Science & TechnologyS


Moon

China's Yutu-2 lunar rover found something odd on the far side of the Moon

Andrew Jones
Space.com
Fri, 30 Aug 2019 17:52 UTC
YUTU China rover moon
© China Lunar Exploration ProjectTracks made by Yutu-2 while navigating hazards during lunar day 8, which occurred during late July and early August 2019.
(Image: )
China's Chang'e-4 lunar rover has discovered an unusually colored, 'gel-like' substance during its exploration activities on the far side of the moon.

The mission's rover, Yutu-2, stumbled on that surprise during lunar day 8. The discovery prompted scientists on the mission to postpone other driving plans for the rover, and instead focus its instruments on trying to figure out what the strange material is.

Day 8 started on July 25; Yutu-2 began navigating a path through an area littered with various small impact craters, with the help and planning of drivers at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, according to a Yutu-2 'drive diary' published on Aug. 17 by the government-sanctioned Chinese-language publication Our Space, which focuses on space and science communication.
Read More...
Microscope 1

Finding design everywhere: When maggots fly, and more


Evolution News
Mon, 02 Sep 2019 17:26 UTC
electron microscope fly larvae
© Grace Farley, Duke University, via EurekAlert!Electron micrographs show patches on the ends of larvae, covered with adhesive protrusions just one micron in size.
Many stories at Evolution News critique the fact-free pronouncements from scientific materialists, while worrying about the risks that skeptics take for pointing out their errors. But believe it or not, there are amazing discoveries being made that owe nothing to Darwin, at least not explicitly. Some enjoyable examples follow.

High-Jumping Maggots

In a Duke University lab, a couple of scientists photographed some larvae of gall midges that can leap 30 times their body length — without legs! The Duke team filmed them in slow-motion at 20,000 frames per second; you can watch the results here:
Read More...
Apple Red

Intelligent Design opponents don't know what they're talking about, but love telling you ID is stupid anyway

Tom Gilson
Stream
Sat, 31 Aug 2019 21:01 UTC
intelligent design
© qimono/Pixabay
Last week, Rachel Alexander wrote about Yale professor David Gelernter's "leaving Darwinism." The article has garnered almost 400 comments already. I encourage you to read through them. It's entertaining, at least — especially if you know anything about the history of this debate. Especially the online version.

Because — how shall I say this nicely? — people who defend Darwin online typically don't know what they're talking about. They're terribly sure of themselves, though, and they don't mind spewing insults to tell you so. And that's not just bias speaking on my part. I've got data to back it up, as you'll see shortly.

First, though, let me rewind a bit. As I wrote here on The Stream some time ago, ID is the idea that
certain features of the natural world are better explained as the product of a guiding transcendent intelligence than as the result of unguided natural processes. By way of example he [Stephen Meyer, in debate] showed that new functional protein configurations, which Darwinian evolution must discover by chance, actually cannot be discovered that way. Not only that, but these proteins possess new and functional information — the sort of thing that in other contexts we always ascribe to intelligent causes. Therefore it's reasonable to conclude that this biological information (along with other information-rich features of life) was also the result of intelligent design.
Many ID proponents take that designer to be the God of the Bible. That conclusion isn't essential to the theory, however.
Read More...
Telephone

Hackers have had 'monitoring implants' in iPhones for years - Google researcher

Alex Hern
The Guardian
Fri, 30 Aug 2019 15:03 UTC
iphone
© Samuel Gibbs/The GuardianOperating systems from iOS 10 to iOS 12 were targeted in the hack.
An unprecedented iPhone hacking operation, which attacked "thousands of users a week" until it was disrupted in January, has been revealed by researchers at Google's external security team.

The operation, which lasted two and a half years, used a small collection of hacked websites to deliver malware on to the iPhones of visitors. Users were compromised simply by visiting the sites: no interaction was necessary, and some of the methods used by the hackers affected even fully up-to-date phones.

Once hacked, the user's deepest secrets were exposed to the attackers. Their location was uploaded every minute; their device's keychain, containing all their passwords, was uploaded, as were their chat histories on popular apps including WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessage, their address book, and their Gmail database.

Comment: For better or worse, computer and modern phone technology has become so integrated into our lives that it's nearly impossible to avoid. If you've been using an iPhone that could have been impacted by this, it might be wise to change all your passwords. But for everyone, it is likely best to take any reasonable precautions against attacks like this.

Read More...
Galaxy

Physicists discuss the possible detection of a black hole so large it shouldn't even exist

Natalie Wolchover
Quanta Magazine
Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:30 UTC
black hole
© Olena Shmahalo/Quanta MagazineA 100-solar-mass black hole would be roughly twice as massive as the theoretical limit.
Black hole physicists have been excitedly discussing reports that the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors recently picked up the signal of an unexpectedly enormous black hole, one with a mass that was thought to be physically impossible.

"The prediction is no black holes, not even a few" in this mass range, wrote Stan Woosley, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in an email. "But of course we know nature often finds a way."

Seven experts contacted by Quanta said they'd heard that among the 22 flurries of gravitational waves detected by LIGO and Virgo since April, one of the signals came from a collision involving a black hole of unanticipated heft — purportedly as heavy as 100 suns. LIGO/Virgo team members would neither confirm nor deny the rumored detection.

Chris Belczynski, an astrophysicist at Warsaw University, previously felt so sure that such a large specimen wouldn't be seen that in 2017 he placed a bet with colleagues. "I think we are about to lose the bet," Belczynski said, "and for the good of science!"
Read More...
Microscope 2

Giant study highlights homosexuality is "beyond genetics"

Emma Yasinski
The Scientist
Thu, 29 Aug 2019 12:00 UTC
gay bed
© ISTOCK.COM, RAWPIXEL
Genes play a role in — but cannot alone predict — same-sex sexual behaviors, according to a study published today (August 29) in Science. Using genetic data from nearly half a million participants who consented to be surveyed about their sexual experiences, the authors find that at most, genetics accounts for 8-25 percent of the variation in sexual behaviors and only some of the genes involved are shared between men and women.

"The strength of the paper is that it used a very large dataset," says Jacqueline Vink, a behavioral geneticist at Radbound University who was not part of the study but has worked with some of the researchers before. The methods allowed the researchers to "find novel genes associated with same-sex sexual behavior and learn more about possible biological pathways."
Read More...
Galaxy

Mysterious neutrinos get new mass estimate

Clara Moskowitz
Scientific American
Mon, 26 Aug 2019 06:41 UTC
map of galaxies
© Daniel Eisenstein and the SDSS-III collaborationPhysicists used this three-dimensional map of galaxies in the universe, created by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, to estimate a limit on how massive the lightest neutrino particle can be. Each dot in the image represents a single galaxy.
Neutrinos, some of nature's weirdest fundamental particles, are nearly massless — emphasis on nearly. They were predicted to be completely massless, but experiments roughly 20 years ago found they surprisingly do have some mass. Just how much has remained a mystery. Now a new calculation based on cosmological observations places an upper limit on how heavy the lightest kind of neutrino can be.

There are many strange things about neutrinos: their unexpected heft, for one thing, and that they rarely interact with other matter and are passing through our bodies by the billions each moment. Perhaps the oddest aspect of these particles is their tendency to switch identities, cycling between the three possible "flavors," or types. In fact, it was the observation of this shape-shifting ability in the first place that told scientists the three neutrino flavors must have different masses — which means, of course, that all of their masses cannot be zero.

Scientists would desperately like to know what they actually weigh, which would be a vital clue about why they have mass, given that they do not seem to acquire it the way other particles do: through the Higgs field (associated with the Higgs boson, which was discovered in 2012). "Understanding why particles have mass is something very fundamental in how we understand physics," says physicist Joseph Formaggio of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "What neutrinos pose is the possibility that the mechanism we think gives rise to masses for all the particles may not apply, for some strange reason, to neutrinos. I find that exciting."

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Info

Brainwaves detected in lab-grown mini-brains

Paul Biegler
Cosmos Magazine
Thu, 29 Aug 2019 19:08 UTC
A cross-section of a brain organoid
© Muotri Lab-UCTVA cross-section of a brain organoid, showing the initial formation of a cortical plate. Each colour marks a different type of brain cell.
Researchers have grown human mini-brains on a lab bench that are so advanced that AI rated their brainwaves on the same level as those of a premature baby.

It's a stunning finding that left the scientists wondering if it was real.

"We couldn't believe it at first - we thought our electrodes were malfunctioning," says lead researcher Alysson Muotri, a neuroscientist and stem cell researcher at the University of California San Diego in the US.

"Because the data were so striking, I think many people were kind of sceptical about it, and understandably so."

The study is a major advance in the field of brain "organoids", pea-sized versions of our most precious organ that are being co-opted in the race to find treatments for epilepsy, dementia and cancer.

Mini-brains are typically grown from human skin cells that are magicked into a kind of master cell, called an induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cell. With further coaxing, IPS cells can become any type of cell in the body, including brain cells.

These mini-brains are already complex. They have message-sending neurons and the glial cells that support them. They also grow recognisable brain parts such as the cortex, cerebellum and even the retina.

Until now, however, the chatter between brain cells has been pretty low level, causing something of a headache for researchers.
Read More...
Microscope 1

Can new species evolve from cancers? Maybe

Christie Wilcox
Quanta Magazine
Mon, 19 Aug 2019 00:01 UTC
parasites myxosporeans
© Ivan FialaThe parasites called myxosporeans live in fish during one stage of their life and in aquatic worms during another. If a new theory is right, they had a bizarre origin: as a form of transmissible cancer that evolved into its own species of animal.
Researchers agree it's a long shot, but transmissible cancers could theoretically evolve into independent species. Certain weird parasites might be living proof.

Aggressive cancers can spread so fiercely that they seem less like tissues gone wrong and more like invasive parasites looking to consume and then break free of their host. If a wild theory recently floated in Biology Direct is correct, something like that might indeed happen on rare occasions: Cancers that learn how to roam between hosts may gradually evolve into their own multicellular species. Researchers are now scrutinizing a peculiar group of marine parasites called myxosporeans to see whether they might be the first known example.

Even among microscopic parasites, myxosporeans are enigmatic. They were first discovered nearly two centuries ago, and more than 2,000 species are recognized today. Their complex life cycles make study particularly difficult: It wasn't until the 1980s that scientists realized the ones found in fish were the same species as those found in worms, and not completely different classes of parasite. And while most parasites are content merely to snuggle into their animal host's tissues, myxosporeans often take up residence inside a host's own cells.
Read More...
Dig

Skull of 3.8 million-year-old Australopithecus discovered in Ethiopia challenges understanding of evolutionary process

Sean Morrison
The Independent
Thu, 29 Aug 2019 12:01 UTC
human ancestor
© PAExperts recreated the face the early ape-like human ancestor after the 3.8-million-year-old fossil was found
Scientists have recreated the face of an early human ancestor after a "remarkably complete" skull dating back 3.8 million years was discovered in Ethiopia.

Researchers said the find at the Woranso-Mille palaeontological site was a "game changer" in the understanding of human evolution.

The fossil, referred to as MRD, was found at the located in the Afar region of Ethiopia in February 2016 and represents a time interval between 4.1 and 3.6 million years ago when such fossils are extremely rare.

It sheds new light on what Australopithecus anamensis, a species widely accepted to have been the ancestor of Australopithecus afarensis, represented by the famous Lucy fossil - looked like.

Comment: These findings not only 'challenge' researchers understanding of evolution, but also, as noted above, similar discoveries have cast serious doubt over whether they are indeed ancestors of humans at all: Unlikely that South African fossil species is ancestral to humans

See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

Read More...