Science & Technology

Does gold have a purpose? Science hints at answers

Evolution News
Thu, 15 Oct 2020 18:22 UTC

Was there ever a time when gold did not fascinate human beings? It seems not. The Bible itself alludes to this primordial fascination, enigmatically locating the Garden of Eden by reference to gold deposits that are said to be of a particularly high quality. But here is a mystery. It arises from the observation that there is too much gold on Earth to fit current theories of nucleosynthesis. Gold is also too heavy to be found in quantity on Earth's surface. Adding to the puzzle, biochemists are finding surprising interactions of cells with gold, and are using gold nanoparticles for diagnosing and treating diseases such as cancer.

A question suggests itself: Does gold have a function beyond exhibiting one's wealth? The answer may be no. It may just be that people are generally attracted to gold for its shiny looks, and because it is relatively rare and hard to find, it tends to be valued more than iron, copper, and other metals. A gold rush makes sense. But a copper rush? Not so much. And yet, perhaps there is more to gold than aesthetics.

Volcanic eruptions may explain Denmark's giant mystery crystals says new research

University of Copenhagen
Wed, 14 Oct 2020 01:15 UTC

Researchers have long been stumped for an explanation of how tens of millions of years-old giant crystals known as glendonites came to be on the Danish islands of Fur and Mors. A recent study from the University of Copenhagen offers a possible explanation to the conundrum: major volcanic eruptions resulted in episodes of much cooler prehistoric climates than once thought.

Some of the world's largest specimens of rare calcium carbonate crystals known as glendonites are found in Denmark. The crystals were formed between 56 and 54 million of years ago, during a period known to have had some of the highest temperatures in Earth's geologic history. Their presence has long stirred wonder among researchers the world over.

"Why we find glendonites from a hot period, when temperatures averaged above 35 degrees, has long been a mystery. It shouldn't be possible," explains Nicolas Thibault, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management.

This is because glendonites are composed of ikaite, a mineral that is only stable, and can therefore only crystallize, at temperatures of less than four degrees Celsius.

Researchers synthesize room temperature superconducting material, the "Holy Grail" sought for more than a century

SciTech Daily
Wed, 14 Oct 2020 17:06 UTC

© University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster
Extreme cold is required to achieve superconductivity, as demonstrated in this photo from Dias's lab, in which a magnet floats above a superconductor cooled with liquid nitrogen.

The goal of new research led by Ranga Dias, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of physics and astronomy, is to develop superconducting materials at room temperatures.

Compressing simple molecular solids with hydrogen at extremely high pressures, University of Rochester engineers and physicists have, for the first time, created material that is superconducting at room temperature.

Featured as the cover story in the journal Nature, the work was conducted by the lab of Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of physics and mechanical engineering.

Dias says developing materials that are superconducting — without electrical resistance and expulsion of magnetic field at room temperature — is the "holy grail" of condensed matter physics. Sought for more than a century, such materials "can definitely change the world as we know it," Dias says.

Could an 'invisible' cell transplant treat diabetes?

Katrina Wesencraft
The Conversation
Wed, 14 Oct 2020 23:22 UTC

Type 1 diabetes used to be a death sentence. After a diagnosis, patients were put on a starvation diet. The lucky ones would have a year or two to live. But, thanks to the discovery of insulin in the early 1920s, this is no longer the case.

We need insulin to regulate our blood sugar. After a meal, insulin helps our cells to use the sugar in our food. We use this sugar as fuel for energy - without insulin, sugar has nowhere to go. It stays in the bloodstream, and over time, damages blood vessels.

People with type 1 diabetes inject themselves with insulin to control their blood sugar level. However, while the treatment is a lifesaver, it can't prevent people from developing diabetic complications. These conditions can be life limiting, so what if there was a treatment that was better than insulin injections?

Well, there might be, and it involves transplanting cells.

Over 450 million people have diabetes, but less than 10% of these people have the kind known as type 1. In type 1 diabetes, the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas stop working. Scientists don't know exactly how this happens, but the immune system seems to attack these cells by accident.

I work with researchers and surgeons at the universities of Strathclyde and Edinburgh who are replacing these faulty cells for a small group of people with severe type 1 diabetes. In a healthy person, around 1% of the pancreas cells produce insulin. Scientists are able to extract these insulin-producing cells from a donor pancreas and surgeons transplant them into a diabetic patient.

Threat from explosive space junk is increasing, warns ESA in worrying report

RT
Tue, 13 Oct 2020 10:37 UTC

Despite efforts to combat the problem of space debris in orbit around our planet, the ESA has released a damning report indicating the problem is becoming a lot worse over time, with explosive consequences.

Space debris has been accumulating ever since such pioneering space missions as the launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957 and the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in July 1969.

Rocket boosters, defunct satellites and a variety of spaceborne shrapnel now vastly outnumber operational craft in orbit. With each new satellite launch and mission to the ISS, the risk of collision rises, as objects destroy each other, producing yet more debris.

Earlier this year, there were fears that two old satellites might collide, while the International Space Station has also been forced to make emergency maneuvers to avoid a collision three times in 2020 alone.

Two new space oddities reported by astronomers

Cosmos Magazine
Tue, 13 Oct 2020 22:36 UTC

© ESO/M. Kornmesser
An illustration of a star (foreground) experiencing spaghettification as it's sucked in by a supermassive black hole (background) during a tidal disruption event.

Astronomers have described not one but two rather rare sights in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In the first, an international team led by the University of Birmingham, UK, reports spotting a blast of light emitted by a star as it is sucked in by a supermassive black hole just 215 million light-years from Earth.

The phenomenon, known as a tidal disruption event, is caused when a star passes too close to a black hole and the extreme gravitational pull from the black hole shreds the star into thin streams of material - a process with the wonderful name "spaghettification".

As the process occurs, some of the material falls into the black hole, releasing a bright flare of energy which astronomers can detect. It's usually not easy, but this flare was found just a short time after the star was ripped apart.

Matt Nicholl and colleagues also had access to some of the big guns of the telescope world, including the ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and New Technology Telescope (NTT), the Las Cumbres Observatory global telescope network, and the Neil Gehrel's Swift Observatory.

They monitored the flare, named AT2019qiz, for six months as it grew brighter then faded away. Their paper is available on the pre-print server arXiv.

New tech promises to diagnose COVID-19 through an implantable microchip

Raul Diego
Mint Press News
Thu, 08 Oct 2020 00:00 UTC

The POC (point-of-care) diagnostics market stands at about $18.8 billion globally, according to recent market trends, and is expected to grow by a third to $24.1 billion this year and projected to explode by 2024 to $46.7 billion. The main driver for these highly optimistic forecasts is the surge in healthcare technology demand brought on by the pandemic crisis, which is lining the pockets of big pharma and big tech, aided and abetted by the Defense Department's various tentacles into the private sector, like DARPA or In-Q-Tel, where federal dollars are channeled into private enterprise through direct investment, stock purchasing, and grants, representing one of the clearest examples of how the military industrial complex works.

The "detection" of COVID-19 is among the most crowded segments of the POC diagnostics market and recent advances in the life sciences have made new technologies, such as mRNA-based vaccines and testing possible. The U.S. government, through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has been intimately involved in helping these technologies along, and in the case of mRNA, specifically, has made considerable investments in its development dating back to November 2019 in the case of one company developing an mRNA-based COVID-19 diagnostic tool.

Comment: See also:

No, science is not a 'social construct'

James Lindsay
New Discourses
Fri, 25 Sep 2020 18:36 UTC

When dealing with the Woke — that is, devotees of the ideology outlined in Critical Social Justice Theory — one assumption (among many) that is an almost sure bet to make about their claims is that some trick of language is being played. What's needed to expose the vacuity of the Woke position, then, is not necessarily the ability to bring facts to bear on the matter or even to argue better than they can (as they'll deconstruct your position and leave you looking foolish to anyone slightly sympathetic to their cause). The best thing to do is expose the trick.

Most often, these language games — as Wittgenstein named them, the postmodern theorists then exploited, and the Woke have appropriated — take one of a rather small number of forms. In nearly all cases, it's some form of a "strategic equivocation," in which two ideas are being forwarded simultaneously, allowing the Theorist to play both sides of the argument to his own advantage in any given situation.

One example of these sorts of language games is the "motte and bailey" rhetorical structure, in which a radical position (the "bailey" position) is maintained by defending only a highly defensible (but disingenuous) variation (the "motte"). When the pressure is on, the claim being made is just some perfectly reasonable thing (the motte), like that Critical Race Theory is just an analytical tool that fosters racial sensitivity. When it comes off, the radical position (the bailey) — racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society and thus society requires a revolution to reorder it according to the Critical Race Theory view of the world by empowering Critical Race Theorists — comes back out to play. An extreme example of this style of strategic equivocation are "Troll's Truisms," as Nicholas Shackel had it ("deepities," as named by Dan Dennett). Troll's Truisms occur when something is trivially true in a banal sense with no real implications and false in a profound sense with serious implications (Dennett gives the example of "love is just a word").

In the eye of a stellar cyclone: Bizarre secrets of a ticking time-bomb star 8,000 light years from Earth

PhysOrg
Mon, 12 Oct 2020 18:04 UTC

While on COVID lockdown, a University of Sydney honours student has written a research paper on a star system dubbed one of the "exotic peacocks of the stellar world".

Only one in a hundred million stars makes the cut to be classified a Wolf-Rayet: ferociously bright, hot stars doomed to imminent collapse in a supernova explosion leaving only a dark remnant, such as a black hole.

Rarest of all, even among Wolf-Rayets, are elegant binary pairs that, if the conditions are right, are able to pump out huge amounts of carbon dust driven by their extreme stellar winds. As the two stars orbit one another, the dust gets wrapped into a beautiful glowing sooty tail. Just a handful of these sculpted spiral plumes has ever been discovered.

NASA asteroid hunters spot flurry of new space rocks headed towards Earth, after identifying mysterious new 'minimoon'

RT
Mon, 12 Oct 2020 17:35 UTC

NASA is warning of yet another five asteroids headed our way in the first half of this week, as the agency's leading asteroid expert claims to have solved the mystery of the 'minimoon' set to enter earth's orbit.

Amid a flurry of asteroidal activity as we enter the final few months of 2020, NASA's asteroid hunters have flagged five more space rocks en route ranging in size from 5.5m all the way up to a whopping 45m.

On October 12, two asteroids spotted in the past four days, are due to fly past: the 5.5-meter 2020 TS1 will pass closer to us than the moon, at just 225,000 km, followed shortly after by the 12-meter 2020 TR1 which will swing further out at 1.2 million km.

For reference, the moon orbits the Earth at an average distance of 385,000 kilometers.

Quote of the Day

State power has its own limits defined by the fact that it is authority that reaches people from outside. State power cannot oversee and dictate the creative states of the soul and mind, the inner states of love, freedom and goodwill. The state cannot demand from its citizens faith, prayer, love, goodness and conviction. It cannot regulate scientific, religious and artistic creation. It should not intervene in moral, family and daily private life, and only when extremely necessary should it impinge on people's economic initiative and creativity.

- Ivan Ilyin

RT = CNN So this piece is likely agitprop. "The beatings will continue until morale improves." Please, just follow the $cience.

DeliciousTears

Whats a Lizzo? Is that like a Lesbo? Asking for a friend....

Bezel Bub

New York hospitals prepare for staffing crisis as vaccination mandate forces mass firings [Link]

Serig

I think we need to start a GoFundMe so we can air drop AK-47's into Australia....

Bezel Bub

slime biden exacts no consequences for murdering 10 afghans, but punishes cowboys for riding horses

smertzasmert

Science & Technology

Does gold have a purpose? Science hints at answers

Volcanic eruptions may explain Denmark's giant mystery crystals says new research

Researchers synthesize room temperature superconducting material, the "Holy Grail" sought for more than a century

Could an 'invisible' cell transplant treat diabetes?

Threat from explosive space junk is increasing, warns ESA in worrying report

Two new space oddities reported by astronomers

New tech promises to diagnose COVID-19 through an implantable microchip

No, science is not a 'social construct'

In the eye of a stellar cyclone: Bizarre secrets of a ticking time-bomb star 8,000 light years from Earth

NASA asteroid hunters spot flurry of new space rocks headed towards Earth, after identifying mysterious new 'minimoon'

Latest News

Picture of the Day

Quote of the Day

Recent Comments

Quantum Quirk

Contact Us