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Novel method discovers 139 new minor planets in our Solar System

Erica Naone
Discover Magazine
Tue, 31 Mar 2020 23:12 UTC
A new method for hunting minor planets uncovered more than a hundred small, distant worlds. And the novel technique could even help resolve the mystery of Planet Nine.
Minor Planet
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
The discovery of 139 new minor planets in the outer solar system, and especially the new method used to find them, might eventually help astronomers determine whether Planet Nine exists or not.
Astronomers have discovered 139 new minor planets orbiting the sun beyond Neptune by searching through data from the Dark Energy Survey. The new method for spotting small worlds is expected to reveal many thousands of distant objects in coming years — meaning these first hundred or so are likely just the tip of the iceberg.

Taken together, the newfound distant objects, as well as those to come, could resolve one of the most fascinating questions of modern astronomy: Is there a massive and mysterious world called Planet Nine lurking in the outskirts of our solar system?
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Biohazard

Controversial research that could make bird flu more risky poised to resume

Jocelyn Kaiser
Science Magazine
Fri, 08 Feb 2019 18:57 UTC
bird avian flu research DCD
© James Gathany/CDC
A worker at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratory harvests avian flu viruses for sharing with other laboratories in 2013
Controversial lab studies that modify bird flu viruses in ways that could make them more risky to humans will soon resume after being on hold for more than 4 years. Science Insider has learned that last year, a U.S. government review panel quietly approved experiments proposed by two labs that were previously considered so dangerous that federal officials had imposed an unusual top-down moratorium on such research.

One of the projects has already received funding from the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, and will start in a few weeks; the other is awaiting funding.

The outcome may not satisfy scientists who believe certain studies that aim to make pathogens more potent or more likely to spread in mammals are so risky they should be limited or even banned. Some are upset because the government's review will not be made public. "After a deliberative process that cost $1 million for [a consultant's] external study and consumed countless weeks and months of time for many scientists, we are now being asked to trust a completely opaque process where the outcome is to permit the continuation of dangerous experiments," says Harvard University epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch.

Comment: Who's to say that covid-19 didn't have a similar story. Why are these two allowed to continue what is clearly dangerous lines of research? More on Fouchier and Kawaoka:

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Satellite

Last year, we finally photographed a black hole. What next?

Charlie Wood
Popular Science
Thu, 26 Mar 2020 18:28 UTC
black hole imagine
© .NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman
Future black hole images could look sharper, although probably not as sharp as this rendering
In-orbit telescopes could help us image black holes like never before.

It took Sheperd Doeleman nearly a decade to pull off the impossible. As the director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a project involving an international collaboration of hundreds of researchers, he spent years flying suitcases full of hard drives around the globe to coordinate observations between radio telescopes on four continents, including Antarctica. On April 9, 2019, the collaboration at last released the fruits of their labors and the world gazed upon the first image of a black hole.

The feat — which pioneering black hole theorist James Bardeen called hopeless in 1973 — represented a towering achievement of astronomical technology. But once the data processing was done and the champagne popped, the EHT collaboration in some sense resembled the dog who caught the car. "It took everyone a little by surprise that they got such a good image so fast," says Andrew Strominger, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University. "Sheperd and Michael [Johnson, a Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist and EHT coordinator,] were asking me about it. 'What do we do with this? We took the picture, now what?'"
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Chart Pie

How to understand - and report - figures for 'Covid deaths'

Dr. John Lee
The Spectator
Sun, 29 Mar 2020 18:03 UTC
coronavirus world map
Every day, now, we are seeing figures for 'Covid deaths'. These numbers are often expressed on graphs showing an exponential rise. But care must be taken when reading (and reporting) these figures. Given the extraordinary response to the emergence of this virus, it's vital to have a clear-eyed view of its progress and what the figures mean. The world of disease reporting has its own dynamics, ones that are worth understanding. How accurate, or comparable, are these figures comparing Covid-19 deaths in various countries?

We often see a ratio expressed: deaths, as a proportion of cases. The figure is taken as a sign of how lethal Covid-19 is, but the ratios vary wildly. In the US, 1.8 per cent (2,191 deaths in 124,686 confirmed cases), Italy 10.8 per cent, Spain 8.2 per cent, Germany 0.8 per cent, France 6.1 per cent, UK 6.0 per cent. A fifteen-fold difference in death rate for the same disease seems odd amongst such similar countries: all developed, all with good healthcare systems. All tackling the same disease.

You might think it would be easy to calculate death rates. Death is a stark and easy-to-measure end point. In my working life (I'm a retired pathology professor) I usually come across studies that express it comparably and as a ratio: the number of deaths in a given period of time in an area, divided by that area's population. For example, 10 deaths per 1,000 population per year. So just three numbers:
  1. The population who have contracted the disease
  2. The number dying of disease
  3. The relevant time period
The trouble is that in the Covid-19 crisis each one of these numbers is unclear.

Comment: Two other clear-headed reports by Dr. John Lee can be read here:

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Info

Researchers create a 'funnel' of light


University of Würzburg
Fri, 27 Mar 2020 18:56 UTC
Physicists of the University of Würzburg, in a joint collaboration with colleagues from the University of Rostock, have developed a light funnel apparatus. It could serve as a new platform for hypersensitive optical detectors.
Light Funnel
© Universität Rostock / Alexander Szameit
The figure shows how light is caught through the light funnel.
Professor Ronny Thomale holds a chair for theoretical condensed matter physics, the TP1, at the Julius-Maximilian University of Würzburg. The discovery and theoretical description of new quantum states of matter is a prime objective of his research. "Developing a theory for a new physical phenomenon which then inspires new experiments seeking after this effect is one of the biggest moments in a theoretical physicist's practice", so he says. In an ideal case, such an effect would even unlock unexpected technological potential.

All this has come together with a recent project which Thomale pursued together with the optical experimental group of Professor Alexander Szameit at the University of Rostock the results of which have now been published in the Science magazine.
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Beaker

DNA riddle: how cells access data from 'genetic cotton reels'


University of Sydney
Mon, 23 Mar 2020 09:23 UTC
human dna
Research has revealed the role played by motor protein CHD4 that allows the DNA to remodel when information is needed - and it will help us understand diseases connected to when that process goes wrong.

Australian scientists have unravelled part of the mystery about how nature can usefully access genetic information in cells despite it being so tightly packed away.

The discovery helps solve what is effectively an 'input/output' problem caused by the need for cells to pack metres of DNA into a space just millionths of a metre across - but at the same time read, copy and repair the information held in the DNA. It also helps provide pathways to understand how defects in this process contribute to disease such as schizophrenia and cancer.

Led by Professor Joel Mackay in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, the biochemists have revealed that a particular motor protein, CHD4, is used to access genetic information tightly spooled onto what can be imagined as 'genetic cotton reels'.

Comment: See also:

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Better Earth

Planetary defenders: Asteroid deflection code validated

Nolan O'Brien
Phys.org
Fri, 27 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
6 pic fragment asteroids
© Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lawrence Livermore researchers compared results of asteroid deflection simulations to experimental data and found that the strength model has a substantial effect on momentum transferred.
Planetary defense researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) continue to validate their ability to accurately simulate how they might deflect an Earth-bound asteroid in a study that will be published in the April issue of the American Geophysical Union journal Earth and Space Science.

The study, led by LLNL physicist Tané Remington, also identified sensitivities in the code parameters that can help researchers working to design a modeling plan for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission in 2021, which will be the first-ever kinetic impact deflection demonstration on a near-Earth asteroid.
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Brain

Has your brain evolved to hoard supplies and shame others for doing the same?

Stephanie Preston
The Conversation
Fri, 27 Mar 2020 09:14 UTC
stockpile
© AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
In scary and uncertain times, having a stockpile can feel soothing.
The media is replete with COVID-19 stories about people clearing supermarket shelves - and the backlash against them. Have people gone mad? How can one individual be overfilling his own cart, while shaming others who are doing the same?

As a behavioral neuroscientist who has studied hoarding behavior for 25 years, I can tell you that this is all normal and expected. People are acting the way evolution has wired them.

Stockpiling provisions

The word "hoarding" might bring to mind relatives or neighbors whose houses are overfilled with junk. A small percentage of people do suffer from what psychologists call "hoarding disorder," keeping excessive goods to the point of distress and impairment.

But hoarding is actually a totally normal and adaptive behavior that kicks in any time there is an uneven supply of resources. Everyone hoards, even during the best of times, without even thinking about it. People like to have beans in the pantry, money in savings and chocolates hidden from the children. These are all hoards.
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Microscope 1

Genomic studies yield more hints of higher-level order in our DNA


Evolution News
Sat, 28 Mar 2020 16:16 UTC
Caulobacter crescentus
© University of Basel, Swiss Nanoscience Institute/Biozentrum, via EurekAlert!
Caulobacter crescentus
Genomics has come a long way since the central dogma (the notion that DNA is the master controller that calls all the shots) and junk DNA (the expectation that much of the genome is non-functional). If scientists ditch those old dogmas and approach the genome expecting to find reasons for things, they often do.

Synonymous Mutations

To-may-to or to-mah-to? The British write flavour; the Americans write flavor, but generally each understands the other without too much difficulty. Genomes, too, have alternate ways of spelling things: GGU and GGC in messenger RNA both spell glycine. No big deal, thought geneticists; these "silent" mutations cause no change in the resulting protein. At the University of Notre Dame, however, biochemists are finding that the differences in spelling are not just background noise; they alter the protein's folding. Is that good or bad?
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Rose

Billion-year-old algae and the discovery of newer genes hint at land plants' origin

Dana Najjar
Quanta Magazine
Thu, 26 Mar 2020 17:02 UTC
wales countryside
© Graham Eaton / NPL / Minden Pictures
Green algae grow at the edges of a glacial lake in Wales. Hundreds of millions of years ago, similar algae adapted to survive temporarily outside of the water may have kicked off the evolution of green land plants.
A recently unearthed fossil and new genomic discoveries are filling important gaps in scientists' understanding of how primitive green algae eventually evolved into land vegetation.

Around 500 million years ago — when the Earth was already a ripe 4 billion years old — the first green plants appeared on dry land. Precisely how this occurred is still one of the big mysteries of evolution. Before then, terrestrial land was home only to microbial life. The first green plants to find their way out of the water were not the soaring trees or even the little shrubs of our present world. They were most likely soft and mossy, with shallow roots and few of the adaptations they would later evolve to survive and thrive on dry land. And though scientists agree that these plants evolved from some kinds of seaweed, we know comparatively little about those green algal ancestors.

But a few recent papers — two based on molecular biology, and one on rare, precious fossils from 1 billion years ago — are helping to fill in the gaps in our understanding of those ancient algae and what allowed them to eventually make the transition to land.
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