Fuck it. Let’s build Jurassic Park.
That’s what many have gleaned from recent comments by Max Hodak, one of the founders—alongside SpaceX and Tesla’s Elon Musk—of the neurotech company Neuralink.
Tag Archives: ANIMALS
How Do Animals Perceive Time?
I’m writing this on a Tuesday, at 2:26 p.m. Minutes ago, it was 9 a.m., or so it feels; back then, I was enjoying the delusion, refreshed each morning, that I’d accomplish what I needed to do today. I still might—there are hours left in the workday—but I’m wiser than I was when I woke up five hours ago: it’ll be 7pm soon, the day definitively in tatters. Another of Time’s routine beatdowns.
One advantage of being a cat, or a stingray, is not having to think about time this way (and, by extension, death). But are they entirely free from the temporal plane? Do they perceive it in any way? Do some species perceive it more acutely than others? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts to find out.
Oldest DNA Sequenced Yet Comes From Million-Year-Old Mammoths
Woolly mammoths were icons of the Ice Age. Starting 700,000 years ago to just 4,000 years ago, they trundled across the chilly steppe of Eurasia and North America. As ancient glaciers expanded across the Northern Hemisphere, these beasts survived the rapidly cooling temperatures with cold-resistant traits, a characteristic they came by not through evolution, as earlier thought. Woolly mammoths, a new Nature study finds, inherited the traits that made them so successful from a mammoth species closer to a million years old.
Earth’s Harshest Ecosystems May Birth New Species Fastest
The riches of the natural world are not spread evenly across the globe. Some places, such as the tropical Andes in South America, are simply stacked with unique species of plants and animals, many found no place else on Earth. So-called biodiversity “hotspots” are thought to cover just 2.3 percent of the planet’s surface, mostly in the tropics, yet they account for half of all known plant species and 77 percent of land vertebrates.
How the Venus Flytrap ‘Remembers’ When It Captures Prey
SCIENTISTS ARE CONTINUING to tease out the mechanisms by which the Venus flytrap can tell when it has captured a tasty insect as prey as opposed to an inedible object (or just a false alarm). There is evidence that the carnivorous plant has something akin to a short-term “memory,” and a team of Japanese scientists has found evidence that the mechanism for this memory lies in changes in calcium concentrations in its leaves, according to a recent paperpublished in the journal Nature Plants.
Ukraine Hostage Standoff Ends After President Shares Public Endorsement of Joaquin Phoenix Film
An hours-long standoff in Ukraine centered on an armed man who had taken 13 hostages came to a close after President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly endorsed a Joaquin Phoenix-narrated movie. Continue reading Ukraine Hostage Standoff Ends After President Shares Public Endorsement of Joaquin Phoenix Film
Over 360 Elephants Found Dead From Unknown Causes in Botswana
Over 360 elephants have been found dead across Botswana since the beginning of May, and conservationists have yet to figure out what is causing their deaths. Continue reading Over 360 Elephants Found Dead From Unknown Causes in Botswana
