Of the four billion years of life on earth, humans are the only species to have communicated information between generations. By gathering information, sharing it, and building upon it, we have been the most productive race. Other species that have had opportunities to reign have had to live by trial and error. We continue to take our pre-existing knowledge and use it to create better technologies. With all this knowledge we must understand the fragility of other life and our environments.
Frank Widdle and the history of theJet Engine leading into WW2.
Between the tumultuous times of World War 1 and World War 2, technology plans greatly advanced. Through the process of collective learning, engineers were able to create machinery to fly all over the world.
A Stanford student has taken ancient knowledge and transformed it to a medical miracle. On January 10th Stanford's bioengineering student Manu Prakash published his work on an innovative centrifuge.
When used for disease testing, a centrifuge separates blood components and makes pathogens easier to detect. A typical centrifuge spins fluid samples inside an electric-powered, rotating drum. As the drum spins, centrifugal forces separate fluids by density into layers within a sample tube. In the case of blood, heavy red cells collect at the bottom of the tube, watery plasma floats to the top, and parasites, like those that cause malaria, settle in the middle.
Prakash, who specializes in low-cost diagnostic tools for underserved regions, recognized the need for a new type of centrifuge after he saw an expensive centrifuge being used as a doorstop in a rural clinic in Uganda. There was no electricity to run the machine. The design of the childhood toy, the whirligig, has been around for over 1,000 years and inspired Prakash’s new centrifuge today. One of Prakash’s centrifuges costs only 20 cents unlike originally machines that sell for a few thousand dollars.
Threshold six--the Amerge of the first to large species ever to change the face of the earth in such a short period of time. We humans are associated with greater impact and greater energy flows than ever before in planetary history. Experts have a long argued about was is distinctive about modern humans even after they agreed we used tools. Today they tend to think that our chief distinction is the way we use language, symbolically and grammatically, Which permits precise meaning to be conveyed. This story who began using the term "Big history” and “collective learning” was David Christian.
Humans are closest related to chimpanzees, over 98% of our DNA are the same. We are more closely related to them than any other apes species. Our species started to evolve when the global temperature declined and became more unpredictable. Our world had flipped from an ice age and back about seventeen times. From clear evidence of hominin fossils, it is now believed that humans originated in Africa. With the irritable weather our ancestors were forced to walk upright in new terrains, this was a major threshold into our existence. This new way of travel is called “bipedalism”, bones of the earliest known fossils are evidence of this. ‘Ardi’; a female dated at about 4.4 million years ago, although the most well known fossils are those of Lucy, dated about 3.2 million years ago. Next these apes learned and improved coordination and how to make and use tools. Then, about 1.8 million years ago, a new species appeared, Homo erectus. The size of their brains was increased, but only about 70% of the size of modern human brains. Finally after around 2 million years of the Homo Erectus, a new species of ourselves formed of about 200 to 250,000 years ago in Africa. Group began to separate and many minor genetic changes occurred that spread rapidly and formed more distinct types of humans.
http://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/10/whirligig-toy-bioengineers-develop-20-cent-hand-powered-blood-centrifuge/
http://nbcnews.to/2duh7KHhttp://bit.ly/2hSWvtU
Credits:
Created with images by ulleo - "books books crate read" • acidpix - "Human Evolution" • PhillipC - "BE2C, Masterton, New Zealand, 25 April 2009" • R/DV/RS - "WW1 bomb damage to Victorian sphinx at Cleopatra's Needle" • 4volvos - "airplane engine propeller" • USACE HQ - "First leaf of the new The Dalles navigation lock" • Vasnic64 - "Anonyme WW2 Europe - Soldat de la Wehrmacht dit "Schutze" en marche forcée - juin 1939" • 27707 - "fokker airplane warplane" • docoverachiever - "Whirligig in motion.jpg" • UCL Mathematical and Physical Sciences - "Centrifuge" • Joi - "Centrifuging" • krapalm - "android samsung samsung galaxy" • GerMai - "gorillas mammals young"