Science & Technology

Spiders eat astronomical numbers of insects keeping countless pests and disease-carriers at bay

Yahoo News
Wed, 15 Mar 2017 23:40 UTC

© David E. Hill, Peckham Society, Simpsonville, South Carolina
A jumping spider Phidippus regius preying on a bush cricket (Tettigoniidae). There are some 45,000 known spider species, all of them meat-eating.

The world's spiders eat 400-800 million tonnes of insects every year -- equivalent to the amount of meat and fish that humans consume over the same period, a study said Tuesday.

In the first analysis of its kind, researchers used data from 65 previous studies to estimate that a total of 25 million metric tonnes of spiders exist on Earth.

Taking into account how much food spiders need to survive, the team then calculated the eight-legged creatures' annual haul of insects and other invertebrates.

"Our estimates... suggest that the annual prey kill of the global spider community is in the range of 400-800 million metric tons," they wrote in the journal The Science of Nature.

This showed just how big a role spiders play in keeping pests and disease-carriers at bay -- especially in forests and grasslands where most of them live.

Comment: Scientist have discovered only one species of spider that feeds predominantly on plant food - the Bagheera kiplingi, a small Central American jumping spider that survives mostly on bits of acacia trees.

Conducting the Milgram experiment in Poland, psychologists show people still obey

Science Direct
Wed, 15 Mar 2017 22:08 UTC

© Andrey Kuzmin / Fotolia
The Milgram experiment tested people's willingness to deliverer electric shocks to another person when encouraged by an experimenter. While no shocks were actually delivered in any of the experiments, the participants believed them to be real.

The title is direct, "Would you deliver an electric shock in 2015?" and the answer, according to the results of this replication study, is yes. Social psychologists from SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Poland replicated a modern version of the Milgram experiment and found results similar to studies conducted 50 years earlier.

The research appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Comment:

Starquakes: Surprises revealed about the birth of stars in our galaxy

UNSW Sidney
Science Daily
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 00:00 UTC

A study of the internal sound waves created by starquakes, which make stars ring like a bell, has provided unprecedented insights into conditions in the turbulent gas clouds where stars were born 8 billion years ago.

The spins of about 70% of the red giant stars observed in the clusters were strongly aligned in a study by researchers including Dr Dennis Stello. Astronomers used this asteroseismology approach to work out the orientation of the angle of spin of 48 stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way.

"The results were unexpected," says study team member UNSW's Dr Dennis Stello. "We found that the spins of most of the stars were aligned with each other. Previously it had been assumed that massive turbulence would have scrambled the rotational energy of the clouds where the stars were born, and prevented this alignment.

Comment: See also:

Researchers show how to hack a smartphone using sound waves

John Markoff
NY Times
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 15:49 UTC

© Joseph Xu/University of Michigan
Kevin Fu and other researchers have found a way to take control of or influence devices using a standard component in cellphones and other gadgets

A security loophole that would allow someone to add extra steps to the counter on your Fitbit monitor might seem harmless. But researchers say it points to the broader risks that come with technology's embedding into the nooks of our lives.

On Tuesday, a group of computer security researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of South Carolina will demonstrate that they have found a vulnerability that allows them to take control of or surreptitiously influence devices through the tiny accelerometers that are standard components in consumer products like smartphones, fitness monitors and even automobiles.

In their paper, the researchers describe how they added fake steps to a Fitbit fitness monitor and played a "malicious" music file from the speaker of a smartphone to control the phone's accelerometer. That allowed them to interfere with software that relies on the smartphone, like an app used to pilot a radio-controlled toy car.

"It's like the opera singer who hits the note to break a wine glass, only in our case, we can spell out words" and enter commands rather than just shut down the phone, said Kevin Fu, an author of the paper, who is also an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan and the chief executive of Virta Labs, a company that focuses on cybersecurity in health care. "You can think of it as a musical virus."

3D Images provide first look at how DNA shapes itself inside cells

David Nield
Science Alert
Wed, 15 Mar 2017 13:53 UTC

For the first time, scientists have been able to model the physical structure of mammalian genomes from individual cells, giving us a unique 3D perspective on how DNA packages itself inside our cells.

Through the new technique, scientists can see how the arrangement of cell chromosomes (DNA strands) are designed to keep some cells active or inactive at any one time.

The procedure, which so far has been conducted on mice cells, could help us understand more about how animals grow, as well as how cell malfunction can lead to disease.

"Knowing where all the genes and control elements are at a given moment will help us understand the molecular mechanisms that control and maintain their expression," says one of the researchers, Ernest Laue from the University of Cambridge in the UK.

Swedish App may mean an end to physical contraception methods

Sputnik News
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 00:00 UTC

The "fertility awareness" contraceptive method - timing unprotected sex to coincide with less fertile portions of a menstrual cycle - is an enduring means of avoiding pregnancy, although far from effective. Now, a Swedish startup claims it has created an app to help men and women "perfect" the process, greatly increasing its preventative efficacy.

While reliable data on its modern usage is unforthcoming, it's safe to say women counting the days in between periods and avoiding sex when they're most fertile is a fairly well-known family planning method.

Ova (female eggs) only live for about a day, meaning if someone has sex after one expires and before another is created, they will not get pregnant. However, if someone has sex before they ovulate, they can get pregnant, as sperm can stay alive in a uterus for around a week.

NASA's Cassini detects heat of ocean on Saturn moon Enceladus

RT
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 23:04 UTC

© NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute
Bluish "tiger stripe" fractures can be seen ripping across Enceladus' south polar region.

Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft revealed evidence of heat close to the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The latest discovery shows the moon as being warmer than expected with an ocean of water closer to the surface than previously believed.

The excessive heat is prominent in fractures in the moon's south pole, known as "tiger stripes," dormant venting fractures as seen in an image of the planet taken by Cassini. A study published in the journal Nature of microwave radiometry observations by Cassini of the stripes revealed a heating in temperature a few meters below the surface.

The results indicate an ocean of liquid water believed to be beneath Enceladus' surface may be at a depth of a mere couple of miles, closer than previously believed.

Auroras affect sat-nav systems due to unknown mechanism

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 18:53 UTC

The leading hypothesis used to explain why the aurora borealis and its southern hemisphere counterpart, the aurora australis, play havoc with global positioning systems has been knocked into a cocked hat.

The spectacular auroras are produced when gas particles in the earth's atmosphere collide with charged particles emitted by the sun. The resulting plasma turbulence has long been assumed to be the reason that the phenomena interfere with Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). Now, research led by Biagio Forte of the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Bath in the UK has discovered that the predicted turbulence doesn't actually exist, meaning that an as yet unknown driver is causing the problem.

To conduct the research Forte's team collaborated with the European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association (EISCAT), setting up in northern Norway to observe and analyse the aurora borealis using radar and a GNSS receiver. As the radar team developed visual imagery of the phenomenon, the GNSS team looked at how it interacted with global positioning systems.

DARPA aims to develop platform to stop spread of pandemic in 60 days

darpa.mil
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 16:38 UTC

Over the past several years, DARPA-funded researchers have pioneered RNA vaccine technology, a medical countermeasure against infectious diseases that uses coded genetic constructs to stimulate production of viral proteins in the body, which in turn can trigger a protective antibody response. As a follow-on effort, DARPA funded research into genetic constructs that can directly stimulate production of antibodies in the body.1,2

DARPA is now launching the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program, aimed at developing that foundational work into an entire system capable of halting the spread of any viral disease outbreak before it can escalate to pandemic status. Such a capability would offer a stark contrast to the state of the art for developing and deploying traditional vaccines—a process that does not deliver treatments to patients until months, years, or even decades after a viral threat emerges.

"DARPA's goal is to create a technology platform that can place a protective treatment into health providers' hands within 60 days of a pathogen being identified, and have that treatment induce protection in patients within three days of administration. We need to be able to move at this speed considering how quickly outbreaks can get out of control," said Matt Hepburn, the P3 Program Manager. "The technology needs to work on any viral disease, whether it's one humans have faced before or not."

Recent outbreaks of viral infectious diseases such as Zika, H1N1 influenza, and Ebola have cast into sharp relief the inability of the global health system to rapidly contain the spread of a disease using existing tools and procedures. State-of-the-art medical countermeasures typically take many months or even years to develop, produce, distribute, and administer. These solutions often arrive too late—if at all—and in quantities too small to respond to emerging threats. In contrast, the envisioned P3 platform would cut response time to weeks and stay within the window of relevance for containing an outbreak.

Transposable genetic elements could put evolutionary theory into question

Cornelius Hunter
Evolution News
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 16:07 UTC

Transposable elements just don't make sense. These so-called "jumping genes" are segments of junk DNA that insert themselves at random in our genomes. That is the evolutionary interpretation of these genetic units, but how and why do they move about, and why don't they wreak havoc on the genome?

The answers to these questions, which have been emerging in recent years, is that transposable elements are exquisite, finely tuned, highly functional molecular machines that contradict evolutionary expectations. Evolutionists have a long, failed history of presumed dis-utility — after all, the world arose by chance, surely it doesn't work very well — and transposable elements are just one more example of this failed prediction. But the junk-to-hero story is only one of three ways that transposable elements utterly demolish evolutionary theory. The other two prongs in this Darwin-destroying triad are serendipity and pattern.

By serendipity, I am referring to the rather awkward findings, which are undeniable at this point, that if evolution is true, then it must have come about by highly complex, non-adaptive, mechanisms. From diploid genetics to horizontal gene transfer, alternate gene splicing, genetic regulation, epigenetics, mechanisms that cause adaptive mutations, and transposable elements, evolution must have bumbled along by luckily constructing fantastically complex mechanisms. Those mechanisms would provide no immediate adaptive value, yet somehow would persist and become vital agents in evolutionary history. Simply put, evolution must have created evolution in a most unlikely (astronomically unlikely) set of circumstances. That's serendipity, not science, and transposable elements heap more fuel onto the fire.

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Science & Technology

Spiders eat astronomical numbers of insects keeping countless pests and disease-carriers at bay

Conducting the Milgram experiment in Poland, psychologists show people still obey

Starquakes: Surprises revealed about the birth of stars in our galaxy

Researchers show how to hack a smartphone using sound waves

3D Images provide first look at how DNA shapes itself inside cells

Swedish App may mean an end to physical contraception methods

NASA's Cassini detects heat of ocean on Saturn moon Enceladus

Auroras affect sat-nav systems due to unknown mechanism

DARPA aims to develop platform to stop spread of pandemic in 60 days

Transposable genetic elements could put evolutionary theory into question

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