Leonardo Da Vinci had no children but he has relatives. 

A new study shows how many and corrects some genealogical errors and documents the continuous male line, from father to son, of the Da Vinci family (later Vinci), from progenitor Michele (born 1331) to grandson Leonardo (6th generation, born 1452) to today; 21 generations in all, including five family branches. It identifies 14 living descendants.

Leonardo himself had (at least) 22 half-brothers but no children. The five family branches are traced from Leonardo's father, ser Piero (5th generation), and half-brother Domenico (6th). Since the 15th generation, data have been collected on over 225 individuals. 

The evolution of hard disk storage shows how we've managed to shrink down technology over decades. From having a room full of disks and tapes to owning a single drive that one could hold in the palm of one's hands, we've managed to develop portable devices for storing data. However, one thing has plagued all storage media to this day. Reading and writing have traditionally been done using magnetic heads. Thus, the disk layers themselves would have to be magnetizable. Hyper Physics notes that ferromagnetism is a unique property of some metals that enable them to become magnetized. New research into antiferromagnetic materials has opened the door to new options in AI and memory construction.

Gold should be uniformly scattered throughout the Earth's crust, not in giant deposits, because it is unreactive. It is one of the most inert metals in the whole Periodic Table, it doesn't easily react with other substances, so it should not have come together in sufficient quantity to mine.

Yet it did, and became prized for its purity and stability and later for its rarity. It's still rare. The World Gold Council estimates that all the gold ever mined in the world would fit into a 20x20x20-meter cube. 

Chemists may have found an answer as to why it should not form into deposits yet did, and it may also explain why many gold miners were at risk from arsenic poisoning.

At an archaeological site in the City of David in Jerusalem, scholars have found an unexplained cache of fossilized shark teeth in an area where there should be none - nearly 40 miles from where they should have naturally occurred nearly 3,000 years ago, just after the death of King Solomon.

Since the teeth were from 66,000,000 years ago, Late Cretaceous, The answer would seem to be simple; they were fossilized, found, and then moved. But why? Did did the owners know they were ancient fossils?

"That’s what viruses do, they evolve, but we can prevent the emergence of variants by preventing transmission. It’s quite simple. More transmission, more variants. Less transmission, less variants."

 

Dr Tedros (Director General of the WHO)

(click to watch on Youtube)

Are you worried about getting cancer from a light bulb? Probably not, but if someone conspiratorially intones that 5G wireless towers are emitting radiation and you are a woman or a milllennial, you are a lot more likely to worry than men or Generation Z to be concerned, according to a new survey. Even though the radiation is the same.

After over one year of forced confinement, due to the still ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, academics around the world seem to have settled down on the idea that after all, we can still do our job via videoconferencing. We had to adapt to the situation as everybody else, of course, and in a general sense we are a privileged minority - other human occupations which are only possible in person suffered way more.

New York's Indian Point nuclear power plant was banned on April 30th of this year - because the ruling political party and the environmental lobbyists who guide decisions convinced themselves that solar was ready to fill the gap.

Now the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, has told residents they need to shut off their air conditioners during a heat wave, because they don't have enough electricity. At the state level, alleged serial sexual predator Governor Andrew Cuomo is deflecting from his scandals by appealing to his base with another ban on energy - making the state one on natural gas using hydraulic fracturing permanent.

In 2019, Biogen announced that it was abandoning its late stage drug for Alzheimer’s, aducanumab but then in 2021 they got FDA approval for it.

Two new gravitational-wave events, dubbed GW200105 and GW200115, were detected on Jan. 5, 2020, and Jan. 15, 2020, but they happened 900,000,000 years ago.

It took that long for the gravitational waves from two black holes gobbling up their neutron star companions to finally hit Earth.

This first-ever detection of a black hole merging with a neutron star occurred during the second half of the LIGO and Virgo detectors third observing run, called O3b. Although multiple observatories carried out several follow-up observations, none observed light from either event, consistent with the measured masses and distances.