Tag: science

Saturn’s moon could harbour ALIEN life: Scientists discover organic molecules in Enceladus’ plume that suggest it could be habitable

It’s one of the most beautiful objects in our solar system, a shimmering sphere of pure white ice, hiding a liquid ocean within. 

But despite looking nothing like our planet, Enceladus, Saturn‘s sixth-largest moon, may have something in common with Earth – the presence of life. 

Scientists have discovered organic molecules in the moon’s plumes that could be supporting ‘communities’ of tiny microbes. 

Researchers think these compounds could support their metabolisms or the formation of amino acids. 

Experts already know that there are phosphates, methane, hydrogen and carbon dioxide on Enceladus – all potential signs of life as well.  

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Now scientists say BREATHING is bad for the environment: Gases we exhale contribute to 0.1% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions

Whether it’s eating less meat or cycling instead of driving, humans can do many things to help prevent climate change.

Unfortunately, breathing less isn’t one of them. 

That might be a problem, as a new study claims the gases in air exhaled from human lungs is fueling global warming.

Methane and nitrous oxide in the air we exhale makes up to 0.1 per cent of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say. 

And that’s not even accounting for the gas we release from burps and farts, or emissions that come from our skin without us noticing. 

The new study was led by Dr Nicholas Cowan, an atmospheric physicist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh. 

‘Exhaled human breath can contain small, elevated concentrations of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), both of which contribute to global warming,’ Dr Cowan and colleagues say. 

‘We would urge caution in the assumption that emissions from humans are negligible.’

As most of us remember from science classes at school, humans breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. 

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GOVERNMENT-FUNDED STUDY EXPLORES WARP DRIVES AS MEANS OF FASTER-THAN-LIGHT COMMUNICATION THROUGH “HYPERWAVES”

Exploring faster-than-light (FTL) communication, a concept rooted in science fiction has intrigued scientists and engineers for years. The proverbial little brother to FTL travel, where a spacecraft is sent at warp to a distant location, FTL communication may be a promising first step, and one theorist is shifting focus to “Hyperwaves,” a method of sending messages across vast distances faster than the speed of light.

The recent paper, partially funded by the British government’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the Ministry of Defence, uploaded to arXiv, “Hyperwave: Hyper-Fast Communication within General Relativity,” by Dr. Lorenzo Pieri, offers a novel approach to this challenge. It suggests using “hypertubes” – structures that can manage the distribution and configuration of negative energy – to accelerate and decelerate warp bubbles, facilitating FTL communication. 

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HAS DARK MATTER’S IDENTITY BEEN REVEALED? SCIENTISTS SEARCHING FOR MYSTERIOUS HYPOTHETICAL PARTICLE MAY SOON HAVE AN ANSWER

Scientists may be closing in on solving the mystery of dark matter, a hypothetical, nonluminous material that is believed to comprise a large majority of the mass in our universe, in new research that may link it to the existence of a hypothetical subatomic particle.

Among the primary questions scientists have about dark matter is what it could be made of. However, new research by an international team of astrophysicists proposes a possible candidate, meaning that this elusive cosmic material might be detectable in the form of a glow emanating from certain kinds of stars.

The research, conducted by astrophysicists at the universities of Amsterdam and Princeton, suggests that dark matter, which presently is believed to constitute around 85% of the matter in the universe, could be composed of hypothetical particles known as axions.

First proposed in the 1970s to resolve an unrelated problem involving neutrons, axions are of interest to dark matter researchers because if they possess a low mass within a certain range, they could be good candidates in the search for dark matter. Not only that, but they might help to potentially explain how and why dark matter has remained so elusive.

Axions are thought to weakly interact with known particles, which, like dark matter, makes them difficult to detect. That isn’t to say that scientists don’t have a good idea about where to look, since according to the recent findings, axions may be able to be converted into light in the presence of strong electromagnetic fields, thereby illuminating these invisible universal mysteries.

If this is correct, one of the best places to begin any search for axions—and potentially also for dark matter—is to look where the strongest magnetic fields in the universe are known to occur.

Astrophysicists are aware that regions around rotating neutron stars, otherwise known as pulsars, are prime candidates for the search. Possessing a mass comparable to our Sun, but packed into a space close to 100,000 times smaller, pulsars spin very rapidy and produce bright radio emissions along their rotational axis, thereby generating a powerful electromagnetic field.

If axions exist, then the powerful magnetic fields of pulsars make them the perfect place to search for them.

In their recent research, the international team of physicists and astronomers developed a theoretical framework that helped them understand how axions might be produced in these stellar regions, as well as how they might be converted into radio waves emitted by the rotation of pulsars.

Using computer simulations, the team was able to successfully model axion production around pulsars and predict the resulting additional radio signal that would be likely to indicate the presence of the otherwise invisible axions.

With this information, the team then used observations from 27 nearby pulsars, comparing their models to these real-life sources of cosmic radio waves. Despite their best attempts, however, the team was unable to find any conclusive evidence yet that points to the existence of the elusive axions.

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A Google DeepMind AI Just Discovered 380,000 New Materials. This Robot Is Cooking Them Up.

A robot chemist just teamed up with an AI brain to create a trove of new materials.

Two collaborative studies from Google DeepMind and the University of California, Berkeley, describe a system that predicts the properties of new materials—including those potentially useful in batteries and solar cells—and produces them with a robotic arm.

We take everyday materials for granted: plastic cups for a holiday feast, components in our smartphones, or synthetic fibers in jackets that keep us warm when chilly winds strike.

Scientists have painstakingly discovered roughly 20,000 different types of materials that let us build anything from computer chips to puffy coats and airplane wings. Tens of thousands more potentially useful materials are in the works. Yet we’ve only scratched the surface.

The Berkeley team developed a chef-like robot that mixes and heats ingredients, automatically transforming recipes into materials. As a “taste test,” the system, dubbed the A-Lab, analyzes the chemical properties of each final product to see if it hits the mark.

Meanwhile, DeepMind’s AI dreamed up myriad recipes for the A-Lab chef to cook. It’s a hefty list. Using a popular machine learning strategy, the AI found two million chemical structures and 380,000 new stable materials—many counter to human intuition. The work is an “order-of-magnitude” expansion on the materials that we currently know, the authors wrote.

Using DeepMind’s cookbook, A-Lab ran for 17 days and synthesized 41 out of 58 target chemicals—a win that would’ve taken months, if not years, of traditional experiments.

Together, the collaboration could launch a new era of materials science. “It’s very impressive,” said Dr. Andrew Rosen at Princeton University, who was not involved in the work.

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ENTANGLEMENT ON-DEMAND ACHIEVED IN BREAKTHROUGH STUDY POINTING TO “NEW FRONTIER” IN QUANTUM SCIENCE

Physicists at Princeton University report the successful on-demand entanglement of individual molecules, a significant milestone that they say leverages quantum mechanics to achieve these unusual states, according to new research.

Quantum entanglement remains one of the great enigmas in contemporary physics. Essentially, the phenomenon entails particles that are bound together in such a manner that any alteration in the quantum state of one particle instantaneously influences its entangled counterpart.

Remarkably, this connection persists even over vast distances, an effect initially labeled as “spooky action at a distance” following its introduction in a seminal 1935 paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen.

While remaining mysterious, recent years have seen substantial progress in unraveling the mysteries of entanglement, with the additional promise for its practical application in diverse fields such as quantum computing, cryptography, and communication technology.

Now, the Princeton team’s recent success can be counted among these developments, in the application of quantum entanglement toward producing beneficial future technologies. The team’s work was recently described in a paper that appeared in the journal Science. 

Lawrence Cheuk, assistant professor of physics at Princeton and the paper’s senior author, says the achievement helps to pave the way toward the construction of quantum computers and related technologies, which will inevitably overtake their classical counterparts in speed and efficiency in the coming years.

Significantly, the new research also achieves “quantum advantage,” whereby quantum bits, or qubits, can simultaneously exist in multiple states, unlike classical binary computer bits which are limited to assuming values of either 0 or 1.

“This is a breakthrough in the world of molecules because of the fundamental importance of quantum entanglement,” Cheuk said in a statement.

“But it is also a breakthrough for practical applications because entangled molecules can be the building blocks for many future applications,” Cheuk added.

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BREAKTHROUGH REVEALS FLAWS IN DIAMONDS COULD LEAD TO NANOSCALE MAGNETIC AND THERMAL SENSORS

Cambridge researchers report a new breakthrough that could lead to the development of highly sensitive quantum sensors, which they say was achieved by exploiting tiny flaws in diamond fragments.

The discovery could pave the way toward innovative new applications that could help offer a deeper glimpse at neuron activity within living cells through magnetic imagery and other technologies.

Specifically, nanoscopic detectors capable of measuring temperature and magnetic fields could be inserted into living cells, allowing scientists an unprecedented glimpse at chemical reactions that occur on the cellular level. Beyond biology, the achievement also could have applications for helping scientists better understand the way certain unique materials gain their magnetic properties.

Flaws in diamonds that occur at the atomic scale can lead to unique and often beautiful color variations in certain rare kinds of diamonds. However, apart from their generation of precious stones, scientists view these impurities as a significant avenue for research in quantum physics.

An example of the kinds of flaws that interest scientists is what is known as the Nitrogen-vacancy Center, or NVC, where a gap exists in the crystal lattice of a diamond alongside nitrogen atoms. When this occurs, electrons become tightly contained, and scientists have learned that their spin states can be precisely manipulated.

In the past, scientists have succeeded in achieving electron coherence in the NVCs of larger diamonds. This phenomenon refers to the degree of interference between electrons emitted from a source such as an electron gun, which plays a key role in ultrafast chemistry and physics research.

Coherence times of up to one second—a significant amount for research in this field and the longest amount ever observed in any known solid material—have been achieved in the NVCs of larger diamond samples, whereas finding any amount of coherence in tiny diamonds measuring just a few nanometers has previously remained unattainable.

Achieving coherence in smaller diamonds, however, presents several advantages. One is the precision they would allow for applications at the nanoscale, as well as their ability to be inserted into living cells.

Now, researchers at Cambridge University say that the elusiveness of coherence in smaller diamonds has been identified as a concentration of nitrogen impurities instead of interactions with spins on the surfaces of the diamond.

The discovery, according to researchers at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, was made by observing the spin dynamics in nanodiamond NVCs. Independent control of the nitrogen impurities allowed the researchers to raise coherence times to 0.07 milliseconds longer than any previous attempt. The figure may sound minuscule, but it is orders of magnitude greater than past studies had ever achieved, paving the way toward nanodiamonds becoming a key material in the development of new quantum sensing technologies.

Researcher Helena Knowles, who participated in the study, said the results could ultimately lead to the development of the world’s smallest magnetic field detector, as well as the tiniest temperature detector ever made.

“Nanodiamond NVCs can sense the change of such features within a few tens of nanometres,” Knowles said in a statement. “[N]o other sensor has ever had this spatial resolution under ambient conditions.”

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Climate Scientist Says It’s ‘Unreasonable’ To Call Climate Change An Existential Threat

An MIT scientist has said that although the global temperature rise owing to a greenhouse effect is real, the increase is small and does not pose any existential threat.

The greenhouse effect is primarily caused by water vapor and clouds, said Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide are minor constituents of the greenhouse effect, Mr. Lindzen told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” in an interview.

“If all other things are kept constant, and you double CO2, you would get a little under one degree of warming,” Mr. Lindzen said. Some climate models estimate the highest warming at three degrees, but “even three degrees isn’t that much,” he added.

“We’re dealing with changes for a doubling of CO2 on the order of between breakfast and lunch,” he said.

According to NASA, the greenhouse effect is “the process through which heat is trapped near Earth’s surface by substances known as ‘greenhouse gases.’ Greenhouse gases consist of carbon dioxide, methane, ozone, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and water vapor.”

Politicians, universities, international organizations, and media have called climate warming an existential threat to humanity.

President Joe Biden said at a press conference in Vietnam in September that, “The only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening than a nuclear war is global warming going above 1.5 degrees in the next … 10 years.”

The Climate Change Working Group at Western Michigan University has warned that the “global temperature has risen at least 1°C since mid-20th century” and said that “climate change is an existential threat to the quality of life on this planet.”

Bruce Aylward, assistant director General at the World Health Organization (WHO), said in November that climate change poses an existential threat to all people, in particular pregnant women and children.

Mr. Lindzen asserted that calling climate change an existential threat comes from propaganda.

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the United Nations body for assessing the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts, and options to mitigate—does not call it an existential threat, Mr. Lindzen said.

In its report, the IPCC talks about a reduction in GDP by 3 percent by 2100 owing to climate change, Mr. Lindzen added. “Assuming the GDP has increased several times by then, that doesn’t sound existential to most people.”

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Study Finds ‘No Evidence’ That Medical Marijuana Causes Cognitive Impairment In Patients With Chronic Health Problems

Findings of a study examining marijuana’s neurocognitive effects “suggest that prescribed medical cannabis may have minimal acute impact on cognitive function among patients with chronic health conditions”—which may come as a relief to long-term cannabis patients who are concerned about potential neurological drawbacks of the drug.

Authors of the report, published last month in the peer-reviewed journal CNS Drugs, wrote that they found “no evidence for impaired cognitive function when comparing baseline with post-treatment scores.”

To conduct the study, researchers had 40 people in Australia self-administer a single dose of medical marijuana in a laboratory setting, following instructions on the product label. Participants were then tested on an array of neuropsychological metrics—including multitasking, pattern recognition memory, reaction time, rapid visual information processing and spatial working memory, among others—and surveyed on their subjective experience.

“The absence of evidence for cognitive impairment following medical cannabis self-administration was surprising,” the study says, “given prior and substantive evidence that non-medical (‘recreational’) cannabis use reliably impairs a range of cognitive functions. At the same time, these findings are consistent with two systematic reviews published in the last year that suggest that medical cannabis, when used regularly and consistently for a chronic health concern, may have little if any impact on cognitive function.”

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Trannysaurus Rex: The Activist Academics ‘Queering’ Dinosaurs

Recently, I wrote about North Hertfordshire Museum’s pathetic attempts to imply the ancient (male, moustachioed) Roman Emperor Elagabalus was actually a transgender woman. If you thought this was ridiculous, there is a museum in the United States which possesses a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton which came out as nonbinary back in 2017, proudly announcing it was now a user of they/them pronouns on Twitter.

The Chicago Field Museum, where the T. rex lives and tweets, justified this lunacy on the spurious grounds that it is quite difficult to determine the sex of old dinosaur specimens (it’s not even certain if such creatures had true external genitalia at all). Therefore, as curators did not know for sure whether the specimen was a boy-lizard or a girl-lizard, they made the insane leap in logic that it was actually a trans one.

Do please further note from the above tweet that, although museum staff profess not to know whether their T. rex is male or female, they have somehow managed to accurately determine its star sign.

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