Science & TechnologyS


Beaker

What could go wrong department: Fungus genetically engineered to produce spider venom that kills mosquitoes

Walt Bonner
Fox News
Mon, 10 Jun 2019 00:00 UTC
GMO fungus kills mosquitos
© Brian LovettAn Anopheles gambiae mosquito with our transgenic fungus emerging from its body after death. This is a merged version of a natural light image and a green fluorescent image.
A new weapon in the war against malaria-carrying mosquitoes has arrived just in time for summer.

Researchers from the University of Maryland and the Research Institute of Health Sciences in Burkina Faso have figured out a way to genetically alter a fungus to produce deadly spider venom that kills mosquitoes.

The fungus, known as Metarhizium pinghaense, which is already deadly to mosquitoes even without the added venom, works so well that in one trial, it nearly killed off an entire population of the pest in 45 days.

"We are using a gene encoding a single toxin, one of the many toxins in spider venom," Dr. Raymond St. Leger of UMD Entomology told Fox News.

"The toxin has been thoroughly characterized by our Australian collaborator Glenn King and approved for use as an insecticide by the EPA, so this toxin has been confirmed to be safe for everything but insects."


Comment: An A-OK by the EPA isn't exactly comforting:

Comment: More on the 'war on mosquitoes' and genetic engineering:

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Bizarro Earth

Scientists find the weirdest magma on the planet below Bermuda

Lissie Connors
Physics Central
Thu, 13 Jun 2019 07:42 UTC
Bermuda draws in over 650,000 tourists each year with its luxurious pink sand beaches, clear blue waters, and thriving local art scene. Sitting just below the surface, however, lies a volatile history: The island is actually an ancient volcano. While we're not concerned of any future eruptions, the compositions of these volcanic rocks could provide key information about how volcanoes form, and what its like deep inside the earth. New research from a team of geoscientists suggests the magma that fueled this volcano formed in a rather odd place.
Magma
© Jenny Marvin (via Unsplash)
Over 30 million years ago, the island of Bermuda would have looked a bit different-where sunburnt tourists now sit sipping piña coladas, there may have been a hot, coursing river of lava. No humans were harmed during this volcanic episode, although that's mainly because humans did not exist yet (existing animals may not have been so lucky). While little evidence of this is exposed on the island's limestone surface, scientists can drill below to access Bermuda's deep volcanic history.

Back in the 70s, geologists from Dalhousie University and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory drilled a hole into the Bermuda platform over 2,600 feet deep, extracting tons of cylindrical volcanic rock samples. A few studies looked at these rocks, but since then, the core has been mostly collecting dust in a basement in Halifax, waiting for someone to stumble across it again.

Decades later, Sarah Mazza, a volcanologist at the University of Münster, noticed something peculiar while looking at these rocks under a microscope.

"I first suspected that Bermuda's volcanic past was special as I sampled the core and noticed the diverse textures and mineralogy preserved in the different lava flows," said Mazza.
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Microscope 1

Gene study suggests T. rex had an amazing sense of smell

Michael Greshko
National Geographic
Thu, 13 Jun 2019 21:26 UTC
Tyrannosaurus rex, dinosaur
© Reuters / Charles PlatiauTyrannosaurus rex kely had a sense of smell only slightly less powerful than that of a modern house cat.
Fresh analysis of modern genes and ancient brains backs up the notion that the meat-eating dinosaur had an especially powerful nose.

Talk about inhaling your food: The iconic predator Tyrannosaurus rex and its kin had some of the keenest senses of smell among all extinct dinosaurs, a new study finds. The work, published yesterday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, attempts to roughly quantify how many genes would have been involved in T. rex's sniffing skills, tens of millions of years after any traces of its DNA have decayed away.

The idea that tyrannosaurs had good noses is not new. In 2008, for instance, researchers showed that T. rex and its siblings devoted large portions of their brains to processing smell. But the new study marks the latest in a growing movement to correlate living animals' DNA with their bodies and sensory abilities, with the goal of better understanding the capabilities and behaviors of their long-extinct relatives.
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Snowflake Cold

Researchers gathering clues to mysterious, gaping holes in Antarctic ice


Sputnik
Thu, 13 Jun 2019 20:23 UTC
polynas
© NASAThe Maud Rise Polynya that appeared in the Weddell Sea in 2017 is larger than the state of Maryland
Enormous holes piercing the Antarctic winter ice pack have popped up sporadically since the 1970s, leaving scientists scratching their heads.

Scientists may have finally found an explanation for the enormous holes appearing in the Antarctic winter ice pack since about four decades ago.

With the help of floating robots and tech-equipped seals, they seem to be close to shedding light on the mysterious phenomena, the so-called polynyas (Russian for "open water"), that seem to be the result of storms and salt, new research published on 10 June in the Nature journal says.

Comment: Massive hole in Antarctica's ice appears after 40 years

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Microscope 1

New discovery about origins of multi-celled animals 'turns core theory of evolutionary biology on its head'


Science Daily
Thu, 13 Jun 2019 19:33 UTC
microscopic life
Scientists at The University of Queensland have upended biologists' century-old understanding of the evolutionary history of animals.

Using new technology to investigate how multi-celled animals developed, their findings revealed a surprising truth.

Professor Bernie Degnan said the results contradicted years of tradition.

"We've found that the first multicellular animals probably weren't like the modern-day sponge cells, but were more like a collection of convertible cells," Professor Degnan said.

Comment: In other words, these ancient multicellular animals were organized with much greater complex than predicted by evolutionary biologists. This finding sounds much more in line with Intelligent Design than Darwinian evolution.

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Satellite

India sets sights on its own space station around 2030


RT
Thu, 13 Jun 2019 19:49 UTC
earth
© Global Look Press / NASA
Not content with just sending astronauts into the cosmos, India is also planning an ambitious project to develop and launch its own space station, the head of its space agency has announced.

Dr Kailasavadivoo Sivan, Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), told reporters on Thursday that the effort will be an extension of its Gaganyaan mission, which aims to blast New Delhi's first ever astronauts into orbit by August 2022.

"We have to sustain the Gaganyaan program after the launch of the human space mission," Sivan said. In this context, India is planning to have its own space station.

A detailed plan for the station will be submitted to the administration of prime minister Narendra Modi. It is expected that, following the Gaganyaan mission, the proposed installation will be put into orbit around 2030.
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Eye 1

Samsung deepfake AI could fabricate a video of you from a single profile pic

Joan E. Solsman
CNET
Fri, 24 May 2019 17:50 UTC
face
Imagine someone creating a deepfake video of you simply by stealing your Facebook profile pic. The bad guys don't have their hands on that tech yet, but Samsung has figured out how to make it happen.

Software for creating deepfakes -- fabricated clips that make people appear to do or say things they never did -- usually requires big data sets of images in order to create a realistic forgery. Now Samsung has developed a new artificial intelligence system that can generate a fake clip by feeding it as little as one photo.

The technology, of course, can be used for fun, like bringing a classic portrait to life. The Mona Lisa, which exists solely as a single still image, is animated in three different clips to demonstrate the new technology. A Samsung artificial intelligence lab in Russia developed the technology, which was detailed in a paper earlier this week.
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Sun

'Superflares' could threaten Earth says study

Daniel Strain
University of Colorado Boulder
Mon, 10 Jun 2019 01:39 UTC
Superflare
© NASA, ESA and D. PlayerAn artist's depiction of a superflare on an alien star.
Astronomers probing the edges of the Milky Way have in recent years observed some of the most brilliant pyrotechnic displays in the galaxy: superflares.

These events occur when stars, for reasons that scientists still don't understand, eject huge bursts of energy that can be seen from hundreds of light years away. Until recently, researchers assumed that such explosions occurred mostly on stars that, unlike Earth's, were young and active.

Now, new research shows with more confidence than ever before that superflares can occur on older, quieter stars like our own-albeit more rarely, or about once every few thousand years.

The results should be a wake-up call for life on our planet, said Yuta Notsu, the lead author of the study and a visiting researcher at CU Boulder.

If a superflare erupted from the sun, he said, Earth would likely sit in the path of a wave of high-energy radiation. Such a blast could disrupt electronics across the globe, causing widespread black outs and shorting out communication satellites in orbit.

Notsu will present his research at a press briefing today at the 234th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis.

"Our study shows that superflares are rare events," said Notsu, a researcher in CU Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. "But there is some possibility that we could experience such an event in the next 100 years or so."

Scientists first discovered this phenomenon from an unlikely source: the Kepler Space Telescope. The NASA spacecraft, launched in 2009, seeks out planets circling stars far from Earth. But it also found something odd about those stars themselves. In rare events, the light from distant stars seemed to get suddenly, and momentarily, brighter.

Researchers dubbed those humungous bursts of energy "superflares."
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Robot

The future is here: Robot cops being developed to pull over drivers and issue tickets for offenses

Tyler Durden
Zerohedge
Tue, 11 Jun 2019 23:25 UTC
police robot
Engineer Reuben Brewer and SRI International, a nonprofit scientific research institute based in California, developed a police robot for traffic stops. This new robot is expected to act as a buffer between the officer and motorist during an encounter, reported The Washington Post.

The project began several years ago in Brewer's garage but has since been in development at SRI International's facilities in California. The robot, dubbed GoBetween, is designed to make it safer for both the officer and the motorist.
"The main advantage of a robot over a human is that physical danger no longer matters," Brewer wrote after being reached by email by The Post.

"The robot is purely defensive, so it can't hurt the motorist. If the motorist damages the robot, it's only money to replace it."

"People are more dangerous when they're scared, so the goal is to remove the possibility of being physically hurt so that they're less scared and less dangerous," he added.
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Jet2

China's new high-frequency surface wave radar can reportedly detect stealth craft like the F-35


Sputnik
Wed, 12 Jun 2019 16:59 UTC
f-35 fighter jet f35
© Reuters/FileF-35 fighter jet
Chinese military researchers have reportedly mastered a type of radar they say can detect stealth aircraft, which are designed to be invisible to normal radars. What's more, they say the radar is protected against anti-radiation missiles, too.

The lead researcher on a maritime radar team who developed the radar system, Liu Yongtan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering, told Naval and Merchant Ships magazine in an interview last month that their high-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) can detect stealth aircraft over the horizon and under any weather conditions.

It's actually not a new type of radar at all, but among the oldest that exist. However, militaries abandoned them in the 1950s as airborne early warning and control system (AWACS) radar became more popular and scientists struggled to overcome the shortcomings of HFSWR, which includes high signal-to-noise ratio and low system mobility.

However, Liu claims to have overcome all that.

Because modern stealth aircraft, like the US' F-35 and F-22, or China's J-20 and J-31, were designed to hide from the predominantly-used microwave radar systems, they have zero protection from long-wave radars, he told Naval and Merchant Ships, according to the Global Times. That same property also protects the radar stations from anti-radiation missiles, which are designed to home in on radar emissions and destroy them.
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