discuss Science & Technology news & discussion

[CraigD]

Post and discuss interesting articles & videos about science and technology.

You don't need to be an expert - just interested in the wonders of modern science, technology, and the history of these fields.

Please keep it rational, and post articles from reputable sources.
Try not to editorialise headlines and keep the copy to just a paragraph with a link to the original source. When quoting excerpts from articles, I think the best method is to italicise the copy, and include a link to the source.

Have some fun with your comments and discussions... just keep the sources legitimate.

Other threads:
The Break Room has a number of other popular threads, so there is no need to post material here that is better suited to these other threads:

- Covid19-Coronavirus updates and news
- Conspiracy Thread Free For All
- The *religious* discussion thread

Please enjoy!

 

[koolishman]

This is how the human heart adapts to space

When astronaut Scott Kelly spent nearly a year in space, his heart shrank despite the fact that he worked out six days a week over his 340-day stay, according to a new study.

Surprisingly, researchers observed the same change in Benoît Lecomte after he completed his 159-day swim across the Pacific Ocean in 2018.

The findings suggest that long-term weightlessness alters the structure of the heart, causing shrinkage and atrophy, and low-intensity exercise is not enough to keep that from happening. The study published Monday in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.

The gravity we experience on Earth is what helps the heart to maintain both its size and function as it keeps blood pumping through our veins. Even something as simple as standing up and walking around helps pull blood down into our legs.

When the element of gravity is replaced with weightlessness, the heart shrinks in response.
Kelly lived in the absence of gravity aboard the International Space Station from March 27, 2015, to March 1, 2016. He worked out on a stationary bike and treadmill and incorporated resistance activities into his routine six days a week for two hours each day.

Lecomte swam from June 5 to November 11, 2018, covering 1,753 miles and averaging about six hours a day swimming. That sustained activity may sound extreme, but each day of swimming was considered to be low-intensity activity.

 

[koolishman]

Pantry moths who eat each other prove a key principle of evolution

• Researchers studied cannibalism among commonly-found moths to test an evolutionary principle.
• The scientists concluded that moths with more sibling interaction were less selfish.
• The principle applies to humans and other animals.

Volker explained why cannibalism, which has been found in over 1,000 species, was worth studying:

"At one end of the continuum are altruistic behaviors, where an individual may be giving up its chance to survive or reproduce to increase reproduction of others," said Rudolf. "Cannibalism is at the other extreme. An individual increases its own survival and reproduction by literally consuming its own kind."

 

[koolishman]

Many planetary systems prematurely evaporate into thin air

When stars are born, large clouds of gas and dust form that are known as circumstellar discs. Research by Ph.D. candidate Francisca Concha-Ramírez shows that strong radiation from neighboring stars soon evaporates the dust in these discs, which can prevent planet formation at an early stage. Ph.D. defence on 6 April.


Ever stared at the night sky and wondered where we come from? Francisca Concha-Ramírez's Ph.D. research brings us one step closer to an answer. She studied circumstellar discs, distant ancestors of planetary systems. "These are enormous rotating discs of gas and dust that develop around young stars. The dust in these discs can ultimately form planets, but if there are stars close by, the dust is swiftly evaporated. Planets must therefore form before the dust is destroyed."

Concha-Ramírez's research results have interesting consequences for our ideas on the our solar system's origin. For our solar system to have become what it is now, something must have happened in its early years to allow it to escape the strong radiation of other stars. "A collision may have taken place between our circumstellar disc [which later became the solar system, ed.] and another disc," says Concha-Ramírez. "We can see proof of this at the edge of our solar system, in the region of the planet Neptune. Here there are suddenly much fewer asteroids, which suggests that another disc could have nabbed material. And there is another interesting clue that there might have been a collision between discs: asteroids that, in relation to the Earth, orbit the sun on a different plane. These asteroids probably come from another disc."

 

[koolishman]

Why do hummingbirds 'hum'?

Colorful hummingbirds get their name from the hum generated by their fast-moving wings as they hover; these tiny aerodynamic marvels have the fastest wingbeat of all birds, clocking in at around 70 strokes per second (more than 4,000 per minute).


But how exactly do their wings produce a humming noise? Researchers recently took a closer look at hummingbirds as the birds hovered and flew, to better understand what generated their signature sound.

The scientists created the first-ever 3D acoustic model of flying hummingbirds, combining video and audio recordings of the birds in motion with measurements of the forces generated by hummingbird wings as they oscillated. The team traced the humming sound to the upstroke of hummingbird wingbeats, which provided the birds with an extra boost of lift — unlike the upstrokes in the wingbeats of other birds.

In most flying birds, the "whoosh" that you hear is the sound of their downstroke — the only wingbeat to generate lift. By comparison, hummingbird wings, which trace a "U" shape in the air as they flap, produce lift on both the downstroke and upstroke, the study authors found. At the speed that hummingbird wings move, these actions and air pressure differences during wingbeats account for the hummingbirds' humming sound. Variability in the way air moves over feathers and the wing's overall shape add overtones and nuance to the sound. This make the hum sound pleasant to humans — unlike the more irritating whine of a mosquito or the buzzing of a fly, according to Scholte.

"A hummingbird wing is similar to a beautifully tuned instrument," Scholte said.

 

[koolishman]

Scientists Built an Artificial Cell That Grows And Divides Like a Natural One

In a new first for genetic engineering, scientists have developed a single-celled synthetic organism that grows and divides much like a normal cell, mimicking aspects of the cell division cycle that underlies and generates healthy living cellular life.

The achievement, demonstrated in an engineered unicellular bacteria-like life form called JCVI-syn3A, is the result of decades of genomic sequencing and analysis by scientists, exploring the roles individual genes play inside living creatures.

"Our goal is to know the function of every gene so we can develop a complete model of how a cell works," says biophysicist James Pelletier from MIT and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

 

[koolishman]

99% of Australia's Wild Dog 'Problem' Turns Out to Be a Different Animal

The vast majority of animals considered 'wild dogs' in Australia are actually pure dingoes or canines that are mostly dingo in terms of their genetic makeup, new research suggests.

Scientists collated the results from DNA tests of over 5,000 wild canids across Australia and found that only about 1 percent were actually feral dogs or dog-dominant hybrids.

"We don't have a feral dog problem in Australia," says conservation biologist Kylie Cairns from the University of New South Wales (UNSW).

"They just aren't established in the wild. There are rare times when a dog might go bush, but it isn't contributing significantly to the dingo population."

In fact, of the 5,039 samples analyzed in the study, 33.7 percent were pure dingoes, 30.4 percent were probable dingoes, and 34.7 percent were canids with greater than 50-75 percent dingo ancestry.

In other words, the 'wild dogs' terminology almost entirely misrepresents the truth about what these animals really are, and it's not just a question of semantics.

 

[CraigD]

SPACEX STARSHIP SN11 LAUNCH LIVE: ELON MUSK SAYS MARS-BOUND ROCKET 10KM TEST ATTEMPT TODAY

SpaceX will once again attempt to launch and land a Starship rocket, three weeks after the last test ended in a fiery explosion.

Starship SN11 is already on the launchpad at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility in Texas and has performed all necessary static fire tests required to fly.

A previous launch attempt was scrubbed on Friday due to adverse weather conditions but SpaceX boss Elon Musk said to a expect a “possible Starship flight” on Monday.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...ch-live-starship-sn11-elon-musk-b1823788.html

Today’s flight has been scrubbed.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says the delay relates to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and that another attempt will be made tomorrow.

 

[Cannuck]

At 7.8 billion people, I'd say overpopulation is the bigger concern for now.

Predicted a decade ago...
Humans will be extinct in 100 years says eminent scientist

Eminent Australian scientist Professor Frank Fenner, who helped to wipe out smallpox, predicts humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change.

Fenner said that climate change is only at its beginning, but is likely to be the cause of our extinction. “We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island,” he said. More people means fewer resources, and Fenner predicts “there will be a lot more wars over food.”

https://phys.org/news/2010-06-humans-extinct-years-eminent-scientist.html

 

[Cannuck]

Narwal tusks reveal mercury exposure related to climate change

In the Arctic, climate change and pollution are the biggest threats to top predators like narwals. Studying the animals' tusks reveals that diet and exposure to pollution have shifted over the past half century in response to sea-ice decline. Human emissions have also led to a sharp rise in the presence of mercury in recent years, according to an international team of researchers.

"The narwhal is one of the Arctic mammals most affected by climate change. They lack the physiological properties that help eliminate environmental contaminants. They can't get rid of mercury by forming hair and feathers like polar bears, seals, or seabirds," explains co-author Professor Rune Dietz from the Department of Bioscience at Aarhus University in Denmark.

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-narwal-tusks-reveal-mercury-exposure.html

Paying to clear-cut the rain forests

In the last few years, as climate changes continues to become more severe, there has been a growing push for rich countries to pay poorer ones to preserve and protect rain forests and other tropical forests. However, according to a new study in Nature Ecology & Evolution, RIHN Associate Professor Keiichiro Kanemoto and Senior Researcher Nguyen Tien Hoang show that other financial motives, namely international trade with these same rich countries have actually encouraged poorer countries to increase their annual deforestation levels from 2001 to 2015.

Trade with the world's biggest economies had a clear correlation with deforestation, but the footprint depended on the demanded product. China caused major deforestation in East Asia for timber, while Japan's footprint was greater in Africa for several agricultural commodities, such as vanilla, cotton, and sesame seed. Germany also had a large footprint in Africa but because of its demand for cocoa.

Ultimately, the United States, with its high demand for several commodities, had the most distinguishable footprint, including timber from Cambodia, rubber from Liberia, fruits and nuts from Guatemala, and soy and beef from Brazil.

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-clear-cut-forests.html

 

[J Sokol]

That's pretty sobering news. We seem to be doomed as a species.

“there will be a lot more wars over food.”

... and water -- already a big source of conflict in the western and southwestern United States.

 

[eyedomainous]

According to Shanna Swan, we're headed towards the opposite of overpopulation. It's interesting to have both concerns at the same time.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/26/falling-sperm-counts-human-survival
Falling sperm counts and changes to sexual development are “threatening human survival” and leading to a fertility crisis, a leading epidemiologist has warned.

Population decline 1950~2100, The fastest shrinking countries; Population problem

Is overpopulation really a problem for the planet?

When I look into space I say to myself... We Need More People!​

 

[koolishman]

/\

Where will the 'water wars' of the future be fought?

A new paper paints a disturbing picture of a nearby future where people are fighting over access to water. These post-apocalyptic-sounding "water wars" could rise as a result of climate change and population growth and could become real soon enough if we don't take steps to prevent them.

The study, which comes from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), says that the effects of climate change will be combined with an ever-increasing number of people to trigger intense competition for increasingly scarce resources. This can lead to regional instability and social unrest.

The paper pointed to several hotspots in the world where "hydro-political issues" are more likely to flare up. Not surprisingly, these are areas having problems with accessing fresh water and where a "transboundary" to water exists. That means the people in that area share some body of water, like a lake or a river. So in times of scarcity due to environmental factors and growing population, the water resources become thin and tensions result.

In particular, the five most vulnerable hotspots highlighted by the paper include the Nile, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Indus, Tigris-Euphrates, and Colorado rivers.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937801830253X?via=ihub

 

[koolishman]

Forests on caffeine: coffee waste can boost forest recovery

A new study finds that coffee pulp, a waste product of coffee production, can be used to speed up tropical forest recovery on post agricultural land. The findings are published in the British Ecological Society journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence.


In the study, researchers from ETH-Zurich and the University of Hawai`i spread 30 dump truck loads of coffee pulp on a 35 × 40m area of degraded land in Costa Rica and marked out a similar sized area without coffee pulp as a control.

“The results were dramatic.” said Dr Rebecca Cole, lead author of the study. “The area treated with a thick layer of coffee pulp turned into a small forest in only two years while the control plot remained dominated by non-native pasture grasses.”

After only two years the coffee pulp treated area had 80% canopy cover compared to 20% in the control area. The canopy in the coffee pulp area was also four times taller than that of the control area.

The addition of the half metre thick layer of coffee pulp eliminated the invasive pasture grasses which dominated the land. These grasses are often a barrier to forest succession and their removal allowed native, pioneer tree species, that arrived as seeds through wind and animal dispersal, to recolonise the area quickly.

The researchers also found that after two years, nutrients including carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous were significantly elevated in the coffee pulp treated area compared to the control. This is a promising finding given former tropical agricultural land is often highly degraded and poor soil quality can delay forest succession for decades.

 

[koolishman]

NTU Singapore scientists develop antibacterial gel bandage using durian husk

Food scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have made an antibacterial gel bandage using the discarded husks of the popular tropical fruit, durian.

Known as the "King of Fruits" in Southeast Asia, the durian has a thick husk with spiky thorns which is discarded, while the sweet flesh surrounding the seeds on the inside is considered a delicacy.

By extracting high-quality cellulose from the durian husks and combining it with glycerol – a waste by-product from the biodiesel and soap industry – NTU scientists created a soft gel, similar to silicon sheets, which can be cut into bandages of various shapes and sizes.

They then added the organic molecules produced from baker's yeast known as natural yeast phenolics, making the bandage deadly to bacteria.

Developed by Professor William Chen, the Director of NTU's Food Science and Technology Programme, the innovation was published recently in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemistry Society.

"With the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, the world will need multiple alternative ways to prevent infections. An effective way to protect open wounds is with antimicrobial bandages that are biocompatible and safe for prolonged use by humans. This is especially important for diabetic patients suffering from chronic wounds," explained Prof Chen, the Michael Fam Chair Professor in Food Science and Technology at the School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering.

 

[koolishman]

Average westerner's eating habits lead to loss of four trees every year

Research links consumption of foods such as coffee and chocolate to global deforestation.

The average western consumer of coffee, chocolate, beef, palm oil and other commodities is responsible for the felling of four trees every year, many in wildlife-rich tropical forests, research has calculated.

Destruction of forests is a major cause of both the climate crisis and plunging wildlife populations, as natural ecosystems are razed for farming. The study is the first to fully link high-resolution maps of global deforestation to the wide range of commodities imported by each country across the world.

The research lays bare the direct links between consumers and the loss of forests across the planet. Chocolate consumption in the UK and Germany is an important driver of deforestation in Ivory Coast and Ghana, the scientists found, while beef and soy demand in the US, European Union and China results in forest destruction in Brazil.

 

[eyedomainous]

/\
Where will the 'water wars' of the future be fought?
A new paper paints a disturbing picture of a nearby future where people are fighting over access to water.

Folks will always fight over water rights to a river, lake and so forth... but technologies to get water from this water world -even from its driest regions, are booming.

Transforming Air Into Pure Drinking Water Is Finally Possible

​

 

[koolishman]

Folks will always fight over water rights to a river, lake and so forth... but technologies to get water from this water world -even from its driest regions, are booming.

Transforming Air Into Pure Drinking Water Is Finally Possible

​

Agree.

But these technologies need to be scalable and affordable even to a desert dweller. Even simpler technologies already exist like fog collectors.

Considering the population and the proportional need for water, I do not think these will be enough. I hope to be proven wrong.

 

[koolishman]

Aerion is working on a Mach 4+ supersonic airliner for 50 passengers

Aerion is looking beyond the 2027 launch of its AS2 supersonic business jet for the ultra-rich, to something for the rest of us. The AS3TM, if it gets built, would be a 50-passenger supersonic commercial airliner capable of speeds over Mach 4.


That's at least twice the maximum speed of the venerable Concorde, and represents a ground speed somewhere over 3,000 mph (4,800 km/h). That would mean LA to Tokyo in under three hours, according to Aerion, instead of nearly 12 hours on today's airliners.

 

[koolishman]

Growing Underground

Thirty-three metres below London’s Clapham High Street is the world’s first underground farm. It’s shaping the future of urban farming.

 

[koolishman]

Humans Have The Biological Toolkit to Have Venomous Saliva, Study Finds

Could humans ever evolve venom? It's highly unlikely that people will join rattlesnakes and platypuses among the ranks of venomous animals, but new research reveals that humans do have the tool kit to produce venom - in fact, all reptiles and mammals do.


This collection of flexible genes, particularly associated with the salivary glands in humans, explains how venom has evolved independently from nonvenomous ancestors more than 100 times in the animal kingdom.

"Essentially, we have all the building blocks in place," said study co-author Agneesh Barua, a doctoral student in evolutionary genetics at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. "Now it's up to evolution to take us there."

 

[koolishman]

The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands

Rejection of mainstream science and medicine has become a key feature of the political right in the U.S. and increasingly around the world

Antiscience has emerged as a dominant and highly lethal force, and one that threatens global security, as much as do terrorism and nuclear proliferation. We must mount a counteroffensive and build new infrastructure to combat antiscience, just as we have for these other more widely recognized and established threats.

Antiscience is the rejection of mainstream scientific views and methods or their replacement with unproven or deliberately misleading theories, often for nefarious and political gains. It targets prominent scientists and attempts to discredit them. The destructive potential of antiscience was fully realized in the U.S.S.R. under Joseph Stalin. Millions of Russian peasants died from starvation and famine during the 1930s and 1940s because Stalin embraced the pseudoscientific views of Trofim Lysenko that promoted catastrophic wheat and other harvest failures. Soviet scientists who did not share Lysenko’s “vernalization” theories lost their positions or, like the plant geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, starved to death in a gulag.

Now antiscience is causing mass deaths once again in this COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning in the spring of 2020, the Trump White House launched a coordinated disinformation campaign that dismissed the severity of the epidemic in the United States, attributed COVID deaths to other causes, claimed hospital admissions were due to a catch-up in elective surgeries, and asserted that ultimately that the epidemic would spontaneously evaporate. It also promoted hydroxychloroquine as a spectacular cure, while downplaying the importance of masks. Other authoritarian or populist regimes in Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Philippines and Tanzania adopted some or all of these elements.

 

[koolishman]

Latest Research News: New drug to regenerate lost teeth

Tooth loss is a widespread problem in adults and results in poor quality of life. Currently, solutions to this problem include artificial teeth and implants. But these aren’t as good as “real teeth,” and they don’t markedly improve quality of life. Now, scientists from Japan have made a discovery that can make re-growing teeth possible. They found, with animal studies, that suppressing the gene USAG-1 by using its antibody can efficiently lead to tooth growth.

A new study by scientists at Kyoto University and the University of Fukui, however, may offer some hope. The team reports that an antibody for one gene — uterine sensitization associated gene-1 or USAG-1 — can stimulate tooth growth in mice suffering from tooth agenesis, a congenital condition. The paper was published in Science Advances.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/7/eabf1798

 

[CraigD]

Working from home and your toddler almost triggers the third world war...

 

[koolishman]

Australasian genetic influence spread wider in South America than previously thought

A team of researchers from Universidade de São Paulo, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, has found evidence of a genetic Australasian influence in more parts of South America than just the Amazon. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study of a genomic dataset from multiple South American populations across the continent.

The work involved collecting blood samples from native people all across the mid-section of the South American continent and then conducting a genetic analysis of each. In all, they studied samples from 383 people which included 438,443 markers.

The researchers found the Y marker in native people living on the Brazilian plateau in the center of the country and also in those living in the western part of the county—and they also found the signal in the Chotuna people of Peru. The findings suggest migrations of people with the Y signal were far more widespread in South America than were thought. Their findings also suggest that two waves of such migrations occurred. This has led to scrutiny of previous theories regarding how such individuals arrived in South America and why the signal has not been found in early North American people. Some have suggested it is because those in North America were wiped out by European colonists. Others have suggested that it is more likely that closer study of North American native people will eventually find some with the Y signal. And finally, the hardest theory to swallow is the possibility that early people from Australasia somehow made their way directly to the shores of South America.

 

[koolishman]

Lab-made hexagonal diamonds stiffer than natural diamonds

Nature's strongest material now has some stiff competition. For the first time, researchers have hard evidence that human-made hexagonal diamonds are stiffer than the common cubic diamonds found in nature and often used in jewelry.

Named for their six-sided crystal structure, hexagonal diamonds have been found at some meteorite impact sites, and others have been made briefly in labs, but these were either too small or had too short of an existence to be measured.

Now scientists at Washington State University's Institute for Shock Physics created hexagonal diamonds large enough to measure their stiffness using sound waves. Their findings are detailed in a recent paper in Physical Review B.

"Diamond is a very unique material," said Yogendra Gupta, director of the Institute for Shock Physics and corresponding author on the study. "It is not only the strongest—it has beautiful optical properties and a very high thermal conductivity. Now we have made the hexagonal form of diamond, produced under shock compression experiments, that is significantly stiffer and stronger than regular gem diamonds."