Researchers bring prehistoric algae back to life
Researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research made the discovery.They say it is particularly exciting for scientists as it has pushed the limits of what they believed was possible. According to the team, the revived algae now ranks amongst the oldest living organisms ever brought back to life.Lead author of the study Sarah Bolius described the find as "a time capsule" which contained valuable information about past ecosystems, as well as information about what changing conditions may mean for the future of them.
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Metro
4 days ago
- Metro
How a dusty old envelope led to discovery of one of world's rarest minerals
When Roland Eichhorn popped open the dusty cardboard box, he couldn't believe it. There, in the basement of a stuffy government office in Germany, was a pile of six yellow lumps. But these old rocks were one of the rarest minerals found on Earth. Until the discovery, only about a snowball-sized amount of the mineral, called humboldtine, had ever been found, Roland Eichhorn of the Bavarian State Office for the Environment (LfU) said. 'And we've now found a second snowball,' he told the German newspaper Welt. Humboldtine, named after the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, was first discovered in a rundown brown coal deposit in the Czech Republic in 1821. The mineral is prized highly by collectors because it has only been discovered in 30 locations across eight countries, including the UK. 'We are legally obligated to make geological collection pieces accessible to the public,' Eichhorn said. Archivists were asked last year to digitise the agency's mineral and rock catalogue stored in the LfU basement in Hof, on the banks of the Saale, in 2023. While scanning the shelves, a worker stumbled on a note written by a coal mine owner in 1949. 'Humboldtine from the Mathias mine near Schwandorf,' it read, referring to an old open-pit mine for brown coal by the river Naab. Eichhorn was taken aback, to say the least, not only because of how rare the mineral is, but because it wasn't listed anywhere in the collection. The owner of the Mathias mine likely sent in samples of the rock, but it was never documented by agency officials. Eichhorn's team immediately began rifling through more than 13,000 rocks collected across 250 years, only to discover the humboldtine stored anticlimactically in a drawer. Inside was a box labelled 'Oxalit', German for organic mineral, with the rare material inside. The dusty rock is the 'cyborg among minerals', Eichhorn said. Like all life on Earth, the mineral's crystal lattice contains carbon, water and oxygen, according to the mineral database Mindat. But what sets it apart i the iron these ingredients to life are bound to. Humboldtine only forms when iron-rich rocks contact specific acids in damp conditions, creating a lemon-yellow clump that can contain crystals. Most of humboldtine unearthed so far are only millimetre‑sized grains. But how these yellow-amber crumbs formed in the Mathias mine left Eichhorn baffled. Brown coal, also called lignite, is one of the dirtiest fossil fuels and has a low concentration of carbon. More Trending A brown coal mine isn't exactly the best conditions for humboldtine to form, yet LfU lab tests 'clearly confirmed' it was the precious crystal. Digging at the mine had closed in 1966 and was flooded with water a few decades later. Eichhorn said this makes it almost impossible for officials to investigate the site and obtain clues about where the humboldtine came from. 'Why the yellow nodules formed in the Schwandorf brown coal will probably remain a mystery forever,' the LfU said. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Here's how it could become harder for people-smugglers to reach the UK MORE: Lufthansa CEO's wife 'runs over and kills woman crossing the road' on family holiday MORE: Now I want to watch Netflix's 'ultimate grandmother of all bad movies ever made'
Metro
11-07-2025
- Metro
Now I want to watch Netflix's 'ultimate grandmother of all bad movies ever made'
A new Netflix film has been causing a lot of chatter after being added to the streaming platform yesterday – but mainly for all the wrong reasons. However, when an early viewer described this psychological thriller as 'the ultimate grandmother of all bad movies ever made', it actually made me keen to see it and find out whether or not I agree with that bold description. Brick, a German-language release, does have an intriguing central conceit: A couple wakes up to find an ominous brick wall has been built overnight, surrounding their apartment building and trapping them inside. They must then unite with their wary neighbours to uncover the secrets of the wall and try to find a way out alive. Written and directed by Philip Koch, Brick stars Oppenheimer actor Matthias Schweighöfer, Ruby O. Fee, Frederick Lau and Salber Lee Williams. Wake up to find news on your TV shows in your inbox every morning with Metro's TV Newsletter. Sign up to our newsletter and then select your show in the link we'll send you so we can get TV news tailored to you. It's not charmed critics, as it currently sits on a dismal rating of just 29% on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, with FandomWire's account complaining that the movie 'isn't over-the-top enough to be fun or intense enough to be gripping'. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video 'Even a perfectly workable thriller premise needs engaging writing, directing and performances to bring it to life, and in this capacity, Netflix's new feature Brick is as utterly inert as its title,' Paste Magazine's review added, which was published with the headline 'Netflix's new sci-fi thriller is dumb as a Brick'. Collider suggested that in Brick's final act 'the wall feels less like a fascinating puzzle to solve and more like a monotonous problem to overcome', while Clint Worthington for wrote: 'It's frustrating to see such high-concept potential, some decent production design, and a couple of game leads fall victim to a mystery that unfolds with thudding obviousness'. Others were more positive, with Allan Hunter for Screen International acknowledging that, while Brick is more conventional in its later stages, it's 'still a satisfying and watchable audience-pleaser'. But it's the early audience reactions where the gloves truly came off and Brick started to sound like it could be in so-bad-it-could-be-entertainingly-good territory – or at least so-bad-you-should-watch-it-to-see-if-you-agree territory. 'Brick is the ultimate grandmother of all bad movies ever made. So bad you can hardly believe it,' seethed Jim H in a challenge I will probably have to take up. 'Watching this was actually painful…Holy [sic.] it's so bad and the actors are terrible,' moaned another fan, adding: 'Do not watch… you will regret it.' Again, this makes me think that maybe I should watch it. Could this perhaps be 2025's answer to The Room, which was infamously dubbed 'the Citizen Kane of bad movies'? Or maybe we're at least in the same ballpark as 2019's Cats or even last year's superhero stinker Madame Web or Disney horror rip-off Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. Maybe it could even be as bad as Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, currently one of the worst films I've ever seen. In another half-star reaction, Shiv D called Brick 'one of the WORST movies in the whole world' and wondered 'why did they waste so much money and time for such garbage'. 'Not gonna lie, I just enjoyed when the characters died for the first time in my life. It felt like they deserved it for wasting my time,' they added. 'I don't want you guys to waste your time so just delete it from your library and never watch it.' 'I've rarely seen such a bad, pointless film. Luckily, there's a fast-forward button,' sniped Andrea K on Google. However, others have shared their enjoyment of Brick, with Philipp Rabe calling actor Freddy Lau's performance 'an 11/10'. 'Contrary to my expectations (the reviews and criticism almost put me off watching it), I really liked the film,' shared Ma Bau in a five-star Google review. 'A neat, futuristic idea that might not be so far-fetched in 20 years. Anyone who likes films like Cube will probably be well-served here.' Benjamin M was another rave reviewer, calling Brick 'a pretty amazing and exciting contained thriller with a sci fi twist'. More Trending 'The ensemble and the camera work sticks out, with the plot taking twists you don´t see coming. Fun and cool with that little German hint of weirdness!' he added. Curiosity could just get the better of me this weekend and see me hitting play on Brick. Brick is streaming now on Netflix. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: All 4 films in iconic horror series hailed 'a cinematic masterpiece' coming to Netflix MORE: Dark period drama that 'instantly hooked' viewers is now streaming on Netflix MORE: A new high-speed train is set to link three of Europe's coolest capital cities
Spectator
09-07-2025
- Spectator
Why driving at 80mph won't save you time
The device you see on this page is called a 'paceometer' and was devised by behavioural scientists Eyal Peer and Eyal Gamliel. It features in their scientific paper 'Pace yourself: Improving time-saving judgments when increasing activity speed'. Study it carefully, because as many people have confirmed to me, it will 'change the way you drive forever'. Nassim Taleb described it as 'mathematically trivial, but completely counterintuitive'. The inner digits show speed in the conventional way: in this case miles per hour. In other words, how far you travel at some velocity in a given time. The small digits around the outside are the paceometer: they show the same information but expressed the other way around. Instead of the distance you travel in a given time, this shows the time taken to travel a given distance. (For maths nerds, there is a similar inversion between the way the US and UK measure fuel economy in cars – we use 'miles per gallon' whereas the US and most other countries flip it and measure 'litres per 100km'.) What you will suddenly realise – something not instinctively obvious – is that the relationship between the two measures is completely non-linear. The faster you are going already, the less time you save by going 10mph faster still. Accelerate from 20 to 30mph and you save ten minutes for every ten miles you are travelling. Accelerate from 70 to 80mph and you save under a minute. As you go faster, everything unpleasant and dangerous – braking distance, energy consumption, risk of accident, risk of fatality, the likelihood of being mistaken for a German – goes up, whereas the very thing you are attempting to achieve, namely a reduction in journey time, is being attained to a smaller and smaller degree. This shouldn't be an epiphany, but it is. No one who had studied a paceometer would have demanded HS2 travel so needlessly fast. The distance involved is simply too short for the time-saving to be worthwhile. London to Manchester is about 160 miles. At 80mph that takes two hours. At 160mph you save an hour. But accelerate to 240mph and you have a train that can't stop mid-journey and can't go around corners to avoid the attractive parts of the countryside – in return for which you save a paltry 20 minutes. That's less time than you currently waste on the Euston concourse waiting for them to announce the platform number two sodding minutes before the train leaves. There are a few questions to be asked here. Could the 'paceometer effect' be applied to other metrics? For instance, could you completely disrupt the whole commercial property market by demanding that prices were listed in 'square feet per £1,000' rather than the other way around? You might reasonably argue that the paceometer makes a case against increasing the speed limits on motorways, since you could save people vastly more time by reducing the incidence of pointless roadworks and contraflows. But you could also use it to argue that the 20mph speed limit in London is absurdly low, since it notionally increases journey time by 50 per cent. Or maybe not. In my next article, I plan to confuse you still further by suggesting that the funereal 20mph limit in London might not increase journey time by very much at all.
