Science & TechnologyS


Brain

A new implant for blind people jacks directly into the brain

Russ Juskalian
MIT Technology Review
Thu, 06 Feb 2020 07:39 UTC
electrical signals brain
© Russ JuskalianThese are the electrical signals from Bernardeta Gómez's brain. Each box represents one of the electrodes, and the squiggly lines within each box show the signals from her neurons firing.
"Allí," says Bernardeta Gómez in her native Spanish, pointing to a large black line running across a white sheet of cardboard propped at arm's length in front of her. "There."

It isn't exactly an impressive feat for a 57-year-old woman — except that Gómez is blind. And she's been that way for over a decade. When she was 42, toxic optic neuropathy destroyed the bundles of nerves that connect Gómez's eyes to her brain, rendering her totally without sight. She's unable even to detect light.

But after 16 years of darkness, Gómez was given a six-month window during which she could see a very low-resolution semblance of the world represented by glowing white-yellow dots and shapes. This was possible thanks to a modified pair of glasses, blacked out and fitted with a tiny camera. The contraption is hooked up to a computer that processes a live video feed, turning it into electronic signals. A cable suspended from the ceiling links the system to a port embedded in the back of Gómez's skull that is wired to a 100-electrode implant in the visual cortex in the rear of her brain.

Bernardeta Gómez
© Russ JuskalianBernardeta Gómez wearing the glasses with the cameras. Unfortunately, she no longer has the brain implant, which is still a temporary device.

Comment: See also:

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Arrow Up

State of The Climate Report 2020

Tony Heller
Real Climate Science
Fri, 07 Feb 2020 18:37 UTC
The Climate is fine, but climate science is a catastrophe - and Congressional Democrats demand a censorship plan from Google by tomorrow.
AP News Clip
© Associated PressU.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked
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Moon

A new space race? US, China, Russia, and Europe all plan for moon bases

Aaron Kesel
The Mind Unleashed
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 17:02 UTC
the moon
The bigger worry isn't space exploration — it's weaponizing space for war.

One year ago in January, a Chinese robot landed on the dark side of the moon. Since then, the Chang'e 4 probe and the Yutu-2 rover it carried onboard have been busy photographing and scanning minerals, growing yeast, hatching fruit-fly eggs, and cultivating cotton, potato, and rapeseeds in the moon's low gravity, according to the Daily Beast.

Now, China's National Space Administration is quietly planning to launch yet another probe into space. Chang'e 5 could blast off as early as this year.

Last year, TMU reported that the Yutu-2 rover came across a strange "gel-like" substance which the Chinese began to study extensively.

The Chinese space agency has continued to work on its Tiangong 3 space station and is planning on testing a new manned spacecraft for deep-space missions. That permanent station will reach orbit aboard the country's new Long March 5B rocket in the first half of 2020, AFP reported. The mission will not be associated with the International Space Station.

It is worth noting that China and Europe both planned on building a moonbase together in a move of "international collaboration" back in 2017. Europe and Russia are also eyeing plans to send a probe to the dark side of the moon to determine if they should build a moon base on the far side of the lunar surface.
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Comet 2

New Comet C/2020 B3 (Rankin)

Ernesto Guido
Remanzacco Blogspot
Thu, 06 Feb 2020 21:11 UTC
MPEC 2020-C111, issued on 2020, February 06, announces the discovery of a comet (magnitude ~20) by D. Rankin in the course of the Mt. Lemmon Survey (G96), in images taken on 2020, Jan 29 with a 1.5-m reflector + 10K CCD. The new comet has been designated C/2020 B3 (Rankin).

I performed follow-up measurements of this object while it was still on the PCCP webpage. Stacking of 16 unfiltered exposures, 120 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2020, February 03.2 from X02 Telescope Live (El Sauce, Chile) through a 0.6-m f/6.5 astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a compact coma about 5" in diameter slightly elongated toward PA 250.

My confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version)
Comet C/2020 B3 (Rankin)
© Remanzacco BlogspotComet C/2020 B3 (Rankin)
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Info

Living giant trees store millennia of clues to historic climates and societies

Natalie Parletta
Cosmos Magazine
Thu, 06 Feb 2020 17:36 UTC
Brazil Nut Tree
© VICTOR CAETANO-ANDRADEA towering Brazil nut tree in Jaú National Park in Brazil’s Amazonas state.
Evolving technologies hold the key to unlocking information stored by ancient tropical trees, which have borne witness to human activities and environmental forces from pre-historic to industrial epochs.

"As trees grow, they absorb details about their surroundings into their wood, creating snapshots of the environment through time," says Victor Caetano-Andrade, from the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

The insights that can be gleaned from these "time capsules of cultural heritage" could help inform conservation efforts, according to a review published by Caetano-Andrade and colleagues in the journal Trends in Plant Science.

This is a mounting imperative, they write, as tropical forests are refuges for half of the Earth's biodiversity and major mitigators of greenhouse gases.

However, the trees face numerous threats from climate change and logging; an area equivalent to 40 football fields is being deforested every minute.

The review discusses bringing together dendrochronology (the study of tree rings), radiocarbon dating, stable isotope in the wood and tree DNA to shine more light on questions about past human societies.

"We emphasise the importance of using these methods in dialogue with history and archaeology to understand the dimensions of human influence in tropical forests," says Caetano-Andrade.

Rather than forests being "pristine" prior to industrialisation, evidence from trees, archaeological and historical records suggest prehistoric humans had far greater impacts on their ecology than previously thought.
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Galaxy

Dark Emulator: AI program created to predict Universe's structure, solve mysteries of dark matter and dark energy


SciTech Daily
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 13:40 UTC
AI dark matter universe structure emulator
© Tsunehiko Kato, ARC and SDSS, NAOJ Four-Dimensional Digital Universe ProjectThe way in which galaxies cluster together in the Universe is made clear in this image of the Universe as observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The yellow dots represent the position of individual galaxies, while the orange loop shows the area of the Universe spanning 1 billion light-years. At the center is Earth, and around it is a three-dimensional map of where different galaxies are. The image reveals how galaxies are not uniformly spread out throughout the Universe, and how they cluster together to create areas called filaments, or are completely absent in areas called voids.
The origin of how the Universe created its voids and filaments can now be studied within seconds after researchers developed an artificial intelligence tool called Dark Emulator.

Advancements in telescopes have enabled researchers to study the Universe with greater detail, and to establish a standard cosmological model that explains various observational facts simultaneously. But there are many things researchers still do not understand. Remarkably, the majority of the Universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, of which no one has been able to identify their nature. A promising avenue to solve these mysteries is the structure of the Universe. Today's Universe is made up of filaments where galaxies cluster together and look like threads from far away, and voids where there appears to be nothing (image 1). The discovery of the cosmic microwave background has given researchers a snapshot of what the Universe looked like close to its beginning, and understanding how its structure evolved to what it is today would reveal valuable characteristics about what dark matter and dark energy is.
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Galaxy

ALMA telescope catches beautiful outcome of stellar fight


European Southern Observatory
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 20:19 UTC
HD101584 stars collide
© ALMA/ ESO/ NAOJ/ NRAO)/ Olofsson et al./ Robert CummingThis new image from the ALMA telescope in Chile shows the aftermath of a near-collision between stars in the binary star system HD101584. The red and blue rings and blobs of gas are the result of a red giant star engulfing its smaller companion.
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner, have spotted a peculiar gas cloud that resulted from a confrontation between two stars. One star grew so large it engulfed the other which, in turn, spiralled towards its partner provoking it into shedding its outer layers.

Like humans, stars change with age and ultimately die. For the Sun and stars like it, this change will take it through a phase where, having burned all the hydrogen in its core, it swells up into a large and bright red-giant star. Eventually, the dying Sun will lose its outer layers, leaving behind its core: a hot and dense star called a white dwarf.

"The star system HD101584 is special in the sense that this 'death process' was terminated prematurely and dramatically as a nearby low-mass companion star was engulfed by the giant," said Hans Olofsson of the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, who led a recent study, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, of this intriguing object.
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Arrow Up

A bio-artificial kidney is being developed to end the need for dialysis

John Vibes
The Mind Unleashed
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 11:14 UTC
Artificial kidney
Roughly two million people around the world are being treated for end-stage renal disease (ESRD), which has led to an urgent shortage of kidneys for transplant.

In 2016, there were only 21,000 donor kidneys available for transplant in the US, but a waiting list of nearly 100,000, resulting in a wait time of five to ten years.

The Kidney Project is a national network that has been cooperating to develop an implantable bio-artificial kidney that could eliminate the need for dialysis.

During a presentation at the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week in November of 2019, the team announced that UC San Francisco scientists were able to implant a prototype kidney bioreactor containing functional human kidney cells into pigs without causing any harm to the test subjects.
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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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