Welcome to Sott.net
Fri, 15 Oct 2021
The World for People who Think

Science & Technology
Map

Document

Midi-chlorians or mitochondria? "Star Wars" hoax paper published in four journals

Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience
Thu, 27 Jul 2017 17:30 UTC
Star Wars midi-chlorians
© Lucas Film
"Star Wars" microscopic midi-chlorians were born on the fictional Wellspring of Life.
Mitochondria: totally real cell organelles that convert sugars, fats and oxygen into usable energy for cells. Midi-chlorians: completely made-up and widely derided microscopic life-forms that give Jedi warriors their ability to use the Force in the "Star Wars" movies.

See the difference? A handful of "peer reviewers" apparently didn't, as a paper that subbed in "midi-chlorians" for "mitochondria" got accepted into four journals this week. The paper mashed up lightly altered text from Wikipedia on mitochondria with Star Wars-related rambling, including the infamous monologue on the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise from "Revenge of the Sith."

The paper was a hoax written by the so-called Neuroskeptic, who blogs pseudonymously for Discover magazine. The point? To expose "predatory journals," which claim to offer peer-reviewed, open-access publication but in fact publish almost anything for a fee, according to the Neuroskeptic.
      Read More...
Microscope 1

Report: Human embryo DNA edited in the US for the first time


RT
Thu, 27 Jul 2017 04:01 UTC
DNA human embryo
© Getty images
A team of researchers in Oregon have become the first to attempt to create genetically modified human embryos in the United States. The team reportedly demonstrated they could eliminate diseases in offspring with CRISPR.

Led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a team of scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University used the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology to alter human DNA in single-cell embryos, according to a report published Wednesday on the MIT Technology Review.

"So far as I know, this will be the first study reported in the US," Jun Wu, a collaborator at the Salk Institute, told the MIT Technology Review.

The report claims that Mitalipov broke new ground "both in the number of embryos experimented upon and by demonstrating that it is possible to safely and efficiently correct defective genes that cause inherited diseases."
      Read More...
Cassiopaea

Signs of the times - New comet, Nova in Scutum constellation and Supernova in Pisces!

Bob King
Sky & Telescope
Wed, 26 Jul 2017 23:17 UTC
New Comet ASASSN1 (C/2017 O1)
© Rolando Ligustri
New Comet ASASSN1 (C/2017 O1) already glows aqua from carbon-laced gases. The comet is currently visible in the pre-dawn sky through modest-sized telescopes.
It feels like the FedEx guy just pulled up and dropped off a truckload of astronomical goodies. News arrived in my e-mail Monday about a new comet discovered by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN).Founding member Benjamin Shappee and team have 498 bright supernovae and numerous other transient sources to their credit, but this is the group's first comet discovery, ASASSN1 (C/2017 O1).

The 15th-magnitude object was caught before dawn on July 19th in the constellation Cetus using data from the quadruple 14-cm "Cassius" telescope on Cerro Tololo, Chile. Don't be put off by that magnitude. The comet has brightened quickly in the past few days; visual observers are now reporting it at around magnitude +10 with a large (7′), weakly condensed coma. Chris Wyatt of Australia relates that a Swan band filter does a great job enhancing the apparent brightness and contrast of the coma, a sign this is a "gassy" comet.
Comet ASASSN1's location
© Stellarium
This wide-view map shows Comet ASASSN1's location at the Cetus–Eridanus border south of Alpha (α) Ceti (Menkar) on July 26th.
Assuming the orbit remains close to the current calculation, Comet ASASSN1 will move northeast across Cetus and Taurus this summer and fall, slowly brightening as it approaches perihelion on October 14th in Perseus. It comes closest to the Earth four nights later, missing the planet by a cool 67 million miles. In a fun twist, ASASSN1 will slow down and spend the entire month of December and much of January within a few degrees of the North Star!
      Read More...
Saturn

Secretive Saturn: New Cassini data upends existing theories


Sputnik
Wed, 26 Jul 2017 22:27 UTC
Saturn
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
NASA's Cassini probe to Saturn has revealed that the magnetic field of the ringed planet has almost no "tilt" to it, which contradicts previous scientific wisdom about the nature our Milky Way neighbor.

Cassini has been diving into and back out of Saturn's atmosphere in order to answer a longstanding question about the planet: how long is its day? In other words, how long does it take the gas giant to complete one full rotation?

This seems like it would be an easy question to answer, but it's ended up being more complicated than most expected. Saturn is a massive ball of swirling gases that make it impossible to simply choose a point on the planet and track how long it takes before you see it again.
      Read More...
Rocket

NASA's mega-powerful rocket test a step closer with Mars missions on horizon


RT
Wed, 26 Jul 2017 20:20 UTC
NASA made another successful test of an RS-25 engine controller unit
© NASA
NASA made another successful test of an RS-25 engine controller unit - one of four engines that will eventually propel the world's most powerful rocket - the Space Launch System (SLS).

This is the third of the four engines to be tested and marks another significant milestone en route to the first integrated flight of the SLS deep space rocket and the Orion spacecraft, known as Exploration Mission-1.

The first unmanned flight for the SLS will take place around the moon in 2019. NASA's long term goal is to send a manned mission to Mars by 2035.
      Read More...
Info

Kaspersky Lab's CEO announces the antivirus software is completely free-of-charge


RT
Wed, 26 Jul 2017 19:49 UTC
Kaspersky Lab
© Vladimir Astapkovich / Sputnik
Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab has unveiled the global launch of a free version of its antivirus software.
"I've some fantastic, earth-shattering-saving news: we're announcing the global launch of Kaspersky Free, which, as you may have guessed by the title, is completely free-of-charge! Oh my giveaway!" company CEO Eugene Kaspersky wrote in a blog post.
The announcement came amid US allegations the company is vulnerable to Russian government influence, a charge Kaspersky has vehemently denied.
      Read More...
HAL9000

China developing 'pre-crime' artificial intelligence to catch suspects before they do the crime


RT
Wed, 26 Jul 2017 09:18 UTC
Precrime China
© Getty
In a storyline lifted straight from the Tom Cruise film 'Minority Report,' China is planning to use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict future crimes and prevent them from happening.

Police are teaming up with technology companies to develop artificial intelligence which they say will help them identify and apprehend suspects before crimes are even committed, according to The Financial Times.

      Read More...
Beaker

What could possibly go wrong? Scientists creating custom man-made DNA to change function of living cells and create new life forms from scratch

Malcolm Ritter
Phys.org
Wed, 26 Jul 2017 00:00 UTC
NYU researchers creating man-made DNA
© AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
Assistant research technician Henri Berger, talks about live yeast cultures at a New York University lab in the Alexandria Center for Life Sciences in New York, where researchers are attempting to create completely man-made, custom-built DNA. The yeast genome is like a chain with 12 million chemical links, known by the letters, A, C, T and G. That's less than one-hundredth the size of the human genome, which has 3.2 billion links.
At Jef Boeke's lab, you can whiff an odor that seems out of place, as if they were baking bread here.

But he and his colleagues are cooking up something else altogether: yeast that works with chunks of man-made DNA.

Scientists have long been able to make specific changes in the DNA code. Now, they're taking the more radical step of starting over, and building redesigned life forms from scratch. Boeke, a researcher at New York University, directs an international team of 11 labs on four continents working to "rewrite" the yeast genome, following a detailed plan they published in March.

Their work is part of a bold and controversial pursuit aimed at creating custom-made DNA codes to be inserted into living cells to change how they function, or even provide a treatment for diseases. It could also someday help give scientists the profound and unsettling ability to create entirely new organisms.

The genome is the entire genetic code of a living thing. Learning how to make one from scratch, Boeke said, means "you really can construct something that's completely new."
      Read More...
Beaker

150 years of biology upended by guy from Montana trailer park

Ed Yong
The Atlantic
Thu, 21 Jul 2016 11:56 UTC
Lichen
© Conor Lawless/Flicker
Lichen
Biology textbooks tell us that lichens are alliances between two organisms-a fungus and an alga. They are wrong.

In 1995, if you had told Toby Spribille that he'd eventually overthrow a scientific idea that's been the stuff of textbooks for 150 years, he would have laughed at you. Back then, his life seemed constrained to a very different path. He was raised in a Montana trailer park, and home-schooled by what he now describes as a "fundamentalist cult." At a young age, he fell in love with science, but had no way of feeding that love. He longed to break away from his roots and get a proper education.

At 19, he got a job at a local forestry service. Within a few years, he had earned enough to leave home. His meager savings and non-existent grades meant that no American university would take him, so Spribille looked to Europe.

Thanks to his family background, he could speak German, and he had heard that many universities there charged no tuition fees. His missing qualifications were still a problem, but one that the University of Gottingen decided to overlook. "They said that under exceptional circumstances, they could enroll a few people every year without transcripts," says Spribille. "That was the bottleneck of my life."

Throughout his undergraduate and postgraduate work, Spribille became an expert on the organisms that had grabbed his attention during his time in the Montana forests-lichens.
      Read More...
Comet

Comets from oort cloud more common threat to Earth than previously thought


Daily Galaxy
Wed, 26 Jul 2017 01:28 UTC
Comet
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
"Comets travel much faster than asteroids, and some of them are very big," said Amy Mainzer, co-author based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and principal investigator of the NEOWISE mission. "Studies like this will help us define what kind of hazard long-period comets may pose."

"The number of comets speaks to the amount of material left over from the solar system's formation," said James Bauer, lead author of the study and now a research professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. "We now know that there are more relatively large chunks of ancient material coming from the Oort Cloud than we thought."

Comets that take more than 200 years to make one revolution around the Sun are notoriously difficult to study. Because they spend most of their time far from our area of the solar system, many "long-period comets" will never approach the Sun in a person's lifetime. In fact, those that travel inward from the Oort Cloud -- a group of icy bodies beginning roughly 186 billion miles (300 billion kilometers) away from the Sun -- can have periods of thousands or even millions of years.

This illustration shows how scientists used data from NASA's WISE spacecraft to determine the nucleus sizes of comets. They subtracted a model of how dust and gas behave in comets in order to obtain the core size.
      Read More...
Amazon Smile
Revolt! T-shirts