Science News

I've just stumbled upon this new paper draft, [2205.07921] The Futility of Exoplanet Biosignatures (arxiv.org) and immediately thought of @beecee because of this statement in the abstract: Technical constraints and our limited access to other worlds suggest we are more likely to detect an out-of-equilibrium suite of gasses than a writhing octopus. Yet, anything short of a writhing octopus will raise skepticism among astrobiologists about what has been detected.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220523162813.htm and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30505-2 Does that sound good?

Carbon. It takes a hundred suns to die before your magic web extends. But once it does, a world of possibilities is revealed. Your opening act is: "Let there be life". Not quite satisfied with this, you make things that make things that bring about: The hardest substance (diamond) The best lubricant (graphite). The best thermal conductor (graphene). Is there an end to this magic? If the Ancient Greeks had only suspected your capital importance, they would have named a god in your honour. Sorry, I got carried away with carbon love. Here's the news: https://phys.org/news/2022-05-long-hypothesized-material.html?fbclid=IwAR2lC…

"The expansion rate of the universe was predicted to be slower than what Hubble actually sees. By combining the Standard Cosmological Model of the Universe and measurements by the European Space Agency's Planck mission (which observed the relic cosmic microwave background from 13.8 billion years ago), astronomers predict a lower value for the Hubble constant: 67.5 plus or minus 0.5 kilometers per second per megaparsec, compared to the SH0ES team's estimate of 73. Given the large Hubble sample size, there is only a one-in-a-million chance astronomers are wrong due to an unlucky draw, said Riess, a common threshold for taking a problem seriously in physics. This findin…

Alien shopping-bag ocean weirdo has glowing Cheetos for guts | Live Science

In this paper, the authors use the trends of NASA budget and of research activities, and the prior history of the crewed space exploration to predict how far we will go during the next 100 years: [2205.08061] Impact of Economic Constraints on the Projected Timeframe for Human-Crewed Deep Space Exploration (arxiv.org) And here are the results:

By Curiosity rover, 7May2022 Also at ---> https://www.facebook.com/Mars360VR/photos/552593076237538

https://www.science.org/content/article/why-judge-might-overturn-guilty-verdict-against-u-s-scientist-hiding-china-ties Arrested in June 2019, Tao was the first academic scientist prosecuted under the China Initiative, a controversial program begun in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump that was aimed at rooting out economic espionage. However, only two of some two dozen academics charged under the initiative were ever prosecuted for espionage-related offenses; the others were generally charged with failing to disclose ties to Chinese institutions to U.S. funding agencies. U.S. universities once encouraged interactions with Chinese institutions, notes German,…

"Until May 12 rolls around, we won't know with any certainty what exactly it is that the NSF is going to announce." The US National Science Foundation Has 'Groundbreaking' News About The Milky Way (slashgear.com)

The first thing that has attracted my attention to this newly posted study was the long list of authors. 165 authors! From 103 different institutions! From dozens different countries! When you see what they did, you understand, why it is so. Big job. Here is quite detailed summary: The transitions from foraging to farming and later to pastoralism in Stone Age Eurasia (c. 11- 3 thousand years before present, BP) represent some of the most dramatic lifestyle changes in human evolution. We sequenced 317 genomes of primarily Mesolithic and Neolithic individuals from across Eurasia combined with radiocarbon dates, stable isotope data, and pollen records. Genome imputation…

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-04-patients-hospitalization-covid-fully-recovered.html Study of 2,000 patients after hospitalization with COVID-19 shows only around 1 in 4 feel fully recovered after 1 year by European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases A new UK study of more than 2,000 patients after hospitalization with COVID-19 presented at this year's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2022, Lisbon 23-26), and published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine shows that, one year after having COVID-19, only around one in four patients feel fully well again. The study is led by Professor Chris…

In this short paper renowned Harvard astrophysicist Abraham Loeb describes with "back of envelope calculation" a possible effect of a gravitational wave originated by a merger of two supermassive black holes in the center of Milky Way galaxy. Such merger would cause a measurable, up to 1 mm permanent increase of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. It would happen because the gravitational attraction between the two bodies would weaken during the time that takes for the wave to cover the distance between them, which is about 1 s. [2205.02746] Two Novel Observational Tests of General Relativity (arxiv.org)

https://phys.org/news/2022-05-bilayer-graphene-two-universe-cosmological.html Bilayer graphene inspires two-universe cosmological model: Physicists sometimes come up with crazy stories that sound like science fiction. Some turn out to be true, like how the curvature of space and time described by Einstein was eventually borne out by astronomical measurements. Others linger on as mere possibilities or mathematical curiosities. In a new paper in Physical Review Research, JQI Fellow Victor Galitski and JQI graduate student Alireza Parhizkar have explored the imaginative possibility that our reality is only one half of a pair of interacting worlds. Their mathem…

https://www.vice.com/en/article/akvm5b/scientists-discover-method-to-break-down-plastic-in-one-week-not-centuries If this is scalable, it could be a game-changer. Of course, we still need to get the plastic waste into recycle bins. So it would help if the enzyme also acted rapidly on human stupidity and laziness.

A new genetic study involving more than 2,000 dogs and 200,000 survey answers from dog owners has revealed that a dog's breed is a poor predictor of behavior on its own. The first-of-its-kind, peer-reviewed study—conducted by professors, students and researchers at University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School—is set to appear this month in the journal Science. The major findings go against the popular beliefs that breed plays a role in how aggressive, obedient or affectionate a dog can be. Those stereotypes can prompt breed-specific legislation, insurance restrictions and home bans for some dog breeds, including pit bulls and German Shepherds. more at li…

This new paper suggests an interesting way of clarifying, unifying, and generalizing notions of entropy from Clausius, Boltzmann, and Shannon, using a new concept of Information Reference Frame with a corresponding "observer", analogous to reference frames, with Bobs and Alices in other areas of science: [2103.16913] Information form of the second law of thermodynamics (arxiv.org)

In this study the authors found a significant correlation: global strong seismic activity followed about two weeks after detection of variations in cosmic rays. Causal connection is not clear, but the authors suggest either effects of massive movements of the liquid iron in the Earth core, or some effects of the Sun. They have noticed some additional correlations and periodicity, but these need more data. [2204.12310] Observation of large scale precursor correlations between cosmic rays and earthquakes (arxiv.org)

It is interesting that finds like this still happen, in a long and densely populated place, in an agricultural field rather than under some old construction... Plus, I drove through Khan Younis 40 years ago... Palestinian farmer finds 4,500-year-old statue of a goddess while working his land - CNN Style

https://phys.org/news/2022-04-blueprint-life-asteroids.html Using new analyses, scientists have just found the last two of the five informational units of DNA and RNA that had yet to be discovered in samples from meteorites. While it is unlikely that DNA could be formed in a meteorite, this discovery demonstrates that these genetic parts are available for delivery and could have contributed to the development of the instructional molecules on early Earth. The discovery, by an international team with NASA researchers, gives more evidence that chemical reactions in asteroids can make some of life's ingredients, which could have been delivered to ancient Earth by meteor…

A laser weapon capable of shooting down flying drones has been deployed for the very first time by the US Navy, though only for demonstration purposes. Until now, many questions had lingered over whether laser-based weaponry would ever become an effective tool in modern warfare, some of which have now been answered by official footage of the event. Installed aboard the USS Portland, the 150-kilowatt-class Technology Maturation Laser Weapon System Demonstrator (LWSD) was used to successfully disable an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on May 16, 2020, in what was the first use of a high-energy class solid-state laser weapon. "By conducting advanced at-sea tests agai…

Let me be the first to announce the birth of a new science. Lee Smolin et al. explain it in a new paper, Biocosmology: Towards the birth of a new science.

https://phys.org/news/2022-04-space-blocs-future-international-cooperation.html Space Blocs: The future of international cooperation in space is splitting along lines of power on Earth: Even during times of conflict on the ground, space has historically been an arena of collaboration among nations. But trends in the past decade suggest that the nature of cooperation in space is shifting, and fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine has highlighted these changes. 'm an international relations scholar who studies power distributions in space—who the main players are, what capabilities they possess and whom they decide to cooperate with. Some scholars predict…

On the Origin of Hallucinations in Conversational Models: Is it the Datasets or the Models? (2204.07931.pdf (arxiv.org)) In knowledge-based conversational AI systems, "hallucinations" are responses which are factually invalid, fully or partially. It appears that AI does it a lot. This study investigated where these hallucinations come from. As it turns out, the big source is in the databases used to train these AI systems. On average, the responses, on which the systems are trained, contain about 20% factual information, while the rest is hallucinations (~65%), uncooperative (~5%), or uninformative (~10%). On top of this, it turns out that the systems thems…

May have detected dark energy. https://www.inverse.com/science/why-scientists-might-have-detected-dark-energy-on-earth Hypothesized by physicists to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe, dark energy has never been directly observed or measured. Instead, scientists can only make inferences about it from its effects on the space and matter we can see. What’s new — In the paper, the researchers claim that hints of dark energy were detected at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy during an experiment designed to detect dark matter.