Science & Technology news & discussion

I think this can be filed under the subject of escape technology?

Anyhow, it's an interesting read!

Thinking inside the box: the Welsh teen who tried to post himself home from Australia

Homesick and unable to afford the airfare, Brian Robson embarked on a crate escape to Wales. Now he’s looking for the two Irish men who nailed it shut.



Robson was a 19-year-old working for Victorian Railways when he became homesick. But the airfare would have cost about £700 and he only made £40 a month, he told the Irish Times.

So he came up with a “stupid” plan, to buy a small wooden crate and have himself sent as freight. Robson said the “quite horrific experience” had taken four days, and he had been repeatedly stored upside down.

Nearly 60 years later, Robson said he wanted to get in touch with the men to thank them and to buy them a drink.

Read on...

https://www.theguardian.com/austral...who-tried-to-post-himself-home-from-australia

@NickB this may be of interest to you. How to travel to Wales on the cheap

 

Can't Get a Certain Song Out of Your Head? Here’s What Makes It an Earworm

It’s a jingle from a radio ad, or maybe the theme song to an old sitcom, or perhaps it’s a scrap of a tune you haven’t heard since high school (and didn’t much like even then). But one thing is certain — if it doesn’t stop playing in your head in a never-ending loop, you’re going to start banging your head against the wall.

Yep. You’ve got an earworm.





Earworms are as common as they are annoying. Almost everyone gets them, and some poor souls have them several times a week. Scientists call them “involuntary musical imagery” or sometimes “intrusive musical imagery.” The English word earworm is a literal translation the German word Ohrwurm. No wonder English speakers adopted the phrase. It makes perfect sense: The tune worms its way into your brain via your ears — and refuses to leave. Most often, it’s just a bit of a tune, a short passage of a song that repeats over and over and over and over and over... like a needle caught on a scratch in an old vinyl record.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that scientists began to seriously study the phenomenon. They still haven’t figured out what causes them, but in 2016 an international team of researchers asked 3,000 people about their earworms. They looked at the songs themselves in an effort the determine what made a song likely to get stuck on repeat. It turns out, if it’s hoping to have an afterlife as an earworm, a song needs to have an upbeat, easy to remember melody. It also helps if there are some unique intervals or repetitions (think “who let the dogs out,” or “whoops there goes another one”) that distinguish it from the average pop song. Advertising jingles are especially good at this (cue “break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar.”) Most of the tunes reported in the study have lyrics, but not all do. Just the drum track of “My Sharona” or the opening bars of Beethoven’s 5th can do the trick.

 

Ghost forests are creeping along NC’s coast. They’re big enough to be seen from space

Dead. Pale. Devoid of limbs.

No, not the stars of horror stories, but families of trees sprawled across America’s East Coast that are being swallowed by swarms of salty ocean water.

Scientists call them “ghost forests” — and they’re becoming more common as human-driven climate change paves the way for more frequent extreme weather events that cause abrupt environmental changes nearly impossible to recover from.

They’re also getting bigger. So much so, the barren land can be seen from space.




One particular forest in North Carolina within the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, home to endangered animals and unique wetlands, has lost 11% of its tree cover due to rising sea levels since 1985, according to a Duke University study published Sunday in the journal Ecological Applications.

What’s more, the ghost forest wreaked the most havoc in just one year out of the 35-year study period. The die-off followed a five-year drought and a hurricane that killed five people in the state and brought a 6-foot wall of seawater ashore.

The devastating year essentially choked the trees to death, sucking their moisture from its seeds and stems, creating a graveyard of “wooden tombstones.”

Researchers refer to the region as “the leading edge of climate change.”

“This flooding is evidence that climate change is altering landscapes along the Atlantic coast. It’s emblematic of environmental changes that also threaten wildlife, ecosystems, and local farms and forestry businesses,” study co-author Emily Ury, a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University in North Carolina, wrote of her study in the Conversation. “Like all living organisms, trees die. But what is happening here is not normal. Large patches of trees are dying simultaneously, and saplings aren’t growing to take their place. And it’s not just a local issue

 

The truth about doublespeak: Is it lying or just being persuasive?

Doublespeak, or the use of euphemisms to sway opinion, lets leaders avoid the reputational costs of lying while still bringing people around to their way of thinking, a new study has found.





Researchers at the University of Waterloo found that the use of agreeable euphemistic terms biases people's evaluations of actions to be more favourable. For example, replacing a disagreeable term, "torture," with something more innocuous and semantically agreeable, like "enhanced interrogation."

"Like the much-studied phenomenon of 'fake news,' manipulative language can serve as a tool for misleading the public, doing so not with falsehoods but rather with the strategic use of euphemistic language," said Alexander Walker, lead author of the study and a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive psychology at Waterloo. "The avoidance of objectively false claims may provide the strategic user of language with plausible deniability of dishonesty, thus protecting them from the reputational cost associated with lying."

As part of a series of studies investigating the effectiveness, consequences and mechanisms of doublespeak in a psychological context, the researchers investigated whether the use of language characteristic of doublespeak can be used to influence peoples' evaluations of actions.

The researchers identified doublespeak as the strategic manipulation of language to influence the opinions of others by representing the truth in a manner that benefits one's self. To do this, the researchers assessed whether substituting an agreeable term—for example, "working at a meat-processing plant" in place of a semantically related disagreeable term like "working at a slaughterhouse"—has an impact on how a person's actions are interpreted.

 

Rates of Parkinson’s disease are exploding. A common chemical may be to blame

Researchers believe a factor is a chemical used in drycleaning and household products such as shoe polishes and carpet cleaners.

Asked about the future of Parkinson’s disease in the US, Dr Ray Dorsey says, “We’re on the tip of a very, very large iceberg.”

Dorsey, a neurologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center and author of Ending Parkinson’s Disease, believes a Parkinson’s epidemic is on the horizon. Parkinson’s is already the fastest-growing neurological disorder in the world; in the US, the number of people with Parkinson’s has increased 35% the last 10 years, says Dorsey, and “We think over the next 25 years it will double again.”

Most cases of Parkinson’s disease are considered idiopathic – they lack a clear cause. Yet researchers increasingly believe that one factor is environmental exposure to trichloroethylene (TCE), a chemical compound used in industrial degreasing, dry-cleaning and household products such as some shoe polishes and carpet cleaners.

Read on...

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...e-exploding-a-common-chemical-may-be-to-blame

Preliminary Information on Manufacturing, Processing, Distribution, Use, and Disposal: Trichloroethylene (PDF that also lists some products containing TCE):
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2017-02/documents/trichloroethylene.pdf

 

Microsoft adopts boiling liquid to cool datacenter servers

Microsoft has implemented boiling liquid to help keep datacenter servers at reasonable temperatures. The company uses electronic equipment and liquid capable of boiling at 122 degrees Farenheit, 90 degrees below the boiling point of water.




Once the computer processors within the datacenters reach a certain temperature due to labor, the boiling effect moves heat away from the servers. This movement allows the processors to continue operating at full power without the risk of failure from overheating.

Microsoft engineered this solution using a tank that takes the fluid vapor from its liquid contents and exposes the mist to a cooling lid. This process transforms that vapor back into liquid and rain down onto the servers in order to cool the machines. This process of vaporization and condensation for cooling is known as a closed loop cooling system.

Microsoft has announced being the first cloud provider to use two-phase immersion cooling in a production environment. In fact, the company has acknowledged using this cooling process as a means to accommodate the demand for larger, more powerful computer processors at a time when air-cooled computer chip technology is harder to come by.

 

French rail company orders 12 hydrogen trains

French national railway SNCF said Thursday it has ordered 12 hydrogen-powered trains to begin tests in four regions in 2023 as it eyes a zero-emissions future with the nascent technology.


The trains are to be built by the French industrial group Alstom and operate on either hydrogen or electricity when overhead catenary wires are available, a joint statement said.





They are designed to run up to 600 kilometres (375 miles) on each hydrogen charge, and "should begin service in 2025," Alstom France head Jean-Baptiste Eymeoud was quoted as saying.

The contract is worth 190 million euros ($225 million) for the 12 first trains, which are to seat 218 passengers and be divided evenly among the four regions in eastern and southern France.

Alstom first tested prototypes in Germany three years ago and has now begun a commercial phase with 41 orders for the 72-metre-long (yards) trains.

They are designed to combine onboard hydrogen with outside oxygen via a fuel cell mounted in the roof that powers the motors.

 

20 years ago, I built a Pentium II computer that utilised liquid cooling, but it all ended in disaster. I was running NT4 on a unique A-Bit motherboard that ran two overclocked 433Mhz Celeron processors. The cooling system pumped water through a system of tubes that sometimes leaked at the connection points on the processors. Water and consumer PCs don't play well together!

By contrast, this modern immersive cooling system utilises a chemical liquid specially developed by 3M, that is non-conductive and non-corrosive [edited with correction].

According to the Microsoft website:

Participants in the cryptocurrency industry pioneered liquid immersion cooling for computing equipment, using it to cool the chips that log digital currency transactions.

Microsoft investigated liquid immersion as a cooling solution for high-performance computing applications such as AI. Among other things, the investigation revealed that two-phase immersion cooling reduced power consumption for any given server by 5% to 15%.

The findings motivated the Microsoft team to work with Wiwynn, a datacenter IT system manufacturer and designer, to develop a two-phase immersion cooling solution. The first solution is now running at Microsoft’s datacenter in Quincy.

That couch-shaped tank is filled with an engineered fluid from 3M. 3M’s liquid cooling fluids have dielectric properties that make them effective insulators, allowing the servers to operate normally while fully immersed in the fluid.

https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/datacenter-liquid-cooling/






PC Cooling Submerged in 3M LIQUID

 

5th Important Force of Nature Discovered in New Lab Experiment

Physicists recently said they had discovered probable signs of a fifth fundamental force of nature, showing findings coming from a study carried out at a laboratory near Chicago.

The United Kingdom's Science and Technology Facilities Council or STFC said the outcome offers strong evidence for the presence of an undiscovered sub-atomic particle or the so-called 'new force of nature.'

Nevertheless, the results from the experiment called Muon g-2 do not contribute to a conclusive discovery yet. There is presently a one in 40,000 probability that the outcome could be a statistical coincidence, equating to a statistical confidence level described as 4.1 sigma.

Essentially, a level of '5 sigma,' or a one in 3.5 million probability of the experiment being accidental, is needed to consider such a discovery.

According to the UK leader for the experiment, Professor Mark Lancaster, they have found the interaction of muons are not in agreement with the Standard Model, the present widely accepted notion to explain the manner the Universe's building blocks are behaving.

The University of Manchester researchers also said; clearly, this new development is exciting since it is potentially pointing to a future with new laws of physics, new particles, and a new force that has not been seen to date.

Read on...

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articl...orce-nature-discovered-new-lab-experiment.htm

 

Eucalyptus trees can be genetically modified not to invade native ecosystems

Eucalyptus, a pest-resistant evergreen valued for its hardy lumber and wellness-promoting oil, can be genetically modified not to reproduce sexually, a key step toward preventing the global tree plantation staple from invading native ecosystems.

Oregon State University’s Steve Strauss led an international collaboration that showed the CRISPR Cas9 gene editing technique could be used with nearly 100% efficiency to knock out LEAFY, the master gene behind flower formation.

“The flowers never developed to the point where ovules, pollen or fertile seeds were observed,” Strauss said. “And there was no detectable negative effect on tree growth or form. A field study should be the next step to take a more careful look at stability of the vegetative and floral sterility traits, but with physical gene mutation we expect high reliability over the life of the trees.”

Findings were published in Plant Biotechnology Journal.

Strauss, Ph.D. student Estefania Elorriaga and research assistant Cathleen Ma teamed up with scientists at the University of Colorado, Beijing Forestry University and the University of Pretoria on the research. The greenhouse study involved a hybrid of two species, Eucalyptus grandis and E. urophylla, that is widely planted in the Southern Hemisphere; there are more than 700 species of eucalyptus, most of them native to Australia.

 

Heavy mobile phone use a cancer risk, Israeli study finds

Heavy mobile phone use a cancer risk, Israeli study finds

Is your phone safe? A new report suggests that people who are heavy users of cell phones are 50 percent more likely to develop tumors.Heavy cell phone use has been linked to the development of cancer in the salivary gland, according to a new report by an Israeli scientist.

Dr. Siegal Sadetzki, a physician, epidemiologist and lecturer at Tel Aviv University, discovered that people who use a cell phone for lengthy periods every day are 50 percent more likely to develop rare benign or malignant tumors of the main salivary gland (parotid), located near the jaw and ear, than those who did not use cell phones.

She also found that mobile users who live in rural areas with few antennas have an increased risk of cancer than people living in the cities, because cell phones have to emit more radiation for effective communication.

Israelis adopted cell phone technology early and are heavy users, said Sadetzki, who carried out her research at the Gertner Institute for Epidemiology and Health Policy Research at Sheba Medical Center. She found this fact played a significant role in her work.

Sadetzki’s research, which was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, is part of the international Interphone Study, which is working to determine whether there is a link between cell phones and several types of brain and parotid gland tumors.

 

Carbon dioxide levels are higher than they've been at any point in the last 3.6 million years

Carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane levels in the atmosphere continued to rise in 2020, with CO2 level reaching their highest point in 3.6 million years, according to calculations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The barrier was broken despite a reduction in expected emissions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.




NOAA reported that the global average of atmospheric CO2 hit 412.5 parts per million (ppm) in 2020, a rise of 2.6 ppm from 2019, the fifth-largest increase since they began measuring atmospheric CO2 levels 63 years ago. The rise happened despite an estimated 7% reduction in global emissions due to the pandemic. Pieter Tans, the senior scientist at NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, estimates that 2020 would have been a record-breaking year had it not been for the pandemic


Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego released similar findings Wednesday, saying their measurements showed atmospheric CO2 levels to be 417.4 ppm at their monitoring station in Hawaii. Scripps noted that this puts atmospheric CO2 levels 50% higher than they were just prior to the industrial revolution.

 

Reminds me of the saying "Think outside the box? There is no box. There's only a search for the truth."

There Are 4 Modes of Thinking: Preacher, Prosecutor, Politician, and Scientist. You Should Use 1 Much More

"I think too many of us spend too much time thinking like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians"

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillma...ian-scientist-you-should-use-1-much-more.html

 

The future is in the present...

 

How we found hints of new particles or forces of nature – and why it could change physics

Themis Bowcock - Professor of Particle Physics, University of Liverpool.
Mark Lancaster - Professor of Physics, University of Manchester

Muons are closely related to electrons, which orbit every atom and form the building blocks of matter. The electron and muon both have properties precisely predicted by our current best scientific theory describing the subatomic, quantum world, the standard model of particle physics.

A whole generation of scientists have dedicated themselves to measuring these properties in exquisite detail. In 2001, an experiment hinted that one property of the muon was not exactly as the standard model predicted, but new studies were needed to confirm. Physicists moved part of the experiment to a new accelerator, at Fermilab, and started taking more data.

A new measurement has now confirmed the initial result. This means new particles or forces may exist that aren’t accounted for in the standard model. If this is the case, the laws of physics will have to be revised and no one knows where that may lead.

Read on...

https://theconversation.com/how-we-...nature-and-why-it-could-change-physics-158564

 

It's a concern, and got me thinking about the potential hazards of Bluetooth headphones:

Do Wireless Bluetooth Headphones Really Increase Cancer Risk?

Yes, Bluetooth radiation is a thing—but that doesn't mean you should freak out about your wireless earbuds.

...Bluetooth devices also give off less radiation than cell phones—only about one-tenth or less, Foster points out. “If you also use a cell phone on a daily basis, it’s bizarre to worry about the hazards of these earphones,” he says. Sure, if you use them for hours a day to listen to music or podcasts, of course, that exposure could add up. But if you're using them mainly to have phone conversations, you’ll actually get less exposure than if you were to hold the phone up to your head.

https://www.health.com/condition/cancer/bluetooth-wireless-headphones-cancer

 

Third of Antarctic ice shelves ‘will collapse amid 4C global heating’

More than a third of the vast floating platforms of ice surrounding Antarctica could be at risk of collapsing and releasing “unimaginable amounts” of water into the sea if global temperatures reach 4C above pre-industrial levels, UK scientists say.

Researchers from the University of Reading said that limiting the temperature rise to 2C could halve the area at risk and avoid a drastic rise in sea levels.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-shelves-will-collapse-amid-4c-global-heating

 

This is both exciting and scary equally.
1. The potential
2. In human hands
Understand me?

 

Elon Musk's Neuralink has a monkey play Pong with its mind


The goal for Neuralink, and many researchers in the field, is to develop a completely wireless version, which would allow sufferers of paralysis far greater freedom and quality of life. A consortium of scientists working on this problem, known as BrainGate, earlier this week revealed it had developed the first wireless system to transmit neural signals at a similar bandwidth to wired systems. It uses arrays of 200 electrodes to gather the full spectrum of signals from the brain's motor cortex and pass them along to a connected wireless transmitter on the user's head.

 

Altering traumatic memories

Researchers have found that they can indirectly retrieve and weaken fear memories; the discovery has therapeutic implications for treating trauma


Scientists could be a step closer to finding a way to reduce the impact of traumatic memories, according to a Texas A&M University study published recently in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The report details a study by researchers from the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the Institute for Neuroscience. Stephen Maren, professor of psychological and brain sciences, said the group's findings suggest that procedures used by clinicians to indirectly reactivate traumatic memories render a window whereby those memories can be altered, or even erased completely.

In therapy, imaginal reminders are often used to safely retrieve traumatic memories of experiences. For example, Maren said a military veteran wounded by an improvised explosive device may be asked to re-experience trauma cues -- like the lights and sounds of the explosion -- without the negative consequences. The idea is that the fear responses can be dampened through this exposure therapy.


The study showed that indirectly reactivating a contextual fear memory through re-exposure to the cue can make the memory vulnerable to disruption. Maren said further research is needed to answer if scientists can produce a permanent loss of the traumatic information.

 

This Nuclear Reactor Just Made Fusion Viable by 2030. Seriously.

TAE Technologies, the world’s largest private fusion company, has announced it will have a commercially viable nuclear fusion power plant by 2030, which puts it years—or even decades—ahead of other fusion technology companies.

The California-based company has raised $880 million in funding for its hydrogen-boron reactor. This reactor isn’t a traditional tokamak or stellarator; instead, it uses a confined particle acceleration mechanism that produces and confines plasma.




All fusion technology has plasma, which mimics the extreme reactions that power all the stars—it’s what we’re emulating when we make fusion energy experiments. “Plasma is an oozy substance; the challenge of containing it is akin to holding Jell-O together using rubber bands,” TAE says on its website.




What is TAE doing differently than the industry’s perhaps higher-profile projects, like the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)? TAE’s tech, which is called advanced beam-driven field-reversed configuration (FRC), uses non-radioactive hydrogen-boron to generate plasma in a carefully contained area. The tech can also work for hydrogen isotope fuels like deuterium-tritium, TAE says. The particle-accelerating beam heats the molecules to plasma status, then the field-reversed configuration keeps it all together.

 

Forget Boston Dynamics. This robot taught itself to walk

A pair of robot legs called Cassie has been taught to walk using reinforcement learning, the training technique that teaches AIs complex behavior via trial and error. It’s the first time reinforcement learning has been used to teach a two-legged robot how to walk from scratch, including the ability to walk in a crouch and while carrying an unexpected load.

 

Long-awaited review reveals journey of water from interstellar clouds to habitable worlds

Dutch astronomer Ewine van Dishoeck (Leiden University, the Netherlands), together with an international team of colleagues, has written an overview of everything we know about water in interstellar clouds thanks to the Herschel space observatory. The article, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, summarizes existing knowledge and provides new information about the origin of water on new, potentially habitable, worlds. The article is expected to serve as a reference work for the next twenty years.




How and where water is formed in interstellar space and how it eventually ends up on a planet like Earth was not well understood 10 years ago. One reason for this is that observations made with ground-based telescopes are affected by water vapor in our own atmosphere. In 2009, ESA launched the far-infrared space telescope Herschel. One of Herschel's main goals was to research water in space. Herschel was in service until 2013. Of particular importance was the HIFI instrument built under Dutch leadership, also known as the 'molecule hunter." In recent years, dozens of scientific articles have been published based on Herschel's water data. Now these results have been combined and expanded with new insights.

The new study describes the journey of water throughout the star formation process, including the intermediate stages which , until now, had received less attention. The paper shows that most of the water is formed as ice on tiny dust particles in cold and tenuous interstellar clouds. When a cloud collapses into new stars and planets, this water is largely preserved and quickly anchored into pebble-sized dust particles.. In the rotating disc around the young star, these pebbles then form the building blocks for new planets.

Furthermore, the researchers have calculated that most new solar systems are born with enough water to fill several thousand oceans. Ewine van Dishoeck: "It's fascinating to realize that when you drink a glass of water, most of those molecules were made more than 4.5 billion years ago in the cloud from which our sun and the planets formed."

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2021/04/aa39084-20/aa39084-20.html

 

Japan decides to release water from Fukushima plant into sea

The Japanese government has decided to release treated radioactive water accumulated at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea despite opposition from fishermen, a source familiar with the matter said Friday.




It will hold a meeting of related ministers as early as Tuesday to formally decide on the plan, a major development following over seven years of discussions on how to discharge the water used to cool down melted fuel at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The release into the sea of the treated water containing radioactive tritium, which is said to pose little risk to human health, is likely to provoke concern among consumers and neighboring countries such as China and South Korea. The government had initially hoped to make a decision on the discharge of the treated water in October last year but later decided it would need more time for discussions amid staunch concern about reputational damage to marine products.

 

How 'agromining' — farming plants that contain metal — could help power the future

When scientist Alan Baker made a cut in the side of an exotic plant in the Philippines jungle, the sap that bled out had a jade-green glow.

The shrub was a newly discovered species, soon to be known as Phyllanthus Balgooyi, one of a rare variety of plants that naturally suck high amounts of metallic elements from the soil.

The fluorescent sap turned out to be nine per cent nickel.




It was a welcome finding, but not a surprise, as Professor Baker's research into so-called "hyperaccumulators" had already uncovered species that seemed to thrive on everything from cobalt to zinc, and even gold.

"These are plants which can take up elements from the soil [at rates] orders of magnitude higher than normal plants," Professor Baker says.

Scientists are now on a quest to discover whether farming these plants could provide an alternative to environmentally-destructive mining, while also helping to rehabilitate former mine sites.