A contact lens that magnifies objects at the wink of an eye has been created by scientists to help people with impaired vision.
The lens contains an extremely thin telescope that is switched on when the wearer winks their right eye and returns to normal when they wink their left eye.
Eric Tremblay, a researcher at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), said the lens could help people with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which leaves them with a blind spot in the centre of their vision.
The contact lens magnifies objects by 2.8 times, making road signs, facial features and other objects large enough for people with AMD to recognise with their peripheral vision.
The device was funded by Darpa, the Pentagon’s research agency, as a means of giving soldiers a form of bionic vision.
“They were really interested in supervision, but the reality is more tame than that,” said Tremblay at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. So far, only five people have tested the latest version.
The device is larger and slightly thicker than a normal contact lens. It allows the wearer to see normally by correcting for short or long sight. But around the central region is a thin, ring-shaped reflective telescope, which expands the perceived size of objects like weak binoculars.
To swap between normal and magnified vision, the wearer dons a pair of liquid crystal glasses. By winking, they can switch the glasses electronically to polarise light in different planes. The contact lens is designed so that one type of polarised light goes through the normal, central part of the lens, while the other goes through the magnifying region.
More work is needed before the contact lenses are ready for patients to wear regularly. The latest lenses can only be worn for about half an hour, because they do not allow enough oxygen to pass through them and into the eye. Tremblay said he expected a working version of the contact lenses to be available in two years or so.
You might have heard the oceans are full of plastic, but how full exactly? Around 8 million metric tonnes go into the oceans each year, according to the first rigorous global estimate published in Science today.
That’s equivalent to 16 shopping bags full of plastic for every metre of coastline (excluding Antarctica). By 2025 we will be putting enough plastic in the ocean (on our most conservative estimates) to cover 5% of the earth’s entire surface in cling film each year.
Around a third of this likely comes from China, and 10% from Indonesia. In fact all but one of the top 20 worst offenders are developing nations, largely due to fast-growing economies but poor waste management systems.
However, people in the United States – coming in at number 20 and producing less than 1% of global waste – produce more than 2.5 kg of plastic waste each day, more than twice the amount of people in China.
While the news for us, our marine wildlife, seabirds, and fisheries is not good, the research paves the way to improve global waste management and reduce plastic in the waste stream.
Lindsay Robinson/University of Georgia
Follow the plastic
An international team of experts analysed 192 countries bordering the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and the Mediterranean and Black Seas. By examining the amount of waste produced per person per year in each country, the percentage of that waste that’s plastic, and the percentage of that plastic waste that is mismanaged, the team worked out the likely worst offenders for marine plastic waste.
In 2010, 270 million tonnes of plastic was produced around the world. This translated to 275 million tonnes of plastic waste; 99.5 million tonnes of which was produced by the two billion people living within 50 km of a coastline. Because some durable items such as refrigerators produced in the past are also thrown away, we can find more waste than plastic produced at times.
Of that, somewhere between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes found its way into the ocean. Given how light plastic is, this translates to an unimaginably large volume of debris.
While plastic can make its way into oceans from land-locked countries via rivers, these were excluded in the study, meaning the results are likely a conservative estimate.
With our planet still 85 years away from “peak waste” — and with plastic production skyrocketing around the world — the amount of plastic waste getting into the oceans is likely to increase by an order of magnitude within the next decade.
Our recent survey of the Australian coastline found three-quarters of coastal rubbish is plastic, averaging more than 6 pieces per meter of coastline. Offshore, we found densities from a few thousand pieces of plastic to more than 40,000 pieces per square kilometre in the waters around the continent.
Where is the plastic going?
While we now have a rough figure for the amount of plastic rubbish in the world’s oceans, we still know very little about where it all ends up (it isn’t all in the infamous “Pacific Garbage Patch”).
Between 6,350 and 245,000 metric tons of plastic waste is estimated to float on the ocean’s surface, which raises the all-important question: where does the rest of it end up?
Some, like the plastic microbeads found in many personal care products, ends up in the oceans and sediments where they can be ingested by bottom-dwelling creatures and filter-feeders.
It’s unclear where the rest of the material is. It might be deposited on coastal margins, or maybe it breaks down into fragments so small we can’t detect it, or maybe it is in the guts of marine wildlife.
Plastic recovered from a dead shearwater - a glowstick, industrial plastic pellets, and bits of balloon
CSIRO, Author provided
Wherever it ends up, plastic has enormous potential for destruction. Ghost nets and fishing debris snag and drown turtles, seals, and other marine wildlife. In some cases, these interactions have big impacts.
For instance, we estimate that around 10,000 turtles have been trapped by derelict nets in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria region alone.
More than 690 marine species are known to interact with marine litter. Turtles mistake floating plastic for jellyfish, and globally around one-third of all turtles are estimated to have eaten plastic in some form. Likewise seabirds eat everything from plastic toys, nurdles and balloon shreds to foam, fishing floats and glow sticks.
While plastic is prized for its durability and inertness, it also acts as a chemical magnet for environmental pollutants such as metals, fertilisers, and persistent organic pollutants. These are adsorbed onto the plastic. When an animal eats the plastic “meal”, these chemicals make their way into their tissues and — in the case of commercial fish species — can make it onto our dinner plates.
Plastic waste is the scourge of our oceans; killing our wildlife, polluting our beaches, and threatening our food security. But there are solutions – some of which are simple, and some a bit more challenging.
Solutions
If the top five plastic-polluting countries – China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Sri Lanka – managed to achieve a 50% improvement in their waste management — for example by investing in waste management infrastructure, the total global amount of mismanaged waste would be reduced by around a quarter.
Higher-income countries have equal responsibility to reduce the amount of waste produced per person through measures such as plastic recycling and reuse, and by shifting some of the responsibility for plastic waste back onto the producers.
The simplest and most effective solution might be to make the plastic worth money. Deposits on beverage containers for instance, have proven effective at reducing waste lost into the environment – because the containers, plastic and otherwise, are worth money people don’t throw them away, or if they do others pick them up.
Extending this idea to a deposit on all plastics at the beginning of their lifecycle, as raw materials, would incentivize collection by formal waste managers where infrastructure is available, but also by consumers and entrepreneurs seeking income where it is not.
Before the plastic revolution, much of our waste was collected and burned. But the ubiquity, volume, and permanence of plastic waste demands better solutions.
Scientists sparred at a conference in California over whether humans should actively attempt to contact intelligent life on other planets – and, if so, what we should say.
Researchers at the SETI Institute have been listening with radio telescopes for signals from outer space for more than three decades, but so far have found no evidence of extraterrestrial life.
They took part in a conference this week in San Jose, California, organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
SETI director Seth Shostak argued that earthlings must do more than listen for other life forms.
“Some of us at the institute are interested in 'active SETI,’ not just listening but broadcasting something to some nearby stars, because maybe there is some chance that if you wake somebody up you'll get a response,” Shostak said.
Shostak and other “active SETI” advocates want to send repeated signals from the world’s largest radio transmitter in Puerto Rico toward hundreds of stars within about 82 light-years of Earth.
However, he admits that some scientists -- including physicist Stephen Hawking -- oppose “active SETI” as potentially dangerous.
David Brin, the scientist and science fiction writer, argued during the conference against active attempts to contact alien life forms.
"Historians will tell you that first contact between industrial civilizations and indigenous people does not go well," he told the BBC.
Brin accused Shostak and others of "railroading the public” toward sending messages into space without addressing the potential cultural impact.
The likelihood of contact is extremely low, he said, but he argued that the risks are extremely high.
“The arrogance of shouting into the cosmos without any proper risk assessment defies belief,” Brin said. “It is a course that would put our grandchildren at risk.”
Shostak understands the concerns, even if he does not share them.
“It is like shouting in the jungle,” Shostak said later in a BBC interview. “You don't know what is out there -- you better not do it. If you incite the aliens to obliterate the planet, you wouldn't want that on your tombstone, right?"
However, he can’t imagine what incentive extraterrestrials would have to destroy Earth and its inhabitants – who he said have made less-focused attempts to send messages into space and “leaked” television, radar, and radio signals for more than 70 years.
"Any society that could come here and ruin our whole day by incinerating the planet already knows we are here,” Shostak said.
The US south-west and the Great Plains will face decade-long droughts far worse than any experienced over the last 1,000 years because of climate change, researchers said on Thursday.
The coming drought age – caused by higher temperatures under climate change – will make it nearly impossible to carry on with current life-as-normal conditions across a vast swathe of the country.
The droughts will be far worse than the one in California – or those seen in ancient times, such as the calamity that led to the decline of the Anasazi civilizations in the 13th century, the researchers said.
“The 21st-century projections make the [previous] mega-droughts seem like quaint walks through the garden of Eden,” said Jason Smerdon, a co-author and climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Researchers have long known that the south-west and Great Plains will dry out over the second half of the 21st century because of rising temperatures under climate change.
But this was the first time researchers found those droughts would be far worse even than those seen over the millennia.
The years since 2000 give only a small indication of the punishment ahead. In parts of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, 11 of those years have been drought years.
As many as 64 million people were affected by those droughts, according to Nasa projections.
Those conditions have produced lasting consequences. In California, now undergoing its fourth year of drought – and the worst dry spell in 1,200 years, farmers have sold off herds. Growers have abandoned fields. Cities have imposed water rationing .
But future droughts could be even more disruptive, because they will likely drag on for decades, not years.
“We haven’t seen this kind of prolonged drought even certainly in modern US history,” Smerdon said. “What this study has shown is the likelihood that multi-decadal events comprising year after year after year of extreme dry events could be something in our future.”
The researchers said the effects of drought would likely be exacerbated by population growth in the south-west and rising demands for water.
Already current demands for water – for agriculture and for daily life – have drastically reduced groundwater sources in California and across the south-west.
Under the current warming trajectory, the south-west and Great Plains could expect to see chronic water shortages, making it impossible to carry out farming and ranching under current methods.
“Given the likelihood of a much drier future and increasing water resources demand, groundwater loss and higher temperatures will likely exacerbate the impacts of future droughts, presenting a major adaptation challenge,” the paper said.
The researchers used data derived from tree rings, whose growth patterns show the effects of dry and wet years, sampled across North America, and soil moisture, rainfall and evaporation records, and 17 climate models to study the effects of future temperature rise on the region.
In a few billion years, the sun will become a red giant so large that it will engulf our planet. But the Earth will become uninhabitable much sooner than that. After about a billion years the sun will become hot enough to boil our oceans.
The sun is currently classified as a “main sequence” star. This means that it is in the most stable part of its life, converting the hydrogen present in its core into helium. For a star the size of ours, this phase lasts a little over 8 billion years. Our solar system is just over 4.5 billion years old, so the sun is slightly more than halfway through its stable lifetime.
Even stars die
After 8 billion years of happily burning hydrogen into helium are over, the sun’s life gets a little more interesting. Things change because the sun will have run out of hydrogen in its core – all that’s left is the helium. The trouble is that the sun’s core is not hot or dense enough to burn helium.
In a star, gravitational force pulls all the gases towards the centre. When the star has hydrogen to burn, the creation of helium produces enough outward pressure to balance out the gravitational pull. But when the star has nothing left in the core to burn, gravitational forces take over.
Eventually that force compresses the centre of the star to such a degree that it will start burning hydrogen in a small shell around the dead core, which is still full of helium. As soon as the sun begins to burn more hydrogen, it would be considered a “red giant”.
The process of compression in the centre allows the outer regions of the star to expand outwards. The burning hydrogen in the shell around the core significantly increases the brightness of the sun. Because the size of the star has expanded, the surface cools down and goes from white-hot to red-hot. Because the star is brighter, redder and physically larger than before, we dub these stars “red giants”.
Earth’s fiery demise
It is widely understood that the Earth as a planet will not survive the sun’s expansion into a full-blown red giant star. The surface of the sun will probably reach the current orbit of Mars – and, while the Earth’s orbit may also have expanded outwards slightly, it won’t be enough to save it from being dragged into the surface of the sun, whereupon our planet will rapidly disintegrate.
Life on the planet will run into trouble well before the planet itself disintegrates. Even before the sun finishes burning hydrogen, it will have changed from its present state. The sun has been increasing its brightness by about 10% every billion years it spends burning hydrogen. Increased brightness means an increase in the amount of heat our planet receives. As the planet heats up, the water on the surface of our planet will begin to evaporate.
An increase of the sun’s luminosity by 10% over the current level doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but this small change in our star’s brightness will be pretty catastrophic for our planet. This change is a sufficient increase in energy to change the location of the habitable zone around our star. The habitable zone is defined as the range of distances away from any given star where liquid water can be stable on the surface of a planet.
With a 10% increase of brightness from our star, the Earth will no longer be within the habitable zone. This will mark the beginning of the evaporation of our oceans. By the time the sun stops burning hydrogen in its core, Mars will be in the habitable zone, and the Earth will be much too hot to maintain water on its surface.
Uncertain models
This 10% increase in the sun’s brightness, triggering the evaporation of our oceans, will occur over the next billion years or so. Predictions of exactly how rapidly this process will unfold depend on who you talk to. Most models suggest that as the oceans evaporate, more and more water will be present in the atmosphere instead of on the surface. This will act as a greenhouse gas, trapping even more heat and causing more and more of the oceans to evaporate, until the ground is mostly dry and the atmosphere holds the water, but at an extremely high temperature.
As the atmosphere saturates with water, the water held in the highest parts of our atmosphere will be bombarded by high energy light from the sun, which will split apart the molecules and allow the water to escape as hydrogen and oxygen, eventually bleeding the Earth dry of water.
Where the models differ is on the speed with which the earth reaches this point of no return. Some suggest that the Earth will become inhospitable before the 1 billion year mark, since the interactions between the heating planet and the rocks, oceans, and plate tectonics will dry out the planet even faster. Others suggest that life may be able to hold on a little longer than 1 billion years, due to the different requirements of different life forms and periodic releases of critical chemicals by plate tectonics.
The Earth is a complex system – and no model is perfect. However, it seems likely that we have no more than a billion years left for life to thrive on our planet.
Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking might be terrified by the prospect of artificial intelligence driving humans into extinction, but Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson are not at all convinced it is a pressing issue -- though it might make for a good doomsday cult.
"So, everybody, I'm all for the singularity when computers are as smart as people," Nye said in a recent episode of StarTalk. "But computers run on electricity, and right now, someone literally has to shovel the coal to keep the robots going. So, I'm all for this robot uprising, as long as there is an infinite supply of electricity."
"I think it's a long way off," he added.
"They'll control the (power) grid," Tyson said. "They're not going to wait for you to plug them in for them to take over your life."
But Nye was still unconvinced. "Who is going to shovel the coal?"
"They will!" Tyson shot back. "Wait a minute, you speak like it's weird the robots need some special source of energy -- so do we! We eat food, three -- at least -- times a day."
Nye decided to change the subject to Ray Kurzweil's singularity.
"Just to be clear," Tyson interrupted. "There's an astrophysicist at the table, if you use the word singularity you have to clarify. We're not talking about the beginning of the universe, or the center of a black hole, or any other previous use of the word singularity. Go."
"We are getting to where computers have enough computational power to be like a human brain," Nye said. "And in my book, I have a little discussion about this. You can go to places in the world where people have not made a cell phone call. I'm not saying that won't change in the next little while, but it may be later than you think when there's a robot uprising taking over the world."
"The robots show up in western China, and they go, 'There's no place to plug in,' he continued. "And they're not very productive, let alone take-over-the-world-ive."
Nye said there were plenty of other things to worry about.
And Tyson agreed: "There's nothing about it that sounds impending to me, though it be impending to others, which is the perfect setup for a cult."
"Right? The world is going to come an end, it'll change really soon, really fast, just join the bandwagon."
Broadcaster and physicist Brian Cox recently explained why the discovery of the Higgs particle was so amazing.
"We sort of do know what the fuck is going on at some level with subatomic particles," he said on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. "If you look to the LHC -- the Large Hadron Collider -- which is the place where we generate the highest energy, so it is the biggest microscope in the world in that sense, we have an extremely good understanding of the laws of physics at that level, up to and including the discovery of the Higgs particle."
Cox, who was recently appointed Royal Society professor for public engagement in science at the University of Manchester, explained that the Higgs particle -- also known as the Higgs boson -- was predicted by Peter Higgs and other theoretical physicists in the 1960s.
"The idea is, basically, that early on in the expansion of the universe, so let's say less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, as the universe cooled something condensed out into empty space," he said. "So empty space isn't empty. It's full of Higgs particles," said Cox
The resulting "Higgs field" gives all other particles mass, and explains why some particles are heavier than others.
"That's the remarkable thing, if you think about it," Cox continued. "(Eugene) Wigner wrote an essay back in the 60s, I think, called 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences.' The unreasonable effectiveness is demonstrated by this discovery."
"It really is a mathematical prediction. We think there is a new fundamental particle that does the job of giving mass to other particles, and this is how it does it, this is how it behaves, and this is what it will look like, and this is what it will do.
The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, was built specifically to test the prediction.
"Then 50 years later, you build the biggest machine ever built -- 60 miles in circumference, most of it's in France, a bit of it's in Switzerland, you accelerate protons -- the nuclei of hydrogen -- around this thing at 99.999999 percent the speed of light, they go around the 60 miles 11,000 times a second, we can collide 60 million of them together every second to recreate the conditions that were present a billionth of a second after the universe began, photograph it in the biggest digital camera's ever built -- the one I work on called ATLAS is 40 meters in diameter, 7,000 tons of digital camera in a cavern the size of St. Paul's Cathedral -- and you find it."
"You find the thing that this guy Peter Higgs, working with many other people, predicted to exist 50 years ago because he did some sums! So it's real. It's real. The universe does behave like that. There is a condensate in the vacuum. It is a Higgs condensate. It does give mass to the other particles."
"It's a tremendous testament to the power of human reasoning, and it means that we understand physics."
As crazy as it sounds, we've all kind of accepted the part of the Big Bang Theory that says the universe started as a single point around 13.8 billion years ago. The thing is – a lot of theoretical physicists aren't enthralled with that idea, as a lot…
Over 4 million people have viewed a video posted by a New Zealand mother about her daughter's decision to begin to transition to being a male, Mashable reports.
Milla Fabish has been diagnosed with having gender dysphoria, a condition in which a person's gender identity causes them psychological distress. In the video posted below, Milla's mother Renee likens the condition to having a male brain born in a female body.
From as young as two Milla would refer to herself as girl-boy -- a girl that liked boy things from very early on," she said. "Her gender assigned at birth does not align with how she feels inside -- Milla was born female but her brain identifies as male."
Although the responses to the video on Renee's Facebook page have been overwhelmingly positive, the reception of the video -- especially as regards Renee's willingness to allow Milla to transition at such a young age -- has been critical.
"No, no, no!" Helen Thomas replied. "Still a girl, and always will be. If this was a naturally occurring situation, that's how it would occur...naturally. Instead, we subject these children to hormones, surgery, pain to satisfy our own misguided agendas. Pray for these children, because only GOD can help them."
But as Vanessa Whatmough of the Royal Children's Hospital wrote, the "optimal time" to begin treating individuals with gender dysphoria is during early puberty, as numerous studies have demonstrated that "physical and mental health outcomes [begun then] are better for transgender individuals."
"International treatment guidelines for children and adolescents with gender dysphoria recommend a series of medical interventions that are initially fully reversible (Stage 1 treatment using medication to suspend puberty), through to partially reversible interventions (Stage 2 treatment using oestrogen or testosterone hormones) and finally irreversible surgical interventions in adulthood (after the age of 18 years)."
Milla's mother, Renee, has heeded this advice.
"We have no doubt in our minds that Milla is fully invested in her plight to be recognized as a boy -- the only thing that has changed for us is pronouns -- we support him wholeheartedly."
At the end of the video, Milla himself speaks, saying that "I have gender dysphoria. I feel like I'm in the wrong body. I'm having a really hard time at school at the moment. Kids tease me all the time. They call me 'shim,' 'gay girl,' and 'weirdo.' I just want people to accept me for who I am, and I'm lucky that I have an awesome family who support me 100 percent."
"I have decided I want to take the next step. From today, I want live and be known as a boy. I hope I have your support."
To most people, it may be just a fun food to munch while watching a movie.
But to a couple of French investigators, popcorn is a biomechanical enigma waiting to be explained.
In an unusual study published on Wednesday, engineers Emmanuel Virot and Alexandre Ponomarenko carried out experiments into what makes popcorn, well, pop.
Cameras recording at 2,900 frames per second helped show what happened when a kernel of corn strutted its stuff.
When the temperature reached 100 degrees Celsius (180 degrees Fahrenheit), some of the moisture inside the corn started to turn into steam, the researchers found.
As the temperature rose to around 180 C (356 F), pressure built to around 10 bar, or 10 times the atmosphere at sea level.
Unable to withstand the stress, the outer shell broke open, causing a dramatic drop in pressure that forced the kernel's starchy innards to expand and protrude.
"We found that the critical temperature is about 180 C (356 F), regardless of the size or shape of the grain," said Virot, an aeronautical engineer at the elite Ecole Polytechnique.
The first thing to emerge from the fractured shell is a limb-shaped structure -- a "leg" -- that comes into contact with the surface of the pan and starts to compress under the heat.
Tensed and then released, the "leg" causes the corn to leap up -- a height ranging from a few millimetres to centimetres (tenths of an inch to several inches)-- and emit a "pop" from the sudden release of water vapour.
A few milliseconds later, the granules spewing from inside expand to form a spongey flake.
Evolution from fracture to flake takes less than 90 milliseconds -- 0.09 of a second.
The popcorn's leap results from an intriguing combination of thermodynamics and fracture mechanics, rather than just the blast of pent-up gases.
"A piece of popcorn has a singular way of jumping, midway between explosive plants such as impatiens, and muscle-based animals such as human beings," the researchers said.
The study appears in a British journal, the Royal Society Interface.
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online As the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Monday that the current measles outbreak has topped 120 cases and spread to 17 states, the decision of some parents not to vaccinate their children against such diseases remains at the forefront of the debate. For a…
A treasure trove of objects that were supposed to have been left behind after the first moon landing have turned up in the closet of Neil Armstrong, the first man to step onto the lunar surface, the Smithsonian Institution has said.
Armstrong died in August 2012 and his wife, Carol, found the items from the 1969 lunar landing as she was cleaning out one of his home closets in Cincinnati, Allan Needell, a space history curator at the National Air and Space Museum, wrote in a recent blog.
Among the objects are a camera that was mounted in the window of the Eagle lunar module to record the landing and two waist tethers. Armstrong used one of the tethers to support his feet during his rest period on the moon, Needell said.
The items were stashed in a white stowage bag informally known as a McDivitt Purse used aboard Eagle to store items.
"Needless to say, for a curator of a collection of space artifacts, it is hard to imagine anything more exciting," Needell wrote.
The items were intended to be left behind on the moon but were instead brought back. Needell said that as far as he knew Armstrong had never discussed them and no one had seen them in the 45 years since he returned to Earth.
According to mission transcripts, Armstrong described the objects to astronaut Michael Collins, who stayed in orbit around the moon aboard the command ship, as "just a bunch of trash that we want to take back - LM parts, odds and ends, and it won’t stay closed by itself."
The camera and the tether that Armstrong used during his rest break are part of a temporary exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum.
Dinosaurs ate hallucinogenic fungus that grew on prehistoric grass and was then preserved for about 100 million years in an amber fossil.
The fossil, which was discovered in Myanmar, provides evidence of the earliest grass specimen ever found, reported Eureka Alert.
The prehistoric grass played host to a fungus similar to ergot, a fungus blamed for disease epidemics and the Salem witch trials that was used for centuries as an labor-inducing or abortifacient drug and later synthesized as LSD.
"It seems like ergot has been involved with animals and humans almost forever, and now we know that this fungus literally dates back to the earliest evolution of grasses," said George Poinar, Jr., an Oregon State faculty member and expert on studying specimens found in amber.
He said the discovery helps scientists understand the timeline in grass development and how it relates to human food crops such as corn, rice, and wheat.
Researchers said dinosaurs undoubtedly ate the now-extinct ergot-like fungus, Palaeoclaviceps parasiticus -- which would have been toxic and naturally hallucinogenic.
"There's no doubt in my mind that it would have been eaten by sauropod dinosaurs, although we can't know what exact effect it had on them," Poinar said.
The fossil likely dates to the early-to-mid Cretaceous period, when land masses were dominated by dinosaurs and conifers but flowering plants, grasses, and small mammals were beginning to evolve.
Ergot may have acted as a natural defense mechanism for grasses, because it’s bitter and can cause illness in humans and livestock.
