hubie writes:Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are cylindrical tubes made up of very thin walls of carbon atoms. They are what you get if you roll up a sheet of graphene. They come in single walled (SWCNT) and multi-walled (MWCNT) versions, and they have some very remarkable physical and electrical properties. Despite popping up from time-to-time as early has the late 19th Century, they exploded on the science scene in the early 1990s as an area of very active research.However, if one looks back into antiquity at the famed swords of Damascus, they were made from Damascus steel. This steel was recognized to be superior to all others, but the art of its manufacture was lost to time for hundreds of years; however, in 2006 an analysis of an ancient sabre was found to contain CNTs in the steel.A group of researchers from India have now pushed the appearance of CNTs back even further. They were studying black polished pottery shards from a dig site in Keeladi that could be as old as 600 BCE and they determined that the black coating consists of CNTs and graphene.
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956_:Coating metal bone implants with bacteria found to promote healing while reducing infections:
Disappearing Tweets? Twitter Now Has a Feature for Thatupstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956_:Disappearing Tweets? Twitter Now Has a Feature for That:
martyb writes:The first attempt[*] was a no-go, and the weather forecast is up in the air (thanks to hurricane Eta), but if things work out, SpaceX's Crew-1 will fly to the ISS (International Space Station) today. The launch is scheduled for four hours from the time this story goes live. It marks the official end of the US needing to purchase launches from Russia to get to and from the ISS.A lot has happened along the way to, during, and following the Crew-1 Demo mission where SpaceX sent a Crew Dragon carrying Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the ISS. For one thing, it was a demo flight. How well did things really work out?It's launch day for the historic Crew-1 mission to the space station:
[2020-11-15 17:42:54 UTC: Updated title: TCL Roku TVs are apparently not affected -- the vulnerability described apparently applies only to TCL Android TVs. --martyb]takyon writes:Major Security Flaws in TCL Android Smart TVs May Have Opened Chinese Backdoor, Researchers Say
canopic jug writes:Fifty years ago on November 12, 1970 the Oregon State Highway Department used dynamite to blast the rotting corpse of a stranded whale. It did not go well.
High prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in pets from COVID-19+ householdsAn Anonymous Coward writes:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352771420302937
hubie writes:Stephen Pyne, expert on the history of fire, published an interesting open access commentary regarding the relationship between humans and fire. He argues that the rise of the command of fire occurred as the Pleistocene (the "ice age") was ending, and the world going back as far as Homo erectus has been fundamentally changed by the human command of fire. He notes that all the defining features of an ice age (ice sheets, pluvial lakes, permafrost, and outwash plains) have been replaced with fire equivalents (fire‐informed biotas, fire‐famished ecosystems, melting permafrost, and megapalls of smoke).