Science & TechnologyS

Snakes in Suits

Birth control gel for men being tested in Seattle

Paige Cornwell
The Seattle Times
Wed, 12 Dec 2018 21:03 UTC
male contraceptive gel
It takes two people to make a baby. But to prevent pregnancy, the burden has almost always fallen on the woman.

A new method being tested at the University of Washington aims to change that.

The UW School of Medicine is one of three sites testing a contraceptive gel for men, which works by reducing sperm production when applied daily on the upper arms or shoulders, according to researchers. If the trials are successful, the substance may soon be available to people seeking to avoid unplanned pregnancies whose options traditionally have relied on more than a dozen options for women, including pills, implants, shots, patches and rings, compared with just condoms for men.

"We are neglecting 50 percent of the population with our current methods," Dr. Stephanie Page, a UW School of Medicine endocrinologist and the study's principal investigator, said in a phone interview. "There's every reason for men to be more engaged."
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Info

Earth's magnetic field may be headed for a cataclysm says latest French study

Chris Mahon
Outer Places
Wed, 12 Dec 2018 22:55 UTC
Earth's Magnetic Field
© NASA Goddard โ€“ CC BY 2.0
We've reported on Earth's magnetic field before, including studies claiming that the planet's poles may reverse at any time and studies saying that Earth is probably not headed for a polar reversal at all. At the heart of these studies is the undeniable, millennia-old weakening trend in the planet's magnetic field, which, depending on your point of view, is either a temporary phenomenon that will eventually reverse itself (as it has in the past), or the harbinger of a cataclysmic breakdown of the Earth's entire magnetic shield and a subsequent flip of the magnetic poles.

The most recent study from the EDIFICE project, a geophysical research initiative based in France, claims we're headed for a cataclysm. According to Dr. Nicolas Thouveny, one of the principal investigators for EDIFICE: "The geomagnetic field has been decaying for the last 3,000 years. If it continues to fall down at this rate, in less than one millennium we will be in a critical (period)."
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Question

Dr. Wilhelm Reich: Scientific genius - or medical madman?

Alan Cantwell
New Dawn Magazine
Thu, 06 Dec 2018 14:10 UTC
Wilhelm Reich
In my medical research into the infectious cause and origin of cancer, I never imagined I would become enmeshed in the strange world of Wilhelm Reich. For two decades I had studied the work of scientists linking bacteria to cancer, but never once did I come across Reich's important experiments with the deadly "T-bacilli" that he discovered in cancer.

I first learned about Reich in 1982 from Lorraine Rosenthal who heads the Cancer Control Society in Los Angeles. Her mother worked in his laboratory in the 1950s, and Lorraine was sure his cancer work was related to my cancer microbe research. She recommended I read Reich's two most revolutionary books: The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life (1938) and The Cancer Biopathy (1948). These two volumes provide valuable and fascinating insights into the origin of the cancer cell and his discovery of cancer "T" bacteria.

Comment: More on Dr. Wilhelm Reich's research: Outlawed: "Important Medical Discovery" ... But Why?

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Cassiopaea

Supernovae may have killed off large animals at dawn of Pleistocene

Brendan M. Lynch
The University of Kansas
Wed, 12 Dec 2018 17:09 UTC
A nearby supernova remnant
© NASAA nearby supernova remnant.
Lawrence - About 2.6 million years ago, an oddly bright light arrived in the prehistoric sky and lingered there for weeks or months. It was a supernova some 150 light years away from Earth. Within a few hundred years, long after the strange light in the sky had dwindled, a tsunami of cosmic energy from that same shattering star explosion could have reached our planet and pummeled the atmosphere, touching off climate change and triggering mass extinctions of large ocean animals, including a shark species that was the size of a school bus.

The effects of such a supernova - and possibly more than one - on large ocean life are detailed in a paper just published in Astrobiology.

"I've been doing research like this for about 15 years, and always in the past it's been based on what we know generally about the universe - that these supernovae should have affected Earth at some time or another," said lead author Adrian Melott, professor emeritus of physics & astronomy at the University of Kansas. "This time, it's different. We have evidence of nearby events at a specific time. We know about how far away they were, so we can actually compute how that would have affected the Earth and compare it to what we know about what happened at that time - it's much more specific."

Melott said recent papers revealing ancient seabed deposits of iron-60 isotopes provided the "slam-dunk" evidence of the timing and distance of supernovae.

"As far back as the mid-1990s, people said, 'Hey, look for iron-60. It's a telltale because there's no other way for it to get to Earth but from a supernova.' Because iron-60 is radioactive, if it was formed with the Earth it would be long gone by now. So, it had to have been rained down on us. There's some debate about whether there was only one supernova really nearby or a whole chain of them. I kind of favor a combo of the two - a big chain with one that was unusually powerful and close. If you look at iron-60 residue, there's a huge spike 2.6 million years ago, but there's excess scattered clear back 10 million years."

Melott's co-authors were Franciole Marinho of Universidade Federal de Saฬƒo Carlos in Brazil and Laura Paulucci of Universidade Federal do ABC, also in Brazil.
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Cut

Russian cosmonauts perform space surgery to take samples from mysterious Soyuz hole


RT
Wed, 12 Dec 2018 15:44 UTC
soyuz
© VK / Roscosmos
During a seven-hour spacewalk, Russian cosmonauts have ripped off sections of the Soyuz spacecraft insulation to locate and take samples from a small hole that caused an air leak from the International Space Station in August.

Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Oleg Kononenko performed the one-of-a-kind seven-hour spacewalk to unseal the thermal lining covering the hole that appeared on Soyuz MS-09. It was patched-up by a Russian crew using a sealant repair kit back in August.

"Slashing the spacecraft with a knife makes my heart bleed," Kononenko told the Mission Control Center (MCC) as he cut through the insulation layer to find a tiny hole behind the cover. "Yes, we also observe it [the hole]," an MCC officer, responded.

Comment: Previously:

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Display

Progressive creationists denying biology: A review of the film 'A Dangerous Idea'

Toby Young
Quillette
Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:01 UTC
richard lwontin
In a recent article for Quillette, Colin Wright argued that left-wing scientific denialism poses a greater threat to academic freedom than right-wing scientific denialism. In the past, evolutionary biologists could dispute the claims of creationists and advocates of Intelligent Design without jeopardizing their careers. But the same cannot be said of scientists who publicly dissent from progressive dogma when it comes to, say, the biology of group differences.

The reason, according to Wright, is because the Christian Evangelicals who denied the basic principles of evolutionary biology held no power in academia, while their secular equivalents are often professors, department chairs, deans, administrators, college presidents, journal editors, and so on. Indeed, the new denialist orthodoxy when it comes to biological sex - that it is "assigned" at birth, rather than observed and recorded - is now the official view of the scientific establishment, having been embraced by Scientific American and Nature. As Jordan Peterson wrote in The National Post two years ago: "Look out evolutionary biologists. The PC police are coming for you."

Comment: Much like the creationists on the right, the leftist attack on biological science is completely without merit. You can't deny reality simply because you fear how people may interpret and use the information. It's essentially making the choice to live in a fantasy world, entirely constructed to keep out any uncomfortable truths. Any individual not at least attempting to look at reality objectively is essentially doomed.

See also:

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Better Earth

Arctic mega bridge opens to traffic in Norway... with thanks to China


RT
Wed, 12 Dec 2018 09:11 UTC
Halogaland Bridge
© Global Look Press / XinhuaHalogaland Bridge
Norway has officially opened the longest suspension bridge above the Arctic Circle. The 1.5 kilometer span was built in cooperation with a Chinese company.

Chinese workers, locals and officials took part in the opening ceremony of the new Norwegian super bridge, dubbed Halogaland, near the northern port city of Narvik. With pylons soaring 180 feet into the clouds, the bridge crosses the Rombaken fjord and boasts a free span of 1,145 meters. With a length of 1,533 meters, it is the longest suspension bridge ever built above the Arctic Circle.

Built with assistance of China's Sichuan Road and Bridge Group (SRBG), it provides a significant shortcut on the European route E6 highway - the main north-south road through Norway and the west coast of Sweden. The Chinese firm delivered the steel constructions and was responsible for the mounting of the bridge, which took more than five years to build.

Comment: It's quite symbolic that while the West bombs bridges in the Middle East, and its own become unsafe due to lack of maintenance, China and Russia are building them at home and abroad in collaborative projects:

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Telescope

NASA's OSIRIS-REx has found signs of water on asteroid Bennu

Lisa Grossman
ScienceNews
Mon, 10 Dec 2018 06:13 UTC
Bennu water
© University of Arizona/Goddard/NASAROUGH TERRAIN The boulder-strewn asteroid Bennu, shown here in a mosaic of images taken by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on December 2, is full of water-rich minerals.
The craft will spend 2019 scoping out the best spot to grab a handful of space rock dust.

As the asteroid Bennu comes into sharper focus, planetary scientists are seeing signs of water locked up in the asteroid's rocks, NASA team members announced December 10.

"It's one of the things we were hoping to find," team member Amy Simon of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a news conference at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington, D.C. "This is evidence of liquid water in Bennu's past. This is really big news."

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft just arrived at Bennu on December 3 (SN Online: 12/3/18). Over the next year, the team will search for the perfect spot on the asteroid to grab a handful of dust and return it to Earth. "Very early in the mission, we've found out Bennu is going to provide the type of material we want to return," said principal investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona in Tucson. "It definitely looks like we've gone to the right place."

OSIRIS-REx's onboard spectrometers measure the chemical signatures of various minerals based on the wavelengths of light they emit and absorb. The instruments were able to see signs of hydrated minerals on Bennu's surface about a month before the spacecraft arrived at the asteroid, and the signal has remained strong all over the asteroid's surface as the spacecraft approached, Simon said. Those minerals can form only in the presence of liquid water, and suggest that Bennu had a hydrothermal system in its past.

Comment: See also: NASA's Osiris-Rex arrives at asteroid Bennu after a two-year journey

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Blue Planet

Life in Deep Earth holds 15-23B tons of carbon - hundreds of times more than humans

Terry Collins, Katie Pratt
Deep Carbon Observatory
Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00 UTC
Deep earth life
© Gaetan Borgonie/Katrin Knittel-MPI Bremen/Greg Wanger, Gordon Southam/JAMSTEC1) Nematode; 2) Archaea cell cluster; 3) Candidatus Desulforudis; 4) Methanobacterium. Descriptions below.
Deep Carbon Observatory collaborators, exploring the 'Galapagos of the deep,' add to what's known, unknown, and unknowable about Earth's most pristine ecosystem. Bacteria, archaea, and other microbes - some of them zombies -exist even in deepest known subsurface, and they're weirder than their surface counterparts. ~70% of Earth's bacteria and archaea live underground. Earth's deep life suggests microbes might inhabit the subsurface of other planets.

Barely living "zombie" bacteria and other forms of life constitute an immense amount of carbon deep within Earth's subsurface - 245 to 385 times greater than the carbon mass of all humans on the surface, according to scientists nearing the end of a 10-year international collaboration to reveal Earth's innermost secrets.

On the eve of the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting, scientists with the Deep Carbon Observatory today reported several transformational discoveries, including how much and what kinds of life exist in the deep subsurface under the greatest extremes of pressure, temperature, and low energy and nutrient availability.

Drilling 2.5 kilometers into the seafloor, and sampling microbes from continental mines and boreholes more than 5 km deep, the team has used the results to construct models of the ecosystem deep within the planet.

With insights from now hundreds of sites under the continents and seas, they have approximated the size of the deep biosphere - 2 to 2.3 billion cubic km (almost twice the volume of all oceans) - as well as the carbon mass of deep life: 15 to 23[1] billion tonnes (an average of at least 7.5 tonnes of carbon per cu km subsurface).

The work also helps determine types of extraterrestrial environments that could support life.

Among many key discoveries and insights:

Comment: This is pretty amazing, although it is not new. There are at least two important points to make in relation to it.

1) It's almost certain that this kind of life exists on many other planets, including those with temperatures too hot or too cold for life on the surface. Therefore, "alien life on other planets" is a 'nobrainer'.

2) These microbes occupying a vast area under our feet are, according to Cornell professor emeritus of astronomy Thomas Gold, the source of natural oil and gas.

Writes Gold:

"In my view, hydrocarbons are not biology reworked by geology (as the traditional view would hold) but rather geology reworked by biology. In other words, hydrocarbons are primordial, but as they upwell into Earth's outer crust microbial life invades."

Reviewing the book, Publishers Weekly noted that "if Gold is right, the planet's oil reserves are far larger than policy-makers expect... moreover, astronomers hoping for extraterrestrial contacts might want to stop seeking life on other planets and inquire about life in them."

The book was published in 1999 based on a theory from 20 years prior.

news.cornell.edu/stories/1999/01/gold-finds-our-deep-hot-biosphere-teeming-life-and-controversy

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Brain

Findings rewrite the thalamus's role in consciousness


Technology Networks
Thu, 29 Nov 2018 17:31 UTC
thalamus neurologist
© University of IowaUniversity of Iowa neurologist Aaron Boes, MD, PhD.
With a finding that will "rewrite neuroanatomy textbooks," University of Iowa neurologist Aaron Boes, MD, PhD, and his colleagues show that the thalamus is not a critical part of the brain pathway involved in keeping humans awake and conscious.

The finding upends decades of medical dogma that placed the thalamus as a critical relay point for the signals originating in the brainstem and ending in the cortex that maintain consciousness (wakefulness). The new study, published online Nov. 12 as a preprint in the Annals of Neurology, provides the first systematic evidence from humans that questions the routing of this critical pathway. The study evaluates patients with strokes of the thalamus and shows that even extensive injury to the thalamus does not severely impair consciousness.

"Beyond just challenging a long-standing dogma that has persisted for decades, what's really exciting about this finding is that it has implications for clinical care for patients," says Boes, UI assistant professor of pediatrics and neurology and a member of the Iowa Neuroscience Institute. "Based on the old understanding, people have tried to stimulate the thalamus for disorders of consciousness without much success. Our results suggest that was the wrong target to go after and that the hypothalamus or basal forebrain would be better targets."
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