Science & TechnologyS


Better Earth

Scientists discover first sea spiders powered by methane-fed microbes deep in the Pacific Ocean

Neetika Walter
Interesting Engineering
Tue, 17 Jun 2025 22:29 UTC
Sericosura sea spiders methane bacteria food
© Shana GoffrediSericosura sea spiders are not the prettiest of creatures.
They don't bite prey — they graze bacteria. In the deep sea, sea spiders survive by harvesting methane-eating microbes.

Sericosura spiders are the first of their kind caught feeding on methane-fueled microbes.

Methane is a menace to Earth's climate, but to tiny spiders in the pitch-black depths of the ocean, it's fuel for life.

In a bizarre twist of nature, scientists have discovered three previously unknown species of sea spiders thriving around methane seeps off the U.S. West Coast.

Far from the sunlit world, these translucent, alien-like creatures survive not by hunting prey but by farming bacteria on their own exoskeletons. The microbes feast on methane leaking from the seafloor and, in return, produce sugars and fats, turning the spiders into living ecosystems that graze on their own microbial coats.

"Just like you would eat eggs for breakfast, the sea spider grazes the surface of its body, and it munches all those bacteria for nutrition," said Shana Goffredi, a professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the lead author of the study.

"This unique nutrition strategy has never been observed in sea spiders before."
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Attention

Something is going terribly wrong in the Baltic Sea

Christina Sizova
RT
Wed, 18 Jun 2025 14:33 UTC
Baltic Sea debris
© RTBaltic Sea debris
Chemical weapons are corroding on the seafloor - and Berlin's plan to remove them without Russia's help may spark an irreversible environmental crisis.

Beneath the waves of the Baltic Sea lies a silent but growing threat - the decaying remains of chemical munitions dumped after World War II. For years, these weapons have sat largely untouched, posing a known danger to marine life and coastal communities.The issue gained serious attention in the 21st century as scientists began to sound the alarm about growing environmental risks. Decades-old shells are corroding, raising the specter of toxic leaks that could trigger a full-blown environmental disaster.

Now, Germany is moving to recover and destroy these submerged stockpiles. But framed as an environmental cleanup, Berlin's project may in fact worsen the environmental balance in the Baltic.

Russia has repeatedly emphasized the importance of its involvement in this process, citing its status as a directly affected nation with relevant expertise. Yet with international relations strained, meaningful cooperation remains elusive. So what happens if this mission is carried out without Russian input? RT takes a closer look.
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Bug

The simple algorithm ants use to build and deconstruct their bridges

Kevin Hartnett
Quanta Magazine
Mon, 26 Feb 2018 21:34 UTC
army ants build bridges
© Vaishakh Manohar/Shutterstock
Even with no one in charge, army ants work collectively to build bridges out of their bodies. New research reveals the simple rules that lead to such complex group behavior.

Introduction

Army ants form colonies of millions yet have no permanent home. They march through the jungle each night in search of new foraging ground. Along the way they perform logistical feats that would make a four-star general proud, including building bridges with their own bodies.

Much like the swarms of cheap, dumb robots that I explored in my recent article, army ants manage this coordination with no leader and with minimal cognitive resources. An individual army ant is practically blind and has a minuscule brain that couldn't begin to fathom their elaborate collective movement. "There is no leader, no architect ant saying 'we need to build here,'" said Simon Garnier, director of the Swarm Lab at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and co-author of a new study that predicts when an army ant colony will decide to build a bridge.
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Info

Surprising discovery shows a strong link between Earth's magnetic field and atmospheric oxygen levels

Sanjukta Mondal
Phys Org
Wed, 18 Jun 2025 16:39 UTC
O2 Variations
© Sci. Adv. (2025). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adu8826Time variations of the oxygen (O2) content and the VGADM in the past 540 million years.
Every breath we take in contains 21% oxygen, the gas that makes life on Earth possible. Oxygen, in its combined oxide state, has always been abundant in Earth's crust, but elemental diatomic oxygen became part of our atmosphere around 2.4 to 2.5 billion years ago as a gift from cyanobacteria, which triggered the Great Oxidation Event and breathed life into Earth.

A joint venture between NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Leeds discovered that the Earth's magnetic field strength and atmospheric oxygen levels over the past 540 years have seemed to spike and dip at the same time, showing a strong, statistically significant correlation between the two.

This correlation could arise from unexpected connections between geophysical processes in Earth's deep interior, redox reactions on Earth's surface, and biogeochemical cycling.

According to findings published in Science Advances, both magnetic field strength and atmospheric oxygen levels reached their peak intensities between 330 and 220 million years ago.

Scientists have long speculated that Earth's magnetic field may play a role in making the planet habitable, a hypothesis reinforced by paleomagnetic records that show that the existence of a geomagnetic field overlaps with the timeline of life's emergence. However, there has been little direct evidence of a long-term connection, as most Earth system models don't even include the geomagnetic field when studying how oxygen levels in the atmosphere have changed over time.
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Attention

Is the human species doomed?

Randall Carlson
Randall Carlson Newsletter June 2025
Wed, 18 Jun 2025 07:27 UTC
Extinction
© Randall Carlson Newsletter June 2025
In the spirit of asking questions, I will ask this: Are human beings exceptional among the millions of species that have inhabited this planet and have gone extinct? Depending upon which estimates of the total number of extinct species that have ever existed, both terrestrial and marine, something like 99.99% of all species that have ever lived have suffered complete extinction. This might suggest that we have no reason for optimism with respect to the odds of long-term human survival.

A new book has been published this year by British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Henry Gee, who is also senior editor of the scientific journal Nature. Inspired by Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gee has authored a work entitled The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species is on the Edge of Extinction. In a review of the book author, cofounder and CEO of Genyro Inc. Adrian Woolfson has written that Gee "presents a sobering vision of humankind's future, as intriguing as it is unsettling. Despite our technological prowess and capacity for imagination, he argues, Homo sapiens is 'marked for extinction.'"

Gee attributes these diminishing chances of long-term survival of modern humans to "the rot" which "set in when we hunted down and extinguished Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the diminutive 'hobbit men' Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis. Suddenly, we had no competition, something as necessary for success as the 'irritating grit in an oyster' that creates a pearl."

I would be inclined to take issue with the idea that modern humans hunted down and exterminated our hominid competitors, being more inclined to believe that they succumbed to the same succession of natural catastrophes that extinguished so many of the other terrestrial mammalian species with which we recently cohabited this planet. Be that as it may, whatever might be its cause or causes, it is an apparent fact that Homo sapien sapiens is the sole survivor of the numerous hominid species that have recently occupied the Earth.
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Cassiopaea

Bright nova lights up Lupus Constellation

Bob King
Sky & Telescope Org
Mon, 16 Jun 2025 16:24 UTC
A newly-discovered nova in Lupus is on the rise and approaching naked-eye visibility. Here's how to see it.
Nova in Lupus
© Piqui DiazThe new nova in Lupus, formally named V462 Lupi, shines here at around magnitude 8.5 on June 15.2 UT. Photo taken through 8×42 binoculars with a smartphone. The nova's coordinates (J2000) are RA 15h 08m 03.3s, Dec. –40° 08″ 29.6′. North is up.
Exciting news! On June 12th (June 12.9 UT), the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) discovered a new 8.7-magnitude stellar object in Lupus. Not long after, Yusuke Tampo, with the South African Astronomical Observatory (University of Cape Town), obtained a spectrum of the "new star" and identified it as a classical nova based on its spectral features and dramatic increase in brightness.

The nova went through a slew of temporary names — AT 2025nlr, ASASSN-25cm, and N Lup 2025 — until receiving its official designation V462 Lupi on June 16th. Since discovery, the nova has brightened rapidly. As of 8 p.m. Eastern Time June 16th, it's at magnitude 6.4 and flirting with naked-eye visibility. The magnitude rise has been phenomenal when you consider that prior to the explosion, the progenitor star was approximately magnitude 22.3 (in the blue band) according to American Association for Variable Stars (AAVSO) observer Sebastián Otero, who dug up an older image from a photographic plate.
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Satellite

China is building a constellation of AI supercomputers in space — and just launched the first pieces

Ben Turner
Live Science
Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:00 UTC
Rocket launch
© VCG/VCG/Getty ImagesChina launches a Long March rocket carrying communication equipment from Wenchang Space Launch Site on May 20, 2025
China has launched the first cluster of satellites for a planned AI supercomputer array. The first-of-its-kind array will enable scientists to perform in-orbit data processing.

China has launched its first cluster of satellites for a planned artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer constellation in space.

The 12 satellites are the beginnings of a proposed 2,800-satellite fleet led by the company ADA Space and Zhejiang Lab that will one day form the Three-Body Computing Constellation, a satellite network that will directly process data in space.

The satellites, which launched on board a Long March 2D rocket from China's Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center May 14, are part of a plan to lower China's dependence on ground-based computers.

Instead, the satellites will use the cold vacuum of space as a natural cooling system while they crunch data with a combined computing capacity of 1,000 peta (1 quintillion) operations per second, according to the Chinese government.
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Bulb

How was the wheel invented anyway?

Kai James
The Conversation
Wed, 11 Jun 2025 20:50 UTC
stone wheel
© Comstock/Getty imagesThe assumption was that the wheel evolved from wooden rollers.
Computer simulations reveal the unlikely birth of a world-changing technology nearly 6,000 years ago

Imagine you're a copper miner in southeastern Europe in the year 3900 B.C.E. Day after day you haul copper ore through the mine's sweltering tunnels.

You've resigned yourself to the grueling monotony of mining life. Then one afternoon, you witness a fellow worker doing something remarkable.

With an odd-looking contraption, he casually transports the equivalent of three times his body weight on a single trip. As he returns to the mine to fetch another load, it suddenly dawns on you that your chosen profession is about to get far less taxing and much more lucrative.

What you don't realize: You're witnessing something that will change the course of history - not just for your tiny mining community, but for all of humanity.
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Info

What if we weren't the first advanced civilization on Earth?

Tibi Puiu
ZME Science
Thu, 12 Jun 2025 16:56 UTC
The Silurian Hypothesis asks whether signs of truly ancient past civilizations would even be recognisable today.
Advance Civilization
© ZME Science/SORA

In the grand sweep of Earth's four-billion-year history, 300 years is barely a blink. And yet, that blink — our industrial era — has already reshaped the atmosphere, oceans, and sediments. If civilization collapsed tomorrow, would anything of us remain 100 million years from now? Could some alien beings visiting Earth in the future ever tell that this planet was inhabited by an advanced civilization? More startling still: if another civilization once existed on Earth long before us, could we even tell?

This question lies at the heart of the Silurian Hypothesis — a playful yet serious scientific proposition by NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt and astrophysicist Adam Frank, detailed in a 2018 paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology. The name nods to the Silurians, a fictional species of ancient intelligent reptiles from Doctor Who, but the premise is grounded in geology, astrobiology, and climate science.

"We are not however suggesting that intelligent reptiles actually existed in the Silurian age," the authors clarify in their paper, just to be sure no one misreads them. "Nor that experimental nuclear physics is liable to wake them from hibernation."
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Magnify

Engineers race to harness the dazzling magic of feathers: They haven't solved their mysteries just yet

Ian Rose
Smithsonian Magazine
Tue, 10 Jun 2025 21:26 UTC
flamingo feather
© Tom Winstead Moment via Getty ImagesA flamingo peeks from behind its feathers at the North Carolina Zoo.
The natural marvels, which do everything from enabling acrobatic flight to insulating against Antarctic cold, continue to inspire new designs and technologies

At the end of just about every commercial airliner's wings is an important piece of technology that can be easy to miss. The small upturned tips of each wing are called winglets, and although they weren't added to the big airliners until the late 1980s, they were invented more than a century earlier. Years before the Wright brothers' historic first flight, a British engineer named Frederick Lanchester patented the idea of more efficient wings for his model gliders, tipped with the very first human-made winglets. His design took inspiration from one that evolved millions of years ago: the wings of eagles that flex their tips upward as they soar.

Birds have inspired human inventions for millennia. Japanese bullet trains have long noses designed to copy the beaks of kingfishers, and woodpeckers' natural shock absorption could be borrowed for applications including protection of airplane black boxes. The more that designers, engineers and inventors study birds, and particularly their feathers, the deeper their appreciation becomes for these marvels of evolutionary engineering. Bird feathers can move or repel water, make or mask sound, create wondrous displays of color or impressive camouflage, all while maintaining a light weight, softness and warmth. This natural covering that birds have grown and used for millions of years is still, in many ways, superior to anything that humans can produce.

Comment: Other interesting research on bird feathers:

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