Genetic studies hint that we may in fact have domesticated dogs not once, but twice. Overall, dogs are more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia, but African and near east dogs...have up to half of their ancestry from a different wolf population.
It's possible this is from inbreeding, but it's also possible, even probable that dogs, with their natural social structure so close to ours, were in fact domesticated twice.
.from Windows 98. Or at least from software based off of it.
Don't look so shocked. The space shuttle used floppy disks.
Science fiction writers would do well to remember that spacecraft last a while and their software is likely to be, not state of the art, but slightly outdated. Especially robots.
It's now possible...due to a form of artificial photosynthesis. Plants are grown on a substrate of acetate that supports their physiology. It's generated through an electrocatalytic process.
They've so far managed to grow algae (at faster rates than natural photosynthesis), cowpeas, tomatoes, tobacco, rice, canola, and green peas.
This just made moon colonies much more feasible as you won't need to use grow lamps to keep plants alive through the 14 day night. It could also be used on Mars, on space colonies. On Ganymede, Expanse readers ;).
It also may make the science fiction trope of people on space colonies eating algae more likely...there's all kinds of ways to make it palatable. Algae could also be grown to scrub carbon dioxide as part of the life support system.
It could also be used to feed farmed fish to provide protein for our colonists. Of course, we would have to either modify the algae not to be toxic (many green algae have chemical defenses) or carefully choose strains.
And on Earth, this could be used to grow crops indoors or to increase yields.
(Of course, what's the over under on marijuana growing fine this way too? Ahem)
Our brains literally change when we engage in activities together. They synchronize.
And the more they synchronize, the better the group gets along and the better people are. For example, in a classroom, students who's brains sync up are more engaged and do better.
Which may be how brainstorming sessions allow us to come up with ideas we wouldn't on our own. We're literally wired, as social animals, to work together.
Tommorw comes a rare alignment. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will be lining up. In that order, so closest to furthest.
You'll need to get up early if you want to see it, though. 45 minutes before sunrise, on the eastern horizon. And Mercury's small, so get your telescope.
(I have too much light pollution here even if it finally stops being cloudy).
On July 12, the first dataset will be released from the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA is putting together a test set that will highlight the telescope's capabilities; kind of a media kit for the telescope. The goal is to show researchers who might want to buy time on the telescope what it can do.
The first real science schedule hasn't been released (there may still be wrangling going on). But we absolutely have a space telescope and I can't wait to see what questions it asks.
There's actually a theory that the famous "Yeti" is a species of white bear.
And there's a group of polar bears that don't need sea ice. These two things might not be connected, but the Greenland population, who live at the mouth of a glacier and hunt from ice calved from it...are also quite happy to cross mountains to look for food. They're a small population, but...
Could something similar to polar bears have retreated to the Himalayas when the Ice Age ended? That's the theory. More likely, if they exist, they weren't polar bears but something more like the hybrids that exist when polars and grizzlies overlap range.
But the fact that polar bears can and do climb mountains makes one wonder...
