Science! (7 Viewers)

[Optimus Prime]

I remember when the 1st one was found
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Our tally of strange, new worlds just reached 5,000.

Astronomers have added the 5,000th alien world to the NASA Exoplanet Archive, officials with the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California announced on Monday (March 21).

The milestone comes amid a surge of recent discoveries and the promise of more insights to come, as NASA's $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope readies for planet-gazing operations in deep space...........

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

Are we all evil with goatees?
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Some scientists say that our universe could just be one side of the coin. The other side is something they call the “anti-universe”. It’s basically a hypothetical mirror universe where time moves backward.

But how exactly did scientists come to this conclusion? A new study on the matter focuses on the three most important symmetries that scientists have found in nature: charge, parity, and time.

Charge basically dictates that if you flip the charge of a particle involved in an interaction to its opposite, then you’ll get the exact same interaction. Parity then dictates that if you look at the mirror image of an interaction, you will see the same result in the reflection. Finally, time dictates that running any interaction backwards in time will cause it to look the same. This fundamental idea is known as CPT symmetry for short.

As Livescience notes, most physical interactions obey at least most of these symmetries most of the time. However, there are some violations. Despite those outliers, scientists have never found any interactions that ignore all three symmetries at the same time.

In this new paper, though, scientists posit that this symmetry doesn’t just pertain to the actions that take place in the universe. Instead, it applies to the entirety of the cosmos. But how do you get from talking symmetry in the universe to proposing a mirror universe altogether? That’s where things get really interesting...........

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[Tapxe]

After nearly 3 months of unsuccessful efforts, the team tried neurofeedback, in which a person attempts to modify their brain signals while getting a real-time measure of whether they are succeeding. An audible tone got higher in pitch as the electrical firing of neurons near the implant sped up, lower as it slowed. Researchers asked the participant to change that pitch using any strategy. On the first day, he could move the tone, and by day 12, he could match it to a target pitch. “It was like music to the ear,” Chaudhary recalls. The researchers tuned the system by searching for the most responsive neurons and determining how each changed with the participant’s efforts.

By holding the tone high or low, the man could then indicate “yes” and “no” to groups of letters, and then individual letters. After about 3 weeks with the system, he produced an intelligible sentence: a request for caregivers to reposition him.

Science | AAAS

www.science.org

I'd have probably gone with scratch my arse for a first sentence.

 

[Optimus Prime]

A new type of high-frequency acoustic wave discovered propagating on the Sun seems to be defying expectations.

The waves appear on the surface of the Sun as a pattern of swirling vortices, moving against the Sun's rotation. The problem is that these high-frequency retrograde vorticity waves seem to be moving three times faster than predicted by theory – and solar physicists have been unable to determine why.

The discovery, they say, suggests that there is new solar physics to be uncovered, as well as giving fresh insight into the Sun's internal properties and activity.

Although we can't actually see inside the Sun, stars are remarkable in that their internal processes can often be inferred based on surface activity...........

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

There is a new kind of mystery object in space, and after capturing their best image yet, astronomers are one step closer to understanding these celestial oddballs.

They are known as odd radio circles, or ORCs. While the thought of ORCs may bring the goblinlike humanoids from the "Lord of the Rings" books to mind, these fascinating objects have baffled scientists since they first discovered them in 2020.

Astronomers found the odd radio circles using the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope, operated by Australia's national science agency CSIRO, or Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, two years ago.

These space rings are so massive that they measure about a million light-years across -- 16 times bigger than our Milky Way galaxy…….

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/24/world/odd-radio-circles-space-scn/index.html

 

[Eeyore]

Evolutionary transition from a single RNA replicator to a multiple replicator network - Nature Communications

Long-term experimental evolution shows that a single polymerase-encoding RNA replicator can evolve into a complex replicator network, shedding light on how a molecular replicator could have developed complexity before the emergence of life.

www.nature.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists have figured out why vampire bats are the only mammals that can survive on a diet of just blood.

They compared the genome of common vampire bats to 26 other bat species and identified 13 genes that are missing or no longer work in vampire bats. Over the years, those gene tweaks helped them adapt to a blood diet rich in iron and protein but with minimal fats or carbohydrates, the researchers reported Friday in the journal Science Advances.

The bats live in South and Central America and are basically “living Draculas,” said co-author Michael Hiller of Germany’s Max Planck Institute. About 3 inches (8 centimeters) long with a wingspan of 7 inches (18 centimeters), the bats bite and than lap up blood from livestock or other animals at night.

Most mammals couldn’t survive on a low-calorie liquid diet of blood. Only three vampire species of the 1,400 kinds of bats can do that — the others eat mostly insects, fruit, nectar, pollen or meat, such as small frogs and fish.

“Blood is a terrible food source,” said Hannah Kim Frank, a bat researcher at Tulane University, who was not involved in the study. “It’s totally bizarre and amazing that vampire bats can survive on blood — they are really weird, even among bats.”…..

Scientists figure out how vampire bats got a taste for blood

Scientists have figured out why vampire bats are the only mammals that can survive on a diet of just blood.

apnews.com

 

[Eeyore]

Experimental protocol for testing the mass–energy–information equivalence principle

The mass–energy–information equivalence principle proposed in 2019 and the information content of the observable matter in the universe estimated in 2021 represent two important conjectures, called...

aip.scitation.org

 

[Optimus Prime]

Overgrowth of a brain area called the amygdala in the first year of life could be behind children developing autism, scientists believe.

The small structure grows much faster between the ages of six and 12 months in babies who are then diagnosed with autism, according to a new study.

It sits deep inside the brain and plays a vital role in recognizing people's faces and fearful images which warn people of potential dangers.

But at what stage of their development this enlargement happens has remained a mystery until now.

First author Dr. Mark Shen at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said: "We also found that the rate of amygdala overgrowth in the first year is linked to the child’s social deficits at age two.

"The faster the amygdala grew in infancy, the more social difficulties the child showed when diagnosed with autism a year later.”

A total of 408 babies were enrolled in the study, many of whom were considered to be at risk of developing autism because they had an older sibling with the condition.

During the study, 58 of the 212 considered to be at risk were later diagnosed with autism and 29 with a genetic condition known as fragile X syndrome which delays development.............

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Astronomers have discovered the farthest star yet, a super-hot, super-bright giant that formed nearly 13 billion years ago at the dawn of the cosmos.

But this luminous blue star is long gone, so massive that it almost certainly exploded into bits just a few million years after emerging. Its swift demise makes it all the more incredible that an international team spotted it with observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It takes eons for light emitted from distant stars to reach us.

“We’re seeing the star as it was about 12.8 billion years ago, which puts it about 900 million years after the Big Bang,” said astronomer Brian Welch, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of the study appearing in Wednesday’s journal Nature.

“We definitely just got lucky.”

He nicknamed it Earendel, an Old English name which means morning star or rising light — “a fitting name for a star that we have observed in a time often referred to as `Cosmic Dawn.′ ”

The previous record-holder, Icarus, also a blue supergiant star spotted by Hubble, formed 9.4 billion years ago. That’s more than 4 billion years after the Big Bang......

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

I know the answer is no because I think most planetary orbits are elliptical and double no because we have satellites and telescopes but here is something I used to wonder as a kid

If a planet's orbit was a perfect circle is it possible to have another planet with the same orbit 180 degrees away and you'd never see it?

 

[Sailorsaint]

I know the answer is no because I think most planetary orbits are elliptical and double no because we have satellites and telescopes but here is something I used to wonder as a kid

If a planet's orbit was a perfect circle is it possible to have another planet with the same orbit 180 degrees away and you'd never see it?

I guess it would be possible for another planet to be exactly on the opposite side of the sun from us. As long as it’s orbit is identical, we would never “see” it from earth. But, once you have satellites in the outer solar system, you would detect it. I also assume you would know it’s there by the way it affects the orbit of other planets.

 

[SWJJ]

Even if we couldn't see it we could detect its gravitational force, so we know its not there. There are a lot of planets we only discovered because we knew where to look because we could see it's gravity effecting the other things we could see.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Yoda was right


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Visitors to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland report feelings of tightness in their chests, nervousness in their hands, and feelings of depression—it’s almost like the place is haunted by tremendous amounts of bad energy. According to some scientists, there’s a high chance it’s one of many sites containing “negative energy.”

That means our habitat may not be as neutral as we perceive it to be, explaining the goosebumps and sick-to-your-stomach feeling you may experience in haunted houses or sites where horrific violence took place. There are three predominant theories for this phenomenon: the presence of emotional residue, or leftover evidence of past emotions that are still lurking around, “geopathic stress” emanating from Earth itself, and the power of our mind’s own expectations.

That means our habitat may not be as neutral as we perceive it to be, explaining the goosebumps and sick-to-your-stomach feeling you may experience in haunted houses or sites where horrific violence took place. There are three predominant theories for this phenomenon: the presence of emotional residue, or leftover evidence of past emotions that are still lurking around, “geopathic stress” emanating from Earth itself, and the power of our mind’s own expectations.

A possible explanation is that the human nervous system is able to pick up on chemical signals the body gives off through sweat and tears. Studies have found, for instance, that men’s libido declines in the presence of women’s tears and that these “chemosignals” persist in the surrounding environment. Some experiments have attempted to describe human responses to them.............

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[Sailorsaint]

Yoda was right


================

Visitors to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland report feelings of tightness in their chests, nervousness in their hands, and feelings of depression—it’s almost like the place is haunted by tremendous amounts of bad energy. According to some scientists, there’s a high chance it’s one of many sites containing “negative energy.”

That means our habitat may not be as neutral as we perceive it to be, explaining the goosebumps and sick-to-your-stomach feeling you may experience in haunted houses or sites where horrific violence took place. There are three predominant theories for this phenomenon: the presence of emotional residue, or leftover evidence of past emotions that are still lurking around, “geopathic stress” emanating from Earth itself, and the power of our mind’s own expectations.

That means our habitat may not be as neutral as we perceive it to be, explaining the goosebumps and sick-to-your-stomach feeling you may experience in haunted houses or sites where horrific violence took place. There are three predominant theories for this phenomenon: the presence of emotional residue, or leftover evidence of past emotions that are still lurking around, “geopathic stress” emanating from Earth itself, and the power of our mind’s own expectations.

A possible explanation is that the human nervous system is able to pick up on chemical signals the body gives off through sweat and tears. Studies have found, for instance, that men’s libido declines in the presence of women’s tears and that these “chemosignals” persist in the surrounding environment. Some experiments have attempted to describe human responses to them.............

MSN

www.msn.com

I would place merit in that hypothesis only if you don’t know the history of the place that gives off those feelings. I think it’s the knowledge of what happened there that is causing the anxiety.