Lifeboat Foundation

Soft, squishy, ancient spiders are hard to investigate — they don’t fossilise as easily as bones or exoskeletons. So you can imagine how excited researchers were to find 10 brand new spider fossils in a relatively unexplored area called the Jinju Formation.

The Jinju Formation is a geological area of South Korea from the Mesozoic era, between 252 and 66 million years ago. This new spate of fossils, which researchers from the Korea Polar Research Institute and the University of Kansas found in shale, has increased the number of known spiders in the Jinju Formation from just one to a whopping 11.

But two of these spider finds were even more exciting than the rest – their eyes still reflected light 110 million years after they died.

Continue reading “This Spider Has Been Dead For 110 Million Years, But Its Eyes Still Shine in The Dark” »

A new study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry is suggesting high iron levels in the brain may fundamentally trigger the progressive neurodegeneration associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. A clinical trial is now underway exploring whether Alzheimer’s-related cognitive decline can be slowed by lowering brain iron levels.

A starry sky on a warm summer’s night is a beautiful view to behold. We tend to focus mainly on the wonders of space—how it could save our planet, how we could make contact with other friendly civilizations, and how we could learn about natural marvels that we can only begin to imagine.

However, behind the twinkling lights hide some of the most dangerous phenomena that we, as a species, have ever witnessed. From burning balls of gas to violent bursts of deadly radiation, here are 10 terrifying ways that space could destroy civilization as we know it.

Korean tech giant Samsung officially announced its take on the growing foldable smartphone trend at its Galaxy Unpacked event today in San Francisco: the Samsung Galaxy Fold. The device will go on sale for $1,980 on April 26.

We first got a glimpse of the device in November, but the brand has likely been working on the concept for almost half a decade.

Watch Could Magnonics Spark the Extinction of Electronics?, a Tech video from Seeker.

The mice could hear almost as well as those that were born able to hear.

Try as you might, some events cannot be remembered. Known in psychology as memory blocking, the phenomenon has remained elusive since first described more than half a century ago. Now Donnelly Centre researchers have found that blocking is not due to problems with forming memories, as previously thought, but with memory recall—in worms at least.

By studying this process in the C. elegans worm, a creature only one millimeter long but whose biology has been studied so extensively that the position of all of its 302 nerve cells in the body is known, the researchers think they’ll be able to pinpoint the cells and molecules at play during learning and memory.

The findings are described in a study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

A team of scientists studying the brain have discovered a previously unidentified form of “wireless” neural communications in brain tissue.

Samsung announced the Galaxy Fold phone during a press event in San Francisco. It’s the first foldable phone consumers will be able to buy.