discuss Science & Technology news & discussion

[CraigD]

Post and discuss interesting articles & videos about science and technology.

You don't need to be an expert - just interested in the wonders of modern science, technology, and the history of these fields.

Please keep it rational, and post articles from reputable sources.
Try not to editorialise headlines and keep the copy to just a paragraph with a link to the original source. When quoting excerpts from articles, I think the best method is to italicise the copy, and include a link to the source.

Have some fun with your comments and discussions... just keep the sources legitimate.

Other threads:
The Break Room has a number of other popular threads, so there is no need to post material here that is better suited to these other threads:

- Covid19-Coronavirus updates and news
- Conspiracy Thread Free For All
- The *religious* discussion thread

Please enjoy!

 

[Sutruk]

Mysterious ‘yellowballs’ littering the Milky Way are clusters of newborn stars

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/yellowballs-stars-milky-way-space-astronomy

"Scientists have cracked the case of mysterious cosmic objects dubbed “yellowballs.” The celestial specks the birthplaces of many kinds of stars with a wide range of masses, rather than single supermassive stars, researchers report April 13 in the Astrophysical Journal.

The stars in the clusters are relatively young, only about 100,000 years old. “I think of these as stars in utero,” says Grace Wolf-Chase, an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute who is based in Naperville, Ill. For comparison, the massive stars forming in the Orion nebula are about 3 million years old, and the middle-aged sun is 4.6 billion years old."

 

[Compassion]

New York and the third temple of Solomon

 

[koolishman]

Humanity Now Lives in The Anthropocene. But What Does That Actually Mean?

In the last two decades, the Anthropocene has become an informal buzzword to describe the numerous and unprecedented ways humans have come to modify the planet.

As the concept has become more widely adopted, however, definitions have begun to blur. Today, the very meaning of the Anthropocene and its timeline differs considerably depending on who is doing the talking.

The rise of crop domestication and hunting, the spread of livestock and mining, and the move to urbanization, for instance, have all caused great changes to Earth's soil signature and its fossil record, setting us on a course to the modern day.

As far back as 3400 BCE, for instance, people in China were already smelting copper, and 3,000 years ago, most of the planet was already transformed by hunter-gatherers and farmers.

While these smaller and slower regional changes did not destabilize Earth's entire system as more modern actions have, some researchers think we are underestimating the climate effects of these earlier land-use changes.

As such, some have considered using the terms "pre-Anthropocene" or "proto‐Anthropocene" to describe significant human impacts before the mid‐twentieth century.

 

[koolishman]

Why Are There No Horse-Sized Rabbits? We Finally Know The Evolutionary Answer

For example, lagomorphs – which include rabbits and hares – don't vary much in size, whereas the closely related rodents can go all the way from the tiny pygmy mouse to the chunky capybaras with hundreds of times as much mass.

"The largest living wild lagomorphs weigh only about 5 kg (11 lbs) on average, a tenth of the largest living rodent, the capybara," says vertebrate paleontologist Susumu Tomiya from Kyoto University in Japan.

"But some breeds of domestic rabbits and other extinct species can weigh up to 8 kg. We were surprised by this and so began to investigate what sort of external forces keep wild lagomorphs across the world from evolving larger body sizes."

The researchers analyzed lagomorph sizes past and present, looking at the fossil record and evolutionary history of the mammals, before turning their attention to other ecological factors. It turns out that the presence of ungulates, or hoofed animals, can be linked to lagomorph size.

Following up on the lead, the team looked at energy use across different sizes of lagomorphs and ungulates. They found that once lagomorphs reach around 6 kilograms (about 14 lbs) in mass, they're at a competitive disadvantage to ungulates.

A return to the fossil record for North America backed up the idea that the smallest contemporaneous ungulate in an area was a big factor in determining the largest lagomorph – anything larger had a lower chance of survival with the bigger, more energy-efficient competitors around.

"We see this pattern today across numerous eco-regions, suggesting that there is an evolutionary ceiling placed on lagomorphs by their ungulate competitors," says Tomiya.

 

[koolishman]

Malaria vaccine becomes first to achieve WHO-specified 75% efficacy goal

• High-level vaccine efficacy of 77% in African children achieve WHO-specified efficacy goal of 75%
• Vaccine, trialled in 450 children, shows favourable safety profile and was well-tolerated
• Vaccine candidate, R21/Matrix-M, has excellent potential for large-scale manufacturing and low-cost supply

Researchers from the University of Oxford and their partners have today reported findings from a Phase IIb trial of a candidate malaria vaccine, R21/Matrix-M, which demonstrated high-level efficacy of 77% over 12-months of follow-up.

In their findings (posted on SSRN/Preprints with The Lancet) they note that they are the first to meet the World Health Organization’s Malaria Vaccine Technology Roadmap goal of a vaccine with at least 75% efficacy.

The authors report (in findings in press with The Lancet) from a Phase IIb randomised, controlled, double-blind trial conducted at the Clinical Research Unit of Nanoro (CRUN) / Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé (IRSS), Burkina Faso. 450 participants, aged 5-17 months, were recruited from the catchment area of Nanoro, covering 24 villages and an approximate population of 65,000 people.

The participants were split into three groups, with the first two groups receiving the R21/Matrix-M (with either a low dose or high dose of the Matrix-M adjuvant) and the third, a rabies vaccine as the control group. Doses were administered from early May 2019 to early August 2019, largely prior to the peak malaria season.

The researchers report a vaccine efficacy of 77% in the higher-dose adjuvant group, and 71% in the lower dose adjuvant group, over 12 months of follow-up, with no serious adverse events related to the vaccine noted.

 

[koolishman]

Disney Robot Makes Most Convincing Eye Contact Ever

Scientists at Disney Research, the network of labs supporting the company’s technological endeavors, have recently devised a new system for creating a lifelike robotic gaze.


By introducing minute “secondary behaviors” that humans exhibit in a conversation—from the flicker of the pupils between focal points, to the faint tilt of the head—the team managed to craft a machine that feels sort of human. The scientists presented their paper at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems last fall.

 

[koolishman]

Rare Microbes Turn Toxic Sludge into Usable Copper

Bacteria found around a Brazilian mine could improve copper harvesting.

It took only 48 hours to turn a bottle of toxic, dark ochre sludge into something that looked more like an orange-tinged hazy beer. Within the bottle, invisible to the naked eye, a newly discovered bacterial strain referred to only as 105 was eating away at toxic copper sulfate to leave pure copper atoms. The bacteria had been found in the tailings pond of a Brazilian mine, and they were completing their task with little of the pollution and energy currently used by industry to produce similar results.

"The microbes can do it in a very clean manner," said Debora Rodrigues, an environmental engineer at the University of Houston and one of the co-authors of a study published today in the journal Science Advances. Producing a similar change using industrial processes "is a very hard chemistry and a very dirty chemistry," she added.

Rodrigues and her co-authors discovered the bacteria by accident while looking for microbes that might produce nanomaterials. While working with certain microbes, they noticed the color change of the liquid they were using to grow bacteria.

A closer examination revealed that a bacterium was consuming positively charged copper ions (Cu2+), which form when copper sulfate dissolves in water, and turning the ions into more stable neutral copper atoms.

 

[CraigD]

Meet 'Zhurong': China names Tianwen-1 Mars rover ahead of mid-May landing attempt

The rover was named after an ancient fire god.

China has named its first-ever Mars rover "Zhurong" after an ancient fire god ahead of a landing attempt on the Red Planet in May.


The China National Space Administration (CNSA) revealed the name at the sixth China Space Day held in Nanjing on Saturday (April 24).

10 shortlisted names for a public vote that opened in January, and that choice was backed by an expert panel and the CNSA itself.

Going with the fire god is apt, for the Chinese name for Mars, "Huoxing," literally means "fire star."


The roughly 530-lb. (240 kilograms) solar-powered Zhurong rover is part of the Tianwen-1 mission, which launched in July 2020 and arrived in orbit around Mars in February.

https://www.space.com/china-tianwen-1-mars-rover-named-zhurong

 

[J Sokol]

‘Insanely cheap energy’: how solar power continues to shock the world

In the year 2000, the International Energy Agency (IEA) made a prediction that would come back to haunt it: by 2020, the world would have installed a grand total of 18 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar capacity. Seven years later, the forecast would be proven spectacularly wrong when roughly 18 gigawatts of solar capacity were installed in a single year alone.

Ever since the agency was founded in 1974 to measure the world’s energy systems and anticipate changes, the yearly World Energy Outlook has been a must-read document for policymakers the world over.

Over the last two decades, however, the IEA has consistently failed to see the massive growth in renewable energy coming. Not only has the organisation underestimated the take-up of solar and wind, but it has massively overstated the demand for coal and oil.

https://www.theguardian.com/austral...-how-solar-power-continues-to-shock-the-world

 

[CraigD]

Deep Time study: French volunteers leave cave after 40 days in isolation

A group of French volunteers have emerged from a cave after a 40-day study exploring the limits of human adaptability to isolation.

The 15 participants lived in the Lombrives cave in south-west France with no phones, clocks or sunlight.

They slept in tents, made their own electricity, and had no contact with the outside world.

The project aimed to test how people respond to losing their sense of time and space.

The so-called Deep Time experiment came to an end on Saturday, allowing the eight men and seven women, aged 27 to 50, who took part to leave the cave.

Scientists overseeing the project entered the cave a day earlier to tell them the project was nearing its end.

Smiling but appearing dazed, the group left their voluntary isolation to a round of applause. They wore sunglasses to give their eyes time to adjust to the sunlight.


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56875801

 

[Sutruk]

Deep Time study: French volunteers leave cave after 40 days in isolation

A group of French volunteers have emerged from a cave after a 40-day study exploring the limits of human adaptability to isolation.

The 15 participants lived in the Lombrives cave in south-west France with no phones, clocks or sunlight.

They slept in tents, made their own electricity, and had no contact with the outside world.

The project aimed to test how people respond to losing their sense of time and space.

The so-called Deep Time experiment came to an end on Saturday, allowing the eight men and seven women, aged 27 to 50, who took part to leave the cave.

Scientists overseeing the project entered the cave a day earlier to tell them the project was nearing its end.

Smiling but appearing dazed, the group left their voluntary isolation to a round of applause. They wore sunglasses to give their eyes time to adjust to the sunlight.


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56875801

This reminds me of another experiment made in China:

https://www.namepros.com/threads/science-technology-news-discussion.1212824/page-85#post-8208159

Chinese volunteers live in Lunar Palace 1 closed environment for 370 days

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-chinese-volunteers-lunar-palace-environment.html

 

[koolishman]

/\


Space simulation sees Americans and Russians sealed in isolation for 4 months

A group of American and Russian volunteers this week were sealed into a collection of mock space modules in Moscow at the start of a four-month isolation experiment intended to simulate a mission to the moon.

The mixed gender crew on Tuesday began their imagined flight inside a brown brick building on the edge of the city center at a Soviet-era facility run by Moscow’s Institute of Biomedical Problems.


There, they will be confined to a collection of cramped tubular constructions inside a hangar-like hall at the institute for 120 days. The modules are hermetically sealed, meaning they have their own atmosphere, and the crew will not leave or see any other human beings for the duration of the mission.

 

[koolishman]

Man's Ancient Friend: 6,000-Year-Old Dog Remains Found On Arabian Peninsula

As archeologists in Saudi Arabia excavated an ancient tomb last year, they were surprised to find the remains of a dog buried alongside humans some 6,000 years ago.

"It was an incredibly exhilarating moment," archaeologist Hugh Thomas says. "Suddenly it dawned on us: Wow, do we have the oldest domesticated dog in Arabia?"

The burial placement suggested that the dog was domesticated, Hugh says. Signs of aging and arthritis on the dog's bones corroborated the theory because wild animals would not have lived such long lives.

Given how old the tomb was, Thomas suspected he may have found a historically early example of a pet dog. He wanted to use carbon-14 testing to date the remains to see whether he had a discovery on his hands.

Then suddenly, a tiny piece of the dog's jawbone was extracted from the site and submitted for carbon-14 testing. It turned out to be the oldest domesticated dog in the region.

The 6,000-year-old remains aren't groundbreaking; one of the earliest accounts of dog domestication is from 14,000 years ago in Germany. But this discovery does give researchers a clue about ancient life in the region.

 

[koolishman]

In mouse experiments, scientists unlock the key to scar-free skin healing

And it has long been thought that scarring, like death and taxes, is an inevitable part of being human.

Now, researchers at Stanford University have decoded the chemical and physical signals that trigger a particular type of skin cell to produce scars. And they have discovered a way to reprogram these cells, transforming them into another cell type capable of regenerating tissues intact. Mice that received this tweak healed from wounds with no scars, scientists reported Thursday in Science. The animals regrew hair, glands, and other critical structures. Their recovery was so complete that an image-classifying algorithm couldn’t tell the healed wound apart from the animals’ healthy, unmaimed skin.


The researchers say the next step is to try to achieve similar skin regeneration in larger, tighter-skinned animals, like pigs, that more closely resemble humans. They are optimistic that the finding could lead to readily available treatments, and the possibility of a scar-free future. They already have identified a drug candidate that has been on the market for two decades to treat certain eye conditions.

 

[koolishman]

Pizzly' bear hybrids are spreading across the Arctic thanks to climate change

Endangered polar bears are breeding with grizzly bears, creating hybrid “pizzly” bears, and it's being driven by climate change, scientists say.

As the world warms and Arctic sea ice thins, starving polar bears are being driven ever further south, where they meet grizzlies, whose ranges are expanding northwards. And with that growing contact between the two species comes more mating, and therefore increased sightings of their hybrid offspring.

With features that could give them an edge in warming northern habitats, some scientists speculate that the pizzlies, or "grolars", could be here to stay.


Grizzly bears and polar bears only diverged 500,000 to 600,000 years ago, so the two species can mate and produce viable offspring. Observations made in captivity and a study conducted in the wild also suggest that the hybrids are fertile and have themselves produced young.

 

[koolishman]

Sixty-year-old question on DNA replication timing sequence answered

Over the last 60 years, scientists have been able to observe how and when genetic information was replicated, determining the existence a "replication timing program," a process that controls when and in what order segments of DNA replicate. However, scientists still cannot explain why such a specific timing sequence exists. In a study published today in Science, Dr. David Gilbert and his team have answered this 60-year-old question.

 

[koolishman]

Perseverance Rover's Mastcam-Z Captures Ingenuity's Third Flight

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter takes off and lands in this video captured on April 25, 2021, by Mastcam-Z, an imager aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. As expected, the helicopter flew out of its field of vision while completing a flight plan that took it 164 feet (50 meters) downrange of the landing spot. Keep watching, the helicopter will return to stick the landing. Top speed for today's flight was about 2 meters per second, or about 4.5 miles-per-hour.

 

[koolishman]

Orbital launches O2, the "most powerful tidal turbine in the world"

Scotland's Orbital Marine Power (formerly Scotrenewables) has completed the build on what it claims will be the world's most powerful operational tidal turbine. It's now on its way to the Orkney Islands, where it'll have a chance to prove its worth connected to the grid.

Orbital's approach is targeted to keeping costs as low as possible. It uses floating turbines, installed in channels that accelerate tidal flows. These turbine platforms are moored to the ocean floor at four points using extremely strong chains, meaning the undersea work to install them is quick, cheap and minimal.

The turbines are joined to the main platform with huge arms, and their giant blades can be reversed in pitch between tide cycles to generate power whichever way the water's moving. Energy is sent back to shore through thick undersea cables, and the platform's arms can articulate to bring the turbines up out of the water for simple inspection and maintenance without any scuba gear required.

 

[koolishman]

Earth’s land may have formed 500 million years earlier than we thought

Earth’s continental crust may have emerged 500 million years earlier than scientists had previously estimated. Pinning down when our planet’s land emerged could help us understand the conditions in which primitive life began.

Today, new oceanic crust rises at mid-ocean ridges where tectonic plates drift apart. Continental crust is usually much older, formed from volcanism where plates crash into each other, thrusting a thicker, less-dense layer above sea level.


When Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, it was a hellish landscape of molten rock. Eventually, the planet’s outer layer cooled enough to start forming a solid crust covered by a global ocean.

That kicked off a new geological aeon around 4 billion years ago, known as the Archaean, which is when scientists believe life first emerged. There is strong evidence for microbial activity at least 3.5 billion years ago, but precisely when and how life began is far from clear.

 

[Cannuck]

‘Insanely cheap energy’: how solar power continues to shock the world

In the year 2000, the International Energy Agency (IEA) made a prediction that would come back to haunt it: by 2020, the world would have installed a grand total of 18 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar capacity. Seven years later, the forecast would be proven spectacularly wrong when roughly 18 gigawatts of solar capacity were installed in a single year alone.

The notion of energy security is the call to action 'buy in' needed to spur the industry on IMO. Of course there are some downsides, like the extraction of required resources to produce and limits to energy storage capacity etc., which the oil industry has been quick to point out. However, they ought to not point any fingers. As alternative energy becomes more mainstream, costs will come down and improvements made more rapidly, just like computers.

Pizzly' bear hybrids are spreading across the Arctic thanks to climate change

Endangered polar bears are breeding with grizzly bears, creating hybrid “pizzly” bears, and it's being driven by climate change, scientists say.

As the world warms and Arctic sea ice thins, starving polar bears are being driven ever further south, where they meet grizzlies, whose ranges are expanding northwards. And with that growing contact between the two species comes more mating, and therefore increased sightings of their hybrid offspring.

With features that could give them an edge in warming northern habitats, some scientists speculate that the pizzlies, or "grolars", could be here to stay.

Having had contact with both species in the wild, I would definitely use the term "grolar" vs "pizzly"

 

[FolioTeam]

Having had contact with both species in the wild, I would definitely use the term "grolar" vs "pizzly

Grolars are those that have grizzlies as fathers while Pizzlies have polars as fathers.

PS: I also like the way Grolar sounds when compared to Pizzly

 

[koolishman]

/\
The question becomes. how to tell the two apart?

 

[FolioTeam]

/\
The question becomes. how to tell the two apart?

Lol.

I think some scientist guy said something about the nose. But, really don't know

 

[Cannuck]

Grolars are those that have grizzlies as fathers while Pizzlies have polars as fathers.

PS: I also like the way Grolar sounds when compared to Pizzly

I'm not exactly fond of those names, though grizzlar sounds about right in English.

I'm actually surprised that grizzlies made it that far north and west into otherwise brown bear territory. In fact, most of the hybrid bears found in the wild are not actually of the grizzly variety but 'Makwa' (generic for brown bear) mating with 'Wapusk' (polar bear in Cree).

So, I would distinguish the polar hybrids as 'Nakwa' or 'Maklak' for their northern and south-western origin vs 'Nanulak' as Canadian wildlife officials have suggested (ie. polar bear 'Nanuk' and grizzly bear 'Aklak' in Inuktitut).

*edit: Since brown/grizzly bears are migrating north vs polar bears moving south, I would suggest that Canadian wildlife officials use a combination of southwestern and northern Native languages/dialects (ie. 'Nakwa' or 'Maklak') for the hybrid bears considering their genealogies.

 

[koolishman]

The salmon you buy in the future may be farmed on land

In a series of indoor tanks 40 miles south west of Miami, Florida, five million fish are swimming in circles a very long way from home.

The fish in question are Atlantic salmon, which are far more typically found in the cold waters of Norway's fjords or Scotland's lochs.

As the species is not native to Florida, and would be unable to cope with the state's tropical heat, the water tanks are kept well chilled, and housed in a vast, air-conditioned and heavily insulated warehouse-like building.

The facility, called the Bluehouse, opened its first phase last year, and intends to be the world's largest land-based fish farm.

Targeting an initial production of 9,500 metric tonnes of fish per year, its owner - Atlantic Sapphire - plans to increase that to 222,000 tonnes by 2031, enough to provide 41% of current US annual salmon consumption, or a billion meals.