Science News

I hear tell there is a whole new telescope coming on stream on the next couple of days What might be the most interesting results we could expect? There is no chance that we might get a better look at our Galaxy's black hole is there?

Is the new LHC off to a blinder? https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62027238 "Pentaquarks: scientists find new "exotic" configurations of quarks" Or is this from the old LHC?

Adaptive Optics is a game-changer in the field of astronomical instrumentation. But how exactly does it work? A University of Toronto astronomer explains, here: video removed by moderator

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61723806

About (data from frey and detterman, 2004): reference what would explain in figure C an evaluator close to IQ 90 with an evaluation of 1300 on the SAT? Is IQ very relative, where we can't reduce someone's aptitude on a test?

"...while attempting to study genetic differences between plants in a massive undersea [Australian] meadow, their samples revealed that the "meadow" was in fact just one very old — and very large — organism." It is estimated to cover 77 square miles, is about 4,500 years old, a strange hybrid ribbon weed, that kept all chromosomes from both mother and father. "it is a haven for all sorts of sea creatures, including "turtles, dolphins, dugongs, crabs and fish," Scientists Discover World's Largest Organism, Chilling Out Under Ocean (futurism.com)

This is not surprising news, as species location boundaries have always moved with changing climate. However it is good news, especially if Man looks after the new areas as suggested in the article. Coral is one of the 'canary' lifeforms for global warming. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-61592108

I recently came upon an oldish (2015) "physorg" article, that some may like to discuss......(The title by the way, is the title of a book by Jimena Canales) The artlcle... https://phys.org/news/2015-05-science-historian-story-einstein-dangerous.html Two of the 20th century's greatest minds, one of them physicist Albert Einstein, came to intellectual blows one day in Paris in 1922. Their dispute, before a learned audience, was about the nature of time - mostly in connection with Einstein's most famous work, the theory of relativity..... extracts: The philosopher in the title, and Einstein's adversary that day, was Henri Bergson, a French philosophe…

I've just stumbled upon this new paper draft, [2205.07921] The Futility of Exoplanet Biosignatures (arxiv.org) and immediately thought of @beecee because of this statement in the abstract: Technical constraints and our limited access to other worlds suggest we are more likely to detect an out-of-equilibrium suite of gasses than a writhing octopus. Yet, anything short of a writhing octopus will raise skepticism among astrobiologists about what has been detected.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220523162813.htm and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30505-2 Does that sound good?

Carbon. It takes a hundred suns to die before your magic web extends. But once it does, a world of possibilities is revealed. Your opening act is: "Let there be life". Not quite satisfied with this, you make things that make things that bring about: The hardest substance (diamond) The best lubricant (graphite). The best thermal conductor (graphene). Is there an end to this magic? If the Ancient Greeks had only suspected your capital importance, they would have named a god in your honour. Sorry, I got carried away with carbon love. Here's the news: https://phys.org/news/2022-05-long-hypothesized-material.html?fbclid=IwAR2lC…

"The expansion rate of the universe was predicted to be slower than what Hubble actually sees. By combining the Standard Cosmological Model of the Universe and measurements by the European Space Agency's Planck mission (which observed the relic cosmic microwave background from 13.8 billion years ago), astronomers predict a lower value for the Hubble constant: 67.5 plus or minus 0.5 kilometers per second per megaparsec, compared to the SH0ES team's estimate of 73. Given the large Hubble sample size, there is only a one-in-a-million chance astronomers are wrong due to an unlucky draw, said Riess, a common threshold for taking a problem seriously in physics. This findin…

Alien shopping-bag ocean weirdo has glowing Cheetos for guts | Live Science

In this paper, the authors use the trends of NASA budget and of research activities, and the prior history of the crewed space exploration to predict how far we will go during the next 100 years: [2205.08061] Impact of Economic Constraints on the Projected Timeframe for Human-Crewed Deep Space Exploration (arxiv.org) And here are the results:

By Curiosity rover, 7May2022 Also at ---> https://www.facebook.com/Mars360VR/photos/552593076237538

https://www.science.org/content/article/why-judge-might-overturn-guilty-verdict-against-u-s-scientist-hiding-china-ties Arrested in June 2019, Tao was the first academic scientist prosecuted under the China Initiative, a controversial program begun in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump that was aimed at rooting out economic espionage. However, only two of some two dozen academics charged under the initiative were ever prosecuted for espionage-related offenses; the others were generally charged with failing to disclose ties to Chinese institutions to U.S. funding agencies. U.S. universities once encouraged interactions with Chinese institutions, notes German,…

"Until May 12 rolls around, we won't know with any certainty what exactly it is that the NSF is going to announce." The US National Science Foundation Has 'Groundbreaking' News About The Milky Way (slashgear.com)

The first thing that has attracted my attention to this newly posted study was the long list of authors. 165 authors! From 103 different institutions! From dozens different countries! When you see what they did, you understand, why it is so. Big job. Here is quite detailed summary: The transitions from foraging to farming and later to pastoralism in Stone Age Eurasia (c. 11- 3 thousand years before present, BP) represent some of the most dramatic lifestyle changes in human evolution. We sequenced 317 genomes of primarily Mesolithic and Neolithic individuals from across Eurasia combined with radiocarbon dates, stable isotope data, and pollen records. Genome imputation…

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-04-patients-hospitalization-covid-fully-recovered.html Study of 2,000 patients after hospitalization with COVID-19 shows only around 1 in 4 feel fully recovered after 1 year by European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases A new UK study of more than 2,000 patients after hospitalization with COVID-19 presented at this year's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2022, Lisbon 23-26), and published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine shows that, one year after having COVID-19, only around one in four patients feel fully well again. The study is led by Professor Chris…

In this short paper renowned Harvard astrophysicist Abraham Loeb describes with "back of envelope calculation" a possible effect of a gravitational wave originated by a merger of two supermassive black holes in the center of Milky Way galaxy. Such merger would cause a measurable, up to 1 mm permanent increase of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. It would happen because the gravitational attraction between the two bodies would weaken during the time that takes for the wave to cover the distance between them, which is about 1 s. [2205.02746] Two Novel Observational Tests of General Relativity (arxiv.org)

https://phys.org/news/2022-05-bilayer-graphene-two-universe-cosmological.html Bilayer graphene inspires two-universe cosmological model: Physicists sometimes come up with crazy stories that sound like science fiction. Some turn out to be true, like how the curvature of space and time described by Einstein was eventually borne out by astronomical measurements. Others linger on as mere possibilities or mathematical curiosities. In a new paper in Physical Review Research, JQI Fellow Victor Galitski and JQI graduate student Alireza Parhizkar have explored the imaginative possibility that our reality is only one half of a pair of interacting worlds. Their mathem…

https://www.vice.com/en/article/akvm5b/scientists-discover-method-to-break-down-plastic-in-one-week-not-centuries If this is scalable, it could be a game-changer. Of course, we still need to get the plastic waste into recycle bins. So it would help if the enzyme also acted rapidly on human stupidity and laziness.

A new genetic study involving more than 2,000 dogs and 200,000 survey answers from dog owners has revealed that a dog's breed is a poor predictor of behavior on its own. The first-of-its-kind, peer-reviewed study—conducted by professors, students and researchers at University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School—is set to appear this month in the journal Science. The major findings go against the popular beliefs that breed plays a role in how aggressive, obedient or affectionate a dog can be. Those stereotypes can prompt breed-specific legislation, insurance restrictions and home bans for some dog breeds, including pit bulls and German Shepherds. more at li…

This new paper suggests an interesting way of clarifying, unifying, and generalizing notions of entropy from Clausius, Boltzmann, and Shannon, using a new concept of Information Reference Frame with a corresponding "observer", analogous to reference frames, with Bobs and Alices in other areas of science: [2103.16913] Information form of the second law of thermodynamics (arxiv.org)