Science & Technology

New modeling suggests Earth's supercontinents tore apart quickly after millions of years of strained separation

Belinda Smith
Cosmos Magazine
Thu, 21 Jul 2016 20:25 UTC

© MIKKEL JUUL JENSEN / BONNIER PUBLICATIONS / GETTY IMAGES
Around 175 million years ago, the ancient supercontinent Pangea began to break up. New research shows how the continents were sling-shotted off each other, thanks to their strained separation.

Earth's supercontinents spent millions of years under huge amounts of strain before abruptly lurching apart to form oceans between them, new modelling suggests.

A team at the University of Sydney in Australia revealed the underlying actions of the splitting landmass - a sustained period of slow inching apart followed by a sudden heave - in the journal Nature.

Dieter Mueller, senior author on the paper, likens the geological mechanics to pulling apart a thick piece of dough: "At first, separating it requires a lot of effort because the dough resists your pulling and stretches slowly between your hands.

"If you're persistent, you'll eventually reach a point where the dough becomes thin enough to separate quite easily and quickly."

Final frontier: Hubble captures spectacular space-warped images of mega-distant galaxies (VIDEO)

RT
Thu, 21 Jul 2016 18:01 UTC

The latest images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show the spectacular space-warping of hundreds of distant galaxies - something first outlined by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity.

The vivid galaxy cluster Abell S1063, located some 4 billion light-years away, holds the key to this staggering phenomenon.

Scientific procedures using millions of animals still being used despite tried and tested alternative

Science Daily
Wed, 20 Jul 2016 00:00 UTC

Routine scientific procedures using millions of animals are still being authorised when there is a tried and tested alternative, according to a group of scientists investigating the production of antibodies.

The scientists, writing in the Cell Press journal, Trends in Biotechnology, say the use of animals in consumer society is effectively 'hidden' and products assumed to be 'animal-friendly' are anything but. They say an animal friendly antibody production technique using bacteriophage viruses instead of live animals is being overlooked, despite the enormous potential for reduction in animal use.

The global antibody industry is worth 80 billion dollars and relies heavily on animals to produce the antibodies that are used to detect the vast range of molecules indicative of state of health, safety or the environment. Antibody-based tests are used in consumer and environmental safeguarding -- from healthcare, over the counter, point of care and laboratory diagnostic testing to food safety, agriculture and household products.

Dr Alison Gray, a visiting researcher at The University of Nottingham's School of Veterinary Medicine and Science, said: "The antibody-based tests that are commonly used in society appear to be far removed from animal experimentation since no animals were directly tested on. However, the target molecule to be detected is repeatedly injected into the animal, initiating an immune response. Months later, the animal is euthanased and antibodies to that molecule are extracted and incorporated into an in vitro, 'animal-free' test. So in reality, we are not replacing animals but substituting methods.

Comment: Seventeen to 100 million mice, rats, birds, rabbits, cats, dogs, primates and other animals suffer and die in laboratories every year in the U.S. Scientists, medical doctors and animal activists have railed against animal experimentation for decades, yet the practice continues. Listen to the The Health & Wellness Show: The Quackery and Cruelty of Animal Medical Research to learn more about the controversy surrounding animal medical research.

Signs of impending volcanic super-eruptions become evident less than a year before eruption

David Salisbury
Phys.org
Thu, 21 Jul 2016 17:04 UTC

Super-eruptions—volcanic events large enough to devastate the entire planet—give only about a year's warning before they blow.

That is the conclusion of a new microscopic analysis of quartz crystals in pumice taken from the Bishop Tuff in eastern California, which is the site of the super-eruption that formed the Long Valley Caldera 760,000 years ago.

The study is described in the paper "The year leading to a supereruption" by Guilherme Gualda, associate professor of earth and environment sciences at Vanderbilt University, and Stephen Sutton at the University of Chicago published July 20 in the journal PLOS One.

"The evolution of a giant, super-eruption-feeding magma body is characterized by events taking place at a variety of time scales," said Gualda. Tens of thousands of years are needed to prime the crust to generate sufficient eruptible magma. Once established, these melt-rich, giant magma bodies are unstable features that last for only centuries to few millennia. "Now we have shown that the onset of the process of decompression, which releases the gas bubbles that power the eruption, starts less than a year before eruption."

Comment: Magma May Give Signs of Super-Volcano Eruptions

Updated map of the brain identifies nearly 100 new regions

Carl Zimmer
The New York Times
Wed, 20 Jul 2016 00:00 UTC

© Matthew F. Glasser, David C. Van Essen
A new map based on brain scan data collected by the Human Connectome Project. The data revealed 180 new regions.

The brain looks like a featureless expanse of folds and bulges, but it's actually carved up into invisible territories. Each is specialized: Some groups of neurons become active when we recognize faces, others when we read, others when we raise our hands.

On Wednesday, in what many experts are calling a milestone in neuroscience, researchers published a spectacular new map of the brain, detailing nearly 100 previously unknown regions — an unprecedented glimpse into the machinery of the human mind.

Scientists will rely on this guide as they attempt to understand virtually every aspect of the brain, from how it develops in children and ages over decades, to how it can be corrupted by diseases like Alzheimer's and schizophrenia.

"It's a step towards understanding why we're we," said David Kleinfeld, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the research.

Scientists created the map with advanced scanners and computers running artificial intelligence programs that "learned" to identify the brain's hidden regions from vast amounts of data collected from hundreds of test subjects, a far more sophisticated and broader effort than had been previously attempted.

Was life on Mars already found 40 years ago?

Ethan Siegel
Forbes
Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:37 UTC

In 2016, our understanding of Mars has been helped along tremendously by a slew of successful rovers, landers, and orbiting missions. We've mapped the Martian surface completely and at high-resolution; we've roamed more than a marathon's worth of distance on the surface, discovering meteorites, crater interiors, dunes and frozen water; we've seen mysterious methane-rich "vents" of gas on the surface; we've discovered salty flowing liquid water on the surface itself and dried-up riverbeds. And perhaps most spectacularly, we've discovered — up close — the presence of what we call Martian blueberries, which are hematite spheres produced here on Earth by organic processes and living creatures in an aquatic environment. Given how Earth-like Mars' past may have been, it raises the most important question we've ever asked of another world: is there now, or was there ever, life on Mars?

40 years ago, the twin Viking orbiters-and-landers were humanity's greatest, most ambitious missions to explore the red planet. They both arrived at Mars in 1976, less than a year after launch due to careful timing of Earth's orbit relative to Mars. While the orbiters constructed the first complete surface maps, discovering strong evidence of Mars' watery past, the Viking 1 lander touched down on July 20, 1976, with Viking 2 following suit six weeks later. For the first time, we were about to discover what the surface of the red planet was like, and it would be our best data until the 1990s.

What shape are photons?

Cathal O'Connell
Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 20 Jul 2016 22:09 UTC

Hologram of a single photon reconstructed from raw measurements (left) and theoretically predicted (right).

Imagine a shaft of yellow sunlight beaming through a window. Quantum physics tells us that beam is made of zillions of tiny packets of light, called photons, streaming through the air. But what does an individual photon "look" like? Does it have a shape? Are these questions even meaningful?

Now, Polish physicists have created the first ever hologram of a single light particle. The feat, achieved by observing the interference of two intersecting light beams, is an important insight into the fundamental quantum nature of light.

Scientists on the verge of predicting children's scholastic aptitude using DNA

RT
Wed, 20 Jul 2016 16:32 UTC

Think your kid isn't the brightest crayon in the box? Don't worry - one look at your child's DNA may soon help scientists predict whether he or she will have learning difficulties at school, so that you can take timely measures to avoid any problems.

Apparently, it's all in the genes. Research by scientists from King's College London has shown that a genetic score of some 20,000 DNA variants explains up to 10 percent of differences in educational achievements of 16-year-old students. The authors of the study stressed that DNA gives a far better prediction of a pupil's achievement than gender or grit - a trait measuring determination for attaining challenging goals.

"We are at a tipping point for predicting individuals' educational strengths and weaknesses from their DNA," Professor Robert Plomin, senior author of the study, said in the press-release.

Researchers studied the influence of genetic variants on results from GCSEs - a system of exams in England, Wales and Northern Ireland - in maths and English in 5,825 unrelated individuals aged 7, 12 and 16.

New concentrating solar tower is worth its salt with 24/7 power

Knvul Sheikh
Scientific American
Thu, 14 Jul 2016 14:52 UTC

A California firm is converting sunlight to heat and storing it in molten salt so it can supply electricity when the wind is calm or the sun isn't shining

© SolarReserve
The 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Facility in Nevada is the first utility-scale concentrating solar plant that can provide electricity whenever it's needed most, even after dark.

Deep in the Nevada desert, halfway between Las Vegas and Reno, a lone white tower stands 195 meters tall, gleaming like a beacon. It is surrounded by more than 10,000 billboard-size mirrors focusing the sun's rays on its tip. The Crescent Dunes "concentrating solar power" plant looks like some advanced communication device for aliens. But the facility's innovation lies in the fact that it can store electricity and make it available on demand any time—day or night.

Crescent Dunes, the flagship project of Santa Monica - based firm SolarReserve, has achieved what engineers and proponents of renewable energy have struggled with for decades: providing cheap, commercial-scale, non - fossil fuel electricity even when winds are calm or the sun is not shining. The facility is touted as being the first solar power plant that can store more than 10 hours of electricity, which translates into 1,100 megawatt-hours, enough to power 75,000 homes. "We can ramp up electricity generation for utilities based on the demand. We can turn on when they want us to turn on and we can turn off when they want us to turn off," SolarReserve CEO Kevin Smith says.

The trick is to have all those mirrors heat up a massive tank full of sodium and potassium nitrates that are pumped up to the top of the tower. There the molten salt can reach temperatures as high as 565 degrees Celsius. When electricity is needed, the hot salt is used to boil water and produce high-temperature, high-pressure steam, which turns turbines that generate electricity. The rest of the time, the molten salt can be stored in another insulated tank on the ground.

Comment: Related articles:

Quantum computer accurately simulates hydrogen molecule, could revolutionize many industries

Lucian Armasu
Tom's Hardware
Tue, 19 Jul 2016 14:51 UTC

Google's 9-qubit universal quantum computer.

Google, in collaboration with researchers from Harvard, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, UC Santa Barbara, Tufts University and University College London, announced that they have achieved the first completely scalable quantum simulation of a molecule. Quantum-level chemistry simulation is one of the first real-world uses for quantum computers, and it could revolutionize medicine research, materials research, and much more.

Classical computers aren't that good at simulating chemical reactions. For instance, accurately computing the energies of the propane molecule (C3H8) takes ten days with a classic computer design. Molecular systems use highly-entangled superposition states, which require exponentially more computing resources to represent them sufficiently with high precision.

If it takes up to ten days to represent a single molecule with high precision, then representing thousands (or millions) of molecules at the same time, and how they react with each other, becomes an almost impossible task with a classic computer architecture. It is also a highly inefficient process in terms of energy use. Chemical reactions seem to work at a quantum level, so quantum computers are ideal for trying to simulate them as efficiently and as accurately as possible.

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Science & Technology

New modeling suggests Earth's supercontinents tore apart quickly after millions of years of strained separation

Final frontier: Hubble captures spectacular space-warped images of mega-distant galaxies (VIDEO)

Scientific procedures using millions of animals still being used despite tried and tested alternative

Signs of impending volcanic super-eruptions become evident less than a year before eruption

Updated map of the brain identifies nearly 100 new regions

Was life on Mars already found 40 years ago?

What shape are photons?

Scientists on the verge of predicting children's scholastic aptitude using DNA

New concentrating solar tower is worth its salt with 24/7 power

Quantum computer accurately simulates hydrogen molecule, could revolutionize many industries

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