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Singapore tests 'distancing dongles' to track & prevent extended meetings


Reuters
Wed, 24 Mar 2021 12:12 UTC
singapore track dongle
A Singapore business gathering is using movement dongles to make sure participants keep their distance, as the region's business hub prepares to start hosting big events safely as the world looks to move on from the coronavirus pandemic.

The pocket-sized dongle, which utilises Bluetooth technology, tracks users' information such as location, distance and interaction time between attendees at a two-day tech conference that started on Wednesday.

The data collected will be uploaded to a system intermittently and organisers can check if anyone is breaching the government's social distancing rules and intervene if necessary.


Comment: It probably won't be too long before these dongles will be obligatory and be fitted with microphones and other supposedly useful accessories.


Comment: Under guise of coronavirus concerns, lockdowns have enabled those in authority to overtly surveil, control and modify the behaviour of citizens in a way that would not have been imaginable just over a year ago. And it would appear that some countries are more eager than others to get to work on their people:


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Comet 2

New Comet C/2021 D2 (ZTF)

Ernesto Guido
Remanzacco Blogspot
Tue, 23 Mar 2021 18:12 UTC
CBET 4948 & MPEC 2021-F67, issued on 2021, March 22, announce the discovery of an apparently asteroidal object (magnitude ~19.5) on CCD images taken on Feb. 19.5 UT & Mar. 09-5 with the 1.2-m Schmidt telescope at Palomar in the course of the "Zwicky Transient Facility" (ZTF) search program (the object was reported twice by the ZTF survey team as two different objects) . This object has been found to show cometary appearance by CCD astrometrists elsewhere. The new comet has been designated C/2021 D2 (ZTF).

Stacking of 20 unfiltered exposures, 60 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2021, March 15.2 from I89 (iTelescope, Nerpio, Spain) through a 0.32-m f/8.0 reflector + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a diffuse coma about 8" arcsec in diameter (Observers A. Valvasori, E. Guido).

Stacking of 12 unfiltered exposures, 90 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2021, March 18.2 from Z08 (Telescope Live, Oria) through a 0.7 m f/8 Ritchey Chretien + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a diffuse coma about 10" in diameter (possibly elongated toward PA 140). (Observers E. Guido, M. Rocchetto, E. Bryssinck, M. Fulle, G. Milani, C. Nassef, G. Savini).

Our confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version; made with TYCHO software by D. Parrott)

Comet C/2021 D2 ZTF
© Remanzacco Blogspot
Comet C/2021 D2
© Remanzacco Blogspot
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Brain

Getting angry at children 'similar to serious abuse' as it harms brain growth, study finds


Sky News
Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:54 UTC
angry parent

Harsh parenting' can lead to smaller brain structures in adolescence
Parents who repeatedly get angry at their children can harm the physical development of their brain structures in a similar fashion to how those structures are impacted by serious abuse.

While serious abuse and neglect are already known to stunt the growth of victim's brains, the impact of so-called "harsh parenting" practices below that threshold has not previously been studied.

Now new research from the University of Montreal - published in the journal Development and Psychology - has found that some socially acceptable "harsh parenting" practices also result in smaller brain structures.

Victims of serious abuse and neglect often exhibit smaller regions such as the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.

The implications of the new research, conducted by Dr Sabrina Suffren, are that "frequent use of harsh parenting practices can harm a child's development" as well, she said.
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Nebula

Warp speed may be possible with tremendous amount of energy

Lu Xiao
Epoch Times
Wed, 17 Mar 2021 00:00 UTC
Wormhole travel
© Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wormhole travel as envisioned by Les Bossinas for NASA. (Les Bossinas (Cortez III Service Corp.)
People have long dreamed of traveling to other stars and planets and wandering in the universe with a starship. However, such things only exist in sci-fi, because even the closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, is more than four light-years away. This means that even if you could travel at the speed of light, it would take you more than four years to reach the closest star.

To allow the Star Trek characters to quickly reach any part of the universe, Star Trek introduced the concept of "warp speed," which lets the starships travel faster than light. However, according to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, it is impossible to go faster than light.

Then is it never possible to use warp drive? Scientists seem to have found a viable solution, at least theoretically.

In a new study, physicist Erik Lentz from Göttingen University in Germany proposed a model for faster-than-light travel, thanks to what he calls a new class of hyper-fast solitons. They are a kind of wave that maintains its shape and energy and can move at a constant faster-than-light velocity.

According to Lentz's model, these hyper-fast soliton solutions can exist within the framework of general relativity.

Comment: Remember how well Star Trek anticipated the cell phone?

Star Trek comminicator


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Books

Becoming the King in the North: Identification with fictional characters is associated with greater self - other neural overlap

Timothy W Broom, et.al
academic.oup.com
Sat, 20 Mar 2021 17:40 UTC
game of thrones jon king in the north

Jon Snow
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies...The man who never reads lives only one.
-George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
Abstract

During narrative experiences, identification with a fictional character can alter one's attitudes and self-beliefs to be more similar to those of the character. The ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) is a brain region that shows increased activity when introspecting about the self but also when thinking of close friends. Here, we test whether identification with fictional characters is associated with increased neural overlap between self and fictional others. Nineteen fans of the HBO series Game of Thrones performed trait evaluations for the self, 9 real-world friends and 9 fictional characters during functional neuroimaging. Overall, the participants showed a larger response in the vMPFC for self compared to friends and fictional others. However, among the participants higher in trait identification, we observed a greater neural overlap in the vMPFC between self and fictional characters. Moreover, the magnitude of this association was greater for the character that participants reported feeling closest to/liked the most as compared to those they felt least close to/liked the least. These results suggest that identification with fictional characters leads people to incorporate these characters into their self-concept: the greater the immersion into experiences of 'becoming' characters, the more accessing knowledge about characters resembles accessing knowledge about the self.

Comment:

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Cassiopaea

New nova visible in Cassiopeia constellation discovered by amateur astronomer

Alison Klesman
Astronomy
Fri, 19 Mar 2021 11:03 UTC
Cassiopeia nova
© Yuji Nakamura
The discovery image (left) of a new nova that recently appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia. The right image shows how the same region of the sky appeared just four days prior.
At around 7 P.M. JST on the evening of March 18, Japanese amateur astronomer Yuji Nakamura spotted something strange: A new point of light in the familiar constellation Cassiopeia the Queen.

Researchers at Kyoto University quickly followed up using the 3.8-meter Seimei Telescope atop Mt. Chikurinji in Japan. They obtained a spectrum of the new object, hoping to determine its nature based on clues hiding in its light.

They discovered that the object, which is cataloged as PNV J23244760+6111140, is a classical nova: An outburst from a white dwarf that's stealing matter from its nearby companion star.

Comment: See also:

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Fish

Many deep-sea microbes invisible to mammalian immune system

Abby Olena
The Scientist
Fri, 19 Mar 2021 23:12 UTC
vessel
© SCHMIDT OCEAN INSTITUTE
The Schmidt Ocean Institute's research vessel Falkor
One way the mammalian immune system defends against pathogens known and novel is by picking up on common microbial features, such as elements of bacterial cell walls or flagella. But a study published today (March 12) in Science Immunology indicates that this detection system has some blind spots. The authors found that the majority of microbes collected from the depths of the Pacific Ocean are invisible to mammalian immune cells, despite the presence of familiar bacterial cell wall component lipopolysaccharide (LPS).

This work "implies that there's a lot more potential for a pathogen to escape our immune responses than we had previously thought," says Christopher LaRock, an immunologist at Emory University School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. The bacterium Yersinia pestis, which causes plague, can modify its LPS, thus escaping immune detection, he adds. "We thought things that weren't detected were really clever pathogens that had it all figured out . . . but here's some bacteria that have never seen a human and they can still escape."

Comment: See also:

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Info

Enigmatic circling behavior observed in numerous marine animals


EurekAlert!
Thu, 18 Mar 2021 22:35 UTC
Circling Behaviour
© Narazaki et al. / iScience
This image shows the circling behavior of various marine megafauna.
Technological advances have made it possible for researchers to track the movements of large ocean-dwelling animals in three dimensions with remarkable precision in both time and space. Researchers reporting in the journal iScience on March 18 have now used this biologging technology to find that, for reasons the researchers don't yet understand, green sea turtles, sharks, penguins, and marine mammals all do something rather unusual: swimming in circles.

"We've found that a wide variety of marine megafauna showed similar circling behavior, in which animals circled consecutively at a relatively constant speed more than twice," says Tomoko Narazaki of the University of Tokyo.

Narazaki's team first discovered the mysterious circling behaviors in homing green turtles during a displacement experiment. They had transferred nesting turtles from one place to another to study their navigation abilities.

"To be honest, I doubted my eyes when I first saw the data because the turtle circles so constantly, just like a machine!" Narazaki says. "When I got back in my lab, I reported this interesting discovery to my colleagues who use the same 3D data loggers to study a wide range of marine megafauna taxa."

What came next surprised the researchers even more: they realized that various species of marine animals showed more or less the same circling movements. This finding is surprising in part because swimming in a straight line is the most efficient way to move about. It suggests there must be some good reason that animals circle.
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Hourglass

'Deep Time' experiment with 15 people sealed in dark cave for 40 days begins

James Felton
IFL Science
Wed, 17 Mar 2021 15:40 UTC
deep time experiment
© Christian Clot/Twitter
The volunteers will not know what time it is during their underground isolation.
Everybody has a favorite psychological experiment where a bunch of people were put in an isolated place for a number of weeks, then left to let nature take its course.

Classics of the genre include the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which volunteers were locked into a prison and assigned the roles of either prisoner or guards, and the Biosphere 2 project, which saw eight people sealed inside an artificial biosphere for 2 years. Needless to say, both went horribly wrong, with the prison experiment ending in a complete (and possibly partially-staged) horror show, and Biosphere 2 ending after the oxygen inside hit dangerous levels and everyone nearly starved.

Following in their footsteps comes Deep Time, an experiment that has just shut 15 people inside a dark cave for 40 days, with no access to natural light or the ability to tell time. What could possibly go wrong?

Comment: See also:

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Ice Cube

Glaciers and enigmatic stone stripes in the Ethiopian highlands

University of Bern
Archaeology News Network
Fri, 12 Mar 2021 16:00 UTC
ethiopia glacier
© Heinz Veit
The up to 200 m long, 15 m wide and 2 m deep sorted stone strips on the southern Sanetti Plateau
(ca. 3,900 m a.s.l.) were probably formed during the last glacial period under much cooler
conditions and can best be explained by a natural sorting of the stones in the course
of the cyclic freezing and thawing of the ground
As the driver of global atmospheric and ocean circulation, the tropics play a central role in understanding past and future climate change. Both global climate simulations and worldwide ocean temperature reconstructions indicate that the cooling in the tropics during the last cold period, which began about 115,000 years ago, was much weaker than in the temperate zone and the polar regions. The extent to which this general statement also applies to the tropical high mountains of Eastern Africa and elsewhere is, however, doubted on the basis of palaeoclimatic, geological and ecological studies at high elevations.

A research team led by Alexander Groos, Heinz Veit (both from the Institute of Geography) and Naki Akcar (Institute of Geological Sciences) at the University of Bern, in collaboration with colleagues from ETH Zurich, the University of Marburg and the University of Ankara, used the Ethiopian Highlands as a test site to investigate the extent and impact of regional cooling on tropical mountains during the last glacial period. The results have been published in the scientific journals Science Advances and Earth Surface Dynamics.

Comment: See also:

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