Energy drinks will help you live forever!
Alright, maybe not exactly.
But worms, mice, and monkeys have been slamming a common energy drink ingredient to slow aging.
The amino acid taurine that’s in those 17 cans on your desk was supplemented in the
diets of a range of animals…
when given to middle-aged nematodes, their life span increased by 10 to 23%, and wild
mice lived 10-12% longer.
6 months of taurine supplementation in rhesus macaques improved their bone health, metabolic
processes, and immune systems.
Taurine has been added to baby formula since the 1980’s, and it does fuel gut microbes
-- but researchers in the journal Science caution that we need human clinical trials
on taurine to know whether it’s a life-saver or just not worth the risk.
But if taurine is shown to extend the human lifespan, gamers are gonna live forever.
Vsauce!
One story down, 7 to go.
This is Mind Blow!
Let's open a fake leaf fuel factory.
An artificial leaf can produce ethanol from carbon dioxide, sunlight, and water.
Photosynthesis converts light energy to chemical energy that can fuel plants -- so how can
we get the fuel we need with a similar process?
Researchers at Cambridge University used a photoelectrochemical operation with a cell
containing semiconducting photoelectrodes that absorb sunlight and generate electricity,
which drives a chemical reaction that produces equal amounts of propanol and ethanol.
The artificial leaf is just 5 millimeters on each side and produces fuel in microliters…
and once that can get scaled up it’s WAY better than waiting for fossils to happen
but we’ve got a ways to go on that front.
Send in the robot cavalry!
We make a big deal about what robots can do -- but to do it, they need to know where they
are.
Humans can look around, scan an environment, and communicate the situation to others…
and now the SLAM system helps robots do it, too.
SLAM stands for “simultaneous localization and mapping,” and MIT roboticists developed
the Kimera-Multi system so teams of robots could distribute mapping responsibilities
amongst themselves and then communicate the results to each other to build highly-accurate
maps.
Eventually an array of robot cartographers could scale up to map everything -- except
the 71% of earth’s surface covered by the terrifying unexplored depths of the oceans.
For now.
It turns out Greeks are a lot older than we thought!
Fossils 200 kilometers south of Athens have revealed that our human ancestors in Greece
are a full 250,000 years older than previously believed.
A joint excavation by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports and the American School
of Classical Studies identified several sites in the Megalopolis Basin that mapped human
activity -- including the site Kyparissia 4, which contained stone tools and bones from
hippos, rhinos, and elephants from the Lower Paleolithic era.
The Basin’s unique paleoenvironment made it a safe harbor in the Ice Age, and Kyparissia
4 reveals hominin activity that’s 700,000 years old -- when it was probably too cold
to survive in more northern climates.
The excavation shows promise of unlocking more about our ancestors’ in the middle
of the Pleistocene -- but we’re still about 150 million years removed from sliding off
the tail of a Brontosaurus.
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We just discovered the oldest organic molecules in the known universe.
Jimmy Dubs aka The James Webb Space Telescope discovered the organic molecules that are
more than 12 billion light years away.
It continues to deliver amazing images that tell us more about the universe, and this
time it’s a collection of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
We see them here on Earth in wildfires -- Canada recently sent a ton of PAH’s to New York
City -- but in space, they might be a building block to forming stars.
An international team of scientists were able to see the molecules because of gravitational
lensing, the alignment of two galaxies from Earth’s perspective, which they call “nature's
magnifying glass."
They focused on SPT0418-47 at a distance of 12.3 billion light years, equivalent to when
Earth was around 10% of its current age.
Organic molecules are necessary for the earliest forms of life -- but I am still waiting to
see some aliens, guys.
Please.
Thank you.
And now for some deep sleep news.
Think of inducing “torpor” like freezing Han Solo in carbonite -- a sort of hibernation
in which metabolic functions slow way down and a body can survive a lower temperature.
Temporarily shutting down a living body safely has been an element of science fiction for
a reason -- but now a team of biomedical engineers at Washington University have used ultrasound
on mouse brains to activate a torpor-like state.
By subjecting the hypothalamus preoptic area to ultrasound waves, mice entered a state
of hypothermia and hypometabolism lasting more than 24 hours.
Over 60 years ago this idea was floated so astronauts could have an easier time with
space travel -- but it could also slow down bodies during the treatment of acute events
like heart attacks.
So yeah, a few decades from now your augmented reality headset might detect your abnormal
heart rhythm and zap you into a cold sleep as you wait for the emergency drones to arrive.
One can only hope.
We’re finally one step closer to astronaut Doctor Octopus.
A space suit that allows free, safe movement outside a vehicle is great -- but one that
gives you more than 2 hands and 2 arms is even better.
3 researchers at MIT’s d’Arbeloff Laboratory for Information Systems have designed a space
suit with supernumerary limbs -- really, an additional set of arms.
They can help brace astronauts against forces within microgravity and attenuate the astronaut’s
mass -- these combine to stabilize the astronaut and make outside missions safer.
Also it just looks really cool.
Glowing ancient sword alert!
Archaeologists in Bavaria have uncovered a sword from the 14th century BC that’s so
well-preserved that its blade still shines.
The bronze of its octagonal hilt has turned green from its copper oxidizing, but the sword
is in amazing condition -- it was buried with a man, woman, and child, and its pristine
state suggests it may have been ceremonial.
But I like to think it was used to slay Skeletor.
And now introducing the compact disc in 1982.
And that’s it.
The biggest revolution in the recording industry since the invention of the long-playing gramophone
record.
But this is no ordinary disc.
Just 12 centimeters in diameter, the music is recorded onto it digitally and there’s
no needle being dragged through a groove, that information is being read by a laser
light.