© Wikipedia
MIT
MIT
In a paper published Friday in the journal Science, researchers from MIT and Austria's University of Innsbruck said that they devised a working quantum computer that runs on just five atoms in an ion trap.
Science & Technology
In a paper published Friday in the journal Science, researchers from MIT and Austria's University of Innsbruck said that they devised a working quantum computer that runs on just five atoms in an ion trap.
© Piti Tan/Shutterstock.
Also known as sea-nomads, the Moken were once entirely dependent the ocean, and the children spent much of their time diving for food on the seafloor. Experiments have shown that they could see underwater with total clarity - a unique adaptation that other children can learn within weeks.
© Wikipedia
A meteor fireball is seen over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013. The resulting blast injured more than 1,600 people.
A meteor fireball is seen over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013. The resulting blast injured more than 1,600 people.
We can, however, ease our fears now because American scientists are already developing a high-powered laser beam to defend Earth from these approaching asteroids.
A team of researchers at the University of California has conducted tests on a weapon called De-Star, which stands for Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and exploration. The researchers are becoming more and more convinced that this technology may actually work.
"Generally speaking, the technology is available today," said Qicheng Zhang of the University of California, Santa Barbara, one of the authors of the project, as quoted by The Telegraph.
The author nevertheless acknowledged that the team would have to develop a device that will be powerful enough to destroy giant asteroids.
"The main challenge with building a full De-Star is the necessary scale to be effective," Zhang said.
The research team has nevertheless succeeded in testing the De-Star's technique on Earth, by blasting a piece of basalt using laser beams. Basalt is a type of rock from frozen magma that has a similar composition as asteroids.
© ALAMY
In the current issue of the journal Stem Cell Reports, Tony Parenti, lead author and MSU cell and molecular biology graduate student, unearthed the new cells - induced XEN cells, or iXEN - in a cellular trash pile, of sorts.
"Other scientists may have seen these cells before, but they were considered to be defective, or cancer-like," said Parenti, who works in the lab of Amy Ralston, MSU biochemist, cell and molecular biologist and co-author of the study. "Rather than ignore these cells that have been mislabeled as waste byproducts, we found gold in the garbage."A great deal of stem cell research focuses on new ways to make and use pluripotent stem cells. Pluripotent stem cells can be created by reactivating embryonic genes to "reprogram" mature adult cells. Reprogramming mature cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, allows them to become malleable building blocks that can morph into any cell in the body.
For example, if a patient has a defective liver, healthy cells could be taken from the patient, reprogrammed into iPS cells, which could then be used to help regenerate the person's failing organ. Taking cells from the same patient may greatly reduce the chance of the body rejecting the new treatment, Parenti said.
Prior to the discovery of reprogramming, scientists developed pluripotent stem cells from embryos. However, the embryo produces not only pluripotent stem cells, but also XEN cells, a stem cell type with unique properties. While pluripotent stem cells produce cells in the body, XEN cells produce extraembryonic tissues that play an essential but indirect role in fetal development.
© Regis Duvignau / Reuters
A ransomware is malicious code, like any other type of malware. The way it works is usually by hiding inside a program one may hastily download, irrespective of the risks. A message then appears, telling the user all or part of their files have been encrypted, and the only way to decrypt them is by paying a ransom - usually in digital currency, which is difficult to trace.
One might expect Challenger Deep—which sits at the bottom of the Mariana trench some 36,000 feet beneath the ocean surface—to be a quiet place. But in reality, we know very little about what life is like down there: as with most places where the sun never shines, the Mariana trench is shrouded in mystery.
"Light does not propagate underwater very far," oceanographer Bob Dziak of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) told Gizmodo. "But sound waves travel long distances through the Earth's oceans. Acoustics is really the best way to get a good picture of deep ocean environments."
Just as single-crystal silicon wafers revolutionised computing technology more than 60 years ago (your phone, laptop, PC, and iPad wouldn't exist without one), quantum dot solids could change everything about how we transmit and process information in the decades to come.
© advances.sciencemag.org
Lizards preserved in mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber. advances.sciencemag.org
Lizards preserved in mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber. advances.sciencemag.org
"It was incredibly exciting to see these animals for the first time. It was exciting and startling, actually, how well they were preserved," researcher Edward Stanley said, as quoted by Reuters. He added that the reptile's entire body, including its eyes and scales, is preserved in "superb detail." Usually, reptiles' bodies decay quickly. "We can pretty much see how the animals looked when they were alive," Professor Juan Diego Daza, who led the research, said.
The lizard is thought to have been an infant reptile, living in a tropical forest in territory that is now Myanmar, Southeast Asia. However, its journey ended when it became trapped in sticky resin. Other animals trapped in the amber, are a gecko and an arctic lizard, although those are not as ancient as the 99-million-year-old reptile.
What might this amazing discovery lead to? It could help us learn more about the "lost ecosystem, the lost world" the creatures lived in. Researchers could also find out more about the animals' modern relatives. "It's kind of a missing link," the professor said, as cited by Reuters.
The research was published on Friday in Science Advances journal.
During a recent deep-sea dive in the Hawaiian Archipelago, a remotely operated vehicle came across an unknown creature.
Unlike most cephalopods, the little octopus found by the NOAA Deep Discoverer lacks pigment, making it ghostlike and mysterious, and every bit adorable.
At more than 4,000 meters below the surface, this is the deepest observation ever published of this type of cephalopod, and researchers say its cartoonish appearance has social media users pushing to name it 'Casper.'
The discovery was made during the first operational dive of Okeanos Explorer's 2016 season on February 27.
Researchers planned to collect geological samples from the Necker Ridge in order to determine its possible connection with Necker Island (Mokumanamana).
But, during its mission, the remotely operated vehicle called Deep Discoverer found something extraordinary - a small octopus sitting on a rock.
© Der Robert
This protein, "chryptochrome", known scientifically as Cry1a, sits in the retina of many primates and allows them to detect the earth's magnetic field. The discovery comes after examining the hunting behavior of several mammals, but more specifically the red fox in snowy conditions.
As can be seen in the image below, the fox uses a sort of 'bunny hop' to catch pray lurking in the snowy layer. It was found that when the fox aligned himself with the earth's magnetic field, respective to hemisphere, his success rate in catching the prey improved drastically.
Comment: With all of the 'newly discovered' asteroids and considering impact records, these lasers could not do much to prevent any cataclysms. For more on the reality of our situation here on planet Earth and the potential for bombardment from space objects, read our Comets and Catastrophe series: