Photo credit: Colossal Biosciences
Colossal Biosciences, a startup working on bringing back animals that disappeared long ago, just announced they’ve “de-extincted” the dire wolf, a big, tough wolf that roamed North America over 12,500 years ago. It went extinct when the world changed and its food ran out. You might know dire wolves from Game of Thrones—they’re the cool, giant wolves in the show.
Researchers from the University of Auckland have captured a video of a real-life Sharktopus, or more specifically, an orange-hued octopus riding on the back of a large shortfin mako shark as it swam. How these two unlikely companions crossed paths remains a mystery. The team observed them for about ten minutes before leaving them to their journey, so we don’t know how their story ended—whether it was a brief hitchhiking stint or something more.
We may be decades away from artificial wombs, but one Australian man was able to leave St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney with a full titanium artificial heart from BiVACOR this past month. Officially called the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart (TAH), this device basically replaces both ventricles of the heart, taking over the pumping of blood to the body (systemic circulation) and lungs (pulmonary circulation).
Cortical Labs CL1 is touted as the world’s first biohybrid computer, or more specifically a synthetic biological intelligence machine capable of running on living human brain cells. The world these cells live in is created by the company’s Biological Intelligence Operating System (biOS) running a simulated world and sending information directly to the neurons about their environment.
Photo credit: USSF 30th Space Wing | Alex Valdez
NASA’s PUNCH mission is set to explore the mysteries of the Sun’s corona and most importantly, solar wind. It will launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California no later than Feb. 28, 2025, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and provide scientists with new information about how potentially disruptive solar events form as well as evolve.
Photo credit: David Jara Boguñá
Photographer David Jara Boguñá captured a rarely seen black seadevil anglerfish swimming near the surface off the coast of Tenerife, Spain last week. What makes this so odd is that these creatures are typically found at depths of 650 to 6,500 feet below the ocean’s surface, inhabiting the deep sea region known as the bathypelagic zone or “midnight zone”.
Photo credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Chengming Liu of Beihang University in China and his colleagues have discovered chorus waves in deep space that sound like chirping birds, or so we’d like to think. These peculiar bursts of energy called could pose problems for long-distance space travel.
Osaka University and Diponegoro University researchers believe that autonomous cyber cockroaches could one day be used for disaster response, similar to Toyota’s insect robot. Put simply, the cockroaches were equipped with sensors to detect movement and obstacles using an electronics package designed to work alongside their innate abilities, a bio-hybrid approach if you will.
