Science & TechnologyS


Magnet

Fluctuating fields: Russian scientists develop new composites for microelectronics


Sputnik
Tue, 06 Aug 2019 12:15 UTC
Piezoelectric element in a sensor
© MISISPiezoelectric element in a sensor
The ceramic composites - a breakthrough of a Russian research team - are deemed as exceptionally promising in terms of the development of data storage devices of greater capacity, as well as top sensitive detectors and sensors.

Scientists at the Russian National University of Science and Technology MISIS together with their colleagues from the South Ural State University and the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus have devised new, exceptionally promising materials that may be used to create the cutting-edge data storage devices and sensors. The research has been published in the prestigious scientific journal Composites Part B: Engineering.

The experiment conducted by Russian physicists has resulted in the development of ceramic composites, in other words, materials consisting of several components that boast curious properties. They may simultaneously exert control of the magnetic and electric fields, which will enable to process information in a quicker mode, create new data storage devices for larger bulks of information that will be more efficiently protected from hackers, new detectors and sensors, all the way to other more reliable and accurate microelectronic devices that do not have to be plugged into a power supply.
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Telescope

The Perseid meteor shower is here!


NASA
Thu, 01 Aug 2019 17:36 UTC
Shower of perseids
© Wikipedia
Perseid meteors, caused by debris left behind by the Comet Swift-Tuttle, began streaking across the skies in late July and will peak on the night of August 12.

The Perseid meteor shower is often considered to be one of the best meteor showers of the year due to its high rates and pleasant late-summer temperatures. This year's shower, however, has unfortunate circumstance of having a full Moon right at the shower peak, reducing the meteor rates from over 60 per hour down to 15-20 per hour. But the Perseids are rich in bright meteors and fireballs, so it will still be worth going out in the early morning to catch some of nature's fireworks.
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Microscope 1

The genius involved in creating alternative reading frames in DNA sequences

Ann Gauger
Evolution News
Mon, 12 Aug 2019 16:46 UTC
genes evolution alternate reading frames
© Emmanuel Douzery, [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
A reader, Charles, asks a good question:
I've been wondering about this for some time and haven't been able to find an answer. In protein production in an organism having a diploidal genome, do both strands contribute to protein production? In particular, does the complementary segment of a translated gene also get translated? It seems to me that it would be a real miracle if that were to be the case, since the chances of a sequence being useful and its complement being useful in the reversed direction would be quite small.

Best regards,
Charles

Comment:

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Black Cat 2

Why cats eat grass solved

David Shultz
Science Magazine
Thu, 08 Aug 2019 18:55 UTC
Cat Eating Grass
© KDDESIGNPHOTO/SHUTTERSTOCK
Cats do a lot of weird things. One of the biggies is eating grass, often to throw it up just a few minutes later. Now, after perhaps centuries of mystery, scientists think they know why.

Researchers surveyed more than 1000 cat owners on the internet who spent at least 3 hours a day watching and hanging out with their pet. As many cat parents suspected, eating plants is an extremely common behavior: Seventy-one percent of the animals were caught in the act at least six times in their lifetime, whereas only 11% were never observed gobbling greenery.

Many online explanations for grass eating posit that the behavior helps cats throw up when they're feeling ill. But only about a quarter of grass eaters were observed vomiting afterward, and 91% of respondents said their cat did not appear sick before imbibing plant matter.
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Nuke

Sabotage? Deadly explosion at Russian rocket test site near home of Northern Fleet - 5 nuclear specialists killed


RT
Fri, 09 Aug 2019 21:35 UTC
Rosatom scientists
© Facebook/Rosatom GlobalScientists at Rosatom facility
Five staff of Russia's nuclear corporation Rosatom were killed and three suffered serious burns in the blast during a test of a liquid-propellant engine that resulted in a brief spike of radiation around the military testing site.

The Rosatom engineering and technical team was working on the "isotope power source" for a propulsion system on Thursday, when the accident happened. The blast resulted in a background radiation spike, which quickly returned back to normal.

"As a result of the accident at the military firing range in Arkhangelsk region during liquid reactive propulsion system tests, five employees of the state corporation Rosatom were killed," the company said. Three military and civilian specialists remain in serious condition, but their injuries are "not life-threatening."

Comment: Between this hit on its nuclear and rocket specialists, the deaths of its military-intelligence submarine experts last month, and the ongoing massive explosions at multiple military ordinance sites, some hefty sabotage (and possibly deliberate assassination) efforts appear to be underway against key military-scientific targets across Russia.

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Broom

Russia's Roscosmos invents self-destroying satellite to solve 'space junk' problem


RT
Sat, 10 Aug 2019 15:47 UTC
Space junk
© NASA’s Johnson Space CenterThere is currently more than 8,400 tons of space trash orbiting the Earth.
Russia's Roscosmos space agency has invented a satellite with the ability to destroy itself at the end of its life, offering a solution to the significant problem of space debris.

The materials used in the satellite means it would "evaporate" when it is no longer useful, preventing it from adding to the increasing volume of defunct man-made objects that are floating around in space.

A patent filed with the Federal Service for Intellectual Property (Rospatent) shows that this would involve constructing the satellite out of materials that sublimate, meaning they transition directly from solid to gas without becoming liquid.

This clever construction would allow the satellites to self-decompose when they get a signal from Earth.

Comment: Scientists have been working on a variety of solutions to the excess space debris: What they aren't mentioning is the exponentially increasing amount of 'space junk' that isn't man-made, and can't be eliminated: Debris from increased asteroids and comets? Dust ring discovered 'where it should not be' - in Mercury's orbit

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Cell Phone

Huawei launches operating system HarmonyOS to replace Google's Android


RT
Sat, 10 Aug 2019 01:47 UTC
Huawei logo
© Reuters/Rodrigo Garrido
Huawei has rolled out its long-rumored Hongmeng operating system (OS), known as the HarmonyOS. The company says it can switch to the new system at any time, including on phones, if it is unable to use Android.

The Chinese tech giant officially unveiled the new platform on Friday. The operating system can be used on various smart devices and will be launched on "smart screen products," such as televisions, later this year. After the launch in China, the OS can become available on global markets, Huawei announced.

While the company said that it currently prefers to power its smartphones with Google's Android, it did not rule out the future use of its own system on smartphones.

"If we cannot use [Android] in the future we can immediately switch to HarmonyOS," CEO of the Chinese tech giant's consumer division, Richard Yu, told the Huawei Developer Conference in Dongguan. He added that the switch would take just one or two days.

Comment: See also:

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Info

New 'e-clothing' developed by researchers at Purdue University


Purdue University
Thu, 08 Aug 2019 19:17 UTC
e-Clothing
© Purdue UniversityPurdue University researchers have developed a new fabric innovation that allows the wearer to control electronic devices through the clothing.
West Lafayette, Ind. - A new addition to your wardrobe may soon help you turn on the lights and music - while also keeping you fresh, dry, fashionable, clean and safe from the latest virus that's going around.

Purdue University researchers have developed a new fabric innovation that allows wearers to control electronic devices through clothing.

"It is the first time there is a technique capable to transform any existing cloth item or textile into a self-powered e-textile containing sensors, music players or simple illumination displays using simple embroidery without the need for expensive fabrication processes requiring complex steps or expensive equipment," said Ramses Martinez, an assistant professor in the School of Industrial Engineering and in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering in Purdue's College of Engineering.

The technology is featured in the July 25 edition of Advanced Functional Materials.

"For the first time, it is possible to fabricate textiles that can protect you from rain, stains, and bacteria while they harvest the energy of the user to power textile-based electronics," Martinez said. "These self-powered e-textiles also constitute an important advancement in the development of wearable machine-human interfaces, which now can be washed many times in a conventional washing machine without apparent degradation."
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Dig

Giant parrot Heracles inexpectatus lived in New Zealand 19 million years ago

Jenny Howard
National Geographic
Tue, 06 Aug 2019 10:30 UTC
giant parrot
© Brian ChooThe giant parrot Heracles inexpectatus lived 16 to 19 million years ago in what is now New Zealand. Researchers estimate that this giant parrot would have weighed more than 15 pounds. Small wrens called Kuiornis that were also native to New Zealand at the time sit at the parrot's feet.
More than 16 million years ago in what is now New Zealand, a giant bird died and sank to the bottom of a lake. Preserved in layers of sand and gray-blue clay, the bones of this behemoth have since been unearthed, revealing what is now the largest parrot known to science.

Of the 350 parrot species alive today, the heaviest is the kakapo, a flightless bird also native to New Zealand. But the extinct parrot, dubbed Heracles inexpectatus, crushes the kakapo's record: Described from two fossilized leg bones, the bird would have weighed 15 pounds and stood roughly three feet tall.

That's tall enough to be "able to pick the belly button lint out of your belly button," says Michael Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia who is part of the team describing the find today in the journal Biology Letters.

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

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Galaxy

Can AI explain mysterious radio signals that keep hitting Earth?

Rafi Letzter
NBC News
Wed, 07 Aug 2019 08:59 UTC
radio bursts
Sudden shrieks of radio waves from deep space keep slamming into radio telescopes on Earth, spattering those instruments' detectors with confusing data. And now, astronomers are using artificial intelligence to pinpoint the source of the shrieks, in the hope of explaining what's sending them to Earth from — researchers suspect — billions of light-years across space.

Usually, these weird, unexplained signals are detected only after the fact, when astronomers notice out-of-place spikes in their data — sometimes years after the incident. The signals have complex, mysterious structures, patterns of peaks and valleys in radio waves that play out in just milliseconds. That's not the sort of signal astronomers expect to come from a simple explosion, or any other one of the standard events known to scatter spikes of electromagnetic energy across space. Astronomers call these strange signals fast radio bursts (FRBs). Ever since the first one was uncovered in 2007, using data recorded in 2001, there's been an ongoing effort to pin down their source. But FRBs arrive at random times and places, and existing human technology and observation methods aren't well-primed to spot these signals.

Comment: See also:

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