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Nature wins again: Scientists identify NATURAL SARS-CoV-2 super immunity against 23 variants

Dr. Sanchari Sinha Dutta, Ph.D.
news-medical.net
Mon, 05 Jul 2021 17:44 UTC
natural super immunity covid
© NIAID and American Association for the Advancement of Science imagery
Study: Ultrapotent antibodies against diverse and highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 variants.
A team of international scientists has recently identified ultrapotent anti-severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) antibodies from convalescent donors.

The antibodies are capable of neutralizing a wide range of SARS-CoV-2 variants even at sub-nanomolar concentrations. In addition, the combinations of these antibodies reduce the risk of generating escape mutants in vitro. The study is published in the journal Science.
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Broom

Deflect 'Armageddon' asteroids with rockets, Chinese researchers propose


Yahoo
Wed, 07 Jul 2021 06:17 UTC
Chang'e china moon rocket

FILE PHOTO: China's lunar exploration program Chang'e-5 Mission exhibition at National Museum in Beijing
Chinese researchers want to send more than 20 of China's largest rockets to practice turning away a sizable asteroid - a technique that may eventually be crucial if a killer rock is on a collision course with Earth.

The idea is more than science fiction. Sometime between late 2021 to early 2022, the United States will launch a robotic spacecraft to intercept two asteroids relatively close to Earth.

When it arrives a year later, the NASA spacecraft will crash-land on the smaller of the two rocky bodies to see how much the asteroid's trajectory changes. It will be humanity's first try at changing the course of a celestial body.

Comment: Note that, despite the claims that the chance of danger is low, China is not the only country investing significant funds towards early identification of space rocks as well as the possible ways to divert their course. Could this concerted effort be because, in some circles, the possibility of this threat is known to be much greater than commonly believed? And check out SOTT radio's:

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Info

Strange 'fairy lanterns' discovered growing in a Malaysian rainforest

Tessa Koumoundouros
Science Alert
Sat, 03 Jul 2021 19:16 UTC
fairy lantern
© University of Oxford
The rare and unique fairy lantern.
Within the depths of a Malaysian rainforest's shadows an astonishing plant, lacking sunlight-eating leaves, bizarrely blooms. This small, otherworldly growth, belonging to a group of rare flowering plants known as fairy lanterns (Thismia), has just been scientifically described for the first time.

They're tiny plants, too deep within the forest to receive sunlight, and often emerge beneath the leaf litter, so they don't bother with photosynthesizing and have lost the ability to do so. They have no chlorophyll; instead, they siphon food through their roots from the fungal network shared by other rainforest plants.

These incredible mycorrhizal fungal networks connect large plant communities together via their roots, allowing plants to communicate with each other using electric signals and even send resources to each other. In turn, the fungi receive sustenance from the plants.

Plants that do this, like fairy lanterns, are thought to have evolved from one of the plant parts of the mycorrhizal fungal partnership. They've cheated the system, however, and turned fully parasitic on the fungi network. This form of food acquisition is called myco-heterotrophy.
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Telescope

Astronomers detect a lurking cosmic cloud, bigger than the entire Milky Way

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Mon, 05 Jul 2021 08:59 UTC
New gas cloud discovered
© ESA/XMM-Newton
X-ray emission in blue; originally discovered clump in red in the southeast lobe.
In the yawning vacuum of intergalactic space, something large is lurking.

Not a galaxy, although it's of a comparable size: A vast cloud of hot, faintly glowing gas, bigger than the Milky Way, in the space between galaxies congregating in a huge cluster.

Scientists believe this cloud may have been unceremoniously stripped from a galaxy in the cluster, the first gas cloud of this kind we've ever seen. Even more surprisingly, it hasn't dissipated, but has remained clumped together for hundreds of millions of years.

This not only tells us something new about the environments inside galaxy clusters, it suggests a new way to explore and understand these colossal structures.

"This is an exciting and also a surprising discovery. It demonstrates that new surprises are always out there in astronomy, as the oldest of the natural sciences," said physicist Ming Sun of the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
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Info

'Icelandia': Is Iceland the tip of a vast, sunken continent?


Geological Society of America
Tue, 29 Jun 2021 19:34 UTC
Submerged Continent
© Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
Durham, UK: Academics believe they have identified a remarkable geological secret; a sunken continent hidden under Iceland and the surrounding ocean, which they have dubbed 'Icelandia'.

An international team of geologists, led by Gillian Foulger, Emeritus Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth Sciences at Durham University (UK), believe the sunken continent could stretch from Greenland all the way to Europe.

It is believed to cover an area of ~ 600,000 km2 but when adjoining areas west of Britain are included in a "Greater Icelandia" the entire area could be ~1,000,000 km2 in size.

If proven, it means that the giant supercontinent of Pangaea, which is thought to have broken up over 50 million years ago, has in fact not fully broken up.

This new theory challenges long-held scientific ideas around the extent of oceanic and continental crust in the North Atlantic region, and how volcanic islands, like Iceland, formed.

The presence of continental, rather than oceanic, crust could also spark discussions about a new source of minerals and hydrocarbons, both of which are contained in continental crust.

The revolutionary new theory was born from an innovative series of expert meetings held in Durham (UK) and is included in a dedicated chapter of In the Footsteps of Warren B. Hamilton: New Ideas in Earth Science published today (29 June 2021), by the Geological Society of America, which Professor Foulger has co-written with Dr Laurent Gernigon of the Geological Survey of Norway and Professor Laurent Geoffroy of the Ocean Geosciences Laboratory, University of Brest (France).
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Info

New AI technique reveals clearer universe


National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
Fri, 02 Jul 2021 20:30 UTC
shape of the Universe
© The Institute of Statistical Mathematics
Artist’s visualization of this research. Using AI driven data analysis to peel back the noise and find the actual shape of the Universe.
Japanese astronomers have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) technique to remove noise in astronomical data due to random variations in galaxy shapes. After extensive training and testing on large mock data created by supercomputer simulations, they then applied this new tool to actual data from Japan's Subaru Telescope and found that the mass distribution derived from using this method is consistent with the currently accepted models of the Universe. This is a powerful new tool for analyzing big data from current and planned astronomy surveys.

Wide area survey data can be used to study the large-scale structure of the Universe through measurements of gravitational lensing patterns. In gravitational lensing, the gravity of a foreground object, like a cluster of galaxies, can distort the image of a background object, such as a more distant galaxy. Some examples of gravitational lensing are obvious, such as the "Eye of Horus". The large-scale structure, consisting mostly of mysterious "dark" matter, can distort the shapes of distant galaxies as well, but the expected lensing effect is subtle. Averaging over many galaxies in an area is required to create a map of foreground dark matter distributions.

But this technique of looking at many galaxy images runs into a problem; some galaxies are just innately a little funny looking. It is difficult to distinguish between a galaxy image distorted by gravitational lensing and a galaxy that is actually distorted. This is referred to as shape noise and is one of the limiting factors in research studying the large-scale structure of the Universe.
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Control Panel

Researchers observe thermal waves in semiconductor materials - unlocks new possibilities in electronics design


PhysOrg
Sun, 04 Jul 2021 15:44 UTC
lasers test thermal semi conductors
© ICMAB, CSIC
Two different lasers are focused onto the surface of the samples using a microscope objective. A rather large combination of optical elements allows to control and modify the spot size and shape, as well as the power and harmonic modulation of the lasers. Cold nitrogen gas is used for better visualization of the lasers optical path.
A study published in Science Advances reports on the unexpected observation of thermal waves in germanium, a semiconductor material, for the first time. This phenomenon may allow a significant improvement in the performance of our electronic devices in a near future. The study is led by researchers from the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB, CSIC) in collaboration with researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and the University of Cagliari.

Heat, as we know it, originates from the vibration of atoms, and transfers by diffusion at ambient temperatures. Unfortunately, it is rather difficult to control, and leads to simple and inefficient strategies for manipulation. This is why, for example, large amounts of residual heat can accumulate in our computers, mobile phones and, in general, most electronic devices.

However, if heat was transported through waves, such as light, it would offer new alternatives to control it, especially through the unique and intrinsic properties of waves.
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Mars

UAE's Hope Mars orbiter spots elusive aurora on Red Planet

Meghan Bartels
Space.com
Thu, 01 Jul 2021 11:38 UTC
mars aurora 1
© Emirates Mars Mission
An artist's depiction of the discrete aurora on Mars.
The United Arab Emirates' (UAE) Hope Mars mission made its first major finding just a couple months after arriving at the Red Planet when it snagged unprecedented observations of a tricky aurora.

Also known as the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM), Hope is designed to study Mars' atmosphere across all its layers and at a global scale throughout the course of the year. But the new finding is outside that main science purview and occurred even before the probe's formal science mission had begun, when scientists were testing the instruments on the spacecraft. In images from one of those instruments, scientists easily spotted the highly localized, nightside aurora that scientists have struggled to study at Mars for decades.

"They're not easy to catch, and so that's why seeing them basically right away with EMM was kind of exciting and unexpected," Justin Deighan, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado'' Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and deputy science lead for the Hope mission, told Space.com. "It's definitely something that was on our radar, so to speak, but just looking at our first set of nighttime data and saying, 'Hey, wait a second — is that? — it can't be — it is!' — that was a lot of fun."

Scientists know that Earth's auroras are tied to the planet's global magnetic field and are triggered by charged particles from the sun. But the situation is a little different at Mars, where scientists have observed three types of auroras.
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Cassiopaea

First X-flare in 4 years, CME from B-class flare may hit Earth this weekend


Space Weather
Sat, 03 Jul 2021 19:12 UTC
x flare july 2021

Today's explosion registered X1.5 on the Richter Scale of Solar Flares

CME IMPACT POSSIBLE THIS WEEKEND

A minor coronal mass ejection (CME) is expected to hit Earth this weekend. It left the sun on June 29th, propelled toward us by a B7-class solar flare. The impact will probably be too weak to cause a geomagnetic storm, but high-latitude auroras are possible on July 3rd or 4th.

Aurora alerts: SMS Text.

FIRST X-FLARE IN 4 YEARS

A new sunspot emerged during the early hours of July 3rd and promptly exploded, producing the first X-class solar flare since Sept. 2017. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash:

Today's explosion registered X1.5 on the Richter Scale of Solar Flares

Comment: See also: A warning from history: The Carrington event was not unique

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Telescope

Astronomers may have discovered the smallest and heaviest white dwarf star ever seen

Charles Q. Choi
Space.com
Fri, 02 Jul 2021 08:31 UTC
white dwarf ZTF J1901+1458
© Giuseppe Parisi
The white dwarf ZTF J1901+1458 is depicted above the moon in this artistic representation; in reality, the white dwarf lies 130 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquila, the eagle.
Astronomers may have discovered the smallest and heaviest white dwarf star ever seen, a smoldering ember about the size of our moon but 450,000 times more massive than Earth, a new study finds.

White dwarfs are usually about the size of Earth and are the cool, dim cores of dead stars that are left behind after average-size stars have exhausted their fuel and shed their outer layers. Our sun will one day become a white dwarf, as will about 97% of all stars.

Although the sun is alone in space without a stellar partner, many stars orbit around each other in pairs. If these binary stars are both less than eight times the mass of the sun, they will both evolve into white dwarfs over time.

The newfound white dwarf, designated ZTF J1901+1458, is located about 130 light-years from Earth and may be an example of what can happen when white dwarf pairs merge. If the white dwarfs were more massive, they would explode in a powerful thermonuclear explosion known as a Type Ia supernova. However, if their combined masses fell below a certain threshold, they could form a new white dwarf heavier than either of its parents, which is what scientists think happened in the case of ZTF J1901+1458.
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