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]

Scientists Are Pretty Sure They Found a Portal to the Fifth Dimension

In a new study, scientists say they can explain dark matter by positing a particle that links to a fifth dimension.

The new study seeks to explain the presence of dark matter using a WED model. The scientists studied fermion masses, which they believe could be communicated into the fifth dimension through portals, creating dark matter relics and “fermionic dark matter” within the fifth dimension.


Could dimension-traveling fermions explain at least some of the dark matter scientists have so far not been able to observe? “We know that there is no viable [dark matter] candidate in the [standard model of physics],” the scientists say, “so already this fact asks for the presence of new physics.”

 

[CraigD]

AI can now learn to manipulate human behaviour

Artificial intelligence (AI) is learning more about how to work with (and on) humans. A recent study has shown how AI can learn to identify vulnerabilities in human habits and behaviours and use them to influence human decision-making.

It may seem cliched to say AI is transforming every aspect of the way we live and work, but it’s true. Various forms of AI are at work in fields as diverse as vaccine development, environmental management and office administration. And while AI does not possess human-like intelligence and emotions, its capabilities are powerful and rapidly developing.

There’s no need to worry about a machine takeover just yet, but this recent discovery highlights the power of AI and underscores the need for proper governance to prevent misuse.

https://theconversation.com/ai-can-now-learn-to-manipulate-human-behaviour-155031

 

[CraigD]

Reversing severe muscle wasting in disease, aging and trauma

An exciting discovery by Monash University scientists may lead to faster recovery from muscle injury and wasting diseases.

When we tear a muscle – stem cells within it repair the problem. We can see this occurring not only in severe muscle wasting diseases such as muscular dystrophy and in war veterans who survive catastrophic limb injuries, but also in our day to day lives when we “pull” a muscle. Also when we age and become frail we lose much of our muscle and our stem cells don’t seem to be able to work as well as we age.

These muscle stem cells are invisible engines that drive the tissue's growth and repair after such injuries. But growing these cells in the lab and then using them to therapeutically replace damaged muscle has been frustratingly difficult.

Researchers at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia have discovered a factor that triggers these muscle stem cells to proliferate and heal. In a mouse model of severe muscle damage, injections of this naturally occurring protein led to the complete regeneration of muscle and the return of normal movement after severe muscle trauma.

The research led by Professor Peter Currie, Director of Monash University’s Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute, is published today in Nature.

https://www.monash.edu/medicine/new...re-muscle-wasting-in-disease-aging-and-trauma

 

[CraigD]

Astronomers confirm orbit of most distant object ever observed in our solar system

A team of astronomers, including associate professor Chad Trujillo of Northern Arizona University's Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, have confirmed a planetoid that is almost four times farther from the Sun than Pluto, making it the most distant object ever observed in our solar system. The planetoid, which has been nicknamed "Farfarout," was first detected in 2018, and the team has now collected enough observations to pin down its orbit. The Minor Planet Center has now given it the official designation of 2018 AG37.

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-astronomers-orbit-distant-solar.html

 

[CraigD]

Scientists create liquid crystals that look a lot like their solid counterparts

A team at the University of Colorado Boulder has designed new kinds of liquid crystals that mirror the complex structures of some solid crystals-a major step forward in building flowing materials that can match the colorful diversity of forms seen in minerals and gems, from lazulite to topaz.

The group’s findings, published today in the journal Nature, may one day lead to new types of smart windows and television or computer displays that can bend and control light like never before.

https://www.miragenews.com/scientists-create-liquid-crystals-that-look-a-512527/

 

[CraigD]

Living fossil fish has 62 copies of a “parasite gene” humans share too — we have no idea how they got there

The capture of a ‘living fossil’ fish off the coast of South Africa in the 1930s is now helping us understand one of the more exotic ways evolution can happen — interspecies genetic hijacking.

Coelacanths are one of the oldest lineages of fish in existence today. They’re so old, in fact, that they’re more closely related to the ancestors of reptiles and amphibians than modern-day fish. We first encountered them as fossils from the Late Cretaceous (some 66 million years old), and naturally assumed they must’ve died off by now. However, the capture of a live African Coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) fish in 1938 showed that it was actually still living in the deep oceans, and had hardly changed compared to its fossilized relatives.

But we should never judge a fish by its scales, as new research explains that the species did in fact gain 62 new genes around 10 million years ago. The most interesting part is how — these didn’t appear spontaneously in their genomes but are ‘parasitic’ DNA gained through encounters with other species.

https://www.zmescience.com/science/living-fossil-fish-gene-copy-transposons-358734542/

 

[koolishman]

Earth’s mountains may have mysteriously stopped growing for a billion years


The restless tectonic plates of modern Earth shift continuously, in a slow-motion dance that reshapes the surface of our planet. Collisions between continents thicken the crust and heave up mountains, such as the Himalayas, that reach ever higher into the skies.

But clues etched into tiny zircon crystals that formed deep in the Earth suggest that plate tectonics didn't always work the same way it does today. In the eon between 1.8 and 0.8 billion years ago—a time dubbed the "boring billion"—the continents seemed to grow progressively thinner. The exact driver of this continental slimming is unknown. But at its most slender, the land was about a third thinner than it is today—a change that researchers suggest may have been caused in part by a slowdown in plate tectonics.

The researchers also posit that this thin crust could have delayed the evolution of life as we know it. Puny mountains would have slowed erosion of the planet’s rocks, limiting the supply of life-giving nutrients for creatures in the oceans.

 

[Sutruk]

Scientists detect water vapour emanating from Mars

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-scientists-vapour-emanating-mars.html

"Researchers said Wednesday they had observed water vapour escaping high up in the thin atmosphere of Mars, offering tantalising new clues as to whether the Red Planet could have once hosted life.

The traces of ancient valleys and river channels suggest liquid water once flowed across the surface of Mars. Today, the water is mostly locked up in the planet's ice caps or buried underground.

But some of it is vaporising, in the form of hydrogen leaking from the atmosphere, according to the new research co-authored in the journal Science Advances by two scientists at Britain's Open University."

 

[Sutruk]

Observations inspect radio emission from two magnetars

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-radio-emission-magnetars.html

"Using the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have conducted a study of two magnetars known as PSR J1622−4950 and 1E 1547.0−5408. Results of this investigation, published February 4 on arXiv.org, provide important information about radio emission from these two sources.

Magnetars are neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields (above 100 trillion G), more than 1 quadrillion times stronger than the magnetic field of our planet. Decay of magnetic fields in magnetars powers the emission of high-energy electromagnetic radiation, for instance, in the form of X-rays or radio waves."

 

[Sutruk]

Chinese spacecraft enters Mars' orbit, joining Arab ship

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-chinese-spacecraft-mars-orbit-arab.html

"A Chinese spacecraft went into orbit around Mars on Wednesday on an expedition to land a rover on the surface and scout for signs of ancient life, authorities announced in a landmark step in the country's most ambitious deep-space mission yet.

The arrival of Tianwen-1 after a journey of seven months and nearly 300 million miles (475 million kilometers) is part of an unusual burst of activity at Mars: A spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates swung into orbit around the red planet on Tuesday, and a U.S. rover is set to arrive next week."

 

[Sutruk]

A new anomaly detection pipeline for astronomical discovery and recommendation systems

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-anomaly-pipeline-astronomical-discovery.html

"The SNAD team, an international network formed by researchers from Russia, France and the U.S., has developed a pipeline to find rare and exotic objects among the haystacks of data from astronomical surveys.

Given the ever increasing size of astronomical data sets, even if our telescopes do detect unexpected interesting astronomical phenomena, it is very unlikely that we will be able to recognize them in the middle of millions or even billions of observations. The solution lies in automatic tools specifically designed to recognize unusual behaviors hidden among billions of measurements."

 

[koolishman]

Pigs have to be among the top 5.

Pigs show potential for 'remarkable' level of behavioral, mental flexibility in new study

Pigs will probably never be able to fly, but new research is revealing that some species within the genus Sus may possess a remarkable level of behavioral and mental flexibility. A study published in Frontiers in Psychology tested the ability of four pigs to play a simple joystick-enabled video game. Each animal demonstrated some conceptual understanding despite limited dexterity on tasks normally given to non-human primates to analyze intelligence.

 

[koolishman]

Using whale songs to image beneath the ocean’s floor

Seismic data generated by whale songs helps build a picture of the ocean's base.

The song of a fin whale is not exactly the sort of thing you'd typically describe as musical. It's generally in the area of 20Hz, which sounds more like a series of clicks than a continual sound, and the whales produce it in second-long bursts separated by dozens of seconds. But they are loud. A guidance on hearing risks places danger at any level above 80 decibels and the loudest concerts as hitting roughly 120 decibels. A fin whale's song can be in the neighborhood of 190 decibels (although that's in water, which transmits sound differently from the air), and it typically goes on for hours.

As it turns out, the frequency of whale calls is within the range of a bunch of underwater seismographs that researchers had placed on the ocean floor west of the coast of Oregon. These seismographs sample for signals 100 times every second, so they can easily pick up the song of a fin whale.

Reconstructing the exact details of which signals arise, and when, is complicated, to put it mildly. But earth science researchers have a great deal of experience with this sort of thing. Waves that take certain paths require enough physical space between the whale and the seismometer to undergo all the reflections involved. So certain elements are cut off when the whale gets closer than 12 kilometers, and another set cut out at 4 kilometers.

By piecing these details together, Kuna and Nábėlek were able to figure out the thickness of the sediment layer, a layer formed by lava flows below that, and more robust volcanic rock below that. The seismometers were even sensitive enough to register differences in the amount of sediment, which ranged from 400 to 650 meters thick, that had built up.

 

[koolishman]

Astronomers Found a 'Benjamin Button' Galaxy
At 1.2 billion years young, the galaxy ALESS 073.1 should have the chaotic look of a youthful galaxy—a fledging, diffuse group of stars and gas suspended in the early universe. Instead, this primordial starburst galaxy has a central bulge and rotating belt that makes it look billions of years older. This odd corner of the universe was recently imaged by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile.

An international team of astronomers dug into the nascent galaxy’s rapid development in a recent analysis published in the journal Scientific Reports. They found ALESS’s age to be less than 10% the current age of the universe, but parts of its structure indicate a much older entity. Specifically, the presence of a bulge in the galaxy’s center and a rotating disc surrounding that center, feature that astronomers have historically only seen in galaxies that have had more time to form, on the scale of billions of years.

 

[koolishman]

A Previously Unseen Chemical Reaction Has Been Detected on Mars

"We've discovered hydrogen chloride for the first time on Mars," said physicist Kevin Olsen of the University of Oxford in the UK.

"This is the first detection of a halogen gas in the atmosphere of Mars, and represents a new chemical cycle to understand."

Scientists have been keeping an eye out for gases that contain chlorine in the atmosphere of Mars, since they could confirm that the planet is volcanically active. However, if hydrogen chloride was produced by volcanic activity, it should only spike very regionally, and be accompanied by other volcanic gases.

The hydrogen chloride detected by ExoMars did not, and was not. It was sniffed out in both the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars during the dust storm, and the absence of other volcanic gases was glaring.

 

[koolishman]

Swirlonic Super Particles: Physicists Baffled by a Novel State of Matter

A novel state of matter has been discovered by physicists at the University of Leicester.

To this end, large-scale models of active particles were being scrutinized by experts at Leicester, in order to understand basic principles underlying active particle dynamics and apply them in a scenario of an evacuation strategy for customers in crowded place. Unexpectedly, the ‘super-particles’ milling in a circular motion were stumbled upon by Leicester’s physicists who subsequently coined the phenomenon as “swirlonic.”

The “swirlon” — a novel state of active matter — displayed a stunning behavior whereby instead of moving with acceleration, the quasi-particle groups moved with a constant velocity, proportional to the applied force and in the same direction of the force. This conduct seemingly violates the Second Newton’s Law, currently taught in secondary schools across the UK.

 

[koolishman]

Earth to Voyager 2: After a Year in the Darkness, We Can Talk to You Again

NASA’s sole means of sending commands to the distant space probe, launched 44 years ago, is being restored on Friday.

Last March, the agency was compelled to shut down its only means of reaching 12 billion miles across the heavens to this robotic trailblazer. On Friday, Earth’s haunting silence will come to an end as NASA switches that communications channel back on, restoring humanity’s ability to say hello to its distant explorer.

Because of the direction in which it is flying out of the solar system, Voyager 2 can only receive commands from Earth via one antenna in the entire world. It’s called DSS 43 and it is in Canberra, Australia. It is part of the Deep Space Network, or DSN, which along with stations in California and Spain, is how NASA and allied space agencies stay in touch with the armada of robotic spacecraft exploring everything from the sun’s corona to the regions of the Kuiper belt beyond the orbit of Pluto. (Voyager 2’s twin, Voyager 1, is able to communicate with the other two stations.)

A round-trip communication with Voyager 2 takes about 35 hours — 17 hours and 35 minutes each way.

 

[CraigD]

Astronomers Find a Fascinating Cluster of Stars Filled With Small Black Holes

A dense clump of stars a few thousand light-years away has been harbouring a surprise in its core. Rather than one relatively chunky black hole, astronomers have found that the globular cluster NGC 6397 is wrapped around a cluster of smaller, stellar-mass ones.

This could not only help us better understand the formation of larger black holes, it suggests that globular clusters could be of great interest to gravitational wave astronomy as the black holes inevitably draw closer together towards collision.

https://www.sciencealert.com/astron...all-black-holes-where-they-expect-one-big-one

 

[CraigD]

Weather Phenomenon Triggers Nightmarish Spider Infestations in Australian Homes

The pitter-patter of little feet in a child's bedroom is a joyous sound – except perhaps when those feet belong to hundreds of baby huntsman spiders.

https://www.sciencealert.com/so-cute-cannibalistic-baby-spiders-swarm-australian-teen-s-bedroom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsman_spider

 

[CraigD]

Footage of Tianwen-1 entering the orbit of Mars released

China National Space Administration unveiled footage on Friday of China's first Mars probe, Tianwen-1, entering the Red Planet's orbit.

The monitor cameras recorded the complete process, including crucial moments such as when the Mars emerged, when the probe cruised from daytime to night, and the mild vibration after ignition.

Clearly visible was the solar wing, the directional antenna, and Mars' atmosphere and surface.

The probe successfully entered the orbit of the Red Planet on Wednesday after a crucial braking system was activated to decelerate the spacecraft's speed, enabling it to be captured by Mars gravity.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-...-orbit-of-Mars-released-XP1ZwUcziU/index.html

 

[koolishman]

Plastic trash can now be recycled into ultra-strong graphene

Packaging from the grocery store, lint from our clothing, plastic shopping bags – plastics and microplastics are everywhere, and they’re not going anywhere. In fact, it will take them hundreds of years to decompose in landfills . In order to speed up this decomposition process, scientists from Rice University are transforming these discarded plastics into non-toxic, naturally occurring materials. They’re doing this by using a newly developed technique called “flash Joule heating,” to rapidly heat plastic materials to very high temperatures .

Flash joule heating is actually a fairly simple process that involves running a large current through plastic materials. Joule heating is a commonly used heating technique. If you’ve used an iron, you’ve seen Joule heating in action. When a current is passed through a conductive material, like the metal of an iron, it quickly generates heat. Flash joule heating just means that, rather than building up heat over time, a large initial current is passed through the material, which causes an intense burst of heat. In the case of plastic waste, with the right conditions, this intense heat can actually cause chemical transformations.

 

[koolishman]

Coca-Cola company trials first paper bottle

Coca-Cola is to test a paper bottle as part of a longer-term bid to eliminate plastic from its packaging entirely.

The prototype is made by a Danish company from an extra-strong paper shell that still contains a thin plastic liner.

But the goal is to create a 100% recyclable, plastic-free bottle capable of preventing gas escaping from carbonated drinks.

The barrier must also ensure no fibres flake off into the liquid.

That would pose a risk of altering the taste of the drink - or potentially fall foul of health and safety checks.

But industry giants are backing the plan. Coca-Cola, for example, has set a goal of producing zero waste by 2030.

 

[koolishman]

CaSSIS mission: The camera capturing Mars' craters and canyons

Since its launch in 2016 and its subsequent orbit insertion around Mars, an instrument named the Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) has been used to enhance scientists' knowledge of the planet's surface.

The camera is travelling with the European Space Agency's (Esa) Exomars Trace Gas Orbiter, which is studying methane and other rare gases in the Martian atmosphere.

 

[Sutruk]

Neanderthal-inspired ‘minibrains’ hint at what makes modern humans special

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...ibrains-hint-what-makes-modern-humans-special

"What is it about DNA that makes the human brain “human?” Seeking to understand how our complex brains evolved, researchers have now switched a single human gene out for its Neanderthal counterpart in brain tissue grown in a lab dish. Changes to the resulting organoid reveal the role this gene may have played in ancient—and modern—brain development.

Neanderthals are archaic humans that lived from 500,000 years ago to about 11,700 years ago, interbreeding with our species, Homo sapiens, for much of that time. Their brains were about as big as ours, but anthropologists think they must have worked incredibly differently, because in those hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals never achieved the sophisticated technology and artistry humans have.

To explore what differences might exist, neuroscientist Alysson Muotri at the University of California (UC), San Diego, and his team first compared the genomes of modern humans with those of Neanderthals and Denisovans—another archaic human—reconstructed from excavated bones. They found 61 genes for which modern humans all had one version and the archaic humans had another.

His team then used the gene-editing tool CRISPR on stem cells derived from human skin cells to modify a gene, NOVA1, known to regulate the activity of other genes during early brain development. Switching out just one DNA base turned that gene into a Neanderthal NOVA1. Next, the researchers grew little clusters of brain cells called organoids, with and without the Neanderthal version, and compared them."

 

[koolishman]

Fungi create genes to “win over” their plant friends and neighbors

Monocultures, where large fields have only one kind of plant like wheat, soybean, and corn can deplete soil nutrients. Using fungi could be a way for farmers to help their crops get more, but matching the fungi to a specific crop can be challenging: we need to know how they communicate using specific genes.

Researchers have found that fungi can gain genes for plant-attracting characteristics in multiple ways, including making them from scratch or borrow from other fungi.

After fungi exposure to the root, if plants express a specific gene at their root during symbiosis, it can suggest that might be important fungi communication, explains Yen-Wen (Denny) Wang, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a recent study on fungi genes and plant relationships published in the Genome Biology and Evolution journal.