The researchers said that it’s possible that the sea grape may be a descendent of the creature that made the tracks that are well known from the fossil record. Or – like the tuatara or the coelacanth – the protist could be a living fossil, that has changed little for as many as 1.8 billion years.
Human life expectancy keeps increasing steadily, thanks not only to medicine and technology but to social and cultural progress, too. Potential next steps on the ladder could well come from both camps: an example from the med-tech side might be custom-grown replacement organs from pigs; whereas a change in dietary habits could probably be classified as a cultural change informed by science (although drinking ‘heavy water’ sounds a bit too much like snake-oil to me). [image by r000pert]
What do you get when you combine thin sheets of gold leaf and a protein found in spinach? You get an artificial leaf that can photosynthesise energy from sunlight. It’s not a highly efficient conversion rate yet – way behind the top-of-the-range silicon photovoltaics – but the simplicity of the design means it could become a much cheaper alternative. [image by angelrays]
All we need right now is a new plague, on top of everything else we have to deal with. But then again, Bird Flu was the new plague a few years ago, and despite all the yammering and media panic nothing really happened at all… [story via MetaFilter]
At the moment you still have to download the original ebook to your Stanza desktop app and transfer it across, and you can only get an excerpt rather than the whole thing, but apparently the ability to buy direct from your iPhone is in the pipeline. I’ve been waiting to see how the big houses would respond to Oprah’s backing of the Kindle – maybe we’re seeing the first shot in a hardware war yet to come?
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A new discovery from the world beneath the ocean waves: a single-celled organism the size of a grape that rolls along the sea-bed like some sort of aquatic tumbleweed. [image credit Sönke Johnsen; borrowed from linked article]
Human life expectancy keeps increasing steadily, thanks not only to medicine and technology but to social and cultural progress, too. Potential next steps on the ladder could well come from both camps: an example from the med-tech side might be 
What do you get when you combine thin sheets of gold leaf and a protein found in spinach? You get 
It’s almost as if – despite our advancing technologies – all the health risks we considered dead and buried are coming back again. You’ve probably already heard about 
Hey, you – yeah, you with the iPhone. Wanna do something more interesting than pretend to check your mail while you’re on the bus? Genre publishers Pan Macmillan obviously think you do, and have taken the remarkably forward-looking choice of