Science & TechnologyS


Water

How tomato plants adapt to drought conditions

Liana Wait
UC Davis
Tue, 02 Jan 2024 21:09 UTC
research tomato drought conditions adaptation
© TJ Ushing/UC DavisAlex Cantó-Pastor, a postdoctoral scholar working with Siobhan Brady, used mutant tomato plants to understand suberin’s role in drought tolerance.
When water supplies are low, tomato roots produce suberin — the molecule that gives wine corks and waxy potato skins their water-repellant qualities — to control water flow

Plants have to be flexible to survive environmental changes, and the adaptive methods they deploy must often be as changeable as the shifts in climate and condition to which they adapt. To cope with drought, plant roots produce a water-repellent polymer called suberin that blocks water from flowing up towards the leaves, where it would quickly evaporate. Without suberin, the resulting water loss would be like leaving the tap running.

In some plants, suberin is produced by endodermal cells that line the vessels inside the roots. But in others, like tomatoes, suberin is produced in exodermal cells that sit just below the skin of the root.
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Quenelle - Golden

China reveals next-gen multi-target electronic warfare weapon design

Ameya Paleja
Interesting Engineering
Wed, 03 Jan 2024 00:18 UTC
china
© rancho_runner/iStockIllustrative image to show a fighter jet with an electronic warfare pod.
Researchers at the Southeast University in Nanjiang China have revealed the design of their new generation electronic warfare (EW) weapon in a peer-reviewed journal. Unlike other EW weapons known so far, the Chinese-developed weapon can allegedly launch multiple beams of electromagnetic waves from a single antenna and target multiple objects simultaneously.

Electronic warfare is widely accepted as the next frontier of warfare which is seeing intense technological development. Failure to dominate the deployment of the technology is seen as a precursor to losing territorial ground. Advanced EW weapons are capable of suppressing weapons, and radars as well as adversarial ability to communicate, navigate and collect information in contested areas.

Comment: It's perhaps no coincidence that China is releasing this information so publicly, and putting it up for scrutiny, at this rather turbulent time on our planet; and this is just the technology that they're choosing to make public:

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Sun

A sweater made from new aerogel fiber tests warmer than one made from down

Bob Yirka
phys.org
Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:00 UTC
twisting
© SCIENCE 2023Bending and twisting of encapsulated aerogel textile
A team of chemical engineers and materials scientists at Zhejiang University in China has developed a new type of aeroge l fiber that has proven to be warmer than down when woven into a sweater. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes the inspiration for their fibers, how they were made and how well they worked when tested in a cold environment. Zhizhi Sheng and Xuetong Zhang, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have published a Perspective piece in the same journal issue outlining the work done by the team on this new effort.

Aerogels are types of gels where the liquid is replaced by air. They were invented in the 1930s and have been used for a variety of applications, including NASA space vehicles. Because of their positive thermal properties, materials scientists have been trying to make fibers using them that could be used to create warm textiles. Thus far, such attempts have mostly failed, however, due to a lack of moisture permeability and strength. In this new study, the research team in China has found a way to overcome both problems.
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Saturn

Saturn's seasonal spectacle: Hubble's ultra-sharp vision unveils ring spoke phenomenon


Sci Tech Daily
Mon, 25 Dec 2023 07:58 UTC
photo of Saturn was taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on October 22, 2023
© NASA, ESA, STScI, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC)This photo of Saturn was taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on October 22, 2023, when the ringed planet was approximately 850 million miles from Earth. Hubble’s ultra-sharp vision reveals a phenomenon called ring spokes.
Saturn’s spokes are transient features that rotate along with the rings. Their ghostly appearance only persists for two or three rotations around Saturn. During active periods, freshly-formed spokes continuously add to the pattern.
Levitated Dust Takes a Carousel Ride Around the Giant Ringworld

Though Saturn's unusual-looking "cup handle" features were first noted by Galileo in 1610, it would be another 45 years before they were described by Christiaan Huygens as a disk surrounding Saturn. Subsequently, ground-based telescopes could only distinguish four unique concentric rings, labeled A, B, C, and D. Not until the 1980s did NASA's two Voyager probes fly by Saturn to photograph thousands of concentric ringlets. An even bigger surprise to Voyager scientists were dark, radial spoke-like patterns in the ring plane that came and went as they revolved around Saturn.

Over the past three decades, the Hubble Space Telescope has picked up where the Voyagers have left off. Hubble's ultra-sharp vision is the next best thing to being there. Hubble follows the ring spoke "merry-go-round" every year. It's believed the dark spokes are dust particles electrostatically levitated above the ring plane. They seem to change in abundance with Saturn's seven-year-long seasons. And, this may be linked to changes in Saturn's magnetic field, as it is battered by the solar wind.

Comment: See also:

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Telescope

After 2 years in space, the James Webb telescope has broken cosmology. Can it be fixed?

Ben Turner
Live Science
Sat, 23 Dec 2023 00:00 UTC
illustration
© AlamyAn artist's illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope.
For decades, measurements of the universe's expansion have suggested a disparity known as the Hubble tension, which threatens to break cosmology as we know it. Now, on the eve of its second anniversary, a new finding by the James Webb Space Telescope has only entrenched the mystery.

Something is awry in our expanding cosmos.

Nearly a century ago, the astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the balloon-like inflation of the universe and the accelerating rush of all galaxies away from each other. Following that expansion backward in time led to our current best understanding of how everything began — the Big Bang.

But over the past decade, an alarming hole has been growing in this picture: Depending on where astronomers look, the rate of the universe's expansion (a value called the Hubble constant) varies significantly.

Now, on the second anniversary of its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has cemented the discrepancy with stunningly precise new observations that threaten to upend the standard model of cosmology.

The new physics needed to modify or even replace the 40-year-old theory is now a topic of fierce debate.
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Brain

Power of illusion can help with learning new movements

Tokyo Metropolitan University
Medical Xpress
Wed, 27 Dec 2023 00:00 UTC
visual-motor illusion
© Scientific Reports (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-47435-8(a) The Visual-motor illusion group observed a video of their counterclockwise ball rotation task. (b) The action observation group watched the same video as the visual-motor illusion group.
Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University showed that visual aids that create the illusion of movement, like a screen placed in front of one's hand showing the hand move, can improve motor performance and the early stages of motor learning. Compared to observing third-person motions, functional near-infrared spectroscopy data also showed greater changes in brain activity in regions associated with motor learning.

Findings like this might inform new treatment strategies for hemiplegic stroke patients. The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Visual-motor illusion (VMI) is the curious illusion of watching your body move even while it is still. Imagine having a tablet screen placed in front of your hand. Your hand is hidden behind the tablet, and your hand is not moving. Now, imagine the screen playing a video of your hand moving; your eyes are telling you that your hand is moving, but it is not moving at all.
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Archaeology

Perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo found inside fossilized egg

Ben Taub
IFL Science
Tue, 26 Dec 2023 19:18 UTC
oviraptorosaur
© Xing et al., 2021The oviraptorosaur embryo known as Baby Yingliang.
The 66- to 72-million-year-old specimen is one of the most complete dinosaur embryos ever found.

An incredibly rare, fully articulated dinosaur embryo has been found inside a fossilized egg that had been collecting dust for over a decade in the storage room of a museum in China. Thought to be between 66 and 72 million years old, the unborn specimen reveals an incredible link between dinosaurs and modern birds.

Belonging to a group of feathered, toothless theropods known as oviraptorosaurs, the unhatched creature is estimated to be about 27 centimeters (10.6 inches) long, and marks the first discovery of a dinosaur embryo displaying a posture that is typical of present-day bird embryos. Shortly before hatching, modern birds engage in a series of maneuvers known as tucking, which involves curving the body and bringing the head down under the wing, yet the evolutionary origins of this behavior have until now remained unknown.
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Moon

Korean lunar orbiter reveals Moon's far side is inexplicably more conductive

Stephen Luntz
IFL Science
Mon, 18 Dec 2023 01:42 UTC
moon far side dark side
© NASA via wikimedia commonsWe've known for almost 60 years that the far side of the Moon has almost no seas, but it's only know we have learned it is more conductive than the near
It's just one of the intriguing things the Danuri orbiter has revealed that previous missions missed.

There's something odd about the far side of the Moon, scientists have concluded based on data from the Korean Pathfinder Lunor Orbiter. The results are yet to be published, but suggest a discrepancy between the conductivity of the near and far sides, which so far lacks a plausible explanation.

Lunar exploration is becoming a global affair. Along with missions from the United States, China, India and Japan, the Korean Aerospace Research Institute has had an orbiter around our satellite for a year. Nicknamed Danuri, the mission is proving there is plenty the larger nations have missed.

Although the Institute is coy on the results over that time, Nature has been given advance notice of some of what has been found.
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HAL9000

The world's first human brain-scale supercomputer will go live next year

Ellie Zolfagharifard
Business Insider
Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00 UTC
deep south
Our brains are remarkably energy efficient.

Using just 20 watts of power, the human brain is capable of processing the equivalent of an exaflop — or a billion-billion mathematical operations per second.

Now, researchers in Australia are building what will be the world's first supercomputer that can simulate networks at this scale.

The supercomputer, known as DeepSouth, is being developed by Western Sydney University.

When it goes online next year, it will be capable of 228 trillion synaptic operations per second, which rivals the estimated rate of operations in the human brain.

The hope is to better understand how brains can use such little power to process huge amounts of information.

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Airplane Paper

Physicist discovers 'paradox-free' time travel is theoretically possible

David Nield
Science Alert
Sun, 17 Dec 2023 00:00 UTC
hole
© andrey_I/ShutterstockTime Travel Web
No one has yet managed to travel through time - at least to our knowledge - but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.

As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?

It's a monumental head-scratcher known as the 'grandfather paradox', but a few years ago physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, worked out how to "square the numbers" to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.

Tobar explained back in 2020:
"Classical dynamics says if you know the state of a system at a particular time, this can tell us the entire history of the system. However, Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts the existence of time loops or time travel - where an event can be both in the past and future of itself - theoretically turning the study of dynamics on its head."
What the calculations show is that space-time can potentially adapt itself to avoid paradoxes.
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