Science & TechnologyS


Cassiopaea

sPHENIX project to study "soup" that gave rise to the universe


Sputnik
Fri, 30 Nov 2018 15:11 UTC
galaxy
© Courtesy of the European Southern Observatory
Research conducted with the help of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) has shown that the original state of the Universe was a "soup" known as quark-gluon plasma, which is an almost ideal liquid.

Its properties are now being studied by the sPHENIX international collaboration involving the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (NRNU MEPhI). Prof. Gunther Rolland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who co-heads the sPHENIX project, told a collaboration meeting at the NRNU MEPhI about the course of the studies and how they could benefit mankind.

The quark-gluon plasma is a high-temperature state, in which the matter of the Universe existed moments after the Big Bang (after a period of its accelerated expansion, when it reached the size approximately equal to that of the solar system). There are several hypotheses that matter can exist in this state in the center of very dense stars.

Researchers from the sPHENIX collaboration have endeavored for the last 15 years either to confirm or deny these hypotheses, while trying to determine the properties of the quark-gluon plasma.

"We have discovered that this is the most ideal liquid in existence. But it is still unclear how this property is related to the components of quark-gluon plasma. As it follows from its name, it consists of quarks and gluons. But we are yet to clarify how they interact and if there are any new bound states formed of quarks and gluons that can produce such liquidity at the output," Gunther Roland, co-head of the sPHENIX collaboration, told RIA Novosti.

Comment: Plasma is also the driving force behind the structure of the universe, according to the electric universe theory. Although the scientists are starting from the unproven assumption that there was a big bang, perhaps this research will reveal more clues to the electrical nature of the universe. See also: Review: "Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection"

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Sherlock

2.4 million-year-old stone tools turn up in Algeria, further complicating the story of early-human evolution

Ed Yong
The Atlantic
Fri, 30 Nov 2018 14:00 UTC
Oldowan core
© Mohamed SahnouniAn Oldowan core from Ain Boucherit
To the untrained eye, the rock would have looked like any other. But when Mohamed Sahnouni pulled it out of the ground in the summer of 2006, he immediately recognized it as a chopper: a palm-size tool deliberately flaked to create a sharp cutting edge. It looked exactly like something from the so-called Oldowan culture, a style of stone tools that existed between 1.9 and 2.6 million years ago, predate Homo sapiens, and had mainly come from East Africa.

But Sahnouni wasn't in East Africa.

For years, he and his colleagues had been exploring the archaeological site of Ain Boucherit in Algeria's High Plateaus, just an hour's drive from the Mediterranean at the continent's northern edge. This part of the continent has been relatively neglected by archaeologists, and until now, the oldest artifacts from the region were 1.8 million-year-old stone tools that Sahnouni had found at nearby Ain Hanech. But what his team discovered at Ain Boucherit was much older.

After unearthing that first chopper, his team eventually dug up 252 other Oldowan-style tools. They also found 19 animal bones with long indentations that they interpret as cut marks, a sign of prehistoric butchery. The oldest of these tools and bones are 2.4 million years old. "It was a big joy to find them," Sahnouni says.

Comment: It's even more complicated than that: Story of human origins continues to be rewritten in East Asia

See also:

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Fish

Beijing plans deep sea AI base, and more, in the South China Sea

Stephen Chen
South China Morning Post
Mon, 26 Nov 2018 01:01 UTC
Qianlong III UUV robot submarine China
Qianlong III UUV robot submarine China
China is planning to build a deep sea base for unmanned submarine science and defence operations in the South China Sea, a centre that might become the first artificial intelligence colony on Earth, officials and scientists involved in the plan said.

The project - named in part after Hades, the underworld of Greek mythology - was launched at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing this month after a visit to a deep sea research institute at Sanya, Hainan province, by Chinese President Xi Jinping in April.

Xi urged the scientists and engineers to dare to do something that has never been done before. "There is no road in the deep sea, we do not need to chase [after other countries], we are the road," he said.


Comment: Pentagon pledges to continue belligerent operations in South China Sea


The idea of an outpost for deep sea exploration has been a favourite of scientists, engineers and fiction writers for hundreds of years, while the Greek allegory of Atlantis has inspired many "city beneath the sea" stories.

Comment: China is proving itself to be at the forefront of technology, and diplomacy, and has also recently unveiled its plans for space:

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Archaeology

Story of human origins continues to be rewritten in East Asia

Günter Bechly
Evolution News
Wed, 28 Nov 2018 20:30 UTC
Levallois stone tool technology
© Muséum de Toulouse [CC BY-SA 3.0]Levallois stone tool technology
In recent Evolution News articles (Bechly 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2018), I have commented on paleoanthropological discoveries that overturned the cherished out-of-Africa scenario. Now, the rewriting of the story of human evolution continues with undampened enthusiasm. In a special report series, "Rewriting human evolution," the journal New Scientist featured an article "Who are you? How the story of human origins is being rewritten" (Barras 2017) reviewing a lot of this modern research. This summer the article "Asia's mysterious role in the early origins of humanity" (Douglas 2018a) was appropriately added to the series, because indeed many of the revolutionary new discoveries were made in China and the Indian subcontinent.

Rewritings from East Asia

The more recent East Asian rewritings of human prehistory commenced some two or three years ago with the re-dating of two hominid fossils and stone artifacts, from Longgupo cave in Central China, as 2.48 million years old (Han et al. 2015), and the description of 2.588 million year old cut marks on bovid bones from the Siwalik Himalayan foothills in India (Dambricourt Malassé 2016, Dambricourt Malassé et al. 2016a, 2016b). These cut marks are so precise and required such a detailed knowledge of bovid anatomy that an anthropic origin seems the only possible explanation. These two findings are remarkable because they not only predate the previous oldest fossil remains of the genus Homo outside of Africa (from Dmanisi in Georgia about 1.85 million years ago), but even predate most of the oldest Homo fossils from Africa, except for a recently described single jawbone from Ledi-Geraru in Ethiopia (Villmoare et al. 2015), dated to 2.8 million year ago. Therefore, the new discoveries suggest either an earlier origin and migration of our genus Homo to Asia, or a prior migration of australopithecine hominins into Asia, or even an independent development of non-hominin tool-using apes.
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Gear

MI6 architect showcases hidden technology that 'combat terrorists and moped raiders'

Mark Blunden
Evening Standard
Wed, 28 Nov 2018 00:00 UTC
Argon device
Nowhere to hide: the Argon device on show today scans passers-by to reveal any weapons concealed under their clothing
X-ray cameras that can reveal hidden weapons under clothes and bike stands to deter ram raiders are among the next generation of "public realm" defence gadgets on show in London today.

More than 20 features have been built into an urban park - designed by the architects of the MI6 building - at the International Security Expo.

The Protecting Urban Spaces installation is the centrepiece of the two-day Olympia show, featuring concealed technology such as heat-seeking cameras.

The park's designer Neil Bennett, a partner at Marylebone-based Farrells, said London developers were increasingly requesting hidden defensive features. He said "subtle changes" to public and semi-public spaces were being built in to add security.

Comment: Welcome to the wonderfully-for-profit world of high tech public surveillance where our every move will be scanned and scrutinized in the name of 'security'. Health and privacy concerns be damned.

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Cowboy Hat

Chinese scientist attempts to justify creation of genetically modified babies amid ethics backlash

Rob Stein
npr
Wed, 28 Nov 2018 11:15 UTC
He Jiankui, gene-edited babies, GMO babies
© Kin Cheung/APFor the first time in public, He Jiankui, a Chinese scientist, defended his gene-editing research involving twin babies who were born last month. Other scientists rebuked him.
The scientist who stunned the world by claiming he created the first genetically modified babies defended his actions publicly for the first time on Wednesday, saying that editing the genes of the twin girls while they were embryos would protect them from contracting HIV.

He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, addressed hundreds of scientists gathered at an international gene- editing summit in Hong Kong that has been rocked by ethical questions swirling around his research.

Earlier, He surprised the scientists just as they were gathering for the meeting with his claim, which he outlined in a series of YouTube videos. With the announcement, He bypassed scientific norms of first subjecting his experiment to scrutiny by other scientists.

"First, I must apologize that this result was leaked unexpectedly," He told some 700 attendees. "This study has been submitted to a scientific journal for review."

He faced a skeptical, incensed audience at the 2nd International Summit On Human Genome Editing, which was organized to try to reach a global consensus on whether, how and when it might be permissible to create children from genetically altered human embryos.

In yet another unsettling revelation, He said that "there is another potential pregnancy" involving a gene-edited embryo, but that it is still at an early stage.


Comment: Who's your daddy? Scientist behind the CRISPR-Cas9 babies says another could be on the way


Comment: See also:

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Beaker

Who's your daddy? Scientist behind the CRISPR-Cas9 babies says another could be on the way

Isabella Steger
qz.com
Tue, 27 Nov 2018 13:51 UTC
CRISPR9
The Chinese scientist who claimed he helped create a pair of genetically edited twin girls with HIV resistance may have more such babies on the way.

He Jiankui, who was educated at Stanford University and Rice University, revealed today (Nov. 28) there is another "potential pregnancy" at a conference on human-genome editing held at the University of Hong Kong, where an auditorium full of scientists, reporters, and photographers-whose cameras were so loud that they sometimes drowned out his voice-grilled the scientist three days after his controversial claims first came to light.

On Sunday (Nov. 25), the MIT Technology Review and Associated Press both reported that He's experiments resulted in the birth of twin girls named Lulu and Nana. Of the seven couples taking part in his trials, the men are all HIV-positive while the women are not. The couples underwent in-vitro fertilization, in which a sperm is injected in an egg in a petri dish, and then after a few days a living embryo is planted in the mother's womb. In this case, however, there was a small tweak. After the egg was fertilized, He's team injected Crispr-Cas9, a genetic tool that can precisely target and cut a specific gene among 20,000 human genes.

Comment: Not as precise or safe as we thought: CRISPR genome editing can cause big deletions or rearrangements of DNA

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Satellite

NASA's InSight spacecraft lands on Mars, takes selfie after dangerous supersonic landing


CBS News
Tue, 27 Nov 2018 06:52 UTC
Instrument Deployment Camera picture
© NASA / APThis photo provided by NASA shows an image on Mars that its spacecraft called InSight acquired using its robotic arm-mounted, Instrument Deployment Camera (IDC) after it landed on the planet on Monday, Nov. 26, 2018.
Minutes after touching down on Mars, NASA's InSight spacecraft sent back a "nice and dirty" snapshot of its new digs. Yet the dust-speckled image looked like a work of art to scientists. The photo revealed a mostly smooth and sandy terrain around the spacecraft with only one sizable rock visible.

Another photo taken by its robotic arm-mounted camera after it landed on the planet shows a close-up of the spacecraft itself.

"I'm very, very happy that it looks like we have an incredibly safe and boring landing location," project manager Tom Hoffman said after Monday's touchdown. "That's exactly what we were going for."

A better image came hours later and more are expected in the days ahead, after the dust covers come off the lander's cameras.

The spacecraft arrived at Mars after a perilous, supersonic plunge through its red skies that took just six minutes.

"Touchdown confirmed!" a flight controller called out just before 3 p.m. EST, setting off jubilation among scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who had waited in white-knuckle suspense for word to reach across 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) of space.
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Meteor

700-foot-wide space rock with 62 RISK trajectories could strike Earth by 2023... But probably won't

Alexandra Lozovschi
InQuisitr
Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:00 UTC
asteroid
© Muratart/Shutterstock
A large asteroid could be headed toward us in the near future - barreling through space on a risk trajectory that might cause it to collide with Earth.

The news comes from the Express, which cites NASA sources, who revealed that the space rock could end up engaged in not one, but 62 different potential impact trajectories with our planet - each of them waiting to sling the asteroid toward Earth over the next 100 years.

Known as asteroid 2018 LF16, the space rock was last observed by our astronomers on June 16 - notes NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) - who calculated its orbit and its potential to become a threat to our planet. The calculations showed asteroid 2018 LF16 could collide with our planet on 62 different dates between now and 2117.

Comment: Check out SOTTs interactive map documenting fireball events over the past 5 years:



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Blackbox

Core problem: Human Genome Project reference is based on a single person and missing millions of DNA base pairs

Emma Betuel
Inverse
Sat, 24 Nov 2018 00:00 UTC
human genome project
The Human Genome Project, which began in the 1990s, was Homo sapiens' successful attempt to map out the entirety of our species' DNA. It produced the human reference genome, a finely polished collection of human DNA that's crucial for genetics research and genetics testing services around the world. Integral as it has been to the science community, two researchers at Johns Hopkins University have discovered that the reference genome is missing a piece or two - well, 296,485,284 base pairs of DNA, to be exact.

The reference genome is an essential map of human genetic material that is used as a basis for comparison. When we sequence our own DNA for insight into health, family history, and future disease risk, we chop up the sequence into lots of little pieces and compare stretches of it to the reference genome, looking for areas where we differ. The fundamental problem with this, the scientists write in a recent paper in Nature Genetics, is that the reference genome is based largely on a single person. Considering the myriad genetic differences among the 7.7 billion people alive today, that's obviously not ideal.

Professor of computer science and biostatistics Steven Salzberg, Ph.D., and Rachel Sherman, a Ph.D. candidate, make the case that this single reference genome doesn't capture the diversity of human genetics. Some populations, they add, differ too much from this reference genome. To make their case, they refer to the genomes of 910 individuals from twenty different countries, all of pan-African descent.

Comment: Seems scientists have been concerned about the incomplete genome for a number of years: Are There Missing Pieces to the Human Genome Project?

See also:

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