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-Why don’t humans have tails? Scientists find answers in an unlikely place [[https://ff-swap.com/|usdt обменять]]
+Why scientists say we need to send clocks to the moon — soon
+[[https://fixedf1oat.org/|fixedfloat exchange]]
+Perhaps the greatest, mind-bending quirk of our universe is the inherent trouble with timekeeping: Seconds tick by ever so slightly faster atop a mountain than they do in the valleys of Earth.
-Humans have many wonderful qualities, but we lack something that’s a common feature among most animals with backbones: a tail. Exactly why that is has been something of a mystery.
+For practical purposes, most people don’t have to worry about those differences.
-Tails are useful for balance, propulsion, communication and defense against biting insects. However, humans and our closest primate relatives — the great apes — said farewell to tails about 25 million years ago, when the group split from Old World monkeys. The loss has long been associated with our transition to bipedalism, but little was known about the genetic factors that triggered primate taillessness.
+But a renewed space race has the United States and its allies, as well as China, dashing to create permanent settlements on the moon, and that has brought the idiosyncrasies of time, once again, to the forefront.
-Now, scientists have traced our tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code that is abundant in our genome but had been dismissed for decades as junk DNA, a sequence that seemingly serves no biological purpose. They identified the snippet, known as an Alu element, in the regulatory code of a gene associated with tail length called TBXT. Alu is also part of a class known as jumping genes, which are genetic sequences capable of switching their location in the genome and triggering or undoing mutations.
+On the lunar surface, a single Earth day would be roughly 56 microseconds shorter than on our home planet — a tiny number that can lead to significant inconsistencies over time.
+NASA and its international partners are currently grappling with this conundrum.
+Scientists aren’t just looking to create a new “time zone” on the moon, as some headlines have suggested, said Cheryl Gramling, the lunar position, navigation, and timing and standards lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Rather, the space agency and its partners are looking to create an entirely new “time scale,” or system of measurement that accounts for that fact that seconds tick by faster on the moon, Gramling noted.
+The agency’s goal is to work with international partners to set up a new method of tracking time, specifically for the moon, that space-faring nations agree to observe.
+A recent memo from the White House also directed NASA to map out its plans for this new time scale by December 31, calling it “foundational” to renewed US efforts to explore the lunar surface. The memo also asks that NASA implement such a system by the end of 2026, the same year the space agency is aiming to return astronauts to the moon for the first time in five decades.
+For the world’s timekeepers, the coming months could be crucial for figuring out how to accurately keep lunar time — and reach agreements on how, when and where to put clocks on the moon.

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