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Scientists warn plague 'hiding in plain sight'

Anne Gulland
The Telegraph, UK
Thu, 01 Mar 2018 16:23 UTC
Great Plague of London
© Getty Images
Eighteenth Century engraving showing a death cart unloading bodies into a mass grave during the Great Plague of London
The bacteria that cause plague, or the Black Death, could be lying dormant in common soil and water sources, posing a serious public health risk, scientists have warned.

The finding, published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, could explain why plague suddenly re-emerges without warning in countries such as Madagascar and even the United States.

In the middle ages the Black Death swept through Europe, killing an estimated 75 to 200 million people. It is no longer a global threat but the new research may explain its occasional outbreaks across the world.

David Markman, from Colorado State University who led the study, said that plague is endemic in many different parts of the world and its origins are still not well understood.

Comment: See also: New Light on the Black Death: The Viral and Cosmic Connection

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Laptop

GitHub hit by 'largest-known cyber attack in history'


RT
Fri, 02 Mar 2018 15:38 UTC
GitHub cyber attack
© Kacper Pempel/Reuters
GitHub has become the target of the largest-known cyber attack in history. The web-hosting service revealed the attack in a blog post earlier this week.

The firm said it suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on February 28. A DDoS attack is designed to bombard websites with enough traffic to put them offline.

GitHub revealed that the attackers took over a memory system known as 'memcaching' to amplify the volume of data it was sending to GitHub by a factor of 51,000, meaning that for each byte sent by the attacker, up to 51KB was sent toward the target. Astonishingly, the blog revealed that the amount of traffic hitting the developer platform was 1.35 terabits per second at its peak.
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Clock

Redefining the second

Edwin Cartlidge
Science
Thu, 01 Mar 2018 12:00 UTC
cold strontium atoms
© PHYSIKALISCH-TECHNISCHE BUNDESANSTALT/CC-BY
A cloud of cold strontium atoms, glowing with a blue light, is trapped in the vacuum chamber of an optical clock at Germany's National Meteorology Institute.
The atomic clocks that mark official time lose the equivalent of just 1 second every 200 million years. But meteorologists are not satisfied. A more precise time standard might improve the navigation of spacecraft and help experimenters look for variations in fundamental constants that would signal new physics. So the push is on to replace current clocks, which are tuned to a specific microwave frequency, with even better clocks that exploit higher-frequency visible light.

In a paper out last month, a group of experts set up by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Sèvres, France, lays out a road map for the steps needed to redefine the unit of time-the metric second-in terms of optical radiation. Already, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Boulder Laboratories in Colorado appear to have satisfied one of the road map's key requirements-a 100-fold improvement in accuracy over the best microwave clocks-using a pair of optical clocks.

Clocks mark time by tracking a periodic action. A grandfather clock relies on the regular swings of a pendulum, and the original definition of the second was based on the length of a day as fixed by Earth's spin. Current atomic clocks depend on the oscillations of a microwave beam at the precise frequency needed to excite atoms of cesium-133 to a higher energy level. In 1967, the second was defined as 9,192,631,770 cycles of a beam tuned to the cesium standard. Today, the best cesium clocks have accuracies of 1.6 parts in 1016.
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Candy Cane

Our human ancestors had the same dental problems as us

Ian Towle
The Conversation
Fri, 02 Mar 2018 15:29 UTC
Carious lesions on the mandibular right second premolar and first molar. Homo naledi (UW 101-001).
© Ian Towle
Carious lesions on the mandibular right second premolar and first molar. Homo naledi (UW 101-001). Ian Towle
Dental erosion is one of the most common tooth problems in the world today. Fizzy drinks, fruit juice, wine, and other acidic food and drink are usually to blame, although perhaps surprisingly the way we clean our teeth also plays a role. This all makes it sound like a rather modern issue. But research suggests actually humans have been suffering dental erosion for millions of years.

My colleagues and I have discovered dental lesions remarkably similar to those caused by modern erosion on two 2.5m year-old front teeth from one of our extinct ancestors. This adds to the evidence that prehistoric humans and their predecessors suffered surprisingly similar dental problems to ourselves, despite our very different diets.

Dental erosion can affect all dental tissue and typically leaves shallow, shiny, lesions in the enamel and root surface. If you brush your teeth too vigorously you can weaken dental tissue, which over time allows acidic foods and drinks to create deep holes known as non-carious cervical lesions (NCCLs).

Comment: One wonders if a shift came in their biology which was no longer compatible with a diet high in acidic foods, similar to how our brains grew along with eating meats, and what was going on at the time which meant they were consuming foods to the detriment of their health.

From Embracing figures found beneath molten rock of ancient Pompeii found to be male


In previous research the Pompeii scientific team discovered the Romans killed in the ancient town had excellent teeth.

In 2015 they used CAT scans to examine the remains of 30 men, women and children and attributed their top dental health to a Mediterranean diet rich in fibre and low in sugar.
Which was also probably high in consumption of meat, fish and their accompanying fats, see: The Mediterranean Diet is Not Mediterranean (Nor is it Particularly Good)

See also:


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Family

Biggest ever family tree shows when cousins stopped marrying

Helen Thompson
New Scientist
Thu, 01 Mar 2018 13:03 UTC
family tree
© Alan Collins / Alamy Stock Photo
A lot of our ancestors married their close relatives
Think you've got a big family? Check out the world's biggest family tree, containing 13 million people. The giant family tree is the largest of several built using crowd-sourced data, each of which tells a tale about the history of Western civilisation.

Joanna Kaplanis at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, and her colleagues, collected 86 million publicly-available profiles from Geni.com. Users on this crowd-sourcing website create family trees, which are then merged with others when matches occur.

After cleaning up the data, the team was able to dispel a long-standing myth.

It was thought that people in the west stopped marrying their close relatives in the 19th century, because improved transport meant that people were born further away from their families. But the family tree proved otherwise.

"Even though people started to be born further away from their families during the early 19th century, they were still marrying cousins for 50 years," says Kaplanis. It seems the eventual decrease in inbreeding was more to do with cultural influences. "It just became less socially acceptable."
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Info

Humans can use echolocation just like bats says study

Matthew Loffhagen
Outer Places
Thu, 01 Mar 2018 19:06 UTC
Bats
© Flickr/Shellac
One of the more interesting Marvel superheroes is Daredevil, a character who is blinded as a child, but who is able to sense the world around him because his other senses - most notably his hearing - improve to compensate for his disability.

As it turns out, this super power is more real than you might think. According to a new study from Durham University, there are humans who really can use echolocation, just like a bat, in order to see objects in their path based on sound waves that bounce off them.

While this is a power that, theoretically, many people can develop, at present, most of us don't really have a reason to try. After all, those of us who can see will naturally rely on our eyes rather than attempting to learn echolocation. For some blind people, though, this skill is a fabulous help in everyday life, and it now has some scientific backing which suggests it works.
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Brain

Study examines brain mechanisms that endow Iceman Wim Hof with exceptional resistance to cold


Medical Express
Wed, 28 Feb 2018 00:00 UTC
Wim Hoff, iceman cold resistance
© Wayne State University School of Medicine
Dr. Otto Muzik, professor in the School of Medicine at Wayne State University, prepares for a study with Wim Hof, 'The Iceman,' to better understand how his brain responds during exposure to cold.
Dutch adventurer Wim Hof is known as "The Iceman" for good reason. Hof established several world records for prolonged resistance to cold exposure, an ability he attributes to a self-developed set of techniques of breathing and meditation-known as the Wim Hof Method-that have been covered by the BBC, CNN, National Geographic and other global media outlets. Yet, how his brain responds during cold exposure and what brain mechanisms may endow him with this resistance have not been studied-until now.

Wayne State University School of Medicine professors Otto Muzik, Ph.D., and Vaibhav Diwadkar, Ph.D., changed that. Their publication, "Brain Over Body: A study on the willful regulation of autonomic function during cold exposure," published in the journal NeuroImage, is the first to study how The Iceman's brain responds during experimentally controlled whole-body cold exposure. These investigations are part of the scientists' series of seminal studies launched in 2014 on how the human brain responds to thermoregulatory challenges. The results document compelling brain processes in The Iceman and present intriguing possibilities for how his techniques might exert positive effects related to disorders of the immune system and even psychiatry.

Comment: Read more on Wim Hof's methods and the benefits of cold therapy:

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Bug

Totally new species of Tardigrade discovered in Japanese carpark (PHOTOS)

Peter Dockrill
Science Alert
Wed, 28 Mar 2018 12:00 UTC
New species of Tardigrade discovered in a Japanese carpark
© (Daniel Stec et al.)
They're the weirdest organisms known to science: unkillable critters that can turn into glass and survive the cold vacuum of space.

But sometimes tardigrades just want to take a breather, you know? Chill for a bit in more comfortable surroundings. Which is how scientists discovered a whole new species of them living in moss on the concrete surface of a Japanese carpark. Bioscientist Kazuharu Arakawa from Keio University was renting an apartment in the city of Tsuruoka when he scooped up a sample of moss from the building's parking lot for later analysis.

It's not as crazy as it sounds.

Tardigrades - aka water bears and moss piglets - commonly dwell in mosses, lichens, and leaf litter, so there was a chance he could get lucky.

And he did, with examination in the lab revealing 10 of the microscopic metazoans living in the sample, who were extracted and transferred into culture in five separate pairs.

Comment: Also See:

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Fireball

Bus-sized asteroid to pass Earth on 2nd March

Jonathan Kesh
Outer Places
Wed, 28 Feb 2018 20:42 UTC
Asteroid
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
This coming Friday, March 2, an near-Earth asteroid will be sweeping within 70,000 miles (113,000 kilometers) of our planet's surface.

While there's no danger of any collision, asteroid 2018 DV1 will be coming closer to Earth than the Moon, which is nearly always enough to grab the attention of asteroid-hunters. And on top of that, 2018 DV1 is about 23 feet (7 meters) wide, which NASA's official Asteroid Watch declared was about the size of a bus.

And it should make for an impressive sight if you have the necessary tools to see it. Assuming that you don't have access to powerful telescopes, you can watch a live stream of the asteroid passing through the night sky from the Virtual Telescope Project and Tenegra Observatories in Arizona, who will be showing the video on their website.

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Horse

Quantum wishes can turn into horses: New thought experiment on non-events causing causal effects

Eliahu Cohen, Avshalom C. Elitzur
Science Trends
Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00 UTC
quantum state
© Varsha
The quote is quite fitting "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." If you want to grasp the uniqueness of quantum mechanics, this cynical saying provides the most profound illustration by being sometimes disproved by this theory.

True, quantum mechanics (QM) is unique also due to the uncertainty principle which challenges classical determinism; to Schrödinger's cat paradox which makes the conflict with classical physics even more acute; to the notorious wave-particle duality as demonstrated by the double-slit experiment; and to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox which seems to run in the face of special relativity. Yet the above "if" captures something no less essential to QM, little considered so far.

But why should "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride" matter if wishes, as everyone knows, are not horses? Here is QM's answer. Suffices for the beggar's wishes that they could be horses, then, even if they are not, the theory sometimes enables beggars to ride them. This is what quantum philosophers refer to as "counterfactual," namely, an event that could have happened but eventually didn't. Amazingly, by the very potential of this possibility's occurrence, it leaves an unequivocal physical effect.
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