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Feb 1, 2019
‘Mutant’ coyotes in California with piercing blue eyes stun scientists
Posted by Genevieve Klien in category: futurism
Last year, a wildlife photographer spotted a “one in a million” coyote with captivating blue eyes while out on a walk in California’s Point Reyes National Seashore.
The sighting quickly became national news and prompted an investigation by National Geographic, which confirmed the coyote’s eye color was indeed rare — as coyotes’ irises are almost always some shade of gold. At the time, Juan Negro, a senior researcher at the Spanish Council for Research in Spain, told the publication he hadn’t seen something like that in the 25 years he’d been studying animal coloration.
“Deviants, or strange colors, arise from time to time as mutants,” Negro suggested back in June.
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Feb 1, 2019
Jeff Bezos’ rocket company to help Telesat take on Elon Musk in internet satellite race
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: Elon Musk, internet, satellites
Telesat picked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin New Glenn rocket to launch its satellites into space.
Feb 1, 2019
The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite
Posted by Derick Lee in category: robotics/AI
But in private settings, including meetings with the leaders of the many consulting and technology firms whose pop-up storefronts line the Davos Promenade, these executives tell a different story: They are racing to automate their own work forces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers.
DAVOS, Switzerland — They’ll never admit it in public, but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible.
I know this because, for the past week, I’ve been mingling with corporate executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. And I’ve noticed that their answers to questions about automation depend very much on who is listening.
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Feb 1, 2019
Learning Language in Deep Sleep Isn’t Just Science Fiction Anymore
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: health, neuroscience
As important as sleep is for health, happiness, and performance, it really is a time suck. Those eight or so hours when we lose consciousness may be restorative, but just think of what we could accomplish if we could actually put them to productive use. Scientists believe that we can use these unconscious hours to begin to learn new facts or languages in our sleep, as long the information is presented in the right way.
In his paper published Thursday in Current Biology, University of Bern neuropsychologist Marc Züst, Ph.D., presents evidence that it’s actually possible to form new “semantic connections” at specific moments during the sleep cycle. These, he explains, are associations between two words that we use to help encode new information and give words context. For instance, when we hear the word “winter,” we think of cold temperatures, skiing, or, most recently, polar vortices. In his study, Züst found that the brain can actually learn to make these associations if we hear two words paired together at certain times within the sleep cycle.
“Humans are capable of sophisticated information processing without consciousness,” Züst tells Inverse. “Sleep-formed memory traces endure into the following wakefulness and can influence how you react to foreign words, even though you think you’ve never seen that word before. It’s an implicit, unconscious form of memory — like a gut feeling.”
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Feb 1, 2019
New Madrid fault zone could spawn huge quakes in U.S. Midwest, South
Posted by Genevieve Klien in category: futurism
LOS ANGELES — The New Madrid fault zone in the nation’s midsection is active and could spawn future large earthquakes, scientists reported.
It’s “not dead yet,” said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Susan Hough, who was part of the study published online Thursday by the journal Science.
Researchers have long debated just how much of a hazard New Madrid (MAD’-rihd) poses. The zone stretches 150 miles, crossing parts of Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee.
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Feb 1, 2019
Scientists create strange matter that once filled Universe
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: cosmology, particle physics
The team created the so-called quark-gluon plasma by smashing packets of protons and neutrons into a much heavier gold atom in the PHENIX Detector particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. It is theorised that this matter filled the entire Universe shortly after the Big Bang when it was still too hot for particles to come together to make atoms.
Feb 1, 2019
Lab-Grown Chicken Nuggets Made From Feathers to Hit Shelves
Posted by James Christian Smith in categories: food, futurism
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_GgP6jo5DTM
Is lab grown meat the future of the industry, or simply an expensive boondoggle that wealthy investors like Bill Gates and Richard Branson will eventually have to bite the bullet on? According to major players in this “cultured meat” industry, lab grown meats can replace having to actually slaughter and process these foods for human consumption, preventing animal deaths and giving rise to a new era in the food industry.
The JUST cultured meat company of California hopes to sell nuggets synthesized from chicken feathers by the end of 2018.
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Jan 31, 2019
Could an extremophile hold the secret to treatment of devastating injuries?
Posted by Klaus Baldauf in category: biological
Water bear. Moss piglet. Tardigrade.
The gentle teddy-bear features of this polyonymic animal belie its hardy nature.
Capable of withstanding dehydration and cosmic radiation and surviving temperatures as low as −450 F and as high as 300 F, this eight-limbed microscopic creature holds the key to one of biology’s greatest secrets — extreme survival.
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Jan 31, 2019
Former NASA Rocket Scientist On Why We’re Still Going Nowhere Fast
Posted by Bruce Dorminey in categories: innovation, space travel
Interstellar propulsion breakthroughs will require research that is motivated by more than mere hype, says former NASA breakthrough propulsion physicist.