Science & TechnologyS


Broom

Crashed Israeli lunar lander spilled tardigrades on the Moon

Eytan Halon
Jerusalem Post
Wed, 07 Aug 2019 13:28 UTC
Tardigrade
© iStockPhotoA Tardigrade, also known as a water bear, is a microscopic life-form that can survive in the vacuum of space.
When Israeli lunar lander Beresheet crash-landed onto the Moon in April, watched live by millions across the world, the spacecraft left a rather serious dent in the lunar surface.

According to a report published Monday by American magazine Wired, however, Beresheet may have left more on the Moon than previously thought. The SpaceIL spacecraft was apparently carrying thousands of microscopic tardigrades, also known as "little water bears," which are among the most resilient animals known to man.

The tardigrades, only 0.5mm in length when fully grown, joined the lunar-destined journey as part of an initiative led by the Arch Mission Foundation, founded by Nova Spivack.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Info

Researchers find proteins that might restore damaged sound-detecting hair cells

Vandana Suresh
The Johns Hopkins University
Mon, 05 Aug 2019 19:24 UTC
Mouse cochlea with hair cells
© Doetzlhofer labMouse cochlea with hair cells shown in green and auditory nerves shown in red.
Using genetic tools in mice, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have identified a pair of proteins that precisely control when sound-detecting cells, known as hair cells, are born in the mammalian inner ear. The proteins, described in a report published June 12 in eLife, may hold a key to future therapies to restore hearing in people with irreversible deafness.

"Scientists in our field have long been looking for the molecular signals that trigger the formation of the hair cells that sense and transmit sound," says Angelika Doetzlhofer, Ph.D., associate professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "These hair cells are a major player in hearing loss, and knowing more about how they develop will help us figure out ways to replace hair cells that are damaged."

In order for mammals to hear, sound vibrations travel through a hollow, snail shell-looking structure called the cochlea. Lining the inside of the cochlea are two types of sound-detecting cells, inner and outer hair cells, which convey sound information to the brain.

An estimated 90% of genetic hearing loss is caused by problems with hair cells or damage to the auditory nerves that connect the hair cells to the brain. Deafness due to exposure to loud noises or certain viral infections arises from damage to hair cells. Unlike their counterparts in other mammals and birds, human hair cells cannot regenerate. So, once hair cells are damaged, hearing loss is likely permanent.
Read More...
Info

Children notice everything

Jeff Grabmeier
Ohio State University
Mon, 05 Aug 2019 20:44 UTC
Young Child
© Ohio State UniversityYoung children pay attention to everything -- even when they don't have to.
Adults are really good at paying attention only to what you tell them to - but children don't ignore anything.

That difference can actually help children do better than adults in some learning situations, a new study suggests.

Researchers surprised adults and 4- and 5-year-old children participating in the study by making information that was irrelevant at the beginning of the experiment suddenly important for a task they had to complete.

"Adults had a hard time readjusting because they didn't learn the information they thought wouldn't be important," said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

"Children, on the other hand, recovered quickly to the new circumstances because they weren't ignoring anything. I'm sure a lot of parents will recognize that tendency of children to notice everything, even when you wish they wouldn't."

Sloutsky conducted the study with Nathaniel Blanco, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at Ohio State. Their research was published online in the journal Developmental Psychology and will appear in a future print edition.

The results show that children tend to distribute their attention broadly, while adults use selective attention to focus on information they believe is most important, Sloutsky said.

"Distributing attention may be adaptive for young children. By being attentive to everything, they gather more information which helps them learn more," Blanco said.

In one study, the researchers had 34 adults and 36 4-year-old children take part in a learning task.
Read More...
Radar

6 underwater volcanoes found hiding in plain sight in Italy

Maya Wei-Haas
National Geographic
Fri, 02 Aug 2019 12:00 UTC
diver
© Emanuele LodoloA diver from the Italian army, Carabinieri, collects rocks from one of the newfound volcanoes, Actea, in February 2019. By studying the chemistry of the rocks, the team hopes to better understand the timing of past eruptions and the evolution of the volcanic system.
When the rocky mound lurched onto his computer screen aboard the R/V OGS Explora, geophysicist Emanuele Lodolo couldn't believe his eyes. Just four miles off the coast of Sicily, the team had stumbled on a previously unknown volcano with an old lava flow trailing some 2.5 miles westward across the seafloor.

"We were quite surprised about this, because we were really very close to the coast," says Lodolo, a researcher at Italy's National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics.

The edifice, named Actea, is one of six volcanoes recently discovered while scientists were mapping the underwater landscape of the Sicilian Channel, a heavily trafficked waterway off the southwest coast of the island. While Actea is the closest to shore, the structures were all found in the northwest side of the channel, within 14 miles of land, researchers report in the journal Marine Geology.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
People 2

Recursive language and modern imagination appeared simultaneously 70,000 years ago

Pensoft Publishers
Phys.org
Mon, 05 Aug 2019 09:49 UTC
lion-man sculpture
© JDuckeckThe lion-man sculpture from Germany (dated to 37,000 years ago) must have been first imagined by the artist by mentally synthesizing parts of the man and beast together and then executing the product of this mental creation in ivory. The composite artworks provide a direct evidence that by 37,000 years ago humans have acquired prefrontal synthesis.
A genetic mutation that slowed down the development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in two or more children may have triggered a cascade of events leading to acquisition of recursive language and modern imagination 70,000 years ago.

This new hypothesis, called Romulus and Remus and coined by Dr. Vyshedskiy, a neuroscientist from Boston University, might be able to solve the long-standing mystery of language evolution. It is published in the open-science journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO).

Numerous archeological and genetic evidence have already convinced most paleoanthropologists that the speech apparatus has reached essentially modern configurations before the human line split from the Neanderthal line 600,000 years ago. Considering that the chimpanzee communication system already has 20 to 100 different vocalizations, it is likely that the modern-like remodeling of the vocal apparatus extended our ancestors' range of vocalizations by orders of magnitude. In other words, by 600,000 years ago, the number of distinct verbalizations used for communication must have been on par with the number of words in modern languages.

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

Read More...
Heart

Potential heart issues could be detected by AI

Nick Carne
Cosmos Magazine
Mon, 05 Aug 2019 23:59 UTC
Heart Rhyhym
© zak00 / Getty ImagesAI may be able to identify patients with abnormal heart rhythm.
A brief, non-invasive test using artificial intelligence has been found to identify patients with abnormal heart rhythm even when their rhythm seems normal.

The study, which involved almost 181,000 patients, is the first to use deep learning to find signals in heart scans that might be invisible to the human eye.

Writing in The Lancet, researchers from the Mayo Clinic describe how they trained an AI model to detect the signature of atrial fibrillation in 10-second electrocardiograms (ECGs), with 83% accuracy.

Atrial fibrillation is estimated to affect as many as six million people in the US alone, and is associated with increased risk of stroke, heart failure and mortality.

It is difficult to detect on a single ECG because patients' hearts can go in and out of this abnormal rhythm, so atrial fibrillation often goes undiagnosed.

"Applying an AI model to the ECG permits detection of atrial fibrillation even if not present at the time the ECG is recorded," says co-author Paul Friedman. "It is like looking at the ocean now and being able to tell that there were big waves yesterday."
Read More...
Arrow Up

Huawei smartphone with own HongMeng OS preparing to go on sale


Global Times
Sun, 04 Aug 2019 15:46 UTC
Huawei technology
© Reuters/Aly Song
Huawei is busy testing its smartphone armed with self-developed HongMeng operating system (OS), and the phone could be put into the market at the end of this year, targeting low- and medium-end markets and priced at around 2,000 yuan ($288.24) to attract software developers and users to join the ecosystem, sources said.

Huawei is set to release the much-anticipated HongMeng OS, an alternative to Google's Android OS, at Huawei's Developer Conference on August 9 in Dongguan, South China's Guangdong Province.

The Chinese company said that the first batch of devices to be equipped with HongMeng OS will be the Honor smart TV series, which will be put into market on August 10, according to tech news site 36kr.com. In the future, the HongMeng OS will be expanded into other fields including autonomous driving, remote medical services and industrial control.

Comment: See also: Say hello to the Russia-China operating system

Read More...
2 + 2 = 4

SOTT Focus: The Probability of Evolution

Mandatory Intellectomy
Sott.net
Mon, 05 Aug 2019 22:35 UTC
protein folding
A ribosome. It might seem like a jumble, but if it's arranged in any other sequence, it wouldn't be a ribosome
How does evolution happen? By chance, we're told. Stuff just happens. Every step in evolution is an accident. The model we're all taught at school says that evolution happens through random mutations and natural selection. Natural selection is supposed to sort the good from the bad, so the only mechanism that produces any "new" information is mutation. This mutation amounts to random errors in DNA. (Yes, this may already sound bizarre, but that's the theory. You are the result of billions of years of accumulated errors. You were a bacterium back when you were flawless.) If these errors happen to be "helpful" (also a slightly bizarre concept), the organism survives and reproduces better than others, and passes the new genetic information on. As we know, most mutations are detrimental. The beneficial ones are rare. So if evolution happens only by chance and the good mutations are rare, we should ask ourselves, just how probable is evolution?

Comment: This article is the fourth in a series. For part 5, go here:

The Theory of Evolution is Anti-Science

Read More...
Music

By translating proteins into music, and back, researchers gain insight into their structures and create new variations


Science Daily
Mon, 05 Aug 2019 18:35 UTC
translating proteins and music
Want to create a brand new type of protein that might have useful properties? No problem. Just hum a few bars.

In a surprising marriage of science and art, researchers at MIT have developed a system for converting the molecular structures of proteins, the basic building blocks of all living beings, into audible sound that resembles musical passages. Then, reversing the process, they can introduce some variations into the music and convert it back into new proteins never before seen in nature.

Although it's not quite as simple as humming a new protein into existence, the new system comes close. It provides a systematic way of translating a protein's sequence of amino acids into a musical sequence, using the physical properties of the molecules to determine the sounds. Although the sounds are transposed in order to bring them within the audible range for humans, the tones and their relationships are based on the actual vibrational frequencies of each amino acid molecule itself, computed using theories from quantum chemistry.
Read More...
Moon

The Moon is older than scientists thought

Evan Gough
Universe Today
Wed, 31 Jul 2019 11:08 UTC
moon earth collision
The most comprehensive and widely-held theory of how the Moon formed is called the 'giant impact hypothesis.' That hypothesis shows that about 150 million years after the Solar System formed, a roughly Mars-sized planet named Theia collided with Earth. Though the timeline is hotly-debated in the scientific community, we know that this collision melted Theia and some of Earth, and that molten rock orbited around Earth until it coalesced into the Moon.

But now a new study, though not contradicting the giant impact hypothesis, is suggesting a different timeline, and an older Moon.

New research from scientists at the University of Cologne's Institute of Geology and Mineralogy suggests that the Moon is older than the giant impact hypothesis says it is. Their research is based on chemical analyses of Apollo lunar samples and it shows that the Moon formed only 50 million years after the Solar System, rather than 150 million years. This ages the Moon by 100 million years.

Comment: See also:

Read More...