Science & Technology news & discussion

Study shows that combinations of blood-based biomarkers can be used to predict cognitive decline and dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease in patients with mild cognitive impairment.

Individualized prognosis of cognitive decline and dementia in mild cognitive impairment based on plasma biomarker combinations

Combination of plasma biomarkers may be of high value to identify individuals with MCI who will progress to AD dementia in clinical trials and in clinical practice.

https//doi.org/10.1038/s43587-020-00003-5

 

China's Chang'e-5 Moon mission probe touches down

China has successfully put another probe on the Moon.

Its robotic Chang'e-5 mission touched down a short while ago with the aim of collecting samples of rock and dust to bring back to Earth. The venture has targeted Mons Rümker, a high volcanic complex in a nearside region known as Oceanus Procellarum. The lander is expected to spend the next couple of days examining its surroundings and gathering up surface materials.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55148998

 

In Australia, Just One Wasp Can Ground an Airplane With a Strategically Placed Nest

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/australia-wasps-pose-danger-airplanes-180976424/

"New research conducted at Brisbane airport shows how the invasive keyhole wasp builds their nests over important sensors, causing havoc for aircraft, George Dvorsky reports for Gizmodo.

Keyhole wasps like to lay their eggs in small, pre-made cavities like window crevices, electrical sockets and, as their name implies, keyholes. Airplanes, meanwhile, rely on external sensors that are shaped like thin tubes. If the pilot realizes after takeoff that a sensor is blocked, the plane just has to turn around so it can be cleaned. But in a worst-case scenario, malfunctioning sensors are catastrophic. The new study, published on November 30 in the journal PLOS One, confirmed keyhole wasps are the sensor-blocking culprit, figured out their favorite size sensors for nest-building, and found that they built most of their nests near a grassy field at the airport."

 

I watched a program on airlines grounded by Covid, and this is one issue ground crew also mentioned.

 

HIV-Like Virus Edited Out of Primate Genome

Taking a major step forward in HIV research, scientists at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University have successfully edited SIV – a virus closely related to HIV, the cause of AIDS – from the genomes of non-human primates. The breakthrough brings Temple researchers and their collaborators closer than ever to developing a cure for human HIV infection.

Of particular significance, the new work shows that the gene-editing construct developed by Dr. Khalili's team can reach infected cells and tissues known to be viral reservoirs for SIV and HIV. These reservoirs, which are cells and tissues where the viruses integrate into host DNA and hide away for years, are a major barrier to curing infection. SIV or HIV in these reservoirs lies beyond the reach of ART, which suppresses viral replication and clears the virus from the blood. As soon as ART is stopped, the viruses emerge from their reservoirs and renew replication.

In non-human primates, SIV behaves very much like HIV. “The SIV-infected rhesus macaque model studied in Dr. Burdo's lab is an ideal large animal model for recapitulating HIV infection in humans,” explained Dr. Khalili.

Co-corresponding author Dr. MacLean is encouraged by the findings. “This is an important development in what we hope will be an end to HIV/AIDS,” says MacLean. “The next step is to evaluate this treatment over a longer period of time to determine if we can achieve complete elimination of the virus, possibly even taking subjects off of ART.”

 

Color pictures from moon.

China's Chang'e-5 Moon mission returns colour pictures - BBC News

 

Astronauts Harvest First Radish Crop on International Space Station
On Nov. 30, 2020, NASA astronaut Kate Rubins harvested radish plants growing in the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) aboard the International Space Station. She meticulously collected and wrapped in foil each of the 20 radish plants, placing them in cold storage for the return trip to Earth in 2021 on SpaceX’s 22nd Commercial Resupply Services mission.



The plant experiment, called Plant Habitat-02 (PH-02), is the first time NASA has grown radishes on the orbiting laboratory. NASA selected radishes because they are well understood by scientists and reach maturity in just 27 days. These model plants are also nutritious and edible, and are genetically similar to Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant related to cabbage that researchers frequently study in microgravity.

 

ESA/NASA’s Sun-Observing SOHO Mission Celebrates a Quarter-Century in Space

 

The sensor the article is talking about is called a pitot tube and it is usually attached under a wing to measure airspeed. There have been a number of infamous passenger-jet crashes attributed to this little instrument being blocked.

 

China's Chang'e-5 probe has completed sampling on the moon, and the samples have been sealed within the spacecraft.

 

That's a very impressive time montage.
I noted some planets swinging past, and a few comets.

 

‘WTF?’: newly discovered ghostly circles in the sky can’t be explained by current theories, and astronomers are excited

"I predicted a couple of years ago this exploration of the unknown would probably make unexpected discoveries, which I called WTFs. But none of us expected to discover something so unexpected, so quickly... these discoveries were made with good old-fashioned eyeballing."

https://theconversation.com/wtf-new...t-theories-and-astronomers-are-excited-142812

 

On Mars, internal heat may have powered habitable hotspots long ago

The Martian underground may have been habitable billions of years ago even if the planet's surface was a dry, frigid wasteland.

Mars likely churned out enough geothermal heat in the ancient past to melt the bases of thick ice sheets, generating large amounts of potentially life-supporting groundwater, a new study suggests.

The researchers determined that heat flowing from the Martian mantle and crust likely would have been sufficient to melt the bottom layers of thick ice sheets long ago, creating potentially habitable environments underground no matter what conditions may have been like on the planet's surface.

But pockets of groundwater likely persisted, though they probably retreated to greater and greater depths as the surface dried out. Some of these Martian aquifers may even have survived to the present day.

"At such depths, life could have been sustained by hydrothermal activity and rock-water reactions," Ojha said in the same statement. "So, the subsurface may represent the longest-lived habitable environment on Mars."



https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/49/eabb1669

Musk is already drilling on earth. Sure he will send drills to Mars too.

 

Dark energy camera snaps deepest photo yet of galactic siblings

Images from the Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History (SMASH) reveal a striking family portrait of our galactic neighbors—the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The images represent a portion of the second data release from the deepest, most extensive survey of the Magellanic Clouds. The observations consist of roughly 4 billion measurements of 360 million objects

 

ClearSpace-1: Earth’s First Space Debris Removal Mission

SA has signed an €86 million contract with an industrial team led by Swiss start-up ClearSpace SA to purchase a unique service: the first removal of an item of space debris from orbit.

As a result, in 2025, ClearSpace will launch the first active debris removal mission, ClearSpace-1, which will rendezvous, capture and take down for reentry the upper part of a Vespa (Vega Secondary Payload Adapter) used with Europe’s Vega launcher. This object was left in a ‘gradual disposal’ orbit (approximately altitude 801 km by 664 km), complying with space debris mitigation regulations, following the second flight of Vega in 2013.

 

Astronomers unveil most detailed 3D map yet of Milky Way

Astronomers have unveiled the most precise 3D map yet of the Milky Way, an achievement that promises to shed fresh light on the workings of the galaxy and the mysteries of the broader universe.

The vast electronic atlas was compiled from data gathered by the European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory which has been scanning the heavens since it blasted off in 2013 from Kourou in French Guiana.

The map contains enough detail for astronomers to measure the acceleration of the solar system and calculate the mass of the galaxy. These in turn will provide clues as to how the solar system formed and the rate at which the universe has expanded since the dawn of time.

 

How the insect got its wings: Scientists (at last!) tell the tale

Finally, a team from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, has settled the controversy, using clues from long-ago scientific papers as well as state-of-the-art genomic approaches. The study, conducted by MBL Research Associate Heather Bruce and MBL Director Nipam Patel, is published this week in Nature Ecology & Evolution.


Insect wings, the team confirmed, evolved from an outgrowth or "lobe" on the legs of an ancestral crustacean (yes, crustacean). After this marine animal had transitioned to land-dwelling about 300 million years ago, the leg segments closest to its body became incorporated into the body wall during embryonic development, perhaps to better support its weight on land. "The leg lobes then moved up onto the insect's back, and those later formed the wings," says Bruce.

 

China's Chang'e-5 mission leaves Moon's surface



China has executed the next stage of its Chang'e-5 Moon mission, blasting into orbit samples gathered on the lunar surface.

Right on cue, at 15:10 GMT, an ascent vehicle lit its engine to head up to a service module that will shepherd home the rock and dust materials. It's more than 40 years since lunar samples were last brought back to Earth.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55179983

 

The new light-based quantum computer Jiuzhang has achieved quantum supremacy

A photonic quantum computer, which harnesses particles of light, or photons, performed a calculation that’s impossible for a conventional computer, researchers in China report online December 3 in Science. That milestone, known as quantum supremacy, has been met only once before, in 2019 by Google’s quantum computer (SN: 10/23/19). Google’s computer, however, is based on superconducting materials, not photons.

Named Jiuzhang after an ancient Chinese mathematical text, the new quantum computer can perform a calculation in 200 seconds that would take more than half a billion years on the world’s fastest non-quantum, or classical, computer.

 

Physicists Nail Down the ‘Magic Number’ That Shapes the Universe

As fundamental constants go, the speed of light, c, enjoys all the fame, yet c’s numerical value says nothing about nature; it differs depending on whether it’s measured in meters per second or miles per hour. The fine-structure constant, by contrast, has no dimensions or units. It’s a pure number that shapes the universe to an astonishing degree — “a magic number that comes to us with no understanding,” as Richard Feynman described it. Paul Dirac considered the origin of the number “the most fundamental unsolved problem of physics.”

Today, in a new paper in the journal Nature, a team of four physicists led by Saïda Guellati-Khélifa at the Kastler Brossel Laboratory in Paris reported the most precise measurement yet of the fine-structure constant. The team measured the constant’s value to the 11th decimal place, reporting that α = 1/137.03599920611. (The last two digits are uncertain.)

It is not 42.

Determination of the fine-structure constant with an accuracy of 81 parts per trillion | Nature

 

Asteroid space capsule completes 5 billion kilometre mission, touching down in a blaze of light in outback South Australia

The Hayabusa2 spacecraft had successfully released the small capsule on Saturday and sent it toward Earth to deliver samples from a distant asteroid that could provide clues to the origin of the solar system and life on our planet, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said.

Early on Sunday the capsule briefly turned into a fireball as it re-entered the atmosphere 120km above Earth.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12...-mission-capsule-lands-in-outback-sa/12949898


Asteroid capsule 'found' in Australian desert

A recovery team in Australia has found a space capsule carrying the first large quantities of rock from an asteroid.

The capsule, containing material from a space rock called Ryugu, parachuted down near Woomera in South Australia.

The samples were originally collected by a Japanese spacecraft called Hayabusa-2, which spent more than a year investigating the object.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55201662

 

NASA’s SDO Captures Brilliant Solar Eruption



This imagery captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows a solar flare and a subsequent eruption of solar material that occurred over the left limb of the Sun on November 29, 2020. From its foot point over the limb, some of the light and energy was blocked from reaching Earth – a little like seeing light from a lightbulb with the bottom half covered up.

 

Solar telescope releases first image of a sunspot



The world's largest solar observatory, the U.S. National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, just released its first image of a sunspot. Although the telescope is still in the final phases of completion, the image is an indication of how the telescope's advanced optics and four-meter primary mirror will give scientists the best view of the Sun from Earth throughout the next solar cycle.

https://phys.org/news/2020-12-solar-telescope-image-sunspot.html

 

Chinese photonic quantum computer demonstrates quantum supremacy

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China has built and tested a photonic quantum computer that demonstrates quantum supremacy. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their computer, which they call Jiuzhang, and how well it performed while conducting Gaussian boson sampling.

https://phys.org/news/2020-12-chinese-photonic-quantum-supremacy.html

 

DUNE publishes first physics results from prototype detector

The DUNE collaboration has published their first scientific paper based on data collected with the ProtoDUNE single-phase detector located at CERN’s Neutrino Platform. The results show that the detector is performing with greater than 99% efficiency, making it not only the largest, but also the best-performing liquid-argon time projection chamber to date.

https://news.fnal.gov/2020/12/dune-publishes-first-physics-results-from-prototype-detector/