Science & TechnologyS


Bug

Wasps that recognize faces cooperate more, may be more intelligent

wasp facial recognition social insects
© Current Biology (2023).
The ability to recognize individuals is related to cooperation and signal diversity

A new study of paper wasps suggests social interactions may make animals smarter. The research offers behavioral evidence of an evolutionary link between the ability to recognize individuals and social cooperation.

Furthermore, genomic sequencing revealed that populations of wasps that recognized each other — and cooperated more — showed recent adaptations (positive selection) in areas of the brain associated with cognitive abilities such as learning, memory, and vision.

The study focused on two distinct populations of paper wasps (Polistes fuscatus): A southern one from Louisiana, where individuals are more uniform in appearance, and a northern one in Ithaca, where individuals have diverse color patterns on their faces. A series of experiments indicated that, unlike its southern counterparts, the northern population both recognized individuals and cooperated socially with some members over others.

Comment: More studies on the Polistes fuscatus wasp species:


Nuke

Shidaowan: World's first fourth-generation nuclear reactor begins commercial operation on China's east coast

power plant
© Weibo/CPNNShidaowan's HTGR nuclear power plant
China's Shidaowan nuclear power plant, the world's first fourth-generation reactor, has begun commercial operations, one of the companies behind its development said.

The high temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) went online following a week-long (168 hours) continuous operation test, state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) said in announcing the feat on Wednesday.

Fourth-generation nuclear reactors are designed to be successors for the existing, often water-cooled, nuclear reactors in operation around the world.

The reactor at the Shidaowan plant in China's eastern Shandong province is part of a global push for safer, more sustainable and efficient nuclear operations.

Instead of using water to cool the system, the high-temperature reactor will be cooled using helium gas, offering a promising way to develop more inland nuclear plants, as they will not need to be located next to a water source.

High-temperature reactors can produce heat, power, and hydrogen, and would help China and the world "become carbon neutral", said Zhang Zuoyi, dean of the Tsinghua University Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology and chief designer of the Shidaowan reactor project. CNNC, Tsinghua and state-owned China Huaneng Group are the joint developers and operators of the plant.

Sun

Giant sun 'hole' bigger than 60 'Earths' spews solar wind towards our planet

giant coronal hole december 2023 solar wind
© NASA/SDO/AIAThe gigantic coronal hole is more than 60 times wider than Earth.
A monstrous dark patch, known as a coronal hole, recently appeared near the sun's equator. The temporary gap enables unusually fast solar wind to race toward Earth.

The sun has produced a massive coronal hole and is "spewing a stream of solar wind directly toward Earth," according to Spaceweather.com.

An enormous dark hole has opened up in the sun's surface and is spewing powerful streams of unusually fast radiation, known as solar wind, right at Earth. The size and orientation of the temporary gap, which is wider than 60 Earths, is unprecedented at this stage of the solar cycle, scientists say.

The giant dark patch on the sun, known as a coronal hole, took shape near the sun's equator on Dec. 2 and reached its maximum width of around 497,000 miles (800,000 kilometers) within 24 hours, Spaceweather.com reported. Since Dec. 4, the solar void has been pointing directly at Earth.

Galaxy

James Webb telescope finds water in roiling disk of gas around ultra-hot star for 1st time ever

protoplanetary disk
© ESO/L. CalçadaAn illustration of a protoplanetary disk of planet-forming gas and dust around an infant star.
In a first-of-its-kind discovery, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected water in the inner region of a disk of planet-forming gas and dust surrounding an infant star.

The detection is significant because the water, along with other molecules needed to form worlds like Earth, were found close to several massive, young stars that generate extreme ultraviolet radiation. Such extreme environments were previously thought to be unfit for the formation of rocky planets, but this new discovery suggests that Earth-like planets may be capable of forming in a wider range of cosmic environments than once thought.

The findings could also help scientists better understand how the planets of the solar system formed around 4.5 billion years ago. The research also represents the first results from JWST's eXtreme Ultraviolet Environments (XUE) program, which aims to characterize the environments and chemistry of huge spinning disks of dust, gas and rock that surround stars in their youth and eventually spawn planets, asteroids and comets.

"The JWST is the only telescope with the spatial resolution and sensitivity to study planet-forming disks in massive star-forming regions," team leader María Claudia Ramírez-Tannus, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, said in a statement.

Info

Comet trapped between Saturn and Uranus is transforming

rings of saturn view from chiron asteroid illustration
© European Southern ObservatoryAn illustration shows the rings from the surface of the ice-rock centaur Chiron.
A distant comet trapped in orbit between Saturn and Uranus is accompanied by a transforming disk of icy dust, new observations reveal.

A bizarre object that sometimes gets as close to the sun as Saturn, and other times retreats as far out as Uranus, has been discovered to have a transforming disk of dust around it that changes shape and can even mimic rings.

Minor planet 2060 Chiron is what's known as a Centaur, which are captured cometary objects that travel around the sun on looping orbits between Jupiter and Neptune. Chiron is just 218 kilometers (135 miles) across and occasionally has outbursts like a comet. To date, however, no spacecraft has ever visited a Centaur.

In 2011, Chiron passed in front of a faint star from our point of view here on Earth. Such events are referred to as "stellar occultations," and based on how an object such as Chiron blocks a star's light, the occulting object's shape and size can be determined through deduction. During the 2011 occultation, it was noticed that the star's light dimmed slightly — twice before Chiron itself occulted the star, and two further times after Chiron had moved past the star. This observation was interpreted as Chiron having a double-ring system of dust.

Then, Chiron occulted another star on Nov. 28, 2018, in an event taken advantage of by Amanda Sickafoose, who is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. Because Chiron's shadow cast by the star is so small, it crossed only a narrow region of the Earth, clipping southern Africa. Sickafoose therefore led a team who used the 1.9-meter (6.2 feet) telescope at the South African Astronomical Observatory in Sutherland, South Africa, to observe the occultation.

Their results, published exactly five years later, tell a slightly different story to 2011.

Brain

Research shows human behavior guided by fast changes in dopamine levels

brain hemispheres graphic dopamine
© Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
What happens in the human brain when we learn from positive and negative experiences? To help answer that question and better understand decision-making and human behavior, scientists are studying dopamine.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter produced in the brain that serves as a chemical messenger, facilitating communication between nerve cells in the brain and the body. It is involved in functions such as movement, cognition and learning. While dopamine is most known for its association with positive emotions, scientists are also exploring its role in negative experiences.

Now, a new study from researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine published Dec. 1 in Science Advances shows that dopamine release in the human brain plays a crucial role in encoding both reward and punishment prediction errors. This means that dopamine is involved in the process of learning from both positive and negative experiences, allowing the brain to adjust and adapt its behavior based on the outcomes of these experiences.

Telescope

JWST records reappearance of ghost-like dusty galaxy

galaxy AzTECC71   jwst
© J. McKinney/M. Franco/C. Casey/University of Texas at Austin.Color composite of galaxy AzTECC71 from multiple color filters in the NIRCam instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope.
It first appeared as a glowing blob from ground-based telescopes and then vanished completely in images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Now, the ghostly object has reappeared as a faint, yet distinct galaxy in an image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Astronomers with the COSMOS-Web collaboration have identified the object AzTECC71 as a dusty star-forming galaxy. Or, in other words, a galaxy that's busy forming many new stars but is shrouded in a dusty veil that's hard to see through — from nearly 1 billion years after the Big Bang. These galaxies were once thought to be extremely rare in the early universe, but this discovery, plus more than a dozen additional candidates in the first half of COSMOS-Web data that have yet to be described in the scientific literature, suggests they might be three to 10 times as common as expected.

Blue Planet

Major earthquakes could be predicted months in advance, scientists say

morroco earthquake damage 2023
© ABC7FILE PHOTO: Survivors pick their way through the rubble near Marrakech, Morocco, after a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck the city on September 9, 2023
Seismologists found unique seismic signals eight months before the destructive Turkey-Syria earthquake in 2023, raising hopes for forecasting large earthquakes. Challenges persist, emphasising ongoing research and cautious optimism.

Seismologists report a groundbreaking study suggesting that significant earthquakes could be predicted by identifying early warning signals several months before the event.

The research, published in Nature Communications, focused on the devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Turkey and Syria in February 2023, bringing to the fore unique seismic signals approximately eight months before the quake.

Comment: Independent researchers are attempting to forecast potential seismic events by taking into account cosmic energy inputs and modulators and their effect on quake activity; and, notably, even mainstream science is beginning to discover that there is indeed a correlation: One such independent researcher is Frank Hoogerbeets:


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Galaxy

Astronomers spot rare six-planet system that orbit star 'in sync'

NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)
© NASANASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)
For planet-hunting astronomers, finding a star system with six planets is rare enough, but one system recently spotted 100 light-years away has six planets that orbit in lock-step with one another.

The six planets orbit a star designed HD110067, which from the perspective of an Earth observer sits in the constellation Coma Berenices. It was first spotted as a potential planet-possessing star in 2020, when NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) detected a distinct dip in its brightness - a telltale sign that a planet had passed in front of the star.

Once scientists combined the TESS data with that from the European Space Agency's CHaracterizing ExOPlanet Satellite (Cheops) telescope, they discovered that HD110067 was quite the gem. Their work was published on Wednesday in Nature.

Info

Webb captures a prominent new star in Perseus

New Star in Perseus
© ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, T. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)In the lower half of the image is a narrow, horizontal nebula that stretches from edge to edge. It is brightly coloured with more variety on its right side. In the upper half there is a glowing point with multi-coloured light radiating from it in all directions. A bright star with long diffraction spikes lies along the right edge, and a few smaller stars are spread around. The background is covered in a thin haze.
This new Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope reveals intricate details of the Herbig Haro object 797 (HH 797). Herbig-Haro objects are luminous regions surrounding newborn stars (known as protostars), and are formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from these newborn stars form shockwaves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speeds. HH 797, which dominates the lower half of this image, is located close to the young open star cluster IC 348, which is located near the eastern edge of the Perseus dark cloud complex. The bright infrared objects in the upper portion of the image are thought to host two further protostars.

This image was captured with Webb's Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam). Infrared imaging is powerful in studying newborn stars and their outflows, because the youngest stars are invariably still embedded within the gas and dust from which they are formed. The infrared emission of the star's outflows penetrates the obscuring gas and dust, making Herbig-Haro objects ideal for observation with Webb's sensitive infrared instruments. Molecules excited by the turbulent conditions, including molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide, emit infrared light that Webb can collect to visualise the structure of the outflows. NIRCam is particularly good at observing the hot (thousands of degree Celsius) molecules that are excited as a result of shocks.