Science News

A new type of virus has been found that could have a profound influence on ecosystems. https://phys.org/news/2018-01-virus-ocean.html

What wonders lie beneath... https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/03/scientists-discover-ancient-mayan-city-hidden-under-guatemalan-jungle

Hello forum, If you are interested in a short paper on the Construction of "KAGRA: an Underground Gravitational Wave Observatory" in Japan. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.00148.pdf

Astronomers reveal secrets of most distant supernova ever detected February 20, 2018, University of Portsmouth Supernova. Credit: NASA An international team of astronomers, including Professor Bob Nichol from the University of Portsmouth, has confirmed the discovery of the most distant supernova ever detected – a huge cosmic explosion that took place 10.5 billion years ago, or three-quarters the age of the Universe itself. The exploding star, named DES16C2nm, was detected by the Dark Energy Survey (DES), an international collaboration to map several hundred million galaxies in order to find out more about dark energy – the mysterious force believed to …

A scientist takes a photo of a single atom using an ordinary camera: https://qz.com/1205279/photo-of-an-atom-a-scientist-captured-an-incredible-photograph/ (Didn't we have someone here recently claiming that atoms don't exist!) Five ways the heaviest element on the periodic table is really bizarre: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/5-ways-heaviest-element-periodic-table-really-bizarre Discrepancy in neutron lifetime measurements might hint at new physics (but probably not dark matter): https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutron-lifetime-puzzle-deepens-but-no-dark-matter-seen-20180213/ (I wonder is this might be relevant to the discrepancy in the amount of of lithi…

The BBC report on the long term orbital behaviour of Musk's Tesla, launched by the Falcon Heavy last week. Here is an extract: The Tesla car that Elon Musk launched into space is likely to stay there for tens of millions of years before crashing into the Earth or Venus. That's the conclusion of an analysis by Czech and Canadian researchers. They calculated that the roadster has a 6% chance of colliding with Earth and a 2.5% probability of hitting Venus over the next million years. But there's no cause for concern: if it eventually returns to Earth, most of the vehicle will burn up. The team's computer simulations suggest there is a very sli…

In a (now trashed) thread, Moontanman linked to an interesting story about the role of retroviruses in brain function and memory: That was a very poorly written article (in one sentence, I couldn't even work out what the "it" referred to). But it still looked like very interesting, so here is a better one (with references to the original papers): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00492-w

https://phys.org/news/2018-02-astrophysicists-planets-extragalactic-galaxies-microlensing.html Astrophysicists discover planets in extragalactic galaxies using microlensing February 2, 2018, University of Oklahoma The gravitational lens RX J1131-1231 galaxy with the lens galaxy at the center and four lensed background quasars. It is estimated that there are trillions of planets in the center elliptical galaxy in this image. Credit: University of Oklahoma A University of Oklahoma astrophysics team has discovered for the first time a population of planets beyond the Milky Way galaxy. Using microlensing—an astronomical phenomenon and the only known…

A recent report on TYT (re: youtube How AI Is Being Used To Create Fake Porn) says AI systems are available on the internet with instructions telling novice users, ones with no programming experience, how to use the AI. Furthermore, someone has created a video editing system that allows the person to trade faces in the video for one in a picture. Thus, anyone may show up in a porn movie. Not good. Adolescents will grow up developing AI and some of them will do good things. Of course there are serious developers using AI, too. It is good to know how easy it is to use AI. I think everyone needs to now about this technology, Forewarning perhaps can lessen the shock…

I wish to find out if a tree so heavily pruned is still capable of survival. Please comment.

New evidence may push back the appearance of modern humans to 500,000 years. Early human migration out of Africa and interbreeding with more archaic humans is thought to have occured. https://www.livescience.com/61532-oldest-human-fossils-outside-africa.html?

„Biologists in Shanghai, China, have created the first primates cloned with a technique similar to the one used to clone Dolly the sheep and nearly two dozen other species. The method has failed to produce live primates until now” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01027-z

The purpose of this thread is to discuss the current tectonic activity around the Pacific Rim. Mods please move to Earth Science if you feel it fits better there. The Alaska quake is the big news, but there is other activity to consider - volcanic in japan and Indonesia. Here is my contribution to kick off. If anyone could embed the video I would be grateful http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-42785939/the-philippines-most-active-volcano-mount-mayon-erupts

AutoML is the first AI automation tool that I've heard of; although, there may be others. Previously, before the current AI epoch, Computer Aided Engineering and Design systems of various types were sold. However, few were a commercial success. The AutoML team seems to have a good technique, since they are integrating AI into the system they are designing and putting AI into the systems it produces. Any time they can save developing will be used for other things. In the limit, an AI will be able to do anything a human can. At this time this tool falls short of that goal, but I believe they will continue to improve AutoML and perhaps build other related tools. Th…

The director of the NIEHS wrote an editorial for PloS Biology highlighting the lack of regulation on potential harmful pollutants and called for more research and policies to address these gaps. One would think that this is not controversial as it clearly within the mission of the NIEHS. In response, the House Science Oversight Committee wants to investigate her for, wait for it.... "lobbying".

Can London, Paris and Hong Cong file similar suits? Will these lawsuits smother the oil companies?

Hello everyone, for a university course I am currently collecting research articles in the field of biomedicine/genetics/molecular biology. I am particularly interested in papers which have been published within the last 15 years or so and which represent cornerstones of the life sciences. The articles are thought to be presented by the participating students in a "journal club" format. I was already thinking of the Yamanaka/ipSCs paper from 2007; the brainbow mouse paper(Livet et al, 2007), the essential genes of a minimum bacterial cell and first "synthetic cell" by Craig Venter's people and more recently, the 2012 CRISPR paper from Doudna's and Charpentier's group…

NASA team studies middle-aged Sun by tracking motion of Mercury January 18, 2018 by Elizabeth Zubritsky, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Like the waistband of a couch potato in midlife, the orbits of planets in our solar system are expanding. It happens because the Sun's gravitational grip gradually weakens as our star ages and loses mass. Now, a team of NASA and MIT scientists has indirectly measured this mass loss and other solar parameters by looking at changes in Mercury's orbit. The new values improve upon earlier predictions by reducing the amount of uncertainty. That's especially important for the rate of solar mass loss, because it's …

https://phys.org/news/2018-01-neutron-star-merger-yields-puzzle-astrophysicists.html Neutron-star merger yields new puzzle for astrophysicists January 18, 2018, McGill University: The afterglow from the distant neutron-star merger detected last August has continued to brighten - much to the surprise of astrophysicists studying the aftermath of the massive collision that took place about 138 million light years away and sent gravitational waves rippling through the universe. New observations from NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, reported in Astrophysical Journal Letters, indicate that the gamma ray burst unleashed by the collisio…

https://phys.org/news/2018-01-massive-neutron-stars.html#ms How massive can neutron stars be? Astrophysicists at Goethe University Frankfurt set a new limit for the maximum mass of neutron stars: They cannot exceed 2.16 solar masses. Since their discovery in the 1960s, scientists have sought to answer an important question: How massive can neutron stars actually become? By contrast to black holes, these stars cannot gain in mass arbitrarily; past a certain limit there is no physical force in nature that can counter their enormous gravitational force. For the first time, astrophysicists at Goethe University Frankfurt have succeeded in calculating a st…

As car autopilots become common, it seems some things now done at fixed locations, such as stores and warehouses, will become mobile. Eventually, food may be picked and delivered to your door without stopping at a store or warehouse, including fresh food and prepared. It will cut costs. There will be similar things done with durable goods, but this segment of the market seems more difficult to fully mobilize.

According to this Physicist Illinios article: "Professor of Physics Peter Abbamonte and graduate students Anshul Kogar and Mindy Rak, with input from colleagues at Illinois, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Amsterdam, have proven the existence of this enigmatic new form of matter, which has perplexed scientists since it was first theorized almost 50 years ago." "So what exactly is excitonium? Excitonium is a condensate—it exhibits macroscopic quantum phenomena, like a superconductor, or superfluid, or insulating electronic crystal. It’s made up of excitons, particles that are formed in a very strange quantum mechanical pairing, namely that …

https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article-abstract/474/1/L81/4566532?redirectedFrom=fulltext Formation of precessing jets by tilted black hole discs in 3D general relativistic MHD simulations: Abstract Gas falling into a black hole (BH) from large distances is unaware of BH spin direction, and misalignment between the accretion disc and BH spin is expected to be common. However, the physics of tilted discs (e.g. angular momentum transport and jet formation) is poorly understood. Using our new GPU-accelerated code H-AMR, we performed 3D general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of tilted thick accretion discs around rapidly spinning BHs…

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/673349/NASA-430000mph-Parker-Solar-Probe-Sun-speed-London-New-York-video If this probe succeeds, it'll be traveling at a whopping 430,000 MPH. For reference, Voyager 1, the current fastest space probe, is traveling at 38,610 MPH.

Gravitational waves measure the universe January 8, 2018, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics NGC4993, the galaxy hosting the gravitational wave event GW170817 that has been used to measure the age of the universe. The source of the event is the red dot to the upper left of the galaxy's center; it was not there in earlier images. Credit: NASA and ESA The direct detection of gravitational waves from at least five sources during the past two years offers spectacular confirmation of Einstein's model of gravity and space-time. Modeling of these events has also provided information on massive star formation, gamma-ray bursts,…