91412461
submission
merbs writes:
Probably not, but one scientist is convinced we did—he believes humans arose from hybridization between pigs and chimps millennia ago:
"Pigs and chimps, 'both of which are very sexual animals,' have probably gotten busy more than once over geological history, genetic researcher Eugene McCarthy figures. On one such occasion, that union may have resulted in a fertile pig-chimp mix. This animal (a chig? a pimp?) may have then reproduced with a regular chimp. Fast forward multiple generations, and perhaps something resembling a human emerged."
81459379
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schwit1 writes:
... So I downloaded that new app, registered it to a pre-paid Visa, and called for a Taxy.
The Taxy rolled up to the curb, matte black. It looked liked it wanted to disappear into the night, even in the day. What hacker doesn't want to roll in a matte black self-driving car?
I got into the passenger seat. There wasn't a driver seat. I pulled on the safety harness, two shoulder belts that clipped together right in front of my navel.
"Hello, Nic," it said. Like, out of the dashboard, but over on the driver side. As if there were a driver. "Hey," I said.
It cut out from the curb and back into traffic, deferring to human-driven cars but damned aggressive amongst the rest of the automated vehicles.
After two turns, the Taxy already looked like it it was heading the wrong direction.
"This isn't the way I usually take," I said. "You redirecting to avoid traffic or something?"
"I regret to inform you that your destination has been marked as a location of potential interest to the police."
I went for the safety harness release. It wouldn't let go ...
81251147
submission
merbs writes:
NASA has released its global temperature data for January 2016, and, once again, the record for the hottest month in recorded history has been shattered. At a time when these kinds of records are broken with some regularity, it takes a particularly scorching month to raise eyebrows in the climate science community. It has to be the hottest hottest month by a pretty hot margin.
Sure enough, last January did the trick: It was 1.13 C warmer than the global average of 1951-1980 (the benchmark NASA uses to measure warming trends)—in other words, a full 2F warmer than pre-1980 levels.
81152139
submission
merbs writes:
In 2013, NASA’s former chief climate scientist James Hansen published a short white paper that described the “Venus Syndrome”—a situation that could unfold far in the future, in which so much carbon dioxide is loaded into the atmosphere that Earth is rendered a replica of the scorching second planet from the sun. Hansen concluded that though it would take millions of years, “Earth can ‘achieve’ Venus-like conditions, in the sense of ~90 bar surface pressure, only after first getting rid of its ocean via escape of hydrogen to space.”
We would, in other words, have to heat the Earth up enough to boil away the oceans—a feat that another scientist, Max Popp, of Princeton and NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, has now confirmed is entirely within the realm of possibility.
80729343
submission
merbs writes:
Imagine a stretch of open ocean, populated by a swath of wind turbines with skyscraper-sized blades, whipping into the gusts like enormous palm trees. The vision is partly terrifying, partly inspiring, and being taken entirely seriously by the federal government and one of our top research laboratories.
The University of Virginia's Sandia National Labs has unveiled the preliminary design for a new offshore wind turbine with 650-foot turbine blades. That, as its announcement points out, is twice the size of an American football field. It's also roughly the size of Trump Tower in New York.
80449681
submission
merbs writes:
Throughout the early 90s, a team of Russian astronomers and engineers were hellbent on literally turning night into day. By shining a giant mirror onto the earth from space, they figured they could bring sunlight to the depths of night, extending the workday, cutting back on lighting costs and allowing laborers to toil longer. If this sounds a bit like the plot of a Bond film, well, it’s that too.
The difference is that for a second there, the scientists, led by Vladimir Sergeevich Syromyatnikov, one of the most important astronautical engineers in history, actually pulled it off.
79093709
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merbs writes:
Anote Tong, the president of low-lying Kiribati, has spent nearly a decade trying to save his people from rising sea levels. There’s a good chance he will not succeed. This is how he leads a nation that will likely not exist in 100 years.
78622653
submission
merbs writes:
In Papua New Guinea, one well-financed, first-mover company is about to pioneer deep sea mining. And that will mean dispatching a fleet of giant remote-operated robotic miners 5,000 feet below the surface to harvest the riches scattered across ocean floor. These mammoth underwater vehicles look like they’ve been hauled off the set of a sci-fi film—think Avatar meets The Abyss. And they'll be dredging up copper, gold, and other valuable minerals, far beneath the gaze of human eyes.
78503309
submission
merbs writes:
A computer glitch that brought the Paris airport of Orly to a standstill Saturday has been traced back to the airport's "prehistoric" operating system. The computer failure had affected a system known as DECOR, which is used by air traffic controllers to communicate weather information to pilots. Pilots rely on the system when weather conditions are poor. DECOR, which is used in takeoff and landings, runs on Windows 3.1, an operating system that came onto the market in 1992.
78421685
submission
merbs writes:
Early next year, DARPA will begin testing a 132-foot unmanned submarine-hunting ocean drone in San Diego. Slapped with the cumbersome title of Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV), it’s designed to do exactly that: track stealth submarines from the surface, quietly and autonomously.
78194871
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merbs writes:
The vast majority of websites you visit are sending your data to third-party sources, usually without your permission or knowledge. That’s not exactly breaking news, but the sheer scale and ubiquity of that leakage might be.
Tim Libert, a privacy researcher, has published new peer-reviewed research that sought to quantify all the “privacy compromising mechanisms” on the one million most popular websites worldwide. His conclusion? “Findings indicate that nearly 9 in 10 websites leak user data to parties of which the user is likely unaware.”
77240671
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merbs writes:
If all goes according to plan, the world’s first private lunar mission will be launched just two years from now. SpaceIL, an Israeli nonprofit, has secured a launch contract with California-based Spaceflight Industries, and will aim to land a rover on the moon in the second half of 2017. It’s the first such launch contract to be verified by the $30 million Google Lunar XPrize competition.
77047027
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merbs writes:
After a lengthy delay in shipments of Soylent 2.0, the company's new bottled upgrade, the company explained the cause on Friday: There were 11 confirmed cases of mold.
76609429
submission
merbs writes:
Sven Teske's latest study, the tenth of its kind, shows that clean energy technologies can meet all of the world’s power demands by 2050. And, given his track record, perhaps we should take the conclusion seriously: The man who most accurately predicted today's clean power boom in 2005 is now saying we could see 100 percent clean energy by midcentury.
76589371
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merbs writes:
Joe Haldeman wrote what is hailed by many as the best military science fiction novel ever written, 1974's 'The Forever War'. In this interview, Haldeman discusses what's changed since he wrote his book, what hasn't, and what the future of war will really look like.
