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Biostasis: DARPA wants to 'freeze' injured soldiers on the battlefield

Rachael Rettner
Live Science
Mon, 05 Mar 2018 20:58 UTC
Human body
© Shutterstock
When troops are injured on the battlefield, time is of the essence: How long it takes service members to receive medical care is often the single most important factor in determining whether they live or die.

Now, scientists are looking at new ways to buy some extra time for battlefield injuries, but not by getting medical care to troops faster. Instead, the scientists want to essentially slow down time.

And they're taking a cue from tiny creatures called tardigrades.

A new program from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) - the U.S. agency tasked with developing new technologies for the military - aims to develop treatments that literally slow down the body's biochemical reactions, tipping the body into a slowed or suspended state until medical care is available. In other words, the program, called Biostasis, aims to "slow life to save life," according to a DARPA statement.
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Archaeology

1.6-billion-year-old 'breath of life' preserved in fossilized microbe mats

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Mon, 05 Mar 2018 19:11 UTC
fosslized air bubbles
© Stefan Bengtson
Fossilized bubbles formed by cyanobacteria some 1.6 billion years ago were found in the so-caled Vindhyan supergroup in central India.
A nondescript series of pockmarks in rock is actually the captured breath of microbes from 1.6 billion years ago.

The fossils come from fossilized mats of microbes found in central India. Most of the microbes are cyanobacteria, according to new research published Jan. 30 in the journal Geobiology. These ancient microbes, among the oldest life on Earth, were photosynthesizers - like modern plants, cyanobacteria turned sunlight into energy, exhaling oxygen as a byproduct. Their ancient exhalations oxygenated Earth's atmosphere beginning around 2.4 billion years ago, paving the way for life as we know it today.

Cyanobacteria also excreted minerals that hardened into layered mats called stromatolites. Stromatolites are found in a few places today, notably Shark Bay in Western Australia and in a remote patch of freshwater in Tasmania, but they once dominated Earth's shallow seas. Swedish Museum of Natural History biogeologist Therese Sallstedt and her colleagues studied some of these mats from a thick sedimentary layer called the Vindhyan Supergroup, which may contain fossils of some of the oldest animal life on the planet.
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Better Earth

South Atlantic Anomaly: The 'Bermuda Triangle' of space and what's going on there


The Daily Galaxy
Mon, 05 Mar 2018 10:24 UTC
Anomaly
© Unknown
"We're getting stronger evidence that there's something unusual about the core-mantel boundary under Africa that could be having an important impact on the global magnetic field," says John Tardano professor of geophysics and physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester.

Using new data gathered from sites in southern Africa, University of Rochester researchers have extended their record of Earth's magnetic field back thousands of years to the first millennium. The record provides historical context to help explain recent, ongoing changes in the magnetic field, most prominently in an area in the Southern Hemisphere known as the South Atlantic Anomaly.

"We've known for quite some time that the magnetic field has been changing, but we didn't really know if this was unusual for this region on a longer timescale, or whether it was normal," says Vincent Hare, who recently completed a postdoctoral associate appointment in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES) at the University of Rochester, and is lead author of a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters.


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Cloud Lightning

Knot the plan: Scientists unravel mysterious ball lightning puzzle...by accident


RT
Tue, 06 Mar 2018 13:34 UTC
Ball Lightning
© Heikka Valja
Artistic impression of a quantum ball lightning.
Researchers have shed new light on a decades-old mystery by finally creating ball lightning. The phenomenon is seen only rarely in nature and had never been made before in a lab.

The three-dimensional knot of atoms, which is called a skyrmion, was predicted theoretically over 40 years ago. It has finally been observed in a laboratory by scientists at Amherst College in the United States and Aalto University in Finland.

After the scientists created the knots, which are made up of magnetic spins of atoms in cold quantum gas, they realized it looked strikingly familiar to ball lightning, which is a dramatically long-lived type of lightning.


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Comet

Comet Chury: Younger than originally thought


PhysOrg
Tue, 06 Mar 2018 18:55 UTC
comet chury
© ESA/Rosetta/Navcam - CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
The final stage of a simulation, carried out by the authors, of a catastrophic collision between comets, showing one of the objects formed by re-accretion of debris from the collision, with a shape identical to that of Chury.
Comets which consist of two parts, like Chury, can form after a catastrophic collision of larger bodies. Such collisions may have taken place in a later phase of our solar system, which suggests that Chury can be much younger than previously assumed. This is shown through computer simulations by an international research group with the participation of the University of Bern.

In the computer simulations, the research team investigated what happened after two large comet nuclei violently collided together. "The calculations showed that a large part of the material accumulates in many smaller bodies," explains Martin Jutzi of the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern and member of the National Centre of Competence in Research PlanetS. The newly created objects have different sizes and shapes, among them are many elongated bodies, some of which consist of two parts, just like the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which the University of Bern studied in detail with the Bern mass spectrometer ROSINA on the Rosetta spacecraft.

Comment:

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Eye 1

A cure for blindness soon

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Tue, 06 Mar 2018 17:33 UTC
3 Blind Mice
© Fuse/Getty Images
Not for much longer, perhaps...
Hope for a cure for blindness may no longer be simply wishful thinking following a successful attempt by scientists to restore sight in vision-impaired mice.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from Fudan University in China report that light sensitivity was restored to blind mice following the implantation of nanowires made from titanium dioxide coated in gold nanoparticles.

A team led by Jing Tang placed the nanowires into the retinas of the mice, using them to reinvigorate damaged photoreceptors.
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Meteor

'Potentially hazardous': Asteroid larger than Golden Gate Bridge to shave past earth March 7th


RT
Tue, 06 Mar 2018 10:28 UTC
asteroid earth flyby
© NASA
An asteroid bigger than the Golden Gate Bridge is careering toward Earth at breakneck speed. What's even more alarming is that experts admit it's "potentially hazardous" to our world.

Astronomers have been following asteroid 2017 VR12 since it was detected in November last year. NASA says that the enormous space rock will shave past our planet in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Measuring up to 470 meters (1,542ft) in diameter the rock is travelling through space at 14,093mph (22,680kph). Because it will come so close to Earth and is big enough to cause significant damage, if it were to strike, the Minor Planet Center designated the asteroid as "potentially hazardous."

Comment: Quite a disturbing number of these space rocks have been coming our way lately:

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Network

MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon: Why BBG needs Tor & its influence over the 'anonymous browser'


RT
Tue, 06 Mar 2018 12:51 UTC
computer hacker
© Thomas Jentzsch / Global Look Press
It would be dangerous to say that Tor is only a tool for nefarious people. On the other hand, it's useful for protecting activists, whistleblowers, lawyers and journalists, former MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon told RT.

Popular so-called 'anonymous' web browser Tor may not be living up to its name after it was revealed that Tor received funding from US government agency the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and cooperates with intelligence agencies.

The free software is a "privatized extension of the very same government that it claimed to be fighting," claimed journalist Yasha Levine, who obtained 2,500 pages of correspondence about the project via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

RT discussed the revelations about Tor with former MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon.

Comment: Once hailed as "NSA proof", Tor software project exposed receiving almost 100% of funding from US government

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Info

127 million-year-old baby bird rewrites dinosaur story

Matthew Loffhagen
Outer Places
Mon, 05 Mar 2018 10:50 UTC
Prehistoric Bird
© YouTube
Ever since the release of Jurassic Park, it's been common knowledge that dinosaurs share more than a few similarities with birds.

As the years have gone by, more data has proven that, contrary to popular belief, many dinosaurs were covered in feathers, giving them a far more avian look.

What's even less well known, though, is that there were actually some types of birds in existence in the time of the dinosaurs, which looked very similar to the airborne fowl that we're used to seeing today. A new paper, published in Nature Communications, shows off the findings of an analysis of an adorable tiny baby bird that was born (and subsequently died) around 127 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous period of Earth's history.
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Microscope 2

Scientists uncover source of deadly 'jihadist disease' that arrived in Iraq and Syria the same time as ISIS


Sputnik
Mon, 05 Mar 2018 18:02 UTC
jihadist disease Leishmaniasis
© Pixabay
What some people call the "jihadist disease" unexplainably began to afflict the territories captured by Daesh (banned in Russia), causing its victims to rot and decay from within, starting with their faces.

Leishmaniasis, which had never previously been detected in Syria and Iraq, arrived in the countries at the same time as Daesh. The horrific disease normally spreads via sandflies, which are not endemic to this region. Now that most of the territories captured by the terrorists are liberated, scientists finally got the chance to study those infected to detect the origin of the pathogen, which is required to create a vaccine.

Comment: Could this disease have been cooked up in a lab as an experiment in bio-warfare? Given the chaotic and horrific circumstances in Syria, it's not easy to say one way or the other. If it is such an instance, it would be highly unlikely that Iran would release such a weapon on its neighbors given their close geographic proximity.

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