News 16 March, 2022
When scientists look at the age of the earth, which has been predicted at 4.5 billion years, they have found an area of time in which the earth had become capable of supporting complex life. Of course, this assumes they are correct on the date. They believe after the earth hit the age of 1.75 billion years old, it became capable of complex life forms. This means for the next 2.75 billion years life could have developed and disappeared way before we came along and it might have even been intelligent. This led to the development of Eukaryota. Eukaryota are organisms with cells that have a nucleus enclosed within a nuclear envelope and the rest is history. The point being however that from this time on, other humans or intelligent beings might have lived here. We assume we know how the earth developed, but could we be in error? Could the earth have changed radically or been better suited to life in the beginning than we believe? There is always that possibility, no matter how slim.
We talk about self-driving cars and some people think they are just too dangerous. We see their accidents posted on the internet with almost joy, but the truth is if we ever posted the number of accidents human drivers have every year, we would realize how relatively safe self-driving cars are. It is said about 90 people die in car accidents in America every day and there are about 6 million car accidents every year varying in damage and injury. Most of the self-driving car accidents was the fault of the driver and not the car with just a miniscule amount being the automobile. One company which is using driverless cars and has a fleet of 600, had 18 accidents in almost two years. In four years, it is said Tesla self-driving cars have had 11 accidents. One of the problems with self-driving cars is the public’s feeling they are not safe. It is hard to break the habit of being in charge of the car and how it drives. Self-driving cars are still improving. As accidents are examined tweaks are being made to their software and soon the only accidents they will have will be the ones caused by cars driven by humans.
Want to try something really cool on your computer then go to Radio Garden. The app lets you listen to almost every radio station in the world. A globe appears and you just rotate it to any country and station you want and instantly you hear that station. This is particularly handy today especially for the Ukraine and in Russia if it hasn’t been cut off. Having a working news source from around the world means a lot for many people. The major problem with the site it is not as secure as it should be.
Our oceans have a problem. Since about 1950 the oceans have lost about 2% of their oxygen content. It has been predicted by 2100 the loss will be between 3% to 4%. Why is this happening? Experts think there are two causes. The first one they cite is the warming of the oceans which is preventing the upper part of the ocean with mixing with the deeper part and getting oxygen from there. It is also said the warmer the ocean gets the more oxygen the life in the ocean needs. The second reason is said to be too much algae caused by Fertilizer run-off, sewage and other things getting into the oceans. Can we turn this around? Absolutely, but we should start now.
Where would you not expect to find life? One place is inside crystals in Mexico. A cave has been found in Mexico which contained crystals and to the extreme surprise of geologists life is thriving inside them and it could be as old as 50,000 years old. These caves are so hot the people going into them can only stay for a few minutes and have to cover themselves with ice. There are also toxic gases in the caves. The life is forty different types of microbes and some viruses and are almost completely different from known species. NASA has called them super life. The life in the cave evolved on its own because the cave was completely blocked until a mining company opened it up recently.
Some satellites have been spotting some interesting objects. Take our Landsat satellite for example. It has been finding sunken ships and there are plenty of them estimated to exist. It has been said an estimate of sunken ships puts them at about three million worldwide. Guess were most of them are? Believe it or not most are pretty close to shore making recovery a little easier.
There is a new fabric in town and it imitates our muscles. If a low voltage is run through it, the material contracts. It has been suggested this fabric could act like a lightweight exoskeleton and be very useful for impaired people to get around. It has also been suggested those with physically taxing jobs could wear this material to make their jobs easier. The fabric can come in either knitted or woven. The woven type is far stronger giving the wearer a big increase in strength.
Scientists wanted to know if bees could be trained to do certain tasks and they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The scientists have trained bees to play football by scoring goals with a small ball. Why was football picked? Here is what the scientists said, “We wanted to explore the cognitive limits of bumblebees by testing whether they could use a non-natural object in a task likely never encountered before by any individual in the evolutionary history of bees.” When the bee scores a goal, it gets a sugar treat. I have said this before and will say it again, animals, fish and even insects are smarter than we think.
Hackers and even leakers have said the U.S. Navy has a space fleet. Have we a space fleet and have we been hiding the facts? Many believe this is a possibility and the creation of the new branch of the military, Space Force may be the proof we needed. Could it be we needed this branch because it was getting too much for the navy to manage all the resources and we wanted to separate the space force on its own for better control? It seems that way. I think if we knew everything we really had, we would be astounded.