Researchers may have discovered direct evidence of a former sister planet that resided in our Solar System, but was obliterated during an unknown cataclysm that occurred billions of years ago. It is theorized that the Solar System may have had as many as ten such lost planets early in its history, but this new evidence takes such theories and brings them that much closer to reality.
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A research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a device that can listen to and transcribe a person’s otherwise silent inner voice, to make that information available to record or transmit electronically–all without the user having to utter a word.
The device, called "AlterEgo" by its designers, makes use of a specialized headset that wraps around the back of the user’s ear, with an extension placed along the jawline. It picks up on neuromuscular signals transmitted through the jaw and face, an unconscious result of the internal verbalizations being made by the individual. These signals are then interpreted by a machine-learning system that translates the patterns into words.
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"Life, as we know it."
In recent years, some members of the scientific community have begun to realize that this oft-repeated phrase encapsulates a concept that appears to have been limiting modern efforts to recognize signs of extraterrestrial life, both intelligent and primitive: our search efforts tend to focus on what is familiar to us, as opposed to our keeping an eye out for something that might be truly alien. Toward that end, a recently-published study has proposed that our inherent bias towards seeking the familiar may have been blinding us to evidence that has been staring us in the face all along.
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Two new studies on the health of ocean currents in the North Atlantic have found that a natural decrease in the flow of these currents that began in the mid-nineteenth century has been exacerbated by modern-day climate change, resulting in the weakest the North Atlantic’s currents have been in over 1,500 years.
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