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Too usually seaweed is portrayed as a slimy, smelly nuisance that disrupts seaside journeys and ocean swims. In reality, seaweed, formally a sort of marine algae, is an untapped resource that would remodel the planet and our well being.
Seaweed grows quick and is nutrient-rich, could be made into a substitute for plastic and a few textiles, and is a possible retailer of carbon that may take in pollution, in response to “The Seaweed Revolution,” a brand new guide by Vincent Doumeizel, a senior adviser on the United Nations World Compact on Oceans.
Doumeizel is a visitor editor for CNN’s Call to Earth sequence, which explores the environmental challenges our world is going through.
In addition to providing hope for the longer term, seaweed indelibly formed our previous, as an enchanting discovering launched this week has revealed.
The bacterial gunk and meals particles that builds up on tooth over time could be a useful supply of data for archaeologists.
This fossilized dental plaque — which may survive for millennia, significantly when it’s from eras earlier than trendy dentistry — holds a trove of tantalizing details about weight-reduction plan and illness.
A brand new research of organic markers contained in fossilized plaque discovered that, earlier than they largely disappeared from Western diets, several types of seaweed had been as soon as a staple meals for Europeans for hundreds of years — even in some prehistoric landlocked communities.
Area scientists have made an sudden discovery within the ambiance of a blazing-hot planet referred to as WASP-17b, positioned 1,300 light-years from Earth.
Utilizing the James Webb Area Telescope, a global group of scientists detected tiny quartz crystals containing pure silica, a mineral that’s widespread on Earth. The silicates which were beforehand detected in exoplanet atmospheres are magnesium-based, not quartz, so this discovering was sudden.
The revelation may assist scientists get a broader sense of WASP-17b’s composition and what the surroundings could also be like on this charming planet exterior of our photo voltaic system.
A College of Nebraska laptop science pupil has received an uncommon scientific contest.
With the assistance of synthetic intelligence and laptop tomography, Luke Farritor was the primary to decode a word written in ancient Greek on a scroll burnt to a crisp in the course of the eruption of Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years in the past.
The doc was considered one of some 1,100 carbonized scrolls that had been recovered from volcanic mud within the 1700s. The gathering, referred to as the Herculaneum scrolls, is maybe the biggest identified library from classical antiquity, however the paperwork’ contents have remained a thriller.
With the ability to learn only one phrase was a “quantum leap ahead,” stated papyrologist Michael McOsker of the College Faculty London, who wasn’t concerned with the feat. Farritor was awarded $40,000, and one other researcher who made the identical discovery independently earned $10,000.
Researchers are hopeful that it received’t be lengthy till complete scrolls could be deciphered utilizing the approach.
The discovering that Neanderthals formed our DNA in prehistoric sexual encounters with trendy human ancestors was by itself a startling discovery, revealed by Nobel Prize winner Svante Pääbo greater than a decade in the past.
Nevertheless, a lot remains to be unknown about this intriguing genetic legacy, together with why Neanderthal DNA is barely extra considerable right this moment within the genomes of East Asian populations than European ones.
This discrepancy is perplexing as a result of Neanderthal skeletal stays are discovered extensively throughout Europe and the Center East however not farther east of the Altai Mountains in Central Asia.
Now, a crucial mass of invaluable knowledge has allowed scientists to come up with an explanation for this puzzling inconsistency, and it comes right down to a shift in how early hominins obtained their meals.
Caffeine crystals in a kaleidoscope of coloration. A tarantula’s venomous fangs. Pink and inexperienced wing scales of a Chinese language moon moth.
These are a few of the hanging photographs recommended in a global images contest that seize the gorgeous great thing about life below a microscope.
Now in its forty ninth 12 months, the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition celebrates creative prowess in addition to technical perfection.
The profitable shot of a rodent’s optic nerve head at 20 occasions magnification was taken by Hassanain Qambari, assisted by Jayden Dickson, on the Lions Eye Institute in Australia. Qambari research a watch illness referred to as diabetic retinopathy, which is a high reason behind imaginative and prescient loss worldwide.
Put together to be awed by these fascinating tales.
— Billions of snow crabs have gone lacking from the ocean round Alaska in recent times. Scientists now know what happened.
— The “Mona Lisa” is maybe the world’s most well-known murals, however we’re nonetheless studying concerning the techniques Leonardo da Vinci employed to create it.
— Astronomers detected a mysteriously distant and powerful blast of radio waves that has taken 8 billion years to achieve Earth.
And be looking out this weekend for the Orionid meteor shower, which is predicted to peak on Sunday.
Like what you’ve learn? Oh, however there’s extra. Sign up here to obtain in your inbox the subsequent version of Surprise Principle, dropped at you by CNN Area and Science writers Ashley Strickland and Katie Hunt. They discover surprise in planets past our photo voltaic system and discoveries from the traditional world.