Tag: technews

Placozoans: The Evolution of Placozoans The blob-like sea creatures could hold the keys to the origins of our nervous systems, literally – and they contain cells that look a little bit like our neurons. See, tiny blobs of sand in the water? That’s right, it’s time to get down to brass tacks. A new study…

Viperine snake (Natrix maura This snake bit off more than it could chew, and that might be just the beginning of the story. See, scientists have caught a snake in France eating a fish that had a bunch of spines stuck in its throat. No, really. This is not a joke: The dorsal spines of…

Kalambo Falls, Zambia – Kalambo Falls, Zambia Archaeologists have found evidence of a 476,000-year-old wooden structure in Africa, possibly the earliest wooden structure ever seen. The prehistoric remains were discovered near the Kalambo River basin of Zambia, near to the famous waterfalls Kalambo Falls. To date the wood, scientists used new luminescence dating techniques. They…

Pando, the largest organism on Earth Pando, a stand of quaking aspen clones, may be the longest-living organism known to science. It has spread its roots for thousands of years and can live up to 14,000 years. What gives? The secret to a long life might as well be asking the world’s largest organism: Pando,…

End Times, by Peter Turchin, ed. Peter Turchin, a Russian-American complexity scientist and emeritus Professor at the University of Connecticut, is one of the leaders in a new scientific field called cliodynamics, which uses big data and statistical methods to predict the future. His latest book, End Times, looks at the crisis facing US democracy…

Night Sky Grief (Nyctalgia) Noctalgia is the new term they’ve invented to describe the feeling of loss of the dark skies. More and more people are experiencing sky grief due to light pollution, and increasingly, it’s being felt by people all over the world. The solution to this is to reduce light pollution from land-based…

The Tasmanian Tiger (thylacine) More than a century after its extinction, the thylacine has gone from reviled to beloved. Sports teams are named after the extinct carnivore, and theater performed about them. Even implausible reports of sightings stimulate waves of excitement. Now that it’s extinct, scientists are trying to figure out what happened to the…

Bison Bonasus (bison bonasus) Beefalo are a breed of cattle bred by humans to produce more economical and easier to manage cattle. They are also known as cattalo in the United States, but in Europe they are known as European bison. It has been a long time since Europeans have seen wild bison, and in…

The Sahara Desert Becomes a Green Forest A new study shows that the Sahara Desert changes from barren savannah to lush green woodland every 21,000 years or so. It wasn’t just an odd blip, though–this shift is part of a cyclic transformation that has changed the area from arid to humid roughly every seven thousand…

The Atacama Desert: The Age of Violence The hunter-gatherers in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile did not live in perfect harmony, according to new research published today. Instead, they were immersed in millennia-old endemic violence, which was a consistent part of life in these ancient societies. Using a three-pronged approach, which explored bioarchaeology, geomorphology,…