal Protist.

Dazzling photographs reveal the world on a microscopic scale

SITTING at the intersection of microscopy and art, these dazzling images are some of the best entries for the Nikon Small World 2022 Photomicrography competition, a global contest that showcases the beauty of science on the microscale.

A fly is clasped by its eyes under the chin of a tiger beetle in the image above, the 10th place entry taken by Murat Öztürk. But this is no tender embrace. Thanks to their strong jaws and ability to run at up to 8 kilometres per hour, tiger beetles make for formidable predators for their prey, which also include ants, spiders and caterpillars.

Wonders of Ancient Egypt: The Puzzling 100-Ton Stone Boxes of Saqqara

Egypt hides many secrets.

The modern country we see today was built atop thousands and thousands of years of history crafted by countless pharaohs and rulers that reigned over the land of the golden sands and the River Nile.

And while we have uncovered many of ancient Egypt’s histories and secrets, many more remain hidden beneath the sands of the land of the pharaohs, waiting for the day when adventurous explorers will uncover that which has remained hidden for millennia.