Category: Life
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Die. It is for my own good.
Some worms are genetically predisposed to die before reaching old age, which appears to benefit the colony by reducing food demand, finds a new study. (1) Dying. For the sake of others. Why don’t you die? Do you wish to live? Unknown darkness. Dictating light. Unknown terror. Dictating pleasure. Petty humans. Living. For the sake…
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What is an individual?
It’s almost impossible to imagine biology without individuals — individual organisms, individual cells, and individual genes, for example. But what about a worker ant that never reproduces, and could never survive apart from the colony? Are the trillions of microorganisms in our microbiomes, which vastly outnumber our human cells, part of our individuality? The authors…
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Ancient pottery. Cooking. Dead men.
A team has developed a new method to date archaeological pottery using fat residues remaining in the pot wall from cooking. The method means prehistoric pottery can be dated with remarkable accuracy, sometimes to the window of a human life span. Pottery found in Shoreditch, London proven to be 5,500 years old and shows the…
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Walk. Just walk.
Researchers have developed an AI-powered, smart insole that instantly turns any shoe into a portable gait-analysis laboratory. (1) Walk. There is no point in analyzing your gait. For that would need you to stop walking. Walk. At the end you will reach the end. And at the end you will stop and die. (Like Olson…
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Touching with light…
In a lab at Columbia University, engineers have developed a strange yet clever way for robots to feel: Let’s call it the finger of light. It’s got a 3D-printed skeleton embedded with 32 photodiodes and 30 adjacent LEDs, over which is laid a squishy skin of reflective silicone, which keeps the device’s own light in…
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