IFLScience

Electronic tattoos use conductive ink to let you interact with your skin in some pretty amazing ways!

Well, could they? And what would happen if they did?

The ocean’s deepest fish doesn’t look like it could survive in harsh conditions thousands of feet below the surface. Instead of giant teeth and a menacing frame, the fishes that roam in the deepest parts of the ocean are small, translucent, bereft of scales - and highly adept at living where few other organisms can. Meet the deepest fish in the ocean, a new species named the <a href="https://rumble.com/v40diw-the-mariana-snailfish-is-the-worlds-deepest-dwelling-fish.html" target="_blank">Mariana snailfish</a>. The Mariana snailfish (Pseudoliparis swirei) thrives at depths of up to about 8,000 meters (26,200 feet) along the Mariana Trench near Guam. That’s 26 meters deeper than the previous record holder. In addition to snailfish, which are soft, small and have no scales, researchers also saw numerous amphipods, shrimp-like creatures that lack an outer shell. By studying life in the deepest part of the ocean, known as the hadal zone, scientists hope to better understand populations and food chains. Snailfish are found at many different depths in marine waters around the world. In deep water, they cluster together in groups and feed on tiny crustaceans and shrimp using suction from their mouths to gulp prey. Little is known about how these <a href="https://rumble.com/v3p8wz-the-worlds-largest-fish-whale-shark-philippines-top-tourist-attraction.html" target="_blank">fish</a> can live under intense water pressure; the pressure at those depths is similar to an elephant standing on your thumb. In a series of dives in 2014 and 2017, a small team of researchers from the U.S. and U.K. dropped special traps into the depths of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean in order to catch the elusive creature. This trench shoots through the ocean floor near Guam and is home to the deepest point in Earth's seas.

Every time you connect to the internet, there's a very good chance you're sending and receiving data through a network of cables that run along the bottom of the earth's oceans. The Internet is so fast and effortless to use. We often forget that a lot of it travels through underwater cables. Nearly 300 meters cable systems line the ocean floor, connecting the entire world together. Since <a href="https://rumble.com/v32xtw-corning-fiber-optic-usb-3.0-and-thunderbolt-cables.html" target="_blank">fiber-optic cables</a> use light to encode information and remain unfettered by weather, cables carry data faster and cheaper than satellites - they carry 99% of all international data. They’re about as thick as a garden hose and carry the world’s internet, phone calls and even TV transmissions between continents at the speed of light. The fastest ones carry up to 60 terabits per second travelling at two-third the speed of light. That’s why every time you chat to someone overseas, it all happens almost instantly, which is pretty amazing, considering the first cable was laid over 150 years ago and took 17 hours to send a short telegraph. So, next time you are online remember some of that data is crossing oceans just for you. The fact that we route internet traffic through the ocean - amidst deep sea creatures and hydrothermal vents - runs counter to most people’s imaginings of the internet. Didn’t we develop satellites and <a href="https://rumble.com/v46sc2-can-exposure-to-wi-fi-cause-irreparable-damage-to-dna.html" target="_blank">Wi-Fi</a> to transmit signals through the air? Haven’t we moved to the cloud? Undersea cable systems sound like a thing of the past. The reality is that the cloud is actually under the ocean. The cables are actually state-of-the-art global communications technologies. They crisscross the continents too - a message from New York to California also travels by fiber-optic cable. These systems are not going to be replaced by aerial communications anytime soon.

The Cassini probe, which flew all the way to Saturn, sent back some breathtaking images and invaluable data during its nearly 20 years of activity.

Different animals see the world in very different ways from us and from each other. Here are just a few examples of what animals can see.

The Dubai police, which already has luxury patrol cars, self-driving pursuit drones, and a robot officer, just announced it will soon have officers buzzing around on electric hoverbikes around the skies in Star Wars-style. <a href="https://rumble.com/v3t027-dubai-police-eye-the-skies-with-new-hoverbike.html" target="_blank">The police in Dubai</a> are hopeful that the technology will allow them to quickly access hard to reach places, such as areas with a lot of traffic. The Scorpion hoverbike, exhibited at the biggest technology expo in the gulf region and built by a Russian company called Hoversurf, has been likened to a rideable drone, and is capable of flying with or without a pilot. Though the bike won’t fly higher than 20 feet, the Dubai police say that the hoverbike “will be deployed as a first-responder vehicle to get into hard-to-reach places where larger vehicles can’t go”. The Hoversurf's concept vehicle - <a href="https://rumble.com/v34fpp-hoversurf-team-show-off-their-latest-project-scorpion-3-hoverbike.html" target="_blank">Scorpion-3</a>, features a built-in safety system during its development that kept the pilot from losing control and going too fast or too high, but it's unclear if the model the Dubai police is adopting will have those safeguards. The Hoverbike can reach a height of five meters if mounted and can fly at up to 70 km/h. It can be also controlled remotely. The Hoverbike can carry up to 300kg and fly up to 25 minutes on a full battery. It’s uncertain when exactly these bikes will hit the streets but as Hoversurf’s website says: “ The future is closer than it seems”. Buffing up its reputation as the world’s most futuristic city, the hoverbikes knit into an array of other technological innovations, from replacing security checks with face-scanning at airports, to establishing the first major property development to accept bitcoin as payment.

Science and engineering graduates have come up with some interesting ideas for The Royal Navy. Here are just a few of them.

When shopping in the produce section of your grocery store, you’re probably used to seeing red tomatoes and green cucumbers, yellow bananas and purple eggplants. Just like animals - which have changed a lot since humans started breeding them for food - fruits and vegetables have undergone drastic transformations since humans became agriculturally focused.The fruit and veg that graces our plates today would have been unrecognizable to our ancestors. For thousands of years, humans were hunters and gatherers, which means they hunted animals and gathered wild plants for sustenance. As communities grew larger and more established, however, humans learned that it was more efficient to centralize the cultivation of food. Some plants were very different before humans came along and domesticated them, usually to make them more edible. Some of the fruit and vegetables we eat today were very different before humans got involved. We changed <a href="https://rumble.com/v42j5b-boost-your-energy-with-bananas.html" target="_blank">bananas</a> from stubby little fruits with hard seeds into long, easy to peel tubes of deliciousness. Eggplants, which actually used to look more like eggs became bigger with a sexy new shape. Carrots started off as little more than roots until we decided to turn most of them into tiny orange rocket ships. Watermelons were once small, bitter and tough to crack but now they are massive green chambers of juicy red goodness. Corn was just a dinky little plant with a few hard seeds that became one of the most important <a href="https://rumble.com/v31s8l-champagne-crops-saved-by-old-school-workers.html" target="_blank">crops</a> in human history. Watch the video to see side-by-side comparisons of wild produce versus what we see in the store today!

Most stars have been around a long time, but where do they come from?

This nifty little invention could help clean up trash from marinas, docks, and other watery areas.

Cassie is a bipedal robot that's really good at not falling over.

When you use cannabis, it can temporarily alter the way your brain works.

The NOAA sent down a remotely operated vehicle to study a coral reef surrounding Cuba.

Scientist have created tools from by 3D printing metamaterials that can transfer movement.

NASA is designing a tiny robot to explore harsh terrains on other worlds

Meet the Mexican mole lizard. The”Bipes Biporus” was spotted by scientists Sara Ruane and Kaitlyn Kraybill-Voth while they were on biodiversity survey for islands and seas in San Juanico. It’s an animal known as an “amphisbaenian” - a type of elongate burrowing reptile that is often pink and wormlike in appearance. They have front strong legs, but its back legs have vanished shrunk by evolution into small vestigial bones. These subterranean creatures are hard to spot. They grow to around 9 inches long, and use their <a href="https://rumble.com/v32pt4-lobstah-the-cat-with-a-claw-like-paw-cute-as-fluff.html" target="_blank">claws</a> for digging underground. However, they will come above ground at night, and are known to eat variety of insects. Locals say they climb inside you when you squat to use the toilet, but that’s a total myth, and bipes are completely harmless. Bipes is the only amphisbaenian genus with limbs, in particular, members of this genus have small but well developed forelimbs. As a species, B. biporus always has five digits on each limb, its head is blunt, and it burrows in sandy desert soils on the peninsula of Baja, California. The <a href="https://rumble.com/v4inmj-5-foot-long-lizard-disappears-from-pet-store.html" target="_blank">lizard’s</a> tail is short and autotomic, although once it is lost it will not regenerate. This species lives in self-constructed tunnels in the soil and, although it typically resides close to the surface, it rarely emerges from underground. As a result, its most likely predators are snakes, which are well suited to enter and navigate its underground burrow systems. Bipes biporus is active year-round, due in part to its capacity for behavioral thermoregulation.

The Robot was designed by Stanford researchers, and could be useful for search and rescue missions in the future.

Scientists have identified more than 400 shark species but there is still so much we don’t know about these magnificent animals. One species, in particular, is a source of wonder for many researchers: the Greenland Shark or Somniosus microcephalus. Greenland sharks are among the world’s largest predatory sharks, growing up to 6 meters in length. Because of their habitat in cold dark waters, there is still so much that scientists are yet to discover about the sharks. Greenland sharks live in the cold dark waters of the Arctic and have long been a mystery to the science community. Scientists that are studying them, suggest that these <a href="https://rumble.com/v3obkd-baby-great-white-shark-washes-up-on-sydneys-manly-beach.html" target="_blank">sharks</a> can live up to six centuries old. Sharks are some of the most fascinating creatures on the planet. They have been swimming in our oceans and seas for hundreds of millions of years. One question that kept burning away at scientists was just how old are these slow-moving creatures? Researchers from the universities of Copenhagen and Manchester sailed in treacherous waters to study <a href="https://rumble.com/v4hfn7-scientists-capture-rare-greenland-shark-on-video.html" target="_blank">Greenland sharks</a>, which can live for over 400 years. Little is known about this type of shark, but they are known to be scavengers and predators as they have been observed feeding on seals, and have been found with polar bear remains in their stomachs. The researchers took samples and satellite tagged the sharks, in order to find out more about their hearts and diet, their movement and reproductive patterns. Initial data recorder their heart beating once every ten seconds. By studying more data from the expedition they hope to learn about diseases associated with the aging process, in the hope of developing new therapies for humans in the future.

Watching a male seahorse give birth to its young is quite an interesting experience.

While climate change is slowly driving up the average global temperature, it's also contributing to a higher rate of dangerous weather.

The Earth is really, really old. Over 4 1/2 billion years old, in fact. How do we begin to comprehend a number that large? It helps to put it on a more fathomable scale. Watch to see where Earth's major events would fall on a timeline. Everything humans have ever experienced - art, science, language, technology - happened in a tiny fraction of <a href="https://rumble.com/v4bj75-nasa-history-earth-from-space-a-view-from-the-space-shuttle-1994.html" target="_blank">Earth’s history</a>. Life has an incredible amount to teach us about living well on planet Earth, in no small part due to the fact that it’s been thriving here for a very long time. But, how long is that really? And where do we fit in to that history? Where do we fit on Earth’s timeline? Earth was “born” on January 1, 4.54 billion years ago. If we compress 4.54 billion years into one year, that means 144 years is 1 second. Life appeared 3.8 billion years ago. On the geologic calendar, that makes February 25 Life’s birthday. Life first appeared as simple cells, which thrived for millions of years before photosynthesis evolved 3.6 billion years ago. That would make <a href="https://rumble.com/v4vest-new-catalyst-catches-the-sun-by-improving-artificial-photosynthesis.html" target="_blank">photosyntheis’s</a> birthday March 21. 1.5 billion years ago multicellular life emerges, 650 million years ago planet earth freezes, 470 million years ago land plants start to grow, 300 million years ago first land vertebrates emerge. The list is infinitely long and stretches on and on. There’s no guarantee that we, or any of the other species around us, will remain. We are all subject to the laws of natural selection. But we are surrounded by success stories that we can consciously emulate. We’re surrounded by species that have adapted and evolved to create conditions conducive to future generations of their own species, and others.

When you think about sharks, you probably picture a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth tearing away at your body limb by limb. Thanks to amazingly awful shark horror movies, people generally share a deep fear of the creatures. While there have been various incidents of real-life shark attacks throughout history, sharks are not the natural man-eaters people imagine them to be. In fact, scientists agree that you're more likely to be killed by a coconut than by a shark. For example, without sharks, the oceans would be riddled with dead aquatic life or overpopulated with fast-breeding schools of fish. This is because <a href="https://rumble.com/v34sx2-going-to-hammerhead-shark-school.html" target="_blank">sharks</a> will often feast on carcasses and consume exploding sea life populations, which helps to keep the oceans clean, healthy, and balanced. Did you know that some sharks can live up to 200 years? These amazing creatures have existed for over 400 million years. That’s longer than trees! They survived through an incredible 4 mass extinction events. Their eternal ears can detect a sound up to 1 km away, and over the course of a lifetime, sharks can grow around 30,000 teeth. Sharks hunt like no others. They can detect one drop of blood in 2.5 million litres of water, while small nodules can detect electrical pulses from beating hearts. <a href="https://rumble.com/v3kokj-spectacular-slow-motion-footage-of-great-white-sharks.html" target="_blank">Some sharks</a> can emit light from special skin organs know as photophores, and use it for camouflage, and to attract mates. Parthenogenesis has also been reported in some sharks. This is when females give birth without male fertilization. Sharks kill an average of five people per year, while humans kill up to 100 million sharks per year. As sharks are apex predators, slaughtering them in such high numbers could be disastrous to fisheries, coral reefs and ocean ecosystems around the world.

Was it a meteor, or were there other factors as well?

According to science, is it possible that ghosts really do exist?