Science & TechnologyS


Heart

Major step forward in fabricating an artificial heart, fit for a human

Leah Burrows
Science News
Fri, 08 Jul 2022 00:00 UTC
Heart cross section
© xmatis75/stock.adobe.comHuman heart cross-section illustration matis75/stock.adobe.com
Heart disease -- the leading cause of death in the U.S. -- is so deadly in part because the heart, unlike other organs, cannot repair itself after injury. That is why tissue engineering, ultimately including the wholesale fabrication of an entire human heart for transplant, is so important for the future of cardiac medicine.

To build a human heart from the ground up, researchers need to replicate the unique structures that make up the heart. This includes recreating helical geometries, which create a twisting motion as the heart beats. It's been long theorized that this twisting motion is critical for pumping blood at high volumes, but proving that has been difficult, in part because creating hearts with different geometries and alignments has been challenging.

Now, bioengineers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed the first biohybrid model of human ventricles with helically aligned beating cardiac cells, and have shown that muscle alignment does, in fact, dramatically increases how much blood the ventricle can pump with each contraction.

This advancement was made possible using a new method of additive textile manufacturing, Focused Rotary Jet Spinning (FRJS), which enabled the high-throughput fabrication of helically aligned fibers with diameters ranging from several micrometers to hundreds of nanometers. Developed at SEAS by Kit Parker's Disease Biophysics Group, FRJS fibers direct cell alignment, allowing for the formation of controlled tissue engineered structures.

The research is published in Science.
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Galaxy

14-hour geomagnetic storm sparks spectacular aurora display

Katy Evans
IFLScience
Fri, 08 Jul 2022 17:19 UTC
aurora
© Brad Perry/TwtterAurora display New Brunswick, Canada on July 7-8, 2022
Yesterday, a crack opened in Earth's magnetic field and stayed open for nearly 14 hours, allowing Vecna and his minions through from the Upside Down. OK, perhaps not that last bit, but it did allow some powerful solar winds to pour through the hole, creating a geomagnetic storm that sparked some pretty epic aurora.

The crack in the magnet field was created by a rare phenomenon called a co-rotating interaction region (CIR) from the Sun. CIRs are large-scale plasma structures generated in the low and mid-latitude regions of the heliosphere - the region surrounding the Sun that includes the solar magnetic field and the solar winds - when fast and slow-moving streams of solar wind interact.
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Star

8,000 kilometers per second: Star with the shortest orbital period around black hole discovered


Universität zu Köln
Tue, 05 Jul 2022 00:00 UTC
K-band view
© unknownK-band view of the GC observid with NIRC2 (Keck) in 2019.30
Researchers at the University of Cologne and Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic) have discovered the fastest known star, which travels around a black hole in record time. The star, S4716, orbits Sagittarius A*, the black hole in the center of our Milky Way, in four years and reaches a speed of around 8,000 kilometers per second. S4716 comes as close as 100 AU (astronomical unit) to the black hole — a small distance by astronomical standards. One AU corresponds to 149,597,870 kilometers. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

In the vicinity of the black hole at the center of our galaxy is a densely packed cluster of stars. This cluster, called S cluster, is home to well over a hundred stars that differ in their brightness and mass. S stars move particularly fast.

Dr. Florian Peissker, lead author of the new study. said:
"One prominent member, S2, behaves like a large person sitting in front of you in a movie theater: it blocks your view of what's important. The view into the center of our galaxy is therefore often obscured by S2. However, in brief moments we can observe the surroundings of the central black hole."
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Galaxy

Scientists discover how first quasars in universe formed


Phys.org
Wed, 06 Jul 2022 00:00 UTC
quasar
© University of Portsmouth
The mystery of how the first quasars in the universe formed — something that has baffled scientists for nearly 20 years — has now been solved by a team of astrophysicists whose findings are published in Nature.

The existence of more than 200 quasars powered by supermassive black holes less than a billion years after the Big Bang had remained one of the outstanding problems in astrophysics because it was never fully understood how they formed so early.

The team of experts led by Dr. Daniel Whalen from the University of Portsmouth have found that the first quasars naturally formed in the violent, turbulent conditions of rare reservoirs of gas in the early universe.

Dr. Whalen, from the University's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said:
"This discovery is particularly exciting because it has overturned 20 years of thought on the origin of the first supermassive black holes in the universe."
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Comet 2

Comet heading towards Earth may strike moon!


Hindustan Times
Wed, 06 Jul 2022 07:25 UTC
An animation video shows the giant Comet coming very close to Earth and then moving towards the moon.
Comet C/2017 K2 might strike the moon!
© NASAComet C/2017 K2 might strike the moon!
A giant comet C/2017 K2 is likely to make a close approach to Earth this month on July 14, 2022. The comet was first discovered in 2017 by Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope hurtling somewhere between Saturn and Uranus. Now it is approaching Earth and the inner solar system at a distance of around 270 million km. Though it does not pose any threat to our planet, an animation video published by specialist Hazegrayart last week shows the comet coming close to our planet and then getting pulled toward the Moon, and impacting it with its full force. However, nothing can be confirmed as yet.

Meanwhile, skywatchers will be able to see the comet by using a small telescope. C/2017 K2 (PanSTARRS) has been traveling from the Oort cloud to the inner solar system and it will be so active and bright that it could be detectable from Earth. The comet relies on energy from the Sun to heat up gasses. Here's all you need to know about Oort cloud and how to spot Comet C/2017 K2 from earth.
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Galaxy

Physicists see electron whirlpools for the first time


MIT
Wed, 06 Jul 2022 12:00 UTC
electron whirlpools
© Christine Daniloff, MITLong predicted but never observed, fluid-like electron whirlpools could be leveraged for next-gen low-power electronics.
Though they are discrete particles, water molecules flow collectively as liquids, producing streams, waves, whirlpools, and other classic fluid phenomena.

Not so with electricity. While an electric current is also a construct of distinct particles — in this case, electrons — the particles are so small that any collective behavior among them is drowned out by larger influences as electrons pass through ordinary metals. But, in certain materials and under specific conditions, such effects fade away, and electrons can directly influence each other. In these instances, electrons can flow collectively like a fluid.

Now, physicists at MIT and the Weizmann Institute of Science have observed electrons flowing in vortices, or whirlpools — a hallmark of fluid flow that theorists predicted electrons should exhibit, but that has never been seen until now.

Comment: See also:

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Better Earth

Depths of North Atlantic ocean once as warm as the Mediterranean

University of St Andrews
Phys.org
Wed, 06 Jul 2022 23:35 UTC
atlantic warm
© University of St AndrewsHistory of deep ocean temperature and atmospheric CO2 change. Previous estimates of temperature are shown with a red line, with new data in symbols.
History of deep ocean temperature and atmospheric CO2 change. Previous estimates of temperature are shown with a red line, with new data in symbols. Credit: University of St Andrews

A new study of ancient ocean temperatures, published today in Science, shows that the deep North Atlantic Ocean was once 20°C (68 °F) — warmer than the surface of the modern Mediterranean.

"Today the deep ocean is filled with icy cold waters," said Dr. James Rae from the University of St Andrews, who co-authored the study, "but 50 million years ago it was as warm as the Mediterranean is today."

Comment: Could there also be other factors to consider that caused some regions to be warming? Such as higher elevation of the land, or, as has been documented at the poles, ice has been melting due to undersea volcanoes, and, over at Lake Erie, the depths of which have been noted to have been warming.

See also: And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Earth changes in an electric universe: Is climate change really man-made?

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Info

Censored papers that refute the big bang hypothesis


LPP Fusion
Wed, 06 Jul 2022 18:30 UTC
Big Bang
© Wikipedia
These are the papers that the cosmology censors don't want anyone to read:

The first one predicts what the new JWST telescope will find — further refuting the Big Bang, expanding universe, hypothesis.

The second paper shows, with the latest data, how large-scale structures could not have formed in the time since the hypothesized Big Bang — and how they really formed from plasma filamentation.

The third paper summarizes the evidence against the Big Bang hypothesis, which is contradicted by at least 16 independent sets of data and supported by only one. It also shows how a universe without a Big Bang evolved into the one that we currently observe.

These papers were refused publication even on the arXiv pre-print website that supposedly allows all researchers to publish without peer review. But you can read them here. To get a non-specialist summary of what the papers show, watch our new video below.
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Fish

Camera captures giant rare deep-sea fish in Pacific


NHK WORLD-JAPAN
Fri, 01 Jul 2022 09:55 UTC
FISH
Japanese researchers say they have successfully filmed a giant rare deep-sea fish in the Pacific called the "yokozuna iwashi."

The fish was discovered some years ago in Suruga Bay, central Japan, and identified as a new species last year. Only six have been captured or photographed so far, and little is known about it.

Researchers from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology said the footage was taken by a camera placed at a depth of 2,000 meters in the sea last October about 100 kilometers southwest of Hachijojima Island in Tokyo.

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Chalkboard

German physicists detect a new type of molecular bond

Stefan Popa
Physics World
Tue, 05 Jul 2022 19:05 UTC
Rydberg atom bonded to an ion
© Danyel CavazosAn artist's impression of a Rydberg atom bonded to an ion.
A novel type of molecule that is longer than some kinds of bacteria has been detected by physicists at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. Using a specially designed microscope, the team observed a binding mechanism between a charged ion and a neutral Rydberg atom - that is, an atom with a single, highly excited valence electron. The extent of the bond length in the new molecule is as wide as a few micrometres, which is at least 1000 times larger than in usual molecules.

When two particles combine to make a molecule, they usually do so in one of two ways: by electrostatic attraction between two oppositely charged ions (ionic bond) or by sharing electrons between two neutral atoms (covalent bond). In contrast, the bond observed by the Stuttgart team forms when the electric field of an ion deforms a Rydberg atom, inducing a dipole in which one side of the atom is more negatively charged and the other more positive. Depending on the orientation of the electric dipole, the interaction between the induced dipole of the Rydberg atom and the charge of the ion can be attractive or repulsive.
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