Science & TechnologyS


Bug

Mammal cells could struggle to fight space germs

University of Exeter
Phys Org
Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00 UTC
Mars atmosphere
© CC0 Public Domain
The immune systems of mammals — including humans — might struggle to detect and respond to germs from other planets, new research suggests.

Microorganisms (such as bacteria and viruses) could exist beyond Earth, and there are plans to search for signs of them on Mars and some of Saturn and Jupiter's moons.

Such organisms might be based on different amino acids (key building blocks of all life) than lifeforms on Earth.

Scientists from the universities of Aberdeen and Exeter tested how mammal immune cells responded to peptides (combinations of amino acids) containing two amino acids that are rare on Earth but are commonly found on meteorites.

The immune response to these "alien" peptides was "less efficient" than the reaction to those common on Earth.

Comment: Extraterrestrial microorganisms do not just pose a danger to space missions - but have, in fact, for many thousands of years presented dangers to humans on Earth in the form of plague. The arrival of comets, neo's and meteors quite often brought more from space than just the atmospheric and geologic disruptions that were their most obvious effects.

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Info

Hair cell loss may explain hearing loss


Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 22 Jul 2020 20:45 UTC
Hearing Loss
© Robert Essel NYC / Getty Images
It seems your parents were right. Too much loud music isn't good for you.

US scientists say they have shown that age-related hearing loss - presbycusis - is mainly caused by damage to hair cells, the sensory cells in the inner ear that transform sound-induced vibrations into the electrical signals that are relayed to the brain by the auditory nerve.

This challenges the prevailing view of the past 60 years that age-related hearing loss is mainly driven by damage to the stria vascularis, the cellular "battery" that powers the hair cell's mechanical-to-electrical signal conversion.

In other words, hearing loss is not so much a natural consequence of getting old, as the result of decisions made when young. In humans at least.

"It's likely that if we were more careful about protecting our ears during prolonged noisy activities, or completely avoiding them, we could all hear better into old age," says Charles Liberman from Massachusetts Eye and Ear, co-author of a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience.
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Microscope 2

Quadruple-stranded DNA seen in healthy human cells for the first time

Rowan Hooper
Nature
Mon, 20 Jul 2020 12:00 UTC
helix dna
© Ella Maru StudioThe double helix gets an upgrade
The world's most famous molecule - the DNA double helix - sometimes doubles up again. Researchers have now found this quadruple-stranded form in healthy human cells for the first time.

Four-stranded DNA has been seen before in some cancer cells and in lab-based chemistry experiments, but this is the first time the molecule has been visualised in healthy, living human cells, as a stable structure created by normal cellular processes.

"We've undoubtedly demonstrated that the quadruple-strand DNA forms in living cells," says Marco Di Antonio at Imperial College London. "This forces us to rethink the biology of DNA."

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Bad Guys

Totalitarianism is Darwinism applied to politics

Michael Egnor
Evolution News
Mon, 20 Jul 2020 17:40 UTC
Reichstag fire
© Wikimedia CommonsReichstag fire, February 27, 1933
Philosopher Hannah Arendt is, in my view, the most perceptive analyst of totalitarianism. In her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she points out that Darwinism played an essential role in the rise of totalitarian governments in the 20th century. Arendt:
Underlying the Nazi's belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin's idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human beings, just as under the Bolsheviks' belief in class-struggle as the expression of the law of history lies Marx's notion of society as the product of a gigantic historical movement which races according to its own law of motion to the end of historical times when it will abolish itself.
Nazism was clearly inspired in no small part by Darwin's theory, and Arendt notes that Marx and Engels explicitly credited Darwin with insights essential to Marxism. She points out
...the great and positive interest Marx took in Darwin's theories; Engels could not think of a greater compliment to Marx's scholarly achievements than to call him the "Darwin of history"... the movement of history and the movement of nature are one and the same.
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Seismograph

Deep repeating earthquakes beneath Hawaii's Maunakea volcano surprise scientists

Aaron Wech
Hawaii Tribune Herald
Sun, 19 Jul 2020 12:05 UTC
Seismic data from the station near Maunakea volcano
Example of 2 hours of seismic data from the station near Maunakea on April 14. The large spikes are earthquakes under Maunakea repeating every 11 minutes. The bottom waveform zooms in on 15 seconds of an individual event.
Maunakea volcano hasn't erupted in over 4,500 years, but that doesn't mean it's quiet. In fact, for decades it has been hiding one of the most unique seismic signals seen at any volcano.

Some discoveries are just serendipity. Several years ago, U.S. Geological Survey seismologists at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and Alaska Volcano Observatory were trying out a new method to track seismicity at Kilauea Volcano. The method scans 24-hour sections of seismometer data looking for signal similarity on many instruments. Out of curiosity, they decided to look at the rest of the Island of Hawaii to see what else they might find.

What they found came as a surprise. A study published in the journal Science in May, 2020 describes how they detected deep earthquakes beneath Maunakea that repeat every 7-12 minutes. Noise in the seismic records from wind and nearby cars, together with the small size of the individual earthquakes (magnitude 1.5), had prevented these earthquakes from being detected with the regular earthquake detection system.

The small, repeating earthquakes occur at depths of about 20-25 km (12-15 mi) directly beneath Maunakea's summit and happen every 7-12 minutes with surprising regularity. Furthermore, the repeating events can be detected going back to at least 1999. This was when a particularly quiet seismic station was installed in the saddle between Maunakea and Mauna Loa. It is very likely that the repeating earthquakes were occurring even further back in time.

Comment: See also:

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Pyramid

Google launches new Egyptian hieroglyphs online tool 'Fabricius'

Moshe Gilad
Haaretz
Tue, 21 Jul 2020 12:24 UTC
Egyptian King Tutankhamun
© Courtesy of Google Art & CultureEgyptian King Tutankhamun. “The use of pictures is a window into understanding how the Egyptians saw the world," says Israel Museum curator Shirly Ben-Dor Evian.
The pharaohs are smiling in their tombs. Things were pretty rough for them way back when, but today, several thousand years later, everything's great. Egyptian hieroglyphs are making a comeback. The Google Arts & Culture app has just launched Fabricius, a new online tool that harnesses "the power of artificial intelligence to help decode ancient languages" - including hieroglyphics.

Maybe you didn't know that this is exactly what's been missing in your life, but Google knows you better than you know yourself. How does its new AI invention work? Users enter texts in English or Arabic and receive a translation in hieroglyphs, pictorial and other symbols that until today were fully understood by only a small number of people.

On July 15, 1799, a French soldier in Napoleon Bonaparte's army discovered a large, black stone slab set into the wall of a fort near the town of Rashid (Rosetta), in the Egyptian Delta. To Pierre-François Bouchard's credit it must be said that he realized that this was the greatest prize in the lottery of Western culture - the key to deciphering the mysterious, ancient Egyptian system of writing. Today, exactly 221 years later, the Rosetta Stone is still the most popular exhibit in the British Museum in London. Indeed, it is considered one of the most important archaeological discoveries in history.

The world-famous stele, originally created in 196 B.C. in the city of Memphis, in Egypt, but later moved and used in construction in Rashid, is inscribed with the text of a decree in three languages: Ancient Greek, Ancient Egyptian (using hieroglyphs) and Ancient Egyptian using Demotic script (a simpler, cursive form of Egyptian writing).
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Sun

'Campfires' on the Sun revealed by Solar Orbiters first images


European Space Agency
Thu, 16 Jul 2020 12:00 UTC
sun orbiter
The first images from Solar Orbiter, a new Sun-observing mission by ESA and NASA, have revealed omnipresent miniature solar flares, dubbed 'campfires', near the surface of our closest star.

According to the scientists behind the mission, seeing phenomena that were not observable in detail before hints at the enormous potential of Solar Orbiter, which has only just finished its early phase of technical verification known as commissioning.

"These are only the first images and we can already see interesting new phenomena," says Daniel Müller, ESA's Solar Orbiter Project Scientist. "We didn't really expect such great results right from the start. We can also see how our ten scientific instruments complement each other, providing a holistic picture of the Sun and the surrounding environment."

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Better Earth

Expanding Earth? New theory on how Earth's tectonic plates may have formed


Eureka Alert
Tue, 21 Jul 2020 09:23 UTC
tectonic
© The University of Hong KongFigure 1. A snapshot of a model from the new work, showing the late stages of growth and coalescence of a new global fracture network. Fractures are in black / shadow, and colors show stresses (pink color denotes tensile stress, blue color denotes compressive stress).
The activity of the solid Earth - for example, volcanoes in Java, earthquakes in Japan, etc - is well understood within the context of the ~50-year-old theory of plate tectonics. This theory posits that Earth's outer shell (Earth's "lithosphere") is subdivided into plates that move relative to each other, concentrating most activity along the boundaries between plates. It may be surprising, then, that the scientific community has no firm concept on how plate tectonics got started. This month, a new answer has been put forward by Dr. Alexander Webb of the Division of Earth and Planetary Science & Laboratory for Space Research at the University of Hong Kong, in collaboration with an international team in a paper published in Nature Communications. Webb serves as corresponding author on the new work.

Comment: Regarding the expanding Earth theory, in the documentary posted below, Neal Adams makes a good argument that this is actually what is happening - however it may be that there is even more to the story when it comes to plate tectonics:


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Chalkboard

United Arab Emirates launches probe to Mars, communication established


Sputnik
Mon, 20 Jul 2020 22:38 UTC
mars probe uae
© REUTERS / KYODO
The United Arab Emirates has successfully launched the Al Amal ("Hope") probe to Mars, the mission announced, saying that communication has already been established with Hope Probe.

"Launch process complete: The Hope Probe has successfully separated from the launch vehicle," the mission said on its official Twitter account, where the launch was broadcast live.

Hope was launched from the space center on the Japanese island of Tanegashima on Sunday at 21:58 GMT using a Mitsubishi H-IIA booster.
"Two-way communication established. The ground segment has received and communicated the first signals with the Hope Probe," the mission said on Twitter shortly after the launch.
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Hearts

Dogs may use Earth's magnetic field to take shortcuts

Erik Stokstad
Science Mag
Fri, 17 Jul 2020 08:00 UTC
dachshund
Video cameras and GPS allowed researchers to track the navigation of hunting dogs, such as this wire-haired miniature dachshund named Hurvinek Valentinka.
Kateřina Benediktová and Hynek Burda
Dogs are renowned for their world-class noses, but a new study suggests they may have an additional — albeit hidden — sensory talent: a magnetic compass. The sense appears to allow them to use Earth's magnetic field to calculate shortcuts in unfamiliar terrain.

The finding is a first in dogs, says Catherine Lohmann, a biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies "magnetoreception" and navigation in turtles. She notes that dogs' navigational abilities have been studied much less compared with migratory animals such as birds. "It's an insight into how [dogs] build up their picture of space," adds Richard Holland, a biologist at Bangor University who studies bird navigation.

There were already hints that dogs — like many animals, and maybe even humans — can perceive Earth's magnetic field. In 2013, Hynek Burda, a sensory ecologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague who has worked on magnetic reception for 3 decades, and colleagues showed dogs tend to orient themselves north-south while urinating or defecating. Because this behavior is involved in marking and recognizing territory, Burda reasoned the alignment helps dogs figure out the location relative to other spots. But stationary alignment isn't the same thing as navigation.

Comment: See also:

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