Fires persist on the Pacific Crest Trail, leading to closures and evacuations

Posted on August 24, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

The Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) is facing increasing challenges due to wildfires and their aftermaths, making sections of the trail hazardous and leading to sudden road closures. Long-distance hikers are experiencing significant environmental transformations as wildfires ravage the area, while rural communities near the trail are stepping up to assist hikers during wildfire emergencies.

According to Riley, wildfires are becoming more frequent and unpredictable, affecting a larger number of trails, users, and communities. The PCT, which traverses diverse terrains like the Mojave Desert, Sierra Nevada Mountains, and Cascade Mountains, attracts thousands of long-distance hikers and hundreds of thousands of day hikers annually.

However, the combination of global warming-induced extreme temperatures and decades of aggressive fire suppression has led to intense wildfire seasons altering the landscape along the PCT. Climate change effects are noticeable along the trail, with local weather scientist John O’Brien remarking, “This is an extended tour of climate history.”

Trail crews on the Pacific Crest Trail pass through burned areas of the Eagle Creek Fire in the Columbia River Gorge near Portland, Oregon, in 2018.Jamie Hale/The Oregonian via The Associated Press

Apart from fire risks, climate change is intensifying water scarcity along the trail and affecting wildlife populations. Glacial retreat in higher elevations is exposing more slippery rock, while river levels are peaking earlier in the season, leading to hazardous crossings.

Hikers like Karen Altergott have faced extreme weather conditions, from heavy late-season snowfall to intense heat waves, prompting concerns about the impact on health. Altergott emphasized the need for preparedness and flexibility when dealing with changing trail conditions.

Karen Altergott.Courtesy of Karen Altergott

The PCT community is coming together to tackle these challenges, with the Pacific Crest Trail Association releasing a smartphone app to help hikers navigate wildfire closures. Local “trail angels” are also stepping up to provide aid, transport, and support to stranded hikers during emergencies.

Becky Wade and her partner Jeff McCabe.Courtesy of Becky Wade

Becky Wade and Jeff McCabe, who have experienced evacuations due to wildfires, exemplify the importance of community support. Their efforts in assisting hikers around fire-affected areas highlight the crucial role of local residents in ensuring hiker safety along the PCT.

Although wildfires and their aftermath present challenges, hikers like Will Geolis attest to the enduring value of the PCT experience. While adapting to changing trail conditions is necessary, the trail’s community and scenic beauty remain priceless.

Joris aptly sums up the essence of the PCT experience, emphasizing that it’s the people and the journey that truly matter, rather than completing a continuous hike along the trail.

Source: www.nbcnews.com

Super-Earths and Sub-Neptunes have significantly higher water content than previously believed

Posted on August 24, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Water is a key component of exoplanets, and its distribution – on the surface or deep inside – has a fundamental impact on the planet’s properties. A new study suggests that for Earth-sized planets and planets with more than six times Earth’s mass, the majority of water resides deep within the planet’s core.

Most of the water isn’t stored on the surface of exoplanets, but deep within their cores and mantles. Image courtesy of Sci.News.

“Most of the exoplanets known to date are located close to their stars,” said Professor Caroline Dohn of ETH Zurich.

“That means they consist mainly of hot worlds with oceans of molten magma that haven’t yet cooled enough to form a solid mantle of silicate rock like Earth’s.”

“Water is very soluble in these magma oceans, unlike, say, carbon dioxide, which quickly outgasssssssssssss and rises into the atmosphere.”

“The iron core is beneath a molten silicate mantle. So how does water partition between the silicates and the iron?”

“It takes time for the iron core to form. Most of the iron is initially contained in the hot magma soup in the form of droplets.”

“The water trapped in this soup binds to these iron droplets and together they sink to the center. The iron droplets act like a lift force, being carried downward by the water.”

Until now, such phenomena were known to occur only under moderate pressures, which also exist on Earth.

It was not known what would happen on larger planets with higher internal pressures.

“This is one of the key findings of our study,” Professor Dorn said.

“The larger and more massive the planet, the more likely the water is to be integrated into the core, together with the iron droplets.”

“Under certain circumstances, iron can absorb up to 70 times more water than silicates.”

“But because of the enormous pressure at the core, the water no longer exists in the form of water molecules, but in the form of hydrogen and oxygen.”

The research was sparked by an investigation into the Earth’s water content, which four years ago led to a startling result: the Earth’s surface oceans contain only a tiny fraction of the planet’s total water.

More than 80 of Earth’s oceans may be hidden within it.

This is shown by simulations that calculate how water would have behaved under conditions when the Earth was young, so experiments and seismological measurements are compatible.

New discoveries about the distribution of water within planets will have a dramatic impact on the interpretation of astronomical observational data.

Astronomers can use telescopes in space and on Earth to measure the weight and size of exoplanets under certain conditions.

They use these calculations to create mass-radius diagrams that allow them to draw conclusions about the planet’s composition.

“Ignoring water solubility and distribution, as has been done in the past, can lead to a massive underestimation of the water volume, by up to a factor of ten,” Prof Doern said.

“There’s a lot more water on the planet than we previously thought.”

The distribution of water is also important if we want to understand how planets form and develop: any water that sinks to the core will remain trapped there forever.

However, dissolved water in the mantle’s magma ocean can degas and rise to the surface as the mantle cools.

“So if we find water in a planet’s atmosphere, there’s probably even more water in its interior,” Prof Dorn said.

Water is one of the prerequisites for life to develop, and there has long been speculation as to whether water-rich super-Earths could support life.

Calculations have since suggested that too much water could be detrimental to life, arguing that on such a watery world, an alien layer of high-pressure ice would prevent vital exchange of materials at the interface between the ocean and the planet’s mantle.

Current research has come to a different conclusion: Most of the water on super-Earths is locked away in their cores, rather than on their surfaces as previously assumed, so planets with deep aqueous layers are probably rare.

This has led astronomers to speculate that planets with relatively high water content could potentially form habitable environments like Earth.

“Their study sheds new light on the possibility that worlds rich enough in water to support life may exist,” the authors said.

of study Published in the journal Natural Astronomy.

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H. Luo othersThe interior as the main water reservoir of Super-Earths and Sub-Neptunes. Nat AstronPublished online August 20, 2024; doi: 10.1038/s41550-024-02347-z

Source: www.sci.news

New insights into the evolutionary origins of tardigrades from Cretaceous amber fossils

Posted on August 24, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Tardigrades are a diverse group of microinvertebrates widely known for their remarkable ability to survive. Molecular clocks suggest that tardigrades diverged from other panarthropods (arthropods, tardigrades, velvet worms, and lobopods) before the Cambrian, but the fossil record is extremely poor. Now, paleontologists have described a new species of tardigrade and redescribed previously known species. readBoth are from Canadian Cretaceous amber.

Artistic Restoration read (Top) and Aerobius dactylus (Bottom) A hypothetical fossilization environment. Image courtesy of Franz Anthony.

First discovered in 1773, tardigrades are a diverse group of microscopic invertebrates best known for their ability to survive in extreme environments.

Also known as tardigrades or moss pigs, these creatures can live up to 60 years and grow to a size of up to 0.5mm. They are best seen under a microscope.

They can survive up to 30 years without food or water, and can survive temperatures as low as -272°C and as high as 150°C for a few minutes, and as low as -20°C for decades.

Tardigrades can withstand pressures ranging from nearly zero atmospheres in outer space to 1,200 atmospheres at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and can also tolerate radiation levels of up to 5,000-6,200 Gy.

They survive by entering a state of suspended animation called biostasis, using proteins that form a gel inside the cells and slow down vital processes.

“Tardigrades are microscopic invertebrates characterized by a compact body shape with lobopod legs with four pairs of claws, and are closely related to the clawed pterygota and euarthropods. Panarthropods“Harvard doctoral student Mark Mapalo and his colleagues said:

“Tardigrades are widely known for having several species with cryptobiotic capabilities that allow them to survive extreme conditions such as the vacuum of space, ionizing radiation and freezing temperatures. Tardigrades are also found in marine, freshwater and terrestrial habitats around the world.”

“Despite their ubiquity in the modern biosphere, tardigrades have a notoriously poor fossil record, and research into their macroevolution, such as the origin of their body shape, the timing of their terrestrialization, and the acquisition of their cryptic abilities, is limited.”

“Currently, only four fossil crown-group tardigrades are known, all preserved as amber inclusions, but only two of these have an established taxonomic position relative to extant tardigrades.”

Aerobius dactylusImages/Photos: Mapalo others., doi: 10.1038/s42003-024-06643-2.

For the study, the authors looked at a piece of amber containing a tardigrade fossil that was discovered in Canada in the 1960s. read and what was presumed to be another tardigrade, which was virtually unexplained at the time.

Using confocal laser scanning microscopy, a technique commonly used to study cell biology, the researchers were able to examine the microscopic structure of the tardigrade fossils in astonishing detail.

This study read It has been identified as a new species in the Tardigrade family tree, Aerobius dactylus.

“Both were found in the same Cretaceous amber, which means that these tardigrades coexisted with dinosaurs,” said Dr Javier Ortega-Hernández of Harvard University.

” read The seven claws are well preserved, and those that curve towards the body are smaller than those that curve away from it, a pattern seen in modern tardigrades.”

“The second, previously unidentified specimen had claws of equal length on each of the first three pairs of legs, but the outer claws on the fourth leg were longer.”

Both species serve as important calibration points for an analysis called a molecular clock analysis, which helps scientists estimate important evolutionary timing.

For example, new research suggests that modern tardigrades likely branched off during the Cambrian period, more than 500 million years ago.

The study also sheds light on the origins of tardigrades' remarkable ability to survive extreme environments by entering a state of torpor.

“This study estimates that this survival mechanism likely evolved during the middle to late Palaeozoic and may have played a key role in helping tardigrades survive the end-Permian mass extinction, one of the most severe extinction events in Earth's history,” Dr Ortega-Hernández said.

of result Published in a journal Communication Biology.

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MA Mapalo others2024. Inclusions in Cretaceous amber shed light on evolutionary origins of tardigrades. Communication Violet 7, 953; doi: 10.1038/s42003-024-06643-2

Source: www.sci.news

Hot Gulf of Mexico experiences unusually calm hurricane season

Posted on August 24, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

summary

Despite warm ocean temperatures, hurricane season is on a lull.
This season is expected to be much more active than usual and is off to a record-breaking start.
Still, the unofficial peak of hurricane season is on September 10, so scientists wouldn’t be surprised if cyclonic activity picks up again soon.

The Gulf of Mexico is scorching hot, but hurricane season is on a lull (at least temporarily) — a surprise to researchers who say there’s a lot brewing in the Atlantic, but no storms are showing up on radar.

The National Hurricane Center said on Friday No tropical cyclone activity expected for at least a week.

“Nothing is happening, which is extremely quiet and odd given the warm temperatures in the Atlantic and the La Niña climate pattern,” said Philip Klotzbach, a meteorologist at Colorado State University who specializes in seasonal hurricane forecasting in the Atlantic basin. “It’s a head-scratching situation right now.”

The La Niña weather phenomenon that scientists are predicting will develop this fall is closely linked to hurricanes, as is warming water in the Atlantic Ocean, with ocean heat content in the Gulf of Mexico at its highest since 2013, according to data from the University of Miami.

Sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic are trending about 1.8 degrees above normal. According to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalysis InstrumentThis trend is especially evident in the Gulf of Mexico.

Warmer oceans increase hurricane energy through heat, increasing the risk of storms intensifying rapidly.

“We have plenty of fuel. It’s not going to hinder our season,” Klotzbach said.

Hurricane season begins on June 1 and ends on November 30. Hurricane scientists had predicted this year’s hurricane season would be record-breaking, but it got off to a record-breaking start in June with Hurricane Beryl being the first Category 4 storm to form in the Atlantic. Then, the slow-moving Hurricane Debbie dumped incredible rain on several southeastern states in early August. But since then, it’s been relatively quiet.

Steve Bowen, chief scientific officer at global reinsurance broker Gallagher Re, said weather trends off the coast of West Africa, including a strengthening monsoon, may have prevented tropical storms from developing in the Atlantic basin.

But that may not last long: The unofficial peak of hurricane season is September 10.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we get what’s called a backloading season with pretty good activity through September, October, and possibly November,” Bowen said.

Although things have calmed down recently, scientists believe this season has been quite active so far.

“We’ve already had two landfalls in the United States,” Bowen said. “Typically, the first major hurricane doesn’t form until August 31st. … Just looking at the statistics, we’re well ahead of normal.”

Source: www.nbcnews.com

Neolithic architects utilized scientific understanding to construct massive megalithic structures.

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Inside the monument known as Mengadolmen in Spain

Miguel Angel Blanco de la Rubia

Neolithic people appear to have understood advanced concepts from sciences such as physics and geology, and used this knowledge to build megalithic monuments in southern Spain.

The dolmen, called Menga Dolmen, was built between 3600 and 3800 BC and is one of the oldest megalithic structures in Europe. The covered enclosure is made of 32 large stones, some of which are the largest ever used for such a structure. The heaviest stone weighs over 130 tonnes, more than three times the heaviest stone at Stonehenge in England, which was built more than 1000 years later.

“[In the Neolithic Period]”It must have been an impressive experience to experience these huge stone structures,” he said. Leonardo Garcia San Juan He studied at the University of Seville in Spain. “It still moves me. It still makes an impression on me.”

García Sanjuan and his colleagues are now conducting a detailed geological and archaeological analysis of the stones to deduce what knowledge Menga's builders needed to construct the monument in the city of Antequera.

Paradoxically, they found that the rock was a type of relatively brittle sandstone, meaning that it was at high risk of breaking, but the team found that they could compensate for that risk by shaping the rock, locking it into a very stable overall structure.

Neolithic people would have needed some way to make the stones fit together very snugly, Garcia-Sanjuan says. “It's like Tetris,” he says. “The precision, and how tightly each stone is fastened to each other, forces you to think they had some concept of angles, even if it was just rudimentary.”

The researchers also discovered that the 130-ton stone, laid horizontally on top to form part of the roof, has a raised surface in the middle and slopes down at the edges, which helps distribute forces in the same way an arch does and strengthens the roof, Garcia-Sanjuan says. “To our knowledge, this is the first time the principle of the arch has been documented in human history.”

The purpose of the mengas is unknown, but they were positioned to create unique light patterns inside them during the summer solstice, and the stones are protected from water damage by layers of carefully pounded clay, supporting evidence of their builders' knowledge of architecture and engineering.

“They knew about geology and the properties of the rocks they were working with,” Garcia San Juan says. “When you put all of this together — engineering, physics, geology, geometry, astronomy — you get what you call science.”

There are other Neolithic structures in France of a similar size to Menga, but less is known about how it was built, Garcia San Juan said. “To date, Menga is unique both in the Iberian peninsula and in Western Europe.”

“What's surprising is how sophisticated it is.” Susan Greaney “This architectural understanding of how weight is distributed is something I've never seen anywhere before,” says Professor David Schneider of the University of Exeter in the UK. But, she adds, this may be a testament to an understanding of architecture and engineering rather than an understanding of science.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Mpox: Understanding the Fatality Rate and Treatment Options of the Virus

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Health workers assess a suspected case of MPOX in North Kivu province, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Arlette Basij/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, is currently in the midst of an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and neighboring countries, with the surge in cases being blamed in part on a new variant that is thought to be more deadly than the variant of the Mpox virus that caused a global outbreak in 2022. But there are treatments that may help.

How deadly is MPOX?

Studies have shown that the mortality rate among people infected with the currently circulating lineage I variant of MPOX is approximately 1-2%. 11 percentThe variation in reported mortality rates is probably due to differences in affected populations and problems with disease surveillance, Lilith Whittles At Imperial College London.

For example, infants and children with underdeveloped immune systems may be more likely than adults to develop serious, even fatal, infections, and people with suppressed immune systems, such as those with HIV, may also be more susceptible, she says.

Additionally, some areas have little access to health care and limited surveillance for MPOX. As a result, health care providers only catch the most severe cases and miss milder cases, making the death rate appear higher than it actually is. If MPOX symptoms are increasingly misdiagnosed as other illnesses, like measles or chickenpox, more cases will go undetected, Whittles says.

In fact, most deaths from MPOX occur due to complications such as sepsis, where infection enters the bloodstream and causes organ failure, and inflammation caused by the MPOX virus that damages the lungs, he said. Piero Oriaro At Oxford University.

What are the MPOX treatment options?

In the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries where the current outbreak is occurring, there are few treatments specific to MPOX. Instead, doctors focus on treating symptoms, which usually last two to four weeks, such as reducing fever and headaches with paracetamol (acetaminophen) and cleaning skin lesions to prevent bacterial infections, he said. Jean-Claude Udahemka At the University of Rwanda.

In the UK and US, doctors can use the antiviral drug Tecovirimat to treat people with severe smallpox. Originally developed to treat smallpox, its use against the disease was based on animal studies in which it improved survival rates compared to a placebo. Tecovirimat works by binding to a protein on the surface of both variola and smallpox that the virus uses to attack. Freeing itself from infected cells spreads to other cells.

Doctors in the United States and the United Kingdom can also treat MPOX with other antiviral drugs, such as brincidofovir and cidofovir. Protecting mice from lethal doses of the mpox virus. Both brincidofivir and cidofovir Interfering with enzymes Used by viruses to replicate their genome.

Another treatment, known as VIGIV, involves injecting people with smallpox with antibodies against smallpox taken from people who have had the smallpox vaccine, thus strengthening their immune response to the virus.

How effective is mpox treatment in humans?

Animal studies suggest that these treatments may be effective against MPOX, but their effectiveness in humans is unknown. Early results from a recent randomized controlled trial (best medical evidence) in the Democratic Republic of Congo suggest that tecovirimat does not accelerate the progression of MPOX. Healing of painful lesions in children and adults infected with lineage I variants of MPOX.

Nonetheless, the researchers found that the MPOX mortality rate for participants who received the antiviral drug was 1.7 percent, an improvement over the 3.6 percent mortality rate typically seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But this can be partly explained by the fact that participants in the trial received close care in hospital, Oriaro says.

Ultimately, better treatments and a better understanding of MPOX's lethality will be essential to protect people, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo, from the ongoing epidemic. Lucille Blumberg She is a researcher at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. “There's a lot of work to be done,” she says.

topic:

virus/
Infection

Source: www.newscientist.com

State media reports show that Chinese scientists are using lunar soil to produce water

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Chinese scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery in producing large amounts of water using lunar soil collected from the 2020 mission, as reported by state-run CCTV on Thursday.

The Chang’e-5 mission in 2020 marked a significant milestone in collecting lunar samples after a 44-year hiatus. Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences found high amounts of hydrogen in minerals present in the lunar soil. When heated to extreme temperatures, this hydrogen reacts with other elements to generate water vapor, according to China Central Television.

CCTV reported, “After extensive research and verification over three years, a new method has been identified for producing significant quantities of water from lunar soil. This discovery is anticipated to play a crucial role in designing future lunar research and space stations.”

This finding could have significant implications for China’s long-standing ambition to establish a permanent lunar base, amid the race between the United States and China to explore and exploit lunar resources.

On August 26, 2021, a small vial containing lunar soil brought back from the moon by China’s lunar probe Chang’e-5 was placed in Beijing.Ren Hui/VCG via Getty Images file

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has expressed concerns about China’s rapid progress in space exploration and the potential risk of Beijing controlling valuable lunar resources.

According to state media, the new technique can yield approximately 51-76 kilograms of water from one ton of lunar soil, enough to fill over 100 500ml bottles or sustain the daily water needs of 50 individuals.

China aims for its recent and upcoming lunar missions to establish a basis for constructing the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), a collaborative project with Russia.

The Chinese space agency’s plan includes establishing a lunar “base station” at the moon’s south pole by 2035, followed by a lunar orbiting space station by 2045.

This discovery coincides with ongoing experiments by Chinese scientists on lunar samples obtained from the Chang’e-6 probe in June.

While the Chang’e-5 mission collected samples from the moon’s near side, Chang’e-6 gathered lunar soil from the far side, perpetually hidden from Earth.

The significance of lunar water surpasses sustaining human settlement; NASA’s Nelson mentioned to NPR in May that moon water could be utilized to produce hydrogen fuel for rockets, potentially fueling missions to Mars and beyond.

Source: www.nbcnews.com

The World’s Leading AI Expert Predicts a Strange 2050

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Ray Kurzweil is a prominent figure in the field of artificial intelligence, with over 60 years of experience. He has achieved many milestones in AI development, such as inventing the first commercially available large vocabulary speech recognition software. Kurzweil’s expertise in AI was recognized with the National Medal of Technology by President Bill Clinton in 1999 and his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002.

In addition to his practical accomplishments, Kurzweil is known for his accurate predictions about future technologies. His book “The Singularity is Near,” published in 2005, explored the rapid advances in computing and AI, predicting the future impact of AI on society. In his follow-up book, “The Singularity is Approaching,” Kurzweil delves into how AI will reshape our lives.

Kurzweil forecasts significant changes ahead, particularly in the realm of artificial general intelligence (AGI). He believes AGI will surpass human abilities in various cognitive tasks, potentially becoming available by 2029. The pace of technological advances in AI is accelerating exponentially, with Kurzweil emphasizing the need to prepare for the evolution of AI.

Another groundbreaking prediction by Kurzweil is the potential end of aging through advancements in healthcare and technology. He envisions a future where aging can be slowed down or prevented entirely, with life expectancy increasing significantly. Kurzweil’s optimistic outlook extends to the integration of AI with human intelligence by 2050, creating a new form of intelligence through the merging of human brains with computers.

As a futurist, author, and inventor, Ray Kurzweil continues to shape the conversation around AI and its impact on society. His visionary insights invite us to consider the possibilities and challenges that lie ahead in the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence.

Source: www.sciencefocus.com

Get ready for an influx of tarantulas in the US: Here’s what you need to know

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Reports suggest that Americans are set to witness a peculiar and somewhat alarming occurrence as swarms of tarantulas are poised to invade certain regions of the country.

Despite the ominous connotations associated with this event, it is actually a normal annual happening where thousands of spiders are on the lookout for mates, particularly in Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

Naturally, one might feel inclined to take action upon witnessing such a spectacle, but how challenging is it to manage these swarms? And what level of threat do they truly pose?

What’s prompting the spider swarms?

The appearance of swarms of animals and insects typically indicates two main reasons: migration or mating. In the case of American tarantulas, it is primarily due to the latter. It is an intriguing scenario distinct from what we might typically envision.

“Every year, male tarantulas come out in search of a mate, while females remain in their burrows releasing pheromones to attract males,” stated Lauren Davidson, an entomologist at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. “It’s a fascinating phenomenon that occurs based on weather conditions and geographical location.”

Male tarantulas usually have a short lifespan solely for the duration of the mating season, with only mature males actively seeking a mate. Upon detecting a female’s pheromones, the male tarantula initiates a mating ritual by drumming near the entrance of her burrow. If the female is receptive, she will come out to meet him.

Wondering where you might encounter these males? Tarantula mating season varies across different regions; for instance, mating in Texas typically occurs in early summer, while in Colorado and New Mexico, it can extend until October.

Davidson notes, “The timing is consistent each year, and these events are often unnoticed by urban residents. It’s a cyclical process that occurs at night due to tarantulas being nocturnal.”

Though it may appear to be migration, the spiders are primarily in search of mates within close proximity to their usual habitats, generally traveling no more than a kilometer from home.

Encountering a tarantula: What to do?

While encounters with tarantulas may be rare, it is not impossible. If you do come across one, remain calm as these spiders are harmless. Despite their intimidating size, their venom is similar to that of a bee sting and bites are infrequent. Tarantulas typically avoid human contact and resort to kicking out irritating hairs if threatened.

Direct contact with these hairs can cause itchiness and irritation, but one would need to be in close proximity to the spider for that to occur. Davidson reassures, “Many people travel to witness these tarantulas as they are docile creatures and safe to handle.”

About our expert

Lauren Davidson: Associate Curator of Entomology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science and Manager of the Cockrell Butterfly Center. Davidson has authored several children’s books focusing on entomology education.

Read more:

Source: www.sciencefocus.com

Here’s why scientists are planning to construct a massive “bioreservoir” on the moon

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Life on Earth has faced various threats over millions of years, from asteroids to pandemics to climate change. According to the IPCC, nearly one in five terrestrial species is at risk of extinction by 2100 due to rising global temperatures.

Marine life is also in peril, with coral reefs disappearing rapidly. Dr. Mary Hagedorn, a coral reef expert, has been working on cryopreserving coral to ensure its survival and potential reintroduction into ecosystems.

Her innovative idea involves creating a lunar biorepository to store frozen cell samples of key species for ecosystem reconstruction. The moon’s cold temperatures and protection from radiation make it an ideal location for such a vault.

The focus is on preserving fibroblasts, which can be reprogrammed into different cell types, including stem cells for cloning. This initiative aims to safeguard Earth’s ecosystems and potentially support future human space exploration, such as Mars missions.

While the concept may seem futuristic, the team has already begun freezing cell samples from species like the starry goby for testing. The ultimate goal is to send diverse genetic samples to the lunar vault to ensure the preservation of essential species.

Creating a biorepository on the moon presents logistical challenges but could be achievable with NASA’s support and funding. Future generations might benefit from this innovative approach to conservation and space exploration.

Dr. Mary Hagedorn and Professor Ian Crawford are leading experts in this field, with a focus on conservation, lunar science, and astrobiology. Their research and work contribute to the understanding of ecosystems and the future of space exploration.

Learn more about the UK mission to the Moon
Discover how to build a moon base

Source: www.sciencefocus.com

Physicists Witness the First Observation of Antihyperhydrogen 4

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Physicists from the STAR Collaboration have observed an antimatter hypernucleus, antihyperhydrogen-4, consisting of an antihypernucleus, an antiproton, and two antineutrons, in nuclear collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Artistic representation of antihyperhydrogen-4 produced in the collision of two gold nuclei. Image courtesy of the Institute of Modern Physics.

“What we know in physics about matter and antimatter is that, apart from the opposite charge, antimatter has the same properties as matter – the same mass, the same lifetime before decaying, and the same interactions,” said Junlin Wu, a graduate student at Lanzhou University and the China Institute of Modern Physics.

“But in reality, our universe is made up of antimatter rather than matter, even though equal amounts of matter and antimatter are thought to have been created during the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago.”

“Why our universe is populated with matter remains a question, and we don't yet have a complete answer.”

“The first step in studying the asymmetry between matter and antimatter is to discover new antimatter particles. This is the basic idea of this research,” added Dr Hao Qiu, a researcher at the Institute of Modern Physics.

STAR physicists had previously observed atomic nuclei made of antimatter produced in RHIC collisions.

In 2010, they detected an antihypertriton, the first example of an antimatter nucleus containing a hyperon, a particle that contains at least one strange quark rather than just the light up and down quarks that make up ordinary protons and neutrons.

Just a year later, STAR physicists broke that massive antimatter record by detecting antihelium-4, the antimatter equivalent of a helium nucleus.

Recent analysis suggests that antihyperhydrogen 4 may also be feasible.

But detecting this unstable antihypernucleus is a rare event: all four components (one antiproton, two antineutrons and one antilambda) need to be ejected from the quark-gluon soup produced in the RHIC collision in just the right place, in the same direction and at just the right time, briefly becoming bound together.

“It's just a coincidence that these four component particles appear close enough together in the RHIC collision that they can combine to form an antihypernucleus,” said Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist Lijuan Luan, one of the STAR collaboration's co-spokespeople.

To find antihyperhydrogen-4, STAR physicists studied the trajectories of particles produced when this unstable antihypernucleus decays.

One of these decay products is the previously detected antihelium-4 nucleus, and the other is a simple positively charged particle called a pion (pi+).

“Antihelium-4 had already been discovered with STAR, so we used the same methods as before to pick up those events and reconstruct them with the π+ track to find these particles,” Wu said.

“It is simply by chance that these four component particles emerge from the RHIC collision close enough together to combine to form an antihypernucleus,” said Dr. Lijuan Luan, a research scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

RHIC's collisions produce huge amounts of pions, and physicists have been sifting through billions of collision events to find the rare antihypernuclei.

The antihelium-4 produced by the collision can pair up with hundreds or even a thousand pi+ particles.

“The key was to find an intersection point where the trajectories of the two particles had a particular characteristic – a collapse vertex,” Dr. Luan said.

“That is, the collapse apex must be far enough away from the collision point that the two particles could have originated from the decay of an antihypernucleus that formed shortly after the collision of the particle originally produced in the fireball.”

STAR researchers worked hard to eliminate the background of all other potential collapse pair partners.

Ultimately, their analysis found 22 candidate events with an estimated background count of 6.4.

“That means that about six of what appear to be antihyperhydrogen-4 decays could just be random noise,” said Emily Duckworth, a doctoral student at Kent State University.

Subtracting that background count from the 22, physicists can be confident that they have detected about 16 actual antihyperhydrogen-4 nuclei.

The results were significant enough to allow scientists to make a direct comparison between matter and antimatter.

They compared the lifespan of antihyperhydrogen 4 to that of hyperhydrogen 4, which is made from normal matter variants of the same building blocks.

They also compared the lifetimes of another matter-antimatter pair, antihypertritons and hypertritons.

Neither difference was significant, but the authors were not surprised.

“This experiment tested a particularly strong form of symmetry,” the researchers said.

“Physicists generally agree that this symmetry breaking is extremely rare and is not an answer to the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe.”

“If we saw this particular breaking of symmetry, we would basically have to throw a lot of what we know about physics out the window,” Duckworth said.

“So in a way it was reassuring that symmetry still worked in this case.”

“We agree that this result provides further confirmation that our model is correct and marks a major step forward in the experimental study of antimatter.”

Team work Published in a journal Nature.

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STAR Collaboration. Observation of the antimatter hypernucleus antihyperhydrogen 4. NaturePublished online August 21, 2024, doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07823-0

This article is based on an original release from Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Source: www.sci.news

A new carnivorous dinosaur species discovered in Kyrgyzstan

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

New genus and species of large theropod dinosaur named Alpkaraqsh Kyrgyzics. It was discovered in the Middle Jurassic Barabansai Formation in the northern Fergana Basin of Kyrgyzstan.

Reconstructing your life Alpkaraqsh Kyrgyzics.Image credit: Joschua Knüppe.

Alpkaraqsh Kyrgyzics roamed the Earth during the Callovian Period of the Jurassic Period, between 165 and 161 million years ago.

This ancient predator was 7 to 8 metres (23 to 26 feet) long and had highly prominent “eyebrows” on a part of the skull behind the eye sockets, called the postorbital bone, which indicates the presence of horns in this area.

Alpkaraqsh Kyrgyzics belongs to Metriacanthosauridae, a group of medium- to large-sized allosauroid theropod dinosaurs characterized by high, arched skulls, elongated, dish-like neural spines, and slender hind limbs.

“Theropod dinosaurs are well-known predators, similar to modern birds,” said Professor Oliver Rauhut from the SNSB – Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geology and his colleagues.

“A wide variety of theropods are known from the Mesozoic Era, the age of dinosaurs.”

“Just as lions today live mainly in Africa and tigers only in Asia, for example, Allosaurus was widespread throughout North America and southwestern Europe during the Jurassic, but a similarly sized Allosaurus lived in China.”

However, the region between Central Europe and East Asia was previously unknown, and no large carnivorous dinosaurs from the Jurassic period were previously known to have been found in this vast area.”

Two specimens of Alpkaraqsh Kyrgyzics were recovered from the top Barabansai Formation in Kyrgyzstan, Jalal-Abad, near the city of Tashkumil.

“While the type specimen represents a subadult individual, the smaller specimen is a juvenile, indicating that it probably lived in groups,” the paleontologists said.

Alpkaraqsh Kyrgyzics is the first diagnosable theropod species from the Jurassic of Central Asia in western China.

We suggest that metriocanthosaurid dinosaurs originated in Southeast Asia during the Late Early or Early Middle Jurassic and rapidly became the dominant group of apex theropod predators in many ecosystems on the continent during the Jurassic.

Alpkaraqsh Kyrgyzics “The discovery of a metriacanthosaurid dinosaur fossil isn’t necessarily a surprise, but it fills a major gap in our knowledge of Jurassic theropods,” Prof Rauhut said.

“This discovery provides important new insights into the evolution and biogeography of these animals.

This discovery paper issued this month in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

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Oliver W. M. Rauhut others A new theropod dinosaur from the Callovian-Balabansai Formation of Kyrgyzstan. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 201(4):zlae090;doi:10.1093/zoolinnean/zlae090

Source: www.sci.news

Your Brain May Have Mutated in Unexpected Ways

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Fragments of mitochondrial DNA can be added to the cell's main genome

wir0man/Getty Images

Mutations in which DNA from energy-producing mitochondria is mistakenly added to a cell's main genome were thought to be extremely rare. Now, studies of brain tissue show that such mutations occur in all of us, and their numbers may be a factor in ageing.

“Not only are they present, but they are abundant in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with cognitive abilities.” Ryan Mills At the University of Michigan.

In human cells, almost all of the DNA (about 6 billion letters) resides in the nucleus, but the energy-producing organelles called mitochondria have their own tiny genome of about 16,600 letters.

That's because mitochondria were once free-living bacteria with their own large genome. In the roughly 2 billion years since those bacteria formed a symbiotic relationship with our distant ancestors, most of the original bacterial genome has been lost or transferred to the main genome in the nucleus.

This evidence of transfer has led biologists to know for a long time that fragments of mitochondrial DNA could somehow find their way into the nucleus and then be added to the main genome. But this kind of mutation was thought to be very rare, Mills says. Over the past few years, work by his team and others has shown that this isn't as uncommon as we thought. At least in cancer cells.

Mills and his colleagues showed that these types of mutations also occur in non-cancerous cells by sequencing the DNA of brain tissue samples taken from 1,200 people during post-mortem examinations.

Although another team took the samples and sequenced them, Mills and his colleagues looked for mutations that add mitochondrial DNA to the nuclear genome. “We were just curious,” Mills says.

Not only did they find such mutations, but they also found that they were more prevalent in people who, on average, died younger.

It's not clear whether these mutations are just a symptom of aging or a cause of it, Mills says. “The jury is still out,” he says. “But if you take the entire mitochondrial sequence and put it somewhere in the genome, it's hard for me to believe that it wouldn't have an effect.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Many climate policies are ineffective in mitigating climate change

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Most political efforts to tackle climate change have had little effect

Shutterstock

Most climate policies fail to significantly reduce emissions and have little effect on halting climate change, meaning governments must work harder to find ways to actually make a difference.

Nicholas Koch Researchers from the Mercator Institute for the Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin found this by assessing the impact of 1,500 climate policies implemented in 41 countries across six continents between 1998 and 2022.

The researchers began by using machine learning to identify moments when a country's emissions fell significantly compared to a control group of other countries not included in the analysis. They found 69 such emissions “breaks” and compared them to a database compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that tracks what climate policies were enacted and when.

Matching policy shifts with changes in emissions is not an exact science, but the team was able to identify 63 of these changes as being due to one or more policy interventions that took place within a two-year period before or after the change, to account for lagged or anticipated effects.

Each of the 63 breaks reduced carbon dioxide emissions by between 600 million and 1.8 billion tonnes, but the researchers found that overall, most climate policies have fallen far short of this level of success. “There are many policies that have not led to significant reductions in emissions, and more policies do not necessarily lead to better outcomes,” Koch said.

Many policies fail because they are too specific, he says. For example, governments might subsidize the purchase of new electric cars, but most cars on the road are not electric, so the impact is minimal. One measure that seems to be very effective is a total ban, for example stopping the use of coal for electricity generation, but these are always used in conjunction with others, making it hard for the team to identify whether they work in isolation.

Politicians are looking for a one-size-fits-all policy mix, but they're out of luck: there's nothing that works for all sectors. Pricing seems to be the most effective tool, especially in reducing emissions in commercial industries, but it's not the only solution, Koch says. “We've found that the most frequently used policy tools – subsidies and regulations – are not enough,” he says. “Only in combination with price-based tools like carbon prices, energy taxes, can we achieve significant emissions reductions.” In other words, people will only reduce their emissions if it hurts their wallets.

“A key value of this paper is that it identifies clear changes in emissions in specific sectors and countries.” Matthew Patterson The researcher, from the University of Manchester in the UK, points out that the OECD's database of policy change has some limitations because the government documents it draws from are not reported consistently around the world, but he says it is the best available for the purposes of this study.

“We've known for some time that climate policies work best in combination, but this study gives us more specific information about which combinations work and in what circumstances,” Patterson says. This will allow us to more aggressively pursue these “breaks” to address the emissions gap and create the policy combinations that most effectively address emissions.

Marion Dumas Researchers at the London School of Economics and Political Science say that while the study should be useful to policymakers, looking first at emissions trends – or the results – and then working backwards to understand the causes may not capture the full reality of policy interventions.

“This is a very interesting approach, but there is a lot of uncertainty as to how to simulate the likely outcomes. [emissions] “You need to map out the trajectory and then identify the tipping points,” Dumas said, adding that a two-year gap around the tipping point may be too short and underestimates the real impact of more gradual, longer-term policy changes.

“It's important not to overinterpret the headline results, which suggest that very few policies will reduce emissions.” Robin Rambo The researchers, from Imperial College London, say small emissions reductions that their team's methods didn't detect could add up to big differences.

Of course, a larger issue in identifying the most effective measures is that policymaking doesn't take place in a vacuum, and specific policies must be acceptable to the general public. “The political dynamics will determine whether that combination can be implemented in any given country or sector,” Patterson says.

“We know this is going to be very difficult politically,” Koch said, “but the good news is that in general it's possible to put policies in place to achieve these very ambitious goals.”

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Climate change measures/
Carbon Emissions

Source: www.newscientist.com

The Importance of Saving the Chandra Space Telescope

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Chandra X-ray Observatory

NASA/CXC & J. Vaughan

On July 23, 1999, just a few months before I enrolled in college, NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia launched with a precious cargo. Not only was it carrying a crew led by the first woman, Eileen Collins, its primary purpose was to launch the Chandra X-ray Observatory, a new flagship space telescope. Chandra This was the heaviest payload ever carried by a NASA space shuttle and turned out to be one of the last two missions completed by Columbia before it tragically exploded after launch on February 1, 2003.

Chandra is the first, and so far only, NASA mission named after a person of color. The late theoretical astrophysicist and Nobel Prize winner Subramanian Chandrasekhar was called Chandra by his friends and family. Chandrasekhar, whose last name means “crown of the moon,” made many important contributions to astrophysics. His most important work was discovering the Chandrasekhar limit, the maximum mass a white dwarf remnant can have before it collapses into a black hole.

It's fitting that an X-ray telescope mission should be named after a scientist who has spent his life thinking about the physics of black holes, as X-ray telescopes play a key role in black hole research. X-rays are high-energy light waves, which means they are produced in extremely energetic environments, such as those around black holes, where extreme distortions of space-time cause strong gravitational forces to accelerate particles to extremely high speeds. In other words, when we look at the universe through the lens of X-ray astronomy, rather than the visible wavelengths of traditional telescopes, we see an entirely different universe.

Importantly, X-ray astronomy can't be done from the Earth's surface, because it's blocked by the Earth's atmosphere. That's good for human health, but not so good for astronomers. Chandra is therefore a reminder of just how important it is to keep low Earth orbit debris-free, so we can safely launch space telescopes that perform tasks that are simply beyond the control of the Earth.

I feel like I have grown up with Chandra. And not just because I attended college at Chandra headquarters, now known as the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Massachusetts, and was often mistakenly called “Chandra”. One of my lab projects as an undergraduate was to adjust the light-gathering part of Chandra's backup camera. The following year, I wrote my undergraduate thesis under the guidance of Martin Elvis, an expert in X-ray astronomy. My research focused on the particle winds that fly out of galaxies that contain supermassive black holes. I used Chandra data to analyze what structures these galaxies take. It is true that Martin's letter helped me secure admission to at least one PhD program. In other words, without Chandra, my career may never have begun.

I am one of thousands of scientists in the fields of physics and astronomy who can tell similar stories of how Chandra data was the foundation of the early stages of their careers, or how they have dedicated their lives to using Chandra to explore the mysteries of the universe. Laura Lopez Ohio State University has used Chandra for many years to study supernovae. Daniel Castronow a staff scientist at CfA, is doing the same thing. The three of us were postdoctoral fellows at MIT and are from a generation that grew up on the power of the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Now, after 25 years in orbit, Chandra is under threat – not the reality of space debris and aging equipment, but the political climate. US President Joe Biden's appointees to head NASA recently tried to scale back the project, but the scientific community worked with Congress to save the mission. But things will never be the same. A compromise proposal, which has not yet been signed into law, would drastically cut Chandra's funding and limit its scientific scope. Notably, there is no scientific basis for opposing the plan. Recommendations They have an army of expert advisers, but NASA has cut funding it had already promised to scientists, leaving PhD students and postdocs without enough money to cover living expenses.

Chandra deserves better. And so does its global audience. Thanks to Chandra, we have discovered new neutron stars and learned about their interiors. Our knowledge of black holes has blossomed. We have gained a deeper understanding of stellar life cycles and the history of our galaxy. We have been able to study galaxy clusters and learn how dark matter is distributed within them, putting the Milky Way in context. There is still time to save Chandra, a monument to human ingenuity. The fact that it is still going strong after 25 years should be celebrated and it should be honoured by the continuation of the mission.

Chanda's Week

What I'm Reading

My friend is Andrea Kindried. From Slavery to the Stars: A Personal Journey And it's beautiful.

What I'm seeing

I've seen some classic episodes Star Trek: The Next Generation Like “Remember Me”.

What I'm working on

I am developing a new course that prepares students to understand science in a social context..

Chanda Prescod Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy and a faculty member of women's studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her latest book is A Disordered Universe: A Journey into Dark Matter, Space-Time, and Dreams Deferred.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Interested in dark love stories? A study could be just for you

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Pathological dating

People with a craving for pathological romance could, if they so wished, write algorithms to select attractive, pathological prospective spouses or recreational dating partners.

Driven by curiosity, Coltan Scribner, inventor of the Morbid Curiosity Scale (Feedback, November 19, 2022), has explored new uses for the tool. He and two colleagues have study explains that “behavioral attraction predicts mating interest among morbidly curious women” toward men with risky personalities.

They cite previous research that shows those “women are aware of the potential costs associated with such men.” The new study aims to help those women, stating: “Despite the potential costs of men high on the dark triad, it may be beneficial for women with pathological curiosity to develop a preference for such men to fulfill short-term mating goals.

The study doesn’t delve into the obvious business potential here. Feedback envisions a new era dedicated to the making and use of morbid gadgets. Perhaps brighter days lie ahead for this industry, originally called “computer dating.”

(For those interested, Scribner has also created a simple way to measure where you stand on the scale: a free online Morbid curiosity test Before we begin, we’re told that “‘morbid’ doesn’t mean curiosity is bad, it simply refers to the fact that the topic is related to death in some way.”

The limits of curiosity

What are the limits of your curiosity? Is there a foolproof, easy way to find out? Here’s a test.

The feedback includes a copy of a paper published by Subhash Chandra Shaw and his colleagues. Indian Army Medical Journal The title of the study and your response may tell you something about yourself.

This paper is Missing anus: don’t miss it“”.

Talking about politics

Some politicians seek success through extremely eloquent speeches, which give them a momentary sense of persuasion.

Feedback noticed a similarity between the flashy but empty speeches of these politicians and the flashy but empty texts generated by ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence computer programs.

Michael Townsen-Hicks, James Humphreys and Joe Slater of the University of Glasgow in the UK said: ChatGPT is bullshit“”teeth, Ethics and Information Technology They argue that “describing AI misinformation as bullshit is a more useful and accurate way to predict and discuss the behavior of these systems.” As a classic example of bullshit, the team cites a political candidate saying certain things simply because those words “might create a positive impression on potential voters.”

The feedback at least celebrates the skill of politicians who, like ChatGPT, can deliver endless streams of easy-to-swallow but indigestible chatter. In some countries, some of the most successful ChatGPT-esque politicians also display a visual counterpart to their words, a momentarily plausible physical aspect: they adorn their heads with ChatGPT-esque hair, or what might be mistaken for hair for a moment. There is little published research on why and how this happens.

It’s not such a small thing

Feedback continues its quest to create a list of trivial psychic powers, with Aline Berry confessing and professing that she has a trivial psychic power, which may not be trivial at all.

She writes, “I believe I have a superpower that I’ve taken for granted my whole life: when someone complains that they’re looking around for something, I usually find it within five minutes. Somehow, like Sherlock Holmes, I filter out the obvious things they no doubt see and focus on the lost item that’s camouflaged in such a way that it can easily be overlooked if not seen.”

“Recently, a friend of mine asked me for help after frantically searching for her car keys all morning. I stopped, looked around, realized there was no point in looking everywhere, and asked her if she’d looked in the fridge. Her eyes lit up – she’d placed her keys on something cold to remind herself to take them with her, but promptly forgot.”

Another skill emerged during her childhood: “I started a new school a few weeks late and was given a geometry problem. I had never studied geometry before and didn’t know any of the rules. So I looked at a graph and wrote the answer down. I was right. The teacher accused me of cheating and gave me a problem that I had drawn myself, that no one had seen. I wrote the right answer again. As punishment, the teacher gave me ten problems that had to be solved the right way. I didn’t know the correct rules, so I was happy when I got the news that I was going to a different school.”

A whirlwind of interest

An exercise in dimensional scaling. Which is more powerful: a) a storm in a teacup, or b) a storm in a teapot? An experiment is the real way to answer this question. Survey your colleagues (at least 50 people) and submit the three survey results (number of respondents, storm, and tempest) to Swirl of interest, c/o Feedback.

Marc Abrahams is the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founder of the journal Annals of Improbable Research. He previously worked on unusual uses of computers. His website is Impossible.

Do you have a story for feedback?

You can submit articles for Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedback can be found on our website.

Source: www.newscientist.com

Basic memory allows a blob of jelly to play Pong

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Pong is a simple video game

Interphoto/Alamy

Inanimate blobs of ion-laden jelly can play computer games Pong And it will continue to improve over time: The researchers are planning further experiments to see if it can handle more complex calculations, and hope that it could eventually be used to control robots.

Inspired by past research into playing with brain cells in a dish Pong, Vincent Strong So he and his colleagues at the University of Reading in the UK decided to try a tennis-like game with simpler materials. They mixed ions into a water-filled polymer material so that it responded to electrical stimuli. When an electric current was passed through the material, those ions migrated to the current source, dragging water with them and causing the gel to swell.

In their experiments, the researchers used a standard computer to Pong They then used a 3 x 3 electrode grid to send electric currents to different points in the hydrogel to simulate ball movement, while a second electrode grid measured the concentration of ions in the hydrogel, which a computer interpreted as instructions for where to move the paddle.

The researchers found that not only was the hydrogel playable, but that with practice, accuracy improved by up to 10 percent and rallies also lasted longer.

The hydrogel expands faster than it contracts, and expands more slowly even when a constant electric current is applied.These properties allow the gel to record signals of expansion, creating a sort of rudimentary memory, the researchers say.

“Instead of just knowing what happened moment by moment, it's remembering the movement of the ball throughout the entire game,” Strong said, “so it's not just experiencing where the ball is right now, but the entire movement of the ball. It's like a black-box neural network that remembers how the ball behaves, how it moves, what it's doing.”

A polymer gel sandwiched between electrodes that deliver electrical current and measure ion levels

Vincent Strong et al. 2024

Strong said that while the hydrogel is much simpler than neurons in the brain, experiments have shown it can perform similar tasks. He believes the hydrogel could be used to develop new algorithms that would allow regular computers to perform tasks with minimal resources, making problem solving more efficient. But the hydrogel could also become an analog computer itself.

“I wouldn't rule out putting something like a hydrogel inside a robot brain,” Strong says. “That sounds interesting, and I'd like to see it. But the practicality of that is… I don't know yet.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com

First private spacewalk to be featured in SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

A groundbreaking space mission known as Polaris Dawn is set to take off next week with four private citizens on board. The mission is expected to feature the first ever spacewalk conducted entirely by a civilian crew.

The commander of the mission is billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who is also the founder and CEO of Shift4, a payment processing company. Polaris Dawn is the first of three spaceflights funded and organized by Isaacman in collaboration with SpaceX, collectively known as the Polaris Program. This will be the first private SpaceX mission to reach orbit in 2021.

The crew of three includes pilot Scott Kidd-Poteet, a retired Air Force Lt. Col., and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. They will be venturing into space aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule on a Falcon 9 rocket for a planned five-day mission.

One of the highlights of the mission will be a spacewalk on the third day, where two crew members will exit the capsule via cables and spend up to 20 minutes in space. This is a historic moment as until now, spacewalks have been carried out exclusively by astronauts from government space agencies.

During the spacewalk, the Crew Dragon capsule will be fully exposed to the vacuum of space at an altitude of 435 miles above Earth. To prepare for this event, all four astronauts will don SpaceX-designed spacesuits for testing and future long-duration missions.

The mission aims to inspire people to dream big and push the boundaries of human exploration beyond Earth. The crew, including Isaacman, have undergone extensive training over the past two years in preparation for this momentous journey.

In addition to conducting science experiments and testing technology during the mission, the crew will also raise funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, continuing Isaacman’s philanthropic efforts in space.

Details regarding the cost, objectives, and timeline of future Polaris flights have not been disclosed by Isaacman at this time.

Source: www.nbcnews.com

Humpback whales employ unique tools for their tasks

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Humpback whale (Megaptera novaegangliae) Whales build so-called “bubble nets” as tools to hunt, but researchers from the University of Hawaii and the Alaska Whale Foundation have found that these marine animals not only build bubble nets, but also manipulate these unique tools in a variety of ways to maximize food intake in their Alaskan feeding grounds. This novel study sheds light on a behavior critical to whale survival and makes a compelling case for including humpback whales among the rare animals that manufacture and use unique tools.

Although some animal species use tools to forage, only a few manufacture or modify tools. Humpback whales are one of these rare species, as they manufacture bubble net tools while foraging. Using animal tags and unmanned aerial system technology, Sabo others. Investigating the bubble nets made by solitary humpback whales (Megaptera novaegangliae) while feeding on krill in the Pacific Ocean, whale nets in southeast Alaska. They demonstrate that the nets are composed of internal tangential loops, suggesting that the whales actively control the number of loops, the size and depth of the net, and the horizontal spacing of adjacent bubbles. They argue that the whales adjust structural elements of the net to increase the amount of prey they catch in a single lunge by an average of seven-fold. Image credit: Szabo others., doi: 10.1098/rsos.240328.

“Many animals use tools to find food, but few actually make or modify their own tools,” says Lars Bader, a professor at the University of Hawaii.

“We discovered that solitary humpback whales in southeast Alaska build complex bubble webs to capture krill.”

“These whales expertly blow bubbles in patterns that form nets with internal loops, actively controlling details such as the number of loops, the size and depth of the net, and the spacing of the bubbles.”

“This method allows them to catch up to seven times as many prey in one feeding dive without expending any extra energy.”

“This impressive behaviour puts humpback whales in a rare group of animals that make and use their own tools to hunt.”

The marine mammals known as cetaceans include whales, dolphins and porpoises and are notoriously difficult to study.

Advances in research tools are making it easier to track and understand whale behaviour, and in this case, Professor Bader and his colleagues used specialised tags and drones to study the whale's movements from above and below the water.

“We attached non-invasive suction cup tags to whales in southeast Alaska and flew drones over humpback whales as they hunted alone in bubble nets to collect data on their underwater movements,” said Dr William Goff, also from the University of Hawaii.

“The tools are great, but it takes practice to hone them.”

“Whales are a difficult group to study and successful tracking with tags and drones requires skill and precision.”

“This little-studied foraging behavior is unique to humpback whales.”

“It's really amazing to see these animals in their natural habitat, doing things that only a handful of people get to see.”

“And then it's rewarding to be able to go back to the lab and look at the data and find out what they're doing underwater after they're out of sight.”

a paper The study was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

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A. Sabo others2024. Solitary humpback whales manufacture bubble nets as a tool to enhance prey intake. R. Soc. Open Science 11(8):240328;doi: 10.1098/rsos.240328

This article is based on a press release provided by the University of Hawaii.

Source: www.sci.news

Research indicates TRAPPIST-1 system developed through a two-stage formation process

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

TRAPPIST-1 is an ultracool dwarf star located 38.8 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius that hosts seven planets. The period ratios of the neighboring planets are closer as they move away from the star: 8:5, 5:3, 3:2, 3:2, 4:3, 3:2. This compact resonant configuration is a clear indication of disk-driven migration, but the desired outcome of such an evolution would be the establishment of a first-order resonance, rather than the higher-order resonances observed in the inner system. Astronomer Gabriele Pichierri of the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues explain the orbital configuration of the TRAPPIST-1 system with a model that is largely independent of the specific disk migration and orbital circularization efficiency. Two key elements of the team's model are that, along with the migration, the inner boundary of the protoplanetary disk retreated over time, and that the TRAPPIST-1 system initially separated into two subsystems.

This artist's rendering shows TRAPPIST-1 and its planets as seen on the surface. Image courtesy of NASA / R. Hurt / T. Pyle.

“When all we had to analyse was the solar system, we could simply assume that planets formed where we see them today,” Dr Pichieri said.

“But when the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995, we had to rethink this assumption.”

“We're developing better models of how planets form and how they come to be oriented in the way that we found them.”

Most exoplanets are thought to form from a disk of gas and dust around a newly formed star, and then migrate inwards, approaching the inner boundary of this disk.

This results in a planetary system assembled much closer to the host star than is the case in our solar system.

In the absence of other factors, planets tend to move away from each other at characteristic distances based on their mass and the gravitational force between them and their host star.

“This is the standard transition process,” Dr. Pichieri said.

“The positions of the planets form resonances between their respective orbital periods. If you divide the orbital period of one planet by the orbital period of its neighbor, you get a simple integer ratio like 3:2.”

For example, if one planet takes two days to orbit a star, the next planet further away takes three days.

If the second planet and a more distant third planet were also in 3:2 resonance, the third planet's orbital period would be 4.5 days.

“The exoplanets behave nicely in simpler predicted resonances, so to speak,” Dr Pichieri said.

“But the inner ones have slightly more exciting resonances. For example, the orbital ratio of planets b and c is 8:5, and the ratio of c and d is 5:3.”

“This subtle difference in the outcome of TRAPPIST-1 assembly is puzzling and represents a unique opportunity to tease out in detail what other processes were at work in its assembly.”

“Moreover, most planetary systems are thought to have begun in such resonances, but have experienced significant instabilities during their lifetimes before we observe them today.”

“Most planets would become unstable or collide with each other, and everything would be in chaos. For example, our solar system was affected by such instability.”

“But we know there are some systems that are more or less pristine specimens that have remained stable.”

“They effectively represent a record of its entire dynamical history, and we can try to reconstruct it. TRAPPIST-1 is one of them.”

The challenge then was to develop a model that could explain the orbits of the TRAPPIST-1 planets and how they got to their current configuration.

The resulting model suggests that the inner four planets evolved alone within the originally predicted 3:2 resonant chain.

As the disk's inner boundary expanded outward, the orbits loosened from the tighter 3:2 linkage into the configuration observed today.

The fourth planet was originally located on the inner boundary of the disk and moved outward with the disk, but was pushed back inward at a later stage when three more outer planets joined the planetary system.

“By observing TRAPPIST-1, we were able to test an exciting new hypothesis about the evolution of planetary systems,” said Dr Pichieri.

“TRAPPIST-1 is very interesting because it's a very complex, long chain of planets, and it's a great example for testing alternative theories about the formation of planetary systems.”

of Survey results Published in a journal Natural Astronomy.

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G. Pichieri othersDuring the recession of the inner edge of the disc, the TRAPPIST-1 system forms in two steps. Nat AstronPublished online August 20, 2024, doi: 10.1038/s41550-024-02342-4

Source: www.sci.news

Research shows that Clovis people utilized planted pikes for hunting large herbivores

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Historical and ethnographic sources document that portable pole-hafted weapons, or spears, were used for hunting and defense against large game in North and South America, Africa, Eurasia, and Southeast Asia for several millennia during the Late Holocene. Given the dominance of large game in North America during the Late Pleistocene, centuries when Clovis points emerged and spread across much of the continent between 13,050 and 12,650 years ago, pole-hafted weapons may have been used for hunting large herbivores or for defense against large carnivores.

A Clovis point with distinctive grooved flake scars. Image courtesy of S. Byram.

“This ancient Native American design was a remarkable innovation in hunting strategy,” said Dr Scott Byrum, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

“This unique indigenous technology provides a window into hunting and survival techniques that have been used for thousands of years in many parts of the world.”

The team's discovery may help solve a mystery that has plagued archaeological communities for decades: how North American communities actually used Clovis stone tools, the most commonly unearthed remains from the Ice Age.

Clovis Points are named after the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where they were first discovered about a century ago. Clovis Points are formed from rocks such as chert, flint, and jasper.

They range in size from the size of a person's thumb to the size of a medium-sized iPhone, and have a clearly defined, sharp edge and grooved indentations on either side of their base.

Thousands of fossils have been discovered across the United States, some of which have been unearthed within preserved mammoth skeletons.

“Clovis points are often the only part recovered from a spear,” said Dr. June Sunseri of the University of California, Berkeley.

“The elaborately engineered bone hafts at the ends of the weapons are sometimes found, but the wood at the bases of the spears, and the rosin and string that made them work as a complete system, have been lost over time.”

“Furthermore, research silos limit such systems thinking about prehistoric weaponry, and if stone experts are not bone experts they may not get the full picture.”

“We need to think beyond simple artifacts. The key here is looking at this as an engineered system that requires multiple types of expertise in our field and in other fields.”

Building tools into powerful and effective systems would have been a priority for communities 13,000 years ago.

Tools had to be durable; there were only a limited number of suitable rocks that people could use to cross the land.

They might travel hundreds of miles without obtaining a long, straight stick suitable for making a spear.

“So obviously you don't want to risk throwing or breaking your gear when you're not sure if you're going to catch the animal,” Dr Byrum said.

“People who analyse metal military artefacts know about it because it was used to halt horses in war.”

“But before that, it wasn't really known for other situations, like wild boar hunting or bear hunting.”

“It's a common theme in literature, but for some reason it hasn't been talked about much in anthropology.”

To evaluate their spear hypothesis, the researchers built a test platform to measure the force that the spear system could withstand before the tip broke off or the shaft stretched.

A low-tech, static version of an animal attack using reinforced replica Clovis point spears allowed us to test how different spears reach their breaking point and how their extension systems respond.

This builds on previous experiments in which researchers fired stone-tipped spears into clay and ballistic gel, which may have been as painful as a needle prick to a nine-tonne mammoth.

“The energy that a human arm can generate is completely different from the energy that a charging animal can generate. It's an order of magnitude different,” Dr Jun said.

“These spears were designed to protect the wielder.”

“The sophisticated Clovis technology, developed uniquely in North America, is a testament to the ingenuity and skill used by indigenous peoples to coexist with ancient lands and now-extinct megafauna,” said Kent Lightfoot, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Team result Published in a journal PLoS One.

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RS Byram others2024. Clovis projectile points and foresharps subjected to reinforced weapon compression: modelling the encounter between Stone Age spears and Pleistocene megafauna. PLoS One 19 (8): e0307996; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0307996

This article is a version of a press release provided by the University of California, Berkeley.

Source: www.sci.news

The 1.5°C target may be out of reach, but climate action is still crucial

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

AP Photo/François Mori, File/Alamy

As a COP₂₆ During climate change negotiations in Glasgow, UK, in November 2021, a new slogan entered the vocabulary: “Stay at 1.5°C.” The phrase, on everyone’s lips from politicians to climate scientists, was aimed at maintaining the goals set as part of the Paris Agreement at the COP six years ago._{twenty one}In hindsight, this ambition was probably already fizzling out, destined to remain merely an empty slogan.

New Scientist The argument began in 2022, when expert opinion did not reflect their personal views or the data we were seeing. Scientists felt trapped and unable to speak out because limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is still possible according to the laws of physics, but not realistic given the political, social and economic upheaval.

Since then, there has been a growing recognition that 1.5°C is unattainable, but there was no frank discussion of what that meant. Now, for the first time, researchers have explicitly rejected that, saying that 1.6°C is the best we can hope for, and that higher temperatures are more likely (see “Best-case scenario for climate change now is 1.6°C warming”).

Will policymakers finally realize that platitudes and slogans are not enough to combat climate change? Promises to “maintain” these targets are meaningless if we do not achieve the only means of preventing rising temperatures — reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other global-warming greenhouse gases to net zero.

Unfortunately, the phrase “net zero” is losing its original meaning as a description of atmospheric physics, and instead being used by many to mean “environmental policy I don’t like.” This is dangerous, because extreme temperature changes have locked us in a vicious cycle of emissions that only a net-zero energy system can break (see “Efforts to combat extreme temperatures are making the situation worse”). If we are to have any hope of limiting warming, we need to learn from the failure of “stay 1.5°C” and not let “net zero” become meaningless.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

COVID-19 vaccines may be less effective due to intestinal parasites

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Duodenal hookworms (Ancylostoma duodenale) cause one of the most common intestinal parasitic infections worldwide.

Katerina Conn/Shutterstock

People with intestinal parasitic infections, quarter This has been suggested by experiments in mice infected with the parasite, which had significantly weaker immunity after receiving a COVID-19 vaccination compared to mice not infected with the parasite.

Previous studies have shown that people with intestinal parasitic infections have a weakened immune response to vaccines for diseases such as tuberculosis and measles because the parasites suppress the processes that vaccines trigger to confer immunity, such as activating pathogen-killing cells. Intestinal parasitic infections are most common in tropical and subtropical regions, where they often occur because of limited access to clean water and sanitation.

Scientists have not tested whether these pathogens reduce the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. Michael Diamond Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, vaccinated 16 mice with a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, half of which had been infected 12 days earlier with an intestinal parasite that lives only in rodents. They gave each mouse a booster shot three weeks after the first vaccination.

About two weeks after the booster shot, the researchers analyzed the animals' spleens to measure concentrations of CD8+ T cells, specialized white blood cells that are important for eliminating other cells infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They found that the spleens of mice infected with the intestinal parasite had about half the number of cells as mice without the parasite, suggesting a weakened immune response to the vaccine.

The researchers repeated the vaccination process in another group of 20 mice, half of which were infected with the intestinal parasite, exposing them to the highly infectious Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. After five days, the lungs of vaccinated rodents infected with the intestinal parasite had, on average, about 20% more virus than uninfected ones.

These findings suggest that intestinal parasites may reduce the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in people, but different types of intestinal parasites are known to affect immunity differently, the researchers say. Keke Fairfax The University of Utah researchers said it's unclear whether the parasite's infection in humans would have the same effect on vaccinating against COVID-19 as it did in mice, and the situation is further complicated by the fact that humans tend to harbor multiple types of intestinal parasites at the same time, they said.

Still, understanding how to alter the immune response to vaccination is important given the prevalence of parasitic infections, and these findings suggest that researchers may need to further evaluate the vaccine's effectiveness in parts of the world where a high proportion of the population is infected with intestinal parasites, Fairfax says.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

AI models do not learn in the same way humans do

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

AI programs quickly lose the ability to learn new things

Jiefeng Jiang/iStockphoto/Getty Images

The algorithms that underpin artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT are unable to learn as they are used, forcing tech companies to spend billions of dollars training new models from scratch. This has been a concern in the industry for some time, but new research suggests there's an inherent problem with how the models are designed – but there may be a solution.

Most AI today is so-called neural networks, inspired by how the brain works, with processing units called artificial neurons. Typically, AI goes through distinct stages during its development: First, the AI is trained, and its artificial neurons are fine-tuned by an algorithm to better reflect a particular dataset. Then, the AI can be used to respond to new data, such as text inputs like those entered into ChatGPT. However, once a model's neurons are set in the training phase, they can no longer be updated or learn from new data.

This means that most large AI models need to be retrained when new data becomes available, which can be very costly, especially when the new dataset represents a large portion of the entire internet.

Researchers have wondered whether these models might be able to incorporate new knowledge after initial training, reducing costs, but it was unclear whether this was possible.

now, Shivhansh Dohare Researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada tested whether the most common AI models could be adapted to continually learn. The team found that when exposed to new data, a huge number of artificial neurons became stuck at a value of zero, causing the AI models to quickly lose the ability to learn new things.

“If you think of it like a brain, it's like 90 percent of the neurons are dead,” D'Hare says. “You don't have enough neurons to learn with.”

Dhare and his team started by training their AI system from the ImageNet database, which consists of 14 million labeled images of simple objects like houses and cats. But instead of training the AI once and then testing it multiple times to distinguish between the two images, as is the standard approach, they retrained the model for each image pair.

The researchers tested different learning algorithms in this way and found that after thousands of retraining cycles, the networks were unable to learn and their performance deteriorated, with many neurons becoming “dead” – that is, having a value of zero.

The team also trained the AI to simulate the way ants learn to walk through reinforcement learning, a common technique that teaches an AI what success looks like and helps it figure out the rules through trial and error. They tried to adapt this technique to allow for continuous learning by retraining the algorithm after walking on different surfaces, but they found this also led to a significant decrease in learning ability.

The problem is inherent to the way these systems learn, D'Hare says, but there is a workaround: The researchers developed an algorithm that randomly turns on some neurons after each training round, which seems to mitigate the performance degradation. [neuron] “When it dies, you just bring it back to life,” D'Hare says, “and now it can learn again.”

The algorithm seems promising, but needs to be tested on larger systems before it can be trusted to be useful, he says. Mark van der Wilk At Oxford University.

“Solving continuous learning is literally a billion-dollar problem,” he says. “If you have a true comprehensive solution that allows you to continuously update your models, you can dramatically reduce the cost of training these models.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Children and teenagers experience varying symptoms from Long Corona

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

The impact of the long corona pandemic appears to vary by age

Damir Cudic/Getty Images

Symptoms of long COVID appear to be very different in young children and adolescents, and a better understanding of how the symptoms manifest could aid in diagnosis.

So far, most research on long-COVID has focused on adults, in part because of a “misconception that children can't get long-COVID,” he said. Rachel Gross At New York University.

Gross and his colleagues are currently following 751 children ages 6 to 11 and 3,109 children ages 12 to 17 whose parents say they had previously been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The researchers defined long COVID as having at least one symptom that lasted more than a month, started or worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, and was present at the time of the study.

Among young children, these symptoms primarily included sleep problems, difficulty concentrating, and abdominal problems such as pain, nausea, vomiting, and constipation.

The symptoms were uncommon among about 150 children of the same age who had not previously been infected, and were confirmed by the absence of antibodies against the virus in their blood samples.

In contrast, symptoms in the 1,300 uninfected young people typically included pain, fatigue and loss of smell or taste.

It's unclear why symptoms differ across different age groups, but Gross said it could be due to differences in hormones or immune systems, or that teenagers may simply be better able to vocalize their symptoms than younger kids. Danilo Buoncenzo A study from the Gemelli University Hospital in Rome, Italy. For example, a teenager may complain of fatigue, but a caregiver may only notice lingering symptoms in a younger child when they vomit.

Armed with this data, the researchers developed a score that ranks how likely a young person's symptoms are to have long-Covid. Currently, diagnosis depends on doctors ruling out other illnesses and recognizing that long-Covid can take many different forms. “Doctors would prefer a score or more objective criteria. Such a tool would definitely help clinicians at least recognize that a child may have long-Covid,” Buoncenso said.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Latest Research Findings in BBC Science Focus Magazine

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

13,000 years ago, humans had to come up with creative ways to survive in icy environments. Recent studies suggest that their solutions were more inventive and brutal than previously thought: Ice Age hunters likely used weapons to impale prey such as mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers.

This discovery could potentially resolve a long-standing debate regarding the purpose of ancient tools known as Clovis points. These sharp rocks, made of materials like chert and flint, have been found throughout the United States in various sizes. While it was initially believed that Clovis points were used as spear tips by skilled hunters for hunting large animals like mammoths and bison, a new study suggests a different perspective.

Published in the journal PLoS One, the study conducted by archaeologists from the University of California, Berkeley proposes that these weapons were used to ensnare and wound charging animals, and possibly even defend against sabre-toothed cats.

So how did this hunting method work? Hunters likely positioned the sharpened spear in the ground at an angle, allowing the animal’s momentum to drive the spear deep into its body upon impact. This innovative technique provided a strategic advantage in hunting large animals, making it more effective than traditional spear-throwing.

“This ancient Native American design represents a significant advancement in hunting strategies,” stated Scott Byrum, a contributing researcher. John Myers, the lead author of the study, emphasized the importance of understanding ancient survival techniques that have been utilized worldwide for millennia.

To validate their findings, the researchers conducted experimental simulations of the hunting technique in addition to analyzing historical records and literature. This process led to a better understanding of how Clovis points were used to hunt mammoths during the Ice Age.

A replica of an ancient Clovis point shows distinctive flutes near its base. These may have been the weapons used to kill the mammoth. – Photo by Scott Byrum

Recreating this ancient hunting technique through experimental models enabled researchers to gain insight into the effectiveness and practicality of pike hunting. Byrum and his team aim to further test their theory by creating a simulated mammoth to assess the durability and impact of the Clovis point.

This method of impaling prey, known as pike hunting, has historical precedence in warfare and hunting practices. During the Ice Age, this technology was crucial for survival as it allowed hunters to reuse their weapons and avoid the challenge of finding suitable materials for crafting new spears in harsh winter conditions.

By discovering how Clovis points were utilized in hunting, researchers have shed light on the coexistence of early humans with large extinct animals. This new perspective highlights the innovative strategies employed by ancient hunters and deepens our understanding of human history.

Read more:

Source: www.sciencefocus.com

New Images of UGC 4879 Captured by Hubble Space Telescope

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Hubble astronomers have released a stunning new image of the dwarf irregular galaxy UGC 4879, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows irregular dwarf galaxy UGC 4879, about 3.6 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Space Telescope / K. Chiboucas, NOIRLab and Gemini North / M. Monelli, Canarian Astrophysics Institute / Gladys Kober, NASA and Catholic University.

UGC 4879 is an irregular dwarf galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major.

Also known as VV124 and LEDA 26142, this galaxy is quite isolated.

It lies 3.6 million light years from our Milky Way galaxy and 3.9 million light years from the Andromeda galaxy.

Dwarf galaxy Leo A, located about 1.6 million light-years away, is UGC 4879's closest neighbor.

This isolation makes UGC 4879 an ideal laboratory to study primordial star formation, without the complications of interactions with other galaxies.

There are only two other galaxies in the Local Group that have a similar, though slightly lower, isolation to UGC 4879: DDO 210 and SgrDIG, which are located in the opposite direction from UGC 4879.

“UGC 4879 is an isolated dwarf galaxy that lies just outside our Local Group of galaxies,” Hubble astronomers said in a statement.

“Because of its isolation, we are studying UGC 4879 to determine whether it is an old, relatively undisturbed galaxy.”

“Theories suggest that the least massive dwarf galaxies may have formed first.”

“If UGC 4879 is a relic from the early universe, it may offer clues about the hierarchy and evolution of galaxies, galaxy clusters, and even the universe itself.”

This image of UGC 4879 combines data from two Hubble observing programs focused on learning more about how dwarf galaxies form and evolve.

Source: www.sci.news

Scientists are puzzled by mysterious object speeding through galaxy at over a million miles per hour

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

An object moving through space at close to 1 million miles per hour has been detected, moving so fast that it is leaving the Milky Way galaxy. Scientists are now trying to identify this mysterious object.

Currently located 400 light-years away, the object known as CWISE J1249 is unlikely to be a spacecraft due to its massive size. It is approximately 30,000 times the mass of Earth, making it about 8% of the mass of the Sun.

This unusual size places J1249 somewhere between a star and a planet, as described by Dr. Darren Baskill, a lecturer in astronomy at the University of Sussex. According to Dr. Baskill, stars moving at such high speeds are rare.

The object’s speed is so rapid that it could exit the Milky Way galaxy in just a few tens of millions of years, which is a short period considering stars’ long lifespans.

This massive object, flying at 0.001% of the speed of light, has the potential to escape the galaxy and venture into intergalactic space.

Discovered by citizen scientists contributing to NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project, J1249’s speed is approximately 2.6 times faster than any space probe ever launched.

A new study, pending peer review, confirms these findings and further characterizes the object discovered through the initiative.

The object, with an unusual composition compared to stars and brown dwarfs, may be the first star of its kind in the galaxy, based on NASA’s observations.

Researchers believe the high-speed movement of the object may be linked to a supernova explosion in a binary star system or encounters with black holes in a star cluster.

Dr. Baskill suggests that gravitational slingshots could explain the extreme speed of J1249, potentially originating from the galaxy’s dense center and accelerated through gravitational interactions.

About our experts:

Dr. Darren Baskill is an Outreach Officer and Lecturer at the University of Sussex School of Physics and Astronomy, with a background in organizing astronomy-related events and competitions.

For more information, visit the University of Sussex website.

Source: www.sciencefocus.com

New study finds that climate change influenced the demographics of prehistoric hunter-gatherers

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Using the large number of human fossils found in Ice Age Europe, paleoanthropologists have identified a population turnover in Western Europe 28,000 years ago, isolation between western and eastern refugia between 28,000 and 14,700 years ago, and a bottleneck during the most recent Ice Age.

Artistic reconstruction of an Ice Age hunter-gatherer group. Image courtesy of Tom Björklund.

“Around 45,000 years ago, the first modern humans migrated into Europe during the Ice Age, marking the beginning of the so-called Late Paleolithic period,” said Dr Hannes Lassmann, a researcher at the University of Tübingen.

“These early populations continuously inhabited the European continent, even during the so-called Last Glacial Maximum about 25,000 years ago, a time when glaciers covered much of northern and central Europe.”

“Archaeologists have long debated how climate change and the resulting new environmental conditions affected the demographics of hunter-gatherers at the time.”

“The limited number of available fossils and the often poor molecular preservation for ancient DNA analysis have made it very difficult to draw conclusions about the influence of climatic factors on migrations, population growth, decline and extinction.”

Because teeth make up a large part of the fossil record and preserve genetic traits in their morphology, Dr. Rathman and his colleagues compiled a large dataset of 450 dentitions dating from 47,000 to 7,000 years ago.

They focused on morphological features of the teeth – small variations within the dentition, such as the number and shape of cusps on the crowns, the pattern of ridges and grooves on the chewing surfaces, and the presence or absence of wisdom teeth.

“Because these traits are heritable, they can be used to trace the genetic relationships of Ice Age humans without the need for well-preserved ancient DNA,” Dr Lassman said.

“These features are visible to the naked eye, so we also looked at hundreds of publicly available photographs of the fossils.”

The results show that between about 47,000 and 28,000 years ago, during the Middle Glacial Period, populations from Western and Eastern Europe were well connected genetically.

During the subsequent Late Glacial Period, between 28,000 and 14,700 years ago, the researchers found no genetic link between Western and Eastern Europe.

Furthermore, the analysis shows that both regions have experienced significant declines in population size and loss of genetic diversity.

“This dramatic population shift was likely caused by major climate change,” Dr Rathman said.

“Temperatures during this period fell to their lowest values for the entire Upper Paleolithic, culminating in the Last Glacial Maximum, when ice sheets reached their maximum extent and covered large parts of northern and central Europe.”

“The worsening climate changed the vegetation from steppe to primarily tundra, affecting the habitat of prey animals and, consequently, the hunter-gatherers who depended on them.”

“Our findings support the long-held theory that humans were not only pushed southward by the advancing ice sheet but also isolated into isolated refugia with more favourable environmental conditions,” said Dr Judith Beier, also from the University of Tübingen.

Another notable finding of the study is the discovery that Western European populations became extinct during the transition from the Middle to Late Neoglacial and were replaced by new populations migrating from Eastern Europe.

After the Late Glacial Period, temperatures rose steadily again, the glaciers retreated, grassland and forest vegetation returned, and previously abandoned areas could be recolonized for the first time.

The team observed that during this period, the populations of Western and Eastern Europe, which had previously been isolated and significantly declining, began to grow again and migration between the regions resumed.

“Our new method makes it possible for the first time to reconstruct complex prehistoric demographic events using morphological data,” said researcher Dr Maria Teresa Vizzarri from the University of Ferrara.

“To our knowledge, this has never been accomplished before.”

“Our study provides important insights into the demographic history of Ice Age Europeans and highlights the profound impact that climatic and environmental change had on prehistoric human life,” Dr Lassmann said.

“If we want to tackle the complex environmental challenges of the future, we need to urgently learn from the past.”

of Survey results Published in the journal Scientific advances.

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Hannes Lassmann others2024. Human demography in Late Paleolithic Europe inferred from fossil dental phenotypes. Scientific advances 10(33);doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adn8129

This article has been edited based on the original release from the University of Tübingen.

Source: www.sci.news

Study finds air pollution may intensify summer thunderstorms

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Researchers from James Madison University conducted a comprehensive study of thunderstorm environments in two distinct geographic regions: Washington, DC, and the Kansas City metropolitan area.

Air pollution is increasing the intensity of summer thunderstorms. Image courtesy of ELG21.

Land cover and atmospheric boundary layer characteristics modify thunderstorms and their characteristic phenomenon: lightning.

The most intense thunderstorm contrasts on Earth occur along continental and oceanic boundaries.

Generally, lightning strikes land at an order of magnitude more than it strikes sea.

The thermodynamic properties of the atmosphere vary significantly with different land covers over the Earth’s surface.

“Pollutants act as cloud nuclei,” said Mace Bentley, a professor at James Madison University and lead author of the study.

“Updrafts carry them into the clouds, and the updrafts and downdrafts separate the polluting particles, dispersing the electrical charges in the clouds and encouraging lightning to form.”

For the study, the authors surveyed nearly 200,000 thunderstorm events in the Washington, DC, area and more than 300,000 in the Kansas City area.

Using 12 years of lightning data from the National Lightning Detection Network and data from hundreds of air pollution monitoring stations in two cities, they found that in highly volatile environments, increased pollution increases the frequency of anti-ground lightning strikes.

“Our analysis identified a total of 196,836 thunderstorm events in the Washington DC area, while 310,209 thunderstorms were identified from the Kansas City lightning database,” the researchers said.

“In Washington, DC and Kansas City, more than 37.7% and 39.2% of all thunderstorm events, respectively, consisted of 10 or more flashes.”

“Evidence suggests that thunderstorm environments during mild warm-season synoptic weather are substantially different in terms of thermodynamics, aerosol properties, and aerosol concentrations in the Washington, DC, and Kansas City regions,” the researchers added.

“However, thunderstorm intensity, as measured by flash counts, appears to be controlled by similar thermodynamic and aerosol relationships despite differences in the surrounding environments.”

“When we look at the environments in which thunderstorms occur, we find a statistically significant positive correlation between convective available potential energy and the number of lightning events.”

“Aerosol concentration also appears to be a more important quantity than particle size when it comes to lightning enhancement.”

Scientists are now conducting a similar study in Bangkok, Thailand, a megacity that is more polluted than Washington, DC, or Kansas City and sits in a hot, tropical climate.

The results so far are similar, but these storms are showing a higher incidence of lightning.

“It appears that urban pollution can enhance thunderstorms and lightning wherever you go in the world,” Prof Bentley said.

of study Published in a journal Atmospheric Research.

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Mace Bentley others2024. Towards elucidating the relationship between thunderstorms and aerosols: An observational study centered on Washington, DC and Kansas City, Missouri. Atmospheric Research 304: 107402; doi: 10.1016/j.atmosres.2024.107402

Source: www.sci.news

Astronomers Spot Tiny Mark on Polaris’s Surface

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Astronomers Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) Array observed Polaris, the nearest and brightest classical Cepheid star, which is part of a triple star system.

This false-color image of Polaris taken by the CHARA array in April 2021 reveals large bright and dark spots on the star's surface. Image credit: Evans others., doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ad5e7a.

PolarisCepheid variable, also known as Polaris, Polaris, Alpha Ursa Minoris, HR 424 or HD 8890, is a type of star known as Cepheid variables.

Astronomers use these stars as “standard luminaries” because their true brightness is determined by their pulsation period: brighter stars pulsate more slowly than fainter stars.

How bright a star appears in the sky depends on the star's actual brightness and its distance.

Because astronomers know a Cepheid star's true brightness based on its pulsation period, they can use it to measure the star's distance to its host galaxy and infer the universe's expansion rate.

Dr. Nancy Evans of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and her colleagues observed Polaris using the six-telescope CHARA Optical Interferometer Array on Mount Wilson in California.

Their goal was to map the orbit of a nearby, faint companion star that orbits the North Star every 30 years.

“Binary systems are extremely difficult to resolve at their closest approach due to the small distance between the two stars and the large difference in brightness,” Dr Evans said.

The researchers were able to track the orbit of Polaris's nearby companion star and measure its change in size as Polaris pulsates.

From its orbital motion, we know that Polaris has five times the mass of the Sun.

Images of Polaris reveal that its diameter is 46 times that of the Sun.

CHARA's observations also revealed for the first time what the surfaces of Cepheid variables look like.

“CHARA images revealed large bright and dark spots on Polaris' surface that change over time,” said Dr. Gail Schaefer, director of the CHARA array.

“The presence of sunspots and the rotation of the star could be related to the 120-day variation in the measured speed.”

“We plan to continue photographing the North Star,” said University of Michigan professor John Monnier.

“We hope to better understand the mechanisms that produce the spots on Polaris' surface.”

Team paper Published in Astrophysical Journal.

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Nancy Remage Evans others2024. Orbit and dynamic mass of Polaris: Observations with the CHARA array. ApJ 971, 190;doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ad5e7a

Source: www.sci.news

Evidence of Indigenous Canines in Jamestown Colony during the 17th Century Unearthed through Ancient DNA Analysis

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Multiple studies have demonstrated that European colonization of the Americas caused the extinction of most mitochondrial lineages of North American dogs between 1492 and present, and that they were replaced by European lineages. Historical records indicate that colonists imported dogs from Europe to North America, and that they became objects of interest and exchange as early as the 17th century. However, it is unclear whether the oldest archaeological dogs found from the colonial period were of European, Native American, or mixed ancestry. To determine the ancestry of dogs from the Jamestown Colony in Virginia, scientists sequenced ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from six archaeological dogs dating from 1609 to 1617.

Lithograph “Indian Dog with Rabbit” by John Woodhouse Audubon.

Europeans and Native Americans treasured dogs as pets, used them for similar tasks, and as symbols of identity.

As a result, the dogs reflected the tensions between European and Native American cultures: settlers described Native American dogs as mongrels to emphasize their perception that Native Americans would not breed or own dogs.

Indigenous peoples perceived European dogs as a direct threat to their existence and took steps to restrict their use.

“Previous research had suggested that there were many indigenous dog species in the continental United States, but that they had gone extinct,” said Ariane Thomas, an anthropologist at the University of Iowa.

“We wanted to understand what it meant: when did it happen, were the dogs culled, were they in competition with European dogs or were they sick?”

Dr. Thomas and his colleagues focused on the Jamestown Colony in Virginia because of the number of dog remains found at the site and evidence of Native American influence.

They were able to identify and analyze 181 bones representing at least 16 different dogs.

Of these, the researchers selected 22 sites that span multiple points in Jamestown's early settlement, from 1607 to 1619.

To better understand the ancestry of these dogs, they extracted and sequenced ancient mtDNA.

Based on body size estimates alone, the researchers found that most of the Jamestown dogs weighed between 10 and 18 kg (22 and 39 pounds), comparable to modern beagles and schnauzers.

Additionally, many of the dog bones bore signs of human damage, including burn marks and cuts.

“Cut marks and other signs of butchery found on the dogs indicate that some of these dogs were eaten,” Dr Thomas said.

“This suggests that when settlers arrived, they did not have enough food and had to rely on the native dogs of the area.”

“Furthermore, DNA sequencing demonstrated that at least six of the dogs showed evidence of Native American ancestry.”

“Our findings indicate that there were indigenous dogs in the region and that they did not quickly become extinct when Europeans arrived.”

“While it is not surprising that dogs could be identified with Native American ancestry, our results suggest that settlers and Native American tribes may have been exchanging dogs and had little concern about potential interbreeding.”

of Survey results Published in the journal American Antiquity.

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Ariane E. Thomas othersTsenacomoco Dogs: Ancient DNA reveals presence of local dogs in Jamestown Colony in the early 17th century. American AntiquityPublished online May 22, 2024, doi: 10.1017/aaq.2024.25

Source: www.sci.news

New Fish Species Found in Mauritanian Waters by Marine Biologists

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

A new species of three-bearded rockfish has been described from a specimen taken from a depth of 595 metres in the Tanoudre Valley, off the coast of Mauritania.

Guidelopsarus mauritanicus Hiding under a branching whitish bryozoan Serena reference. Lucida Image courtesy of Tomas Lundelf, University of Gothenburg.

order Cod These include some of the most important species for commercial fisheries today.

There are also small species in this genus, such as the Three-bearded Bulbul. Guide Lopezal Although it has little commercial value, its range is surprisingly wide.

“More than a quarter of all commercially caught marine fish in the world belong to the cod family. Cod family” These include fish species such as Atlantic cod, Alaskan pollock and haddock, which are particularly economically important,” said Dr. Alexander Norn, researcher at Senckenberg am Meer and the University of Bremen.

“However, the Gadidae family also includes much smaller, little known and less studied fish families, such as the Sardinae (Guidelopsalidae), of little commercial value but astonishingly wide in scope.”

The newly described species lives in deep-sea coral reefs off the coast of Mauritania.

“This is the site of the world's largest deep-sea coral reef system, the Mauritanian Wall. The reef stretches for at least 580 kilometres and is 80-100 metres high,” the biologists said.

Scientific Name Guidelopsarus mauritanicus The new species is just 7.3 centimetres long.

this is, Guide Lopezal The species was collected from Tasmania, the most remote geographic location of the samples the team studied.

“Guidelopsarus mauritanicus “It can be distinguished from other fish of the same species based on a combination of different characteristics, including large eyes, a head that takes up a quarter of its body length, long, slender pelvic fins and pink body colour,” Dr Norn said.

“Genetic analysis confirmed that this is a previously undescribed species.”

“Guidelopsarus mauritanicus They were caught with the help of grubs, along with a variety of live deep-sea animals, including framework-forming stony corals and other corals. Desmophyllum pertussum or red deep sea gorgonian Swiftia PhaetonIt also contains colonies of large sponges, bryozoans, starfish, annelids, decapod crustaceans, snails and bivalve mollusks.”

“Also, in the video footage, Guidelopsarus mauritanicus They live exclusively in deep sea coral ecosystems. One of the specimens we saw had whitish spots on its skin. This was the only fish we could see hiding under a branching, whitish bryozoan. Serena reference. Lucida.”

a paper The article describing this discovery Journal of Fish Biology.

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Alexander H. Norn others. Guidelopsarus mauritanicus (Gadiformes, Gaidropsaridae) A new species of three-baleen redfish from a deep-sea coral ecosystem. The biogeographical distribution of the genus is genetically verified, and notes on its ecology and behavior are provided. Journal of Fish Biology Published online August 16, 2024; doi: 10.1111/jfb.15859

Source: www.sci.news

The Boeing spacecraft: What went wrong?

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

The astronauts launched aboard the Starliner on June 5. The following day, they faced difficulties.

As Starliner neared the International Space Station, five of its 28 Reaction Control System thrusters failed, causing a nearly one-hour delay in the docking process.

Located on the spacecraft’s service module, these thrusters are crucial for maneuvering the capsule in orbit, especially during docking and undocking with the space station.

Although all four thrusters were eventually fixed, prompting NASA to launch an investigation into the cause of the failure.

Engineers from NASA and Boeing have been testing the thruster performance using a test engine at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, under conditions similar to those experienced by the capsule during its journey to the space station.

Mission managers also performed a “hot fire test” by firing Starliner’s thrusters briefly while docked to the space station.

Initial results revealed that most of the thrusters operated normally, but a small Teflon seal expanding at high temperatures potentially blocked propellant flow to the thruster, leading to the docking issues.

Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, mentioned the need for further testing to ensure ground tests accurately simulate on-orbit conditions. They also want to understand how the thruster issues impact Starliner’s ability to undock safely from the space station.

Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore at Space Launch Complex 41 in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on June 5.
Chris O’Meara/AP Files

Additionally, the team is monitoring the spacecraft’s propulsion system for slow helium leaks.

Despite knowing about a helium leak before Starliner’s launch, officials discovered two more leaks in the capsule’s service module shortly after liftoff.

NASA confirmed that the propulsion system was stable and that the rate of helium leaks was not critical for the spacecraft’s return to Earth.

Further testing and analysis were conducted by additional propulsion experts hired by the company earlier this month.

The decision to return Wilmore and Williams aboard Starliner or use SpaceX for their return will determine their orbital stay extension into the new year, potentially until February for Wilmore, who could return with two other crew members aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.

NASA is expected to announce its decision on the astronauts’ return in the coming days.

Source: www.nbcnews.com

BBC Science Focus Magazine Unveils New Book: Endless Power

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Dark Empath

A surprising study finds that people with dark personality traits can also be highly empathetic – but does this make them more dangerous? that's right What goes on in the mind of a dark empath?

Lionsman Mushroom

Lion's Man is making waves right now. This hairy mushroom's health-boosting and disease-preventing properties are being lauded across the internet and it's widely available as a supplement, taking the health food world by storm. But is all the hype real? Food and nutritionist Dr Emma Beckett delves into the science behind Lion's Man's claims for immunity, inflammation, gastrointestinal health, mental health, cognition, heart health, diabetes and cancer – and of course the side effects.

Deep Sea Creatures

Discover some weird and wonderful creatures that live in the darkest depths of the ocean and the extraordinary vision they've evolved. To find prey or avoid predators, these incredible eyes can detect bioluminescence, or the last vestiges of the sun's light dripping into the pitch black ocean.

Black hole collision

Just as runners “hit the wall” at the end of a race, supermassive black holes come to a near-complete halt as they hurtle towards each other. Is it dark matter that gets them over this final hurdle and allows them to collide?

plus

Questions and Answers: Expand your science knowledge bit by bit. This time we will be covering topics like: What is the most secret weapon we know? How to overcome the fear of rejection? What is the strongest substance in the universe? Do we all have lizard brains? Can we really absorb microplastics through our skin? And many more!
Polluted Rivers: This year's men's triathlon was postponed due to concerns about the quality of the Seine's water. Meanwhile, in Britain, seas and rivers are being used as dumping grounds for untreated sewage. terrible it is?
Scientific Hacks for Better Sleep: Did you know the secret to better sleep is to fall asleep faster? Here are 8 science-backed tips to help you fall asleep quickly and restfully every night.

Issue 409 will be released on Tuesday, August 20, 2024

Don't forget BBC Science Focus It is also available on major digital platforms. Android, Kindle Fire and Kindle e-Reader,and iOS App For iPad and iPhone.

Source: www.sciencefocus.com

Study finds that Chicxulub asteroid, which caused dinosaur extinction, originated from beyond Jupiter.

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

The asteroid, called the Chicxulub impactor, was a carbonaceous asteroid that formed outside the orbit of Jupiter. New Paper Published in the journal Science.

Ankylosaurus magniventrisA Tyrannosaurus, a type of large armored dinosaur, witnessed the impact of an asteroid that fell on the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago. Image by Fabio Manucci.

About 66 million years ago, a 10-kilometer-wide asteroid struck Earth near what is now a small town called Chicxulub in Mexico.

This impact released incredible amounts of climate-changing gases into the atmosphere, setting off a chain of events that led to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs and 75% of life on Earth.

Evidence includes the presence of high concentrations of platinum group elements (PGE) in the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary layer, including iridium, ruthenium, osmium, rhodium, platinum, and palladium, which are rare on Earth but common in meteorites.

These elevated PGE levels have been found worldwide, suggesting that the impact spread debris around the world.

Some have proposed large-scale volcanism in the Deccan Traps igneous province of India as an alternative source of PGEs, but the specific PGE ratios at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary are more consistent with an asteroid impact than volcanism.

However, little is known about the nature of the Chicxulub impactor, including its composition and extraterrestrial origin.

To answer these questions, Dr Mario Fischer-Gödde from the University of Cologne and his colleagues measured ruthenium isotopes in samples taken from three sites at the Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary.

For comparison, the team also analysed samples from five other impacts that occurred between 36 million and 470 million years ago, an ancient impact spherule from 3.5 to 3.2 billion years ago, and two carbonaceous meteorites.

The researchers found that the ruthenium isotope signature of samples taken from the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary was uniform and matched very closely to that of carbonaceous chondrites rather than those from Earth or other types of meteorites, suggesting that the Chicxulub impactor likely came from a carbonaceous-type asteroid that formed in the outer solar system.

The other five impact structures have isotopic signatures more consistent with silicic asteroids that formed closer to the Sun.

The ancient spherulitic samples are consistent with a carbonaceous asteroid impact during the final stages of Earth's accretion.

“The composition of this asteroid is consistent with that of carbonaceous asteroids that formed outside Jupiter's orbit during the formation of the solar system,” Dr Fischer-Gödde said.

“Asteroid impacts like Chicxulub turn out to be very rare and unique events in geological time,” said Professor Carsten Müncher from the University of Cologne.

“The fate of the dinosaurs and many other species was sealed by this object that came from the outer solar system.”

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Mario Fischer-Gedde others2024. Ruthenium isotopes indicate that the Chicxulub impactor was a carbonaceous asteroid. Science 385 (6710): 752-756; doi: 10.1126/science.adk4868

Source: www.sci.news

Hubble Space Telescope captures photo of obscure barred spiral galaxy

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Astronomers have created a beautiful image of the barred spiral galaxy UGC 11861 using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows UGC 11861, a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Cepheus, 69 million light-years from Earth. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / C. Kilpatrick.

11861 posts It is located in the northern constellation Cepheus and is about 69 million light years away from Earth.

The galaxy, also known as LEDA 67671, IRAS 21557+7301, or TC 609, is classified as a barred spiral galaxy and a candidate active galactic nucleus.

UGC 11861 is Composed It consists of an exponential disk, a central box-shaped structure, and two broad spiral arms.

“The galaxy is actively forming new stars amidst clouds of gas and dark dust grains, visible as glowing blue spots in the outer arms,” Hubble astronomers said in a statement.

“As a result of this activity, three supernova explosions have been observed in and near UGC 11861, in 1995, 1997, and 2011.”

“The first two were both Type II supernovae, the kind that result from the collapse of a massive star at the end of its life.”

“This Hubble image was made from data collected to study a Type II supernova and its environment.”

The color image of UGC 11861 was created from images taken separately in the visible and near-infrared regions of the spectrum. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).

Two filters were used to sample different wavelengths, and color was generated by assigning a different hue to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.

“UGC 11861 is located 69 million light-years from Earth, which may seem a very long distance, but it was just the right distance for the Hubble Space Telescope to capture this spectacular photo of the galaxy’s spiral arms and the short, bright bar at its center,” the astronomers wrote.

Source: www.sci.news

New study indicates that increased UV exposure may be beneficial for health in sun-deprived nations

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

A recent study indicates that individuals in the UK Biobank who utilized solariums and resided in regions with high annual average residential shortwave radiation were at a decreased risk of death from various causes, including cardiovascular disease and cancer. Solarium users also exhibited a lower risk of non-cardiovascular/cancer mortality.

Higher exposure to UV light was associated with lower all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease mortality, and cancer mortality.

“In the UK and other nations with substantial European descendant populations, the emphasis of public health messaging has been on the dangers of ultraviolet (UV) exposure,” stated Professor Chris Dibben from the University of Edinburgh and his team.

“This is particularly concerning considering the established connection between UV radiation and melanoma development.”

“New findings suggest that the benefits of UV exposure might outweigh the risks, especially in low sunlight settings.”

“Among a group of Swedish women, those with higher sun exposure had a longer life span compared to those who avoided the sun.”

“The reduction in mortality rates is mainly linked to decreased cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular/non-cancer mortality.”

“In a study of Swedish women with moderate sun exposure habits, fair-skinned women had an 8% lower overall mortality rate compared to non-fair-skinned women.”

The study utilized genetic and health data from UK Biobank to examine UV exposure in 395,000 individuals in the UK.

Participants were limited to individuals of European descent with fair skin due to the impact of skin pigment on the body’s response to UV radiation.

Researchers utilized two criteria to identify individuals with higher UV exposure levels.

They assessed participants’ geographical locations to determine their average yearly solar energy exposure and whether they utilized sunbeds.

Living in regions with elevated UV levels, like Cornwall, was correlated with a lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and cancer (19% and 12% respectively) compared to regions with lower UV levels, such as Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Use of sunbeds was connected to a 23% reduced risk of cardiovascular disease death and a 14% lower risk of cancer-related death compared to non-users.

Given that sunbed users might also engage in more sunbathing, this result could reflect broader sun-seeking behaviors.

Individuals with higher estimated UV exposure showed a slightly greater risk of melanoma diagnosis but not an increased risk of mortality from melanoma.

“Our study contributes to the mounting evidence indicating that relatively high UV exposure in low-light environments could be advantageous for health,” Prof Dibben remarked.

“While increased UV radiation exposure may elevate skin cancer risk, this risk seems to be outweighed by the considerable reduction in cancer and cardiovascular-related disease mortality.”

“Dermatologists have traditionally only considered sunlight’s potential harm to the skin based on experiences of white individuals in sunny nations like Australia,” noted Professor Richard Weller from the University of Edinburgh.

“It is essential to safeguard your skin during periods of very high UV index, but this study indicates that the balance of benefits and risks from sun exposure in the UK may differ significantly from sunnier locales.”

Reference: Survey results Published in the journal Health and location.

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Andrew C. Stevenson others2024. Higher UV exposure is associated with reduced mortality: analysis of data from the UK Biobank cohort study. Health and location 89: 103328; doi: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2024.103328

Source: www.sci.news

Astrophysicists find denser molecular clouds do not increase efficiency of star formation.

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Despite recent progress, the question of what controls the star formation efficiency in galaxies remains one of the most debated in astrophysics. According to the dominant view, star formation is controlled by turbulence and feedback, with a star formation efficiency of 1-2% per local free-fall time. In an alternative scenario, the star formation rate in the Galactic disk is proportional to the mass of dense gas above a critical density threshold. In a new study, astrophysicists from Université Paris-Sacra show that Michael Mattern and his colleagues aimed to distinguish between the two images with high-resolution observations. Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) tracks dense gas and young stars in a comprehensive sample of 49 nearby dense molecular clouds.

This composite image shows RCW 106, a star-forming region in the southern constellation Norma, about 12,000 light-years from Earth. The image overlays a red map of dense gas taken by APEX’s ArTéMiS camera on top of an optical image taken by ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope. Image credit: ESO / M. Mattern others.

Understanding what controls the efficiency of star formation in galactic giant molecular clouds is a fundamental unsolved problem in star formation research.

The star formation rate at multiple scales in galaxies is known to be strongly correlated with the mass of available molecular gas.

Overall, star formation is observed to be a very inefficient process.

“The glowing red clouds seen in the image above indicate regions of dense gas where new stars are being born in the RCW 106 region,” the astronomers said in a statement.

“But only 1 percent of this gas actually forms stars, and we don’t know why this percentage is so low.”

“We know that star formation occurs when regions of these giant clouds of cold gas come together and eventually collapse, and new stars are born. This happens at a critical density.”

“But beyond that density, could even more stars be formed in even denser regions? And could this help explain the 1% mystery?”

Their new results suggest that this is not the case: the dense regions are not efficient for star formation.

According to the team, this can probably be explained by these dense clouds breaking up into filaments and nuclei from which stars form, but many questions remain.

“Our results suggest that the star formation efficiency does not increase as the density passes a critical threshold, supporting a scenario in which the star formation efficiency in dense gas is nearly constant,” the researchers said.

“However, measurements of star formation efficiency tracked by young class I stars in nearby clouds are inconclusive, as they are consistent with both the existence of a density threshold and its dependence on density above the threshold.”

“Overall, we suggest that the efficiency of star formation in dense gas is determined primarily by the physics of filament fragmentation into protostellar cores.”

of study will be displayed in journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

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M. Mattern others2024. Understanding star formation efficiency in dense gas: Initial results from the ArTéMiS CAFFEINE survey. A&Ain press; arXiv: 2405.15713

Source: www.sci.news

The South American lungfish has the largest genome ever sequenced to date.

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Researchers from the University of Konstanz and other institutions Africa(Protopterus annectens) and South American lungfish (Lepidosiren paradoxa)The genome of the South American lungfish (approximately 91 gigabases, about 30 times the size of the human genome) is the largest animal genome sequenced to date. Australia(Neoceratodus forsteri) African lungfish.

South American lungfish (Lepidosiren paradoxaImage courtesy of Katherine Seghers, Louisiana State University.

Lungfish are freshwater vertebrates belonging to the order Dipnoi (Pulmonaceae) and have existed for 400 million years, from the Devonian to the present day.

Some people consider lungfish to be “living fossils” because their morphology has changed very little over the years.

They, like all terrestrial vertebrates, have the ability to breathe air through lungs similar to our own.

Only six species of lungfish remain today: four live in Africa, one in South America, and one in Australia.

“These ancient 'living fossils' still resemble their ancestors so closely that they seem to have been forgotten during evolution,” said biologist Axel Meyer of the University of Konstanz and his colleagues.

“Since our genetic material, DNA, is made up of nucleobases and the sequence of these nucleobases contains the actual genetic information, a comparative analysis of the lungfish genome will only be possible if we know its complete sequence.”

“We already knew that the lungfish genome was large, but until now it was unclear how large it really was and what we could learn from it,” the researchers added.

“Sequencing the lungfish genome has therefore been very labor-intensive and complex, both from a technical and bioinformatics point of view.”

In a new study, scientists have sequenced the genome of African and South American lungfish.

“The South American species' DNA is 91 gigabases (or 91 billion bases), the largest of any animal genome and more than twice the size of the genome of the previous record holder, the Australian lungfish,” Dr Meyer said.

“Eighteen of the South American lungfish's 19 chromosomes are each larger than the entire human genome, about 3 billion base pairs in length.”

The largest genome sequence to date, that of the Australian lungfish, was also sequenced by the same team.

“Autonomous transposons are responsible for the large size of the lungfish genome over time,” the authors write.

“These are DNA sequences that are 'replicated' and change position in the genome, which causes the genome to grow.”

“Although similar phenomena have occurred in other organisms, our analysis shows that the South American lungfish has by far the fastest rate of genome expansion ever recorded; every 10 million years, its genome has expanded to a size equivalent to the entire human genome.”

“And it continues to grow. We now have evidence that the transposon responsible is still active.”

“We have identified a mechanism for this enormous genome growth. This extreme expansion is due, at least in part, to the very low presence of piRNAs.”

“This type of RNA is normally part of the molecular mechanism that silences transposons.”

Team paper Published in the journal Nature.

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M. Chartres othersAll lungfish genomes provide information on genome expansion and tetrapod evolution. NaturePublished online August 14, 2024, doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07830-1

Source: www.sci.news