Lifeboat Foundation

As the Times reports, researchers have been puzzling over the age of the Shigir sculpture for decades. The debate has major implications for the study of prehistory, which tends to emphasize a Western-centric view of human development.

In 1997, Russian scientists carbon-dated the totem pole to about 9500 years ago. Many in the scientific community rejected these findings as implausible: Reluctant to believe that hunter-gatherer communities in the Urals and Siberia had created art or formed cultures of their own, says Terberger to the Times, researchers instead presented a narrative of human evolution that centered European history, with ancient farming societies in the Fertile Crescent eventually sowing the seeds of Western civilization.

Prevailing views over the past century, adds Terberger, regarded hunter-gatherers as “inferior to early agrarian communities emerging at that time in the Levant. At the same time, the archaeological evidence from the Urals and Siberia was underestimated and neglected.”

Circa 2018

In just a few weeks, NASA is due to launch one of its most ambitious projects yet. The Parker Solar Probe is going to swoop in and ‘touch’ the Sun — coming in closer to the solar surface than any probe has ever done before.

Parker’s three closest orbits will bring it within 6.1 million kilometres (3.8 million miles) of the Sun’s surface and inside its outer atmosphere, or corona, where temperatures reach millions of degrees Kelvin.

Continue reading “Here’s How NASA’s Solar Probe Is Going to Touch The Sun Without Melting” »

Phosphorus, the element critical for life´s origin and life on Earth, may be even Venus.

Scientists studying the origin of life in the universe often focus on a few critical elements, particularly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. But two new papers highlight the importance of phosphorus for biology: an assessment of where things stand with a recent claim about possible life in the clouds of Venus, and a look at how reduced phosphorus compounds produced by lightning might have been critical for life early in our own planet’s history.

First a little biochemistry: Phosphine is a reduced phosphorus compound with one phosphorus atom and three hydrogen atoms. Phosphorus is also found in its reduced form in the phosphide mineral schreibersite, in which the phosphorus atom binds to three metal atoms (either iron or nickel). In its reduced form, phosphorus is much more reactive and useful for life than is phosphate, where the phosphorus atom binds to four oxygen atoms. Phosphorus is also the element that is most enriched in biological molecules as compared to non-biological molecules, so it’s not a bad place to start when you’re hunting for life.

Continue reading “The Fuss Over Phosphorus” »

Pyongyang’s recent ballistic missiles test indicated that the country is once again raising tensions to gain leverage with Washington.

Circa 2020

Nanotechnology development company UbiQD announced an optical fiber-coupled luminescent concentrator technology as a new tool for optimizing light in controlled environments, enabling light-guiding to future UbiGro spectrum-control greenhouse products.

A team of researchers working at Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology has developed a skeletal-muscle-based, biohybrid soft robot that can swim faster than other skeletal-muscle-based biobots. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes building and testing their soft robot.

As scientists continue to improve the abilities of soft robots, they have turned to natural materials such as animal tissue. To date, most efforts in this area have involved the use of skeletal or cardiac muscles—each have their strengths and weaknesses. Skeletal-muscle-based biobots have, for example, suffered from lack of mobility and strength. In this new effort, the researchers in Spain have developed a new design for a tinyskeletal-muscle-based soft robot that overcomes both issues and is therefore able to swim faster than others of its kind.

To make their biobot, the researchers used a simulation to create a spring-based spine for a swimming creature shaped like an eel. The simulation allowed the researchers to optimize its shape. They then 3D printed the skeleton (which was made of a polymer called PDMS) and used it as a scaffold for growing skeletal muscles. The finished robot was approximately 260 micrometers long—its shape allowed for propulsion in just one direction. The biobot moves when given electrical stimulation; the charge incites the muscle to contract, which compresses the skeletal spring inside. When the stimulation is removed, the energy in the spring is released, pushing the biobot forward.

A group of researchers in Florida may have found a way to control the weather, through the use of dual lasers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EzVVSFRKrY

Are we gonna get paid just to live in an automated world?

We may need to pay people just to live in an automated world, says Elon Musk. He reckons the robot revolution is inevitable and it’s going to take all the jobs.

Continue reading “Musk: ‘We Need Universal Basic Income Because Robots Will Take All the Jobs’” »

Splitting water using suspensions of particulate carbon nitride-based photocatalysts may be a cheap way to produce hydrogen, but efficiencies have remained low. Now, Shen and colleagues use doped carbon nitride-based Z-scheme heterostructures to split water with a solar-to-hydrogen efficiency of 1.1% in the presence of metal-based co-catalysts.