DNA sequencing has located the oldest living thing on Earth, and scientists say that is… some seagrass.

Very anticlimactic, yes, but the discovery seems to have unearthed a plant that is far older than the previous oldest living thing on Earth, which was a Tasmanian plant estimated to be 43,000 years old. The seagrass in question is located over 40 ocean meadows (which exist) and 2,000 miles between Cyprus and Spain. The findings were published in the journal PLoS ONE, and Professor Carlos Duarte credits asexual reproduction for the longevity of the oldest living thing. He says:

“They are continually producing new branches. They spread very slowly and cover a very large area giving them more area to mine resources. They can then store nutrients within their very large branches during bad conditions for growth.”

According to Duarte via the Telegraph, living things “that can only reproduce sexually are inevitably lost at each generation,” and the oldest living thing, seagrass, can reproduce asexually and create clones of itself. However, after between 12,000 and 200,000 years of life on Earth, it seems the seagrass is now facing a threat- changing temperatures:

Despite its historical robustness, Duarte says the patch of P. oceanica is now threatened by climate change. The Mediterranean is warming three times faster than the world average, and each year P. oceanica meadows decline by around 5 per cent. “They have never experienced the speed of climate that the Mediterranean is currently experiencing,” he says.

The journal concludes that the “findings call for further research on these life history traits associated with clonality, considering their possible ecological and evolutionary implications.”

Oldest Living Thing Discovered by Scientists, Is Relatively Ordinary is a post from: The Inquisitr

This instructional video is not only quite interesting, but you internet people might recognize some geeky shoutouts.

[via TDW]

[Video] Everything About Coffee, Ever is a post from: The Inquisitr

Taken out of the context of Facebook’s ubiquity, the 96% figure in itself is pretty astounding.

Do 96% of Americans eat at McDonald’s? Drink Starbucks? Shop at Target? Then again, the study that yielded the findings was a very statistically small number of people- just over 400. But even in a small group such as that, a rate of 96% saturation is pretty damned impressive.

Of those polled, 39% log in to Facebook multiple times a day, and 29% check in at least once. 19% Facebook 3-4 times a week, and 8% do it weekly. Just 5% of those polled report logging in “rarely,” and no one reported “never” Facebooking.

Also not surprising was that the biggest Facebook related concern the individuals polled had were… privacy concerns. 82% of those surveyed cited the issue as their top Facebook worry. The population polled is said to have “roughly resembled” the general demographics of America, but it would be interesting to really drill down on Facebook saturation in different segments of under-50 America.

Do you find the results to be accurate? How often do you log on to Facebook?

[Image]

The United States of Facebook: Whopping 96% of Americans Under 50 on the Social Network is a post from: The Inquisitr

A video has appeared on YouTube alleging to show hacking of video screens in Times Square using nothing more than an iPhone and a video transmitter.

According to the blurb for the video:

“the way it works is pretty simple: plug in my transmitter into the iphone 4 and play back any video clip. you can play it through the ipod feature or through the camera roll. the transmitter instantly sends the video signal to the video repeater and the video repeater overrides any video screen that it’s being held next to. it doesn’t matter what shape or size the hacked screen is because the hack video will simply keep its correct dimensions and the rest of the hacked space will stay black.”

There’s some speculation as to whether the hack is real or not, but certainly the tech being used is off the shelf stuff. What do you think?

Can Video Screens Be Hacked in Times Square? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Have you ever fallen in love almost instantly?

More levelheaded folks might scoff at the idea of love at first sight, but scientists say it happens and that ‘first sight’ can be a rather short period of time. A recent study at New York’s Syracuse University indicates you can fall for someone in under- way under- a single second, and that the process comes along with a rush similar to that of cocaine.

The study says falling in love stimulates twelve parts of the brain to begin releasing chemicals linked with feeling totally awesome- dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression- as soon as those first pangs hit:

Professor Stephanie Ortigue, who led the research, said: “These findings confirm love has a scientific basis. But they beg the question: ‘Does the heart fall in love, or the brain?’

“I would say the brain, but the heart is also related because the complex concept of love is formed by both bottom-up and top-down processes from the brain to the heart and vice versa.”

The study also found different types of love affect different parts of the brain- unconditional love, like the feeling you get when you look at your cat, comes from the “common and middle” parts of the brain. Passionate love, on the other hand, is sparked by the brain’s reward centers.

Falling in love takes a fifth of a second, has rush ‘like cocaine’ is a post from: The Inquisitr

A Canadian artist has created what could possibly be a world first: a porn book for the blind.

Tactile Mind is “is a handmade thermoform book consisting of 17, 2-D tactile photographs on white thermoform plastic pages with the visual image and descriptive Braille accompaniment.”

In English, that means you can feel the rude parts, and then read about what your feeling.

The book isn’t cheap though at CDN $225, but given it’s one of a kind, perhaps worth it. More details here.

Porn, Now Available For The Blind is a post from: The Inquisitr

New York City is a strange and wonderful place, made all the more bizarre by the fact that its 8 million inhabitants are confined to the tiny island of Manhattan- posing difficulties in reinforcing an infrastructure that’s one of the oldest in US history.

New Yorkers are familiar with urban decay, and exploding manholes and crumbling buildings (and the dangers posed therein) are a part of the consciousness of the city. German artist Jan Vormann has a colorful, if not necessarily practical, solution to New York’s ever aging landscape… the humble Lego.

New Yorkers aren’t the first city-dwellers on the receiving end of Vormann’s “Dispatchwork” project- Rome, Berlin and Paris have gotten Lego patches of their own prior to the New York City initiative. Reaction to the project was largely positive, reminding many New Yorkers of when street art was more commonplace and Disney didn’t own Times Square:

“I’ve never seen anything like that before. It’s cool,” said Anna Marciano, 20, admiring the 1-by-1-foot patch. “They should put more around the city.”

Vormann wrote on his Web site, “I went to New York City . . . to support Mayor Bloomberg in his everyday struggle to make this city even more amazing.”

“I liked it. It’s a nice public-art project,” said Francesca Gentile, a saleswoman at Milan Luxury. “It was nice to have it in this neighborhood where everything is corporate. I wish it were still here.”

Although residents were largely supportive of the Lego repairs, all but one “patch” has been removed. You can see more of Vormann’s street art in New York City at the Dispatchwork website.

Fixing a broken NYC… with Legos? is a post from: The Inquisitr

The exponential growth of the internet never fails to amaze me.

Every year, you think it couldn’t possibly be more influential, or huge, or humanity uniting, and then you see videos like this one. Plus, it’s done in a soothing yet hip color scheme with fun graphics included so you can wrap your head around figures like “billion,” “trillion,” and “Europe.”

If you dig stats, check out the video below on the crazy strides made by the internet in general in even just the last month. (For instance, 247 billion e-mails are sent every day. 200 billion of those are spam. And why is Facebook so slow to load sometimes? Because 6 million other people are all trying to be on it, too, every minute.)

[Via Mashable]

Gorgeous stats video on “the state of the internet” is a post from: The Inquisitr

OKCupid is interesting for a variety of reasons, one being that they don’t bombard us with suicidal thought-inducing commercials that could be mistaken for Cialis ads, featuring depressing people frolicking on a boat.

Another cool thing is the way they analyze and blog about trends present in their massive pool of daters- whether it’s the impact of religion on relationship marketability or the relative success of profile picture poses, OKCupid has a knack for presenting stats in a way that recalls the pop-statistics book Freakonomics. While a lot of the data gathered by the algorithms address things users can control like cleavage exposure, today’s topic is one sadly less adjustable on the user end: aging out of the dating pool.

The lengthy post to which I refer isn’t all bad news though- while it confirms that online matchmaking favors the under-thirty set, an argument is made that there’s an untapped sweet spot of women in their thirties and beyond who are, get this, “in a fellatio-positive time in their lives.” Yes, if you take nothing else from reading this, remember those words: fellatio-positive. There’s even an interactive map showing level of enthusiasm towards oral sex by region and age that you can adjust to show how bj-friendly women in your area happen to be. Isn’t math fun?

It’s not just a propensity for sword swallowing that increases after a woman leaves her twenties- kissing, bondage and threesomes were all looked upon more favorably in OKCupid’s data collection. Still not convinced? The OKCupid data goes on to point out that women over 30 are generally happier (although this inexplicably drops off at 40), more self confident, and shower/brush their teeth at a higher frequency. As for attractiveness, while the writer of the post concedes that youth and beauty are inextricably linked, attractiveness level stays fairly constant throughout one’s twenties and thirties. (Out of your league is out of your league, homes.)

TIME posted an article today with slightly more sobering statistics regarding online dating. While America’s still patting themselves on the collective back for electing a black president, an overwhelming number of us would be far less content with a black date. Studies conducted by other dating sites, including Match, Yahoo and Chemistry, found that 73% of female users indicated a racial preference for potential partners, and of that 73%, 64% of those studied have a “whites only” sign above their dating water fountain. Men aren’t that much more racially enlightened, with nearly 60% of those surveyed expressing a preference, and possibly only branching out from white women because they think Asian women get their freak on more in the boudoir. (The exact word used was “hypersexual.”)

Black women and Asian men seem to have the hardest go of it when looking for a mate online, again partially due to stereotypes. (Black women are mentioned in the study as being stereotyped as “bossy,” and I won’t speculate on what people say about Asian men.) Once again, OKCupid is heading up the data gathering game, from the earlier link about profile pics:

After attempting to control for attractiveness… the study found that black women garnered the fewest responses of any female group. White women responded at much higher rates to white men than to men of color. Asian women’s and Latinas’ response rates showed even stronger preferences for white men. (The site’s latest eye-opening study determined which types of profile pictures elicit the most responses. To all the single ladies: the older you are, the more cleavage you should show.)

So there it is- plenty of fish in the cyber sea, if you’re young, white and hate giving BJs. What do you think? Is it worth the possible rejection? Do we all deserve a lifetime of not getting laid because we’re superficial, racially unenlightened jerks?

Today in online dating: men are “ageist,” everyone’s racist is a post from: The Inquisitr

It’s oft repeated and likely untrue that there’s an old Chinese “curse”- “may you live in interesting times.”

The years between 2000 and 2010- while certainly interesting- have also been largely a dazzling mosaic of suck. Wars, unrest, September 11th, global economic meltdown after meltdown, the Bush years- people are fond of reflecting upon when things might “get better.” So much so that the current American president was largely elected on the nebulous concept of hope- hope that Americans might feel safe again, jobs would return and foreclosures would slow down, endless wars might draw to a close… It’s difficult to quantify what changes any individual has endured over the past ten years. But what if your entire frame of reference was only those ten years?

Imagine not recalling what it was like when a single act of fellatio could grind government processes to a halt for months. To live in such a time of peace and prosperity that a semen stained dress was deemed worthy of congressional inquiry rather than the question of sending tens of thousands of soldiers into harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, reading a book jacket synapsis last night, I realized that concepts like “Homeland Security” are not all that new anymore, that we’ve lived with the specter of domestic terrorism for nearly ten years now.

Below is a video of a reporter asking some questions about the world of a few nine-year-old fourth graders. Interesting especially is their pithy, matter of fact recounting of the events of September 11th, held up against their current mortal fears. (Bloody Mary, bigfoot, the Jersey Devil.) But they’re already showing signs of rational reasoning of the same fears- my mom says Bloody Mary is just a drink!

[Yahoo, via snopes, XKCD image]

The past decade, as described by 9-year-olds is a post from: The Inquisitr

Twin impacts occurred at 11:31 UTC on October 9th, striking the crater Cabeus. At a press briefing today at 9am at PST NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA, preliminary data was unveiled regarding the details contained in massive amounts of data collected by the spacecraft:

“We are ecstatic,” said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “Multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapor plume and the ejecta curtain created by the LCROSS Centaur impact. The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water.”

NASA indicates that presence of water may not be the extent of the moon’s secrets:

“The full understanding of the LCROSS data may take some time. The data is that rich,” Colaprete said. “Along with the water in Cabeus, there are hints of other intriguing substances. The permanently shadowed regions of the moon are truly cold traps, collecting and preserving material over billions of years.”

NASA says water found in moon crater is a post from: The Inquisitr

Medical marijuana has evolved into a state vs. federal law argument, with the notable example of a thriving medical marijuana industry in California.

Aside from California, 13 other states allow use of marijuana for medical reasons ranging from anxiety and insomnia to glaucoma and cancer- Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. Colorado is also notable for the presence of dispensaries, and Rhode Island and New Mexico are working on licensing providers for medical marijuana.

Attorney General Eric Holder stated in March that feds should pursue medical marijuana users that violate federal laws, but a memo was expected to be sent to states advising that prosecuting medical marijuana cases is not a prudent usage of law enforcement manpower.  While those who are operating within state guidelines can breathe a little more easily, feds acknowldge they will be just as aggressive in pursuing parties that use medical marijuana as a cover for other illegal activity.

Holder clarified the change of heart and policy in a statement:

“It will not be a priority to use federal resources to prosecute patients with serious illnesses or their caregivers who are complying with state laws on medical marijuana, but we will not tolerate drug traffickers who hide behind claims of compliance with state law to mask activities that are clearly illegal,” Holder said in a statement accompanying the new guidelines. “This balanced policy formalizes a sensible approach that the Department has been following since January: effectively focus our resources on serious drug traffickers while taking into account state and local laws.”

Feds ease up on cancer-stricken tokers is a post from: The Inquisitr

In their marketing materials, lipgloss manufacturer “2 Love My Lips” cites a survey of 750 women by a British newspaper about the use of date rape drugs such as GHB and Rohypnol.

The survey, which was conducted over two days in sixteen cities, indicates that as many as 1 in 4 women reported experiencing spiked drinks. With an objective of giving women “the confidence to look beautiful and stay in control,” “2 Love My Lips” lipgloss comes packaged with a mini-kit to detect the presence of date rape drugs.

The company says the kit isn’t meant to be used with every drink, only those that seem suspect or may have been unattended. They offer this bulleted list of tips to avoid possibly dangerous situations:

2 LOVE MY LIPS DRINK SAFE & STAY IN CONTROL GUIDE

• You have started you night looking fab dressed to impress
• Stay in control alcohol impairs judgement
• Watch your drink at all times
• Trust your own instincts, if you feel something is wrong, let someone you trust know
• Do not consume a drink, which has been left unattended
• Buy your own drink – it’s not just strangers who spike drinks
• Pre-book your taxi
• If you’re out with your friends all go home together
• If a friend/anybody is unconscious, place them in the recovery position – get help – they may require medical attention.
• THINK BEFORE DRINK THINKS FOR YOU

[Via Gizmodo]

Dual action lip gloss glosses lips, prevents date rape is a post from: The Inquisitr

Some people have said that the moon landing was the last great moment of American triumph, even if Buzz Aldrin still has to, at an advanced age, smack around doubting Thomases for challenging the event’s veracity.

But a successful round-trip wasn’t always a foregone conclusion. William Safire, former White House speechwriter who died earlier this week, had a plan b speech queued up in the event Aldrin and Neil Armstrong expired in the attempt. Gawker posted pictures of the luckily-never-orated speech:

Interesting: Safire’s speech for Major Tom moon landing scenario is a post from: The Inquisitr

OKCupid is a popular free alternative to expensive dating sites like Match.com and EHarmony.

The site uses mysterious algorithms to deduce percentages of “match” and “enemy” that users are in relation to one another. But the site’s stat bots have also been (anonymously and blindly) scanning the messages users send as a first contact to see which terms and phrases work to lure the opposite (or same) sex more efficiently.

In what is possibly a reflection on OKCupid’s more progressive user base, messages that use the word “atheist” received a 10% higher hit rate than the average first message. Mentioning one of the big three religions (Christianity, Judaism or Islam) raised response rates over the typical 32% only marginally, but if a user mentioned “God” in general, contactees were generally disinclined to reply.

Vague personal praise such as referring to someone as “beautiful,” “cutie,” or “sexy” also discouraged replies, while a targeted approach referencing interests gains more replies. Phrases such as “noticed that” or “you mention” sent reply rates up to 50%. And while men weren’t moved by self effacing women, women tended to reply to men who used words such as “sorry,” “apologize,” and “awkward.”

It could be that appearing unsure makes the writer seem more vulnerable and less threatening. It could be that women like guys who write mumbly. But either way: men should be careful not to let the appearance of vulnerability become the appearance of sweaty desperation: please is on the negative list (22% reply rate), and in fact it is the only word that is actually worse for you than its netspeak equivalent (pls, 23%)!

Even your opening greeting affects response rate, a boring old “hi” or “hello” doesn’t do much, but “how’s it going” or “what’s up?” had a bit more sway with potential mates. The number one turnoff? Just like when applying for a job, netspeak like “ur” or “wat” won’t open any doors. For your convenience, OKCupid has compiled the data into a handy list of what not to say when trying to get a date on the site.

The key to online dating success: ditch Jesus? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Wired has an interesting list up today of all the things your children will probably never know about or understand.

It’s likely familiar ground for those of us that came of age with technology of a different sort- those of us who were bowled over by the technological wizardry that was the original Lemonade Stand or Oregon Trail. Or those who sometimes get nostalgic for video games that were the size of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The list is full of things that will definitely bring you back to the days when new gadgets and advances were fewer and further between, and much harder to come by. (I never had a Commodore 64, and I only got to play Summer Olympics and Winter Olympics at a friend’s house. And I liked it! I was happy to get it at three week intervals.)

Making the list are universally loved memories such as “blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.” “swimming pools with diving boards,” roller skates and just plain “privacy.” Also making the list are some “don’t let the door hit you” items such as writing checks, posting letters with a stamp and waiting for the hour and a half a week when the bank was actually open to get money.

Either way, you’re old, dude.

[100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About, Wired]

100 things your kids will never know about, old man is a post from: The Inquisitr

A Japanese spacecraft has detected Uranium on the moon.

The Japanese Kaguya spacecraft detected uranium with a gamma-ray spectrometer as part of a projet to map the moon’s surface composition. The finding in theory could mean that nuclear power plants could be built on the moon, or the moon could become an open cut mine.

“We’ve already gotten uranium results, which have never been reported before,” said Robert Reedy, a senior scientist at the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute told Florida media. “We’re getting more new elements and refining and confirming results found on the old maps.”

Since some creationists don’t believe the moon is lit by the sun, maybe the uranium can now be used to explain it

Uranium on the moon? More common than you think is a post from: The Inquisitr