Science & TechnologyS


Compass

Earth's magnetic poles could flip more frequently than previously thought

Mike Mcrae
Science Alert
Sat, 05 Oct 2019 10:30 UTC
Earth’s Magnetic Field
© CC BY 2.0 / NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / Dynamic EarthEarth’s Magnetic Field
Half a billion years ago, when trilobites ruled and dry land was a barren wasteland, Earth was having a terrible time making a decision. North and south had switched places nearly 80 times in just a few million years, making it one of the most geomagnetically turbulent moments in history.

Geologists from the Russian Academy of Science and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris in France measured the orientations of tiny magnetised particles in rock samples from northeastern Siberia.

The source was a set of crumbling cliffs overlooking the Khorbusuonka River - a legacy of a time 500 million years ago when the region's landscape was covered in water.

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Microscope 1

Ice grains from Saturn's moon Enceladus yields new organic compounds


NASA
Wed, 02 Oct 2019 12:00 UTC
Enceladus
© NASA/JPL-CaltechIn this image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2007, the plumes of Enceladus are clearly visible. The moon is nearly in front of the Sun from Cassini's viewpoint.
New kinds of organic compounds, the ingredients of amino acids, have been detected in the plumes bursting from Saturn's moon Enceladus. The findings are the result of the ongoing deep dive into data from NASA's Cassini mission.

Powerful hydrothermal vents eject material from Enceladus' core, which mixes with water from the moon's massive subsurface ocean before it is released into space as water vapor and ice grains. The newly discovered molecules, condensed onto the ice grains, were determined to be nitrogen- and oxygen-bearing compounds.

On Earth, similar compounds are part of chemical reactions that produce amino acids, the building blocks of life. Hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor provide the energy that fuels the reactions. Scientists believe Enceladus' hydrothermal vents may operate in the same way, supplying energy that leads to the production of amino acids.

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Satellite

Data from Chinese satellite shedding light on cosmic rays

Bob Yirka
Phys.org
Mon, 30 Sep 2019 07:32 UTC
Cosmic rays
© CC0 Public Domain
An international team of researchers studying data from China's Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) has measured cosmic ray protons up to the energy of 100 TeV with high precision for the first time. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes the research they have been conducting on data received from the satellite and what they have learned thus far.

Four years ago, the Chinese government launched into orbit the DAMPE satellite-based telescope (nicknamed Wukong after the Monkey King — a hero in a Chinese tale) — its stated mission is threefold: to study properties of dark matter by taking a closer look at high-energy gamma rays and electrons; to study possible origins of cosmic rays by carefully analyzing heavy nuclei and high energy electrons; and finally, to study the nature of propagation and acceleration of cosmic rays.

Scientists believe that most cosmic rays are produced by supernova explosions. And prior research has shown that most cosmic rays are actually pieces of atomic nuclei — and all of the elements of the periodic table have been found to be present in them. Approximately 90 percent of the cosmic rays that reach the Earth are actually nuclei of hydrogen atoms (protons). Scientists have also found that the paths cosmic rays take in reaching us are impacted by a variety of factors such as magnetic fields — thus, it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine their source. To learn more about possible sources, scientists look at cosmic ray spectra.
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Nebula

Ready for the space bagel? Russia to fly donut-shaped spaceship to edge of solar system


RT
Fri, 04 Oct 2019 13:56 UTC
Space doughnut
© RT composite/Pixabay/Bruno Glätsch/Gerd Altmann
A team of Russian scientists is developing a donut-shaped spaceship that can reach the farthest corners of the solar system in record time by taking power directly from the Sun.

The spaceship's clever method of sourcing fuel will allow it to overtake even the fastest probes, unravel questions about the origin of comets, and even provide electricity to future martian colonists, all while proving Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

The plate covering the middle part of the bagel-shaped ship is a solar sail. It is coated in a special substance that will begin to evaporate as it approaches the Sun, giving the ship a boost of jet acceleration without having to carry heavy engines.

Using the pressure of sunlight in this ingenious manner will allow the sailboat to speedily get to the mysterious Oort cloud at the edge of the solar system, where it's believed that comets are born.

"The duration of flights to other stars is gigantic. The Voyager 1 high-speed space probe will take 300 years to reach the Oort cloud. Our sail can reach it in 20-30 years," said Professor Olga Starinova, of Samara University's Department of Space Engineering.

"This means that we or the next generation will be able to obtain evidence of existence clouds, presumably generating all comets, and examine what remains of the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago," she explained.
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Info

Printed electronic tattoos could transform healthcare and the battlefield


RT
Fri, 04 Oct 2019 15:57 UTC
Finger
© Duke University
Engineers have developed a method of printing electronic devices directly onto human skin. The eyebrow-raising breakthrough could be used to create high tech bespoke bandages and may even become another tool in modern warfare.

Scientists have been trying to create so-called electronic tattoos for years now and the latest development represents a significant step forward for the spooky-sounding technology.

The system created by researchers from Duke University is gentle enough to work on delicate surfaces including paper and human skin. The boffins say that it could pave the way for embedded electronic tattoos for "biological tagging" and bandages containing patient-specific biosensors.
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Chalkboard

Math provides insight into the secrets of cells' feedback circuitry

XiaoZhi Lim
Quanta Magazine
Sun, 18 Aug 2019 12:00 UTC
cells
© Peter Diamond for Quanta Magazine
Mustafa Khammash's small Lego robot is engaged in a one-way staring contest with a book held 30 centimeters in front of it. Khammash slides the book forward and his robot instantly revs its four offset wheels to follow it; he moves it closer and the robot leaps back, staying exactly 30 centimeters away from the book. Khammash weighs the machine down with his eyeglass case, he lifts the table at an angle, he replaces the wheels with ones that are 30% larger — each time, his robot restores its 30-centimeter buffer zone from the book and resumes staring at it.

The robot's uncanny ability to correct its position gives it what biologists call robust perfect adaptation. "When the dust settles, there is no error," said Khammash, a control theorist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich). "That's the perfect adaptation; it keeps the distance perfectly."

Whether in industrial control systems or in nature, negative feedback is an omnipresent strategy to help systems cope with disturbances. "People have noticed these feedback systems in physiology for as long as people have been studying physiology," said Noah Olsman, a control theorist at Harvard University. Homeostasis, the self-regulation of biological systems, keeps many physiological parameters like body temperature, blood pressure and levels of blood glucose within exacting limits, whether we've run a marathon, gone scuba diving, or binge-watched Netflix all day. And for good reason: "If life couldn't respond to changes and learn, it wouldn't last very long," Olsman said.

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Bug

Gene edit gone terribly wrong in Brazil, but hey, let's do it again!

F. William Engdahl
New Eastern Outlook
Wed, 02 Oct 2019 00:00 UTC
mosquito
© unknown
A British-American gene-editing company has released millions of genetically modified mosquitoes containing a dominant lethal gene, each week for 27 months in the Bahia, Brazil region in a test to see if the gene-edited mosquitoes would mate with local mosquitoes carrying Zika, malaria or other mosquito-borne diseases. A new study documents the alarming fact that following an initial reduction of the target population of mosquitoes, after some months the "population which had been greatly suppressed rebounded to nearly pre-release levels." Scientists to date have no idea what dangers are presented by the new mutations. This once more highlights the dangers of uncontrolled gene-editing of species.

According to a new published study in Nature Reports journal, genetically engineered mosquitoes produced by the biotech company, Oxitec, now part of the US company Intrexon, have escaped human control after trials in Brazil and are now spreading in the environment.

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Gear

Darwin Devolves — Evidence Keeps Rolling In

Michael Behe
Evolution News
Wed, 02 Oct 2019 17:41 UTC
dolphin
© christels via Pixabay
Several new papers have appeared that reinforce key points of my recent book, Darwin Devolves. (Hat tip to Paul Nelson.) The first one — "Quantifying the pathways to life using assembly spaces" — is from a group of theoreticians at Arizona State and the University of Glasgow. (The work was discussed by one of the authors, Sara Imari Walker, at a meeting this July in Italy, "Mind Matters: Intelligence and Agency in the Physical World." Walker is a frequent collaborator of Paul Davies.)

Reeking of ID

The paper investigates phenomena that reek of intelligent design, but the authors ascribe design either to an extrinsic agent or to (presumably undirected) evolution.
Herein, we present the foundations of a new theoretical approach to agnostically quantify the amount of potential pathway assembly information contained within an object. This is achieved by considering how the object can be deconstructed into its irreducible parts, and then evaluating the minimum number of steps necessary to reconstruct the object along any pathway. ... This allows determining when an extrinsic agent or evolutionary system is necessary to construct the object ...
Their only gesture at justifying the mythic powers ascribed to mutation and selection is to cite a single, decade-old, semi-theoretical, non-experimental paper. The authors hope that their work will "help identify the new physical and chemical laws needed to understand what life is, by quantifying what life does." Well, it would be great if they could indeed reliably identify biological objects whose assembly is beyond random processes. But, as I documented in Darwin Devolves, no sign of a mysterious new mind-like law was seen in Richard Lenski's evolution experiments, or the development of chloroquine resistance by the malaria parasite, or any of the best relevant data from other work. Maybe there is no such law.
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Microscope 2

Beyond Einstein: Physicists solve mystery surrounding photon momentum


Phys.org
Tue, 01 Oct 2019 17:01 UTC
COLTRIMS
© Alexander HartungA photo of the COLTRIMS reaction microscope built by Alexander Hartung as part of his doctoral research in the experiment hall of the Faculty of Physics.
Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize for explaining the photoelectric effect: in its most intuitive form, a single atom is irradiated with light. According to Einstein, light consists of particles (photons) that transfer only quantised energy to the electron of the atom. If the photon's energy is sufficient, it knocks the electrons out of the atom. But what happens to the photon's momentum in this process? Physicists at Goethe University are now able to answer this question. To do so, they developed and constructed a new spectrometer with previously unattainable resolution.

Doctoral student Alexander Hartung became a father twice during the construction of the apparatus. The device, which is three meters long and 2.5 meters high, contains approximately as many parts as an automobile. It sits in the experiment hall of the Physics building on Riedberg Campus, surrounded by an opaque, black tent inside which is an extremely high performing laser. Its photons collide with individual argon atoms in the apparatus, and thereby remove one electron from each of the atoms. The momentum of these electrons at the time of their appearance is measured with extreme precision in a long tube of the apparatus.

The device is a further development of the COLTRIMS (Collision Optical Laser Testing Reaction Interacting Momentum System) principle that was invented in Frankfurt and has meanwhile spread across the world: it consists of ionising individual atoms, or breaking up molecules, and then precisely determining the momentum of the particles. However, the transfer of the photon momentum to electrons predicted by theoretic calculations is so tiny that it was previously not possible to measure it. And this is why Hartung built the "super COLTRIMS."
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Yoda

Quillette's response to Jerry Coyne on his (non)defense of Neo-Darwinism

Drs. Günter Bechl, Brian Miller and David Berlinski
Quillette
Thu, 03 Oct 2019 16:29 UTC
gorilla suset
Jerry Coyne has offered a response in the pages of Quillette to David Gelernter's provocative article, "Giving Up Darwin." Gelernter rejected the standard model of neo-Darwinian evolution for a simple reason: he looked at three pieces of scientific evidence that appeared to be incompatible with that model:
  • The sudden appearance of new body plans in the fossil record.
  • The extreme rarity of protein folds.
  • The absence of early-acting beneficial mutations, the kind that would be needed to generate new animal body plans.
In knowing where to look, Gelernter had help from Stephen Meyer's Darwin's Doubt, and David Berlinski's The Deniable Darwin. These books both contain many references to the literature. Gelernter also highlighted the book Debating Darwin's Doubt, which responded in detail to all notable critiques of the arguments that swayed him. For all that, Coyne faulted Gelernter for not examining counter-arguments to his own position. "One simply can't do good science," Coyne wrote, "by spouting only one side of an argument and ignoring the claims of the other." A certain measure of irony is conveyed by this unjustified remark. Had Coyne followed it more faithfully, he would have spared himself some embarrassment.
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