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African bird's intricate feather design inspires new ways to store water


PhysOrg
Tue, 11 Apr 2023 17:08 UTC
Namaqua sandgrouse feathers water storage
© SWNSThe Namaqua sandgrouse is a desert specialist whose breast feathers can soak up water like a sponge
With high resolution microscopes and 3D technology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology captured an unprecedented view of feathers from the desert-dwelling sandgrouse, showcasing the singular architecture of their feathers and revealing for the first time how they can hold so much water.

"It's super fascinating to see how nature managed to create structures so perfectly efficient to take in and hold water," said co-author Jochen Mueller, an assistant professor in Johns Hopkins' Department of Civil and Systems Engineering, who specializes in smart materials and design. "From an engineering perspective, we think the findings could lead to new bio-inspired creations."

The work is published today (April 11) in Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
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Microscope 1

Scientists discover why hibernating bears don't get blood clots

Erin Garcia de Jesús
Science News
Thu, 13 Apr 2023 15:21 UTC
brown bear
Brown bears normally kick off their hibernation at the end of November and only emerge at the start of April
A key clotting protein decreases in the slumbering bears — and other immobile animals

When a brown bear settles down for hibernation, its body makes adjustments to prevent developing dangerous blood clots while immobile, a new study shows.

People stuck sitting in tight airplane seats for an entire long-haul flight are at risk of dangerous blood clots. But somehow immobile, hibernating bears are not. Now scientists know why.

Bears settled in for winterlong slumbers have low levels of a key protein that helps blood clots form, researchers report in the April 14 Science. Platelets lacking this protein don't easily stick together, protecting the animals from developing potentially dangerous blood clots. And low levels of the protein are not just found bears, the team writes. Mice, pigs and humans with a largely sedentary lifestyle because of long-term mobility problems have the same protection.
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Info

New type of superconductor discovered

Patricia Contreras Tejada
Advance Science News
Wed, 12 Apr 2023 17:06 UTC
For decades, it was thought that only two types of superconductors existed, but a new study has just uncovered a third.

Super Conductor
© US Department of Energy on Flickr
Wires don't usually like being the bearers of electric current. While we find them extremely useful to light our houses, charge our phones, and heat water for our tea, they routinely manifest their opposition to the flow of electricity by heating up. Because of this effect, called electrical resistance, the energy dissipated as heat is wasted, and the amount of electric current that a wire can carry before it melts is limited.

But a special kind of material is much happier to host electricity, so much so that under very low temperatures they do not exhibit any resistance. Superconductors, as they are known, don't heat up at all and can thus carry much larger electric currents, which in turn makes them behave as extremely strong magnets. These superconducting magnets are part of MRI scanners, particle accelerators such as the ones at CERN, and the ultra-fast magnetic levitation trains being constructed in Japan, to name a few examples.

Since superconductivity was comprehensively studied in the 1950s, it has been traditionally classified into two main types. But a new paper in Advanced Science puts forward a third type of superconductivity that was previously only thought to apply to extremely thin layers of materials.

In the study, researchers develop the mathematical equations that describe this new type of superconductivity in thick, three-dimensional materials, and observe their behavior in the laboratory. The authors suggest that this new mechanism could open a door towards developing room-temperature superconductivity — a "holy grail" in the field.
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Info

Double-slit experiment that proved the wave nature of light explored in time

Hayley Dunning
Imperial College London
Mon, 03 Apr 2023 18:54 UTC
Physics Experiment
© Thomas Angus / Imperial College London
Imperial physicists have recreated the famous double-slit experiment, which showed light behaving as particles and a wave, in time rather than space.

The experiment relies on materials that can change their optical properties in fractions of a second, which could be used in new technologies or to explore fundamental questions in physics.

The original double-slit experiment, performed in 1801 by Thomas Young at the Royal Institution, showed that light acts as a wave. Further experiments, however, showed that light actually behaves as both a wave and as particles - revealing its quantum nature.

These experiments had a profound impact on quantum physics, revealing the dual particle and wave nature of not just light, but other 'particles' including electrons, neutrons, and whole atoms.

Now, a team led by Imperial College London physicists has performed the experiment using 'slits' in time rather than space. They achieved this by firing light through a material that changes its properties in femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second), only allowing light to pass through at specific times in quick succession.

Lead researcher Professor Riccardo Sapienza, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: "Our experiment reveals more about the fundamental nature of light while serving as a stepping-stone to creating the ultimate materials that can minutely control light in both space and time."

Details of the experiment are published today in Nature Physics.
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Microscope 1

Even more mammoth devolution

Michael Behe
Evolution News
Tue, 11 Apr 2023 17:08 UTC
wooly mammoths
© Mauricio AntónThis image depicts a Pleistocene landscape in northern Spain with woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), equids, a woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis), and European cave lions (Panthera leo spelaea) with a reindeer carcass.
Last year I reported1 on a paper2 that showed 87 genes were broken in genomes of recovered extinct woolly mammoth remains, compared to their modern elephant relatives. The authors of the paper noted previous research had shown that "gene losses ... can be adaptive" and thought that was the case for the mammoths they studied, too. I pointed out that, while such a process might indeed aid adaptation of a species to its changing environment, nonetheless it constitutes de-volution, not e-volution, in the sense that the species is losing genetic information, not gaining it.

A new paper strongly bolsters that conclusion.3 In "Genomics of adaptive evolution in the woolly mammoth" a large international team of researchers sequenced genomes from 23 woolly mammoth remains and examined genes for proteins that had the most "fixed" amino acid mutations (that is, mutations that occurred in all of the genomes that were sequenced, and so very probably were widely present in the mammoth population). They evaluated the mutations by something called an "aggregated SIFT score." SIFT stands for "Sorting Intolerant From Tolerant."4 In the paper, the higher the aggregated SIFT score, the more likely the amino acid mutations were to not be tolerated by the protein's structure — that is, to disrupt the protein's activity. Of the 31 most highly mutated genes (Table S5), the great majority had high aggregated SIFT scores for the number of mutations they carried, and 21 of the genes each contained one or more "high impact" mutations (very likely to disrupt structure). Only four genes had low aggregated SIFT scores. (Interestingly, one of those is the BRCA2 gene, whose mutation in humans can lead to breast cancer.)

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Cassiopaea

Dazzlingly detailed photo of a record sized solar tornado '14 Earths tall'

Gege Li
New Scientist
Wed, 05 Apr 2023 12:00 UTC
sun photo
© Andrew McCarthy and Jason GuenzelFusion of Helios
NEVER has the sun been seen in quite this way. This dazzlingly detailed shot of our star was recently created in the aftermath of a solar tornado of record proportions that was whipping up the sun's atmosphere. Titled Fusion of Helios (pictured above), it is the result of a painstaking five-day collaboration between astrophotographers Jason Guenzel and Andrew McCarthy, who are "always looking for fresh and creative ways to present views of the universe", says Guenzel.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Info

Physicists discover that gravity can create light

Paul M Sutter
Universe Today
Fri, 07 Apr 2023 18:27 UTC
supermassive black hole consuming a star
© Carl Knox (OzGrav, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, Swinburne University of Technology)A star is being consumed by a distant supermassive black hole. Astronomers call this a tidal disruption event (TDE). As the black hole rips apart the star, two jets of material moving with almost the speed of light are launched in opposite directions. One of the jets was aimed directly at Earth.
Researchers have discovered that in the exotic conditions of the early universe, waves of gravity may have shaken space-time so hard that they spontaneously created radiation.

The physical concept of resonance surrounds us in everyday life. When you're sitting on a swing and want to go higher, you naturally start pumping your legs back and forth. You very quickly find the exact right rhythm to make the swing go higher. If you go off rhythm then the swing stops going higher. This particular kind of phenomenon is known in physics as a parametric resonance.

Your legs act as an external pumping mechanism. When they match the resonant frequency of the system, in this case your body sitting on a swing, they are able to transfer energy to the system making the swing go higher.

These kinds of resonances happen all over the place, and a team of researchers have discovered that an exotic form of parametric resonance may have even occurred in the extremely early universe.

Perhaps the most dramatic event to occur in the entire history of the universe was inflation. This is a hypothetical event that took place when our universe was less than a second old. During inflation our cosmos swelled to dramatic proportions, becoming many orders of magnitude larger than it was before. The end of inflation was a very messy business, as gravitational waves sloshed back and forth throughout the cosmos.
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Magnify

Three species of extremely primitive spider discovered in China

Jake Buehler
New Scientist
Thu, 06 Apr 2023 12:00 UTC
spider
© Zhang Y, Chen Z, Li D, Xu XA female Songthela longhui, one of three mesothelean spiders identified in China: Mesothelean spiders diverged from all other spiders long before the first dinosaurs - three species of these living fossils have just been identified in western Hunan province.
Three new species of an ancient, secretive group of spiders, all native to Hunan province in China, have been described. These "mesothelean" spiders diverged from other arachnid families about 300 million years ago and have strange, primitive features not found in the vast majority of living spiders.

Most spider species on Earth today belong to one of two groups: the heavy-bodied mygalomorph spiders - such as tarantulas and the notoriously venomous funnel-web spiders - and the tens of thousands of araneomorph spider species, many of which spin intricate, sticky webs.

Approximately 100 spider species belong to a poorly understood third group that fall under the suborder Mesothelae. The mesothelean spiders diverged from other spiders back when the planet's rainforests were full of giant arthropods and the very first reptiles. Today, the sole remaining mesothelean spider family retains some physical features of the first spiders. Unlike all other spiders, mesotheleans have a segmented abdomen with plates on top, much like a shrimp tail or a bee's rump. Their silk-spewing spinnerets are uniquely slung below the centre of their abdomen, rather than positioned at the rearmost tip.

Comment: See also:

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Control Panel

Zombie no more: The unbelievable comeback of analog computing

Charles Platt
Wired
Thu, 30 Mar 2023 23:03 UTC
floppy disks analog computing
© StockXchange
Computers have been digital for half a century. Why would anyone want to resurrect the clunkers of yesteryear?

When old tech dies, it usually stays dead. No one expects rotary phones or adding machines to come crawling back from oblivion. Floppy diskettes, VHS tapes, cathode-ray tubes — they shall rest in peace. Likewise, we won't see old analog computers in data centers anytime soon. They were monstrous beasts: difficult to program, expensive to maintain, and limited in accuracy.

Or so I thought. Then I came across this confounding statement:
Bringing back analog computers in much more advanced forms than their historic ancestors will change the world of computing drastically and forever.
Seriously?

I found the prediction in the preface of a handsome illustrated book titled, simply, Analog Computing. Reissued in 2022, it was written by the German mathematician Bernd Ulmann — who seemed very serious indeed.
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Question

Does Earth have a new Quasi-Moon?

David Chandler
Sky & Telescope
Fri, 07 Apr 2023 20:32 UTC
New Moon
© NASA / JPL-Caltech469219 Kamoʻoalewa also has an orbit around the Sun that keeps it as a constant companion of Earth.
Astronomers have discovered an asteroid that orbits the Sun with Earth, earning it the moniker "quasi-moon."

Recently discovered asteroid 2023 FW13 has created a bit of a stir among asteroid watchers. It turns out to be on an orbit that is not only in a 1:1 resonance with the Earth, but follows a path that actually circles Earth — albeit on an orbit that is so eccentric that it sweeps out halfway to Mars and in halfway to Venus.

There's no formal definition for objects such as this, which are sometimes called quasi-moons or quasi-satellites. They follow a path around Earth, but usually for no more than a few decades. Perhaps the best known of these objects, known as Kamoʻoalewa, was found in 2016, and is considered the smallest, closest, and most stable known quasi-satellite. It has an orbit that has been in a stable resonance with Earth for almost a century, and will remain so for centuries to come, according to calculations by Paul Chodas (Jet Propulsion Laboratory).

But this newfound asteroid, if preliminary orbital calculations are correct, will handily eclipse that record. Some estimates say it has circled Earth since at least 100 BC and will likely continue to do so until around AD 3700. If that's correct, 2023 FW13 would be the most stable quasi-satellite of Earth ever found.
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