Tag: science

Uneven Gravity Makes You Weigh More in Illinois Than in Indiana

WHAT A WEIRD PLACE THIS planet is. But especially southern Illinois, according to this map of gravity anomalies across three Midwestern states.

Gravity is what made the apple fall from a certain tree (in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire), causing Newton to wonder why it fell down straight. But the law of universal gravitation he formulated (and published in 1687) by way of explanation is a lot less uniform than you’d think.

For gravity does vary across the earth, meaning Newton’s apple has a slightly different weight in various other parts of the world and falls at slightly different speeds. That’s due to a combination of four factors.

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Scientists Recover RNA From an Extinct Species for the First Time

The last known thylacine—the largest marsupial carnivore in recent times—died in Tasmania’s Beaumaris Zoo in 1936. But the animal has recently been the target of de-extinction efforts, and now, a team of researchers has managed to recover RNA from the creature—the first time such a feat has been accomplished for any extinct species.

The researchers extracted, sequenced, and analyzed RNA (Ribonucleic acid) from an approximately 130-year-old thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) specimen in the Stockholm Natural History Museum. The team’s research describing the recovery and its utility was published today in Genome Research.

“Our study is unique in this sense as we were able, for the first time, to sequence RNAs from an extinct species, the Tasmanian tiger,” said Emilio Mármol-Sánchez, a paleogeneticist at Stockholm University and the Centre for Paleogenetics in Stockholm, and the study’s lead author, in an email to Gizmodo. “This is the first time that we have been able to catch a glimpse of the actual biology and metabolism of Tasmanian tiger cells right before they died.”

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NASA wants to take UFOs seriously — and scientifically

On Sept. 14, 2023, NASA announced plans to take a more prominent role in investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) — better known as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. The agency will appoint a team of experts to collect data and develop scientific explanations of UAP. The team will be led by Mark McInerney, who had previously been NASA’s liaison to the Department of Defense on UAP.

The action comes in response to a report, also released Sept. 14, that was authored by an independent panel that NASA convened. The report’s purpose was not to conduct a comprehensive review or analysis of UAP, but to issue recommendations to NASA on how the agency can leverage its expertise to shed light on the nature of UAP with scientific methods.

At a press conference, members of the independent panel were adamant that they found no evidence for an extraterrestrial origin of UAP. Many sightings of UAP, they noted, have mundane explanations, like weather balloons or camera artifacts. However, there are still many incidents involving objects that remain unidentified due to a lack of data.

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Pig kidney transplanted in a human lasted for TWO MONTHS in new record that could be a breakthrough for organ donations

A pig kidney transplanted into a brain-dead man continued to function for two months, marking the longest time a non-human organ has survived in a human.

The procedure, conducted on July 14, implanted the kidney in 58-year-old Maurice ‘Mo’ Miller, whose body was donated by his family after he was declared dead by neurologic criteria and maintained with a beating heart on ventilator support.

The experiment concluded Wednesday when doctors removed the genetically modified organ, and Miller’s sister said her final goodbyes.

‘I’m so proud of you,’ Mary Miller-Duffy said in a tearful farewell at her brother’s bedside.

Surgeons at NYU Langone Health, who performed the experiment, determined no differences in how the pig kidney reacted to human hormones, excreted antibiotics or experienced medicine-related side effects.

It is the latest in a string of developments renewing hope for animal-to-human transplants, or xenotransplantation, after decades of failure as people’s immune systems attacked the foreign tissue.

A previous attempt saw the organ only last for 72 hours before it was rejected. 

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Ancient-human fossils sent to space: scientists slam ‘publicity stunt’

On a bright Friday morning last week, a Virgin Galactic spacecraft travelled 88 kilometres above Earth to the edge of space. On board were two Virgin Galactic pilots, an instructor and three passengers — and the remains of two ancient-human relatives that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago in southern Africa.

Everyone aboard VSS Unity — including the hominin remains — landed safely an hour after take-off. But the fossils’ journey has drawn extraordinary rebuke from archaeologists, palaeoanthropologists and other researchers. They say that it was an unethical publicity stunt that put priceless hominin fossils at risk, raising questions about the protection of cultural heritage in South Africa, as a government agency signed off on the mission.

“To treat ancestral remains in such a callous, unethical way — to blast them into space just because you can — there’s no scientific merit in this,” says Robyn Pickering, a geologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Precious bones

Other fossils — including dinosaur bones — have been taken into space on various missions since the 1980s, but these are the first ancient-hominin remains to leave Earth. They belong to Australopithecus sediba, which lived around 2 million years ago1, and the roughly 250,000-year-old Homo naledi. Both species were found near Johannesburg in South Africa by teams led by Lee Berger, a palaeoanthropologist now at the National Geographic Society in Washington DC.

In July, the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) in Cape Town granted Berger an export permit to transport an A. sediba shoulder bone and a H. naledi finger bone to New Mexico, where Virgin Galactic’s spaceport is located, and aboard the company’s craft. The fossils were carried on the flight by Tim Nash, a South African businessman who was one of the passengers.

Berger’s application said that scientific studies might be conducted on the fossils, but that this was not the main aim of the request. “Major media partners will assist in using this once in a lifetime opportunity to bring awareness to science, exploration, human origins and South Africa and its role in understanding Humankind’s shared African ancestry,” it said.

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The ‘Climate Emergency’ Is A Hoax

More than 1,600 scientists, including two Nobel laureates, have signed a declaration saying that “There is no climate emergency.”

The declaration is unlikely to get any attention from the mainstream media, unfortunately, but it is important for people to know about: the mass climate hysteria and the destruction of the US economy in the name of climate change need to stop.

“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” states the declaration signed by the 1,609 scientists, including Nobel laureates John F. Clauser from the US and Ivar Giaever from Norway/US.

The statement adds:

“Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures…

“The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.

“Warming is far slower than predicted…

“The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.

“Climate policy relies on inadequate models
Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools. They do not only exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases, they also ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial…

“Global warming has not increased natural disasters
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2 mitigation measures are as damag­ing as they are costly.

“Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities
There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are.”

Professor Steven Koonin, former Undersecretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy under the Obama administration, current professor at New York University, and fellow at the Hoover Institution, authored the 2021 bestseller, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. In it, he states that what the largely unreadable (for laymen) and complicated science reports say on climate change is completely distorted by the time their contents are filtered through a long line of summary reports of the research by the media and the politicians.

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Scientists grow whole model of human embryo, without sperm or egg

Scientists have grown an entity that closely resembles an early human embryo, without using sperm, eggs or a womb.

The Weizmann Institute team say their “embryo model”, made using stem cells, looks like a textbook example of a real 14-day-old embryo.

It even released hormones that turned a pregnancy test positive in the lab.

The ambition for embryo models is to provide an ethical way of understanding the earliest moments of our lives.

The first weeks after a sperm fertilises an egg is a period of dramatic change – from a collection of indistinct cells to something that eventually becomes recognisable on a baby scan.

This crucial time is a major source of miscarriage and birth defects but poorly understood.

“It’s a black box and that’s not a cliche – our knowledge is very limited,” Prof Jacob Hanna, from the Weizmann Institute of Science, tells me.

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Prominent Scientist Admits To Pushing “Preapproved” Climate Change Narrative To Get Papers Published

A climate scientist has admitted that he pushed a “preapproved” narrative on climate change in order to get papers published in leading journals.

Patrick T. Brown told The Free Press “I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.”

He continued, “editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.”

Brown, who also lectures at Johns Hopkins, added that the biases of the editors and reviewers of journals are well known among aspiring scientists who will often omit inconvenient truths to please them, a process he says “distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”

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Genetically Modified Soil Microbes May Have ‘Irreversible Consequences’

A plan by major agrochemical companies to develop genetically engineered (GE) soil microbes, including bacteria and fungi, to act as pesticides and fertilizers is raising concerns about the unknown and potentially disastrous risks associated with the new organisms, according to a report published Tuesday by Friends of the Earth.

Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta and BASF are among the chemical giants known to be developing the microbes which, according to the report, are fundamentally different from the already controversial genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that have existed for decades.

GE microbes are living organisms that share their genetic material easily with other species and travel vast distances in the wind. And because they are microscopic, their numbers are vast.

“An application of GE bacteria could release approximately 3 trillion genetically modified organisms every half an acre — that’s about how many GE corn plants there are in the entire U.S.,” said Dana Perls, food and technology manager at Friends of the Earth, in a press release.

Introducing GE microbes into agriculture represents an “unprecedented open air genetic experiment,” the report says. “The scale of release is far larger, and the odds of containment are far smaller than for other GE crops.”

Scientists understand the role and function of less than 1 percent of the billions of existing species of microbes or “biologicals.”

Yet the race is on by biotech and agrochemical companies to develop, modify and patent new microbes to capture a share of the biologicals market, which is set to triple in value to $29.31 billion by 2029.

At least two GE microbes, Pivot Bio’s Proven and BASF’s Poncho Votivo seed treatments, are already being used by U.S. farmers on millions of acres of farmland.

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Vaccines to prevent fentanyl, heroin overdose close to human trials

Researchers are expected to begin human clinical trials in early 2024 to test the safety and efficacy of vaccines to prevent heroin and fentanyl overdoses. While there is still a way to go, if approved, the vaccines could revolutionize the treatment of opioid addiction and reduce the number of deaths resulting from overdose.

Opioids – especially synthetic opioids – are the main driver of drug-related overdose deaths. The availability of drugs like heroin and fentanyl continues to feed the problem of opioid dependence and places users at risk of death. They’re also difficult drugs to quit.

Drug use and associated overdoses not only burden the loved ones of the person who died, but they also inflict an economic burden. In 2017, the costs for opioid use disorder and fatal opioid overdose in the US were estimated to be US$1.02 trillion.

While the streets are unlikely to ever be clear of drugs like heroin and fentanyl – and, even if they were, they’d probably be replaced by other, equally damaging drugs – researchers at the University of Montana (UM) are close to trialing the next best thing in tackling the opioid epidemic: vaccines to prevent fentanyl and heroin overdose and aid in treating opioid dependence.

The development of the vaccines began with Marco Pravetoni, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington, who, along with his research team, has been working on vaccines against opioids for more than 10 years.

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