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Gabrielblold

21 Apr 2025 - 05:10 pm

Axolotl problems
As Mexico City grew and became more industrialized, the need for water brought pumps and pipes to the lake, and eventually, “it was like a bad, smelly pond with rotten water,” Zambrano said. “All of our aquatic animals suffer with bad water quality, but amphibians suffer more because they have to breathe with the skin.”
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To add to the axolotls’ problems, invasive fish species such as carp and tilapia were introduced to the lake, where they feed on axolotl eggs. And a 1985 earthquake in Mexico City displaced thousands of people, who found new homes in the area around the lake, further contributing to the destruction of the axolotls’ habitat.

These combined threats have devastated axolotl populations. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, there are fewer than 100 adult axolotls left in the wild. The species is considered critically endangered.
While the wild axolotls of Lake Xochimilco have dwindled to near-extinction, countless axolotls have been bred for scientific laboratories and the pet trade. “The axolotl essentially helped establish the field of experimental zoology,” Voss said.

In 1864, a French army officer brought live axolotls back to Europe, where scientists were surprised to learn that the seemingly juvenile aquatic salamanders were capable of reproduction. Since then, scientists around the world have studied axolotls and their DNA to learn about the salamanders’ unusual metamorphosis (or lack thereof) as well as their ability to regrow injured body parts.
In addition to their role in labs, axolotls have become popular in the exotic pet trade (though they are illegal to own in California, Maine, New Jersey and Washington, DC). However, the axolotls you might find at a pet shop are different from their wild relatives in Lake Xochimilco. Most wild axolotls are a dark grayish brown. The famous pink axolotls, as well as other color variants such as white, blue, yellow and black, are genetic anomalies that are rare in the wild but selectively bred for in the pet trade.

What’s more, “most of the animals in the pet trade have a very small genetic variance,” Zambrano said. Pet axolotls tend to be inbred and lack the wide flow of different genes that makes up a healthy population in the wild. That means that the axolotl extinction crisis can’t simply be solved by dumping pet axolotls into Lake Xochimilco. (Plus, the pet axolotls likely wouldn’t fare well with the poor habitat conditions in the lake.)

Fame and misfortune
The difficulties that axolotls face in the wild are almost diametrically opposed to the fame they’ve found in recent years. Axolotls have captured the human imagination for centuries, as evidenced by their roles in Aztec religion and stories, but the early 21st century seems to be a high point for them. An axolotl graces the 50 peso bill. There are axolotl-inspired Pokemon, and Reddit commenters have noted that the character Toothless from the “How to Train Your Dragon” movie series is distinctly axolotl-like.

The introduction of axolotls to Minecraft in 2021 neatly mapped onto an uptick in Google searches for the animals, and social media makes it easy for people to gain access to photos and videos of the salamanders, particularly the photogenic pink ones often kept as pets.

The axolotl pet trade probably doesn’t directly harm the wild populations since wild salamanders aren’t being poached or taken from Lake Xochimilco. However, Zambrano said, axolotls’ ubiquity in pop culture and pet stores might make people assume that because axolotls “live in all the tanks around the world, they are not in danger.”

Allannip

21 Apr 2025 - 04:55 pm

Why axolotls seem to be everywhere — except in the one lake they call home
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Scientist Dr. Randal Voss gets the occasional reminder that he’s working with a kind of superstar. When he does outreach events with his laboratory, he encounters people who are keen to meet his research subjects: aquatic salamanders called axolotls.

The amphibians’ fans tell Voss that they know the animals from the internet, or from caricatures or stuffed animals, exclaiming, “‘They’re so adorable, we love them,’” said Voss, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. “People are drawn to them.”

Take one look at an axolotl, and it’s easy to see why it’s so popular. With their wide eyes, upturned mouths and pastel pink coloring, axolotls look cheerful and vaguely Muppet-like.

They’ve skyrocketed in pop culture fame, in part thanks to the addition of axolotls to the video game Minecraft in 2021. These unusual salamanders are now found everywhere from Girl Scout patches to hot water bottles. But there’s more to axolotls than meets the eye: Their story is one of scientific discovery, exploitation of the natural world, and the work to rebuild humans’ connection with nature.

A scientific mystery
Axolotl is a word from Nahuatl, the Indigenous Mexican language spoken by the Aztecs and an estimated 1.5 million people today. The animals are named for the Aztec god Xolotl, who was said to transform into a salamander. The original Nahuatl pronunciation is “AH-show-LOAT”; in English, “ACK-suh-LAHT-uhl” is commonly used.
Axolotls are members of a class of animals called amphibians, which also includes frogs. Amphibians lay their jelly-like eggs in water, and the eggs hatch into water-dwelling larval states. (In frogs, these larvae are called tadpoles.)

Most amphibians, once they reach adulthood, are able to move to land. Since they breathe, in part, by absorbing oxygen through their moist skin, they tend to stay near water.

Axolotls, however, never complete the metamorphosis to a land-dwelling adult form and spend their whole lives in the water.

“They maintain their juvenile look throughout the course of their life,” Voss said. “They’re teenagers, at least in appearance, until they die.”

Williamgow

21 Apr 2025 - 03:43 pm

New design revealed for Airbus hydrogen plane
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In travel news this week: Bhutan’s spectacular new airport, the world’s first 3D-printed train station has been built in Japan, plus new designs for Airbus’ zero-emission aircraft and France’s next-generation high-speed trains.

Grand designs
European aerospace giant Airbus has revealed a new design for its upcoming fully electric, hydrogen-powered ZEROe aircraft. powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

The single-aisle plane now has four engines, rather than six, each powered by their own fuel cell stack.

The reworked design comes after the news that the ZEROe will be in our skies later than Airbus hoped.

The plan was to launch a zero-emission aircraft by 2035, but now the next-generation single-aisle aircraft is slated to enter service in the second half of the 2030s.

Over in Asia, the Himalayan country of Bhutan is building a gloriously Zen-like new airport befitting a nation with its very own happiness index.

Gelephu International is designed to serve a brand new “mindfulness city,” planned for southern Bhutan, near its border with India.

In rail travel, Japan has just built the world’s first 3D-printed train station, which took just two and a half hours to construct, according to The Japan Times. That’s even shorter than the whizzy six hours it was projected to take.

France’s high-speed TGV rail service has revealed its next generation of trains, which will be capable of reaching speeds of up to 320 kilometers an hour (nearly 200 mph).

The stylish interiors have been causing a stir online, as has the double-decker dining car.

Finally, work is underway in London on turning a mile-long series of secret World War II tunnels under a tube station into a major new tourist attraction. CNN took a look inside.

Jeffreymiz

21 Apr 2025 - 03:18 pm

Lunar clockwork
What scientists know for certain is that they need to get precision timekeeping instruments to the moon.
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Exactly who pays for lunar clocks, which type of clocks will go, and where they’ll be positioned are all questions that remain up in the air, Gramling said.

“We have to work all of this out,” she said. “I don’t think we know yet. I think it will be an amalgamation of several different things.”
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Atomic clocks, Gramling noted, are great for long-term stability, and crystal oscillators have an advantage for short-term stability.
“You never trust one clock,” Gramling added. “And you never trust two clocks.”

Clocks of various types could be placed inside satellites that orbit the moon or perhaps at the precise locations on the lunar surface that astronauts will one day visit.

As for price, an atomic clock worthy of space travel could cost around a few million dollars, according Gramling, with crystal oscillators coming in substantially cheaper.

But, Patla said, you get what you pay for.

“The very cheap oscillators may be off by milliseconds or even 10s of milliseconds,” he added. “And that is important because for navigation purposes — we need to have the clocks synchronized to 10s of nanoseconds.”

A network of clocks on the moon could work in concert to inform the new lunar time scale, just as atomic clocks do for UTC on Earth.

(There will not, Gramling added, be different time zones on the moon. “There have been conversations about creating different zones, with the answer: ‘No,’” she said. “But that could change in the future.”)

Virgiltitle

21 Apr 2025 - 03:16 pm

Space, time: The continual question
If time moves differently on the peaks of mountains than the shores of the ocean, you can imagine that things get even more bizarre the farther away from Earth you travel.
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To add more complication: Time also passes slower the faster a person or spacecraft is moving, according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

Astronauts on the International Space Station, for example, are lucky, said Dr. Bijunath Patla, a theoretical physicist with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, in a phone interview. Though the space station orbits about 200 miles (322 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, it also travels at high speeds — looping the planet 16 times per day — so the effects of relativity somewhat cancel each other out, Patla said. For that reason, astronauts on the orbiting laboratory can easily use Earth time to stay on schedule.
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For other missions — it’s not so simple.

Fortunately, scientists already have decades of experience contending with the complexities.

Spacecraft, for example, are equipped with their own clocks called oscillators, Gramling said.

“They maintain their own time,” Gramling said. “And most of our operations for spacecraft — even spacecraft that are all the way out at Pluto, or the Kuiper Belt, like New Horizons — (rely on) ground stations that are back on Earth. So everything they’re doing has to correlate with UTC.”
But those spacecraft also rely on their own kept time, Gramling said. Vehicles exploring deep into the solar system, for example, have to know — based on their own time scale — when they are approaching a planet in case the spacecraft needs to use that planetary body for navigational purposes, she added.

For 50 years, scientists have also been able to observe atomic clocks that are tucked aboard GPS satellites, which orbit Earth about 12,550 miles (20,200 kilometers) away — or about one-nineteenth the distance between our planet and the moon.

Studying those clocks has given scientists a great starting point to begin extrapolating further as they set out to establish a new time scale for the moon, Patla said.

“We can easily compare (GPS) clocks to clocks on the ground,” Patla said, adding that scientists have found a way to gently slow GPS clocks down, making them tick more in-line with Earth-bound clocks. “Obviously, it’s not as easy as it sounds, but it’s easier than making a mess.”

Jasonrof

21 Apr 2025 - 02:53 pm

Water and life
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Lightning is a dramatic display of electrical power, but it is also sporadic and unpredictable. Even on a volatile Earth billions of years ago, lightning may have been too infrequent to produce amino acids in quantities sufficient for life — a fact that has cast doubt on such theories in the past, Zare said.

Water spray, however, would have been more common than lightning. A more likely scenario is that mist-generated microlightning constantly zapped amino acids into existence from pools and puddles, where the molecules could accumulate and form more complex molecules, eventually leading to the evolution of life.

“Microdischarges between obviously charged water microdroplets make all the organic molecules observed previously in the Miller-Urey experiment,” Zare said. “We propose that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules that constitute the building blocks of life.”

However, even with the new findings about microlightning, questions remain about life’s origins, he added. While some scientists support the notion of electrically charged beginnings for life’s earliest building blocks, an alternative abiogenesis hypothesis proposes that Earth’s first amino acids were cooked up around hydrothermal vents on the seafloor, produced by a combination of seawater, hydrogen-rich fluids and extreme pressure.

Researchers identified salt minerals in the Bennu samples that were deposited as a result of brine evaporation from the asteroid’s parent body. In particular, they found a number of sodium salts, such as the needles of hydrated sodium carbonate highlighted in purple in this false-colored image – salts that could easily have been compromised if the samples had been exposed to water in Earth’s atmosphere.

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Yet another hypothesis suggests that organic molecules didn’t originate on Earth at all. Rather, they formed in space and were carried here by comets or fragments of asteroids, a process known as panspermia.

“We still don’t know the answer to this question,” Zare said. “But I think we’re closer to understanding something more about what could have happened.”

Though the details of life’s origins on Earth may never be fully explained, “this study provides another avenue for the formation of molecules crucial to the origin of life,” Williams said. “Water is a ubiquitous aspect of our world, giving rise to the moniker ‘Blue Marble’ to describe the Earth from space. Perhaps the falling of water, the most crucial element that sustains us, also played a greater role in the origin of life on Earth than we previously recognized.”

Danielgab

21 Apr 2025 - 02:53 pm

‘White Lotus’ villain Jon Gries reveals the true crimes that inspired his twisty take on Greg/Gary
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When Season 3 of “The White Lotus” premiered last month, the shock was palpable when returning character Belinda recognized a familiar face at the resort in Thailand: Greg Hunt, the wily suitor of the late Tanya McQuoid.

As the season has unfolded, Greg (played by Jon Gries) has emerged as an antagonist, particularly after Belinda dove into the investigation surrounding Tanya’s death and learned that Greg, who now goes by Gary, evaded questioning by authorities.

On a show famous for reinventing itself, the same has been asked of the actor, who says that playing the ever-shifting character has been a welcome challenge and, like “White Lotus” itself, full of twists.

“In the beginning, I totally played him for a guy who was, you know, on his last legs,” Gries said in a recent interview with CNN, referencing Greg’s very apparent ill health in the first season of “White Lotus,” which premiered to rave reviews in summer 2021. He added: “When you play a character, you want to find his empathetic side, and you want to understand where they came from, and what got them to where they are.”

But when he was contacted by creator Mike White about appearing in Season 2, Gries realized he would have to adjust his framing of Greg, despite having previously imagined a “comprehensive history” for him on his own.

“(White) said, ‘I’m writing it right now, and I’m writing you, and I just need to know here and now: If you’re in, I’ll continue writing. If not, I’ll stop,’” Gries recalled.

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Kennethdrile

21 Apr 2025 - 12:02 pm

Challenging our perceptions of ‘perfection’
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With health influencers raising the bar for success, the wellness space now often feels like a performative space where people strive to showcase peak physical and mental strength.

While seeing others’ achievements can be motivating, it can also be discouraging if your progress doesn’t match theirs.

Each person is chasing the perfect version of themselves — whether it’s a body or a lifestyle — which is dangerous because this is typically an impossible or dangerous version to achieve, Curran said. He added that this type of comparison creates a dangerous cycle in which people constantly feel dissatisfied with their own progress.

“It’s a fantasy in many ways, and once you start chasing after it, you constantly find yourself embroiled in a sense of doubt and deficit,” he said.

Curran also noted that wellness challenges can be particularly damaging for women who struggle with perfectionism, as they tend to be bombarded with impossible beauty standards and societal expectations.

Renee McGregor, a UK-based dietitian who specializes in eating disorders and athlete performance, encourages people to approach wellness trends with curiosity and skepticism. That’s because some influencers and celebrities could be promoting products because there’s a financial benefit for them.

“The thing to ask yourself about the person you’re taking advice from is what do they gain from it?” McGregor said. “If they are going to gain financially, then you know that they (could be willing) to sell you a lie.”
Whether you want to try a new challenge or product that promises amazing results, McGregor suggests doing your research and seeking diverse perspectives, including consulting with doctors when possible.