Have you ever wondered if the Earth has a heartbeat? Well, it turns out that our planet does pulsate every 26 seconds, and scientists have no idea why.
This mysterious phenomenon has been detected by seismometers across the world for more than half a century, but its origin and meaning remain unknown.
When the discovery of fossilized footprints made in what’s now New Mexico was made public in 2021, it was a bombshell moment for archaeology, seemingly rewriting a chapter of the human story. Now new research is offering further evidence of their significance.
While they look like they could have been made yesterday, the footprints were pressed into mud 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, according to radiocarbon dating of the seeds of an aquatic plant that were preserved above and below the fossils.
This date dramatically pushed back the timeline of humans’ history in the Americas, the last landmass to be settled by prehistoric people. The 61 dated prints, which were discovered in the Tularosa Basin, near the edge of an ancient lake in White Sands National Park, were made at a time when many scientists think that massive ice sheets had sealed off human passage into North America, indicating that humans arrived in the region even earlier.
Their advantages extend beyond reducing carbon emissions.
Thirteen US states are now implementing underground thermal energy networks to reduce buildings’ carbon emissions as part of a nationwide push to adopt cleaner energy sources.
Thermal energy networks use pipe loops that connect multiple buildings and provide heating and cooling through water-source heat pumps. Geothermal heat is commonly used in these networks, but it is also possible to bring in waste heat from other buildings through the sewer system.
AI-powered parking platform Metropolis today announced that it raised $1.7 billion to acquire SP Plus, a provider of parking facility management services, in a combination of equity and debt.
Eldridge Capital and 3L Capital co-led the tranche with participation from BDT & MSD Partners’ affiliated credit funds, Vista Credit Partners, Temasek, Slow Ventures and Assembly Ventures. As a part of the financing, Metropolis will take on $650 million in loans and $1.05 billion in Series C preferred stock financing.
Metropolis will pay roughly $1.5 billion for SP Plus “while retaining significant capital on its balance sheet,” Metropolis co-founder and CEO Alex Israel said in a press release. Prior to the latest fundraise, Metropolis had raised $226 million in total.
This novel millimeter wave radar sensor chip is tiny, energy-efficient, and inexpensive, yet is as accurate as the world’s best sensors.
The Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo was known for claiming that he deserved little credit for his beautiful works: they were already there inside the rock, he merely cut them out. ‘Every block of stone,’ he said, ‘has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’
The final product already existed within Michelangelo’s ideals. But it took years of trial and error, practice, and failure to reach the point of being able to give form to it. In a similar sense, Nietzsche would say the ‘you’ that you must become is already there. It’s already inscribed in your values. That which you admire – the preponderance of all your latent virtues – reflects who you are in the truest sense.
The act of becoming who you are is the act of carving your ideal self out of the hard stone of your psyche – of bringing greater and greater refinement to the crude shapes of character that exist in you now. Simultaneously an act of discovery and creation, to become who you are is to bring your virtues to life and synthesise them into a unified whole. Nietzsche proclaims:
OpenAI, the leading artificial intelligence research lab, had an eventful week with major announcements that give insight into its future plans and direction. This was covered in the recent All-In Podcast:
Whether you’re battling foes in a virtual arena or collaborating with colleagues across the globe, lag-induced disruptions can be a major hindrance to seamless communication and immersive experiences.
That’s why researchers with the University of Central Florida’s College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL) and the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed new technology to make data transfer over optical fiber communication faster and more efficient.
Their new development, a novel class of optical modulators, is detailed in a new study published recently in the journal Nature Communications. Modulators can be thought of as like a light switch that controls certain properties of data-carrying light in an optical communication system.
When working at the Millenium Project, a global think tank that publishes reports surrounding global problems, I decided to improve the way reports were presented by ranking the actions provided by the organization to adress the problem. I focused on the 23 actions in global challenge 7 (Rich-poor gap) and created a system focusing on two aspects: feasibility and impact.
Assigning scores from 1–10 for each of these aspects made sense as an action needs to be both implemented and impactful for it to adress the problem. By researching to assign these scores and multiplying them, I could get an overall idea of where an action would compare to another one. Below is a graph summarizing my results, followed by the details behind each ranking.
Rates of higher education have doubled worldwide 19 to 38 percent over the last two decades, indicating that increased access is very possible. Although the process of making education truly available will take decades, governments clearly recognize the need for it and are taking steps towards achieving it, with education becoming a larger percent of GDP for most countries.
Higher education has been known to increase earnings significantly, thereby reducing poverty. Additionally, education has been known to have various benefits towards poverty like reducing food insecurity and standards of health.
Today’s generative AI revolution poses similar challenges and opportunities as the Industrial Revolution.
