Bampot

Rescue operations involving volunteers under way in Stilfontein amid reports that hundreds are still trapped underground.

Two men have been pulled out from an abandoned gold mine in South Africa after a court ordered the police to lift a blockade and allow the rescue of hundreds of workers believed to be involved in “illegal” mining activities.

Rescue operations involving volunteers were under way on Sunday in Stilfontein, southwest of the executive capital Pretoria, according to Al Jazeera correspondent Haru Mutasa, reporting from the site.

The primates in Pineda-Munoz and Alroy (2014) dataset are specialized plant-eaters. There is little argument that meat was not the main food of early hominins, but it appears that at least 3.2 Mya, australopiths may have increased the portion of meat in their diet.

The appearance of the genus Homo was associated with a gradual increase of the animal component in the diet. Early Homo has initially expanded the diet from major reliance on plant foods to scavenging of bone marrow and brains and meat. Consistent signs of increased concentration on animal-sourced foods appear in H. erectus .

Most of the evidence that has been collected and analyzed in this article points to a carnivore trophic level for humans during most of the Paleolithic, starting with H. erectus.

In this study, we present the utilization of urinary miRNAs derived from urinary EVs, including exosomes, captured by nanowires.

The nanowires could capture more than 99% of the EVs in urine, and the captured EVs had expression of the membrane proteins (CD63, CD81, and CD9).

Moreover, the nanowire-based method showed the ability to extract about 2500 species of urinary miRNAs.

Compared with serum miRNA species, the urinary miRNA species extracted by the nanowire-based method showed almost the same number of miRNA species, meaning that urine includes almost all human miRNAs. And, we used the identified urinary miRNA ensembles to distinguish lung cancer and noncancer subjects with an AUROC of 0.997; even when the lung cancer was stage I, an AUROC of 0.987 was achieved.

These results suggested that miRNAs are transferred via blood circulation and nonselectively filtered out by kidneys. Furthermore, we used identified miRNA ensembles to distinguish three classifications among brain tumor, lung cancer, and noncancer subjects with 86% sensitivity and 93% specificity.

The rod-shaped tuberculosis (TB) bacterium, which the World Health Organization has once again ranked as the top infectious disease killer globally, is the first single-celled organism ever observed to maintain a consistent growth rate throughout its life cycle. These findings, reported by Tufts University School of Medicine researchers on November 15 in the journal Nature Microbiology, overturn core beliefs of bacterial cell biology and hint at why the deadly pathogen so readily outmaneuvers our immune system and antibiotics.

The most basic thing you can study in bacteria is how they grow and divide, yet our study reveals that the TB pathogen is playing by a completely different set of rules compared to easier-to-study model organisms.

These experiments showed that the TB bacterium doesn't follow expected patterns of cell growth. In other bacterial species, growth is exponential, which means cells grow slower when they are smaller. For TB bacteria, growth rates can be the same whether they are newly born (and small) or far along in their cell cycle and soon to divide.

A Pakistani province declared a health emergency Friday due to smog and imposed a shutdown in two major cities.

Smog has choked Punjab for weeks, sickening nearly 2 million people and shrouding vast swathes of the province in a toxic haze.

Time off for medical staff is cancelled, all education institutions are shut until further notice, restaurants are closing at 4 p.n. while takeaway is available up until 8 p.m. Authorities are imposing a lockdown in the cities of Multan and Lahore and halting construction work in those two places.

"Smog is currently a national disaster," Aurangzeb said. "It will not all be over in a month or a year. We will evaluate the situation after three days and then announce a further strategy."

Average air quality index readings in parts of Lahore, a city of 11 million, exceeded 600 on Friday. Anything over 300 is considered hazardous to health.

The 2023 Planetary Defense Strategy focuses on six goals in total across Federal Departments and Agencies for the decade ahead:

Goal 1: Enhance NEO detection, tracking, and characterization capabilities. Early detection and tracking of a potential NEO impact threat provides the greatest leverage to adequately respond in time to prevent loss of life and damage to critical infrastructure.

Goal 2: Improve NO modeling, prediction, and information integration. Departments and Agencies will coordinate the development of validated modeling tools and simulation capabilities that aid in characterizing and mitigating NO impact risks while integrating and streamlining data flows to support effective decision-making.

Goal 3: Develop technologies for NO reconnaissance, deflection, and disruption missions. NASA will continue to lead development of technologies that could potentially be used in fast-response NEO reconnaissance missions and timely missions to deflect or disrupt hazardous NEOS.

Goal 4: Increase international cooperation on NO preparedness. The potentially cataclysmic consequences of a NEO impact, independent of national borders and geopolitical dynamics, presents special opportunity for engagement with the international community to foster cooperation in joint research and response efforts.

Goal 5: Strengthen and routinely exercise NO impact emergency procedures and action protocols. The United States will strengthen and exercise procedures and protocols for assessment of NO threats, communication-including to the public and international community-regarding threats, and response and recovery activities.

Goal 6: Improve U.S. management of planetary defense through enhanced interagency collaboration. Actions under this goal will improve ongoing coordination and implementation on projects across Federal agency boundaries.

The dream of traversing the depths of space and planting the seed of human civilization on another planet has existed for generations. For long as we’ve known that most stars in the Universe are likely to have their own system of planets, there have been those who advocated that we explore them (and even settle on them). With the dawn of the Space Age, this idea was no longer just the stuff of science fiction and became a matter of scientific study. Unfortunately, the challenges of venturing beyond Earth and reaching another star system are myriad.

When it comes down to it, there are only two ways to send crewed missions to exoplanets. The first is to develop advanced propulsion systems that can achieve relativistic speeds (a fraction of the speed of light). The second involves building spacecraft that can sustain crews for generations – aka. a Generation Ship (or Worldship). On November 1st, 2024, Project Hyperion launched a design competition for crewed interstellar travel via generation ships that would rely on current and near-future technologies. The competition is open to the public and will award a total of $10,000 (USD) for innovative concepts.

Saber-toothed cats are iconic creatures often seen in museum dioramas, displays of fossil skeletons, and even the movie Ice Age. Now, for the first time one of these extinct predators has been spotted in the flesh. In a study published this week in Scientific Reports, researchers describe the frozen body of a saber-toothed kitten preserved for 37,000 years in the Siberian permafrost.

The carcass—containing the head, forelimbs, and front part of the animal—was discovered encased in a chunk of ice in 2020 near the Badyarikha River in northern Siberia, above the Arctic Circle. Radiocarbon dating revealed the cat—belonging to the species Homotherium latidens—lived in the late Pleistocene epoch 35,500 to 37,000 years ago.

Based on the emergence of its baby incisor teeth, researchers estimate the cub was about 3 weeks old when it died.

The search for clues after a U.S. Air Force F-16 Viper fighter brought down a still-unidentified object over Lake Huron in February 2023 did result in the recovery of debris it has been disclosed. However, it remains unclear whether or not the wreckage was from that shootdown. The new details continue to raise more questions about the downing of this and two other mystery objects that same month in American and Canadian skies, and why more information has not been made public.

Fun Facts about Teeth across the Animal Kingdom

Two competing theories about the evolutionary origins of teeth have been battling back and forth for decades, vacillating with the latest supporting discoveries in developmental biology or the fossil record. The “outside-in” hypothesis suggests that toothlike dermal scales with pulplike centers covered in hardened mineral—similar to denticles found today—gradually migrated across the body’s exterior surface over successive generations of fish before moving inward to take up residence in our ancestors’ jawbones. The “inside-out” hypothesis suggests that teeth originated internally before migrating forward in the oral cavity to become oral teeth.

An investigation of a fossilized sawtooth shark’s rostral denticles (the “teeth” on the fish’s sawlike bill) showed complex internal structures incredibly similar to those found in shark teeth. This discovery suggests that the developmental gap between dermal scales and teeth is smaller than originally thought, edging the outside-in hypothesis ahead of inside-out once more.

The Pentagon provided new details today about how its deployable, readily reconfigurable suite of sensors called GREMLIN works to help set the stage for figuring out what unidentified objects in our skies are and are not, if they appear at all.

In its annual report released on Thursday, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) shared a graphic that gives us our best look yet at what its GREMLIN system is. It was developed by Georgia Tech Research Institute specifically to help gather data about so-called unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs. That’s the DoD’s new parlance for what used to be called UFOs.

Last year the British spotter group UFO Identified documented 395 UK sightings - and you can see what UFO encounters have been reported where you live using our interactive map.