All Life on Earth Comes From One Single Ancestor.

Life on Earth had to begin somewhere, and scientists think that “somewhere” is LUCA—or the Last Universal Common Ancestor. True to its name, this prokaryote-like organism represents the ancestor of every living thing, from the tiniest of bacteria to the grandest of blue whales.

While the Cambrian Explosion kickstarted complex life in a major way some 530 million years, the true timeline of life on Earth is much longer. For years, scientists have estimated that LUCA likely arrived on the scene some 4 billion years, which is only 600 million years after the planet’s formation.

But a study from an international team of scientists pushes that timeline back even further to some 4.2 billion years ago, while also discovering some fascinating details about what life for LUCA might’ve been like. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

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Wrong About the Origins of Life

In a new peer reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.”

The last universal common ancestor is the single life form that branched into everything since.

Earth four billion years ago may help us check for life on one of Saturn’s moons today.

Scientists are making a case for adjusting our understanding of how exactly genes first emerged. For a while, there’s been a consensus about the order in which the building block amino acids were “added” into the box of Lego pieces that build our genes. 

But according to genetic researchers at the University of Arizona, our previous assumptions may reflect biases in our understanding of biotic (living) versus abiotic (non-living) sources.

In other words, our current working model of gene history could be undervaluing early protolife (which included forerunners like RNA and peptides) as compared to what emerged with and after the beginning of life. 

Our understanding of these extremely ancient times will always be incomplete, but it’s important for us to keep researching early Earth. The scientists explain that any improvements in that understanding could not only allow us know more of our own story, but also help us search for the beginnings of life elsewhere in the universe.     READ MORE...

First Carbon-14 Diamond Battery

There are many ways to make hydrogen, but only green hydrogen is climate-neutral—unfortunately, it isn't nearly as cost competitive as other energy sources.

A new proof-of-concept reactor, developed by scientists at Shinshu University in Matsumoto, Japan, aims to split water using photocatalysts and good ole sunlight.

Although the idea needs more time in the oven before being commercially viable, it offers a possible pathway for green hydrogen to be a useful for tool for helping humanity kick its fossil fuel addiction.

Hydrogen fuels come in many colors—each one an indicator of how the fuel was initially created. Blue hydrogen refers to fuel created from steam and capturing the resulting carbon underground, pink hydrogen means nuclear energy powers the electrolysis process, and black and brown carbon (as their name denotes) splits H20 using fossil fuels, which isn’t exactly helpful with the whole cutting emissions thing.     READ MORE...

Humanity Reaching SINGULARITY

By one unique metric, we could approach technological singularity by the end of this decade, if not sooner.

A translation company developed a metric, Time to Edit (TTE), to calculate the time it takes for professional human editors to fix AI-generated translations compared to human ones. This may help quantify the speed toward singularity.

An AI that can translate speech as well as a human could change society.

In the world of artificial intelligence, the idea of “singularity” looms large. This slippery concept describes the moment AI exceeds beyond human control and rapidly transforms society. 

The tricky thing about AI singularity (and why it borrows terminology from black hole physics) is that it’s enormously difficult to predict where it begins and nearly impossible to know what’s beyond this technological “event horizon.”

However, some AI researchers are on the hunt for signs of reaching singularity measured by AI progress approaching the skills and ability comparable to a human.      READ MORE...

Archaeology Discovery

Archaeologists discovered a walled city in the northern Saudi Arabian desert that was likely home to 500 people as far back as 2,400 B.C.

The experts believe the city’s roughly 1,000 years of use showed a growing urban complexity in the region.

The town was functionally subdivided into different areas, but also included towers and ramparts for defense.

A newly discovered ancient oasis in the Saudi Arabian desert shows that, centuries ago, the area had a completely unexpected level of urban sophistication. The remains of the walled and fortified city include towers, ramparts, organized zones of residential areas connected by small roads, a centralized area, a cemetery, and a place to cultivate food.

In a new study published in the journal PLOS ONE, a team of archaeologists (led by France’s National Center for Scientific Research) unveiled the discovery of an “exceptional Bronze Age fortified site called al-Natah,” located in the Khaybar oasis and uncovered by the Khaybar Longue Duree Archaeological Project.       READ MORE...

2700 Years Old Bronze Shields

A team of archaeologists uncovered three bronze shields and a bronze helmet that were buried under more than 20 feet of castle rubble at the site of Ayanis Castle in eastern Turkey. 

The artifacts are roughly 2,700 years old, and decorations on the helmet point towards the discoveries likely being ceremonial gifts offered to a god or royalty.

According to social media posts from Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, minister of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey, archaeologists found the artifacts during excavations of the city of Ayanis, the last and largest city of the Urartu Kingdom, an ancient civilization of Anatolian history.     READ MORE...

A Mysterious CREATURE

There’s something intriguing, even frightening, about the image of an ancient horned serpent roaming across the land. Thanks to some suggestive fossils and legends of old, talk of such a creature isn’t a new concept. But the recent discovery of 200-year-old rock paintings found in South Africa now has scientists hypothesizing that this ancient creature may have been far more than just a legend.

The first formal scientific descriptions of this horned serpent—a supposed member of the dicynodont group—appeared in 1845. Considering the abundance of dicynodont fossils found in the Karoo Basin in South Africa, some have pondered whether this long-thought mythical horned serpent is rooted in reality. 

The discovery of rock art dated to between 1821 and 1835 adds even more credence to the legend, as the painting is older than the first formal reference to the dicynodont. If we’re lucky, it could provide further clues as to just how intertwined this horned serpent was with South Africa’s indigenous San culture.          READ MORE...

Van Gogh's Starry Night

Scientists recently analyzed Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night to see how well its famous swirls matched up with known atmospheric physics.

After analysis, they found that not only did the shapes match up with our current ideas of atmospheric turbulence, but the colors used throughout the piece communicated fairly accurate physics at a remarkably small scale.

Researchers think that Van Gogh could have come to understand these movements by “studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere, or that he could have just had “an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky.”

The swirling colors and flowing brushstrokes of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night have secured the painting (and its artist) a place among the all-time greats. As a piece of art, Starry Night is undeniably beautiful, but beauty alone is often not enough to keep a painting so cemented in the minds and hearts of the public.

Beyond just being beautiful, Starry Night somehow manages to capture the feeling of a clear night sky. Capturing feeling may be the whole point of impressionism—Van Gogh is himself most often labeled a post-impressionist, a style separate from true impressionism that nonetheless uses many impressionist techniques—but Starry Night does a singular job at managing it. Something about those particular swirls of paint just… feels like the night.     READ MORE...

Quantum Time Flip

It’s been 35 years since Cher first wanted to turn back time, but it turns out that quantum mechanics might have allowed for this wild reversal all along. In new research, scientists from China and Hong Kong show that—in certain quantum systems—the time variable can be reversed by creating a double superposition (one each in opposite directions) and still bear out valid results. 

What results from this little bit of quantum trickery is both an input and output that are considered indefinite, meaning that either one can be the input or the output. Basically, the after can go before the before. The peer-reviewed research appears in the journal Physical Review Letters.

In our day-to-day lives, we perceive time as marching inexorably forward, and that means many processes aren’t easily reversible. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, so to speak—it’s a lot more difficult to reset an object back to its original state than it is to change it in the first place. This is called time’s arrow, and we believe it’s partly caused by the fact that our universe has been ever-expanding since the Big Bang.     READ MORE...

NASA: Past Life on Mars

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  In its ancient past, Mars likely contained many of the necessarily ingredients for microbial life to flourish on its surface.
• Now, a new discovery by NASA’s Perseverance rover shows a trifecta of compelling evidence—including the presence of water, organic compounds, and a chemical energy source—all on one rock located in the Jezero Crater.
• Although this is the best clue yet that microbial life existed on Mars, there are still other explanations that could explain this geologic display without the existence of microbes.

“Is there life on Mars” is a question that has vexed astrobiologists and David Bowie alike. While the latter imagined some macabre collection of arachnids on the Red Planet, NASA scientists are fixated on finding evidence that microbial life once flourished on the fourth rock from the Sun. So fixated, in fact, that the space agency has spent more than $5 billion getting two immensely complicated robotic rovers—Curiosity and Perseverance—onto the Martian surface with this specific microbial mission in mind.     READ MORE...

Evidence of Hydraulics in Ancient Pyramid

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  A new study suggests that the first of seven key pyramids in Egypt, the Step Pyramid of Djoser, was built using a hydraulic lift.
• Dated to about 4,500 years ago, this would move up the introduction of major hydraulic systems from previous beliefs.
• The landscape, waterways, and interior architecture of the pyramid all point to the hydraulic system.

Hydraulic mechanics may have indeed been the driving force behind the construction of ancient Egyptian pyramids.

In a recent preprint paper, scientists concluded that the Step Pyramid of Djoser in Saqqara, Egypt—believed to be the oldest of the seven monumental pyramids and potentially constructed about 4,500 years ago—offers a remarkable blueprint for hydraulic engineering.

The hydraulic-powered mechanism could have maneuvered the oversized stone blocks forming the pyramid, starting from the ground up. The research team says the Step Pyramid’s internal architecture is consistent with a hydraulic elevation mechanism, something that’s never been reported before at that place or in that time.     READ MORE...

Blonde Man Found in Ancient Cbinese Tomb

A tomb discovered in Taiyuan from the 8th century features murals in the “figures under the tree” style.  The multiple scenes depicted throughout the tomb show daily life during the Tang dynasty.  One image includes a man with blond hair and western dress, likely an influence from the Silk Road trading route.

A Tang dynasty tomb decorated with colorful murals is providing a new glimpse into daily life in China during the 8th century. Most interestingly, the murals show signs of Western influence, particularly the inclusion of a blond, bearded figure.

A 2018 reconstruction project of a hillside road in the capital of the Shanxi Province led to unearthing the tomb, but archaeologists hadn’t really reported on the discovery until now.     READ MORE...

All Life on EARTH has One Ancestor

Life on Earth had to begin somewhere, and scientists think that “somewhere” is LUCA—or the Last Universal Common Ancestor. True to its name, this prokaryote-like organism represents the ancestor of every living thing, from the tiniest of bacteria to the grandest of blue whales.

While the Cambrian Explosion kickstarted complex life in a major way some 530 million years, the true timeline of life on Earth is much longer. For years, scientists have estimated that LUCA likely arrived on the scene some 4 billion years, which is only 600 million years after the planet’s formation. 

But a new study from an international team of scientists pushes that timeline back even further to some 4.2 billion years ago, while also discovering some fascinating details about what life for LUCA might’ve been like. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.       READ MORE...

A Paradox in Evolution

It may have fewer than many of the other sciences, but biology does have two dozen or so “rules”—broad generalizations about the behavior or nature and evolution.

Now, USC researchers want to add a new rule called “selectively advantageous instability (SAI),” which explores how instability can actually benefit a cell and a cellular organism.

The flipside of this “rule” is that SAI can also be a key factor to things like disease and aging, so understanding this process could aid in exploration of those biological processes.

Across the sciences, rules and laws help us make sense of the world around us, whether applied to cosmic scales or subatomic ones. However, in the biological world, things are a bit more complicated. That’s because nature is often full of biological exceptions, and so “rules of biology” are also considered broad generalizations rather than absolute facts that explain and govern all known life.      READ MORE...

A Remarkable New Thruster

The history of space travel is filled with impressive sizzle reels of fire-breathing chemical engines launching monumental rockets skyward toward the Moon, Mars, and beyond. 

While these massive devices are marvels of human engineering, the real workhorses of the space industry are the immensely less-gargantuan ion thrusters.

These engines are as old as rocketry itself—Soviet and German rocket leaders first dreamed up their future uses more than a century ago. And today, these electric propulsion systems power the swarms of satellites around Earth that make modern life possible. 

Unlike chemical rockets that throw out gasses for propulsion, ion engines are powered by individual atoms, which makes them much more fuel efficient and allows satellites to operate for longer.     READ MORE...

Evidence We Live in a Simulation

In the 1999 film The Matrix, Thomas Anderson (a.k.a. Neo) discovers a truth to end all truths—the universe is a simulation. While this premise provides fantastic sci-fi fodder (and explains how Neo can learn kung-fu in about five seconds), the idea isn’t quite as carefully relegated to the fiction section as one might expect.

University of Portsmouth scientist Melvin Vopson, who studies the possibility that the universe might indeed be a digital facsimile, leans into the cinematic comparison. In an article published on website The Conversation this past October, Vopson invoked the Wachowskis’ sci-fi masterpiece, and around the same time, he published a book on the subject—Reality Reloaded, a subtle hat tip to the title of the less successful Matrix sequel. While he is just one among many who’ve contemplated the idea, Vopson claims to have one thing that those before him lacked: evidence.                READ MORE...

A Paradigm Shift in RAM

Your computer wouldn’t be very useful without RAM, which is short for random access memory. These chips function as the temporary storage for an operating system, and speed is of great importance, as they’re constantly needing to access bits of memory to keep everything running smoothly. 

For more than two decades, the most advanced version of this technology—magnetoresistive RAM, or MRAM—has been the go-to tech for the kind of intense computing necessary in industrial, military, and space applications.

Now, a new breakthrough discovered by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has illustrated how a mechanism in a laser beam can control the magnetic state in solids, which the scientists describe as a “paradigm shift” in our understanding of the behavior between light and magnetic materials. 

The results of the study were published earlier this year in the journal Physical Review Research.           READ MORE...

A Chinese Humanoid Robots Sets Record

The human body isn’t really an ideal template for a robot. Out of the entire family of primates, Homo sapiens are the only ones who spend a majority of their time on two feet—a biological outlier that isn’t exactly easy to replicate in artificial form. In the past decade, many companies have created impressive facsimiles: robots that can run, jump, and stumble just like a real boy. But none of them have been able to generate very much speed while doing so. That’s beginning to change.

Earlier this month, the Chinese robotic company Unitree uploaded a sizzle video to Youtube that highlighted the impressive attributes of its H1 humanoid robot. Chief among those impressive attributed is the robot’s startling speed, clocking in at an impressive 3.3 m/s, or roughly 7.4 mph. That beats the previous record holder, Boston Dynamics’ Atlas, which can book it at a steady 5.59 mph. Unitree claims that its artificial creation can even reach speeds of up to 11 mph.     READ MORE...

A Medieval Village Uncovered

During the intense and bloody French Revolution (1789-1799), Catholic churches and abbeys didn’t fare very well. In 1789, the National Constituent Assembly decided to seize all Catholic property and sell it off in an effort to fund the fledgling Revolutionary currency. 

The Beaumont Abbey, which had existed outside the city of Tours, France for nearly 800 years, was swept up in this nationwide land grab, its 46 nuns were expelled, and the abbey itself was eventually demolished.

But unknown at the time of its demolition, a treasure trove of medieval history rested underneath the abbey. The area contained some 1,000 burial sites—the graveyard of the centuries-old abbey—and remnants of the medieval town of Belmons, which the Beaumont Abbey effectively replaced.  READ MORE...

Alice Rings

Topological monopoles are a quantum physics phenomenon that can decay into what’s known as “Alice rings.”

Named after Lewis Carroll’s famous heroine, this vortex ring flips the magnetic charge of any monopole that passes through it, creating an anti-monopole.

Although these rings last only 80 or so milliseconds, they could have big implications in the study of cosmology and high-energy physics.

The literary works of Lewis Carroll and the complex machinations of quantum physics rarely cross paths—but when they do, it’s about as mind-bending as it sounds.

Last month, scientists from Aalto University in Finland and Amherst College in Massachusetts created a bizarre quantum object known as an ‘Alice ring.’ An homage to Carroll’s titular character in Alice in Wonderland, the name is an apt one. 

This decayed monopole—a particle with only one magnetic pole—opens a “vortex ring” that flips the magnetic charge of any other monopole passing through its center, creating an “anti-monopole.” The results of the study were published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.     READ MORE...