The Guild of Scientific Troubadours: Recent Episodes
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This is an ad for Ampex tape from the August 1963 edition of Electronics Australia, a magazine (which I found on archive.org) that also bore the title Radio, Television, and Hobbies during this period, and that had stories on the physical basis of color (so you can figure out those newfangled color TVs), and US Navy experiments in detecting and recording underwater sounds.
Ampex tape is maybe more of a key element of our culture than many folks realize; this was the stuff that practically every professional studio recording would have been made on from the 1940s up to the 1990s. Sound for films, too. And video tapes of television performances like, for instance, the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate. And Ampex were military contractors, so their tape recorded defense flight tests and the first images of Earth from the Moon. Just like Elvis Presley’s first song, “That’s All Right,” recorded on an Ampex reel-to-reel recorder.
The company has won an Oscar, a Grammy, and 12 Emmys for technical achievements like instant replay and slow-motion color recording. So a lot of the history of the 20th century was literally recorded on this stuff.
The post Science Art: What can make any tape recorder sound a little more like an Ampex?, 1963. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Scienmag reports on a new discovery in one of the world’s most famous (and most urban) fossil sites — an Ice Age toad species found in the La Brea tar pits:
Named Spea labreae, the extinct amphibian was identified in the long-studied collections of the La Brea Tar Pits, where its small bones had remained largely overlooked since they were excavated in the 1950s. The discovery adds a rare amphibian to the North American Pleistocene fossil record and offers scientists a new window into the environmental conditions that shaped Los Angeles at the end of the last Ice Age.
The species is described in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by Dr. Alberto Cruz, a paleoecologist and paleogeographer who reviewed the Tar Pits’ understudied reptiles and amphibians while working as a postdoctoral fellow at La Brea Tar Pits. Cruz did not initially suspect that he was looking at an unknown animal. The unusual features of one specimen appeared so distinctive that he first considered whether the toad had suffered an injury or disease during its lifetime. Only after comparing the fossil material repeatedly with modern spadefoot toads did he conclude that the differences represented a previously unrecognized species.
“I’m really more of a paleoecologist, paleogeographer, not a taxonomist,” Cruz said, explaining that the discovery emerged unexpectedly during a broader review of the collection. The fossil material was originally collected decades ago, but detailed anatomical comparisons revealed characteristics that had escaped earlier investigations.
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The extinction of S. labreae therefore suggests that the habitats surrounding Rancho La Brea were reorganized as the Pleistocene ended and Southern California shifted toward the ecological conditions seen today.
The study also reports the first fossil record of the Mexican burrowing toad, Rhinophrynus, from the southwestern United States. Living members of this lineage are absent from modern Los Angeles, and their nearest populations occur nearly 2,500 kilometers away in southern Mexico. Finding evidence of the group in Ice Age Los Angeles indicates that its historical range once extended dramatically farther north. Together, the northward ancient presence of Rhinophrynus and the disappearance of S. labreae describe a complex ecological transition rather than a simple story of warming or cooling.
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Cell research into a North American Northern Plains tribe’s gut biota shows that the living things inside them (the bacteria, archaea, and other microbes responsible for mood, digestion, immunity, and a host of other things) are in transition. More than a century after their encounters with (and relocations by) European settlers, their guts are halfway between those seen in industrialized populations and those seen in indigenous groups around the world:
Summary
The human gut is shaped by environmental factors, producing distinct microbial communities. Indigenous individuals practicing traditional lifestyles often harbor more diverse microbiota, with taxa often absent in industrialized people. However, little engagement has occurred with American Indian communities in North America who experienced forced relocation and dietary programs during colonization. Here, shotgun metagenomics profiled the gut microbiome of people from a Northern Plains tribe (NPT) reservation in comparison to 12 global populations engaged in traditional, agrarian, or industrialized lifestyles. Analysis of the 532 samples revealed that the NPT microbiota exhibited greater bacterial and archaeal diversity than industrialized populations but reduced diversity compared to global traditional and agrarian populations. Relative to the general United States population, NPT microbiomes encoded more virulence factor and microbial defense genes and fewer CAZyme-encoding genes. These findings suggest that the NPT gut microbiome is in transition between lifestyles associated with global Indigenous and industrialized populations.…
Here, we profiled the gut microbiome of individuals from a Northern Plains tribe (NPT) reservation community. Comparison to 12 different global populations found that NPT individuals had a distinct microbial signature from other traditional, agrarian, and industrialized populations. NPT individuals harbored more microbial taxa than industrialized populations, with a greater representation of more rare phyla and species, but less diverse and fewer taxa than traditional and agrarian populations. Many classical “pathobionts” were more prevalent among NPT microbiota when compared to the United States (US) general population, despite individuals being healthy adults. Yet, the US general population microbiome encoded higher frequencies of CAZymes, which are typically associated with Indigenous populations, than in NPT microbiomes. This contributes to a unique NPT microbiome relative to non-Indigenous people in the US, which may limit generalizations of “healthy” and “diseased” microbiomes determined for majority of populations to other groups in the same geographic region and provides additional insight into microbial resilience in the gut despite the influence of industrialization.
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This work was built on a decades-long relationship between the authors and the participating community. Importantly, the corresponding author was invited to initiate this work at the request of entities within the community and performed all sample collection, sample processing, and data analysis in partnership with individuals on site, including training individuals from our partner community in approaches used here.
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Discussion
The gut microbiota of humans is influenced by multiple factors of host physiology, lifestyle, and the environment.52,53,54,55 People in the NPT are uniquely situated through their continued practice of traditional lifeways combined with the adoption of certain aspects of large-scale agrarian and industrialized life that distinguishes them from the broader US population and over half of the global population that reside primarily in urban settings and engage exclusively in industrialized lifestyles. Taxonomic profiling revealed bacterial and archaeal compositions of NPT people reside between populations with industrialized and non-industrialized lifestyles. In general, the NPT population had less diverse gut microbiota than traditional and agrarian populations. Yet, the NPT microbiota were composed of more taxa and greater microbial diversity than the surrounding US general population and other industrialized populations for some taxonomical comparisons. Greater microbial diversity compared to the US general population did not necessarily result in a detectable level of more gene diversity. Microbes found in the US general population encoded higher numbers of CAZymes relative to NPT individuals but had a reduced abundance of defense mechanisms for viral and microbial competitors. Thus, the gut microbiota identified in NPT people are distinct from that in the other global populations analyzed here and may result from a combination of environmental and lifestyle factors that are common to reservation communities in North America.…
It is unclear what factors are leading to this mosaic state, but we speculate that patterns of colonization that affect dietary patterns, environmental exposures, and place-based cultural practices likely play a role.19,35,58 For example, harvesting traditional foods like prairie turnips and fish is still practiced by many individuals, but agricultural and processed foods sold in gas stations, grocery stores, and through federal food programs dominate the diets of many individuals.59
Compared to industrialized populations, we observed a higher prevalence of classical pathogens and pathobionts among the gut microbiota of NPT individuals. It is important to note that definitions of pathogenic potential for many microbes are centered within industrialized contexts that often fail to acknowledge that the absence of these species may negatively impact health.…
In conclusion, the NPT have a distinct microbial signature in the gut compared to global traditional, agrarian, and industrialized populations that suggests a transitional state between a non-industrialized and industrialized state. Associations between environmental exposures common to reservation communities in the Northern Plains and specific gene signatures suggest that microbiota of Indigenous people may be substantially shaped by their surroundings that could also promote greater microbial diversity. Lastly, we would like to highlight the importance of working alongside of community members in production of biological datasets to address questions of interest and importance in the partner community. Strong ethical research relationships improve the contextualized understanding of results through discussion and reinforce data sovereignty.
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This is a photo of space with a bit of color amplification so we can tell what we’re looking at. Nebulas on their own aren’t quite this exciting.
In more detail, from the Wikimedia Commons page where I found it:
Numerous emission nebulae in the constellation Cygnus seen by the Northern Sky Narrowband Survey. In this false color image, doubly ionized oxygen ([OIII] at 500.7 nm) is mapped to red, ionized hydrogen (Hα at 656.3 nm) is mapped to green and singly ionized sulfur ([SII] at 671.7 nm and 673.0 nm) is mapped to blue. The brightest stars are added to visualize the regions contaminated by strong continuum light. (Aside from that, the image does not contain continuum light.)
The field of view is 40° × 28°. Equatorial center coordinates are RA=20h40m and DEC=40°. North is up.The yellow regions are HII regions ionized by young stars recently formed within giant molecular clouds. Most of the bluish and reddish filaments spreading across the image are supernova remnants.
User Tk833 (that is, the Northern Sky Narrowband Survey) can be proud of making this Featured Picture, which will be highlighted as the site’s Picture of the Day for 31 July 2027, when and if we get there.
I mean, if anything, this picture does show that some stars just blow up….
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Science Alert reports on the discovery of a long-gone urban sprawl hidden underneath the “untouched” Amazon rain forest:
Between around 600 BCE and 850 CE, a civilization known as the Aquiry transformed swaths of southwestern Amazonia, carving enigmatic geometric earthworks into the landscape.
Now, a new LIDAR survey suggests that civilization was even larger than archaeologists imagined, hinting at a people that built as many as 30,000 earthworks and had a peak population of up to 3 million people around 200 CE.
For archaeo-anthropologist Martti Pärssinen of the University of Helsinki, the realization was transformative.
“I first experienced such a moment in 2002, when I flew with Alceu Ranzi and Sanna Saunaluoma over the monumental geometric earthworks and observed ancient roads connecting the sites in the state of Acre, Brazil, a region that had long been regarded as pristine rainforest,” Pärssinen told ScienceAlert.
“It completely transformed my understanding and made me realize how mistaken earlier assumptions had been.
“More recently, I felt something similar when I came to understand that there may actually be up to ten times more of these earthworks in the region than I had previously imagined.”
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The researchers surveyed 4,497 square kilometers (1,736 square miles) of rainforest by flying a series of long, roughly 450-kilometer (280-mile) transects over the region.
Their entire dataset yielded 432 earthworks – 396 of which were previously unknown.
“What surprised us most was the extraordinarily large number of geoglyphs and other earthworks found within an area representing less than 3 percent of Greater Amazonia,” Pärssinen said.
“The scale of the archaeological record suggests that many other regions across Amazonia may have been far more densely populated and intensively modified than previously assumed.”
By extrapolating their results, combined with existing surveys, the researchers estimated that, at its peak, the Aquiry civilization may have covered an area as large as 183,000 square kilometers.
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It would have been a dramatically different place than the wilderness we see today – a forest threaded with clearings where people lived, farmed, celebrated, and gathered.
“At the center of many of these clearings would stand large geometric earthworks connected by broad and narrow roads,” Pärssinen told ScienceAlert when asked what the landscape might have looked like around 200 CE.
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This is an illustration of a particular perspective in a cardiac echocardiogram. An “apical view” is one of the four views of an echocardiogram, and you get it by aiming the little probe between the fifth and sixth ribs on the left side of your body, aimed a little bit upward (toward your head) and a bit outward (toward your armpit). It’s a way of looking at your left ventricle, left atrium, and mitral valve. The left atrium is where oxygenated blood enters the heart before the left ventricle sends it out to the rest of the body.
This illustration, showing different areas of the heart muscle, was done in 2006 as part of a series of heart illustrations for Yale’s med school by Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator, with C. Carl Jaffe, MD, cardiologist. I found it in the Lynch collection on Wikimedia Commons.
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SONG: “Sleeping Cathedrals”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “World’s biggest whale graveyard found in Indian Ocean off Australia”, ABC News (Australia), 10 June 2026, as used in the post “Whale graveyard reveals unknown prehistoric species”.
ABSTRACT:
This was a strange one.
I had it virtually done as last month’s deadline rolled around. Drums were first, then a chord progression, an idea for how the words would work, but … the more “good” things I did to it — getting a good bass line recorded cleanly, re-doing vocals, experimenting with vocal harmonizer effects in a very intentional way — the less I liked it. The chord progression was basically the same as “Creep” (I can’t remember the name of the cadence, but I remember it having one; Radiohead just puts it on an an endless loop), but it kept sounding chipper and not right for a song about the eerie majesty of an undersea graveyard for creatures with immense bodies as big as… well, OK, “cathedrals” is probably overstating it, but big enough to go inside, at any rate. The synthetic vocal harmonies just weren’t harmonic enough. The lead vox were too warbly to be proper leads, but too proper to really shoegaze into reverb blankets like an undersea song should be. Dynamics weren’t being very dynamic either.
And then for whatever reason I started listening to some old Camper Van Beethoven, one of my favorite bands from my misspent youth. And on their self-titled third album (or maybe fourth, depending on how you want to count), they did a couple of songs that were just other, earlier songs played backwards. And then I heard a couple other things online — not looking for this sort of thing, just looking and listening around — that were doing the same sort of thing in different genres and with different moods, and yeah, OK, message received. The world wants psychedelia with its prehistoric whale graveyard. Got it, chief.
Sliced up the musical backing into verse/chorus/outro sections, reversed each chunk individually, did a little more mixing, cross-fading, bringing up the right-way-around organ track, playing with some backwards vocals, and yeah, This feels like entering an alien world and finding massive remains of ancient creatures collected there, fossilizing in the dark and the pressure.
Part of what held this up is that I’ve been, for more than two months, trying to learn a penitential cover in a mode that does not come naturally to me. There are changing time signatures. Musicianship. But I’m still at it.
LYRICS:
The sun never shines
The sea is our vault
How heavy our sky
How precious our saltHow flesh leaves the bones
How gardens take bloom
How mountains descend
How crowded the tombsIn cathedrals
Of collapsing carrion…
Collapsing carrionWhere giants break down
We take this and eat
The valleys resound
Giving thanks for the meatFuture fossils of whales
Fall like brittle stars
Like the bones grow stones
Reading 500 barsIn cathedrals
Of collapsing carrion…
Collapsing carrionIn cathedrals
Of collapsing carrion…
Collapsing carrionIn the Dordrecht Deep
Where the methane seeps
At their final sleep
So many sleeping cathedrals
So many sleeping cathedrals
So many sleeping cathedrals
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Florida archaeologists got more — way more — than they bargained for when they started digging near Chipley, Florida. According to The Cooldown, an excavation for a Civil War battlefield instead turned up remains of a lost Spanish mission dating two centuries earlier:
Researchers had long believed the mission was somewhere in Washington County, west of Marianna, but its exact location had remained unknown.
“There was a Spanish mission here in 1674, 1675,” historian Dale Cox said, per MyPanhandle.
“Researchers have always known that it was somewhere west of Marianna, but no one ever really knew where.”
According to Cox, the find grew out of an archaeological effort sponsored by a nonprofit with which he is affiliated to find a Civil War battlefield. During the process, Spanish artifacts were discovered.
“And since there are no other recorded Spanish settlements in this entire stretch of West Florida between about Marianna and Pensacola, you know, we knew we had found the lost mission,” he added.
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“We would love to find the traces of the chapel, which was, of course, the central structure of a mission,” Cox said, per MyPanhandle. “We have found artifacts from both cultures, from Spanish and from Native Americans. So we would really like to find that chapel so we can be, you know, at the center of the mission community.”
Cox said the team hopes some of the artifacts recovered in the next excavation can eventually be shown in local museums.
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Singularity reports on a new study charting the pathway that stress takes from brain to your body — literally going into the center of your bones:
A new study offers one of clearest answers yet. In mice modeling chronic stress, activity dropped in two brain regions governing emotional resilience. By way of a large nerve to the digestive track, the change wiped out a beneficial bacterial strain key to a healthy microbiome.
Without those microbes, the gut produced less of a crucial molecule that helps cells clear damaged proteins and other molecular junk. These effects impacted the bone marrow, where stem cells generate oxygen-carrying blood cells and components of the immune system. Over time, these stem cells dwindled, leaving signs of premature immune aging in stressed mice.
“One surprising finding of our study was that suppression of only two specific brain regions was sufficient to produce many of the hematopoietic [blood stem cell] defects caused by psychological stress,” study author Linjia Jiang at Sun Yat-sen University said in a press release.
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To trace how chronic stress ages the body, the team tested four mouse models. Some experienced mild nerve injury. Others faced subtle disruptions to their daily routines, such as lights switching on earlier than expected or their home cages gently rocking at unpredictable times.
The changes put the mice on edge based on established behavioral tests. Mapping brain activity, the team zeroed in on two regions that consistently quieted. One, the medial prefrontal cortex, orchestrates executive control, or the ability to keep ideas in mind while reaching towards a goal. The other, the periaqueductal grey, coordinates attention to potential threats.
As activity decreased in both regions, blood stem cells struggled to divide and replenish immune cells. Inflammation and other toxic pathways flared up, and the cells developed molecular signatures similar to those seen in much older animals. Silencing either brain region with genetic tools reproduced many of the same symptoms, suggesting neural changes are a cause, not just a correlation.
But how was the brain communicating with the bone marrow? The answer lay in the gut microbiome.
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Spermidine levels plummeted in stressed mice due to the loss of Lactobacillus reuteri, a beneficial strain of bacteria in the gut ecosystem that supports spermidine production. Stress-related nerve signals from the brain depleted these microbes, which caused spermidine levels to collapse and leaves blood stem cells unable to maintain themselves.
In another test, transplanting gut microbes from a stressed mouse into a happy-go-lucky mouse triggered early blood stem cell aging in the recipient—even though it didn’t experience stress itself.
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This is the opener for an article in the May 1955 issue of Popular Electronics. You can read the article here, on archive.org — and, of course, then build your own lie detector.
As the instructions say, “INTERESTED in a gadget to take to a party? How about something for the classroom? Studying experimental psychology? Want to see what else can be done with electronics? Then here is an interesting answer. A simple circuit consisting of one tube, three batteries, four resistors, and one potentiometer that will convert a v.t.v.m. into a lie detector.”
I think a “v.t.v.m.” is a voltmeter or multimeter, but it’s never really explained in the text. If you’re reading Popular Electronics in 1955, I think it’s just something you know.
I’m also not exactly sure who that is in the bow tie with the pocket protector and electrodes taped to his fingers, but the acknowledgements say: “The original plans for the lie detector were suggested by Joseph A. Fiederer. Additional construction and photographs by Edwin T. Kephart.”
It occurs to me that this might even be the article that gave the first Scientologists the idea for the e-meter. Just replace taped electrodes with cans.
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IFL Science introduces us to “plastivores” — a species of waxworm caterpillars (often thought of as beehive pests) that get fat gorging themselves on plastic waste… Read the rest “Hungry caterpillars eat plastic pollution”
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Science Daily looks at an American Cancer Society study that found psilocybin mushrooms can help lift depression symptoms in cancer patients for as long as two years after a single psychedelic… Read the rest “Shrooms ease cancer-patient depression for two years.”
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American Scientist provides a spirited defense against funding cuts for research into oddball subjects … by listing a lot of strange projects that suddenly led to world-changing… Read the rest “Why fund weird science.”
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Cell reconstructs a prehistoric face, thanks to DNA analysis of an unusual skull that proved to be the first-known skull of a Denisovan, the other prehistoric human besides Neanderthals… Read the rest “Looking Denisovans in the face for the first time.”
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Cyamis boopis is one of the cyamidae better known as a whale louse.
This particular species is from Scandinavia, as illustrated in the book An account of the Crustacea of Norway, with short… Read the rest “Science Art: Cyamus boopis, Lütken, 1895.”
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Science shares research that identifies a massive killer of honeybees — a virus that’s carried by pesticide-resistant mites:
U.S. beekeepers had a disastrous winter. Between
… Read the rest “USDA finds what caused America’s biggest bee die-off.”The post USDA finds what caused America’s biggest bee die-off. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is an illustration from the British Museum’s Sutton Hoo Collection, studying the grave (and buried treasures) of a “Very Important Person” laid to rest in the … Read the rest “Science Art: Figures preparing the Sutton Hoo ship for burial, Craig Williams”
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SONG: “The Temples Resurrect These Fallen Trees”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “Thousands of endangered trees preserved for centuries inside… Read the rest “SONG: The Temples Resurrect These Fallen Trees.”
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Mongabay reports on a survey of data going back 25 years that show Alaskan coastal wolves have changed their diet from deer to sea otters — and have acquired toxic levels of mercury … Read the rest “Eating sea otters is giving wolves mercury poisoning.”
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That’s a closeup of the Surveyor-1 satellite printed above an image of the Gemini orbital capsule, with the words “WE GAVE” (image of Surveyor-1) “a mirror and”… Read the rest “Science Art: Detail from Tinsley Laboratories ad, 1966.”
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New Scientist plumbs the depths in search of foot-long white shrimp-like creatures that might be one of the most populous creatures on the bottom of the ocean, but about which we know very… Read the rest “Gigantic, ghostly crustaceans could live over half the ocean floor.”
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Someone in China hasn’t watched Kristen Stewart in UNDERWATER… or so Sustainability Times leads me to believe. They’re reporting (rather breathlessly) on a “deep-sea… Read the rest “China’s undersea station.”
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This is a picture of a mesonychid, a family of prehistoric creatures known as “wolves with hooves.”
I got the idea to post this from a Bluesky post by Riley “Resting Dino… Read the rest “Science Art: Harpagolestes immanis, by Ryan Somma.”
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This is Venus, moving in front of the Sun. Technically, I suppose it’s a lot of Venuses, or a chain of a lot of pictures of Venus.
It was made by NASA/SDO, AIA, or NASA’s Solar Dynamics… Read the rest “Science Art: Transit of Venus in 2012.”
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Smithsonian shares some unusual observations from Australia, where wild cockatoos have learned to operate the controls of water fountains in public parks to get a quick drink:
Barbara
… Read the rest “Wild cockatoos use public water fountains”The post Wild cockatoos use public water fountains first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
PhysOrg reports on an archaeological discovery in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which seems to have been the site of a 1,000-year-old Native American farming complex more than 330… Read the rest “Ancient megafarm found in Michigan.”
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Nature reports on a study from China that found thousands of endangered trees growing on the grounds of religious monuments across the country:
It is an example of “where ecological and
… Read the rest “The temple as refuge … for endangered species.”The post The temple as refuge … for endangered species. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is an image of a white plume moth, a photograph taken of a specimen in the Muséum de Toulouse in August of 2011. The moths really look like this in life, too. But this one was on display in … Read the rest “Science Art: Pterophorus pentadactyla MHNT, by Didier Descouens”
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This is a waterwork as the Industrial Revolution hit full swing.
It’s the final image in a book I’ve used here before, A practical treatise on hydraulic and water-supply engineering:… Read the rest “Science Art: Turbines and Pumps, Manchester, 1882.”
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SONG: “Hyperfocus”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “Something in The Back of Your Eye Could Reveal Whether You Have ADHD,” Science Alert… Read the rest “SONG: Hyperfocus”
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Popular Science shares a finding that people born without the ability to smell actually inhale and exhale differently than people who can tell what it is they’re smelling:
In other words: Your ability to smell dictates the way you breathe, per the study published October 22 in the journal Nature Communications. Respiratory differences between smellers and non-smellers could have important implications for both physical and mental health, suggest the authors, all scientists within the Olfaction Research Group at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.
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The study authors fitted participants with wearable devices that tracked air flow in and out of their noses over 24 hours of normal activity. They followed 31 people with self-reported normal olfaction and 21 participants born without a sense of smell (known as “congenital anosmics”). They found that both smellers and non-smellers had similar breathing rates, but that, while awake, smellers’ respiratory patterns included an average of 240 additional inhalation peaks per hour, compared with non-smellers. These “peaks” represent sniffs, or smaller inhalations on top of a smooth breath in, which give each inhale a jagged shape when charted.
During sleep (when past research has indicated people are less attuned to and responsive to odors) the study scientists noted that the number of inhalation peaks evened out between the two groups. Yet other factors, like the variation in the volume of inhalations, significantly differed between smellers’ and non-smellers’–even while they slept. Altogether, these differences were enough for the researchers to determine someone’s smell-status with 83% accuracy, simply by analyzing their breathing pattern.
In one additional experiment, the study scientists tracked the breathing of 32 normal smellers in a controlled, “odor-free” room. In the scentless environment, they found that the smellers’ breathing became much more similar to that of anosmics, suggesting that respiration pattern is an interplay between sensory ability and environment.
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Acquired anosmia and other types of olfactory dysfunction are associated with many different health conditions, including depression, diabetes, obesity, cognitive decline, and neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. One analysis found that people aged 57 and older who lose their ability to smell are three times as likely to die over a five-year period than their peers who retain the ability to detect odors.
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You can read more about the olfactory research here, in Nature Communications.
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BBC reports on the accidental discovery of an immense, forgotten Mayan city in the Mexican jungle by an archaeology PhD student browsing the internet:
Archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche.
They uncovered the hidden complex – which they have called Valeriana – using Lidar, a type of laser survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.
They believe it is second in density only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America.
The team discovered three sites in total, in a survey area the size of Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, “by accident” when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet.
“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US.
It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of laser pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.
But when Mr Auld-Thomas processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed – a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.
…
Valeriana has the “hallmarks of a capital city” and was second only in density of buildings to the spectacular Calakmul site, around 100km away (62 miles).
It is “hidden in plain sight”, the archaeologists say, as it is just 15 minutes hike from a major road near Xpujil where mostly Maya people now live.
There are no known pictures of the lost city because “no-one has ever been there”, the researchers say, although local people may have suspected there were ruins under the mounds of earth.
The city, which was about 16.6 sq km, had two major centres with large buildings around 2km (1.2 miles) apart, linked by dense houses and causeways.
It has two plazas with temple pyramids, where Maya people would have worshipped, hidden treasures like jade masks and buried their dead.
…
In total, Mr Auld-Thomas and Prof Canuto surveyed three different sites in the jungle. They found 6,764 buildings of various sizes.
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You can read more of the Mayan discovery here, in Antiquity.
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This is a photograph of a strangely-shaped galaxy, as taken by the Webb Space Telescope. Or rather, a set of “interacting” galaxies, known collectively as Arp 142. From the Webb gallery:
This image was taken by MIRI, the telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, which astronomers use to study cooler and older objects, dust, and extremely distant galaxies.
Here, the Egg appears as an exceptionally small teal oval with gauzy layers. Mid-infrared light predominantly shows the oldest stars in the elliptical galaxy, which has lost or used up most of its gas and dust. This is why the view is so different from the combined image, which includes near-infrared light.
At right, the Penguin’s shape is relatively unchanged. The MIRI image shows all the gas and dust that has been distorted and stretched, as well as the smoke-like material, in blue, that includes carbon-containing molecules, known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
Next, look for the edge-on galaxy cataloged PGC 1237172 at the top right — a dim, hazy line. Find it by looking for the bright blue star with small diffraction spikes positioned over the top of its left edge. This galaxy nearly disappears in mid-infrared light because its stars are very young and the galaxy isn’t overflowing with dust.
Now, scan the full image left to right to spot distant galaxies in the background. The red objects are encased in thick layers of dust. Some are spiral galaxies and others are more distant galaxies that can only be detected as dots or smudges. Green galaxies are laden with dust and are farther away. Bluer galaxies are closer. Zoom in carefully to see if a blue dot has miniscule diffraction spikes — those are stars, not galaxies.
The post Science Art: Interacting Galaxies Arp 142 (MIRI Image), by NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The American Chemical Society looks at homegrown (or farmed) tomatoes and finds that the way in which they’re watered can make a difference in how well they grow:
Researchers reporting in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry examined the impact of watering practices on tomato plants. They found that the size of the water droplets affected plant growth and resistance to pests and pathogens.
Climate change threatens crop production as rising temperatures, unstable rainfall patterns, and more insects and diseases endanger plant health and yields. Thus, there is growing pressure to identify ways to moderate these environmental effects, ideally without increasing the use of chemical pesticides. To address this challenge, Man-Qun Wang and colleagues examined how mechanically stimulating tomato plants with water droplets impacts their growth and might protect them from insect predation and fungal infection.
The researchers sprayed tomato plants with water twice daily and compared the effects of small droplets (200 micrometers, about the size of a computer monitor pixel) and large droplets (1,000 micrometers, about the diameter of a pinhead) versus no spray. They also covered the soil with a barrier to ensure the spray didn’t influence how much water the roots received.
Structural observations revealed:
- Tomato plants sprayed with large water droplets were shorter and more compact than other groups.
- There were minimal visible differences between plants receiving small droplets or no spray.
- Fruit yield and quality were similar among the three groups.
Metabolic analysis revealed that tomato plants sprayed with large water droplets had:
- Significant changes in hormones involved in plant defenses, resulting in increased resistance to destruction by moth larvae or gray mold compared to plants that weren’t sprayed.
- Higher levels of defense-mediating chlorogenic acid in their leaves compared to the other plant groups.
- Reduced emissions of volatile organic compounds compared with plants receiving no spray, which made them less attractive to egg-laying moths and resulted in 74% fewer eggs on the leaves.
The post The way you water your tomatoes matters, not just how much you water ’em. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Outside reports on a study that finds meditation can have a profound effect not only on your mental wellbeing, but also on your physical endurance and athletic performance:
…[R]esearchers at National Taiwan Normal University led by Yu-Kai Chang … and his colleagues compared two groups of athletes, one of which had experience with meditation, and found striking differences in how they were able to handle mental fatigue and maintain focus during endurance exercise.
…
The subjects in the study—24 meditators and 25 non-meditators—were all serious athletes in a mix of sports including track and field, judo, and wrestling. They had an average age of around 20, and trained on average for 16 hours a week. Three quarters of them were male, a quarter female. They had similar performance in a cognitive test that involved remembering a series of digits.
In other words, the two groups were very well matched in all respects except one: the meditators reported spending an average of 41.7 minutes per week meditating, and had been doing it at least once a week for a year or more.
…
To find out if there was a link between meditation and endurance performance, the study protocol involved doing a mentally fatiguing computing task (more on that below), then a cognitive task that assessed their “inhibitory control,” then a progressive treadmill test to exhaustion. Inhibitory control is what it takes to stay focused, tune out distractions, and resist impulses that interfere with your goals. In some sense, the mental side of athletic endurance is one big test of inhibitory control—so you can think of the study protocol as a computer-based test of inhibitory control followed by a treadmill-based test of the same thing.
…
In this study, the researchers used a task called the Stroop Test to ramp up the mental fatigue in their subjects. A color word flashes on the screen, either RED, GREEN, BLUE, or YELLOW. The letters are displayed in one of those colors, and you have to quickly press a button corresponding to the color of the letters. The catch is that the color of the letters doesn’t match the word (RED might appear in green letters, for example). You have to inhibit your automatic response to the semantic meaning of the word in order to respond only to the display color. This is mentally taxing, and after half an hour has been shown to reduce both mental and physical performance.
In the control condition, the subjects did the same Stroop Test for the same half-hour, but with the colors and words matching so that it didn’t tax their response inhibition. There’s some previous research showing that experienced meditators have better response inhibition, so the researchers hypothesized that the meditation group would perform better after the mentally fatiguing version of the Stroop Test.
…
In the control condition (right), which was preceded by the non-fatiguing Stroop Test, the two groups were roughly equal. In the mental fatigue condition (left), the meditators produced almost the same performance, while the non-meditators gave up 4 percent earlier. There were similar results in the computer test that assessed inhibitory control: the non-meditators got worse when they were mentally fatigued, and the meditators didn’t.
—
You can read more of the study here, in the Journal of Sports Sciences.
The post Meditate for marathons. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is how the the US Navy tried to get recruits to stand tall during World War II, with anatomical studies of slouching. How do you know if you’re slouching? Well, here’s how, point by point.
This from the 1943 Physical Fitness Manual of the U.S. Navy. There are lots of fascinating illustrations throughout, showing how to do handsprings and the like, and more photos of diving and pullups and rope climbing without your feet. But the sloppy trainee could become an alert trainee by doing this with his body.
I found the manual here, on archive.org.
The post Science Art: Illustrations of poor and good posture, 1943. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Heatmap reports on some SpaceX alums — that is, former employees of the space corporation — who gave up on astronauting in favor of making some things work better down here/ As Arbor Energy, they’ve figured out a way to turn rocket technology into a power source that undoes some of the damage of burning fossil fuels:
After the company’s CEO, Brad Hartwig, left SpaceX in 2018, he attempted to craft the ideal resume for a future astronaut, his dream career. He joined the California Air National Guard, worked as a test pilot at the now-defunct electric aviation startup Kitty Hawk, and participated in volunteer search and rescue missions in the Bay Area, which gave him a front row seat to the devastating effects of wildfires in Northern California.
That experience changed everything. “I decided I actually really like planet Earth,” Hartwig told me, “and I wanted to focus my career instead on preserving it, rather than trying to leave it.” So he rallied a bunch of his former rocket engineer colleagues to repurpose technology they pioneered at SpaceX to build a biomass-fueled, carbon negative power source that’s supposedly about ten times smaller, twice as efficient, and eventually, one-third the cost of the industry standard for this type of plant.
…
But the advances in 3D printing and computer modeling that allowed the SpaceX team to build an increasingly simple and cheap rocket engine have allowed Arbor to move quickly into this new market, Hartwig explained. “A lot of the technology that we had really pioneered over the last decade — in reactor design, combustion devices, turbo machinery, all for rocket propulsion — all that technology has really quite immediate application in this space of biomass conversion and power generation.”
Arbor’s method is poised to be a whole lot sleeker and cheaper than the BECCS plants of today, enabling both more carbon sequestration and actual electricity production, all by utilizing what Hartwig fondly refers to as a “vegetarian rocket engine.” Because there’s no air in space, astronauts have to bring pure oxygen onboard, which the rocket engines use to burn fuel and propel themselves into the stratosphere and beyond. Arbor simply subs out the rocket fuel for biomass. When that biomass is combusted with pure oxygen, the resulting exhaust consists of just CO2 and water. As the exhaust cools, the water condenses out, and what’s left is a stream of pure carbon dioxide that’s ready to be injected deep underground for permanent storage. All of the energy required to operate Arbor’s system is generated by the biomass combustion itself.
…
Last month, Arbor signed a deal with Microsoft to deliver 25,000 tons of permanent carbon dioxide removal to the tech giant starting in 2027, when the startup’s first commercial project is expected to come online. As a part of the deal, Arbor will also generate 5 megawatts of clean electricity per year, enough to power about 4,000 U.S. homes. And just a few days ago, the Department of Energy announced that Arbor is one of 11 projects to receive a combined total of $58.5 million to help develop the domestic carbon removal industry.
Arbor’s current plan is to source biomass from forestry waste, much of which is generated by forest thinning operations intended to prevent destructive wildfires.
The post Using rocket science to make “carbon-negative” energy. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
iScience peers back through the mists of time to the Viking Age, when a saga describes a dead man being tossed down a castle’s well. Now, archaeologists are pretty sure they’ve found the vic’s body down the same well:
The potential of ancient DNA analyses to provide independent sources of information about events in the historical record remains to be demonstrated. Here we apply palaeogenomic analysis to human remains excavated from a medieval well at the ruins of Sverresborg Castle in central Norway. In Sverris Saga, the Old Norse saga of King Sverre Sigurdsson, one passage details a 1197-CE raid on the castle and mentions a dead man thrown into the well. Radiocarbon dating supports that these are that individual’s remains. We sequenced the Well-man’s nuclear genome to 3.4× and compared it to Scandinavian populations, revealing he was closely related to inhabitants of southern Norway. This was surprising because King Sverre’s defeated army was assumed to be recruited from parts of central Norway, whereas the raiders were from the south. The findings also indicate that the unique genetic drift seen in present-day southern Norwegians already existed 800 years ago.
…
A specific passage in Sverris Saga6 describes in detail how in 1197 CE, while King Sverre wintered in Bergen, the Baglers launched a sneak attack against the Birkebeiner stronghold at Sverresborg Castle built by Sverre around 1180 CE (63° 25′ 10.1922″, 10° 21′ 25.4298″) just west of Nidaros (now the present-day city of Trondheim, Norway). The Bagler army entered the castle through a secret door while the residents were dining. They plundered and raided the castle, burning every house inside, sparing the residents only the clothes they were wearing. Crucially for this study, they threw a dead man’s body down the local drinking well inside the castle, subsequently filling it with boulders.6
Early, incomplete, excavations of the well in 1938 unearthed a body of an individual at the base of the well below a substantial aggregation of large stones (Figure 1). New excavations were performed in 2014 and 2016,7,8 and in the southern side of the well additional worked and unworked stones were found, partly sealing new parts of the body not identified in 1938 (Figure S1). The osteological analyses from 2014 to 2016 indicate the remains belonged to a male, aged 30–40 years at the time of death.8,9 A photograph from the 1938 excavation shows the torso belonging to a human skeleton leaning slightly on its left side (Figure 1). Investigations in 20168 revealed additional important details. The left arm was missing, but phalanges belonging to the left hand were found ex situ. The skull was also found ex situ, to the right of the upper part of the torso, and was not connected to the body. The skeleton displays several traumas, but due to the conditions, it has been difficult to differentiate which of these are antemortem or postmortem. A blunt force injury to the rear left part of the skull in addition to two sharp force cuts in the skull are not likely postmortem events.8
Radiocarbon dating of bone from the skeleton produced a conventional radiocarbon age of 940 ± 30 years (Beta-394180, bone).10 We sought to shed further light on the Well-man and the events described in Sverris Saga, by sequencing his genome and making inferences about his sex, ancestry, and physical characteristics. Our study provides an unusual opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of this historical event through the integration of results from isotopic, osteological, archaeological and genetic analyses in the context of information from an 800-year-old text.
—
“Visual summary” and other illustrations & photos at the link.
[h/t Mr. Goodstein]
The post They found the body of someone from the sagas. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Need a lift? These are hooks designed for lifting … well, whatever you need picked up.
I found them in (deep breath): The engineer’s sketch-book of mechanical movements, devices, appliances, contrivances and details : employed in the design and construction of machinery for every purpose : classified and arranged for reference for the use of engineers, mechanical draughtsmen, managers, mechanics, inventors, patent agents, and all engaged in the mechanical arts, with nearly two thousand illustrations, descriptive notes and memoranda, on archive.org.
The hooks in this illustration include:
Automatic slip hook; slips the T end of the “monkey” hy the curved arms striking the sides of a fixed stop hole.
Draw bar hook, self-locking.
Fixed bar hook, with snap.
Slip hook.
Hook, with mousing ring.
Crane hook, with swivel.
Double swivel links, inserted in a chain to take out the twist.
Triangular link, to attach two chains to one.
Safety link. Has a flat on link to slip in notch of hook.
S link.
Split link.
Bolt shackle.
Double link and bolt connection for chain.
Pin shackle.
The post Science Art: Hooks, Swivels, &c. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The European Space Agency reports on the team who successfully decoded an “alien” transmission actually sent by a probe orbiting Mars as part of a multidisciplinary project serving as a test run for radio contact with real extraterrestrial civilizations. Father-daughter citizen-scientists Ken and Keli Chaffin successfully translated the transmission, which when properly processed unveiled images of five amino acids, the building blocks of life:
The cooperative challenge directed by media artist Daniela de Paulis with the support of ESA, the SETI Institute and the Green Bank Observatory is not over yet. The interpretation of the message, like any art piece, remains open.
…
It took the perseverance of a father and his daughter to solve the cosmic puzzle. On 7 June 2024, Daniela received the decoded message from Ken and Keli Chaffin. The US citizens explained that it was a simple image with five amino acids in a molecular diagram with a few pixels in between.
“Ken and Keli ran simulations for hours and days on end, following their intuition and persevering beyond despair. These are extraordinary people who took up the task with great motivation and faith both in their instinct and knowledge,” explains Daniela.
Ken, a retired software developer and musician, worked every single day on his computer committed to finding the solution. “When the results didn’t come, his daughter Keli encouraged him to carry on and to follow his intuition,” adds Daniela.
“There was something in their search beyond rationality, close to obsession. If we ever receive a signal from an intelligent civilisation, we will need visionary people like them,” she believes.
Ken and Keli discovered that the message contained movement, suggesting some sort of cellular formation and life forms. Amino acids and proteins are the building blocks of life. “They successfully found the ingredients of the recipe, but now it is time to interpret it,” says Daniela.
—
Video and pictures at the link.
The post Daddy-daughter alien decoding. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
NPR explains why the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina is ringing alarm bells across the global tech industry. Because nearly every semiconductor and solar panel made relies on pure quartzite, and nearly all of that comes from mineral deposits near the mountain town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina:
To make both semiconductors and solar panels, companies need crucibles and other equipment that both can withstand extraordinarily high heat and be kept absolutely clean. One material fits the bill: quartz. Pure quartz.
Quartz that comes, overwhelmingly, from Spruce Pine.
“As far as we know, there’s only a few places in the world that have ultra-high-quality quartz,” according to Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Russia and Brazil also supply high-quality quartz, he says, but “Spruce Pine has far and away the [largest amount] and highest quality.”
Conway says without super-pure quartz for the crucibles, which can often be used only a single time, it would be impossible to produce most semiconductors.
“Purity really does matter,” he says. “You’re talking about a process to create the silicon wafers that later become silicon chips, where one single atom being in the wrong place” could derail production.
…
Power, water and cellular service are all down, [local business development leader Spencer] Bost says. Fallen trees and washed-out roads have left the community isolated from the outside.
“We were there for about three days before we got enough chainsaws together to cut a path out of our neighborhood,” Bost says. He and his fiancée spent nine hours working their way to Greenville, N.C., where they’ve temporarily sought shelter.
The conditions at the mines that produce the quartz remain unclear. “We are in a phase of assessing the situation, and it is far too early to comment on the impact to high-purity quartz production,” Mary Kristin Haugen of the Quartz Corporation told NPR in a statement.
The post One massive flood hits one small town… and the computer industry quakes. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Ars Technica writes on the psychology of the tabletop, with initial research showing promise for using role-playing games like D&D for group therapy:
“It seems particularly useful in combating the effects of social isolation and improving both interpersonal skills and intrapersonal skills (problem-solving),” explained Gary Colman, the chairman of Game Therapy UK, a registered charity staffed by volunteer professionals who are developing evidence-based therapeutic gaming projects. “In practical terms, it can also be used for a range of purposes, including modeling positive behavior and teaching soft social skills and basic educational skills, including language and numeracy.”
…
D&D became the focus of therapeutic research in the mid-1990s, but only a handful of papers have shown its possible effectiveness. “There is currently very little good-quality, peer-reviewed evidence published in scientific journals on the benefits of TTRPGs,” said Colman. “The challenge has been the very small sample size of the research projects and the challenge to find funding.”
…
While the research is ongoing, many academics and therapists say they have already seen positive results implementing D&D as a therapeutic tool. Most recently, a group of researchers at the University College Cork published findings in the International Journal of Role-Playing showing that D&D can positively support a player’s mental health state.
How does this work? In a standard D&D group therapy session, gameplay begins with an introduction to allow the patient/player to get into their character’s mindset; the game then runs for 70 to 90 minutes, followed by a 15- to 20-minute debriefing session to allow for discussion. The session is intended to provide a safe space for people to explore past trauma and work on social anxiety, depression, or other issues in a productive way.
Through the session, the therapist creates specific scenarios for individual players and the group to interact with. These scenarios may be a partial re-enactment of an issue or memory an individual has faced (such as dealing with a difficult person like a bully or abusive family member) or a unique situation that challenges an individual with a tough decision or invokes an emotional response. The player-driven narrative of D&D enables players to respond to these scenarios however they choose, allowing them to react candidly. The therapist may then allow the individual to sit with their scenario while giving the other players a separate situation or bringing the individual back into the larger narrative after completing the scenario.
By interacting with situations as a character, players can potentially enjoy some emotional separation from their personal responses. “A lot of what I end up doing implicitly with D&D is helping people shift from a self-focused view of their emotions as a problem to a systems lens understanding… recognizing our emotions are adaptive and an outside-in phenomenon instead of an inside-out judgment of our worth,” explained Vinny Malik Dehili, a staff therapist at Vassar College.
“So D&D helps people mentalize and think in terms of ‘why does this person feel this way or act this way?’ If I have a character that’s the opposite of me—like I’m more accommodating by nature and I want to be more assertive—I can think about their backstory and say, ‘Well, what would have happened to them in their life to make them have to be this way?’” he said.
While the research is ongoing, many academics and therapists say they have already seen positive results implementing D&D as a therapeutic tool. Most recently, a group of researchers at the University College Cork published findings in the International Journal of Role-Playing showing that D&D can positively support a player’s mental health state.
How does this work? In a standard D&D group therapy session, gameplay begins with an introduction to allow the patient/player to get into their character’s mindset; the game then runs for 70 to 90 minutes, followed by a 15- to 20-minute debriefing session to allow for discussion. The session is intended to provide a safe space for people to explore past trauma and work on social anxiety, depression, or other issues in a productive way.
Through the session, the therapist creates specific scenarios for individual players and the group to interact with. These scenarios may be a partial re-enactment of an issue or memory an individual has faced (such as dealing with a difficult person like a bully or abusive family member) or a unique situation that challenges an individual with a tough decision or invokes an emotional response. The player-driven narrative of D&D enables players to respond to these scenarios however they choose, allowing them to react candidly. The therapist may then allow the individual to sit with their scenario while giving the other players a separate situation or bringing the individual back into the larger narrative after completing the scenario.
By interacting with situations as a character, players can potentially enjoy some emotional separation from their personal responses. “A lot of what I end up doing implicitly with D&D is helping people shift from a self-focused view of their emotions as a problem to a systems lens understanding… recognizing our emotions are adaptive and an outside-in phenomenon instead of an inside-out judgment of our worth,” explained Vinny Malik Dehili, a staff therapist at Vassar College.
“So D&D helps people mentalize and think in terms of ‘why does this person feel this way or act this way?’ If I have a character that’s the opposite of me—like I’m more accommodating by nature and I want to be more assertive—I can think about their backstory and say, ‘Well, what would have happened to them in their life to make them have to be this way?’” he said.
The post Roll D20 for catharsis, with a plus-2 closure bonus. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This illustration is from an article in Science Gossip on how to set up your own “X-Ray Outfit.” As the author, James Quick, explains: “The four chief items comprising this are, (a) the induction coil, (b) the battery, (c) the X-Ray tube, and (d) the fluorescent screen.” The set here generates a 4-inch spark, while the ones more common in hospitals (even in 1894) were 14-inch sets or larger.
The article ends … well, with a “to be continued,” but before that, with a warning about “slightly inferior and soft paraffin wax” messing up the spark length of some coils. Check your paraffin, folks, before irradiating people.
The post Science Art: Apparatus Arranged for Taking a Radiograph, 1894. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science Daily goes deep (well, a little deep) on sea robins, the fish known for having little legs they use to scurry across the ocean floor. Apparently those “legs” are actually sense organs these walking fish use to detect buried prey:
“This is a fish that grew legs using the same genes that contribute to the development of our limbs and then repurposed these legs to find prey using the same genes our tongues use to taste food — pretty wild,” says Nicholas Bellono of Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.
Bellono, along with David Kingsley of Stanford University and their colleagues, didn’t set out to study sea robins at all. They came across these creatures on a trip to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. After learning that other fish follow the sea robins around, apparently due to their skills in uncovering buried prey, the researchers became intrigued and took some sea robins back to the lab to find out more. They confirmed that the sea robins could indeed detect and uncover ground-up and filtered mussel extract and even single amino acids.
As reported in one of the two new studies, they found that sea robins’ legs are covered in sensory papillae, each receiving dense innervation from touch-sensitive neurons. The papillae also have taste receptors and show chemical sensitivity that drives the sea robins to dig.
“We were originally struck by the legs that are shared by all sea robins and make them different from most other fish,” Kingsley says. “We were surprised to see how much sea robins differ from each other in sensory structures found on the legs. The system thus displays multiple levels of evolutionary innovation from differences between sea robins and most other fish, differences between sea robin species, and differences in everything from structure and sensory organs to behavior.”
—
You can read more about the research here, and here, in Current Biology.
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Mashable has the details, but the general gist is the space telescope will not focus on Sun-like stars to find Earth-like planets (that is, rocky worlds with gaseous atmospheres). Instead, a new project is seeking air-supporting planets around red dwarf stars:
Despite red dwarfs’ potential, no one knows for sure whether their worlds can have atmospheres, or what chemicals could be within their air.
Scientists will soon begin to answer those questions with the James Webb Space Telescope, a partnership of NASA and its European and Canadian counterparts. A new large-scale program will budget about 500 hours for observing rocky exoplanets orbiting small red stars, specifically to search for atmospheres.
Though the survey is designated for Webb’s fourth research cycle, which starts next July, observations may begin sooner, said Néstor Espinoza, an astronomer heading the program’s implementation team.
“This is one of those high-risk, high-reward programs,” he told Mashable. “Imagine that for all of the targets, we detect atmospheres. Then you answer the question, ‘Yes, atmospheres are very common around these stars. That means maybe life can emerge.’ On the other hand, if you found out that none of them have atmospheres, that would be pretty sad, but also pretty interesting. It would mean that our planetary system is actually really, really special.”
…
The new campaign will allow scientists to survey 10 to 20 rocky worlds, with an emphasis on planets between 200 and 450 Kelvin. For comparison, Earth is 288 Kelvin, or an average 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Most of the targets will be less than twice the size of Earth. The Space Telescope Science Institute will put out a call for advisers to help determine the target list.
For Kevin Stevenson, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the wishlist would include GJ 486 b, a world he has previously studied, and LTT 1445 A b, one of the nearest strong cases for having air. He believes the Webb campaign will advance humans’ understanding of rocky worlds by a decade.
“This survey program will be the next major step towards answering the question, ‘Are we alone?'” Stevenson said in an email. “Without an atmosphere, it’s hard to see how life, at least as we know it, can survive on a planet.”
If most M-dwarf-orbiting planets turn out not to have an atmosphere, then a future instrument, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, becomes all the more important in the search for life beyond this solar system, he said. The Hubble-esque telescope is expected to focus on terrestrial worlds orbiting sun-like stars.
The post James Webb will be looking for other Earths in unusual places. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Just didn’t come together in time. But it will happen, and there will also be a penitential cover.
The post No song today first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
As the image description tells it:
NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, left, Jessica Watkins, center, and Robert Hines, right, are seen in the in the One World Connected gallery looking at an interactive recreation of the International Space Station’s Cupola, Tuesday, March 28, 2023 at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Lindgren, Watkins, and Hines spent 170 days in space as part of Expeditions 67 and 68 aboard the International Space Station. Photo Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)
From the Best of 2023 by NASA HQ PHOTO album on Flickr.
The post Science Art: NASA’s SpaceX Crew-4 at NASM (NHQ202303280029), 2023 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science Alert explains the allure of the puppy-dog eyes with Chinese research demonstrating brainwaves suddenly syncing up between humans and dogs when they look into each other’s eyes:
The researchers measured brain activity in humans and dogs by placing electrodes on the skull. For the trial, 10 young beagles were matched with unknown humans, and the pairs got to know each other over the course of five days.
In the experiments, the human-dog pairs engaged in nonverbal communication, such as mutual gazing or a good old pat. As a control, the human and dog also stayed in the same room and did not interact.
“We observed that inter-brain correlations in frontal and parietal regions dramatically increased… during mutual gaze,” the authors of the study write, led by biologist Wei Ren from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
…
In the current study, when humans were asked to pet the dogs and gaze into their eyes, the inter-brain activity between the two was even more connected than when they were merely patting or merely gazing at the dogs.
…
Plugging in the data from each human-dog interaction, the team found it was the human brains that were initiating the coupled neural activity. Over the course of the study, inter-brain synchronization between the human-dog pairs grew, which suggests the two were bonding.
—
You can read more of the study here, in Advanced Science.
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Science Direct, or really, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, has a study of very old craters that suggests that in the Ordovician period, around 460 million years ago or so, when trilobites and nautiloids ruled the world (because dinosaurs hadn’t been invented yet), Earth may have had its own Saturn-like ring:
Highlights
• Earth may have had a ring during the middle Ordovician, from ca. 466 Ma.• Breakup of an asteroid passing within Earth’s Roche limit likely formed the ring.
• Among several features preserved is a near-equatorial band of impact craters.
• Shading of Earth by the ring may have triggered a global icehouse period.
…
To investigate the possibility of a ring-forming event in the mid-Ordovician, we examined the paleolatitude positions (based on six tectonic plate reconstruction models; Domeier, 2016, 2018; Merdith et al., 2021; Scotese, 2016; Torsvik and Cocks, 2016; Torsvik et al., 2014) of the 21 meteorite impacts known to coincided with the enhanced Ordovician meteorite flux.
[via Dr. Sarah “Squid Facts” McAnulty on Bluesky]
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This is a scientist operating scientific equipment, or a model posing as a scientist showing off the capabilities of a shiny new piece of informational display equipment.
It’s an oscilloscope, an electronic device for measuring things like frequency and amplitude and wave-shapes of signals including, in the case of this model, the cathode-ray signals that create moving pictures on a TV screen. In other words, it can be used to record video — no simple thing in the age before videotape and personal computers.
I found the brochure here, on archive.org.
The post Science Art: Illustration, New Model 1806 Fiber-Optics Cathode-Ray Tube Visicorder from a Honeywell brochure, c.1973 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The Guardian reports on a study of knock-on effects. Bat populations have been decimated in the U.S. and beyond by the white-nose fungus. Because bats eat mosquitoes (which carry disease) and other insects (which destroy crops), the declining bat population has led to an increase in crop failures, sickness, and — most significantly — pesticide use… which in turn can be mapped onto an 8% increase in infant mortality in the worst-hit areas:
When Eyal Frank, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, learned about the disease, called white-nose syndrome, he realised it provided a perfect natural experiment to demonstrate the value of a bat. Bats eat 40% or more of their bodyweight in insects every night, including many crop pests. What would their disappearance mean?
In infected areas, he found, farmers compensated for the loss of bats by significantly increasing their use of insecticides – by 31.1% on average.
Next, Frank looked at infant mortality – a metric commonly used to judge the impact of environmental toxins. Infected counties had an infant death rate 7.9% higher, on average, than counties with healthy bats, despite pesticide use being within regulatory limits. That equates to 1,334 extra infant deaths.
Frank tested other factors that might plausibly explain the rise in deaths: unemployment, the opioid epidemic, the weather, differences among mothers, or the introduction of genetically modified crops, but none explained the increase in pesticide use or the rise in infant deaths. He spent a year “kicking the tyres on the study”, and the results held. It provided “compelling evidence”, he said, “that farmers did respond to the decline in insect-eating bats, and that response had an adverse health impact on human infants”.
It is unusual for a study of this type to suggest causation, not just correlation, said [Harvard researcher Charles] Taylor [who was not part of this study].
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The findings on pesticide use also echo previous research, including a study of Taylor’s. In the US, cicadas emerge en masse at intervals of 13 to 17 years. Taylor found that pesticide use increased in cicada seasons, as did infant mortality. People born in cicada years had lower test scores and were more likely to drop out of school.
You can read Frank’s research here, in Science, and Taylor’s cicada research here.
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A prehistoric pet. This is a mesolithic dog, same dog we know today more or less, Canis lupus familiaris, but about 9,300 years old.
It was found in an archaeological dig in Almeö, Sweden, in 1983. From the Wikimedia Commons page where I found it, “Since 1994 the skeleton is shown in the prehistoric exhibition at Falbygdens museum in Falköping.” The photographer, Gunnar Creutz, is an archaeologist who designs exhibits for the museum. He’s also got some cool photos of bugs and mushrooms in the woods.
I wonder what this dog was like, 9,300 years ago. A good fetcher? Sheep herder? Just hanging around the edges of camp? Of course it was a good dog… right?
The post Science Art: Almeö Dog Skeleton, by Gunnar Creutz. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The Conversation extends the dog-owner’s friendly game of fetch to feline friends who, researchers have found, can also enjoy bringing back toys that are thrown for them to retrieve:
In our newly published study, we found that more than 40% of cats described in our survey data played fetch, compared with almost 80% of dogs. We also outlined several possible reasons for fetching, including play, selection during domestication, and learning effects.
…[O]ur group teamed with University of Pennsylvania researcher James Serpell, who developed two survey-based tools to assess dog and cat behavior. The surveys include basic questions about each animal’s breed, age and living environment, followed by dozens of questions about their behavior, including traits such as predatory behavior, sociability with humans, activity level and fearfulness. Both surveys also included questions about fetching.
Using these survey results, we analyzed data from thousands of cat and dog owners to explore just how common fetching is and what characteristics of a cat or dog and their environment are likely to predict fetching.
We found that fetching was much more common in cats than we anticipated. Over 40% of cat owners had a cat that “sometimes, usually, or always” fetched. For comparison, we also provided the first estimate of the prevalence of fetching behavior in dogs. Almost 78% of dogs represented in the data were reported to fetch.
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But both cats and dogs will carry prey items away from the kill site, which may also partially explain how a behavior such as fetch could arise.
Although cats often are viewed as independent and aloof, recent studies have found that cats can show attachment to humans, pick up social cues from humans and even recognize their owner’s voice. We hope that our study further encourages people to understand that cats are capable of loving relationships with humans, especially when these popular pets are well socialized and provided with an enriched and safe environment. Including fetching, if your cat is so inclined.
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You can read more of Mikel Delgado and Judith Stella’s research here, in Plos One.
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These are illustrations from “Notes on Species of Sagitta Collected on a Voyage from England to Australia” by B.B. Gray, as published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland, which I found here, in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Sagitta are arrow worms, predatory marine worms in a phylum called “bristle-jaws,” or Chaetognatha. The biggest of them is around 120 mm long. That’s less than 5 inches.
Like all the bristle-jaws, they’re hermaphrodites, and when they mate, each individual fertilizes the other. They also look more or less the same throughout their lives, unlike other invertebrates who spend a while as a nymph and then metamorphosize into some entirely different shape. The little ones are just little, hopping and darting around and swallowing their little prey whole.
The one on the left, Sagitta atlantica, is described in The Proceedings… as “a transparent but fairly firm form,” which I suppose is flattering enough. It was found between Madeira and the Canary Islands. Sagitta equatoria is less flatteringly “a firm opaque form with a very large head.” It was captured off the coast of West Africa at 15 degrees of latitude.
The post Science Art: Sagitta atlantica and Sagitta equatoria, 1922. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The Byte is not filling us with apprehension at all with news of robot dogs being unleashed in the latest escalation of their conflict with Russia:
To address its manpower shortage, Ukraine is planning to let loose packs of robot dogs against the invading Russian military, Agence France-Presse reports.
The robot dogs will be used to detect land mines, go on reconnaissance missions to scope out the enemy in hostile territory, and carry weapons, ammunition, and medicine to the battlefield.
During a recent demonstration to journalists, one of the robot dogs dubbed BAD ONE crouched and ran not unlike its flesh and blood counterpart, showing off its compact size and stealthy agility.
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The robot dog has a battery run time of two hours, an onboard thermal imaging system, and a kill switch that erases all of its data if the robot would fall in the hands of the Russians.
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“This not only increases the effectiveness of combat operations, but also strengthens the morale of the army,” [military contractor Kyle] Thorburn added.
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The Conversation discusses an engineering problem with electronic brain implants intended to restore vision, like Neuralink’s hyped Blindsight. They can add more pixels to the resolution, sure… but human neurons don’t operate on pixels:
In our newly published research, we created a computational model of human vision to simulate what sort of vision an extremely high-resolution cortical implant might provide. A movie of a cat with a resolution of 45,000 pixels is sharp and clear. A movie generated using a simplified version of a model of 45,000 cortical electrodes, each of which stimulates a single neuron, still has a recognizable cat but most of the details of the scene are lost.
The reason why the movie generated by electrodes is so blurry is because neurons in the human visual cortex do not represent tiny dots or pixels. Instead, each neuron has a particular receptive field, which is the location and pattern a visual stimulus must have in order to make that neuron fire. Electrically stimulating a single neuron produces a blob whose appearance is determined by that neuron’s receptive field. The tiniest electrode – one that stimulates a single neuron – will produce a blob that is roughly the size of your pinkie’s width held at arm’s length.
Consider what happens when you look at a single star in the night sky. Each point in space is represented by many thousands of neurons with overlapping receptive fields. A tiny spot of light, such as a star, results in a complex pattern of firing across all these neurons.
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You can read more of the implant research here, in Nature: Scientific Reports.
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Here’s Larus argentatus, one of those wild animals that barely seems wild because it interacts with people so much. Simple line art captures a wild creature in motion, above a shoreline shaped by wind and wave.
I found this in the US Fish & Wildlife Service National Digital Library.
The post Science Art: Herring Gull 4, by Robert Pos, 2008. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
SONG: “Oceans Under Mars”. (WAV version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: PhysOrg, 12 Aug 2024, “Scientists find oceans of water on Mars. It’s just too deep to tap.“, as used in the post “There are oceans on Mars – but they’re too deep to get to..”
ABSTRACT: This turned out better than expected. I hadn’t found too much going on in the science mags and journals over the last month, and was sort of slack about posting those stories I did find to the feed here. So the subject matter for songs was limited.
On the other hand, I was fortunate enough to get a small part in some friends’ surrealistic radio-drama podcast, American Doom (on Apple Podcasts here), and my part (a mysterious drifter named Wayne Smile) involved me playing chords that were either “mysterious” or “mournful” supposedly in the cab of truck traveling across a dystopian kitsch highway. There are tiki drinks and a talking parrot. Well, I’m still tinkering with open-G tuning on a little 3/4-size guitar, and for the purposes of ART, tuned the B-string down a half-step so the tuning turned into open-G minor, which is nicely melancholy and a little mysterious. I mean, it’s not a jazz chord, but it slides well. The chord progression and hook came out of my improvising into a microphone for the drama.
It’s a super-simple blues/Americana progression and is built like some of my favorite songs and unlike most of what I do, doesn’t have weird changes or psychedelic harmonies. The oddest thing about it is the guitar solo, which is a fortunate accident. I put down the main bass track and between serious takes, was having a lot of fun just playing solos over that part, so I recorded one, and then decided to see what would happen if I just pitched it up an octave, the way I used to pitch a guitar down an octave to fake a bass. And there it is — that sound. I’m now mostly positive Tom Waits did that on a couple of albums to get that guitar sound.
At any rate, it works. This song does nothing to erode the connection in my mind between sad guitars and Mars exploration, especially unmanned Mars exploration. (Stellar phenomena tend to be heavy distortion; Mars is more desolate.) I imagine someone could dance a slow cha-cha to this one. There’s not exactly a reference in my lyrics to life being in the subterranean ocean (and to be totally accurate, no one is really suggesting human astronauts drink it, not outright), but maybe the “I” in this could be someone or something used to living down there, two Mariana Trenches deep. I started out thinking I’d write this as a brag-song, since I spent an afternoon last week listening to “Back in Black” a few times. (Is that a strange thing to do? Whatever, man.) It was at least a decent writing prompt, especially in a minor key – not a key normally used for boasting. One good consequence of the format was that it made it easier to not write too many words per line.
“Oceans Under Mars” would be a good album title.
LYRICS:
I can see in the dark
I can breathe underground
I can sink like the Mariana Trench (times 2)
And keep going down
I’ve got so many reservoirs
I’ve got oceans under Mars.We’ve got a seismic map
We’ve got a rover on a hill
We’re in a desert made of dark red sand
We’ve got a 12-mile drill
We’ll have to go that far
We’ll drink oceans under MarsYou can try to find
The places where I hide
Leave the light behind
For miles and miles and miles inside
Dark as tar between the stars
Are the oceans under MarsThe oceans under Mars.
The oceans under Mars.
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Scientific American has a new explanation for the famous “Wow!” signal – the orderly burst of focused radio energy recorded in 1977 that seemed like it could possibly have been an alien civilization’s attempt at “hello,” or at least a chance interception of alien Funniest Home Videos reruns. A new analysis of that signal — compared with simultaneous data recorded at the massive Arecibo radio telescope — indicates that it might have been a trace of a dramatic astronomical collision instead:
The latest explanation emerged last week from a trio of astronomers in a preprint that has not yet been subjected to peer review. And sorry, once again, it’s not aliens. The researchers suspect that the Wow! signal was created when a flare from a hypermagnetized, hyperdense star called a magnetar struck a cold interstellar cloud of hydrogen gas. The flare caused the cloud to incandesce in the radio wavelength, and this fast-and-furious outburst was detected by Big Ear.
Lead author Abel Méndez, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico, for many years dismissed the Wow! signal as a mere instrumental glitch. But after scrutinizing several somewhat Wow!-like signals found unexpectedly in archival data from the late, great Arecibo Observatory, he and his colleagues now suspect that the famous yawp from 1977 was caused by a very rare kind of astrophysical anarchy.
“I would say, wow—I never thought of that. I never thought of the Wow! signal as being real and being produced by some weird astrophysical phenomenon,” Méndez says.
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The researchers’ flare-meets-hydrogen-cloud story is “definitely a bit speculative,” says study co-author Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, a graduate student of astrophysics at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. “We’re not saying that this is definitely the case. We’re saying that it’s a very exciting hypothesis.”
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You can read more of the hydrogen hypothesis here, in the authors’ preprint on arXiv.
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PhysOrg says there’s liquid water on Mars (great!) but (aw!) it’s too far underground to tap:
The data from NASA’s Insight lander allowed the scientists to estimate that the amount of groundwater could cover the entire planet to a depth of between 1 and 2 kilometers, or about a mile.
While that’s good news for those tracking the fate of water on the planet after its oceans disappeared more than 3 billion years ago, the reservoir won’t be of much use to anyone trying to tap into it to supply a future Mars colony.
It’s located in tiny cracks and pores in rock in the middle of the Martian crust, between 11.5 and 20 kilometers below the surface. Even on Earth, drilling a hole a kilometer deep is a challenge.
…
The new paper analyzed the deeper crust and concluded that the “available data are best explained by a water-saturated mid-crust” below Insight’s location. Assuming the crust is similar throughout the planet, the [University of California, Berkeley] team argued, there should be more water in this mid-crust zone than the “volumes proposed to have filled hypothesized ancient Martian oceans.”
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You can read more of the Mars findings here, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The post There are oceans on Mars – but they’re too deep to get to. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is from a photographically illustrated advertisement in Hugo Gernsback’s magazine The Electrical Experimenter.
The description of this item is as follows:
For extreme measurements such as WAVE METERS, REGENERATIVE CIRCUITS and the like this Condenser has no equal. It is seven complete Condensers in one. It is especially valuable as a grid circuit Condenser. Owing to the sky rocket prices in material and labor we were obliged to increase the price of this instrument to $10. Get our new catalog, it tells all about it.
It was made by the Eugene T. Turney company and advertised next to a Constant Amplitude Test Buzzer. I found it while browsing the old magazine here, on archive.org. It weighed around 3 pounds, and I have no idea how I’d connect this to a circuit. Seems pretty solid, though.
The post Science Art: The Turney Vario Variable Condenser, 1913. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
CNN has reported on prehistoric remains found in North Africa that reveal more evidence that our primordial ancestors didn’t really eat a meat-heavy diet, but got their protein from plants:
But new research on a Paleolithic group called the Iberomaurusians, hunter-gatherers who buried their dead in Taforalt cave in what’s now Morocco between 13,000 and 15,000 years ago, is adding to a growing body of evidence that challenges the notion human ancestors predominantly relied on meat, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Scientists analyzed chemical signatures preserved in bones and teeth belonging to at least seven different Iberomaurusians and found that plants, not meat, were their primary source of dietary protein.
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Researchers also spotted a higher number of tooth cavities among the Taforalt specimens than is typically seen with hunter-gatherer remains of that period. The evidence suggested that the Iberomaurusians consumed “fermentable starchy plants” such as wild cereals or acorns, according to the study. The findings raise some intriguing questions about how agriculture spread across different regions and populations.
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he isotope technique shows the amount of plants eaten but not the type. However, botanical remains of charred sweet acorns, pistachio, pine nuts, wild oats and pulses discovered at the site support the information gleaned from the human remains. Grinding stones unearthed at the site also suggest plant processing took place nearby.
However, the Iberomaurusians weren’t strict vegetarians, the study noted. Cut marks on the remains of Barbary sheep and gazelles, as well as ancient horselike and cowlike mammals, suggested that some animals had been butchered and processed for food.
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The isotope analysis also detected evidence of one case of early weaning, with starchy plant foods introduced into an infant’s diet before its death at between 6 and 12 months old.
“This contrasts with hunter-gatherer societies where extended breast-feeding periods are the norm due to the limited availability of weaning foods,” according to the study.
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You can read more of the Stone Age diet hints here, in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
The post The real “paleo diet” was mostly vegetarian. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
NPR reports on a big step forward in keeping a deadly disease at bay, with a new treatment for preventing AIDS transmission that, rather than a daily (and easily forgettable) pill, relies on an injection twice a year:
Now a new trial —- called PURPOSE 1 —- points the way to a new preventive strategy —- a twice yearly injection of a drug called lenacapavir. The trial was sponsored by Gilead Sciences, the California-based maker of the drug.
In this double-blind, randomized study of 5,300 cisgender women in South Africa and Uganda, 2,134 got the injection and the others took one of two types of daily PrEP pills. The trial began on August 2021 and, so far, not a single woman who received the injections has contracted HIV. The participants who received either of the oral PrEP options, Truvada and Descovy, had infection rates of about 2% — consistent with the infection rates of oral PrEP in other clinical trials.
These results were significant enough for the Data Monitoring Committee —- an independent group of experts appointed to assess the progress of clinical trials —- to recommend that Gilead halt its blinded trial and offer lenacapavir to all study participants. On June 20, Gilead announced these results, and now, all participants can choose to receive the injection.
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Lenacapavir is not a new drug. It’s been approved by the FDA in the United States for multi-drug resistant HIV treatment since 2022. But PURPOSE 1 is the first clinical trial to test it for HIV prevention.
The PURPOSE 1 trial is part of a larger initiative to improve HIV prevention across the global south. It is one of several studies that are part of ongoing efforts to end the HIV epidemic by 2030.
The post Prevent AIDS with a couple shots a year. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Scientific American has new information on very old remains of Homo floresiensis, the diminutive prehistoric humans who lived on the island of Flores around 700,000 to 60,000 years ago. A newly discovered arm bone from some of the first humans on Flores show that the so-called “hobbits” grew smaller over the 100s of millennia they stayed on their small island:
Researchers have argued about whether it arose from an already small, primitive early human, such as Homo habilis or an Australopithecus species, or from a bigger-bodied, larger-brained H. erectus that shrunk under the pressures of island life. A third argument that was taken off the evolutionary table was that these were modern humans with a condition that caused dwarfism.
In 2016 scientists unveiled a lower jaw fragment and small teeth that appeared to belong to a more primitive H. floresiensis at the site of Mata Menge, about 70 kilometers from the Liang Bua site on Flores. These fossils, which came from at least three individuals, dated back 700,000 years, well before modern humans emerged anywhere on Earth. (The oldest fossils from an anatomically modern human date to around 315,000 years ago in what is now Morocco.) The researchers argued that similarities between those tooth and jaw remains suggested that a larger hominin (a member of a group containing modern humans and their extinct relatives), possibly H. erectus, traveled from the Indonesian island of Java and got stuck on Flores, where it evolved smaller proportions, eventually giving rise to the tiny H. floresiensis.
Researchers led by Yousuke Kaifu of the University of Tokyo recovered the new arm bone—an incomplete humerus measuring just 8.8 centimeters long—from Mata Menge, along with some additional teeth.
…
Importantly, all the Mata Menge remains are small. The teeth mandible and humerus are all smaller than those found at Liang Bua, Kaifu says. “This means that, 700,000-years-ago, Homo floresiensis was at least as small as, or even slightly smaller than, the 60,000-years-ago Homo floresiensis from Liang Bua,” he adds.
The findings suggest that “once a population of Homo erectus got stranded on Flores one million years ago, there was no more genetic exchange with mainland hominins, and the large-bodied Homo erectus evolved to the smaller Homo floresiensis by a process called insular dwarfing,” [University of Wollongong researcher Gerrit] van den Bergh says. The same seems to have occurred for Flores’s animals, such as dwarfed species of Stegodon, ancient relatives of elephants: because of food limitations, lack of predators and the loss of the need to search long distances for such food (which is aided by being bigger), creatures shrunk, the thinking goes. Van den Bergh adds that H. floresiensis’ body size could have fluctuated over time because of changing climate and environmental conditions. The species vanished from the fossil record at about the same time that modern humans appeared on the island, about 50,000 years ago.
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This is a biological photo that is also a mathematical photo. It’s a ball of worms that Georgia Tech researchers were studying, because, as it says on the National Science Foundation image gallery where I found this photo, “These tangled assemblies occur over the span of a few minutes, yet they can untangle in mere milliseconds.”
You can read more about the tangled topology behind these wriggly critters here at Georgia Tech’s website.
The post Science Art: Ball-shaped blob of California black worms, 2023. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
PhysOrg gets funky with research that demonstrates how off-putting smells that can signal the presence of disease-causing critters can also tell your gut it’s time to beef up the body’s chemical defenses:
As with humans, nematodes’ guts are a common target of disease-causing bacteria. The nematode reacts by destroying iron-containing organelles called mitochondria, which produce a cell’s energy, to protect this critical element from iron-stealing bacteria.
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The presence in C. elegans of this protective response to odors produced by microbes suggests that the intestinal cells of other organisms, including mammals, may also retain the ability to respond protectively to the smell of pathogens, said the study’s senior author, Andrew Dillin, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator.
“Is there actually a smell coming off of pathogens that we can pick up on and help us fight off an infection?” he said. “We’ve been trying to show this in mice. If we can actually figure out that humans smell a pathogen and subsequently protect themselves, you can envision down the road something like a pathogen-protecting perfume.”
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You can read more of Dillin’s research here, in Science Advances.
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This is a glowing hunk of rock, lit from within.
The rock was found in the Kelly Mine in Magadela, New Mexico. Smithsonite is a form of zinc carbonate, or zinc spar, that’s formed a large crystal mass, which is not what zinc carbonate usually does.
In the early 1800s, James Smithson identified the mineral as something different from zinc silicate (until then, they were both called calamine, not to be confused with the itch cream). He’s the same guy the Smithsonian Museums were named for. He didn’t name the rock after himself – that happened 30 years later, thanks to a French geologist named François Sulpice Beudant who thought the stuff should probably bear the name of the guy who discovered it wasn’t something else, but was its own thing.
People mine it for zinc, sometimes, and a yellowish variety rich in cadmium is commonly called “turkey fat ore.”
The post Science Art: Smithsonite, from the Smithsonian Natural Museum of Natural History. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Forbes has a strange but true example of unintended (but welcome) consequences. It seems like Shingrix, the new shingles vaccine, also offers protection against developing dementia:
The scientists studied health outcomes of more than 200,000 people who received one of the two different shingles vaccines and found that the recombinant shingles vaccine, Shingrix, reduces dementia by at least 17% more than the older, but now discontinued, live shingles vaccine, Zostavax. Further, they found that Shingrix reduced dementia risk by 23-27% than did vaccines against other illnesses. This equates to 5-9 months or more dementia-free days of life.
This protective effect was seen in both sexes, but was greater in women.
Interestingly, after the live vaccine against shingles, Zostavax, was introduced in 2006, several studies suggested it might reduce the risk of dementia. Later, Zostavax was discontinued in many countries, including the USA and UK, in favor of the much more effective vaccine, Shingrix.
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It was during this switchover between the two vaccine types that participants were identified for this comparative study. This provided the rare opportunity to compare the risk of dementia in the six years following Shingrix compared to the otherwise similar group of people who received Zostavax. There were more than 100,000 people in each group. The study also compared Shingrix to vaccines against other infections (flu and tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis).
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How might Shingrix protect against dementia?
“One possibility is that infection with the Herpes zoster virus might increase the risk of dementia, and therefore by inhibiting the virus, the vaccine could reduce this risk, replied co-author, John Todd, a Professor of Precision Medicine at the University of Oxford and Director of the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics and of the JDRF/Wellcome Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory (DIL).
“Alternatively, the vaccine also contains chemicals which might have separate beneficial effects on brain health,” Dr Todd added. These chemicals, known as adjuvants, are designed to ensure that your immune system reacts strongly to the vaccine so a lasting immune response develops.
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You can read more of the Oxford research here, in Nature Medicine.
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Some rockets are bigger than others.
I think this illustration (which I found here, on Wikimedia Commons) is maybe a better depiction of how space science itself has changed trajectory lately. The image was compiled by a Wikipedia user in 2007, who put the mighty Saturn V of the 1960s space race to scale next to the less glamorous (but more useful) Space Shuttle of the 1980s, next to what was supposed to be the next big thing. As it is, there’s a lot of wishful science fiction out there about the Ares IV replacing the Space Shuttle as our go-to launch vehicle, but the Constellation Program which was going to build and launch those Ares rockets with the Orion space capsules up top was cancelled in 2011 as too expensive.
Nowadays, a lot of the stuff (including the Orion hardware) has been taken over by the Artemis Program, which aims to put humans back on the Moon by 2026.
The Ares IV was really a kind of proposed hybrid vehicle, made up of a (crewed) upper stage of an Ares I passenger rocket with the brawny lower stages of an Ares V cargo-lifting rocket. The outer fuel tanks were a technology taken from the Shuttle program, but the rest of it was pretty similar to what was lifting astronauts off Earth in the 1960s. The “Ares IV” name mostly stuck around as the ill-fated mission that Matt Damon survives in The Martian.
Artemis will be using a heavy-lift rocket called the SLS – “Space Launch System” – to lift the Orion spacecraft off our planet. It’s not the Ares, but it’s not too different, really. If you squint.
The post Science Art: Saturn V-Shuttle-Ares IV comparison, by Bchan. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
PhysOrg shares research from ETH Zurich that demonstrates something that should be obvious to anyone who’s played pool. But as the warming Earth makes the ice caps melt, changing the mass at the poles, the Earth’s spin is slowing down.
Climate change is causing the ice masses in Greenland and Antarctica to melt. Water from the polar regions is flowing into the world’s oceans—and especially into the equatorial region.
“This means that a shift in mass is taking place, and this is affecting the Earth’s rotation,” explains Benedikt Soja, Professor of Space Geodesy at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at ETH Zurich.
“It’s like when a figure skater does a pirouette, first holding her arms close to her body and then stretching them out,” Soja says. The initially fast rotation becomes slower because the masses move away from the axis of rotation, increasing physical inertia.
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In the PNAS study, the ETH Zurich researchers show that climate change is also increasing the length of the day by a few milliseconds from its current 86,400 seconds. This is because water is flowing from the poles to lower latitudes and thus slowing down the speed of rotation.
Another cause of this slowdown is tidal friction, which is triggered by the moon. However, the new study comes to a surprising conclusion: if humans continue to emit more greenhouse gases and the Earth warms up accordingly, this would ultimately have a greater influence on the Earth’s rotational speed than the effect of the moon, which has determined the increase in the length of the day for billions of years.
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“For the first time, we present a complete explanation for the causes of long-period polar motion,” says Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, one of Soja’s doctoral students and lead author of the study. “In other words, we now know why and how the Earth’s axis of rotation moves relative to the Earth’s crust.”
One finding in particular that stands out in their study is that the processes on and in the Earth are interconnected and influence each other. “Climate change is causing the Earth’s axis of rotation to move, and it appears that the feedback from the conservation of angular momentum is also changing the dynamics of the Earth’s core,” Soja explains.
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You can read the team’s research here in PNAS and here in Nature Geoscience.
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Mashable reports on the Mars Rover Curiosity, which has just found evidence of some major flooding and splishing and splashing on the surface of Mars long ago:
Although Mars today is 1,000 times drier than the driest desert on Earth, the rover has spotted clues that long ago the Red Planet experienced momentous floods. It was a wet world.
“This was not a quiet period on Mars,” Becky Williams, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute who researches Mars using the rover’s Mast Camera, said in a statement. “There was an exciting amount of activity here. We’re looking at multiple flows down the channel, including energetic floods and boulder-rich flows.”
…
Curiosity also closely examined these water-tumbled rocks. A number of them contain telltale “halo” markings, as seen in the image below. “Finally, water soaked into all the material that settled here,” the space agency explained. “Chemical reactions caused by the water bleached white ‘halo’ shapes into some of the rocks.”
Lots of photos at the link.
The post Curiosity finds some exciting times on Mars. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
SONG: “Inside the Moon”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: BBC, 15 July 2024, “Cave discovered on Moon could be home for humans“, as used in the post “There’s a cave on the moon we could live in.”
ABSTRACT: This is one of the very few songs finished well ahead of deadline, in part because I knew I’d be traveling and in close quarters over the 23rd. It started as a combination of two different melodic things: First, I was playing around with open-G tuning again, just finding different ways to use it, and second, I got earwormed by an old favorite song (“I’m Straight,” by The Modern Lovers) and realized it had the same three-chord progression as “Summertime Rolls,” by Jane’s Addiction, but sounded pretty different.
So this is a three-chord song. You never need more than three chords (“It’s just how you play them,” per The Ramones). I was sort of surprised at how laid back it came out with that silvery guitar noodling going on, but I really like the “lunar” quality of it. The choruses were meant to be a little amped up compared to the verses, so I started out putting a drone down there … because in addition to The Modern Lovers, I’ve been listening to a lot of hurdy-gurdy music over the last few weeks. The rest fell into place around that.
I’m a little surprised that lyrically I couldn’t work in the actual title of the post, since “There’s a cave on the moon we could live in” sounds like a pretty good line for a chorus or something, but it needed that dun-dun…dah meter for the Bb-to-G bit at the end of the line. And the point is less that there is a home in the Moon as much as it is we are making temporary digs there to help with the general mission of looking elsewhere because things are (we assume) getting kind of scarce and crowded here on Earth.
This is not a post-apocalypse song, but the narrator is definitely looking back at Earth when it’s visible in the sky and imagining what it would be like to see the home planet light up and then go dark, Martian Chronicles-style. He also is aware of what it means to build structures inside a landscape with mythic significance. Even the first space missions had the names of gods, after all. And the hollow hills are home to even older beings. Is this an astronaut folk-horror song? I don’t think so, but I can see why someone might think it could be. Space, as I always think of it, is a thing that never stops trying to kill you, freeze you, blind you, steal your breath. And yet there we go.
LYRICS:
There’s a hole in the sky
Where a silver light would shine
On fools, werewolves and lovers
Back in timeBut things got hot and crowded
And the night got bright and loud and
We got thirsty for water and
Astronauts’ livesCH1:
This desert cave is lonely
I’d like to see you soon
But I’ll be up here watching
Inside the MoonI’ve got grey rubber boots
I’ve got a visor for the sun
I’ve got a thousand hours of podcasts
I don’t hear from anyoneIt makes the tides run timely
And the space back home so wide
When I see that marble fill the night
I get something in my eyesCH2:
This desert cave is lonely
I hope you’ll see me soon
I’ll be up here watching
Inside the MoonThis desert cave gets lonely
I hope you’ll see me soon
I’ll be up here waiting
Inside the MoonI have dreamed of circles burning
As I watch the world keep turning
Like a caveman spinning stories
From stars at nightTonight I’ll go to sleep here
After digging even deeper
Scraping stone and dust and mining ice
To make more roomCH3:
This desert cave is lonely
I’d like to see you soon
I’ll be up here watching
Inside the MoonOur desert cave is lonely
But I’d like to see you soon
I’ll be up here watching
Inside the MoonPray to Mercury and Apollo
As the piper calls the tune
I have made all these hills hollow
Inside the Moon.
Inside the Moon, Inside the Moon
These hills are hollow inside the Moon
The post SONG: Inside the Moon first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is an educational poster, retouched by Wikimedia Commons user Rawpixel, of birds. It’s taken from Oliver Goldsmith’s book A History of the Earth and Animated Nature, which you can find in all its glory, though a slightly murky scan, in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
The post Science Art: Collection of various birds from A History of the Earth and Animated Nature, 1820. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
I can’t tell if this is either totally obvious or the gravest of insults … or, more likely, both… but Stanford researchers have found that night owls, those of us who tend to stay up late and prefer sleeping in, don’t actually thrive in the wee hours:
In a survey of nearly 75,000 adults, researchers compared the participants’ preferred sleep timing, known as chronotype, with their actual sleep behavior. They determined that regardless of one’s preferred bedtime, everyone benefits from turning in early. Morning larks and night owls alike tended to have higher rates of mental and behavioral disorders if they stayed up late.
The study, published May 19 in Psychiatry Research, recommends lights out by 1 a.m.
“We found that alignment with your chronotype is not crucial here, and that really it’s being up late that is not good for your mental health,” said Jamie Zeitzer, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the senior author of the study. “The big unknown is why.”
…
The researchers set out to study chronotype alignment in a larger population. They examined middle-aged and older-aged adults in the United Kingdom, who were asked about their sleep, including their morning or evening preference. They were sent a wearable accelerometer (basically a fancy activity monitor, Zeitzer said) to track their sleep over seven days.
The participants’ mental health was determined through their health records. The researchers included any mental or behavioral disorder listed in the International Classification of Diseases.
Among the 73,880 participants, 19,065 self-identified as morning types, 6,844 as evening types and 47,979 as somewhere in the middle.
Their sleep behavior was evaluated in relation to the whole group. The earliest 25% were considered early sleepers, the latest 25% as late sleepers and the middle 50% as intermediate. Categorizing sleep behavior this way, rather than by specific bedtimes, is more meaningful because different populations can have different sleep norms, Zeitzer said. “If we were doing this study in college students, 1 a.m. obviously wouldn’t be that late.”
…
The results were clear — both morning types and evening types who went to sleep late had higher rates of mental health disorders, including depression and anxiety.
“The worst-case scenario is definitely the late-night people staying up late,” Zeitzer said. Night owls being true to their chronotype were 20% to 40% more likely to have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder, compared with night owls following an early or intermediate sleep schedule.
Evening types who followed an earlier schedule fared better. Morning types who followed a later schedule suffered, but not too much.
Morning larks who rose with the sun tended to have the best mental health of all, to no one’s surprise.
The researchers found that sleep duration and consistency of sleep timing could not account for these differences in mental health.
They also tested the possibility that it was poor mental health causing people to stay up late, not the other way around. They tracked a subset of participants who had no previous diagnosis of a mental disorder for the next eight years. During that time, night owls who slept late were the most likely to develop a mental health disorder.
…
One theory, known as the “mind after midnight” hypothesis, suggests that neurological and physiological changes late at night can foster impulsivity, negative mood, impaired judgment and more risk-taking.
That might explain why even late at night, morning types seem to have an advantage — they’re out of their comfort zone. “If I had to hazard a guess, morning people who are up late are quite cognizant of the fact that their brain isn’t working quite right, so they may put off making bad decisions,” Zeitzer said.
“Meanwhile, the evening person who is up late thinks, ‘I’m feeling great. This is a great decision I’m making at 3 o’clock in the morning.’”
Another explanation could be a social misalignment with the mainstream chronotype.
“Maybe there are fewer social constraints late at night because you have fewer people around who are awake,” Zeitzer said. That is especially true in places like the United States and the United Kingdom, where people tend to be more isolated in the evenings. In a Mediterranean culture, where nights are more gregarious, staying up might even be good for mental health.
The post Being a night owl is a mental-health risk. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The Conversation finds a scientific reason for an often-observed phenomenon – that some people seemed strangely immune to COVID-19, while others would come down with it more than once:
Through a collaboration between University College London, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Imperial College London in the UK, we set out to answer this question using the world’s first controlled “challenge trial” for COVID – where volunteers were deliberately exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, so that it could be studied in great detail.
Unvaccinated healthy volunteers with no prior history of COVID were exposed – via a nasal spray – to an extremely low dose of the original strain of SARS-CoV-2. The volunteers were then closely monitored in a quarantine unit, with regular tests and samples taken to study their response to the virus in a highly controlled and safe environment.
For our recent study, published in Nature, we collected samples from tissue located midway between the nose and the throat as well as blood samples from 16 volunteers. These samples were taken before the participants were exposed to the virus, to give us a baseline measurement, and afterwards at regular intervals.
The samples were then processed and analysed using single-cell sequencing technology, which allowed us to extract and sequence the genetic material of individual cells. Using this cutting-edge technology, we could track the evolution of the disease in unprecedented detail, from pre-infection to recovery.
To our surprise, we found that, despite all the volunteers being carefully exposed to the exact same dose of the virus in the same manner, not everyone ended up testing positive for COVID.
…
Out of the ten volunteers who did not develop a sustained infection, suggesting that they were able to fight off the virus early on, three went on to develop an “intermediate” infection with intermittent single positive viral tests and limited symptoms. We called them the “transient infection group”.
The final seven volunteers remained negative on testing and did not develop any symptoms. This was the “abortive infection group”. This is the first confirmation of abortive infections, which were previously unproven.
…[W]e were able to identify cells stimulated by a key antiviral defence response in both the nose and the blood. This response, called the “interferon” response, is one of the ways our bodies signal to our immune system to help fight off viruses and other infections. We were surprised to find that this response was detected in the blood before it was detected in the nose, suggesting that the immune response spreads from the nose very quickly.
Lastly, we identified a specific gene called HLA-DQA2, which was expressed (activated to produce a protein) at a much higher level in the volunteers who did not go on to develop a sustained infection and could hence be used as a marker of protection. Therefore, we might be able to use this information and identify those who are probably going to be protected from severe COVID.
—
You can read more of the research here, in Nature.
The post Why did some folks never get covid, and others always got it? first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
BBC reports on the discovery of a cave on the moon that has awakened a primordial proto-human urge in the space scientists observing it. They spot a cave on the moon and think, hey, we could live in that thing:
Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut to travel to space, told BBC News that the newly-discovered cave looked like a good place for a base, and suggested humans could potentially be living in lunar pits in 20-30 years.
But, she said, this cave is so deep that astronauts might need to abseil in and use “jet packs or a lift” to get out.
Lorenzo Bruzzone and Leonardo Carrer at the University of Trento in Italy found the cave by using radar to penetrate the opening of a pit on a rocky plain called the Mare Tranquillitatis.
It is visible to the naked eye from Earth, and is also where Apollo 11 landed in 1969.
The cave has a skylight on the Moon’s surface, leading down to vertical and overhanging walls, and a sloping floor that might extend further underground.
It was made millions or billions of years ago when lava flowed on the Moon, creating a tunnel through the rock.
…
Once Prof Bruzzone and Prof Carrer understood how big the cave was, they realised it could be a good spot for a lunar base.
“After all, life on Earth began in caves, so it makes sense that humans could live inside them on the Moon,” says Prof Carrer.
The cave has yet to be fully explored, but the researchers hope that ground-penetrating radar, cameras or even robots could be used to map it.
Scientists first realised there were probably caves on the Moon around 50 years ago. Then in 2010 a camera on a mission called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of pits that scientists thought could be cave entrances.
But researchers did not know how deep the caves might be, or if they would have collapsed.
The post There’s a cave on the moon we could live in. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Here’s a horned dinosaur, or what’s left of one. I found it on Wikimedia Commons, but it was originally found in Utah, then written up in “New Horned Dinosaurs from Utah Provide Evidence for Intracontinental Dinosaur Endemism,” by a bunch of paleontologists. It’s a Utahceratops! Or was.
The post Science Art: Skull reconstruction of Utahceratops gettyi, 2010. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
PhysOrg reports on mysterious chunks of hard-to-see space rock all around us, even now. They contained – and might still contain – ice, which University of Michigan astronomers say means that they could one day be used to transport water around the solar system:
The findings suggest that asteroids in the asteroid belt, a region of the solar system roughly between Jupiter and Mars that contains much of the system’s rocky asteroids, have subsurface ice, something that has been suspected since the 1980s, according to Aster Taylor, a U-M graduate student in astronomy and lead author of the study.
The study also shows a potential pathway for delivering ice into the near-Earth solar system, according to Taylor. How Earth got its water is a longstanding question.
“We don’t know if these dark comets delivered water to Earth. We can’t say that. But we can say that there is still debate over how exactly the Earth’s water got here,” Taylor said. “The work we’ve done has shown that this is another pathway to get ice from somewhere in the rest of the solar system to the Earth’s environment.”
…
Dark comets are a bit of a mystery because they combine characteristics of both asteroids and comets. Asteroids are rocky bodies with no ice that orbit closer to the sun, typically within what’s called the ice line. This means they are close enough to the sun for any ice the asteroid may have been carrying to sublimate, or change from solid ice directly into gas.
…
The study examined seven dark comets and estimates that between 0.5 and 60% of all near-Earth objects could be dark comets, which do not have comae but do have nongravitational accelerations. The researchers also suggest that these dark comets likely come from the asteroid belt, and because these dark comets have nongravitational accelerations, the study findings suggest asteroids in the asteroid belt contain ice.
“We think these objects came from the inner and/or outer main asteroid belt, and the implication of that is that this is another mechanism for getting some ice into the inner solar system,” Taylor said. “There may be more ice in the inner main belt than we thought. There may be more objects like this out there. This could be a significant fraction of the nearest population. We don’t really know, but we have many more questions because of these findings.”
—
You can read more of Taylor’s findings here, in Icarus.
The post Up to 60% of the objects nearest Earth could be “dark comets.” first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
How will the students play Bubble Cash? Mashable reports on what might be a smart move in favor of dumb phones at the upper-crusty English school Eton:
The all-boys boarding school, founded in 1440 with alumni including George Orwell, several UK prime ministers, and Prince William, is removing smartphone use out of concerns regarding mental health and behaviour. In their place, students will reportedly receive Nokia handsets that are not connected to the internet. Students will only be able to make calls and send text messages.
…
The rules only apply to those aged 13 and currently in year nine, with age-appropriate controls remaining “in place for other year groups.” Parents were alerted to the changes by Mike Grenier the school’s deputy head, who told The Times that smartphones should be taken home after SIM cards are transferred to the Nokia handsets that Eton will provide. The school will also reportedly provide iPads for educational news.
The post One of the world’s poshest schools bans smartphones, issues Nokias. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science Alert has some encouraging research for those who keep up with their immunizations, with evidence that covid boosters offer increased protection against other strains of coronavirus, and other viruses too:
“These data suggest that if these cross-reactive antibodies do not rapidly wane – we would need to follow their levels over time to know for certain – they may confer some or even substantial protection against a pandemic caused by a related coronavirus,” explains Washington University immunologist Michael Diamond.
Other vaccinations, such as those for the flu, are not necessarily made more effective by booster shots. Initial vaccinations prompt our immune system to create antibodies to recognize and fight an invasive virus. The details of the antibody are carried by memory immune cells, which help keep watch for and sound the alarm if the virus reappears, quickly producing more of the specific antibodies to defend against it.
When it comes to the flu, these cells are then so good at their jobs, they overwhelm our attempts to introduce updated antibodies through subsequent vaccinations. This is problematic as it leaves little chance for our bodies to store the more updated antibodies’ details in memory B cells, weakening our response to future viral variants.
There was some concern this would occur with COVID-19 vaccines, too. So, using a mouse model and human volunteers who had contracted SARS-CoV-2, Washington University immunologist Chieh-Yu Liang and colleagues examined the memory B cell antibodies after different combinations of vaccines.
Incredibly, the researchers found that across doses, the response of the immune system to variants of the virus grows stronger, which is a sign of positive imprinting. In both humans and mice, rather than seeing antibodies specific to any one variant, the researchers found the majority of the antibodies reacted to both tested COVID-19 strains – the original and omicron.
Further tests in mice revealed not only could the antibody response deal with a panel of different SARS-CoV-2 strains, but it could also help subdue SARS-CoV-1 as well, which derives from the 2002 to 2003 epidemic.
—
You can read more of the Washington University research here, in Nature.
The post Covid boosters protect against other viruses. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is an illustration from Nordisk Familjebok, a Norwegian encyclopedia from the turn of the last century. The labyrinth, naturally, is much older. It’s of a sort that can be laid out using two stakes and a knotted rope – you tie the end of the rope around one stake and sort of swing around it in a not-quite circle. The spacing of the knots is the width of the “walls” of the labyrinth. I actually did this in my yard a few years back when I came into a stack of old paving stones, but it’s now nearly invisible under the grass.
Still, walking the pattern can be soothing. It’s a little tedious until it becomes fun, and after that it gets peaceful. Simple complexities, as they were in the ancient world, are much the same today.
One of the interesting things pointed out by this blog entry about Trojeborg labyrinths is that they are plural – a style of labyrinth, hailing back to (semi-mythical) ancient Troy, rather than a specific labyrinth in a specific place.
At any rate, when I knotted up rope and starting laying pavers in my overgrown grass, I definitely didn’t have “Trojeborg” in my search history. I think it called itself an “Archimedes” labyrinth, but it seems like what this maze-making site calls a “Cretan” labyrinth. At any rate, it’s a very old design, it turns up throughout human history, and it’s sort of fun to create in the landscape.
The post Science Art: Trojeborg, a stone labyrinth from Visby, 1919 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Yellowstone Public Radio has a piece on the grand-looking Lokiceratops rangiformes, unearthed in Montana and “unveiled” at the Natural History Museum of Utah:
Mark Loewen is a professor of Geology and Geophysics and a paleontologist at the University of Utah. In 2022, he and his students were given permission to research and piece together hundreds of small, individual skull bones. The fragments were excavated in 2019, from what used to be swampland in now northern Montana.
“We totally expected this to be an already known species of dinosaur that comes from Montana called Medusa ceratops. Me and my students are saying, Oh, this shouldn’t be here. And it was like a Eureka moment in which, wow, we have a new dinosaur,” Loewen said.
…
The horned dinosaurs are interesting. They’re notable because they have horns above their eyes, often on their nose. And at the same time, they take the back of their head and they stretch it out to double the length of their skull with this giant head shield that we call a frill,” Loewen said.
Loewen says this discovery likely means there are more species of horned dinosaurs out there than paleontologists first realized.
…
The university team made a sculpture reconstruction, which is being revealed June 20th, simultaneously with the unveiling of the real bones at the Museum of Evolution in Denmark, which purchased the original fossils.
The post New species of horned, plant-eating dinosaur unveiled first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is Saturn, as photographed (yes, it’s a composite photo, not a drawing) by Cassini as it passed in front of the Sun. Our Earth is visible, barely, if you zoom in and look “above the left extremity of the main set of rings.” You might have to use the full-resolution version of the image available here, in the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory Photojournal. That page also shares some of why this image – assembled from 165 wide-angle photos – was so dramatic from a scientific perspective:
The mosaic images were acquired as the spacecraft drifted in the darkness of Saturn’s shadow for about 12 hours, allowing a multitude of unique observations of the microscopic particles that compose Saturn’s faint rings.
Ring structures containing these tiny particles brighten substantially at high phase angles: i.e., viewing angles where the sun is almost directly behind the objects being imaged.
During this period of observation Cassini detected two new faint rings: one coincident with the shared orbit of the moons Janus and Epimetheus, and another coincident with Pallene’s orbit.
I found the image on Wikimedia Commons, but it’s really a product of NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.
The post Science Art: Saturn Eclipse, Cassini Orbiter, 2006. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Glistening and pink like extruded edible protein, sure… but at least it’s friendly! NPR uncovers the living skin used to cover robots with a (supposedly) more approachable face:
“In this study, we managed to replicate human appearance to some extent by creating a face with the same surface material and structure as humans,” professor Shoji Takeuchi, the team leader, said in a news release. In the process, he added, “we identified new challenges, such as the necessity for surface wrinkles and a thicker epidermis to achieve a more humanlike appearance.”
The approach promises to make robots more lifelike — and in the future, the researchers say, similar techniques could also be used on humans, in the cosmetics and plastic surgery industries.
…
To overlay and connect the lab-produced skin on a robotic skeleton, a layer of collagen gel containing cultured human dermal fibroblasts (a type of connective tissue cell) binds to an innovative system of tiny V-shaped perforations in the surface, letting the skin move with the underlying structure without tearing or peeling. The work of muscles — creating a smile, and other motions — is done by actuators.
—
You can read more of Takeuchi’s work here, in Cell Reports Physical Science.
The post Living skin helps robot smile in a way that is not at all creepy. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is a Popular Mechanics illustration from 102 years ago that sounds like it could have been written today. Warnings about industrial pollution increasing air temperature are nothing new. We (for some value of “we,” some group of humans who share information with each other) have known that our machines release gases at a volume large enough to change weather patterns for quite a long time now. We just can’t see it happening, not directly.
The text of the caption reads:
The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
I found the image while browsing Wikimedia Commons, but you can read the whole March 1912 Popular Mechanics here, at archive.org. There are charts, and prose like the following…which has a slightly Lovecraftian tinge, from a 21st-century perspective:
It is perhaps somewhat hazardous to make conjectures for centuries yet to come, but in the light of all that is known it is reasonable to conclude that not only has the brain of man contrived machines by means of which he can travel faster than the wind, navigate the ocean depths, fly above the clouds, and do the work of a hundred, but also that indirectly by these very things, which change the constitution of the atmosphere, have his activities reached beyond the near at hand and the immediate present and modified the cosmic processes themselves.
Of course, the inciting incident for the article was an unseasonable heat wave. It’s the only way anyone but a very few start to pay attention.
The post Science Art: The Furnaces of the World…., 1912 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
SONG: “Low Orbit Ion Cannon” (a penitential Emperor X cover).
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: This isn’t based on any research; it’s a cover of an Emperor X song recorded for missing the monthly deadline on an original song for May 2024.
ABSTRACT: This is a song about computers, and it delights me. I have no idea how I missed the Emperor X train for so long, and owe a debt of gratitude to tropdust on Tumblr for hipping me to his jive. Lo-fi singer, acoustic with digital blips, the occasional polyrhythm, has lyrics about “cobalt belts” and “utopian ethnostates.” Whatever genre I am, I think he is too. And he’s been doing this for more than a decade – wild! He is constantly touring, so has better chops than I do, I will admit freely.
This song is about Anonymous and software that crowdsourced denial-of-service attacks, bringing down websites by overwhelming them with too many greetings. Hello. Hello. Hello. You can google “LOIC” and find a lot more about how it worked (or works) and some of the specifics that must have inspired the song. The phonetic resemblance between “Hello, I see” and “LOIC” is a pretty great realization.
I recorded it in a very quick at dirty way, with a guitar that wasn’t being picked up properly by the mic (either a cable or spacing issue, most likely), and then lots of lo-fi layers. There’s actually a track in there that sounds like a guitar being fingerpicked but is actually a qin SoundFont. Someday, I think I’d like to learn to play qin – it’s a classical Chinese slide guitar, basically.
There’s a game being played between a slow chord progression and a dat-dat-dat-dat fast beat hiding under it, which is a game that first clicked for me while playing with a talented drummer who just improvised something with a lot of 16th notes under a mournful Police cover I was singing in a coffee house. The feeling is sort of one of plaintiveness covering a rising swell of panic, which is also how a DDOS attack works – websites want to be clicked on, they want to attract viewers, and yet too many all at once is a perfect way to bring them down. Hi. Here I am. THere arE TOO MANY OF YOU!
There’s also something very period-specific about burying your face in a girl’s sweater to get that wistful smell and coming up with a face full of atropine. That is, among other things, an antidote for nerve gas. Whatever she was doing, some nefarious state actors didn’t want her there.
The thing I wonder now is if the revolution is ongoing….
LYRICS:
Anonymous claimed to catch us pinning our necks down
We uprooted the ancillary wiring downtown
So we could say hello, hello, hello, helloWe tracked the signal to noise
Controlling every electron
“Don’t turn the bolt in the door: The heating element’s left on”
“You’re nice to me
Who are you?”And we fell asleep reading Crimethinc
And awoke in a crime scene
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello
Hello. Hello. Hello. HelloI put my face on the desk into the sweater she slept on
And though the fabric was soft, it was recently rained on
With her atropine“How are you?”
We were guards and we loved it
And we scorned the republic
To come back from Nebraska
“Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?
Hello? Hello? Hello?
Where are you?
Where are you?
Where are you?”LOIC
LOICDPRK
Hello, hello, hello, hello
Hello, hello, hello, hello
Goodbye
The post SONG: Low Orbit Ion Cannon (a penitential Emperor X cover) first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
SONG: “Migration Roads”. (available as .ogg here)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on LiveScience, 3 May 2024, “1st Americans came over in 4 different waves from Siberia, linguist argues,” as used in the post Languages show four waves of migration into prehistoric North America.
ABSTRACT: I am not sure why this song took so long, but I think it was vastly improved – the recording at least – thanks to the time to tweak a little bit here and lower a little bit there. This (and the penitential cover for missing the deadline, to be posted very shortly) were both recorded on my “non-music” computer, an ASUS netbook running Windows. I have a sort of skeletal version of Reaper on it, with only one VST player and only one SoundFont (though that is the enormous “Timbres of Heaven” collection). Everything else on this is whatever came packaged with Reaper a couple of versions ago.
Meanwhile, I’m finding it easier to skip the actual daily (or a few times a week) science-feed posts on here. I think I’m getting tired, in part, but also I used to get a lot of those updates from social media and those feeds have dried up… and most respectable publications have moved subscription-only, alas.
At any rate, the music part of this song was basically written and recorded more than a month ago, as part of my recent experiments with open-G tuning. The words didn’t come so easily, although I knew I wanted it to be from the perspective of someone following a generations-old migration from Asia to North America, aware of being one wave among many. The bridge went through about four or five drafts, and was one of those things where actually just singing it through was the only way to write it. That process is also where those backing vocals (is it wrong to think of them as REM-ish?) came from; they emerged from the bridge and worked their way out.
I’d planned to move the guitars and flutey sine-wave synth from the netbook onto the “music laptop,” but never got around to it. That laptop still needs a battery, so it’s a little difficult to physically move around (unplugging and replugging, constant fear of accidental jostle to the cord resulting in loss of work). There is something going on with the way the interface or mic plugs into this netbook – I’m not sure if a cable is wearing out or if it’s just that I’m tending to play further away from the mic, but it’s getting a sort of gated, boxy sound with no sustain. I had to layer a lot of guitars in order to get around that. Something to look at before the next song.
I’m very happy with the words, although I suppose I should have made the “linguistics” part more of the song to really share the wisdom of this research. Just the fact that there have been waves of migrations for as long as there have been human beings… that’s the main thing. It is what we do. We move around. We go looking for the newer sunrise.
LYRICS:
I pulled boots over blisters
As the frost gave way to mud
Dried salmon on campfires
The sun felt good and the sun feels good and…CH
I am following migration roads,
the migration roads. (x2)V2
The mastodon herds were thinning
I would serve you better steaks
So I walk toward the sunrise
As if horizons would not breakI was dreaming of your eyes again
And the skies the color of the waves
I would carve this in a clamshell
I would take this to my graveCH
BR
Grandma said in Beringia we had walked this way before (we’re walking)
The ocean took the shore (we’re walking)
Where the land is being born (we’re walking)
These boots are worn (x3)CH
V3
(we’re walking) (we’re walking)
The stars fall like embers
There are sparks in the smoke
There are signs in the morning clouds
And we keep walking
And we keep walking
And we keep walking …
The post SONG: Migration Roads first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is a device from Cotton Card-Room Machinery, a catalog published by Whitlin Machine Works.
I can’t say much about how it works because I’ve never been in a cotton card-room. All I can say is this detaching roll mechanism is part of an improved combing machine, and that it’s also called a “drawing-off roll.” I imagine that means this device somehow detaches or draws off cotton fibers, probably from the stems and seeds of the plant, which I think is what “combing” was for. Unless “combing” was to get the already-cleaned fibers all lined up, in which case the drawing-off would be of the processed and smoothed out cotton from the rest of the yet-to-be combed mess down there.
I can say I appreciate the aesthetics of the machine, wheels within wheels, steel casings precisely assembled.
The post Science Art: Detaching Roll Mechanism, 1912. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Awww. Sci News has reported on the historic discovery of a new deer species in Peru. The short-legged dwarf deer Pudella carlae is the first deer discovered in the 21st century, and the first New World deer in more than 60 years … although now it seems like there may be more out there:
In a new study, the authors found that Pudu mephistophiles is in fact two distinct species.
“The typical form, Pudu mephistophiles, distributes north of the Huancabamba Depression from northernmost Peru to the north (Ecuador and Colombia), while the other distributes south of the Huancabamba Depression and is a Peruvian endemic,” they said.
“As no name is available for the last one, we describe and name it here: Pudella carlae.”
…
The researchers also found that Pudu puda, the type species of Pudu, is not sister to the two northern pudu species.
“We revalidate the genus Pudella to allocate the latter two species.”
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You can read more of the species splitting here, in the Journal of Mammology.
The post A brand new tiny deer. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This discovery reminds me of some people I know. Mashable reports on the discovery 66 light years away of solar system “HD 104067,” with a planet so roiled by the graivty of its nearest neighbors that it’s covered in active volcanos to the point that it’s constantly exploding:
In a distant solar system some 66 light-years away, researchers used NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to spot a volcano-blanketed world new to science. It’s covered in volcanoes because the other two planets in this system have forced it into an unusual elliptical orbit, which tugs and squeezes the world, roiling the interior.
The deep space situation is similar to what’s happening on Jupiter’s moon Io, an orb that’s relentlessly locked in a tug-of-war between nearby Jovian moons. This dynamic squeezes and stretches Io, stoking lava to pour out of volcanoes.
“This is a terrestrial planet that I would describe as Io on steroids,” Stephen Kane, a planetary astrophysicist at UC Riverside, said in a statement. “It’s been forced into a situation where it’s constantly exploding with volcanoes. At optical wavelengths you would be able to see a glowing, red-hot planet with a molten lava surface.”
—
You can read more of the “perfect tidal storm” twisting HD 104067’s volcanic planet here, in The Astronomical Journal.
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Medical News Today has findings that make it that much easier to fight bacterial infections without throwing your whole body out of whack – by using lolamicin, a “smart antibiotic” that kills the bad germs while sparing the gut biome that controls digestion, mood, and a bunch of other stuff:
Researchers identified the antibiotic lolamicin, which disrupts a particular system called the Lol lipoprotein transport system.
Next, they evaluated how well lolamicin worked against the multi-drug-resistant clinical isolates. They found that “Lolamicin has activity against a panel of more than 130 multidrug-resistant clinical isolates,” so the drug showed great promise as an effective antibiotic.
Researchers then tested lolamicin in mice. Overall, mice tolerated doses of the drug well. To test the efficacy of lolamicin, researchers infected mice with acute pneumonia and septicemia (blood poisoning) and found the drug effective at treating the infections.
When given orally, 70% of the mice with a septic infection lived. The septicemia models were used to test overall survival.
Next, researchers examined mouse stool samples to determine how much lolamicin affected the gut microbiome compared to broad-spectrum and gram-positive-only antibiotics. Lolamicin outperformed these antibiotics in leaving the microbiome alone.
Mice treated with lolamicin were also much less likely to experience C. difficile infections than those treated with other antibiotic types after exposure to C.difficle.
—
Don’t give up the kimchi, bran, and yogurt just yet … they’re yet to try this on humans. You can read more of the microbiome-sparing antibiotic research here, in Nature.
The post An antibiotic that spares gut bacteria. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is the listening part, the twisting bits of the inner ear. It really does look like a mollusk, doesn’t it? (“Cochlea” literally means “snail” in Greek.)
It was drawn (or engraved) by Henry Vandyke Carter in the mid-1800s, though published in 1910. Before illustrating Henry Gray’s Anatomy, descriptive and surgical, Carter had previously “worked for John Queckett, the first expert of microscopy, and Richard Owen, one of the best anatomists of the Victorian era” as part of the Royal College of Surgeons. After the several years spent with Gray, illustrating his textbook among other things, Carter went off to India to actually practice medicine. The first edition of Gray’s Anatomy was published in 1858, and gradually became a world-renowned classic of medical information. Carter went on to lead a life probably more interesting than he’d counted on, but did manage to advance the cause of medicine before returning home to England and, less than 10 years later, dying of consumption.
His illustrations remain to this day a gold standard for scientific illustration, however.
The post Science Art: Interior of right osseous labyrinth, from Gray’s Anatomy. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Well, if a microphone can act as a speaker (which it can, and vice versa), then why can’t an ear act as a megaphone? It might fly in the face of expectations but The Quietus has an interview with Lola De La Mata, an artist and audiological experimenter who has actually recorded the sound of her own tinnitus, caused by an old ear injury, using the soundless environment of an anechoic chamber to capture the vibrations of her damaged cilia:
The plan at that point was to create a number of pieces relating to different parts of the ear, but over time her scope broadened to become her new album Oceans On Azimuth, a visceral and intense thing that bristles with life in the same way her eardrum thundered as it tried to force itself back into shape. At the record’s launch at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery in Greenwich, a week before she speaks to tQ, De La Mata displays accompanying sculptures based on a 3D rendering of her ear canal while Jono Heale from the hearing protection company ACS takes similar moulds from attendees to form part of a future piece.
…
She was intrigued that the [Hudspeth Laboratory Of Sensory Neuroscience]’s director A.J. Hudspeth “kept employing words from artistic fields, like how the way hair bundles are distributed on the cochlea is almost like a piano in reverse. There was something that was accessible, not just academic.” You can hear that same impulse in Gianoli’s explanation of impedance matching, too, included on the album and in her live performance, where he compares the role of the middle ear to the bridge of a violin. “He wrote a master’s paper about it, and how there’s a possibility of creating the perfect bridge for each specific violin if you put in the right equations with the thickness of wood, the type, the width, etcetera.”
…
De La Mata had things to offer in return, pointing out how they might make use of soundproof rooms to deal with the noise produced by the fans of their machinery. Thanks to her experiments with an electromagnetic field recorder, which highlighted how noisy the lab could get, they were able to ascertain where previous experiments had run into issues. In turn, it also altered her view of science. “I’ve learned that it’s all about failure, and that they welcome it. People would open discussions by saying, ‘We have no idea how this thing works, we’re not there and we might never be there.’ And just as there’s a lot of failure in science, there’s a lot of failure in our communication, which actually allows spaces for questions, space to dream and innovate. So there was this common shared language, but we just had slightly different definitions of what it all meant, which was exciting.”
…
The most mind-blowing moment, not only for De La Mata but the scientists too, came when they managed to actually record the sounds that she heard in her ears – which now appear as ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ which begin sides A and B on the album – and in doing so opened up questions about the nature of tinnitus itself. “The NHS definition is that it’s a phantom sound that your brain is creating, that it isn’t something ‘real’, so you should try to ignore it.” By having De La Mata place her ear into an anechoic chamber, with an ultra-sensitive microphone perched in her ear canal, they were able to provide significant evidence to the contrary. “After the first recording of it, it was ‘There’s no way, this isn’t possible.’” They tried again with her breath held, and again with her tensing her ears, and again with other members of staff, but each time it became apparent that yes, the noises De La Mata hears are seemingly something physical. More intriguingly still, the two women whose ears were recorded, De La Mata and Lana Norris – the musicologist whose voice appears on the album’s ‘PINK Noise’, and who is also a choral director – were the only two people whose ears were found to produce spontaneous otoacoustic emissions. “It’s something to do with hormone difference, but they don’t really know why,” De La Mata says. Present in most children but believed to fade over time, they’re also found far more in musicians than in other adults, for reasons yet unknown. It all raises a lot of questions.
—
You can hear De La Mata’s album here, on Bandcamp.
The post Recording tinnitus as it happens – for art AND science. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science News finds inspiration from the carnival for a new way to keep astronauts in shape, by running along the inside of a circular wall just like motorcycle stunt-riders do on the Wall of Death:
An amusement park attraction, the Wall looks something like a giant wooden barrel with the top sawed off. Daredevils on motorcycles zip around the inside, driving along the circular wall in a feat that seems to defy gravity.
But exercise physiologists Gaspare Pavei and Valentina Natalucci weren’t doing motorcycle stunts — they were testing out a technique to run on the moon.
If the team’s calculations were correct, future moon dwellers running fast enough inside a cylinder would be able to stay on the wall, rather than float down to the ground, says Alberto Minetti, a physiologist at the University of Milan. That suggests the technique could one day offer lunar inhabitants a new means of Earth-like exercise, some 384,000 kilometers from our home planet.
…
Each runner’s harness attached to a bungee cord suspended from a nearly 40-meter-tall crane. That effectively reduced Pavei’s and Natalucci’s weight, mimicking moon gravity. Then, they had to figure out how to shift from standing vertically on the ground to running horizontally along the cylinder’s walls.
Pavei was up first. He sprinted straight at the wall like a kid trying parkour. No luck. He gently skidded down to the ground on his bungee cord. After a few failed attempts, Pavei took a cue from Wall of Death motorcyclists. He approached the wall at an angle, running counterclockwise up a small ramp at the cylinder’s base in a spiraling path. Suddenly, Pavei was cruising around nearly horizontal, shoes slapping the walls, body almost parallel to the ground.
“WOW,” Minetti remembers screaming in excitement as he watched from the ground. “I knew that physics and mathematics predicted this,” he says, “but it’s different … when you see it in reality.”
…
Minetti points out a minor issue for any would-be moon runners: the need for speed. They have to race pretty fast, he says, about 5 to 6 meters per second — roughly a 5-minute mile. But you don’t need to be an elite athlete to achieve this speed in short bursts, Pavei says.
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Endgadget (via Yahoo! News) has bad news for the Tooth Fairy coming out of Kyoto University, where researchers have a drug for regrowing lost teeth that’s about to enter human trials:
The research has been led by Katsu Takahashi, head of dentistry and oral surgery at Kitano Hospital. The intravenous drug deactivates the uterine sensitization-associated gene-1 (USAG-1) protein that suppresses tooth growth. Blocking USAG-1 from interacting with other proteins triggers bone growth and, voila, you got yourself some brand-new chompers.
…
September’s clinical trial will include adults who are missing at least one molar but there’s a secondary trial coming aimed at children aged two to seven. The kids in the second trial will all be missing at least four teeth due to congenital tooth deficiency. Finally, a third trial will focus on older adults who are missing “one to five permanent teeth due to environmental factors.”
Takahashi and his fellow researchers are so optimistic about this drug that they predict the medicine will be available for everyday consumers by 2030.
—
Video (and photos of ferrets’ regenerated teeth) at the link. You can read more of Takahashi’s research here, from Kyoto University.
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This is a photo taken in 2015 by Wikimedia Commons user Jebulon, of a helmet made for a Mycenaean warrior between 3.300 and 3,400 years ago. It’s a display at the National Archaeological Museum of Greece, but at the dawn of history, Homer described a helmet just like this in Book 10 of The Iliad, which Odysseus pulls onto his crafty head before a raid on the Trojans: “On the inside there was a strong lining on interwoven straps, onto which a felt cap had been sewn in. The outside was cleverly adorned all around with rows of white tusks from a shiny-toothed boar, the tusks running in alternate directions in each row.”
According to Wikipedia, this would be a valuable piece of military hardware — Homer refers to it as an heirloom, and to get this many tusks, you’d have to kill 40 to 50 boars, no easy feat in the days of javelins and spears. Of course, once you’d put this on your head, it would be no easy feat to kill you….
The post Science Art: Boars’s tusk helmet NAMA6568, Athens, Greece. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science Alert covers a (mock) battle that solved an ancient mystery – when Greek marines figured out if the 3,500-year-old Dendra armor was genuinely useful or just made for show, by making a copy and wearing it into battle:
Wholly intact, it looked solid but early experiments with replicas suggested it wasn’t suited for use in long battles. So was the suit purely ceremonial or only for those who rode to battle in chariots, archaeologists wondered?
Not so, according to a new study from researchers who had a group of 13 marines from the Hellenic Armed Forces test the suit in an 11-hour-long simulation of battle conditions recreated from historical texts. They found the Dendra suit would have been “entirely compatible with use in combat” and the demands of war.
Historical reenactors will go mad for the researchers’ efforts. They extracted information about warfare and battle tactics in ancient Greece from a well-accepted translation of the Iliad, a lengthy poem about the final throes of the Trojan War, which took place around 1300 to 1200 BCE.
“As no historical accounts or descriptions survive from the Greek Late Bronze Age regarding the scope and use of armor of the Dendra type, we turned to a key – and only – detailed early account of warfare, battle, and single combat: Homer’s epic account of 10 days in the Trojan War, the Iliad,” the researchers explain in their published paper.
The team analyzed the text and reviewed other literature, looking for details of battlefield environments, how long daily battles in the Trojan War typically lasted, what warriors ate and drank, and the types of maneuvers, combat techniques, and weapons typically used.
They combined this with published sedimentology and geomorphology data that situates the final battles of the Trojan War in a low-lying 4 square-kilometer (1.5 square miles) area of swampy plains near the Scamander River, which encircled the city of Troy.
They estimated warriors in the latter stages of the Trojan War would have fought in June temperatures of 24–29 °C (75–84 °F) and sweated in the relative humidity of 70–85 percent. Daily army operations probably lasted 11 hours after a typical breakfast of dry bread, goat’s cheese, olives, and red wine.
From accounts of Trojan battles, the team also established that warring sides constantly attacked, retreated, recovered, gained ground, and retreated – fighting activity that resembles what we might today call high-intensity interval exercise.
All this, to “create a combat simulation protocol replicating the daily activities performed by elite warriors in the Late Bronze Age,” write exercise physiologist Andreas Flouris of the University of Thessaly in Greece and colleagues.
—
You can read more of the recreation of prehistoric Greek combat here, in PLoS ONE.
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Science Adviser has news (and video) of a handy little upgrade invented by robotics researcher Tamar Makin and her colleagues. They’re calling it the Third Thumb because that’s what it is – a sixth digit that helps a human hand carry, hold, and manipulate better than ever:
The Third Thumb was designed to expand a person’s motor abilities, providing improved grasping and increasing the ability to carry things in hand. It’s operated with pressure sensors under a person’s feet, which can either be external or worn inside a shoe.
Out of nearly 600 testers—who ranged in age from 3 to 96 and included people of multiple genders and ethnicities as well as disabilities—only four were unable to use the additional finger. Younger children struggled the most, and older adults also had some difficulty. But overall, most were able to get the hang of the device and use it to perform tasks like moving pegs in a pegboard or picking up and placing oddly shaped objects into a basket.
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You can read more about the third-thumb augmentation tech here, in Science Robotics.
The post All thumbs bad, third thumb good. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Did we just mention exercise slowing down time? NPR has a whole ‘noter story on muscular effort changing the progress of time. This is a survey of studies that find regular bicycling can prevent or repair all sorts of age-related damage, from arthritic knees to overall longevity:
The study, which was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, and published in the American College of Sports Medicine’s flagship peer-reviewed journal, included about 2,600 men and women, with an average age of 64 years old. They were surveyed about their physical activity over their lifetime. As part of the study, researchers took X-ray images to evaluate signs of arthritis in their knee joints. “Bicyclers were 21% less likely to have X-ray evidence and symptoms of osteoarthritis compared to those who did not have a history of bicycling,” explains study author Dr. Grace Lo of Baylor College of Medicine.
“I was surprised to see how very strong the benefit was,” Lo says given the profile of the participants. The people enrolled in the study were not competitive athletes, but rather “average” people, ranging from their mid-40’s up to 80 years old. All of them had elevated risks of developing knee arthritis due to weight, family history or former injuries.
…
“There’s good data to support that people live longer when they bicycle,” says Lo. She points to a study that found people who cycled one hour per week were about 22% less likely to die prematurely. This was a study of people with diabetes, so it’s possible that the benefits are greater for people without the disease.
—
You can read more of the arthritis study here, in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.
The post Biking for long life. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is a likeness of the southern bit of South America as it was near the end of the Cretaceous, right before the event that drove the dinosaurs to extinction. The Maastrichtian Age was a geologic period named in the 1800s after chalk deposits found near the Dutch city of Maastricht. The formation is also known for big fossils of Mosasaurus, a mighty swimming reptile named for the Maas River where the fossils were found. The creature, the Dutch city, the mineral layer, and the time period were all named, ultimately, for that river.
I wonder if there’s a mosasaur swimming under the placid surface of that water surrounding those lush, green banks – shaded by the curling fronds of the tree ferns and prehistoric palms.
The post Science Art: Main floristic types from the Maastrichtian, F. Guillén, 2012. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
BBC reports on scientist Marie Makuate, who is leading a one-woman campaign to give the African continent a winning position in the new space race:
As a geospatial expert for the NGO Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, she creates maps to help emergency services navigate an unpredictable territory so that people in need can be reached quickly.
It is a job that Ms Makuate says gives her purpose and motivation.
“I was shocked to hear about the [Morocco] disaster, but then I thought that if I mapped as much infrastructure as possible, it would help other people save lives.”
…
Morocco does have its own satellites, but Ms Makuate makes the case that more African countries should be sending them into space and make their output more freely available.
This is not just about emergencies. Satellite imagery can help, among other things, in boosting agriculture, analysing population changes and understanding what is happening to natural resources such as water.
“If a country has its own satellite, it doesn’t have to pay for the images,” says the young scientist.
Satellite images can cost up to $25 (£20) per square kilometre – getting high-definition photographs of an area the size of Lagos, for example, would cost more than $80,000.
Ms Makuate has been making her case for more pan-African collaboration in front of a group of industry specialists that came together this week in Angola’s capital, Luanda, for the NewSpace Africa Conference.
…
There is huge potential in the African space sector – it is expected to be worth more than $20bn by 2026, according to consultancy firm Space in Africa. But the vast majority of this money is coming from outside the continent – through companies who are selling services to Africans.
“Imagine if we can just take 10% of that share and invest it in African companies,” says Dr Zolana João, the general manager of the Angolan National Space Programme.
He, like Ms Makuate, believes that greater investment within the continent will better serve African governments, which are often hampered by a lack of reliable data.
The post The space heroine of Cameroon. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
NPR was one of several outlets covering the release of writer Zoë Schlanger’s new book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, which might reopen some old botanical debates about whether plants can be said to be intelligent. Ongoing research is demonstrating that plants really do demonstrate an awareness of their environment … and the ability to solve problems relating to it:
Schlanger acknowledges that our understanding of plants is still developing — as are the definitions of “intelligence” and “consciousness.” “Science is there [for] observation and to experiment, but it can’t answer questions about this ineffable, squishy concept of intelligence and consciousness,” she says.
But, she adds, “part of me feels like it almost doesn’t matter, because what we see plants doing — what we now understand they can do — simply brings them into this realm of alert, active processing beings, which is a huge step from how many of us were raised to view them, which is more like ornaments in our world or this decorative backdrop for our our lives.”
…
I was able to go to a lab in Wisconsin where there [were] plants that had … been engineered to glow, but only to glow when they’ve been touched. So I used tweezers to pinch a plant on its vein, … the kind of mid-rib of a leaf. And I got to watch this glowing green signal emanate from the point where I pinch the plant out to the whole rest of the plant. Within two minutes, the whole plant had received a signal of my touch, of my “assault,” so to speak, with these tweezers. And research like that is leading people within the plant sciences, but also people who work on neurobiology in people to question whether or not it’s time to expand the notion of a nervous system.
…
There’s one concept that I think is very beautiful, called the “memory of winter.” And that’s this thing where many plants, most of our fruit trees, for example, have to have the “memory,” so to speak, of a certain number of days of cold in the winter in order to bloom in the spring. It’s not enough that the warm weather comes. They have to get this profound cold period as well, which means to some extent they’re counting. They’re counting the elapsed days of cold and then the elapsed days of warmth to make sure they’re also not necessarily emerging in a freak warm spell in February. This does sometimes happen, of course. We hear stories about farmers losing their crops to freak warm spells. But there is evidence to suggest there’s parts of plants physiology that helps them record this information. But much like in people, we don’t quite know the substrate of that memory. We can’t quite locate where or how it’s possibly being recorded.
The post Plants have desires … and the agency to meet them. So are they smart? first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Music is in place, for the most part, but no lyrics yet, and I’m on a highway somewhere between Shreveport and Jackson, so am unlikely to be able to write & record lyrics until… well, not today, anyway. On the other hand, the landscape is lovely. There are some parts of America that I can definitely recommend.
The post No song today. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science Alert brings us (well, those of us who are working out) one step closer to moving like the wind through a world of living statues with research from the UK and the Netherlands that shows exercise directly affects the perception of time, speeding up our reactions by making everything else seem slowed down:
Led by Andrew Mark Edwards from Canterbury Christ Church University in the UK, the team conducted experiments involving 33 male and female active adults who were asked to guess when a 30-second time period was up, without the help of a clock, only their own internal timekeeper.
At rest, participants thought 30 seconds was up slightly later than the actual ticking clock. In other words, time felt like it was ‘flying’ by.
But when participants hopped on a stationary bike for a 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) time trial, that perception grew distorted. Half a minute on the bike felt roughly 8 percent longer, on average, than what the clock said.
…
The study of the human perception of time is called chronoception, and scientists have found that age, emotions, drugs, exercise, and body temperature can all alter that internal timekeeper in different ways.
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You can read more of the time-perception study here, in Brain and Behaviour.
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That is a kitten. A panther kitten. Offspring of the catamount. Doesn’t look all that happy to have its picture engraved.
On a digital device, there’s no telling how large this illustration was, but in the printed copy of A Natural History of New York it was 1/3 the natural size of the real article. The adult panther down the page is represented at 1/18th of the natural size.
The book I found in the Biodiversity Heritage Library by looking for James Erxleben illustrations. I’m not positive he illustrated this, since there are a lot of volumes. The only credit on the page itself is to Packard, Garit & Co., Albany, the engravers and printers. The volume has a statement after the title page saying that “copy right has been secured for the people of New York by Samuel Young, Secretary of State.” This volume, “Division 1: Zoology,” seems to have been written by James E. De Kay. But the first 176 pages are by William H. Seward (20 years before he became the U.S. secretary of state who bought Alaska from the Russians), and have, like, charts of legislators and details about deliberations and, uh, the model prisons of Philadelphia and “New-York” that have since been imitated by other states and… well, there are a few pages of pictures at the end.
Including angry kitty here.
The post Science Art: Whelp of the Northern Panther (Felix concolor), 1842. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Scientific American listens in on beluga conversations, thanks to a new dictionary that itemizes the “words” formed by their squishy, shape-able forehead “melons” to let other whales know when they’re flirting, fighting, feeding, or just hanging out:
For a study in Animal Cognition, scientists tracked four beluga whales at Connecticut’s Mystic Aquarium for more than 200 hours and observed roughly 2,500 instances of these mammals morphing their melons. To investigate if the movements might be intentional communication, the researchers carefully observed whether they occurred in a social context and within view of other whales. The team documented five distinct melon morphs used repeatedly in various situations.
“We have known, intuitively, that they do this,” says Justin Richard, the study’s lead author and an animal scientist at the University of Rhode Island. “But this is the first time we have documented it rigorously.”
Richard says scientists should be cautious about ascribing meaning to the shapes at this stage—but he does note some patterns. A jiggly “melon shake” appears to be used primarily by males and to be directed toward females during courtship. An elongating “melon push” seems to occur among both males and females and may be a display of aggression, as it makes the whales look larger. Researchers are still investigating what might prompt the other three distinctive moves.
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You can read more of the team’s research here, in Animal Cognition.
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LiveScience has a dramatic development in a field I don’t think I’d ever considered: Linguistic archaeology. A historical linguist from UC Berkeley has used a language model to determine that the earliest Americans didn’t come in a steady stream from Siberia, but probably arrived in four distinct waves of settlers:
…Johanna Nichols, a historical linguist at the University of California Berkeley, analyzed structural features of 60 languages from across the U.S. and Canada, which revealed they come from two main language groups that entered North America in at least four distinct waves.
Nichols surveyed 16 features of these languages, including syllable structure, the gender of nouns and the way consonants are produced when speaking. The languages split into two main groups: an early one where the first-person pronoun has an “n” sound while the second-person pronoun has an “m” sound, and a later group with languages that incorporate a sentence’s worth of information in just one word.
Further linguistic analysis indicated that people arrived in the Americas in four distinct waves. The first occurred around 24,000 years ago, when massive glaciers covered much of North America. Nichols found no unique language features, suggesting a diverse set of people and languages entered North America at that time. A second wave of people around 15,000 years ago brought languages with n-m pronouns, while a third wave 1,000 years later brought languages with simple consonants. A fourth wave around 12,000 years ago then brought complex consonants.
Until relatively recently, researchers assumed that Indigenous people first arrived in the Americas via a land bridge from Siberia around 13,000 years ago. But Nichols’ previous study of the linguistic data convinced her that this was not enough time for the nearly 200 Indigenous American languages to develop: Instead, she proposed people first arrived closer to 35,000 years ago.
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You can read more of Nichols’ research here, in the Journal of Biological Anthropology.
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This is an illustration — two illustrations, actually — from A New Astronomy for Beginners by David P. Todd. It’s actually an illustration of a demonstration, with a nattily dressed young man holding a disk, representing the Moon’s orbit around the Earth, at arm’s length, with his eye representing the Sun. Sort of complicated on paper. Seems like it makes more sense in person, maybe?
But at least we can picture it, along with some primo 19th-century men’s fashion.
It’s just one of the marvelous illustrations in this book, which you can peruse here, on Archive.org.
The post Science Art: Sun not in Plane of Moon’s Orbit – Eclipses Impossible, etc., 1898 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
AP reports on a robot F16 that has just taken Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall out for a joyride courtesy of an AI fighter pilot:
Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning for an AI-enabled fleet of more than 1,000 unmanned warplanes, the first of them operating by 2028.
It was fitting that the dogfight took place at Edwards Air Force Base, a vast desert facility where Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound and the military has incubated its most secret aerospace advances. Inside classified simulators and buildings with layers of shielding against surveillance, a new test-pilot generation is training AI agents to fly in war. Kendall traveled here to see AI fly in real time and make a public statement of confidence in its future role in air combat.
“It’s a security risk not to have it. At this point, we have to have it,” Kendall said in an interview with The Associated Press after he landed.
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The AI-controlled F-16, called Vista, flew Kendall in lightning-fast maneuvers at more than 550 miles an hour that put pressure on his body at five times the force of gravity. It went nearly nose to nose with a second human-piloted F-16 as both aircraft raced within 1,000 feet of each other, twisting and looping to try force their opponent into vulnerable positions.
At the end of the hourlong flight, Kendall climbed out of the cockpit grinning. He said he’d seen enough during his flight that he’d trust this still-learning AI with the ability to decide whether or not to launch weapons in war.
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Vista flew its first AI-controlled dogfight in September 2023, and there have only been about two dozen similar flights since. But the programs are learning so quickly from each engagement that some AI versions getting tested on Vista are already beating human pilots in air-to-air combat.
The pilots at this base are aware that in some respects, they may be training their replacements or shaping a future construct where fewer of them are needed.
But they also say they would not want to be up in the sky against an adversary that has AI-controlled aircraft if the U.S. does not also have its own fleet.
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404 Media report on an Australian team that has created cold espresso and a cold-brew coffee that takes a mere three minutes (instead of 12-to-24 hours) to make, thanks to a boost from ultrasonic technology to create “acoustic cavitation,” or tiny bubbles that can burst through the cell-walls of plant material like ground-up coffee beans:
The researchers at the University of New South Wales Sydney claim that their ultrasonic extraction held up to a “sensory analysis” and blind taste tests by trained experts: “A sensory analysis was conducted to evaluate appearance, aroma, texture, flavor, and aftertaste, which demonstrated that coffee brewed for 1 and 3 min in the sonoreactor exhibited almost undistinguishable properties compared to a standard 24 hour [cold] brewing without ultrasound,” they write in a paper about the method in the journal Ultrasonics Sonochemistry.
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You can read more of the cold-coffee techniques here, in Ultrasonics Sonochemistry.
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He thought so! LiveScience recently reported on Alejandro Otero, who in 2021 was pretty sure the weird chunk of stuff that crashed through his roof in Naples, Florida, was a battery pack from the International Space Station. Well, he concluded correctly:
Otero said he thought the offending object was part of a cargo pallet packed with 5,800 pounds (2,630 kilograms) of aging batteries jettisoned from the ISS in March 2021.
And he was right, according to a new NASA analysis of the object, which was performed at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.
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The cylindrical piece of space junk is made of a metallic alloy called Inconel, they added. It weighs 1.6 pounds (0.7 kg) and measures 4 inches (10 centimeters) high by 1.6 inches (4 cm) wide.
The nickel-hydride batteries were dumped after new lithium-ion versions were delivered to the ISS for a power-supply upgrade. The pallet and the batteries were expected to burn up completely in Earth’s atmosphere, NASA officials said in today’s update — yet that didn’t happen, and the agency wants to learn why.
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According to the European Space Agency, Earth orbit hosts about 36,500 pieces of space junk at least 4 inches (10 cm) wide, and a whopping 130 million objects at least 1 millimeter in diameter. Even these tiny shards pose a danger to satellites and other orbiting assets, given the tremendous speeds at which they travel. For example, at 250 miles (400 kilometers) up — the average altitude of the ISS — orbital velocity is about 17,000 mph (27,400 kph).
And, as has been demonstrated, some of this junk comes crashing back to Earth from time to time. For instance, the 23-ton core stages of China’s powerful Long March 5B rocket routinely fall in an uncontrolled fashion a week or so after their launches, to the consternation of the international space community.
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Off we go….
Here’s some cutting-edge technology from 1957 which, frankly, is still pretty impressive. The Bell Labs X-2 is a rocket-plane that flew humans up into the upper atmosphere before we were taking rockets into space. It broke the speed barrier and then more than doubled its speed. From the photo description in the NASA on The Commons gallery:
Lt. Col. Frank “Pete” Everest piloted 674 on its first unpowered flight on August 5 1954. He made the first rocket-powered flight on November 18, 1955. Everest made the first supersonic X-2 flight in 674 on April 25, 1956, achieving a speed of Mach 1.40. In July, he reached Mach 2.87, just short of the Mach 3 goal.
The X-2 was the successor to the X-1A famously flown by Chuck Yeager. But this vehicle was subject to forces that pilots were only just beginning to understand. Up beyond the sound barrier, “thermal resistance” caused by heat from friction with the air was just one of the weird factors that made conventional maneuvers (and controls) not work the way they always had in other aircraft.
The second half of the Wikipedia article on the X-2 is full of some pretty harrowing crash photos and stories of “very severe stability problems” … like, what happens when a pilot attempts to do a banking turn at three times the speed of sound.
Pilot Mel Apt did not walk away from that one, and the plane — which was already behind schedule in performance tests and data gathering — was discontinued, and was ultimately replaced three years later by the North American X-15.
But for a while, it was the fastest thing humans had ever made and ridden in.
The post Science Art: X-2 After Drop from B-50 Mothership, 1957. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The Guardian reports on a coalition of universities who have found hope for the low-lying, storm-prone (and tourism-dependent) Sunshine State, if climate resilience plans are put in place now:
One key element, an 18m-acre swath of protected land called the Florida wildlife corridor, is already mostly in place, and will spearhead Florida’s climate resilience if properly managed and allowed to evolve, the researchers believe.
“We are very blessed in Florida to have the opportunity to have a land conservation project as ambitious as the wildlife corridor, and right now a little over 30% of the state is permanently conserved,” said Joshua Daskin, conservation director of Archbold Biological Station, an ecological research non-profit that compiled the report in collaboration with five universities from Tallahassee to south Florida.
“Without decades of work by conservationists, by state agencies, by non-profits, by landowners, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to reap the benefits of resilience to fires, storms, floods and heat.”
The study makes a number of recommendations for the corridor, a private-public partnership finally approved by the Florida legislature in 2021 after years of planning, with a vision for a single, unrestricted wildlife passageway running hundreds of miles from the southern Everglades to the Alabama border.
Rich in flora and fauna, and home to almost all of Florida’s land-based imperiled species such as panthers, black bears and bald eagles, the corridor was designed to be primarily a conservation project, with little focus on climate resilience.
Yet the report notes that two-thirds of Florida’s floodplains, covering about 10m acres, are contained within the corridor, bringing potentially “billions of dollars’ worth of flood hazard protection” if they remain undeveloped.
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Success, the report concedes, will “require political will”, something not shown earlier this week when the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission agreed to surrender protections of the ecologically sensitive Split Oak Forest east of Orlando and allow a toll road to be built right through it.
Daskin, however, is confident there remains a common desire for conservation, noting that the corridor was established by the unanimous consent of a Florida legislature mindful of its future benefits.
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Live Science reports on a first-of-its-kind archaeological discovery in the graveyard of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, where a woman buried a century ago was found to have a perfectly preserved “porcelain gallbladder” as the result of a medical condition:
In a study published March 30 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, researchers detailed the rare discovery of a gallbladder that had been preserved for a century. While organs normally decay completely over time after a person’s death, in this case, the gallbladder had calcified, a process in which calcium builds up in the muscular wall of the organ, causing it to harden.
The preserved organ, often called a porcelain gallbladder in the medical literature, was associated with the skeleton of a middle-aged woman who was buried in the asylum’s cemetery. Founded in 1855 and closed in 1935, the asylum treated tens of thousands of patients, around 7,000 of whom died while in residence and were buried in simple pine boxes with wooden markers.
The cemetery was rediscovered in 2012 during development of the land, which is now on the grounds of the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
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Measuring 1.8 inches (46 millimeters) long and 1.1 inches (28.5 mm) wide, the object in the burial weighed just over half an ounce (16.1 grams). It was identified as a porcelain gallbladder through X-rays and micro-CT scans carried out at UMMC because, underneath the irregular surface of the calcified rim, the research team found a single large gallstone.
“It’s funny that the object was initially an exciting mystery for the bioarchaeologists,” [UMMC bioarchaeologist Jennifer] Mack said, “whereas it was identified almost at a glance by the retired surgeon on our project.”
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BBC reports on Raku, a Sumatran orangutan, who has become the first non-human animal observed creating medicine – intentionally mashing up plants to create a paste to smear on an open wound on his face:
A research team in the Gunung Leuser National Park, Indonesia spotted Rakus with a large wound on his cheek in June 2022.
They believe he was injured fighting with rival male orangutans because he made loud cries called “long calls” in the days before they saw the wound.
The team then saw Rakus chewing the stem and leaves of plant called Akar Kuning – an anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial plant that is also used locally to treat malaria and diabetes.
He repeatedly applied the liquid onto his cheek for seven minutes. Rakus then smeared the chewed leaves onto his wound until it was fully covered. He continued to feed on the plant for over 30 minutes.
The paste and leaves then appear to have done their magic – the researchers saw no sign of infection and the wound closed within five days.
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Scientists were already aware that great apes used medicine to try to heal themselves.
In the 1960s biologist Jane Goodall saw whole leaves in the faeces of chimpanzees, and others documented seeing great apes swallowing leaves with medicinal properties.
But they had never seen a wild animal applying a plant to a wound.
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You can read more of the medical research here, in Scientific Reports.
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They do look a little like meerkats, these big African satellite dishes. This is a photo from the Square Kilometre Array Organisation (SKAO) / South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO).
The KAT in the name comes from the Karoo Array Telescope – the Karoo being a desert in South Africa (and I believe the driest desert in the world). Meerkats live thereabouts, more or less, and these radio dishes happen to be inside Meerkat National Park. But the park appears to be named for the Square Kilometre Array’s MeerKAT, PAPER and HERA telescopes.
The SKA (Square Kilometre Array) is a joint Australian and South African project, because there’s less radio interference south of the equator and they good views of the Milky Way. Per Wikipedia: “It will operate over a wide range of frequencies and its size will make it 50 times more sensitive than any other radio instrument. If built as planned, it should be able to survey the sky more than ten thousand times faster than before.”
The MeerKAT (with PAPER and HERA) is considered a precursor to the full-on SKA, but it looks plenty developed all on its own.
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Maybe Houston Chronicle just likes ragging on Elon Musk, maybe it’s a local paper commenting on a locally important industry – either way, they’ve got a story on how SpaceX has got a leadership position no business wants. The company is head and shoulders above its private and government-run competitors in the rate of employees getting hurt on the job:
Using data released by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Reuters found that injuries at SpaceX’s facilities in Brownsville in 2023 reached 5.9 injuries per 100 workers. The space industry average is 0.8.
Above-average injury rates were also seen at other Texas sites last year. In Bastrop, the injury rate was 2.5. In 2023, the injury rate at the company’s McGregor facility was 1.7, down from 2.7 the year before. The Central Texas site is where employee Lonnie LeBlanc died from head trauma in 2014 while transporting a load at the facility.
The only location that saw a higher injury rate than Brownsville’s was a rocket recovery team on the West Coast with injuries more than nine times the industry rate.
In a previous Reuters investigation, current and former SpaceX employees described staff trying to meet CEO Elon Musk’s tight deadlines for space missions and neglecting safety procedures in the process.
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SONG: “I Am Your Library”. (available as .ogg here)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on Science Daily, 25 Mar 2024, “New archive of ancient human brains challenges misconceptions of soft tissue preservation,” as used in the post ‘An archive of ancient human brains’.
ABSTRACT: I didn’t think I’d have a song in time. But then I sort of realized I could … I could just put the laptop on my chest, lie back, and record that way, late at night in the sleeping house. So I did.
This song, production- and arrangement-wise, owes more to Tom Petty than might be immediately obvious. I was listening to a video about him on YouTube a few weeks ago, and they noted that he believed in the precept “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus,” and wrote at least one song, maybe more, that actually put the chorus in front of the verses, the first thing you hear in the song. So that was sort of lurking in the back of my mind.
And then, when I got to writing a lyric down, the chorus had a lot of “I”s in it, which sort of made me think, OK, that’d make for a fun backing vocal, which made me think of that kind of eternal backing vocal in the choruses of “American Girl,” so I kinda thought “Huh, that’s a good trick.”
I really thought tonight I’d only do that backing vocal layered and layered and leave the main vocals for tomorrow and mope my way into another penitential cover, but no. I didn’t do that.
The guitar here is one tuned down to an open-G tuning, which is what I wrote the chord progression in. I’m actually not even sure what key the song is in, since it starts with a chord that… well, it’s shaped like a barred-C but shifted up a string, and with the E and A strings tuned down two steps… I don’t know, I could figure it out if I had to. The lowest note is an F, anyway, and the second chord is all open, so it must be a G.
There’s one guitar track and two bass tracks, and a little synth track at the final chorus/outro, and a SoundFont drum. And then something like four or five pairs of vocal tracks, some with echoes and reverbs, and some panned hard left and right.
As far as the subject of the song, there was a lot of interesting stuff about brains over the last five weeks, and I halfway thought this would be about the virus that made brains happen. But no, it’s about libraries and memory. (Have I been using the word “library” a lot in songs lately? It feels like maybe I have. I wonder why.)
I think there’s a subtext in the lyrics here that maybe if a brain is recoverable, it’s somehow reconstructable, which is not what anyone is saying in the actual research. They’re just into the fact that soft tissue (and I guess all the lovely DNA inside it) survives more often than you’d think and is probably worth looking out for. This is more of an ode or apostrophe to a long-preserved brain, lying inside the hollow of a prehistoric person’s cranium.
Hello, old neighbor. Nice to see you’re still around… at least a little bit.
LYRICS:
I am your library
I am an archive of health and disease
And I won’t fade till you read me
Over centuries.V1.
Muscle and blood are here and then gone
The thing that lasts is within the bone
The metal that’s buried beside us
Remembers what matters inside usCH
V2.
Preserved like a century egg
Molecules fused in the space in my head
I remember you dreaming the day I was dead
The grey is still sleeping, still keeping me.CH/SOLO
OUT:
Your library
Over centuries
Still believe
I’m your library
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NASA reports that the interstellar probe, which stopped sending back updates last November, is once again letting HQ know how its onboard systems are doing. Next step is getting it to send back scientific data as it keeps traveling farther than any other human-made object:
The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.
So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.
The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.
During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.
Voyager 2 continues to operate normally. Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history.
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I think this is a brain, but it might just be a maze. This is a small icon that appears on the lower left corner of the back cover of The Mind, from the LIFE Science Library published by Time-Life Books in 1965.
The book came up in conversation recently, and for people of a certain age was one of those things you’d find in a middle-school library that would fill you with something a lot like the Kantian sublime, pre-teen edition. There was a spread of optical illusions, articles on hypnosis and brainwashing, self portraits test subjects drew while on LSD, and a selection of the gradually more and more geometric and terrifying cats painted by Louis Wain as he gradually became psychotic. For a generation of us, this was the first time we’d heard of magic mushrooms and the division between left and right hemispheres of the brain. The idea that perception was something that could be experimented with and altered – that perceiving was really a thing at all, and not just, I don’t know, existing in a universe where light was bright and heat was hot and teachers’ voices got louder the more you stared off into space wondering about how wondering happened.
From today’s perspective, it’s also interesting to look at this very stylized bit of 1960s graphic design and see it as an ancestor of computer icons. The symbol reduced to geometry.
This image came from a book in my own collection; once I spotted a copy of this for sale years and years ago, I had to have it.
The post Science Art: Back Cover Detail, THE MIND, 1965. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science Daily has news of a child — child! — of 11 who discovered the fossilized bones, during a seaside walk in England, of a very big sea creature. It probably measured about 25 meters from snout to tail, or about 82 feet. That’s two school buses end to end. It might just have been the largest marine reptile ever to swim the primordial seas, and potentially even the largest animal with a skeleton full stop:
Father and daughter, Justin and Ruby Reynolds from Braunton, Devon, found the first pieces of the second jawbone to be found in May 2020, while searching for fossils on the beach at Blue Anchor, Somerset. Ruby, then aged 11, found the first chunk of giant bone before searching together for additional pieces.
Realising they had discovered something significant, they contacted leading ichthyosaur expert, Dr Dean Lomax, a palaeontologist at The University of Manchester. Dr Lomax, who is also a 1851 Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, contacted Paul de la Salle, a seasoned fossil collector who had found the first giant jawbone in May 2016 from further along the coast at Lilstock.
Dr Dean Lomax said: “I was amazed by the find. In 2018, my team (including Paul de la Salle) studied and described Paul’s giant jawbone and we had hoped that one day another would come to light. This new specimen is more complete, better preserved, and shows that we now have two of these giant bones — called a surangular — that have a unique shape and structure. I became very excited, to say the least.”
Justin and Ruby, together with Paul, Dr Lomax, and several family members, visited the site to hunt for more pieces of this rare discovery. Over time, the team found additional pieces of the same jaw which fit together perfectly, like a multimillion-year-old jigsaw.
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The team have called the new genus and species Ichthyotitan severnensis, meaning “giant fish lizard of the Severn.”
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Further examinations of the bones’ internal structures have been carried out by master’s student, Marcello Perillo, from the University of Bonn, Germany. His work confirmed the ichthyosaur origin of the bones and revealed that the animal was still growing at the time of death.
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You can read more of the giant ichthyosaur research here, in PLOS One. and photos of the discoverers (with paintings of the big beast) here, at CNN.
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Bolts magazine follows up on studies showing a link between health insurance and crime rates (that is, the less people are insured, the higher crime rates tend to go) by focusing specifically on Medicaid, the U.S. government plan intended to cover low-income recipients’ medical costs. They found that states which make it harder to qualify for Medicaid saw a jump in crime – and states that sink a lot of money into punishing criminals would actually save a lot by funding healthcare instead:
To study these relationships, [George Mason University researcher Connie] Maclean and her coauthors examined crime rates in Tennessee before and after that state disenrolled some 200,000 people from Medicaid, with little warning, in 2005. That was and still remains one of the most sweeping state-level Medicaid drop-offs in U.S. history.
By 2007, the study finds, the crime rate in the median Tennessee county had increased by almost 17 percent, with large increases observed in both violent and non-violent crime; the study attributes this to the disenrollment through a series of causal analyses. “Losing Medicaid induced changes in economic standing, housing stability, healthcare use, and health, all of which are documented to be determinants of crime,” the authors write.
It stands to reason, Maclean said, that crimes inspired by desperation or behavioral health crises—or both—became more common in Tennessee post-2005, as poverty increased and people became more likely to delay needed health care. This was especially devastating for people who might have benefitted from mental health care or treatment for substance abuse disorder, the study found.
These patterns now risk repeating themselves at a large scale. Just last year, every state in the U.S. experienced a major contraction in Medicaid coverage, as the federal government ended an emergency pandemic policy that had kept millions enrolled in the program.
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There’s plenty of existing research on how people become less likely to commit crimes after gaining health coverage. Your study notes there’s been much less research into what happens when people lose coverage. Why did you find that important to examine?Over time, generally, Medicaid policy has led to expansion in coverage. But we’re now starting to see increasingly more talk and action about policy that could curtail it.
Some of these losses may come as more of a surprise. (Editor’s note: People who lose Medicaid coverage due to a change in rules, or a lapse in documentation, may not find out in a timely manner or with advance warning.) If you’re gaining Medicaid, it may be that you’ve taken steps—you’ve applied for Medicaid and you’ve shown documentation, so it’s not much of a surprise. If you just suddenly lose Medicaid, that can be very destructive in and of itself, and also for the inability to plan for what you’re going to do next.
Your study found that crime increased generally in Tennessee among those who’d lost health coverage, and that the increase in nonviolent crime was particularly clear. What does that tell us?
I think our findings pointed toward a financial resources story. That is, we found stronger, more stable effects for non-violent crime, which tend to be property crimes. The property crimes we looked at are burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson. The violent crimes we looked at were murder, manslaughter, rape, sexual assault, robbery, and assault. When we broke these crimes out, we see that our findings for non-violent crime were really driven by theft.
That, to me, suggested that some of these crimes we see might be financially motivated, which might be due to the loss of resources that one experiences when Medicaid is removed, or it could be increased need to finance medical bills.
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Today, many politicians who tend to oppose expanding social services, including government-covered health benefits, also tend to support “tough on crime” policies. Why do health access and public safety so often appear in conflict?
It does seem to me that there’s a strong correlation between policymakers and politicians being tough on crime while also taking a conservative view of the role of government in the provision of health insurance. People can certainly have different views about that role of government, but I sometimes suspect there is less [of] an understanding of the potential linkages between the two.
When you give people access to Medicaid, they generally have better financial outcomes.
You see increases in poverty when you curtail Medicaid, as was done in Tennessee. The idea is that health insurance, in addition to providing access to care, also protects people against the risk and cost of unexpected health care expenditures. You see increases in evictions as well. You can think of a whole range of outcomes that could be improved with the provision of health insurance. It seems like there are other means through which we could reduce reliance on the criminal justice system.
Just to say, alright, let’s hire some new police officers or let’s buy some new infrastructure for the police to use—it’s there, it can be seen, you can show your constituents what you’ve done. There’s something about being able to show your constituents that you did something.
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You can read more of the public health study here, at the National Bureau of Economics (pdf).
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Scientific American has new research that finds a connection between one subspecies of a bacterium commonly found in our mouths, Fusobacterium nucleatum, and the growth colon cancer, an ailment that’s currently on the rise:
F. nucleatum, associated with dental plaque and gingivitis, occurs naturally in the mouth microbiome. A decade ago scientists discovered that the bacterium was also found in colon cancer more often than in normal colon tissue. “This was particularly interesting because this microbe in noncancerous individuals is usually not present below the [mouth],” says the new study’s co-senior author Susan Bullman, a biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.
To further explore the microbe’s relationship to colon cancer, Bullman and her colleagues conducted extensive sequencing on F. nucleatum within colon cancer tumors and looked at how the microbe influenced the intestinal environment. The team first analyzed the genomes of F. nucleatum found in colon tumors in order to compare them with those found in the mouth. It collected colon tumors from approximately 100 people and then broke up the tumors and placed them on agar plates to allow the microbes present to grow.
After isolating the F. nucleatum from these cultures, the scientists performed a process called long-read sequencing to get a comprehensive look at the bacterium’s genome.
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This revealed two main clades within a subspecies (called F. nucleatum animalis) that were distinguished by differences in DNA bases and patterns of encoded proteins. Bacteria in the two clades also had distinct appearances under the microscope: specimens in the second clade were longer and thinner than those from the first.
F. nucleatum animalis from the colon tumors fell overwhelmingly into the second clade. This clade’s genomes seemed to code for characteristics that would help the bacteria survive the perilous journey from the mouth to the intestine—such as the ability to gain nutrients in hostile environments (such as an inflamed gastrointestinal tract) or to better invade cells.
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They gave one group of mice a single oral dose of F. nucleatum animalis from clade 1 and another a dose of clade 2 and then counted the number of tumors that formed. Mice in the clade 2 group developed a significantly higher number of large intestinal tumors in comparison with those given clade 1 bacteria or a nonbacterial control.
When the scientists measured metabolic molecules inside tumors from the mice with clade 2 bacteria, they found more molecules associated with cellular damage from oxidative stress, cancer cell division and inflammation than mice in the control and clade 1 bacteria groups. “This supports the idea that clade 2 bacteria are contributing to this proinflammatory, pro-oncogenic environment,” [study lead auther Martha] Zepeda-Rivera says.
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You can read more of the bacterial cancer research here, in Nature.
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This had to have been meant slightly tongue-in-cheek at the time… hadn’t it? Bespectacled man, meet Vitruvian lady.
The cartoon couple are from an ad in the October 1964 issue of Informational Display, based on drawings by industrial designer Walter Koch. These show how human bodies of both types should determine the size and shape of vertical informational displays, with the helpful description:
The drawings show one of the basic limitations imposed on vertical display areas by physical size of people. Studies show that the effective viewing area of most people is only about 30% of the total of most floor-standing vertical displays. We suspect this data is of interest to readers outside the vending machine industry since human engineering deals in one universal factor: people.
It’s one small corner of a full-page ad for Industrial Electronic Engineers, Inc. I like the way it’s very much of its era, though. There are a lot of diagrams in this one ad. It seems like IEE really cared a lot about rear-projection displays, both how they’re seen and how much information they can convey. And this in age before CGI, when we’re basically shining lights through pieces of plastic with letters and pictures on them.
Can you see this? Can you tell what it means?
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NPR has a piece on a USF anthro prof’s idea to make her sort of depressing research more palatable in a way of which this guild heartily approves – by turning data on public reactions to algae blooms (and resulting fish kills and coral death) into music:
The paper, co-authored with three other professors, had to do with the impact of algae blooms and depletion of coral reefs on the region’s tourism industry. The work was glum, says Heather O’Leary. It involved tracking visitors’ reactions to the environment on social media.
“Part of the data for months was just reading tweets: dead fish, dead fish, dead fish,” she recalls. “We were really thinking every day about the Gulf of Mexico and the waters that surround us, especially in St. Pete as a peninsula, about those risks, and the risks to our coastal economy.”
But attending concerts at USF’s School of Music inspired and gladdened her. So she reached out to its director of bands, Matthew McCutchen.
“I’m studying climate change and what’s going down at the coral reefs,” he remembers her saying. “And I’ve got all this data and I’d like to know if there’s any way that we can turn it into music.”
Indeed there was. Composition professor Paul Reller worked with students to map pitch, rhythm and duration to the data. It came alive, O’Leary says, in ways it simply does not on a spreadsheet.
“My students were really excited to start thinking about how the other students, the music students, heard patterns that we did not see in some of the repetitions,” she says. With music, she added, “you can start to sense with different parts of your mind and your body that there are patterns happening and that they’re important.”
In this case, she says, the patterns revealed the economic impact of pollution on coastal Florida communities.
…
ow, a group of faculty and students are working to bring together music and the environment in related projects, such as an augmented reality experience based on this composition. The group, which calls itself CRESCENDO (Communicating Research Expansively through Sonification and Community-Engaged Neuroaesthetic Data-literacy Opportunities) wants to spread awareness about the algae blooms, data literacy and democratizing science.
—
You can read (and listen to) more of CRESCENDO’s work here, at USF St. Petersburg’s site.
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NPR greets springtime with flowers that show their brightest color (a fluorescent green) after the sun goes down, thanks to genetic modification that makes these petunias glow in the dark like jellyfish or mushrooms:
The petunia with bright, white flowers looks like something you’d buy in spring at a garden nursery. But, when the lights are turned out, the petals slowly start lighting up with a greenish, white glow. The plant is always glowing, it’s just our eyes that need to adjust to see the light. The newest buds are the brightest and punctuate the glowing flowers.
“That’s why we call it the Firefly Petunia. Because these bright buds resemble fireflies sitting on top of the plant.,” [pharmaceutical researcher Keith] Wood explained.
And despite its name, this plant doesn’t have any firefly genes, rather four genes from a bioluminescent mushroom and a fifth from a fungi.
“The first gene takes a metabolite and turns it into an intermediate,” Wood explained, “The second gene takes the intermediate and turns it into the actual fuel for the bioluminescence. The third gene is what actually makes the light. And then the last gene takes the product from the light reaction and recycles it back to the starting point.”
…
It took about 10 years to go from development to approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture last fall.
The plants went on sale online in February and the first ones were shipped out this week.
—
You can get the Firefly Petunias here, at light.bio.
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BBC is reporting on the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission, which touched down on the asteroid Dimorphos (which orbits larger asteroid Didymos) earlier this [...]
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This is another way of doing a Cosmic Zoom, comparing the sizes of astronomical things. If you’ve wondered how many Earths could fit inside Arcturus, [...]
The post Science Art: Comparison of planets and stars (2017 update), by Dave Jarvis and Jcpag2012. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science News brings home the bacon for humans needing kidney transplants, with news of a Chinese research team that has successfully grown a “humanized” kidney [...]
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Science News reports on a new method of exploring what happens to our brains when we sleep – by using self-trained lucid dreamers as guides [...]
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I thought this was a nautilus, but it might be a moon snail. It’s a mollusk of some kind, with a gracefully curved shell and [...]
The post Science Art: From Notes on Cephalopods from Northern California, 1967. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The British Antarctic Survey reports on one consequence of thinning sea ice after one of the warmest winters on record. Out of five known breeding [...]
The post A lot fewer emperor penguins next year. “Catastrophic breeding failure.” first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science News reports on a system for “upcycling” plastic trash by converting the non-recycled waste destined for the landfill into surfactants, the chemicals that make [...]
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A satellite that is also a balloon, as inflated at NASA’s Langley Research Center in 1958. I found this image gleaming in the NASA Image [...]
The post Science Art: ECHO 100′ Satellite Inflation Tests, 1958. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
SONG: “FAQs”. (available as .wav here) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on Popular Science, 14 Aug 2023, “School district uses ChatGPT to help remove library books,” [...]
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This is the cover of the 1972 March/April issue of Information Display, Vol 9 No 2, from archive.org. Stories inside include ways to project different-sized [...]
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The Verge has one of the more interesting pieces (to me) about AI that I’ve seen lately, reporting less on “what do these content-making machines [...]
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I was looking these particular dinosaurs up because I recently came across a news story about the world’s largest dinosaur skull being displayed somewhere new [...]
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SONG: “Content Feeds”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: The Markup, 1 May 2023, “The Very Hungry Algorithm: Bedtime with ChatGPT,” as used in the post “How do [...]
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Science Alert reports on research that finds that boosting levels of the amino acid taurine – present in meat, fish, and dairy, and one that [...]
The post Taurine, not telomeres, could be the key to a longer lifespan. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
BBC reports on a simple pharmaceutical study at the University of Chicago – about the mechanism by which MDMA increased “the pleasantness of social touch” [...]
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This is a kind of spinosaur-ancestor dubbed “the hell heron” by some dramatically minded scientists. C. inferodios was identified in 2021 from some fossil fragments [...]
The post Science Art: Ceratosuchops inferodios life reconstruction, by PaleoGeekSquared first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Scientific Frontline looks at a new way to create rechargeable lithium-ion batteries – the power behind electric cars, iPhones, and most of the rest of [...]
The post Making a pain-free battery: “Nickel doesn’t have child-labor issues.” first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Reuters reports on a hot, hot summer that is pulling more electricity from the Texas state grid than ever before: AccuWeather forecast high temperatures in [...]
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As The Markup points out, this is no longer a hypothetical question, but an actual parenting challenge now: I made a note to ask his [...]
The post How do you feel when the AI starts reading your young children their bedtime stories? first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is an image made by combining visible light (from the Hubble and ESO orbiting telescopes) and invisible infrared and X-ray imagery (from the Webb, [...]
The post Science Art: NASA’s Chandra, Webb Combine for Arresting Views (Pillars of Creation), 2023 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Smithsonian Magazine covers the discovery of a new species of dinosaur, Iani smithi, that’s part of a little-known group of dinosaurs that were around just [...]
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This is a plant bug. That’s the technical term – it’s part of that group of insects called “true bugs,” the family Miridae; plant bugs are the subfamily Phylinae. This one, Chimairacoris lakshimae, was only identified in 2015, living inside galls – that is, little rounded warts or swellings – on the leaf margins of banyan trees in Bangalore, India. A different bug creates the galls, probably to lay eggs, and then these guys, Chimairacoris lakshmiae, move into the spaces after those guys are done.
The bright, royal blue and crimson ones in that photo are the youngsters. Their coloring, I’m guessing, is why the species is named for Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune and illusion, and the divine wife of Vishnu. Lakshmi isn’t often represented in blue, as far as I know, but Vishnu is.
This image is from “A remarkable new genus and new species of the plant bug (Heteroptera, Miridae, Phylinae), inhabiting psyllid leaf margin roll gall on Indian banyan, Ficus benghalensis,” an excited article from 2015 published in American Museum Novitates, which I found at the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The “Novitates” in the journal name is Latin for “new acquaintances” – all the articles are about new forms and new information.
Banyans are old-looking trees, even when they’re new. But these banyan-dwelling bugs look new, and for now, for science, they are new, too.
The post Science Art: Habitus images of Chimairacoris lakshmiae, 2015. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The Berlin Institute of Health has a new metric for intelligence. It’s not speed at solving problems, but the opposite. Higher intelligence means simple problems get solved quickly, but more complicated problems actually take smarter thinkers longer to suss out, because there are more avenues to approach them, and more implications for the intelligent brain to figure out:
Prof. Petra Ritter, head of the Brain Simulation Section at the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH) and at the Department of Neurology and Experimental Neurology of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, simulates the human brain using computers. “We want to understand how the brain’s decision-making processes work and why different people make different decisions,” she says, describing the current project.
…
For the present study, the scientists worked with data from 650 participants of the Human Connectome Project, a U.S. initiative that has been studying neural connections in the human brain since September 2010. “It’s the right excitation-inhibition balance of neurons that influences decision-making and more or less enables a person to solve problems,” explains Ritter. Her team knew how participants fared on extensive cognitive tests and what their IQ scores were.
…
Interestingly, the “slower” brains in both the humans and the models were more synchronized, i.e., in time with one other. This greater synchrony allowed neural circuits in the frontal lobe to hold off on decisions longer than brains that were less well coordinated. The models revealed how reduced temporal coordination results in the information required for decision-making neither being available when needed nor stored in working memory.
…
Participants were asked to identify logical rules in a series of patterns. These rules became increasingly complex with each task and thus more difficult to decipher.In everyday terms, an easy task would consist of quickly braking at a red light, while a hard task would require methodically working out the best route on a road map. In the model, a so-called winner-take-all competition occurs between different neural groups involved in a decision, with the neural groups for which there is stronger evidence prevailing. Yet in the case of complex decisions, such evidence is often not clear enough for quick decision-making, literally forcing the neural groups to jump to conclusions.
“Synchronization, i.e., the formation of functional networks in the brain, alters the properties of working memory and thus the ability to ‘endure’ prolonged periods without a decision,” explains Michael Schirner, lead author of the study and a scientist in Ritter’s lab. “In more challenging tasks, you have to store previous progress in working memory while you explore other solution paths and then integrate these into each other. This gathering of evidence for a particular solution may sometimes takes longer, but it also leads to better results. We were able to use the model to show how excitation-inhibition balance at the global level of the whole brain network affects decision-making and working memory at the more granular level of individual neural groups.”
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Reuters reports that a couple of days ago, the Shenzhou-16, or “Divine Vessel-16,” a spaceship mounted on a Long March-2F rocket, sent a new crew [...]
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If you’re a longtime Scientific American reader, or just a geek of a certain age, you’ll remember Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” puzzle column. (It got taken over by Douglas Hofstadter at one point and became, via anagrams, “Metamagical Themas.”) For the most part, they’re pretty funny … if you’ve got a sense of humor that can find something to giggle about in a Fibonacci sequence, say. ChatGPT, on the other hand, passes IQ tests with flying colors, and can even make up jokes on command. But as the magazine has now discovered, the AI absolutely fails at finding solutions to puzzles made by Gardner or in his quirky, human style:
The third puzzle I tried came from a March 1964 Gardner column on prime numbers: “Using each of the nine digits once, and only once, form a set of three primes that have the lowest possible sum. For example, the set 941, 827 and 653 sum to 2,421, but this is far from minimal.”
A prime is a number that cannot be evenly divided by any number besides 1 and itself. It’s relatively easy to assess small primes, such as 3, 5, 7 and 11. But the larger a number gets, the more difficult it becomes to evaluate whether that number is prime or composite.
Gardner offered a particularly elegant solution the following month: “How can the nine digits be arranged to make three primes with the lowest possible sum? We first try numbers of three digits each. The end digits must be 1, 3, 7 or 9 (this is true of all primes greater than 5). We choose the last three, freeing 1 for a first digit. The lowest possible first digits of each number are 1, 2 and 4, which leaves 5, 6 and 8 for the middle digits. Among the 11 three-digit primes that fit these specifications it is not possible to find three that do not duplicate a digit. We turn next to first digits of 1, 2 and 5. This yields the unique answer 149 + 263 + 587 = 999.”
I was genuinely impressed by the AI’s first answer: 257, 683 and 941—all primes, representing all nine digits and summing to 1,881. This is a respectably low total, even though it’s higher than Gardner’s solution. But unfortunately, when I asked ChatGPT to explain its work, it offered a verbose path to a different solution: the numbers 109, 1,031 and 683—all primes but otherwise a poor fit for the prompt’s other requirements.
Upon being reminded of its initial answer, ChatGPT offered a daft explanation, including a claim that “we cannot use 1, 4, or 6 as the first digit of a three-digit prime, as the resulting numbers would be divisible by 3.” This is patently false: you can recognize numbers divisible by 3 because their digits total a number divisible by 3.
I attempted a pep talk, noting that there was a better solution and suggesting ChatGPT imagine it was a math professor, but it next offered 2, 3 and 749. It then stumbled to 359, 467 and 821—another valid trio of primes, totaling 1,647—better than its first solution but still not as elegant as Gardner’s.
Alas, it was the best I would get. Six more answers were riddled with nonprime numbers and missing or excess digits. And then ChatGPT once again offered 257, 683 and 941.
All these failures reflect what [University of Michigan computer scientist Kentaro] Toyama says is a key property of these sorts of AI systems. “ChatGPT excels at the humanlike,” he says. “It’s mastered the style of being linguistically human, but it doesn’t have explicit programming to do exactly the things that computers have so far been very good at, which is very recipelike, deductive logic.” It isn’t solving the problem, or necessarily even trying to—it’s just showing approximately what a solution might look like.
Throughout the attempts, I was also struck that nothing seemed to fluster the AI. But Toyama says that’s also a reflection of ChatGPT’s creation and the material it was fed. “The vast majority of the data it was trained on, you could imagine the average tone of all of that text—probably that average tone is quite confident,” he says.
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This is an illustration of a public waterwork taken from the pages of A practical treatise on hydraulic and water-supply engineering: relating to the hydrology, hydrodynamics, and practical construction of water works, in North America, a text by John Thomas Fanning (a name that I think British people of a certain age might find very funny) dedicated primarily to “the wholesomeness of domestic water supplies.”
There are some lovely atmospheric engravings in there of things like bridges and pumping stations, but this really seems to capture that middle ground between “landscape painting” and “engineering schematic.” It’s a cyclopean machine for supplying water, is what it is.
The post Science Art: Intercepting Well, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, by R.S. Bross, 1882. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
New York Times rewrites human prehistory with a genetic study that replaces the tree of life – a diagram of human origins with one trunk growing out of one spot in the continent before sending out different branches around the world – with something a lot more like a grass prairie of life. A new genetic study has found evidence of lots of interlinked human roots, showing that the earliest humans arose all over Africa at different times:
The researchers analyzed DNA from a range of African groups, including the Mende, farmers who live in Sierra Leone in West Africa; the Gumuz, a group descended from hunter-gatherers in Ethiopia; the Amhara, a group of Ethiopian farmers; and the Nama, a group of hunter-gatherers in South Africa.
The researchers compared these Africans’ DNA with the genome of a person from Britain. They also looked at the genome of a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal found in Croatia. Previous research had found that modern humans and Neanderthals shared a common ancestor that lived 600,000 years ago. Neanderthals expanded across Europe and Asia, interbred with modern humans coming out of Africa, and then became extinct about 40,000 years ago.
The researchers concluded that as far back as a million years ago, the ancestors of our species existed in two distinct populations. Dr. [Brenna] Henn [a geneticist at the University of California, Davis] and her colleagues call them Stem1 and Stem2.
About 600,000 years ago, a small group of humans budded off from Stem1 and went on to become the Neanderthals. But Stem1 endured in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years after that, as did Stem2.
If Stem1 and Stem2 had been entirely separate from each other, they would have accumulated a large number of distinct mutations in their DNA. Instead, Dr. Henn and her colleagues found that they had remained only moderately different — about as distinct as living Europeans and West Africans are today. The scientists concluded that people had moved between Stem1 and Stem2, pairing off to have children and mixing their DNA.
The model does not reveal where the Stem1 and Stem2 people lived in Africa. And it’s possible that bands of these two groups moved around a lot over the vast stretches of time during which they existed on the continent. About 120,000 years ago, the model indicates, African history changed dramatically.
In southern Africa, people from Stem1 and Stem2 merged, giving rise to a new lineage that would lead to the Nama and other living humans in that region. Elsewhere in Africa, a separate fusion of Stem1 and Stem2 groups took place. That merger produced a lineage that would give rise to living people in West Africa and East Africa, as well as the people who expanded out of Africa.
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You can read more of Henn’s & her colleagues’ research here, in Nature.
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SONG: “In the Years Before A/C”.
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: National Park Service, 1 May 2023, “National Park archeologists find remains of an underwater hospital and cemetery at Dry Tortugas,” as used in the post “Sunken cemetery, hospital found off the Dry Tortugas.”
ABSTRACT:
I cannot write songs like Brian Sella, but then again I don’t think even Brian Sella can write songs like Brian Sella. I wrote this song like me. I started out with an idea – it was going to be, it had to be about the discovery or rediscovery of the Fort Jefferson Post Cemetery. There is, first of all, the image of a diver hovering in the murky blue over rows of coral-encrusted headstones. And then there is the idea that it was lost. The military is kind of known for keeping records, even of things we’d all rather forget. But someone we lost track of this cemetery. That’s pretty strange.
There’s also the idea that this place was swallowed by the sea in the way that some climate observers say all of South Florida will be in a few decades. How much will we forget then? And there is also the thought that this was a place of quarantine, and how much we have forgotten quarantines, and how much the recent covid pandemic is already being forgotten, how much it doesn’t show up in movies or comic books at all. Just a couple of years we can skip past, except for the politics of masking and lockdowns becoming an element of presidential campaigns.
I wrote this song after earworming myself yet again with “Twin-Size Mattress.” It is not meant to sound anything like it, other than I think that two-finger guitar thing that starts that song is a thing I do alot with songs, too. The lyrics, though, do start with a “This is for the…” construction, and then go into something I will do, a first-person response. In this case, I will listen to the ghosts of the sunken island and try to remember them.
Air conditioning was invented in Florida as a medical therapy for yellow fever sufferers. But that was up in the panhandle. At Fort Jefferson, which you can only reach after a fairly long boat ride, the comfort of the patients was not the primary concern. This is where Dr. Mudd, who treated presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth, was imprisoned.
All the guitar parts on this are done with a nylon-string acoustic run through some amplifiers and other effects. The bass is real and the cello is MIDI. The vocals I had to wait for days to record because I just can’t sing that loud with other people in the same house. The drums are made from three tracks and maybe they could be made simpler, but they fit together nicely.
This is for you to remember.
LYRICS:
This is for the quarantines washed over by the sea
And this is for the restless, forgotten dead who no longer need to breathe
I will bring aqualungs and archaeology
Of hospitals and headstones / of rising tides and temperatures
The nurses, saints, and prison guards/ at the yellow fever wards
In the years before A/C.This is for the name John Greer
Carved across a graywacke slab
He built the walls that once stood here
In the military prison hospital lab
Where they’d amputate the gangrene / And evaluate the scab
Make observations of the fever
In the years before A/CBR: Until the sand itself surrendered
And the ocean swallowed everything that stood
We maintain a talent for forgetting
But I’m for getting back what once was gone for good
In the years before A/C (x2)Shadows grow on the horizon (In the years before A/C)
Like rising temperatures and tides (Sweat soaked and saber-scarred)
We write our notes on paper bloated with the brine (Drilled to stand ramrod straight)
We are dissolving over time (In whale bones and winged hussars)
In the years before A/C (x3)
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I have rough drafts of music tracks and written lyrics… but have not yet brought the two together. More soon, along with a penitential cover.
The post No song today. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
These are painted buntings, “1.2.3. males in different states of plumage and 4. female” in the branches of a chickasaw wild plum, as displayed in The birds of America : from drawings made in the United States and their territories, an Audubon book from the middle of the 19th century.
You can find painted buntings in the Caribbean, too, but the book says of Spiza ciris: “About the middle of April, the orange groves of the lower part of Louisiana, and more especially those in the immediate vicinity of the City of New Orleans, are abundantly supplied with this beautiful little Finch.” I like the idea of there being a supply of painted buntings, abundant buntings, a flowing wellspring of little colored birds. Buntings on tap, ultimately, I’m sure, with a central bunting processing facility as part of the burgeoning natural resources made available in these United States.
The post Science Art: Painted Bunting, by John James Audubon, 1841 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
They used to be above water, but the National Park Service reports that divers surveying a sunken island off Garden Key in the Dry Tortugas have found the ruins of a quarantine hospital and graveyard:
In August 2022, park cultural resources staff, assisted by members of the National Park Service’s Submerged Resources Center, the Southeast Archeological Center, and a University of Miami graduate student conducted a survey that led to the findings. Since that time, they have been researching historical records to learn more about the site and the individual.
According to historical research, dozens of people were interred in the Fort Jefferson Post Cemetery, and while most of them were military members serving or imprisoned at the Fort, several were civilians. One of those civilians, John Greer, was employed as a laborer at the fort and died there on Nov. 5, 1861. While the details surrounding his death are unclear, his grave, located during the survey, was prominently marked with a large slab of greywacke, the same material used to construct the first floor of Fort Jefferson. The slab was carved into the shape of a headstone and inscribed with his name and date of death.
“This intriguing find highlights the potential for untold stories in Dry Tortugas National Park, both above and below the water,” said Josh Marano, maritime archeologist for the south Florida national parks and project director for the survey. “Although much of the history of Fort Jefferson focuses on the fortification itself and some of its infamous prisoners, we are actively working to tell the stories of the enslaved people, women, children and civilian laborers.”
While mostly known for its use as a military prison during the American Civil War, the islands and waters surrounding Fort Jefferson were also used for a naval coaling outpost, lighthouse station, naval hospital, quarantine facility, and more generally for safe harbor and military training. As the population of Fort Jefferson swelled with military personnel, prisoners, enslaved people, engineers, support staff, laborers, and their families, the risk of deadly communicable diseases, particularly the mosquito-borne yellow fever, drastically increased. Major outbreaks of disease on the island exacted a heavy toll on those staying there, killing dozens throughout the 1860s and 1870s.
Given the increasing population and lack of space on Garden Key, several of the nearby islands were equipped with small structures for use as quarantine hospitals in the 1860s. While the plainly built facilities on the islands were considered minimal at the time, the transfer of sick and dying patients to these small islands, isolated from the congested Fort Jefferson, likely saved hundreds from a similar fate. Although the use of many of the quarantine hospitals on the surrounding islands ceased after Fort Jefferson was abandoned in 1873, the fort’s future use by the U.S. Marine Hospital Service between 1890 and 1900 again required the development of an isolation hospital on one of the keys.
The find also highlights the impacts of climate change on resources in the Dry Tortugas. While the facilities identified in this survey were originally built on dry land, the dynamic conditions caused many of the islands to move over time.
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The Intercept has found that Dataminr, an “official partner” of Twitter, has been collecting information on abortion protests for federal law enforcement by paying close attention to social media (not just Twitter), using collected posts to determine exactly when and where protests were about to take place, and how large they would be:
Internal emails show that the U.S. Marshals Service received regular alerts from Dataminr, a company that persistently monitors social media for corporate and government clients, about the precise time and location of both ongoing and planned abortion rights demonstrations. The emails show that Dataminr flagged the social media posts of protest organizers, participants, and bystanders, and leveraged Dataminr’s privileged access to the so-called firehose of unrestricted Twitter data to monitor constitutionally protected speech.
“This is a technique that’s ripe for abuse, but it’s not subject to either legislative or judicial oversight,” said Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
…
The Marshals Service’s social media surveillance ingested Roe-related posts nearly as soon as they began to appear. In a typical alert, a Dataminr analyst wrote a caption summarizing the social media data in question, with a link to the original post. On May 3, 2022, the day after Politico’s explosive report on the draft decision, New York-based artist Alex Remnick tweeted about a protest planned later that day in Foley Square, a small park in downtown Manhattan surrounded by local and federal government buildings. Dataminr quickly forwarded their tweet to the Marshals. That evening, Dataminr continued to relay information about the Foley Square rally, now in full swing, with alerts like “protestors block nearby streets near Foley Square,” as well as photos of demonstrators, all gleaned from Twitter.
The following week, Dataminr alerted the Marshals when pro-abortion demonstrators assembled at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Manhattan, coinciding with a regular anti-abortion event held by the church. Between 9:06 and 9:53 that morning, the Marshals received five separate updates on the St. Patrick’s protest, including an estimated number of attendees, again based on the posts of unwitting Twitter users.
In the weeks and months that followed, the emails show that Dataminr tipped off the Marshals to dozens of protests, including many pro-abortion gatherings, from Maine to Wisconsin to Virginia, both before and during the demonstrations. Untold other protests, rallies, and exercises of the First Amendment may have been monitored by the company; in response to The Intercept’s public records request, the Marshals Service identified nearly 5,000 pages of relevant documents but only shared about 800 pages. The U.S. Marshals Service did not respond to a request for comment.
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At other times, Dataminr seemed incapable of distinguishing between slang and violence. Among several tweets about the 2022 Met Gala inexplicably flagged by Dataminr, the Marshals Service was alerted to a fan account of the actor Timothée Chalamet that tweeted, “i would destroy the met gala” — an online colloquialism for something akin to stealing the show.
These alerts show that despite the claims in its marketing materials, Dataminr isn’t necessarily in the business of public safety, but rather bulk, automated scrutiny. Given the generally incendiary, keyed-up nature of social media speech, a vast number of people might potentially be treated with suspicion by police in the total absence of a criminal act.
…
The Marshals Service emails also show the extent to which Dataminr is drinking from far more than the Twitter firehose. The emails indicate that the agency is notified when internet users merely mention certain political figures, namely judges and state attorneys general, on Telegram channels or in the comments of news articles.
The post U.S. Marshals use Twitter partner to scope out abortion-rights protestors. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Security Magazine evaluates (using Imperva’s Bad Bot Report) just how much internet traffic comes from humans, and how much is automatically generated machines. The latest results aren’t looking so good for human communication:
A new report reveals that in 2022, 47.4% of all internet traffic came from bots, a 5.1% increase over the previous year. The same report showed that human traffic, at 52.6%, decreased to its lowest level in eight years.
…
For the fourth consecutive year, the volume of bad bot traffic — malicious automated software applications capable of high-speed abuse, misuse and attacks — grew to 30.2%, a 2.5% increase over 2021.
…
Account takeover (ATO) attacks increased 155% in 2022 and 15% of all login attempts in the past 12 months — across all industries — were classified as account takeover.
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You can read more about the bot research here, in the 2023 Imperva Bad Bot Report.
The post The internet isn’t all bots. It’s about half bots. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Do two sampans make a catamaran? Looks like they did for this Chinese fisherman at the dawn of the last century, angling on the river near Shanghai.
This image came from Pol Korrigan, but I found it in the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank of the University of Washington Library.
If you search for Korrigan’s name you get all sorts of interesting citations; apparently, first-hand accounts of how Chinese people caught fish were of keen academic interest in the 1900s. (If you really want to take a deep dive, check out historical English-language accounts of boats on the Yangzi. Western marine engineers and anthropologists alike were fascinated by stuff that would be an ordinary part of everyday life for someone living on the river.)
The post Science Art: Causerie sur la Peche Fluviale en Chine, 1909. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science News reports on new discoveries shedding light on how prehistoric mammals grew so dang big, evolutionarily, once the dinosaurs cleared out:
Brontotheres were among the first mammals to grow to enormous size — their name comes from Greek words for “thunder” and “beast.”
But while more than half of the nearly 60 known brontothere species tipped the scale at over a metric ton, the first footfalls of these “thunder beasts” weren’t thunderous at all. When the earliest brontotheres appeared in the lush forests of ancient North America and Asia in the early Eocene Epoch, roughly 56 million years ago, they were about the size of a border collie — hardly the stuff of thundering herds.
Within about 16 million years, these modest mammals had grown into a family of giants.
…
[T]he orthodox explanation for this trend, called Cope’s rule, holds that bigger individuals of a single species have a fitness advantage over smaller ones.
…
[University of Alcalá paleobiologist Juan] Cantalapiedra and colleagues tested how well three different evolutionary scenarios — including Cope’s rule — could explain the fossil record of brontotheres. They also used the fossil data to look for links between brontotheres’ size, ecology and the likelihood of going extinct or splitting into new species.
The new analysis suggests that brontothere species usually stayed about the same size until splitting off into new species, which could be either bigger or smaller than their forebears. But because smaller species branched into new species and went extinct more often, brontotheres overall tended to get bigger with time.
Comparing the family tree of brontotheres with a bonsai, Cantalapiedra says that this mechanism is a bit like letting the bonsai tree’s branches split normally while “cutting branches away from one side.” Cope’s rule, on the other hand, would be like using wires to continuously guide the tree in one direction.
—
You can read more of Cantalapiedra’s research here, in Science.
The post Big ol’ brontotheres. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Vice‘s Motherboard covers what is probably the first-ever AI-related arrest, by Chinese officials who accuse a man of using the software to mass-produce fake news:
The man, who is referred to by the surname Hong, used ChatGPT to write an article that claimed that nine people had died in a local train accident on April 25. This article was shared by more than 20 accounts on Baijahao, a blog-style platform run by Baidu, and had over 15,000 clicks by the time authorities’ spotted it.
Police in the Gansu province said that they detained Hong for “using artificial intelligence technology to concoct false and untrue information” and that he “exploited modern technological methods to fabricate fake information, and proceeded to spread it on social media.”
Investigators found that Hong would input elements of viral stories in China from the past few years into ChatGPT to produce different versions of the same fake story and then upload it to his accounts on Baijiahao. Though ChatGPT is not available in China, it can be accessed by using a VPN network. Hong, who operates personal media platforms, told investigators that he said that friends on WeChat had shown him how to make cash from clicks.
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More at the link, and here, at the South China Morning Post.
The post China makes first ChatGPT arrest – for manufacturing fake news. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Two machines, or parts of machines. These are a “Four-Plunger Valve” and “A starter valve” from The engineer’s sketch-book of mechanical movements, devices, appliances, contrivances and details : employed in the design and construction of machinery for every purpose : classified and arranged for reference for the use of engineers, mechanical draughtsmen, managers, mechanics, inventors, patent agents, and all engaged in the mechanical arts, with nearly two thousand illustrations, descriptive notes and memoranda, a charming collection of industrial illustrations which I found on archive.org
The descriptions of what these things do are as follows:
1508. Four plunger valve, used for double power hydraulic lift
cylinders employing a trunk piston. For the low power the pressure water acts on both sides of the piston ; for the double power it acts only on the back of piston, the front side being then open to the exhaust.1509. A starting valve, having two ordinary wing or spindle valves,
either of which is lifted by a double cam or wiper on a spindle passing through a stuffing box on side of valve case. A supply, B cylinder port, C exhaust
The post Science Art: The Engineer’s Sketch-Book, 1508 & 1509. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Ars Technica gets a first glimpse at the language of cephalopods, with the discovery that each octopus (which can change the pattern of its skin at will) has its own unique pattern of stripes that says, “This is me”:
The UC Berkeley researchers studying the lesser Pacific striped octopus (also called the zebra octopus, Octopus chierchiae), found that the animals’ striping patterns seemed to be individualized, similar to our fingerprint patterns. As this small cephalopod has previously been recommended as a new model organism for future studies, having these octopus “fingerprints” could help to solidify O. chierchiae’s place as the poster child for cephalopod research.
…
“Originally, we were just trying to figure out how to breed them in captivity, but we noticed that all of the individuals looked different, and we could easily identify them by their stripe patterns, even if they escaped from their labeled jars into the larger tank,” explained researchers Benjamin Liu, Leo Song, Saumitra Kelkar, and Anna Ramji. “Dr. Roy Caldwell, our mentor and the PI [principal investigator] of the lab, recommended that we investigate whether this could be useful to the study of this species.”
As the team explained: “Dr. Christine Huffard, one of Caldwell’s former graduate students, led a study on the unique body patterns of Wunderpus photogenicus, an Indo-Pacific octopus species. In that paper, the authors showed that the body patterns of adult octopuses remain constant in aquaria and captured photos that appear to show the same individual octopus in the wild many months apart.”
While raising a new clutch of O. chierchiaes, the team found similarities to what Huffard had seen. “We noticed that the baby octopuses we were raising seemed to retain the same stripe patterns from the age that the stripes are first visible—the stripe pattern never shifted, it just grew proportionally to the animal, in every baby octopus we raised and observed,” they added. “We thought this was interesting and worth reporting, and possibly useful for the potential study of this species’ life history and ecology in the wild.”
The UC Berkeley researchers looked at 25 of the 156 octopuses that they had in the laboratory and were able to photograph their striping patterns. While the patterns didn’t appear until day five of the hatchling’s existence, these stripes would stay with them throughout their life. “The dominant stripes are landmarks on the skin,” explained Dr. Z Yan Wang, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Washington. “They are dynamic in the sense that they can get darker or lighter. But as far as we know, the particular stripes themselves are permanent.”
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You can read more of the Berkeley team’s research here, in PLOS One.
The post An octopus will say its name in stripes. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
NPR reports on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory finding a way to keep the plucky space probe going in the outer limits of the solar system for another few years by tapping some reserve power from a safety device:
With Voyager 2’s power supply dwindling, NASA was about to shut down one of its five science instruments onboard the spacecraft. To keep it going, engineers had already sacrificed heaters and other nonessential parts that drained power. But engineers have now found a way to tap reserve power from a safety mechanism that regulates the spacecraft’s voltage.
…
Voyager 2 is 12.3 billion miles away from Earth and counting. Voyager 1, also facing an expiration date as it also loses power, is 14.7 billion miles away.
“The science data that the Voyagers are returning gets more valuable the farther away from the Sun they go, so we are definitely interested in keeping as many science instruments operating as long as possible,” Linda Spilker, the Voyager program’s project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab, said in a statement.
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This image, by Wikimedia Commons user Seslami~commonswiki, shows an implantable electronic device that allows some people to hear, or to hear better.
What we’re seeing here, according to the description there (translated from Swedish by Google), is:
The implant is placed under the skin behind the ear. The electrode wire is placed in the cochlea via the middle ear. 1. The sound processor picks up sound and converts it into a digital signal. 2. The sound processor sends the digitally encoded sound to the implant under the skin via the transmitter coil. 3. The implant receives the signal via its receiver coil, converts the digitally encoded sound, and emits signals via the electrode array. 4. The electrode wire stimulates the nerve fibers of the cochlea which send signals on to the brain which produces the hearing experience.
The post Science Art: Implantatet placeras under huden bakom örat…, 2008. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Eric Topol, on Ground Truths, does a dive into the history of our understanding of what bacteria has to do with cancer – from the old dogma that “cancer tumors are sterile” to research this April that bacteria can be used to elicit a T-cell response that eliminates tumor cells:
Akin to my recent post of discovering a better-than-natural antigen with RSV or SARS-CoV-2 for vaccines, this is about manipulating the genome of a skin bacterium (Staphylococcus epidermidis) to make antigens that elicit a potent T cell response against melanoma. These enhanced T cells were capable of migrating to distant skin melanoma graft sites well beneath and beyond the skin, including the metastases in the lung, with a very strong anti-tumor killing property—without causing inflammation. Notably, this approach did not result in infections, did not require intratumor delivery, and appeared to be synergic (more than additive) with immune checkpoint therapy. … This can be seen as a potential new means of immunotherapy for cancer and more broadly a novel pathway to modulate our immune response.
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You can read more of the T-cell research here, in Science.
The post Engineering bacteria to take on cancer. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is the head of a plesiosaur from Kansas, back in the day when Kansas was an inland sea.
Or a picture from back in the day when the U.S. was still in World War II, and The University of Kansas Science Bulletin was digging up skulls of prehistoric marine creatures and giving them new names. The researcher here was E.S. Riggs, who was enlightened enough to give credit to artist Dorothea Franzen even before getting into the story of how this skull was found and what it means for our understanding of the primordial seas.
Trinocromerum willistoni is better known today as Trinacromerum, and is one of the “best represented polycotylid plesiosaurs in the fossil record.” At the time, this was the first member of this species of Trinacromerum to be identified.
I found the May 15, 1944, issue of The University of Kansas Science Bulletin here, in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
The post Science Art: Skull of Trinocromerum willistoni, Dorothea Franzen,1944. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
SONG: “Secret Dragons”.
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: The Guardian 2 March 2023, “‘Like a little dragon’: new gecko species discovered on rugged Queensland island,” as used in the post “Dragon discovered: A new gecko species found on Australian island”
ABSTRACT:
Phyllurus fimbriatus is a charismatic little guy, and I’m sure absolutely terrifying for any creature less than 6 inches long. So in a way I think this song is like a diorama version of the sweeping hard-prog fantasy metal that provided the backdrop to so many D&D games and Michael Moorcock reading sessions in the 1980s. Lo-fi indie heavily informed by King Crimson and Cultosaurus Erectus-era Blue Oyster Cult. It’s also the result of a fascination I have with riffs, the way a lot of the music I like is built on riffs yet they don’t really come naturally to me. What comes naturally to me is singing barely above a whisper over a mournful, detuned acoustic guitar.
Well, this isn’t that.
I suppose I should say that all the guitars and basses in this are a nylon-string acoustic guitar. There are no keyboard basses, no synth or sample basses. There’s a mellotron in the background, and there’s something like … oh, let me count them … seven tracks of me playing acoustic guitar straight into the laptop mic and then layering different effects on each one. (I even made a solo happen!) Two tracks of MIDI drums. Two vocal tracks. A little bit of Martin Eastwood Audio’s “Duet” VST effect to tie everything together and make it seem a little wider.
I managed to resist the usual urge to overwrite it, helped along by the idea of making the first syllable of each line repeat like an echo, which feels like an 80s hooky pop-prog-metal move to me – although I can’t think of examples of any of those bands doing it. Maybe Ozzy Osbourne?
Anyway, there are dragons in the world, on an island, or rather in less than a square mile of an island, and they’ve being hiding there all along if only we had eyes to see them. This is my salute, oh majestic Scawfell Island leaf-tailed gecko.
LYRICS:
Hide (hide hide hide hide) from invisible eyes
Slide (slide slide slide slide) through the shadows inside
An I-(I I I I)sland for less than a mile
Why (I I I I) would a dragon take flight?Secret dragons
Le-(he he he he)-eaf tails as smooth as a stone
A be-he-eaky face on an island alone
Dee-he-he-he-heep in the boulders of homeSecret dragons
See these secret dragons (x4)
The post SONG: Secret Dragons first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The Guardian introduces us to a new group of cyanobacteria that live in volcanic hot springs in Italy and America’s Rocky Mountains and that feast on carbon dioxide — offering the potential to eat up greenhouse gases in the atmosphere:
The new microbe, a cyanobacterium, was discovered in September in volcanic seeps near the Italian island of Vulcano, where the water contains high levels of CO2. The researchers said the bug turned CO2 into biomass faster than any other known cyanobacteria.
In February the team also explored hot springs in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, US, where levels of CO2 are even higher. Those results are now being analysed. The researchers said all their data on microbes would be published and made available to other scientists as a database that pairs DNA sequences with banked samples of the bacteria.
Dr Braden Tierney, at Weill Cornell Medical College and Harvard Medical School, said: “Our lead collaborator at Harvard isolated this organism that grew astonishingly quickly, compared to other cyanobacteria.”
“The project takes advantage of 3.6bn years of microbial evolution,” he said. “The nice thing about microbes is that they are self-assembling machines. You don’t have that with a lot of the chemical approaches [to CO2 capture].”
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You can read more about the research at The Two Frontiers Project and at Seed Labs, which funded the research.
[via Dr. Drainville]
The post Volcanic bacteria can eat CO2. Lots of it, and fast. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Ars Technica reports on an underwater electronic neurological breakthrough. A group of researchers from Naples, Okinawa, and further afield who have used implanted recording electrodes to monitor three captive but free-moving octopuses, and found some very interesting things about the way they think:
Using recording electrodes, the researchers found a type of brain wave never before seen, along with brain waves that may be similar to some seen in human brains, possibly providing hints about the evolution of intelligence.
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“The enormous difference between octopuses and us stems from over 550 million years of independent evolution,” explained Dr. Michael Kuba, the OIST project leader for the 2023 octopus brainwave study who now works at Naples University. “Our closest common ancestor probably resembled a flatworm.” Yet Kuba and his team are looking at the few similarities to learn more about the evolution of mental abilities.
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“Since the octopuses have eight ultra-flexible arms that can reach any part of their body and have a soft body with no skull to anchor the recording equipment, the challenge of this project was to realize a new equipment that was out of reach,” said Dr. Anna Di Cosmo, a professor at the University of Naples and a researcher involved in the 2023 study.
Reach matters because the animal often removes or plays with the recording equipment. Kuba, Di Cosmo, and others decided to take a new approach by implanting their recording devices inside the octopus’s brain, far out of reach.
…
When the team looked at an octopus’s brain waves for the first time, the results were shocking. As Di Cosmo explained, these signatures were “long-lasting, slow oscillations that have not been described before.” As far as we know, these signatures appear to be unique to the octopuses.
…
Perhaps even more surprising was that several brain wave signatures mimicked those in humans and other mammals. “We now had an opportunity to observe memory formation in the octopus and compare it to mammals, to identify common motifs or distinct idiosyncrasies in brains that have developed completely independently,” explained Dr. Tamar Gutnick, the paper’s first author and a visiting scientist at the University of Naples. This project “gave us the chance to study brains with complex behaviors and cognition that are evolutionarily separated from vertebrates by at least 500 million years,” Kuba added. “This gives us a chance to see general principles on how brains need to work [to be considered intelligent].”
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You can read more about the octopus findings here, in Current Biology.
The post Brain-reading electrodes in a free-ranging octopus. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Scientific Frontline reports on a Diamantinasaurus skeleton that’s chalked up a few Australian firsts after being discovered in Queensland:
Lead researcher and paleontologist Dr Stephen Poropat, from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said ‘Ann’ is the first sauropod dinosaur found in Australia to include most of the skull, and also the first Diamantinasaurus specimen to preserve a back foot.
“I was lucky enough to be involved in this Australian-first discovery. Being able to lead the research on these fossils was a huge privilege. This skull gives us a rare glimpse into the anatomy of this enormous sauropod that lived in northeast Australia almost 100 million years ago,” Dr Poropat said.
“In analyzing the remains, we found similarities between the ‘Ann’ skull and the skull of a titanosaur called Sarmientosaurus musacchioi, which lived in South America at about the same time as Diamantinasaurus lived in Queensland. These include details of the braincase, the bones forming the back end of the skull near the jaw joint, and in the shape of the teeth (which are conical and curved).
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Dr Poropat said the findings support previous theories suggesting that sauropods were using Antarctica as a pathway between South America and Australia between 100 and 95 million years ago.
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You can read more of Poropat’s research in collaboration with the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History here, in Royal Society Open Science.
The post Australia’s first sauropod skull. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is one of four compass roses created by Vincenzo Coronelli, a 17th-century cartographer. I found them all on Wikimedia Commons, which got them from the French Bibliotheque Nationale.
Coronelli was a Franciscan friar from Venice who made atlases and encyclopedias, learning the art of woodcuts at age 10 and, at age 16, publishing the first of what would be 140-plus works. His star charts were so celebrated, he eventually rose to the position of Cosmographer of the Republic of Venice.
A good compass rose can help you chart a true course.
I inverted this one from its original orientation so that the banner could be read more easily, and so that north pointed up. It’s interesting to me that this is not written in Italian (or French), but so the reader could Praticaii Dage Inglese. I guess everyone was reading Coronelli, even the English. (And the Italians, the Latin-speakers, and the Dutch – for those are the other three compass roses in the collection.)
The post Science Art: From Four Roses des Vents, by Vincenzo Coronelli. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Frontiers In Immunology has published a hypothesis – which is basically a call for more research – put out by two Long Covid sufferers who noticed something interesting about their own bodies that seems like it might explain all the 200-plus symptoms linked to the condition. What they first found, using a home blood-lactate meter, was abnormally high levels of lactate, as if their muscles were constantly producing the level of lactic acid they would during a heavy workout. The “unifying mechanism” this points to is an acid-base balance that’s been knocked out of whack by inflammation:
The mechanism of Long Covid (Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19; PASC) is currently unknown, with no validated diagnostics or therapeutics. SARS-CoV-2 can cause disseminated infections that result in multi-system tissue damage, dysregulated inflammation, and cellular metabolic disruptions. The tissue damage and inflammation has been shown to impair microvascular circulation, resulting in hypoxia, which coupled with virally-induced metabolic reprogramming, increases cellular anaerobic respiration. Both acute and PASC patients show systemic dysregulation of multiple markers of the acid-base balance. Based on these data, we hypothesize that the shift to anaerobic respiration causes an acid-base disruption that can affect every organ system and underpins the symptoms of PASC. This hypothesis can be tested by longitudinally evaluating acid-base markers in PASC patients and controls over the course of a month. If our hypothesis is correct, this could have significant implications for our understanding of PASC and our ability to develop effective diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.
…
Discussion
We propose the testable hypothesis that PASC is underpinned by an inflammatory acid-base disruption. If the proposed evaluations confirm the hypothesis, this offers both a diagnostic pathway for PASC and suggestions for treatment. As PASC may be a reinforcing cycle of tissue damage, blood flow and oxygenation impairment, dysregulated inflammation, and acid-base disruption, then a treatment protocol could be designed to simultaneously address each disease component through pharmaceutical and/or non-pharmaceutical interventions. It is possible that PASC is not the only pathogen-induced inflammatory acid-base disorder, as several other pathogens cause persistent disease. ME, in particular, shares many features with PASC and the symptom profile of both diseases overlaps with that of acute and chronic acidosis (9, 33). Thus, the proposed hypothesis may be of broader relevance. Additionally, it is possible that even people without persistent symptoms following SARS-CoV-2 infection harbor residual tissue damage and viral proteins, increasing their risk of new health conditions in the future (34). There are still many unanswered questions and the data from this hypothesis testing is urgently needed.
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Maybe they’re wrong, maybe they’re right… but it’s an interesting avenue to investigate.
[via Vicky Van Der Togt’s Mastodon]
The post A Long Covid hypothesis: acids and bases. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The Guardian reveals Phyllurus fimbriatus, a charismatic, 15cm (6-inch) reptile otherwise known as the the Scawfell Island leaf-tailed gecko, which has never before been scientifically identified:
Assoc Prof Conrad Hoskin, a terrestrial ecologist at James Cook University, came across the lizard during a four-day survey of the island, in “deep bouldery habitat covered in fig trees and ferns”.
“It’s super exciting – it’s every biologist’s dream to find a new species,” he said.
…
Hoskin spotted about 30 specimens during his survey and estimates that the newly discovered gecko occupies a total area of less than 1 sq km.
“It’s only found in the wettest, rainforesty, rockiest pockets of [Scawfell].”
The coast of the rugged island is lined by granite cliffs, while areas of rainforest cover its steep mountain slopes.
“[The lizard] can’t handle the hot conditions that you’d get in most parts of the island – it needs to have really good shelter from the heat and the dry,” Hoskin said.
You can read more of Hoskin’s description here, in Zootaxa.
The post Dragon discovered: A new gecko species found on Australian island first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
PhysOrg reports on NASA’s Mars Dune Alpha, a 3D-printed home for researchers ready to spend a year simulating a mission on Mars:
The facility, created for three planned experiments called the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA), is located at the US space agency’s massive research base in Houston, Texas.
Four volunteers will begin the first trial this summer, during which NASA plans to monitor their physical and mental health to better understand humans’ fortitude for such a long isolation.
With that data, NASA will better understand astronauts’ “resource use” on Mars, said Grace Douglas, lead researcher on the CHAPEA experiments.
…
The volunteers will live inside a 1,700 square-foot (160 square-meter) home, dubbed “Mars Dune Alpha,” which includes two bathrooms, a vertical farm to grow salad, a room dedicated to medical care, an area for relaxing and several workstations.
An airlock leads to an “outdoor” reconstruction of the Martian environment—though still located inside the hangar.
Several pieces of equipment astronauts would likely use are scattered around the red sand-covered floor, including a weather station, a brick-making machine and a small greenhouse.
There is also a treadmill on which the make-believe astronauts will walk suspended from straps to simulate the red planet’s lesser gravity.
The post Here’s a Mars habitat, ready for a year’s occupancy. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science News brings tidings from Central Africa, where painted lady butterflies born in Europe spend their winters in the longest migration of any butterfly:
Pinpointing exactly where painted lady butterflies (Vanessa cardui) overwinter and breed was the last unknown piece of their roughly 15,000-kilometer migration, says Gerard Talavera, an entomologist and evolutionary biologist at the Botanical Institute of Barcelona.
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Before this study, Talavera and colleagues had predicted that subtropical regions close to the equator might provide suitable habitat. To know for sure, the researchers needed to find butterflies in the field.
From late 2017 through early 2020, Talavera and an international team of researchers conducted fieldwork at a wide variety of sites across sub-Saharan Africa during the months of December and January. Another 15 sites were monitored year-round for about two years. In total, the team looked for adults and their young in nine countries, including Benin, Cameroon, and Kenya.
It was a big bet that the team would even find the butterflies, Talavera says. Their preferred plants in Europe are well-known, making them relatively easy to find. But what plants the insects might settle on in Africa was a big open question. Aside from the previous analysis pointing toward the subtropics and knowing that the insects prefer open spaces over forests, the team was going in blind.
…
From September to November, the butterflies occupy semiarid savannas. As those areas dry up, the painted ladies shift south to savannas and highlands in slightly humid regions from December to February. Central Africa’s tropical rainforests stop the butterflies from going any farther south, Talavera says. “These butterflies don’t like wet areas.”
Field observations suggest that lots of breeding might happen in these slightly humid savannas and highlands.
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You can read more of Talavera’s migratory discovery here, in PNAS.
The post The last leg of the longest butterfly migration has been mapped at last. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is half of one color plate from a book intended to show how “showy” coloration can actually make some creatures harder to spot in their natural habitats.
This is a male wood duck, as sketched in color by Abbott H. Thayer. He explains:
These paintings show one of the very common situations in which the boldest contrasts of a male Wood Duck’s coloring come into play in preventing his showing his silhouette.
His dark areas, with all their varied colors, here ‘become a part’ of the like-colored dark reflections in the water, and his white patterns exactly reproduce the bright sky-reflections, so that he is so to speak ‘dissolved’ into the scene. — A. H. T.
The book is called Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom: An Exposition of the Laws of Disguise through Color and Pattern and is mostly written by Gerald Thayer, Abbott’s son, about his father’s theories of camouflage. The elder Thayer (and his gifted painter’s eye) won quite a few admirers for his ideas, but he took them a little too far, crediting the need for camouflage with nearly every element of evolutionary pressure. “Our book presents, not theories, but revelations, as palpable and indisputable as radium or X-rays,” he declared.
The whole book can be browsed on archive.org, but I first came across it in a brief but fascinating write-up on The Public Domain Review.
The post Science Art: Male Wood Duck, by Abbott H. Thayer, 1904. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science reports on some unexpected consequences of a slightly warmer planet. In the statistics-heavy game of baseball, hitters have been averaging more home runs than ever for a lot of reasons – but one of them is warmer air creating less friction on the ball:
Because warmer air is less dense and exerts less drag on a batted ball, the number of home runs should in theory climb as global temperatures increase. And, sure enough, a new study shows that about 0.8% of the homers hit in Major League Baseball (MLB) since 2010 made it over the fence thanks to the extra distance global warming lent their flight.
…
During a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Milwaukee Brewers in 2012, former big-league catcher and broadcast commentator Tim McCarver wondered aloud whether climate change was driving an upward trend in home run rates across the sport. At the time, many fans and some scientists were dismissive. However, the idea resonated with Christopher Callahan, a climate scientist and baseball fan at Dartmouth College.
To find out whether rising temperatures and decreasing air density played a role in home run rates, Callahan and his colleagues delved into the copious data MLB keeps. In addition to keeping home run stats for decades, since 2015 MLB has used an automated system of cameras and computers called Statcast to track the velocity and trajectory of every ball thrown or hit in every game. “MLB is obsessed with collecting data on itself, so we have this treasure trove of numbers,” Callahan says.
The researchers tracked game-day temperatures and homers from 100,000 MLB games between 1962 and 2019 at stadiums at various elevations across the country. To control for the launch angle and speed of each batted ball–and thus the skill of both pitchers and batters in varying temperature conditions –they combed through high-speed Statcast camera footage of 220,000 individual hits between 2015 and 2019. Both analyses returned the same effect: On average, a 1°C increase in air temperature on game day correlates with nearly a 2% uptick in the number of home runs per game. Each additional degree of global warming results in an additional 95 home runs per baseball season, and more than 500 home runs since 2010 can be attributed to anthropogenic warming, the researchers report today in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. “I think we’ve vindicated McCarver,” Callahan says.
However, those extra homers represent a tiny fraction of the more than 65,300 hit since 2010. They also account for only a drop in the tsunami of home runs that has inundated MLB. Over the past 4 decades, home runs have increased by 34% per game.
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AP News reports on research into the fearful mouth of the scariest of flesh-eating dinosaurs which found that – despite the public image of Tyrannosaurus rex as being a snaggle-toothed fang beast – the big fellas actually had faces more like today’s monitor lizards, with their teeth mostly invisible most of the time:
Some thought the predators’ teeth were just too big to fit in their mouths, said study author Thomas Cullen, a paleontologist at Auburn University in Alabama.
When researchers compared skulls from dinosaurs and living reptiles, though, they found this wasn’t the case. Some large monitor lizards actually have bigger teeth than T. rex compared to their skull size, and can still fit them under a set of scaly lips, Cullen said.
The scientists also found clues in the pattern of wear and tear on tooth surfaces.
For a creature like a crocodile, whose teeth stick out of its mouth, the exposed part gets worn down quickly — “like someone’s taken a sander to the side of the tooth,” said another study author Mark Witton, a paleoartist at England’s University of Portsmouth.
But when researchers analyzed a tooth from a Daspletosaurus, a T. rex relative, they found it was in good condition and it didn’t show that uneven damage pattern.
With this evidence and other clues from the dinosaurs’ anatomy, the study makes a good case for lipped tyrannosaurs, said University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz, who was not involved with the study. Still, “we’re not talking kissy lips,” he pointed out — they’d be thin and scaly like those of the Komodo dragon, a large lizard.
—
You can read the original research here, in Science.
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The University of Oxford has unfortunate news for anyone on the pill, or implant, or hormone-releasing IUDs. A new anaysis from the Oxford Population Health’s Cancer Epidemiology Unit has found that all hormonal contraceptives come with an increased risk of breast cancer:
The researchers analysed data from 9,498 women who developed invasive breast cancer between ages 20 to 49 and 18,171 closely-matched women without breast cancer who acted as controls. The data were collected by the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD). 44% of women with breast cancer and 39% of women without breast cancer included in the study had a prescription for a hormonal contraceptive an average of three years before diagnosis, around half of whom were last prescribed a progestogen-only contraceptive.
The data were used to calculate the strength of the association between use of each type of hormonal contraceptive and breast cancer risk. These calculations were then adjusted to take into account established risk factors such as body mass index (BMI), number of recorded births, and the time since a woman’s last birth. The researchers combined the CPRD results on oral contraceptive use with those from other previously published studies to estimate absolute excess risks, meaning the additional number of women who would be expected to develop breast cancer in those who used oral contraceptives compared to those who did not.
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You can read the meta-analysis here, at PLOS Medicine.
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This map shows where silt was laid down untold ages ago. According to its brief description on Wikimedia Commons, it depicts: Loess sediments distribution and its thickness in western part of the Nałeczów Plateau according to Mroczek and Rodzik (2015)
Loess is a fine silt usually deposited by wind or the meltwater of a glacier. The Nałeczów Plateau is in Poland’s Lublin Uplands, and is home, nowadays, to a spa famed for its healing waters. I haven’t looked this up, but it’s a good bet that those waters are rich with minerals from loess deposits. With this map, maybe you could find the waters with the strongest mojo.
The post Science Art: Loess Sediments Thickness, by Przemysław Mroczek, 2020. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Ars Technica digs the research of Indiana University grad student W. Walker Smith, who has combined his interests in music and chemistry to create a “data sonification project” – in other words, a way to convert a spectroscope reading quantities of different elements into a musical instrument playing different notes and timbres:
All the elements release distinct wavelengths of light, depending on their electron energy levels, when stimulated by electricity or heat, and those chemical “fingerprints” make up the visible spectra at the heart of chemical spectroscopy. Smith translated those different frequencies of light into different pitches or musical notes using an instrument called the Light Soundinator 3000, scaling down those frequencies to be within the range of human hearing. He professed amazement at the sheer variety of sounds.
“Red light has the lowest frequency in the visible range, so it sounds like a lower musical pitch than violet,” said Smith, demonstrating on a toy color-coded xylophone. “If we move from red all the way up to violet, the frequency of the light keeps getting higher, and so does the frequency of the sound. Violet is almost double the frequency of red light, so it actually sounds close to a musical octave.” And while simpler spectra like hydrogen and helium, which only have a few lines in their spectra, sound like “vaguely musical” chords, elements with more complex spectra consisting of thousands of lines are dense and noisy, often sounding like “a cheesy horror movie effect,” according to Smith.
His favorites: helium and zinc. “If you listen to the frequencies [of helium] one by one instead of all at once, you get an interesting scale pattern that I have used to make a couple of compositions, including a ‘helium dance party,'” said Smith. As for zinc, “The first row of transition metals have very complex, dense grating sounds. But zinc, for whatever reason, despite having a large number of frequencies, sounds like an angelic vocalist singing with vibrato.”
There’s full-color video with audio at the link.
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SpaceX Dragon Endurance returns to Earth on the night of March 11, 2023. Specifically, it’s just after 9:00 p.m. in the waters off Tampa, Florida.
As described in NASA’s image feature: “During the 156.5 days they spent aboard the International Space Station as part of Expedition 68, Crew-5 participated in several spacewalks to prepare the space station for solar arrays and conducted various experiments, including growing plants without soil and studying radiation exposure.” They also released Uganda’s and Zimbabwe’s first satellites and reinstalled a bioprinter that might be used to replicate whole human organs in near-zero-g.
You can read more about the mission, and see pictures of the crew — Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina, NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata — over here, in NASA’s newsfeed.
The post Science Art: Crew-5’s Nighttime Splashdown, by NASA/Keegan Barber, 2023 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
NPR looks at a subtle, slow-motion health crisis facing America. Compared to every other industrialized nation, across every age group, Americans die younger … and we’re dying more and more young with every passing year:
Just before Christmas, federal health officials confirmed life expectancy in America had dropped for a nearly unprecedented second year in a row – down to 76 years. While countries all over the world saw life expectancy rebound during the second year of the pandemic after the arrival of vaccines, the U.S. did not.
Then, last week, more bad news: Maternal mortality in the U.S. reached a high in 2021. Also, a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association found rising mortality rates among U.S. children and adolescents.
“This is the first time in my career that I’ve ever seen [an increase in pediatric mortality] – it’s always been declining in the United States for as long as I can remember,” says the JAMA paper’s lead author Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Now, it’s increasing at a magnitude that has not occurred at least for half a century.”
…
There are some things Americans get right, according to the “Shorter Lives” report: “The United States has higher survival after age 75 than do peer countries, and it has higher rates of cancer screening and survival, better control of blood pressure and cholesterol levels, lower stroke mortality, lower rates of current smoking, and higher average household income.” But those achievements, it’s clear, aren’t enough to offset the other problems that befall many Americans at younger ages.
All of this costs the country tremendously. Not only do families lose loved ones too soon, but having a sicker population costs the country as much as $100 billion every year in extra health care costs.
“Behind the statistics detailed in this report are the faces of young people – infants, children, and adolescents – who are unwell and dying early because conditions in this country are not as favorable as those in other countries,” the paper’s authors wrote.
…
Woolf calls it a misconception to assume that America’s great scientific minds and medical discoveries translate to progress for the health of the population. “We are actually very innovative in making these kinds of breakthroughs, but we do very poorly in providing them to our population,” he says.
…
[NIH “Short Lives” researcher Ravi Sawhney] believes that the changes might not be as hard as some policymakers and health officials seem to think. “You look at these healthier countries, they’re free countries – England, France, Italy – they’re not banning delicious foods. They’re not chaining people to treadmills,” he says. “Americans love to travel to Europe, to Australia, to Canada to enjoy their foods and their lifestyles, and so the idea that we might say, ‘Hey, maybe we could bring some of those lifestyles back’ – I don’t think people are going to go up in arms that we’re taking away their freedoms.”
—
You can read the 10-year-old “Shorter Lives, Poorer Health” report here at the NIH, and the more recent NCHS Data Brief here, at the CDC. (There are also plenty more sources at the linked article – the whole thing is really worth a read.)
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SONG: “Giant Isopods Have Stolen My Gameboy”.
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: This has no source in scientific research; it’s a penitential cover of a song by a band named Werk from an album called Songs About Giant Isopods. You can still hear the song here, on Soundcloud.
ABSTRACT:
I feel like I owe a lot of apologies here. I do not know why I love the original of this song; I heard it in 2007 when the album came out, I wrote about it in one of the earliest entries on here, in those heady days when this website shared the internet with a social media platform called “MySpace” that musicians used to promote music and people used to share stuff with friends.
The song, I remember reading at the time, was made in not very much time, and basically consists of a simple techno backing track (using exactly three bass notes over and over, except during a break when there are only two) and some quickly jotted words based on an internet joke that was popular that year (random things were always stealing Gameboys back then) that were then fed into a speech-synthesis program called “Crap Talker.” Nowadays, it would be an app. Then, it was a program.
Crap Talker did not attempt to sound too realistic, and it had a setting where it would automatically sing whatever words you typed in. The melody was randomized somehow so that if you typed the same words into the program elsewhere, it would consistently sing them the same way. (I know this because I downloaded the program and tried it.) But that melody was sort of angular and weird – the phrases didn’t really follow human expectations for slow rises and falls in a progression. It was sort of arbitrarily choosing notes in a scale, jumping around unpredictably.
Somehow, this came out sounding very New Wave to me. I know I’m not the only person in the world to remember this song, because it got posted on Soundcloud not too long ago. And I’m not the only person to click on the “like” button there. But I would not be at all surprised if I remember it more than the person (or people) who originally wrote it.
I wanted to record this in as non-mechanical a way as I could. The piano is a MIDI instrument (though built from real samples), and the drums are the same kind of SoundFont. But it’s a real acoustic guitar and bass (with a ring modulator on the guitar to give it a little edge). And I do my best to sing that weird melody with my own real voice, with words as close as I could get to the original. They’re not written down anywhere, so I just listened to the song a few times and wrote down what I heard. . I did an embarrassing number of takes in a couple of different sessions to get it on key. I should put that much work into my own songs.
It’s also a little weird that I recorded this sort of simultaneously with the original song for March. I’ve basically been working on this for a few months, but it took that much time to get a moment where I could sing stupidly and loud without interruptions.
LYRICS:
(I-I-isopods)
Giant isopods have stolen my gameboy
They could not have known it’s not a deep-sea toy
It’s good to know they have not beat my high score
It’s hard to play Zelda if you’ve got clawsThey stole my Nintendo and warned me off
If I called the police they’d be back for more stuff
I wasn’t scared for the safety of my SuperNES
Living near the seaside wasn’t worth all this stress.(I-I-isopods)
Giant isopods have stolen my gameboy
They could not have known it’s not a deep-sea toy
It’s good to know they have not beat my high score
It’s hard to play Zelda if you’ve got clawsI asked them if I could keep my Pokemon Red
Can I swim well was all they said.
I thought my level-15 Bulbasaur
Was not worth dying for.
(I-I-isopods)
The post SONG: “Giant Isopods Have Stolen My Gameboy” (a penitential Werk cover) first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
SONG: “The Elephant”.
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: BBC 28 Feb 2023, “Kerala: India temple replaces elephant with robot for rituals,” as used in the post “Kerala temple introduces a robot ritual elephant.”
ABSTRACT:
I suppose this song grew out of the penitential cover I was working on from before I missed last month’s song. At least, it uses some of the same instrument tracks and effects: sampled rock drums, a ring modulator, some reverb and chorus settings, a couple virtual amps. It also grew out of an older song I recorded here, “Electric Wind,” which (like this one) was mostly built out of multiple bass tracks and a harmonica solo. Listening to old projects sometimes makes it easier to make new ones. Sometimes it throws up obstacles – like getting earwormed by some other song; it’s hard to not just write the same thing over again.
This is a different song. For one thing, it’s got an actual guitar in it (with a lot of effects to make it sound like soft metal pulled into wire, or like a gear bending under great pressure). For another, I couldn’t find my harmonica – it’s not where it belongs, and I have a hunch one child or another (grown or otherwise) played with the damn thing and then left it where someone else tidied it somewhere mysterious to me. Anyway, the harmonica solo is actually a Chrometta, a chromatic harmonica, the kind with the little lever on the side that moves all the notes a half-step off so you can play every note in an octave, not just the ones in a particular scale. It’s a little hard to play once you’re used to a regular harmonica – the pattern of inhale notes and exhale notes is different, and you can hear one misstep right near the end where I hit the lever at the wrong point. It’s not a jarring dissonance, so I left it in. In general, it got the mournful, brassy sound I wanted. It is in some way the lament of the chained robot elephant, or the ghost of the real chained elephant living on in the robot elephant.
Because that’s what this song is about. It’s about a robot replacing an animal whose job it was to be worshiped, which meant its job was to suffer. It’s also about the widespread sense I’m picking up on that the Turing Test is about to be passed by one machine or another, or at least that everyone thinks we’re about to program a computer that can fool most people most of the time into thinking that’s it’s another person too. The thing that is being unspoken in all this anticipation is the spiritual dimension, the idea that this process is pushing up against what personhood means, what it might mean to create a soul. Computer scientists should maybe be asking some religious and philosophical questions. The robot elephant is just the beginning.
LYRICS:
The animal is not my idea of an animal
I am not an idea of me
And when I pray, it’s like I’m thinking
But what I think I do not see.The elephant is worshipped
The elephant is chained
The elephant is a machine
The elephant is a machineTwo guys talking in the temple
Counting beads and spinning wheels
Two guys kneeling at the altar
Each thinks the other guy sounds realThe elephant is worshipped
The elephant is chained
The elephant is a machine
The elephant is a machine
The post SONG: The Elephant first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The Guardian reports on a geographically broad study – a study of studies from many different countries – that looked at same-sex couples and found that their children are pretty much like children anywhere else, raised by anyone else:
The latest study, published in the journal BMJ Global Health by researchers in the US and China, is based on analysis of 34 studies from countries where same-sex relationships are legal, including the US, UK and parts of Europe. These studies compared the development of children raised by heterosexual parents with those brought up by lesbian and gay parents – and some studies also included the families of bisexual, queer or transgender parents.
The team analysed data from 16 of the studies and found that sexual minority parents reported significantly fewer psychological problems among preschool-age children than heterosexual parents, although no difference was found among older, school-age children.
While family functioning, couple relationship satisfaction, parental mental health and parenting stress showed no differences based on parents’ sexual orientation, in some areas sexual minority families appear to fare better.
“Sexual minority parent groups showed higher levels of parent-child relationship quality, such as higher levels of warmth, greater amounts of interaction and more supportive behaviour, when compared with the heterosexual parent groups,” the researchers wrote.
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You can read the research here, in BMJ Global Health.
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Nature honestly (and slightly brutally) examines its own shortcomings as a political advocate in a study that found the scientific journal’s 2020 endorsement of Joe Biden didn’t really bring in any votes. Intstead, it caused some readers to lose confidence in Nature and in US scientists generally:
In a preregistered experiment conducted in late July and early August 2021, Floyd Zhang randomly assigned 4,260 US participants to receive either a message summarizing Nature’s endorsement of Joe Biden followed by a screenshot and link to the piece, or a control message, screenshot and link regarding Nature’s announcement of its new visual designs for its website and print copies.
The author found that the endorsement message was associated with reductions in stated trust in Nature among supporters of Trump. When prompted to acquire information about emerging COVID-19 variants and vaccine efficacy, those Trump supporters who had received information about the endorsement were 38% less likely than those in the control group to access stories from Nature’s website. The endorsement also reduced the trust of Trump supporters in US scientists in general. Biden supporters’ trust in Nature and scientists were not reliably affected by the endorsement. There was also little evidence that the endorsement changed the views of participants about Biden and Trump.
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This is a photograph of a model from the Field Museum of Natural History, representing a cycad flower reconstructed from a fossil.
The fossil came from the Cycad National Monument, established by President Harding in the Black Hills of Dakota, and shows the primordial flowering structure of a plant that’s far older than the “true” flowering plants, at least 100 million years ago. It’s a dinosaur flower, a flower from before flowers, a flower so old it might as well be an alien flower. It’s still pretty.
I found the image in B.E. Dahlgren’s pamphlet, “A Fossil Flower,” preserved in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
The post Science Art: A Fossil Flower (Cycadeoidea ingens), 1924. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science News reports on a presentation at the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by researcher Abhilash Ramachandran, who found that rice – one of our planet’s most significant food sources – can find all the nutrients it needs to thrive in the red soil of Mars… as long as we find a way to get around one toxic chemical called perchlorate:
Growing rice there would be ideal, because it’s easy to prepare, he says. “You just peel off the husk and start boiling.”
Ramachandran and his colleagues grew rice plants in a Martian soil simulant made of Mojave Desert basalt. They also grew rice in pure potting mix as well as several mixtures of the potting mix and soil simulant. All pots were watered once or twice a day.
Rice plants did grow in the synthetic Mars dirt, the team found. However, the plants developed slighter shoots and wispier roots than the plants that sprouted from the potting mix and hybrid soils. Even replacing just 25 percent of the simulant with potting mix helped heaps, they found.
The researchers also tried growing rice in soil with added perchlorate. They sourced one wild rice variety and two cultivars with a genetic mutation — modified for resilience against environmental stressors like drought — and grew them in Mars-like dirt with and without perchlorate.
No rice plants grew amid a concentration of 3 grams of perchlorate per kilogram of soil. But when the concentration was just 1 gram per kilogram, one of the mutant lines grew both a shoot and a root, while the wild variety managed to grow a root.
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You can read more of Ramachandran and colleagues’ research here, in the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference reports.
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The Space Shuttle Discovery shot this photo of the International Space Station flying high over the Caspian Sea during the STS-114 Return to Flight mission. The shuttle had been docked with ISS and then disconnected, ready to return home. Click!
I found the photo in a collection of Wikimedia Commons Featured Images, but it was originally from the NASA image gallery for STS-114.
The post Science Art: ISS Aug 2005, by NASA. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine looked (I’m tempted to say “longingly”) at the sex lives of middle-aged women, and found the main factor influencing women’s sex lives wasn’t menopause, but lifestyle. In other words, these women just have too much else going on to get in the mood for intimacy:
The study combined survey data from the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3) and in-depth interviews with women in middle-age. The survey revealed that out of over 2,000 women aged between 40 and 59, a third had not had sex in the past month but less than half this proportion were dissatisfied with their sex lives.
After taking account of a range of interrelated factors the survey showed that age and menopausal status were less important in determining levels of sexual satisfaction, function, and frequency than relationship and lifestyle factors and health status.
Follow up interviews with a sample of women confirmed the survey findings. Few linked their menopause with a decline in the quality or frequency of sexual activity. What the survey failed to capture, and women’s accounts illustrated vividly, was the sheer weight of pressures on women in midlife. Women interviewed described their hectic schedules, and the challenges of combining family, work, and social lives. They talked about financial and relationship difficulties, worries about family members, the simultaneous demands of children and aging parents, both needing practical help and emotional support and neither contributing greatly to a reduction in workload or stress. The ‘double caring duties’ for children and parents were seen as an issue the previous generation had not experienced. Many women’s lives were so busy that they left little time or energy to enjoy a regular and satisfying sex life.
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You can read more of the research (which also had contributions from University of Glasgow and University College London) here, in the Journal of Sex Research under the headline “We’re Just Tired.”
The post No sex, please. Not menopausal, just busy! (Research says.) first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Riddles are funny! BBC reports on the discovery at the Hathor Temple in southern Egypt of a small sphinx with an engaging grin that might have been modeled on the Emperor Claudius:
The limestone sphinx with its “smiley face and two dimples” is thought to represent Roman Emperor Claudius.
…
The artefacts were found inside a two-level tomb in the temple of Dendera in Qena Province, 450km (280 miles) south of the capital of Cairo.
Emperor Claudius, whom archaeologists believe the statue’s smiling features may belong to, extended Roman rule into North Africa between 41 and 54 AD.
Emperor Claudius, whom archaeologists believe the statue’s smiling features may belong to, extended Roman rule into North Africa between 41 and 54 AD.
Archaeologists will study the markings on the stone slab, which could reveal more information on the statue’s identity, the ministry said.
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Ars Technica celebrates an underwater discovery: the surprisingly well-preserved wreck of the schooner barge Ironton, which went down in 1898 after colliding with the Great Lakes freighter Ohio in a stretch of Lake Huron known as “Shipwreck Alley.” The sunken remains have just been identified in the dark waters of NOAA’s Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary:
Ohio‘s wreck was found in 2017 by an expedition organized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Now the same team has announced its discovery of the wreck of the 191-foot Ironton nearly 130 years after its sinking, so well-preserved in the frigid waters of the Great Lakes that its three masts are still standing, and its rigging is still attached. Its discovery could help resolve unanswered questions about the ship’s final hours.
…
Once the Ohio had been found, the team conducted further research into the weather and wind conditions on the fateful night of the double sinking to narrow down the search area for Ironton. They partnered with famed explorer Robert Ballard and the Ocean Exploration Trust to map that area in 2019. (Ballard famously discovered the wreck of the Titanic, as well as the wrecks of the battleship Bismarck and the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier, among other finds.) Finally, in the final days of the expedition, they captured a sonar image from the lakebed clearly showing a shipwreck.
There wasn’t enough detail in that sonar image to definitively identify the wreck as Ironton, so the team decided to capture video of the wreck with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). That footage confirmed that they had found the Ironton. The site will be marked with a deep-water mooring buoy so divers can safely visit the wreck.
The post Lake Huron reveals 19th-century shipwreck. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
“Screws at one single cut,” the ad boasts. This is an ad from the front of The Engineer’s Sketch-Book of Mechanical Movements, by Thomas W. Barber – full title: The engineer’s sketch-book of mechanical movements, devices, appliances, contrivances and details : employed in the design and construction of machinery for every purpose : classified and arranged for reference for the use of engineers, mechanical draughtsmen, managers, mechanics, inventors, patent agents, and all engaged in the mechanical arts, with nearly two thousand illustrations, descriptive notes and memoranda.
I’ve presented images from it before, and no doubt will again. It’s a beautiful book, available on archive.org.
The post Science Art: Britannia Co.’s Patent Screwing Machine, 1890. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
PNAS reports on some unanticipated consequences of solar farming – but things that banks of solar panels that are unexpectedly good, not bad:
To generate as much energy as a conventional 1-gigawatt power station, an array of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels needs to cover about 80 square kilometers of land. Unsurprisingly, solar development faces increasingly organized resistance from many rural communities and activist groups, who see it as an enemy of farming.
…
In 1982, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy (ISE) in Germany proposed a stunningly simple solution: set solar panels a few meters above the ground, and grow food underneath. Their original sketch shows angled panels with fairly large gaps in between, so the crops still get plenty of sunlight (1). This concept began to bear fruit in the early 2010s, with field trials in Japan and Europe. Japan now has about 3,000 farms with small solar installations set up on stilts, which are financially supported by government funding and known as solar sharing. In the United States and Europe, this idea is usually called agrivoltaics (AV), and it comes in a mouth-watering array of varieties.
The simplest approach is to plant grass under the panels and unleash some sheep. The United States already has more than 15,000 acres of solar grazing, including a huge 4,700-acre site at Topaz Solar Farm in California. The sheep gain shelter from the panels, and it saves on the cost of cutting the grass. With an eye on improving biodiversity, other projects plant native vegetation beneath their panels to support pollinating insects. This can also restore soils that have been depleted and compacted by decades of intensive farming, locking up carbon from the atmosphere. Both of these are low-maintenance options, and they work with panels set less than 1 meter above the ground, which keeps installation costs down.…
In 2016, for example, [plant ecologist Greg] Barron-Gafford’s team started an AV project growing cherry tomatoes, chiltepin peppers, and jalapeños—“things to make salsa, because if all else fails, you can still eat the science,” he says. The researchers found that the panels kept plants cooler during the day and warmer at night, and they held more moisture in the air. These less-stressed plants produced just as many jalapeños, twice the crop of tomatoes, and three times the amount of chiltepin peppers as those on a control plot (2). They also needed substantially less watering, a key benefit in a time of worsening water shortages around the world. Water evaporation from the plants even helped to cool the panels and increase electricity output.
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AV must also be tailored to local climate, landscape, and soil—for example, by spacing panels more widely in darker latitudes to let in more light. To fine-tune these designs, Alexis Pascaris at the Michigan company AgriSolar Consulting is working with Colorado developers Sandbox Solar to create a software tool called SPADE, which will calculate light c
onditions for a given location and panel configuration and then identify crops that could thrive there.
Although AV generally offers higher crop yields in sunny, water-stressed areas, it can reduce yields in damper, darker climes. Even so, AV can put less pressure on land than separate farm and solar installations. For example, if a hectare of AV in Germany produces as much food as 0.8 hectares of conventional farming, and as much power as 0.7 hectares of conventional solar, it still saves half a hectare of land.
[via Tim Kellogg on Mastodon]
The post Solar panels increase crop yields, insulate reservoirs, and can help farmers. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
BBC reports on a mechanical elephant that is replacing a flesh-and-blood elephant that previously conducted rituals in a temple in Kerala, India:
The initiative by authorities at Irinjadappilly Sree Krishna Temple in Thrissur district is part of their pledge to stop using live animals for any festivities.
…
Chained, saddled and decorated, elephants play an important part in temple festivals in Kerala – the state is home to about a fifth of the country’s roughly 2,500 captive elephants.
…
According to the Indian Express newspaper, the elephant model donated by PETA is 11 ft (3.3m) tall, weighs 800 kg (1763.7 lbs) and is made of an iron frame.
Temple priest Rajkumar Namboothiri told the Indian Express newspaper that authorities were happy to receive the mechanical elephant.
“We hope other temples will also think about replacing elephants with robotic elephants for their rituals,” Mr Namboothiri said.
—
[via Dr. Holly Waters on Mastodon]
The post Kerala temple introduces a robot ritual elephant. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The journal Human Movement Science carries research from Swiss sports scientists who have used ballet dancers to figure out how it can be possible for a human being to keep spinning on one leg without keeling over. The key is in keeping a visual reference point:
Abstract
In dance, performing multiple rotations around the longitudinal axis is a complex task that can only be accomplished proficiently by highly skilled dancers. However, this extraordinary skill has been investigated sparsely. The few studies to date have focused on the biomechanical analysis of ballet rotations. However, none have investigated the influence of visual information on continuous rotations, such as Fouettés or à la Seconde turns. Therefore, the present study aims to examine the role of a visual reference on balance control and the dance-specific head coordination – spotting – during turning performance of highly skilled ballet dancers. To this end, 12 participants performed 12 Fouettés (females) or à la Seconde turns (males) with and without a visual reference. As dependent measures, we analysed balance control (i.e., supporting foot path length), spotting duration, head isolation, and orientation (i.e., deviation of pelvis from the front). A linear mixed model was performed to analyse the influence of the visual conditions overall and over the continued performance of 12 consecutive rotations. The results revealed that overall, path length was significantly smaller in the condition without a visual reference. Spotting duration and head isolation did not differ significantly between conditions. Moreover, dancers oriented themselves better towards the front in the condition with a visual reference. When looking closer into the progression of performance over each consecutive rotation, highly skilled ballet dancers significantly decreased the supporting foot path length, and improved orientation when turning with a visual reference. On the other hand, without a visual reference, the dancers increased the spotting duration over time. Additionally, dancers increased head isolation towards the end of the turns in both conditions. These findings suggest that a visual reference helps ballet dancers sustain performance of consecutive rotations, mainly in optimising balance control and orientation. Thus, the more rotations a ballet dancer must turn, the more relevant a visual reference becomes for sustaining successful performance.
—
Is it weird that I automatically start thinking of this research in terms of military applications? I lived with a hardcore ballet dancer for years; I know they’re basically commandos in tights.
[via Forbes]
The post How a ballerina spins, as a neurophysical phenomenon. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
It’s a wickle baby slipper lobster!
That color came from it being prepared on a slide so it could be examined under a microscope. The legs and antenna are all its own. Evibacus princeps also gets called a “shield fan lobster.”
You can find it (and a lot more) in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History collection, but I first noticed it in the Smithsonian Open Access collection of public domain imagery.
The post Science Art: Evibacus princeps, 2019 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Another penitential cover will be forthcoming. I’m a tired man.
The post No song today. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
DARPA reports on the Air Combat Evolution program’s newest breakthrough, which took a regular F-16 fighter jet, equipped it with an Artificial Intelligence program capable of taking the controls, and let the AI take off, engage with a virtual enemy, and land safely, all without a human pilot doing anything:
In early December 2022, ACE algorithm developers uploaded their AI software into a specially modified F-16 test aircraft known as the X-62A or VISTA (Variable In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft), at the Air Force Test Pilot School (TPS) at Edwards Air Force Base, California, and flew multiple flights over several days. The flights demonstrated that AI agents can control a full-scale fighter jet and provided invaluable live-flight data.
…
“Thanks to the outstanding teamwork and coordination between DARPA, the Air Force Test Pilot School, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and our performer teams, we’ve made rapid progress in Phase 2 across all areas of the ACE program,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Ryan “Hal” Hefron, the DARPA program manager for ACE. “VISTA allowed us to streamline the program by skipping the planned subscale phase and proceeding directly to a full-scale implementation, saving a year or more and providing performance feedback under real flight conditions.”
DARPA performers EpiSci, PhysicsAI, Shield AI, and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory flew different F-16 AI algorithms on the X-62A. The aircraft, a highly modified two-seat F-16, can be programmed to demonstrate the flight-handling characteristics of a variety of different aircraft types. VISTA was upgraded recently with the System for Autonomous Control of Simulation (SACS), making the aircraft a perfect platform to test ACE’s autonomous F-16 AI agents. A safety pilot was on board the VISTA aircraft to take control if anything went awry.
“We conducted multiple sorties [takeoffs and landings] with numerous test points performed on each sortie to test the algorithms under varying starting conditions, against various simulated adversaries, and with simulated weapons capabilities,” Hefron said. “We didn’t run into any major issues but did encounter some differences compared to simulation-based results, which is to be expected when transitioning from virtual to live. This highlights the importance of not only flight testing advanced autonomous capabilities but doing so on testbeds like VISTA, which allowed us to rapidly learn lessons and iterate at a much faster rate than with other air vehicles.”
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This is a painting of Mimodactylus libanensis soaring over what Nature (where it was first published) called “Afro-Arabia,” a continent that existed many millions of years ago. Fossils of this flying creature were discovered in what is now Lebanon. The name Mimodactylus seems like it might have something to do with wings or fingers (dactyls) being the same as something (mimic, mimeograph) or maybe like a Norse giant (Mimir). But no – it’s from MIM, the acronym for the Mineral Museum where the specimen was stored.
The artwork was done by Julius T. Csotonyi, and I found it on Wikimedia Commons.
The post Science Art: Mimodactylus in life, 2019. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
EurekAlert shares a University of Queensland study that shows a turn to violence among courting whales along Australia’s eastern seaboard. Whales seeking mates are giving up courtship songs and instead starting to fight potential competitors:
Associate Professor Rebecca Dunlop from The University of Queensland’s School of Biological Sciences led research analysing almost two decades of data on humpback whale behaviour and found singing may no longer be in vogue when it comes to seduction.
“In 1997, a singing male whale was almost twice as likely to be seen trying to breed with a female when compared to a non-singing male,” Dr Dunlop said.
“But by 2015 it had flipped, with non-singing males almost five times more likely to be recorded trying to breed than singing males….”
…
“With humpbacks, physical aggression tends to express itself as ramming, charging, and trying to head slap each other.
“This runs the risk of physical injury, so males must weigh up the costs and benefits of each tactic.”
Dr Dunlop said male whales were less likely to sing when in the presence of other males.
“Singing was the dominant mating tactic in 1997, but within the space of seven years this has turned around,” Dr Dunlop said.
…
Co-author, Associate Professor Celine Frere said previous work by UQ’s Professor Michael Noad found the whale population grew from approximately 3,700 whales to 27,000 between 1997 and 2015.
—
You can read more of Dunlop and Frere’s research here, in Communications Biology.
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Ars Technica reports on a long-awaited milestone. After many not-quite-that-long missions, a NASA astronaut is on the way to finally spend more than a full year living in space:
When Mark Vande Hei launched to the space station in April 2021, he was planning for a six-month mission. But again, the Russians shuffled the schedule in order to use a Soyuz spacecraft to make a movie on the station. So instead of launching a replacement crew on Soyuz MS-19, film director Klim Shipenko and actress Yulia Peresild flew to the station on that spacecraft, along with cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov.
With this extended mission, Vande Hei spent 355 days in space and currently holds the record for longest-duration spaceflight by an American astronaut. But still, he did not spend a full year in space.
That may now finally happen, however. On Tuesday, a senior official in NASA’s International Space Station Program, Dina Contella, said during a news briefing that the crew of the damaged Soyuz spacecraft would now “probably” come back to Earth in late September.
Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA’s Frank Rubio launched on the Soyuz MS-22 vehicle on September 21, 2022. The mission was due to return this spring, but after a micrometeorite strike in December, the vehicle’s external cooling loop was damaged. (Russian officials are convinced it was a micrometeorite rather than orbit debris due to the high velocity of the strike and its unlikely impact vector.)
As a result, this three-person crew will now return to Earth on a new Soyuz vehicle, MS-23, that will launch and fly autonomously to the station next month. Because the next Soyuz crew spacecraft will not be ready for flight until the fall, this will delay the launch of a replacement crew. A source said that at present, NASA’s internal schedule calls for this Soyuz MS-23 vehicle to return to Earth after September 21, 2023.
With the caveat that such schedules are invariably fluid and emergencies are always possible, this means Rubio is presently on course to spend more than a full year in space—becoming the first NASA astronaut to do so. It’s a nice and unexpected feat for the first-time flyer, who only joined NASA in 2017 and is the space agency’s first astronaut of Salvadoran origin.
—
As a note, this is only the first American astronaut to go up for more than a year. Russia’s record-holder spent 438 days in orbit.
The post NASA astronaut finally ready to spend more than a year in space. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
A test apparatus, as used for the article “Modification of Force Feed Lubricators” in the 1960-05 edition of Lubrication Engineering. The idea was to study why the same oils in the same engines in similar locations had to be replaced at different rates. So they lined up a bunch of reservoirs attached to a single drive shaft – the same rpm for every batch of oil in every reservoir – in order to test temperature and pressure differences in a more accurate way. They also wanted, in the experimenters’ own words, “to develop lubrication consciousness.”
They also report their program far exceeded expectations.
I found this on archive.org.
The post Science Art: Test Apparatus, 1960 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Ars Technica reports on the ongoing blotting out of the stars at night, with artificial light pollution doubling in the last 10 years alone. There are ways, however, to bring the stars back to the sky we (and plenty of migrating animals) see at night:
Migratory animals, including birds and insects, are drawn away from their natural flight paths by the beckoning “sky glow” of cities. In the summer of 2019, Las Vegas was invaded by millions of migrating grasshoppers, while the beams of New York’s 9/11 Tribute in Light are a magnet for flocks of migrating songbirds flying at night.
Disoriented by the bright city lights, birds crash into towering skyscrapers. Insect numbers are collapsing worldwide and light pollution is making matters worse by disrupting their nocturnal life cycles.
…
Light pollution also affects our ability to study the universe. Even modern observatories, built on remote mountaintops, are affected by the encroaching sky glow from growing, sprawling cities. Light pollution is so widespread that three-quarters of all observatories are affected.
…
Fighting light pollution begins at home. If you need to keep outside lights on for security, use shielded lamps that only shine downward. Use light bulbs that do not emit violet and blue light as this is harmful to wildlife. Smart lighting controls will also help reduce your house’s effect on wildlife and make it easier for you to observe the night sky.
You will also find interactive maps that show how polluted the skies are in your area. These maps are created from data gathered by satellites and by citizen scientists taking part in annual star counts. You can help darken our skies, too.
In the UK, the 2023 annual star count will take place on February 17-24. And, wherever you are in the world, you can always take part in the year-long Globe at Night star count whenever you want.
The task is simple: step outside on a clear night, count how many stars you can see in a well-known constellation, such as Orion, and report back.
To defeat light pollution, we need to know how severe it is and what difference national policies and local interventions (such as replacing the street lights in your town) make. In the UK, for example, star counts show light pollution may have peaked in 2020 and has started to decline.
—
You can take part in the Globe At Night count here.
The post We can get back to the night sky. But it will take work. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science News looks at a Viking burial site in England where animals were buried alongside humans, and finds that radioactive traces show these critters traveled to Great Britain aboard Viking ships:
In the 1990s, researchers unearthed the cremated remains of a human adult and child as well as of a dog, horse and probable pig from a burial mound in a Viking cemetery in Derbyshire, England. In previous work, radiocarbon dating of femur, skull and rib fragments revealed that the inhabitants all died sometime between the eighth and 10th centuries. That date was narrowed down to the year 873, thanks to the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which records that a Viking army wintered near the site that year.
…
In the new work, Tessi Löffelmann and colleagues turned to certain forms, or isotopes, of strontium to unravel the individuals’ provenance. The element accumulates in bones over time through diet, leaving a distinct signature of where an individual has lived.
…
Isotope analysis helped reveal where these individuals lived and when they died, but it couldn’t answer why the dog, horse and pig made the journey to England in the first place. That’s where historical records can help, says Löffelmann, of Durham University in England and Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium.
For Löffelmann, the small sizes of early Norse ships combined with the fact that the animals and people were buried together suggest Vikings may have initially brought animals with them for companionship, not just function.
—
You can read more of Löffelmann’s research here, in PLOS One.
The post Vikings brought animals to England, radioactive analysis shows. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
An image from NASA/JPL-Caltech depicting a capsule starting to slow down in the Martian atmosphere. All we see is the outer structure, which seems mostly to be made of metal. But inside…
The rover (Curiosity) and descent stage of the spacecraft are inside the aeroshell consisting of the backshell and heat shield. This friction with the atmosphere before the opening of the spacecraft’s parachute will accomplish more than nine-tenths of the deceleration of the entry, descent and landing phase.
I found the image on Wikimedia Commons, but you can read more about in the NASA mission pages multimedia library.
The post Science Art: Deceleration of Mars Science Laboratory in Martian Atmosphere, 2011 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Bolts magazine has an article by one of the researchers published in American Political Science Review who found that police interactions directly correlate with lower voter turnout, no matter who or why:
Our study compared the voter turnout of Hillsborough motorists who were stopped by police shortly before and after each election. Drawing on information about each person’s turnout in past cycles, we found that these stops reduced the likelihood that a stopped individual turned out to vote by 1.8 percentage points on average. The effect held when accounting for characteristics like race, gender, party affiliation, past turnout, and prior traffic stops to improve our comparisons. The discouraging effect of stops was slightly higher in 2014 and 2018.
…
Why would traffic stops make people less likely to show up to the polls? Past research has already established that the most disruptive forms of criminal legal contact, like arrest and incarceration, discourage people from voting. Our study shows that low-level police contact matters in the same way. If a traffic stop makes a motorist fear that the government will harm them, it can prompt a withdrawal from civic life that political scientists call “strategic retreat.” Motorists might worry that a routine traffic stop could escalate into police violence, a more common outcome for Black people in particular. Beyond justified fears of violent victimization, voters might also bristle at the perception of being targeted to raise revenue through excessive ticketing. Accordingly, if incarceration ‘teaches’ would-be voters that their government is an alienating and harmful force in their lives, traffic stops could catalyze a similar form of ‘learning.’
—
You can read the study here, in American Political Science Review.
The post Researchers: one police stop makes a person less likely to vote. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Researchers from Imperial College London and the Paris School of Economics have looked across the pond at 50 years of data and found that America, rather than being the country of dreams, is a place where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer:
The researchers drew on new economic data from which they could build a database of the distribution of wealth for most European countries for the first time. This brought the data in line with the available US financial figures and allowed them to compare the change in both total household wealth and wealth inequality in Europe and the United States since the 1970s to the present day, as well as working out the reasons for those changes.
The researchers found that although both regions had a similar steady growth in total household wealth, the way the wealth had been distributed has been markedly different since the 1980s.
Dr Clara Martínez-Toledano, Assistant Professor in Finance at Imperial College Business School and one of the lead authors of the study said: “From the 1980s we see a wealth gap start to emerge, where there’s a more dramatic change in the United States. The wealth that the top one percent richest people own in the States has undergone a significantly larger increase than the top one percent richest in Europe – in other words, the gap between rich and poor in the US became much more pronounced as wealthy Americans became even richer.”
…
Another important factor that can explain the wealth gap between rich and poor in the US is inequality of labour income, with the US economy showing a much bigger contrast in pay between the lowest and highest paid workers than the European economies over the same time period.
To document these findings, the researchers ran simulations that substituted the labour income inequality and asset price trajectories from France into the US figures. They found the hypothetical US wealth concentration levels were lower as a result of the smaller rise in labour income inequality and the larger rise in house prices relative to financial assets in Europe. The results were similar when they substituted the same figures from other European countries into the US data.
The researchers say US policymakers should prioritise job market policies that are aimed at boosting wages at the lower end of the distribution to reduce wealth inequality. They also call on central banks to play a key role in stabilising house prices.
Dr Martínez-Toledano explained: “Less equal societies have less stable economies. High levels of economic inequality can lead to economic and political instability. This is why action needs to be taken before societies become polarised.”
—
You can see the datasets at the Distribution Wealth Accounts for Europe database, and read the research here, in the Journal of Monetary Economics.
The post The gap between rich and poor is growing faster in the U.S. than Europe. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health has released an alarming study that’s found levels of carcinogens and other toxic materials, including lead and hormone-disrupting chemicals, in cosmetics made for children:
Children’s makeup and body products (CMBPs) are widely marketed to children throughout the US; however, little is known about how and why children use them. We administered a survey to parents/guardians of children aged ≤12 years about the use of CMBPs. Among all the children (n = 312) of survey respondents (n = 207), 219 (70%) have used CMBPs in their lifetime. Older children used CMBPs at higher rates than younger children, and female children used CMBPs at higher rates than male children. Children of Hispanic/Latinx parents/guardians used CMBPs more often and for shorter durations and a greater proportion used lip, hair, and fragrance products than children of non-Hispanic parents/guardians. Approximately half the children that use CMBPs were reported to use them with play intentions. Compared to children of non-Hispanic parents/guardians, children of Hispanic/Latinx parents/guardians reported more play motivations for CMBP use.
…
Major gaps in the regulation include a lack of mandatory pre-market safety approvals for products and ingredients other than color additives, lack of transparency in fragrance ingredients, limited recall of products, and under-reporting of adverse events [5,6]. Additionally, cosmetics are often marketed with vague terms such as “natural”, “organic”, “non-toxic”, and “hypoallergenic”, which are not defined by the FDA for cosmetic products [7,8].
In part due to these regulatory limitations, ingredients of concern have been found in adult cosmetics and CMBPs. For example, heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, and chromium have been found in children’s face paints [9]. Endocrine disruptors such as phthalates, parabens, and perfluorochemicals (PFCs) are also widely used in adult cosmetics and CMBPs [10,11,12]. Even when concentrations of individual chemicals are low in products, the potential for interactive effects from multiple toxicants is important to take into consideration [13]. Allergic reactions, such as contact dermatitis, are some of the most frequently cited negative health outcomes associated with the use of cosmetics [14]. Natural rubber, fragrances, preservatives, dyes, and metals are classes of allergens commonly found in cosmetics [15]. Rastogi et al. (1999) found that in certain CMBPs, fragrance allergens were frequently detected, occasionally at unsafe concentrations [16].
Children are particularly vulnerable to adverse health risks associated with makeup and body products. Behavioral patterns such as hand-to-mouth activity may increase exposure to products through ingestion. Additionally, children’s small body size, rapid growth rate, developing tissues and organs, and immature immune systems make them biologically susceptible to the effects of toxicants [17].…
More than half of the children of respondents used CMBPs at least monthly and approximately one-fifth typically use CMBPs for 8 h or more. Frequent and lengthy exposures to CMBPs in early life warrant concern about the safety of their ingredients. Child behaviors such as hand-to-mouth activity and inappropriate application could further increase exposure to harmful ingredients. One-third of children were reported to have ingested CMBPs in the last year, and many children were reported to wear CMBPs applied by another child, increasing the risk of incorrect application and exposure to harmful ingredients. Our results suggest that the risk of exposure to CMBP ingredients may be affected by ethnicity, as children of Hispanic/Latinx parents/guardians were reported to use CMBPs significantly more frequently but for shorter durations and to ingest CMBP at lower rates than children of non-Hispanic parents/guardians. A limitation of investigating the average length of CMBP use across all products is that some products (e.g., nail polish) are intended to be used on longer time scales (i.e., weeks as opposed to hours).
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An image of the machine that builds our bodies, bit by bit.
From the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, located at www.genome.gov – though I found it in the NIH Image Gallery on Flickr.
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SONG: “Whispering Secrets to Me”.
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Defector 15 Nov 2022, “Turtles Have Been Vocalizing All This Time. Why Did We Not Listen?,” as used in the post “Turtles have voices that we hadn’t heard till now.”
ABSTRACT:
OK, there are two things I feel like I need to get out of the way first. One is that the first verse is set in a real location, along Florida roads that run from the Fakahatchee Strand in Corkscrew Swamp northeastward toward Cape Canaveral and the Space Coast. (State Road 29 to Moore Haven, 78 to Okeechobee, then 70 to I95 and up.) There are a lot of turtles there.
The other thing is that this song has a solo consisting of a recording of tortoises getting it on (thank you, Dennis Hansen via Defector) laid over another recording of Dermatemys mawii hatchlings calling out (thank you, Camila Ferrara, also via Defector). I feel slightly guilty about building a song-section out of sex and babies, but only slightly. The chelonians won’t mind.
I got the idea for what became this song while listening to the soundtrack to the K-drama Alchemy of Souls. There was a melodramatic K-pop song that got repeated a lot that started with this pad of strings playing a really high note that led into a bass playing eighth notes. Simple pop stuff. I spent days fiddling with string pads and synth sounds and basslines. Then the song took shape almost on its own. I worked out the chorus the old-fashioned way, vocalizing like a lunatic while riding my bicycle through residential streets in the wee hours of the morning.
For a while I was playing around with words like “ultrasound” and “infrasonic,” but then I read the article again and none of the scientists mentioned anything about turtle voices being outside the range of human hearing – which makes this research even more stunning. People just weren’t listening.
Well, here I am, listening, getting the turtle secrets at night in the swamp.
LYRICS:
I left the Fakahatchee
And headed toward the stars
On eight lanes of dead grey asphalt
They were all jammed with carsCH: There were hardtops hauling families
There was roadkill on the roads
No shade from pines or from cypress
Just plastic in our clothes
Whispering secrets to meV2: But that night I dreamt of water
And the smell of rotting logs
The moon hung green and heavy
Reptiles waiting in the fogCH:
Whispering secrets to me
Mumbling from somewhere under your shell
Microphones might receive
What nobody ever thought you would tell
Whispering secrets to me….(solo)
V3: Point sensors at flying saucers
Strange faces lined with paint
Stacked like Easter Island statues
Silent pictures of restraint,
But I sayCH:
Whisper your secrets to me
Mumbling from somewhere under your shell
Microphones might receive
What nobody ever thought you would tellThese people hardly believe
Mumbling from somewhere under your shell
Decoding words that you speak
What nobody ever thought you would tell
…in grunts and clicks and snuffles
…in hybrid sounds, in vocal puzzles
Mumbling from somewhere under your shell
And whispering secrets to me
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A professor at the prestigious Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania – probably America’s most highly regarded business school – has found that, based on the artificial intelligence bot’s performance in one of the program’s core classes, ChatGPT could earn an MBA there with pretty good grades (pdf):
ABSTRACT:
OpenAI’s Chat GPT3 has shown a remarkable ability to automate some of the skills of highly compensated knowledge workers in general and specifically the knowledge workers in the jobs held by MBA graduates including analysts, managers, and consultants. Chat GPT3 has demonstrated the capability of performing professional tasks such as writing software code and preparing legal documents. The purpose of this paper is to document how Chat GPT3 performed on the final exam ofa typical MBA core course, Operations Management. Exam questions were uploaded as used in a final exam setting and then graded. The “academic performance” of Chat GPT3 can be summarized as follows. First, it does an amazing job at basic operations management and process analysis questions including those that are based on case studies. Not only are the answers correct, but the explanations are excellent. Second, Chat GPT3 at times makes surprising mistakes in relatively simple calculations at the level of 6th grade Math. These mistakes can be massive in magnitude. Third, the present version of Chat GPT is not capable of handling more advanced process analysis questions, even when they are based on fairly standard templates. This includes process flows with multiple products and problems with stochastic effects such as demand variability. Finally, ChatGPT3 is remarkably good at modifying its answers in response to human hints. In other words, in the instances where it initially failed to match the problem with the right solution method, Chat GPT3 was able to correct itself after receiving an appropriate hint from a human expert. Considering this performance, Chat GPT3 would have received a B to B- grade on the exam. This has important implications for business school education, including the need for exam policies, curriculum design focusing on collaboration between human and AI, opportunities to simulate real world decision making processes, the need to teach creative problem solving, improved teaching productivity, and more.
—
Please don’t skip the paper’s conclusion, in which Terwiesch asks ChatGPT itself what its impact will be on business education in the future. In other words, he actually got the bot to help write his paper for publication.
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AP News reports on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approving the first design for a new kind of nuclear power plant that’s smaller and less expensive to build that traditional diesel plants – and should make it easier for American power companies to get away from fossil fuels:
It means that companies seeking to build and operate a nuclear power plant can pick the design for a 50-megawatt, advanced light-water small modular nuclear reactor by Oregon-based NuScale Power and apply to the NRC for a license.
…
Diane Hughes, NuScale’s vice president of marketing and communications, said the design certification is a historic step forward toward a clean energy future and makes the company’s VOYGR power plant a near-term deployable solution for customers. The first small modular reactor design application package included over 2 million pages of supporting materials, Hughes added.
However, David Schlissel at the Ohio-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis expressed concerns about the costs. Schlissel, who has studied the history of the nuclear power industry and the finances of the NuScale project, expects they will continue to go up, which could limit how many NuScale reactors are built. He said he thinks they’re not competitive in price with renewables and battery storage.
…
The U.S. Energy Department said it provided more than $600 million since 2014 to support the design, licensing and siting of NuScale’s VOYGR small modular reactor power plant and other domestic small reactor concepts. The department is working with Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems to demonstrate a six-module NuScale VOYGR plant at the Idaho National Laboratory. The first module is expected to be operational by 2029.
NuScale has signed 19 agreements in the U.S. and internationally to deploy its small reactor technology.
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I wasn’t sure if this really counted as a scientific illustration, despite finding it in the Biodiversity Heritage Library, since most of the other plates in this book are really about hunting rabbits. But it is definitely a natural history. The title page kind of encapsulates what I mean: The Rabbit by James Edmund Harting, with a Chapter on COOKERY by Alexander Innes Shand.
There’s also a lovely image of a stoat hunting rabbits near the beginning.
It’s the Chinese New Year today, welcoming the Year of the Rabbit. May all of us outrun the owls at our back this year (yet may none of us go hungry).
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Vice reports on the LOL Verifier, a device that won’t let you type out “LOL” in a message unless you’ve actually just laughed out loud:
[Brian] Moore, an artist who likes to play with technology to make a point, told Motherboard in a phone call that he had long been thinking about the plight of LOL. “The deflation of the LOL, as it were, was a realization when I started talking with friends. LOL does not say anything anymore. It might as well be punctuation,” he said.
“I wanted to figure out if there was a way to make something that would actually verify it,” he continued. “Finally I figured out a way to make it into a physical piece of hardware that sits between your keyboard and your computer and sniffs for an LOL.”
The physical device, a small black box with “LOL” printed on the front, is connected to the user’s computer by a cable. It has a big light in the center. When a user types “LOL,” the device listens for some form of laughter. If it detects passable laughter, the light turns green, and the device’s verification message—“LOL verified at [time]”—is inserted into the message. If no laughter is detected, the light turns red, and the typed “LOL” is switched out for another message, like “that’s funny” or “ha.”
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Ars Technica looks at the way Exxon executives decided to bury their own company’s very accurate findings on petroleum and climate:
Exxon’s scientific climate work was shut down a long time ago. But the new paper relies on the work of two science historians (Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes), who dug through old documents and a number of peer-reviewed papers to identify cases where Exxon’s scientists made projections about how carbon dioxide emissions might alter the future climate. In several cases, we know that the graphs that they found were part of documents that were sent to Exxon executives.
The historians collaborated with a noted climate scientist (Stefan Rahmstorf), who then compared their projections to the behavior of the actual climate. This allowed the team to determine whether the projections made internally at Exxon were in line with those produced by academic climate scientists and whether they were “skillful,” meaning that they were in line with what the actual climate ended up doing.
Overall the historians came up with 16 different climate projections produced by Exxon scientists between 1977 and 2003. For most of this era, computer power wasn’t sufficient to run the sort of complete-atmosphere climate models that are used today. Instead, the models they used were generally physics-based energy distribution models that tracked things like where and how much radiation gets absorbed, and how air circulation moves that energy around.
Nevertheless, the projections of future warming done by Exxon scientists were remarkably good. Most of them (nearly two-thirds) had error bars that overlapped with the errors in the temperature record. And a couple of the exceptions were simply due to graphs that lacked error bars, narrowing down the potential to overlap with anything considerably. Two of the remaining ones also forecast more warming than actually occurred.
A climate projection’s skillfulness is a measure of how closely it agreed with the historic record. And again, Exxon scientists performed well. The aggregate skillfulness of their internal climate models is over 70 percent. By that measure, they outperformed contemporary models from the scientific community.
You can read more of the analytical team’s findings here, in Science.
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These are sea anemones, from History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals by Phillip Henry Gosse.
They are, according to the caption below:
1-5 Corynactis Viritis, 6. Bologera Eques, 7. Zoanthus Sulcatus, 8. Z. Alderi, 9-10. Zoanthus Coucnii, 11. Aureliania Augusta, 12. A. Meteocera, 13. Capnea Sanguinea.
I found the image in the digital collection of the University of Washington library.
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MedPage Today shares a painful finding from the American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine (ASRA Pain Medicine), who have issued guidelines for pre-operative treatment based on findings that people who use cannabis are likely to feel more pain after surgery:
Cannabis is the most commonly used recreational drug in the U.S. and the most commonly used psychoactive substance after alcohol, noted guideline co-author and ASRA Pain Medicine president Samer Narouze, MD, PhD, of Northeast Ohio Medical University in Akron.
About 10% of the population — 27.6 million people — reported monthly use in 2017, according to data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and that number is growing, Narouze added. Recent Gallup poll numbers place the number of Americans who smoke marijuanaopens in a new tab or window at about 16%.
“That’s why we’ve been working on these guidelines for the last 2 years, because we have millions of people using cannabis recreationally or medicinally,” Narouze said in an interview with MedPage Today.
…
But even in observational studies, patterns were clear, Narouze noted.”The main issue we’re seeing is more pain in recovery and more nausea and vomiting, also in recovery,” he observed.
“We also saw associations with increased risk for post-operative cardiovascular morbidity — post-operative myocardial infarction and arrhythmias — and post-operative cerebrovascular morbidity in some patients,” he said.
Cannabis had varying interactions with anesthetics and sedatives, Narouze added. Some patients also experienced post-operative cannabis withdrawal symptoms.
…
C grade recommendations included delaying elective surgery for at least 2 hours after patients smoked cannabis, adjusting anesthesia delivery based on symptoms and timing of last cannabis consumption, increasing vigilance of potential heart and neurological problems after surgery, using multimodal pain control including opioids if needed, and using a cannabinoid agonist like dronabinol to treat severe cannabis withdrawal symptoms post-operatively.
“There’s a large gap in our knowledge about cannabis and surgery,” Narouze stated. “That’s why most recommendations did not reach the grade A level.”
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PhysOrg looks back (via the James Webb Space Telescope) to when the universe was a quarter of its current age, and has been able to see young galaxies stretching out into shapes like our own Milky Way:
In a Hubble image, one galaxy, EGS-23205, is little more than a disk-shaped smudge, but in the corresponding JWST image taken this past summer, it’s a beautiful spiral galaxy with a clear stellar bar.
“I took one look at these data, and I said, ‘We are dropping everything else!'” said Shardha Jogee, professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. “The bars hardly visible in Hubble data just popped out in the JWST image, showing the tremendous power of JWST to see the underlying structure in galaxies,” she said, describing data from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS), led by UT Austin professor, Steven Finkelstein.
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Bars play an important role in galaxy evolution by funneling gas into the central regions, boosting star formation.
“Bars solve the supply chain problem in galaxies,” Jogee said. “Just like we need to bring raw material from the harbor to inland factories that make new products, a bar powerfully transports gas into the central region where the gas is rapidly converted into new stars at a rate typically 10 to 100 times faster than in the rest of the galaxy.”
Bars also help to grow supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies by channeling the gas part of the way.
…
“This discovery of early bars means galaxy evolution models now have a new pathway via bars to accelerate the production of new stars at early epochs,” Jogee said.
And the very existence of these early bars challenges theoretical models as they need to get the galaxy physics right in order to predict the correct abundance of bars. The team will be testing different models in their next papers.
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You can read more of the findings here, in The Astrophysical Journal.
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This is how you advertise a science book. At least, it was how Hugo Gernsback did in the pages of The Electrical Experimenter in September 1916. Is that figure in the middle Hephaestus or is it Zeus? Either way, by reading this course, you’re bound to get that shirtless, lightning-wielding, machine-operating guy’s power. Just imagine! The book is “not only useful, but absolutely necessary to everybody interested in electricity.” And in 1916, who wasn’t?
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EurekAlert presents the findings of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s John DeLong, who has found the first known virovore – a microorganism that feeds on viruses:
DeLong and his colleagues have found that a species of Halteria —microscopic ciliates that populate freshwater worldwide — can eat huge numbers of infectious chloroviruses that share their aquatic habitat. For the first time, the team’s lab experiments have also shown that a virus-only diet, which the team calls “virovory,” is enough to fuel the physiological growth and even population growth of an organism.
…
But if ciliates are having those same viruses for dinner, then virovory could be counterbalancing the carbon recycling that the viruses are known to perpetuate. It’s possible, DeLong said, that virovory is aiding and abetting carbon’s escape from the dregs of the food chain, granting it an upward mobility that viruses otherwise suppress.
“If you multiply a crude estimate of how many viruses there are, how many ciliates there are and how much water there is, it comes out to this massive amount of energy movement (up the food chain),” said DeLong, who estimated that ciliates in a small pond might eat 10 trillion viruses a day. “If this is happening at the scale that we think it could be, it should completely change our view on global carbon cycling.”
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Thanks to an unexpected gift from an old friend, I was just reading an article in the print edition of Scientific American about the Sora people of eastern India, who have a unique culture that’s in danger of being forgotten completely, as more of their children convert to Christianity or mainstream Hinduism. One of their core religious beliefs involves a kind of trance mediumship to communicate with departed relatives, very similar to what I’ve seen in a Spiritualist church or read about in the story of the Witch of Endor. As long as a living family member remembers the departed, they can be reached in the underworld and carry messages.
But once the last living descendant of the last living family member has forgotten who the departed spirit was, they become a butterfly.
We don’t have a similar belief in my culture … except maybe some of the stories about Acherontia atropos, the death’s-head hawkmoth. Those stories are not quite so wistful, but maybe they should be. I imagine some spirits can feel angry or fall into despair over being forgotten.
The death’s-head hawkmoth is not on this encyclopedia page. The star attraction is a moth that looks like a luna moth, but is actually a Madagascar moon moth, also called a comet moth. I don’t know any folklore about it, but looking like that and with names like that, I imagine there must be.
The illustration came from Wikimedia Commons, but you can leaf through the book on Archive.org.
Happy 2023, world. Let’s try to remember what we need to remember.
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MedPage Today maps the correlation between riding fast and free and donating your young organs to people who need them:
Compared with the 4 weeks before and after rallies, there was an estimated 21% more organ donors per day during the rallies (incidence rate ratio [IRR] 1.21, 95% CI 1.09-1.35, P=0.001), as well as 26% more transplant recipients per day (IRR 1.26, 95% CI 1.12-1.42, P<0.001), reported Anupam Jena, MD, PhD, of Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues.
“This amounts to approximately 1 additional donor or 6 additional transplant recipients in these regions for every 2 major motorcycle rallies,” they wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine.
…
“During motorcycle rally weeks in distant regions not containing motorcycle rallies, there was no increase in the number of organ donations or transplants, suggesting that our observed main effect was associated with the rallies rather than other temporal factors such as vacation travel,” the authors wrote.
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You can read more of Jena’s (and colleagues’) study, here in JAMA.
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The Guardian reveals research into the private lives of lady snakes, which has found that those things human scientists thought might be scent glands or underdeveloped penises were actually twin clitorises, or “hemiclitores”:
Male snakes and lizards are known to have hemipenes – a pair of penises which are everted outside the body during reproduction. In many species, hemipenes are covered in spines or hooks.
The study’s lead author and a PhD student at the University of Adelaide, Megan Folwell, said “a massive taboo around female genitalia” was a potential factor in why snake clitorises had not been described earlier. “I think it’s a combination of not knowing what to look for and not wanting to,” she said.
“Trying to find it is not always the easiest thing – some are extremely tiny,” Folwell said. She first dissected the clitorises in a death adder, in which the organ forms a triangle shape “like a heart”.
“I was fortunate that the death adder had a reasonably prominent hemiclitores,” Folwell said.
The study suggests that the sex organs “have functional significance in mating” in snakes. Though more research into snake behaviour is needed, Folwell said the team theorised the hemiclitores “could provide some sort of stimulation signalling for vaginal relaxation and lubrication, which would aid the female in copulation potentially prevent damage from those big hemipene hooks and spines during mating”.
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You can read more of Folwell & colleagues’ research here, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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Defector (not just a sports blog) reports on a zoological discovery – that turtles have been vocalizing all along, but we’ve only realized they had voices in the last couple of years. And not just as a sex thing:
In October, a group of researchers that included Ferrara published a paper in Nature Communications finding that at least 50 species of turtles, as well as a few other cold-blooded species long dismissed as mute, do actually vocalize. The researchers recorded all of these species emitting a range of snuffles, grunts, snorts, and farts—in the acoustic sense. Not only do these results overturn the assumption that turtles are always silent, they also suggest that vocalizations can be traced back to a common ancestor about 407 million years ago.
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In other words, to complete her PhD, Ferrara (and a microphone) had to venture into the Amazon, find the giant South American river turtles, and then listen to see if they were making sounds. The first year, she listened only to adults. The next, she listened to hatchlings. She eventually recorded the eggs too, and learned the turtles start to vocalize in an embryonic form. “We were so excited with what we had discovered. And then we started to ask ourselves, ‘How about the other species?’”
Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Zurich and the lead author on the new paper, first learned about turtle talk through Ferrara’s paper on the vocalizations of the giant South American river turtle. Intrigued, he went to the Amazon to do fieldwork with some of the authors of Ferrara’s paper and heard the turtles vocalize for the first time. The experience reminded him of another time he’d heard tortoises vocalizing…
…
Although Jorgewich-Cohen had a pair of tortoises at home as well as a black-bellied slider turtle, he had not been lucky enough to hear their mounting-related melodies. But he remembered the day he brought his second tortoise home to meet the first tortoise, the two began moving their heads around and making “funny sounds that somehow sounded like chickens,” he said. He started recording his black-bellied slider, too, putting a recording device in its tank for hours and then analyzing the resulting sounds—of which there were many.
Jorgewich-Cohen began an international tour of turtles, traveling to various institutions that had rare species in tanks. Some visits were as easy as dropping a microphone into a turtle tank and waiting for a few hours. Others proved more difficult, depending on the turtle. He visited Turtle Island in Graz, Austria, which houses two-thirds of all living species of turtles. “It’s insane,” he said. “I think it’s the biggest collection of living turtles in the world.” Turtle Island cares for several softshell turtles from New Guinea, a species called Pelochelys bibroni that can grow over a meter long. “They’re fine, normally, but if you try to pick them up, they can become very aggressive,” Jorgewich-Cohen said. “You don’t want to get bitten by one, it feels like it could take your arm off.” Instead, the keepers opted to remove every single other species of animal from the tank to isolate the hard-hearted softshells.
But the recording of the softshells was reward enough.
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You can listen to some recordings at the link, and read Jorgewich-Cohen’s and Ferrara’s research here, in Nature Communications.
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Uranium, which produces 3 million times more energy and 10 million times less waste!
I honestly have no idea if this PSA is real or a sarcastic reproduction. It could easily have gone with this actual 1950s chemistry set that contained real uranium for your budding young experimenter.
May all your Christmases be bright, right?
[via @ShannyGasm on Mastodon]
The post Science Art: Science by Santa: Remember bad kids get coal, Good kids get Uranium…., first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
SONG: “14.8 Million”.
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Nature 14 Dec 2022, “Missing data mean we’ll probably never know how many people died of COVID,” as used in the post “More people died of COVID-19 than we know. Or ever will know. Because data is missing.”.
ABSTRACT:
This is, shall we say, one the more “experimental mode” songs. I spent a month, more or less, playing around with a hang drum VST, making a kind of ambient soundscape thing with some overlapping loops (I hesitate to call them polyrhythms), and no idea really what to write words about.
I’m really sort of tired of covid news – on the one hand, it’s super important (and we’re still getting it wrong), but on the other hand, it’s a topic that has sort of overtaken everything else in the world of science publishing, and as far as narratives go, they’re all basically the same. I want more corners to be turned, more breakthroughs, more triumphs over adversity at long last.
Instead, the newest sort of story is this: we will never know exactly how many people we have lost. We still don’t know how to do the simplest thing, which is to count.
All I knew when I settled on this topic was that I didn’t want it to rhyme, and I wanted it to be sort of a mess of different voices, overlapping. I didn’t sing on this at all. There is no melody. This is seven or so text-to-speech websites using different voices to repeat the same words. It starts with a child and ends with a Chinese woman.
The math is a back-of-envelope calculation. I like doing that with big numbers, because 20 people is a tragedy, 200 is unfathomable, but 2 thousand and 2 million are both equally statistics, you know? I have to make that kind of figure concrete. So here’s where I start: If the figure of 14.8 million uncounted people is correct, then to read out all of their names, at one second per name, would take five months and three weeks.
But we can’t do that, can we. We can’t even get all of their names on one list. Someone, somewhere knows each name, but collectively, we can’t do that. That means these are each private losses. The loss is of historic proportions, but it’s not part of history.
There is a sense where I was putting this together and thinking of the songs of the dinosaurs that we’re only now reconstructing, because they seem not to have had larynxes, and that kind of soft tissue isn’t fossilized anyway. But I didn’t want to insert anything as potentially corny or monstrous as dinosaurs into this, and I didn’t want to flirt with the idea of mass extinction either, since that’s a totally different order of magnitude.
These songs that are lost, they are our own.
LYRICS:
In five months and three weeks,
We could read every name
One name per second
But we would need to stop to breathe
And we would need to remember14.8 million songs were silenced
And we have not remembered
14.8 million songs, we can’t remember.
We won’t remember.
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BBC reports on new research reconstructing the sounds of the dinosaurs, the honks, hoots, chirps, and vibrating grunts that the giant creatures used to communicate millions of years ago:
Some dinosaurs had greatly elongated necks – up to 16m (52ft) long in the largest sauropods – which would have likely altered the sounds they produced (think about what happens when a trombone is extended). Others had bizarre skull structures that, much like wind instruments, could have amplified and altered the tone the animals produced. One such creature, a herbivorous hadrosaur named Parasaurolophus tubicen…had an enormous crest almost 1m (3.2ft) long protruding from the back of its head. Inside this were three pairs of hollow tubes running from the nose to the top of the crest, where two of the pairs performed a U-bend to wind back down towards the base of the skull and the animal’s airways. The other pair widened to form a large chamber near the top of the crest. In total they formed what was essentially a 2.9m (9.5ft) long resonating chamber.
In 1995, palaeontologists at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science unearthed a nearly complete skull of this unusual looking Parasaurolophus. Using a computerised tomography (CT) scanner, they were able to take 350 images of the crest, allowing them to see inside in unprecedented detail. Then, working with computer scientists, they digitally reconstructed the organ and simulated how it might behave if air was blown through it.
“I would describe the sound as otherworldly,” says Tom Williamson, one of those who worked on the dig and is now curator of palaeontology at the museum. “It sent chills through my spine, I remember.”
The closest analogues he can find in living animals today are the vibrating grunts of the southern cassowary, which lives in Australia. This flightless bird emits a series of deep bellows and growls that reverberate through the thick jungle where they live.
“It’s easy for me to imagine a misty Late Cretaceous rainforest setting with those eerie sounds thundering in the background,” says Williamson. “The sounds are of low frequencies – just what is necessary to penetrate the dense undergrowth.”
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Not all dinosaurs were blessed with what amounted to a trumpet atop their heads. And we have no fossilised evidence of voice boxes from dinosaurs, leading some to speculate the animals may even have been mute.
“What we do have are fossil clues that can tell us about different parameters of the airways like its diameter and its length,” says Julia Clarke, a palaeontologist at the University of Texas at Austin. “We can compare those geometries to see how they relate to those dinosaurs that are living today – birds.”
But Clarke has another clue that has provided a further piece of the puzzle. In the mid-2000s, she and her colleagues conducted a detailed examination of the preserved skeleton of an early type of bird found over a decade earlier by Argentinian researchers on Vega Island, a tiny scrap of land on the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. The fossil itself remains partially embedded in a piece of rock, but using advanced CT scanning techniques, Clarke and her team were able to detect bits of the fossil hidden from view. They then digitally reconstructed the fossil from the scans.
And there, nestled amongst the fossilised bone fragments, were the remnants of something astonishing – the mineralised rings of a syrinx, the sound producing organ found in birds, dating back to the time of the dinosaurs.The primitive bird it belonged to – a goose-like creature called Vegavis iaai – would have coexisted with non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, 66-68 million years ago. At around this time, this part of modern Antarctica would have been covered in temperate forests and surrounded by shallow seas. The honking sounds of V. iaai were probably part of that landscape.
But for Clarke, the discovery reveals something else by its presence – that these sound-producing organs can fossilise, and their absence from most dinosaur fossils is telling.
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Her work has led her to a revelation that will shake the ground from under the feet of five-year-olds and movie goers around the world. Dinosaurs almost certainly didn’t roar. They probably cooed instead.
Or more accurately they may have produced sounds in ways similar to the way doves coo or ostriches boom. Many modern birds use what is known as closed-mouth vocalisation, where sound is made by inflating the throat rather than passing air through the syrinx. Crocodiles – another distant relative of the dinosaurs that split from a common ancestor around 240 million years ago – also use closed-mouth vocalisation to generate deep rumbles that can cause the water around them to “dance” around their bodies. Crocodiles, like other reptiles and mammals, have a larynx rather than a syrinx that produces the sound. But they bypass this when producing their mating bellows.
“The Jurassic Park films have got it wrong,” laughs Clarke.
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“The cochlear elongation denoting sensitivity to squeaky noises occurred near the origin of the archosaurian ‘ruling reptiles’, which includes birds and crocodiles,” says Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut…
“Given that baby birds and baby crocodiles chirp, it’s reasonable to infer that baby non-bird dinosaurs did as well, and that their parents listened to them and cared for them just as crocodile and bird parents do,” he says.
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This is a NASA-released image of a very important piece of space technology. That small, color-corrected orange thing is a tiny plush Snoopy doll used to measure relative weightlessness in the crew cabin. I’d kind of like to see Snoopy’s descendants featured in more “hard” science fiction like The Expanse or The Martian, alerting space travelers to the level of gravity (or at least acceleration force) without having to use readouts on a dashboard. Is Snoopy up? Yes. We’re at zero-G.
From the image description on NASA’s Orion image gallery:
In this enhanced image, Snoopy stands out in a custom orange spacesuit, while Orion’s interior has been shaded black and white for contrast. The character’s spacesuit is modeled after the suit astronauts will wear during launch and reentry in Orion on future missions to the Moon. NASA has shared an association with Charles M. Schulz and Snoopy since the Apollo missions and the relationship continues under Artemis. Snoopy was selected as the zero-gravity indicator for the flight because of the inspiration and excitement the character has provided for human spaceflight for more than 50 years.
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Nature reports on the gaps in information that mean the official counts of people who died as a result of COVID-19 are much, much lower than the real numbers:
The [Nature and WHO] data suggest that during 2020 and 2021, excess mortality was some 2.7 times greater than the official toll, at between 13.2 million and 16.6 million deaths, with the most-likely value 14.8 million.
This is, in fact, slightly more conservative than other estimates. In March, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a global health-research centre at the University of Washington in Seattle, reported a range of 17.1 million to 19.6 million excess deaths between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021, with a most-likely figure of 18.2 million. A team at The Economist magazine uses a machine-learning model to produce a constantly updated figure that was originally around 18 million, but currently lies at around 16 million (see go.nature.com/3d5bpc3).
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irst, it emphasizes the scale of the crisis, and highlights that many low- and middle-income countries that on the face of it saw few deaths were probably hit just as hard as richer countries, if not more so. People in these countries did not enjoy a secret immunity to COVID‑19, even if their deaths were not recorded as assiduously as were those in higher-income nations.
Second, it underlines how much still needs to be done to improve systems for recording deaths. The United Nations is trying to track countries’ success in registering deaths as part of its Sustainable Development Goals. Its latest records state that by 2020, 154 countries out of 188 tracked had death data that were “at least 75% complete”. In countries with weak social safety nets, there might be little incentive for people to report deaths. When asked, many people say they didn’t know they needed to. Census-type surveys can fill in some gaps later, but tend to focus on capturing maternal and child mortality. The UN children’s charity UNICEF estimates that, globally, around half of all deaths are not officially counted; a non-profit public-health organization in New York City called Vital Strategies more optimistically suggests that 40% are unregistered.
The post More people died of COVID-19 than we know. Or ever will know. Because data is missing. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
EurekAlert reveals new evidence of an age long before the dinosaurs, a primeval world 470 million years ago when the world was ruled by giant swimming arthropods. Like, the same family as shrimp, lobsters, and crabs:
Early evidence from the site at Taichoute, once undersea but now a desert, records numerous large “free-swimming” arthropods.
More research is needed to analyse these fragments, but based on previously described specimens, the giant arthropods could be up to 2m long.
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They say Taichoute (considered part of the wider “Fezouata Biota”) opens new avenues for paleontological and ecological research.
“Everything is new about this locality – its sedimentology, paleontology, and even the preservation of fossils – further highlighting the importance of the Fezouata Biota in completing our understanding of past life on Earth,” said lead author Dr Farid Saleh, from the University of Lausanne and and Yunnan University.
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Fossils discovered in these rocks include mineralised elements (eg shells), but some also show exceptional preservation of soft parts such as internal organs, allowing scientists to investigate the anatomy of early animal life on Earth.
Animals of the Fezouata Shale, in Morocco’s Zagora region, lived in a shallow sea that experienced repeated storm and wave activities, which buried the animal communities and preserved them in place as exceptional fossils.
However, nektonic (or free-swimming) animals remain a relatively minor component overall in the Fezouata Biota.
The new study reports the discovery of the Taichoute fossils, preserved in sediments that are a few million years younger than those from the Zagora area and are dominated by fragments of giant arthropods.
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You can read more research on the Fezouata Biota here, in Nature: Scientific Reports.
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Nature asks a question that doesn’t have an easy answer. Medical implants – especially newer ones that interface directly with your brain – are designed for the long term, to give as close to a lifetime of service as possible. But they’re made, mostly, by tech startups. And those companies are, more and more often, designed to rise up, get a product to market, and then get shuttered by their VC investors who are there to maximize their returns with the next big thing. So if you’ve got a life-changing piece of brain hardware that’s aging and needs a tune-up, who do you go to once the inventors have gone belly up?:
Developed by the start-up Autonomic Technologies (known as ATI) in San Francisco, California, the device had passed a series of placebo-controlled clinical trials with flying colours. “It worked remarkably well,” says Arne May, a neurologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany who led some of those trials on behalf of the start-up. In most people, stimulation reduced the pain of an attack, made attacks less frequent, or both1. Side effects were rare. In February 2012, while US trials continued, the European Medicines Agency granted the company approval to market the device across Europe.
[Markus] Möllmann-Bohle contacted May, and travelled from his home near Düsseldorf, Germany, to meet him. Filled with hope that this might alleviate his suffering, Möllmann-Bohle underwent surgery to have the device fitted in 2013.
The implant was a revelation. After the pattern and strength of the stimulation had been tailored to Möllmann-Bohle’s needs, around an hour’s use five or six times a day was enough to prevent attacks from becoming debilitating. “I was reborn,” he says.
But, by the end of 2019, ATI had collapsed. The company’s closure left Möllmann-Bohle and more than 700 other people alone with a complex implanted medical device. People using the stimulator and their physicians could no longer access the proprietary software needed to recalibrate the device and maintain its effectiveness. Möllmann-Bohle and his fellow users now faced the prospect of the battery in the hand-held remote wearing out, robbing them of the relief that they had found. “I was left standing in the rain,” Möllmann-Bohle says.
…
For example, in 2013, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a closed-loop system for people with epilepsy. The device detects signs of neural activity that could indicate a seizure and stimulates the brain to suppress it. Some researchers are aiming to treat depression by creating analogous devices that can track signals related to mood. And systems that allow people who have quadriplegia to control computers and prosthetic limbs using only their thoughts are also in development and attracting substantial funding.
The market for neurotechnology is predicted to expand by around 75% by 2026, to US$17.1 billion. But as commercial investment grows, so too do the instances of neurotechnology companies giving up on products or going out of business, abandoning the people who have come to depend on their devices.
Shortly after the demise of ATI, a company called Nuvectra, which was based in Plano, Texas, filed for bankruptcy in 2019. Its device — a new kind of spinal-cord stimulator for chronic pain — had been implanted in at least 3,000 people. In 2020, artificial-vision company Second Sight, in Sylmar, California, laid off most of its workforce, ending support for the 350 or so people who were using its much heralded retinal implant to see. And in June, another manufacturer of spinal-cord stimulators — Stimwave in Pompano Beach, Florida — filed for bankruptcy. The firm has been bought by a credit-management company and is now embroiled in a legal battle with its former chief executive. Thousands of people with the stimulator, and their physicians, are watching on in the hope that the company will continue to operate.
When the makers of implanted devices go under, the implants themselves are typically left in place — surgery to remove them is often too expensive or risky, or simply deemed unnecessary. But without ongoing technical support from the manufacturer, it is only a matter of time before the programming needs to be adjusted or a snagged wire or depleted battery renders the implant unusable.
People are then left searching for another way to manage their condition, but with the added difficulty of a non-functional implant that can be an obstacle both to medical imaging and future implants. For some people, including Möllmann-Bohle, no clear alternative exists.
…
A greater challenge arises when no ready replacement is available. The stimulator made by ATI that Möllmann-Bohle and White have was the first of its kind. When the manufacturer closed its doors, there was no other implant on the market that they could use to manage their cluster headaches.
Left to fend for themselves, White and Möllmann-Bohle each leant on their own professional expertise. White drew on his medical training and found a drug, developed for treating migraines, that suppresses his headaches. But he must take triple the recommended dose, and worries about potential long-term side effects.
Möllmann-Bohle, meanwhile, turned to skills he developed as an electrical engineer. In the past three years, he has repaired a faulty charging port on the hand-held portion of his device and replaced its inbuilt battery several times. This battery was never intended to be accessible to the user, and it turned out to be unusual. Möllmann-Bohle scoured the Internet and eventually found suitable replacements made by a firm in the United States. When he returned for more, however, he learnt that the company had stopped making them. His most recent replacement came from a Chinese company that custom made what he needed.
His tinkering brought him into conflict with his insurers, who initially advised him not to tamper with the device, but eventually agreed to foot the bill for the replacement parts, after he convinced them he was suitably qualified. “They put really big obstacles in my way, or at least they tried to,” Möllmann-Bohle says. But although his repairs have been successful so far, he knows that he does not have the tools or skills to fix everything that could go wrong.
[via Doctorow on Mastodon]
The post What do you do when your neurological-implant company goes under? first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Rivers of lava glow a burning orange, sending white plumes up from a black stone landscape. This is a photograph of Hawaii – a place usually seen as a sort of paradise on Earth – and not a painting of Pandemonium rising up from the primal Chaos around the Lake of Fire in Paradise Lost. Mauna Loa was erupting two weeks ago.
I found this photo on the USGS website, submitted by the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory but credited to the Civil Air Patrol. They were taking a flight shortly before sunset and snapped images of the lava flow. The description reads, in part: This photo is looking at the line of fissure vents erupting above 10,000 ft elevation on the Northeast Rift Zone of Mauna Loa. Lava flows being generated from the line of fissure vents are on the northeast flank of Mauna Loa.
This is where land comes from.
The post Science Art: Mauna Loa Northeast Rift Zone Eruption – November 28, 2022, Civil Air Patrol first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science is not a publication normally given to interpersonal conflict. But now it’s covering the story of the weird competition between Robert DePalma and Melanie During, who suspects DePalma made up data to publish an article on the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs (it seems to have struck in spring in the Northern Hemisphere) before she could get her own study out. DePalma made up data to publish an article on the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs (it seems to have struck in spring in the Northern Hemisphere) before she could get her own study – which listed DePalma as a second author – out:
After trying to discuss the matter with editors at Scientific Reports for nearly a year, During recently decided to make her suspicions public. She and her supervisor, UU paleontologist Per Ahlberg, have shared their concerns with Science, and on 3 December, During posted a statement on the journal feedback website PubPeer claiming, “we are compelled to ask whether the data [in the DePalma et al. paper] may be fabricated, created to fit an already known conclusion.”
…
The plotted line graphs and figures in DePalma’s paper contain numerous irregularities, During and Ahlberg claim—including missing and duplicated data points and nonsensical error bars—suggesting they were manually constructed, rather than produced by data analysis software. DePalma has not made public the raw, machine-produced data underlying his analyses. During and Ahlberg, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, question whether they exist.
DePalma, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester, vehemently denies any wrongdoing. “We absolutely would not, and have not ever, fabricated data and/or samples to fit this or another team’s results,” he wrote in an email to Science. He says the study published in Scientific Reports began long before During became interested in the topic and was published after extended discussions over publishing a joint paper went nowhere.
…
The raw data are missing, he says, because the scientist who ran the analyses died years prior to the paper’s publication, and DePalma has been unable to recover them from his deceased collaborator’s laboratory.
Several independent scientists consulted about the case by Science agreed the Scientific Reports paper contains suspicious irregularities, and most were surprised that the paper—which they note contains typos, unresolved proofreader’s notes, and several basic notation errors—was published in the first place. Although they stopped short of saying the irregularities clearly point to fraud, most—but not all—said they are so concerning that DePalma’s team must come up with the raw data behind its analyses if team members want to clear themselves.
The post Paleontology drama: Scientist accused of faking asteroid-death data to scoop colleague. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
USA Today (among other outlets) celebrated the discovery of an inscription in the oldest known alphabet – a 3,700-year-old Canaanite ivory comb engraved with 17 letters spelling out a wish to keep lice out of your beard:
The sentence contains 17 letters that read: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”
Experts say the discovery shines new light on some of humanity’s earliest use of the Canaanite alphabet, invented around 1800 B.C. and the foundation of the all successive alphabetic systems, such as Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin and Cyrillic.
The mundane topic indicates people had trouble with lice in everyday life during the time – and archaeologists say they have even found microscopic evidence of head lice on the comb.
The comb was first excavated in 2016 at Tel Lachish, an archaeological site in southern Israel, but it was only late last year when a professor at Israel’s Hebrew University noticed the tiny words inscribed on it. Details of the find were published Wednesday in an article in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.
The post Oldest full sentence ever found is a warning against beard lice. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
These are seashells – murexes from the deep waters off Vanuatu called Scabrotrophon inspiratum. Belgian researcher Roland Houart wrote about them (and as far as [...]
The post Science Art: Scabrotrophon Species, Roland Houart, 2003. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Phys.org passes along research led by Dr. Katerina Johnson of Oxford and Dr. Karli Watson of UC Boulder, who found that the more social a [...]
The post Good friendships make a healthier gut biome (in monkeys, at least). first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
MIT Technology Review takes a serious look at the ramifications of having public discourse in private hands, especially when it comes to a written record [...]
The post Twitter’s collapse could wipe clean the historical record – of the last 16 years’ major moments, at least. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The National Science Foundation follows researchers taking a second look at “junk” DNA – the genes that don’t seem to do anything and instead just [...]
The post Butterfly wing-patterns come from ancient DNA, switched around by junk. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is an illustration of MAGIC telescopes capturing images of very intense gamma rays. “MAGIC” refers to the twin Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) [...]
The post Science Art: MAGIC telescopes detected the highest-energy gamma rays from a Gamma Ray Burst…, 2019. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is from the 2017 Bridge Records release of Dvořák, Ravel, Gershwin & Others: Chamber Works, the “lost Clara Rockmore theremin album.” Rockmore, of course, [...]
The post Thanksgiving Theremin: “La Vie En Rose,” Clara Rockmore and Nadia Reisenberg first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is a piece written (by a pupil of Claude Debussy’s) for woodwind, percussion, bass vocal and two theremin cellos – an instrument similar to [...]
The post Thanksgiving Theremin: “Ecuatorial” by Edgar Varese first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science News celebrates a potential (and fragile) recovery – that might have far-reaching implications – with observations that several species of harlequin frogs, thought to [...]
The post Something to be thankful for: Some nearly extinct species are quietly springing back. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
SONG: “Sandpaper Skin”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: PLOS One 19 Oct 2022, “Sharks are the preferred scraping surface for large pelagic fishes: Possible implications for parasite [...]
The post SONG: Sandpaper Skin first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science News reveals the discovery of ice flows off Greenland’s melting that had been hidden until now. Researchers say the amount of sea-level rise due [...]
The post Greenland is melting faster than we thought, and the sea is rising in response. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is a likeness of the elephant seals of Baja California, Mexico, as displayed in 1933 in the newly opened Hall of Ocean Life in [...]
The post Science Art: Elephant Seals of Guadaloupe Island first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
The Scientist looks at two studies that indicate (not prove, but suggest) there may be a link between rare fungi and cancerous tumors: One group, [...]
The post New evidence hints that fungal infections may be related to cancerous tumors. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Phys.org decodes the messages left in the skin of mummies unearthed in the 1920s – ancient Egyptian women who had themselves permanently marked with signs [...]
The post Ancient Egyptian ladies’ tattoos were meant to protect them during childbirth. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
On the heels of Eli Lilly taking a stock hit (when a fake “verified” account on Twitter made it seem like the pharma giant would [...]
The post California will be making its own affordable insulin. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
This is part of a presentation created by physicist Gerard K. O’Neill – one of three “summer studies” he carried out in the 1970s on [...]
The post Science Art: Space Colony Interior by Rick Guidice, c. 1975. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Phys.org reports on Princeton Engineering researchers who have found a way to turn egg whites into an aerogel that can then be used to filter [...]
The post Using egg whites to scoop up microplastics. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.
Science magazine recently covered the tale archaeologists uncovered about one of the earliest known settlers of Borneo, a young hunter-gatherer who had an injured foot [...]
The National Science Foundation puts a spotlight on Tufts University, where researchers have taken proteins from the cocoons of silk moths and used them to [...]
This is a drum. Or a gong. Or maybe a throne. Or a model of the universe with little solar disks around the edge. It [...]
Science News says the BOAT (for “brightest of all time”) has shed new light on a galaxy very, very far away … and even affected [...]
PLOS One has revealed a strange secret of the sea, in which researchers have observed tuna and other pelagic (free-swimming) teleosts (bony fishes) intentionally rubbing [...]
New Scientist reveals an accidental discovery that happened when a passing swarm of bees got close to a weather station on a clear day – [...]
Reuters reports on Modhera, Gujarat, the first 24/7, all-solar village built in India for ordinary folks to live without a local power plant: The project [...]
The Scientist reports on mice fed a high-fat diet, whose children and grandchildren still felt the effects in social behavior and overall health: High-fat diets [...]
This is one of the first American spacecraft to land on the moon. We sent machines there before we sent people. From the Smithsonian Open [...]
Science News reveals a new therapy based on memory exercises that shows promise in totally doing away with nightmare disorder: Frequent, terrifying dreams disturb sleep [...]
SONG: “Good People Grow”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Science 29 Sep 2022, “This lagoon is effectively a person, says Spanish law that’s attempting to save it,” [...]
This is a bunch of smut. Mostly, it’s smut in the genus Ustilago growing on plants in the same genus as knotweed and buckwheat. The [...]
MIT Technology Review offers a strange solution to a serious problem. They’ve got robot bees who can dance inside a bee hive to direct workers [...]
University of Florida (go gator research!) is looking into a treatment that could help stop the loss of coral, which is nice because coral reefs [...]
As a habitual night-owl, it pains me to consider this Scientific American interview with UC Berkeley neuroscientist Eti Ben Simon, whose research has shown that [...]
Science magazine reports on a bit of Indigenous philosophy that’s become a legal strategy for environmental protection. After nearly 640,000 citizens signed a petition supporting [...]
Reuters reports on a painstaking headcount that proves that for every one of the nearly 8 billion humans on Earth, there are 2.5 million ants: [...]
According to the accompanying text, this illustration depicts a baboon species “easily distinguished by its tail, which is four inches long, slender, and exactly like [...]
Live Science considers the fate of the shovel lizard Lystrosaurus, a plant-eating creature from 251 million years ago who survived the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, but [...]
Science News looks gas flares, the open flames used to burn off leaking natural gas and to convert methane to CO2 directly at oil fields. [...]
The flame from a Bunsen burner (a standard piece of chemistry equipment; you might have used one in high school) can change color and height [...]
SONG: “False Social Reality”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Nature Communications 23 Aug 2022, “Americans experience a false social reality by underestimating popular climate policy support by [...]
PsyPost reports on a study of social isolation – “the objective state of having limited social relationships or contact with others” – that found the [...]
Science News reports on the discovery of charred dung in Syria that has rewritten history, pushing back the date of the oldest domesticated animals by [...]
Science News winds back the astronomical clock to the early days of Planet Earth, when waves of comet collisions seem to have slammed the planet’s [...]
Here’s a picture of a distinctive bit of geography. There are hobbits down there, and members of Split Enz and The Chills, and some of [...]
The Payload newsletter reports on a new law being debated by American legislators. The ORBITS act is intended to create new technologies for ADR – [...]
Nature investigates the idea that the various symptoms of long covid – which can include cardiac trouble, neurological problems, muscle pain, and general fatigue – [...]