|  Wondrous fungus: fossils are oldest of any land-dwelling organism  | A study published on Wednesday described microfossils of a subterranean fungus called Tortotubus that was an early landlubber at a time when life was largely confined to the seas, including samples from Libya and Chad that were 440 to 445 million years old. The fossils represented the root-like filaments that fungi use to extract nutrients from soil. Tortotubus helped set the stage for complex land plants and later animals by triggering the process of rot and soil formation.
| Read More » Ancient Mini Kangaroos Had No Hop, They Scurried  | In a recent study, researchers described a new kangaroo genus, Cookeroo, and two new species: Cookeroo bulwidarri, dated to about 23 million years ago,and Cookeroo hortusensis, which lived between 18 million and 20 million years ago. Both species were found at the Riversleigh World Heritage area in northwestern Queensland, Australia, a location recognized as one of the richest fossil deposits in the world, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Center. According to Kaylene Butler, the study's lead author, the new genus occupies a position near the base of the kangaroo family tree that includes all modern kangaroos and wallabies, their close relatives.
| Read More » Electrifying Drone Race Tests Pilots' Sky-High Skills  | The Drone Racing League's semifinals for its first race of the season took place yesterday (Feb. 29) in Miami, where drone pilots from around the world gathered to test their chops on an aerial course that includes navigating tight turns, maneuvering through glowing gates and dodging objects throughout the stadium. Racing at speeds that exceed 80 miles per hour (129 km/h) at times, the skilled pilots don first-person view (FPV) goggles (that show a video feed of what the drones are seeing) to race custom-built drones through a course that weaves in and out of Sun Life Stadium, home of the NFL's Miami Dolphins. The racecourse required pilots to navigate around the stadium, zooming around bleachers, through concession areas, up a spiraling staircase, and then back around the bleachers again, according to a Drone Racing League (DRL) video about the event.
| Read More » How Much Ice Can Antarctica Afford to Lose? Over the past 20 years, ice shelves in Antarctica that normally support the rest of the continent's glaciers have been shrinking, and some have disappeared entirely. A recent study led by researchers at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, in Germany, has mapped out which Antarctic ice shelves are buttressing the most ice and which are more "passive" and thus can stand to lose a large area without any immediate effect on the rest of the ice shelf. Ice shelves are slabs of ice several hundred meters thick that extend from the edges of the mainland and float on the surface of the sea. Read More » Robotic arm allows 'cyborg drumming' A wearable robotic limb that allows drummers to play their kit with three arms has been invented by U.S.-based researchers. The two-foot long 'smart arm' can be attached to a musician's shoulder and was invented by researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, overseen by Professor Gil Weinberg. An inventor of various experimental musical instruments, Weinberg said the aim of the technology was to maximize a drummer's potential, while pushing the limits of human-technology interaction. "We believe that if you augment humans with technology humans should be able to do much more, and we thought that music is a great medium to try that," said Weinberg. It's also very spatial, you need to go to the right places, so what better medium than to try the concept of a third arm that would augment you and allow you to do things that you couldn't before in music." The arm has been programmed to respond both to human gestures and the music it hears, using motion capture technology. Read More » Google Self-Driving Car at Fault for Bus Crash  | One of Google's self-driving cars crashed into a bus last month, marking the first time a vehicle in the company's robotic fleet caused a collision, according to an accident report filed to the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). The report says the crash took place on Feb. 14 in Mountain View, California, between Google's self-driving Lexus RX450h and a public transit bus. The collision occurred after Google's autonomous vehicle (AV) came to a stop and tried to maneuver around sandbags that had been positioned around a storm drain, according to the accident report.
| Read More » Many Melanoma Patients May Have Few Moles  | Checking out the moles on your skin is a common way to look for the deadly skin cancer melanoma, but a new study shows that many people with melanoma may have few moles. In the study, researchers looked at about 560 people with melanoma and found that 66 percent of them had 20 or fewer moles. The new results show that all people, including those who have few moles, "should be paying attention to their moles, should be looking at their skin really carefully and should be asking their doctors for regular skin checks," said study author Alan C. Geller, a senior lecturer at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
| Read More » Sex Tied to Better Brain Power in Older Age People over age 50 who are more sexually active also have better memory and cognitive skills than people who get busy less often, a new study from England suggests. Sex appeared to give men's brains a bigger boost than women's: Men who were more sexually active showed higher scores on tests of memory skills and executive function — the mental processes involved in planning, solving problems and paying attention — whereas women who were more sexually active saw only a higher score in their memory skills, according to the findings, published online Jan. 28 in the journal Age and Ageing. The study shows that there is a significant association between sexual activity and cognitive function in adults over 50, said study author Hayley Wright, a researcher in cognitive aging at the Centre for Research in Psychology, Behavior and Achievement at Coventry University in England. Read More » | |
