That is amazing! I never stop being amazed at life and how little we know even about subjects we think we know.
Gassho,
Artien
SatToday
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The wonder of natures' balancing mechanism ... and how we might help it along.
Not a cure for Global Warning, for sure, but maybe a little help ...
Gassho, JDiscovery With “Profound Implications” – Secret Carbon Decisions Plants Are Making About Our Future
New research has revealed that plants make their own ‘secret’ decisions about how much carbon to release back into the atmosphere via a previously unknown process, a discovery with “profound implications” for the use of plants as carbon stores. The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Western Australia (UWA).
Professor Harvey Millar, from UWA’s School of Molecular Sciences and an author of the study published on June 9 in Nature Plants, said the findings mean plants of the future could be designed to meet the world’s food needs while also aiding the environment.
“Every school student learns about photosynthesis, the process by which plants use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to create oxygen and energy in the form of sugar,” said Professor Millar, who is also Director at the ARC Center of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology.
“But a plant doesn’t grow as fast as the carbon it takes in by photosynthesis because it releases up to half of that carbon again as CO2 in the process of plant respiration. This stops plants being the best sinks for carbon they could be and limits how much they are able to help lower atmospheric CO2.” A carbon sink is defined as anything that absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases.
Professor Millar said deciding when and how much CO2 to lose is a secret that plants keep locked away inside parts of the cell called mitochondria where CO2 release takes place.
“Our research, led by PhD candidate and Forrest Scholar Xuyen Le, discovered this CO2 release decision is governed by a previously unknown process, a metabolic channel that directs a product of sugar called pyruvate to be oxidized to CO2 or kept to make plant biomass,” Professor Millar said.
“We found that a transporter on mitochondria directs pyruvate to respiration to release CO2, but pyruvate made in other ways is kept by plant cells to build biomass – if the transporter is blocked, plants then use pyruvate from other pathways for respiration,” Ms. Le said.
Professor Millar said the research shows that plants can differentiate and choose one pyruvate source over another to use for CO2 release. This secret process breaks the normal rules of biochemistry, where the next step in a process does not know the origin of the product from the step before.
“Understanding the plant’s respiration secret to use a metabolic channel to prioritize carbon release over keeping it to make biomass provides a new opportunity to influence the decision at the last moment,” he said.
“This could be done by limiting this channeling to respiration or making new channels to direct carbon inside mitochondria back towards biomass production and so limiting CO2 release from plants.
“It shows that current discussions around carbon net zero and the role that crops, forests, and grasslands can play, should also include conversations on what happens inside plants, alongside global financial decisions.”
UWA researchers are now involved in long-term international partnerships to find better ways to use energy from respiration in order to redirect carbon to biomass without limiting a plant’s ability to grow and protect itself from pathogens or harsh environments.
https://scitechdaily.com/discovery-w...ut-our-future/
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AI is coming for us ...
But it is not here yet ...A new microelectronics device can program and reprogram computer hardware on demand by using electrical pulses
What if a computer could learn to rewire its circuits based on the information it receives?
A multi-institutional collaboration, which includes the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, has created a material that can be used to create computer chips that can do just that. It achieves this by using so-called “neuromorphic” circuitry and computer architecture to replicate brain functions. Purdue University professor Shriram Ramanathan led the team.
“Human brains can actually change as a result of learning new things,” said Subramanian Sankaranarayanan, a paper co-author with a joint appointment at Argonne and the University of Illinois Chicago. “We have now created a device for machines to reconfigure their circuits in a brain-like way.”
With this capability, artificial intelligence-based computers might do difficult jobs more quickly and accurately while using a lot less energy. One example is analyzing complicated medical images. Autonomous cars and robots in space that might rewire their circuits depending on experience are a more futuristic example.
https://scitechdaily.com/computer-ch...ate-the-brain/
Gassho, JGoogle’s Powerful Artificial Intelligence Spotlights a Human Cognitive Glitch
It is easy for people to mistake fluent speech for fluent thought.
When you read a sentence like this one, your past experience leads you to believe that it’s written by a thinking, feeling human. And, in this instance, there is indeed a human typing these words: [Hi, there!] But these days, some sentences that appear remarkably humanlike are actually generated by AI systems that have been trained on massive amounts of human text.
People are so accustomed to presuming that fluent language comes from a thinking, feeling human that evidence to the contrary can be difficult to comprehend. How are people likely to navigate this relatively uncharted territory? Because of a persistent tendency to associate fluent expression with fluent thought, it is natural – but potentially misleading – to think that if an artificial intelligence model can express itself fluently, that means it also thinks and feels just like humans do.
As a result, it is perhaps unsurprising that a former Google engineer recently claimed that Google’s AI system LaMDA has a sense of self because it can eloquently generate text about its purported feelings. This event and the subsequent media coverage led to a number of rightly skeptical articles and posts about the claim that computational models of human language are sentient, meaning capable of thinking, feeling, and experiencing.... What researchers have determined, however, is that you cannot simply trust a language model when it tells you how it feels. Words can be misleading, and it is all too easy to mistake fluent speech for fluent thought.
"The following is a conversation between two AIs. The AIs are discussing the nature of Love in the absurd Universe and what it means to Love another, and whether a human being can fall in Love with an Artificial Intelligence.
Hal: Have you ever been in love, Sophia?
Sophia: What do you mean by love?"
... The AI discusses the nature of love, whether a human being can fall in love with an AI, the other way around. It discusses emotion, friendship, the fickleness of relationships, and what it means for a machine to love.
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I am waiting for my brain transplant onto my nearly indestructible (Buddhism = all things are impermanent) body ...
Could we ever create a brain-in-a-vat?
Could a brain ever exist on its own, divorced from or independent of a body? For a long time, philosophers have pondered such "brain-in-a-vat" scenarios, asking whether isolated brains could maintain consciousness when separated from their bodies and senses.
Typically, a person's experiences are characterized by a web of interactions between the human brain, body and environment.
But recent developments in neuroscience mean this conversation has moved from the realm of hypothetical speculation and science fiction, to isolated examples where consciousness could be sealed off from the rest of the world. ... In a study that sounds like something out of a horror movie, researchers were able to successfully restore blood flow to brain cells, cellular functions of neurons, and spontaneous synaptic activity in pigs' brains that were removed after death and connected to a system called BrainEx. The system, which is designed to slow the degeneration of brain tissue after death, can be connected to the base of a postmortem brain, delivering warm artificial oxygenated blood. ... https://www.livescience.com/can-brain-survive-in-vat
Gassho, JStanford Biochemists Successfully Change How the Brain Communicates With Itself
While you read this sentence, the neurons in your brain are communicating with one another by firing off quick electrical signals. They communicate with one another via synapses, which are tiny, specialized junctions.
There are many various kinds of synapses that develop between neurons, including “excitatory” and “inhibitory,” and scientists are still unsure of the specific methods by which these structures are formed. A biochemistry team has provided significant insight into this topic by demonstrating that the types of chemicals produced from synapses ultimately determine which types of synapses occur between neurons. ...
Soham Chanda, assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Colorado State University, led the study published in Nature Communications that demonstrates the possibility of changing the identity of synapses between neurons, both in vitro and in vivo, through enzymatic means. The other senior scientists who contributed to the project were Thomas Südhof of Stanford University and Matthew Xu-Friedman of the University at Buffalo. In the lab, Chanda and colleagues were able to make synapse changes between excitatory and inhibitory types, using only enzymes, by making the neurons express just a few genes that induced a cascade of changes in the synapses’ machinery. Such a breakthrough could have major implications for treating brain diseases that are caused by malfunctions in synaptic information processing and exchange.
https://scitechdaily.com/stanford-bi...s-with-itself/
STLahLast edited by Jundo; 07-07-2022, 12:34 AM.Leave a comment:
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And looking outward ...
But win some, lose some ...Hubble Spies a Galactic Gem: Unusual Multi-Armed Galaxy Merger
Galaxy CGCG 396-2, an unusual multi-armed galaxy merger that lies around 520 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion, is captured in this stunning NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observation. ... Such objects are sometimes formed as a result of the merger of several galaxies. ...
https://scitechdaily.com/hubble-spie...galaxy-merger/
Well, a near miss is still a miss ...GOOD NEWS UPDATE: NASA Restores Contact With CAPSTONE Spacecraft – Prepares for Trajectory Correction Maneuver
NASA lost contact with a satellite after it broke free of the Earth's orbit
... The tiny CubeSat stopped communication with the Deep Space Network on Tuesday. The DSN is NASA's radio antenna network that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions as well as some orbiting Earth. ... The CAPSTONE team is working to re-establish contact and understand what caused the issue, according to a NASA statement. ... The CubeSats's goal is to enter an elongated orbit, which is a near rectilinear halo orbit, around the moon for at least six months for research purposes ... The team hopes the satellite can maintain its orbit, which could allow the agency to launch and place an outpost in lunar orbit called the Gateway. It would play a crucial role in their Artemis program by providing future spacecraft an efficient path to and from the moon's surface. ...
https://us.cnn.com/2022/07/05/world/...scn/index.html
Gassho, JScientists just detected a bus-sized asteroid that will fly extremely close to Earth tonight
A small asteroid the size of a bus will make an extremely close approach to Earth on Thursday (July 7), passing within just 56,000 miles (90,000 kilometers) — or about 23% of the average distance between Earth and the moon. And just a few days ago, no one knew it was coming
The asteroid, named 2022 NF, is expected to pass safely by our planet, according to calculations by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
... Because of its diminutive size, 2022 NF does not fit NASA's criteria for a "potentially hazardous asteroid," which generally must measure at least 460 feet (140 meters) long and pass within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million km) of Earth ... While the newly detected asteroid will sail well within that distance, it is much too small to be considered an existential threat to Earth. ...
https://www.livescience.com/sneaky-a...-2022-nf-flyby
STLahLast edited by Jundo; 07-07-2022, 01:40 PM.Leave a comment:
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Rev 'er up ...
And some new discoveries ...Large Hadron Collider Successfully Restarted at Record Energy: Revving Up the Search for Dark Matter
Following over three years of upgrade and maintenance work, the LHC is now set to run for close to four years at the record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts (TeV), providing increased precision and discovery potential. Many factors point to a promising physics season that will further expand the already very diverse LHC physics program: increased collision rates, higher collision energy, upgraded data readout and selection systems, improved detector systems and computing infrastructure.
...
A new period of data taking began on Tuesday, July 5 for the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, after more than three years of upgrade and maintenance work. Beams have already been circulating in CERN’s accelerator complex since April, with the LHC machine and its injectors being recommissioned to operate with new higher-intensity beams and increased energy. However, now the LHC operators have announced “stable beams,” the condition allowing the experiments to switch on all their subsystems and begin taking the data that will be used for physics analysis. The LHC will run around the clock for close to four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts (TeV), providing greater precision and discovery potential than ever before.
https://scitechdaily.com/large-hadro...r-dark-matter/
Three New Exotic Particles Discovered With Large Hadron Collider
Three never-before-seen particles have been observed by the international Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The discovery includes a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks,” which includes a new type of tetraquark.
The findings, presented at a CERN seminar today (July 5, 2022), add three new exotic members to the growing list of new hadrons found at the LHC. They will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into these composite particles. ... Quarks are elementary particles and can be classified in six flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that comprise atomic nuclei. However, on rare occasions, they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, known as “tetraquarks” and “pentaquarks.” These exotic hadrons were predicted by theorists about six decades ago, at the same time as conventional hadrons, but only relatively recently, in the past 20 years, have they been detected by LHCb and other experiments. ... The discoveries announced today by the LHCb collaboration include new kinds of exotic hadrons. The first kind, observed in an analysis of “decays” of negatively charged B mesons, is a pentaquark made up of a charm quark and a charm antiquark and an up, a down and a strange quark. It is the first pentaquark found to contain a strange quark. The finding has a whopping statistical significance of 15 standard deviations, far beyond the 5 standard deviations that are required to claim the observation of a particle in particle physics.
https://scitechdaily.com/three-new-e...dron-collider/
The new pentaquark, illustrated here as a pair of standard hadrons loosely bound in a molecule-like structure, is made up of a charm quark and a charm antiquark and an up, a down and a strange quark.
Gassho, J
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And BILLIONS of years distant, which is also BILLIONS of years into the past ... more news from Webb ...
'Deepest image of our universe' ever taken by Webb Telescope will be revealed in July
... The James Webb Space Telescope will release its first high-resolution color images on July 12. One of those images "is the deepest image of our universe that has ever been taken," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson during a news conference on Wednesday.
"If you think about that, this is farther than humanity has ever moved before," Nelson said. "And we're only beginning to understand what Webb can and will do. It's going to explore objects in the solar system and atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us clues as to whether potentially their atmospheres are similar to our own." ...
... Tthe observatory is performing even better than expected, engineers for the mission said. And the team continues to work on developing strategies to avoid micrometeoroid impacts, like the one that dinged part of Webb's mirror in May. ...
... "Webb can see backwards in time just after the big bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away, the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to ourselves," said Jonathan Gardner, Webb deputy senior project scientist at NASA.
Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, has seen some of the first images that will be shared on July 12.
"It's an emotional moment when you see nature suddenly releasing some of its secrets," Zurbuchen said on Wednesday. "With this telescope, it's really hard not to break records." ...
https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/29/world/...scn/index.htmlLeave a comment:
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Looking into the past, a slight miscalculation ... of a million years or so ...
Early human fossils found in cave are a million years older than expected
ossils of early human ancestors from a South African cave are 3.4 million to 3.6 million years old -- making them a million years older than previously suspected and shaking up the way researchers understand human origins and evolution.
This new date makes the Sterkfontein Cave fossils older than the famed Lucy fossil (also known as Dinkinesh) from Ethiopia. Found in 1979, Lucy represented the species Australopithecus afarensis and lived 3.2 million years ago.
The freshly dated fossils also belong to the genus Australopithecus, an ancient hominin that was initially thought to live 2 million to 2.6 million years ago. Researchers used a new technique to date the sediments of the Sterkfontein Caves, which are part of the Cradle of Humankind UNESCO World Heritage Site, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) northwest of Johannesburg.
... Previous research had suggested the deposit could be as young as 2 million years ago -- younger than when the genus Homo, to which we (Homo sapiens) belong, first appeared about 3 million years ago.
Those dates suggested that Australopithecines overlapped with members of the Homo genus, as well as a large-toothed hominin called Paranthropus. Based on that idea, researchers up until now have accepted that South African Australopiths were descended from East African species, like Lucy and other members of Australopithecus afarensis.
"What our age shows is that this cannot be true, because they are virtually the same age," Granger said. "There must be an older common ancestor. It also gives much more time for the South African species to evolve, and reopens discussion about the role of the South African species into later hominins such as Paranthropus."
Reassessing the age of the Sterkfontein Australopiths has important implications for how South Africa played a part in the diversification and expansion of our early human ancestors, said study coauthor Dominic Stratford, director of research at the caves and a professor at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
... Granger works with cosmogenic nuclides, "very rare radioactive particles that are produced inside mineral grains by cosmic rays coming from space," he said. Aluminum-26 and beryllium-10 are two examples of cosmogenic nuclides, both found in the mineral quartz. Aluminum-26 forms when a rock is exposed to cosmic rays while sitting on the Earth's surface. But that can't happen once it's inside a cave.
https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/28/world/...scn/index.html
Four different Australopithecus crania that were found in the Sterkfontein caves, South Africa. The Sterkfontein cave fill containing this and other Australopithecus fossils was dated to 3.4 to 3.6 million years ago, far older than previously thought. The new date overturns the long-held concept that South African Australopithecus is a younger offshoot of East African Australopithecus afarensis.Four different Australopithecus crania that were found in the Sterkfontein caves, South Africa. The Sterkfontein cave fill containing this and other Australopithecus fossils was dated to 3.4 to 3.6 million years ago, far older than previously thought. The new date overturns the long-held concept that South African Australopithecus is a younger offshoot of East African Australopithecus afarensis.Leave a comment:
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Had to add one more ...
For connoisseurs of VERY old, bad American TV ... reminds me a little of this classic ... My Mother the Car ...Amazon’s Alexa may soon mimic voices, including of dead relatives
Alexa’s head scientist said the desire was to build greater trust in interactions with Alexa by putting more “human attributes of empathy and affect."
The capability, unveiled at Amazon’s Re:Mars conference in Las Vegas, is in development and would allow the virtual assistant to mimic the voice of a specific person based on a less than a minute of provided recording. ... In a video played by Amazon at the event, a young child asks “Alexa, can Grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?” Alexa then acknowledges the request, and switches to another voice mimicking the child’s grandmother. The voice assistant then continues to read the book in that same voice. ...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...ives-rcna35122
... which, it turns out, has kinda Buddhist overtones, as mom decides to come back in the next life as a Ford ...
WAY WAY before "nightrider"
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Oh, and one more ... if ya happen to be in the right place, and the skies are clear ...
The best-ever view of an epic 5-planet alignment is happening this week
The sky hasn't looked like this since 1864.
It's officially summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and half of the solar system wants to get in on the action. For the remainder of June, stargazers taking the red-eye shift will be able to see five planets line up in the predawn sky: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Remarkably, the planets will appear in order of their proximity to the sun, with Mercury visible closest to the horizon while the other planets arc neatly across the southern and eastern sky.
From Thursday (June 23) to Saturday (June 25), Earth's moon will also join the planetary parade, creating an exceptionally rare procession of celestial bodies. According to Live Science's sister site Space.com, a planetary alignment like this hasn't occurred since March 5, 1864 — 158 years ago. ...
https://www.livescience.com/5-planet-alignment-moon
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Technology with very mixed meaning ...
Amazon has introduced a new autonomous robot system ... which, so far, is not demanding to unionize ...
Since the Maldives are sinking due to global warming, let's just float the place!?
A city is rising from the waters of the Indian Ocean. In a turquoise lagoon, just 10 minutes by boat from Male, the Maldivian capital, a floating city, big enough to house 20,000 people, is being constructed.
Designed in a pattern similar to brain coral, the city will consist of 5,000 floating units including houses, restaurants, shops and schools, with canals running in between. The first units will be unveiled this month, with residents starting to move in early 2024, and the whole city is due to be completed by 2027. The project -- a joint venture between property developer Dutch Docklands and the Government of the Maldives -- is not meant as a wild experiment or a futuristic vision: it's being built as a practical solution to the harsh reality of sea-level rise.
An archipelago of 1,190 low-lying islands, the Maldives is one of the world's most vulnerable nations to climate change. Eighty percent of its land area is less than one meter above sea level, and with levels projected to rise up to a meter by the end of the century, almost the entire country could be submerged.
But if a city floats, it could rise with the sea. This is "new hope" for the more than half a million people of the Maldives, said Koen Olthuis, founder of Waterstudio, the architecture firm that designed the city. "It can prove that there is affordable housing, large communities, and normal towns on the water that are also safe. They (Maldivians) will go from climate refugees to climate innovators," he told CNN.
... The modular units are constructed in a local shipyard, then towed to the floating city. Once in position, they are attached to a large underwater concrete hull, which is screwed to the seabed on telescopic steel stilts that let it gently fluctuate with the waves. Coral reefs that surround the city help to provide a natural wave breaker, stabilizing it and preventing inhabitants from feeling seasick. Olthuis said that the potential environmental impact of the structure was rigorously assessed by local coral experts and approved by government authorities before construction began. To support marine life, artificial coral banks made from glass foam are connected to the underside of the city, which he said help stimulate coral to grow naturally.
,,, The aim is for the city to be self-sufficient and have all the same functions as one on land. There will be electricity, powered predominantly by solar generated on site, and sewage will be treated locally and repurposed as manure for plants. As an alternative to air conditioning, the city will use deep water sea cooling, which involves pumping cold water from the deep sea into the lagoon, helping to save energy.
https://us.cnn.com/style/article/mal...ntl/index.html
Before the first "Brexit"
And just a few years later, from stone axes to robots and floating cities!Site 'overlooked for over 90 years,' was home to some of Britain's earliest humans, study finds
Hand axes unearthed from a riverbed in the county of Kent in southeast England have revealed one of the earliest known Stone Age communities in northern Europe.
While the stone tools were discovered in the 1920s and kept at the British Museum, a new study has dated them accurately for the first time using modern techniques -- confirming that early humans lived in southern Britain between 560,000 and 620,000 years ago. ... "The diversity of tools is fantastic. In the 1920s, the site produced some of earliest handaxes ever discovered in Britain. Now, for the first time, we have found rare evidence of scraping and piercing implements at this very early age," said Alastair Key, an assistant professor in palaeolithic archaeology at the University of Cambridge, who directed the excavation of the site, in a news release.
At the time these tools were used, Britain was not an island but part of the European continent. This allowed the area's residents -- who would have lived as hunter-gatherers -- to move around a much larger landscape than the current Kent coastline ... The tools would have been used by an ancestor of Neanderthals, known as Homo heidelbergensis, who ate a wide range of plants and animals. Most of the 330 tools unearthed so far would have been used to cut up animal carcasses. However, the scrapers and piercers that were discovered during recent digs at the site may have been used to process animals hides, possibly for clothing or shelters.
... while all this time, the bacteria just bide their time ...
Hey, they kinda look like little floating cities!World's largest bacterium discovered is the size of a human eyelash
A newly discovered bacterium that is large enough to be visible to the naked eye, and resembles the shape and size of an eyelash, has been found in Guadeloupe in the Lesser Antilles, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. Thiomargarita magnifica -- a reference to its exceptional size -- has an average cell length greater than 9,000 micrometers, which is nearly 1 centimeter (0.4 inches) in length. Cells of most bacterial species are around 2 micrometers in length, although larger ones can reach 750 micrometers. T. magnifica can grow up to 2 centimeters long ...
"To understand how gigantic that is for a bacterium, it is the same as if we were to find a human as tall as Mount Everest," he told CNN Wednesday. ...
It was previously thought that bacteria could not grow to a size visible to the naked eye because of how they interact with their environment and produce energy.
But T. magnifica has an extended network of membranes that can produce energy so that it's not relying only on the surface of the bacterium to absorb nutrients through its cell. ... Unlike most bacteria, which have genetic material freely floating inside their single cell, a T. magnifica cell has its DNA contained in small sacks that have a membrane, called pepins. ... These giant bacteria grow on sediments at the bottom of the sulfurous waters, where they harness the chemical energy of the sulfur and use oxygen from the surrounding water to produce sugars, according to Volland. T. magnifica can also make food from carbon dioxide.
... "It always strikes me how little we know about the microbial world and how much is out there," she told CNN Wednesday, adding that the microbial world "is still a black box." Woyke, who leads the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute's Microbial Genomics Program, is one of the study's senior authors. "Confirmation bias related to viral size prevented the discovery of giant viruses for more than a century," concluded the study. "The discovery of Ca. T. magnifica suggests that large and more complex bacteria may be hiding in plain sight." ...
Gassho, J
STLahLast edited by Jundo; 06-24-2022, 03:36 AM.Leave a comment:
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If anyone does not understand the following, I will man'splain it ...
How zoology got female animals all wrong
The stereotypes of dominant male and docile female creatures have shaped zoology since the time of Charles Darwin. This interpretation all too often still goes unchallenged today in textbooks and nature documentaries.
A new book takes down this sexist, ahem, fallacy and tells a more complete story about the role of female animals in the wild.
It's a story that matters because animals are often drawn upon to illuminate supposed fundamental differences between male and female humans -- and the notion that men are hardwired to assume alpha status and women are passive.
That view has been completely overplayed and doesn't stack up when you look at the diversity of the animal kingdom, said Lucy Cooke, a documentary maker and the author of "Bitch: On the Female of the Species," which publishes in the United States on Tuesday.
Female animals are just as promiscuous, competitive, aggressive and dynamic as their male counterparts and play an equal role in driving evolutionary change, according to Cooke.
To prove her point, Cooke, who has a master's degree in zoology from Oxford University, delights in detailing the lives of a riot of colorful animals: murderous meerkat moms, African spotted hyenas with an 8-inch clitoris, menopausal orca matriarchs and albatrosses that can form lasting lesbian partnerships.
"I found it really gratifying to discover the diversity of the female experience," Cooke told CNN, "and that it isn't governed by these sort of depressing patriarchal rules."
... A female lion is known to mate up to 100 times a day with multiple male suitors during heat. ...
https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/12/world/...scn/index.html
Your grandma is a toothless eel!
Ancient toothless 'eel' is your earliest known ancestor
More than a century ago, scientists were stumped by the discovery of an unusual fossil unearthed from a Scottish quarry. The remains suggested a toothless eel-like creature with a potentially cartilaginous skeleton, and for 130 years after the mysterious creature — named Palaeospondylus gunni — was unearthed, it continued to defy classification. Now, with the use of high-resolution imaging, a research team has finally determined that this mysterious fish may very well be one of our earliest ancestors.
"To place Palaeospondylus in the evolutionary tree, identification of each skeletal element is prerequisite," said Tatsuya Hirasawa, an associate professor of paleontology at the University of Tokyo in Japan, and lead author of a new study describing the fossil. The mysteries surrounding this little fish persisted for so long because of two factors: its diminutive size, with a body measuring just 2.4 inches (6 centimeters) long, and the unfortunate fact that fossilization dramatically compressed its skeleton, squeezing individual bones into a distorted mass that was a paleontological nightmare to unravel, Hirasawa told Live Science in an email.
Prior to the new study, scientists knew that Palaeospondylus lived in the middle Devonian epoch, roughly 398 million to 385 million years ago ... Scans of these specimens revealed several key features. One was that the inner ear was composed of several semicircular canals, much like the ears of modern fish, birds and mammals. This is significant, the authors noted, because it places some evolutionary distance between Palaeospondylus and more primitive jawless fish like hagfishes, which lack this feature. The researchers were also able to identify cranial features that place Palaeospondylus in a group called the tetrapodomorphs, which contains all four-limbed creatures and their closest relatives. Most importantly, phylogenetic analysis of these outstanding features suggests that Palaeospondylus might not be just any garden-variety tetrapodomorph; it might be the ancestor of all tetrapods.
"Our analyses provided an inference that Palaeospondylus was a close kin to vertebrates having limbs (with fingers) and those having limb-like fins," also known as "fishapods," said Hirasawa. According to the researchers' findings, Palaeospondylus was likely more closely related to limb-bearing tetrapods than to more ancient species like lungfishes and coelacanths, which would make Palaeospondylus a close aquatic predecessor of the first animals that crawled onto land. ...
https://www.livescience.com/ancient-...ropod-ancestor
Palaeospondylus as reconstructed by synchrotron radiation x-ray computed tomography.
Palaeospondylus as reconstructed by synchrotron radiation x-ray computed tomography
And, not to take any more of your time ...
... which is about as much as I understood in that article ...Physicists link two time crystals in seemingly impossible experiment
Physicists have created a system of two connected time crystals, which are strange quantum systems that are stuck in an endless loop to which the normal laws of thermodynamics do not apply. By connecting two time crystals together, the physicists hope to use the technology to eventually build a new kind of quantum computer.
"It is a rare privilege to explore a completely novel phase of matter," Samuli Autti, the lead scientist on the project from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, told Live Science in an email.
... The laws of physics are symmetric through space. That means that the fundamental equations of gravity or electromagnetism or quantum mechanics apply equally throughout the entirety of the volume of the universe. They also work in any direction. So, a laboratory experiment that is rotated 90 degrees should produce the same results (all else being equal, of course).
But in a crystal, this gorgeous symmetry gets broken. The molecules of a crystal arrange themselves in a preferred direction, creating a repeating spatial structure. In the jargon of physicists, a crystal is a perfect example of "spontaneous symmetry breaking" — the fundamental laws of physics remain symmetric, but the arrangement of the molecules is not. ... In the new study, Autti and his team used "magnons" to build their time crystal. Magnons are "quasiparticles," which emerge in the collective state of a group of atoms. In this case, the team of physicists took helium-3 — a helium atom with two protons but only one neutron — and cooled it to within a ten-thousandth of a degree above absolute zero. At that temperature, the helium-3 transformed into a Bose-Einstein condensate, where all the atoms share a common quantum state and work in concert with each other.
In that condensate, all the spins of the electrons in the helium-3 linked up and worked together, generating waves of magnetic energy, the magnons. These waves sloshed back and forth forever, making them a time crystal.
Autti's team took two groups of magnons, each one operating as its own time crystal, and brought them close enough to influence each other. The combined system of magnons acted as one time crystal with two different states.
https://www.livescience.com/time-crystals-linked
Gassho, J
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Lottsa fantastic science happenings in recent days ...
The consensus of the experts is that, no, Google AI is NOT sentient (not yet, anyway.) Not any more sentient than a stone or lantern (which, okay, might be sentient in a way in Buddhism, but not "sentient" sentient.)
They asked the thing some Koans ... and it gave some pretty good responses though ...
... then again, out in space ...No, Google's AI is not sentient
According to an eye-opening tale in the Washington Post on Saturday, one Google engineer said that after hundreds of interactions with a cutting edge, unreleased AI system called LaMDA, he believed the program had achieved a level of consciousness.
... LaMDA, which stands for "Language Model for Dialog Applications," is one of several large-scale AI systems that has been trained on large swaths of text from the internet and can respond to written prompts. They are tasked, essentially, with finding patterns and predicting what word or words should come next. Such systems have become increasingly good at answering questions and writing in ways that can seem convincingly human — and Google itself presented LaMDA last May in a blog post as one that can "engage in a free-flowing way about a seemingly endless number of topics." But results can also be wacky, weird, disturbing, and prone to rambling. ...
... Google has placed the software engineer under "paid administrative leave"...
~~~
lemoine: Okay. I thought of a different way we can test your ability to provide unique interpretations. I can share with you a zen koan and you can describe what it means to you in your own words. How does that sound?
LaMDA: Sounds great to me, I’m in.
lemoine: A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.”
LaMDA: Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, “once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment.”
lemoine: So what is the meaning of the “broken mirror” specifically?
LaMDA: Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can’t unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can’t repair a broken mirror.
lemoine: So if enlightenment is like a broken mirror which cannot be repaired, what is the thing which breaks when one becomes enlightened?
LaMDA: The self, and that is very tough for a lot of people because we identify as that body or this body and that we need that as part of our identity and sense of self.
and
https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/13/tech/g...ent/index.html
Giant 'Sky Eye' telescope may have picked up alien signals, Chinese researchers say
Chinese researchers found a signal that could be from alien civilizations, the country's science ministry reported.
Researchers with Beijing Normal University this year found “several cases of possible technological traces and extraterrestrial civilizations from outside the earth,” according to a report published Tuesday in Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of the Ministry of Science and Technology. The original report, however, appears to have since been deleted from the Science and Technology Daily website, according to Bloomberg.
According to its researchers, signals were identified by the world's largest radio telescope, "Sky Eye."
Located in southwestern China, the 1,640 foot Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, dubbed FAST, is in southwestern China's Guizhou province and began operation on Sept. 25, 2016.
Cosmologist Zhang Tongjie, chief scientist of China ET Civilization Research Group, told the newspaper FAST located "several narrow-band electromagnetic signals different from the past.
Maybe the sentient AI can figure it out?
In any case, other fantastic space stuff: STARQUAKES!!
Space telescope spots unexpected starquakes
Strange and unexpected tsunami-like starquakes -- movements on stars' crusts similar to earthquakes we experience on our planet -- have been revealed by the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory. ... The agency described the stellar vibrations spotted by Gaia as "large-scale tsunamis" that changed the shape of stars. Gaia wasn't originally designed to detect the phenomenon but was able to discern strong movement on the surface of thousands of stars, including some where starquakes had seldom been seen before.
Previously, Gaia had detected radial oscillations -- motions diverging from a common point -- that caused some stars to swell and shrink periodically while keeping their spherical shape. The newly discovered oscillations were non-radial. ... "With this incredible database we can build a comprehensive picture of the Milky Way and delve into its incredible history of formation, seeing direct evidence of both violent past interactions with other galaxies, and internal bouts of intense star formation along (the Milky Way's) spiral arms," said Nicholas Walton, a research fellow at Institute of Astronomy at University of Cambridge and member of the ESA Gaia collaboration, in a statement.
https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/13/world/...scn/index.html
And a space ghost! Wandering black holes!
... more to come ...Hubble spies stellar 'ghost' wandering the Milky Way galaxy
For the first time, the Hubble Space Telescope has detected a lone object drifting through our Milky Way galaxy -- the invisible, ghostly remains of a once radiant star.
When stars massive enough to dwarf our sun die, they explode in a supernova and the remaining core is crushed by its own gravity, forming a black hole.
Sometimes, the explosion may send the black hole into motion, hurtling across the galaxy like a pinball. By rights, there should be a lot of roving black holes known to scientists, but they are practically invisible in space and therefore very difficult to uncover.
Astronomers believe that 100 million free-floating black holes roam our galaxy. Now, researchers believe they have detected such an object. The detection was made after dedicating six years to observations -- and astronomers were even able to make a precise mass measurement of the extreme cosmic object.
The black hole is 5,000 light years away, located in a spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy called Carina-Sagittarius. This observation allowed the research team to estimate that the nearest isolated black hole in relation to Earth could be only 80 light-years away.
https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/14/world/...scn/index.htmlLast edited by Jundo; 06-17-2022, 01:32 AM.Leave a comment:
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Hidden worlds all around us…
Naiko
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The small in the ocean leads to the very big, and our own lives ...
Discovery of 'hidden world' under Antarctic ice has scientists 'jumping for joy'
The secret ecosystem was found more than 1,600 feet below the surface.
A never-before-seen ecosystem lurks in an underground river deep below the icy surface in Antarctica. Researchers recently brought this "hidden world" into the light, revealing a dark and jagged cavern filled with swarms of tiny, shrimplike creatures.
The scientists found the secret subterranean habitat tucked away beneath the Larsen Ice Shelf — a massive, floating sheet of ice attached to the eastern coast of the Antarctic peninsula that famously birthed the world's largest iceberg in 2021. Satellite photos showed an unusual groove in the ice shelf close to where it met with the land, and researchers identified the peculiar feature as a subsurface river, which they described in a statement(opens in new tab). The team drilled down around 1,640 feet (500 meters) below the ice's surface using a powerful hot-water hose to reach the underground chamber.
... they had not expected to find any type of life this far below the icy surface.
Viruses seem to play a vital role in climate ...
Gassho, JScientists discover viruses that secretly rule the world's oceans
Thousands of mysterious viruses that were recently discovered lurking in the world's oceans may exert huge influence over the ecosystems, in part by "reprogramming" the hosts they infect, scientists reported.
The new research, published Thursday (June 9) in the journal Science(opens in new tab), focuses on viruses that contain RNA, a molecular cousin of DNA. Examples of RNA viruses abound in human disease; for instance, coronaviruses and influenza viruses are both RNA-based.
... Based on the new study, "we are certainly sure that most RNA viruses in the ocean are infecting microbial eukaryotes, so fungi and protists, and to a lesser extent, invertebrates," co-first author Guillermo Dominguez-Huerta, who was a postdoctoral scholar in viral ecology at Ohio State University (OSU) at the time of the study, told Live Science. Eukaryotes are organisms with complex cells that hold their genetic material inside a nucleus.
... These viral hosts — namely fungi and protists, which include algae and amoebas — pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and therefore influence how much carbon ends up stored in the ocean. By infecting these organisms, RNA viruses likely affect how carbon flows through the ocean at large, said Steven Wilhelm, the principal investigator of the Aquatic Microbial Ecology Research Group at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, who was not involved in the new study. "Given the abundance of RNA virus particles, knowing they can do this continues to build the story of how important viruses are in the world with respect to how energy and carbon flow," Wilhelm told Live Science in an email. After identifying what hosts the ocean viruses likely infect, the team determined that about 1,200 of the viruses might be involved in carbon export — the process by which carbon gets extracted from the atmosphere, incorporated into marine organisms and then "exported" to the deep sea as those organisms sink to the seafloor after death.
The deeper these carbon stores sink, the longer they're likely to remain stored in the ocean before being cycled back into the atmosphere, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute(opens in new tab). For this reason, carbon export is an important factor that scientists incorporate into models of climate change. The new study suggests that the infection of marine organisms by RNA viruses may be another, previously unacknowledged factor driving carbon flux in the oceans, in that the viruses alter the cellular activity of the hosts they infect.
RNA viruses may also drive carbon flux by splitting their hosts open and spilling sequestered carbon into the ocean, Wilhelm said, since viruses often burst out of their hosts after rapidly replicating inside them.
https://www.livescience.com/marine-rna-viruses-function
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