Wow, very bright!!
gassho, Shokai
gassho, Shokai
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合掌,生開
gassho, Shokai
仁道 生開 / Jindo Shokai
"Open to life in a benevolent way"
https://sarushinzendo.wordpress.com/ -
Sadly, we also learn from our pioneers and failures as well ... as much knowledge was gained here.
Let us sit for Mr. Bennett, his family and doctors, and also for the animals who sacrificed for his life ...
Gassho, JFirst person to receive heart transplant from pig dies, says Maryland hospital
David Bennett dies two months after groundbreaking surgery
His condition began deteriorating several days earlier
Two months after a pioneering operation, the first person to receive a heart transplant from a pig has died, the US hospital that performed the surgery announced on Wednesday.
A handyman by trade, David Bennett, 57, had undergone the experimental procedure in Baltimore, Maryland, after suffering from heart failure and being out of other options.
Bennett died on Tuesday, the University of Maryland medical center said, adding that he was able to communicate with his family during his final hours.
Senior doctors hailed a “brave man” who had made a big contribution to advancing medical science by taking part in the surgery.
The hospital did not provide an exact cause of death but said his condition had worsened in recent days. Bennett’s son, David Bennett Jr, said his father knew the 7 January operation might not work, but was grateful to the medical community for such innovation. He had called the procedure “a miracle”.
... On Wednesday the scientific director at the University of Maryland’s animal-to-human transplant program, Dr Muhammad Mohiuddin, paid tribute to Bennett. “Mr Bennett was a brave man. Without his contribution, we couldn’t have done this procedure. He was brave enough to donate his body to science and to accept this pig heart, which many would not. We are grateful to his family who also supported during this long survival of two months.
“This is the first time a pig organ has been transplanted in a human and there are lot of unknowns that we can discover after carefully evaluating the dataA lot of new information will come out that will help the field move forward at a faster pace.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-david-bennett
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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Geika, our priest in San Diego, BE CAREFUL!! 'Hypercarnivore' with blade-like teeth found in San Diego, California!!
(okay, 42 million years ago!)
Gassho, JAn unidentified fossil collected more than three decades ago was actually a mysterious species of saber-toothed carnivore that once stalked prey through the ancient rainforests of Southern California.
The fossil includes a near-complete lower jawbone and a set of well-preserved teeth, according to a new study, published Tuesday (March 15) in the journal PeerJ. Paleontologists at the San Diego Natural History Museum (The Nat) originally collected the specimen in 1988 from a site known as the Santiago Formation in Oceanside, a city in San Diego County, California. The geological formation is estimated to be about 42 million years old, so fossils from the site date back to the Eocene epoch (55.8 million to 33.9 million years ago), according to the American Museum of Natural History.
... Remains of these strange beasts have been uncovered only at select sites in Asia and North America, and prior to the new study, only 14 specimens had ever been found, according to the PeerJ report. The now-extinct group includes the earliest known saber-toothed mammalian carnivores, which are not closely related to any living carnivores.
https://www.livescience.com/newfound...othed-predator
STLahLast edited by Jundo; 03-16-2022, 04:08 AM.ALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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The source of sentience ... all that separates us from them, complexity ...
Alas, human beings have kept the killing part ... but seem far less logical about it ...These 1-millimeter-long worms can make complex decisions with a mere 300 neurons
The worms have around 285 million times fewer nerve cells than humans
A tiny worm with just 300 brain cells has shocked scientists with its ability to make complex decisions. These invertebrate Einsteins display a range of different "smart" behaviors that vary with the situation, despite having sparse neuron power ...
When P. pacificus came across a C. elegans larvae in the lab, they bit and killed the juvenile nematodes before eating them; however, when the predatory worm went up against fully grown C. elegans, they used non-lethal bites meant to act as a territorial warning that caused C. elegans adults to move away from the bacteria. P. pacificus are perfectly capable of killing an adult C. elegans worm, but such fights likely require more energy and potentially risk injury. Therefore, researchers believe that P. pacificus worms are choosing whether or not to kill their competitors based on the size and life stage of the C. elegans. ... During the experiments, P. pacificus was also more likely to bite C. elegans when there were fewer bacteria around, regardless of their life stage, suggesting that the nematodes can factor in multiple types of information when making decisions. For a worm with only 300 neurons, this level of decision making is very surprising to researchers. The ability to weigh the costs and benefits of an action with multiple potential outcomes is seen often in vertebrates, but previously scientists thought invertebrates lacked this ability, according to the statement.
The researchers don't know exactly how P. pacificus makes such complicated decisions with so few neurons. However, when the team inhibited the worm's ability to produce dopamine, a chemical known as a neurotransmitter that is used to fire nerve cells in a majority of animals, it caused the worms to target adult C. elegans worms with territorial bites. The researchers also inhibited the worm's ability to produce octopamine, a neurotransmitter exclusively found in invertebrates, which caused the worms to focus less on adult C. elegans worms and target larvae instead. It is, therefore, likely that these two neurotransmitters play a key role in the decision-making, the researchers wrote in the paper. ...
https://www.livescience.com/worms-ma...th-300-neurons
Gassho, J
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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Had me scared there for a second! I already gotta worry about mountain lions and rattlesnakes
I went to the zoo last month and it got me thinking about what would happen to our local ecology if the San Diego Safari Park suddenly had all its animals escape into the San Pasqual Valley... O_O
Gassho
Sat, lah求道芸化 Kyūdō Geika
I am just a priest-in-training, please do not take anything I say as a teaching.Comment
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Images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes show a filament of matter and antimatter extending from a pulsar.
Gassho, JA small pulsar has belched out an enormous beam of matter and antimatter particles that streamed for 40 trillion miles (64 trillion kilometers) across the Milky Way.
Astronomers detected the cosmic particle trail in images captured in X-rays by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in space and in optical light by the Gemini North telescope in Hilo, Hawaii.
Observations of X-ray filaments emitted by pulsars are rare; to date, only a handful have been detected, researchers reported in a new study.
Pulsars are dense, shrunken remnants of giant collapsed stars that emit radiation pulses as they spin, and they have powerful magnetic fields that are generated by their rapid rotation. This pulsar, known as PSR J2030+4415 (J2030 to its close friends) spins about 1,600 light-years from Earth and is relatively tiny — just 10 miles (16 km) in diameter, or about the size of a city, NASA representatives said in a statement.
This fast-spinning pulsar travels through space at about 500,000 mph (800,000 km/h) and rotates about three times per second; as it spun, charged particles escaped as a streaming filament that was then captured in telescope images.
...
https://www.livescience.com/pulsar-s...ntimatter-beam
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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Webb Update ... like looking at yourself in the mirror ...
The James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) has released its first sharp image and it is a doozy — a spectacular view of a twinkling orange star that is focused with such sharpness that it pushes the limits of the laws of physics.
The image shows that the telescope's 18 separate mirrors are now accurately aligned and acting as one, and the photo is even better than scientists hoped it would be, NASA officials said in a statement.
The Webb team released the photograph of the Milky Way star, designated 2MASS J17554042+6551277 and located roughly 2,000 light-years away, Wednesday (March 16). It was taken with a red filter to maximize the visual contrast between the star and the blackness of space, while dozens of other stars and distant galaxies can be seen in the background.
... According to BBC News, the image shows that the optical systems of the new space telescope are now working better than the scientists and engineers had hoped. ... "The engineering images that we see today are as sharp and as crisp as the images that Hubble can take but are at a wavelength of light that is totally invisible to Hubble," ...
https://www.livescience.com/james-we...its-of-physics
Gassho, J
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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Anyone watching STAR TREK: DISCOVERY, Season 4, probably already knows what this is! (NO SPOILERS please! I am only on Episode 4. So far, Season 4 is excellent, by the way!):
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.
... 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. Astronomers believe it takes the circles 1 billion years to reach their maximum size, and they are so large that the objects have expanded past other galaxies.
... Initially, astronomers thought the circles could be galactic shock waves or even the throats of wormholes, among a whole host of ideas. Now, researchers have narrowed down a range of theories to three.
The odd radio circles could be remnants of a huge explosion at the center of a galaxy, not unlike what happens when two supermassive black holes merge together.
Second, they might be powerful jets pumping out energetic particles from the galactic center.
Or, the third possibility is that they could be the result of a starburst shock wave triggered by the birth of stars in a galaxy.
... "We know ORCs are rings of faint radio emissions surrounding a galaxy with a highly active black hole at its centre, but we don't yet know what causes them, or why they are so rare," said study coauthor Ray Norris, a professor at the Western Sydney University and CSIRO, in a statement.
https://us.cnn.com/2022/03/24/world/...scn/index.html
Data from the MeerKAT telescope (green) showing the odd radio circles is overlaid on optical and near-infrared data from the Dark Energy Survey.
DMA Anomaly from Star Trek Discovery, Season 4 ...
Gassho, J
STLahLast edited by Jundo; 03-25-2022, 03:24 AM.ALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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I also have some "bulges" that increase with age ...
The Milky Way's 'thick disk' is 2 billion years older than scientists thought
The thick disk began forming stars just 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang.
... In the new study, scientists inferred the ages of roughly 250,000 stars in the Milky Way using brightness, positional and chemical composition data gathered by two powerful telescopes: the European Space Agency's (ESA) orbiting Gaia observatory, and the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) in China. ...
... The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy measuring about 105,000 light-years across, but not all parts of that spiral are uniform in thickness, composition or stellar density.
Near the center of our galaxy is an enormous bulge of stars (and probably a supermassive black hole whose gravity holds the galaxy together). Rippling out on either side of that bulge is the galaxy's disk, which is made of two main sections.
One side of the disk – the "thin disk" – contains most of the stars we can see from Earth, mixed in with clouds of star-forming gas. The "thick disk," meanwhile, is about twice the height of the thin disk, but has a much smaller radius and only contains a small fraction of the stars we can see in the sky, according to ESA. This part of the Milky Way is also thought to be much older — devoid of gas, and done with its star-forming days. ...
In their new study, the researchers looked at stars throughout the Milky Way, focusing on a specific type of star called a subgiant. These are stars that have stopped generating energy in their cores, and are slowly transforming into red giants (enormous stars that are on their way to collapsing into white dwarfs). The subgiant phase is a relatively brief period of stellar evolution, which means astronomers can estimate the ages of these stars with more accuracy, according to the researchers.
Because older stars tend to glow in a specific range of brightness and contain lower metal content (that is, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium) than younger stars, the team was able to date their sample of stars by running data from both telescopes through a computer simulation. The researchers found that stars in the galaxy's thick disc were indeed much older than the stars seen elsewhere — and surprisingly, those stars were billions of years older than previous studies suggested.
According to the researchers, this discovery could rewrite the history of our galaxy. The age differences between stars in the thin and thick disks suggest that our galaxy formed in two discrete phases. First, 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang, star formation began in the thick disk. This star formation accelerated greatly about 2 billion years later when a dwarf galaxy called the Gaia Sausage collided with our young galaxy, kicking off the second phase of galactic evolution. During this second phase, the thick disk rapidly filled up with stars, while the first wave of star formation began in the thin disk. ...
https://www.livescience.com/milky-way-thick-disc-age
Gassho, J
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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Not a planet any more, but still interesting ...
Pluto has giant ice volcanoes that could hint at the possibility of life
Images of Pluto captured by NASA's New Horizons mission have revealed a new surprise: ice volcanoes.
The spacecraft performed a flyby of the dwarf planet and its moons in July 2015, and the insights gathered then are still rewriting nearly everything scientists understand about Pluto. Pluto was relegated to dwarf planet status in 2006 when the International Astronomical Union created a new definition for planets, and Pluto didn't fit the criteria.
The dwarf planet exists on the edge of our solar system in the Kuiper Belt, and it's the larger of the many frozen objects there orbiting far from the sun. The icy world, which has an average temperature of negative 387 degrees Fahrenheit (negative 232 degrees Celsius), is home to mountains, valleys, glaciers, plains and craters. If you were to stand on the surface, you would see blue skies with red snow.
... "We found a field of very large icy volcanoes that look nothing like anything else we have seen in the solar system," said study author Kelsi Singer, senior research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. ... "This means Pluto has more internal heat than we thought it would, which means we don't fully understand how planetary bodies work," she said. ... "The icy material was probably more of a slushy mix of ice and water or more like toothpaste while it flowed out of a volcanic vent onto the surface of Pluto," Singer said. "It is so cold on the surface of Pluto that liquid water cannot remain there for long. In some cases, the flow of material formed the massive domes that we see, as well as the lumpy terrain found everywhere in this region."
... Pluto once had a subsurface ocean, and finding these ice volcanoes could suggest that the subsurface ocean is still present -- and that liquid water could be close to the surface. Combined with the idea that Pluto has a warmer interior than previously believed, the findings raise intriguing questions about the dwarf planet's potential habitability.
"There are still a lot of challenges for any organisms trying to survive there," Singer said. "They would still need some source of continual nutrients, and if the volcanism is episodic and thus the heat and water availability is variable, that is sometimes tough for organisms as well."
Gassho, J
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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Size is sometimes important ...
Artemis I prepares for its final test ahead of launch
The first NASA mission to the moon since 1972 is ready for its most crucial test to date. The 322-foot-tall (98-meter-tall) Artemis I rocket stack, including NASA's mega SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, will begin the wet dress rehearsal Friday. The test is expected to last through Sunday. The results of the test will determine when the uncrewed Artemis I will launch on a mission that goes beyond the moon and returns to Earth. This mission will kick off NASA's Artemis program, which is expected to return humans to the moon and land the first woman and the first person of color on the lunar surface by 2025.
... Once the rocket has been loaded with more than 700,000 gallons (3.2 million liters) of propellant, the teams on Sunday will go through all of the steps toward launch."Liquid hydrogen is at a negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit (negative 268 degrees Celsius), liquid oxygen is negative 273 (negative 169 degrees Celsius), so it's very cold substances," said Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development at NASA Headquarters during the news conference. "I used to participate in this back in the Shuttle Program and it's like watching a ballet. You've got pressure, volume and temperature. And you're really kind of working all those parameters to have a successful tanking operation."
It is nice when we build rockets that don't carry bombs.
So, the Saturn 5 was just a big kerosene heater!
Gassho, J
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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Some other big science and technology announcements today besides Treeleaf's work on the 'JIZO 1' program ...
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." ...
Morning star? Maybe that is the star where the Buddha came from after all!
Gassho, J
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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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!
GACTGassho, JScientists 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
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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!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
Gassho, J
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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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泰林 - Tai Rin - Peaceful WoodsComment
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