Science & TechnologyS


Wine n Glass

Pathway to alcohol addiction discovered

Tim Sandle
Digital Journal
Mon, 31 Dec 2018 20:06 UTC
Oktoberfest beer festival
© Christof Stache, AFPA waitress serves beer mugs during the opening of the Oktoberfest beer festival at the Theresienwiese in Munich, southern Germany, on September 21, 2013
Researchers have been looking at the biochemical processes involved with alcohol addiction and they have succeeded in identifying the pathway involved. This could assist with the treatment of alcohol related addiction.

The new study, from Brown University (U.S.), has been conducted on the brains of fruit flies (which serve as the deal model for studying many processes in all organisms, including humans). The research reveals the pathway affected by alcohol. This pathway is the one that establishes rewarding memories and cravings.

Rewarding memories

The basis of the research was to help to understand how certain drugs, be that narcotics or alcohol, create rewarding memories in people, notwithstanding their neurotoxic effects. It was also helped that the research would help to provide an insight into addiction and treating the effects of alcohol abuse. A big challenge in treating addiction is the possibility of relapse. This can occur even after a period of abstinence. This is due to the 'reward memory' that is retained.
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Laptop

Hybrid qubits solve key hurdle to quantum computing


Riken
Fri, 28 Dec 2018 11:15 UTC
Qubit quantum device
Schematic of the device
Spin-based quantum computers have the potential to tackle difficult mathematical problems that cannot be solved using ordinary computers, but many problems remain in making these machines scalable. Now, an international group of researchers led by the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science have crafted a new architecture for quantum computing. By constructing a hybrid device made from two different types of qubit-the fundamental computing element of quantum computers-they have created a device that can be quickly initialized and read out, and that simultaneously maintains high control fidelity.

In an era where conventional computers appear to be reaching a limit, quantum computers-which do calculations using quantum phenomena-have been touted as potential replacements, and they can tackle problems in a very different and potentially much more rapid way. However, it has proven difficult to scale them up to the size required for performing real-world calculations.

In 1998, Daniel Loss, one of the authors of the current study, came up with a proposal, along with David DiVincenzo of IBM, to build a quantum computer by using the spins of electrons embedded in a quantum dot-a small particle that behaves like an atom, but that can be manipulated, so that they are sometimes called "artificial atoms." In the time since then, Loss and his team have endeavored to build practical devices.

Comment: See also:

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Bizarro Earth

Mysterious anomaly under Africa is weakening Earth's magnetic field

Peter Dockrill
Science Alert
Thu, 27 Dec 2018 07:21 UTC
south atlantic anomaly
© NASA Hubble Space Telescope/Flickr
Above our heads, something is not right. Earth's magnetic field is in a state of dramatic weakening - and according to mind-boggling research from earlier this year, this phenomenal disruption is part of a pattern lasting for over 1,000 years.

Earth's magnetic field doesn't just give us our north and south poles; it's also what protects us from solar winds and cosmic radiation - but this invisible force field is rapidly weakening, to the point scientists think it could actually flip, with our magnetic poles reversing.

As crazy as that sounds, this actually does happen over vast stretches of time. The last time it occurred was about 780,000 years ago, although it got close again around 40,000 years back.

When it takes place, it's not quick, with the polarity reversal slowly occurring over thousands of years.

Nobody knows for sure if another such flip is imminent, and one of the reasons for that is a lack of hard data.

The region that concerns scientists the most at the moment is called the South Atlantic Anomaly - a huge expanse of the field stretching from Chile to Zimbabwe. The field is so weak within the anomaly that it's hazardous for Earth's satellites to enter it, because the additional radiation it's letting through could disrupt their electronics.

"We've known for quite some time that the magnetic field has been changing, but we didn't really know if this was unusual for this region on a longer timescale, or whether it was normal," physicist Vincent Hare from the University of Rochester in New York said in February this year.

Comment: For related articles see also:

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Seismograph

Gastrograph: The AI that knows exactly what you want to eat

Amos Zeeberg
The Atlantic
Tue, 04 Dec 2018 14:58 UTC
spices
© Tomasz Bobrzynski
Can an app lead to better-tasting food by digitally measuring flavor?

Flavor, the conjunction of taste and smell, is not a sensation that yields easily to analysis. Unlike sights and sounds, which can be captured by cameras and microphones, there is no widespread way to measure flavor. What people experience when they eat has heretofore been largely ineffable and uncomputable.

"If I go to a farmers' market, I can take a picture of a really lovely mushroom, but I cannot take an exact 'flavor image' and show it to someone and have them understand," says Tarini Naravane, a doctoral student at the University of California at Davis who studies flavors. This goes right to an age-old philosophical question. "How do I know what I call red is what you call red? This happens far more in flavor than it does in the visual world," Naravane says. Flavor "is far more complicated."

But an artificial-intelligence app called Gastrograph aims to introduce a way to reliably measure flavor. If it succeeds, it will give the company that makes it a digital handle on food. And as with everything else, once flavor is digitized, it will be that much easier to understand-and control.
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Cow Skull

Gene-edited farm animals are coming...will you eat them?

Carolyn Y. Johnson
The Washington Post
Mon, 17 Dec 2018 14:10 UTC
cows
© Christie Hemm KlokVeterinarians at the University of California at Davis evaluate cows in November to see whether they are ready for genetically edited embryos to be implanted.
Cutting-edge lab techniques could improve animal breeding, but society may not be ready

Three cows clomped, single-file, through a chute to line up for sonograms - ultrasound "preg checks" - to reveal if they were expecting calves next summer.

"Right now. This is exciting, right this minute," animal geneticist Alison Van Eenennaam said as she waited for a tiny blob of a fetus to materialize on a laptop screen on a recent afternoon at the Beef Barn, part of the University of California at Davis's sprawling agricultural facilities for teaching and research.

The cows had been implanted a month and a half earlier with embryos genetically edited to grow and look like males, regardless of their biological gender.
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Sun

Ice cores could solve cosmic ray mystery

Ryan F. Mandelbaum
Gizmodo
Fri, 28 Dec 2018 04:52 UTC
An ice core from Greenland
© Eden, Janine and Jim, FlickrAn ice core from Greenland.
New evidence confirms that an influx of cosmic rays struck the entire planet around 994 CE-and it might solve the mystery of the event's origin.

Ice cores and tree rings around the world show mysterious increases in the concentrations of certain elements around 994 CE. The newest evidence originates in Antarctic ice, validating the prior observations and suggesting that the cosmic rays came from the Sun.

The Japanese scientists behind the new research analysed ice cores from Greenland as well as from two locations in Antarctica. They looked specifically at the concentration of beryllium-10, a radioactive but long-lived form of beryllium with one more neutron than the most common beryllium atoms. This element is typically produced when high-energy particles from space called cosmic rays strike certain atmospheric atoms, like oxygen. Ice cores can store a record of these atoms and their concentrations over time in layers, kind of like tree rings.

The researchers found a 50 per cent increase in the concentration of beryllium-10 in the Antarctic ice cores around 992 CE, according to the paper published recently in Geophysical Research Letters. They point out that there isn't much data elsewhere on the beryllium-10 concentrations, likely because the signal is so small that it could be hard to pick out of background noise or other terrestrial processes that could form beryllium-10.
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Info

'Brainless' amoeba solves college level math problem


IFL Science
Fri, 28 Dec 2018 18:34 UTC
Brainless Amoeba
© Royal Society Open Science
Unless you've studied math to a pretty high level, you probably haven't heard of the Traveling Salesman Problem. That's a shame because it's one of the finest examples available to the question we've all asked at some point - "when will I ever need math in the real world?"

The Traveling Salesman Problem goes like this: Given a list of cities you have to visit, what is the shortest possible route you can take that gets you to every city and back home again?

Students who are assigned the problem in school or college often receive a simple version, planning a journey between, say, four cities. That's not too hard; there are only three possible routes you can take.
The Traveling Salesman Problem
© IFL ScienceCan you find all possible routes? If you think there are six, take them backwards to check for duplicates.
But if we double that number to eight cities, there are over 2,500 possible routes we can take - and all of them need to be checked if we want to be sure we've got the shortest one. It's an NP-hard problem, which means that as we add cities to the list, the amount of time - and pain inflicted on students who are assigned the problem - increases exponentially.

Well, now those students get to feel even worse. It turns out the problem is so easy, a single amoeba can do it.
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Meteor

Earth enters densest stream of deadly Taurid meteor cluster this June

Joel Achenbach
The Washington Post
Tue, 25 Dec 2018 19:56 UTC
asteroid Bennu
© (NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/AP) By Joel Achenbach December 25This mosaic image collected on Dec. 2 and provided by NASA shows the asteroid Bennu, which is being studied by the NASA probe Osiris-REx. Bennu regularly crosses Earth's orbit and will pass close to our planet in about 150 years.
Incoming! A June meteor swarm could be loaded with surprises. Scientists studying a mysterious event over Siberia in 1908 call for a special observation campaign next summer.

On June 30, 1908, an object the size of an apartment building came hurtling out of the sky and exploded in the atmosphere above Siberia. The Tunguska event, named for a river, flattened trees for 800 square miles. It occurred in one of the least-populated places in Asia, and no one was killed or injured. But the Tunguska airburst stands as the most powerful impact event in recorded human history, and it remains enigmatic, as scientists don't know the origin of the object or whether it was an asteroid or a comet.

One hypothesis: It was a Beta Taurid.

The Taurids are meteor showers that occur twice a year, in late June and late October or early November. The June meteors are the Betas. They strike during the day, when sunlight washes out the "shooting stars" that are visible during the nighttime meteor shower later in the year.

Comment: Scientists should be held accountable for propagating such ignorance and wishful thinking. The threat of cyclical cometary catastrophes is very real, it has been well documented by peoples throughout history and it is clearly evident in the archaeological record: And to hear what the historical records have to say on the matter, check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Who was Jesus? Examining the evidence that Christ may in fact have been Caesar!

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Rocket

Russia's Avangard hypersonic glider travels at a whopping 30,000km/h


RT
Thu, 27 Dec 2018 15:54 UTC
Avangard launch
© Russia's Defense MinistryPublic missile launch of the art Avangard hypersonic glider.
An actual speed of Avangard, Russia's state-of-the-art hypersonic projectile, is probably beyond the general public's imagination as it can travel at more than 30,000km/h, Russia's Deputy Prime Minister revealed.

Little is verifiably known about the glider that was successfully test-launched by Russian military on Wednesday - essentially completing trials. Yet, Yuri Borisov threw some light on the secretive project, telling the Rossiya 24 TV channel that the latest test proved it can travel a whopping 27 Mach, which equals to over 30,000 km/h or 19,037 mph.

Outstanding mobility makes the Avangard one of the hardest targets, Borisov explained: "There's almost no missile that can shoot it down at such speeds."

It is extremely hard to predict the glider's trajectory, which essentially leaves any missile defense system off-guard. "Any missile defense becomes useless, it is very tough to detect and hit the projectile," Borisov told.


Comment: See also:

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Microscope 2

Strangest scientific discovery of 2018? Memory formation appears to be facilitated by the same mechanism as a viral infection

Charles Mudede
The Stranger
Fri, 14 Dec 2018 21:55 UTC
virus particle
© Artem_Egorov/gettyimages.com
According to two papers published in Cell on January 11, 2018, the making of memories and the processes of learning resemble, of all things, a viral infection. It works like this: The shells that transport information between neurons are assembled by a gene called Arc. Experiments conducted by two research teams revealed that the Arc protein that forms a shell, functions much like a Gag, a gene that transports a virus's genetic material between cells during an infection. For example, the retrovirus HIV uses a Gag in exactly this manner.

Scientific American:
Viruses are tiny infectious agents that invade cells, bringing foreign genetic material with them. Arc works in a similar way... Arc packages the raw genetic material [and] then visits the other side of the synapse in person. Effectively, Arc 'infects' other neurons with the raw materials of memory.

Comment: Perhaps viruses are the bridging element that explains the theory of panpsychism?

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