Did Spiders Evolved From The Ocean Before Adapting To Land?

One of the creepiest, crawliest creatures of the Earth may have been swimming freely before adapting to live on land, new research suggests.

Spiders and their arachnid relatives may have actually originated in the sea, according to analysis of an "exquisitely preserved" fossil that lived 500 million years ago. The findings were published last 22 July in the journal Current Biology.

Researchers at the University of Arizona completed a detailed analysis of the brain and central nervous system of an extinct animal called Mollisonia symmetrica, according to the study. The species was previously thought to represent an ancestral member of a specific group of arthropods called chelicerates that lived during the Cambrian period - between 540 and 485 million years ago. Chelicerates were believed to be ancestors to modern-day horseshoe crabs.

However, the scientists were surprised to discover that the neural arrangements in Mollisonia's fossilized brain are not organized like those in horseshoe crabs. Instead, they are organized the same way as in modern spiders and their relatives, the researchers said.

The anterior part of Mollisonia’s body - the prosoma - contains a radiating pattern of segmental ganglia that control the movements of five pairs of segmental appendages, the researchers said. In addition, an unsegmented brain extends short nerves to a pair of pincer-like "claws," similar to the fangs of spiders and other arachnids.

The decisive feature that demonstrates the fossil was likely an early arachnid is the unique organization of the brain - a reverse of the front-to-back arrangement found in present-day crustaceans, insects, centipedes and horseshoe crabs, the researchers said.

It's as if the brain has been "flipped backwards," which is what is seen in modern spiders," said Nick Strausfeld, a regents professor at the University of Arizona and lead author of the paper, in a statement.

This may be a crucial evolutionary development, as studies of existing spider brains suggest that a back-to-front arrangement in the brain provides shortcuts from neuronal control centers to underlying circuits, which control the spider's movements, said Frank Hirth, a reader of evolutionary neuroscience at King’s College London and co-author of the paper.

The arrangement likely helps the spiders hunt stealthily and dexterity for the spinning of webs.

Spiders and scorpions have existed for about 400 million years with little change - dominating the Earth as the most successful group of arthropodan predators.

The finding challenges the widely held belief that diversification occurred only after a common ancestor had moved to the shore, according to the study. Previous fossil records appeared to indicate that arachnids lived and diversified exclusively on land.

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Tests Continue For Space Force Plane

The long-running, secretive X-37B spaceplane project has a new mission on the books, according to the US Space Force.

On 21 August, the Boeing-developed X37 aircraft will take its eighth flight with a mission designation of Orbital Test Vehicle-8 (OTV-8). The mission is designed to test key navigation and communication technologies that could help US aircraft and aerospace vehicles operate as enemies deny GPS navigation and radio-based communication.

Boeing has worked on the X37 since 1999, though the spaceplane didn't fly for the first time until 2010. Designed as a long-term orbital craft, it is also entirely reusable and recoverable, able to land in much the same way as the Space Shuttle that inspired its design. It is the smallest and lightest orbital spaceplane yet flown, and it's already demonstrated the ability to remain in orbit for over 900 days, showcasing its resilience to spacebound dangers and long-term reliability.

The next launch is scheduled to take place within the next few weeks, though an exact date has not been confirmed. It will see the latest version of the spaceplane, the X-37B, launching atop a Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket for the first time.

A big component of this launch is testing redundancies. As military conflicts have increasingly leveraged denial technologies like GPS and radio jamming, the X-37B will perform key tests on technologies that can still operate in these environments. One of them will be a GPS-free navigation system that uses a quantum inertial sensor. Operating like a traditional accelerator and gyroscope, the system will be far more accurate thanks to its ability to track the quantum properties of atoms.

This flight will also incorporate a secondary experiment aimed at testing laser-based communications. Fellow Expanse fans might think of this a little like "tightbeam" technology, in which a laser beam conveys information in a direct line to a receiver, rather than using more traditional wireless radio-based communications. It will leverage a network of inter-satellite laser communications systems, highlighting the Space Force's resilience to interrupted communications.

"OTV-8’s laser communications demonstration will mark an important step in the US Space Force’s ability to leverage commercial space networks as part of proliferated, diversified, and redundant space architectures," said General Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations (via SpaceNews).

This flight will also be part of continuing posturing between the United States and China, which has its own reusable spaceplane program. Known as the Shenlong, it has also demonstrated long orbital survival, runway landings, and a range of undisclosed payload transportation capabilities.

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AI Helps Decipher Ancient Roman Text

There are around 1,500 Latin inscriptions that are discovered every year, offering an invaluable view into the daily life of ancient Romans -- and posing a daunting challenge for the historians tasked with interpreting them.

But a new artificial intelligence tool, partly developed by Google researchers, can now help Latin scholars piece together these puzzles from the past, according to a study published last 23 July.

Inscriptions in Latin were commonplace across the Roman world, from laying out the decrees of emperors to graffiti on the city streets. One mosaic outside a home in the ancient city of Pompeii even warns: "Beware of the dog".

These inscriptions are "so precious to historians because they offer first-hand evidence of ancient thought, language, society and history", said study co-author Yannis Assael, a researcher at Google's AI lab DeepMind.

"What makes them unique is that they are written by the ancient people themselves across all social classes on any subject. It's not just history written by the elite," Assael, who co-designed the AI model, told a press conference.

However these texts have often been damaged over the millennia.

"We usually don't know where and when they were written," Assael said.

So the researchers created a generative neural network, which is an AI tool that can be trained to identify complex relationships between types of data.

They named their model Aeneas, after the Trojan hero and son of the Greek goddess Aphrodite.

It was trained on data about the dates, locations and meanings of Latin transcriptions from an empire that spanned five million square kilometres over two millennia.

Thea Sommerschield, an epigrapher at the University of Nottingham who co-designed the AI model, said that "studying history through inscriptions is like solving a gigantic jigsaw puzzle".

"You can't solve the puzzle with a single isolated piece, even though you know information like its colour or its shape," she explained.

"To solve the puzzle, you need to use that information to find the pieces that connect to it."

Latin scholars have to compare inscriptions against "potentially hundreds of parallels", a task which "demands extraordinary erudition" and "laborious manual searches" through massive library and museum collections, the study in the journal Nature said.

The researchers trained their model on 176,861 inscriptions -- worth up to 16 million characters -- five percent of which contained images.

It can now estimate the location of an inscription among the 62 Roman provinces, offer a decade when it was produced and even guess what missing sections might have contained, they said.

To test their model, the team asked Aeneas to analyse a famous inscription called "Res Gestae Divi Augusti", in which Rome's first emperor Augustus detailed his accomplishments.

Debate still rages between historians about when exactly the text was written.

Though the text is riddled with exaggerations, irrelevant dates and erroneous geographical references, the researchers said that Aeneas was able to use subtle clues such as archaic spelling to land on two possible dates -- the two being debated between historians.

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Can You Really Safely Jump Into A Black Hole?

In a finding copied from "Interstellar", scientists say humans can indeed explore black holes firsthand. The catch? If you’re going to jump into a black hole, don’t plan on ever jumping back out into our universe.

"A human can do this only if the respective black hole is supermassive and isolated, and if the person entering the black hole does not expect to report the findings to anyone in the entire Universe," Grinnell College physicists explain in a new article in The Conversation.

That’s because of special physics found in supermassive black holes, resulting in a combination of gravity and event horizon that wouldn’t instantaneously pull the human being into a very dead piece of spaghetti.

Because supermassive black holes are much bigger than stellar and intermediate black holes, all the parts of them are more spread out. A person falling in would make it to the event horizon—the border of the black hole beyond which not even light can escape, and where gravity is so strong that light will orbit the black hole like planets orbit stars—a lot sooner than in a smaller black hole.

The person would stay cognizant and intact for longer. But, of course, they would never emerge—making this a one-way rollercoaster ride of scientific discovery into oblivion.

Why does the math work this way? It’s a matter of facts about black holes of different sizes, the researchers say:

"For a black hole with a mass of our Sun (one solar mass), the event horizon will have a radius of just under 2 miles. The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, by contrast, has a mass of roughly 4 million solar masses, and it has an event horizon with a radius of 7.3 million miles or 17 solar radii. This implies, due to the closeness of the black hole's center, that the black hole's pull on a person will differ by a factor of 1,000 billion times between head and toe, depending on which is leading the free fall."

This means avoiding "spaghettification" and a safe, gentle float past the event horizon.

Why does stuff go in but never come out? Well, scientists have only begun to understand the specific instances in which black holes eject energy or information—and that’s unlikely to ever take the form of a missive, or even Morse code message, from a disappearing astronaut. Those black holes are very old, for example, with different physics than this special case.

But, like in "Interstellar", our imaginations reel at the idea of studying a black hole from the inside. Perhaps in some far future, someone will invent the right kind of tether to pull someone back out. And in that case, we can confirm some of the facts of life in a black hole, time dilation or not.

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Chinese Device Can Extract Oxygen, Water And Fuel From The Moon

Chinese scientists and researchers claimed that they've devised a new way to extract water from lunar soil and convert it into fuel.

As detailed in a new paper published today in the journal Joule, the team found that their proposed "photothermal strategy" — essentially converting light into heat — could effectively convert carbon dioxide from extracted water into carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and oxygen gas, a "potential route for sustaining human life on the Moon and enabling long-term extraterrestrial exploration."

"The sustainable utilization of local resources is essential for long-term human survival on the Moon and beyond," the researchers write, pointing out that bringing water from Earth is cost-prohibitive at roughly US$ 83,000 per gallon.

"We never fully imagined the 'magic' that the lunar soil possessed," said Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen professor and coauthor Lu Wang in a statement.

"The biggest surprise for us was the tangible success of this integrated approach," he added. "The one-step integration of lunar H2O extraction and photothermal CO2 catalysis could enhance energy utilization efficiency and decrease the cost and complexity of infrastructure development."

While plenty of questions remain about our future efforts to harness local resources on the surface of the Moon, it's a glimmer of hope that humanity could indeed establish a more permanent and potentially sustainable presence there.

For their research, the team focused on simplifying existing proposals for how to extract water from lunar regolith, which tend to be energy-intensive and stop short of breaking the water down into its usable elements.

The researchers also propose using the extracted water to turn carbon dioxide exhaled by astronauts into carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas, which could be used to make fuels.

The team tested their photothermal approach on actual Moon samples gathered during China's Chang'E-5 mission, which launched in November 2020, and collected samples from the northwest of the Moon's near side before returning to Earth.

While their lab-based experiments turned out to be a success, the actual lunar surface will likely prove a far more challenging place to extract and convert lunar water. As the paper points out, radiation, low gravity, and extreme temperature fluctuations could complicate matters significantly.

However, the advancements highlight how far the Chinese space program has come in a matter of years. A mere two decades ago, China was a distant underdog in the international space race. But now that the country is launching its own astronauts to space while the Trump administration is effectively looking to eviscerate NASA when it comes to space science, China could stand a chance to surpass the US in its plans to build a Moon base by 2035.

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