The Zen of Technology & Scientific Discovery! (& Robots)

[Jundo]

So, we go to Mars and, first thing we do, we trash up the place ...

Hopefully, this will help us someday go there and clean up after ourselves ...

Ingenuity helicopter takes photos of debris field on Mars

The Ingenuity helicopter has captured a unique bird’s-eye perspective of the gear that helped land the Perseverance rover on Mars.

... Studying the components that allowed for a safe landing can help them prepare for future missions to the red planet that will require landing and even launching from the Martian surface for the first time. ... The backshell can be seen among a debris field it created after hitting the Martian surface while moving at about 78 miles per hour (126 kilometers per hour). But the backshell’s protective coating appears to be intact, as are the 80 suspension lines connecting it to the parachute. The orange and white parachute can be seen [above photo, top left], covered in dust, but the canopy doesn’t show any damage ...
https://us.cnn.com/2022/04/28/world/...scn/index.html

[Jundo]

No, we have not gone in for astrology (don't believe in that).

This is just neat and pretty astronomy, and reminds us that all is moving ...

Watch the Venus-Jupiter conjunction at the end of April

Venus and Jupiter will appear to touch each other in the sky at the end of the month, despite actually being millions of miles apart.

The two planets will appear closest together around 3 p.m. ET on April 30, with Venus 0.2 degrees south of Jupiter, according to EarthSky. The distance is less than the diameter of the moon, the space site added.

By May 1, the planets will have continued on their paths and look as if they are spreading farther apart from Earth’s vantage point.

4 planets line up like ducks in a row in gorgeous night-sky image

The moon is leading a parade of planets across the predawn sky this week. And Italian astrophysicist Gianluca Masi captured the celestial show in a gorgeous image shot from his balcony in Rome.

In advance of an unusual alignment of the five visible planets in the solar system, four planets are lining up behind the moon like ducks in a row. Since April 23, Saturn, Mars, Venus and Jupiter have all been visible above the horizon in the early morning hours in the Northern Hemisphere.

"This morning I could enjoy the planetary parade involving Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Saturn, plus the moon. It was an amazing sight, all the four planets were very easy to see," Masi told Live Science in an email.

Planetary alignments occur when the planets' orbits bring them to the same region of the sky, when viewed from Earth. These planetary alignments are not rare, but they're not regularly occurring, either: The last time five planets aligned in the night sky was in 2020, preceded by alignments in 2016 and 2005.
https://www.livescience.com/four-planet-moon-alignment

[Jundo]

When I first read this, I thought it meant alien ray guns ...

Powerful space laser detected by South African telescope

Astronomers have detected a powerful radiowave laser, known as a megamaser, in space.

This record-breaking megamaser is the most distant one ever observed at 5 billion light-years away from Earth.

The light from this space laser traveled a whopping 36 thousand billion billion miles (58 thousand billion billion kilometers) to reach our planet. ...

... “When galaxies collide, the gas they contain becomes extremely dense and can trigger concentrated beams of light to shoot out,” Glowacki said in a statement. ...

... The MeerKAT telescope, located in the Karoo region of South Africa, includes an array of 64 radio dishes and has been operational since July 2018. The powerful telescope is sensitive to faint radio light.

MeerKAT is a precursor to the transcontinental Square Kilometre Array, or SKA, a telescope under construction in both South Africa and Australia.

The array will include thousands of dishes and up to 1 million low-frequency antennas in an effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope.

Despite the fact that these dishes and antennas will be in different parts of the world, together they will create one telescope that has over 1 square kilometer (0.39 square miles) of collecting area. As a result, astronomers can survey the entire sky much more quickly than with other telescopes.

https://us.cnn.com/2022/04/15/world/space-laser-megamaser-scn/index.html

AND

Where might life be hiding out? It is as resilient as that Equadorian flower, after all ...

Jupiter’s moon Europa may have a habitable ice shell


On Jupiter’s moon Europa, a saltwater ocean exists deep beneath a thick ice shell. Now, a surprising connection between the ice shell and the Greenland ice sheet on Earth has provided new insight: Europa’s ocean may be habitable, according to a new study. ...

... “In Greenland, this double ridge formed in a place where water from surface lakes and streams frequently drains into the near-surface and refreezes,” said lead study author Riley Culberg, a doctoral student in electrical engineering at Stanford, in a statement.

“One way that similar shallow water pockets could form on Europa might be through water from the subsurface ocean being forced up into the ice shell through fractures – and that would suggest there could be a reasonable amount of exchange happening inside of the ice shell.”

... And this ice shell could be a place where the subsurface ocean and nutrients mix together. “Because it’s closer to the surface, where you get interesting chemicals from space, other moons and the volcanoes of Io (another moon that orbits Jupiter), there’s a possibility that life has a shot if there are pockets of water in the shell,” Schroeder said. “If the mechanism we see in Greenland is how these things happen on Europa, it suggests there’s water everywhere.” ...

... “The mechanism we put forward in this paper would have been almost too audacious and complicated to propose without seeing it happen in Greenland,” Schroeder said. ... The temperature, chemistry and pressure are different on Europa when compared to Greenland, so the team want to investigate how these water pockets work on Europa.

Europa is a target of two upcoming missions, the European Space Agency’s JUICE (short for the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) and NASA’s Europa Clipper. Clipper will carry ice-penetrating radar, similar to how the researchers studied Greenland, to collect subsurface imaging of Europa’s ice shell.

Europa stands out as one of the best candidates for hosting extraterrestrial life in our solar system due to the liquid water in the subsurface ocean and what scientists understand about its chemistry, Culberg said.

https://us.cnn.com/2022/04/19/world/europa-ridges-greenland-study-scn/index.html

This artist's illustration shows how double ridges on the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa may form over shallow, refreezing water pockets within the ice shell.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

May they somehow keep surviving ...

A blazing orange wildflower thought to be extinct for 36 years was rediscovered


A rare blazing orange wildflower that was thought to be extinct for 36 years was rediscovered in South America.

The wildflower Gasteranthus extinctus has only been spotted in Ecuador’s cloud forest and was last documented in 1985, according to a new study in the journal PhytoKeys. The researchers saw a dim future for the flower, so they named it “extinctus” because they believed it would soon die out, said coauthor Dawson White, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Field Museum in Chicago. Most of the cloud forest suffered deforestation in the years that followed. The habitat loss was thought to have killed off dozens of species, White said.

Researchers decided to take another look in western Ecuador in 2021 to see if there were any patches of forest left and to search for the species that had lived there. Within days, the flower was found, White said.

“It was total elation because Gasteranthus extinctus is a symbol of these unique forests,” White said ...

[BUT] While no longer considered extinct, the wildflower is still endangered, White said. Despite the devastation the cloud forest is suffering, the Ecuadorian government continues to destroy the forest for their own gain, which wreaked havoc in that part of the country, he explained.

The originally Ecuadorian government redistributed the land to the working class in the 1950s and 1960s, White said.

People cut down trees to make way for growing crops like cacao beans and bananas, most of which end up in the United States, he added. ... Ulloa Ulloa grew up in Ecuador and saw firsthand the deforestation, but as she became an adult, she understood the delicate balance of needing to protect the environment while finding ways to make money.

“You need to protect the forest, but then you also need to feed the population of the country,” Ulloa Ulloa said.

One solution is to invest in ecotourism, which invites tourists to enjoy the natural land, she said. It’s a way to protect the forest while boosting Ecuador’s economy, Ulloa Ulloa explained.

https://us.cnn.com/2022/04/15/world/extinct-flower-ecuador-scn/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

More time travel back to the early universe ...

Ultra-rare black hole ancestor detected at the dawn of the universe

Astronomers have discovered a dusty, red object 13 billion light-years from Earth that may be the earliest known ancestor of a supermassive black hole.

The ancient object shows characteristics that fall between dusty, star-forming galaxies and brightly glowing black holes known as quasars, according to the authors of a new study, published April 13 in the journal Nature. Born just 750 million years after the Big Bang, during an epoch called the "cosmic dawn," the object appears to be the first direct evidence of an early galaxy weaving stardust into the foundations of a supermassive black hole.

Objects like these, known as transitioning red quasars, have been theorized to exist in the early universe, but they have never been observed — until now.

"The discovered object connects two rare populations of celestial objects, namely dusty starbursts and luminous quasars," lead study author Seiji Fujimoto, a postdoctoral fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement. "[It] thereby provides a new avenue toward understanding the rapid growth of supermassive black holes in the early universe."

Quasars (short for "quasi-stellar objects") are extremely bright objects powered by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. With masses millions to tens of billions of times greater than that of Earth's sun, these monster black holes suck in everything around them at blinding speed. Gas spiraling into these black holes heats up due to friction, creating a bright glow that's comparable to starlight.

Prior research has shown that quasars existed within the first 700 million years of the universe, the study authors wrote; however, it's unclear exactly how these supermassive objects formed so quickly after the Big Bang. Simulations suggest that some sort of fast-growing transition phase occurs in dusty, star-dense galaxies.

"Theorists have predicted that these black holes undergo an early phase of rapid growth: a dust-reddened compact object emerges from a heavily dust-obscured starburst galaxy," study co-author Gabriel Brammer, an associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, said in the statement.

In their new paper, the researchers claim to have detected one of these rare transitional objects — officially named GNz7q — while studying an ancient, star-forming galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope.

The team caught the early galaxy in the midst of a stellar baby boom, with the galaxy seemingly churning out new stars 1,600 times faster than the Milky Way does today. All those newborn stars produced an immense amount of heat, which warmed the galaxy's ambient gas and caused it to glow brightly in infrared wavelengths. The galaxy became so hot, in fact, that its dust shines brighter than any other known object from the cosmic dawn period, the researchers said.

Amid that brightly glowing dust, the researchers detected a single red point of light — a large, compact object tinged by the enormous fog of dust around it. According to the researchers, this red dot's luminosity and color perfectly match the predicted characteristics of a transitioning red quasar.

"The observed properties are in excellent agreement with the theoretical simulations and suggest that GNz7q is the first example of the transitioning, rapid growth phase of black holes at the dusty star core, an ancestor of the later supermassive black hole," Brammer said.

... NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which launched on Dec. 25, 2021, will be able to hunt for these elusive objects with much greater clarity than Hubble, the researchers wrote, hopefully shedding a bit more light onto the dusty cosmic dawn.
https://www.livescience.com/transitioning-red-quasar

Gassho, j

STLah

[Jundo]

Interstellar visitor ... (It is amazing how they figure out the source of these objects) ...

One meteor traveled quite a long way from home to visit Earth.

Researchers discovered the first known interstellar meteor to ever hit Earth, according to a recently released United States Space Command document. An interstellar meteor is a space rock that originates from outside our solar system – a rare occurrence.

This one is known as CNEOS 2014-01-08, and it crash-landed along the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014.

... The meteor’s high velocity is what initially caught Siraj’s eye.

The meteor was moving at a high speed of about 28 miles per second (45 kilometers per second) relative to Earth, which is moving at around 18.6 miles per second (30 kilometers per second) around the sun. Because researchers measured how fast the meteor was moving while on a moving planet, the 45 kilometers per second was not actually how fast it was going.

... He then mapped out the trajectory of the meteor and found it was in an unbound orbit, unlike the closed orbit of other meteors. This means that rather than circling around the sun like other meteors, it came from outside the solar system.

“Presumably, it was produced by another star, got kicked out of that star’s planetary system and just so happened to make its way to our solar system and collide with earth ...

https://us.cnn.com/2022/04/13/world/...scn/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

A Neptunian mystery ... and a summer that lasts for decades! ...

Neptune just experienced an unexplained temperature shift

The most distant planet in our solar system has presented a new mystery.

Astronomers observing Neptune for the past 17 years with multiple ground-based telescopes tracked a surprising drop in the ice giant’s global temperatures, which was then followed by a dramatic warming trend at the planet’s south pole.

Neptune, which orbits the sun at a distance of 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers), experiences seasons like Earth does – they just last much longer. One year on Neptune lasts for about 165 Earth years, so a single season can last around 40 years. It’s been summertime in Neptune’s southern hemisphere since 2005.

Astronomers decided to track the planet’s atmospheric temperatures once the southern summer solstice occurred that year.

Nearly 100 thermal images of Neptune taken since then showed that much of Neptune gradually cooled, dropping by 14 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius) between 2003 and 2018.

... Then, a dramatic warming event occurred at Neptune’s south pole between 2018 and 2020 and temperatures rose by 20 degrees Fahrenheit (11 degrees Celsius). This warm polar vortex completely reversed any cooling that occurred before.

This kind of polar warming has never been seen on Neptune until now.

... Frosty Neptune has an average of negative 340 degrees Fahrenheit (negative 220 degrees Celsius)

https://us.cnn.com/2022/04/11/world/neptune-temperature-shifts-scn/index.html

And a moon mystery too! ...

Scientists come up with fresh take on moon mystery

The far side of the moon, which we can never see from our vantage point on Earth, looks surprisingly different than the orb we’re used to seeing in the night sky.

The near side we are so familiar with appears darker in places – the result of the vast ancient lava flows, called lunar mare – while the far side is covered in pock marks and craters but no mare.

Why the two sides of the moon are so different has long puzzled space scientists. However, a study published last week in the journal Science Advances has come up with a new explanation for this lunar mystery.

Researchers at Brown University studied the largest impact crater on the moon, known as the South Pole-Aitken basin (or SPA). Some 1,615 miles (2,600 kilometers) wide and five miles deep, it was formed by a massive space object that slammed into the moon – perhaps a wayward dwarf planet – when the solar system was being formed.

The researchers found that the impact that formed the basin would have created a massive plume of heat that spread the moon’s interior, according to the statement. That plume would have carried certain materials to the moon’s nearside, fueling the volcanism that created the volcanic plains.

“We know that big impacts like the one that formed SPA would create a lot of heat,” said Matt Jones, a doctoral candidate at Brown University and the study’s lead author, in a news release.

“The question is how that heat affects the Moon’s interior dynamics. What we show is that under any plausible conditions at the time that SPA formed, it ends up concentrating these heat-producing elements on the nearside.

“We expect that this contributed to the mantle melting that produced the lava flows we see on the surface.”
https://us.cnn.com/2022/04/11/world/...scn/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Apparently, this has never been observed in squid before (only octopi) ... and is just lovely to see ... and could (says the researcher) help with development of our Harry Potter invisibility cloaks! ...

See why color-changing squid could help with development of invisibility cloaks

Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan have recorded squid changing their color to match the substrate for the first time.

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/04/08/squid-changing-color-substrate-scn-lon-orig-tp.cnn/video/playlists/intl-latest-world-videos/

or video without the scientists' very interesting explanation about pigment and transparency, here:

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/04/08/squid-changing-color-substrate-scn-lon-orig-tp.cnn/video/playlists/intl-latest-world-videos/

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

This is perhaps robots gone wrong ... especially when one considers the price tag (currently about $150 US per month x 48 months) for this, admittedly, very cute little "LOVOT" ... although eccentric Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa (who bought himself a ticket to the ISS international space station) has bought in ...

Eccentric Japanese billionaire now betting that ‘emotional’ robots can heal your heart


Nearly two years before Japanese fashion titan Yusaku Maezawa embarked on his recent tourist visit to the International Space Station, he made global headlines for launching a worldwide search for a “life partner” to go to the moon with him.

In his online appeal for love, Maezawa, who was 44 at the time, said he hoped finding a companion would ease the “feelings of loneliness and emptiness” surging within him. A few months later, however, he abruptly called off this quest for a romantic partner due to unspecified personal reasons.

Now, it appears Maezawa is betting robots may be able to fill the hole in one’s heart.

The eccentric billionaire, who made his fortune through the Japanese e-commerce fashion site Zozotown, announced last month that his investment fund is buying Japanese robotics startup Groove X, which makes a product called Lovot, a combination of the words “love” and “robot.” Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The pet-sized companion robots aim to stir an “instinct to love” in its human customers, according to the company’s website, with potential use cases in nursing homes and with children. As the pandemic raged, the so-called “emotional” robots also found new purpose in providing companionship to those who have been forced to stay apart from others, according to the company.

The wide-eyed devices roll around on wheels and have more than 50 sensors to respond to stimuli from humans (whom it distinguishes via a thermal camera) through machine learning technology, according to the company. The robot is currently only available for sale in Japan. The price starts at $2,825 for a single device, plus a monthly service fee of approximately $80.

Groove X was founded in 2015 by CEO Kaname Hayashi, a SoftBank veteran who developed the humanoid robot Pepper. The firm received funding from the Japanese government and unveiled its first Lovot device to the local market in 2019. These robots don’t seek to provide any convenience or practical purpose. In fact, the company has previously described it as “not a useful robot.” The robot was “born for just one reason — to be loved by you,” the company said.

“I never imagined that a robot would heal me,” Maezawa said in a statement announcing his fund’s acquisition of Groove X. While the robot “can’t clean or do work,” Maezawa said he sees “big potential in a presence that can make people feel happy, particularly at this time,” alluding to the global Covid-19 pandemic.

https://us.cnn.com/2022/04/08/tech/y...ove/index.html

https://youtu.be/hCxQ0_HcYHQ

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

That was some SPLASH ... but without that splash, perhaps mammals (like us) would not have had our day ...

Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Triggered Mile-High Tsunami That Spread Through Earth's Oceans

When the dinosaur-killing asteroid collided with Earth more than 65 million years ago, it did not go gently into that good night. Rather, it blasted a nearly mile-high tsunami through the Gulf of Mexico that caused chaos throughout the world's oceans, new research finds.

The 9-mile-across (14 kilometers) space rock, known as the Chicxulub asteroid, caused so much destruction, it's no wonder the asteroid ended the dinosaur age, leading to the so-called Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction.

"The Chicxulub asteroid resulted in a huge global tsunami, the likes of which have not been seen in modern history," said lead researcher Molly Range, who did the research while getting her master's degree in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan.

... "We found that this tsunami moved throughout the entire ocean, in every ocean basin," Range said. In the Gulf of Mexico, water moved as fast as 89 mph (143 km/h), she found. Within the first 24 hours, the effects of the tsunami's impact spread out of the Gulf of Mexico and into the Atlantic, as well as through the Central American seaway (which doesn't exist anymore, but used to connect the Gulf to the Pacific).

After the initial nearly mile-high (1.5 km) wave, other huge waves rocked the world's oceans. In the South Pacific and North Atlantic, waves reached a whopping maximum height of 46 feet (14 m). In the North Pacific, they reached 13 feet (4 m). Meanwhile, the Gulf of Mexico saw waves as high as 65 feet (20 meters) in some spots and 328 feet (100 m) in others.

To put that in perspective, the largest modern wave ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere was a "measly" 78 feet (23.8 m) tall, which struck near New Zealand in May 2018, Live Science previously reported.

... There's evidence that supports the models, Range said. According to the second model, fast-moving water from the impact likely caused erosion and sediment disruption in South Pacific, North Atlantic and Mediterranean ocean basins.

In a separate study (which also has yet to be published), Moore examined sediment records across the ocean. His findings agree with the tsunami model, Range said.

... Of course, the giant tsunami wasn't the only event that did in the non-avian dinosaurs. The asteroid also triggered shock waves and sent a vast amount of hot rock and dust into the atmosphere, which rubbed together with so much friction that they started forest fires and cooked animals alive. These particles also hovered in the atmosphere and blocked the sun's rays for years, killing plants and the animals that ate them.

https://www.livescience.com/64426-dinosaur-killing-asteroid-caused-giant-tsunami.html

Grab your surfboards!

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

This is NOT the same as the "most distant star" (named "Earendel") I posted about just a couple of days ago ... now, the most distant (and thus, oldest) galaxy ... or what they think is a galaxy ... In any case "the farthest object (and thus, oldest) in the known universe" ...

Hot on the heels of the discovery of “Earendel”—the most distant single star at 12.9 billion light-years distant—comes the announcement today that astronomers have now found the most distant galaxy.

Called HD1 and discovered by Japanese astronomers using a bevy of telescopes across the globe, this ultra-remote exists at a staggering 13.5 billion light-years away.

That’s a mere 300 million years after the “Big Bang” that is thought to have created the Universe.

...

That age places this collection of stars, now dubbed HD1, between a time of total darkness — about 14 billion years ago the universe was a blank slate devoid of any stars or galaxies — and one of just-burgeoning lights as clumps of dust and gas were growing into their cosmic destinies.

"The first galaxies formed about a hundred million years after the Big Bang. They were a millionth of the mass of the Milky Way and much denser," study researcher and Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb told Live Science in an email. "One way to think of them is as the building blocks in the construction project of present-day galaxies, like our own Milky Way." ...

... The researchers discovered HD1 in data collected over 1,200 hours of observation time using the Subaru Telescope, the VISTA Telescope, the U.K. Infrared Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. They were particularly looking at redshift, a phenomenon in which light waves stretch out or become redder as an object moves away from the observer. In this case, the redshift suggested HD1 was extremely distant. ... HD1 also seems to be growing at a feverish rate — about 100 stars each year, or at least 10 times the rate predicted for starburst galaxies that are known to produce stars at an extraordinarily high pace.

These stars were also more massive, brighter (in ultraviolet wavelengths) and hotter than younger stars, the researchers found.

As such, HD1 could be home to the universe's very first stars, called Population III stars; if that identity is verified, this would be the first observation of this type of star, the researchers said. There's also the possibility that HD1 is a supermassive black hole with a mass of about 100 million times that of the sun.

To figure out HD1's true identity, the researchers can look for X-rays, which are emitted as material gets devoured by the gravity of a black hole. "If HD1 is a black hole, we should see X-ray emission from it. If we do not find X-rays, the emission must originate from massive stars," Loeb told Live Science.

Astronomers hope to find more of these early-universe structures with the James Webb Space Telescope, which was launched Dec. 25, 2021 and will search for the oldest objects in the universe.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2022/04/07/meet-hd1-the-new-most-distant-galaxy-found-135-billion-years-back-in-time-and-close-to-the-big-bang/?sh=7b59f2f434f8

and

https://www.livescience.com/farthest-astronomical-object-ever-seen

The galaxy candidate HD1 is the farthest object in the universe



Gassho, J

STLh

[Tairin]

One small answer to the world's plastics problem could require us to make more vanilla pudding!



Gee, but what if the little beings get lose and start eating everything plastic!

Gassho, J

STLah

While it sounds promising your comment matches mine. Once such a solution is deployed how do we know it will only solve the problem we face and not create a cacophony of new ones?


Tairin
Sat today and lah

[Jundo]

One small answer to the world's plastics problem could require us to make more vanilla pudding!

Plastic-eating bacteria: Genetic engineering and environmental impact

Plastic-eating bacteria could help to one day tackle some of the 14 million tons of plastic that is offloaded into our oceans every year. Plastic pollution leads to severe impact on marine ecosystems and can affect human health. For example, once plastic enters the ocean it can suffocate and entangle animals, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Microplastics are also ingested by many marine species that are both preyed upon by other species and that we catch for food. Once ingested, microplastics can leach the toxic contaminants that have collected on their surface into the body of the organism that has consumed it, according to the IUCN.

...

However, in 2016 Japanese scientists made a remarkable discovery that could help tackle the world's plastic problem, according to the journal Science. Scientists collected plastic bottles outside a recycling facility, and discovered that a species of bacteria was "eating" its way through them. ... Although the discovery offers hope in the fight against mounting plastic, scientists caution that we are still years away from widespread commercial use. Similarly, PETase only decomposes PET plastic, there are six other plastic types that we are still unable to degrade using enzymes.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have been using E. coli bacteria to convert plastic into vanillin, the primary component of vanilla bean extract. Considering that the global demand for vanillin exceeded 40,000 tons (37,000 metric tonnes) in 2018 and 85% is made from chemicals taken from fossil fuels, using plastic could be an eco-friendly alternative situation, as Live Science has previously reported.

After degrading PET plastic into its basic monomers, researchers took the process one step further and converted one of those monomers, terephthalic acid, into vanillin through a series of chemical reactions. The resulting vanillin is believed to be fit for human consumption, though further investigation is needed.

https://www.livescience.com/plastic-eating-bacteria

Gee, but what if the little beings get lose and start eating everything plastic!

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Hey, I thought that they got this done long ago! A 92% is only an A minus!

In any event, that last 8% really counts!

Scientists sequence the complete human genome for the first time

In 2003, the Human Genome Project made history when it sequenced 92% of the human genome. But for nearly two decades since, scientists have struggled to decipher the remaining 8%. Now, a team of nearly 100 scientists from the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) Consortium has unveiled the complete human genome -- the first time it's been sequenced in its entirety, the researchers say.

"Having this complete information will allow us to better understand how we form as an individual organism and how we vary not just between other humans but other species," Evan Eichler, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Washington and the research leader, said Thursday. The new research introduces 400 million letters to the previously sequenced DNA -- an entire chromosome's worth. The full genome will allow scientists to analyze how DNA differs between people and whether these genetic variations play a role in disease.

"It turns out that these genes are incredibly important for adaptation," Eichler said. "They contain immune response genes that help us to adapt and survive infections and plagues and viruses. They contain genes that are ... very important in terms of predicting drug response."

Eichler also said that some of the recently uncovered genes are even responsible for making human brains larger than those of other primates, providing insight into what makes humans unique.

This remaining 8% of the human genome had stumped scientists for years because of its complexities. For one thing, it contained DNA regions with several repetitions, which made it challenging to string the DNA together in the correct order using previous sequencing methods.

https://us.cnn.com/2022/03/31/health...nce/index.html

GACTGassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Some other big science and technology announcements today besides Treeleaf's work on the 'JIZO 1' program ...

https://www.treeleaf.org/forums/showthread.php?19953-MAJOR-TREELEAF-ANNOUNCEMENT-Springing-into-Space

Hubble sees most distant star ever, 28 billion light-years away

he Hubble Space Telescope has glimpsed the most distant single star it's ever observed, glimmering 28 billion light-years away. And the star could be between 50 to 500 times more massive than our sun, and millions of times brighter.

It's the farthest detection of a star yet, from 900 million years after the big bang. Astronomers have nicknamed the star Earendel, derived from an Old English words that means "morning star" or "rising light." A study detailing the findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

This observation breaks the record set by Hubble in 2018 when it observed a star that existed when the universe was around four billion years old. Earendel is so distant that the starlight has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us.

... "When the light that we see from Earendel was emitted, the Universe was less than a billion years old; only 6% of its current age. At that time it was 4 billion lightyears away from the proto-Milky Way, but during the almost 13 billion years it took the light to reach us, the Universe has expanded so that it is now a staggering 28 billion lightyears away." ...

https://us.cnn.com/2022/03/30/world/hubble-distant-star-image-scn/index.html

Morning star? Maybe that is the star where the Buddha came from after all!

Gassho, J

STLah