Science & TechnologyS


Galaxy

The strange similarity of neuron and galaxy networks

Franco Vazza, Alberto Feletti
Nautilus
Thu, 20 Jul 2017 00:00 UTC
brain-galaxy
© PHOTO COLLAGE BY FRANCESCO IZZO
Your life's memories could, in principle, be stored in the universe's structure.

Christof Koch, a leading researcher on consciousness and the human brain, has famously called the brain "the most complex object in the known universe." It's not hard to see why this might be true. With a hundred billion neurons and a hundred trillion connections, the brain is a dizzyingly complex object.

But there are plenty of other complicated objects in the universe. For example, galaxies can group into enormous structures (called clusters, superclusters, and filaments) that stretch for hundreds of millions of light-years. The boundary between these structures and neighboring stretches of empty space called cosmic voids can be extremely complex.1 Gravity accelerates matter at these boundaries to speeds of thousands of kilometers per second, creating shock waves and turbulence in intergalactic gases. We have predicted that the void-filament boundary is one of the most complex volumes of the universe, as measured by the number of bits of information it takes to describe it.

This got us to thinking: Is it more complex than the brain?
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Better Earth

Fossil pollen record suggests vulnerability to mass extinction ahead

Georgia Institute of Technology
Phys.org
Mon, 24 Aug 2020 00:00 UTC
Yue Wang, Jenny McGuire
© Allison Carter/Georgia TechPostdoctoral Fellow Yue Wang and Assistant Professor Jenny McGuire are studying pollen sample data from across the North American continent to develop improved strategies for conserving biodiversity.
Reduced resilience of plant biomes in North America could be setting the stage for the kind of mass extinctions not seen since the retreat of glaciers and arrival of humans about 13,000 years ago, cautions a new study published August 20 in the journal Global Change Biology.

The warning comes from a study of 14,189 fossil pollen samples taken from 358 locations across the continent. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology used data from the samples to determine landscape resilience, including how long specific landscapes such as forests and grasslands existed — a factor known as residence time — and how well they rebounded following perturbations such as forest fires — a factor termed recovery.

Authors Yue Wang, Benjamin Shipley, Daniel Lauer, Roseann Pineau and Jenny McGuire wrote:
"Our work indicates that landscapes today are once again exhibiting low resilience, foreboding potential extinctions to come. Conservation strategies focused on improving both landscape and ecosystem resilience by increasing local connectivity and targeting regions with high richness and diverse landforms can mitigate these extinction risks."
The research, supported by the National Science Foundation, is believed to be the first to quantify biome residence and recovery time over an extended period of time. The researchers studied 12 major plant biomes in North America over the past 20,000 years using pollen data from the Neotoma Paleoecology Database.

Comment: 'Response to warming'? More pertinent and useful would be to conduct research aimed at the effects of global cooling and resulting earth changes applicable to these habitats.

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Galaxy

Three pairs of merging supermassive black holes discovered


Phys.org
Thu, 27 Aug 2020 05:51 UTC
dual quasar
© Silverman et al.SDSS J141637.44+003352.2, a dual quasar at a distance for which the light reaching us was emitted 4.6 billion years ago. The two quasars are 13,000 light years apart on the sky, placing them near the center of a single massive galaxy that appears to be part of a group, as shown by the neighboring galaxies in the left panel. In the lower panels, optical spectroscopy has revealed broad emission lines associated with each of the two quasars, indicating that the gas is moving at thousands of kilometers per second in the vicinity of two distinct supermassive black holes. The two quasars are different colors, due to different amounts of dust in front of them.
A cosmic dance between two merging galaxies, each one containing a supermassive black hole that's rapidly feeding on so much material it creates a phenomenon known as a quasar, is a rare find.

Astronomers have discovered several pairs of such merging galaxies, or luminous "dual" quasars, using three Maunakea Observatories in Hawaii — Subaru Telescope, W. M. Keck Observatory, and Gemini Observatory. These dual quasars are so rare, a research team led by the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo estimates only 0.3% of all known quasars have two supermassive black holes that are on a collision course with each other.

The study published today in the August 26, 2020 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

"In spite of their rarity, they represent an important stage in the evolution of galaxies, where the central giant is awakened, gaining mass, and potentially impacting the growth of its host galaxy," said Shenli Tang, a graduate student at the University of Tokyo and co-author of the study.
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Clock

US sleep scientists want to cancel daylight saving time

Ed Cara
Gizmodo
Sat, 29 Aug 2020 07:26 UTC
Daylight Savings
© JEFF PACHOUD, Getty Images
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a U.S. organisation representing sleep scientists and clinicians, has called for the eradication of the century-long practice of daylight saving time, in which clocks are moved an hour forward in the spring and returned back an hour in the winter. The twice-a-year transition, they argue, not only inconveniences everyone but also increases the risk of various health problems and motor vehicle accidents.

The organisation isn't the first group of scientists to rage against the tradition. Indeed, a growing number of studies over the years have found that the time shift can have modest but real negative effects on everything from sleep quality to the risk of heart attack and stroke. Just this January, for instance, a study found that the first week of daylight saving time in the spring was associated with a greater number of fatal car crashes; it also estimated that getting rid of it would have prevented more than 600 deadly accidents over a 22-year span.

"An abundance of accumulated evidence indicates that the acute transition from standard time to daylight saving time incurs significant public health and safety risks, including increased risk of adverse cardiovascular events, mood disorders, and motor vehicle crashes," the AASM notes in its statement, published Wednesday in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, which is run by the AASM.
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Eye 1

Prime privacy intrusion: Amazon rolls out body-scanning fitness tracker that detects emotions in voice

Helen Buyniski
RT
Fri, 28 Aug 2020 21:48 UTC
voice emotion detector
© AmazonVoice emotion detector
Amazon's new fitness tracker 'Halo' takes technological intrusion to new levels, scanning the user's body and tracking the emotions in their voice. Even mainstream media coverage says the tech's privacy implications are troubling.

Like most fitness trackers, the retail behemoth's new wearable Halo monitors cardio activity, motion and sleep. Unlike most trackers, it also records body fat and voice tone - in ways that some users might find uncomfortably intrusive.

Not only can the device track your current body fat percentage (with the help of machine learning, no less!) by working with your smartphone's camera (red alert!) to photograph you in your underwear - it can show you your ideal self using a slider that fattens and slims the 3D model it creates. Endless hours of crushing inadequacy are at your fingertips! Amazon told the Verge it has built-in safeguards against encouraging eating disorders, explaining the slider doesn't dip below "dangerously low" levels of body fat and can't be used by customers under 18.
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2 + 2 = 4

Bad science: Covid-19 does NOT cause heart damage, as blockbuster study reveals basic calculation errors

Peter Andrews
RT
Fri, 28 Aug 2020 18:11 UTC
techs and monitor
© Getty Images/Sefa KaracamHealth officials check tomography datas displaying Covid-19 symptoms on lungs and the overall damage of the virus to the body received with radiological testing method at a state hospital in Moscow, Russia on May 22, 2020.
A widely circulated scientific study reported that Covid-19 causes long-term heart problems. Its authors have been forced to issue major corrections after they wildly miscalculated the risk, but the damage has already been done.

The scientific establishment wields a lot of power these days. The emergence of the novel coronavirus has elevated many career scientists and academics to positions of great influence, acting as advisors and commissars to governments on all things Covid-related. Which, it turns out, is everything. That is why it is so important that they conduct rational, unbiased research, and analyse all findings with great scepticism, taking nothing for granted.
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Biohazard

New genetic engineering techniques like CRISPR pose numerous risks


GMWatch
Wed, 12 Aug 2020 00:00 UTC
DNA strands
New scientific paper demonstrates need for process-based risk assessment

A new scientific paper published in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe gives an overview of the risks associated with gene-editing procedures (new genetic engineering) for plants and animals. The risks are not restricted to the wide range of unintended effects that can be triggered by the process of gene editing. There are also risks associated with the intended biological characteristics generated through gene editing.

Gene-editing techniques, in particular those using the CRISPR/Cas "gene scissors", increase the possibilities and speed with which the genomes of plants and animals can be altered. It does not matter whether additional genes are introduced into the genome or not. Small genetic modifications are often performed in combination and can cause significant changes in metabolic pathways and plant composition. The study concludes that the novel, intended properties must be thoroughly tested, even if no additional genes are inserted.

Comment: These are only a few of the many stories covering the extreme dangers of CRISPR gene editing that Sott.net has published over the past few years:

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Galaxy

Mystery of Milky Way's strange glow deepens as leading theory dismissed

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Fri, 28 Aug 2020 22:41 UTC
milky way glow
© NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration
The centre of the Milky Way is glowing. Yes, there's a big chonkin' black hole there, and it's a very energetic region, but there's an additional high-energy, gamma-ray glow, above and beyond the activity we know about, and it's something that's yet to be explained.

This glow is called the Galactic Center GeV Excess (GCE), and astronomers have been trying to figure it out for years. One hotly debated explanation is that the glow might theoretically be produced by the annihilation of dark matter - but new research is a nail in that idea's coffin.

In a series of exhaustive models that include recent developments in simulating the galactic bulge and other sources of gamma-ray emission in the galactic centre, a team of astrophysicists have ruled out dark matter annihilation as the source of the glow.

This finding, the team says, gives dark matter less room to hide - placing stronger constraints on its properties that could aid in future searches.
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Magnify

Cells reach out and touch, providing evidence of foresight and design


Evolution News
Fri, 28 Aug 2020 19:15 UTC
fish
Cells are equipped with sensors that recognize touch and respond accordingly. They can even reach out to other cells with nanoscopic tunnels and share parts.

An article yesterday for Evolution News about allostery showed how an individual protein or RNA can send information to its distant domains. Information sharing can also occur between chains of molecules arranged in a signaling cascade, where each one triggers action in the next. This is a bit more like the Rube Goldberg technique, except that in cells, it is much more logical and reliable. Here are new examples of mechanosensing (the ability to sense a touch) and mechanotransduction (the ability to pass on touch information). A paper on bioRxiv explains, "Cells sense the physical properties of their environment, translate them into biochemical signals and adapt their behaviour accordingly."

One such system is the MAPK/ERK pathway that all eukaryotic cells use to get information from the cell surface into the nucleus. A diagram on Wikipedia's page makes it clear that many individual factors take part. Once the EGFR receptor triggers ERK on the cell's exterior membrane, a signaling cascade begins with at least 16 cofactors and proteins transporting the information to the cell nucleus, which responds by transcribing code proteins or enzymes. ERK signals can also spread throughout the cytoplasm, leading to a variety of responses depending on the nature of the triggering molecule.
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Chalkboard

Google just ran the first-ever quantum simulation of a chemical reaction

Mike McRae
ScienceAlert
Fri, 28 Aug 2020 17:08 UTC
Google AI Quantum
© JameA quantum computer at Google’s lab in California
Of the many high expectations we have of quantum technology, one of the most exciting has to be the ability to simulate chemistry on an unprecedented level. Now we have our first glimpse of what that might look like.

Together with a team of collaborators, the Google AI Quantum team has used their 54 qubit quantum processor, Sycamore, to simulate changes in the configuration of a molecule called diazene.

As far as chemical reactions go, it's one of the simplest ones we know of. Diazene is little more than a couple of nitrogens linked in a double bond, each towing a hydrogen atom.

However, the quantum computer accurately described changes in the positions of hydrogen to form different diazene isomers. The team also used their system to arrive at an accurate description of the binding energy of hydrogen in increasingly bigger chains.
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