Thursday, 2 March 2023

Experts Reveal How Our Diet Will Change After a Major Asteroid Impact

The asteroid fell into the Earth’s atmosphere and crashed into the sea floor about 66 million years ago, causing an explosion more than 6,500 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima.

The collision sent clouds of debris and sulfur into Earth’s atmosphere, blocking out sunlight and heat for about two years. Photosynthesis ceased, which meant the cessation of plant growth, and the dinosaurs became extinct.

But fossil records show that mushrooms subsequently flourished.

According to science journalist and Vox editor Brian Walsh, this makes the mushroom essential to human survival if such an apocalyptic event occurs in the future.

Walsh’s 2019 book The End Times explores how catastrophic events, whether natural or man-made, threaten our existence. He suggests that three types of potential catastrophes — asteroid impacts, supervolcano eruptions, and nuclear war — have one thing in common: they can block the sunlight needed to feed plants.

To survive, he says, people will need to master agriculture without sunlight.

Studies show that the effects of supervolcano eruptions and nuclear bombs could be similar to those of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

For example, about 74,000 years ago, a massive eruption of Mount Toba sent clouds of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, cutting off sunlight by 90%. According to one analysis, this volcanic winter could have reduced the world population to 3,000 people.

And if enough nuclear bombs go off (thousands), it could also lead to a nuclear winter that will reduce sunlight levels by more than 90%, according to a 1983 paper co-authored by Carl Sagan. In this scenario, global temperatures could drop as low as 45 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius).

“Such a rapid and severe cold snap could have made farming impossible even in areas that had escaped missiles,” writes Walsh.

In other words, without sunlight, our diet will collapse.

The decision to grow mushrooms in Walsh’s book comes from David Dinkenberger, a civil engineer who suggested it in the 2014 post-apocalyptic farming book Feeding Everyone No Matter What.

“Perhaps when humans die, mushrooms will rule the world again,” Dinkenberger said. “Why don’t we just eat mushrooms and die out?”

If clouds of debris or ash block out the sun and rapidly cool the climate, trillions of trees will die.

Walsh said that although we use wood to grow mushrooms, we can also use dead tree leaves.

“The crushed leaves can be made into a tea to provide missing nutrients like vitamin C or fed to ruminants like cows,” Dinkenberger said.

Dead trees can harbor other life forms such as mice and insects.

Mice can digest cellulose, the sugar that makes up 50% of wood. Therefore, Walsh suggests that whatever remains after the fungus can be fed to rats.

What’s more, mice reproduce quickly and probably don’t need sunlight to do so. It takes just six weeks for a rat to reach sexual maturity and then it takes just 70 days to give birth to seven to nine mice. According to Dunkenberger’s calculations, the whole of humanity will be able to eat rats in two years.

Insects can also supply protein, and many of them can survive a solar disaster.

Walsh wrote: “The same qualities that make insects so numerous and resilient will enable many species to survive the biggest climate-changing existential catastrophe. Beetles can eat dead wood, and humans can eat beetles.”

Already considered a staple food in some parts of the world, insects are gaining popularity in others. Walsh describes an insect food fair in Richmond, Virginia, where he tried a pasta dish with ground cricket meatballs called orzo orzo and fried mealworm larvae.

And Walsh’s book debunks another popular idea about what we eat during the end of the world: cannibalism.

He says it won’t help after a disaster that will put people in danger of extinction because others are simply not a sustainable source of food. Walsh points to a 2017 study in which a group of students calculated how long the human race would survive on cannibalism alone. They found that only one person would survive after 1149 days (about three years).

However, he adds that creating a new agricultural system will require collaborative work. He believes that such cooperation would most likely be a catastrophic scenario.

Walsh writes: “For all our fear of what will happen next, and for all our bleak histories, collapse and strife have not yet brought us catastrophe. That is why Homo sapiens lived at the first opportunity with extinction – the Toba superexplosion – and this is the only way survive the next phase.

Source: Science Alert

The post Experts Reveal How Our Diet Will Change After a Major Asteroid Impact appeared first on Asume Tech.



from Technology - Asume Tech https://asumetech.com/experts-reveal-how-our-diet-will-change-after-a-major-asteroid-impact/

Engineer Ejected from Twitter HQ After Weeks-Long Stay Replacing Elon Musk

It appears that the man who has had the upper hand in filtering the names of some Twitter employees to put them on the deportation list may replace controversial billionaire Elon Musk as director of the giant Twitter company.

These at least the rumors circulating among the employees of “Blue Bird”, as reported by the site of “The Information”.

So what do we know about Steve Davis?

Perhaps the first thing that apparently shocked employees at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters in the prime weeks into Musk’s takeover of the famed company was that he spent several weeks as a deputy in his office at the company’s headquarters completing the tasks assigned to him. , which were many with the controversial new owner. .

Davis, who has worked with Musk in his various companies since 2003, also had the upper hand in implementing the policy of “laying employees and reducing their number” adopted by the American billionaire.

He helped with the latest round of layoffs, affecting 200 employees.

Additionally, when asked to cut about $500 million in Twitter operating costs, the dedicated man cut about $1 billion by terminating some contracts with outside companies and negotiating others.

Interestingly, Davis became CEO of tunneling company Hyperloop which Musk also owned in 2019, before becoming CEO of The Boring Company.

He also worked with Musk at SpaceX.

Musk announced in mid-February that he intends to appoint a director in his place for the famous Twitter company, at the end of quest’year.

The post Engineer Ejected from Twitter HQ After Weeks-Long Stay Replacing Elon Musk appeared first on Asume Tech.



from Technology - Asume Tech https://asumetech.com/engineer-ejected-from-twitter-hq-after-weeks-long-stay-replacing-elon-musk/

Revolutionizing the Beauty Industry: Discovering the Next Big Innovation

Toiletry bags could become much lighter after researchers created a “dry” moisturizer in a confetti-like tablet.

The small sachet contains a flat circle of substance about the size of a pound coin. The product is made of thin paper-like material and only a drop of water is needed to moisten it because the product is mostly water.

A process called electrospinning was used to remove oil and water. This means that the humidifier can be placed in a tub with a diameter of about 3 cm for a month.

And the product would not need preservatives if it was created in such a dry form.

Professor Sheng Qi, who prototyped the moisturizer at the University of East Anglia, said the technology could be used for sunscreens, shampoos and conditioners, among other potential uses.

She said: “This moisturizer can be carried in a small paper bag, as if you were carrying a mint scent in your bag. It only takes one drop of water to rehydrate. Most cosmetics and toiletries contain up to 95% water, resulting in up to ‘heavy units’. in terms of volume and bulky packaging.Each year, 120 billion units of cosmetics and toiletries are packaged and shipped worldwide, so the industry has a huge carbon footprint.”

The researcher said: “Unlike other waterless beauty products currently available, the technology used to dry the moisturizer does not involve heat, meaning that proteins, peptides and other ‘sensitive’ ingredients remain well preserved.

And since the water is squeezed out of the humidifier, there is no need for chemical preservatives, because without water there is less risk of moisture-loving bacteria growing.

The researchers originally created the product for drug delivery, but found that it could be useful for cosmetic products.

Source: Daily Mail

The post Revolutionizing the Beauty Industry: Discovering the Next Big Innovation appeared first on Asume Tech.



from Technology - Asume Tech https://asumetech.com/revolutionizing-the-beauty-industry-discovering-the-next-big-innovation/

Wednesday, 1 March 2023

Unearthing a New Moai Statue on Easter Island

At the bottom of a dried-up lake on Easter Island, another statue from the group of Moai stone statues was found.

ABC News reports that about 1,000 moai statues on Easter Island are made of porous rock – volcanic tuff. The height of the largest of these statues is 33 feet (about 10 meters), and the weight of each of them is 3-5 tons, and some of them weigh up to 80 tons.

And the new statue, which was recently found, is small. But it remains an important archaeological discovery, as it points to the possibility of other statues in the area, the existence of which scientists have no information about. And the most interesting thing is that this is the first statue discovered at the bottom of a dried-up lake.

Archaeologist Terry Hunt says: “The moai statues reflect the history of the Rapa Nui people, who are the deified ancestors of the current inhabitants of the island. Therefore, the search for moai statues and the tools used to make them will continue.”

Source: News

The post Unearthing a New Moai Statue on Easter Island appeared first on Asume Tech.



from Technology - Asume Tech https://asumetech.com/unearthing-a-new-moai-statue-on-easter-island/

The Most Recent Improvements Made to Google Chrome You Will Be Allowed to Watch 18 Hours of YouTube on the M2 MacBook Pro

The most recent version of the Google Chrome browser for Macs features battery-life enhancements. According to a blog post published today by Google, a 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro running Chrome can perform 17 hours of web browsing or 18 hours of YouTube viewing on a single full charge.

The Most Recent Improvements Made to Google Chrome You Will Be Allowed to Watch 18 Hours of YouTube on the M2 MacBook Pr o_

Improvements to the Energy Saving mode increase surfing time by an additional 30 minutes by eliminating pointless background operations. Google cites the M2 MacBook Pro as an example. Still, the company claims that older Mac users will also experience performance improvements.

The Most Recent Improvements Made to Google Chrome You Will Be Allowed to Watch 18 Hours of YouTube on the M2 MacBook Pro_

Google made adjustments to improve battery life, such as adjusting iframes to use less energy, modifying JavaScript timers to wake the CPU less frequently, reducing data structures to improve access, and removing pointless redraws.

Google intends to improve Energy Saving mode in the future. Google’s website offers the Chrome browser for Macs for download, the 110 version was just made available.

The post The Most Recent Improvements Made to Google Chrome You Will Be Allowed to Watch 18 Hours of YouTube on the M2 MacBook Pro appeared first on Asume Tech.



from Technology - Asume Tech https://asumetech.com/the-most-recent-improvements-made-to-google-chrome-you-will-be-allowed-to-watch-18-hours-of-youtube-on-the-m2-macbook-pro/

The Evolution of Bird Wings: A Look Into How Birds Developed Flight

Dinosaur fossils containing arms with suspected flexion at the elbow and wrist may point to an unpreserved notochord underlying all modern bird flight.

If the University of Tokyo researchers are correct, this situation could provide clues to the path that flying vertebrates from Earth took to the skies.

The evolution of wings powerful enough to lift vertebrates off the ground is one of the great mysteries of paleontology.

Pterosaurs are famous for being the oldest known vertebrates, actually appearing around 200 million years ago. However, these massive ancient reptiles were not dinosaurs, so the direct ancestors of birds independently discovered all the mechanisms of flight.

Avian dinosaurs evolved much later than bipedal feathered theropods, about 80 million years after pterosaurs had already achieved powerful flight.

Despite these vastly different origin stories, birds use a strikingly similar structure to pterosaurs to stay aloft and, like feathers, seem to have evolved long before flight itself.

Called the propatagium, this is a membrane present in all modern wing-flapping vertebrates, including birds and bats. Some gliding mammals even have a similar structure on their parachute-like upper limbs.

The best way to visualize the propatagium is to take the arm out to the side with the elbow and wrist bent. Now imagine a tendon running from your shoulder to your arm, forming the bridge or “front edge” of the wing.

This “bridge” allows flying birds to flex and extend the wrist and elbow simultaneously during the flapping motion. The skeleton, in fact, gives power to bird flight, allowing the animal to control two joints at once.

For pterosaurs, its role is less clear, but the propatagium appears to have controlled takeoff and landing by changing the airflow over the upper wing surface.

Some scientists believe that without the chord, birds, bats, and dinosaurs would not have been able to fly so high.

“It has not been found in other vertebrates,” explains paleontologist Tatsuya Hirasawa of the University of Tokyo. “It has also been found to have disappeared or lost its function in flightless birds, which is one of the reasons we know it is essential for flight.” So to understand how it evolved in birds, we have to know how propatagium evolved.”

The problem is that propatagium is soft tissue, which means it is rarely preserved in the fossil record. In addition, this tendon is very thin and does not leave marks on the bones to which it is attached.

Luckily, Hirasawa and his colleague Yurika Ono found a way to “see” the tendon even if it wasn’t there. The key is to know how the propatagium restricts the animal’s movements.

For example, when a modern bird dies, this membrane naturally keeps the animal’s wrist and elbow flexed.

By comparing the apparent angle of the elbow to the curvature of the arms in non-avian theropod fossils, the researchers found evidence that a propatagium-like structure could extend over the shoulder and wrist of many land-dwelling dinosaurs.

For example, the angles seen in the fossils of many maniraptors (including velociraptors) were slightly larger than those of modern birds, but still hint at a similar structure to the early propatagium.

To support these predictions, the researchers also found soft tissue remains of what may have been an early propatagium in two maniraptoran fossils: a turkey-sized caudipteryx and a four-winged microraptor.

Caudipteryx probably couldn’t fly, and there is still controversy over whether a microraptor could. What is clear, however, is that both of these dinosaurs possessed the structures that later became necessary for flight.

The study is published in the journal Zoological Letters.

Source: Science Alert

The post The Evolution of Bird Wings: A Look Into How Birds Developed Flight appeared first on Asume Tech.



from Technology - Asume Tech https://asumetech.com/the-evolution-of-bird-wings-a-look-into-how-birds-developed-flight/