Science News

https://theconversation.com/new-evidence-for-a-human-magnetic-sense-that-lets-your-brain-detect-the-earths-magnetic-field-113536 A human response to Earth-strength magnetic fields might seem surprising. But given the evidence for magnetic sensation in our animal ancestors, it might be more surprising if humans had completely lost every last piece of the system. Thus far, scientists found evidence that people have working magnetic sensors sending signals to the brain – a previously unknown sensory ability in the subconscious human mind. The full extent of our magnetic inheritance remains to be discovered.

Dear collegues! Does anyone know the scientific and practical conferences on the human sciences indexed in Wos / Scopus? Or any scientific conference index to Scopus or WoS on an ongoing basis? Please, help me find!

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-star-smash-up-billions-of-years-ago-rained-gold-and-platinum-on-the-solar-system Astronomers Just Found The Ancient Cosmic Event That Gave Earth Gold And Platinum MICHELLE STARR 8 MAY 2019 A violent collision between two neutron stars 4.6 billion years ago showered the as-yet-unformed Solar System with heavy elements, new research has found. As much as 0.3 percent of Earth's gold, platinum and uranium (along with other heavy elements) could have been forged in the fire of a merger 1,000 light-years away, when the Solar System was little more than a cloud of gas and dust. "This means that in each of us we would f…

https://phys.org/news/2019-05-filter-dark-universe.html A new filter to better map the dark universe by Glenn Roberts Jr., Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Just as a wine glass distorts an image showing temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background in this photo illustration, large objects like galaxy clusters and galaxies can similarly distort this light to produce lensing effects. Credit: Emmanuel Schaan and Simone Ferraro/Berkeley Lab The earliest known light in our universe, known as the cosmic microwave background, was emitted about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The patterning of this relic light holds man…

LIGO/Virgo have detected 5 new potential gravitational wave events, one might be a merger between a neutronstar and a black hole. See e.g. here.

Article: https://techxplore.com/news/2019-04-dna-lifelike-machines.html Paper: https://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/4/29/eaaw3512 Engineers at Cornell have successfully used DNA to make tiny life imitating machines. That's how I read it. Could this be one step closer to understanding the mechanisms that resulted in life itself?

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-black-hole-light-speed-plasma-clouds.html Astronomers have discovered rapidly swinging jets coming from a black hole almost 8000 light-years from Earth. Published today in the journal Nature, the research shows jets from V404 Cygni's black hole behaving in a way never seen before on such short timescales. The jets appear to be rapidly rotating with high-speed clouds of plasma—potentially just minutes apart—shooting out of the black hole in different directions. more at link............ the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1152-0 A rapidly changing jet orientation in the stellar-mass b…

Article: https://www.apnews.com/fac50d45a19f4239848b1712cfd22c36 Another (better?) article: https://astronomynow.com/2018/07/13/cosmic-mystery-deepens-with-conflicting-measurements-of-hubble-constant/

https://www.universetoday.com/142041/as-expected-the-newly-upgraded-ligo-is-finding-a-black-hole-merger-every-week/#more-142041 As Expected, the Newly Upgraded LIGO is Finding a Black Hole Merger Every Week In February of 2016, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) announced the first-ever detection of gravitational waves (GWs). Since then, multiple events have been detected, providing insight into a cosmic phenomena that was predicted over a century ago by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. A little over a year ago, LIGO was taken offline so that upgrades could be made to its instruments, which would allow for d…

https://www.quantamagazine.org/scientists-discover-nearly-200000-kinds-of-ocean-viruses-20190425/

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-dark-detector-rarest-event.html Dark matter detector observes rarest event ever recorded by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: How do you observe a process that takes more than one trillion times longer than the age of the universe? The XENON Collaboration research team did it with an instrument built to find the most elusive particle in the universe—dark matter. In a paper to be published tomorrow in the journal Nature, researchers announce that they have observed the radioactive decay of xenon-124, which has a half-life of 1.8 X 1022 years. "We actually saw this decay happen. It's the longest, slowest process that has eve…

Comment not needed... The article is here. Do not forget to follow this link (from the article) for the zoomable version. What are all these ring structures? I thought planetary nebulae do not exist that long, so to see so many seems impossible. But what else are they?

Modeling the 3D Geometry of the Cortical Surface with Genetic Ancestry https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)00671-5

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-elusive-molecule-universe-space.html Elusive molecule, first in Universe, detected in space: In the beginning, more than 13 billion years ago, the Universe was an undifferentiated soup of three simple, single-atom elements. Stars would not form for another 100 million years. But within 100,000 years of the Big Bang, the very first molecule emerged, an improbable marriage of helium and hydrogen known as a helium hydride ion, or HeH+. "It was the beginning of chemistry," said David Neufeld, a professor at John Hopkins University and co-author of a study published Wednesday detailing how—after a multi-decade search—scie…

Since beecee has been feting us lately with scientific announcements I thought I would offer the original announcement about the theoretical proposal of black holes. So we can celebrate the latest discoveries nearly 250 years on.

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-tess-earth-sized-planet.html A nearby system hosts the first Earth-sized planet discovered by NASA's Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite, as well as a warm sub-Neptune-sized world, according to a new paper from a team of astronomers that includes Carnegie's Johanna Teske, Paul Butler, Steve Shectman, Jeff Crane, and Sharon Wang. Their work is published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "It's so exciting that TESS, which launched just about a year ago, is already a game-changer in the planet-hunting business," said Teske, who is second author on the paper. "The spacecraft surveys the sky and we collaborate with the TESS f…

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-formation-magnetar-billion-years.html Researchers observe formation of a magnetar 6.5 billion light years away: A University of Arkansas researcher is part of a team of astronomers who have identified an outburst of X-ray emission from a galaxy approximately 6.5 billion light years away, which is consistent with the merger of two neutron stars to form a magnetar—a large neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field. Based on this observation, the researchers were able to calculate that mergers like this happen roughly 20 times per year in each region of a billion light years cubed. The research team, which incl…

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-gravitational-expose-black-holes-dark.html Gravitational waves helping to expose black holes, dark matter and theoretical particles: extracts: Some gravitational observations can only be explained either by the presence of dark matter, which we cannot see, or by changing our laws of gravity. Professor Ulrich Sperhake, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and lead scientist in the StronGrHEPproject, described gravitational waves as a 'new window onto the universe' that could help us unravel these mysteries An idea Prof. Sperhake is investigating is to extend Einstein's general relativity with a new th…

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-07/black-hole-first-ever-photograph-could-be-unveiled-this-week/10979244 The first-ever photograph of a black hole might be unveiled this week. Here's what it could tell us: Scientists are expected to unveil the first-ever photograph of a black hole this week. If they do, it will mark a major breakthrough in astrophysics and could provide new insight into the giant celestial monsters. Here's what we know about the announcement so far. When will it happen? The US National Science Foundation says it will announce during a press conference "a groundbreaking result" from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) proje…

Organelles — the cell’s workhorses — mingle far more than scientists ever appreciated. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00792-9

https://www.sciencealert.com/we-know-what-dark-matter-isn-t-it-s-not-tiny-black-holes-a-new-test-has-confirmed Astronomers Just Ruled Out Hawking's Theory on The Primordial Nature of Dark Matter MICHELLE STARR 4 APR 2019 We still don't know what dark matter is, but we can strike a line through one option. It is not, as per a theory proposed by the brilliant Stephen Hawking, a bunch of teeny-tiny microscopic black holes. In the most rigorous test of the theory to date, an international team led by researchers from the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Math…

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Building_blocks_of_DNA_and_RNA_could_have_appeared_together_before_life_began_on_Earth_999.html Building blocks of DNA and RNA could have appeared together before life began on Earth by Staff Writers La Jolla CA (SPX) Apr 03, 2019 Scientists for the first time have found strong evidence that RNA and DNA could have arisen from the same set of precursor molecules even before life evolved on Earth about four billion years ago. The discovery, published April 1 in Nature Chemistry, suggests that the first living things on Earth may have used both RNA and DNA, as all cell-based life forms do now. In contrast, the prevaili…

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-dire-future-etched-co2-million.html Dire future etched in the past: CO2 at 3-million year-old levels: Planet-warming carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere—at its highest level in three million years—is poised to lock in dramatic temperature and sea level rises over a timescale of centuries, scientists warned this week. The last time that CO2 hit 400 parts per million (ppm) Greenland was ice free and trees grew at the edge of Antactica. It was long thought that today's greenhouse gas levels were no greater than those 800,000 years ago, during a period of cyclical planetary warming and cooling that would have likely continued…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have unearthed fossils in a coastal desert of southern Peru of a four-legged whale that thrived both in the sea and on land about 43 million years ago in a discovery that illuminates a pivotal stage in early cetacean evolution. The 13-foot-long (4-meter) mammal, named Peregocetus pacificus, represents a crucial intermediate step before whales became fully adapted to a marine existence, the scientists said on Thursday. Read more: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-science-whale/ancient-four-legged-whale-from-peru-walked-on-land-swam-in-sea-idUKKCN1RG1ZF

"Scientists say they have discovered a "stunning" trove of thousands of fossils on a river bank in China. The fossils are estimated to be about 518 million years old, and are particularly unusual because the soft body tissue of many creatures, including their skin, eyes, and internal organs, have been "exquisitely" well preserved." From this BBC news item. The find is within a lagerstatte, a fine grained sediment in which fine detail, especially of soft tissue, is preserved. (Other famous examples include the Burgess Shale and the Solnhofen limestone.) We can reasonably expect signifcant understanding to emerge from further study of the find, and for more samp…