The pharmaceutical company Novavax announced that its COVID-19 vaccine is 90 percent effective, potentially making it a powerful additional tool in the global fight to stop the coronavirus pandemic.

Novavax uses a different kind of technology than the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines that have already been distributed to much of the country, The Verge reports. Instead of using mRNA to instruct the immune system on how to fight off the coronavirus, the Novavax vaccine exposes the immune system to pieces of the virus’ spike protein so that it can prepare antibodies in advance.

Novavax plans to submit its vaccine to the FDA for authorization this fall but it may run into roadblocks inadvertently caused by Pfizer and Moderna, according to The Verge. The two companies are vying for full approval from the regulatory agency. If either gets it, the accelerated emergency authorization pathway that they used to get their shots into people’s arms sooner would be taken away from any vaccines that come after — Novavax included.

If the FDA does approve the Novavax vaccine in some shape or form, we may witness an interesting moment in the battle against medical misinformation.

A great deal of the fearmongering myths surrounding the coronavirus vaccines that we have today have focused on the fact that mRNA technology is comparatively new; bad actors have spouted nonsense about the vaccines somehow altering people’s genetic code. Therefore, there’s a glimmer of hope that approving and offering a vaccine that uses a different underlying technology might inspire some of the vaccine-hesitant folks out there to actually get inoculated. Of course, anti-vaxxers posed a serious societal threat long before the COVID-19 pandemic and will probably continue to be a problem well into the future, so we may simply find ourselves combatting all-new conspiracy theories and medical misinformation instead.

Still, all anti-vaxxer speculation aside, the new Novavax data is great news for the battle against the coronavirus pandemic. Beyond from the obvious benefit of having more vaccine choices, The Verge notes that the pharmaceutical company has already cut a 1.1 billion dose deal with the global vaccine distribution program COVAX to help get more people in low-income countries vaccinated.

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Providing schoolchildren with nutritious lunches for free seems to have outstanding benefits that last throughout their lives, according to a new study.

A team of Swedish scientists decided to investigate the country’s free lunch program to see what impacts it actually had on kids. Their research, which was published last month in the journal The Review of Economic Studies, found that students with access to the program grew taller, stayed healthier throughout life, and even earned more money over the course of their careers than those who didn’t — a shocking result that illustrates the benefits of providing universal welfare programs.

“Our study shows that universal efforts that provide children with nutritious meals can be seen as a long-term investment,” Stockholm University economist and study coauthor Dan-Olof Rooth said in a press release. “In other words: Ensuring that children eat well also pays off later in life in terms of health, education, and income.”

On average, students who got free lunches over the course of their educations grew a centimeter taller than those who didn’t and had three percent higher incomes later in life. Those benefits were even more pronounced among children from lower-income families who may not have had access to as high-quality meals at home — their incomes climbed by six percent.

“Today, we take school lunches for granted in Sweden. But the fact is, it was a very conscious investment when Sweden introduced free lunches in the 1940s,” Lund University economist and study coauthor Petter Lundborg said in the release. “These cooked meals were meticulously planned in terms of nutrition. This begs the question: Did it affect students’ well-being in the long term? We wanted to find out.”

At least in the US, political debates over programs like universal healthcare, school lunches, and other perks common in other developed nations tend to get bogged down by questions about budgeting and how they’ll be paid for. The apparent health benefits may not be convincing enough, but perhaps the long-term economic gains from free lunches can inspire other governments to offer programs of their own.

“It is important for many countries even today, because school meals and their nutritional content is a recurring issue,” Lundborg said. “Our results show significant long-term economic benefits of school meals. You get a lot of ‘bang for your buck’ — it is extremely well-invested money.”

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Tilt-a-Whirl

Some of the gigantic filaments that make up the “cosmic web” — an unfathomably massive network of tendril-like structures linking the universe’s galaxies together — seem to be spinning.

A team of scientists made the shocking discovery that some cosmic filaments, which are the largest known structures in the entire universe, are rotating around their central axis like gigantic drills, according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. But that’s as far as they got, Space.com reports: The team has no idea why the filaments started to spin or what force could have been powerful enough to set them in motion.

“We’re not really sure what can cause a torque on this scale,” study coauthor Noam Libeskind told Space.com.

Big Push

Libeskind, a cosmologist for Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, added that scientists previously assumed that individual galaxy clusters, which can move extremely slowly about their axes, were the largest spinning objects in the cosmos. Spinning is common in space on smaller scales, but there’s nothing about the Big Bang that ought to have set the massive filaments in motion, especially given their incredible scale.

“[Cosmic filaments] are structures so vast that entire galaxies are just specks of dust,” Libeskind told Space.com. “These huge filaments are much, much bigger than clusters.”

Libeskind is still searching for possible answers, a task that’s made even more difficult by the fact that only some filaments appear to be spinning while others are more static. One possible explanation, according to Space.com, is that the filaments built up some momentum as their intense gravitational pull sucked up and compacted nearby gases and dust — but that’s just speculation for now.

READ MORE: Astronomers discover largest known spinning structures in the universe [Space.com]

More on cosmic filaments: Here’s The First-Ever Pic of “Cosmic Web” Connecting All Galaxies

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The Largest Structures in the Universe Started To Spin and We Don’t Know Why

Big Promotion

Finally, experts in the National Geographic Society have determined that Earth actually has five oceans, not the four that it already officially recognized.

Joining the crew is the Southern Ocean, the National Geographic publication reports, a circular body of water that envelops Antarctica. While the Southern Ocean was first named in the 1500s and scientists commonly refer to it in their work, Live Science reports, the body of water has been promoted and demoted from “ocean” status several times over the course of history. This official recognition finally sets things straight.

Tumultuous History

In 1921, when the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) was founded, it readily referred to the Southern Ocean as a distinct body of water, Live Science reports. It later changed its mind and demoted the ocean in new guidelines published in 1953. But scientists and trade organizations continued to refer to the ocean as such anyway.

However, as National Geographic Society geographer Alex Tait explained, officially recognizing the Southern Ocean could have a tangible impact by improving the state of kids’ science educations.

“Students learn information about the ocean world through what oceans you’re studying,” Tait said in the NatGeo article. “If you don’t include the Southern Ocean, then you don’t learn the specifics of it and how important it is.”

Arbitrary Delineation

Since most of Earth’s surface area is covered in water, designating the number and boundaries of oceans is actually a fairly arbitrary endeavor. After all, the various oceans are all technically connected to one another and the closest thing to a tangible boundary separating the Southern Ocean from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans is a circular current in the area that gives the Southern Ocean a different temperature and salinity from the others.

“The Southern Ocean has long been recognized by scientists, but because there was never agreement internationally, we never officially recognized it,” Tait said in the NatGeo article. “It’s sort of geographic nerdiness in some ways.”

READ MORE: Earth’s fifth ocean just confirmed [Live Science]

More on oceans: The Early Universe Was a Vast Liquid Ocean, Scientists Say

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Experts Decide That Earth Has Five Oceans, Actually

After well over a year of living through this pandemic, it’s hard to remember what things were like back in January 2020. But if you try to think back, you might recall that was a particularly stressful time in the United States. The government had just identified the country’s first COVID-19 infection on the 21st and, with how little we understood about the coronavirus at the time, very few people could conceptualize the horrors and devastation that were soon to follow.

But at that point, the coronavirus may have already been circulating throughout the country, according to new research published Tuesday in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases that challenges the official pandemic timeline. After studying blood samples gathered by volunteers in early 2020, researchers from Johns Hopkins, Harvard, the National Institutes of Health, and other research institutes, found signs of coronavirus antibodies as early as January 7, meaning Americans had already been infected by December 2019.

To complicate things even further, none of those patients were in New York or Seattle, which were thought to be infection hotspots at the time.

“We continue to add more pieces to this story about low levels of disease and infection prior to the recognition of the epidemic at larger magnitude,” study coauthor and Johns Hopkins public health expert Keri Althoff told Axios.

This isn’t the first time that experts challenged the official record of global coronavirus spread. Last April, it became clear that US intelligence agencies received a warning — which largely went ignored — that the coronavirus was spreading throughout China even earlier in November 2019.

Scientists have also been questioning the official timeline for over a year — this new antibody research could now be the smoking gun evidence that they were right.

“We haven’t followed up with these participants to know if they had traveled outside the U.S., or had contact with folks who traveled outside the U.S.,” study coauthor and NIH researcher Sheri Schully told Axios. “But, it is important, for future pandemic planning, to know what’s happening during periods of low prevalence in epidemics, such as this.”

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New Data: COVID Reached the US Earlier Than We Thought

An international panel of experts warns that political leaders around the world seem to have ignored the lessons of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, as it’s called, is a World Health Organization initiative to figure out what went wrong with the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and make recommendations on how to do better next time, according to a Harvard University press release. The overall message? Not great! The panel concluded that global leadership seems like it would rather try to return to business as usual and forget that the pandemic ever happened than actually take steps to fix the problems and improve the conditions that made things so bad this time.

Among other things, the panel recommends creating a Global Threats Council made up of 20 or so world leaders to promote collaboration and communication among powerful governments rather than the finger-pointing, political posturing, and deception that plagued the global COVID-19 response. But more important than any individual suggestion is the central idea that global reform is necessary if we want to actually end the coronavirus pandemic and fare any better against the next one.

“Don’t nitpick about the ideas. See the big picture here,” panel member David Miliband said in the release. “I really believe that there’s a window here, which if we’re not careful will close. … We’ve had the most monumental warning from some combination of natural and man-made disasters. Next time it could be much worse. It could be more transmissible and more fatal.”

Allowing wealthy nations to move on instead of immediately acting to improve conditions while the pandemic is fresh in everyone’s mind will likely lead to further inaction — and relegate coronavirus management to poorer nations whose outbreaks continue raging for longer, panel member Joanne Liu argued in the release.

“We owe that to the 3.6 million people who died… most of them alone,” Liu, a former president of Doctors Without Borders, said. “It needs to happen now, and the window of attention is very short.”

“The scale of the crisis has not yet brought the momentum for reform that is necessary,” Miliband added. “And I think we have to take that exceedingly seriously, whether you’re in government, an NGO, an academic institution, or another capacity.”

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If we ever make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, we’re unlikely to find a group of little green Martians running around.

That’s at least according to Seth Shostak, senior astronomer and director at the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research. In a recent opinion piece for The Guardian, Shostak argues that we are far more likely to encounter beings that resemble artificial intelligence.

As we’re expecting the release of a Pentagon report into sightings military pilots made of “unidentified aerial phenomena” later this month, the topic of UFOs and aliens has made a significant resurgence — and it’s being taken more seriously than ever before.

The report, however, is unlikely to claim that we’ve already made first contact with an alien race here on Earth — but to Shostak, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re alone in the universe.

“I think it’s overwhelmingly likely that aliens are present in our galaxy,” he wrote. “But I don’t believe they’re hanging out in our airspace. Not now, and not in historic times.”

So what would first contact even look like once it does happen? To Shostak, we won’t be encountering the kind of bug-eyed, and green-skinned aliens that works of science fiction have included over the last 60 or so years.

“All terrestrials have DNA blueprints, and share similarities in molecular makeup,” he argued. “Nonetheless, few of our fellow Terrans resemble us. The extraterrestrials wouldn’t either.”

“Any aliens that trek to our planet are unlikely to be carbon-based life forms, either hirsute or hairless,” Shostak said. “Their cognitive abilities will probably not be powered by a spongy mass of cells we’d call a brain. They will probably have gone beyond biological smarts and, indeed, beyond biology itself.”

In other words, extraterrestrials “won’t be alive.”

That’s because the enormous distances from one star system to the next could take eons to cover. Shostak however acknowledges the simple fact that thanks to the relatively young age of our solar system, other much older systems could house far more advanced civilizations than us.

But that doesn’t allow them to break the laws of physics. “Star Trek and similar scenarios aside, it’s extremely difficult to traverse light-years of space in less than a lifetime – anyone’s lifetime,” he argued. “You can call up Scotty in the engine room, but he won’t be able to help.”

It’s a long trip that won’t “appeal to biological passengers who will die long before their destination is reached,” but AIs or machines aren’t limited by this.

If recent advances in artificial intelligence here on Earth are anything to go by, much older alien civilizations are likely far ahead. “Researchers who work in AI estimate that machines able to beat humans on an IQ test will emerge from the labs by mid-century,” Shostak wrote. “If we can do it, some extraterrestrials will have already done it.”

And while some researchers have argued any extraterrestrials coming in for a visit could spell disaster, Shostak is far less worried. “So, if alien craft ever do settle on the White House lawn, you can hope that whatever’s inside is friendly,” he argued. “If not, there’s always negotiation.”

READ MORE: If we ever encounter aliens, they will resemble AI and not little green martians [The Guardian]

More on aliens: Physicist Warns That Contacting Aliens Could End All Life on Earth

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A Winner

As seen on a recent episode of “Jay Leno’s Garage,” the former late night host hit the drag strip at Pomona Raceway in California with Tesla’s latest Model S refresh dubbed “Plaid.”

Leno covered the quarter mile in just 9.247 seconds, speeding up to 152.09 mph, numbers confirmed by representatives from the National Hot Rod Association, who were present during the sprint, as CleanTechnica reports.

Tesla’s chief designer Franz von Holzhausen cheered on Leno from the sidelines.

It’s a massive achievement for the Elon Musk-led car company. “It was a winner,” Leno told CNBC. “It is now the fastest production car you can buy. It’s faster than any Ferrari; faster than any $3.5 million Bugatti.”

Taking Off

Leno noted just how quiet the Model S Plaid performed. “When I stepped on the accelerator, took off, and I came back down after going 152, the birds were still there,” the car enthusiast told CNBC, referring to nearby birds nesting on a Christmas tree. The loud engine noises of hot rods would’ve easily scared them away.

“I’m a huge fan of American technology, especially products that are developed here in America that are using locally sourced stuff,” he added. “And that’s why I love this car.”

Leno also noted that $130,000, the price of the upcoming variant, may be steep, but nothing compared to hypercars that go for millions.

“From the minute you step on the accelerator, boom you’re gone,” he said.

READ MORE: Jay Leno tries to break record in Tesla’s new Model S Plaid on ‘Jay Leno’s Garage’ [CNBC]

More on Plaid: Tesla’s Model S Plaid Breaks the Quarter-Mile Record at 152 MPH

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It’s Official: Tesla Model S Plaid Fastest Production Car Ever Made

Booster Butt

SpaceX has made big progress towards building the first flightworthy prototype of its Starship booster called Super Heavy.

An image shared by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk early Tuesday morning shows just how tall the booster prototype already is, towering above the intrepid billionaire inside High Bay, a 265 feet tall vertical assembly structure at the company’s South Texas testing facilities.

The image shows the “aft section” or the rear-facing section of the Super Heavy booster.

Stacking Super Heavy Aft Section pic.twitter.com/itydacQ4hM

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 15, 2021

SpaceX has hugely ambitious plans to launch its first Starship prototype into orbit. The space company wants to complete the first orbital test flight as early as next month — and it will need a Super Heavy booster to do just that. The company’s blazing pace however suggests it may just have a chance.

Rocket Stacking

The gigantic towering structure will eventually stand 230 feet tall and is meant to launch a Starship spacecraft prototype, which alone stands at 160 feet tall, into orbit.

Musk also shared a nighttime video of the view from on top of High Bay, a vertigo-inducing height.

To get both rocket and booster off the ground — let alone stacked on top of each other — SpaceX is currently constructing a gigantic 400-foot launch tower made up of massive prefabricated steel segments.

According to the latest pictures, SpaceX is about halfway there. According to Teslarati, SpaceX is only two prefabricated sections away from reaching its full height.

If all goes according to plan, we could soon see a Starship prototype being hoisted on top of a Super Heavy — a momentous occasion in the launch platform’s years-long development.

But whether the first Starship orbital launch test will end in yet another explosion remains to be seen.

More on Starship: The Air Force Seems to Be Investing Heavily in SpaceX’s Starship

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Elon Musk Shares New Pic of Giant Starship Rocket Booster

Now that new medical sensors and gadgets can reliably monitor a patient’s health — in real time and theoretically from anywhere in the world — healthcare providers are left navigating a new kind of medicine where machines might handle so many parts of the job that they don’t even need to show up in person.

Primary care physician Neil Singh of Brighton and Sussex Medical School grapples with this changing landscape of medicine in a new, thoughtful Wired essay about how for better or worse — but most likely both — some traditions in medicine might die off as remote sensing technology gets more powerful.

Part of the story talks about how these sensors are starting to demonstrate the potential to save countless lives: Through real-time biometric analysis, they might be able to flag a patient’s deteriorating condition hours before a doctor or nurse happens to run another round of bloodwork. Singh opens the essay by mourning a patient who took a turn for the worse and died in the hospital, wondering whether more sensors and gadgets might have granted more time to act and potentially save his life.

But if the professionals don’t need to fuss over patients on a regular basis, what happens to the value of bedside manner or the mere possibility of building up trust between practitioner and patient?

“Remote patient monitoring technologies also have another potential: to uncouple patients from their health workers, allowing theoretically limitless distance between the two,” Singh wrote.

Overall, the essay is a fascinating introspection into what role doctors might play in a future where new technology takes over parts of their job and potentially takes them out of the room altogether — and what that means for all of our healthcare.

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SponCon

In retrospect, we have known that it was only a matter of time before giant oil companies like Shell started to sponsor influencers’ posts on social media — because here we are.

Surely, you may be telling yourself, surely no one is buying into an eco-friendly cross-country trip sponsored by big oil. But that’s exactly what’s happening, Earther reports. Just look at this disturbingly ironic post by lifestyle Cherrie Lynn Almonte that talks about the perils of climate change and how it threatens California’s iconic landscapes — right beneath a disclaimer that the post was paid for by Shell.

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A post shared by Cherrie SF | Travel+Lifestyle (@cherrielynn)

Death, Taxes, Branding

The irony, of course, is that the Joshua Trees Almonte photographed were declared endangered specifically because of climate change, Earther reports, making Shell squarely responsible for the problems mentioned in its new eco-tourism sponcon.

But oil companies aren’t letting that irony get in the way of their marketing ­— not while there’s potential goodwill to manufacture! These companies are already framing themselves as part of the answer to global climate change in carefully crafted advertisements, and going directly to social media personalities is simply the next obvious manifestation of that big marketing push.

“My gut would be, they’re probably going to lean into the [corporate social responsibility]-focused stuff as a way in to generate some goodwill, versus being like, ‘we’ve got great gas!'” Brendan Gahan, the chief social officer at an ad agency called Mekanism, told Earther.

Specifically, he was predicting how oil companies might advertise in the future.

“These conglomerates, they’re almost so polished, there’s no humanity there,” he added. “I think they could benefit from humanity, even if some of it’s pointing out their flaws.”

Meanwhile, a peek behind the curtain shows that these companies are fare more interested in cleaning up their image than cleaning up their actual operations, Earther reports, meaning that the goal isn’t to actually fight climate change as much as it is to stop looking like the bad guys that they are.

READ MORE: The Big Oil Instagram Influencers Are Here [Earther]

More on climate change: Scientists Warn of “Ghastly Future” for Global Environment

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Oh No, Oil Companies Are Paying Social Media Influencers Now

Do a Backflip

Tencent Robotics X Lab, a subsidiary of Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent, has unveiled a terrifying new “novel wheel-legged robot” called Ollie that can drive around on two wheels-wielding, leg-like appendages, as IEEE Spectrum reports.

Thanks to plenty of muscle power and a creepy tail, Ollie can jump a good foot in the air — and even do a backflip while jumping over a gap, as evidenced in a new video.

Fetch Me My Coffee

Thanks to its extremely flexible extremities, it can right itself, drive down a step of stairs — and stay upright even when its makers throw all kinds of abuse at it.

It’s all quite reminiscent of US-based robot maker Boston Dynamics, who has on numerous occasions shown off the athletic prowess of its robotic offspring.

Apart from backflipping over a crevasse, Ollie may soon be running errands for its masters thanks to a really long robotic arm attached to the top. The arm turns Ollie into the perfect coffee delivery robot, as suggested in the promotional video.

The robot is still very much in development and won’t be hitting markets any time soon. Until then, we’ll have to make do with Boston Dynamics’ four-legged robot dog Spot Mini — that is, if you have $75,000 to spare.

READ MORE: Tencent’s New Wheeled Robot Flicks Its Tail To Do Backflips [IEEE Spectrum]

More on robots: Hawaii Cops Spent COVID Relief Funds on Robot Dog

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Watch This Terrifying Segway on Steroids Backflip Using Its Tail

No House

Just weeks after news emerged Tesla CEO Elon Musk paid zero dollars in federal income tax over several years, the billionaire has decided to cash in and sell the last of his homes, according to a recent tweet.

“Decided to sell my last remaining house,” Musk tweeted on Monday. “Just needs to go to a large family who will live there. It’s a special place.”

Earlier this month, Musk revealed that he had “sold my houses, except for one in bay Area that’s rented out for events.”

It’s a sign that the entrepreneur is fulfilling his minimalist dream — with the intention to focus all his efforts on making humanity multi-planetary. When asked if he was downsizing to focus on Mars, Musk replied with “yeah.”

Mars Devotion

The billionaire put two of his California homes on sale last month, just days after announcing he is “selling almost all physical possessions.”

At the time, he made “one stipulation on sale: I own Gene Wilder’s old house. It cannot be torn down or lose any its soul.”

Musk also revealed last week that despite reports claiming Musk paid close to zero — or zero, as was the case in 2018 — in federal income taxes, he will “continue to pay income taxes in California proportionate to my time in state, which is and will be significant.”

Musk moved to Texas in August, a move that may have been in part motivated much lower tax rates in the state.

It sure seems like Musk has had enough of Earth and his Earthly possessions. “Don’t need the cash,” Musk tweeted last month. “Devoting myself to Mars and Earth. Possession [sic] just weigh you down.”

READ MORE: Elon Musk Says He’s Putting Last Remaining House on the Market [Bloomberg]

More on Musk: Elon Musk Shares New Pic of Giant Starship Rocket Booster

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Elon Musk: “Decided to Sell My Last Remaining House”

Risk: Galaxy Edition

Colonizing the Milky Way is an unfathomable task for us mere Earthlings, but for an extraterrestrial civilization capable of hopping from one star system to the next, it’s shockingly doable.

Based on reasonable technological constraints, the researchers suggest it would take an ambitious alien race about one billion years to conquer and colonize the entire inner portion of the galaxy, according to research published in the journal Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society. That may seem comically long, but the researchers told Gizmodo that it’s not that bad compared to how long the galaxy has been sitting around, just waiting to be conquered.

Why would aliens want to? Well that’s a separate question, but it’s not that far-fetched of an idea — just think about how many Earthlings talk about colonizing the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Ground Rules

In the realm of far-out science fiction, a super-advanced extraterrestrial civilization could lay waste to Earth and claim the galaxy in the blink of an eye. But the scientists wanted their model of galactic conquest to be somewhat grounded in reality, so they imposed technological constraints that reflect a more believable scenario. That means warp drives are out, planetary civilizations die off over time, and spacecraft travel at the fastest speeds that we can achieve today with our own tech.

“This means we’re not talking about a rapidly or aggressively expanding species, and there’s no warp drive or anything,” study coauthor and Penn State astrophysicist Jason Wright told Gizmodo. “There’s just ships that do things we could actually manage to do with something like technology we can design today, perhaps fast ships using solar sails powered by giant lasers, or just very long-lived ships that can make journeys of 100,000 years running on ordinary rockets and gravitational slingshots from giant planets.”

But they would still get some help — even if the aliens are limited by boring old rules like the speed of light, the movement of the galaxy itself would give them a little boost in their journey.

Extra Boost

In an accompanying animation of the scientists’ model, you can watch as the aliens hop among the stars as they rapidly spiral around the galaxy’s center, claiming greater and greater swaths of the galaxy at a time.

“Stars themselves are moving around, so once you settle a nearby system, the star moves you to another part of the galaxy where more new stars will wander by and give you another nearby star to settle,” Wright told Gizmodo.

Of course, this all just raises an even more crucial question: If these theoretical aliens are so capable of galactic conquest, what the hell are they waiting for?

READ MORE: Aliens Wouldn’t Need Warp Drives to Take Over an Entire Galaxy, Simulation Suggests [Gizmodo]

More on aliens: Astronomer: Aliens Will Most Likely Resemble AI if We Ever Make Contact

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Here’s How Quickly Aliens Could Conquer the Galaxy

SnailBot 9000

Scientists from the University of Michigan took an unusual approach to wildlife conservation: turning the threatened animals into cyborgs so they could keep track of them and study how they survive.

Back in the 1970s, scientists introduced an invasive snail called the rosy wolf snail to the Society Islands in French Polynesia. What followed was a bloodbath, according to a press release on the new research, as the invasive snail eradicated nearly every native tree snail species in the area. It was a devastating loss of biodiversity, but five species managed to survive, including the Partula hyalina. Now, thanks to the cyborg study, which was published Tuesday in the journal Communications Biology, researchers have finally figured out how.

Solar Snails

Both snails — P. hyalina and the rosy wolf snail that hunts it — are nocturnal. But the study revealed that the rosy wolf snail is more vulnerable to sunlight than the P. hyaline, allowing the latter to hang out near the edges of the forest during the day while its predator needs to retreat into the shadows, empty-handed.

To figure all of that out, the University of Michigan researchers glued a tiny computer called the Michigan Micro Mote (M3) to the rosy wolf snail’s shell and used the data from its solar panels as a proxy for how much sun the snails could endure. Because the P. hyaline is protected, the scientists couldn’t be as hands-on. Instead, they stuck the computer to the leaves that the snails cling to during the day.

“We were able to get data that nobody had been able to obtain,” Michigan electrical engineer and computer scientist David Blaauw said in the press release. “And that’s because we had a tiny computing system that was small enough to stick on a snail.”

Going forward, scientists hope that the M3 might be able to help with other conservation projects — meaning more animal cyborgs might be on the way soon.

READ MORE: Snails carrying the world’s smallest computer help solve mass extinction survivor mystery [University of Michigan]

More on cyborgs: Scientists Build Tiny Camera for Beetles To Carry Around

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Scientists Turned Snails Into Tiny Cyborgs