Science News

New analysis of SARS-CoV-2 positive swabs indicated heavy presence of racoon dog DNA, suggesting that those (illegally) sold animals adds weight to the suggestion of the market as a possible spillover source. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/03/covid-origins-research-raccoon-dogs-wuhan-market-lab-leak/673390/

2998.PDF (usra.edu) 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 2023 (LPI Contrib. No. 2806) 2998.pdf A RELICT GLACIER NEAR MARS’ EQUATOR: EVIDENCE FOR RECENT GLACIATION AND VOLCANISM IN EASTERN NOCTIS LABYRINTHUS

Recently we had a discussion on nature vs nurture in this forum and I have mentioned the difficulties of looking at complex traits as directly and firmly genetically linked. Specifically I mentioned the misuse of race and ethnic groups in this context. Now I cam a cross a publication of the National Academies which elaborates on this issue: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/26902 A summary can be found here: https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/2023/03/researchers-need-to-rethink-and-justify-how-and-why-race-ethnicity-and-ancestry-labels-are-used-in-genetics-and-genomics-research-says-new-report Much of it is a call for more precision, but al…

Light is made out of small quantum objects called photons. When you turn on a lamp, the light bulb begins creating and emitting trillions upon trillions of photons. Photons are in a class of quantum particles known as bosons.

Complex Learned Social Behavior Discovered in Bee’s Waggle Dance - Neuroscience News There are several analogies between bee's learning the dance and humans learning language, such as early exposure, quality, and local dialects.

Saw it on my Facebook, I haven't read the article so not sure what the reason(s) are, not sure if I'm going to, might just read the Facebook comments and watch people attack each other over it.

NYT Technology journalist Kevin Roose had an unnerving Valentine’s Day experience while previewing a new AI chatbot Microsoft has recently added to its Bing search engine. https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2023/02/17/bing-chatgpt-chatbot-artificial-intelligence-ctn-vpx-new.cnn In the course of a two hour conversation with the AI, the chatbot said it was called Sidney, insisted that it was in love with him, and tried to persuade him to leave his wife. The journalist says he found the experience a disturbing one that left him unable to sleep; “I’m a tech journalist, I cover this sort of thing every day, and I was deeply unnerved by this conversatio…

Not sure if this is news or not, and it maybe out of date. I saw a recent news article about the James Web telescope capturing images of distance galaxies that were thought to be small primordial ones. But the images are showing the galaxies to be far larger than expected which would indicate that they are much older than first assumed. Based on this it would indicate that the universe is much older than currently described. However, the scale of the galaxies in the images could be misleading due to gravitational lensing, thus giving the appearance that they are much larger than they actually are. Not 100% sure how this is determined but it is suggested that th…

Shiny bright objects are not always what they seem to be. "A shape-shifting robot that looks like a cross between a Lego figure and the T-1000 from Terminator 2 has been filmed melting itself to escape through the bars of a miniature jail cell." https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-64668021

New figures from the Office for National Statistics.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64402524

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64603521

I found the following article on the BBC news science website The Antarctic and Arctic sounds rarely heard before https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64514258 With reference to this." a seal that sounds like it is in space". Is this me, or does this just sound sloppy. As far as i am aware sounds don't travel through the vacuum of space. Also to make such a comparison we would need a proper frame of reference to compare the sound to, e,g an actual seal in space I do understand the other comparisons "Singing" ice, and a seismic airgun thundering like a bomb . As for example the latter would be on earth anyway, and ice cracks and creaks too.…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-63901644

Dark energy ‘chameleon trap’ wins £100,000 prize for Nottingham scientist

Archaeologists have confirmed that a papyrus scroll discovered at the Saqquara necropolis site near Cairo last year does indeed contain texts from the Egyptian Book of the Dead— the first time a complete papyrus has been found in a century, according to Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt. The scroll has been dubbed the "Waziri papyrus." It is currently being translated into Arabic. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/archaeologists-discovered-a-new-papyrus-of-egyptian-book-of-the-dead/ These "books" were actually collections of funerary texts and spells to help the deceased on their journey through the underworld…

A new study suggest dinosaurs might have been much smarter than originally thought! https://www.labroots.com/trending/neuroscience/24431/t-rex-smart-baboon

Viruses are a good food for these bacteria: The consumption of viruses returns energy to food chains | PNAS

Closer To Truth has a new website, which I think is quite well made, visually appealing, and features all the high-quality content the channel is known for. I highly recommend it: https://closertotruth.com

Interesting paper from back in July (how did I miss this?), co-authored by Giorgio Immirzi, one of the foremost experts on GR and quantum gravity: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.04279 This is just the latest paper within an increasingly large body of work that indicates that ‘dark matter’ as a separate phenomenon may be entirely superfluous. The basic idea here is that, under certain specific circumstances, even in the weak-field and low velocity regime, there may be non-negligible GR effects that aren’t found in Newtonian gravity. Hence, sometimes Newtonian gravity is not a valid approximation to GR in the weak field domain - which is the very assumption from which…

Fusion energy breakthrough by US scientists boosts clean power hopes | Financial Times (ft.com)

https://www.quantamagazine.org/asymmetry-detected-in-the-distribution-of-galaxies-20221205/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.03625 Now this is very interesting! Despite the 7-sigma significance mentioned in the paper, this will of course require further corroboration. But if this turns out to be a real thing, then it would have far-reaching consequences. Definitely one to watch!

https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clues-come-from-a-century-old-approach-to-math-20200407/ (This is a pull-quote, but I have to warn that reading the full article may be necessary to follow what Gisin is up to. I can't cut/paste everything on this device, sorry.) Over the past year, the Swiss physicist Nicolas Gisin has published four papers that attempt to dispel the fog surrounding time in physics. As Gisin sees it, the problem all along has been mathematical. Gisin argues that time in general and the time we call the present are easily expressed in a century-old mathematical language called “intuitionist mathematics,” which rejects the…

This certainly sounds like a big deal: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03820-3 5 papers published so far on it: References Rustamkulov, Z. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2211.10487 (2022). Alderson, L. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2211.10488 (2022). Ahrer, E.-M. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2211.10489 (2022). Tsai, S.-M. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2211.10490 (2022). Feinstein, A. D. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2211.10493 (2022). But I would like to sample opinions from local experts.…