List of All Articles with Tag 'science and tech'

New research has shown that our early ancestors almost went extinct some 900,000 years ago. Using a new method called FitCoal (fast infinitesimal time coalescent process), researchers analysed the likelihood of present-day genome sequences to project current human genomic variation backwards in time. They applied the technique to the genomes of 3,154 people from 10 African and 40 non-African populations, and found a massive crash in genetic diversity during the transition between the early and middle Pleistocene. “Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1,280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago,” the study authors wrote in the journal Science. “The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction,” they say. Wiping out roughly 98.7 percent of the ancestral human population, “the bottleneck could also have increased the inbreeding level of our ancestors, thus contributing to the 65.85 percent loss in present-day human genetic diversity,” explained the researchers. This probably happened because of changes in the global climate as short-term glaciations became longer-lasting, triggering a drop in ocean temperatures, prolonged drought, and the loss of large numbers of species that humans might have relied on for food. Then, around 813,000 years ago, populations finally recovered, with a 20-fold increase in numbers because of fire combined with the return of warmer temperatures, researchers reckon. What a near miss, eh? Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

When he’s not making radical, controversial changes to Twitter/X, Elon Musk is eyeing up plans to colonise Mars in the coming years with his company SpaceX – and now a team of researchers at the Virginia-based George Mason University claims it has found out the minimum number of people needed to successfully takeover the red planet. In the study – the results of which were published to the research platform Arxiv in August - the academics established a model to find out the ‘initial population size’ required on Mars to produce a “stable colony size”. They ran the model five times for 28 Earth years, and increased the population by 10 people each time - from 10 to 170 individuals. “Given that there are four critical tasks that are needed continuously (air, water, food production and waste removal) in addition to handling disasters, and two skills needed for each task, we chose a population size of 10 as the minimum needed for a ‘stable’ colony size. “The population is allowed to dip below 10 as long as it bounces back within 1.5 years, or the amount of time between Earth resupply shuttles.” The test found all initial population sizes over 50 were able to sustain a population of at least 10 people across the time period, and that the bare minimum number to meet that criteria is at least 22 people. There you go, Elon. You’re welcome. It’s certainly a decrease in the minimum number previously suspected by French researcher Jean-Marc Salotti in June 2020 – that was the rather astronomical figure (sorry) of at least 110 people. And the Virginia researchers didn’t stop there, either, as they also took a look at the personality types best placed to handle the highly stressful environment that is living on a completely different planet. There’s four: “agreeables”: low competitiveness and aggressiveness, and not fixated on “stringent routine “socials”: medium competitiveness, extroverted, require social interaction but not fixated on stringent routines “reactives”: medium competitiveness and fixed on stringent routines “neurotics”: high competitiveness, highly aggressive and a “challenged ability to adapt to boredom or a change in routine” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the “agreeables” came out on top. The researchers added: “In all runs, the Agreeable personality type was the only one to survive the full duration of model runs. This is likely because it has the highest coping capability.” Their results found that while the “neurotic” was “most likely to fail”, and both “reactives” and “socials” fluctuated, the “agreeables” was the “most resilient”. “While this model assigns equal numbers of each personality type, future work could try adjusting the proportion of each to possibly lead to a lower required minimum initial population. For example, a crew of all Agreeable personalities may be more successful,” they suggest. Musk, meanwhile, said earlier this year that he was optimistic humans landing on Mars was "possible" in the next five years, and "highly likely" in a decade. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

It is no secret that Elon Musk is a quirky individual, so it is no surprise that how he chose to spend the evening after he made his offer to buy Twitter was rather odd. According to Grimes, his on-off girlfriend, the tech mogul stayed up all night playing video games after putting the offer in for the app now known as X. Grimes shared the anecdote to Walter Isaacson for his upcoming biography on the world's richest person — an excerpt of which was published by the Wall Street Journal. She said he flew to Vancouver to meet her parents but then stayed in the hotel because he was in "stress mode" and played the fantasy game Elden Ring on a laptop he had with him. "Instead of sleeping, he played until 5:30 in the morning," Grimes told Isaacson. Since purchasing Twitter last year, Musk has brought in a number of changes including making users pay for their verifying blue ticks and changing the name and logo to X. It seems more changes are afoot, and he recently announced the possibility of video and audio calls on the social media platform. As for playing video games all through the night... whatever calms you down, we guess. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

You would think people would read the room, and learn from the tragic and fatal implosion of the Oceangate submersible in July, yet there’s already plans for another trip down to the Titanic wreckage next year – and the US government doesn’t want it to go ahead. Two months after the Titan sub crushed underwater, killing five people, officials are trying to stop Georgia-based firm RMS Titanic Inc. (RMST) from trying to recover further historical items from the wreckage to add to its collection of artifacts it exhibits. While RMST owns the salvage rights to the doomed liner which infamously struck an iceberg and sank in 1912, the US government is drawing attention to both federal law and an international agreement which classes the shipwreck as a hallowed gravesite. According to the Associated Press, the government states in court documents filed on Friday that RMST is “not free to disregard” the “validly enacted federal law” mentioned above, but it nonetheless is “its stated intent”. “[The shipwreck] will be deprived of the protections Congress granted it,” its lawyers argue. RMST, meanwhile, says it looks to take images of the entire site, including areas where “deterioration has opened chasms sufficient to permit a remotely operated vehicle to penetrate the hull without interfering with the current structure”. Provided the objects are not “affixed to the wreck itself”, artefacts recovered could include items from “inside the Marconi room” – that’s the room where the ship’s wireless radio was used to communicate with other vessels and those on the shore. RMST also insists they do not plan to cut into or detach any part of the wreck “at this time”, but that they don’t plan to seek a permit from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – something the US government says it needs in order for the firm to move forward with its plans. The NOAA oversees the public interest in the Titanic, and on its website accepts it “may be in the public’s interest to salvage some artifacts” from the wreckage. “NOAA therefore balances this value with the Congressional intent to manage the wreck site as a maritime memorial consistent with the International Agreement, which proclaims that the Titanic shall be recognized as a memorial to those who perished. “NOAA has concluded that the recovery of many of the artifacts from the debris field (with certain exceptions) is consistent with the NOAA Guidelines and the International Agreement, including the in situ preservation policy. “However, NOAA has also determined that recovery of artifacts from within either of the two hull sections is not consistent with the purposes of a maritime memorial.” It’s not the first time the US government and RMST have had a legal battle over the ship, as back in 2020 a similar case concerning a planned expedition made its way to the courts, before the coronavirus pandemic scuppered proposals and the issue didn’t go any further. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

Antarctica might be the only continent on Earth with no natural human habitation, but it’s emerged that an “Antarctica accent” is very much a thing. Despite having no locals, thousands of scientists have made up an ever-changing population in research stations over the years. The continent is so isolated and the level of interaction between researchers is so intense, that a common accent is beginning to emerge there despite people coming from different parts of the world. At its busiest points in the year during the summer, Antarctica is home to around 5,000 people. Only around 1,000 people live there during the winter months. The idea of accents changing due to human interaction on Antarctica is no different to the phenomenon seen throughout history at a glacial pace. However, given the very specific sample size, it’s an opportunity for scientists to study it at a much quicker rate and on a much smaller scale. Experts at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich published a study in 2019 which focused on the change in accents observed in 11 people who took part in the British Antarctic Survey. @human.1011 There’s an Antarctic Accent! #language #linguistics #english #antarctica Of the 11 who were studied, eight came from England, one from the US, one from Germany and one from Iceland. Their voices were recorded every six weeks, and the team found that over time they developed longer vowel sounds. There was a physical change too, with participants pronouncing the “ou” sound in the front of their mouths rather than the back of their throats. Speaking to IFL Science, Jonathan Harrington, study author and Professor of Phonetics and Speech Processing at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich said: "The Antarctic accent is not really perceptible as such – it would take much longer for it to become so – but it is acoustically measurable. "It's mostly an amalgamation of some aspects of the spoken accents of the winterers before they went to Antarctica, together with an innovation. It's far more embryonic [than conventional English accents] given that it had only a short time to develop and also, of course, because it's only distributed across a small group of speakers.” Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

Alcohol addiction ruins millions of lives every year, but scientists may have found a cure for this terrible affliction. A new treatment for alcohol use disorder (AUD) has been trialled in monkeys with impressive results and, if these translate to human trials, the impact could be monumental. A team of neuroscientists and physiologists from across the US tested a new type of gene therapy to see if they could directly target the underlying brain circuitry associated with sustained heavy drinking. As they noted, in the journal Nature Medicine, people suffering from AUD commonly return to alcohol use even if they attempt to quit. This is largely to do with what’s known as mesolimbic dopamine (DA) signalling – meaning how the central nervous system circuit communicates the feelgood neurotransmitter dopamine. A protein called glial-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) is key to keeping these neurons in this reward circuitry functioning. However, experts have found that levels of GDNF are reduced in people with AUD during periods of alcohol abstinence, most notably in a region of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (VTA), as IFLScience notes. Therefore, the researchers decided to test whether using gene therapy to deliver more GDNF to the VTA could help reinforce this crucial dopaminergic signalling and prevent patients from suffering an alcoholic relapse. The team of scientists explained how alcohol consumption in non-addicts prompts the release of dopamine, creating a pleasurable buzz feeling, but chronic alcohol use causes the brain to adapt and stop releasing so much dopamine. “So when people are addicted to alcohol, they don’t really feel more pleasure in drinking,” Dr Kathleen Grant, a senior co-author of the study, said in a statement. “It seems that they’re drinking more because they feel a need to maintain an intoxicated state.” For their research, Dr Grant and her colleagues used eight rhesus macaque monkeys, who were exposed to increasing concentrations of alcohol over four 30-day “induction” periods. The monkeys then had free access to alcohol and water for 21 hours a day for six months, during which they developed heavy drinking behaviours. This was then followed by a 12-week abstinence phase, with the GDNF treatment performed four weeks in for half of the subjects. The gene therapy was delivered using a a viral vector containing a copy of the human GDNF gene injected directly into the primate’s VTA, according to IFLScience. And the results were truly jaw-dropping. “Drinking went down to almost zero,” Dr Grant said. “For months on end, these animals would choose to drink water and just avoid drinking alcohol altogether. They decreased their drinking to the point that it was so low we didn’t record a blood-alcohol level.” The most exciting aspect of their findings is the suggestion that gene therapy could offer a permanent solution for people with the most severe cases of AUD. This will be a welcome glimmer of hope to many, given that some 29.5 million people were diagnosed with AUD in the US alone in 2021, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Of these 29.5 million sufferers, almost a million (894,000) were aged between 12 and 17. It’ll likely be some time before we know for sure whether the gene therapy can be rolled out in humans, but it’s an important first step in tackling this devastating disorder. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

Have you been feeling slightly off recently? Have things not been working in your favour? Well you're not alone – and astrologers believe there's a mystic reason behind it. There's been a recent spike in TikTok uploads exploring retrograde, but what actually is it? In short, retrograde simply means when a planet is moving in the opposite direction. The age-old astrological theory has been researched for thousands of years – but now, thanks to social media and a drive towards self-care and mindfulness, interest in astrology has heightened. Most people will be familiar with the phrase 'Mercury retrograde', but the motion can also happen to all of the planets. Currently, there are seven planets in retrograde. Janelle Palibrk told AU News that she believes one planet can leave people feeling "sensitive" or "intense". However, she claims that "with 7 planets in retrograde, it’s going to be almost impossible to avoid some kind of response, which is why as a collective we are all feeling a little stressed and uncomfortable." According to Yoga Journal, the dates are: Pluto retrograde: May 1 – October 11, 2023 Neptune retrograde: June 30 – December 6, 2023 Saturn retrograde: June 17 – November 4, 2023 Venus retrograde: July 22 – September 3, 2023 Chiron retrograde: July 23 – December 26, 2023 Mercury retrograde: August 23, 2023 – September 15, 2023 Uranus retrograde: August 28, 2023 – January 27, 2024 Jupiter retrograde: September 4 – December 31, 2023 @_thelunarchild @amydemure Personal readings are available ✨ #zodiac #zodiacsigns #horoscope #astrology @innerworldsastrology #greenscreen Why you’re feeling stuck #astrology #zodiac #horoscope Meanwhile, David J. Helfand, Professor of Astronomy and Columbia University Chair, slammed the astrological theory as "arrant nonsense." Helfand previously told Indy100 that the retrograde motion of Mercury is a "simple consequence of the fact that we observe the sky from a moving platform we call Earth as it orbits the Sun. The other planets also orbit the Sun, all in the same direction." "The apparent motion of any planet as observed from Earth is a combination of the orbit of the planet and the orbit of Earth," he added. "Simple geometry shows that roughly three times a year (for Mercury – less often for other planets on longer orbits), these combined motions give the Earth-bound observer the illusion that the other planet has reversed its direction of motion compared to the background stars." He stated that the orbit of Mercury is governed by laws of gravity and is completely unchanged, which has "been well-understood for over 400 years – it's hardly a new idea." Helfand continued: "But apparently, some people prefer 2000-year-old views of the world in which the planets govern their lives – no need to take any personal responsibility then, is there? "In fact, the gravitational force of Mercury on an Earth-bound you is less than the force of your dog on you when you pat him or her on the head." He said: "Indeed, patting your dog on its head is likely to have a positive influence on your mood. Maybe people should try that instead of contemplating arrant nonsense about the planets." Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

Wild boar in southeastern Germany have long contained high levels of radioactive substances, which has been attributed to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. But as radioactivity levels have fallen in other animals, they have stayed much the same among boar. Now, scientists have worked out the secret behind the so-called “wild boar paradox”. Research shows there is another culprit for the high levels of radioactivity: nuclear weapons tests from the mid-20th century. And both the weapons and the nuclear reactor meltdown continue contaminating the boar because of their diet. While the muscular boar seem healthy, the dangerous levels of radioactive caesium, the main contaminator, have prompted people to stop hunting them. In turn, there is now an overpopulation issue. “Our work reveals deeper insights into the notorious radio-cesium contamination in Bavarian wild boars beyond the total radionuclide quantification only,” radioecologist Felix Stäger from Leibniz University Hannover wrote in a paper. After a nuclear incident, radioactive materials can pose a significant threat to ecosystems. This happened after the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, where there was an increase in radioactive caesium contamination. The main component of this, caesium-137, has a half-life of about 30 years, meaning it loses its radioactivity fairly quickly. However, caesium-135, which is created via nuclear fission, is far more stable. It has a half-life of more than 2m years. The ratio of cesium-135 compared to cesium-137 can help us work out where the cesium came from. A high ratio indicates nuclear weapon explosions, while a low ratio points to nuclear reactors like Chernobyl. So the researchers analysed caesium levels from 48 wild boar meat samples from 11 regions of Bavaria. It turns out that nuclear weapons testing was responsible for between 12 per cent and 68 per cent of the unsafe contamination in the samples. “All samples exhibit signatures of mixing,” wrote the researchers. “Nuclear weapons fallout and [Chernobyl] have mixed in the Bavarian soil, the release maxima of which were about 20−30 years apart.” So while Chernobyl remains the main source of caesium in wild boar, about a quarter of the samples showed enough contributions from weapons fallout to exceed safety limits even before the reactor meltdown comes into account. And because wild boar eat so many truffles, it has been exacerbated. The fungus absorbs high levels of contamination from both sources. Wild boars' diets, which include underground truffles, have absorbed varying levels of contamination from both sources, which has contributed to the animals' persistent radioactivity. “This study illustrates that strategic decisions to conduct atmospheric nuclear tests 60−80 years ago still impact remote natural environments, wildlife, and a human food source today,” the authors concluded. The study was published in Environmental Science & Technology. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

Alcohol addiction ruins millions of lives every year, but scientists may have found a cure for this terrible affliction. A new treatment for alcohol use disorder (AUD) has been trialled in monkeys with impressive results and, if these translate to human trials, the impact could be monumental. A team of neuroscientists and physiologists from across the US tested a new type of gene therapy to see if they could directly target the underlying brain circuitry associated with sustained heavy drinking. As they noted, in the journal Nature Medicine, people suffering from AUD commonly return to alcohol use even if they attempt to quit. This is largely to do with what’s known as mesolimbic dopamine (DA) signalling – meaning how the central nervous system circuit communicates the feelgood neurotransmitter dopamine. A protein called glial-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) is key to keeping these neurons in this reward circuitry functioning. However, experts have found that levels of GDNF are reduced in people with AUD during periods of alcohol abstinence, most notably in a region of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (VTA), as IFLScience notes. Therefore, the researchers decided to test whether using gene therapy to deliver more GDNF to the VTA could help reinforce this crucial dopaminergic signalling and prevent patients from suffering an alcoholic relapse. The team of scientists explained how alcohol consumption in non-addicts prompts the release of dopamine, creating a pleasurable buzz feeling, but chronic alcohol use causes the brain to adapt and stop releasing so much dopamine. “So when people are addicted to alcohol, they don’t really feel more pleasure in drinking,” Dr Kathleen Grant, a senior co-author of the study, said in a statement. “It seems that they’re drinking more because they feel a need to maintain an intoxicated state.” For their research, Dr Grant and her colleagues used eight rhesus macaque monkeys, who were exposed to increasing concentrations of alcohol over four 30-day “induction” periods. The monkeys then had free access to alcohol and water for 21 hours a day for six months, during which they developed heavy drinking behaviours. This was then followed by a 12-week abstinence phase, with the GDNF treatment performed four weeks in for half of the subjects. The gene therapy was delivered using a a viral vector containing a copy of the human GDNF gene injected directly into the primate’s VTA, according to IFLScience. And the results were truly jaw-dropping. “Drinking went down to almost zero,” Dr Grant said. “For months on end, these animals would choose to drink water and just avoid drinking alcohol altogether. They decreased their drinking to the point that it was so low we didn’t record a blood-alcohol level.” The most exciting aspect of their findings is the suggestion that gene therapy could offer a permanent solution for people with the most severe cases of AUD. This will be a welcome glimmer of hope to many, given that some 29.5 million people were diagnosed with AUD in the US alone in 2021, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Of these 29.5 million sufferers, almost a million (894,000) were aged between 12 and 17. It’ll likely be some time before we know for sure whether the gene therapy can be rolled out in humans, but it’s an important first step in tackling this devastating disorder. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

A caterer who pretended to be a plastic surgeon has been arrested after performing a fatal penis enlargement on a 'patient'. Torben K, a 46-year-old man from Solingen, Germany, administered silicone injections into the victim's penis and scrotum area. He reportedly refused to disclose the type of silicone oil. The 32-year-old patient died from sepsis seven months after the procedure in July 2019. An investigation found that Torben had no medical qualifications and previously carried out the same procedure on another man earlier in the year. Judges in Wuppertal District Court found Torben guilty of causing death by grievous bodily harm. The sister of the unnamed victim said her brother had doubts about the treatment but Torben convinced him to go ahead. He was said to experience breathing difficulties as soon as he returned home. The man reportedly visited several hospitals but later died of blood poisoning and liver and kidney failure. Speaking to local media, High State Prosecutor Wolf-Tilman Baumert said: "Unfortunately, the silicone oil ended up in the person's bloodstream. This led to severe health complications and, eventually, to his death." Torben claimed he had only done what the patient requested, to which Baumert responded: "The fact that the man asked for the treatment is irrelevant from our point of view. The defendant acted in a highly immoral manner." Torben was jailed for five years, though the verdict is not yet legally binding. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

A dead “vampire” star is feeding on a nearby companion and expelling cannonballs and its behaviour has left astronomers stunned. The dead star is located around 4,500 light-years away and, until now, has baffled astronomers with its unusual behaviour. It is a rapidly spinning neutron star, otherwise known as a pulsar, that has been given the name PSR J1023+0038, shortened to J1023. It emits radiation from both its poles that occasionally reach Earth and also appears to have two different “settings” of brightness. Initially, the behaviour of J1023 confused experts, but now they believe that the stark difference in brightness levels has to do with the star launching out matter over short spaces of time. Maria Cristina Baglio, leader of the research team and scientist at New York University, Abu Dhabi, said in a statement: “We have witnessed extraordinary cosmic events where enormous amounts of matter, similar to cosmic cannonballs, are launched into space within a very brief time span of tens of seconds from a small, dense celestial object rotating at incredibly high speeds.” In addition to the pulsar emitting matter, over the last 10 years, scientists have witnessed the star pulling material from its companion star. The material it is stealing forms a structure called an accretion disk that forms around the star itself. Since it began feeding, the star has been alternating between between “low” and “high” power modes. During moments of high power, the star shines brightly with a variation of X-rays, ultraviolet and visible light. During low power, it emits radio waves and appears much dimmer. In June 2021, experts witnessed a star shooting out hot, luminous matter that has been compared to a cosmic cannonball as the star continually switched modes. J1023 has fascinated experts, who have been able to explain the way the star behaves by observing it. Despite solving many of its mysteries, the scientists aren’t done with it yet. With the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in northern Chile currently under construction, it is hoped that when it is ready, scientists will once more be able to observe the pulsar. Sergio Campana, research co-author and Research Director at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics Brera Observatory, said: “The ELT will allow us to gain key insights into how the abundance, distribution, dynamics and energetics of the inflowing matter around the pulsar are affected by the mode switching behavior.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

A group of geologists has recently achieved a breakthrough in identifying potential sites for the formation of diamonds. Diamonds, the hardest naturally occurring material we have found, originate under the extreme conditions of immense pressure and high temperatures deep within the Earth's interior. These precious gems are occasionally pushed to the surface in molten rock formations known as kimberlite. However, there are currently two competing theories regarding what is responsible for this rush of kimberlite which brings diamonds to the surface. In a recent study, these theories were closely examined by a research team. In a piece for The Conversation study author and Associate Professor in Earth Science at the University of Southampton, Thomas Gernon explained: “one proposes that kimberlite magmas exploit the ‘wounds’ created when the Earth’s crust is stretched or when the slabs of solid rock covering the Earth - known as tectonic plates - split up.” “The other theory involves mantle plumes, colossal upwellings of molten rock from the core-mantle boundary, located about 2,900km [1,802] beneath the Earth’s surface.” However, neither of these theories adequately explains how magma manages to find its way through the Earth's crust, or the specific composition of the resulting kimberlite. By employing statistical analysis and machine learning, the team analysed the breakup of continents and its correlation with kimberlite formation. Their findings indicated that the majority of kimberlite volcanoes erupt 20 to 30 million years after tectonic breakup. “It also added a major clue,” Gernon explained. “Kimberlite eruptions tend to gradually migrate from the continental edges to the interiors over time at a rate that is uniform across the continents.” Delving deeper into their investigation through computer-generated models, the team ultimately concluded that diamond eruptions stem from a "domino effect." As continents gradually drift apart from each other, they generate rifts of thinned crust. As this happens, regions of thick, cold rock descend into the hot magma beneath, inducing an upsurge of the mantle, which in turn triggers a similar flow in nearby continents. Gernon elaborated on the team's findings, saying, "Various other results from our computer models then advance to show that this process can bring together the necessary ingredients in the right amounts to trigger just enough melting to generate gas-rich kimberlites,” Gernon explained. “Once formed, and with great buoyancy provided by carbon dioxide and water, the magma can rise rapidly to the surface carrying its precious cargo.” Moreover, the same methodology could potentially be employed to locate diamonds and other rare elements. “The processes triggering the eruptions that bring diamonds to the surface appear to be highly systematic,” Gernon siad. “They start on the edges of continents and migrate towards the interior at a relatively uniform rate.” The study is published in the journal Nature. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.