Weekly Science Picks
FollowIt’s Sunday! Maybe some of you are not that happy for that, because it’s the end of the weekend, but for us it’s our time to provide you with a new editor’s selection for this week. The task was very interesting and exciting. We got an opportunity to present at once amazing stories from biology, space industry, neuroscience and much more. So, let’s review this week’s choice.
The solar explorer built with dead animal bones
When I meet him in his office at Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage, a non-descript industrial town some an hour’s drive north of London, Chris Draper is sitting at his desk idly flicking a long narrow strip of what looks like cooking foil. Smooth burnished metal on one side, ridged matt black on the other, the thin material makes a crinkly noise as he twists it back and forth.
Prehistoric ‘groundhog’ identified by scientists
US lead scientist Dr David Krause, from Stony Brook University in New York, said: “We know next to nothing about early mammalian evolution on the southern continents. This discovery, from a time and an area of the world that are very poorly sampled, underscores how very little we know. No paleontologist could have come close to predicting the odd mix of anatomical features that this cranium exhibits.”
The science of living with fire
The bushfire season isn’t wasting any time this year. There are already large fires in South Australia and NSW, and the obligatory ‘the state is a tinderbox’ warnings came out months ago. There were bushfires in July in NSW, and the number of local council areas in southern Australia declaring the fire season open in August – it starts in July up north – has more than doubled.
Direct brain interface between humans
Researchers have successfully replicated a direct brain-to-brain connection between pairs of people as part of a scientific study following the team’s initial demonstration a year ago. In the newly published study, which involved six people, researchers were able to transmit the signals from one person’s brain over the Internet and use these signals to control the hand motions of another person within a split second of sending that signal.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this journey as we did. Please remain curious and scientifically passionate. The new stories are coming quite soon!