A breakthrough in the fight against hunger, three Nobel Prizes, and 150 million tonnes of annual production - yet still a tricky topic for research: For over 100 years, the chemical industry has been using the Haber-Bosch process to convert atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia, an important component of mineral fertilizers and many other chemical products. Scientists at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung have now found a surprisingly simple way to produce ammonia at ambient temperature - and even at atmospheric pressure - and thus under much milder conditions than those required for the Haber-Bosch process. The reactants are passed through a mill that grinds the catalyst used to facilitate the reaction between the inert nitrogen and hydrogen. The result is a thin but continuous stream of ammonia.

Five hundred degrees Celsius and 200 bar - these are the conditions usually required to get nitrogen to combine with hydrogen to generate ammonia. Only in this form can the nitrogen be used by plants. Despite all the controversy surrounding mineral fertilizers, the Haber-Bosch process is making an essential contribution to feeding the growing world population. It is thus no wonder that Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch as well as Max Planck researcher Gerhard Ertl, who elucidated exactly what happens in the process, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Nevertheless, chemists are still fixated on the synthesis of ammonia. "This has been a dream reaction for 100 years", says Ferdi Schüth, Director at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an der Ruhr. This expresses both how economically important the transformation is and how difficult it is to achieve. Because ammonia is considered a potential storage medium for hydrogen produced with renewable energy, it could become even more important.

Chemists would like to dispense with the harsh reaction conditions - also because of the amount of energy required. Considerable efforts have been made to find an alternative method of production: other catalysts, light as an energy source, electrolysis, and even mechanocatalysis - processes that take place in a ball mill. But these methods have yielded only minute amounts of ammonia (if any at all).

Here are three unrelated but surprising discoveries that will be of interest to the intelligent design community.

Shared Code

Scientists at Flinders University in Australia found that our DNA spreads up to a meter around us without even touching anything. We're leaving breadcrumbs of genetic code everywhere we go!

A person can leave DNA on a surface without directly touching it, a Flinders University study has found, with the longer someone spends in a room the more likely they are to leave a trace of themselves behind.

The researchers placed DNA collection plates half a meter to five meters apart in offices that had been sanitized.

Without anyone directly touching the collection plates, DNA from multiple people was present after only one day, with the DNA profiles stronger the closer the plates were to an individual and the longer they stayed out. [Emphasis added.]

They published their findings in Forensic Science International Genetics.

Everyone knows about ice, liquid and vapor — but, depending on the conditions, water can actually form more than a dozen different structures. Scientists have now added a new phase to the list: superionic ice.

This type of ice forms at extremely high temperatures and pressures, such as those deep inside planets like Neptune and Uranus. Previously, superionic ice had only been glimpsed in a brief instant as scientists sent a shockwave through a droplet of water, but in a new study published in Nature Physics, scientists found a way to reliably create, sustain, and examine the ice.

"It was a surprise — everyone thought this phase wouldn't appear until you are at much higher pressures than where we first find it," said study co-author Vitali Prakapenka, a University of Chicago research professor and beamline scientist at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. "But we were able to very accurately map the properties of this new ice, which constitutes a new phase of matter, thanks to several powerful tools."

After speeding up during 2020, Earth's rotation has settled down. But timekeepers say we still may need a "negative leap second" in the next decade.

On average, each Earth day contains 86,400 seconds. But Earth's rotation isn't perfect; it varies slightly all the time depending on the movement of the core, oceans and atmosphere. Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), the official international timekeeping method, is based on the atomic clock, which measures time by the movement of electrons in atoms that have been cooled to absolute zero. Atomic clocks are precise and invariable.

So when Earth's rotation and the atomic clocks don't quite sync up, something has to give. When astronomical time, based on Earth's rotation, deviates from UTC by more than 0.4 seconds, UTC gets an adjustment in the form of a "leap second." Sometimes leap seconds are added, as last happened on New Year's Eve 2016, when a second was added at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds of Dec. 31. Scientists have added a leap second about every 18 months on average since 1972, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Thousands of years ago, massive woolly mammoths roamed the Mammoth Steppe — a chilly, but flourishing Arctic ecosystem that was once the largest biome on Earth. These megafauna trampled high grasses and fed on ample vegetation.


Woolly mammoths thrived there — until they disappeared. According to some scientists, the appearance of humans in the Arctic coincided with the extinction of the woolly mammoth.

Now scientists have a new hypothesis — one that lets humans off the hook for the animal's demise. It also suggests a new timeline for woolly mammoth extinction.

A team of Chinese military researchers say they have built and tested an anti-satellite robotic device that can place a small pack of explosives into a probe's exhaust nozzle.

Rather than blowing the satellite into pieces, the melt-cast explosive can produce a "time-controlled, steady explosion", Professor Sun Yunzhong and colleagues from the Hunan Defence Industry Polytechnic in Xiangtan wrote in a paper published in the domestic journal Electronic Technology & Software Engineering last month.

The device could stay inside the satellite for an extended period by using a locking mechanism driven by an electric motor. If needed, the process can be reversed to separate it from the target.

The project was funded by a government scheme to develop a new type of warhead for rocket missiles, according to the paper.

Results announced by the LHCb experiment at CERN have revealed further hints for phenomena that cannot be explained by our current theory of fundamental physics.
In March 2020, the same experiment released evidence of particles breaking one of the core principles of the Standard Model - our best theory of particles and forces - suggesting the possible existence of new fundamental particles and forces.

Now, further measurements by physicists at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory have found similar effects, boosting the case for new physics.

The Standard Model describes all the known particles that make up the universe and the forces that they interact through. It has passed every experimental test to date, and yet physicists know it must be incomplete. It does not include the force of gravity, nor can it account for how matter was produced during the Big Bang, and contains no particle that could explain the mysterious dark matter that astronomy tells us is five times more abundant than the stuff that makes up the visible world around us.

As a result, physicists have long been hunting for signs of physics beyond the Standard Model that might help us to address some of these mysteries.

One of the best ways to search for new particles and forces is to study particles known as beauty quarks. These are exotic cousins of the up and down quarks that make up the nucleus of every atom.

An invasive species of mosquito from East Asia is slowly spreading throughout Italy and could serve as a vector for viruses, according to a new scientific report.

An article in the Parasites & Vectors scientific journal last week claimed to have evidence that the concerning mosquitos, known as Aedes koreicus, have been expanding toward southwest Italy since being discovered in the north in 2011.

In a previous post, I looked at where 'The Science' of community masking came from. Here I'll do the same thing for lockdowns.

As many lockdown sceptics (including myself) have noted, lockdowns represent a radical departure from conventional forms of pandemic management. There is no evidence that, before 2020, they were considered an effective way to deal with influenza pandemics.

In a 2006 paper, four leading scientists (including Donald Henderson, who led the effort to eradicate smallpox) examined measures for controlling pandemic influenza. Regarding "large-scale quarantine", they wrote, "The negative consequences... are so extreme" that this measure "should be eliminated from serious consideration".

Likewise, a WHO report published mere months before the COVID-19 pandemic classified "quarantine of exposed individuals" as "not recommended under any circumstances". The report noted that "there is no obvious rationale for this measure".

And we all know what the U.K.'s own 'Pandemic Preparedness Strategy' said, namely: "It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so."

As an additional exercise, I searched the pandemic preparedness plans of all the English-speaking Western countries (U.K., Ireland, U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand) for mentions of 'lockdown', 'lock-down' 'lock down' or 'curfew'.

Infrared light therapy might have the potential to help people living with dementia, according to researchers.

A pilot study, led by Dr. Paul Chazot, Durham University, UK, and Dr. Gordon Dougal, of Maculume Ltd, found improvements in the memory, motor function and processing skills of healthy people with normal intellectual function for their age.

As a result, the researchers said transcranial photobiomodulation therapy (PBM-T) - where infrared light is self-delivered to the brain using a specially designed helmet worn by the patient — might potentially also have benefits for people with dementia.

They stressed that more research into the use and effectiveness of the therapy was needed, but that the findings of their pilot were promising.

The research is published in the journal Photobiomodulation, Photomedicine and Laser Surgery.