In July 2017, a giant iceberg broke off from the Larsen C ice shelf east of the Antarctic Peninsula, unveiling a large swathe of ocean that has existed in darkness beneath the ice for more than 100,000 years, and might hold clues to the evolution and mobility of marine life and its response to climate change –an unexplored world that has existed longer than the evolution of the human neocortex, our “super-brain,” no later than 75,000 years ago that spurred our capacity for novelty and invention.
“Zero is a difficult concept to understand and a mathematical skill that doesn’t come easily – it takes children a few years to learn,” said Adrian Dyer, from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. “We’ve long believed only humans had the intelligence to get the concept, but recent research has shown monkeys and birds have the brains for it as well. What we haven’t known – until now – is whether insects can also understand zero.”
If general principles exist that can explain properties common to all life on Earth, scientists hypothesize, then they may be universal to all life, even life on other planets. If a “universal biology” exists, it would have important implications for the search for life beyond Earth, for engineering synthetic life in the lab, and for solving the origin of life, enabling scientists to predict properties of alien life. (more…)
“A craving for marrow could have fueled not just a growing brain size, but the quest to go beyond smashing bones with rocks to make more sophisticated tools and to hunt large animals. That’s how all technology originated—taking one thing and using it to alter something else,” says Jessica Thompson, lead author and expert in human evolution at Yale University. “That’s the origin of the iPhone right there.”
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to the days’ headlines on the discoveries, people, and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“We leave open the question whether the origin of life is genuinely quantum mechanical,” says the team behind exciting new research that provides a breakthrough that may eventually help answer the question of whether the origin of life can be explained by quantum mechanics — a new approach announced October 2018 to one of the most enduring unsolved mysteries in science: how does life emerge from inert matter.
