NASA scientists awaiting the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft's return will greet it with considerably more gray hair

LOWELL, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 7, 2023--

LG last year introduced 27- and 45-inch “Ultragear” monitors with OLED panels, but as we

Just like his brother Andrew Tate, Tristan also ventured into professional MMA in 2016

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 29, 2023--

If you regularly spread "false information" online, Threads already knows. The platform apparently flagged those

A top European Union official is touring Silicon Valley this week and reminding tech platforms including Twitter and Facebook-parent Meta about their content moderation obligations, just weeks ahead of a deadline to comply with sweeping new EU laws that will apply to large social media platforms.

A huge amount of rock has been found which could have great consequences for us all. The phosphate rock deposit, discovered in Norway, contains enough minerals to meet the global demand for batteries and solar panels for the next 100 years, according to the mining company that controls it, Norge Mining. Phosphate rock, first discovered in 1669 by German scientist Hennig Brandt, contains high concentrates of phosphorus, which is a key component for building green technologies like electric cars. But it has supply issues given the EU is dependent on imports from countries like China, Iraq and Syria, and until recently, Russia.. An article in the scientific journal Nature last year for instance warned of imminent supply disruptions of phosphorus, citing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent economic sanctions as a potential cause of market volatility. So finding all this rock is, in short, good news. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Indeed, a spokesperson for the European Commission described the discovery as “great news” for meeting the objectives of the Commission’s raw material objectives, with Norge Mining telling Euractiv that the projected 4,500-metre-deep ore body would theoretically be capable of meeting global demand for the next century. Norway’s minister of trade and industry, Jan Christian Vestre, said last month that the government was considering fast-tracking a giant mine in Helleland once analysis is completed on 47 miles of drill cores. If approval is given, the first major mine could begin operation by 2028. The mining plans already have the support of the European Raw Materials Alliance, according to local reports, while local consultations continue. Rock on. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

SAVE $100: As of August 24, the JBL Partybox is on sale for $299.99 at

KORTRIJK, Belgium--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 15, 2023--

The meaning of life is the ultimate mystery – why do we exist? And is there a point to… well… anything? These are questions to which we may never find answers, but at least we can define what “life” means in scientific terms. And yet, our understanding of what life is is changing all the time, thanks to space exploration. As scientists continue to hunt for life beyond our own world, biologists are having to rethink the meaning of the word “life” itself. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Generally, biologists explain “life” as connoting a self-sustaining chemical system which is capable of performing functions such as eating, metabolising, excreting, breathing, moving, growing, reproducing, and responding to external stimuli. This definition works pretty well here on Earth (although there are some important exceptions, such as viruses), but experts have pointed out that if life exists elsewhere in the universe, it may not display the same properties that we’re used to. Indeed, it might be unrecognisable as life as we know it (forget those little green men). In which case, how will we spot it if it ever crosses our path? Astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker and chemist Lee Cronin think they’ve come up with a solution. The pair are now arguing that highly complex molecules found in all living creatures can’t exist thanks purely to chance. Therefore, they say, the universe must have a way of creating and reproducing complex information and retaining a “memory” of all of this.. In an interview with New Scientist, Walker, of Arizona State University, explained their radical idea on how objects come into existence. The concept, known as Assembly Theory, explains why certain complex objects have become more abundant than others by considering their histories. If the theory proves correct, it will redefine what we mean by “living” things and show that we’ve been going about the search for extraterrestrial life all wrong. In the process, we could even end up creating alien life in a laboratory, she stressed. In her discussion with New Scientist, Walker pointed out: "An electron can be made anywhere in the universe and has no history. You are also a fundamental object, but with a lot of historical dependency. You might want to cite your age counting back to when you were born, but parts of you are billions of years older. "From this perspective, we should think of ourselves as lineages of propagating information that temporarily finds itself aggregated in an individual." Assembly theory predicts that molecules produced by biological processes must be more complex than those produced by non-biological processes, as Science Alert notes. To test this, Walker and her team analysed a range of organic and inorganic compounds from around the world and outer space, including E. coli bacteria, urine, meteorites and even home-brewed beer. They then smashed up the compounds into smaller pieces and used mass spectrometry to pinpoint their molecular building blocks. They calculated that the smallest number of steps required to reassemble each compound from these building blocks was 15. And whilst some compounds from living systems needed fewer than 15 assembly steps, no inorganic compounds made it above this threshold. "Our system … allows us to search the universe agnostically for evidence of what life does rather than attempting to define what life is," Walker, Cronin, and others wrote in a 2021 Nature Communications article. The handy thing about this building block system – which they’ve dubbed the “'molecular assembly index” – is that it doesn’t rely on carbon-based organic materials to be identified. In other words, an alien could be made of entirely different stuff entirely and we’d still be able to spot it as life using the index. It also works regardless of what stage of “life” an extraterrestrial being is in – whether it is still in its infancy or has moved into a technological stage beyond our understanding. That’s because all of these states produce complex molecules which couldn’t exist in the absence of a living system. If all of this is hurting your head, let’s just get back to the basics: if there is a secret to life, it might all be down to what we do, not what we are. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 13, 2023--