A new paper claims to have discovered a “lost world” of microscopic organisms that lived at least 1.6 billion years ago at a time when the planet’s waterways were full of bacteria. What these organisms looked like, scientists can only speculate, but they have proposed that the lost creatures were tiny predators that hunted said bacteria. The discovery fills in a large gap in the history of complex, eukaryotic life on Earth.Finding ProtosteroidsResearchers from the Australian National Unive ...read more
Humans began burying objects with their deceased loved ones long before anybody started recording history.Archaeological excavations of the Qafzeh and Skhul Caves in Israel have discovered graves dating back as far as 100,000 years that contain grave goods such as flint artifacts, animal bones, seashells and lumps of red ochre. Fast forward 75,000 thousand years and burials included decorative clothing, jewelry, weapons, animal carvings and other ornamental objects.Although there are a number of ...read more
Of all the weird, tiny organisms out there, tardigrades might just be the cutest.“Under a microscope, what you would see is this little critter that kind of looks like either an eight-legged Gummi bear, or an eight-legged manatee,” says Thomas Boothby, a molecular biologist at the University of Wyoming.To top it off, these lovable micro-animals are known colloquially as water bears or moss piglets.What Is a Tardigrade?(Credit: Shutterstock/Oleh Liubimtsev)Biologically speaking, tardigrades a ...read more
The age of dinosaurs was a trying time for survival. Vicious carnivores lived amongst enormous herbivores. The climate was often unforgiving. During the Triassic period, for example, the planet was hot, dry and covered in desert. And there were no polar ice caps to escape the burn. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions were a plenty, eventually breaking up the global continental block of Pangea. All the while, theropods tried their best to hold on to their status at the top of the food chain. Th ...read more
In a not-so-distant future, when a burbling stream cascading down the Rocky Mountains appears in your dreams, you might be skeptical of who planted it there. While the notion of a corporation seeding dreams in the sleeping mind sounds like a science fiction plot, some consumers began taking the idea seriously in 2021.That’s when Molson Coors ran an online video touting its “targeted dream incubation” campaign. The premise of the project was to plant images of Coors beer into the dreams of ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
