Science & TechnologyS


Galaxy

Scientists perplexed by massive galaxy that mysteriously and suddenly went dark

Andrew Griffin
Independent
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 17:26 UTC
galaxy
Scientists have been left puzzled by a vast "monster" galaxy that mysteriously went dark.

The web of stars, known as XMM-2599, existed about 12 billion years ago, in the early days of the universe, when it was only about 1.8 billion years old.

It spewed out a vast number of stars in its short life. And then it suddenly stopped.

That rapid and unexplained death has puzzled astronomers, who say the vast galaxy does not fit with our existing models of the early universe.
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Info

Woman grows hairs out of her gums in extremely rare medical case

Mike Mcrae
Science Alert
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
Gums growing hair
© Zhurakivska etal., OOOOJournal, 2020
From time to time, we all need to pull out the odd hair that's grown out of place. But we're willing to bet that one spot you've never needed to pluck is your gums.

Just over 10 years ago, a 19-year-old woman met with doctors at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli in Italy, providing them with a rare case of what's known in the medical field as gingival hirsutism.

"In 2009, we reported a case of a young woman who presented with hairs on the sulcular epithelium of the retroincisor palatal papilla," the specialists reported in their recent case study.

To translate, they found a scattering of eyelash-like hairs protruding from the soft tissues directly behind her upper front teeth.
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Snowflake Cold

Study find Pluto's icy 'Heart' formation rules its atmospheric circulation, shapes its surface

IANS
The Weather Channel
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 16:11 UTC
pluto close up
© NASA/JHUAPL/SwRIThis high-resolution image captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC).
Pluto's famous "beating heart" of frozen nitrogen control its winds and may give rise to features on its surface, new research has found.

Uncovering how Pluto's atmosphere behaves has provided scientists with another place to compare our own planet with. Such findings can pinpoint both similar and distinctive features between Earth and a dwarf planet billions of kilometres away.

Pluto's heart-shaped structure, named Tombaugh Regio, quickly became famous after NASA's New Horizons mission captured footage of the dwarf planet in 2015 and revealed it is not the barren world scientists thought it was.

Nitrogen gas — an element also found in air on Earth — comprises most of Pluto's thin atmosphere, along with small amounts of carbon monoxide and the greenhouse gas methane.
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Wolf

Limitation of Darwanian processes: Important medical effects but modest mutations

Michael Behe
Evolution News
Tue, 04 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
A rhesus macaque
© pradeep
I was asked to address a comment left by a viewer of one of Discovery's YouTube videos. The comment is:1
Some monkeys have a mutation in a protein called TRIM5 that results in a piece of another, defunct protein being tacked onto TRIM5. The result is a hybrid protein called TRIM5-CypA, which can protect cells from infection with retroviruses such as HIV. Here, a single mutation has resulted in a new protein with a new and potentially vital function. New protein, new function, new information.
A bit of Googling shows that the text was taken word-for-word from an old article (2008) on the New Scientist website2 (perhaps by way of intermediate copying). That was during a period when the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species was fast approaching, and many science-y websites were doing all they could to spin whatever information they had to defend Darwin from those crazy ID people. It turns out the results they cite are interesting but quite modest.

Comment: See also:

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Pineapple

Scientists discover hidden symmetries using soundwaves

Louise Lerner, University of Chicago
Phys.org
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 10:01 UTC
structures
© V. Vitelli and M. Fruchart, University of ChicagoScientists used a LEGO array to demonstrate how sound waves can propagate identically in different structures.
When you knock on a melon to see if it's ripe, you are using sound waves to probe the structure of the material inside. Physicists at the University of Chicago were using the same concept to explore how sound waves travel through patterned structures when they noticed an oddity: completely different structures sounded the same.

This was a surprising thing — sort of like knocking on a melon and a pineapple, and discovering they both made the same sound.

"What got us excited was that we could not explain our findings using existing concepts, such as spatial symmetries," said Vincenzo Vitelli, a professor of physics in the James Franck Institute.

Comment: See also:

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Dig

Earth has a new geologic age: The Chibanian

Rafi Letzter
Live Science
Fri, 31 Jan 2020 12:00 UTC
cliffside
© Kyodo/NewscomA photo shows the cliffside in Japan's Chiba prefecture that's part of a line of sediment that recorded the geologic history of the planet between 770,000 and 126,000 years ago.
Earth has a new age: the Chibanian geologic time interval, which took place from 770,000 to 126,000 years ago, thanks to a layer of sediment found on a riverside cliff in southern Japan.

The Chibanian age was named after Chiba, the Japanese prefecture where the sediment was found, and was recently ratified by the International Union of Geological Sciences. That period is important because it included the most recent reversal of Earth's magnetic field, an article in Eos said. At various points in our planet's history, Earth's magnetic north and south poles have swapped locations. When that flip happens, it leaves a mark in rocks around the planet. The cliffside sediment in Chiba, Japan, may offer a richer record of that reversal than any other site on Earth.

Comment: See also:

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Question

Biological timers: How does the embryo make all its parts at just the right moments?

Eryn Brown
Knowable
Thu, 30 Jan 2020 00:00 UTC
FIVE BIG QUESTIONS: If events weren't properly timed, pandemonium would ensue. Researchers are ferreting out the internal clocks that control developmental sequence and scheduling.
Okapi and Giraffe necks
© ASIANINVASION12 / WIKIMEDIA COMMONSDespite their strikingly different neck lengths, the giraffe and its nearest relative, the okapi, both have the same number of neck bones, called cervical vertebrae. The vertebrae are merely longer in the giraffe. Scientists believe that changes in the timing of developmental events (slowing down growth of one part relative to another, for example) had a huge part to play in the evolution of species.
In all sorts of animals, from fruit flies to mice to elephants, cells follow fairly similar sets of steps to grow from embryo to adult. But while these steps follow the same order and often involve the same kinds of genes and molecular signals, they proceed at different rates from species to species.

A mouse gestates in about 20 days; a human takes about nine months. An African elephant remains in the womb for nearly two years. And in step with their sizes — speaking broadly — goes the speed at which cells in their bodies develop.

So what are the timers that keep things trucking along at the right rate for any given organism, ensuring that it grows to the proper size and with all its parts in place? It's a question that James Briscoe, a developmental biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, would love to answer.
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Info

New platform of computing using light beams


Cosmos Magazine
Tue, 04 Feb 2020 20:07 UTC
Light Passing thru Solids
© MCMASTER UNIVERSITY
North American researchers say they have generated a new platform in which light beams communicate with one another through solid matter, establishing the foundation to explore a new form of computing.

The technology, described in a paper in the journal PNAS, combines a form of hydrogel developed at Harvard University in the US with light manipulation and measurement techniques performed in a lab at Canada's McMaster University.

The resulting translucent material, which resembles raspberry jelly, incorporates light-responsive molecules whose structure changes in the presence of light, giving it special properties both to contain light beams and to transmit information between them.

Typically, beams of light broaden as they travel, but the gel is able to contain filaments of laser light along their pathway through the material, as though the light were being channelled through a pipe.
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Bulb

New research finds solar panels could produce energy at night

David Nield
Science Alert
Tue, 04 Feb 2020 17:05 UTC
solar power
© Jose Camilo Lopez Perez/Getty Images
As beneficial as current solar panel technology has been in our quest to switch to renewable energy, such panels can't generate electricity at night. Now, new research suggests it could be possible to design panels that can operate around the clock.

Under optimum conditions, at night these specially designed photovoltaic cells could generate a quarter of the energy they produce during the day, according to the new study.

To achieve this, we'd need to incorporate thermoradiative cells - devices that generate energy thanks to radiative cooling, where infrared or heat radiation leaves the cell and produces a small amount of energy in the process.
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Butterfly

How a poisonous plant became breakfast, lunch and dinner for monarchs

Tim Vernimmen
Knowable Magazine
Wed, 02 Oct 2019 00:00 UTC
Monarch caterpillar
For most animals, the milkweed plant is far from appetizing: It contains nasty toxins called cardenolides that can make the creatures vomit and, should they ingest enough, cause their hearts to beat out of control.

Yet some insects appear entirely unfazed by the powerful poison. The monarch butterfly's colorful caterpillars, for example, devour milkweed with gusto — in fact, it is the only thing they ever eat. They can tolerate this food source because of a peculiarity in a crucial protein in their bodies, a sodium pump, that the cardenolide toxins usually interfere with.

All animals have this pump. It's essential for physiological recovery after heart muscle cells contract or nerve cells fire — events that are triggered when sodium floods into the cells, causing an electrical discharge. After the firing and contracting is done, the cells must clean up, and so they turn on their sodium pumps and expel the sodium. This restores the electrical balance and resets the cell to its usual state, ready again for action.

Cardenolides are noxious because they bind to key parts of these pumps and prevent them from doing their job. This makes animal hearts beat stronger and stronger, often ending in cardiac arrest.

But since animals are under constant competition for food sources, the ability to eat plants that are toxic to others offers a fantastic opportunity, and many insects have evolved ways to do so.
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