Severe storms caused by La Niña in Queensland, Australia
Genevieve Vallee/Alamy Stock Photo
The UK's national weather and climate agency, the Met Office, predicts that the Earth's average surface temperature in 2025 will be between 1.29°C and 1.53°C warmer than the pre-industrial average, and possibly 1.41°C. This is slightly lower than 2024, when temperatures are expected to exceed 1.5°C for the first time in the calendar year.
“A year ago, our 2024 forecasts highlighted for the first time the potential for temperatures to exceed 1.5C,” the Met Office's Nick Dunstone said in a statement. “While this appears to have happened, it is important to realize that temporarily exceeding 1.5°C does not mean a violation of the Paris Agreement. However, the first year above 1.5°C It is certainly a solemn milestone in climate history.”
The Paris Agreement set a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C to 2°C above pre-industrial standards. Most climate scientists currently define pre-industrial temperature as the Earth's average surface temperature between 1850 and 1900. This is because this is the earliest period for which reliable direct measurements were obtained. However, some studies suggest that by that time, the world had already warmed significantly as a result of human activity.
Next year will be among the top three warmest years on record, according to 2025 projections
Japan Meteorological Agency
The expected drop in surface temperatures in 2025 is the result of heat transfer from the atmosphere to the oceans due to La Niña, and does not mean that global warming has stopped. The overall heat content of the oceans and atmosphere continues to rise as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are rising due to increased carbon dioxide emissions from human activities.
During a La Niña event, cold water rises in the Pacific Ocean and spreads across the Earth's surface, resulting in a net heat transfer from the atmosphere to the ocean. When an El Niño event occurs, the opposite happens. The 2023 El Niño helped break records for surface temperatures that year, which will be surpassed in 2024. But El Niño alone cannot fully explain the record temperatures.
In new research Published in a magazine PLoS ONEArchaeologists have investigated exceptional human remains unearthed from the Middle Trypilian site (c. 3700-3600 BC) of Kosenivka in Ukraine.
The Trypilian culture was a Neolithic European culture that arose in Ukraine between the Seret and Bug rivers in the 5th millennium BC, extending south into modern-day Romania and Moldova and east as far as the Dnieper River.
Also known as the Cucuteni-Trypilian culture, this culture is characterized by advanced agriculture, advanced metallurgy, pottery making, sophisticated architecture, and social organization.
Trypian society was a matrilineal society in which women headed the household, engaged in agricultural work, and manufactured pottery, textiles, and clothing.
Hunting, raising livestock, and making tools were the responsibility of men.
“Despite the huge number of artifacts left behind by the Trypilians, archaeologists have discovered very few human remains,” said Dr Katharina Fuchs from Kiel University and her colleagues.
“Because of this absence, many aspects of the life of this ancient people remain to be discovered.”
Researchers investigated a Trypilian culture settlement near Kosenivka, Ukraine.
This site, which consists of several houses, is unique in the presence of human remains.
The 50 human bone fragments found in the remains of the house were taken from at least seven people, children, adults, men and women, who likely once lived in the house. The bodies of four of them were also badly burned.
Researchers analyzed the carbon and nitrogen content of bones, grains and animal carcasses found at the site and found that meat made up less than 10% of the residents' diet.
This matches teeth found at the scene, which show wear marks indicating chewing on grain or other plant fibers.
That the Trypilian diet consisted largely of plants supports the theory that cattle in these cultures were primarily used to fertilize fields and produce milk rather than for meat production.
“Human bones are a real biological archive,” Dr. Fuchs said.
“The study of Trypilian society and its living conditions in the oldest urban communities in Eastern Europe remains difficult, but our 'Cosembica case' clearly shows that even small bone fragments can be of great help. ”
“By combining new osteological, isotopic, archaeobotanical and archaeological information, we provide excellent insight into the lives, and possibly deaths, of these people.”
Scientists also investigated potential causes of the burns, including fire and unusual forms of burial.
Burnt bone fragments were mainly found in the center of the house, and previous research had assumed that the residents there died in a house fire.
The authors examined the bone fragments microscopically and concluded that the burn probably occurred shortly after death.
In the event of an accidental fire, the researchers suggest that some people could have died from carbon monoxide poisoning even if they had escaped their homes.
According to radiocarbon dating, one of them died in about 19 years. 100 years later. This person's death cannot be related to the fire, but is otherwise unknown.
Two others whose skull injuries have not healed have raised questions about whether violence may have played a similar role.
Examination of Trypilian human bone finds showed researchers that less than 1% of the dead were cremated, and even more rarely buried inside homes.
“Overall, our results point to enormous yet untapped explanatory potential in the rare and poorly preserved bioarchaeological archive of the Cucuteni Trypillia phenomenon,” the scientists concluded.
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K. Fuchs others. 2024. Life and death in the Trypilian period: an interdisciplinary analysis of unique human bones from the Kosenivka settlement, Ukraine (3700-3600 BC). PLoS ONE 19 (12): e0289769;doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0289769
High blood pressure is a common symptom of preeclampsia
Nataliya Piatrovich/Alamy
Currently, the only way to deal with preeclampsia, a common pregnancy complication, is to deliver the baby early if possible. But researchers have now successfully treated this condition in mice by delivering mRNA molecules to the placenta to stimulate the growth of new blood vessels.
They say the next step is to test this mRNA therapy in larger animals such as guinea pigs and non-human primates. kelsey swingle at the University of Pennsylvania. “That’s something we’ve been talking about starting in the really near future.”
If the treatment proves effective in large animals, the researchers envision testing it first in people who develop preeclampsia early in pregnancy.
“If you have pre-eclampsia in the 8th or 9th month of pregnancy, you are inducing it early, but if you have severe pre-eclampsia in the 4th or 5th month of pregnancy, it is It’s not an option. There’s a very good chance you’ll lose the baby,” the team member says. michael mitchell also at the University of Pennsylvania. “That’s where we can get treatment.” [address] There is a pressing need. ”
It may also be used late in pregnancy to avoid the need for early delivery, which can affect the infant’s health.
Approximately 1 in 25 women will develop preeclampsia during their first pregnancy, which can have serious consequences. It is estimated that 75,000 women die from preeclampsia worldwide. 500,000 infants Every year.
Preeclampsia is usually diagnosed based on high blood pressure after 20 weeks of pregnancy and signs of kidney damage, such as protein in the urine. The underlying reason for this is that the arteries that connect the uterus and placenta fail to develop properly, Swingle said.
Therefore, it could theoretically be possible to treat preeclampsia by promoting the growth of arteries within the placenta. We know that a protein called vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) promotes blood vessel growth, but the problem is getting it to the placenta.
Proteins like VEGF are simply injected into the bloodstream and quickly removed, Swingle said. This problem can be overcome by providing a recipe for creating proteins in the form of mRNA molecules wrapped in fatty substances forming lipid nanoparticles (LNPs).
Once LNP is taken up by cells, mRNA molecules tell the cells how to make the desired protein. The effect is temporary, as the molecules break down after a while.
Swingle says this approach has already been tested in pregnancy, as this is how covid-19 mRNA vaccines work. “Many pregnant women have been vaccinated against COVID-19.”
The LNPs used in mRNA covid-19 vaccines are injected directly into muscle cells, so they are taken up by muscle cells. However, when the same LNP is injected into the blood, almost all of it is taken up by liver cells.
Therefore, the big challenge for Swingle and her team was finding a way to get the LNPs to the placenta. To accomplish this, we created and tested about 100 LNPs with slightly different chemical properties.
When the research team used the most promising of these LNPs to deliver an mRNA molecule encoding VEGF to pregnant mice with pre-eclampsia, the mice’s blood pressure returned to normal for the remainder of their pregnancy. .
“This approach merits further study in higher primates and, if animal data suggest both safety and efficacy, in women with preeclampsia,” he says. peter von derdelsen At King’s College London.
Studies in mice using mRNA encoding fluorescent proteins have shown that LNPs are taken up by the spleen and to some extent by the liver and placenta, which is a potential safety issue. Importantly, however, there was no sign that LNPs crossed the mouse placenta and reached the fetus.
There is currently no cure for preeclampsia, but the risks are especially great without advanced medical care. “Injectable therapies that do not require all the highly expensive and complex standard treatments could be transformative for applications in developing countries,” Mitchell said.
This year, from the first civilian moon landing (see “Elon Musk-led private missions boom, space is on sale in 2024”) to the first pig kidney transplant into a living human. It will be remembered for many pioneering events. Unfortunately, another dark first looms in 2024. Although the numbers will not be officially confirmed until next month, it is very likely that this will be the first year in which the totemic climate goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming is exceeded. (see “For the first time in 2024 reached 1.5°C, accelerating climate disruption.”)
Let’s clarify what this means. This number is generally considered to refer to a 20-year average, so it does not violate the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world’s most important climate change treaty. Under the agreement, each country commits to limiting long-term temperature rise to below 1.5°C. Nor is this a sign that the world is doomed and that we should give up all hope of combating climate change. Because if we lower temperatures even a little bit, billions of people will be better off than they would be if we didn’t do so. But reaching this level of warming, even in just one year (so far), is undoubtedly a global failure.
Breaking through 1.5°C also comes as the world enters a new and uncertain phase of climate change. As we have reported throughout the year, extreme warming in 2024 (which will only be matched by 2023) has scientists increasingly concerned about changes in major ocean currents, leading to unexplained levels of warming. They are desperately trying to understand what’s going on with the decline of Antarctic sea ice.
If you start the new year with a feeling of anxiety, you will inevitably feel pessimistic, but that may not be a bad thing. Next year will mark 10 years since the Paris Agreement came into force, and even then it was clear that the 1.5°C target had reached its achievable limits. As we wrote in our year-end leader at the time: “An odd call to action. The goal of capping global warming at 1.5°C looks almost completely unattainable.” In fact, greenhouse gas emissions Reshaping the modern world to stop and achieve net-zero emissions is the most ambitious goal ever set by humanity.
You can’t take good photos if you’re pessimistic. Ask, “What happens if I fail?” “What if we’re wrong?”
Given the scale of the challenges we face, such ambition is essential, but it is not sufficient. It’s easy to set ambitious and optimistic goals like the Paris Agreement, and politicians can line up to take pictures, smile and shake hands. It feels warm and fluffy.
However, to achieve such a goal, pessimism must prevail. You can’t take good photos if you’re pessimistic. The question is, “What happens if we fail?” and “What if we are wrong?” – Issues to be addressed include grappling with deep uncertainties in the green transition, whether technological, social or economic. Failure to do so will lead to failure.
There are lessons to be learned from success in 2024. Space engineers and surgeons alike tend to assume mistakes when considering the complexity of moon landings and complex surgeries. To alleviate this, they use a simple tool: the Humble Checklist. By identifying points of failure and taking steps to avoid them, you greatly increase your chances of success.
Although it makes less sense to have a “climate checklist” given that we are talking about ongoing global processes rather than a single operation or space mission, the underlying spirit still applies. Masu. One of the major failings is the annual United Nations climate change talks. At the 29th COP Summit held in Azerbaijan this year, organizers hailed fossil fuels as “God’s gift.”
COP30, scheduled to be held in Belem, Brazil next November, will be an opportunity to reset attitudes. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is already making noise in this direction, promising a “COP to change direction,” but will he be able to make it happen? Perhaps the most powerful message he can send is to take to the stage, stand aside unsmiling world leaders with clear plans to do better, and publicly acknowledge the failures of the COP process so far. That’s probably true. However, Santa doesn’t necessarily grant your wishes.
A degree of repentance and pessimism could also help with another problem that is quietly brewing in 2024: the imminent threat of an avian influenza pandemic. ). The H5N1 virus has spread to U.S. dairy herds despite minimal surveillance and mitigation efforts by U.S. health officials. As a result, the number of people infected there has also increased, reaching more than 50 people at the time of our reporting.
The virus has not yet adapted well to humans and is not known to be transmitted from person to person so far, but random mutations may change the situation with each new infection. increases. Optimistically rolling the dice and hoping for a double six is not good health policy. In an ideal world, the United States would already be planning for the possibility of a pandemic and sit back and watch it never materialize. We do not live in an ideal world as President-elect Donald Trump endorses vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services. That means other countries will need to come up with their own plans. This is the only rational response to uncertainty.
Obviously, this pessimism doesn’t stem from any particular holiday spirit. However, through these two issues, new scientist From the science of believing in Santa (see ‘Believing in Santa Claus doesn’t guarantee children will behave well at Christmas’) to the quest for the world’s largest snowflake (see ‘The plan to create the world’s snowflake’), there lies a world of festive feasts. The biggest snowflake was humbled by nature”).
Looking ahead to next year, I’d like to thank researchers and companies who are developing new ways to tackle climate change, from sucking carbon dioxide out of the air to genetically modifying food to make it more environmentally friendly. Raise a glass of water too. For more information, see the next issue’s 2025 preview). And we hope that the uncertainty caused by this year’s climate news will be a catalyst for change.
New research led by scientists at the University of Bristol shows how lepidosaurs, the most diverse clade of quadrupeds that includes lizards and snakes, evolved an astonishing variety of jaw shapes and He revealed what has brought him extraordinary success.
The rate of evolution of lepidosaur jaw morphology. Image credit: Ballell others., doi: 10.1098/rspb.2024.2052.
Lepidosauria is a clade of lizards, snakes, and tuataras with over 11,000 species, representing the most specialized group of today's tetrapods.
Since their origin over 240 million years ago, lepidosaurs have diversified into countless sizes and body shapes.
Among extant species, body size ranges over three orders of magnitude, typified by body lengths of approximately 1.7 cm. Sphaerodactylus Geckos and giant anacondas that are about 10 meters long.
The extreme size becomes even more dramatic when you consider extinct mosasaurs (up to 17 meters long).
Differences in body shape are reflected in different degrees of body elongation and reductions or modifications of limb elements in multiple lineages, and snake-like body shapes have evolved independently at least 25 times.
Similarly, lepidosaurs exhibit rich diversity in skull composition, shaped by the loss and gain of cranial bones over their evolutionary history and the acquisition of varying types and degrees of cranial motion.
As a result of this morphological diversification, Lepidosaurus conquered diverse ecological niches in most regions of the planet.
In a new study, University of Bristol researcher Antonio Barrel-Mayoral and his colleagues show that the evolution of jaw shape in lepidosaurs was influenced by ecological factors, including phylogeny (evolutionary relatedness) and allometry (scaling of shape with size). They found that it is influenced by a complex interaction of factors that go beyond science.
In terms of jaw shape, the snake was found to be a morphological outlier, exhibiting a unique jaw morphology. This is probably due to the snake's highly flexible skull and extreme mechanism that allows it to swallow prey many times larger than its head.
“Interestingly, we found that jaw shape evolves particularly rapidly in ecologically specialized groups, such as burrowing, aquatic, and herbivorous lizards. This may be due to evolutionary innovations in the lower jaw. “We suggest that this is the key to achieving these unique ecologies,” said Dr. Barrel-Mayoral. Said.
“Our research shows how lizards and snakes have evolved different jaw shapes to adapt to their wide range of ecology, diets and habitats, driving their extraordinary diversity. ”
This study highlights the important role of morphological innovations in promoting diversification in highly biodiverse groups such as lepidosaurs.
“The mandible, an important component of the vertebrate feeding apparatus, has been an important element in vertebrate ecological experimentation and adaptation.”
Looking ahead, the research team plans to further investigate the evolution of lepidosaur heads.
“The lower jaw is important because it works with the muscles that close the jaw to support important functions such as feeding and defense,” Dr. Barrel-Mayoral said.
“We are investigating the relationship between the shape of the skull and the placement of the jaw-closing musculature throughout evolution, and how this influenced the diversification of feeding mechanisms and habits.”
team's work Published today on Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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antonio barrel others. 2024. Ecological factors in the evolution of jaw morphology in lepidosaurs. Procedure R. Soc. B 291 (2036): 20242052;doi: 10.1098/rspb.2024.2052
Humpback whales have left scientists astonished with their epic journey spanning three oceans and over 8,000 miles, establishing a new record for the longest migration between breeding grounds.
A recent study published in a journal Royal Society Open Science on Wednesday suggests that this remarkable migration may be influenced by climate change, impacting ocean conditions and food availability, or changes in mating behavior.
Professor Darren Croft, an expert in behavioral ecology at the University of Exeter, UK, remarked, “Changes in climate and ocean conditions may drive these migrations to new breeding grounds, and increased competition for mates and food may prompt individuals to seek new opportunities.”
This new study reveals the immense distances traveled by humpback whales and highlights their remarkable migratory behavior.
While some whale species cover over 5,000 miles between feeding and breeding areas, humpback whales hold the title for the longest migratory distance among mammals.
One particular whale captured scientists’ attention after embarking on a journey that extended beyond the usual migratory routes.
Originally spotted in 2013 off the coast of Colombia, South America, the whale was later sighted in similar waters in 2017 and in 2022 near Zanzibar, an island in the Indian Ocean.
Researcher Ryan Reisinger expressed his excitement over the findings, underscoring the importance of documenting humpback whales’ shifting breeding grounds.
Despite this intriguing discovery, the exact reason for this unusually long migration remains unknown.
Humpback whales are renowned for their annual migration from rich feeding grounds in the summer to warmer breeding areas in winter, where food is scarce.
The study employed photos from happywhale.com, a platform where individuals contribute to tracking whale movements globally, utilizing artificial intelligence to identify and study individual whales based on their unique features.
With a match rate of 97% to 99%, the algorithm on Happy Whale’s website utilizes whale tail characteristics to differentiate and monitor humpback whale populations around the world.
“Hello again!” Pigeons remember individual human faces
Martin Parr/Magnum Photo
Recently, when I was walking in the park with some friends, they pointed out the pigeons and told me I was looking at their favorite bird. I couldn’t believe it. Pigeon? That winged pest? My friend responded with this perverse logic. It makes a lot of sense that pigeons are our favorite birds because they’re always fun.
I was momentarily confused and wondered if anyone could really be so obsessed with pigeons. As it turns out, the joke was on me. I talked to other friends and co-workers, and a surprising number of them loved the humble Pidge. one new scientist An anonymous colleague confessed to having a secret dove tattoo. I also saw a news report that A couple with their adopted pigeon sleeping on their bed.
After doing a little reading, I found that pigeons have a lot to recommend. In addition to their well-known homing abilities, they are intelligent to say the least. Although they are not mammals, they do produce a type of milk. They kiss each other and praise themselves after sex, recognize individual people (And you can remember the person who was mean to you). All this put together made me think that I might be able to love this seemingly ordinary bird after all. So, armed with curiosity and a bag of oatmeal, I set out to do just that.
A little bird watching
I wanted to conduct my research with at least a sense of scientific integrity, so I came up with the idea of an “experiment.” First of all, I…
in new research Published in a magazine frontiers of public healthScientists surveyed 69,705 participants (47.2% women) aged 45 to 83 from the Swedish Mammography Cohort and the Swedish Men's Cohort to assess their intake of added sugars and a variety of sugary foods and beverages. We investigated the association between this and the risk of seven cardiovascular diseases. Researchers have found that eating too much added sugar increases the risk of stroke and aneurysm, but eating small snacks lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease. On the other hand, drinking sugary drinks increases your risk of stroke, heart failure, and atrial fibrillation.
Although additional sugar intake was positively associated with ischemic stroke and abdominal aortic aneurysm, the lowest intake categories had the highest risk for most outcomes. Positive linear associations were found between topping intake and abdominal aortic aneurysm, and between sweetened beverage intake and ischemic stroke, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and abdominal aortic aneurysm. There is no relationship between snack intake (pastries, ice cream, chocolate, sweets) and all outcomes, and between topping intake (sugar, honey, jam, marmalade) and heart failure and aortic stenosis. , a negative linear correlation was found. Image credit: Ernesto Rodriguez.
Cardiovascular disease comprises a variety of diseases of the heart and blood vessels and is currently the leading cause of death and disease burden in Europe, mainly due to stroke and ischemic heart disease.
Although diet is one of the main modifiable risk factors for many CVDs, evidence regarding added sugar intake and CVD risk is lacking and inconclusive.
Additionally, most studies have primarily focused on sugar-sweetened beverage consumption rather than total added sugar intake, even though sugar-sweetened beverages account for 14% of added sugar intake in Sweden and only 25% in the United States. I'm guessing.
“The most surprising finding of our study was the differential relationship between different sources of added sugar and CVD risk,” said Suzanne Junge, a PhD candidate at Lund University. That's what I mean.''
“This striking contrast highlights the importance of considering not only the amount of sugar consumed, but also its source and context.”
To understand how sugar intake affects cardiovascular disease risk and whether those risks change with intake of different types of sugar, Janzi et al. Data were collected from two major cohort studies: a cohort of men and a cohort of Swedish men.
These studies administered dietary questionnaires in 1997 and 2009, allowing scientists to monitor participants' diets over time.
Once exclusions were made to ensure the two cohorts shared the same inclusion criteria and remove independent risk factors for CVD, researchers were left with a sample of 69,705 participants .
They identified three classes of sugar intake: toppings such as honey, treats such as pastries, and sugary drinks such as soda, and two different types of stroke, heart attack, heart failure, aortic aneurysm, atrial fibrillation, and aortic stenosis. investigated seven CVDs. .
Participants were monitored until death, diagnosis of CVD, or end of follow-up in 2019.
During this period, 25,739 participants were diagnosed with CVD.
The scientists then used this data to analyze how different types of sugar intake affected the risk of various CVDs.
They found that consuming sugary drinks is worse for your health than any other form of sugar. Drinking more sugary drinks significantly increases your risk of ischemic stroke, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and abdominal aortic aneurysm.
“The liquid sugar found in sweetened beverages is typically less satiating than solid foods, which can lead to less satiety and overconsumption,” says Junge.
“Context is also important. Snacks are often enjoyed during social gatherings or special occasions, while sugary drinks may be consumed more regularly.”
Different types of CVD are affected differently by increased sugar intake. This is likely because added sugar intake has a different impact on participants' individual risk profiles.
Increased carbohydrate intake generally increased the risk of ischemic stroke and abdominal aortic aneurysm, and also increased the risk of heart failure in participants with a normal BMI.
However, the category with the lowest snack intake had the highest risk of negative health outcomes. Occasional snacking was associated with better outcomes than no snacking at all.
“This may reflect underlying dietary habits. People with very low sugar intake may have very restrictive diets, or may have low sugar intake due to pre-existing health conditions. may be limiting,” Junge said.
“Although our observational study cannot prove causation, these results suggest that extremely low carbohydrate intake may not be necessary or beneficial for cardiovascular health.”
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Suzanne Junge others. 2024. Added association between sugar intake and incidence of seven different cardiovascular diseases in 69,705 Swedish men and women. frontiers of public health 12;doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1452085
The deepest 45% of the ocean (6,000-11,000 m), the Hadar Zone, contains high levels of undiscovered biodiversity.
Most geological formations are characterized by grooves formed in subduction zones between tectonic plates, which are formed by a series of unique external and internal factors.
The Atacama Trench, or Peru-Chile Trench, is one of the most geographically isolated landforms, located beneath eutrophic surface waters and characterized by high sediment loads.
This trench is known to host highly distinctive faunal assemblages driven by a combination of these isolating factors.
“The deep sea is a vast trove of new species for science, and each discovery deepens our ecological understanding of these remote ecosystems,” said researcher Johanna Weston of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and colleagues.
“One such island-like ecosystem is the Atacama Trench, where unique endemic communities exist at hadal depths (more than 6,000 meters).”
“Unlike other Hadal subduction ditch communities, it is a predatory (non-predatory) amphipod It has not been documented or collected from the Atacama Trench. ”
The newly discovered species dursibela kamanchakathe first large active predatory amphipod discovered at these extreme depths.
This crustacean, about 4 cm long, uses specialized raptor appendages to capture and prey on small amphipods in food-limited areas of the Atacama Trench.
“Most interestingly, the DNA and morphological data indicate that this species is also a new genus, highlighting the Atacama Trench as a unique hotspot,” Dr. Weston said. .
The discovery was made during the 2023 Integrated Deep Ocean Observing System (IDOOS) expedition. R/V Abate Molina.
4 dursibela kamanchaka Individuals were collected using a lander at a depth of 7,902 m. Landers are untethered platforms used to shuttle scientific equipment, such as baited traps, to the ocean floor and back.
“The collaborative and integrative approach of this research is confirmed.” dursibela kamanchaka This is a new species discovered and highlights the ongoing discovery of biodiversity in the Atacama Trench,” said Dr. Carolina González, a researcher at the Instituto Milenio de Oceanografía.
“This discovery highlights the importance of continued deep-sea exploration, especially in the Chilean forecourt.”
“We expect more discoveries as we continue to study the Atacama Trench.”
This finding is reported in the following article: paper in a diary Systematics and biodiversity.
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Joanna New Jersey Weston others. 2024. A new large predator (family Lycoptidae, Eucilidae) hiding in the depths of the Atacama Trench. Systematics and biodiversity 22 (1): 2416430;doi: 10.1080/14772000.2024.2416430
dark comet First Interstellar Object 1I/2017 U1 ‘A small object with no detected coma, similar to ‘Oumuamua, with large accelerations that can be explained by volatile outgassing. These objects represent a potentially widespread class of small objects that lie further in the continuum between asteroids and comets and whose active nature is inferred from their orbital motions. Michigan State University astronomer Darryl Seligman and his colleagues have now detected seven new dark comets, proving that there are two distinct populations of these objects.
This artist’s impression shows ‘Oumuamua, the first interstellar object discovered in the solar system. Recent observations show that the object is moving faster than predicted as it leaves the solar system. Astronomers speculate that the ejection of material from the surface due to solar heating is responsible for this behavior. This release of gas can be seen, in this artist’s impression, as a subtle cloud emitted from the side of the object facing the sun. Image credits: NASA / ESA / Hubble / ESO / M. Kohnmesser.
In 2003, astronomers noticed that asteroid 2003 RM’s orbit deviated slightly from its expected orbit. This motion cannot be explained by the acceleration typical of asteroids.
Then, in 2017, the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua passed through our solar system, leaving astronomers perplexed.
Like a typical asteroid or comet, it was moved in part by the gravity of other bodies in the solar system, such as the sun.
But astronomers also discovered that ‘Oumuamua is accelerating beyond that, likely due to the release of previously trapped gas.
The strength of the thrust added by such outgassing defied that of a typical asteroid and rivaled the speed of a comet.
problem? ‘Oumuamua lacked the bright dust tail that is characteristic of comets, so it could not be easily classified as an asteroid or comet.
In 2023, astronomers identified seven objects in our solar system that reflect the same unusual features as ‘Oumuamua.
These objects were classified into an entirely new class of objects: the first seven dark comets.
“One of the most important reasons we study small objects like asteroids and comets is because they tell us about how matter is transported around the solar system,” Seligman said. the doctor said.
“Dark comets are a new type of near-Earth object that may contain water, and could provide a new source of materials needed for the development of life to Earth.”
“The more we learn about them, the more we will understand their role in the origin of the Earth.”
Dr. Seligman and his co-authors not only discovered seven new dark comets, but also compared the total number of known comets and identified two different types.
The first type is called an outer dark comet. These are large objects with eccentric orbits similar to Jovian comets and may have originated outside the solar system.
The second type is called an internal dark comet. These are small celestial bodies with roughly circular orbits that move through the inner solar system close to Earth and may have originated in the asteroid belt.
“What’s interesting about these objects is that although they look like asteroids, their motion is similar to that of comets,” said Dr. David Farnochia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“This is a puzzle that challenges the way we have always classified objects as either asteroids or comets.”
Dr. Seligman said, “Expanding our knowledge of dark comets will help us understand the context in which ‘Oumuamua was a fortuitous event that has left the solar system and is no longer observable.”
“What many people might not normally think about is that the solar system is a chaotic place.”
“We don’t know where things came from, but with 14 currently known dark comets orbiting within our solar system, we will collect more data in the coming years and hopefully uncover answers. Opportunities are opening up: the formation of our own planet.”
This finding is reported in the following article: paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Darryl Z. Seligman others. 2024. Two distinct populations of dark comets, distinguished by orbit and size. PNAS 121 (51): e2406424121;doi: 10.1073/pnas.2406424121
The Shengshan culture of the lower Yangtze region of ancient China plays a central role in understanding the origins of rice cultivation and early alcoholic fermentation. To address these questions, the researchers examined artifacts from the early stages of the Kaminoyama site, 10,000 to 9,000 years ago. By analyzing microscopic artifacts such as phytoliths, starch granules, and fungi associated with pottery vessels, the researchers found that people in the upper mountains consumed rice not only as a staple food but also as an ingredient for brewing fermented beverages. Evidence suggesting the use of alcohol fermentation technology in East Asia was also found.
Locations and relics of Shangshan culture sites: (A) Locations of Shangshan, Qiaotou, and Xiaohuangshan ruins (dots) and distribution area of Shangshan culture (red circles). (B) Selected pottery shards analyzed: 1 – Cup shard. 2 – Bottle fragments. 3 – Bottle fragments. 4 – Fragment of the rim of a sandy pot. 5 – Large basin debris. 6 – Base of the ring foot bowl. (C) Corresponding complete containers: 1 – spherical jar; 2 – ring-foot bowl; 3 – cup; 4 – flat base jar. 5 – Large basin. Image credit: Liu others., doi: 10.1073/pnas.2412274121.
The origins of rice cultivation have been the subject of extensive archaeological research and debate in recent years.
Based on existing data, archaeologists generally agree that the early stages of rice domestication occurred in the lower and middle Yangtze River regions of China.
of mountain culture Zhejiang Province represents the region where rice cultivation began in the early stages.
Although the extent of rice domestication is still being investigated, recent studies suggest that this process began early.
In a new study, Professor Leping Jiang and colleagues at the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archeology address questions related to the material and social mechanisms that may have played an important role in the exploitation and alcohol brewing of early Shangshan rice. is.
The researchers analyzed microfossils associated with early-stage pottery at the Kaminoyama site.
“These fragments were associated with different types of containers, including those for fermentation, serving, storage, cooking, and processing,” Professor Jiang said.
“We carried out microfossil extraction and analysis of residues from the inner surfaces of the pottery, the clay of the pottery, and the sediments of the surrounding cultural layers.”
“We focused on identifying phytoliths, starch grains, and fungi, providing insight into the uses of the pottery and food processing methods employed in the field,” said Professor Li Liu of Stanford University. .
Analysis of phytoliths revealed a significant presence of phytoliths from rice grown in the residue and clay.
“This evidence shows that rice was the main plant resource for the Shangshan people,” said Professor Zhang Jianping, a researcher at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
“There is also evidence that rice husks and leaves were used to make pottery, further proving the essential role of rice in the Joshan culture.”
The researchers found a variety of starch granules in the pottery residue, including rice, grasshopper tears, barnyard grass, Triticaceae, acorns, and lilies.
Many of the starch granules showed signs of enzymatic degradation and gelatinization, which are characteristic of fermentation processes.
Scientists also discovered an abundance of fungal elements, including: Monascus It contained mold and yeast cells, some of which showed developmental stages typical of fermentation.
These fungi are closely related to liquor starters used in traditional brewing methods, such as those used to make Hongjiujiu (Hongjiujiu) in China.
The team analyzed the following distributions: Monascus Yeast also persists in many types of ceramic containers, with higher concentrations observed in spherical jars compared to crock pots and processing tubs.
This distribution suggests that vessel type is closely associated with specific functions, and that the spherical jars were intentionally manufactured for alcoholic fermentation.
This discovery suggests that the Shangyama people employed a wide range of survival strategies during the early stages of rice cultivation, using ceramic vessels, especially spherical pots, to brew cue-based rice alcoholic beverages. Masu.
The emergence of this brewing technique in the early Uyama culture was closely related to the domestication of rice and the warm and humid climate of the early Holocene.
“Domestic rice provided a stable resource for fermentation, while favorable climatic conditions supported the development of qu-based fermentation technology that relies on the growth of filamentous fungi,” Professor Liu said.
To rule out potential contamination from soil, the authors analyzed sediment control samples and found that starch and fungal residues in these samples were significantly lower than pottery residues. It became.
This finding strengthens the conclusion that residues are directly related to fermentation activity.
Modern fermentation experiments using rice, MonascusThe yeast then further validated that finding by demonstrating a morphological match with fungal remains identified on Ueyama pottery.
“These alcoholic beverages likely played a pivotal role in ceremonial feasts, highlighting their ceremonial importance as a potential driver of the intensified use and widespread cultivation of rice in Neolithic China.” Professor Liu said.
“Evidence for alcoholic fermentation of rice at Shangshan indicates that this technology arose earliest in East Asia, and suggests that the complexity between rice cultivation, alcoholic beverage production, and social formation in early Holocene China It provides new insights into the interactions between
of findings will appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Li Liu others. 2024. Rice beer dating back 10,000 years has been found in the mountains above the lower reaches of the Yangtze River in China. PNAS 121 (51): e2412274121;doi: 10.1073/pnas.2412274121
Google announces new quantum chip is the most powerful yet
Google Quantum AI
Google has unveiled a new quantum computer, reasserting its lead in the race to prove that these unusual machines can beat even the world's best conventional supercomputers. So does that mean we've finally arrived at a useful quantum computer?
Researchers at the tech giant unveiled their quantum computing chip Sycamore in 2019, becoming the first in the world to demonstrate this feat known as quantum supremacy. But since then, supercomputers have caught up and left Sycamore behind. Now, Google has produced a new quantum chip called Willow. julian kelly Google says its Quantum AI is the best in the company's history.
“You can think of this as having all the benefits of Sycamore, but when you look under the hood, the geometry has changed…We've rethought the processor,” he says.
The latest version of Sycamore boasted 67; The quantum bits, or qubits, that process information have been upgraded to Willow's 105 qubits. Ideally, larger quantum computers should be more powerful, but researchers have found that qubits in larger devices struggle to remain coherent and lose their quantum nature. I discovered it. This is also the case with competitors IBM and California-based startup Atom Computing, both of which recently debuted quantum computers with more than 1,000 qubits.
For this reason, the quality of the qubits is a big focus for the team, and Willow's qubits can store complex quantum states, reliably encoding information more than five times longer than Sycamore's qubits, Kelly said. says.
Google uses a specific benchmark task called RCS to evaluate the performance of its quantum computers, and Willow said it was superior. Hartmut Neven also with Google Quantum AI. This task involves verifying that the distribution of numerical samples output by programs running on the chip is as random as possible. For several years, Sycamore was able to do this faster than the world's best supercomputers, but in 2022 and again in 2024 a new record was set by a conventional computer.
Google says Willow's task took five minutes on a chip, once again widening the gap between quantum machines and conventional machines, but the company said its prior technology would take 10 septillion years, or the age of the universe. We estimate that it will take much longer than the square of supercomputer.
For this comparison, the researchers modeled a Frontier supercomputer (recently downgraded to only the second most powerful supercomputer in the world) with more memory than is currently available. This only emphasizes Willow's computational abilities. says Naven. Although Sycamore's record has been broken, he is confident Willow will remain champion for much longer as traditional computing methods reach their limits.
What remains to be seen is whether Willow can actually do anything useful, given the lack of practical use for RCS benchmark tests. Kelly said that while success in benchmarks is a “necessary but not sufficient” condition for a quantum computer's usefulness, chips that fail to perform well in RCS are unlikely to be used in the future.
But the Google team has another reason to believe in Willow's bright future. That said, Willow is very good at correcting her own mistakes. Quantum computers' propensity for error is one of the biggest current problems preventing them from fulfilling their promise of being more powerful than other types of computers. To improve this, researchers, including a team at Google, are grouping physical qubits together to form “logical qubits” that are much more resilient to errors.
Using Willow, the team showed that as logical qubits get larger, they become more error-proof, with about half as many errors as the physical qubits that make up logical qubits. Furthermore, when the size of the logical qubit was approximately doubled, the error rate was further halved. In this way, Google researchers believe they can continue to increase the number of qubits, making quantum computers larger and larger and capable of performing increasingly greater calculations than previously trending. Threshold reached.
“In my opinion, this is a distinctive result, and although we are still far from demonstrating a practical quantum computer, it is an important and necessary step towards that goal.” Andrew Cleland at the University of Chicago.
Martin Wides Researchers at the University of Glasgow in the UK say their work points the way towards building quantum computers that are “fault tolerant” – quantum computers that can find and correct all errors. Although challenges remain, he says these advances pave the way for innovative applications in quantum chemistry, such as cryptography and machine learning, as well as drug discovery and materials design.
The increased focus on error correction in academic labs and across the burgeoning quantum computing industry has made advances in logical qubits a key point of comparison for today's best quantum computers. In 2023, a team of researchers from Harvard University and the startup QuEra set a record for the most logical qubit ever created using a qubit made from cryogenic rubidium atoms. did. Earlier this year, researchers at Microsoft and Atom Computing linked a record number of logical qubits through quantum entanglement.
Google's approach is different. Because instead of maximizing the number of single logical qubits, the focus is on making single logical qubits bigger and better. “We could have split the chip into even smaller logical qubits and run the algorithm, but we really wanted to reach this threshold. all challenges exist [of quantum computing] ,” says Kelly.
But ultimately, the biggest test of Willow's impact will be the goal that all other quantum computers also pursue: reliably computing things that are useful but impossible for classical computers. The question will be whether it can be achieved. Neven said Sycamore was already used for scientific discoveries such as quantum physics, but the team is setting its sights on more real-world applications with Willow. “We are moving toward new calculations and simulations that could not be performed on classical computers.”
Paul Moseley/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service (via Getty Images)
Data centers could contribute to an estimated 600,000 asthma cases and 1,300 premature deaths per year by 2030 as data centers consume even more energy to meet the intensive computing needs of artificial intelligence. It accounts for more than one-third of annual asthma deaths in the United States.
“Public health impacts are direct and tangible impacts on people, and these impacts are significant and not limited to the narrow areas in which data centers operate.” Ren Xiaolei At the University of California, Riverside. “They affect people all over the country.”
Including Len and his colleagues Adam Wierman Caltech researchers based these estimates on data centers' projected power demands, which generate additional emissions and contribute to air pollution. Researchers say, for example, the electricity usage required to train a large-scale AI model can generate air pollutants equivalent to more than 10,000 round trips in a passenger car between Los Angeles and New York City. It is said that there is a sex.
To model the effects of these air pollution and emissions, researchers tool Provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They estimated that nationally, total public health costs for data centers could exceed $20 billion by 2030. This is about twice the public health burden of the U.S. steel industry and could rival the health effects of exhaust fumes from tens of millions of cars in the largest countries. US states such as California.
Energy-intensive computing centers are already impacting public health. Researchers found that gas generators used as backup power for a facility in Virginia's Data Center Alley already caused 14,000 asthma symptoms per year, with generator emissions of just 10% per year. We estimate that it could impose public health costs of $220 million to $300 million. Cents at the level permitted by state authorities. At the maximum allowable level, total public health costs could increase tenfold, estimated at $2 billion or $3 billion annually. These problems not only affect local residents, but also people in states as far away as Florida.
“Technology company [that operate] Data centers largely fail to include air pollutant standards in their sustainability reports, despite clear public health impacts, and data centers must self-regulate what they should report. cannot be determined. ” julie bolthouse at the Piedmont Environmental Council, a Virginia nonprofit.
Some high-tech companies rushing to build data centers are supporting low-emission energy sources, funding the construction of renewable energy projects, and investing in both conventional nuclear power plants and new reactor technology. There are some places where there are. But for now, many data centers still rely heavily on fossil fuel electricity such as natural gas, and previous research has predicted that by 2030, data centers will be roughly equivalent to one state in the United States and another in California. It has been suggested that this could increase gas demand.
“The questions about the impact of artificial intelligence and data center computing on health are important,” he says. benjamin lee at the University of Pennsylvania. He called the paper “the first to estimate and quantify these costs in dollar terms,” but the underlying approximations and assumptions behind the specific numbers remain to be determined by additional research. He also warned that it needed to be verified.
This year was the second hottest year on record in the Arctic, according to a new report from NOAA.
The authors said the tundra has become a carbon source rather than a carbon sink.
The North Pole is heating much faster than lower altitude locations because melting ice reflects less radiation back into space.
The Arctic just experienced its second warmest year on record. And worryingly, the region's tundra is transitioning from a carbon sink to a carbon emitter as permafrost thaws and methane is released.
This would only increase the amount of heat-trapping gas entering the atmosphere, paving the way for further global warming.
The findings, shared Tuesday in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Arctic Report Card, show how climate change is disrupting ecosystems and altering the landscape in regions where global warming is most intense.
The Arctic, considered a leading region for the effects of climate change, is heating much faster than lower-altitude locations, depending on the baseline scientists use for comparisons and which geographies they include in their assessments. But that speed is 2-4 times faster. Each of the last nine years in the Arctic has been the hottest on record since 1900.
This dynamic is the result of a phenomenon called arctic amplification. As snow cover and sea ice are lost in the Arctic, more dark-colored water and rocks are revealed. Their dark surfaces reflect less radiation back into space, instead absorbing heat. In addition, ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns increasingly transport heat toward the Earth's poles.
Taken together, that means the Arctic is a fundamentally different place than it was just a decade ago. Twila Moon said.
“The Arctic is in a kind of new regime, not a new normal, of course, but it's definitely different than it was just a few decades ago,” she says.
Overall, the Arctic is becoming a greener landscape with more extreme precipitation, less snow and ice, the report said. As fires in the Arctic send smoke into populated areas, ice melts and sea levels rise, the effects of those changes are becoming increasingly apparent closer to American homes, scientists said.
“These problems aren't just limited to the Arctic; they affect all of us,” says Brendan Rogers, an associate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. .
This year's report includes a detailed explanation of how the carbon cycle in the Arctic is changing. Scientists have been closely watching what happens when permafrost thaws, releasing powerful greenhouse gases as it thaws and decomposes.
“Permafrost regions contain about twice as much carbon as is currently present in the atmosphere, and about three times as much carbon as is contained in the above-ground biomass of forests around the world. There's a lot of carbon out there,” Rogers said.
He added that permafrost areas “have been carbon sinks for thousands of years on average, primarily due to low temperatures and frozen soil.” Carbon sinks, by definition, absorb and capture more carbon dioxide than they emit. But now such areas are instead sources of greenhouse gas emissions, as they dissolve carbon and methane and release it into the atmosphere, Rogers said.
Wildfires also contribute to Arctic emissions. Last year's wildfires burned more than twice as much area in the region as the year before, and produced more emissions than Canada's economic activity.
Rogers said Canada's total wildfire emissions are “roughly three times the emissions from all other sectors in Canada.” “This is more than the annual emissions of any other country except China, the United States, India and Russia.”
Temperature records are organized by Arctic water year, so the most recent records are from October 2023 to September 2024. Every September, scientists measure the extent of Arctic sea ice at its seasonal minimum.
This year's sea ice was the sixth lowest in the 45 years since satellite measurements began. Sea ice extent has decreased by about 50% since the 1980s. Meanwhile, the Arctic tundra is the second greenest since records began in 2000, indicating more shrubs have taken root and spread into new terrain.
Measurements of Arctic permafrost taken from boreholes drilled beneath the earth's surface show that average temperatures were warmer than in all but one year.
“There are many indicators that consistently show extreme or near-extreme conditions,” Moon said.
Sex in the future is expected to evolve due to technological advancements. While people will continue to engage in sexual activities, the reasons for doing so may change. The focus may shift from procreation through sex to other methods of reproduction, supported by emerging technologies.
In the past, reproduction mainly relied on natural processes like sexual intercourse. However, with the advent of artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization, the landscape of reproduction started changing. Now, with the development of in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) which involves creating eggs and sperm from skin cells, the possibilities are expanding further.
The idea of creating genetic parents from people of any age, including deceased individuals, raises ethical questions. The potential to generate eggs from male skin cells and vice versa could revolutionize reproduction. With advancements like creating embryos from the same person’s eggs and sperm, the concept of multi-parenting emerges, where genetic contributions come from multiple individuals.
Furthermore, the ability to modify fetal DNA through technologies like CRISPR opens up possibilities to prevent genetic diseases in offspring, although concerns about its misuse for enhancing abilities remain.
Technology Development
Artificial wombs are another field of research that could redefine reproduction. The concept of growing fetuses outside the human body challenges traditional pregnancy norms. While advancements in creating artificial wombs could benefit premature babies, the implications for society are vast. From potentially eliminating the need for pregnancy to growing organs like the uterus, the future of reproduction is full of possibilities.
The evolving landscape of reproductive technologies requires careful consideration of ethical implications and safety concerns. While these advancements offer exciting prospects, ensuring the well-being of babies and embryos remains a top priority in utilizing these technologies responsibly.
We know that constant, ongoing stress can have a negative effect on the body, and new research has found that it's particularly linked to weight gain, around the stomach area. We dig deep into its mechanics and suggest some simple adjustments to help calm your mind (and potentially slim down).
forward warp speed
Will faster-than-light travel become possible? Before your Risa vacation begins, you'll need to gain a deeper understanding of quantum behavior and solve some difficult math problems.
Nazca mysteries
Scientists are using artificial intelligence to uncover the mysteries behind the vast paintings and traces left by the Nazca people more than 2,000 years ago.
2024 in science
From new vaccine developments to climate tipping points, this year has given us plenty of reasons to celebrate. But what about the stories that tickled us, shocked us and completely baffled us? Here are some of our favorites from the past 12 months.
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Dark side of the moon:A new study reveals that volcanoes erupted on the far side of the moon much more recently and for a much longer time than previously thought.
False memory:Human memory is malleable. Does that make us vulnerable to false memories?
Q&A: I needed to know everything I didn't know before. This month, we'll discuss: Can we really build an elevator to space? Why do polar bears have dark skin? What is it?Exactly Does a water filter filter? What are the chances of encountering falling space junk? Do animals dream during hibernation? And…
The Hubble team has released a striking new image of the center of NGC 5643, a spectacularly designed spiral galaxy in the constellation Lupus.
This Hubble image shows NGC 5643, the Grand Design Spiral in the constellation Lupus, about 55 million light-years away. Image credits: NASA / ESA / Hubble / A. Riess / D. Thilker / D. De Martin, ESA & Hubble / M. Zamani, ESA & Hubble.
NGC5643 It is located approximately 55 million light years away in the constellation Lupus.
The planet, also known as ESO 272-16 and LEDA 51969, was discovered by James Dunlop on May 10, 1826.
NGC 5643 is classified as a Grand Design Spiral due to its prominent and graceful spiral arm.
It is approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter and contains an active galactic nucleus of type Seyfert 2.
“NGC 5643 is what is known as a Grand Design Spiral, which refers to how the galaxy's two large, sinuous spiral arms are clearly visible,” Hubble astronomers said in a statement.
“The spiral arms are defined by bright blue stars, lacy reddish-brown dust clouds, and pink star-forming regions.”
“As fascinating as the galaxy is at visible wavelengths, some of NGC 5643's most interesting features are invisible to the human eye.”
New images of NGC 5643 consist of observations from. Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 Found in the ultraviolet, infrared, and optical portions of the spectrum.
Nine filters were used to sample different wavelengths. Color is obtained by assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.
“The ultraviolet images, X-ray images, and spectra of NGC 5643 show that this galaxy has an active galactic nucleus, a particularly bright galactic nucleus driven by a feast of supermassive black holes,” the astronomers said. said.
“When a supermassive black hole takes in gas from its surroundings, it collects in a disk and heats it up to hundreds of thousands of degrees.”
“Superheated gases glow brightly across the electromagnetic spectrum, but especially at X-ray wavelengths.”
“However, NGC 5643's active galactic nucleus is not the brightest X-ray source in the galaxy,” the researchers added.
“Researchers using ESA's XMM Newton discovered an even brighter X-ray emitting object called NGC 5643 X-1 on the outskirts of the galaxy.”
“What source of X-rays is more powerful than a supermassive black hole? Surprisingly, the answer appears to be a much smaller black hole.”
“The exact identity of NGC 5643 X-1 is not yet known, but evidence points to it being a black hole with about 30 times the mass of the Sun.”
“A black hole trapped in an orbital dance with a companion star captures gas from the companion star, creating a superheated disk above the center of the galaxy.”
Hubble astronomers previously released images of NGC 5643 in 2020.
Planetary researcher Tereza Konstantinou and colleagues at the University of Cambridge examined the chemical composition of Venus’s atmosphere and found that the planet’s interior today is too dry to support oceans on its surface. I reasoned that it wasn’t. Rather, Venus is thought to have been a scorching and harsh world throughout its history.
This composite image taken by JAXA’s Akatsuki spacecraft shows Venus. Image credit: JAXA / ISAS / DARTS / Damia Bouic.
From a distance, Venus and Earth look like siblings. It is a rocky planet, about the same size as Earth.
But up close, Venus is more like its evil twin. Venus is covered in thick clouds of sulfuric acid, and its surface has an average temperature of nearly 500 degrees Celsius.
Despite these extreme conditions, astronomers have wondered for decades whether Venus once had a liquid ocean capable of supporting life, or whether some mysterious form is now hidden within its thick clouds. I have been investigating whether there are “airborne” life forms.
“Until we send a probe at the end of this decade, we won’t know if Venus could support life, or if it actually could support life,” Constantineau said.
“However, given that Venus likely did not have an ocean, it is unlikely that Venus could have supported Earth-like life that required liquid water.”
When looking for life elsewhere in the galaxy, astronomers focus on planets orbiting their host stars within the habitable zone. There, temperatures are such that liquid water can exist on the planet’s surface.
Venus provides strong constraints on where this habitable zone exists around the star.
“Despite being our closest planet, Venus is important for exoplanet science because it allows us to explore planets at the edge of the habitable zone that have evolved quite differently than us. Because it gives us a unique opportunity,” Constantinou said.
A dichotomous climate pathway for Venus is proposed. Image credit: Konstantinou others., doi: 10.1038/s41550-024-02414-5.
There are two main theories about how conditions on Venus have evolved since its formation 4.6 billion years ago.
First, surface conditions on Venus were once warm enough for liquid water to exist, but a runaway greenhouse effect caused by widespread volcanic activity has caused Venus to become increasingly hot. is.
The second theory is that Venus was born at such a high temperature that liquid water could not condense on its surface.
“Both of these theories are based on climate models, but we wanted to take a different approach based on observations of Venus’s current atmospheric chemistry,” Constantinou said.
“To keep Venus’s atmosphere stable, the chemicals that are removed from the atmosphere must also be replaced, because the interior and exterior of Venus are constantly in chemical communication with each other.”
The researchers calculated the current rate of destruction of water, carbon dioxide, and carbonyl sulfide molecules in Venus’s atmosphere, which must be repaired by volcanic gases to keep the atmosphere stable.
Volcanic activity provides a window into the interiors of rocky planets like Venus through the supply of gases into the atmosphere.
As magma rises from the mantle to the surface, it releases gases from deep within the planet.
Since the Earth’s interior is rich in water, volcanic eruptions on Earth produce mostly water vapor.
However, based on the composition of the volcanic gases needed to maintain Venus’s atmosphere, scientists have found that Venus’s volcanic gases are at most 6% water.
These dry eruptions suggest that Venus’s interior, the source of the magma that releases volcanic gases, is also dry.
By the end of this decade, NASA’s DAVINCI mission will be able to test and confirm whether Venus has always been an arid and inhospitable planet by sending a series of flybys and probes to the surface. Dew.
The results could help astronomers narrow their search for planets capable of supporting life in orbits around other stars in the galaxy.
“If Venus was habitable in the past, that means other planets we have already discovered may also be habitable,” Constantineau says.
“Instruments like NASA/ESA/CSA’s James Webb Space Telescope are ideal for studying the atmospheres of planets close to their host stars, like Venus.”
“But if Venus was never habitable, Venus-like planets elsewhere are less likely to have habitable conditions or candidates for life.
“We wanted to know that Venus was once a planet much closer to ours, so it’s sad in a way to find out that it wasn’t, but in the end it turned out that most of it was a planet closer to Earth. It would be more profitable to focus our exploration on planets that could probably support life, at least life as we know it. ”
of study Published in this month’s magazine natural astronomy.
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T. Constantinou others. The arid interior of Venus, constrained by atmospheric chemistry. Nat Astronpublished online on December 2, 2024. doi: 10.1038/s41550-024-02414-5
This article is based on a press release provided by the University of Cambridge.
The spiral arm of Messier 83, one of the most prominent spiral galaxies in the night sky, exhibits a high rate of star formation, with six supernovae observed, according to astronomers at NSF’s NOIRLab.
This DECam image shows the spiral galaxy Messier 83. Image credits: CTIO / NOIRLab / DOE / NSF / AURA / TA Chancellor, University of Alaska Anchorage & NSF NOIRLab / D. de Martin, NSF NOIRLab / M. Zamani, NSF NOIRLab.
Messier 83 is located approximately 15 million light-years away in the southern constellation Hydra.
The galaxy, also known as the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, M83, NGC 5236, LEDA 48082, and UGCA 366, has a diameter of about 50,000 light-years, making it about twice smaller than the Milky Way.
With an apparent magnitude of 7.5, it is one of the brightest spiral galaxies in the night sky. May is the best month to observe with binoculars.
Messier 83 is oriented almost completely face-on from Earth, meaning astronomers can observe its spiral structure in great detail.
This galaxy is a prominent member of a group of galaxies known as the Centaurus A/M83 group, which also counts dusty NGC 5128 and irregular galaxy NGC 5253 as members.
It was discovered on February 23, 1752 by French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille.
“Between 1750 and 1754, the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille studied the night sky with the purpose of determining distances to planets,” NOIRLab astronomers said.
“During this period, he observed and cataloged 10,000 stars and identified 42 nebular objects, including Messier 83, which he discovered during an expedition to the Cape of Good Hope in 1752.”
“In 1781, Charles Messier added it to his famous catalog and described it as a ‘starless nebula’, reflecting the limited knowledge of galaxies at the time.”
“It wasn’t until the 20th century, thanks to the work of Edwin Hubble, that astronomers realized that objects like Messier 83 were actually in another galaxy far outside the Milky Way.”
New images of Messier 83 dark energy camera (DECam), mounted on NSF’s Victor M. Blanco 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tororo Inter-American Observatory, a program of the NSF NOIRLab.
“This image shows Messier 83’s distinct spiral arms filled with clouds of pink hydrogen gas where new stars are forming,” the astronomers said.
“Interspersed between these pink regions are bright blue clusters of hot young stars whose ultraviolet radiation has blown away the surrounding gas.”
“At the center of the galaxy, a yellow central bulge is made up of old stars, and weak bars connect spiral arms through the center, funneling gas from the outer regions toward the center.”
“DECam’s high sensitivity captures Messier 83’s extended halo and the countless more distant galaxies in the background.”
“Just as Messier 83 is filled with millions of newly formed stars, this galaxy is also home to many dying stars,” they added.
“Over the past century, astronomers have witnessed a total of six stellar explosions called supernovae in Messier 83. Only two other galaxies can match this number.”
In 2006, astronomers discovered a mysterious feature at the center of Messier 83.
“At the center of this galaxy, we discovered a never-before-seen concentration of mass similar to a secondary nucleus, likely the remains of another galaxy being consumed by Messier 83 in an ongoing collision. , likely the same collision that caused the starburst activity,’ the researchers said.
“The two nuclei, which likely contain the black hole, are expected to coalesce into a single nucleus in another 60 million years.”
These asteroids are as small as 10 meters in diameter, making them the smallest asteroids ever observed in the major asteroid belt.
Artist Webb's illustration reveals clusters of main-belt decameter asteroids in infrared light. Image credit: Ella Mall/Julian de Wit.
The discovery of asteroids is essential to planetary defense efforts aimed at preventing collisions with Earth, such as the frequent megaton explosions caused by decameter impactors.
Large asteroids (=>100 km) remain in the main belt since their formation, while smaller asteroids are typically transported into the near-Earth object (NEO) population.
“We were able to detect NEOs very close to Earth, up to 10 meters in size,” said MIT researcher Dr. Artem Brudanov.
“We now have a way to discover these small asteroids when they are far away, so we can do more precise trajectory tracking, which is important for planetary defense.”
For this study, astronomers used data from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to search for small asteroids.
Coincidentally, asteroids orbiting the main asteroid belt are much brighter in infrared wavelengths than in visible wavelengths, making them much easier to detect with Webb's infrared capabilities.
Researchers were able to discover eight known asteroids in the main asteroid belt.
Further investigation subsequently discovered 138 new asteroids around the belt, all within a few tens of meters in diameter, making them the smallest main-belt asteroids ever detected. .
They think several asteroids may be on their way to becoming NEOs, and one of them is probably the Trojans, or Jupiter-tracking asteroids.
“We thought we would only detect a few new objects, but we detected far more objects than we expected, especially small ones,” said Professor Julian de Witt of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“This is an indication that we are exploring a new population regime, where many more small objects are formed by a chain of collisions that very efficiently disintegrates asteroids smaller than about 100 meters. It will be done.”
“This is a completely new and unexplored territory that we are entering, thanks to modern technology,” said Dr. Brudanov.
“This is a great example of what we can do as a field when we look at data from a different perspective. Sometimes the benefits can be huge, and this is one of them.”
“The statistics of these very small main-belt asteroids are very important for modeling asteroid populations,” said Dr. Miroslav Broz, a researcher at Charles University in Prague.
In fact, these are debris ejected during the impact of larger, kilometer-sized asteroids, which are observable and often exhibit similar orbits around the sun, placing them in a “family” of asteroids. Can be grouped. ”
“We never expected that we could use state-of-the-art exoplanet observations to achieve such impactful solar system bonus science,” said Dr. Michael Guillon, a researcher at the University of Liège.
ESA researcher Dr Marco Micheli said: “Thanks to the web, we can now discover these small asteroids even when they are located far from Earth, allowing us to make more accurate orbit determinations. “This is extremely important for planetary defense.” Near Earth Object Coordination Center.
of the team paper Published in today's magazine nature.
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AY Brudanov others. JWST sighting of a 10-meter main belt asteroid and views on the meteorite source. naturepublished online on December 9, 2024. doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-08480-z
New Zealand paleontologists have discovered a partial skeleton. platypterygoid ichthyosaur It dates back to the Cretaceous period.
a pair of Platypterygius sp. Image credit: Dmitry Bogdanov / CC BY 3.0.
“Ichthyosaurs are a clade of secondary aquatic marine reptiles that lived in the oceans for much of the Mesozoic, first appearing in the Early Triassic and eventually becoming part of the Cenomanian.'' It became extinct at the Turonian border.”
“Cretaceous ichthyosaurs were once thought to be a group with low diversity and disparity, the result of a long-term decline since the Jurassic.”
“However, recent studies have produced a growing body of evidence that Cretaceous ichthyosaurs were much more diverse than previously thought.”
“Ichthyosaur fossils were first recorded in New Zealand by von Haast in 1861 from Pott Mountain in the central South Island,” they added.
“Over the next 150 years, ichthyosaur fossil material was recovered from the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods.”
The new New Zealand ichthyosaur was discovered in the Coverham area at the northern end of the Waiau Toa/Clarence Valley.
The specimen is a disarticulated partial skeleton preserved in a tubercle.
Its origins date back to 98 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, about 4 million years before ichthyosaurs finally became extinct.
“This material comes from the condensate that was discovered.” on site “It lies within the Swale Silt Formation of the Split Rock Formation, a siliciclastic unit deposited during the Cenomanian period and found throughout southern Marlborough and northernmost Canterbury on New Zealand's South Island,” the paleontologists said.
“All Cretaceous ichthyosaur material ever described in New Zealand comes from the North Island.”
This specimen is the most completely preserved ichthyosaur known from New Zealand.
It has a well-preserved pelvis and dorsal fin, adding to the known data set of these elements, which are poorly preserved in Cretaceous species.
“Although the specimen is too fragmentary to be formally named, this taxon has an extremely reduced basioccipital extracondylar area, a scapula with a prominent acromion process and a strap-like scapular shaft, and A complete left pelvic girdle with an elongated depression “located on the anteroproximal aspect of the ischium” is shown, the researchers said.
They suggest that it is a late-diverging member of the platypterygian ichthyosaurs and is closely related to East Gondwanan species. Platypterygius australis and many European Cretaceous ichthyosaurs.
However, it appears to be unrelated to the Cretaceous ichthyosaurs of western Gondwana, suggesting potential regionalism in the Cretaceous ichthyosaur populations of Gondwana.
“New Zealand ichthyosaurs add to the known diversity of Gondwanan-Cretaceous ichthyosaurs, and suggest that ichthyosaur populations were distributed regionally, rather than internationally, near the margins of Cretaceous Gondwana. “This may indicate that,” the scientists concluded.
of findings will appear in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
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George R.A. Young others. A platyptera ichthyosaur from the Cenomanian region of central New Zealand. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontologypublished online October 30, 2024. doi: 10.1080/02724634.2024.2408391
Don’t panic! Disease X doesn’t exist yet, but it might someday. Disease Coined in 2017, the term can be used to mean a newly discovered pathogen or a known pathogen with newly acquired pandemic potential. According to the latter definition, covid-19 was the first disease X. However, in the future another disease may appear.
Why are people talking about it now?
The World Health Organization is warning world leaders about the risk of future pandemics at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. “Some people say this could cause panic,” says WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “No. It’s happened so many times in our history that it’s better to anticipate what might happen and be prepared for it.”
What will be the next disease, X?
We don’t know – that’s why it’s called Disease X. Coronaviruses, a large group of viruses, have long been seen as prime candidates for causing new pandemics, even before the COVID-19 outbreak. That’s because the new coronavirus was not the first dangerous pathogen in this group. In 2002, another coronavirus began to spread in China. It caused a type of pneumonia called SARS, which killed about one in 10 people who contracted it, before being stopped by strict infection control measures. Another more deadly coronavirus, called MERS, occasionally occurs and causes pneumonia that kills one in three people infected. However, recent research suggests that it will be more difficult for SARS and MERS to cause new pandemics. This is because almost everyone in the world now has antibodies against the virus that causes Covid-19, and these have partial resistance to most other pathogens in the coronavirus family. This is because it seems to provide protection.
Are there any other candidates with pandemic potential?
Many diseases, some well-known and some less well-known, can pose a global threat. Influenza strains have caused several global pandemics in the past, including the 1918 Spanish flu, one of the deadliest diseases in history. A highly virulent avian influenza virus is currently sweeping the world, and birds can sometimes infect mammals. causing mass deaths. Just this week, he was named as the culprit behind the deaths of 17,000 baby elephant seals in Argentina last October. There are other sources of infection, including Ebola, which causes severe bleeding, and Zika, a virus transmitted by mosquitoes that can cause babies to have smaller heads if infected during pregnancy. WHO updated its report List of pathogens with the highest pandemic potential In 2022.
What can be done to stop disease X?
There’s some good news. The COVID-19 pandemic may have made it easier to stop future Disease X outbreaks. COVID-19 has spurred the development of new vaccine designs, including vaccines that can be quickly reused to target new pathogens. For example, this has led to the emergence of mRNA-based vaccines. The formula contains a short piece of genetic material that causes the body’s immune cells to produce the coronavirus “spike” protein, but it can be updated to allow the cells to mass-produce a different protein by simply rewriting the mRNA sequence. There is a possibility that it can be done.
Is there anything else I can do to fight disease X?
Mr Tedros said countries needed better early warning systems for emerging diseases and health services needed to be more resilient to unexpected spikes in demand. “When hospitals exceed capacity, [with covid]we lost a lot of people because we couldn’t manage them. There wasn’t enough space and there wasn’t enough oxygen. ” Tedros said health services must be able to scale up response capacity on demand to avoid the same thing happening when Disease X occurs. Fortunately, they can make such preparations without knowing exactly what disease X is. “Disease X is a placeholder,” he says. “You can prepare for any illness.”
Researchers trained artificial intelligence model to measure people's age from brain scans
Laboratory/Alamy
The abundance of 13 types of proteins in the blood appears to be a strong indicator of how quickly the brain is aging. This suggests that blood tests could one day help people track and even improve their brain health.
Most previous studies have looked at protein markers of brain aging in the blood. Less than 1000 peoplesay nicolas seyfried from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, was not involved in the new study.
To get a broader idea of the effects of these proteins, Liu Weishi Researchers from Fudan University in China analyzed MRI brain scan data from around 11,000 adults (approximately 50 to 80 years old at the time of the images) who took part in the UK Biobank project.
Liu's team trained an artificial intelligence model using data from 70% of the participants to determine features of brain images, such as the size of different brain regions and how different parts are connected to each other. The age of the participants was predicted based on When the model was applied to the remaining 30% of participants, its predictions were accurate to within 2.7 years of their actual age.
The researchers then used the model to predict the age of another group of about 4,700 people, with an average age of 63, who also underwent brain imaging for UK Biobank. The researchers calculated the difference between these participants' actual ages and their AI-predicted ages, called the brain age gap. “The higher the age predicted by the AI compared to the actual age, the faster the brain ages,” Liu says.
The group also provided blood samples around the same time as the brain imaging. From this, the research team identified eight proteins that appear to increase in abundance as brain age increases, and five proteins that appear to decrease in abundance.
In an analysis of data from previous studies, researchers confirmed that these proteins are produced by brain cells and that their levels can influence the risk of dementia and stroke.
This suggests that blood tests for these proteins may reveal how quickly the brain ages. “These markers may be canaries in the coal mine that say, 'Hey, look, let's start doing interventions that slow brain aging while there's still plenty of time,'” Seyfried said.
But for this to be helpful, we need to know that these proteins can change with lifestyle changes. “If I run this much, I'll lose this much weight, if I change my diet, [then] We can correct these levels and bring them back into normal range,” Seyfried says.
Because the study was conducted primarily among wealthy white people, Seyfried said more research is needed to see if the results hold true for other populations with more diverse ethnicities and income levels.
The research team now hopes to conduct studies in animals to determine exactly how the 13 proteins affect the brain. For example, researchers might test whether disrupting levels of these proteins affects cognition or even the development of neurodegenerative conditions, Liu says. “In the coming decades, this could open up ways to target proteins to slow aging and disease.”
IBM optical module prototype for connecting chips with optical fibers
IBM’s Ryan Rabin
Fiber optic technology helps chips communicate with each other at the speed of light, allowing them to transmit 80 times more information than using traditional electrical connections. This could significantly reduce the training time required for large-scale artificial intelligence models from months to weeks, while also reducing data center energy and emissions costs.
Most cutting-edge computer chips still communicate using electrical signals transmitted over copper wires. But as the tech industry rushes to train AI models at scale, a process that requires networks of AI superchips to transfer large amounts of data, companies are using fiber optic speed-of-light communications to link chips together. I am very passionate about this.
This technology is not new. The Internet already relies on undersea fiber-optic cables that stretch thousands of kilometers between continents. But to transmit data between fingernail-sized chips, companies need to connect as many hair-thin optical fibers as possible to the end of each chip.
“As everyone knows, the best communication technology is fiber optics. That’s why fiber optics is used everywhere for long-distance communications.” Mukesh Khare A preview of the technology was given at a press conference at IBM Research. “This co-packaged optical innovation essentially brings the power of fiber optics to the chip itself.”
Khare and his colleagues have developed an optical module that allows chipmakers to add six times more optical fibers to the edge of a chip than with current technology. This module uses a structure called an optical waveguide to connect 51 optical fibers per millimeter. It also prevents optical signals from one fiber from interfering with adjacent fibers.
“What IBM has really done here is take advantage of all of its materials and packaging technology, its history of leadership in that field, to truly break down the way waveguides can be used to achieve high-density optical fiber. “It’s about doing it,” he says. dan hutchison at TechInsights, a semiconductor technology research company headquartered in Canada. “For me, when I saw this, it was a big step forward.”
The result is enhanced chip-to-chip communication, potentially allowing AI developers to train large language models in less than three weeks instead of three months. Switching from wires to fiber optics for chip communications could also mean cutting energy costs for training such AI models by a factor of five.
IBM has already put its optical modules through stress tests that include high humidity and temperatures ranging from -40°C (-40°F) to 125°C (257°F). Hutcheson expects large semiconductor manufacturing companies may be interested in licensing the technology.
“We are in the early days of all of this, but semiconductor technology is the hottest area right now in terms of high-performance computing and AI technology,” he says.
It’s not just called go juice. Caffeine is the most popular performance-enhancing drug in the world. It’s not a nutrient, but a drug, and it’s the most widely consumed psychoactive stimulant by humanity.
In the UK, 98 million cups of coffee are consumed every day. Apart from kickstarting your morning, it has been shown to enhance motor skills like muscle strength and endurance, as well as cognitive skills such as attention, reading speed, and problem-solving abilities.
“There’s a long list of substances believed to enhance performance,” says James Betts, Professor of Metabolic Physiology at the University of Bath. “But I would put caffeine at the top of that list because its effects are so powerful and consistent, affecting almost every tissue in the body.”
Fun fact: Coffee beans are actually seeds from the fruit of the coffee tree – Credit: Sam Brewster
These effects are driven by a diverse biology. Caffeine stimulates the nervous system, increases adrenaline, reduces fatigue, promotes fat burning for energy, and helps conserve glycogen stores, thus improving endurance.
Additionally, it blocks adenosine receptors, a neurotransmitter promoting sleep. This is why coffee makes us feel alert and energized. However, excessive caffeine consumption can lead to irritability, anxiety, and insomnia.
It’s important to time your caffeine intake correctly for optimal effects. Research by Betts suggests that consuming strong coffee after a night of poor sleep can impair blood sugar control over time.
Poor blood sugar control can increase the risk of diseases like type 2 diabetes and heart disease, emphasizing the importance of strategic caffeine consumption.
For improved performance during workouts or activities, Betts recommends consuming coffee 45 to 60 minutes before starting. The effects of caffeine are long-lasting, lasting up to one to two hours in heavy consumers and four to six hours in moderate consumers.
In the 16th century, coffee was banned in Mecca because it was believed to stimulate radical thinking – Photo credit: Getty
While caffeine can enhance cognitive tasks, excessive consumption can lead to poor academic performance due to disrupted sleep quality and daytime sleepiness.
Overall, Betts believes caffeine consumption, especially in the morning, is beneficial for waking up and functioning well throughout the day. It has been linked to preventing various diseases and promoting a healthy, active lifestyle.
About our experts
James Betts is a Professor of Metabolic Physiology at the University of Bath with expertise in nutrition, exercise, and metabolism.
The impacts of climate change are widespread, ranging from biodiversity loss to extreme weather events, rising sea levels, wildfires, and mass human migrations. Each year reveals more about our impact on the environment, with some discoveries more surprising than others.
One of the most shocking revelations to join this list is the recent discovery that our greenhouse gas emissions are altering the Earth’s rotation.
As a result, Earth days are gradually becoming longer, potentially leading to significant changes in how we experience time in the future.
“It’s fascinating how our actions as humans can have such a profound impact on the entire planet through the extensive climate change we’ve triggered over the last century,” says Professor Benedict Soja, a scientist at ETH Zurich who contributed to uncovering this concerning trend.
“This effect may surpass previous significant influences on Earth’s rotation.”
Could we see more hours in a day?
We are familiar with the greenhouse effect, where gases like carbon dioxide trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to a rise in temperatures.
Last year, global temperatures were 1.18 degrees Celsius above the 20th-century average, approaching the 1.5 degrees Celsius target set in 2015 as a limit to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
Record melting of Swiss glaciers in 2022 – Credit: Getty Images
The primary consequence of this warming is the melting of large ice areas in the Arctic and Antarctic, with Switzerland losing 10% of its glacier mass in the last two years, Antarctica shedding 150 billion tons of ice annually, and Greenland losing 270 billion tons.
While many are concerned about the impact of this melting on coastal areas, Soja and his team posed a different question: Will this significant mass redistribution likely prevail? What will be its broad-scale impact on the planet? In a recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they provided an answer.
“As the ice melts, the Earth’s mass shifts from the polar regions to the oceans,” Soja explained. “This results in the Earth becoming flatter and more oblate, with its mass moving further from the rotation axis.”
Understanding the Mechanism
Similar to any rotating object, the Earth adheres to the law of momentum conservation. Simply put, momentum must be preserved, and it depends on the moment of inertia and rotational speed. As mass moves away from the rotation axis due to melting ice, the moment of inertia increases.
Therefore, to uphold its momentum despite ice melting, the Earth’s rotation slows down, elongating our days.
Soja likens this concept to a figure skater performing a spin, where extending the arms slows down the rotation, while pulling them in speeds it up.
The study indicated that from 1900 to 2000, the climate’s impact on the length of Earth’s day ranged from 0.3 to 1.0 milliseconds per century. Since 2000, accelerated melting has raised this rate to 1.3 milliseconds per century, with a potential increase to 2.6 milliseconds per century by 2100 if emissions remain unchecked.
While these changes may seem small in our daily lives, they could have significant effects on a globally synchronized technological network.
Considerations on Time Management
Three main timescales play crucial roles in timekeeping: International Atomic Time (TAI), Universal Time (UT1), and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). TAI relies on atomic clocks, UT1 is determined by Earth’s rotation, and UTC synchronizes the two.
Leap seconds were introduced in 1972 to align UTC with UT1 within 0.9 seconds.
Unlike predictable leap years, leap seconds are added irregularly as needed. Since 1972, 27 leap seconds have been added, with the most recent in 2016. Disruptions from leap seconds have caused issues in the digital age, impacting technology companies striving for synchronization.
Atomic clock made in Germany – Credit: Alamy
The recent discovery of Earth’s core slowing down further complicates matters. If the planet’s rotation continues to accelerate, a negative leap second may need to be introduced to UTC. This unprecedented situation poses substantial challenges as systems are unprepared for negative adjustments.
“This has never occurred before, and frankly, I don’t think anyone anticipated it,” Agnew remarked. He compares this scenario to the Y2K scare when concerns about potential computer errors surfaced at the end of the 20th century.
“The critical aspect is that we don’t know the consequences of introducing a negative leap second,” he cautioned. “The negative impacts could be unforeseen.”
According to Agnew, if the effects of climate change had not slowed down, a negative leap second would have been necessary in 2026. “Global warming might postpone negative leap seconds and eliminate their need entirely,” he noted.
While this discovery regarding climate change may offer a positive effect, considering less necessity for negative leap seconds, the implications of further greenhouse gas emissions outweigh any potential benefits. As the situation stands, negative leap seconds may still be required in 2029.
Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the current system?
Agnew proposed a solution to reduce the required precision between timescales, eliminating the need for negative leap seconds and allowing for more predictable positive adjustments.
“It could resemble a leap year. You add a fixed number of seconds at a specific time and accept that it may not be exact but is tolerable,” suggested Agnew.
This proposition aligns with the dominance of slowing over longer timescales, rather than the complex interactions involving Earth’s core or ice melting.
Efforts are reportedly underway to implement this system, with a target to eliminate the need for leap seconds by 2035. However, international agreement hurdles must be overcome. Failure to adapt before requiring a negative leap second could lead to unprecedented chaos, highlighting the urgency of the situation.
Meet the Experts
Benedict Soja: Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geoengineering at ETH Zurich.
Duncan Agnew: Professor Emeritus at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, specializing in crustal deformation measurement and geophysical data analysis.
Homo juruensis Emerging human species, including the mysterious Denisovans and several hominid fossils from Tibet, Taiwan and Laos, lived in East Asia from about 300,000 to 50,000 years ago.
Portrait of a young Denisovan woman based on a skeletal profile reconstructed from ancient DNA methylation maps. Image credit: Maayan Harel.
“Our research uncovered a hominin fossil record that tended to include things that were not easily attributable. homo erectus, homo neanderthalensis or homo sapiens'' said the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. Professor Christopher Bay and Dr. Wu Xiujie from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
“We started this project several years ago, but we never expected that we would be able to propose a new hominin species, and even classify Asian hominid fossils into different groups. In general, this should be useful for scientific communication.”
“This research is important because it will help scientists better understand the complex story of human evolution in Asia and fill gaps in our understanding of our ancient relatives.”
reconstruction of homo floresiensis. Image credit: Elizabeth Danes.
The authors suggest that there are at least four human species. homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis, Homolonghiand the newly established Homo juruensis — Existed in East Asia during the late Quaternary period.
Homo juruensis They lived in East Asia about 300,000 years ago, hunted wild horses in small groups, made stone tools and probably processed animal skins to survive, and disappeared about 50,000 years ago. Ta.
“The field of late Quaternary East Asian paleoanthropology is in the midst of significant and important changes, largely due to the growth of the hominin fossil record, as we look to change these evolutionary models. “This is a major contribution to how we understand and refine this approach,” the researchers said.
“This field in particular was shocked 20 years ago with the publication of this little book. homo floresiensis Fossils discovered on Flores Island, Indonesia in 2004. ”
“Just recently, another small species… Homo luzonensisAn individual living on the island of Luzon in the Philippines has been added as a new hominin. ”
“In China, Homo longhi It was published after the analysis of Harbin fossils. ”
“Fossils like Dali and Jinyushan may be tentatively included.” Homolonghi Similarly, we await further comparative analysis. ”
“More recently, after detailed studies of the Xujiayao and Xuchang fossils, we have added: Homo juruensis to these discussions. ”
Reconstruction of Homolonghi In his habitat. Image credit: Chuang Zhao.
Importantly, along with the Xiahe people, scientists have also assigned the mysterious Denisovans. Penghu CountyTam Ngu Hao 2 fossil, Homo juruensis.
Although further research is clearly needed to verify this relationship, it is primarily based on similarities between jaw and tooth fossils from these different locations.
“The East Asian hominin fossil record is a good example of how unilinear evolutionary models, such as traditional multiregionalism, cannot adequately account for the complexity of the paleoanthropological record, especially in the late Quaternary.” the authors concluded.
“Rather, the East Asian record prompts us to recognize how complex human evolution is more generally, and to revise the interpretations of various evolutionary models to better match the growing fossil record.” , it’s really forcing us to reconsider.”
Their paper Published in a magazine nature communications.
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CJ Bae & X. Wu. 2024. Understanding late Quaternary hominin diversity in East Asia. Nat Commune 15, 9479;doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-53918-7
A long-term US study found that consuming at least 5 servings of dark chocolate per week (1 serving equals a standard chocolate bar/pack or 1 oz) was associated with lower risk of type 2 diabetes compared to infrequent consumption. However, increased milk chocolate intake was associated with increased weight gain.
Consuming dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate may lower your risk of type 2 diabetes. Image credit: Sci.News.
The global prevalence of type 2 diabetes has increased significantly over the past few decades, with an estimated 463 million people affected worldwide in 2019 and projected to rise to 700 million by 2045. I am.
Type 2 diabetes is a multifactorial disease characterized by insulin resistance and impaired insulin secretion, which can lead to a number of serious complications, including cardiovascular disease, kidney failure, and vision loss.
A series of studies has highlighted the importance of lifestyle factors, such as a healthy diet, in the prevention and management of type 2 diabetes.
Higher total dietary flavonoid intake, as well as specific flavonoid subclasses, is associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes.
Randomized controlled trials have shown that these flavonoids exert antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and vasodilatory effects that may benefit cardiometabolism and reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, but the data are inconsistent. It wasn’t.
chocolate made from beans cacao tree (Theobroma cacao)one of the foods with the highest flavanol content and a popular snack around the world.
However, the association between chocolate intake and risk of type 2 diabetes remains controversial due to inconsistent results obtained in observational studies.
For new research, Liu Binkai Researchers at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health combined data from three longitudinal U.S. observational studies of female nurses and male health care workers who had no history of diabetes, heart disease, or cancer at the time of recruitment. .
They investigated type 2 diabetes and total chocolate intake in 192,208 participants and 111,654 participants over an average 25-year monitoring period using food frequency questionnaires completed every 4 years. We analyzed the relationship between chocolate subtype (dark and milk) intake.
Because weight change strongly predicts type 2 diabetes risk, the researchers also used these food questionnaires to assess participants' total energy intake.
In the overall chocolate analysis, 18,862 people developed type 2 diabetes. After adjusting for personal, lifestyle, and dietary risk factors, the authors found that people who ate all types of chocolate at least five times a week were more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those who ate little or no chocolate. We found that the incidence was significantly lower by 10%. .
In the chocolate subtype analysis, 4,771 people developed type 2 diabetes. After adjusting for the same risk factors, those who ate dark chocolate at least five times a week had a 21% significantly lower risk of type 2 diabetes, but there was no significant association with milk chocolate intake. was not found.
Researchers also found that each additional weekly intake of dark chocolate reduced the risk of type 2 diabetes by 3% (dose-response effect).
Increased milk intake was associated with long-term weight gain, but dark chocolate intake was not.
Dark chocolate has similar levels of energy and saturated fat as milk chocolate, but the high levels of flavanols found in dark chocolate reduce the risk of saturated fat and sugar for weight gain and other cardiometabolic diseases such as diabetes. may offset the effects of
“Increased consumption of dark chocolate, but not milk, was associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes,” the scientists said.
“Increased milk intake was associated with long-term weight gain, but dark chocolate intake was not.”
“Further randomized controlled trials are needed to replicate these findings and further investigate the mechanisms.”
Just like iconic duos such as fish and chips, Batman and Robin, and Jack and Jill, humans and dogs have always been destined to be together. But when did this special bond first form? Scientists may have finally discovered the answer.
A recent study led by researchers from the University of Arizona delved into archaeological sites in Alaska, unveiling that the connection between humans and the ancient ancestors of dogs traces back as far as 12,000 years ago.
“This study provides evidence that humans and dogs shared a close relationship in the Americas earlier than previously thought,” stated the lead author of the study, François Lanoe, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. François Lanoe
Initial excavations in 2018 uncovered the lower leg bones of an adult dog dating back 12,000 years in Alaska, shedding light on the close relationship between humans and dogs during that era, especially with signs of possible domestication on the rise.
A more recent excavation in June 2023 unearthed an 8,100-year-old dog jawbone in the same region, providing further evidence of the early human-canid bond. Chemical analysis of the bones revealed evidence of a diet consisting of salmon, suggesting human involvement in the dog’s lifestyle.
While these findings hint at the earliest known relationship between humans and dogs, researchers remain cautious due to the age of the specimens and uncertainties regarding their genetic relation to modern dog populations.
As research continues to unfold, the team hopes to clarify the intricate history behind the companionship between humans and canids, ensuring they are on the right evolutionary path.
The oldest verifiable person in the world is Jeanne Louise Calment, who lived to be 122 years and 164 days old.
It’s incredible to imagine what Calment and today’s supercentenarians (people over 110 years old) have witnessed in their lifetimes. Thinking about what it was like to be a teenager in the 1920s, to have lived through both world wars, to witness the first moon landing in your 50s or 60s, and to still be alive in the 21st century. Please take a look. cent It was centuries ago that we could observe the latest scientific and technological advances unfolding rapidly and dramatically.
Currently, the oldest living person (as of December 2024) is Tomiko Itooka of Japan. She is a healthy 116 years old, far exceeding the average human lifespan. The average life expectancy in the UK is 79 years for men and 82.9 years for women. National Bureau of Statistics. Expectations are a little lower in the US Men are expected to live to age 75 and women to age 80.
Due to different cultural, sanitary, and scientific reasons, life expectancy around the world varies depending on which country you live in and even where you live within that country.
The United Nations estimates that: Average life expectancy worldwide is currently 72.8 years – This is about 9 years longer than people lived in 1990. And if you’re wondering, yes, women live about 5.4 years longer than men on average worldwide (73.8 years vs. 68.4 years).
Who is the oldest person alive today?
As of December 2024, the oldest living person is Tomiko Itooka. She is 116 years old.
She was born in Osaka on May 23, 1908 during the reign of Emperor Meiji. She currently lives in a special nursing home in Ashiya City.
According to Guinness World Records. She played on the volleyball team at school, got married at the age of 20, and had two daughters and two sons. During World War II, she managed the offices of her husband’s textile factory.
Jeanne Louise Calment is the oldest person ever known to be alive. This French woman lived to the ripe old age of 122 years and 164 days. She was born on February 21, 1875 and died on August 4, 1997 at the age of 122.
According to Guinness World Records Carment said she “ate almost 1kg of chocolate every week” and started smoking “from the age of 21, only quitting when she was 117.” She also “sold Van Gogh a painting canvas,” but described Van Gogh as “ugly as sin” and “bad-tempered and smelled of alcohol.”
Jiroemon Kimura – Oldest male
At the time of his death, Jiroemon Kimura had 7 children, 14 grandchildren, 25 great-grandchildren, and 14 great-great-grandchildren – Photo courtesy of Getty
Jiroemon Kimura lived to be 116 years and 54 days old. This Japanese supercentenarian was born on April 19, 1897 and lived until June 12, 2013. Guinness World Records To quote his words: He continued farming until he was 90 years old, saying, “To live a long life, eat light food.”
Lucille Landon – 118
Another French woman, Lucille Landon (see main photo), lived to be 118 years and 340 days old. She was born on February 11, 1904 and passed away on January 17, 2023.
Keon Tanaka – 119
This Japanese woman, who was born on January 2, 1903 and passed away on April 19, 2022, lived to be 119 years and 107 days old.
Miyakochiyo – 117
Another Japanese woman, Chiyo Miyako, was born on May 2, 1901 and lived to be 117 years and 81 days old on July 22, 2018.
Yet another Japanese supercentenarian, Navi Tajima, lived for 117 years and 260 days, from her birth on August 4, 1900 to her death on April 21, 2018.
Violet brown – 117
Next we will head to Jamaica and then Violet Brown. She lived to be 117 years and 189 days old. She was born on March 10, 1900 and passed away on September 15, 2017.
Next up is Emma Martina Luigia Morano. An Italian supercentenarian, she lived to be 117 years old (+137 days), was born on November 29, 1899, and passed away on April 15, 2017.
Maria Brañas Morera – 117
When María Brañas Morera passed away in August 2024 at the age of 117 years and 168 days, she became the eighth-oldest (verifiable age) in history.
According to reports, she was born on March 4, 1907 in San Francisco, California, and lived in Texas and New Orleans until her Spanish family moved back to Catalonia during World War I. Guinness World Records.
She said she lived an “orderly life with great social comfort…a good life without excess.”
Susanna Mushat Jones – 116
Next up is Susanna Mushat Jones from America. She lived to be 116 years and 311 days old, was born on July 6, 1899, and passed away on May 12, 2016.
Geralian Tully – 116
Former world’s oldest person, Geralian Talley, 2015 – Photo courtesy of Getty
Lastly, we have Geralian Talley, who is also from the United States. She lived to be 116 years and 25 days old. She was born on May 23, 1899 and passed away on June 17, 2015.
A massive ice ball plummeting from the sky gives off an apocalyptic vibe rather than signaling a festive white Christmas. Due to climate change, we are witnessing an increase in hailstones larger than a fist descending from above.
A recent analysis of the internal structure of these colossal hailstones has unveiled how they attain such significant size. This breakthrough could assist scientists in predicting hailstorms before they pose a threat.
Hailstones form during storms when raindrops freeze in extremely cold parts of clouds. The particles then grow in size as they descend due to gravity, eventually reaching the Earth.
In a new study, Researchers in Catalonia, an autonomous region in northern Spain, gathered giant hailstones measuring 12 centimeters (4.7 inches) in diameter, equivalent to a soda can in height.
To examine the inside of the hailstones, CT scans were used. While CT scans are commonly used in a medical context to create 3D images of the human body, in this case, a machine borrowed from a dental clinic was utilized to study the structure of the giant ice ball intact.
“We sought a technique that would provide detailed information about the internal layers of the hailstone without damaging the sample,” said senior author Professor Xavier Ubeda from the University of Barcelona. “We were surprised by the clarity of the images we obtained.”
The research team obtained 512 images of the internal structure of a hailstone, known as a “slice,” revealing the density of each layer and illustrating the growth of the hailstones during various stages of the hailstorm.
The study revealed that even the most spherical hailstones have internal irregularities, indicating an absence of a core in the center. Strangely, this was especially true for the nearly perfect-looking sphere, whose center was the most off-center.
Contrary to previous assumptions, researchers found that hailstones do not grow uniformly in every direction.
The hailstones examined were collected after severe thunderstorms in Spain during the summer of 2022, vacuum-packed, and preserved. The hot conditions in Spain during that summer may have intensified the tropical cyclone.
The new findings could aid in predicting similar storms in the future and potentially limiting the damage caused by hail outbreaks.
A team of researchers at Cornell University has created a new class of magnetically controlled microscopic robots (microbots) that operate at the diffraction limit of visible light. These microbots, called diffractive robots, can interact with visible light waves and yet move independently, allowing them to move to specific locations, take images, and measure forces at the scale of the body’s smallest structures. You can.
Diffractive robotics connects untethered robots with imaging techniques that rely on visible light diffraction (the bending of light waves as they pass through an aperture or around something).
Imaging techniques require an aperture with a size comparable to the wavelength of light.
For the optics to work, the robot must be at that scale, and for the robot to reach the target it is imaging, it must be able to move on its own.
The robot is controlled by a magnet that performs a pinching motion, allowing it to move inchworm-like across solid surfaces. The same motion can also be used to “swim” through a fluid.
The combination of maneuverability, flexibility, and sub-diffractive optical technology represents a major advance in the field of robotics.
“A walking robot that is small enough to interact with light and effectively shape it would place a microscope lens directly into the microworld,” said Paul McEwen, a professor at Cornell University.
“We can perform close-up imaging in a way that would never be possible with a regular microscope.”
“These robots are 2 to 5 microns in size. They're tiny. And by controlling the magnetic fields that drive their movement, we can make them do whatever we want them to do.”
“I'm really excited about the fusion of microrobotics and micro-optics,” said Dr. Francesco Monticone of Cornell University.
“The miniaturization of robotics has finally reached a stage where these actuated mechanical systems can interact with and actively shape light on the scale of just a few wavelengths (one millionth of a meter). I did.”
To magnetically drive a robot at this scale, the research team used hundreds of nanometer-scale magnets with two different shapes, long and thin or short and stubby, with the same volume of material to drive the robot. I made it into a pattern.
Professor Itai Cohen of Cornell University says, “Long, thin objects require a larger magnetic field to switch from pointing in one direction to pointing in another direction, whereas short, stubby objects require a larger magnetic field to switch from pointing in one direction to pointing in another direction.'' “Things require smaller magnetic fields.”
“So if you apply a large magnetic field, you can align them all, but if you apply a smaller field, only the short and thick ones will flip.”
To create the robot, the authors combined this principle with a very thin film.
“One of the main challenges for optical engineering was to find the best approach for the three tasks (light conditioning, focusing, and super-resolution imaging) for this particular platform, because “different approaches “There are different performance trade-offs depending on how the microrobots behave,” said Dr. Monticone. “They can move and change shape.”
“There are advantages to being able to mechanically move the diffractive elements to enhance imaging,” Professor Cohen says.
The robot itself can be used as a diffractive grader or a diffractive lens can be added. In this way, the robot can act as a local extension of the microscope lens looking down from above.
The robot measures force using the same magnet-driven pinching motions used to push structures while walking.
“These robots are very compliant springs, so if something pushes on them, it can squeeze them,” Professor Cohen said.
“That changes the diffraction pattern and allows us to measure it very well.”
Force measurements and optical capabilities can be applied to basic research such as exploring the structure of DNA. Or it may be introduced into clinical practice.
“Looking to the future, we can imagine swarms of diffractive microbots walking along the surface of samples to perform super-resolution microscopy and other sensing tasks,” Professor Monticone said.
“I think we have just scratched the surface of what is possible with this new paradigm of combining robotics and optics at the microscale.”
New proof of concept workpublished in a magazine materials horizonpaving the way for self-assembly of more complex electronic devices without relying on existing computer chip manufacturing techniques.
Bottom-up nano-to-microfabrication is of critical importance in modern electronics and optics. However, conventional multiscale array manufacturing techniques face the challenge of reconciling the conflict between the pursuit of better device performance and lower manufacturing costs and/or energy consumption. Chan others. We introduce a facile method for fabricating mixed-metal arrays based on directed self-assembly in which organometallic adducts derived from passivating oxides of ternary liquid metals are polymerized to fabricate mixed-metal wires. Image credit: Julia Chan.
“Existing chip manufacturing techniques involve many steps and rely on highly complex technology, making the process costly and time-consuming,” said Martin Tuo, a professor at North Carolina State University.
“Our self-assembly approach is significantly faster and cheaper.”
“We also demonstrated that this process can be used to tune the bandgap of semiconductor materials and make the materials responsive to light. This means this technique can be used to create optoelectronic devices. ”
“Furthermore, current manufacturing techniques have low yields, resulting in a relatively large number of unusable and defective chips being produced.”
“Our approach is high-yielding, meaning we produce arrays more consistently and with less waste.”
“We call this new self-assembly technique the directed metal-ligand (D-Met) reaction. Here's how it works,” he added.
“We start with liquid metal particles. In our proof-of-concept work, we used field metals, which are alloys of indium, bismuth, and tin.”
“Liquid metal particles are placed next to a mold and can be made into any size or pattern. A solution is then poured into the liquid metal.”
“The solution contains molecules called ligands, which are made up of carbon and oxygen.”
“These ligands collect ions from the surface of the liquid metal and hold them in a specific geometric pattern.”
“The solution flows across the liquid metal particles and is drawn into the mold.”
As the solution flows into the mold, the ion-containing ligands begin to assemble, forming more complex 3D structures.
Meanwhile, the liquid part of the solution begins to evaporate, which causes the complex structures to become more and more tightly packed into the array.
“Without a type, these structures can form somewhat chaotic patterns,” Professor Tusiad says.
“But because solutions are constrained by type, structures form in predictable, symmetrical arrangements.”
“Once the structure reaches the desired size, we remove the mold and heat the array.”
“This heat causes the ligand to decompose, liberating carbon and oxygen atoms.”
“Metal ions interact with oxygen to form semiconducting metal oxides, and carbon atoms form graphene sheets.”
“These components form an ordered structure consisting of semiconducting metal oxide molecules wrapped in graphene sheets.”
Professor Thuo and his colleagues used this technique to create nanoscale and microscale transistors and diodes.
“Graphene sheets can be used to tune the bandgap of a semiconductor, making the semiconductor more or less responsive depending on the quality of the graphene,” said Dr. Julia Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University. Ta.
Additionally, the researchers used bismuth in their proof-of-concept work, which allowed them to create photoresponsive structures.
This allows the authors to use light to manipulate the properties of semiconductors.
“The nature of D-Met technology means that these materials can be manufactured on a large scale, limited only by the size of the molds used,” Professor Thuo said.
“By manipulating the type of liquid used in the solution, the dimensions of the mold, and the rate of evaporation of the solution, we can also control the semiconductor structure.”
“In short, we have shown that highly structured and highly tunable electronic materials can be self-assembled for use in functional electronic devices.”
“This research demonstrated the creation of transistors and diodes.”
“The next step is to use this technology to create more complex devices, such as 3D chips.”
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Julia J. Chan others. guided infinitely Assemble mixed metal oxide arrays from liquid metals. materials horizonpublished online on November 25, 2024. doi: 10.1039/D4MH01177E
This article is a version of a press release provided by North Carolina State University.
Several groups of carnivorous dinosaurs – Tyrannosaurus, Spinosaurus, and their members Velociraptor The family crept into the Bexhill-on-Sea region of present-day East Sussex, England, about 135 million years ago (early Cretaceous period), according to new research.
Early Cretaceous floodplain in southeastern England, 135 million years ago. A spinosaur (center) takes over the carcass of an ornithopod, tormenting smaller tyrannosaurs (left) and dromaeosaurs (bottom right). Image credit: Anthony Hutchings.
Dr Chris Barker, a palaeontologist at the University of Southampton, said: “Carnivorous dinosaurs are rare in the Cretaceous deposits of southern England.”
“Normally it is the Isle of Wight dinosaurs that attract our attention. Little is known about the older Cretaceous specimens recovered from mainland sites.”
In this study, Barker and his colleagues examined assemblages of theropod teeth taken from animals. Wadhurst Clay Formationmainly collected from the Ashdown Brickworks area near Bexhill, East Sussex.
Theropod teeth are complex and vary in size, shape, and serrated edge anatomy.
The authors used several techniques to analyze the fossils, including phylogenetic methods, discriminant methods, and machine learning methods.
“Dinosaur teeth are durable fossils and are typically preserved more frequently than bones, so they are often important when you want to rebuild ecosystem diversity,” Dr. Barker said. .
“There are rigorous methods that help identify teeth with high accuracy.”
“Our findings suggest the presence of spinosaurs, medium-sized tyrannosaurs, and small dromaeosaurs. Velociraptor-There are some theropods in these deposits. ”
A theropod tooth excavated from the Wadhurst Clay Formation. Scale bar – 10 mm. Image credit: Barker others., doi: 10.1002/spp2.1604.
The discovery of Tyrannosaurus is particularly noteworthy. This is because this group has not been previously identified in sediments of this age and region.
These tyrannosaurs would have been about one-third the size of their more famous cousins. tyrannosaurus rexand likely hunted small dinosaurs and other reptiles in floodplain habitats.
“Assigning isolated teeth to a group of theropods can be difficult, especially since many traits evolve independently between different lineages,” says Dr. Lucy Handford. Student at York University.
“Therefore, we employed a variety of methods to refine our findings, leading to a more reliable classification.”
“It is very likely that further discoveries will be made by re-evaluating the theropod teeth elsewhere in the museum.”
Dr Darren Naish, a palaeontologist at the University of Southampton, said: 'Southern England has an extremely good record of Cretaceous dinosaurs, and the various sedimentary layers here are among the world's best in terms of geological age and the fossil content they contain. It's also unique.”
“These East Sussex dinosaurs are older, more mysterious, and less well known than the better-known Cretaceous deposits of the Isle of Wight.”
“We've been hoping to find out for decades which groups of theropods lived here, so the new study's conclusions are really interesting.”
of findings appear in the diary paleontology papers.
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Chris T. Barker others. 2024. Theropod dinosaur diversity of Lower Wealden, England: analysis of the tooth-based fauna of the Wadhurst Clay Formation (Lower Cretaceous: Valanginian) through phylogenetic, discriminant, and machine learning methods. paleontology papers 10 (6): e1604;doi: 10.1002/spp2.1604
According to a new study, higher emotional intelligence is linked to increased emoji use with friends, while avoidant attachment is linked to decreased emoji use with friends, dates, and romantic partners.
The frequency of emoji usage varies by gender and type of relationship. Image credit: Pete Linforth.
Emoji are characters that depict emotions, objects, animals, etc.
Sending alone or with text via computer or smartphone can create more complex meanings during virtual communication.
Assessing how emoji use varies as a function of communication and interpersonal skills provides insight into who uses emoji and the psychological mechanisms underlying computer-mediated communication.
Despite the widespread use of emojis in our daily social lives, little is known about who uses them, apart from evidence of differences related to gender and personality traits.
To fill this knowledge gap, Dr. Simon Dube of the Kinsey Institute and his colleagues surveyed a sample of 320 adults to determine their emotional intelligence across emoji usage, attachment style, and gender and relationship type.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to process and manage your own and others’ emotions. Attachment style refers to the pattern of how an individual interacts with others in intimate relationships, influenced by early interactions with primary caregivers.
These styles are divided into three main types: anxious, avoidant, and secure attachment.
Both anxious and avoidant attachment styles indicate that a child does not feel secure with their primary caregiver.
In contrast, children with a secure attachment style tend to be enthusiastic when reunited with their caregivers after a short period of separation.
The results revealed that people with higher emotional intelligence and secure attachment may use emojis more frequently.
For women, higher levels of attachment avoidance were associated with lower frequency of sending and receiving emojis with friends, partners, and romantic partners.
For men, higher levels of attachment avoidance were associated with sending fewer emojis to such partners.
Additionally, women used more emojis than men, but this difference was specific to interactions with friends and family.
One limitation of this study is that most of the participants were white, educated, married, English-speaking, heterosexual, living in the United States at the time.
However, the authors say the study opens up new research avenues at the intersection of psychology, computer-mediated communication, and the study of attachment and emotional intelligence.
The researchers state, “How we interact during virtual communication may reveal something more about ourselves.”
“It’s more than just a smiley face or a heart emoji. It’s a way to convey meaning and communicate more effectively, and how you use it can tell us something about you.”
a paper Survey results will be published in a magazine PLoS ONE.
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S. Dube others. 2024. Beyond words: The relationship between emoji use, attachment style, and emotional intelligence. PLoS ONE 19 (12): e0308880;doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0308880
By 2023, the number of low-altitude clouds will have decreased dramatically.
Busa Photo/Getty Images
Changes in cloud cover may be the reason global temperatures have exceeded climate model predictions over the past two years.
Temperature records were broken repeatedly in 2023 and 2024, with average temperatures in both years about 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Climate change and El Niño weather patterns are partly to blame, but neither factor can completely explain the unusually warm weather.
Researchers now think the answer lies in a sharp decline in low-lying cloud cover in 2023. This change reduced Earth’s albedo, the planet’s ability to reflect solar radiation back into space, causing temperatures to rise.
Earth’s albedo has been decreasing since the 1970s. This is mainly due to the melting of polar ice sheets, which help reflect sunlight back into space. However, when analyzing satellite data, helge gosling and his colleagues at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute have revealed that the planet’s albedo in 2023 hit an all-time low.
Goessling and his colleagues then used a combination of weather observations and modeling to understand the cause of this decline, and found that the number of low-lying clouds decreased sharply in 2023. This change was particularly noticeable in the Atlantic Ocean. 2023 saw the most unusual temperature extremes.
“We were able to show where the clouds were actually changing and at what altitude in the atmosphere,” Gosling said. “It’s really surprising that this reduction in cloud cover is occurring primarily in the lower levels.”
The findings could explain an additional 0.2°C of heat loss that scientists have struggled to account for, once background climate change and the effects of El Niño in 2023 are added up. “This is another piece of the puzzle, but I think it’s a very important piece,” Goessling said. Although the study only evaluated data from 2023, the findings could also explain why global temperatures will remain extremely high through 2024, despite El Niño weakening earlier this year. be.
paulo ceppi Researchers at Imperial College London say the study is timely as climate scientists are keen to understand the causes of recent record warmth. “I think they make a pretty convincing case that changes in albedo, especially in low-level clouds, contribute significantly to changes in the radiation budget and, therefore, in temperature,” he says.
The next question is why low-altitude clouds disappear. There are three main explanations. This may be due to a global decrease in aerosol pollution, which promotes cloud formation and persistence. Alternatively, it could be the result of changes in cloud behavior due to global warming. Or it could just be natural fluctuations in climate.
Understanding which of these three factors is dominant is critical because it influences how sensitive Earth’s climate is to greenhouse gas pollution. If the lack of clouds is due to a climate change feedback, its effects will accelerate in the coming years, causing global temperatures to rise more than expected. “The answer has pretty deep implications for what we expect about future climate change,” Seppi says.
Highly contagious avian influenza has been circulating around the world since 2020.
Ulises Ruiz/AFP via Getty Images
The H5N1 avian influenza virus that is circulating around the world is already more contagious than earlier strains. In addition, the single mutation allows it to infect cells lining the nose and throat, making it more likely to be transmitted through the air.
This change alone is not enough for the virus to cause a pandemic. But if a virus with this mutation swapped genes with a human influenza virus, it could acquire pandemic potential almost immediately.
“The more people are infected, the more likely this is to happen,” he says. Ian Wilson At the Scripps Research Institute in California. Despite this, Wilson believes the risk remains low.
A particularly virulent strain of avian influenza, H5N1, originated in the 1990s, probably in domestic birds in China, and spread around the world. Around 2020, a new variant of the virus emerged and spread even more widely, reaching as far as the Americas and Antarctica. In the United States, poultry is infected in large numbers, dairy cattle are also infected, and occasionally humans are infected.
team led by Debbie Van Riel Researchers at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands infected cells in human noses and throats with the 2005 and 2022 H5N1 variants. They showed for the first time that the 2022 mutant is better at binding to these cells and replicating within them. . “Bad news,” van Riel says.
“I don’t think it’s extremely likely that the virus will become a pandemic,” she says. However, the fact that this virus is better at infecting humans gives it more opportunity to acquire further mutations, increasing the likelihood of a pandemic.
Meanwhile, Wilson and his colleagues have been studying the key hemagglutinin protein of the influenza virus. This protein binds to receptors on the outside of cells and determines which cells the virus can infect. Because it sticks out from the virus, it is also the main target of the immune system.
Currently, H5N1 hemagglutinin primarily binds to receptors located deep in the lungs in humans. This means that although it can cause serious illness, it is unlikely to leave the body and infect others. For that to happen, the virus needs to infect the cells inside your nose and throat. This means that coughing and sneezing can expel the virus and infect others.
Van Riel's research suggests that the virus can do this to some extent, but it is not clear whether the virus binds to the main receptors on these cells. It was thought that multiple mutations were required for H5N1 to bind strongly to these receptors, but Wilson's team now shows that a single mutation is sufficient for the current H5N1 variants. Showed.
Team members say this change alone won’t prevent the virus from causing a pandemic. Jim Paulsonalso at the Scripps Research Institute. “We think this property is necessary, but importantly not sufficient, for pandemic virus transmission,” he says.
Paulson said other changes are also necessary for the virus to begin replicating and spreading from person to person, but they are not well understood. “There's a lot of biology we don’t know,” he says.
However, if H5N1 viruses that infect humans acquire receptor switching mutations, they may evolve these other changes as well.
Furthermore, it is possible, in theory, to acquire all the necessary abilities at once by exchanging genes with a human virus that infects the same individual. Several previous influenza pandemics have been caused by genetic swapping between animal and human influenza viruses, Paulson said.
“This is very worrying,” he says alice katsurakis from the University of Oxford was not involved in either study. “Every time it spreads to humans, it gives the virus a roll of the dice.”
What is the mortality rate of the H5N1 pandemic?
If H5N1 avian influenza begins to spread from person to person, the big question is how deadly it will be. Half of the people confirmed to have contracted the virus since 2003 have died. However, the actual infection fatality rate is likely to be even lower, as many cases likely go undetected and mild cases are likely to be missed.
Of the roughly 60 people infected in the U.S. since the dairy outbreak began, nearly all have had only mild symptoms. why not understoodbut one explanation is that many were infected through the eyes. “It’s known to have much more benign results,” Katzorakis says.
It is also thought to become less dangerous when the virus switches from binding to receptors deep in the lungs to binding to receptors in the upper airways. But puzzling aspects of the U.S. cases left Paulson unsure whether this also applied to H5N1. “To be honest, I don’t know what to think right now,” he says.
“I don’t think there’s any reason to be satisfied with this and expect that even if this virus were to be easily transmitted from person to person, it would be ‘mild,'” Katzourakis said.
Because Wilson’s team studied the hemagglutinin protein alone, there was no chance that the mutated protein could leak into the lab. “No viruses were used here at all,” he says.
Global temperatures over the past two years have been even warmer than climate scientists expected.
A new study offers a possible reason: reduced cloud cover.
The study suggests that this decline may be a result of global warming, which could mean the Earth is heating up even faster than scientists thought.
Over the past two years, temperatures around the world have risen far more than scientists expected. This trend is creating the mystery of whether there are hidden climate change dynamics behind the sudden change.
Last year was the hottest summer on record, 2024 was likely to be even hotter.. Even after accounting for the expected effects of greenhouse gas pollution and El Niño (a natural pattern that generally increases temperatures), the researchers found that the roughly 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) of warmer temperatures observed in 2023 I couldn’t explain the change.
A new study offers a possible explanation. Cloud cover has decreased over the past two years, meaning more light is now reaching and heating the Earth’s surface, rather than being reflected back into space.
In the research, Published in Science on Thursdaysuggesting that this dynamic, called an overall decrease in the planet’s albedo, is likely the cause of the observed temperature anomaly in 2023.
“This is broadly consistent with the observed recent further increase in solar radiation,” said study author Helge Goessling, a climate physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.
The expected cloud behavior in a warmer world is one of the most difficult aspects of the climate system to study and model. Answering questions about it will help scientists more accurately determine how sensitive the Earth is to greenhouse gas emissions.
If the decrease in low-level cloud cover is not a coincidence, it likely means the Earth is warming even faster than scientists thought.
“It’s not really clear yet how likely it is that some of this variation is variability that disappears again,” Gosling said. “This increases the likelihood of greater-than-expected warming.”
The new study is based on analysis of climate models and NASA satellite data on Earth’s reflectivity. It outlines three possible reasons for the decline in developing low clouds, but provides no conclusions about how much each factor contributes.
One option is that natural processes temporarily deviate from normal, causing a decrease in cloud cover. For example, natural fluctuations may be causing sea surface temperatures to rise more than expected, thereby changing the physics of how clouds form.
The second possibility is a change in maritime transport regulations. In 2020, the International Maritime Organization imposed limits on the sulfur content allowed in marine fuels. Some scientists believe that reducing the number of sulfur particles polluting the atmosphere may have the unintended effect of suppressing ocean cloud formation.
“They act as condensation nuclei for clouds, so they can make clouds brighter and last longer,” Goessling said of the sulfur particles.
A third option is that unidentified feedback loops within the climate system are causing clouds to decrease due to global warming.
If the latter two possibilities turn out to be the main culprits, it would mean that the climate is more sensitive to anthropogenic pollution than many scientists thought, and that humanity is therefore more likely than world leaders to It means we are closer to exceeding the targets set for emissions limits than previously realized. (The term “climate sensitivity” refers to how warm the Earth is. If the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere doubled.. )
Still, many questions remain, said Zeke Hausfather, director of climate research at financial firm Stripe and a researcher at Berkeley Earth.
“It remains to be seen whether these changes in cloud behavior are due to short-term fluctuations and will return to more normal conditions over time, or whether they represent new and ongoing changes to the climate system. No,” he said. Email.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the average surface temperature of land and ocean in 2023 was about 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average.
Efforts by world leaders to reduce greenhouse gas emissions remain insufficient. Global temperatures are on track to rise by more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) on average, far exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) goal set by the Paris Agreement.
NASA’s next Artemis mission, scheduled to send four astronauts to orbit the moon, has been postponed until 2026, the agency announced.
The delay also postpones the expected schedule for Artemis’ subsequent mission to land astronauts on the moon.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that under the new schedule, the United States would land astronauts on the moon before China.
NASA announced Thursday that the next Artemis mission that will send four astronauts around the moon will be delayed until 2026. A program already years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget has been delayed further.
NASA announced in January that the Artemis II mission would launch in September 2025 instead of late 2024. Now, NASA says it is targeting an April 2026 launch to give it more time to address issues with its next-generation Orion space capsule. The problem was discovered during an unmanned Artemis test flight in 2022.
The delay will also postpone the Artemis III mission, which aims to land astronauts near the moon’s south pole. That mission is planned for mid-2027, rather than launching in September 2026.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the adjusted schedule should still put the United States on track to return astronauts to the moon before China lands its own. .
Nelson said the mid-2027 goal is “much earlier than the Chinese government’s stated intention” to land Chinese astronauts on the moon by 2030.
China’s interest in moon exploration has sparked a new space race of sorts, with some U.S. experts and officials saying that if China reaches the moon’s surface before the United States, There are growing concerns that there may be competition for space resources, which are thought to be water ice. They will be trapped in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole. It is believed that water on the moon could be used to make rocket fuel to power missions deep into space.
“Landing on the moon’s south pole is critical to avoid ceding part of the moon’s south pole to China,” Nelson said.
NASA officials attributed the need to delay the Artemis mission to a flaw in the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield that was discovered during the capsule’s uncrewed flight. NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said, for example, that the researchers noticed that the heat shield was worn in places, with some of the outer layers cracking and peeling off due to internal pressure buildup.
Orion’s heat shield covers the bottom of the capsule and plays a key role in protecting the spacecraft and its potential astronauts from extreme temperatures upon re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. .
Extensive testing has determined that the Orion capsule’s unique method of returning to Earth likely eroded its heat shield. The spacecraft is designed to perform what’s called a “skip entry,” in which it enters and exits the atmosphere, dissipating energy and slowing it down.
But Melroy said this reentry caused heat to build up inside the outer layer of the heat shield, eventually causing it to crack and wear out in parts.
The delays for Artemis’ next two flights will give engineers time to address these shielding issues and prepare for what Nelson called a “modified approach trajectory.”
“Astronaut safety is always paramount in our decisions. It is our North Star,” Nelson said. “We will not fly until we are confident that we have made the flight as safe as possible for our passengers.”
With the new administration of Donald Trump set to take over the White House in January, some space industry experts are speculating that parts of the Artemis program may be revisited or even scrapped. There is.
But Melroy said the decision to proceed with the Artemis program was “pretty clear” and should not be delayed during the transition period as the incoming administration establishes its goals and priorities.
“We would like to postpone any decisions about starting or ending the program for as long as possible,” Melroy said. “We had to postpone important decisions for our new team and we haven’t had a chance to explain them to anyone since we haven’t yet accepted a transition team.”
NASA has spent more than $42 billion over more than a decade developing the new Space Launch System mega-rocket and Orion spacecraft aimed at bringing astronauts back to the moon. As part of this effort, NASA envisions launching regular missions to set up base camps on the moon before eventually heading to Mars.
According to a team of astronomers from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Potsdam, the XX triangular star, a bright K0 giant star in a binary star system located in the constellation Triangulum, exhibits chaotic, aperiodic star point behavior. That’s what it means. and Konkoli Observatory.
XX A star spot on the surface of the constellation Triangulum. Image credits: HUN-REN RCAES / Zs. Kushvari, MOME / Á. Radovani, AIP / K. Strassmeyer.
“Among the things that can be observed from a spatially resolved solar disk are the number, size and morphology of sunspots, their growth and decay, and their movement in latitude and longitude,” said lead author and director of the Leibniz Institute for Astronomy. said Professor Klaus Strassmeyer. Potsdam Astrophysics and Potsdam University, and their colleagues.
“Such spots are also seen on other stars and are called star spots.”
“We use indirect surface imaging techniques to invert the spectral line profile into an image of the stellar surface.”
“Typically we only get occasional snapshots of spots on a star’s surface, but the spots change systematically over time, and like the Sun, only then can we learn about the internal dynamos and structure of the target in question. Well known.”
“We chose the XX triangular star, one of the most speckled stars in the sky, for a more sustained application of Doppler imaging.”
XX triangle It is located about 640 light years away in the constellation Triangulum.
The star, also known as XX Tri or HD 12545, has a mass only 10% more than the Sun, a radius 10 times the Sun’s radius, and an effective temperature of 4630 K.
It has a rotation period of 24 days, which is synchronized with the orbital period of the binary star system.
XX Trigonum has previously been shown to contain a gigantic star spot with physical dimensions equivalent to 10,000 times the area of the largest group of spots ever seen on the Sun, and 10 times the size of the projected solar disk. It had been discovered in
Professor Strassmeier and his co-authors took 99 separate images of the star using an indirect surface imaging technique called Doppler imaging.
“A dark spot on the star’s surface caused its optical center (a point that essentially represents the star’s ‘center of light’) to shift by up to 24 microarcseconds, which is less than the radius of the star’s visible disk. This corresponds to approximately 10%,” they said. Said.
“These changes occur because the dark spots reduce the brightness of certain areas of the star, shifting the perceived center of light slightly.”
“However, unlike the sun’s predictable activity cycles, the displacements of these photocenters did not follow a periodic pattern. This is a largely chaotic and probably aperiodic pattern, very different from the solar dynamo. This suggests that it is a dynamo.”
“This phenomenon also highlights challenges in detecting exoplanets, as spot-induced fluctuations in the optical center can mimic or mask small movements caused by orbiting planets, which could impose substantial limitations on the detection of such exoplanets by astronomical observations.”
of findings appear in the diary nature communications.
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KG Strassmeyer others. 2024. XX Long-term Doppler images of triangular stars show chaotic aperiodic dynamos. Nat Commune 15, 9986; doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-54329-4
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