Science News

Betavoltaic battery is going into production https://www.techspot.com/news/107357-coin-sized-nuclear-3v-battery-50-year-lifespan.html “The BV100 harnesses energy from the radioactive decay of its nickel-63 core.” More technical analysis here https://www.wired.com/story/is-this-50-year-battery-for-real/ “this new battery announced by BetaVolt uses a different technology called betavoltaic generation. Instead of tapping thermal energy, it captures the ejected electrons, known as beta particles, from a radioactive isotope of nickel to form an electric circuit. It's made up of several layers of nickel sandwiched between plates of diamond, which…

Hi all. A nuclear energy source substitute on recent news... How real is it among dozens of same style promising technology ? ---> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14447257/China-discovers-limitless-energy-source-power-country.html

The KM3NeT group has found evidence for high enough energy Neutrinos that may provide evidence of primordial Black Hole final evaporation. Black Holes of tens to hundreds of thousand pounds cannot be formed by stellar collapse and may have been formed shortly after the Big Bang event. If found in large numbers, such neutrinos may indicate large numbers of primordial Black Holes; perhaps enough to account for Dark Matter effects. See here for the 'Pop-Sci', quick and dirty explanation Evidence for Stephen Hawking's unproven black hole theory may have just been found — at the bottom of the sea See here for a more detailed analysis Ob…

“Something extraordinary happened on Earth around 10 million years ago, and whatever it was, it left behind a “signature” of radioactive beryllium-10. This finding, which is based on studies of rocks located deep beneath the ocean, could be evidence for a previously-unknown cosmic event or major changes in ocean circulation. With further study, the newly-discovered beryllium anomaly could also become an independent time marker for the geological record.” https://physicsworld.com/a/radioactive-anomaly-appears-in-the-deep-ocean/ A couple of nits, though “Because beryllium-10 has a half-life of 1.4 million years, it is possible to use its abundance to pin down…

"AG2 achieves an impressive 84% solve rate on all 2000-2024 [International Mathematical Olympiad] geometry problems, demonstrating a significant leap forward in AI’s ability to tackle challenging mathematical reasoning tasks, and surpassing an average IMO gold medalist." 2502.03544

Finally we have the recipe for the perfectly boiled egg. I've been doing it wrong all my life. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00334-w

Below is a link to a nasa.gov article regarding NGC922 aka the Bullseye galaxy and a recently released image from the Hubble space telescope. It has been described as rare due to that it has 9 rings surrounding it. It has also been said that the reason for these 9 rings is that a smaller galaxy collided into it through it's centre, the remnants of this smaller galaxy can be seen in the image. Do any members of SF that are interested in this field know of the mechanism of how such a collision would cause these 9 rings? https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-investigates-galaxy-with-nine-rings/

A new Chinese AI app called ‘DeepSeek R1’ (深度求索 - shēndù qiúsuǒ ) has roiled the AI stockmarket sector to the tune of $1 Trillion, and has taken the #1 position in Apple’s App Store, ahead of ChatGPT and other competing AI products. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/27/tech-shares-asia-europe-fall-china-ai-deepseek What has attracted so much attention from analysts and investors is that the Hangzhou-based startup who created DeepSeek claim to have spent little more than $6 Million in developing the product, and they did so without the help of Nvidia’s most advanced H100 chips which have been banned by USA from export to China since September 2022. De…

A surge in cases of the flu-like human metapneumovirus (HMPV) in China has raised fears of another Covid-style pandemic. Images of hospitals overrun with masked patients have circulated widely on social media, but health experts say HMPV is not like Covid https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c23vjg7v7k0o Here we go again other Covid like outbreak.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c728ven2v9eo

What did Earth look like? Pick your time period...I found it interesting. https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth/#105

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-dark-energy-doesnt-lumpy-universe.html "One of the biggest mysteries in science—dark energy—doesn't actually exist, according to researchers looking to solve the riddle of how the universe is expanding. Their analysis has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters." Basically, they claim that there is no need for dark energy because the apparent accelerated expansion of the universe is really due to how we calibrate time and distance.

Just saw this in my FB feed. It's different to how I imagined it. I pictured a collision of solids with fragmentation and gravity doing its stuff after.

Somebody moved UK's oldest satellite, and no-one knows who or why https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpwrr58801yo

Two studies find SARS-CoV-2 virus becoming resistant to antiviral drugs used to treat patients Two studies have found that the virus that causes COVID-19 is becoming resistant to two drugs used to treat patients with infections. As part of that effort, two such therapies, named remdesivir and nirmatrelvir, have become the go-to drugs for patients with immune systems that are not capable of fighting off the virus. But because they are antivirals, they run the risk of obsolescence as the virus mutates. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-09-sars-cov-virus-resistant-antiviral.html ================ It is strange how first two years of the …

A pair of Australian mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta have published a new paper called A numerical evaluation of the Finite Monkeys Theorem which demonstrates that the estimated lifespan of our universe renders it impossible for an infinite number of monkeys to type out the complete works of Shakespeare. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2773186324001014 As a BBC news article explains:

This could be used to argue that animals have a sense of the sacred: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mysterious-chimpanzee-behavior-may-be-evidence-of-sacred-rituals/ Even more intriguing than this, maybe we found the first evidence of chimpanzees creating a kind of shrine that could indicate sacred trees. Indigenous West African people have stone collections at “sacred” trees and such man-made stone collections are commonly observed across the world and look eerily similar to what we have discovered here.

“Study finds standing desks may be bad for your health Every 30 minutes spent standing beyond two hours increases the risk of circulatory disease by 11% We've long been told that sitting at a desk all day is the new smoking, resulting in a higher risk of dangerous health conditions. It's why companies such as Google offer employees the option to use standing desks. However, according to a new study, standing all day may not be as good for us as we think, and could even increase the risk of conditions such as swollen veins and blood clots in the legs.” https://www.techspot.com/news/105176-study-finds-standing-desks-may-bad-health-increasing.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0lw0nxw71po Now for the first time scientists researching the brain of a fly have identified the position, shape and connections of every single one of its 130,000 cells and 50 million connections.

This caught my eye in my FB feed. Thought it might interest a few here.

An interesting study looks at factors related to COVID-19 refusal. There has been an ongoing debate whether hesitancy was fueled by lack of good information or whether there are other drivers. This study focuses on how folks process information and found an important impact in the form of deliberate ignorance: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41541-024-00951-8

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/science/ig-nobel-prize-ceremony-2024-intl-scli/index.html CNN — The world still holds many unanswered questions. But thanks to the efforts of the research teams awarded the IG Nobel Prize on Thursday, some of these questions – which you might not even have thought existed – now have answers. We now know that many mammals can breathe through their anuses, that there isn’t an equal probability that a coin will land on head or tails, that some real plants somehow imitate the shapes of neighboring fake plastic plants, that fake medicine which causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine without side-effects…

LQG (loop quantum gravity) predicts the minutest dependence of the speed of light on frequency, which would be best detectable on large populations of high-energy photons with very long astrophysical paths. A good candidate to test this would be a very far away (=> very early) gamma ray burst. GRB 221009A stepped forward some years ago. From: Stringent Tests of Lorentz Invariance Violation from LHAASO Observations of GRB 221009A Although this doesn't totally do away with LQG, it seems to rule out a vast landscape of the LQG parameter space. The somewhat less hyped version of these news is that we are a tad surer that LIV does not occur in Nature.

The stratigraphic record is very sparse to missing for the period when it was thought that there may have been an intense ice age of the magnitude tojustify the name Snowball Earth. This report suggests that this was about 720 mya. It also suggests that the full stratigraphy is to be found on some remote Scottish Islands. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj9l2mrn43jo