For millennia, humans have been harnessing #microbes to produce everything from breads, to cheeses, to alcohol. Now these tiny organisms have produced another powerful revolution — the gene editing tool CRISPR. Rodolphe Barrangou, Ph.D., was working at the food company Danisco, where he was trying to produce yogurt lines resistant to contamination. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, he helped uncover what CRISPR was, how it worked, and why it could be so transformative.
Mammals run the gamut of social organization systems, ranging from loose, ephemeral interactions like aggregations of jaguars in the South American wetlands to the antlike subterranean societies of naked mole-rats (SN: 10/13/21; SN: 10/20/20).
But marsupials — a subgroup of mammals that give birth to relatively underdeveloped young reared in pouches — have traditionally been considered largely solitary. Some kangaroo species were known to form transient or permanent groups of dozens of individuals. But among marsupials, long-term bonds between males and females were thought rare and there were no known examples of group members cooperating to raise young. Previous work on patterns of mammalian social evolution regarded about 90 percent of examined marsupial species to be solitary.
“If you look at other [studies] about some specific species, you will see [the researchers] tend to assume that the marsupials are solitary,” says Jingyu Qiu, a behavioral ecologist at CNRS in Strasbourg, France.
Today, Frederic Besse told me that he managed to do something different. Did you know, that you can run a whole virtual machine inside of ChatGPT?
Great, so with this clever prompt, we find ourselves inside the root directory of a Linux machine. I wonder what kind of things we can find here. Let’s check the contents of our home directory.
Gigantopithecus was a massive gorilla-like creature that stood 10 feet tall and weighed upwards of 1,100 pounds making it the largest primate that ever lived. It thrived in the tropical forests of Southern China during the Pleistocene Epoch between 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago.
Fossilized teeth from Gigantopithecus were first discovered by a Dutch paleontologist named GHR Koenigswald. Referred to as “dragon’s teeth,” these specimens were sold in Chinese apothecaries for their purported medicinal benefits.
According to reports, the size of the teeth led some early scientists to suggest they belonged to human ancestors who may have been giants: “The teeth, though large, have a few similarities to human teeth, and this led some paleomorphologists to speculate that humans might have had “giant” ancestors. Later discoveries of complete mandibles demonstrated that they were from extinct apes.”
In 1992, scientists found drugs such as cocaine, hashish, and nicotine in some Egyptian mummies. These mummies came to be known as the “cocaine mummies.”
Traces of the drugs were found in the hair and skin of the mummies. Initially, scientists thought that this was a result of contamination and that perhaps improper techniques had been used to analyze the mummy.
There are serious indications from attempts to create a quantum theory of gravity that time must disappear completely from the description of the quantum universe. This has been known since 1967, when DeWitt discovered the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. I shall argue that this forces us to conceive explanation and causality in an entirely new way. The present can no longer be understood as the consequence of the past. Instead, I shall suggest that one may have to distinguish possible presents on the basis of their intrinsic structure, not on the basis of an assumed temporal ordering. If correct, this could have far-reaching implications. Hitherto, because the present has always been interpreted as the lawful consequence of the past, science has made no attempt to answer ‘Why’ questions, only ‘How’ questions. But if there is no past in the traditional sense, we must consider things differently. Thus, if we eliminate time, we may even be able to start asking “Why” questions.
Specification of a point and tangent vector in conformal superspace (CS) determines a slab of spacetime in CMC foliation and unique curve in CS. Almost perfect implementation of Mach’s principle because local inertial frames, local proper distance and local proper time all emergent and determined by the universe’s shape and shape velocity. The Mystery: Shape velocity, as opposed to shape direction, is last vestige of Newton’s absolute space and time. Responsible for expansion of the universe and perhaps perfect transformation theory in quantum theory of the universe.
Panpsychism is a disruptive theory put forward by some philosophers and neuroscientists. It proposes that human consciousness is only one of many forms of consciousness in…
