Too often seaweed is portrayed as a slimy, smelly nuisance that disrupts beach trips and ocean swims. In fact, seaweed, officially a type of marine algae, is an untapped resource that could transform the planet and our health. <\/p>\n
Loic Venance\/AFP\/Getty Images <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Seaweed grows fast and is nutrient-rich, can be made into an alternative to plastic and some textiles, and is a potential store of carbon that can absorb pollutants, according to \u201cThe Seaweed Revolution,\u201d a new book by Vincent Doumeizel, a senior adviser at the United Nations Global Compact on Oceans. <\/p>\n
As well as offering hope for the future, seaweed indelibly shaped our past, as a fascinating finding released this week has revealed. <\/p>\n
The bacterial gunk and food debris that builds up on teeth over time can be an invaluable source of information for archaeologists. <\/p>\n
This fossilized dental plaque \u2014 which can survive for millennia, particularly when it\u2019s from eras before modern dentistry \u2014 holds a trove of tantalizing information about diet and disease. <\/p>\n
A new study of biological markers contained in fossilized plaque found that, before they largely disappeared from Western diets, different types of seaweed were once a staple food for Europeans for thousands of years \u2014 even in some prehistoric landlocked communities. <\/p>\n
Space scientists have made an unexpected discovery in the atmosphere of a blazing-hot planet called WASP-17b, located 1,300 light-years from Earth. <\/p>\n
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of scientists detected tiny quartz crystals containing pure silica, a mineral that\u2019s common on Earth. The silicates that have been previously detected in exoplanet atmospheres are magnesium-based, not quartz, so this finding was unexpected. <\/p>\n
The revelation could help scientists get a broader sense of WASP-17b\u2019s composition and what the environment may be like on this captivating planet outside of our solar system. <\/p>\n
A University of Nebraska computer science student has won an unusual scientific contest. <\/p>\n
With the help of artificial intelligence and computer tomography, Luke Farritor was the first to decode a word written in ancient Greek on a scroll burnt to a crisp during the eruption of Vesuvius almost 2,000 years ago. <\/p>\n
The document was one of some 1,100 carbonized scrolls that were recovered from volcanic mud in the 1700s. The collection, known as the Herculaneum scrolls, is perhaps the largest known library from classical antiquity, but the documents\u2019 contents have remained a mystery. <\/p>\n
Being able to read just one word was a \u201cquantum leap forward,\u201d said papyrologist Michael McOsker of the University College London, who wasn\u2019t involved with the feat. Farritor was awarded $40,000, and another researcher who made the same discovery independently earned $10,000. <\/p>\n
Researchers are hopeful that it won\u2019t be long until entire scrolls can be deciphered using the technique. <\/p>\n
The finding that Neanderthals shaped our DNA in prehistoric sexual encounters with modern human ancestors was on its own a startling discovery, revealed by Nobel Prize winner Svante P\u00e4\u00e4bo more than a decade ago. <\/p>\n
However, so much is still unknown about this intriguing genetic legacy, including why Neanderthal DNA is slightly more abundant today in the genomes of East Asian populations than European ones. <\/p>\n
This discrepancy is perplexing because Neanderthal skeletal remains are found extensively across Europe and the Middle East but not farther east of the Altai Mountains in Central Asia. <\/p>\n
Now, a critical mass of invaluable data has allowed scientists to come up with an explanation for this puzzling inconsistency, and it comes down to a shift in how early hominins obtained their food. <\/p>\n
Caffeine crystals in a kaleidoscope of color. A tarantula\u2019s venomous fangs. Pink and green wing scales of a Chinese moon moth. <\/p>\n
These are some of the striking images commended in an international photography contest that capture the stunning beauty of life under a microscope. <\/p>\n
Now in its 49th year, the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition celebrates artistic prowess as well as technical perfection. <\/p>\n
The winning shot of a rodent\u2019s optic nerve head at 20 times magnification was taken by Hassanain Qambari, assisted by Jayden Dickson, at the Lions Eye Institute in Australia. Qambari studies an eye disease called diabetic retinopathy, which is a top cause of vision loss worldwide. <\/p>\n
Prepare to be awed by these fascinating stories. <\/p>\n
\u2014 Billions of snow crabs have gone missing from the ocean around Alaska in recent years.\u00a0Scientists now know what happened. <\/p>\n
\u2014 The \u201cMona Lisa\u201d is perhaps the world\u2019s most famous work of art, but we\u2019re still learning about the techniques Leonardo da Vinci employed to create it. <\/p>\n
\u2014 Astronomers detected a mysteriously distant and powerful blast of radio waves that has taken 8 billion years to reach Earth. <\/p>\n
And be on the lookout this weekend for the Orionid meteor shower, which is predicted to peak on Sunday. <\/p>\n\n
Too often seaweed is portrayed as a slimy, smelly nuisance that disrupts beach trips and ocean swims. In fact, seaweed, officially a type of marine algae, is an untapped resource that could transform the planet and our health. Farmer Jean-Marie Pedron picks edible seaweed along a beach of Le Croisic in western France in March <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10443,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-10442","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}