If life is proven to exist on Venus, it would be really exciting. Besides the obvious reason to be excited there’s also my thought: If in this planetary system two planets out of 98 have life on them, then that would mean that life isn’t as rare as we conceived it to be.
Edit: Had the tab open for a while without refreshing before posting, so I didn’t see the comment that says it’s just solar wind. :(
In this case, the carbon and oxygen are coming from a much more mundane source: the solar wind.
When high-energy particles from the solar wind collide with molecules in Venus’ upper atmosphere, they carry enough energy to break some of those molecules into their constituent atoms. Since the Venusian atmosphere is almost entirely CO2, you should expect this process to generate C and O ions — which is exactly what we’ve now observed!
So I’m no dolphin osteologist so can someone tell me how “cage-teeth” would be distinct from any more snaggle-tooth type of mouth? It seems interesting that they’d have any evidence to push them to that conclusion in the first place.
It had widely splayed teeth which are thought to have clasped around fish, like a wide basket, which is unusual because other ancient dolphins in the area usually used their teeth to strike prey,” said University of Otago paleontologist Shane Meekin.
I’m having difficulty imagining how it would actually function, but i believe it means more like to trap smaller prey species inside the mouth and then consume whole. Almost like a super early evolution that could lead to baleen plates in filter feeding whales, although I don’t know if those are actual modified teeth or not.
The authors liken the newly discovered hippocampal barcodes to computer hash codes, which are patterns assigned as unique identifiers to different events.
Could the birds be using something analogous to a spatial Bloom filter?
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