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Scientists Relieved To Discover Mysterious Creature Is Not Humanity’s Earliest Ancestor

An international study team has found that a mysterious microscopic creature assumed to be the ancestor of humans actually belongs to a different family tree.

The Saccorhytus is a spikey, wrinkly sack with a huge mouth surrounded by spines and holes that were interpreted as pores for gills – a primitive feature of the deuterostome group, from which our own deep ancestors emerged.

But a thorough examination of fossils from China that date back 500 million years has shown that the holes surrounding the mouth are actually the bases of spines that split during the process of fossil preservation, finally revealing the evolutionary affinity of the microfossil Saccorhytus.

MIT researchers advance cooling technology that does not use electricity

It is one roadblock away from large-scale applications.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Insititute of Technology have further advanced the technology used to achieve passive cooling — a method that does not require electricity at all. In their recent attempts, the post-doctoral researcher Zhengmao Lu and his colleagues achieved passive cooling up to 19 degrees Fahrenheit (9.3 degrees Celsius), a university press release said.

The system combines two standalone passive cooling technologies that have been used previously and then added thermal insulation to provide significantly more cooling, which hasn’t been achieved before. Not only does the system free you up from having to dig a hole underground to make a fridge, but the only maintenance it would require is also the addition of water. The frequency of this would also depend on the humidity of the area. system combines two standalone passive cooling technologies that have been used previously and then added thermal insulation to provide significantly more cooling, which hasn’t been achieved before. Not only does the system free you up from having to dig a hole underground to make a fridge, but the only maintenance it would require is also the addition of water. The frequency of this would also depend on the humidity of the area.

Spiders can fly hundreds of miles with the help of the electric fields on Earth

Air conducts electricity. In the vicinity of the Earth, the electrical conductivity of the atmosphere is — fortunately — very low. However, already about 50 km above the Earth, air becomes a good conductor of electricity.


By this method, spiders can float away from their predators or any competitors. They can even go to any new land where there is an abundance of resources. It is an effective way of traveling for spiders a report by The Atlantic explained. The spiders have been observed to have gone as high as two-and-a-half miles up in the air and as far as 1,000 miles out in the sea.

It is generally believed that ballooning can work as the silk strands catch the wind and tend to drag the spider along with the flow. However, it has been observed that spiders balloon only when there is light wind speed. But such low wind speed can barely move the silk strands let alone move the entire spider or provide high acceleration.

Scientists at the University of Bristol have now shown that spiders can sense the electric field of the Earth, and use it for launching themselves into the air. “When one thinks of airborne organisms, spiders do not usually come to mind,” Erica Morley and Daniel Robert, the researchers from the University of Bristol, said in their study.

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