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Butterfly

The intelligent design in birds, insects inspire aeronautic research and more


Evolution News
Tue, 18 Feb 2020 17:53 UTC
barn owl flight
© Mark Weinmeister
A barn owl in flight
Birds provided the initial inspiration for the Wright brothers' flyers, and yet their first aeroplanes did not try to imitate flapping flight. Technology has advanced considerably over the last century, and yet still jet and airplane wings are mostly immobile. Can we learn more from the flapping flight of birds? And do the same processes work at the small scale of small insects? How do bats fly so well with completely different wings? Here are some of the things engineers are learning from biologists who study animal flight.

Hummingbirds

Everyone's favorite garden bird has revealed another trick among its unique flying capabilities: the aerial roll. A paper by Ravi et al. in Current Biology describes how "Modulation of Flight Muscle Recruitment and Wing Rotation Enables Hummingbirds to Mitigate Aerial Roll Perturbations." To perform the roll maneuver — which involves a challenging continuous perturbation — the hummer must alter its wing tip trajectory (from a figure 8 to an oval), alter its tail fan position and use different muscles on its left and right wings. This must be an instinctive ability, because young birds were seen to master it on the first attempt.
The birds also augmented flight stabilization by adjusting body and tail posture to expose greater surface area to upwash than to the undesirable downwash. Our results provide insight into the remarkable capacity of hummingbirds to maintain flight control, as well as bio-inspiration for simple yet effective control strategies that could allow robotic fliers to contend with unfamiliar and challenging real-world aerial conditions. [Emphasis added.]
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Bulb

University of Massachusetts scientists create electricity out of thin air


Science Daily
Mon, 17 Feb 2020 17:49 UTC
water bubbles

Graphic image of a thin film of protein nanowires generating electricity from atmospheric humidity.
Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a device that uses a natural protein to create electricity from moisture in the air, a new technology they say could have significant implications for the future of renewable energy, climate change and in the future of medicine.

As reported today in Nature, the laboratories of electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovley at UMass Amherst have created a device they call an "Air-gen" or air-powered generator, with electrically conductive protein nanowires produced by the microbe Geobacter. The Air-gen connects electrodes to the protein nanowires in such a way that electrical current is generated from the water vapor naturally present in the atmosphere.

"We are literally making electricity out of thin air," says Yao. "The Air-gen generates clean energy 24/7." Lovely, who has advanced sustainable biology-based electronic materials over three decades, adds, "It's the most amazing and exciting application of protein nanowires yet."

The new technology developed in Yao's lab is non-polluting, renewable and low-cost. It can generate power even in areas with extremely low humidity such as the Sahara Desert. It has significant advantages over other forms of renewable energy including solar and wind, Lovley says, because unlike these other renewable energy sources, the Air-gen does not require sunlight or wind, and "it even works indoors."
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Map

The lost continent of Zealandia hides clues to the Ring of Fire's birth

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Tue, 11 Feb 2020 06:52 UTC
A topographic map of Zealandia, a sunken continent that includes New Zealand.
© NOAA
A topographic map of Zealandia, a sunken continent that includes New Zealand.
The hidden undersea continent of Zealandia underwent an upheaval at the time of the birth of the Pacific Ring of Fire.

Zealandia is a chunk of continental crust next door to Australia. It's almost entirely beneath the ocean, with the exception of a few protrusions, like New Zealand and New Caledonia. But despite its undersea status, Zealandia is not made of magnesium- and iron-rich oceanic crust. Instead, it is composed of less-dense continental crust. The existence of this odd geology has been known since the 1970s, but only more recently has Zealandia been more closely explored. In 2017, geoscientists reported in the journal GSA Today that Zealandia qualifies as a continent in its own right, thanks to its structure and its clear separation from the Australian continent.

Now, a new analysis of chunks of Zealandia drilled from beneath the ocean floor in 2017 reveals that this continent underwent a paroxysm of change between 35 million and 50 million years ago. As the continental collision process known as subduction started in the western Pacific, parts of northern Zealandia rose by as much as 1.8 miles (3 kilometers), and other sections dropped in elevation by a similar amount. (Subduction occurs when one tectonic plate collides with another and sinks underneath it.)

"These dramatic changes in northern Zealandia, an area about the size of India, coincided with buckling of rock layers (known as strata) and the formation of underwater volcanoes throughout the western Pacific," study co-authors Rupert Sutherland, a geophysicist at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, and Gerald Dickens of Rice University in Texas, wrote in The Conversation.

It was, in a nutshell, the birth of the Ring of Fire, the arc of subduction zones that circles the Pacific. The Ring of Fire's tectonic activity is accompanied by relatively frequent earthquakes and regions of volcanic activity.

"One of the amazing things about our observations is that they reveal the early signs of the Ring of Fire were almost simultaneous throughout the western Pacific," Sutherland said in a statement.

Comment: What are lost continents and why are we discovering so many?

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Nebula

Is Betelgeuse dying? Star continues to get dimmer and dimmer


Sputnik News
Mon, 17 Feb 2020 19:10 UTC
Betelgeuse Plume
© CC BY 4.0 / ESO/L. Calçada
A plume on Betelgeuse (artist’s impression)
Betelgeuse, the giant star about 1,400 times the size of our Sun situated 'just' 650 light years from Earth, is ordinarily one of the most easily-observable stars in the night sky, and can normally be spotted even without a telescope with the naked eye. But now it's acting weird.

Astronomers at the European South Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Cerro Paranal, northwestern Chile have confirmed scientists' recent concerns that Betelgeuse, the Orion constellation red supergiant known for its varying visibility from Earth-based telescopes, is continuing to get dimmer and dimmer.

According to the latest observations, the star recently surpassed an apparent magnitude of 1.56 (where a value of 0.0 is 100% brightness relative to the reference star Vega) and is continuing to fade, with its brightness said to be "unprecedentedly" low following decades of observations.

Comment: Latest on Betelgeuse, discovery of a new supernova and new comet Iwamoto

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Info

Electricity 'out of thin air' developed by scientist

Nick Carne
Cosmos Magazine
Mon, 17 Feb 2020 18:51 UTC
Protein Nanowires
© UMASS AMHERST/YAO AND LOVLEY LABS
Graphic image of a thin film of protein nanowires generating electricity from atmospheric humidity.
Scientists in the US have developed a device they say uses a natural protein to create electricity from moisture in the air.

Writing in the journal Nature, electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovley, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, introduce the Air-gen (or air-powered generator), which Lovley describes as "the most amazing and exciting application of protein nanowires yet".

Air-Gen has electrically conductive protein nanowires produced by the microbe Geobacter, which Lovley discovered in the Potomac River three decades ago and has been working with ever since, in particular investigating its potential for "green electronics".

The Air-gen connects electrodes to the protein nanowires in such a way that electrical current is generated from the water vapour naturally present in the atmosphere.

It requires only a thin film of protein nanowires less than 10 microns thick. The bottom of the film rests on an electrode, while a smaller electrode that covers only part of the nanowire film sits on top.
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Info

New electronic state of matter discovered


EurekAlert
Thu, 13 Feb 2020 19:52 UTC
Travelling Electrons
© Yun-Yi Pai
Electrons travel in cars with increasing numbers, giving rise to a conductance series that shows up in Pascal's triangle.
A research team led by professors from the University of Pittsburgh Department of Physics and Astronomy has announced the discovery of a new electronic state of matter.

Jeremy Levy, a distinguished professor of condensed matter physics, and Patrick Irvin, a research associate professor are coauthors of the paper "Pascal conductance series in ballistic one-dimensional LaAIO3/SrTiO3 channels." The research focuses on measurements in one-dimensional conducting systems where electrons are found to travel without scattering in groups of two or more at a time, rather than individually.

The study was published in Science on Feb. 14. A video outlining the paper's findings can be seen below.
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Blue Planet

The mycelium revolution is upon us

Eben Bayer
Scientific America
Mon, 01 Jul 2019 00:00 UTC
Mycelium growing on a tree stump.
© Richard Tullis Getty Images
Mycelium growing on a tree stump.
It's the fungus mushrooms are made of, but it can also produce everything from plastics to plant-based meat to a scaffolding for growing organs — and much more

Humans have been harnessing the power of yeast for thousands of years. These fungi allow fermentation, the molecular process whereby living cells typically transform sugar or starch into more complex molecules or chemicals. Discovered 10,000 years ago, the technology of liquid fermentation — from mead to beer to spirits — and solid-state fermentation — bread and cheese — helped put humanity on a rapidly accelerating path of evolution and advancement.

Fast forward 9,950 years. Around three decades ago, humans applied the potential of liquid fermentation to create medicines. In 1978 Arthur Riggs and Keiichi Itakura produced the first biosynthetic insulin using E. coli as a single-celled manufacturing plant. The epiphany that single-celled bacteria and yeast are sugar-powered microfactories that can be utilized to synthesize novel compounds is one of the most powerful discoveries of the past 100 years.

Since that revolutionary insight occurred, science has been devoted to understanding, cultivating and ultimately reprogramming single-celled organisms such as yeast, bacteria and algae, and we've been using the process to make more lifesaving drugs, biobased fuels such as corn ethanol, fragrances and a growing suite of small biological molecules. Liquid fermentation is now a 150-billion-dollar industry and growing rapidly: many of the products we use today are moving from chemical factories to biological fermenters.

Comment: See also:

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People 2

Sex is binary: Scientists speak up for the empirical reality of biological sex


Fair Play For Women
Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:01 UTC
sperm and ovum graphic


Co-authored by Dr Colin Wright (evolutionary biologist at Penn State, USA) and Dr Emma Hilton (developmental biologist at the University of Manchester, UK). The full article was published in the Wall Street Journal on 13th February 2020. The Dangerous Denial of Sex.

It's one thing to claim that a man can "identify" as a woman or vice versa. Increasingly we see a dangerous and anti-scientific trend toward the outright denial of biological sex.

"The idea of two sexes is simplistic," an article in the scientific journal Nature declared in 2015. "Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that." A 2018 Scientific American piece asserted that "biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male." And an October 2018 New York Times headline promised to explain "Why Sex Is Not Binary."

Comment: See also:

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Galaxy

Arrokoth: Secrets of farthest space object ever visited revealed by NASA

Marcia Dunn
Phys.org
Thu, 13 Feb 2020 20:40 UTC
Arrokoth
© (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Roman Tkachenko via AP)
This Jan. 1, 2019 image from NASA shows Arrokoth, the farthest, most primitive object in the Solar System ever to be visited by a spacecraft. Astronomers reported Thursday, Feb. 13, 2020 that this pristine, primordial cosmic body photographed by the New Horizons probe is relatively smooth with far fewer craters than expected. It's also entirely ultrared, or highly reflective, which is commonplace in the faraway Twilight Zone of our solar system known as the the Kuiper Belt.
NASA's space snowman is revealing fresh secrets from its home far beyond Pluto.

More than a year after its close encounter with the snowman-shaped object, the New Horizons spacecraft is still sending back data from more than 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away.

"The data rate is painfully slow from so far away," said Will Grundy of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, one of the lead authors.

Astronomers reported Thursday that this pristine, primordial cosmic body now called Arrokoth — the most distant object ever explored — is relatively smooth with far fewer craters than expected. It's also entirely ultrared, or highly reflective, which is commonplace in the faraway Twilight Zone of our solar system known as the the Kuiper Belt.

Comment: See also:

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Microscope 2

Scientists discover giant viruses with features only seen before in living cells

Tessa Koumoundouros
Science Alert
Fri, 14 Feb 2020 20:12 UTC
virus
© Graham Beards/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 3.0
Sifting through a soup of genes sampled from many environments, including human saliva, animal poop, lakes, hospitals, soils and more, researchers have found hundreds of giant viruses - some with abilities only seen before in cellular life.

The international team, led by scientists from University of California, Berkeley, has discovered entire new groups of giant phages (viruses that infect bacteria) and pieced together 351 gene sequences.

Within these they found genes that code for unexpected things, including bits of the cellular machinery that reads and executes DNA instructions to build proteins, also known as translation.
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