Lifeboat Foundation

The unsung star of Jurassic Park was a mosquito frozen in amber. While you can’t really extract blood from specimens like that, you could be transported back in time if you looked at a specimen of fossilized tree sap and found a 110 million-year-old lizard staring back at you.

Creatures get trapped in amber all the time, but most prehistoric finds are insects. Amber is a great material for preserving arthropods because of their already tough shells that will hold on even if the insides disintegrate. But what about a lizard? Retinosaurus hkamentiensis is a new extinct species of lizard that was unexpectedly found trapped in Burmese amber. No one expected an entire reptile to be preserved so well, from its scaly skin down to its skeleton.

What are now the empty eyes of Retinosaurus may have once seen dinosaurs or giant ferns or dragonflies the size of your head. It was determined to be a juvenile that ran into a sticky situation when it ran into a glob of tree amber that it couldn’t escape. It was so well preserved that paleontologist Andrej Čerňanský of Comenius University and his team, who recently published a study in Scientific Reports, approached the prehistoric lizard almost as if it were alive.

It’s not a new fact that with age comes several problems, especially if you don’t take care of yourself. This applies to eyesight as well; as you grow old, the chances of you facing vision-related problems are high. And unfortunately, some people do suffer from one or more vision-related issues.

But there is a way in which this problem can be overcome. Several supplements are available to help you improve your vision, and they can help you address vision-related issues in a much more efficient manner. There are several vision-related problems, and likewise, there are supplements that tackle multiple vision problems and provide you with relief.

But the harsh truth is that not every supplement is made the same, meaning not all supplements are safe to use. This is the main reason why people are a little skeptical about purchasing any kind of dietary supplement.

A new model, available as an online calculator, estimates the impact of dietary changes on life expectancy.

The rising visibility of Ethical AI or AI Ethics is doing great good, meanwhile some believe it isn’t enough and a semblance of embracing Radical Ethical AI is appearing. This is closely examined, including for AI-based self-driving cars.

Has the prevailing tenor and attention of today’s widely emerging semblance of AI Ethics gotten into a veritable rut? Some seem to decidedly think so.

Let’s unpack this. You might generally be aware that there has been a rising tide of interest in the ethical ramifications of AI. This is often referred to as either AI Ethics or Ethical AI, which we’ll consider herein those two monikers as predominantly equivalent and interchangeable (I suppose some might quibble about that assumption, but I’d like to suggest that we not get distracted by the potential differences, if any, for the purposes of this discussion).

This kind of “merger” is so rare that only two stars of this type are known.

This merger takes a pretty exact mass range of two white dwarves, one that causes one star to thrash the other and pull its gas on top.

The flow of time isn’t as consistent as we might think – gravity slows it down, so clocks on the surface of Earth tick slower than those in space. Now researchers have measured time passing at different speeds across just one millimeter, the smallest distance yet.

The idea that time would be affected by gravity was first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1915, as part of his theory of general relativity. Space and time are inextricably linked, and large masses warp the fabric of spacetime with their immense gravitational influence. This has the effect of making time pass more slowly closer to a large mass like a planet, star, or, in the most extreme example, a black hole. This phenomenon is known as time dilation.

Continue reading “Physicists measure gravitational time warp to within one millimeter” »

The discovery may be the strongest evidence yet that people reached the Americas thousands of years earlier than many archaeologists thought.

Between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago, people squished through the mud along a lakeshore in what is now New Mexico, alone and in small groups, leaving behind their footprints. Or at least that’s the conclusion of a new paper that Oregon State University, Corvallis, archaeologist Loren Davis calls “potentially groundbreaking.” If the dates are right, the discovery would be the strongest evidence yet that people reached the Americas during the middle of the last ice age, thousands of years earlier than many archaeologists thought.

“If that’s true … it’s going to be a revolution in the way that we think about archaeology in the Americas,” says Davis, who wasn’t involved with the work. It might reignite debates about how people first reached the continent from Asia. But Davis and others would like corroboration of the surprising dates before they rewrite their understanding of when and how people arrived.

Continue reading “Human footprints near ice age lake suggest surprisingly early arrival in the Americas” »