Lifeboat Foundation

A new study co-led by researchers in the U.S. and China has pushed back the first-known physical evidence of insect flower pollination to 99 million years ago, during the mid-Cretaceous period.

The revelation is based upon a tumbling flower beetle with pollen on its legs discovered preserved in amber deep inside a mine in northern Myanmar. The fossil comes from the same amber deposit as the first ammonite discovered in amber, which was reported by the same research group earlier this year.

The report of the new fossil will publish Nov. 11 in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The fossil, which contains both the beetle and pollen grains, pushes back the earliest documented instance of insect pollination to a time when pterodactyls still roamed the skies—or about 50 million years earlier than previously thought.

“Multiple products are affected globally”

Google Cloud down. Issue global in scale. Numerous services affected, including Kubernetes and IoT services like Nest.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) says it is experiencing a “major issue” with services including Cloud Dataflow, AppEngine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Dataflow, Dataproc, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Networking all failing today as of 9.14 am BST.

Americans use an average of 50 pounds of toilet paper, per person, each year. This accounts for millions of trees being destroyed. While the western world has cut back on paper usage with the development of technology, toilet paper is one area that cannot be improved – or can it?

In a future where regeneration technology lets humans live indefinitely, a cop and a troubled young woman investigate a strange wave of youth suicides.

Scientists have developed a reversible contraceptive microneedle patch that is simple-to-administer, slowly releases contraceptive hormone for about one month, and generates no biohazardous sharps waste.

Read the research in Science Advances: https://fcld.ly/j9d081o

Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, futurist, and professor at the City College of New York took the stage at “Talks at Google” event and shared valuable insights on the future of humanity.

In this interview, AZoNano speaks to Frank Deppe, Junior Group Leader for Superconducting Quantum Circuits at the Walther-Meißner-Institut, about QMiCS and the work that it does.

Can you give a brief overview European Quantum Technology Flagship Program ‘QMiCS’?

The project acronym ‘QMiCS’ means “Quantum Microwaves for Communication and Sensing”. QMiCS is one out of 20 projects which got funded in the highly competitive first call of the European Quantum Technology Flagship Program. Within this program, QMiCS is still a basic science project, where academic research groups collaborate with selected commercial companies. The main task of QMiCS is to explore the potential of non-classical propagating microwaves, whose behavior is controlled by the laws of quantum mechanics, for future applications and commercial exploitation.

But Manichean views and tropes of ‘dual use’ miss the point. Some of the key questions that confront science today are about whether its methods, practices and ethos, pursued with very little real change since Maxwell’s day, are fit for purpose in the light of the challenges — conceptual and practical — we now face. Can science continue to fulfil its social contract and to reach new horizons by advancing on the same footing into the future? Or does something need to shift?

Research cannot fulfil its social contract and reach new horizons by advancing on the same footing into the future, argues Philip Ball in the last essay of a series on how the past 150 years have shaped today’s science system, to mark Nature’s anniversary.