Bampot

The Wall Street Journal Is Lying About UFOs - Jesse Michels

"Pre-metazoan cells have mechanisms of dividing and separating, probably with some themes and variations. Then this protein complex allowed cells to stop at the stage just before separation," Glotzer said. "Maybe multicellular life evolved because of a genetic change that prevented cells from fully separating."

"A mutation that disrupted the assembly of centralspindlin is what allowed my colleagues and me to find these proteins in the first place, more than 25 years ago," he continued. "And it appears that the evolution of this exact same region contributed to the evolution of animal life on the planet, which is mind-blowing."

When could scientists have first known that fossil fuel burning was significantly altering global climate?

We attempt to answer this question by performing a thought experiment with model simulations of historical climate change.

We assume that the capability to monitor global-scale changes in atmospheric temperature existed as early as 1860 and that the instruments available in this hypothetical world had the same accuracy as today’s satellite-borne microwave radiometers.

We then apply a pattern-based “fingerprint” method to disentangle human and natural effects on climate. A human-caused stratospheric cooling signal would have been identifiable by approximately 1885, before the advent of gas-powered cars.

Our results suggest that a discernible human influence on atmospheric temperature has likely existed for over 130 y.

Our study reveals that with suitable high-quality temperature measurements, a “discernible human influence on global climate” could have been detected by the end of the 19th century. It is unclear whether such early knowledge of the climate-altering consequences of fossil fuel burning would have prompted human societies to follow a more environmentally sustainable greenhouse gas emissions pathway.

Today, however, we know with high confidence that sustainable pathways must be followed to avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference with climate.

Humanity is now at the threshold of dangerous anthropogenic interference. Our near-term choices will determine whether or not we cross that threshold.

The study found that while the sharp, abrasive lunar dust can act as a physical irritant, it did not cause the severe cellular damage or inflammation seen from the urban Earth dust. "It's important to distinguish between a physical irritant and a highly toxic substance," Smith said.

"Our findings suggest that while lunar dust may cause some immediate irritation to the airways, it does not appear to pose a risk for chronic, long-term diseases like silicosis, which is caused by materials like silica dust."

Advances in the field of asteroid dynamics continue to yield new knowledge regarding the behavior and characteristics of asteroids, allowing unprecedented levels of accuracy for predicting trajectories and contributing to impact avoidance strategies. Meanwhile, more detailed information regarding the physical composition of asteroids has reignited interest in asteroid mining as a potential new resource sector. This article considers some of the technical, ethical, legal and social issues facing global planetary defense efforts and off-world mining proposals. It considers issues such as claim jumping, weaponization of the space environment and ownership issues for resources extracted from space.

The dynamic optical and mechanical properties of cephalopod skin cannot be mimicked using traditional display technologies. Soft materials (and systems thereof) have the potential to realize cephalopod-like color switching capabilities synthetically.

This report describes the fabrication of stretchable arrays of microstructured, stimuli-responsive hydrogels, “synthetic chromatophores,” that emulate the mechano-dynamic action of color change found in cephalopods.

These skins, made entirely of soft materials, are inherently stretchable and can be programmed to respond to specific environmental stimuli, making them well-suited for applications in soft robotics and human-machine interfaces.

Here we report excavation results from a high-altitude (1,073 m) cave, Dargan Shelter, in the upper Blue Mountains, which indicate that occupation first occurred ~20,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Maximum, making this the highest elevation Pleistocene site identified in Australia so far.

Findings include multiple in situ hearths and 693 stone artefacts, several of which were sourced from sites along the mountain range, providing evidence for previously undetected interactions to the north and south and the repeated use of this cold-climate landscape during the Late Pleistocene. Our results align the Australian continent with global sequences, which indicate that cold climates were not necessarily natural barriers to human mobility and occupation.

The Xiōng-nú were a tribal confederation who dominated Inner Asia from the third century BC to the second century AD. Xiōng-nú descendants later constituted the ethnic core of the European Huns. It has been argued that the Xiōng-nú spoke an Iranian, Turkic, Mongolic or Yeniseian language, but the linguistic affiliation of the Xiōng-nú and the Huns is still debated.

Here, we show that linguistic evidence from four independent domains does indeed suggest that the Xiōng-nú and the Huns spoke the same Paleo-Siberian language and that this was an early form of Arin, a member of the Yeniseian language family.

This identification augments and confirms genetic and archaeological studies and inspires new interdisciplinary research on Eurasian population history.

During the Early Cretaceous, southeastern Australia was some of the closest land to the South Pole. Here, the night lasted for three months in winter, contrasting with three months of daytime in summer. Despite this extreme day-night cycle, various kinds of dinosaurs still thrived here, as did flies, wasps and dragonflies.

And, as our recently published research in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology reveals, termites also chewed through the decaying wood of fallen trees. This is the first record of termites living in a polar region – and their presence provides key insights into what these ancient forests were like.

AI is shedding new light on the 12,000-year conversation between cats and their humans, suggesting that house cats wield a far richer vocabulary than once thought

Any individual meow belongs, academically speaking, to a broad “meow” category, which itself contains many variations. The house cat’s verbal repertoire is far greater than that of its largely silent wild cousins. Researchers have even begun to study whether cats can drift into regional dialects, the way human accents bend along the Hudson or the Thames. And just as humans gesticulate, shrug, frown and raise their eyebrows, cats’ fur and whiskers write subtitles: a twitching tail declares excitement, flattened ears signal fear, and a slow blink promises peace. Felis catus is a chatty species that, over thousands of years of domestication, has pivoted its voice toward the peculiar primate that opens the fridge.

The mutual story of humans and cats is thought to have begun 12,000 years ago—when wildcats hunted rodents in the first grain stores of Neolithic farming villages in the Fertile Crescent—so there has been time for us to adapt to each other. By at least 7500 B.C.E., in Cyprus (an island with no native felines), a human had been interred with a cat. Later the Egyptians revered them; traders, sailors and eventually Vikings carried them around the world on ships; and now scientists have adapted humans’ most sophisticated technology to try to comprehend their inner lives. But perhaps cats have been coaching us all along, and maybe they’ll judge our software with the same cool indifference they reserve for new toys. Speech, after all, isn’t merely a label but a negotiated meaning—and cats, as masters of ambiguity, may prefer a little mystery.

Five centuries ago, the Incas ruled the western half of South America with the help of a unique form of writing based on coloured and knotted cords. These strings, called khipus, recorded major events, tracked economic matters, and even encoded biographies and poetry, according to the Spanish chroniclers who witnessed their use.

An elderly ritual specialist, Don Lenin Margarito, told me that the khipus recorded the annual ritual offerings given at different sacred places in the surrounding landscape. Miniature pink ritual bags stuffed with coca leaves and tobacco hang from the cords, representing the sacred purpose of these ancient strings. Rather than communicating through knots, the Jucul khipus record data with different kinds of tassels.

For example, a tassel made of fuzzy beige llama tails indicates that an offering was performed at the sacred lake of Paccha-cocha, high in the mountains. The fluffiness of the llama tails is like a rain cloud, Don Lenin explained, representing the fact that offerings given at Paccha-cocha are thought to bring rain.

The clinical heterogeneity in systemic autoimmune diseases often complicates the management of individual patients1. Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is primarily characterized by Raynaud’s phenomenon and skin sclerosis, with an estimated global prevalence of approximately one million individuals. Patients with SSc present with a particularly diverse range of organ manifestations2. These complications directly impact the daily activities of SSc patients and are associated with a poor prognosis.

The specific organs affected vary between patients; 50–65% develop interstitial lung disease (ILD), approximately 50% develop digital ulcers, and 1–14% develop scleroderma renal crisis (SRC), which is the most severe acute organ complication leading to end-stage renal disease and even death.

While vascular damage and tissue fibrosis due to immune dysregulation play a central role in the pathogenesis of SSc, the immunological abnormalities underlying the clinical heterogeneity of the disease and the diversity of organ involvement have not been sufficiently investigated.

Therefore, it is of great interest to explore the variation of immune abnormalities underlying the diversity of organ involvement in SSc.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is a technique that comprehensively captures the diversity of individual cells. Since 2018, scRNA-seq studies of SSc patient samples have provided important insights into the pathology of the disease.