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Oldest mosquito fossil comes with a bloodsucking surprise

WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (Reuters) — Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are killed annually by malaria and other diseases spread through the bite of mosquitoes, insects that date back to the age of dinosaurs. All of these bites are inflicted by females, which possess specialized mouth anatomy that their male counterparts lack.

But it has not always been that way. Researchers said they have discovered the oldest-known fossils of mosquitoes — two males entombed in pieces of amber dating to 130 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period and found near the town of Hammana in Lebanon. To their surprise, the male mosquitoes possessed elongated piercing-sucking mouthparts seen now only in females.

“Clearly they were hematophagous,” meaning blood-eaters, said paleontologist Dany Azar of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology and Lebanese University, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Current Biology. “So this discovery is a major one in the evolutionary history of mosquitoes.”

12-billion-year-old Body of Water Discovered Floating in Space

Two teams of astronomers led by scientists at Caltech, have discovered the largest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. And it’s 30 billion trillion miles away.

Yep, you read that correctly. The largest reservoir has been found in the cosmos, more specifically in a quasar, which is one of the brightest and most violent objects in the cosmos.

The mass of water vapour is at least 140 trillion times more than all of the water in the world’s oceans combined.

New Health Threat Emerged in Europe: The ‘Walking Pneumonia’ Wave Similar to China’s

A wave of health concern is sweeping across Europe, echoing similar patterns of pediatric pneumonia seen in China. This concern stems from the increasing prevalence of a rather understated yet potent bacterium – Mycoplasma pneumonia, known for causing “walking pneumonia,” particularly for children.

Mycoplasma pneumoniae is a unique bacterium with the capability of triggering a spectrum of respiratory infections, ranging from mild to severe pneumonia. This pathogen predominantly targets school-aged children, with Public Health France indicating it accounts for 30–50% of community-acquired pneumonia infections in this demographic.

Pneumonia, as it stands, is a condition where the lungs’ air sacs become inflamed, potentially filling with fluid or pus. This results in symptoms that include coughing and difficulty breathing.

Magnetic Blob Orbiting Earth’s Closest Supermassive Black Hole Shoots Radiation Toward Us Every 76 Minutes

The latest evidence comes from a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed analysis of gamma-ray emission. The data is publicly available and it was used by researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico to create a timeline of emission from June 2022 to December 2022. The data is from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The team found a repeating emission, appearing every 76.32 minutes.

The light curve shows the repeating pattern clearly, and the period is consistent with observations from last year in a completely different wavelength. Radio observations also suggested that something is going around Sagittarius A* about every 74 minutes, with an uncertainty of 6 minutes higher or lower.

Sagittarius A*’s radius is 12 million kilometers (7.4 miles) and this object is expected to be fairly close to it, five times the black hole radius. To cover the orbital distance in just over an hour, the blob needs to travel at 30 percent of the speed of light, truly an impressive velocity.

Chinese migrants look like tourists on US border — lawyer calls clients ‘at least middle class’

A line of well-dressed Chinese migrants with suitcases who have illegally crossed into the California border show how the type of people seeking asylum in the US is changing.

The men stand out from the exhausted and starved migrants who have traveled thousands of miles from South and Central America to the border, according to video from NewsNation.

“There are families who have experienced political oppression at the hands of the Chinese government and many are political dissidents,” immigration attorney Erika Pinheiro told The Post.

New Zealand Whistleblower Alleges COVID Vaccines Causing Deaths According to Public Health Data

Takeaways:

• Barry Young, a public health worker in New Zealand, was arrested for allegedly accessing and leaking personal information from work databases. Young claims the data shows that COVID-19 vaccines are causing deaths.

• Young leaked the data to Steve Kirsch, a vaccine critic, who anonymized the data and uploaded it to his Wasabi file storage account. Kirsch claims the data proves that the COVID-19 vaccines have caused more than 10 million deaths worldwide.

Astronomers finally caught radio waves from 40 large galaxies in the nearby universe

Supermassive black holes reside in some of the biggest galaxies in the universe. They tend to be billions of times more massive that our Sun, and not even light itself can escape a black hole once it gets too close.

But it’s not all darkness. Supermassive black holes power some of the most luminous celestial objects in the universe – active galactic nuclei, which shine across the spectrum of light, including radio waves.

The active galactic nucleus in nearby galaxy Messier 87 is a prodigious emitter of radio waves, 27 orders of magnitude more powerful than the most powerful radio transmitters on Earth.

Google reveals Gemini AI, its ‘largest science and engineering project ever’ that aims to beat ChatGPT

Google has revealed “Gemini”, which it says is its largest science and engineering project ever.

It is also the company’s latest attempt to catch up with rival OpenAI to develop artificial intelligence, and try and build a better system than its ChatGPT.

As such, Gemini will come to Google’s Bard, the chatbot that it released in the wake of ChatGPT in an attempt to catch up. But it will also roll out to Google’s Pixels phones and elsewhere.