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!

 

[koolishman]

35 Years After Chernobyl’s Meltdown, The Fallout Of Radiation Continues

In one study, researchers based in the United States and Ukraine looked at genetic mutations in the children of people who had been exposed to radiation; in the other, scientists evaluated the genomic profile of cancerous tumors removed from people exposed to the blast’s radiation.

There is some good news from the new studies. The first study, published Thursday in Science, found that parents who had been exposed to radiation from the accident were no more likely to have children with so-called de novo genetic mutations than parents who experienced no radiation exposure.

De novo mutations are genetic alterations that happen after conception and are not inherited directly from one’s parents; rather, they may be the result of other factors, like age, environment, health, and other things that affect the biology of cells.

Stephen Chanock, one of the researchers on the new papers, tells Inverse that typically, you expect to see between 50 and 100 de novo mutations occur in any conception. Chanock is the Director of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology & Genetics at the National Institute of Health. In this study, Chanock and his colleagues couldn’t find any significant difference in the germline of parents who had been exposed to radiation and those who hadn’t.

“In science, it’s very difficult to prove a negative,” he says. “We modeled it many, many different ways, and we didn’t find any significant differences.”

Chanock and his colleagues note in the study that the children were conceived “months or years” after their parents had been exposed. As a result, the findings may not apply to children conceived closer to the moment when their parents are exposed to ionizing radiation.


The second study analyzed thyroid tumors, thyroid tissue, and blood collected from people who were exposed to radiation from Chernobyl, and then compared these samples to equivalent issues and blood taken from people who were not exposed to radiation. The comparison reveals a significant dose-dependent increase in double-strand DNA breaks among the exposed group.

“The DNA is broken in one place, and you have two of part A. Then the DNA is broken in another place, and you have two of part B.” Instead of the As being rejoined and the Bs being rejoined, Morton says, “A and B are joined. And that makes what's called a gene fusion. The cell has fused the wrong parts back together.”

 

[koolishman]

Gravity-based batteries try to beat their chemical cousins with winches, weights, and mine shafts

Alongside the chilly, steel-gray water of the docks here stands what looks like a naked, four-story elevator shaft—except in place of the elevator is a green, 50-ton iron weight, suspended by steel cables. Little by little, electric motors hoist the weight halfway up the shaft; it is now a giant, gravity-powered battery, storing potential energy that can be released when needed. And that moment is now: With a metallic moan, the weight inches back down the shaft. Reversing direction, the motors become electric generators, sending up to 250 kilowatts of power back to the grid. For peak power, the weight can descend in 11 seconds—but for testing purposes, it moves just a few meters at “creep speed,” says Douglas Hitchcock, project engineer at Scottish startup Gravitricity.

The company announced this week that its small-scale demonstrator is now operational, capable of switching between drawing energy from the grid and sending it back in a matter of seconds. The design offers an alternative to the chemical batteries that dominate the global energy storage market—a market that is growing hand in hand with renewable power, which needs to bank energy when the Sun shines or the wind blows, and release it when the grid faces high demand.

 

[koolishman]

Astronauts are about to launch on a used rocket, inside a used spacecraft

For a few days there will be two Crew Dragons docked to the space station.

SpaceX and NASA say they are ready for the launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station early on Friday morning.

This Crew-2 mission—comprising NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, and European astronaut Thomas Pesquet—is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center at 5:49 am EDT (09:49 UTC) on Friday. Weather conditions appear favorable, but if there is an issue SpaceX has a backup opportunity on Monday at 4:48 am EDT (08:48 UTC).

With this mission, SpaceX will be seeking to fly astronauts into orbit for the third time, following the Demo-2 mission in May 2020 and the Crew-1 mission in November. Notably, this launch will seek to reuse the Falcon 9 rocket first stage (from the Crew-1 launch) and the Crew Dragon spacecraft (from Demo-2).

This flight will therefore bring SpaceX closer to its goal of fully reusable orbital spaceflight.

 

[koolishman]

Second Flight of NASA's Ingenuity Helicopter. It flew sideways.

 

[koolishman]

https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/coral-disease-antibiotics.php
Common Antibiotic Effective In Healing Coral Disease Lesions


Diseases continue to be a major threat to coral reef health. For example, a relatively recent outbreak termed stony coral tissue loss disease is an apparently infectious waterborne disease known to affect at least 20 stony coral species. First discovered in 2014 in Miami-Dade County, the disease has since spread throughout the majority of the Florida’s Coral Reef and into multiple countries and territories in the Caribbean. Some reefs of the northern section of Florida’s Coral Reef are experiencing as much as a 60 percent loss of living coral tissue area.

A new study by researchers at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute reveals how a common antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections in humans is showing promise in treating disease-affected Montastraea cavernosa coral colonies in situ. M. cavernosa, also known as the Great Star Coral, is a hard or stony coral found widely throughout the tropical western Atlantic, including several regions currently affected by stony coral tissue loss disease. Preserving M. cavernosa colonies is of particular importance due to its high abundance and role as a dominant reef builder in the northern section of Florida’s Coral Reef.

The objective of the study, published in Scientific Reports , was to experimentally assess the effectiveness of two intervention treatments: chlorinated epoxy and amoxicillin combined with Core Rx/Ocean Alchemists Base 2B as compared to untreated controls. Results showed that the Base 2B plus amoxicillin treatment had a 95 percent success rate at healing individual disease lesions. However, it did not necessarily prevent treated colonies from developing new lesions over time. Chlorinated epoxy treatments were not significantly different from untreated control colonies, suggesting that chlorinated epoxy treatments are an ineffective intervention technique for stony coral tissue loss disease.

 

[koolishman]

Climate Has Shifted The Axis Of The Earth

Loss Of Water On Land Through Ice Melting And Human-Caused Factors Is Changing The Movement Of The North And South Poles

Glacial melting due to global warming is likely the cause of a shift in the movement of the poles that occurred in the 1990s.

The locations of the North and South poles aren’t static, unchanging spots on our planet. The axis Earth spins around—or more specifically the surface that invisible line emerges from—is always moving due to processes scientists don’t completely understand. The way water is distributed on Earth’s surface is one factor that drives the drift.

Melting glaciers redistributed enough water to cause the direction of polar wander to turn and accelerate eastward during the mid-1990s, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, AGU’s journal for high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.

“The faster ice melting under global warming was the most likely cause of the directional change of the polar drift in the 1990s,” said Shanshan Deng, a researcher at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an author of the new study.

 

[koolishman]

Mars has right ingredients for present-day microbial life beneath its surface, study finds

New research suggests that rocks in the Martian crust could produce the same kind of chemical energy that supports microbial life deep beneath Earth’s surface.

As NASA’s Perseverance rover begins its search for ancient life on the surface of Mars, a new study suggests that the Martian subsurface might be a good place to look for possible present-day life on the Red Planet.

The study, published in the journal Astrobiology, looked at the chemical composition of Martian meteorites — rocks blasted off of the surface of Mars that eventually landed on Earth. The analysis determined that those rocks, if in consistent contact with water, would produce the chemical energy needed to support microbial communities similar to those that survive in the unlit depths of the Earth. Because these meteorites may be representative of vast swaths of the Martian crust, the findings suggest that much of the Mars subsurface could be habitable.

“The big implication here for subsurface exploration science is that wherever you have groundwater on Mars, there’s a good chance that you have enough chemical energy to support subsurface microbial life,” said Jesse Tarnas, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led the study while completing his Ph.D. at Brown University. “We don’t know whether life ever got started beneath the surface of Mars, but if it did, we think there would be ample energy there to sustain it right up to today.”

 

[koolishman]

Scientists calculate the number of bubbles in a glass of beer

Carbon dioxide is an important part of what makes a beer so refreshing. The tiny bubbles released when it’s poured into a glass not only give the drink a really nice fizz, but they actually transport flavor and scent compounds to your nose and tastebuds.

But exactly how many bubbles are there in a given glass of the good stuff? Nobody knows, mostly because, A) you’ll look like a weirdo trying to count them at the bar, and B) who even cares?

A very dedicated team of French scientists care, that’s who. In the new study, the Effervescence, Champagne and Applications team at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) set out to answer the question of how many bubbles would form in a standard 250-ml (8.5-oz) bottle of lager, cooled to a frosty 6 °C (43 °F).

The team calculated how much carbon dioxide there would be dissolved in beer that’s poured into a tilted pint glass. It turns out that for bubbles to form, there needs to be tiny air-filled cavities in the microstructure of the glass itself. When the beer is poured over the top, that trapped air and the curvature of the cavity gives the carbon dioxide a starting point to form bubbles. Those cavities need to be at least 1.4 nanometers wide for streams of bubbles to form there.

As high-speed photos showed, the bubbles grow bigger as they float to the surface, which captures more of the gas. The bubbling slows and stops as the carbon dioxide level decreases.


Taking all that into consideration, the researchers estimated that in this size beer, at this temperature, there should be between 200,000 and two million bubbles released by the time it goes flat. That’s quite a wide range, but we’d tend to think that for most people the answer is on the lower end of that spectrum – it feels like a waste to wait for your beer to blow two million bubbles before you dive into it.


So, what can we actually do with this information? For most of us, it’s probably nothing more than a bit of bar trivia, but the researchers say the new insights into the CO2 dynamics could help brewers hone their craft.

 

[CraigD]

Trader flees Turkey with $2b in crypto scam

One of Turkey’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges said it lacked the financial strength to continue operations, leaving hundreds of thousands of investors fearing their savings have evaporated as authorities sought to locate the company’s 27-year-old founder, who fled the country.

Globally, the surge in the prices of digital tokens has been accompanied by convictions and regulatory measures after various scams tied to trading platforms.

https://www.afr.com/markets/currencies/trader-flees-turkey-with-2b-in-crypto-scam-20210423-p57lx5

 

[CraigD]

Scientists calculate the number of bubbles in a glass of beer

Carbon dioxide is an important part of what makes a beer so refreshing. The tiny bubbles released when it’s poured into a glass not only give the drink a really nice fizz, but they actually transport flavor and scent compounds to your nose and tastebuds.

But exactly how many bubbles are there in a given glass of the good stuff? Nobody knows, mostly because, A) you’ll look like a weirdo trying to count them at the bar, and B) who even cares?

A very dedicated team of French scientists care, that’s who. In the new study, the Effervescence, Champagne and Applications team at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) set out to answer the question of how many bubbles would form in a standard 250-ml (8.5-oz) bottle of lager, cooled to a frosty 6 °C (43 °F).

The team calculated how much carbon dioxide there would be dissolved in beer that’s poured into a tilted pint glass. It turns out that for bubbles to form, there needs to be tiny air-filled cavities in the microstructure of the glass itself. When the beer is poured over the top, that trapped air and the curvature of the cavity gives the carbon dioxide a starting point to form bubbles. Those cavities need to be at least 1.4 nanometers wide for streams of bubbles to form there.

As high-speed photos showed, the bubbles grow bigger as they float to the surface, which captures more of the gas. The bubbling slows and stops as the carbon dioxide level decreases.


Taking all that into consideration, the researchers estimated that in this size beer, at this temperature, there should be between 200,000 and two million bubbles released by the time it goes flat. That’s quite a wide range, but we’d tend to think that for most people the answer is on the lower end of that spectrum – it feels like a waste to wait for your beer to blow two million bubbles before you dive into it.


So, what can we actually do with this information? For most of us, it’s probably nothing more than a bit of bar trivia, but the researchers say the new insights into the CO2 dynamics could help brewers hone their craft.

One of the more important scientific studies carried out this year.

Cheers!

 

[CraigD]

[Proxima Centauri]

A Record-Breaking Flare Has Erupted From The Closest Star to Our Solar System

Two years ago, our star's next door neighbor – Proxima Centauri – got a little emotional. It happens from time to time, only this time, the small red star really let go. A storm of fury that breaks its previous records, outdoing anything our own Sun could manage by magnitudes.

As far as neighbors go, you could do worse than Proxima Centauri. At a mere 4 light-years (just over 30 trillion kilometers) over the back fence, it's close enough to keep an eye on without being prone to blowing up in a life-destroying cataclysm.

That doesn't mean it's quiet. Like most hot-tempered red dwarf stars, Proxima Centauri vents its rage every now and then in a brilliant display of radiation, spilling streams of plasma and light out into its system with a manic snapping and rejoining of its magnetic fields.

This is bad news for its host of innermost planets, which periodically cop a roasting that makes it unlikely that any complex organic chemistry on the surface would have remained intact long enough to spark into life.

But for us, watching these outbursts from a safe distance gives insight into the mechanisms of stellar physics. In 2019, astronomers trained nine telescopes around the globe on Proxima Centauri for a marathon 40-hour session.

Read on...

https://www.sciencealert.com/our-ne...ith-a-massive-flare-and-it-s-a-record-breaker

 

[CraigD]

Climate Has Shifted The Axis Of The Earth

Loss Of Water On Land Through Ice Melting And Human-Caused Factors Is Changing The Movement Of The North And South Poles

Glacial melting due to global warming is likely the cause of a shift in the movement of the poles that occurred in the 1990s.

The locations of the North and South poles aren’t static, unchanging spots on our planet. The axis Earth spins around—or more specifically the surface that invisible line emerges from—is always moving due to processes scientists don’t completely understand. The way water is distributed on Earth’s surface is one factor that drives the drift.

Melting glaciers redistributed enough water to cause the direction of polar wander to turn and accelerate eastward during the mid-1990s, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, AGU’s journal for high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.

“The faster ice melting under global warming was the most likely cause of the directional change of the polar drift in the 1990s,” said Shanshan Deng, a researcher at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an author of the new study.

I had always assumed that when scientists spoke about 'polar drift' it was in regard to magnetic poles, and not polar axis.

 

[koolishman]

I had always assumed that when scientists spoke about 'polar drift' it was in regard to magnetic poles, and not polar axis.

That is gomagnetic reversal. We are due for one.


https://earthsky.org/earth/earths-magnetic-poles-reversal-soon-study

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal

 

[CraigD]

That is gomagnetic reversal. We are due for one.


https://earthsky.org/earth/earths-magnetic-poles-reversal-soon-study

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal

Perhaps the terminology is interchangeable?

In these references it has to do with drifting magnetic poles.

Polar drift is a geological phenomenon caused by variations in the flow of molten iron in Earth's outer core, resulting in changes in the orientation of Earth's magnetic field, and hence the position of the magnetic north- and south poles.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_drift​

and...

The north magnetic pole moves over time according to magnetic changes and flux lobe elongation in the Earth's outer core. In 2001, it was determined by the Geological Survey of Canada to lie west of Ellesmere Island in northern Canada at 81°18′N 110°48′W. It was situated at 83°06′N 117°48′W in 2005. In 2009, while still situated within the Canadian Arctic at 84°54′N 131°00′W,[5] it was moving toward Russia at between 55 and 60 km (34 and 37 mi) per year. As of 2019, the pole is projected to have moved beyond the Canadian Arctic to 86°26′52.8″N 175°20′45.06″E.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_magnetic_pole

EDIT: Now that I think about it, yes, it would be interchangeable, depending on weather you are talking about pole axis or magnetic pole.​

 

[koolishman]

Perhaps the terminology is interchangeable?

In these references it has to do with drifting magnetic poles.

Polar drift is a geological phenomenon caused by variations in the flow of molten iron in Earth's outer core, resulting in changes in the orientation of Earth's magnetic field, and hence the position of the magnetic north- and south poles.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_drift​

and...

The north magnetic pole moves over time according to magnetic changes and flux lobe elongation in the Earth's outer core. In 2001, it was determined by the Geological Survey of Canada to lie west of Ellesmere Island in northern Canada at 81°18′N 110°48′W. It was situated at 83°06′N 117°48′W in 2005. In 2009, while still situated within the Canadian Arctic at 84°54′N 131°00′W,[5] it was moving toward Russia at between 55 and 60 km (34 and 37 mi) per year. As of 2019, the pole is projected to have moved beyond the Canadian Arctic to 86°26′52.8″N 175°20′45.06″E.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_magnetic_pole​

Thanks.

In Polar drift, reversal does not happen, looks like. That term is new to me.

 

[koolishman]

With new optical device, Stanford engineers can fine tune the color of light

A new sort of optical device allows engineers to change the frequencies of individual photons, putting new capabilities in engineers’ hands.


Among the first lessons any grade school science student learns is that white light is not white at all, but rather a composite of many photons, those little droplets of energy that make up light, from every color of the rainbow – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

Now, researchers at Stanford University have developed an optical device that allows engineers to change and fine-tune the frequencies of each individual photon in a stream of light to virtually any mixture of colors they want. The result, published April 23 in Nature Communication, is a new photonic architecture that could transform fields ranging from digital communications and artificial intelligence to cutting-edge quantum computing

“This powerful new tool puts a degree of control in the engineer’s hands not previously possible,” said Shanhui Fan, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford and senior author of the paper.

 

[koolishman]

Pulling the plug on living so to speak is easy. Protecting our descendants is another thing.

I doubt I will be around to see Skynet, but at some point in the future AI technology will become regulated, and I imagine that it will be something along the lines of Asimov's laws of robotics.

It's the maverick, rogue, and military developers who work above or outside of the ethical laws who will be the big concern.

A growing problem of ‘deepfake geography’: How AI falsifies satellite images

A fire in Central Park seems to appear as a smoke plume and a line of flames in a satellite image. Colorful lights on Diwali night in India, seen from space, seem to show widespread fireworks activity.

Both images exemplify what a new University of Washington-led study calls “location spoofing.” The photos — created by different people, for different purposes — are fake but look like genuine images of real places. And with the more sophisticated AI technologies available today, researchers warn that such “deepfake geography” could become a growing problem.

So, using satellite photos of three cities and drawing upon methods used to manipulate video and audio files, a team of researchers set out to identify new ways of detecting fake satellite photos, warn of the dangers of falsified geospatial data and call for a system of geographic fact-checking.

“This isn’t just Photoshopping things. It’s making data look uncannily realistic,” said Bo Zhao, assistant professor of geography at the UW and lead author of the study, which published April 21 in the journal Cartography and Geographic Information Science. “The techniques are already there. We’re just trying to expose the possibility of using the same techniques, and of the need to develop a coping strategy for it.”

 

[koolishman]

Stem cell therapy promotes recovery from stroke and dementia in mice

A one-time injection of an experimental stem cell therapy can repair brain damage and improve memory function in mice with conditions that replicate human strokes and dementia, a new UCLA study finds.

Dementia can arise from multiple conditions, and it is characterized by an array of symptoms including problems with memory, attention, communication and physical coordination. The two most common causes of dementia are Alzheimer's disease and white matter strokes -- small strokes that accumulate in the connecting areas of the brain.

"It's a vicious cycle: The two leading causes of dementia are almost always seen together and each one accelerates the other," said Dr. S. Thomas Carmichael, senior author of the study and interim director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.

 

[CraigD]

With new optical device, Stanford engineers can fine tune the color of light

A new sort of optical device allows engineers to change the frequencies of individual photons, putting new capabilities in engineers’ hands.


Among the first lessons any grade school science student learns is that white light is not white at all, but rather a composite of many photons, those little droplets of energy that make up light, from every color of the rainbow – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

Now, researchers at Stanford University have developed an optical device that allows engineers to change and fine-tune the frequencies of each individual photon in a stream of light to virtually any mixture of colors they want. The result, published April 23 in Nature Communication, is a new photonic architecture that could transform fields ranging from digital communications and artificial intelligence to cutting-edge quantum computing

“This powerful new tool puts a degree of control in the engineer’s hands not previously possible,” said Shanhui Fan, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford and senior author of the paper.

I'm not sure about what they teach young kids today, but I was never taught that at grade/ primary school.

We were taught that light is a wave, and colour is the result of the wavelength.

And lots of fun experiments with prisms.

It was only much much later that I was introduced to photon energy levels.

 

[koolishman]

Russian startup hopes smart guitar will open playing to all

Learning to play the guitar is hard, and we've seen a number of solutions leveraging digital smarts to help kickstart the process and keep students engaged. The latest is a funky X-wing smart guitar from Russia that can be played by everyone from beginners to pros, but was designed to open up playing to the disability community too.

I’ve long dreamed of picking up a guitar and playing my favorite rock songs but I couldn’t do it because of Duchenne muscular dystrophy," said Denis Goncharov, founder of Noli Music and student at St Petersburg's ITMO University. "But I kept practicing and tried to master the chords. In one of my vain attempts, I realized that I wasn’t the only one struggling with this problem. There are millions of other people who strive to feel like a rock star but don’t have such an opportunity due to their conditions. And if you give them that chance, then one day you might hear a new Kurt Cobain."

 

[CraigD]

Russian startup hopes smart guitar will open playing to all

Learning to play the guitar is hard, and we've seen a number of solutions leveraging digital smarts to help kickstart the process and keep students engaged. The latest is a funky X-wing smart guitar from Russia that can be played by everyone from beginners to pros, but was designed to open up playing to the disability community too.

I’ve long dreamed of picking up a guitar and playing my favorite rock songs but I couldn’t do it because of Duchenne muscular dystrophy," said Denis Goncharov, founder of Noli Music and student at St Petersburg's ITMO University. "But I kept practicing and tried to master the chords. In one of my vain attempts, I realized that I wasn’t the only one struggling with this problem. There are millions of other people who strive to feel like a rock star but don’t have such an opportunity due to their conditions. And if you give them that chance, then one day you might hear a new Kurt Cobain."

Looks like the old midi Ztar design.
https://www.starrlabs.com/product-category/ztar-midi-guitar-controllers/

I suppose it's a good idea for people who cannot physically fret a guitar, but otherwise, its taking a very simple physical concept and making it extremely complex.

 

[J Sokol]

Climate crisis has shifted the Earth’s axis, study shows

The massive melting of glaciers as a result of global heating has caused marked shifts in the Earth’s axis of rotation since the 1990s, research has shown. It demonstrates the profound impact humans are having on the planet, scientists said.

The planet’s geographic north and south poles are the point where its axis of rotation intersects the surface, but they are not fixed. Changes in how the Earth’s mass is distributed around the planet cause the axis, and therefore the poles, to move.

In the past, only natural factors such as ocean currents and the convection of hot rock in the deep Earth contributed to the drifting position of the poles. But the new research shows that since the 1990s, the loss of hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice a year into the oceans resulting from the climate crisis has caused the poles to move in new directions.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...risis-has-shifted-the-earths-axis-study-shows

 

[Cannuck]

Climate Has Shifted The Axis Of The Earth

Up to 20% of Crucial Groundwater Resources Are at Risk of Disappearing

The hidden crisis beneath our feet
In the grand scheme of things, climate change triggering polar movement isn’t too worrisome, given the other clear and present dangers like intense heat waves, ocean acidification, and the sixth mass extinction.

The role of groundwater depletion has the potential to impact billions of lives.

Groundwater provides drinking water for half the world, including constituting the sole source of drinking water for 2.5 billion people. It also provides nearly half of the water used for agricultural irrigation globally. But a new study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, shows that up to 20% of it is in jeopardy.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/up-to-20-of-crucial-groundwater-resources-are-at-risk-1846744205

Groundwater wells supply water to billions of people, but they can run dry when water tables decline. Here, we analyzed construction records for ~39 million globally distributed wells. We show that 6 to 20% of wells are no more than 5 meters deeper than the water table, implying that millions of wells are at risk of running dry if groundwater levels decline by only a few meters. Further, newer wells are not being constructed deeper than older wells in some of the places experiencing significant groundwater level declines, suggesting that newer wells are at least as likely to run dry as older wells if groundwater levels continue to decline. Poor water quality in deep aquifers and the high costs of well construction limit the effectiveness of tapping deep groundwater to stave off the loss of access to water as wells run dry.

Groundwater provides nearly half of the water used for agricultural irrigation and most of the drinking water for billions of people. It is essential, then, for this resource to remain secure.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6540/418?intcmp=trendmd-sci

 

[koolishman]

Scientists find new evidence linking essential oils to seizures

Certain essential oils have convulsant properties and have been associated with seizures for centuries, though everyday use of oils has generally been considered safe for the average person. But after conducting the largest-ever case study of essential oil-related seizures in adults, a group of Indian neurologists have found evidence suggesting their use may not be as safe as we previously assumed.

In a paper published March 26 in Epilepsy Research, patients at four South Indian hospitals who experienced a seizure were evaluated for their use of camphor and eucalyptus essential oils. Analyzing 350 seizure cases that spanned a four-year period, the researchers determined that 15.7%, or the seizures of 55 patients, may have been induced by the inhalation, ingestion or topical use of essential oils. After advising the patients to discontinue their use of the oils, they found that the vast majority of those patients did not experience another seizure during a follow-up period.

Thomas Mathew, a professor and the head of the neurology department at St. John's Medical College Hospital in Bengaluru, India, told The Academic Times that he and his colleagues noticed an uptick of seizures that may have been caused by the patient using essential oils, in people with epilepsy and a history of seizures, and in those without such a history. They realized that they had not previously been asking their patients with epilepsy about exposure to balms and oils containing convulsant essential oils, which led them to develop and conduct more formal research on eucalyptus and camphor oil specifically.

"There is literature linking essential oils and seizures, especially that of camphor and eucalyptus, and especially in the pediatric age group," Mathew said. "But there are only a few case reports in adults."

The researchers began asking non-epileptic patients who experienced their first seizure, and patients with epilepsy who experienced a breakthrough seizure, about their usage and exposure to the oils. A breakthrough seizure occurs suddenly after an epilepsy patient has not experienced a seizure for an extended period of time. Mathew called the initial results "surprising and shocking," as many patients reported using various balms, toothpastes, tablets and other items containing eucalyptus and camphor oil, which are popular in India for treating headaches, backaches and the common cold.

 

[Sutruk]

Study Shows Life From Earth Could Temporarily Survive on Mars

https://scitechdaily.com/study-shows-life-from-earth-could-temporarily-survive-on-mars/

"Some microbes on Earth could temporarily survive on the surface of Mars, finds a new study by NASA and German Aerospace Center scientists. The researchers tested the endurance of microorganisms to Martian conditions by launching them into the Earth’s stratosphere, as it closely represents key conditions on the Red Planet. Published in Frontiers in Microbiology, this work paves the way for understanding not only the threat of microbes to space missions, but also the opportunities for resource independence from Earth.

“We successfully tested a new way of exposing bacteria and fungi to Mars-like conditions by using a scientific balloon to fly our experimental equipment up to Earth’s stratosphere,” reports Marta Filipa Cortesão, joint first author of this study from the German Aerospace Center, Cologne, Germany. “Some microbes, in particular spores from the black mold fungus, were able to survive the trip, even when exposed to very high UV radiation.”

“We launched the microbes into the stratosphere inside the MARSBOx (Microbes in Atmosphere for Radiation, Survival and Biological Outcomes experiment) payload, which was kept at Martian pressure and filled with artificial Martian atmosphere throughout the mission,” explains Cortesão. “The box carried two sample layers, with the bottom layer shielded from radiation. This allowed us to separate the effects of radiation from the other tested conditions: desiccation, atmosphere, and temperature fluctuation during the flight. The top layer samples were exposed to more than a thousand times more UV radiation than levels that can cause sunburn on our skin.”

“While not all the microbes survived the trip, one previously detected on the International Space Station, the black mold Aspergillus niger, could be revived after it returned home,” explains Siems, who highlights the importance of this ongoing research.