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Science

SCIENCE: Did Most Men Die Off 7,000 Years Ago?

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warrior - pixabay

Modern men’s genes suggest that something peculiar happened 5,000 to 7,000 years ago: Most of the male population across Asia, Europe and Africa seems to have died off, leaving behind just one man for every 17 women. This so-called population “bottleneck” was first proposed in 2015, and since then, researchers have been trying to figure out what could’ve caused it. One hypothesis held that the drop-off in the male population occurred due to ecological or climatic factors that mainly affected male offspring, while another idea suggested that the die-off happened because some males had more power in society, and thus … Read more

SCIENCE: Humans Will Kill All the Aliens

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aliens - pixabay

If you’ve ever looked up into the unfathomable night sky and wondered, “Are we alone?” then you are not alone. About 70 years ago, physicist Enrico Fermi looked up into the sky and asked a similar question: “Where is everybody?” There are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, Fermi reckoned, and many of them are billions of years older than our sun. Even if a small fraction of these stars have planets around them that proved habitable for life (scientists now think as many as 60 billion exoplanets could fit the bill), that would leave … Read more

SCIENCE: Meet the AI Artists

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Botanical Dinosaurs - Chris Rodley - Live Science

One of the behaviors considered to be uniquely human is our creativity. While many animal species create visually stunning displays or constructions — think of a spider’s delicate web or the colorful, intricate structures built by bowerbirds — they are typically created with a practical purpose in mind, such as snagging prey or seducing a mate. Humans, however, make art for its own sake, as a form of personal expression. And as computer engineers attempt to imbue artificial intelligence (AI) with humanlike capabilities and behaviors, a question arises: Can AI create art? The AMC series “Humans,” which returns June 5 … Read more

SCIENCE: There’s a Brain in Your Butt

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colon - pixabay

You’re reading these words because you have a brain in your head. But did you know you also have a brain in your butt? OK, not a literal brain — more of an autonomous matrix of millions of neurons that can, somehow, control intestinal muscle movements without any help from your central nervous system. And these neurons don’t actually live in your butt, but they do live in your colon, or large intestine — that tube-like organ that connects the small intestine to the rectum and shepherds what remains of the food you ate through the final leg of the … Read more

HISTORY: When Gay Sex “Rocked” the World

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gay lovers - rock

An 11,000-year-old pebble believed to be one of the earliest depictions of sex is to go on tour in an LGBTQ themed exhibition. The Ain Sakhri Lovers, a figurine carved from a pebble, will be one of the artefacts shown in a new touring exhibition from the British Museum to celebrate LGBTQ history. As the people depicted in the Ain Sakhri Lovers are ambiguously gendered, the British Museum does not state they are heterosexual and have therefore included the artefact as a potential early representation of gay sex. By Jess Glass – Full Story at Pink news

SPACE: The Science of Reproducing on Mars

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Mars - pixabay

In 1972, citizen scientist Sir Elton John hypothesized that Mars “ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.” While John’s remarks were never published in a peer-reviewed journal (though they did peak at No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart), he’s not wrong about the Red Planet’s inhospitality. With its freezing climate, thin atmosphere and weak gravity, Mars will be a hard place to raise the children necessary to sustain a permanent colony there. And according to a new paper published in the June issue of the journal Futures, conceiving kids on Mars will be even harder. Thinking about … Read more

SCIENCE: Don’t Be Afraid of the Frankenfowl

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Frankenfowl

Scientists recently combined human stem cells with chicken embryos, but that doesn’t mean the researchers are breeding flocks of “frankenfowl.” Rather, the scientists are looking closely at how those embryonic cells organize themselves, to better understand how embryos develop and how cells build specialized body structures. Experiments that graft cells onto a growing embryo date to nearly 100 years ago, and in 1924, such experiments in amphibians led scientists to discover “the organizer,” a region of embryonic cells that manipulates the development of other cells. But an organizer in primate embryonic cells (humans included) has been elusive — until now. … Read more

SCIENCE: Using a Rare Element to Redefine Time

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Time - Pixabay

A lot can happen in a second; you could meet a stranger, snap your fingers, fall in love, fall asleep, sneeze. But what is a second, really — and is it as precise as we think it is? Right now, the most-precise clocks used to tell global time have an error of about 1 second every 300 million years — so a clock that started ticking in the time of the dinosaurs wouldn’t be off by even a second today. But scientists think we can do better. So, they are looking to lutetium, a neglected rare-earth element that has been … Read more

TECH: Tiny Robot Arms Build World’s Tiniest House

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world's tiniest house - live science

Pushing the tiny-house movement to bizarre new limits, French scientists have constructed the “world’s smallest house” on the tip of an optical fiber. With each wall spanning about 0.0006 inches in length (15 micrometers, or 15 millionths of a meter), the humble chalet is too small to accommodate a dust mite, an amoeba or a sperm cell. It’s about 10,000 times too small to host a tardigrade; it’s even too small to hold a piece of tardigrade poop. So, why build a house so small that even a tardigrade can’t make use of it? Mainly just to prove it can … Read more

SCIENCE: Sorry, There Are No Space Octopi On Earth. Probably.

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space octopus - pixabay

Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. I want to believe the conclusions of a new paper that says octopuses are actually space aliens whose frozen eggs first came to Earth aboard an icy meteor. I want to believe that humans, too, are aliens — the final descendants of an extraterrestrial virus that crashed to Earth 540 million years ago and sent evolution spiraling into wild new directions. I want to believe that the universe is one giant biosphere, tossing the same building blocks of life from planet to planet in a never-ending game of cosmic hot potato. I want … Read more