Science News

In various threads we have (albeit briefly) touched on the fact that resistant bacteria are starting to overwhelm our ability to treat them. Now the CDC has issued a new antibiotic resistance threat report, Basically every 4 hours a new resistant strain is detected and about 35k people die every year due to resistant strains. Countermeasures that have started since the last report came out (2013) were less effective than hoped. Among the biggest threats currently are resistant Acinetobacter, Candida auris, Clostridioides difficile (formerly Clostridium), carbapenem resistant Enterobacteriaceae, and resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae. There are a lot of issues that have …

As you all may have heard Prime Editing is the new standard amongst the community. The discovery of the Cas protein proposed that ammunition was on the horizon to ameliorate our efforts on the war against disease. Well BREAKING NEWS Prime editing is know to show even higher efficiency and even fewer byproducts than many other editing techniques, and actually has a much lower off-target effect than the Cas 9 nuclease. Many Scientists are starting to believe that Prime editing will be able to correct up to 90% of known genetic variants that contribute to human diseases. My guess, however, is that this will not be the case. Just a short time ago Crisper was all the ra…

This is a simulation not an animation. In my opinion it is awesome. Before scientists had to chose between long, large scale simulations with little detail or short, fine detail simulations. But with the Hazel Hen supercomputer in Stuttgart, with16,000 cores running for over a year. A simulation of a cube of space measuring more than 230 million light-years in diameter and has 20 billion particles representing dark matter, stars, cosmic gas, magnetic fields, and supermassive black holes has been generated. The team was led by Dr. Annalisa Pillepich of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, and Dr. Dylan Nelson of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.…

Apparently in a decade or so, we should have telescopes good enough that they will be able to measure the expansion of the universe by watching the changing red-shift of distant galaxies. This might even happen in my lifetime! https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/11/12/this-is-how-astronomers-will-finally-measure-the-universes-expansion-directly/ (*) Extremely Large Telescope - zero points for imagination

https://www.space.com/universe-may-be-curved.html

Interesting development in the experimentation of human / primate genetic hybrids in China. The research is being conducted by Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte of the Salk Institute in California. The purported aim of the experiments is to cultivate human/monkey chimeras which can generate human organs: The idea behind the research is to fashion animals that possess organs, like a kidney or liver, made up entirely of human cells. Such animals could be used as sources of organs for transplantation. Their objective is to create “human-animal chimeras,” in this case monkey embryos to which human cells are added. Izpisúa Belmonte tried making human-animal chi…

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/new-class-low-mass-black-holes-07759.html

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded jointly to William G. Kaelin Jr, Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza “for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.” Press release with links to key publications: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2019/press-release/ More advanced scientific background: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2019/advanced-information/

I don't know if this should go into politics or physics or science news. I just heard on my tv, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in his big speech at the Conservative Party conference, that the people at Culham Tokamak project in Oxfordshire are on the VERGE of producing successful mini fusion reactors, and selling them worldwide. He then acknowledged that they have been on the verge for a long time, but now claims that they are on the "verge of the verge". I haven't heard the slightest whisper of any such thing. Are they actually winding up the Prime Minister of the UK ? It's not April Fool's Day. Or did he dream it? I couldn't believe my ears when …

https://www.labmate-online.com/news/news-and-views/5/stfc/project-could-inspire-next-generation-x-ray-lasers-and-particle-accelerators/50418 quote.. A ground breaking technique that could produce an electron beam up to 10,000 times brighter than the most powerful beams today, has been developed by researchers from the UK and US. The findings could be particularly applicable for use in the next generation of more compact, more powerful particle accelerators, enhancing scientific applications. It was this however which caught my attention, quote... These ultrabright beams may eventually allow production of X-ray pulses short and bright enough to allow ob…

"Solar panels might seem like they’re in direct competition with plants. One is catching sunlight to do photosynthesis, the other wants to take it to push electrons. Surely Highlander rules apply, and there can be only one on a plot of land, right? In reality, it’s not a zero-sum game. Some plants will burn in direct sun, after all, and so there are plenty of food crops that would be happy to share their space with panels. And as a new study led by the University of Arizona’s Greg Barron-Gafford shows, the combination isn’t even necessarily a compromise—there are some synergies that can bring significant benefits to a solar-agriculture." https://arstechnica.com/…

Maybe... According to astronomers Planet nine maybe hard to spot because it's a primordial black hole- a superdense lump of matter about the size of a tennis ball. And if that's the case, then we need to search for it in an entirely different way. More at link..https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614441/is-planet-9-actually-a-primordial-black-hole/

The massive planet, which shouldn't exist based on current theories, is prompting astronomers to revisit their models for planetary formation. Source: https://astronomy.com/news/2019/09/giant-planet-found-around-tiny-star-defies-expectations

Several new methods of measuring the Hubble constant have produced inflicting values and more evidence that new physics is needed https://www.quantamagazine.org/cosmologists-debate-how-fast-the-universe-is-expanding-20190808/

Science News webzine - "Physicists may be a step closer to solving the mystery of proton size" I know there's a lot of physics smart users on this board. Are there any theories in physics circles about why these differing measurements are happening? Could it be the equipment isn't a accurate enough or that protons can be different weights and sizes depending on what elements they constitute?

What do you think of this paper that as gone through a peer review process please ? http://journalofcosmology.com/JOC26/General%20Relativity%20and%20Effects%20in%20Time%20as%20Causation%20JofC.pdf

Remember as a kid, how it took forever to go from one Christmas to the next? Remember how as a kid, you would always be wishing some forthcoming event you were looking forward to, would hurry up and arrive? Now in old or middle age we complain about how time flies. At last, we have an answer!!! https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-03-physics-flies-age.html According to Adrian Bejan, the J.A. Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke, this apparent temporal discrepancy can be blamed on the ever-slowing speed at which images are obtained and processed by the human brain as the body ages. The theory was published online on March 18 in the journal Euro…

https://phys.org/news/2019-09-exotic-physics-phenomenon.html Since English isn't my native language, I have a hard time understanding what this means, practically. Could someone kindly explain it? Thanks!

https://phys.org/news/2019-09-radio-emission-neutron-star-magnetic.html Radio emission from a neutron star's magnetic pole revealed by General Relativity by Max Planck Society Representation of the precessing pulsar J1906+0746 (with the spin vector in red color) around the total angular momentum vector (blue vector). Two radio beams are emitted above the opposite magnetic poles of the pulsar, along the magnetic axis (grey arrow). As the radio beams cross through our line of sight, we can reconstruct the emission maps of the beams as shown with the circular maps at the edges of the two beams. Credit: Gregory Desvignes (MPIfR Bonn / Pari…

We have had a couple of different members recently who have referenced Lee Smolin's work (in one case, claiming he had stolen their ideas). So I thought people might be interested in hearing what the man himself has to say about his work: https://www.quantamagazine.org/were-stuck-inside-the-universe-lee-smolin-has-an-idea-for-how-to-study-it-anyway-20190627/

Full story at link....https://phys.org/news/2019-08-filter.html Original story by Erica K. Brockmeier, University of Pennsylvania. a diagram of how the nanofilters are made (top panel) and their microscopic structure (bottom panel) after Abstract.....Post docs Xunda Feng, now at Donghua University, and Yizhou Zhang and graduate student Qaboos Imran, have conducted a study at the lab of Chinedum Osuji which describes a new way to create nanoscale water filters, which as well as being flexible and robust, also have anti microbial properties. When designing a nanoscale filter, engineers usually start with something that resembles a microscopic s…

Milky way's black hole just flared, growing 75 times as bright for a few hours Abstract...

I keep seeing this pop up on youtube, scientists are trying to find a mirror universe and open a portal into it... What is going on if anything? I keep seeing this news blurb in various forms, some quite extreme others not so much but none seem to be exactly the same and the idea is provocative but is it true? I know about Mirror Matter, Dark Matter, and even antimatter and all of these are being connected in some way to this. I don't see how this can be since these things exist or are hypothesized to exist within our universe. The whole idea is beginning to sound like bad science fiction...

Hi all. Aired today, minutes ago. Perhaps deserves a sub-forum here as "Technology news" Create if deserved for such topics, as there is a thread somewhere asking for adding other sub-forums. ----> https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/ataglance/449/ Edited... what is proper English for the title ? 'Assistance to blind' or as posted ?