Science & Technology

Insect pollination pushed back 50 millions years with new amber fossil

Indiana University
Phys.org
Mon, 11 Nov 2019 12:00 UTC

© the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology.
A. burmitina in amber. The 99-million-year-old fossil, recovered from a mine in northern Myanmar, also contains 62 pollen grains from a eudicot flower. It is the earliest known physical evidence of insect pollination.

A new study co-led by researchers in the U.S. and China has pushed back the first-known physical evidence of insect flower pollination to 99 million years ago, during the mid-Cretaceous period.

The revelation is based upon a tumbling flower beetle with pollen on its legs discovered preserved in amber deep inside a mine in northern Myanmar. The fossil comes from the same amber deposit as the first ammonite discovered in amber, which was reported by the same research group earlier this year.

The report of the new fossil will publish Nov. 11 in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The fossil, which contains both the beetle and pollen grains, pushes back the earliest documented instance of insect pollination to a time when pterodactyls still roamed the skies — or about 50 million years earlier than previously thought.

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Study suggests objective reality doesn't exist

Alessandro Fedrizzi and Massimiliano Proietti
The Conversation
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 05:11 UTC

Alternative facts are spreading like a virus across society. Now it seems they have even infected science - at least the quantum realm. This may seem counter intuitive. The scientific method is after all founded on the reliable notions of observation, measurement and repeatability. A fact, as established by a measurement, should be objective, such that all observers can agree with it.

But in a paper recently published in Science Advances, we show that, in the micro-world of atoms and particles that is governed by the strange rules of quantum mechanics, two different observers are entitled to their own facts. In other words, according to our best theory of the building blocks of nature itself, facts can actually be subjective.

Observers are powerful players in the quantum world. According to the theory, particles can be in several places or states at once - this is called a superposition. But oddly, this is only the case when they aren't observed. The second you observe a quantum system, it picks a specific location or state - breaking the superposition. The fact that nature behaves this way has been proven multiple times in the lab - for example, in the famous double slit experiment (see video below).

From science fiction to science lab: Holograms you can 'feel'

Phys Org
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:54 UTC

Walking, talking holograms have been a staple of sci-fi films since Princess Leia was magically brought to life in "Star Wars".

Now scientists in Britain say they can make even more realistic 3-D versions — a butterfly, a globe, an emoji — which can be seen with the naked eye, heard and even felt without the need for any virtual reality systems.

Writing in the journal Nature, a team at the University of Sussex in southern England, said technology currently in use can create 3-D images but they are slow, short-lived and "most importantly, rely on operating principles that cannot produce tactile and auditive content as well".

To fill in the picture, so to speak, the team created a prototype called Multimodal Acoustic Trap Display (MATD) which "can simultaneously deliver visual, auditory and tactile content".

Two identical-looking bird species found to have very different genes

University of Bath
Wed, 13 Nov 2019 20:08 UTC

plover bird different genes look identical

© Jonathan Martinez
The Kentish Plover (right) and White-faced Plover (left) are look very similar but are in fact different species

New research by the Milner Centre for Evolution academics in collaboration with Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou (China) shows that Southern and Northern breeding populations of plovers in China are in fact two distinct species: Kentish plover (Charadrius alexandrinus) in the North and white-faced plover (Charadrius dealbatus) in the South.

Using state-of-the-art genomics analysis, the team revealed that the Kentish plover and White-faced plover diverged approximately half a million years ago due to cycling sea level changes between the Eastern and Southern China Sea causing intermittent isolation of the two regional populations.

Facebook is secretly using your iPhone's camera as you scroll your feed

Mix
The Next Web
Wed, 13 Nov 2019 19:28 UTC

iPhone owners, beware. It appears Facebook might be actively using your camera without your knowledge while you're scrolling your feed.

The issue has come to light after a user going by the name Joshua Maddux took to Twitter to report the unusual behavior, which occurs in the Facebook app for iOS. In footage he shared, you can see his camera actively working in the background as he scrolls through his feed.

The problem becomes evident due to a bug that shows the camera feed in a tiny sliver on the left side of your screen, when you open a photo in the app and swipe down. TNW has since been able to independently reproduce the issue.

Here's what this looks like:

Planet 9 may have already been found, study suggests

Chris Ciaccia
Fox News
Tue, 12 Nov 2019 17:32 UTC

© R. Hurt (IPAC)/Caltech
Artist's illustration of Planet Nine, a hypothetical world that some scientists think lurks undiscovered in the far outer solar system

Since its launch in April 2018, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has found a number of exoplanets, including a so-called "missing link" and an exoplanet with three suns. But a new study suggests the $200 million satellite may have also discovered the mysterious Planet 9.

The research, published in Research Notes of the AAS, notes that TESS is able to take multiple images of the same spot in space, potentially locating trans-Neptunian objects, also known as TNOs.

Since TESS is able to detect objects at approximately 5 pixel displacement and Planet Nine "has an expected magnitude of 19 < V < 24," the possibility is raised "that TESS could discover it!" the authors wrote in the study.

"What TESS is doing is staring at regions in the sky for months for at a time," the study's lead author, Harvard University astrophysicist Matt Holman, said in an interview with Fox News. "It's looking for exoplanets and you can find those by looking at the paths of the host stars."

Cosmic web: Growing evidence that the universe is connected by giant structures

Becky Ferreira
Motherboard
Mon, 11 Nov 2019 14:00 UTC

© Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images
Scientists are finding that galaxies can move with each other across huge distances, and against the predictions of basic cosmological models. The reason why could change everything we think we know about the universe.

The Milky Way, the galaxy we live in, is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies strewn across the universe. Their variety is stunning: spirals, ring galaxies shaped like star-studded loops, and ancient galaxies that outshine virtually everything else in the universe.

But despite their differences, and the mind-boggling distances between them, scientists have noticed that some galaxies move together in odd and often unexplained patterns, as if they are connected by a vast unseen force.

Galaxies within a few million light years of each other can gravitationally affect each other in predictable ways, but scientists have observed mysterious patterns between distant galaxies that transcend those local interactions.

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Mineral at future Mars landing spot may have preserved signs of life

Kevin Stacey
Brown University
Wed, 13 Nov 2019 18:15 UTC

© NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/MSSS/Brown University
Jezero crater, where NASA plans to land a new Mars rover next year, is home to the remains of an ancient river delta. Researchers have now found deposits of hydrated silica, a mineral that's especially good at preserving microfossils and other signs of past life, near the delta.

Using orbital instruments to peer into Jezero crater, the landing site for NASA's Mars 2020 rover, researchers found deposits of hydrated silica, a mineral that's great at preserving microfossils and other signs of life.

Next year, NASA plans to launch a new Mars rover to search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet. A new study shows that the rover's Jezero crater landing site is home to deposits of hydrated silica, a mineral that just happens to be particularly good at preserving biosignatures.

"Using a technique we developed that helps us find rare, hard-to-detect mineral phases in data taken from orbiting spacecraft, we found two outcrops of hydrated silica within Jezero crater," said Jesse Tarnas, a Ph.D. student at Brown University and the study's lead author. "We know from Earth that this mineral phase is exceptional at preserving microfossils and other biosignatures, so that makes these outcrops exciting targets for the rover to explore."

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Artificial Intelligence examining ECGs predicts irregular heartbeat, death risk

Newsroom.com
Mon, 11 Nov 2019 19:17 UTC

Artificial intelligence can examine electrocardiogram (ECG) test results, a common medical test, to pinpoint patients at higher risk of developing a potentially dangerous irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia) or of dying within the next year, according to two preliminary studies to be presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2019 — November 16-18 in Philadelphia. The Association's Scientific Sessions is an annual, premier global exchange of the latest advances in cardiovascular science for researchers and clinicians.

Researchers used more than 2 million ECG results from more than three decades of archived medical records in Pennsylvania/New Jersey's Geisinger Health System to train deep neural networks — advanced, multi-layered computational structures. Both studies, from the same group of researchers, are among the first to use artificial intelligence to predict future events from an ECG rather than to detect current health problems, the scientists noted.

Comment: RT further reports that doctors aren't exactly sure what the AI system is detecting:

Predicting the risk of a heart attack or other heart-related issues, the AI performed better than its human counterparts, consistently scoring above flesh-and-blood doctors. Even for ECG results that cardiologists determined to be normal, the AI was able to pick up on other patterns and accurately predict fatal health risks within a year's time.

"That finding suggests that the model is seeing things that humans probably can't see, or at least that we just ignore and think are normal," Fornwalt said.

AI can potentially teach us things that we've been maybe misinterpreting for decades.

To further compare the AI's methods to present-day doctors, the researchers also set up a second algorithm to consider other factors commonly measured by physicians, including age and gender, but the first model designed to crunch raw ECG data alone still won out in its forecasting abilities.

The AI was trained based on historical ECG data, meaning that researchers already knew the outcome in each patient's case and could measure the algorithm's precision. But it is yet to be checked on real-time data in clinical studies to verify it can indeed predict and improve health outcomes. The research team at Geisinger will present its findings later this month at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions in Philadelphia.

This is exciting and provides more evidence that we are on the verge of a revolution in medicine where computers will be working alongside physicians to improve patient care.

Oxygen on Mars is behaving in a way that is puzzling scientists

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Wed, 13 Nov 2019 00:00 UTC

Atmospheric gases on Mars sure provide us with plenty of mystery. First, there was that business with the disappearing, reappearing methane. Now, oxygen levels have been observed rising and falling over the Gale Crater, by amounts that just don't fit any known chemical processes.

The data comes from Curiosity, the Mars rover that's been making its slow and methodical trek across the crater floor and up the foot of Mount Sharp in the centre of it.

The robot isn't just looking down at the rocks beneath its treads; Curiosity also takes readings of the Martian atmosphere to measure the seasonal atmospheric changes. It's been up there for three Mars years now (that's six Earth years), and scientists poring over the measurements have noticed that oxygen in the planet's atmosphere isn't behaving entirely as expected.

There actually isn't all that much oxygen on Mars. Most of its thin atmosphere (95 percent by volume) is carbon dioxide, or CO2. The rest is made up of 2.6 percent molecular nitrogen (N2), 1.9 percent argon (Ar), 0.16 percent molecular oxygen (O2), and 0.06 percent carbon monoxide (CO).

(Earth's atmosphere, by contrast, is mostly nitrogen, at 78.09 percent by volume, and 20.95 percent oxygen.)

On Mars, atmospheric pressure changes over the course of the year. On the winter hemisphere, CO2 freezes over the pole, which causes the pressure to drop across the hemisphere. This results in a hemisphere-to-hemisphere redistribution of gases to equalise atmospheric pressure planet-wide.

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Science & Technology

Insect pollination pushed back 50 millions years with new amber fossil

Study suggests objective reality doesn't exist

From science fiction to science lab: Holograms you can 'feel'

Two identical-looking bird species found to have very different genes

Facebook is secretly using your iPhone's camera as you scroll your feed

Planet 9 may have already been found, study suggests

Cosmic web: Growing evidence that the universe is connected by giant structures

Mineral at future Mars landing spot may have preserved signs of life

Artificial Intelligence examining ECGs predicts irregular heartbeat, death risk

Oxygen on Mars is behaving in a way that is puzzling scientists

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