Posted on Dec 10, 2022 in Planet Earth, Science
This weekend’s stories include What the world’s largest liquid mirror telescope means for astronomy to How mass extinction and evolution are intimately linked, and much more.
Consciousness may not require a brain–Are plants conscious? asks Annaka Harris, a New York Times bestselling author of CONSCIOUS: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. “What if what we take to be behavior indicating consciousness can be replicated with no conscious agent involved? Annaka Harris invites us to consider the real possibility that our intuitions about consciousness might be mere illusions.”
What the world’s largest liquid mirror telescope means for astronomy–The International Liquid Mirror Telescope, perched high in the Himalayas, has finally started making observations. If it succeeds, we could one day put a much larger liquid telescope on the moon.
Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson wants to build a metaverse open to all–The science-fiction author who coined the term metaverse in his 1992 novel Snow Crash is going head-to-head with Meta and Microsoft to create an open-source platform for creating virtual worlds, reports New Scientist.
Why the US military could replace spy satellites with solar planes–The US military has spent billions of dollars on spy satellites and supersonic surveillance aircraft, but now it seems to be focusing on slow, lightweight solar-powered planes to do the same job, reports New Scientist.
Oldest DNA reveals two-million-year-old lost world–“Today the area in North Greenland is a polar desert, but the genetic material, extracted from soil, has uncovered a rich array of plants and animals. The scientists found genetic traces of elephant-like mastodons, reindeer and geese that roamed among birch and poplar trees, and of marine life including horseshoe crabs and algae.”
Paleontologist explores how mass extinction and evolution are intimately linked –“Extinction at a background level is fundamental to evolution,’ says Thomas Halliday. “The story of complex life on Earth is a story of evolution and extinction — of long-term continuity and massive disruption. “
Why the laws of physics don’t actually exist–What we call laws of physics are often just mathematical descriptions of some part of nature. Ultimate physical laws probably don’t exist and physics is all the better for it, says theoretical physicist Sankar Das Sarma.
Global Population Growth Is Slowing Down. Here’s One Reason Why–In 2022 the world’s population hit the eight-billion mark. But such milestones could top out by the end of the century, reports Katie Peek for Scientific American.
LIGO may be able to detect alien warp drives using gravitational waves–If aliens were to make spacecraft as massive as Jupiter or ones that use warp drives, we might be able to detect them using the ripples they produce in space-time, reports New Scientist.
Dropping Oxygen Will One Day Suffocate Most Life on Earth, reports Science Alert. “This probably won’t happen for another billion years or so. But when the change comes, it’s going to happen fairly rapidly, according to research published in 2021.This shift will take the planet back to something like the state it was in before what’s known as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) around 2.4 billion years ago.”
How Would a Huge Asteroid Strike on the Moon Affect Earth? explores Ross Pomeroy for Real Clear Science. “Could a sufficiently large asteroid – like a celestial billiards ball – ever knock the Moon off its steady course? And how would this affect life on Earth?”
The exotic quantum effects found hiding inside ultra-thin materials–-Superconductivity, fractional charges and magnetic vortices are just some of the weird quantum phenomena lurking in materials like graphene when they get skewed, reports Physics World.
Six Weird and Wild Animal Behaviors Revealed in 2022–Octopus outbursts, evading sexual cannibalism, and a human-cockatoo arms race—here are strange animal behaviors we learned about in 2022, reports Andrea Thompson for Scientific American.
Physicists measure the fine structure constant directly for the first time, reports Physics World. “The value of the fine structure constant – perhaps the most important constant in nature as it dictates the strength of electromagnetism – has been measured directly by researchers in Austria and the US.
Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff
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