Science & TechnologyS


Better Earth

Moons of Uranus might be swarming with deep oceans

Elisha Sauers
Mashable
Sat, 06 May 2023 12:00 UTC
uranus
© NASA / ESA / CSA / J. DePasquale (STScI)A new NASA study concludes four of Uranus' 27 moons likely have oceans locked under their icy crusts.
Some of Uranus' moons likely have deep oceans lurking beneath their ice-capped surfaces, a new study by NASA shows.

Two of them, Titania and Oberon, may even have water warm enough to support life.

Scientists have recently pored through decades-old information collected by the veteran Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew by Uranus in 1986 during its extended space mission. Armed with new computer modeling techniques, researchers reanalyzed the data and concluded four of the ice giant's 27 moons probably have liquid water sandwiched between their cores and crusts.

The findings, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, describe these Uranian water worlds — Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon — as probably holding briny oceans dozens of miles deep. They join a growing list of water worlds being discovered throughout the solar system.

Comment: See also: First evidence that water can be created on the lunar surface by Earth's magnetosphere

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Jupiter

Astronomers capture rarely-seen moment of dying star eating Jupiter-sized planet

Mary Manley
Sputnik
Fri, 05 May 2023 05:45 UTC
Sun and planets
© NASA . ESA, and G. Bacon/STScI
Astronomers say that similar to the demise of ZTF SLRN-2020, the Earth too will face the same fatal fate - however, the end won't be claiming civilization for another roughly 5 billion years.

Newly published findings revealed the moment in which astronomers witnessed the stunning celestial act of a dying star being completely engulfed by a nearby planet thousands of light-years away.

Officials spotted the cosmic act in May of 2020 during observations in the constellation Aquila, which sits about 12,000 light-years away. Researchers had been investigating stellar mergers when they came upon the find.

"Planets with short orbital periods (roughly under 10 days) are common around stars like the sun. Stars expand as they evolve and thus we expect their close planetary companions to be engulfed, possibly powering luminous mass ejections from the host star," write the study authors, who are from MIT, Harvard University, and Caltech.
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Blue Planet

Ancient bacteria genome reconstructed from Neanderthal tooth plaque

James Dinneen
New Scientist
Thu, 04 May 2023 21:42 UTC
tooth
© Werner Siemens Foundation, Felix WeyCalcified tooth tartar preserved DNA for millennia: Researchers pieced together the genomes of two unknown species of green sulphur bacteria from DNA fragments found in ancient calcified tooth plaque
Microbial DNA preserved in the teeth of ancient humans and Neanderthals has been used to reconstruct molecules produced by ancient bacteria. The approach could help us discover new antibiotics or other useful molecules in microbes that may have gone extinct thousands of years ago.

The search for unknown microbes might normally send researchers to tropical islands or hydrothermal vents. Pierre Stallforth at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany and his colleagues went hunting back in time. They looked to the microbial DNA preserved in the calcified tooth plaque from 34 ancient humans and 12 Neanderthals, including one that was 102,000 years old.

The ancient DNA came fragmented in millions of short, often degraded, sequences. Assembling these into sufficiently complete genomes is a "multidimensional jigsaw puzzle", says Stallforth.

Comment: See also: Rotten meat may have been a staple of the original Paleo diet

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Info

On the trail of a mysterious force in space


Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Wed, 03 May 2023 02:56 UTC
An initial study of dark energy with eROSITA X-Ray telescope indicates that it is uniformly distributed in space and time.
three low mass clusters
© eRositaX-ray (over) and optical pseudo-color (below) images of three low mass clusters identified in the eFEDS survey data. The highest redshift cluster come from a time when the Universe was approximately 10 billion years younger than today. The cluster galaxies in that case are clearly much redder than the galaxies in the other two clusters.
When Edwin Hubble observed distant galaxies in the 1920s, he made the groundbreaking discovery that the universe is expanding. It was not until 1998, however, that scientists observing Type Ia supernovae further discovered that the universe is not just expanding but has begun a phase of accelerating expansion. "To explain this acceleration, we need a source," says Joseph Mohr, astrophysicist at LMU. "And we refer to this source as 'dark energy,' which provides a sort of 'anti-gravity' to speed up cosmic expansion." Scientifically, the existence of dark energy and cosmic acceleration are a surprise, and this indicates that our current understanding of physics is either incomplete or incorrect. The significance of the accelerating expansion was underscored in 2011 when its discoverers received the Nobel Prize in Physics. "Meanwhile, the nature of dark energy has become the next Nobel Prize winning problem," says Mohr.

Now I-Non Chiu from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, working in collaboration with LMU astrophysicists Matthias Klein, Sebastian Bocquet, and Joe Mohr, has published a first study of dark energy using the eROSITA X-ray telescope, which focuses on galaxy clusters.
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Brain

Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people's minds


UT News
Mon, 01 May 2023 00:01 UTC
brain thoughts stories
© Jerry Tang/Martha Morales/The University of Texas at AustinA new artificial intelligence system called a semantic decoder can translate a person’s brain activity — while listening to a story or silently imagining telling a story — into a continuous stream of text.
A new artificial intelligence system called a semantic decoder can translate a person's brain activity — while listening to a story or silently imagining telling a story — into a continuous stream of text. The system developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin might help people who are mentally conscious yet unable to physically speak, such as those debilitated by strokes, to communicate intelligibly again.

The study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, was led by Jerry Tang, a doctoral student in computer science, and Alex Huth, an assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at UT Austin. The work relies in part on a transformer model, similar to the ones that power Open AI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard.

Unlike other language decoding systems in development, this system does not require subjects to have surgical implants, making the process noninvasive. Participants also do not need to use only words from a prescribed list. Brain activity is measured using an fMRI scanner after extensive training of the decoder, in which the individual listens to hours of podcasts in the scanner. Later, provided that the participant is open to having their thoughts decoded, their listening to a new story or imagining telling a story allows the machine to generate corresponding text from brain activity alone.
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Saturn

Saturn exhibits behavior never seen before in our solar system: 'Hiding in plain view for 40 years'


HubbleSite
Tue, 02 May 2023 14:39 UTC
saturn
© NASA / JPL-Caltech / Institut za svemirske znanosti
The secret has been hiding in plain view for 40 years. But it took the insight of a veteran astronomer to pull it all together within a year, using observations of Saturn from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and retired Cassini probe, in addition to the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft and the retired International Ultraviolet Explorer mission.

The discovery: Saturn's vast ring system is heating the giant planet's upper atmosphere. The phenomenon has never before been seen in the solar system. It's an unexpected interaction between Saturn and its rings that potentially could provide a tool for predicting if planets around other stars have glorious Saturn-like ring systems, too.

The telltale evidence is an excess of ultraviolet radiation, seen as a spectral line of hot hydrogen in Saturn's atmosphere. The bump in radiation means that something is contaminating and heating the upper atmosphere from the outside.
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Cassiopaea

Seconds before you die activity in the brain and heart increases, new research reveals

Mansur Shaheen
Daily Mail
Mon, 01 May 2023 20:39 UTC
brainwaves
The 'light at the end of the tunnel' a person experiences just before death could be caused by a surge of energy similar to that of a seizure as you die.

Researchers at the University of Michigan found that people experience a jump in gamma wave activity in an area of the brain responsible for consciousness, dreaming, and hallucinations just before death.

They believe that these hallucinations are responsible for reports of people seeing a bright light, hearing voices, singing or even visions of loved ones when near death.


Comment: Or this region of the brain is responsible for processing an aspect of our reality that science has yet to truly discover.


The research is still in its early stages — with this study only including four patients — but scientists hope it paves the way toward a greater understanding of how the brain reacts to death.
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Galaxy

Astronomers solve the 60-year mystery of quasars - the most powerful objects in the Universe

George Dean
University of Sheffield
Wed, 26 Apr 2023 19:13 UTC
Quasar, supermassereiches schwarzes Loch
© Carnegie Institution for ScienceArtist's impression: a quasar is a supermassive black hole surrounded by an accretion disk of hot matter.
Scientists have unlocked one of the biggest mysteries of quasars - the brightest, most powerful objects in the Universe - by discovering that they are ignited by galaxies colliding.

First discovered 60 years ago, quasars can shine as brightly as a trillion stars packed into a volume the size of our Solar System. In the decades since they were first observed, it has remained a mystery what could trigger such powerful activity. New work led by scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire has now revealed that it is a consequence of galaxies crashing together.

The collisions were discovered when researchers, using deep imaging observations from the Isaac Newton Telescope in La Palma, observed the presence of distorted structures in the outer regions of the galaxies that are home to quasars.
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Cloud Grey

Clouds carry drug-resistant bacteria across distances: Study


International Business Times
Sat, 29 Apr 2023 18:18 UTC
clouds
© APAtmospheric monitoring to pinpoint sources of drug-resistant bacteria found in clouds
For a team of Canadian and French researchers, dark clouds on the horizon are potentially ominous not because they signal an approaching storm -- but because they were found in a recent study to carry drug-resistant bacteria over long distances.

Lead author Florent Rossi said in a telephone interview Friday:
"These bacteria usually live on the surface of vegetation like leaves, or in soil. We found that they are carried by the wind into the atmosphere and can travel long distances -- around the world -- at high altitudes in clouds."
The discovery was published in last month's edition of the journal Science of The Total Environment.

The researchers from Laval University in Quebec City and Clermont Auvergne University in central France searched for antibiotic-resistant genes from bacteria found in cloud samples. The samples were taken from an atmospheric research station perched 1,465 meters (4,806 feet) above sea level atop the Puy de Dome summit, a dormant volcano in central France between September 2019 and October 2021.

An analysis of the retrieved mist revealed that they contained between 330 to more than 30,000 bacteria per milliliter of cloud water, for an average of around 8,000 bacteria per milliliter. They also identified 29 subtypes of antibiotic-resistant genes in the bacteria.
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Fish

A blinking fish reveals clues as to how our ancestors evolved from water to land


Eberly College of Science/Penn State University
Fri, 28 Apr 2023 18:33 UTC
mudskipper fish
© Daniel J. FieldTwo mudskippers (Boleophthalmus caeruleomaculatus) fighting in shallow waters, taken at Mai Po Nature Reserve, Hong Kong.
An unusual blinking fish, the mudskipper, spends much of the day out of the water and is providing clues as to how and why blinking might have evolved during the transition to life on land in our own ancestors. New research shows that these amphibious fish have evolved a blinking behavior that serves many of the same purposes of our blinking. The results suggest that blinking may be among the suite of traits that evolved to allow the transition to life on land in tetrapods — the group of animals that includes mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians — some 375 million years ago.

The study appears the week of April 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was led by Thomas Stewart, assistant professor of biology at Penn State, and Brett Aiello, assistant professor of biology at Seton Hill University.

"Animals blink for many reasons," said Stewart. "It helps us keep our eyes wet and clean, it helps us protect our eyes from injury, and we even use blinking for communication. Studying how this behavior first evolved has been challenging because the anatomical changes that allow blinking are mostly in soft tissues, which don't preserve well in the fossil record. The mudskipper, which evolved its blinking behavior independently, gives us the opportunity to test how and why blinking might have evolved in a living fish that regularly leaves the water to spend time on land."
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