Science News

The yeast used by people for millennia to ferment alcoholic drinks can now produce cannabinoids – chemicals with medicinal properties as well as occasionally mind-altering characteristics in cannabis. The accomplishment, described in Nature on February 27, transforms a sugar known as galactose in brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) into THC or tetrahydrocannabinol, the primary psychoactive compound in Cannabis sativa or cannabis. Moreover, the modified enzyme can yield CBD or cannabidiol, another essential cannabinoid that’s been famous lately for its possible therapeutic benefits, such as pain-relief and anti-anxiety effects. The aspirations are that this…

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-02-mobile-bedside-bioprinter-wounds.html Mobile bedside bioprinter can heal wounds: Imagine a day when a bioprinter filled with a patient's own cells can be wheeled right to the bedside to treat large wounds or burns by printing skin, layer by layer, to begin the healing process. That day is not far off. more at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-02-mobile-bedside-bioprinter-wounds.html

Pesticides, pollution and climate change are all wiping out insects at an alarming rate – so much, that a new global review says they could vanish within a century, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”. The scientists are calling for an urgent overhaul of the agricultural industry, warning that “unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades”.https://www.channel4.com/news/insects-decline-threatens-catastrophic-collapse-of-natures-ecosystems The rate of insect extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles.https://www.theguardian.com/environme…

The occurrence of devastating European floods correlates with large-scale fluctuations in atmospheric pressure known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). As scientists improve their predictions for the NAO, society will be better able to prepare for future flooding. Stefano Zanardo and his colleagues at Risk Management Solutions in London, UK, analysed historical records of severe European floods going back to 1870, and compared them with the prevailing pattern of atmospheric pressure at the time of the floods. When the NAO is in its ‘positive’ state, a strong low-pressure system over Iceland funnels winds and storms across Northern Europe. Conversely, when the N…

Netflix have made a documentary about flat-Earthers. It shows how they do two experiments in an attempt to prove the Earth is flat but instead (spoiler!) the results are consistent with the Earth being round. Which, of course, changes no ones' minds. https://www.newsweek.com/behind-curve-netflix-ending-light-experiment-mark-sargent-documentary-movie-1343362

Positron, also called positive electron, positively charged subatomic particle having the same mass and magnitude of charge as the electron and constituting the antiparticle of a negative electron. When a positron hits an electron, both instantly annihilate in a flash of light. And since there are electrons in abundance everywhere on Earth, it is extremely difficult to store positrons in such a way that they survive for at least a while. Now, scientists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) have succeeded in losslessly guiding positrons. This discovery could pave the way towards creating a matter-antimatte…

Interesting article on how it is possible to indirectly detect the effects of the Cosmic Neutrino Background and (of course) how it is consistent with the Big Bang model. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/02/28/earliest-signal-ever-scientists-find-relic-neutrinos-from-1-second-after-the-big-bang/

A new simulation has revealed that global warming could cause stratocumulus clouds to disappear in as little as a century, which would add 8°C of extra warming. A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth’s climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century. https://www.quantamagazine.org/cloud-loss-could-add-8-degrees-to-global-warming-20190225/

https://phys.org/news/2019-02-nasa-life-ocean-floor.html NASA study reproduces origins of life on ocean floor February 26, 2019, NASA: Scientists have reproduced in the lab how the ingredients for life could have formed deep in the ocean 4 billion years ago. The results of the new study offer clues to how life started on Earth and where else in the cosmos we might find it. Astrobiologist Laurie Barge and her team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are working to recognize life on other planets by studying the origins of life here on Earth. Their research focuses on how the building blocks of life form in hydrothermal vents on …

Hundreds of thousands of native fish in Australia’s Darling River have died following a major outbreak of blue–green algae and some severe weather. Two mass die-offs have been reported near Menindee in western New South Wales — the first was late last year, and the second last week. Outbreaks of blue–green algae (cyanobacteria), which thrive in warm water, are not uncommon during droughts. The algae did not directly cause the mass die-off; rapid cooling and intense rainfall might have disrupted the bloom and depleted the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water, killing the fish, said Anthony Townsend, a senior fisheries manager at the New South Wales Department of Pr…

Scientists in Japan now have permission to inject 'reprogrammed' stem cells into people with spinal-cord injuries. An upcoming trial will mark the first time that induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have been used to treat spinal-cord injuries, after a committee at Japan’s health ministry approved the study on 18 February. IPS cells are created by inducing cells from body tissue to revert to an embryonic-like state, from which they can develop into other cell types. Hideyuki Okano, a stem-cell scientist at Keio University in Tokyo, will coax donor iPS cells into becoming neural precursor cells, which can develop into neurons and glial cells. His team will then injec…

The DNA of life on Earth naturally stores its information in just four key chemicals — guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, commonly referred to as G, C, A and T, respectively. Now scientists have doubled this number of life’s building blocks, creating for the first time a synthetic, eight-letter genetic language that seems to store and transcribe information just like natural DNA. "Synthetic DNA seems to behave like the natural variety, suggesting that chemicals beyond nature’s four familiar bases could support life on Earth" https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00650-8

If all goes well, an Israeli lander scheduled to launch tomorrow will become the first privately funded craft to land on the Moon. The trip will be short and sweet — a two-day study of magnetism in rocks. But it will pioneer the type of public-private partnership that seems set to kick off a new era of lunar exploration. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00652-6

Good summary of the observations at the time (gravitational waves and all electromagnetic spectrum) and what has been observed since then, including a relativistic jet (confirming the creation of a black hole). Or about twice the mass of all the world's oceans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/02/21/merging-neutron-stars-made-an-unstoppable-jet-and-it-moves-at-nearly-the-speed-of-light/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0573-2 Published: 24 September 2018 No evidence for modifications of gravity from galaxy motions on cosmological scales: Abstract: Current tests of general relativity (GR) remain confined to the scale of stellar systems or the strong gravity regime. A departure from GR on cosmological scales has been advocated1 as an alternative to the cosmological constant Λ (ref. 2) to account for the observed cosmic expansion history3,4. However, such models yield distinct values for the linear growth rate of density perturbations and consequently for the associated galaxy peculiar velocity field. Measurements of the resul…

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46856779 Bizarrely: So he repeatedly makes bigoted and discriminatory statements but ... what? He doesn't mean them? Just goes to show, even Nobel Prize winners can be idiots.

https://www.space.com/mars-rover-opportunity-declared-dead.html One of the great exploration stories of our time is officially over. NASA declared its Opportunity Mars rover dead today (Feb. 13), more than eight months after the solar-powered robot went silent during a raging dust storm on the Red Planet — and a day after the final calls to wake Oppy up went unanswered. "I declare the Opportunity mission as complete, and with it the Mars Exploration Rover mission complete," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said today during an event at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. [Mars…

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20190214 LIGO Receives New Funding to Search for More Extreme Cosmic Events News Release • February 14, 2019 Grants from the U.S., United Kingdom, and Australia will fund next-generation improvements to LIGO The National Science Foundation (NSF) is awarding Caltech and MIT $20.4 million to upgrade the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), an NSF-funded project that made history in 2015 after making the first direct detection of ripples in space and time, called gravitational waves. The investment is part of a joint international effort in collaboration with UK Research and Innovation and the A…

After exploring for 15 years across 45 kilometres of the Meridiani Planum region of Mars, NASA’s Opportunity rover is officially dead.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00575-2 R.I.P.

https://newatlas.com/earliest-evidence-life-mobility/58435/ Two billion-year old fossils reveal earliest evidence of living locomotion: For most of the time Earth has been inhabited, life took the form of single-celled organisms that just sat there in lumps, or floated around on water currents. But now fossils found in the African country of Gabon have turned up the earliest evidence of life showing some initiative and moving around of its own accord. It now seems that life was mobile some 1.5 billion years earlier than previously thought. more at link...........

I came across a couple of articles that, for different reasons, argue that string theory cannot be correct. The first, from the failure to find evidence for supersymmetry: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/02/12/why-supersymmetry-may-be-the-greatest-failed-prediction-in-particle-physics-history/ The second looks at the types of universes that are possiblest in string theory: https://www.quantamagazine.org/dark-energy-may-be-incompatible-with-string-theory-20180809/

https://phys.org/news/2019-02-possibility-underground-volcanism-mars.html New study suggests possibility of recent underground volcanism on Mars February 12, 2019, American Geophysical Union A study published last year in the journal Science suggested liquid water is present beneath the south polar ice cap of Mars. Now, a new study in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters argues there needs to be an underground source of heat for liquid water to exist underneath the polar ice cap. The new research does not take sides as to whether the liquid water exists. Instead, the authors suggest recent magmatic activity—the formation of a magma chamber within…

https://phys.org/news/2019-02-james-clerk-maxwell-telescope-flare.html The Hawaii-based James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) has discovered a stellar flare 10 billion times more powerful than the Sun's solar flares, a history-making discovery that could unlock decades-old questions about the origin of our own Sun and planets, giving insight into how these celestial bodies were born. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-02-james-clerk-maxwell-telescope-flare.html#jCp the paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/aaf3b1/meta The JCMT Transient Survey: An Extraordinary Submillimeter Flare in the T Tauri Binary System JW 566…

https://phys.org/news/2019-02-nasa-impact-crater-greenland-ice.html NASA finds possible second impact crater under Greenland ice February 11, 2019 by Maria-José Viñas, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center A NASA glaciologist has discovered a possible second impact crater buried under more than a mile of ice in northwest Greenland. Credit: NASA Goddard A NASA glaciologist has discovered a possible second impact crater buried under more than a mile of ice in northwest Greenland. his follows the finding, announced in November 2018, of a 19-mile-wide crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier—the first meteorite impact crater ever discovered under Earth's ice shee…

A hungry mosquito is at best a nuisance; at worst, it is a transmitter of deadly diseases. Now, researchers have discovered a way to stop mosquitoes biting — by using human ‘diet’ drugs to trick them into feeling full. The scientists suggest that the drugs could one day be used to control the spread of diseases. Their results are reported in Cell on 7 February.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00511-4