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An international and multi-disciplinary team coordinated by Abderrazak El Albani at the Institut de chimie des milieux et matériaux de Poitiers (CNRS/Université de Poitiers) has uncovered the oldest fossilised traces of motility. Whereas previous remnants were dated to 570 million years ago, this new evidence is 2.1 billion years old. They were discovered in a fossil deposit in Gabon, where the oldest multicellular organisms have already been found (1). These results appear in the 11 February 2019 edition of PNAS. A few years ago, geologist Abderrazak El Albani and his team at the Institut de chimie des milieux et matériaux...

Taking a dip in the ocean and coming face to face with a predator of the deep would be enough to scare anyone. Modern day great white sharks are intimidating creatures, but they wouldn’t have held a candle to the ancient super-sized beast known as megalodon. The long-extinct shark has been the subject of many research efforts in the past, with scientists attempting to determine when and where it lived, and perhaps even figure out why it’s no longer around. Now, new fossil evidence suggests that the colossal creature actually died off quite a bit earlier than was originally thought,...

Taking a dip in the ocean and coming face to face with a predator of the deep would be enough to scare anyone. Modern day great white sharks are intimidating creatures, but they wouldn’t have held a candle to the ancient super-sized beast known as megalodon. The long-extinct shark has been the subject of many research efforts in the past, with scientists attempting to determine when and where it lived, and perhaps even figure out why it’s no longer around. Now, new fossil evidence suggests that the colossal creature actually died off quite a bit earlier than was originally thought,...

Nav gadgets will be Gah, Properly Screwed if you don't or can't update firmware Older satnavs and such devices won't be able to use America's Global Positioning System properly after April 6 unless they've been suitably updated or designed to handle a looming epoch rollover.GPS signals from satellites include a timestamp, needed in part to calculate one's location, that stores the week number using ten binary bits. That means the week number can have 210 or 1,024 integer values, counting from zero to 1,023 in this case. Every 1,024 weeks, or roughly every 20 years, the counter rolls over from...

General Chuck Yeager—an idol of anyone who has ever sought to break a speed record, whether in the air, on land, or on the water— turns 96 today. He proved that speed that were thought to be impossible for humans were actually attainable. That all started in October, 1947 with the flight of the Bell X-1, an experimental aircraft that was built for one reason: to break the sound barrier. The diminutive plane, nicknamed Glamorous Glennis, wasn't like other aircraft. It carried more than 5000 pounds of fuel, and that fuel wasn't just pump gas. The rocket engine needed liquid...

Just two diet drinks a day increases the risk of stroke by a quarter, and heart disease by a third DRINKING Diet Coke everyday increases your risk of dying young, experts have warned. Two or more artificially-sweetened drinks a day ups the risk of stroke by a quarter and heart disease by a third, new findings show.

Cheetahs are the fastest animals on land, and they owe their speed in part to the design of their skeletons — the tibia and fibula in their legs are fused, helping them maintain stability while sprinting after prey. However, this unique characteristic also prevents cheetahs from being effective climbers like many other cats. If it could somehow separate its leg bones at will, the animal would be far more formidable. In a new paper published in the journal IEEE Robotics & Automation Letters, the CSU [Colorado State University] team describes how it gave its robot the ability to adapt to...

Full Title: February Full Moon 2019: The 'Super Snow Moon' Brings Planetary Conjunctions and Other Celestial Treats The full moon of February, called the Snow Moon, will occur in the U.S. during the morning of Feb. 19. It will be at its fullest about 6 hours after reaching perigee, the nearest point from Earth in its orbit — creating a "supermoon," a full moon that is slightly larger than average.

A young squirrel lucky enough to take over territory from an adult male squirrel is like a teenager falling into a big inheritance, according to a new University of Guelph study. Researchers found male squirrels store more food than females, and if a young squirrel leaving the nest nabs a storage spot previously owned by a male squirrel, they will increase their lifetime pup production by 50 per cent."It's like buying a home and finding a big pile of money buried in the walls," said integrative biology professor Andrew McAdam, who worked on the study with lead author David Fisher,...

SpaceX's Mars ships won't be ferrying just the super rich to and from the Red Planet, if everything goes according to Elon Musk's plan.The price of a seat aboard SpaceX's Starship interplanetary vehicle will eventually drop enough to be accessible to a large chunk of the industrialized world's population, the billionaire entrepreneur predicted over the weekend. "Very dependent on volume, but I'm confident moving to Mars (return ticket is free) will one day cost less than $500k & maybe even below $100k. Low enough that most people in advanced economies could sell their home on Earth & move to Mars if...

Back in the summer of 2016, a big earthquake struck northwestern Turkey. That’s not so unusual, considering that the region sits atop a highly active branching fault network that has a history of producing some seriously powerful tremblors. The strange thing about this particular quake is that it lasted for 50 days, and not a single soul felt it. According to a new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the temblor was a very peculiar type of earthquake known as a slow slip event. Unlike “typical” earthquakes, which crack the crust with a sudden jolt, slow slips involve very...

Cool image time! The south polar cap of Mars is a strange place. It is largely ice, with a seasonal cap of frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Because the dry ice sublimates away during the summer months, the cap undergoes regular changes that reshape it, producing alien features that are not seen on Earth. The image on the right is another example of these alien features. I found it in the February image release from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I have merely cropped the full image to focus at full resolution on its primary feature,...

Following the discovery of the 19.2-mile wide Hiawatha impact crater beneath the northwest margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet, Dr. Joe MacGregor of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and colleagues explored satellite and aerogeophysical data in search of additional such craters and found a possible second impact crater that is 22.7 miles wide and 114 miles southeast of the Hiawatha crater. The discovery is described in a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. ..." Following the finding of that first crater, Dr. MacGregor and co-authors checked topographic maps of the rock beneath Greenland’s ice for signs of other craters....

Ben Laurie, 21, encountered the bizarre creature while diving near Cape Brett on New Zealand's North Island. ..." Ben, who has years of experience in the water and is an ambassador for the WildBlue dive shop, said he had seen nothing like it. He added: "I didn't know what it was at the time, so it was quite a confusing thing. "We get these little like plankton build-ups – they're like small stringy things but they're only like 20 cm. (7.8 inches) long – so I thought it was just a large one of them. "But one of the guys...

Earth's solid surface and moderate climate may be due, in part, to a massive star in the birth environment of the Sun, according to new computer simulations of planet formation. Without the star's radioactive elements injected into the early solar system, our home planet could be a hostile ocean world covered in global ice sheets."The results of our simulations suggest that there are two qualitatively different types of planetary systems," said Tim Lichtenberg of the National Centre of Competence in Research PlanetS in Switzerland. "There are those similar to our solar system, whose planets have little water, and those in...

The Hawaii-based James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) has discovered a stellar flare 10 billion times more powerful than the Sun's solar flares, a history-making discovery that could unlock decades-old questions about the origin of our own Sun and planets, giving insight into how these celestial bodies were born. "A discovery of this magnitude could have only happened in Hawaii," said Dr. Steve Mairs, astronomer and lead investigator of the team that discovered the stellar flare. "Using the JCMT, we study the birth of nearby stars as a means of understanding the history of our very own solar system. Observing flares...

A study published last year in the journal Science suggested liquid water is present beneath the south polar ice cap of Mars. Now, a new study in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters argues there needs to be an underground source of heat for liquid water to exist underneath the polar ice cap. The new research does not take sides as to whether the liquid water exists. Instead, the authors suggest recent magmatic activity—the formation of a magma chamber within the past few hundred thousand years—must have occurred underneath the surface of Mars for there to be enough heat to...

By zeroing in on humans' gait, body symmetry and foot placement, University of Michigan researchers are teaching self-driving cars to recognize and predict pedestrian movements with greater precision than current technologies. Data collected by vehicles through cameras, LiDAR and GPS allow the researchers to capture video snippets of humans in motion and then recreate them in 3-D computer simulation. With that, they've created a "biomechanically inspired recurrent neural network" that catalogs human movements.With it, they can predict poses and future locations for one or several pedestrians up to about 50 yards from the vehicle. That's at about the scale of...

Our Milky Way galaxy will survive in its current form a bit longer than some astronomers had thought, a new study suggests.The monster collision between our Milky Way and fellow spiral galaxy Andromeda will occur about 4.5 billion years from now, according to the new research, which is based on observations made by Europe's Gaia spacecraft. Some prominent previous estimates had predicted the crash would happen significantly sooner, in about 3.9 billion years."This finding is crucial to our understanding of how galaxies evolve and interact," Gaia project scientist Timo Prusti, who was not involved in the study, said in a...

An international research team, coordinated by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) and the Eurasia Department of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Berlin, is the first to carry out systematic genetic investigations in the Caucasus region... based on analyses of genome-wide data from 45 individuals in the steppe and mountainous areas of the North Caucasus. The skeletal remains, which are between 6,500 and 3,500 years old, show that the groups living throughout the Caucasus region were genetically similar, despite the harsh mountain terrain, but that there was a sharp genetic boundary to the adjacent...