Tag: science

GLOWING PLANTS THAT TURN ENERGY INTO LIGHT ARE ABOUT TO BE COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME

Tapping into the magic of bioluminescence, Light Bio is preparing to ship its first orders for glowing plants this spring. The company provides flora that converts energy into light, making their offerings the first commercially available plants that glow in the dark.

After scaling up production to meet excessive demands, Light Bio says it will finally begin shipping orders for their glowing “Firefly Petunia,” which was so named because its glowing leaves resemble fireflies, next month.

Some plant and animal species in nature convert chemical energy into visible light, causing them to glow. While the majority of these seemingly magical lifeforms are aquatic, some take the form of glowing plants. Among the most studied are bioluminescent mushrooms that glow in the dark.

Some laboratories have been able to combine the genes responsible for these glowing fungi into more aesthetically pleasing plants, including flowers. However, genetic engineering is complicated, and the most common process involves incorporating five different genes into the target plant to generate light. The science is also highly regulated, meaning glowing plants have thus far existed as a laboratory curiosity and nothing more.

Keep reading

FOR HALF A CENTURY, OUR CALCULATIONS ON NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS IN SPACE HAVE BEEN WRONG, LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIST REVEALS

On July 9, 1962, the largest in a series of tests involving nuclear explosions in space was conducted by the United States. Dubbed Starfish Prime, the test involved the launch of a W49 thermonuclear warhead developed at Los Alamos from Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

The warhead detonated approximately 250 miles above the Earth, producing belts of radiation as high-energy electrons became trapped, amplifying the magnitude of the natural Van Allen radiation belt and increasing the potential adverse effects of the trapped radiation.

Now, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory has found a novel means of offering better protection for space technologies: by fixing mistakes in mathematical calculations related to the effects of nuclear explosions in space that have gone undetected for close to half a century.

The errors relate to our understanding of the influence electromagnetic waves exert on the dispersal of electrons that become trapped in the planet’s magnetic fields when nuclear explosions in space occur.

According to Greg Cunningham, a space scientist with Los Alamos National Laboratory, the discovery and resolution of these longstanding errors in past mathematical calculations will offer scientists an opportunity to improve protections for space technologies, particularly involving models governing the effects of radiation resulting from the detonation of nuclear devices at high altitudes.

“This allows us to make better predictions of what that threat could be and the efficacy of radiation belt remediation strategies,” Cunningham said in a recent statement.

Keep reading

Almost Half Of UK University Scientists Refuse To Say Sex Is Binary

A survey highlighted by The Telegraph has found that only 58 percent of scientists at British universities believe that sex is binary.

The poll also found that most of the 200 scientists surveyed believe that gender is fluid.

Twenty-nine percent of respondents to the survey agreed with the statement that “sex is not binary,” while 13 percent of respondents did not share a view on the question or preferred not to give an opinion.

That means that 42 percent of the scientists would not classify sex as binary.

The poll, conducted by Censuswide, a market research consultancy, also found that 64 percent of scientists said gender is fluid, with only 22 percent saying the believe gender is binary, and a further 14 percent not providing an answer.

Commenting on the findings, Dr. Wolfgang Goymann, a professor of behavioral biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, said “To me this just means that at least 29% of the academics that filled out this questionnaire do not understand the biological concept of sex, and at least 22% of them do not know what gender means.”

Goymann has noted that some scientists are now positing that sex is a graded spectrum rather than a binary trait.

“Leading science journals have been adopting this relativist view, thereby opposing fundamental biological facts,” he urged.

“While we fully endorse efforts to create a more inclusive environment for gender-diverse people, this does not require denying biological sex,” Goymann continued.

He added, “On the contrary, the rejection of biological sex seems to be based on a lack of knowledge about evolution and it champions species chauvinism, inasmuch as it imposes human identity notions on millions of other species.”

Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, told The Telegraph “This survey has two remarkable findings. The first is that 29 per cent of academics are apparently unaware of the obvious fact that sex is binary. The second is that nearly two-thirds of academics say that ‘gender is fluid’. That is a strikingly confident statement about a nebulous concept.”

“This muddle feeds through into academic research and public policy. It’s concerning that people supposedly among our best and brightest are seemingly blind to this confusion,” Joyce further noted.

Keep reading

Drastic and Irreversible Climate Geoengineering Worries Scientists

The Earth is too hot and only getting hotter, according to governments and global bodies such as the United Nations; and the efforts to reduce carbon dioxide aren’t having enough of an effect.

“The world is passing through the 1.5°C ceiling and is headed much higher unless steps are taken to affect Earth’s energy imbalance,” James Hansen, previous director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in January.

Thus, to buy more time, on Feb. 28, scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report detailing a solution called “intentional stratospheric dehydration,” or in layman’s terms, flying planeloads of ice to 58,000 feet and spraying ice particles into the upper atmosphere.

“It’s a very small effect,” said lead author Joshua Schwarz, a research physicist at NOAA’s chemical sciences laboratory. “Pure water vapor doesn’t readily form ice crystals. It helps to have a seed, a dust particle, for example, for ice to form around.”

The researchers report that by dispersing small particles, or what it calls ice nuclei, into areas of the atmosphere that are both “very cold and super-saturated with water vapor,” water vapor in the atmosphere will “freeze-dry” and rain out of the atmosphere as ice crystals, cooling the planet.

The proposal is known as geoengineering—and NASA and NOAA’s joint plan is far from the only idea that’s jumped from the pages of science fiction, à la the 2013 Hollywood film “Snowpiercer,” to mainstream science.

István Szapudi, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, has turned to essentially geoengineering a giant parasol, or what he calls, a “tethered solar shield” to shield the Earth from a portion of the sun’s energy.

Keep reading

‘Very Bizarre’: Scientists Expose Major Problems With Climate Change Data

Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data, multiple scientists who have published recent studies on the issue told The Epoch Times.

The Biden administration leans on its latest National Climate Assessment report as evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The document states that human emissions of “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the Earth.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and its leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response.

But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back. In peer-reviewed studies, they cite a wide range of flaws with the global temperature data used to reach the dire conclusions; they say it’s time to reexamine the whole narrative.

Problems with temperature data include a lack of geographically and historically representative data, contamination of the records by heat from urban areas, and corruption of the data introduced by a process known as “homogenization.”

The flaws are so significant that they make the temperature data—and the models based on it—essentially useless or worse, three independent scientists with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES) explained.

The experts said that when data corruption is considered, the alleged “climate crisis” supposedly caused by human activities disappears.

Instead, natural climate variability offers a much better explanation for what is being observed, they said.

Some experts told The Epoch Times that deliberate fraud appeared to be at work, while others suggested more innocent explanations.

But regardless of why the problems exist, the implications of the findings are hard to overstate.

With no climate crisis, the justification for trillions of dollars in government spending and costly changes in public policy to restrict carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions collapses, the scientists explained in a series of interviews about their research.

“For the last 35 years, the words of the IPCC have been taken to be gospel,” according to astrophysicist and CERES founder Willie Soon. Until recently, he was a researcher working with the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian.

“And indeed, climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century—heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,” Mr. Soon told The Epoch Times.

Keep reading

Scientists Discover Bizarre Material Where Electrons Stand Still

New research validates method for guided discovery of 3D flat-band materials.

Scientists at Rice University have uncovered a first-of-its-kind material: a 3D crystalline metal in which quantum correlations and the geometry of the crystal structure combine to frustrate the movement of electrons and lock them in place.

The find is detailed in a study published in Nature Physics. The paper also describes the theoretical design principle and experimental methodology that guided the research team to the material. One part copper, two parts vanadium, and four parts sulfur, the alloy features a 3D pyrochlore lattice consisting of corner-sharing tetrahedra.

Quantum Entanglement and Electron Localization

“We look for materials where there are potentially new states of matter or new exotic features that haven’t been discovered,” said study co-corresponding author Ming Yi, a Rice experimental physicist.

Quantum materials are a likely place to look, especially if they host strong electron interactions that give rise to quantum entanglement. Entanglement leads to strange electronic behaviors, including frustrating the movement of electrons to the point where they become locked in place.

“This quantum interference effect is analogous to waves rippling across the surface of a pond and meeting head-on,” Yi said. “The collision creates a standing wave that does not move. In the case of geometrically frustrated lattice materials, it’s the electronic wave functions that destructively interfere.”

Keep reading

‘Stunning Act of Scientific Censorship’: Journal Retracts Peer-Reviewed Study Critiquing COVID-19 Vaccine

The journal Cureus on Monday retracted the first peer-reviewed paper to provide an extensive analysis of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine trial data and post-injection injuries. The authors of the paper also called for a global moratorium on the vaccines.

Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the paper’s authors, called the retraction “a stunning act of scientific censorship.” He told The Defender:

“The journal and its editors had the right to reject the paper at any time during the review process. Once published, it is a violation of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Guidelines to retract a paper without adequate justification.”

The paper, published last month, detailed the vaccines’ potential serious harms to humans, vaccine control and processing issues, the mechanisms behind adverse events, the immunological reasons for vaccine inefficacy and the mortality data from the registrational trials.

The authors concluded:

“Federal agency approval of the COVID-19 mRNA injectable products on a blanket-coverage population-wide basis had no support from an honest assessment of all relevant registrational data and commensurate consideration of risks versus benefits.”

They also called for the vaccines to be immediately removed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) childhood immunization schedule and for the boosters to be suspended.

The paper was read more than 350,000 times in the month after it was posted. An average Cureus paper has only approximately 2,700 views in an entire year.

Keep reading

Scientists Expose Major Problems With Climate Change Data

Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data, multiple scientists who have published recent studies on the issue told The Epoch Times.

The Biden administration leans on its latest National Climate Assessment report as evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The document states that human emissions of “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the Earth.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and its leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response.

But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back. In peer-reviewed studies, they cite a wide range of flaws with the global temperature data used to reach the dire conclusions; they say it’s time to reexamine the whole narrative.

Problems with temperature data include a lack of geographically and historically representative data, contamination of the records by heat from urban areas, and corruption of the data introduced by a process known as “homogenization.”

The flaws are so significant that they make the temperature data—and the models based on it—essentially useless or worse, three independent scientists with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES) explained.

The experts said that when data corruption is considered, the alleged “climate crisis” supposedly caused by human activities disappears.

Instead, natural climate variability offers a much better explanation for what is being observed, they said.

Keep reading

BREAKTHROUGH IN QUANTUM MEASUREMENT OF GRAVITY ACHIEVED USING LEVITATING MAGNETS

Physicists are one step closer to the measurement of gravity at the quantum level, according to a team whose recent studies move us closer to understanding some of the most mysterious forces at work in our universe.

Gravity is the fundamental interaction that produces attraction between all the objects possessing mass in our universe. Although the weakest of the four fundamental interactions recognized by physicists, it is the one that most of us are familiar with, as we experience the effects of gravity virtually every moment of our lives.

However, due to its weakness, gravity has no significant influence when it comes to subatomic particles, and experts have long questioned how it works in the quantum realm—a conundrum that even baffled Albert Einstein, whose theory of general relativity argued that there are no experiments that could demonstrate a quantum version of gravity.

That is until now, as an international team of physicists says they have succeeded in developing a novel technique that allowed them to detect a weak gravitational pull on a microscopic particle, an achievement which they say may advance our progress toward unraveling a long-sought theory of quantum gravity.

In their experiment, the physicists were able to detect gravity on tiny particles near the boundaries of the quantum realm by employing superconducting devices called traps. During their experiment, they measured a weak pull from a microscopic particle by levitating it under extreme freezing conditions approaching absolute zero.

University of Southampton physicist Tim Fuchs said the achievement could help move us toward understanding our universe by revealing a missing puzzle piece in our current picture of reality.

 “For a century, scientists have tried and failed to understand how gravity and quantum mechanics work together,” Fuchs said in a statement.

“Now we have successfully measured gravitational signals at [the] smallest mass ever recorded, it means we are one step closer to finally realizing how it works in tandem,” he added.

Fuchs said that his team’s next objective is to attempt to reduce the scale of the source using the new technique so that it can be applied to the quantum world on both sides. This could help scientists to unravel some of the most pressing mysteries about our universe, including its origins, and whether there is indeed a grand theory that unites all the known forces.

Presently, quantum phenomena are still mysterious to physicists like Fuchs, since the behavior of particles at the microscopic scale is vastly different from how matter behaves at the normal scale we experience in our daily lives.

Keep reading

Is The Government Finally Abandoning Its Anti-Science Stance On Marijuana?

Hundreds of pages of recently released documents provided by the Department of Health and Services affirm what the overwhelming majority of the public has known for decades: Marijuana is therapeutically useful. And its harms are not on par with those of heroin—which federal regulations currently consider it akin to—or even alcohol.

Those were the explicit conclusions of the nation’s top federal health agency, along with the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in a letter calling on the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to remove “botanical cannabis” from its Schedule I prohibitive status in the federal Controlled Substances Act.

By definition, Schedule I substances are federally criminalized because they possess “no currently accepted medical use in the United States,” a “high potential for abuse” and “lack accepted safety under medical supervision.” Since 1970, Congress and other federal bureaucracies have insisted cannabis remain in this strict category. But now the nation’s top federal health agencies are changing their tune.

Health and Human Services, which was tasked by the Biden administration in 2022 to review the federal designation of cannabis, based its conclusions in part on the real-world experiences of over “30,000 health care practitioners authorized to recommend marijuana” under state law and the more than 6 million state-registered cannabis patients they serve.

“The vast majority of individuals who use marijuana are doing so in a manner that does not lead to dangerous outcomes to themselves or others,” the agency concluded. “No safety concerns were identified in our review that would indicate that the medical use of marijuana poses unacceptably high safety risks for the indications where there is some credible scientific evidence supporting its therapeutic use.”

Department officials added, “The risks to the public health posed by marijuana are low compared to other drugs of abuse,” such as benzodiazepines—a Schedule IV drug—or alcohol, which isn’t scheduled at all.

Of course, the public has long been aware of this reality. Thirty-eight states regulate medical cannabis access and 24 states—home to 53 percent of the U.S. population—have legalized adult-use marijuana markets. Most of these statewide policy changes were enacted by voters at the ballot box.

Keep reading