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Scientists propose new way of ordering the elements

Professor Nick Norman
The Conversation
Fri, 27 Nov 2020 00:39 UTC
Periodic Table
© AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko
The periodic table of the elements, principally created by the Russian chemist, Dmitry Mendeleev (1834-1907), celebrated its 150th anniversary last year. It would be hard to overstate its importance as an organising principle in chemistry - all budding chemists become familiar with it from the earliest stages of their education.

Given the table's importance, one might be forgiven for thinking that the ordering of the elements were no longer subject to debate. However, two scientists in Moscow, Russia, have recently published a proposal for a new order.

Let's first consider how the periodic table was developed. By the late 18th century, chemists were clear about the difference between an element and a compound: elements were chemically indivisible (examples are hydrogen, oxygen) whereas compounds consisted of two or more elements in combination, having properties quite distinct from their component elements. By the early 19th century, there was good circumstantial evidence for the existence of atoms. And by the 1860s, it was possible to list the known elements in order of their relative atomic mass - for example, hydrogen was 1 and oxygen 16.

Simple lists, of course, are one-dimensional in nature. But chemists were aware that certain elements had rather similar chemical properties: for example lithium, sodium and potassium or chlorine, bromine and iodine. Something seemed to repeat and by placing chemically similar elements next to each other, a two-dimensional table could be constructed. The periodic table was born.
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Rose

Medicinal plant may have evolved camouflage to evade humans

Alex Fox
Smithsonian
Thu, 26 Nov 2020 20:26 UTC
Fritillaria
© Yang NiuIn places where people harvest the plant most aggressively, its color has changed to blend in with the rocky environment Can you see the plant in this picture? This small brown Fritillaria delavayi has evolved camouflage in response to heavy harvesting by humans. The more closely the plant mimics its environment, the harder it is for humans to find and harvest the plant.
A highly sought after plant used in traditional Chinese medicine has evolved camouflage to make itself harder for humans to spot and collect, reports Jonathan Lambert for Science News.

The plant, Fritillaria delavayi, grows on the rocky alpine slopes of China's Hengduan Mountains, and for more than 2,000 years its dried bulbs have been used to treat heart and lung ailments. Historically, the plant was not hard to find — a bright sprig of green amid a sea of gray scree — but demand for the powder made from its bulbs has made it rarer and more expensive. A kilogram of the powder now costs $480 ($218 per pound), and requires harvesting more than 3,500 individual plants, which only begin to flower in their fifth season, according to Science News.

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Chart Bar

SOTT Focus: Anomalies in Vote Counts and Their Effects on Election 2020: Quantitative Analysis of Decisive Updates in MI, WI, and GA on and after Election Night

Vote Integrity
votepatternanalysis.substack.com
Tue, 24 Nov 2020 17:21 UTC
election fraud vote graphic
© Washington Examiner
Executive Summary

In the early hours of November 4th, 2020, Democratic candidate Joe Biden received several major "vote spikes" that substantially — and decisively — improved his electoral position in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Much skepticism and uncertainty surrounds these "vote spikes." Critics point to suspicious vote counting practices, extreme differences between the two major candidates' vote counts, and the timing of the vote updates, among other factors, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of some of these spikes. While data analysis cannot on its own demonstrate fraud or systemic issues, it can point us to statistically anomalous cases that invite further scrutiny.

This is one such case: Our analysis finds that a few key vote updates in competitive states were unusually large in size and had an unusually high Biden-to-Trump ratio. We demonstrate the results differ enough from expected results to be cause for concern.

With this report, we rely only on publicly available data from the New York Times to identify and analyze statistical anomalies in key states. Looking at 8,954 individual vote updates (differences in vote totals for each candidate between successive changes to the running vote totals, colloquially also referred to as "dumps" or "batches"), we discover a remarkably consistent mathematical property: there is a clear inverse relationship between difference in candidates' vote counts and the ratio of the vote counts. (In other words, it's not surprising to see vote updates with large margins, and it's not surprising to see vote updates with very large ratios of support between the candidates, but it is surprising to see vote updates which are both).
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Info

Electronic skin that can feel


Pohang University of Science and Technology.
Tue, 24 Nov 2020 15:58 UTC
Artificial Skin 2
© Pohang University of Science and Technology
What if we didn't have skin? We would have no sense of touch, no detection of coldness or pain, leaving us inept to respond to any situation. The skin is not just a protective shell for organs, but rather a signaling system for survival that provides information on the external stimuli or temperature, or a meteorological observatory that reports the weather. Tactile receptors*1, tightly packed throughout the skin, feel the temperature or mechanical stimuli - such as touching or pinching - and convert them into electrical signals to the brain.

The challenge for electronic skin, being developed for use in artificial skins or humanlike robots like the humanoids, is to make it feel the temperatures and movements like how human skin feels them as much as possible. So far, there are electronic skins that can detect movement or temperature separately, but none are able to recognize both simultaneously like the human skin.

A joint research team consisting of POSTECH professor Unyong Jeong and Dr. Insang You of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and Professor Zhenan Bao of Stanford University have together developed the multimodal ion-electronic skin that can measure the temperature and mechanical stimulation at the same time. The research findings, published on November 20th edition of Science, are characterized by making very simple structures through applying special properties of the ion conductors.
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Microscope 2

The behavior of tiny liquid droplets are forcing a cell biology rethink

Alla Katsnelson
Knowable Magazine
Wed, 18 Nov 2020 19:33 UTC
liquid droplets cell behavior
© COURTESY OF CLIFF BRANGWYNNE AND TONY HYMAN/MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE OF MOLECULAR CELL BIOLOGY AND GENETICS, DRESDENIn a fertilized egg, proteins tagged with green fluorescent dye condense into visible droplets called P granules and then disappear again as they dissolve back into the cytoplasm.
A recently recognized biophysical feature in the fluid of living cells has biologists thinking afresh about how cells carve up their space

The fluid inside a living cell bustles with activity. Proteins, RNA, lipids and other molecules wiggle, zip, glide and drift through this broth — catalyzing reactions, activating receptors, relaying messages, marking viruses and other foreign molecules for destruction and performing a gazillion other tiny but crucial tasks. It all adds up to keep cells — and the life forms they're a part of — running smoothly.

Biologists have studied these cellular processes for decades. They know an immense amount about the membrane-enclosed organelles inside cells — mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi bodies and more. And they have dissected, often down to atomic-level detail, some of the molecular machinery that drives biological events.

But at the crucial in-between scale, a big question mark remains: How do the right proteins organize themselves in a sea of fluid swarming with millions of molecules? Do they bump into each other by chance, or does the cell actively organize its fluid space to bring the correct partners together?
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Yoda

CIA document reveals remarkable 'paranormal writing' abilities

Arjun Walia
Collective Evolution
Fri, 20 Nov 2020 00:00 UTC
Paranormal
Do paranormal abilities exist? A bold question we often feel is based on belief and not science. But looking to parameters that can help determine if something is real or not in our world, like peer-reviewed publications, video footage, and the ability to experience something, then yes, paranormal abilities do exist and there are many different examples to choose from that clearly illustrates this.

The funny thing is, these abilities are studied and trained at the highest levels of government and military, yet within academia, it's almost completely ignored.

Comment: See also

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Bug

Fire ants love the smell of dirt

Jennifer Frazer
Smithsonian
Sat, 21 Nov 2020 17:37 UTC
fire ants
© Guillermo Lopez Barrera/AlamyFire ants
For these swarming, stinging insects it's the aroma of home sweet home

You and a fire ant have something in common: you can both smell dirt, and, odds are, you both like it.

Although most humans agree that fresh dirt smells sweet, that is not a view universally shared. Fruit flies hate the smell, apparently because it signals spoiled food.

On the other hand, mosquitoes like dirt smell and use it as a cue for egg laying. And as I wrote last spring, tiny arthropods called springtails think dirt not only smells great, it's the smell of steak night at the Sizzler.

The reason, as I wrote here earlier this year, is that dirt doesn't smell like dirt. It smells like bacteria — actinobacteria, to be precise. These bacteria generate the odors we think of as characteristic of dirt to ring the dinner bell for springtails to come eat and disperse their spores.

Why fire ants think dirt smells good, and how we even came to investigate this unorthodox question, is a different story.
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Attention

'No evidence' that asymptomatic Covid-19 cases were infectious, analysis of post-lockdown Wuhan concludes


RT
Sat, 21 Nov 2020 19:10 UTC
Wuhan
© REUTERS/StringerVisitors at an amusement park in Wuhan, Hubei province, China October 31, 2020.
A paper that analyzed the results of a massive post-lockdown Covid-19 testing drive that included nearly every eligible resident of Wuhan, China has found no evidence that positive cases without symptoms spread the disease.

The analysis, published in the scientific journal Nature, looked at the results of a screening initiative held between May and June in Wuhan, the city where the first cases of the novel coronavirus were detected in late 2019. The origins of the virus have yet to be determined, with new studies suggesting that the disease could have been in Italy as early as September last year.

Nearly 10 million people were tested, consisting of 92 percent of all residents aged six years or older.

Incredibly, no new symptomatic cases were registered, and only 300 asymptomatic cases were detected. Subsequent tests of 1,174 close contacts of the asymptomatic cases found resulted in no new positives.

There is "no evidence that the identified asymptomatic positive cases were infectious," the paper said, adding that the results of the massive screening program could help health authorities "adjust prevention and control strategies in the post-lockdown period."

Comment:





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Microscope 1

Playing with fire: Engineered immune cells elicit broad response to HIV in mice using CRISPR


Technology Networks
Fri, 20 Nov 2020 00:00 UTC
Immune Cells
Unlike so many other deadly viruses, HIV still lacks a vaccine. The virus — which continues to infect millions around the world — has proven especially tricky to prevent with conventional antibodies, in part because it evolves so rapidly in the body. Any solution would require coaxing the body into producing a special type of antibody that can act broadly to defeat multiple strains of the virus at once.

This week, scientists at Scripps Research moved closer to attaining that holy grail of HIV research with a new vaccine approach that would rely on genetically engineered immune cells from the patient's body.

In experiments involving mice, the approach successfully induced broadly neutralizing antibodies — also called bnabs — that can prevent HIV infection, says principal investigator James Voss, PhD, of Scripps Research. The study appears in Nature Communications.

Voss and his team showed in 2019 that it was possible to reprogram the antibody genes of the immune system's B cells using CRISPR so the cells would produce the same broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies that have been found in rare HIV patients.

Comment: In using CRISPR towards the described HIV vaccine it would seem that these scientists are quite simply playing with fire. But what else is new?

See also:

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Brain

An old rat with no brain has raised some very interesting questions


Mind Matters News
Tue, 17 Nov 2020 18:39 UTC
lab rat
© Stock photo
The researchers had no idea how strange their lab rat was until, in a routine procedure, they scanned its head

Yes, R222 was only a rat. A rat that turned out to have no brain. But here's the thing: R222 had lived a normal life as a lab rat for two whole years. According to rat specialists, that's like 70 human years.

Researchers were, to say the least, puzzled.

The story begins with a scientist scanning the brains of "very old" lab rats as part of a study on aging. Except that subject R222, otherwise a conventional rat, didn't seem to have a brain. The brain cavity had collapsed and filled with fluid (hydrocephalus).

We can see from the photo that where the control rat has brain, R222 has fluid:

Comment: There are baffling human examples of brain anomalies too:

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