Science News

Wired.com/nuclear power balls

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-rna-reversing-mutations-underlying-neurological.html?fbclid=IwAR38JE4SGPC-ODBqRzTmdpenmcsLHHiSbfUa63rZhH42UFk0Lfxg-qPd5vI This sounds to me like a piece of very interesting news. Possibilities of editing RNA is a topic that fascinates me, although I still have to learn a lot about it.

A visualization showing the South Pole Wall, a large cluster of galaxies near the southernmost part of the sky. (Image: © D. Pomarede, R. B. Tully, R. Graziani, H. Courtois, Y. Hoffman, J. Lezmy.) https://www.livescience.com/south-pole-wall-discovered-in-space.html

Astronomers have witnessed for the first time how a large star in one of the neighboring dwarf galaxies, located in the constellation Aquarius, suddenly disappeared from the sky, presumably directly turning into a black hole. This was announced on Tuesday by the press service of the European southern Observatory (ESO). "Such large stars usually produce bright supernova bursts at the end of their lives, which is why the disappearance of this star has become an extremely unusual event for us. If it really directly turned into a black hole, then we are the first direct witnesses of how the life of a giant star ended in such a manner," said Andrew Allan, an astrophysicis…

https://scitechdaily.com/hungry-black-hole-among-the-most-massive-in-the-universe-34-billion-times-the-mass-of-our-sun/

The axion field rapidly runs over the potential barriers and eventually begins oscillations when sufficiently slowed down by friction. Credit: Co & Harigaya https://phys.org/news/2020-06-case-axion-dark-gains-traction.amp

I've just read this... ...and I was wondering if a gas can be "super cooled" and remain as a gas instead of condensing to a liquid (some go straight to a solid IIRC) can the same be true for plasma? Hopefully they might get some more interesting results with their research in to quantum level collisions, gravitational waves and the equivalency principle. I guess working in microgravity will be the next big milestone in our understanding of these things. Interesting times ahead. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24632862-300-exotic-fifth-state-of-matter-made-on-the-international-space-station/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53151106

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/scientists-prove-decades-old-theory-suggesting-extremely-odd-physics-about-black-holes-1679850

Some potential challenges with regard to immunity. Most patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 showed diminished IgGs (antibodies produced against the virus) after ~2 months of after discharge from the hospital. About 40% became seronegative (no antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 detected). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0965-6 This might put a dent into hopes that infected folks remain immune for an extended amount of time and could make vaccinations more critical. The study was based on 37 symptomatic and 37 asymptomatic patients, so more studies are going to be critical.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/may/31/nasa-spacex-dragon-crew-capsule-docks-international-space-station

This was posted to the [IOP Science](https://iopscience.iop.org/) website today (18th June 2020). https://ioppublishing.org/news/iop-publishing-joins-forces-with-other-publishers-to-make-research-publishing-more-inclusive-and-diverse/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/06/17/is-it-dark-matter-mystery-signal-goes-bump-in-worlds-most-sensitive-detector/ Another article here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/dark-matter-experiment-finds-unexplained-signal-20200617/ And a Twitter thread from one of the physicists involved:

An interesting piece from the Guardian. The Overton window continues to open. "They may not be little green men. They may not arrive in a vast spaceship. But according to new calculations there could be more than 30 intelligent civilisations in our galaxy today capable of communicating with others." “I think it is extremely important and exciting because for the first time we really have an estimate for this number of active intelligent, communicating civilisations that we potentially could contact and find out there is other life in the universe – something that has been a question for thousands of years and is still not answered,” said Christopher Co…

Read more at: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/ai-learns-from-lung-ct-scans-to-diagnose-covid-19-67625 Although the initial wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has abated in many countries, healthcare providers are still looking to identify as many COVID-19 patients as possible and contain the disease. Fast and accurate diagnosis is especially important when unsuspecting patients with a coronavirus infection come to the hospital with health complaints but don’t yet show symptoms of COVID-19. Nasal swab samples analyzed by RT-PCR are currently recommended for the diagnosis of COVID-19, however, supply shortages, a wait time of up to two days for results, a…

https://phys.org/news/2020-06-astrophysicists-cornerstone-einstein-theory-relativity.html

This article is interesting for the very different tactic of protecting mosquitos from malaria in order to protect people.

Detecting Exoplanets and Asteroids: First Citizen Science Successes for Backyard Astronomy Found this on Twitter and sharing here as it may be of interest, https://unistellaroptics.com/detecting-exoplanets-and-asteroids-first-citizen-science-successes-for-backyard-astronomy/ Great the citizen science is making a real contribution. Hope this is interesting Paul

But the best bit is the title: Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/TWK8BX6W2M4FFRTYXBZD/full

This is awesome. A picture of the dust cloud around a star 520 light years away. But better than that, there are signs that a planet is forming. Full story here: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2008/ Note that this is a real image, not a simulation or "artists impression"

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200506091537.htm https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso2007/eso2007a.pdf

This one caught my eye: Hydrocarbon seepage in the deep seabed links subsurface and seafloor biospheres Anirban Chakraborty, S. Emil Ruff, Xiyang Dong, Emily D. Ellefson, Carmen Li, James M. Brooks, Jayme McBee, Bernie B. Bernard, Casey R. J. HubertProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Apr 2020 From the paper: Significance The marine subsurface is one of the largest habitats on Earth composed exclusively of microorganisms and harboring on the order of 1029 microbial cells. It is unclear if deep subsurface life impacts overlying seafloor diversity and biogeochemical cycling in the deep ocean. We analyzed the microbial communities of…

BBC documentary tonight 2100 on BBC2 Friday 24th April

Abstract Complex bound states of magnetic excitations, known as Bethe strings, were predicted almost a century ago to exist in one-dimensional quantum magnets. The dispersions of the string states have so far remained the subject of intense theoretical studies. Here, by performing neutron scattering experiments on the one-dimensional Heisenberg–Ising antiferromagnet SrCo2V2O8 in high longitudinal magnetic fields, we reveal in detail the dispersion relations of the string states over the full Brillouin zone, as well as their magnetic field dependencies. Furthermore, the characteristic energy, the scattering intensity and linewidth of the observed string states exhibit ex…

LIGO and VIRGO have detected gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes of vastly different mass (8 and 30 solar masses). https://www.sciencealert.com/this-black-hole-collision-is-the-first-with-wildly-mismatched-masses They have a nice animation of the merger. This enables some further tests of GR (plot spoiler: results consistent with GR).