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

[Jundo]

Ripples in a pond ...

The Milky Way Is Mysteriously Rippling – Scientists Might Finally Know Why

Using data from the Gaia satellite telescope, a team headed by Lund University researchers in Sweden discovered that large parts of the Milky Way’s outer disk vibrate. The ripples are caused by a dwarf galaxy that passed by our galaxy hundreds of millions of years ago and is now visible in the constellation Sagittarius.

The Milky Way, our cosmic home, contains between 100 and 400 billion stars. The galaxy is thought to have formed 13.6 billion years ago, originating from a rotating cloud of gas composed of hydrogen and helium. The gas then accumulated over billions of years in a rotating disk, where stars like our sun were created.

The research team presents their findings on the stars in the outer regions of the galactic disk in a new study that was recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The data revealed that a mysterious ripple was causing stars all around the galaxy to oscillate at different speeds.

“We can see that these stars wobble and move up and down at different speeds. When the dwarf galaxy Sagittarius passed the Milky Way, it created wave motions in our galaxy, a little bit like when a stone is dropped into a pond”, Paul McMillan, the astronomy researcher at Lund Observatory who led the study, explains.

https://scitechdaily.com/the-milky-w...ally-know-why/

Gassho, J

stlah

[Jundo]

Webb takes more pictures of your vast face, and all our face ...

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a unique perspective of the universe, including never-before-seen galaxies that glitter like diamonds in the cosmos.

The new image, shared on Wednesday as part of a study published in the Astronomical Journal, was taken as part of the Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science observing program, called PEARLS.

It’s one of the first medium-deep-wide-field images of the universe, with “medium-deep” meaning the faintest objects visible, and “wide-field” referring to the region of the cosmos captured in the image.

“The stunning image quality of Webb is truly out of this world,” said study coauthor Anton Koekemoer, research astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who assembled the PEARLS images into mosaics, in a statement. “To catch a glimpse of very rare galaxies at the dawn of cosmic time, we need deep imaging over a large area, which this PEARLS field provides.” ... Thousands of galaxies gleam from a range of distances, and some of the light in the image has traveled almost 13.5 billion years to reach us. ...
https://us.cnn.com/2022/12/14/world/...scn/index.html

Webb captured this mosaic of a region of the sky measuring 2% of the area covered by the full moon.

... and another facial feature ...

The most volcanic world in the solar system is about to be visited by a NASA spacecraft

A NASA spacecraft is gearing up for the first of a series of close encounters with the most volcanic place in the solar system. The Juno spacecraft will fly by Jupiter’s moon Io on Thursday, December 15.

The maneuver will be one of nine flybys of Io made by Juno over the next year and a half. Two of the encounters will be from a distance of just 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) away from the moon’s surface.

Juno captured a glowing infrared view of Io on July 5 from 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers) away. The brightest spots in that image correspond with the hottest temperatures on Io, which is home to hundreds of volcanoes — some of which can send lava fountains dozens of miles high.

https://us.cnn.com/2022/12/14/world/...scn/index.html

NASA's Juno mission captured an infrared view of Io in July.

Gassho, J

stlah

[Jundo]

Hopefully, such technology will be used for good, not for harm. Let's hope Mr. Musk runs this better than twitter ...

Musk's company aims to soon test brain implant in people

, Musk said his team is in the process of asking U.S. regulators to allow them to test the device. He said he thinks the company should be able to put the implant in a human brain as part of a clinical trial in about six months, though that timeline is far from certain.

Musk's Neuralink is one of many groups working on linking brains to computers, efforts aimed at helping treat brain disorders, overcoming brain injuries and other applications.

The field dates back to the 1960s, said Rajesh Rao, co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology at the University of Washington. "But it really took off in the 90s. And more recently we've seen lots of advances, especially in the area of communication brain computer interfaces."

Rao, who watched Musk's presentation online, said he doesn't think Neuralink is ahead of the pack in terms of brain-computer interface achievements. "But ... they are quite ahead in terms of the actual hardware in the devices," he said.

The Neuralink device is about the size of a large coin and is designed to be implanted in the skull, with ultra-thin wires going directly into the brain. Musk said the first two applications in people would be restoring vision and helping people with little or no ability to operate their muscles rapidly use digital devices.

... Researchers have also been working on brain and machine interfaces for restoring vision. Rao said some companies have developed retinal implants, but Musk's announcement suggested his team would use signals directly targeting the brain's visual cortex, an approach that some academic groups are also pursuing, "with limited success." ...

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles...0m/0bu/034000c

Gassho, J

stlah

[Koushi]

Already starting out with animal cruelty allegations… may all sentient beings being harmed for this neuralink be at peace.

https://fortune.com/2022/12/13/elon-musk-neuralink-animal-experiment-fda-data-physician-committee-for-responsible-medicine/amp/

Gassho,
Koushi
STLaH

[Jundo]

Already starting out with animal cruelty allegations… may all sentient beings being harmed for this neuralink be at peace.

https://fortune.com/2022/12/13/elon-musk-neuralink-animal-experiment-fda-data-physician-committee-for-responsible-medicine/amp/

Gassho,
Koushi
STLaH

Thank you for this, Koushi. Animal testing is a very difficult topic. If Mr. Musk is violating ethical standards widely accepted in the scientific community regarding the means to conduct such testing involving animals, then he and his company should be punished. It would not surprise me, knowing his standards of behavior.

I live in Tsukuba "Science City" Japan, a place where animal testing happens. I usually say the following when the topic comes up ... Just my personal view ... I am not the "Pope" on such issues ...

If it comes to curing cancer, preventing infectious diseases in children, finding a cure for alzheimer's and 1 Million other diseases ... I fully support animal testing. Of course, to the degree possible by the needs of the testing, consideration must be given to the comfort and pain of the animals. However, there are few if any substitutes to animal testing at certain points in medical and drug research.

On the other hand, when it comes to experiments on animals to make lady's cosmetics or floor wax ... no, that is very different and the need for animals to suffer is much more doubtful to me.

I do believe that all sentient beings have to be treated with kindness and respect. However, I also believe in curing human disease and suffering. In Buddhism, which developed in traditional agricultural cultures such as India, China, Thailand and Japan, the place of animals in Buddhist doctrine has always been ambiguous, not to be treated the same as human and subservient to human needs. Even so, we should treat animals with empathy and minimize their suffering when necessary for medical research, and we should find alternatives where possible.

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/buddhism-and-the-moral-status-of-animals/10518728

I have expressed this to the couple of cancer and other medical researchers here in Tsukuba "Science City" who have gone from sitting Zazen with us directly to their labs (I would drop them off in the car) to feed or dissect mice and rabbits used in their medical experiments.

~~~~~

The following is held each year at our university medical center here in Tsukuba "Science City" Japan, and similar ceremonies are conducted around Japan at research institutes ...

------------------

Annual Memorial Service (Ireisai,慰霊祭) For Animals Sacrificed At Tsukuba University`s Medical School


The tremendous advances made in the medical sciences over the past few centuries have been simply astounding. Much of this progress can be attributed to the efforts of diligent, talented, and sometimes just-plain-lucky researchers who set about looking for solutions to medical questions by applying the scientific method — which depends heavily on observing the results of controlled experiments to prove hypotheses.

Animals, in their forced role as experimental subjects, have played a crucial part in this March Forward, as many important medical studies from the times of Pasteur and Pavlov to the present day, have been made with the use of test animals. Every year at least tens of millions of vertebrates (and so many more invertebrates) are used around the world in tests which end with these creatures being SACRIFICED.

At Tsukuba University Medical School, as well as at other research institutes in Japan, the role that animals play in scientific progress, and the suffering often involved in their making a CONTRIBUTION to humanity (and sometimes to their fellow animals as well) does not go unrecognized or unacknowledged (for whatever that is worth) .

Once a year, usually in the first week of November (when the climate is most comfortable), an announcement is made throughout the medical school complex, that a special memorial service (ireisai, 慰霊祭) will be held at the IREIHI (慰霊碑), a memorial tablet which is tucked away in the shadows of the small woods, just east of the hospital’s power plant. The IREIHI itself was made 20 years ago by a student of the university and the inscription on it reads “JIKEN DOBUTSU IREIHI”, or “monument for consoling the spirits of experimental animals”.

On the day the ceremony is announced, hundreds of doctors, researchers, administrators, office staff and representatives of the companies which supply the animals attend, many bringing flowers, or foods which the animals might like. Since Tsukuba University is a government institution which must abide by rules separating church and state, incense, which would usually be offered on such an occasion, is not used, because of its overtly religious (Buddhist) connotations. Usually, a distinguished researcher or administrator makes a short speech about the number of animals sacrificed and the need to reduce this number and alleviate suffering. Those assembled then close their eyes for a moment of silence. I am told that many of those who attend this ceremony feel a sense of satisfaction or solace in having shown their respect and gratitude to the sacrificed lab animals.

Some laboratories in Tsukuba affiliated with private companies hold more elaborate and overtly religious IREISAI.



Gassho, J

stlah

[Jundo]

More than mere wires ...

Challenging Established Beliefs: Harvard Research Uncovers Surprising New Roles for Spinal Cord and Brainstem

According to recent research, the brainstem and spinal cord play a crucial role in processing touch signals as they travel to the brain.


The study found that the spinal cord and brainstem, which were previously assumed to just be relay centers for touch information, are actively engaged in the processing of touch signals as they travel to higher-order brain regions.

One study, recently published in the journal Cell, shows that specialized neurons in the spinal cord form a complex network that processes light touch — think the brush of a hand or a peck on the cheek — and sends this information to the brainstem. ... “People in the field thought that the diversity and richness of touch came just from sensory neurons in the skin, but that thinking bypasses the spinal cord and brainstem,” said Josef Turecek, a postdoctoral fellow in the Ginty lab and the first author on the Nature paper.

Many neuroscientists are not familiar with spinal cord neurons, called postsynaptic dorsal column (PSDC) neurons, that project from the spinal cord into the brainstem — and textbooks tend to leave PSDC neurons out of diagrams depicting the details of touch, Turecek explained.

... “The idea is that these two pathways converge in the brainstem with neurons that can encode both vibration and intensity, so you can shape responses of those neurons based on how much direct and indirect input you have,” Turecek explained. In other words, if brainstem neurons have more direct than indirect input, they communicate more vibration than intensity, and vice versa.

Additionally, the team discovered that both pathways can convey touch information from the same small area of skin, with information on intensity detouring through the spinal cord before joining information on vibration that travels directly to the brainstem. In this way, the direct and indirect pathways work together, enabling the brainstem to form a spatial representation of different types of touch stimuli from the same area.

https://scitechdaily.com/challenging-established-beliefs-harvard-research-uncovers-surprising-new-roles-for-spinal-cord-and-brainstem/

A touching story ...

Gassho, J

stlah

[Jundo]

Well, this is certainly so ... yet Zen folks still experience a timeless beyond measure, and that one single electrons holds all the electrons of the cosmos (and then some) ...

Zeptosecond Resolution: Measuring Times in Trillionths of a Billionth of a Second

How fast do electrons inside a molecule move? Well, it is so fast that it takes them just a few attoseconds (1 as = 10-18 s or one billionth of billionth of a second) to jump from one atom to another. Blink and you missed it – millions of billions of times. So measuring such ultrafast processes is a daunting task.

Scientists have now developed a novel interferometric technique capable of measuring time delays with zeptosecond (a trillionth of a billionth of a second) resolution. The work was conducted at the Australian Attosecond Science Facility and the Centre for Quantum Dynamics of Griffith University in Brisbane Australia and led by Professor Robert Sang and Professor Igor Litvinyuk.

https://scitechdaily.com/zeptosecond...h-of-a-second/

Down the universe's bathtub drain ...

NASA Gets Unusually Close Glimpse of Black Hole Destroying a Star
Recent observations of a black hole devouring a wandering star may help scientists understand more complex black hole feeding behaviors.

Multiple NASA telescopes recently observed a massive black hole tearing apart an unlucky star that wandered too close. Located about 250 million light-years from Earth in the center of another galaxy, it was the fifth-closest example of a black hole destroying a star ever observed.

Once the star had been thoroughly ruptured by the black hole’s gravity, astronomers saw a dramatic rise in high-energy X-ray light around the black hole. This indicated that as the stellar material was pulled toward its doom, it formed an extremely hot structure above the black hole called a corona. NASA’s NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescopic Array) satellite is the most sensitive space telescope capable of observing these wavelengths of light, and the event’s proximity provided an unprecedented view of the corona’s formation and evolution, according to a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal.

The work demonstrates how the destruction of a star by a black hole – a process formally known as a tidal disruption event – could be used to better understand what happens to material that’s captured by one of these behemoths before it’s fully devoured.

https://scitechdaily.com/black-hole-tears-apart-unlucky-star-nasa-gets-unusually-close-view-of-dramatic-destruction/

https://youtu.be/nLYQJWE4U_g

This whole proposal may be all wet ...

NASA Discovers Pair of Super-Earths With 1,000-Mile-Deep Oceans

Astronomers have uncovered a pair of planets that are true “water worlds,” unlike any planet found in our solar system.

Slightly larger than Earth, they don’t have the density of rock. And yet, they are denser than the gas-giant outer planets orbiting our Sun. So, what are they made of? The best answer is that these exoplanets have global oceans at least 500 times deeper than the average depth of Earth’s oceans, which simply are a wet veneer on a rocky ball.

The soggy worlds orbit the red dwarf star Kepler-138, located 218 light-years away in the constellation Lyra. The planets were found in 2014 with NASA’s Kepler Space Observatory. Follow-up observations with the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes found that the planets must be composed largely of water. The spectral signature of water wasn’t directly observed. But this conclusion is based on their density, which is calculated from comparing their size and mass.

Don’t expect to find fish in the global oceans. They are probably too warm and under very high pressure, and so there’s no such thing as a discrete boundary between the ocean surface and planet atmosphere.

https://scitechdaily.com/nasa-discovers-pair-of-super-earths-with-1000-mile-deep-oceans/

https://youtu.be/xwKrjiuEKS0

Gassho, J

stlah

[Jundo]

A surprising discovery about very early star factories ...

• UCLA astrophysicists are among the first scientists to use the James Webb Space Telescope to get a glimpse of the earliest galaxies in the universe.
• The studies reveal unprecedented detail about events that took place within the first billion years after the Big Bang. ...

The earliest galaxies were cosmic fireballs converting gas into stars at breathtaking speeds across their full extent, reports a study led by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) published in a special issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

The research, based on data from the James Webb Space Telescope, is the first study of the shape and structure of those galaxies. It shows that they were nothing like present-day galaxies in which star formation is confined to small regions, such as the constellation of Orion in our own Milky Way galaxy.

“We’re seeing galaxies form new stars at an electrifying pace,” said Tommaso Treu, the study’s lead author, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. “Webb’s incredible resolution allows us to study these galaxies in unprecedented detail, and we see all of this star formation occurring within the regions of these galaxies.”

Treu directs the GLASS–JWST Early Release Science Program, whose first results are the subject of the special journal issue. Another UCLA-led study in the issue found that galaxies that formed soon enough after the Big Bang — within less than a billion years — might have begun burning off leftover photon-absorbing hydrogen, bringing light to a dark universe. ... The project seeks to understand how and when light from the first galaxies burned through the hydrogen fog left over from the Big Bang — a phenomenon and time period called the Epoch of Reionization — and how gas and heavy elements are distributed within and around galaxies over cosmic time.

https://scitechdaily.com/webb-space-...e-transparent/

Europa, with its inner seas, a possible place of life within our solar system ... but more would be needed than water alone ...

Comet Collisions Could Seed Europa’s Ocean With Building Blocks of Life

Comet strikes on Jupiter’s moon Europa could help transport critical ingredients for life found on the moon’s surface to its hidden ocean of liquid water — even if the impacts don’t punch completely through the moon’s icy shell.

The discovery comes from a study led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, where researchers developed a computer model to observe what happens after a comet or asteroid strikes the ice shell, which is estimated to be tens of kilometers thick.

The model shows that if an impact can make it at least halfway through the moon’s ice shell, the heated meltwater it generates will sink through the rest of the ice, bringing oxidants — a class of chemicals required for life — from the surface to the ocean, where they could help sustain any potential life in the sheltered waters. “Once you get enough water, you’re just going to sink,” said lead author and doctoral student Evan Carnahan. “It’s like the Titanic times 10.”

Scientists have proposed impacts as a means to transport oxidants on Europa, but they assumed the strikes would have to break through the ice. This study is important because it suggests that a much larger range of impacts can do the job, said co-author Marc Hesse, a professor at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences Department of Geological Sciences.

“This increases the probability that you would have the necessary chemical ingredients for life,” said Hesse, who is also a faculty member at the UT Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences. The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

https://scitechdaily.com/comet-colli...locks-of-life/

Gassho, J

stlah

[Jundo]

Life comes and goes and comes and goes and ... hopefully won't go again ...

550 Million Years Ago – Researchers Shine New Light on Earth’s First Known Mass Extinction Event

According to a new study conducted by Virginia Tech geobiologists, the cause of the first known mass extinction of animals was decreased global oxygen availability, leading to the loss of a majority of animals present near the end of the Ediacaran Period some 550 million years ago.

The study, led by Scott Evans, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geosciences at the Virginia Tech College of Science, shows the earliest mass extinction of about 80 percent of animals across this interval. “This included the loss of many different types of animals, however those whose body plans and behaviors indicate that they relied on significant amounts of oxygen seem to have been hit particularly hard,” Evans said. “This suggests that the extinction event was environmentally controlled, as are all other mass extinctions in the geologic record.”

... “Environmental changes, such as global warming and deoxygenation events, can lead to massive extinction of animals and profound disruption and reorganization of the ecosystem,” said Xiao, who is an affiliated member of the Global Change Center, part of the Virginia Tech Fralin Life Sciences Institute. “This has been demonstrated repeatedly in the study of Earth’s history, including this work on the first extinction documented in the fossil record. This study thus informs us about the long-term impact of current environmental changes on the biosphere.”

... What exactly caused the drop in global oxygen? That’s still up for debate. “The short answer to how this happened is we don’t really know,” Evans said. “It could be any number and combination of volcanic eruptions, tectonic plate motion, an asteroid impact, etc., but what we see is that the animals that go extinct seem to be responding to decreased global oxygen availability.”

The study by Evans and Xiao is timelier than one would think. In an unconnected study, Virginia Tech scientists recently found that anoxia, the loss of oxygen availability, is affecting the world’s fresh waters. The cause? The warming of waters brought on by climate change and excess pollutant runoff from land use. Warming waters diminish freshwater’s capacity to hold oxygen, while the breakdown of nutrients in runoff by freshwater microbes gobbles up oxygen.

“Our study shows that, as with all other mass extinctions in Earth’s past, this new, first mass extinction of animals was caused by major climate change — another in a long list of cautionary tales demonstrating the dangers of our current climate crisis for animal life,” said Evans, who is an Agouron Institute Geobiology fellow.

... There are five known mass extinctions that stand out in the history of animals, the “Big Five,” according to Xiao, including the Ordovician-Silurian Extinction (440 million years ago), the late Devonian Extinction (370 million years ago), the Permian-Triassic Extinction (250 million years ago), the Triassic-Jurassic Extinction (200 million years ago), and the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction (65 million years ago).

“Mass extinctions are well recognized as significant steps in the evolutionary trajectory of life on this planet,” Evans and team wrote in the study. Whatever the instigating cause of the mass extinction, the result was multiple major shifts in environmental conditions. “Particularly, we find support for decreased global oxygen availability as the mechanism responsible for this extinction. This suggests that abiotic controls have had significant impacts on diversity patterns throughout the more than 570 million-year history of animals on this planet,” the authors wrote. ...

https://scitechdaily.com/550-million...inction-event/

Gassho, J

stlah

[Jundo]

A couple of mysteries on the origin of life, and their possible might be solutions ...

Gamma Rays and Meteorites: The Unlikely Duo That May Have Sparked Life on Earth

Even as detailed images of distant galaxies from the James Webb Space Telescope show us more of the greater universe, scientists still disagree about how life began here on Earth. One hypothesis is that meteorites delivered amino acids — life’s building blocks — to our planet. Now, researchers reporting in the journal ACS Central Science have experimentally shown that amino acids could have formed in these early meteorites from reactions driven by gamma rays produced inside the space rocks.

Ever since Earth was a newly formed, sterile planet, meteorites have been hurtling through the atmosphere at high speeds toward its surface. If the initial space debris had included carbonaceous chondrites — a class of meteorite whose members contain significant amounts of water and small molecules, such as amino acids — then it could have contributed to the evolution of life on Earth. However, the source of amino acids in meteorites has been hard to pinpoint.

... Based on these results and the expected gamma-ray dose from the decay of 26Al in meteorites, the researchers estimated that it would have taken between 1,000 and 100,000 years to produce the amount of alanine and β-alanine found in the Murchison meteorite, which landed in Australia in 1969. This study provides evidence that gamma ray-catalyzed reactions can produce amino acids, possibly contributing to the origin of life on Earth, the researchers say.

https://scitechdaily.com/gamma-rays-and-meteorites-the-unlikely-duo-that-may-have-sparked-life-on-earth/

Think of this, the next time you dig into a salad ...

100-Year-Old Paleontology Mystery Solved: Yale Scientists Uncover How Ancient Plants Adapted To Land

A recent study has solved a longstanding mystery in paleontology, revealing how early plants were able to transition from aquatic environments to land through changes in their vascular systems.

For many years, scientists have been trying to understand how early land plants were able to adapt to new habitats and move beyond their original moist, boggy environments. These plants were small, usually no more than a few centimeters tall, and were found near streams and ponds. However, about 400 million years ago, they developed vascular systems that allowed them to extract water more efficiently from the soil and use it for photosynthesis, a change that had a significant impact on the Earth’s atmosphere and ecosystems. A team of researchers has now solved a 100-year-old mystery in paleontology by uncovering how these ancient plants were able to thrive in new habitats with limited access to water.

A study published in Science by a team of researchers from Yale University has found that a small change in the vascular system of plants made them more resistant to drought, allowing them to thrive in new, drier environments. The team was led by Yale School of the Environment Professor Craig Brodersen and included lead author Martin Bouda and Kyra Prats. The findings have opened up new avenues for exploration in this field.

https://scitechdaily.com/100-year-ol...apted-to-land/

And hope for the depressed and unmotivated ... or, depressed and unmotivated mice, anyway ...

Treating Depression by Fine-Tuning Motivation in the Brain

Neuroscientists have discovered a set of brain cells that influence the motivation of mice to perform tasks for rewards. Increasing the cells’ activity makes a mouse work harder or more vigorously. The neurons come with a feature that prevents the mouse from overdoing it and becoming addicted to the reward. The findings reveal new possible therapeutic strategies for treating mental illnesses like depression that impair motivation.

A characteristic of depression is a lack of motivation. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor Bo Li, in collaboration with CSHL Adjunct Professor Z. Josh Huang, discovered a group of neurons in the mouse brain that influences the animal’s motivation to perform tasks for rewards. Dialing up the activity of these neurons makes a mouse work faster or more vigorously—up to a point. These neurons have a feature that prevents the mouse from becoming addicted to the reward. The findings may point to new therapeutic strategies for treating mental illnesses like depression that affect motivation in humans.

https://scitechdaily.com/treating-depression-by-fine-tuning-motivation-in-the-brain/

Gassho, J

stlah

[Jundo]

Dark Gravity?

Modified Gravity Emerges as Leading Explanation for Dark Matter Following New Galaxy Rotation Measurements

Although dark matter is a central part of the standard cosmological model, it’s not without its issues. There continue to be nagging mysteries about the stuff, not the least of which is the fact that scientists have found no direct particle evidence of it. Despite numerous searches, we have yet to detect dark matter particles. So some astronomers favor an alternative, such as Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MoND) or modified gravity model. And a new study of galactic rotation seems to support them.

The idea of MoND was inspired by galactic rotation. Most of the visible matter in a galaxy is clustered in the middle, so you’d expect that stars closer to the center would have faster orbital speeds than stars farther away, similar to the planets of our solar system. We observe that stars in a galaxy all rotate at about the same speed. The rotation curve is essentially flat rather than dropping off. The dark matter solution is that galaxies are surrounded by a halo of invisible matter, but in 1983 Mordehai Milgrom argued that our gravitational model must be wrong.

At interstellar distances, the gravitational attraction between stars is essentially Newtonian. So rather than modifying general relativity, Milgrom proposed modifying Newton’s Universal Law of Gravity. He argued that rather than the force of attraction being a pure inverse square relation, gravity has a small remnant pull regardless of distance. This remnant is only about 10 trillionths of a gee, but it’s enough to explain galactic rotation curves.

Of course, just adding a small term to Newton’s gravity means that you also have to modify Einstein’s equations as well. So MoND has been generalized in various ways, such as AQUAL, which stands for A Quadradic Lagrangian. Both AQUAL and the standard LCDM model can explain observed galactic rotation curves, but there are some subtle differences.

This is where a recent study comes in. One difference between AQUAL and LCDM is in the rotation speeds of inner orbit stars vs outer orbit stars. For LCDM, both should be governed by the distribution of matter, so the curve should be smooth. AQUAL predicts a tiny kink in the curve due to the dynamics of the theory. It’s too small to measure in a single galaxy, but statistically, there should be a small shift between the inner and outer velocity distributions. So the author of this paper looked at high-resolution velocity curves of 152 galaxies as observed in the Spitzer Photometry and Accurate Rotation Curves (SPARC) database. He found a shift in agreement with AQUAL. The data seems to support modified gravity over standard dark matter cosmology.

The result is exciting, but it doesn’t conclusively overturn dark matter. Thye AQUAL model has its own issues, such as its disagreement with observed gravitational lensing by galaxies. But it is a win for the underdog theory, which has some astronomers cheering “Vive le MoND!”

https://scitechdaily.com/modified-gr...-measurements/

Oxygen, a key to life's diversity ...

“Wildly Fluctuating” Oxygen Levels May Have Accelerated Animal Evolution

Oxygen levels in the Earth’s atmosphere are likely to have “fluctuated wildly” one billion years ago, creating conditions that could have accelerated the development of early animal life, according to new research.

... The early Earth, for the first two billion years of its existence, was anoxic, devoid of atmospheric oxygen. Then oxygen levels started to rise, which is known as the Great Oxidation Event.

“Up until now, scientists had thought that after the Great Oxidation Event, oxygen levels were either low and then shot up just before we see the first animals evolve, or that oxygen levels were high for many millions of years before the animals came along.

“But our study shows oxygen levels were far more dynamic. There was an oscillation between high and low levels of oxygen for a long time before early forms of animal life emerged. We are seeing periods where the ocean environment, where early animals lived, would have had abundant oxygen — and then periods where it does not.

Dr. Benjamin Mills, who leads the Earth Evolution Modelling Group at Leeds and supervised the project, said: “This periodic change in environmental conditions would have produced evolutionary pressures where some life forms may have become extinct and new ones could emerge.”

Dr. Mills said the oxygenated periods expanded what are known as “habitable spaces” — parts of the ocean where oxygen levels would have been high enough to support early animal life forms.

He said: “It has been proposed in ecological theory that when you have a habitable space that is expanding and contracting, this can support rapid changes to the diversity of biological life.

“When oxygen levels decline, there is severe environmental pressure on some organisms which could drive extinctions. And when the oxygen-rich waters expand, the new space allows the survivors to rise to ecological dominance.

“These expanded habitable spaces would have lasted for millions of years, giving plenty of time for ecosystems to develop.” ...

https://scitechdaily.com/wildly-fluc...mal-evolution/

Gassho, J

stlah

[Jundo]

This is pretty amazing ...

Researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine have developed technology that has the potential to be a treatment for traumatic muscle loss. This technology has previously been shown to be able to transform skin tissue into blood vessels and nerve cells.


Tissue nanotransfection is a nanochip device that is minimally invasive and able to reprogram tissue function by delivering specific genes in a short amount of time through the use of a harmless electric spark.

A new study, published in Nature Partner Journals Regenerative Medicine, tested tissue nanotransfection-based gene therapy as a treatment, with the goal of delivering a gene known to be a major driver of muscle repair and regeneration. They found that muscle function improved when tissue nanotransfection was used as a therapy for seven days following volumetric muscle loss in rats. It is the first study to report that tissue nanotransfection technology can be used to generate muscle tissue and demonstrates its benefit in addressing volumetric muscle loss. Volumetric muscle loss is the traumatic or surgical loss of skeletal muscle that results in compromised muscle strength and mobility. Incapable of regenerating the amount of lost tissue, the affected muscle undergoes substantial loss of function, thus compromising the quality of life. A 20 percent loss in mass can result in an up to 90 percent loss in muscle function.

... The Indiana Center for Regenerative Medicine and Engineering is home to the tissue nanotransfection technology for in vivo tissue reprogramming, gene delivery, and gene editing. So far, tissue nanotransfection has also been achieved in blood vessels and nerve tissue. In addition, recent work has shown that topical tissue nanotransfection can achieve cell-specific gene editing of skin wound tissue to improve wound closure.
https://scitechdaily.com/innovative-...c-muscle-loss/

This is pretty scary ... although we are already constantly broadcasting our location (not to mention most of the rest of our lives) to Mr. Zuckerberg and friends ...

Researchers Develop a Device That Can Use WiFi To See Through Walls

The drone-powered device exposes vulnerabilities in WiFi security.

A team of researchers from the University of Waterloo has created a drone-powered device that can see through walls using WiFi networks.

The device, named Wi-Peep, can fly close to a building and then utilize the WiFi network of the inhabitants to quickly identify and locate any WiFi-enabled devices within.

The Wi-Peep exploits a loophole the researchers call polite WiFi. Even if a network is password protected, smart devices will automatically respond to contact attempts from any device within range. The Wi-Peep sends several messages to a device as it flies and then measures the response time on each, enabling it to identify the device’s location within a meter.

... “Using similar technology, one could track the movements of security guards inside a bank by following the location of their phones or smartwatches. Likewise, a thief could identify the location and type of smart devices in a home, including security cameras, laptops, and smart TVs, to find a good candidate for a break-in. In addition, the device’s operation via drone means that it can be used quickly and remotely without much chance of the user being detected.”
https://scitechdaily.com/researchers...through-walls/

This is, well, what it is ... the beauty of translating the cosmos into sound and music ...

NASA’s Sonification of RS Puppis – A Glittering Star 200 Times Larger Than Our Sun

RS Puppis is a glittering star 200 times larger than our Sun and wreathed with dust reflecting starlight. Located about 6,500 light-years away, this star rhythmically brightens and dims over a six-week cycle. In this sonification, scientists represent data in the image as sound for a new, festive way of experiencing RS Puppis. Pitch is assigned based on direction from the center; as the circle travels inward, light closer to the top is high pitched, and light closer to the bottom is lower. Light toward the left is heard more in the left speaker and light toward the right is heard more in the right speaker. Additionally, brightness in the image is mapped to louder volume.

https://youtu.be/zm9dRWGXUQ4

Does sound a bit like a combination of the first few notes of the Star Trek theme ...

https://youtu.be/EWSp5ijOOfk

... combined with the Hummm of the monolith from 2001 ...

https://youtu.be/oU4Rk0NATNs

I am sure that it is just coincidence!

Gassho, J

stlah

[Jundo]

I will also post this.

We Zen folks also believe that there is a direct connection between breath and brain states. Now, in Soto Zen, we tend to emphasize that simple, natural breathing from the diaphragm, at its own pace, allowing calm and deep breathing, helps nurture calm and settled sitting and a calm and settled mind (we tend not to go for very structured, and rather artificial ways of breathing as emphasized in some corners of Rinzai Zen and some yogic traditions which are said to lead to various deep states of mind). Also, this article does not appear to recommend any particular ways of breathing, and is just concerned with the mind-breath connection itself. However, it is interesting that science is finding such connections ...

Breathing is essential for survival, but taking in a breath of fresh air does more than just keep us alive.

“Breathe in… Breathe out…”

It’s common knowledge that taking deep breaths can help calm us down in stressful situations. But now, Professor Micah Allen from the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University has made significant strides in understanding the relationship between breathing and the brain. By synthesizing results from numerous studies on the brain imaging of rodents, monkeys, and humans, Allen and his team developed a computational model that explains how our breathing patterns can shape the expectations of the brain.

“What we found is that, across many different types of tasks and animals, brain rhythms are closely tied to the rhythm of our breath. We are more sensitive to the outside world when we are breathing in, whereas the brain tunes out more when we breathe out. This also aligns with how some extreme sports use breathing, for example, professional marksmen are trained to pull the trigger at the end of exhalation,” explains Professor Micah Allen.

The study suggests that breathing is more than just something we do to stay alive, explains Micah Allen.

“It suggests that the brain and breathing are closely intertwined in a way that goes far beyond survival, to actually impact our emotions, our attention, and how we process the outside world. Our model suggests there is a common mechanism in the brain which links the rhythm of breathing to these events.”

Breathing can affect our mental health

Understanding how breathing shapes our brain, and by extension, our mood, thoughts, and behaviors, is an important goal in order to better prevent and treat mental illness.

“Difficulty breathing is associated with a very large increase in the risk for mood disorders such as anxiety and depression. We know that respiration, respiratory illness, and psychiatric disorders are closely linked. Our study raises the possibility that the next treatments for these disorders might be found in the development of new ways to realign the rhythms of the brain and body, rather than treating either in isolation,” explains Micah Allen.

Stabilizing our mind through breathing is a well-known and used tactic in many traditions such as yoga and meditation. The new study sheds light on how the brain makes it possible. It suggests that there are three pathways in the brain that control this interaction between breathing and brain activity. It also suggests that our pattern of breathing makes the brain more “excitable”, meaning neurons are more likely to fire during certain times of breathing

The team is also collaborating with the Pulmonology team at Aarhus University Hospital, where tools developed in the lab are used to understand whether a person suffering from long-covid may have disruptions in the breath-brain alignment. And there are more projects coming, says Micah Allen.

”We will be using a combination of human and animal neuroimaging to better understand how breathing influences the brain, and also utilizing exploring how different drugs influence respiratory-brain interaction. We would also like to someday study how lifestyle factors like stress, sleep, and even things like winter swimming influence breath-brain interaction. We are very excited to continue this research,” says Micah Allen. ...

https://scitechdaily.com/more-import...mental-health/

Gassho, J

stlah

[Jundo]

I posted before about some of the new Webb "Deep Field" images which are being publish ...

For researchers, the PEARLS program’s images of the earliest galaxies show the amount of gravitational lensing of objects in the background of massive clusters of galaxies, allowing the team to see some of these very distant objects. In one of these relatively deep fields (shown in the image above), the team has worked with stunning multicolor images to identify interacting galaxies with active nuclei.

...

Windhorst and his team’s data show evidence of giant black holes in their center where you can see the accretion disc — the stuff falling into the black hole, shining very brightly in the galaxy center. ... The first observations, consisting of two overlapping tiles, produced an image that shows objects as faint as the brightness of 10 fireflies at the distance of the moon (with the moon not there). The ultimate limit for Webb is one or two fireflies. The faintest reddest objects visible in the image are distant galaxies that go back to the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

https://scitechdaily.com/james-webb-space-telescope-unveils-exquisite-views-of-distant-galaxies/

Well, scientists are going really small too, deep within our cells.

Notice how the big and small seem to resemble each other at some point?

Unprecedented Views of Cell Interiors With New Expansion Microscopy Methods

Unprecedented views of the interior of cells and other nanoscale structures are now possible thanks to innovations in expansion microscopy. The advancements could help provide future insight into neuroscience, pathology, and many other biological and medical fields. ... Zhao’s Biophotonics Lab is a leader in the field of enabling super-resolution imaging of biological samples through physically expanding samples in a process known as expansion microscopy. Through the process, samples are embedded in a swellable hydrogel that homogenously expands to increase the distance between molecules allowing them to be observed in greater resolution. This allows nanoscale biological structures that previously only could be viewed using expensive high-resolution imaging techniques to be seen with standard microscopy tools. ... “We overcame some of the longstanding challenges of expansion microscopy,” Zhao said. “One of the main selling points for Magnify is the universal strategy to keep the tissue’s biomolecules, including proteins, nucleus snippets, and carbohydrates, within the expanded sample.” ... “In the past, to make cells really expandable, you need to use enzymes to digest proteins, so in the end, you had an empty gel with labels that indicate the location of the protein of interest,” he said. With the new method, the molecules are kept intact, and multiple types of biomolecules can be labeled in a single sample....

[below] A video shows kidney cells.

https://youtu.be/MluJdhcGeyg

https://scitechdaily.com/unprecedented-views-of-cell-interiors-with-new-expansion-microscopy-methods/

Gassho, J

stlah

[Jundo]

Working on a cure for addictive cravings ... but still more research to be done ...

Insomnia Medications Show Promise in Fighting Drug and Alcohol Addiction

A study conducted by Rutgers University found that changes in the brain can lead to a desire for drugs and demonstrated how certain insomnia medications may be able to prevent this behavior.

Researchers at Rutgers University have discovered a potential biological process for drug and alcohol addiction and believe that current treatments for insomnia could potentially be utilized to reduce or eliminate cravings.

An article recently published in the journal Biological Psychiatry discusses the findings of researchers at the Rutgers Brain Health Institute and other institutions on the role of the orexin system in drug addiction. The orexin system, which regulates sleep patterns, reward pathways, and mood, has been found to drive drug-seeking behavior. It has been observed that many drugs of abuse increase orexin production in both human and animal brains, and blocking this system can reverse addiction in animals. In addition, a separate study has shown that one of the three FDA-approved insomnia medications that block orexin can reduce opioid cravings in human subjects.

“There’s still much to discover about how orexin drives drug craving, but we know more than enough to justify testing orexin antagonists in clinical trials as addiction treatments,” said Gary Aston-Jones, coauthor of the review and director of the Brain Health Institute. “We’re applying for funding from the National Institutes of Health and looking to hire a physician-scientist with clinical trial experience to lead these efforts.”

The review, which draws on more than a decade of publications from researchers at Rutgers and peer institutions, suggests that orexin spurs drug craving and, thus, motivation to procure a drug.
https://scitechdaily.com/insomnia-me...hol-addiction/

Gassho, J

stlah