Science & TechnologyS


Galaxy

LIGO and Virgo likely spotted the first black hole swallowing up a neutron star

Emily Conover
ScienceNews
Thu, 15 Aug 2019 06:06 UTC
Black hole/neutron star
© Dana Berry/NASAGravitational waves may have revealed a black hole in the process of swallowing up a neutron star (illustrated). If confirmed, the event would be the first of its kind ever seen.
Shudders in the cosmos have revealed what's likely the sad end of a neutron star — getting swallowed by a black hole.

If confirmed, it would be the first solid detection of this source of gravitational waves, revealing a type of cataclysm never before spotted. Researchers from the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave observatories reported the candidate event, which was detected August 14, in a public database used by astronomers.

Scientists are still analyzing the data to verify what created the gravitational waves, which are tiny vibrations in spacetime caused by massive, accelerating objects. But one thing seems fairly certain: "Something has occurred out there in the sky," says physicist Daniel Holz of the University of Chicago, a member of LIGO. "So far, it doesn't obviously look like anything we've detected with high confidence before."
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Butterfly

Counterintuitive physics property found to be widespread in living organisms

Lisa Zyga
Phys.org
Fri, 16 Aug 2019 17:16 UTC
negative differential response
© Khopkins2010, Wikimedia CommonsA negative differential response occurs in substrate inhibition, a process that occurs in about 20% of all known enzymes.
Ever since the late 19th century, physicists have known about a counterintuitive property of some electric circuits called negative resistance. Typically, increasing the voltage in a circuit causes the electric current to increase as well. But under some conditions, increasing the voltage can cause the current to decrease instead. This basically means that pushing harder on the electric charges actually slows them down.

Due to the relationship between current, voltage, and resistance, in these situations the resistance produces power rather than consuming it, resulting in a "negative resistance." Today, negative resistance devices have a wide variety of applications, such as in fluorescent lights and Gunn diodes, which are used in radar guns and automatic door openers, among other devices.

Most known examples of negative resistance occur in human-engineered devices rather than in nature. However, in a new study published in the New Journal of Physics, Gianmaria Falasco and coauthors from the University of Luxembourg have shown that an analogous property called negative differential response is actually a widespread phenomenon that is found in many biochemical reactions that occur in living organisms. They identify the property in several vital biochemical processes, such as enzyme activity, DNA replication, and ATP production. It seems that nature has used this property to optimize these processes and make living things operate more efficiently at the molecular scale.


Comment: The materialist assumptions goes unstated: "by accident" and "for no actual purpose".

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Microscope 2

Newly discovered organ that senses pain may be lurking under your skin

Catherine Zuckerman
National Geographic
Thu, 15 Aug 2019 12:00 UTC
nociceptive
© Reprinted with permission from Hind Abdo et al.,A colorized microscope image shows the structure of a newly described organ called the nociceptive glio-neural complex, highlighted here in green. Nerve cells in this image are depicted in red, while cells in the outer part of the skin are shown in blue.
Identified in mice, the simple organ most likely exists in humans, too, offering fresh insight into how we experience painful pressure and pricks.

Most people who've been jabbed by a needle know the drill: First the pierce, then the sharp, searing pain and an urge to pull away, or at least wince. While the exact circuitry behind this nearly universal reaction is not fully understood, scientists may have just found an important piece of the puzzle: a previously unknown sensory organ inside the skin.

Dubbed the nociceptive glio-neural complex, this structure is not quite like the typical picture of a complex organ like the heart or the spleen. Instead, it's a simple organ made up of a network of cells called glial cells, which are already known to surround and support the body's nerve cells. In this case, the glial cells form a mesh-like structure between the skin's outer and inner layers, with filament-like protrusions that extend into the skin's outer layer.

Comment: Only a decade or so ago, parts of the human body that were once considered disposable, like our appendix or tonsils, have actually been discovered to play critical roles in maintaining optimal health. The finding above is just one of a number of recent discoveries that show just how much we've yet to learn: Also check out SOTT radio's: Objective:Health #25 - Fascia - The Body's "Fiber Optic" Crystalline Matrix

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Microscope 2

Scientists discover a cure for the deadliest strain of tuberculosis

Donald G. McNeil Jr.
NY Times
Thu, 15 Aug 2019 18:27 UTC
doctor
© Joao Silva / The New York Times
When she joined a trial of new tuberculosis drugs, the dying young woman weighed just 57 pounds.

Stricken with a deadly strain of the disease, she was mortally terrified. Local nurses told her the Johannesburg hospital to which she must be transferred was very far away — and infested with vervet monkeys.

"I cried the whole way in the ambulance," Tsholofelo Msimango recalled recently. "They said I would live with monkeys and the sisters there were not nice and the food was bad and there was no way I would come back. They told my parents to fix the insurance because I would die."

Five years later, Msimango, 25, who became the trial's fifth enrolled patient, is now tuberculosis-free. She is healthy at 103 pounds, and has a young son.
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Info

More genes in the body than there are stars in the universe

Nick Carne
Cosmos Magazine
Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:05 UTC
Human Microbiome
© KATERYNA KON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, VIA GETTY IMAGESThere are likely more genes in the body than there are stars in the universe.
US scientists have begun the daunting task of trying to work out how many genes there are in the human microbiome.

Even when you consider just the gut and the mouth (in itself, a unique research double) the numbers are potentially overwhelming.

Microbiologists and bioinformaticians from Harvard Medical School and Joslin Diabetes Centre gathered all publicly available sequencing data on human oral and gut microbiomes and analyzed the DNA from around 3500 samples - 1400 from mouths and 2100 from guts.

In all, there were nearly 46 million bacterial genes - 24 million in the oral microbiome and 22 million in the gut.

That leads the team to suggest that there may be more genes in the collective human microbiome than there are stars in the observable universe (we're talking trillions) - and that at least half of them may be unique to each individual.

"Ours is a gateway study, the first step on a what will likely be a long journey toward understanding how differences in gene content drive microbial behaviour and modify disease risk," says Harvard's Braden Tierney, first author of a paper published in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, with admirable understatement.

Most research to date has focused on mapping the types of bacteria that inhabit our bodies in an effort to determine whether and how the presence of a given bacterial species might affect disease risk, the researchers say.

In contrast, their work looks at the genes that make up the various microbial species and strains.
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Eye 1

Amazon says its facial recognition can now identify fear along with other emotions

Saheli Roy Choudhury
MSNBC
Tue, 13 Aug 2019 00:00 UTC
  • Amazon said this week its facial recognition software, Rekognition, can detect a person's fear.
  • Rekognition is used for facial analysis or sentiment analysis.
  • The company claims it can accurately identify seven emotions: happy, sad, angry, surprised, disgusted, calm and confused.
Amazon Rekognition
Amazon said this week its facial recognition software can detect a person's fear.

Rekognition is one of many Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services available for developers. It can be used for facial analysis or sentiment analysis, which identifies different expressions and predicts emotions from images of people's faces. The service uses artificial intelligence to "learn" from the reams of data it processes.

Comment: See also:

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Biohazard

We're unprepared for race specific bioweapons threat - Cambridge University

Dan Robitzsk
Futurism
Wed, 14 Aug 2019 09:40 UTC
bioweapon
In the future, we may have to deal with biological weapons that target specific groups of people, passing over everyone else.

That's according to a new report out of Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk reviewed by The Telegraph. In it, the Cambridge researchers argue that world governments have failed to prepare for futuristic weapons based on advanced technology like artificial intelligence and genetic manipulation — or even a killer pathogen designed to kill only people of a particular race.

Proactive Action

The report specifically called for the creation of independent groups to assess the risks of various future technologies and sort out whatever protocols are already in place to protect people from them, per The Telegraph.

Comment: The US has been at the forefront of bio-weapon research, and stands accused of attempting to develop race specific bioweapons, it also has a history of targeting specific groups for medical experimentation. However genetic research shows that, throughout human history relentless migrations and mixing - even intra-species mixing - means that it's not possible to define race through genetics, therefore any attempts at targeting one particular group would likely threaten the population of the entire planet: Also check out SOTT radio's: The Truth Perspective: Interview with Dilyana Gaytandzhieva: Pentagon Biological Warfare And Arms Trafficking to Terrorists

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Galaxy

Wakey wakey, rise and shine! Black hole begins brightly flashing - leaving scientists puzzled


RT
Wed, 14 Aug 2019 11:14 UTC
blackhole
© Pixabay / David Mark
A supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way just woke up and is flashing 75 times brighter than ever observed, after being quiet for more than 20 years, baffling astronomers.

Sagittarius A*, a supermassive blackhole, is normally low key with minimal fluctuation in brightness. Recently, however, it bloomed 75 times brighter than ever before for no apparent reason.

Earlier this year, Tuan Do, an astronomer at UCLA, and his team took observations of the galactic centre using the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii over four nights. The team observed the bizarre flash on May 13, capturing it in a two-hour timelapse that condensed the phenomenon down to just a few seconds. The "unprecedented" findings have now been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Fish

How Does a Religious Studies Professor Become a Darwinian Skeptic?

Robert F. Shedinger
Evolution News
Tue, 13 Aug 2019 18:02 UTC
Campus of Luther College
© Jonathunder [CC BY-SA 3.0] / Wikimedia CommonsCampus of Luther College
Evolution News Editor's note: We are delighted to welcome Dr. Shedinger as a new contributor. A Professor of Religion at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, he is the author of a new book critiquing Darwinian triumphalism, The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms: Darwinian Biology's Grand Narrative of Triumph and the Subversion of Religion, from which this post is adapted.
For most of my fifty-nine years, I fully accepted the truth of Darwinian evolution. I knew that Daniel Dennett had called Darwin's theory the best idea anyone has ever had and was quite familiar with Richard Dawkins's aggressive defense of modern evolutionary theory. Moreover, I had a passing familiarity with the biological establishment's disparaging treatment of intelligent design theory and accepted the view that ID is just a religious idea dressed up as science — that it has no scientific validity. And as a scholar committed to the academic study of religion, I found that these ideas about evolution and ID fit well with my position in the liberal academy.

A Colleague Retires

But then a senior colleague at Luther College who taught a course on science and religion retired. Wanting the course to continue, he looked to me as the person best suited to take it over. (My undergraduate degree is in civil engineering, so unlike many religion scholars, I have some scientific and mathematical background.) I was happy to do so, but I knew I had much work to do to get up to speed on the issues.

After some reflection, I decided to put the debate about evolution and ID at the center of the course. But since I had little direct experience with ID literature, I knew I needed to engage with it. That was something I did with great trepidation, feeling as though I was betraying my academic standards. I fully expected to find easily dispatched arguments full of faulty understandings of religion — my specialty. I began with Philip Johnson's seminal Darwin on Trial, followed by Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution, Stephen Meyer's Darwin's Doubt, and Jonathan Wells's Icons of Evolution.


Comment: Shedinger committed the mortal sin of honest Darwinists: to actually read the material produced by the other side. Warning to others: doing so is dangerous. You might just end up being convinced. And that means you're in for a world of hurt from your 'professional' colleagues. Better just to not read anything by the ID camp. It's much safer that way.


Comment: Kudos to Shedinger for breaking out of the Darwinist mind prison.

For SOTT's own series on evolution and ID, don't miss these: And if you prefer podcasts:

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Blue Planet

Read's Rule: Researchers map symbiotic relationships between trees and microbes worldwide

Taylor Kubota
phys.org
Wed, 15 May 2019 11:59 UTC
mapping
© Sora HaslerWatercolor depicting the relationship between trees, fungi and bacteria globally.
In and around the tangled roots of the forest floor, fungi and bacteria grow with trees, exchanging nutrients for carbon in a vast, global marketplace. A new effort to map the most abundant of these symbiotic relationships — involving more than 1.1 million forest sites and 28,000 tree species — has revealed factors that determine where different types of symbiots will flourish. The work could help scientists understand how symbiotic partnerships structure the world's forests and how they could be affected by a warming climate.

Stanford University researchers worked alongside a team of over 200 scientists to generate these maps, published May 16 in Nature. From the work, they revealed a new biological rule, which the team named Read's Rule after pioneer in symbiosis research Sir David Read.
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