Science! (7 Viewers)

[Optimus Prime]

The asteroid which killed nearly all of the dinosaurs struck Earth during springtime. This conclusion was drawn by an international team of researchers after having examined thin sections, high-resolution synchrotron X-ray scans, and carbon isotope records of the bones of fishes that died less than 60 minutes after the asteroid impacted. The team presents its findings in the journal Nature…

Press release - Uppsala University, Sweden

The asteroid which killed nearly all of the dinosaurs struck Earth during springtime. This conclusion was drawn by an international team of researchers after having examined thin sections, high-resolution synchrotron X-ray scans, and carbon isotope records of the bones of fishes that died less...

www.uu.se

 

[Tapxe]

Could a 3-metre flying disk change the face of urban mobility?

Stephen Tibbitt hopes his invention, which is competing for the Boeing-sponsored GoFly prize, will transform the way we move around.

www.euronews.com

 

[Tapxe]

Electrode made from inexpensive earth-abundant metals has potential for green fuel production

A metal foam could underpin a low-cost method for generating carbon-free fuels, researchers from KAUST have shown. The team seamlessly coated the foam with iron and cobalt nanomaterials to create a highly active electrode for a device that splits water molecules to release oxygen and hydrogen, a...

techxplore.com

 

[Tapxe]

Construction begins on the US' first-ever offshore wind farm service operations vessel

Meet the "Eco Edison," which will be the first Jones Act-qualified offshore wind farm service operations vessel in the US.

electrek.co

The Eco Edison is being built at Edison Chouest Offshore in-house shipyards in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida, creating over 300 jobs, with components being manufactured across 12 states.

I sure hope this is a sign of new domestic industry. It'd be nice to build a renewable electric grid and reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

 

[Tapxe]

Team chosen to make first oxygen on the Moon

Following a competition, ESA has selected the industrial team that will design and build the first experimental payload to extract oxygen from the surface of the Moon. The winning consortium, led by Thales Alenia Space in the UK, has been tasked with producing a small piece of equipment that...

www.esa.int

 

[Tapxe]

Cool your home by painting your roof: World's whitest paint on track to be sold to public

Researchers plan to commercialize the whitest paint ever made. It could replace air conditioning and may even prevent glaciers from melting, they say.

www.usatoday.com

 

[Tapxe]

Long but interesting journey of a concept from initial work to full scale well funded operations. There's more than a few 'hum' moment with death, untimely accidents, and ultimate cancelation of the project when it appeared to be so very close.

Makani is a company which ran the numbers and figured out windmills are terribly inefficient while a kite with generators mounted to it flying into the wind can produce magnitudes more power with less weight and support structure needed. It comes with some engineering challenges, but ultimately they weren't able to compete as windmill tech made a leap before they could commercialize.

Without further jabber...

 

[Optimus Prime]

Deep beneath Earth's surface, on opposite sides of the planet, sit two enormous blob-like structures spanning thousands of miles. And one of them, beneath Africa, is slowly creeping up towards the surface.

Scientists first spotted the two giant structures via seismic observations. These anomalies sit in the lowermost mantle, between around 400 and 1,600 miles below Earth's surface, above the outer core.

One blob is beneath the Pacific Ocean, while the other is under Africa. They are known as Low-Shear-Velocity Provinces (LLSVPs) and are known to influence processes at the core as well as the mantle. The blobs are thought to be incredibly dense "thermochemical piles" composed of recycled oceanic crust or iron-rich material.

Researchers from Arizona State University have studied these blobs to better understand what they are and where they sit in Earth's mantle, with the findings published in Nature Geoscience................

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

Scientists at the University of Melbourne have created the largest time crystal to date by programming one into a simulation in a quantum computer with 57 qubits—the quantum equivalent of a binary bit in a regular computer. That represents an improvement of nearly a factor of three over the last such groundbreaking simulation, as detailed in newly published research in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.

But what does the largest-ever time crystal really mean in the context of quantum computing?

First, we should define some terms. Quantum computing is an arm of quantum mechanics, which is a way of understanding the world on the scale of electrons. Seen extremely close up, atoms and their particles act a certain way when they’re observed versus when they’re just going about their normal activities. Think of it as physicist Sean Carroll puts it in his book The Big Picture: quantum mechanics is like an opponent’s hidden poker hand. They can say they’ve won, but you don’t know exactly what they have until they turn over their cards.

Time crystals are a special case of quantum mechanics first conceived of ten years ago, Science reports, when Nobel Prize winner and theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek wondered if the patterns of atoms that form crystals could somehow take place in time rather than space. What if time could arrange itself in the same, almost unfathomably orderly way, as the atoms do within an elemental crystal?.............

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[bonnjer]

Spider silk can stabilize cancer-suppressing protein

The p53 protein protects our cells from cancer and is an interesting target for cancer treatments. The problem is, however, that it breaks down rapidly in the cell. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have now found an unusual way of stabilising the protein and making it more potent...

www.eurekalert.org

 

[Optimus Prime]

Astronomers have discovered a 40-trillion-mile-long filament of matter and antimatter ejected by a pulsar and glowing in X-ray light, the largest one ever found.

Astronomers first discovered the filament, which are the largest known structures in the universe, in 2020 using Nasa’s Chandra X-ray observatory, a space telescope turned to X-ray energies.

But Chandra’s detector was not large enough to view the full length of the plume, and in a recent press release, the Chandra team announced the discovery of the record-breaking length — three times longer than any plume observed previously — based on new observations.

The source of the plume is pulsar PSR J2030+4415, a rapidly spinning neutron star with a powerful magnetic field around 1,600 light years from Earth within our galaxy. A pulsar compresses all the maps of a supermassive star into a space the size of a small city, spinning three times Each second.

“It’s amazing that a pulsar that’s only 10 miles across can create a structure so big that we can see it from thousands of light-years away," Martijn de Vries, a postdoctoral researcher in astrophysical particle physics at Stanford University and leader of the study said in a statement.

“With the same relative size, if the filament stretched from New York to Los Angeles the pulsar would be about 100 times smaller than the tiniest object visible to the naked eye.”..........

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[Tapxe]

 

[Tapxe]

Tad misleading in that they don't see an image per se. It's more like they can differentiate the brainwave activity.

Scientists See What People Picture in Their Mind’s Eye - Neuroscience News

Using electrocorticogram technology to capture brain waves, researchers found the meaning of what people imagine can be determined from brain wave patterns, even if the image differs from what a person is looking at.

neurosciencenews.com

 

[Tapxe]

The researchers used cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), a technique well-suited to membrane proteins because the lipid membrane environment is undisturbed throughout the experiment. This allowed them to visualize the atomic structure of the active enzyme at high resolution for the first time.

“As a consequence of the recent ‘resolution revolution’ in cryo-EM, we were able to see the structure in atomic detail,” Rosenzweig said. “What we saw completely changed the way we were thinking about the active site of this enzyme.”

Methane-eating bacteria convert greenhouse gas to fuel

“Methane has a very strong bond, so it’s pretty remarkable there’s an enzyme that can do this,” first author Amy Rosenzweig said. "If we don't understand how the process occurs, we can't replicate it."

news.northwestern.edu

 

[Tapxe]

More brain work. Not sure if a fish brain is in any way analogous to human, but it's at least a challenges perceptions and possible understanding.

“It may be that what we’re looking at is the equivalent of a solid-state drive” in the brain, said coauthor Scott Fraser, a quantitative biologist at USC. While the brain records some types of memories in a volatile, easily erasable form, fear-ridden memories may be stored more robustly, which could help to explain why years later, some people can recall a memory as if reliving it, he said.

Scientists Watch a Memory Form in a Living Brain

While observing fearful memories take shape in the brains of fish, neuroscientists saw an unexpected level of synaptic rewiring.

www.wired.com