Best of Last Week: New human species, nuclear batteries, stress-induced gray hair
It was a good week for paleontological research as a team of Heriot-Watt University researchers from the Lyell Center in Edinburgh announced a surprise fossil discovery made in Tanzania—ancient animal tracks from an unknown cloven-hoofed mammal dated back almost 2 million years. Also, three teams studying an ancient human-like skull housed at Hebei GEO University's Geoscience Museum announced that it represented a newly discovered human species—the skull, from what has been described as "the dragon man," may represent one of modern human's closest relatives. And an international team of researchers found via a geochemical study that the cause of the end-Permian mass extinction event was aerosolized nickel-rich particles ejected by a volcanic eruption.
In technology news, a small team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. suggested that a new paradigm for nuclear power may be on the way, explaining why "nuclear batteries" offer a new approach to carbon-free energy. And a team with members from Nokia Bell Labs, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Heriot-Watt University reported a backscatter breakthrough that runs near-zero-power IoT communicators at 5G speeds everywhere. Also, a team of engineers at computer security company Eclypsium, Inc. found vulnerabilities in Dell BIOSConnect features within Dell SupportAssist. And a combined team from Hanyang University and Sungkyunkwan University, both in South Korea, announced that they had created an artificial tactile skin that mimics the human tactile recognition processes.
In other news, John Evans, co-director of the Institute for Practical Ethics at the University of California, San Diego, argued in an essay published in PNAS that advances in CRISPR mean that the era of germline gene editing has arrived. Also, an international team of astronomers wondered whether dark matter is real, if physicists are misunderstanding gravity.
And finally, if you have experienced premature graying of your hair, you may want to check out the results of a study conducted by a team at Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons—they found that stress can turn a person's hair gray, and that it is reversible.
© 2021 Science X Network