Clues are hard to come by when you’re trying to look back to a time when the continents clumped together like a closed fist. But geologists have found evidence that plants, the most gentle of organisms, may have helped kill most of the life in the oceans 374 million years ago.
Source: juneauempire.com
Waze famously disrupted GPS navigation by crowdsourcing user data from mobile phones, instead of purchasing costly sensors tied to city infrastructure, as Nokia had done before them. Waze then scaled with low overhead costs by using machine learning algorithms to find precise traffic patterns that optimized each user’s route. The end result of this dynamic was massive layoffs at Nokia, and Google’s acquisition of / integration with Waze in 2013.
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For decades, descriptions of viruses have straddled life and nonlife, a divide that usually isn’t difficult to navigate. Their hallmark characteristics, namely their small size, tiny genomes and parasitic dependence on cellular hosts for replication, set them apart from all other living things despite their animation. But that story has gotten far more puzzling — particularly since the discovery of the first giant virus in 2003, which was so large that researchers initially thought it was a bacterium.
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