Were their necks intact?

80s/90s kids? Remember the creepy animated movie The Secret of NIMH? Ever wonder why the "NIMH" part was capitalized? Here's the creepy ass reason for that. It was based on a pretty nasty rat/mouse population experiment in the 50s/60s that was actually pretty terrifying. If you have 30 minutes to kill, this video is pretty crazy:

<iframe width="1205" height="678" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NgGLFozNM2o" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Gizmodo article on it:

Secret of NIMH Was Inspired by Hideous Lab Experiments

In The Secret of NIMH there are no musical interludes or tween heroines to lighten the mood—just the desperate struggle for survival of a mama mouse against her invariable predation. And it's based on a true story.

Don Bluth's The Secret of NIMH traces its roots back to the novel, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. And in both cases, NIMH stands for the National Institute of Mental Health. It's a division of the National Institutes of Health and is the single largest scientific organization dedicated to the study of mental health on Earth. And from the 1940s to 1960s, it was the site of some of the worst, most egregious atrocities against an animal population in the modern scientific era.

According to Edmund Ramsden of the WHO, author of The urban animal: population density and social pathology in rodents and humans:

In a 1962 edition of Scientific American, the ecologist John B Calhoun presented the results of a macabre series of experiments conducted at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).1 He had placed several rats in a laboratory in a converted barn where – protected from disease and predation and supplied with food, water and bedding – they bred rapidly. The one thing they were lacking was space, a fact that became increasingly problematic as what he liked to describe as his "rat city" and "rodent utopia" teemed with animals. Unwanted social contact occurred with increasing frequency, leading to increased stress and aggression. Following the work of the physiologist, Hans Selye, it seemed that the adrenal system offered the standard binary solution: fight or flight.2 But in the sealed enclosure, flight was impossible. Violence quickly spiralled out of control. Cannibalism and infanticide followed. Males became hypersexual, pansexual and, an increasing proportion, homosexual. Calhoun called this vortex "a behavioural sink". Their numbers fell into terminal decline and the population tailed off to extinction. At the experiments' end, the only animals still alive had survived at an immense psychological cost: asexual and utterly withdrawn, they clustered in a vacant huddled mass. Even when reintroduced to normal rodent communities, these "socially autistic" animals remained isolated until death. In the words of one of Calhoun's collaborators, rodent "utopia" had descended into "hell".


Hint: Move to the country.

NASA agrees to work with SpaceX on orbital refueling technology

NASA announced 19 new partnerships with 10 US companies to help bring more cutting-edge technologies closer to production use in spaceflight. There were a lot of useful engineering ideas here, such as precision landing systems and robotic plant farms, but perhaps the most intriguing one involved the rocket company SpaceX and two of NASA's field centers—the Glenn Research Center in Ohio and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

"SpaceX will work with Glenn and Marshall to advance technology needed to transfer propellant in orbit, an important step in the development of the company’s Starship space vehicle," the NASA news release states. This is a significant announcement for reasons both technical and political.

For its part, SpaceX welcomed the opportunity to help advance NASA's Artemis Program, which NASA hopes will send humans to the Moon by 2024 (and, later on, to Mars). “We believe SpaceX’s fleet of advanced rockets and spacecraft, including Falcon Heavy and Starship, are integral to accelerating NASA’s lunar and Mars plans," a company spokesperson told Ars.

Technical
One of SpaceX's principal engineers behind the Starship project, Paul Wooster, has identified orbital refueling as one of most difficult technology challenges the company will have to overcome in order to realize its Mars ambitions.

Under some scenarios by which the company aims to send humans to Mars, a Super Heavy rocket would launch a Mars-bound Starship to low-Earth orbit. At that point, the spacecraft would need to top its fuel tanks back up in order to get its payload all the way to the Red Planet. It's estimated that five Starship launches' worth of fuel (as payload) would be required to refuel a single Mars-bound Starship in low-Earth orbit, and this would involve the transfer of hundreds of tons of methane and liquid oxygen.

Such refueling technology would also be useful for others besides NASA. "I’ve got a stack of studies that go from the floor to the ceiling that list the critical technologies needed for humans to become long-term explorers in deep space, and in-space refueling is always on the list," said Bobby Braun, a former chief technologist at NASA who is now dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. "It's the key for sustainability."

The new partnership recognizes SpaceX's maturity as a leading space transportation company, Braun said. And Glenn and Marshall are the right centers for SpaceX to partner with, even if there simultaneously exists a strong rivalry between SpaceX's low-cost rockets and Marshall's lead development of NASA's Space Launch System rocket.

https://i.imgur.com/OQ1oxhb.png

NASA has previously done considerable work studying the handling, transfer of, and storage of rocket fuels such as liquid oxygen, hydrogen, and methane in space—they are difficult to work with and susceptible to boil off in the space environment (hydrogen atoms can even migrate directly through metal fuel tanks). Under the new Space Act Agreement, NASA's Space Technology program will fund the time the agency's people spend working on these problems and any agency test facilities used. In effect, teams from the company and agency will work together to solve the problem, each paying for its own part of the effort.

"The civil servants at Marshall and at Glenn are very talented in this area," Braun said. "The people at SpaceX clearly know their system, both the capabilities and the needs of the Starship architecture. The fact that they’re all going to get together in the same room, and work on the same problem, that’s tremendous."

[...]

I thought this was cool. Humans make up 1/10,000th of the biomass on Earth.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart...ass-180969141/

https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/bZsIj...f4/f1large.jpg

So the weight of all the spiders in the world is like 5x that of humans...that's horrifying

The more you look, the scarier it gets. We weigh less than 1/3 of the world's viruses. And viruses are really, really small. I looked up the terms I didn't know, and we humans are the odd guests in a distinctly alien world.

What the ****ing ****?

Keep that shit to yourselves. Christ.

For every pound of humans, there are three pounds of leeches and worms and 1.5 pounds of jellyfish.

Also:

The world’s spiders consume somewhere between 400 million and 800 million tons of prey in any given year. That means that spiders eat at least as much meat as all 7 billion humans on the planet combined.

Study: Spiders theoretically could eat every human on Earth in one year

https://link.springer.com/article/10...114-017-1440-1

The human body's complementary system explained:

<iframe width="1024" height="614" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BSypUV6QUNw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Water found in habitable super-Earth's atmosphere for first time

<iframe width="987" height="580" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/amOdtYv5G4E" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Orbiting around a relatively docile red dwarf star, the exoplanet is "the best candidate for habitability that we know right now."

Astronomers have finally uncovered water vapor in the atmosphere of a super-Earth exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of its star. The find means that liquid water could also exist on the rocky world's surface, potentially even forming a global ocean.

The discovery, made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, serves as the first detection of water vapor in the atmosphere of such a planet. And because the planet, dubbed K2-18 b, likely sports a temperature similar to Earth, the newfound water vapor makes the world one of the most promising candidates for follow-up studies with next-generation space telescopes.

"This is the only planet right now that we know outside the solar system that has the correct temperature to support water, it has an atmosphere, and it has water in it, making this planet the best candidate for habitability that we know right now," lead author Angelos Tsiaras, an astronomer at University College London, said in a press conference.

K2-18 b: The basics

Planet K2-18 b sits some 110 light-years away in the constellation Leo, and it orbits a rather small red dwarf star that's roughly one-third the mass of our own Sun. Red dwarfs are infamous for being active stars that emit powerful flares, but the researchers point out that this particular star appears to be surprisingly docile.

This bodes well for the water-bearing planet, as its 33-day orbit brings it about twice as close to its star as Mercury is to the Sun. "Given that the star is much cooler than the Sun, in the end, the planet is receiving similar radiation to the Earth," said Tsiaras. "And based on calculations, the temperature of the planet is also similar to the temperature of the Earth."

Specifically, the paper suggests K2-18 b has a temperature between about –100 °F (–73 °C) and 116 °F (47 °C). For reference, temperatures on Earth can span from below –120 °F (–84 °C) in regions like Antarctica to above 120 °F (49 °C) in regions like Africa, Australia, and the Southwestern United States.

Although K2-18 b flaunts some of the most Earth-like features observed in an exoplanet so far — water, habitable temperatures, and a rocky surface — the researchers point out the world is still far from Earth-like. First off, K2-18 b is roughly twice the diameter of Earth, which makes it about eight times as massive. This puts K2-18 b near the upper limit of what we call a super-Earth — which typically refers to planets between about one and 10 Earth masses.

But the density of K2-18 b is what really cements it as a rocky planet. With a density about twice that of Neptune, K2-18 b has a composition most similar to Mars or the Moon. So, because the planet is believed to have a solid surface, and it's known to have an extended atmosphere with at least some water vapor, researchers say it's feasible that K2-18 b could actually be a water world with a global ocean covering its entire surface.

However, they cannot say for sure.

The uncertainty is because Hubble can't probe the atmospheres of distant exoplanets in great detail. For instance, thanks to a sophisticated algorithm, the researchers were able to tease out the undeniable signal of water vapor in the atmosphere of K2-18 b, But they couldn't tell exactly how much water vapor is really there. So, in their paper, they took the conservative approach and gave a broad-range estimate for the abundance of water — somewhere between 0.01 percent and 50 percent.

In order to pin down exactly how much water is really on K2-18 b, the researchers say we'll have to wait for the next generation of advanced space telescopes to come online. Specifically, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2021, and the European Space Agency's Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large survey (ARIEL) telescope, planned for launch in the late 2020s, are perfectly suited for the challenge.

The new research was published September 11 in Nature Astronomy. A preprint of the study is available at arXiv.org

It's scientifically proven, if you don't fart enough, you will literally burp up your would-be farts.... LOL Science!! Don't be afraid to fart. Ever!

Methane and the Gastrointestinal Tract

Introduction

Several gases are produced through enteric fermentation in the intestinal tract. Carbon dioxide, hydrogen, hydrogen sulfide, and methane are thought to be the most common of these. Recent evidence suggests that methane may not be inert. In this review article, we summarize the findings with methane.

[...]

Results

The majority of these gases are eliminated via flatus or absorbed into systemic circulation and expelled from the lungs. Excessive gas evacuation or retention causes gastrointestinal functional symptoms such as belching, flatulence, bloating, and pain. Between 30 and 62% of healthy subjects produce methane. Methane is produced exclusively through anaerobic fermentation of both endogenous and exogenous carbohydrates by enteric microflora in humans. Methane is not utilized by humans, and analysis of respiratory methane can serve as an indirect measure of methane production. Recent literature suggests that gases such as hydrogen sulfide and methane may have active effects on gut function.

So here's something cool. It has long been known that certain animals can readily smell cancer in humans. For example dogs, bees, etc. Science is slowly catching up. And there is a ton of potential here...

This Device Can Recommend the Best Cancer Treatment — Using Just a Patient’s Breath

The newest cancer sniffer might not be as cute as a sharp-nosed canine, but it could give doctors a new way to determine the best treatment for patients using just the melange of compounds in their breath.

The eNose can detect with 85 percent accuracy if a person will respond to immunotherapy, say researchers in a paper published today in Annals of Oncology. That could make it an alternative to current methods of determining which cancer treatment is best suited to different patients.

What’s in a Whiff?
Normally, determining what treatment will work for people with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is invasive and time-consuming. Immunotherapy, a type of treatment that equips the immune system to fight off cancer cells, is an option, but it’s only effective in about a fifth of patients. To see if it will work, doctors take tissue samples, sometimes from the lungs, and analyze them in a lab. In some cases, results can take weeks to come back. But the eNose, after analyzing a patient’s breath, can churn out results in less than a minute.

The device consists of a tube and seven sensors that sniff out particles in the breath of patients with advanced NSCLC. Think of it as a breathalyzer, but for determining cancer treatments.

When a patient breathes into the device, sensors analyze volatile organic compounds (VOCs), gaseous molecules that carry important information about our metabolic processes. Based on the presence of telltale biomarkers in the breath, the device is able to recommend whether immunotherapy is a good option or not.

The researchers took breath samples of 143 patients with advanced lung cancer two weeks before they started immunotherapy treatment. After three months, they analyzed the progress of the treatment to see if the eNose had prescribed an effective solution.

They concluded that 85 percent of those patients were prescribed the most effective treatment.

Besides being a quicker alternative to previous methods, the eNose is noninvasive. That means it offers a way to detect cancer without requiring doctors to snip any tissues from a patient’s body.

A Long Way to the Hospital
While the researchers are optimistic about the eNose’s potential, they also acknowledge that it might be a while before it becomes a regular diagnostic tool in hospitals.

Since these trials were conducted in a clinical setting, the dataset is lacking the perspective of a larger-scale lab trial among patients. In a press release, the researchers say that the results of this first trial lay the groundwork for further trials – likely something on a larger scale.

But, said study author and oncologist Michel van den Heuvel in the release, “We are convinced that this study merely scratches the surface.”

The science of using breath to churn out speedy diagnoses is in its beginning stages. But our exhalations have more potential than we realize.

This is certainly surprising. Lots of data though. Pretty thorough study. Certainly a topic that deserves lots of focus in my opinion.

The Kids (Who Use Tech) Seem to Be All Right

A rigorous new paper uses a new scientific approach that shows the panic over teen screen time is likely overstated

Social media is linked to depression—or not. First-person shooter video games are good for cognition—or they encourage violence. Young people are either more connected—or more isolated than ever.

Such are the conflicting messages about the effects of technology on children’s well-being. Negative findings receive far more attention and have fueled panic among parents and educators. This state of affairs reflects a heated debate among scientists. Studies showing statistically significant negative effects are followed by others revealing positive effects or none at all—sometimes using the same data set.

A new paper by scientists at the University of Oxford, published in January in Nature Human Behaviour, should help clear up the confusion. It reveals the pitfalls of the statistical methods scientists have employed and offers a more rigorous alternative. And, importantly, it uses data on more than 350,000 adolescents to show persuasively that, at a population level, technology use has a nearly negligible effect on adolescent psychological well-being, measured in a range of questions addressing depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, pro-social behavior, peer-relationship problems and the like. Technology use tilts the needle less than half a percent away from feeling emotionally sound. For context, eating potatoes is associated with nearly the same degree of effect and wearing glasses has a more negative impact on adolescent mental health.

“This is an incredibly important paper,” says Candice Odgers, a psychologist studying adolescent health and technology at the University of California, Irvine, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It provides a sophisticated set of analyses and is one of the most comprehensive and careful accountings of the associations between digital technologies and well-being to date. And the message from the paper is painstakingly clear: The size of the association documented across these studies is not sufficient or measurable enough to warrant the current levels of panic and fear around this issue.”

To date, most of the evidence suggesting digital technologies negatively impact young people’s psychological well-being comes from analysis of large, publicly available data sets. Those are valuable resources but susceptible to researcher bias, say Andrew Przybylski, an experimental psychologist at Oxford and his graduate student Amy Orben, co-authors of the new paper. To prove their point, they found over 600 million possible ways to analyze the data contained in the three data sets in their study. “Unfortunately, the large number of participants in these designs means that small effects are easily publishable and, if positive, garner outsized press and policy attention,” they wrote.

This type of research intends to modify the status quo. “We’re trying to move from this mind-set of cherry-picking one result to a more holistic picture of the data set,” Przybylski says. “A key part of that is being able to put these extremely miniscule effects of screens on young people in real-world context.”

That context is illuminating. Whereas their study found digital technology use was associated with 0.4 percent of the variation that disrupts adolescent well-being, the effects of smoking marijuana and bullying had much larger negative associations for mental health (at 2.7 and 4.3 respectively in one of the data sets). And some positive behaviors such as getting enough sleep and regularly eating breakfast were much more strongly associated with well-being than the average impact of technology use.

Strikingly, one of the data sets Przybylski and Orben used was “Monitoring the Future,” an ongoing study run by researchers at the University of Michigan that tracks drug use among young people. The alarming 2017 book and article by psychologist Jean Twenge claiming that smartphones have destroyed a generation of teenagers also relied on the data from “Monitoring the Future.” When the same statistics Twenge used are put into the larger context Przybylski and Orben employ, the effect of phone use on teen mental health turns out to be tiny.

The method the Oxford researchers used in their analysis is called Specification Curve Analysis, a tool that examines the full range of possible correlations and maps “the sum of analytical decisions that could be made when analyzing quantitative data.” Rather than reporting a handful of results, researchers using SCA report all of them. It is the statistical equivalent of seeing the forest for the trees. “It’s about setting a standard,” Przybylski says. “This kind of data exploration needs to be systematic.”

All of this is not to say there is no danger whatsoever in digital technology use. In a previous paper, Przybylski and colleague Netta Weinstein demonstrated a “Goldilocks” effect showing moderate use of technology—about one to two hours per day on weekdays and slightly more on weekends—was “not intrinsically harmful,” but higher levels of indulgence could be. And in a 2015 paper Odgers and a colleague reviewed the science addressing parents’ top fears about technology and found two important things: First, most of what happens online is mirrored offline. Second, effects really do depend on the user; benefits are conferred on some whereas risks are exacerbated for others, such as children who already suffer from mental health problems.

“We’re all looking in the wrong direction,” Odgers says. “The real threat isn’t smartphones. It’s this campaign of misinformation and the generation of fear among parents and educators.”

Kinda terrifying actually:

<iframe src='https://gfycat.com/ifr/PrestigiousWhiteIcelandicsheepdog' frameborder='0' scrolling='no' allowfullscreen width='640' height='684'></iframe><p> <a href="https://gfycat.com/prestigiouswhiteicelandicsheepdog">via Gfycat</a></p>

Humans are mystical creatures.

I wonder how far they are from a commercially available product.

On the last jump I thought he was going to do a roundhouse kick. Scary to think what it would be like if it did. It would jack you up for life.

A lesson in cloning....

His Cat’s Death Left Him Heartbroken. So He Cloned It.

China’s first duplicate cat marks the country’s emergence in gene research and its entry in a potentially lucrative and unregulated market for cloning pets.

BEIJING — Garlic was dead, and there was nothing Huang Yu could do. So on a cold winter day, he buried his cat’s body in a park close to his home.

Hours later, still heartbroken, the 22-year-old businessman recalled an article he had read on dog cloning in China. What if someday he could bring Garlic back to life?

“In my heart, Garlic is irreplaceable,” said Mr. Huang, who dug up his British shorthair and put the cat in his refrigerator in preparation for cloning him. “Garlic didn’t leave anything for future generations, so I could only choose to clone.”

That thought led him to Sinogene, a commercial pet-cloning company based in Beijing. Roughly $35,000 and seven months later, Sinogene produced what China’s official news media declared to be the country’s first cloned cat — and another sign of the country’s emergence as a power in cloning and genetics.

It also suggests that China could turn pet cloning into a viable business. Duplicating dogs and cats has not really taken off in the United States and elsewhere, experts say. Pet-obsessed China might be different. The size of China’s domestic pet market is expected to reach $28.2 billion this year, up nearly one-fifth from 2018, according to Gouminwang, a pet consultancy in Beijing. The country already has 55 million pet dogs and 44 million pet cats, and demand for cats is accelerating.

Pet cloning is not confined to China — Barbra Streisand famously declared last year that two of her dogs are clones — and people have been cloning cats for years. But Garlic is the first cat cloned by China, solidifying its position among major cloning nations, which include the United States, Britain and South Korea.

Mi Jidong, Sinogene’s chief executive, said the company decided to start cloning pets in 2015 after conducting a survey of roughly 1,000 people that showed there was demand. The company has cloned more than 40 dogs, including schnauzers, Pomeranians and Malteses, at a cost of about $53,000 each, some as pets and others for medical research.

It charges more for dogs than cats because the window for harvesting a dog’s eggs is very small, according to Mr. Mi. He said more than 100 people had stored the DNA samples of their pets in anticipation of creating clones.

Garlic:

https://i.imgur.com/yxeHVYx.jpg

Garlic 2.0:

https://i.imgur.com/vcFmTLW.jpg

Oh boy.....

Researchers Develop New Method for Sexing Sperm
Scientists found they could sort mouse sperm prior to IVF by treating semen with a drug that selectively slows down X-bearing cells.

The mammalian X chromosome has many genes that the Y does not—a feature that has special implications for sperm, and also for scientists.

The mouse X chromosome carries two protein receptors that when activated by a chemical make X-bearing sperm slower and easy to separate from Y-bearing sperm, a team of Japanese researchers has found. By sorting the gametes using this method and allowing them to fertilize oocytes in vitro, the scientists could selectively generate mouse litters with majority-female or majority-male pups, they report today (August 13) in PLOS Biology.

“It’s definitely an excellent piece of work,” remarks James Knight, a reproductive biologist at Virginia Tech who wasn’t involved in the study. “The whole methodology that they’re describing, given the accuracy of separating X- and Y-bearing sperm, has tremendous applicability to several species.”

Reproductive biologist Masayuki Shimada of Hiroshima University and his colleagues initially began the research to better understand the genetic differences between X- and Y-bearing sperm and whether they could explain differences in the mobility of X- and Y-bearing sperm, which previous researchers have observed under specific in vitro conditions.

According to the team’s RNA sequencing data, mouse sperm carry 492 genes on the X chromosome, but only 15 genes on the Y. Among those expressed on the X, the team became interested in two that code for cell receptors, the Toll-like receptors (TLR) 7 and 8. The TLR family of proteins plays important roles in recognizing pathogens such as bacteria and viruses. In addition, Shimada’s group has previously found that when stimulated, certain TLR receptors—TLR2 and TLR4, encoded on chromosomes unrelated to sex—interfere with sperm movement.

By staining mouse testes with antibodies that target TLR7 and TLR8, the researchers confirmed that they were expressed on X- but not Y-bearing sperm. This characteristic was interesting to Shimada, because the products of most X-linked genes that are expressed in sperm are shared with Y-bearing sperm because the gametes are connected through an intracellular bridge as they develop. TLR7 and TLR8 appear to be expressed after the bridge is lost, so they might reveal functional differences between X and Y sperm, Shimada explains.

To investigate this possibility, the team incubated the sperm with resiquimod, an anti-viral drug that activates both receptors. Normally, all sperm normally swim upward when in a tube. But with the treatment, there were significantly fewer X-bearing sperm in the upper portion of the tube, suggesting that these were simply slower. “The linear motility speed [of X-bearing sperm] was decreased to less than half,” Shimada writes to The Scientist.

The team then investigated why resiquimod had this effect. They found that ATP levels drastically fell in treated X-bearing sperm. Further experiments revealed that the drug’s activation of TLR8 suppresses mitochondrial activity in the midpiece of the sperm and its stimulation of TLR7 suppresses enzymes that regulate the energy-producing process of glycolysis in the tail. This leaves X-bearing sperm with less energy, the researchers note.

“This is the first time that the Toll-like receptors 7 and 8 have been identified for this function,” Knight says. “They’re usually just thought of like most of the Toll-like receptors, that is in mediating various immune responses. So this is certainly a novel finding,” he says.

To see if the resiquimod could be used to separate sperm by sex, the team collected the upper and lower layers of sperm from the test tube after treatment, allowed the gametes to fertilize mouse oocytes in vitro, and implanted the resulting embryos into mice. Using sperm from the upper layer, they obtained 77 blastocyst embryos, 83 percent of which resulted in male pups. Sperm from the lower layer produced 83 embryos, 81 percent of which were female.

Sex-sorting in livestock and in the clinic
Shimada says he thinks his method of sperm sexing could be cheaper and faster than methods currently used to sex mammalian sperm. One dominant technique is the Beltsville Sperm Sexing Technology, developed in the 1980s, in which semen is treated with a fluorescent, DNA-binding dye. As the X chromosome is larger than the Y, it absorbs more dye and fluoresces more strongly under UV light than Y-bearing sperm, allowing X-bearing sperm to be isolated through flow cytometry.

Flow cytometry–based technology requires “a pretty expensive piece of equipment, and takes some expertise for operation,” says Knight. He sees several cost and efficiency advantages to Shimada’s method, noting that it has comparable accuracies in sorting sperm as conventional technologies.

Sperm sorting has several applications in the livestock sector, particularly for the dairy cattle industry where it is used to reduce the number of male calves produced. “The males that might be born are going to basically end up as veal calves,” Knight says, which is problematic because they are less valuable for dairy production, and their slaughtering at a young age raises ethical questions.

Shimada and Knight suggest that the research could be relevant for choosing sex prior to IVF in humans. However, Louise King, an OB-GYN and medical bioethicist at Harvard Medical School, cautions that sperm-sorting technology has already been tried in human IVF, for parents at risk of having children with sex-linked disorders as well as for those who wish to choose the sex of their children. “It wasn’t particularly commercially successful because the success rate wasn’t good enough,” she says. One 2014 study, for instance, that tested the efficacy of flow cytometric sorting in influencing a child’s sex found that after sperm sorting, 94 percent were female when selected for that sex, and 85 percent were male when that sex was chosen.

That success rate often isn’t appealing to families who go to the trouble of choosing the sex of their child, given that they have another option that is 100 percent effective, King says. The IVF clinics in the US that do offer sex selection do so by creating a number of embryos and picking the embryo that has the desired sex. “I don’t think sperm sorting’s going to take over for embryo selection as the way to do it,” she says.

Whether it’s ethical to make that choice to begin with is another question, King says. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine considers sex selection for non-medical purposes “ethically controversial,” and encourages clinics to develop their own policies, while the practice is not permitted in most European countries.

Great thread

Detailed Tour of the Space Shuttle

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QvTmdIhYnes" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Some guy in China paid $35K to clone his dead cat....

His Cat’s Death Left Him Heartbroken. So He Cloned It.

Garlic was dead, and there was nothing Huang Yu could do. So on a cold winter day, he buried his cat’s body in a park close to his home.

Hours later, still heartbroken, the 22-year-old businessman recalled an article he had read on dog cloning in China. What if someday he could bring Garlic back to life?

“In my heart, Garlic is irreplaceable,” said Mr. Huang, who dug up his British shorthair and put the cat in his refrigerator in preparation for cloning him. “Garlic didn’t leave anything for future generations, so I could only choose to clone.”

That thought led him to Sinogene, a commercial pet-cloning company based in Beijing. Roughly $35,000 and seven months later, Sinogene produced what China’s official news media declared to be the country’s first cloned cat — and another sign of the country’s emergence as a power in cloning and genetics.

[...]

To clone Garlic, scientists implanted skin cells from Mr. Huang’s original cat into eggs harvested from other cats. After an electric or chemical shock, 40 cloned embryos were implanted into four surrogate mother cats. That produced three pregnancies, two of which were miscarriages, said Chen Benchi, head of Sinogene’s medical experiments team.

[...]

In his first meeting with the new Garlic in August, Mr. Huang found that cloning had not produced an exact copy of his former pet. The clone is missing a patch of black fur that graced Garlic’s chin. Sinogene said that clones might show slight differences in fur or eye color and that an outside firm had proved the DNA matched.

“If I tell you I wasn’t disappointed, then I would be lying to you,” Mr. Huang said. “But I’m also willing to accept that there are certain situations in which there are limitations to the technology.”

Garlic v1:

https://i.imgur.com/xzJYxcE.jpg

Garlic v2:

https://i.imgur.com/bzIVCL4.jpg

Stunning New Black Hole Visualization From NASA Illustrates How Its Gravity Distorts Our View

https://i.imgur.com/MRlP9Ao.gif

This new visualization of a black hole illustrates how its gravity distorts our view, warping its surroundings as if seen in a carnival mirror. The visualization simulates the appearance of a black hole where infalling matter has collected into a thin, hot structure called an accretion disk. The black hole’s extreme gravity skews light emitted by different regions of the disk, producing the misshapen appearance.

Bright knots constantly form and dissipate in the disk as magnetic fields wind and twist through the churning gas. Nearest the black hole, the gas orbits at close to the speed of light, while the outer portions spin a bit more slowly. This difference stretches and shears the bright knots, producing light and dark lanes in the disk.

Viewed from the side, the disk looks brighter on the left than it does on the right. Glowing gas on the left side of the disk moves toward us so fast that the effects of Einstein’s relativity give it a boost in brightness; the opposite happens on the right side, where gas moving away us becomes slightly dimmer. This asymmetry disappears when we see the disk exactly face on because, from that perspective, none of the material is moving along our line of sight.

https://i.imgur.com/bQDdv4F.jpg

Closest to the black hole, the gravitational light-bending becomes so excessive that we can see the underside of the disk as a bright ring of light seemingly outlining the black hole. This so-called “photon ring” is composed of multiple rings, which grow progressively fainter and thinner, from light that has circled the black hole two, three, or even more times before escaping to reach our eyes. Because the black hole modeled in this visualization is spherical, the photon ring looks nearly circular and identical from any viewing angle. Inside the photon ring is the black hole’s shadow, an area roughly twice the size of the event horizon — its point of no return.

“Simulations and movies like these really help us visualize what Einstein meant when he said that gravity warps the fabric of space and time,” explains Jeremy Schnittman, who generated these gorgeous images using custom software at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Until very recently, these visualizations were limited to our imagination and computer programs. I never thought that it would be possible to see a real black hole.” Yet on April 10, the Event Horizon Telescope team released the first-ever image of a black hole’s shadow using radio observations of the heart of the galaxy M87.

That's awesome.

Theres so much shit out there that we have no idea about. Black holes are really interesting to me. Where does the shit go that's sucked in?

Calling them a "hole" is a bit of a misnomer. They're basically just a giant, massive hunk of mass - kind of like an enormous planet or star. The reason that we call them a hole is that they suck in everything around them - even light - so they're a "hole" in what we can actually observe.

So to answer your question, the experience of getting sucked into one wouldn't be that different from getting sucked into a star aside from the fact that you would be ripped apart into tiny little atoms and then added to the giant mass rather than burned up.

(But all that being said, we've never actually observed anything like that, so that's just in theory.)

Yeah, in theory.

I like the temporal fun time of the Kerr theory though. Time travel is neat!

Spaghettified and all, for sure.

They're so dense and to be honest, we really don't KNOW what the hell is goin on in there. It's fascinating.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Did you miss our Tumblr post on Tuesday? Check it out now to learn about Hubble’s 5 weirdest black hole discoveries! <a href="https://t.co/tZu4X9XHq0">https://t.co/tZu4X9XHq0</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/blackholeweek?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#blackholeweek</a> <a href="https://t.co/jOpU7S04P0">pic.twitter.com/jOpU7S04P0</a></p>&mdash; Hubble (@NASAHubble) <a href="https://twitter.com/NASAHubble/status/1177262332063440907?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 26, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

They're denser than knowmo? That's pretty hard to believe.

Another interesting fact about black holes... we can't seem to find any medium-sized ones. We've located many small ones, and many supermassive ones. But no intermediate sized black holes. Which seems really strange...

Missing Seeds: Mysterious Enigma of Supermassive Black Holes

In the vast garden of the universe, the heaviest black holes grew from seeds. Nourished by the gas and dust they consumed, or by merging with other dense objects, these seeds grew in size and heft to form the centers of galaxies, such as our own Milky Way. But unlike in the realm of plants, the seeds of giant black holes must have been black holes, too. And no one has ever found these seeds — yet.

One idea is that supermassive black holes — the equivalent of hundreds of thousands to billions of Suns in mass — grew from a population of smaller black holes that has never been seen. This elusive group, the “intermediate-mass black holes,” would weigh in somewhere between 100 and 100,000 Suns. Among the hundreds of black holes found so far, there have been plenty of relatively small ones, but none for sure in the intermediate mass-range “desert.”

Scientists are working with powerful space telescopes from NASA, as well as other observatories, to track down far-flung objects that fit the description of these exotic entities. They have found dozens of possible candidates, and are working toward confirming them as black holes. But even if they do, that opens up a whole new mystery: How did intermediate-mass black holes form?

“What is fascinating, and why people have spent so much time trying to find these intermediate-mass black holes, is because it sheds light on processes that happened in the early universe— what were the masses of relic black holes, or new formation mechanisms for black holes that we haven’t thought of yet,” said Fiona Harrison, professor of physics at Caltech in Pasadena, California, and principal investigator for NASA’s NuSTAR mission.

The smallest black holes are called “stellar mass,” with between 1 and 100 times the mass of the Sun. They form when stars explode in violent processes called supernovae.

Supermassive black holes, on the other hand, are the central anchors of large galaxies – for example, our Sun and all other stars in the Milky Way orbit a black hole called Sagittarius A* that weighs about 4.1 million solar masses. An even heavier black hole — at a whopping 6.5 billion solar masses — serves as the centerpiece for the galaxy Messier 87 (M87). M87’s supermassive black hole appears in the famous image from the Event Horizon Telescope, showing a black hole and its “shadow” for the very first time.

[...]

The density of matter needed to create a black hole is mind-boggling. To make a black hole 50 times the mass of the Sun, you would have to pack the equivalent of 50 Suns into a ball less than 200 miles (300 kilometers) across. But in the case of M87’s centerpiece, it is as though 6.5 billion Suns were compressed into a ball wider than the orbit of Pluto. In both cases, the density is so high that the original material must collapse into a singularity— a rip in the fabric of space-time.

Key to the mystery of black holes’ origins is the physical limit on how fast they can grow. Even the giant monsters at the centers of galaxies have limitations on their feeding frenzies, because a certain amount of material is pushed back by the high-energy radiation coming from hot particles accelerated near the event horizon. Just by eating surrounding material, a low-mass black hole might only be able to double its mass in 30 million years, for example.

“If you start from a mass of 50 solar masses, you simply cannot grow it to 1 billion solar masses over 1 billion years,” said Igor Chilingarian, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Moscow State University. But, “as we know, there are supermassive black holes that exist less than 1 billion years after the formation of the universe.”

[...]

Intermediate-mass black hole hunters eagerly await the launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which will peer back to the dawn of the first galaxies. Webb will help astronomers figure out which came first — the galaxy or its central black hole — and how that black hole might have been put together. In combination with X-ray observations, Webb’s infrared data will be important for identifying some of the most ancient black hole candidates.

Another new tool launched in July by the Russian space agency Roscosmos is called Spectrum X-Gamma, a spacecraft that will scan the sky in X-rays, and carries an instrument with mirrors developed and built with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama. Gravitational-wave information flowing from the LIGO-Virgo collaboration will also aid in the search, as will the European Space Agency’s planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission.

Black holes terrify me. I don't want to be ripped to pieces, and those things are wandering around all over the place.

Seems like there's been one in our neighborhood of the galaxy forever.

And they say you can't even see them!

I, for one, welcome our future robotic overlords...

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">10 Years Of Progress In The Boston Dynamics Robotics <a href="https://t.co/bdF7D9Boib">pic.twitter.com/bdF7D9Boib</a></p>&mdash; Universal-Sci (@universal_sci) <a href="https://twitter.com/universal_sci/status/1117059672899506176?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 13, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<blockquote class="reddit-card" data-card-created="1569618979"><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/da2te1/boston_dynamics_2009_vs_2019/">boston Dynamics 2009 vs 2019.</a> from <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed">r/BeAmazed</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//embed.redditmedia.com/widgets/platform.js" charset="UTF-8"></script>

Lol is it just me or do you get a feeling that AI is evolving into the next dominant species that will eventually take over making our intellect look like that of a chimps in comparison.

This is more about nature being cool than science being cool, but check out the interesting spotted zebra that was born recently:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/a...trol::int_rid=

National Geographic won't let me copy the picture. They've figured out how to get people to click the link, I guess.

Well... this is weird. And will no doubt become controversial...


Life on Mars could be found within two years but world is ‘not prepared’, Nasa’s chief scientist says
Leading astronomer says discovery will open up ‘whole new line of thinking’

Nasa is close to finding life on Mars but the world is not ready for the “revolutionary” implications of the discovery, the space agency’s chief scientist has said.

Dr Jim Green has warned that two rovers from Nasa and the European Space Agency (ESA) could find evidence of life within months of arriving on Mars in March 2021.

The ExoMars Rover, which has been dubbed “Rosalind” in memory of British chemist Rosalind Franklin, will search for extra-terrestrial life by drilling 6.5 feet down into Mars’ core to take samples.

Those samples will then be crushed up and examined for organic matter in a mobile laboratory.

Dr Green compared the potential discovery to when the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus stated that the Earth revolves around the Sun in the 16th century.

“It will start a whole new line of thinking. I don’t think we’re prepared for the results,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “I’ve been worried about that because I think we’re close to finding it and making some announcements.”

Nasa’s rover Mars 2020 will drill into rock formations on the planet before sending test-tubes of rock samples back to Earth – the first time material from Mars will have been brought onto this planet.

Dr Green added that the discovery of life on Mars will give scientists a new set of questions to explore.

“What happens next is a whole new set of scientific questions. Is that life like us? How are we related?” he said. “Can life move from planet-to-planet or do we have a spark and just the right environment and that spark generates life – like us or do not like us – based on the chemical environment that it is in?”

Recent research has shown that planets which were previously thought to be uninhabitable may have once had suitable conditions for life.

Earlier this year, scientists discovered that there may be a vast and active system of water running underneath the surface of Mars.

A study released this month also claimed that Venus may have been habitable for 2 to 3 billion years before its atmosphere became incredibly dense and hot about 700 million years ago.

Recent research suggests that civilisations could exist on other planets, according to Dr Green.

“There is no reason to think that there isn’t civilisations elsewhere, because we are finding exoplanets [planets outside the solar system] all over the place,” he said.

His comments came less than 24 hours before technology entrepreneur Elon Musk unveiled a SpaceX spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo to Mars or other planets in the solar system before returning to Earth.

Mr Musk said the company’s Starship was essential for the viability of space travel by introducing a spacecraft that can be reused.

The ship is expected to take off for the first time in about two months and reach 65,000 feet before it lands back on Earth.

They're slow rolling the ET stuff. It's coming out.

Planet-hunting NASA satellite captures a star being ripped apart by a black hole

https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/pla...FExOrt6IG8ltuM

Hey ladies... lesbian scissoring is good for you and scientifically encouraged...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019...h-pilot-study/

<samp class="EmbedCode-container"><code class="EmbedCode-code"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">New evidence shows how asteroid dust cloud may have sparked new life on Earth 470m years ago <a href="https://t.co/WCu6ceVuw3">https://t.co/WCu6ceVuw3</a></p>&mdash; The Guardian (@guardian) <a href="https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1183025963359191042?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 12, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> </code></samp>

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y3RIHnK0_NE" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

ROFL

For those interested...

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">&quot;COSMOS: Possible Worlds&quot;<br>Premiere: March 9, 2020<a href="https://twitter.com/NatGeoChannel?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NatGeoChannel</a><br><br>Be there. <a href="https://t.co/oM4tee20n7">pic.twitter.com/oM4tee20n7</a></p>&mdash; Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) <a href="https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1192596341593137152?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 8, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I'm in.

Weird Object: Neutron Star PSR J1748-2446

What is PSR J1748–2446’s claim to weirdness fame? Simple. It’s the universe’s fastest-spinning celestial object. It’s also a star whose surface is not just solid, but harder than a diamond. Its density is 50 trillion times greater than lead. Its magnetic field sizzles a trillion times more intensely than our Sun’s. In a nutshell, it’s the most extreme example of a neutron star.

A neutron star forms when the core of a heavy sun, with the mass of about a few million Earths, collapses into a tiny sphere while the rest of its body hurtles outward during a supernova explosion. When this occurs, the inverse-square law of gravity goes into its demo-mode with a vengeance. Because this star no longer has a fusion generator, and thus no outward-pushing pressure to keep it from collapsing, gravity has a free hand. When the collapsing star gets five times smaller, its inward-pulling surface gravity becomes 25 times fiercer. When the star shrinks to 100 times smaller than it was before, its surface gravity now sucks inward with 100 x 100 (i.e., 10,000) times more force — and it keeps going. The smaller the star becomes, the more violent its collapse.

Normal 1-solar-mass stars stop collapsing when they’re the size of Earth. Then, electron degeneracy pressure halts the show because each electron needs a bit of breathing room. But if a star’s mass is more than 1.4 Suns — the famous Chandrasekhar limit — as PSR J1748–2446 originally was, then electrons get squeezed into the protons and the collapse continues. At this point, the previously separate atomic particles lose their identities. Everything becomes a neutral ocean of ultra-dense goo, and a few million Earths now pack into a ball less than 20 miles (30 kilometers) wide — a star that could barely cover Los Angeles.

Its spin ratchets up, too, like an over-caffeinated ballerina. Such collapsed stars often rotate 20, 30, or even 100 times a second. But if a neutron sun has a companion star as this one does, then newly captured material can speed it up further still. PSR J1748–2446 spins 716 times every second!

It’s hard to visualize. In everyday life, the fastest-spinning thing we might see is the blade on a kitchen blender or a circular saw. But those never rotate more than a few hundred times a second. This star’s equator moves at one-quarter the speed of light. This rotation of 43,000 miles (70,000km) per second would be like Earth’s equator completing nearly two spins a second instead of one a day.

Imagine living there. Taxes would be very low, but there’d also be several significant drawbacks. The gravity would crush you down so that your protoplasm would spread itself evenly around the surface like a film of oil. You couldn't stand more than one atom high. But if you could still somehow remain conscious, you’d see every star in the sky cross the heavens from horizon to horizon in less than a thousandth of a second, each appearing as a solid line. Studying the cosmos might be a challenge.

Indeed, PSR J1748–2446 rotates about as rapidly as possible. If it went any faster, it would fling its material into space like whipped cream tossed into a fan.

https://i.imgur.com/zdyz3iP.jpg

Similar to a lighthouse, neutron stars deliver quick bursts of energy with every turn, and PSR J1748–2446 releases a consistent ultra-quick series of flashes in a wide range of wavelengths. Indeed, Jason Hessels of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, first detected this object at radio frequencies in 2004. Visually, its light looks steady because nobody can differentiate so many flashes per second, which is 30 times faster than those from a movie projector.
The only visible object that could theoretically surpass the density of this crushed “superball” is a “quark star.” In 2002, researchers announced finding exactly such an object, but it was soon rejected by nearly the entire astrophysical community, which faulted the evidence. So the record stands today.

This fastest-ever pulsar is parked in a globular cluster of stars in Sagittarius the Archer, 18,000 light-years away, in the direction of our galaxy’s center. Called Terzan 5, the cluster is hard to see because foreground dusty gas heavily obscures it. In fact, Terzan 5 is itself quite unusual, having a higher star concentration than any other cluster and also housing stars born in different periods. Some think this cluster is actually the remnant of a dwarf galaxy cannibalized by our Milky Way.

PSR J1748–2446 is also weird because it is part of a binary star system. Its companion is a swollen giant that nonetheless contains just one-seventh our Sun’s mass; this pair whirls around each other in a perfectly circular orbit every 26 hours. Doing so, the companion passes in front of the pulsar daily, blocking 40 percent of its light. This adds a precise clockwork dimming to its ultra-fast flashes, making it simultaneously variable in two different ways.

The whole thing just gets curioser and curioser.

Also... regarding that Kora borehole on the far right of the above pic....

<iframe width="1109" height="624" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zz6v6OfoQvs" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

That's crazy to think about.

https://i.imgur.com/AErTwXz.png

The Most Remote Place On Earth

Point Nemo is officially known as “the oceanic pole of inaccessibility,” or, more simply put, the point in the ocean that is farthest away from land. Located at 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W, the spot is quite literally the middle of nowhere, surrounded by more than 1,000 miles of ocean in every direction. The closest landmasses to the pole are one of the Pitcairn islands to the north, one of the Easter Islands to the northeast, and one island off of the coast of Antarctica to the south.

Clearly, there are no human inhabitants anywhere near Point Nemo (the name “Nemo” itself is both Latin for “no one,” as well as a reference to Jules Verne’s submarine captain from 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea). In fact, the location is so isolated that the closest people to Nemo are actually not even on Earth. The astronauts aboard the International Space Station are around 258 miles from their home planet at any given time. Since the inhabited area closest to Point Nemo is more than 1,000 miles away, the humans in space are far closer to the pole of inaccessibility than those on land.

Not even the man who discovered Point Nemo has ever visited it. In 1992, survey engineer Hrvoje Lukatela located the point in the ocean that was farthest away from any land using a computer program that calculated the coordinates that were the greatest distance from three equidistant land coordinates. It is very possible no human has ever passed through those coordinates at all.

As for non-human inhabitants, there aren’t very many of those around Point Nemo either. The coordinates are actually located within the South Pacific Gyre: an enormous rotating current that actually prevents nutrient-rich water from flowing into the area. Without any food sources, it is impossible to sustain any life in this part of the ocean (other than the bacteria and small crabs that live near the volcanic vents on the seafloor).

Because Point Nemo is located in what has been described as “the least biologically active region of the world ocean,” scientists were surprised when, in 1997, they detected one of the loudest underwater sounds ever recorded near the pole.

<iframe width="945" height="532" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZA2wY5-yiGY" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The sound was captured by underwater microphones more than 3,000 miles apart. Befuddled scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were at a loss to think of something large enough to create such a loud sound underwater and dubbed the mystery noise “The Bloop.” Sci-fi enthusiasts, however, quickly thought of one explanation.

When writer H.P. Lovecraft first introduced readers to his infamous titular, tentacled monster in 1926’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” he wrote that the creature’s lair was the lost city of R’yleh in the south Pacific Ocean. Lovecraft gave R’yleh the coordinates 47°9′S 126°43’W, which are astonishingly close to those of Point Nemo and to where The Bloop was recorded. The fact that Lovecraft first wrote about his sea monster in 1928 (nearly a full 50 years before Lukatela calculated Nemo’s location) led some people to speculate that the pole of inaccessibility was, in fact, home to a yet-undiscovered creature of some sorts.

As it turns out, The Bloop was actually the sound of ice breaking off of Antarctica and not the call of Cthulhu. Point Nemo does, however, have at least one other eerie claim to its name. Due to its remoteness and distance from shipping routes, the area around Nemo was chosen as a “spaceship graveyard.”

Because autonomous spaceships are not designed to survive re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere (the heat usually destroys them), scientists needed to select an area where there would be an extremely low risk of any humans being struck with flying space-debris. With a population of zero, the oceanic pole of inaccessibility at Point Nemo offered the perfect solution.

Wowza...

First Detection of Sugars in Meteorites Gives Clues to Origin of Life

An international team has found sugars essential to life in meteorites. The new discovery adds to the growing list of biologically important compounds that have been found in meteorites, supporting the hypothesis that chemical reactions in asteroids – the parent bodies of many meteorites – can make some of life’s ingredients. If correct, meteorite bombardment on ancient Earth may have assisted the origin of life with a supply of life’s building blocks.

The team discovered ribose and other bio-essential sugars including arabinose and xylose in two different meteorites that are rich in carbon, NWA 801 (type CR2) and Murchison (type CM2). Ribose is a crucial component of RNA (ribonucleic acid). In much of modern life, RNA serves as a messenger molecule, copying genetic instructions from the DNA molecule (deoxyribonucleic acid) and delivering them to molecular factories within the cell called ribosomes that read the RNA to build specific proteins needed to carry out life processes.

“Other important building blocks of life have been found in meteorites previously, including amino acids (components of proteins) and nucleobases (components of DNA and RNA), but sugars have been a missing piece among the major building blocks of life,” said Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University, Japan, lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences November 18. “The research provides the first direct evidence of ribose in space and the delivery of the sugar to Earth. The extraterrestrial sugar might have contributed to the formation of RNA on the prebiotic Earth which possibly led to the origin of life.”

“It is remarkable that a molecule as fragile as ribose could be detected in such ancient material,” said Jason Dworkin, a co-author of the study at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “These results will help guide our analyses of pristine samples from primitive asteroids Ryugu and Bennu, to be returned by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.”

An enduring mystery regarding the origin of life is how biology could have arisen from non-biological chemical processes. DNA is the template for life, carrying the instructions for how to build and operate a living organism. However, RNA also carries information, and many researchers think it evolved first and was later replaced by DNA. This is because RNA molecules have capabilities that DNA lacks. RNA can make copies of itself without “help” from other molecules, and it can also initiate or speed up chemical reactions as a catalyst. The new work gives some evidence to support the possibility that RNA coordinated the machinery of life before DNA.

“The sugar in DNA (2-deoxyribose) was not detected in any of the meteorites analyzed in this study,” said Danny Glavin, a co-author of the study at NASA Goddard. “This is important since there could have been a delivery bias of extraterrestrial ribose to the early Earth which is consistent with the hypothesis that RNA evolved first.”

The team discovered the sugars by analyzing powdered samples of the meteorites using gas chromatography mass spectrometry, which sorts and identifies molecules by their mass and electric charge. They found that the abundances of ribose and the other sugars ranged from 2.3 to 11 parts per billion in NWA 801 and from 6.7 to 180 parts per billion in Murchison.

Since Earth is awash with life, the team had to consider the possibility that the sugars in the meteorites simply came from contamination by terrestrial life. Multiple lines of evidence indicate contamination is unlikely, including isotope analysis. Isotopes are versions of an element with different mass due to the number of neutrons in the atomic nucleus. For example, life on Earth prefers to use the lighter variety of carbon (12C) over the heavier version (13C). However, the carbon in the meteorite sugars was significantly enriched in the heavy 13C, beyond the amount seen in terrestrial biology, supporting the conclusion that it came from space.

The team plans to analyze more meteorites to get a better idea of the abundance of the extraterrestrial sugars. They also plan to see if the extraterrestrial sugar molecules have a left-handed or right-handed bias. Some molecules come in two varieties that are mirror images of each other, like your hands. On Earth, life uses left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. Since it’s possible that the opposite would work fine – right-handed amino acids and left-handed sugars – scientists want to know where this preference came from. If some process in asteroids favors the production of one variety over the other, then maybe the supply from space via meteorite impacts made that variety more abundant on ancient Earth, which made it more likely that life would end up using it.

Probably these:

https://i.imgur.com/Zx9h3Na.jpg

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Finds Unexplained Oxygen on Mars
Fluctuating levels of the atmospheric gas, a potential tracer of alien life, have left researchers mystified

NASA’s Curiosity rover, for three Martian years—nearly six years to us Earthlings—has been sniffing the air above Mars’ Gale Crater, its near-equatorial exploration site. Using its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) portable chemistry lab, the rover has ascertained not only what the surface atmosphere is made of, but also how its gases change with the seasons.

Many of Mars’ gases “are very well behaved,” says Melissa Trainer, a planetary scientist at NASA and a team member on the SAM experiment. One, however, appears to be behaving in a decidedly unexpected and altogether bizarre manner: oxygen.

Scientists have long known that carbon dioxide on Mars, which makes up 95 percent of the planet’s atmosphere, freezes out over the poles in winter, and sublimates back into a gas in summer. In the thin air around Gale Crater, Curiosity’s measurements have shown tiny amounts of inert argon and nitrogen periodically rising and falling as expected, due to this seasonal cycling of carbon dioxide.

Curiosity’s instruments also registered atmospheric oxygen rising and falling at similar times but in amounts that defy easy explanation. There was far more of it during the spring and summer, and less of it in the winter, than the seasonal whooshing back and forth of other gases would predict.

That suggests something is making or unleashing stores of oxygen in the warmer months and trapping or swallowing it up during frigid ones. It could be a geological, chemical, atmospheric or, perhaps even a biological process, but right now, no one has the foggiest as to what the culprit actually is. And although the oxygen’s trampolining certainly appears to be a local feature, it might be a regional or even global peculiarity.

François Forget, a planetary scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, says that this finding is surprising, weird and mysterious. Jon Telling, a geochemist and geomicrobiologist at Newcastle University, says he and other experts are understandably “flummoxed.”

An unanticipated challenge has suddenly been laid out before the scientific community. It is unclear when, or even if, the case of the overzealous oxygen will be cracked. Already, says Paul Niles, a planetary geologist and analytical geochemist at NASA, it is abundantly clear that “Mars is a lot more alien than we thought.”

In situ measurements of the pressure, temperature and composition of Mars’ atmosphere date back nearly a half century, from the Viking landers in the 1970s through to the Spirit, Opportunity and now Curiosity rovers. Curiosity’s SAM suite, however, has painstakingly tracked how Martian atmospheric gas amounts change through the seasons, thereby providing scientists with a game-changing, precise chronicle of the planet's atmosphere.

Oxygen’s too-high spikes and too-low nadirs during the warmer and colder months, respectively, came as a shock. Curiosity’s scientists could conceive of only two possibilities: either a mysterious creator and destroyer of oxygen existed on Mars that scientists were unaware of, or the measurements were wrong. Trainer, lead author of the study reporting the discovery in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, emphasizes that this detection and analysis took many years, with all possible false positive triggers ruled out.

“I think they’ve done their due diligence,” Niles says. Plenty can go wrong with these interplanetary science experiments, from equipment malfunctions to contamination. Regardless, he says, “I don’t see any reason to have any doubt in the oxygen measurements.”

“I hope it’s real,” Forget says, because an extraterrestrial oxygen enigma is far more fun than a glitch.

A true enigma would force researchers to go back to basics, says Manish Patel, a planetary scientist at the Open University. “We must first interrogate our understanding of the known processes for creating oxygen, before we invoke any new, or controversial, processes.”

Trainer and her colleagues did just that. But they still came up short. Solar radiation could be breaking up oxygen molecules and blowing them away into space, but this process appears to be too slow and inefficient to account for the seasonal dips seen by Curiosity. Perhaps carbon dioxide’s slow breakdown in the atmosphere could have released oxygen, causing a summertime spike—but again, this process would take too long to produce the observed peaks.

Martian soil is rich in oxygen-containing hydrogen peroxide and perchlorates. The Viking landers demonstrated that warm, damp air could free this oxygen, but those conditions do not prevail across enough of the planet—let alone Gale Crater—to suffice for the SAM data. Soil bombardment by ionizing radiation from cosmic rays and solar storms might do the trick, but is estimated to require a million years to create the oxygen peak seen during one solitary spring.

We simply do not know enough about Mars to get a grip on this particular puzzle, says Niles. So much about its chemistry—how gases are transported above and within the planet, what sources and sinks they may have—remains deeply uncertain. For all we know, he says, events in Mars’ past could have conspired to lock away vast amounts of oxygen belowground, which is now, for some reason, surging back into the atmosphere.

If the answer is not to be found in Mars’ lifeless air and rocks, could some cryptic, alien form of biology be to blame? On Earth, photosynthesis and respiration by living things cause tiny fluctuations in our planet’s otherwise steady oxygen concentration. We shouldn’t expect this on Mars, though. “That’s far out,” Telling says: Mars appears too inhospitable for a critical mass of life capable of sustaining either process. “It’s almost certainly going to be a nonbiological chemical reaction.”

Trainer herself does not rule out a biological explanation, but nevertheless underscores its unlikeliness. “People in the community like to say that it will be the explanation of last resort, because that would be so monumental,” she says. There are abiotic mechanisms aplenty, both known and unknown, to rule out first before leaping to any more sensational claims.

[...]

Maybe a more efficent way to deliver electricity?


<samp class="EmbedCode-container"><code class="EmbedCode-code"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Scientists discover surprising quantum effect in an exotic superconductor <a href="https://twitter.com/Princeton?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@princeton</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/PhysRevLett?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@physrevlett</a> <a href="https://t.co/kJA9U7ZN8C">https://t.co/kJA9U7ZN8C</a></p>&mdash; Phys.org (@physorg_com) <a href="https://twitter.com/physorg_com/status/1197896475948265472?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 22, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> </code></samp>

Um...oh, shit:




Scientists worried by thousands of tardigrades crash-landing on the moon: ‘We have no idea what can happen’

The Beresheet lunar lander mission on April 11 was historic: Funded and deployed by Space IL, it was the first Israeli spacecraft to travel beyond Earth’s orbit and the first private landing on the Moon. Unfortunately for SpaceIL, things didn’t go as planned: Seconds before Beresheet (Hebrew for “beginning”) was supposed to land, it lost contact with the control room. During the braking procedure, the main engine stopped operating. By the time it was brought back online, it was too late for a soft landing and Beresheet crashed onto the surface. On board was a “lunar library” created by the Arch Mission Foundation as kind of time capsule for the combined knowledge of human civilization. The library contained samples of human DNA and 30 million pages of digital and analog data, including a full copy of Wikipedia, an Israeli flag, a Torah and a copy of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

It also housed thousands of tardigrades—microscopic eight-legged animals also known as “water bears.”


https://unitedhumanists.com/2019/09/...at-can-happen/

It was 2119. The Great Moon Tardigrade Invasion had begun. Mankind was not prepared....

https://i.imgur.com/9TDuMTr.jpg

If you've ever accidentally cut a 220 circuit that you thought was off, you'd know that electricity travels fast enough as it is.

Apparently we're also launching genetically engineered mice to the ISS today.

"The mice, from the nonprofit Jackson Laboratory in Maine, have genes manipulated to enhance their muscle growth."
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/05/tech/...scn/index.html

Artemis popped its cherry...

Before: https://i.imgur.com/2KOIeoZ.jpg

After: https://i.imgur.com/mPuFOO3.jpg

Public Gets Glimpse of NASA's Most Powerful Rocket Launcher

The public got a close-up glimpse of NASA's Space Launch System which will be used as part of its Artemis Project to send astronauts to the moon and eventually Mars starting in 2024.

Over the weekend NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine posted a video on Twitter showing the successful test of SLS' liquid hydrogen tank. The tank could withstand more than 260% of expected flight loads before rupturing.

According to reports, with the tank passing its test, the SLS has moved beyond the assembly and testing stage. The rocket, which is the tallest rocket to ever be erected, is 212 feet long which is equal to a 20-story building, While it is the most powerful rocket to be designed, reaching speeds that broke records, it has been mired in controversy. The development of the rocket has been delayed as costs have overrun estimates.

Nevertheless that didn't stop Bridenstine from calling the completed test at the Michoud Assembly Facility, which is located in New Orleans, a "very important day" for NASA.

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SLS is the only rocket, at least for now, that can send Orion, NASA's moon rocket, astronaut and supplies to the Moon on one mission. The final five components of the SLS were secured in September. NASA has said that for the first mission of SLS and Orion, Artemis I, the rocket is capable of sending more than 26 metric tons (57,000 pounds) to the Moon. As the SLS evolves, it will be capable of sending more than 45 metric tons (99,000 pounds) to deep space.

Neutron Stars explained...

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My spirit animal

https://i.imgur.com/FH6MPeI.jpg

Statics was OK. Dynamics was a bitch though. That was the "Weed out those not actually serious in engineering" course when I was in school. Along with Differential Equations after Calc 1&2. The toughest ever for me though was Elements of Thermodynamics. Completely kicked my ass multiple times.

I loved statics and dynamics. Those were my favorite courses. I even took advanced dynamics as an elective and really enjoyed it. We had another course in materials that I liked a lot, too, where you looked at how materials bend and collapse.

I really wasn't into the chemistry-type courses, though, like thermodynamics and the basic chemistry courses. We had to take a circuitry course that was all I needed there, too.

I think I liked the courses where I could physically envision what was happening and wasn't into the courses where I couldn't.

I was pretty good at chemistry, despite me completely hating the entire subject. When I initially took college chemistry, they had a pre-test the first week, and anybody who passed the pre-test had the option to take honors chemistry, which was one semester of chem that counted at credits for chem1 and chem2 both. It was intense, but I got through it with plenty of work/study. But Thermodynamics though, that one was my Achilles...

My favorite courses were the programming/logic related ones. I was in a group robotics course where a team of 5 of us would write code that made a little robot act as a drink-serving butler in a crowd of people, using IR to scan the room and identify a person, then approach and offer a drink while maintaining safe distance, and retain which people in the crowd it had served/etc. Loved the programming and coding courses like that. At my time, I started with Basic, then Pascal, then C++. Nobody knows how to code these days though. Really tough to hire a computer tech with coding experience these days.

Same for sand?

Joshua Tree National Forest is the quietest place I've ever been too. Creepy. Great place to do acid.

Speaking of quiet, this is NASA's new supersonic plane that's designed to reduce sonic booms to sonic thumps. I'm not sure what it'll be used for, but it's aesthetically very pleasing. You drive that thing around town and you'll pick up all the hot chicks.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/n...final-assembly

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/f...?itok=n-JkTyqM

Spicy tomatoes off the vine? Hell yeah...

https://media.giphy.com/media/qCj1NK1rxtnna/giphy.gif


Scientists Say They're Close to Making A Spicy Tomato

The world’s hottest pepper is currently the Carolina Reaper, clocking in at an average of 1.6 million Scoville Heat Units. The world’s hottest tomato? That’s still to be determined.

The current hottest tomato in the world is, of course, none of them, because tomatoes don’t make capsaicin, the chemical compound that gives hot peppers their kick. But, a group of researchers say that the bland red fruits (yes, they are technically fruits) could conceivably be genetically engineered to begin pumping out the scorching compound, due to tomatoes’ close evolutionary relationship with peppers.

You Say Tomato, I Say Hot Tomato
The two diverged around 19 million years ago, not that long, evolutionarily speaking, and the recent sequencing of the tomato genome revealed that they actually still possess the genetic framework to produce capsaicin. The relevant genes aren’t normally active, but with new genetic engineering techniques, researchers from Brazil and Ireland say that tomatoes could be tweaked to make the spicy compound once again.

Ah, the possibilities. Bruschetta with a kick. Pasta sauce that tingles. Fiery pizzas and eye-watering salads. The culinary potential of a hot tomato tempts the palate.

But, say the researchers in a paper published in Trends in Plant Science, the real reason for convincing tomatoes to get their fire on are more economical. Tomatoes are something of a workhorse crop. They grow bountifully and easily, and there’s a commercial and technical infrastructure surrounding them that makes tomatoes a safe option for agriculture. Peppers, on the other hand, are a bit more finicky. They don’t grow as readily, are more easily beset by pests and diseases and their capsaicin yields are highly dependent on the environment — that is to say, they lack the reliability that large-scale agriculture requires. Pepper yields average about three tons per hectare; tomatoes can crack 100 tons per hectare.

And capsaicin is in demand for more than just livening up bland dishes. It’s used in pepper spray and as a topical painkiller, and the varied commercial uses mean that a more dependable means of acquiring capsaicin would be advantageous. There’s no efficient way of mass-producing capsaicin in a chemical plant, so natural factories like peppers, and perhaps tomatoes, are the best option.

Spicing It Up
The researchers outline two methods by which this genetic manipulation could take place. Genes from a kind of bacteria that infects plants and has the ability to regulate their gene expression could be tweaked and inserted into a viral vector to reactivate the capsaicin pathway in tomatoes, or more conventional genetic engineering like the gene-editing tool CRISPR could be used to accomplish the same thing. There are still questions to be explored as to the efficacy of both techniques, but the researchers say they are fairly confident that any technical wrinkles could be smoothed over with further testing.

Tomatoes could be potentially altered in a few other ways to produce useful compounds, the researchers note as an aside. Lycopene, a compound found in tomatoes, could be reformulated during a tomato’s development with the addition of a few extra genes from other species. These subtle genetic reprogrammings could produce both bixin, a common color additive in both food and cosmetics, and beta carotene, an antioxidant.

Whether or not these genetic additions would affect tomato yield or quality is still unknown as well. The authors say in a statement that they are currently working on gradually deciphering how various genetic changes to tomatoes affect their ability to make capsaicin, with the goal of discovering the complete pathway. That would make hot tomatoes a real scientific possibility.

All that would be left to discuss is whether we want them or not.

Another attempt at designing a commercial domestic SST. Been trying to find a way to mitigate sonic booms for decades.

Would have to be exceptionally slippery as well, since the primary hurdle to commercial SSTs is fuel costs.

Maybe it's time for the hot potato ?

Support nuclear!

https://i.imgur.com/eARIv03.jpg

Unused stockpiles of nuclear waste could be more useful than we might think, according to new study

Chemists have found a new use for the waste product of nuclear power - transforming an unused stockpile into a versatile compound which could be used to create valuable commodity chemicals as well as new energy sources.

Depleted uranium (DU) is a radioactive by-product from the process used to create nuclear energy. With many fearing the health risks from DU, it is either stored in expensive facilities or used to manufacture controversial armour-piercing missiles.

But, in a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Professor Geoff Cloke, Professor Richard Layfield and Dr Nikolaos Tsoureas, all at the University of Sussex, have revealed that DU could, in fact, be more useful than we might think.

By using a catalyst which contains depleted uranium, the researchers have managed to convert ethylene (an alkene used to make plastic) into ethane (an alkane used to produce a number of other compounds including ethanol).

Their work is a breakthrough that could help reduce the heavy burden of large-scale storage of DU, and lead to the transformation of more complicated alkenes.

Prof Layfield said: “The ability to convert alkenes into alkanes is an important chemical reaction that means we may be able to take simple molecules and upgrade them into valuable commodity chemicals, like hydrogenated oils and petrochemicals which can be used as an energy source.

“The fact that we can use depleted uranium to do this provides proof that we don’t need to be afraid of it as it might actually be very useful for us.”

Working in collaboration with researchers at Université de Toulouse and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Sussex team discovered that an organometallic molecule based on depleted uranium could catalyse the addition of a molecule of hydrogen to the carbon-carbon double bond in ethylene – the simplest member of alkene family – to create ethane.

Prof. Cloke said: “Nobody has thought to use DU in this way before. While converting ethylene into ethane is nothing new, the use or uranium is a key milestone.

“The key to the reactivity were two fused pentagonal rings of carbon, known as pentalene, which help the uranium to inject electrons into ethylene and activate it towards addition of hydrogen.”

When you really look into it in detail, it's tragic that basically no new progress has been made in nuclear power because people are scared of it.

Interactive map showing Australia's climate change over the past 110 years:

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/history/temperature/

LMAO

I thought this was neat if nothing else for the witty little note with each substance.

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https://66.media.tumblr.com/9f3b6cf3...2ac57738dc.jpg


So there is that......

Science or SciFi plot?

Artificial intelligence yields new antibiotic
A deep-learning model identifies a powerful new drug that can kill many species of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Using a machine-learning algorithm, MIT researchers have identified a powerful new antibiotic compound. In laboratory tests, the drug killed many of the world’s most problematic disease-causing bacteria, including some strains that are resistant to all known antibiotics. It also cleared infections in two different mouse models.

The computer model, which can screen more than a hundred million chemical compounds in a matter of days, is designed to pick out potential antibiotics that kill bacteria using different mechanisms than those of existing drugs.

“We wanted to develop a platform that would allow us to harness the power of artificial intelligence to usher in a new age of antibiotic drug discovery,” says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering. “Our approach revealed this amazing molecule which is arguably one of the more powerful antibiotics that has been discovered.”

In their new study, the researchers also identified several other promising antibiotic candidates, which they plan to test further. They believe the model could also be used to design new drugs, based on what it has learned about chemical structures that enable drugs to kill bacteria.

“The machine learning model can explore, in silico, large chemical spaces that can be prohibitively expensive for traditional experimental approaches,” says Regina Barzilay, the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Barzilay and Collins, who are faculty co-leads for MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (J-Clinic), are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Cell. The first author of the paper is Jonathan Stokes, a postdoc at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

[...]

KIST researchers develop high-capacity EV battery materials that double driving range

Dr. Hun-Gi Jung and his research team at the Center for Energy Storage Research of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST, President Lee Byung Gwon) have announced the development of silicon anode materials that can increase battery capacity four-fold in comparison to graphite anode materials and enable rapid charging to more than 80% capacity in only five minutes. When applied to batteries for electric vehicles, the new materials are expected to more than double their driving range.

The batteries currently installed in mass-produced electric vehicles use graphite anode materials, but their low capacity contributes to electric vehicles' having a shorter driving range than vehicles with internal combustion engines. Consequently, silicon, with an energy storage capacity 10-times greater than graphite, has drawn attention as a next-generation anode material for the development of long-range electric vehicles. However, silicon materials have not yet been commercialized because their volume expands rapidly and storage capacity decreases significantly during charge and discharge cycles, which limits commercialization. A number of methods have been suggested for enhancing the stability of silicon as an anode material, but the cost and complexity of these methods have prevented silicon from replacing graphite.

To enhance the stability of silicon, Dr. Jung and his team focused on using materials that are common in our everyday lives, such as water, oil, and starch. They dissolved starch and silicon in water and oil, respectively, and then mixed and heated them in order to produce carbon-silicon composites. A simple thermal process used for frying food was employed to firmly fix the carbon and silicon, preventing the silicon anode materials from expanding during charge and discharge cycles.

The composite materials developed by the research team demonstrated a capacity four-times greater than that of graphite anode materials (360mAh/g ? 1,530mAh/g) and stable capacity retention over 500 cycles. It was also found that the materials enable batteries to charge to more than 80% capacity in only five minutes. Carbon spheres prevent the usual volume expansion of silicon, thereby enhancing the stability of silicon materials. Also, the use of highly conductive carbon and the rearrangement of the silicon structure resulted in a high output.

Wow, that's a helluva difference.