Science & TechnologyS

Sun

China creates nuke-powered fake sun that burns hotter than the real deal


RT
Wed, 14 Nov 2018 14:49 UTC
EAST artificial sun machine
© Institute of Plasma Physics Chinese Academy of SciencesEAST artificial sun machine
Chinese researchers pushing to find a major clean energy source have created an incredible artificial sun that can reach temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius - a heat so intense it makes the real sun seem merely lukewarm.

The earth-based solar simulator has reached mind-bending temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius, the research team announced Tuesday. Now, that's hot. For comparison, the real sun's core is about 15 million degrees Celsius.

The Institute of Plasma Physics, affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said it has been testing an "artificial sun," known as the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). The sci-fi-sounding contraption has been designed to replicate the way in which the star at the center of our solar system generates its colossal energy.
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Rocket

Russia unveils reusable nuclear rocket engine for Mars mission: 'Elon Musk is using old tech'


RT
Wed, 14 Nov 2018 17:24 UTC
russia nuclear rocket engine
© Facebook / ROSCOSMOSComputer model of the proposed nuclear engine.
A leading Russian space research center has posted a video of its nuclear-powered rocket, that will be able to land on Mars after seven months, and can be re-launched into space just 48 hours after landing.

"A mission to Mars is possible in the very near future, but that's not an aim in itself. Our engines can be the foundation for a whole range of space missions that currently seem like science fiction," Vladimir Koshlakov, who heads Moscow's Keldysh Research Center told Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

The institute, which is famous for developing the Katyusha rocket launched during World War II, has been working on what it says is a "unique" propulsion system since 2009. From past descriptions, it comprises a gas-cooled fission reactor that powers a generator, which in turn feeds a plasma thruster.

Comment: Russia places top priority on high-quality, widely available advanced education. In 2017 it graduated double the number of engineers as the US. It's no wonder it has overtaken the rest of the world in developing its space program.

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Microscope 2

How an outsider in Alzheimer's research bucked the prevailing theory (and he's probably right)

Sharon Begley
STAT
Mon, 29 Oct 2018 00:01 UTC
Robert Moir
© Aram Boghosian for STATRobert Moir prepares a microbial broth in his lab at Massachusetts General Hospital's Genetics and Aging Research Unit.
Robert Moir was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. The Massachusetts General Hospital neurobiologist had applied for government funding for his Alzheimer's disease research and received wildly disparate comments from the scientists tapped to assess his proposal's merits.

It was an "unorthodox hypothesis" that might "fill flagrant knowledge gaps," wrote one reviewer, but another said the planned work might add little "to what is currently known." A third complained that although Moir wanted to study whether microbes might be involved in causing Alzheimer's, no one had proved that was the case.

As if scientists are supposed to study only what's already known, an exasperated Moir thought when he read the reviews two years ago.

Comment: It seems like true innovators always have to fight to have their ideas heard (let alone accepted). But thanks to the tenacity of people like Moir, humanity can come to accept new models and overturn firmly entrenched dogmas to allow for new understandings.

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Cheesecake

Bread-crust bubbles: Scientists discover new type of volcanic ash

Jennifer Leman
Science News
Fri, 09 Nov 2018 12:00 UTC
lava bread-crust bubbles
© S. Quane and B. Andrews/Smithsonian InstitutionLAVA BUBBLES Researchers have discovered a new kind of ash, dubbed bread-crust bubbles, which are tiny spheres of ash no more than a millimeter in diameter that form deep underground.
Bread-crust bubble
Bred krษ™st หˆbษ™b(ษ™)l n.

Tiny, gas-filled beads of volcanic ash with a scaly surface.
Scientists have identified a new type of volcanic ash that erupted from a volcano in central Oregon roughly 7 million years ago. The particles are similar to larger bread-crust bombs, which form as gases trapped inside globs of lava expand, cracking the bombs' tough exterior. Bread-crust bubbles, each no more than a millimeter wide, have a distinctly crackled surface that can reveal secrets about how volcanoes erupt, researchers reported November 4 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Indianapolis.

The researchers had been sifting through other types of volcanic ash in the lab when they spotted the strange ash formations. Viewing the bits of ash through a scanning electron microscope revealed their crusty texture, indicating the gas bubbles expanded rapidly on their way up to Earth's surface, but did not pop. Analysis of the texture also indicated the bubbles' depth when they first exploded in the foamy magma. In the case of the Oregon sample, says volcanologist Ben Andrews of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., the frothy ash formed roughly 500 to 2,000 meters deep - a short distance, geologically - and erupted from the volcano at a rate of about 30 to 80 meters per second.

Comment: Perhaps this will provide some insight into the different kinds of volcanic activity that has occurred on our planet, and what we can expect should we start seeing this kind of ash again.

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Microscope 1

Autonomic nervous system directly controls stem cell proliferation, study shows

Kate Anderton
News Medical
Wed, 17 Oct 2018 07:41 UTC
brain
Somatic stem cells are microscopic workhorses, constantly regenerating cells throughout the body: skin and the lining of the intestine, for example. And to University of Illinois neuroscientists, they represent untapped potential.

"If we could find a way to target and control stem cell proliferation in the body, there could be potential medical benefits, including turning off the proliferation of cancer stem cells or inducing proliferation of somatic stem cells where we want to grow tissue," says Elizabeth Davis, doctoral researcher in the Neuroscience Program at U of I and lead author of a study that demonstrates, for the first time, that stem cell proliferation is directly controlled by the autonomic nervous system (ANS).

The ANS controls all of our unconscious functions: breathing, blood flow, digestion, and so forth. Its two major networks of nerve fibers run from the brain through the entire body, with neurons reaching into nearly every organ. These neurons release chemicals called neurotransmitters, which can affect target cells directly or indirectly.
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People 2

Biggest sex differences study ever confirms men more interested in systems, women more interested in people


RT
Tue, 13 Nov 2018 18:20 UTC
men women bathroom signs
© Getty Images / Julen Garces Carro / EyeEm
Scientists are set to stir up debates around sex and gender after publishing a study which found differences in the brain between the sexes; men prefer 'systems' while women are more interested in people and emotions.

Conducting the largest ever study of sex differences, interviewing some 650,000 people, Cambridge scientists said their study confirmed that, on a population level, men will be more interested by systems, while women will have higher degrees of emotional intelligence - the so-called empathizing-systemizing theory of sex differences.

Secondly, the scientists found that the brains of autistic people were more 'masculine' compared to what is typical for their sex, confirming, they argue, the extreme male brain theory.

The study comes at a time of heated debate around sex and gender norms, and the confirmation of the theories - described by some as 'neuro-sexism' - has risked controversy.

Scientists at the prestigious university, led by renowned clinical psychologist Simon Baron Cohen (who is incidentally the cousin of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen), interviewed 671,606 people, the majority of whom were from Britain.
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Galaxy

Heavy weather: Earth to be battered by 'dark matter hurricane' for next million years


RT
Tue, 13 Nov 2018 17:10 UTC
dark matter ring galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17
© Global Look PressHubble composite image showing the ring of dark matter in the galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17.
As California burns, the Gulf Coast rebuilds and Indonesia is still reeling from a tsunami, what else could possibly go wrong? Well, apparently a 'hurricane' of dark matter travelling at 500 kilometers per second (310 mps).

Scientists studying the nature of gravity and the movement of stars and planets discovered that the space between galaxies contains something else that we can't yet account for. Enter: Dark matter, an invisible and as-yet undetectable phenomenon believed to make up the bulk of matter across the universe.

While we have never directly detected dark matter, and we're not entirely sure what it is, we know 'something' must be there. Think of it like wind in the sails of a ship: we can see its impact on the world right in front of us, but it might be difficult to point it out directly.
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Snowflake Cold

NASA scientist: Lack of sunspots to bring record cold

Robert W. Felix
Ice Age Now
Mon, 12 Nov 2018 13:17 UTC
"It could happen in a matter of months," says Martin Mlynczak of NASA's Langley Research Center

"The sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age," wrote Dr Tony Phillips just six weeks ago, on 27 Sep 2018.

Sunspots have been absent for most of 2018 and Earth's upper atmosphere is responding, says Phillips, editor of spaceweather.com.

Data from NASA's TIMED satellite show that the thermosphere (the uppermost layer of air around our planet) is cooling and shrinking, literally decreasing the radius of the atmosphere.

To help track the latest developments, Martin Mlynczak of NASA's Langley Research Center and his colleagues recently introduced the "Thermosphere Climate Index."
Thermosphere Climate Index
© NASAThe Thermosphere Climate Index by Mlynczak and colleagues.
Displays times of Cold, Cool, Neutral, Warm, and Hot since 1940.
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Treasure Chest

'Poop vault' of human feces could preserve gut's microbial biodiversity

Tania Rabesandratana
sciencemag.org
Thu, 01 Nov 2018 16:31 UTC
Poop vault
© Christopher CorzettResearchers distribute plastic bowls to collect fecal samples from Hadza people near Lake Eyasi in Tanzania.
Whether in villages on the coast of Ghana or in the mountains of Rwanda, asking for people's poop is a good icebreaker, Mathieu Groussin says. "Everybody laughs," says Groussin, a microbiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. "Especially when we stress that we need the whole fecal sample and show them the big bowl."

He's asking on behalf of the Global Microbiome Conservancy (GMC), an effort to identify and preserve gut bacteria from different peoples around the world. Most microbiome research has focused on Western, urban populations, which typically eat processed foods and use antibiotics. The few studies of traditional peoples have found a far more diverse gut microbiome that appears to be linked to the absence of certain diseases.
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Chalkboard

Physicists herd electrons into a quantum fractal

Emily Conover
Science News
Mon, 12 Nov 2018 19:11 UTC
electrons quantum fractal
© S.N. Kempkes et al/Nature PhysicsA fractal called a Sierpinski triangle (right) has been fashioned in the quantum realm (left), shown in an image indicating the density of electrons on the surface of copper.
Electrons within the structure behave as if they live in a fractional number of dimensions

Physicists have created an oddity known as a quantum fractal, a structure that could reveal new and strange types of electron behaviors.

Fractals are patterns that repeat themselves on different length scales: Zoom in and the structure looks the same as it does from afar. They're common in the natural world. For instance, a cauliflower stalk looks like a miniature version of the full head. A lightning stroke splits into many branches, each of which has the same forked structure as the whole bolt.
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