Science & TechnologyS


Syringe

Brazil scientists developing new 'vaccine' for cocaine addiction

Douglas Magno
Medical Xpress
Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00 UTC
calixcoc
View of a vial of Calixcoca, a vaccine for cocaine and crack addiction being developed at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil.
Scientists in Brazil, the world's second-biggest consumer of cocaine, have announced the development of an innovative new treatment for addiction to the drug and its powerful derivative crack: a vaccine.

Dubbed "Calixcoca," the test vaccine, which has shown promising results in trials on animals, triggers an immune response that blocks cocaine and crack from reaching the brain, which researchers hope will help users break the cycle of addiction.

Put simply, addicts would no longer get high from the drug.
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Galaxy

Neutron star collision caught forging heavy metals in a JWST first

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00 UTC
the site
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Levan/IMAPP, Warw, A. Pagan/STScIThe site of the gamma-ray burst and kilonova
The kilonova explosion that resulted when two neutron stars slammed into each other a billion light-years away turned out to be factory for rare heavy elements.

It's the first time the James Webb Space Telescope has probed such an event; and, in the aftermath of a colossal gamma-ray burst that emerged on 7 March 2023, the telescope's data revealed evidence of tellurium - a rare metal too heavy to be forged in the hearts of stars by the process of fusion.

There was also a suggestion of other metals, such as tungsten and selenium. The discovery, researchers say, confirms neutron star mergers as a source of heavy elements, an important piece of how our Universe makes material and spreads it across space.

"There are only a mere handful of known kilonovas, and this is the first time we have been able to look at the aftermath of a kilonova with the James Webb Space Telescope," says astrophysicist Andrew Levan of Radboud University, who led the analysis.

He adds, "Just over 150 years since Dmitri Mendeleev wrote down the periodic table of elements, we are now finally in a position to start filling in those last blanks of understanding where everything was made."

graph
© NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted/STScIThe spectrum observed y JWST, with the signature of tellurium.
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Mars

Curiosity rover finds new evidence of ancient Mars rivers, a key signal for life

Adrienne Berard
Phys.Org
Tue, 24 Oct 2023 00:00 UTC
Curiosity
© NASANASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used two different cameras to create this selfie.
New analysis of data from the Curiosity rover reveals that much of the craters on Mars today could have once been habitable rivers.

"We're finding evidence that Mars was likely a planet of rivers," said Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State and lead author on a new paper announcing the discovery. "We see signs of this all over the planet."

In a study published in Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers used numerical models to simulate erosion on Mars over millennia and found that common crater formations — called bench-and-nose landforms — are most likely remnants of ancient riverbeds.

The study was the first to map the erosion of ancient Martian soil by training a computer model on a combination of satellite data, Curiosity images and 3D scans of the stratigraphy — or layers of rock, called strata, deposited over millions of years — beneath the Gulf of Mexico seafloor. The analysis revealed a new interpretation for common Martian crater formations which, until now, have never been associated with eroded river deposits.
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Info

Ancient landscape not seen for 14 million years discovered beneath Antarctic ice

oguz kayra
Arkeonews Net
Thu, 26 Oct 2023 17:26 UTC
Antarctica Below the Ice
© Stewart Jamieson
Researchers have uncovered an ancient landscape that remained hidden beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) for at least 14 million years, using new satellite data and radar imaging.

This newly discovered landscape consists of ancient valleys and ridges, not dissimilar in size and scale to the glacially-modified landscape of North Wales, UK.

With ice-penetrating radar and satellite data, Durham University glaciologist Stewart Jamieson and colleagues mapped the topographic features of the landscape hidden beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, to get a better understanding of how the ice sheet has fluctuated over time.

The researchers say preserved landscapes like this provide a rare opportunity to examine past ice conditions, but warming temperatures mean we are on track to return to the climate conditions that existed before the landscape was frozen, and it is possible that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet will retreat enough to change the landscape for the first time in at least 14 million years.

"The land underneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is less well known than the surface of Mars," explained study author Professor Stewart Jamieson in a statement. "And that's a problem because that landscape controls the way that ice in Antarctica flows, and it controls the way it might respond to past, present and future climate change."
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Mars

New study reveals source of largest ever Mars quake


University of Oxford
Mon, 23 Oct 2023 21:33 UTC
mars with sunrise marsquake research
© Elen11, Getty Images.A new study led by the University of Oxford suggests that the planet Mars is much more seismically active than previously thought.
A global team of scientists led by the University of Oxford have announced the results of an unprecedented collaboration to search for the source of the largest ever seismic event recorded on Mars. The study rules out a meteorite impact, suggesting instead that the quake was the result of enormous tectonic forces within Mars' crust. The results have been published today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The quake, which had a magnitude of 4.7 and caused vibrations to reverberate through the planet for at least six hours, was recorded by NASA's InSight lander on Wednesday 4 May 2022. Because its seismic signal was similar to previous quakes known to be caused by meteoroid impacts, the team believed that this event (dubbed 'S1222a') might have been caused by an impact as well, and launched an international search for a fresh crater.

Although Mars is smaller than Earth, it has a similar land surface area because it has no oceans. In order to survey this huge amount of ground - 144 million km2 - study lead Dr Benjamin Fernando from the University of Oxford's Department of Physics sought contributions from the European Space Agency, the Chinese National Space Agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation, and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency. This is thought to be the first time that all missions in orbit around Mars have collaborated on a single project.
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Question

In 1952, a group of three 'stars' vanished. Astronomers still can't find them

Brian Koberlein
Universe Today
Sat, 21 Oct 2023 18:54 UTC
The vanishing of three stars
© Palomar Observatory/Solano, et alThe vanishing of three stars
On July 19, 1952, Palomar Observatory was undertaking a photographic survey of the night sky. Part of the project was to take multiple images of the same region of sky, to help identify things such as asteroids. At around 8:52 that evening a photographic plate captured the light of three stars clustered together. At a magnitude of 15, they were reasonably bright in the image. At 9:45 pm the same region of sky was captured again, but this time the three stars were nowhere to be seen. In less than an hour they had completely vanished.

Stars don't just vanish. They can explode, or experience a brief period of brightness, but they don't vanish. And yet, the photographic proof was there. The three stars are clearly in the first image, and clearly not in the second. The assumption then is that they must have suddenly dimmed, but even that is hard to accept. Later observations found no evidence of the stars to dimmer than magnitude 24. This means they likely dimmed by a factor of 10,000 or more. What could possibly cause the stars to dim by such an astounding amount so quickly?

One idea is that they are not three stars, but one. Perhaps a star happened to brighten for a short time, such as a fast radio burst from a magnetar. While this happened, perhaps a stellar-mass black hole passed between it and us, causing the flare to gravitationally lens as three images for a brief time. The problem with this idea is that such an event would be exceedingly rare, but other photographic images taken during the 1950s show similar rapid disappearances of multiple stars. In some cases, the stars are separated by minutes of arc, which would be difficult to produce by gravitational lensing.
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Galaxy

Astronomers spot record-breaking radio signal that took 8 billion years to reach Earth: "Mind-blowing"

Liam Connor
CBS
Fri, 20 Oct 2023 17:19 UTC
radio burst signal 8 billion years
© Kristi MickaligerArtist's impression of an orbital modulation model where the FRB progenitor (blue) is in an orbit with a companion astrophysical object (pink).
Scientists detect "strange" radio signal in distant galaxy

Eight billion years ago, something happened in a distant galaxy that sent an incredibly powerful blast of radio waves hurtling through the universe.

It finally arrived at Earth on June 10 last year and -- though it lasted less than a thousandth of a second -- a radio telescope in Australia managed to pick up the signal.

This flash from the cosmos was a fast radio burst (FRB), a little-understood phenomenon first discovered in 2007.

Astronomers revealed on Thursday that this particular FRB was more powerful and came from much farther away than any previously recorded, having travelled eight billion light years from when the universe was less than half its current age.
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Better Earth

Best of the Web: 3-year solar cycle anomaly during Maunder Minimum discovered in centuries-old texts from Korea

Harry Baker
Live Science
Fri, 20 Oct 2023 12:00 UTC
Korean texts solar cycle
© Yan et al. 2023An annotated section of the historical Korean texts that mentions auroras occurring during the Maunder Minimum.
Aurora records in royal chronicles from Korea show that during the 'Maunder Minimum' between 1645 and 1715, the sun's solar cycles became several years shorter than they are today.

The sun's solar cycles were once around three years shorter than they are today, a new analysis of centuries-old Korean chronicles reveals. This previously unknown anomaly occurred during a mysterious solar epoch known as the "Maunder Minimum," more than 300 years ago.

The sun is constantly in a state of flux. Our home star cycles through periods of increased activity, known as solar maximum, when solar storms become more frequent and powerful, as well as spells of reduced activity, known as solar minimum, when solar storms almost completely disappear.


Comment: According to Russian professor Valentina Zharkova, who has been warning of the hazards that accompany a 'grand solar minimum', solar storms become less frequent during a minimum but when they do happen they have the potential to be even more powerful, and harmful, than during maximum.


Comment: Notably that the current solar cycle is considered to be weaker than expected, and seems to be peaking much earlier than expected: Solar maximum could hit us harder and sooner than we thought

See also: And check out SOTT radio's:


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Info

Patients recall death experiences after cardiac arrest


NYU Langone Health
Thu, 14 Sep 2023 20:48 UTC
Brain Waves
© MARYNA IEVDOKIMOVAA new study shows some patients had brain wave patterns linked to conscious thought up to an hour after their heart stopped.
Up to an hour after their hearts had stopped, some patients revived by cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) had clear memories afterward of experiencing death and while unconscious had brain patterns linked to thought and memory.

This is the finding of a study led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in cooperation with 25 mostly U.S. and British hospitals, in which some survivors of cardiac arrest described lucid death experiences that occurred while they were seemingly unconscious. Despite immediate treatment, less than 10 percent of the 567 patients studied, who received CPR in the hospital, recovered sufficiently to be discharged. However, 4 in 10 of those that survived recalled some degree of consciousness during CPR not captured by standard measures.

Published online September 14 in the journal Resuscitation, the study also found that in these patients, nearly 40 percent had brain activity that returned to normal, or nearly normal, at points even an hour into CPR. As captured by electroencephalogram (EEG), a technology that records brain activity with electrodes, the patients had spikes in the gamma, delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves associated with higher mental function.
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Brain

Scientists record powerful signal in the brain's white matter

Bill Snyder
Medical Express
Fri, 20 Oct 2023 19:05 UTC
signals in the brain
© agsandrew/Shutterstock
The human brain is made up of two kinds of matter: the nerve cell bodies (gray matter), which process sensation, control voluntary movement, and enable speech, learning and cognition, and the axons (white matter), which connect cells to each other and project to the rest of the body.

Historically, scientists have concentrated on the gray matter of the cortex, figuring that's where the action is, while ignoring white matter, even though it makes up half the brain. Researchers at Vanderbilt University are out to change that.

For several years, John Gore, Ph.D., director of the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science, and his colleagues have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) signals, a key marker of brain activity, in white matter.

Comment: With white matter comprising around 60% of brain volume, it's surprising that scientists haven't taken a bigger interest in it until lately. Just as with "junk DNA", everything in Nature is purposeful, if one pays attention.

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