How a handful of prehistoric geniuses launched humanity’s technological revolution

For the first few million years of human evolution, technologies changed slowly. Some three million years ago, our ancestors were making chipped stone flakes and crude choppers. Two million years ago, hand-axes. A million years ago, primitive humans sometimes used fire, but with difficulty. Then, 500,000 years ago, technological change accelerated, as spearpoints, firemaking, axes, beads and bows appeared.
One person could literally change the course of history, with nothing more than an idea.

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Why Discovering 'Nothing' in Science Can Be So Incredibly Important

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Ocean Battery stores renewable energy at the bottom of the sea

As useful as renewable energy sources are, they need to be backed up by storage systems that hold energy for times when the Sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Ocean Battery is a new design for an energy storage system that functions a bit like a hydroelectric dam at the bottom of the sea: https://newatlas.com/energy/ocean-battery-renewable-energy-storage/

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In a Truly Historic Milestone, JWST Has Been Successfully Deployed! Now What?

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Ten Scientific Discoveries From 2021 That May Lead to New Inventions
From nanobots to cancer treatments, nature inspires a wide variety of innovations

In science, inspiration can come from anywhere.

A researcher might wonder about the thrust produced by butterfly wings as they flit through a meadow. Maybe watching squirrels navigate campus trees like parkour artists sparks curiosity about what goes through their furry little minds as they decide to jump from branch to branch. Others, of course, get their spark from less likely sources: analyzing shark intestines or studying how microscopic water bears walk.

These scenarios and more inspired scientists to take a closer look at the natural world this year, but their influence won’t stop there. Discoveries in nature often inspire new designs for water filtration, solar panels, building materials and lots and lots of robots.

Here are ten findings from 2021 that could one day lead to new inventions.

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Microbes in The Ocean Depths Can Make Oxygen Without Sun. This Discovery Could Be Huge

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A Rare, Isolated Script Invented From Scratch Holds Clues to The Evolution of Writing

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Evolution study suggests DNA mutations are less random than we thought

Chance plays a big part in evolution. Conventional thinking goes that DNA mutations will randomly arise in an organism’s genome, and if these new traits happen to help the organism survive and reproduce, then those mutations will be passed down to the next generation. Over a long enough period, the traits can become characteristic of a population or species.

But is there a pattern to where in the genome DNA mutations occur?
To investigate, researchers from UC Davis and the Max Planck Institute grew hundreds of thale cress plants in the lab, then sequenced their genomes and compared where DNA mutations had taken place – and a non-random pattern seemed to emerge.
“We always thought of mutation as basically random across the genome,” says Grey Monroe, lead author of the study. “It turns out that mutation is very non-random and it’s non-random in a way that benefits the plant. It’s a totally new way of thinking about mutation.

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There's a Hidden Mathematical 'Law' in The Sand Megaripples Found All Over Earth

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60 Million Fish Nests in Antarctica Found in Single Largest Breeding Colony to Date

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A new artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm has got your chess style pegged. AI software can already identify people by their voices or handwriting. Now, an AI has shown it can tag people based on their chess-playing behavior, an advance in the field of “stylometrics” that could help computers be better chess teachers or more humanlike in their game play. Alarmingly, the system could also be used to help identify and track people who think their online behavior is anonymous.

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This Ancient Peruvian Empire Put Hallucinogenics in Beer For Political Reasons

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