Tag: science

Scientists make groundbreaking discovery of low-frequency gravitational waves that create ripples in the fabric of space-time, proving Einstein correct 100 years later

Scientists made a groundbreaking discovery of low-frequency gravitational waves that are likely from supermassive black holes that create ripples in the fabric of space-time.

In 1915, Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, in which he determined that the intense gravity of extremely massive objects warps the fabric of space-time. If these gargantuan objects collide with each other, then gravitational waves would be sent into the universe.

Gravitational waves were first discovered in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

The LIGO defines gravitational waves as “ripples in space-time caused by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the universe.

“The strongest gravitational waves are produced by cataclysmic events such as colliding black holes, supernovae (massive stars exploding at the end of their lifetimes), and colliding neutron stars,” the LIGO explains. “Other gravitational waves are predicted to be caused by the rotation of neutron stars that are not perfect spheres, and possibly even the remnants of gravitational radiation created by the Big Bang.”

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Massive ‘Gravity Anomaly’ Caused by Ancient Sea Remnants Deep Inside Earth, Study Says

The Indian Ocean features a massive gravity anomaly that has puzzled scientists for years. Now, a new study proposes that the ancient remains of another ocean that sank deep into the Earth itself gave rise to the Indian Ocean geoid low (IOGL), as the anomaly is called. 

The IOGL is a region covering nearly two million square miles south of the Indian peninsula where the ocean surface plunges over 300 feet. The anomaly was first discovered in 1948, Scientific American noted in its coverage of the new study. But while scientists agree it must be due to gravity and the physical properties of Earth itself—which in reality looks more like a lumpy ball of dough than a smooth sphere—the exact mechanisms of the IOGL’s formation have long eluded a definitive explanation. 

A recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters and authored by researchers Depanjan Pal and Attreyee Ghosh from the Indian Institute of Science used mantle convection models covering the Mesozoic era, which ended 60 million years ago, to the present in order to narrow down the solution. The result was that the IOGL is mainly caused by a geological formation known as a large low-shear-velocity province (LSVP) under Africa, also called a “blob.” According to the study, this region was “perturbed” by sinking slabs of the sea floor belonging to the ancient Tethys Ocean. 

The Tethys Ocean does not exist anymore, but in prehistoric times it was situated between the ancient landmasses of Gondwana and Laurasia. When these continents broke up and shifted, Tethys disappeared, and the modern Indian and Atlantic oceans were formed. The slabs that made up the ancient Tethyian sea floor sank into the Earth’s mantle, producing plumes that reach the upper mantle. 

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Lab Administers A.I.-Designed Drug to First Patient

Hong Kong- and New York-based Insilico Medicine on Tuesday announced a drug for treating idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) designed by generative artificial intelligence (A.I.) has advanced to Phase 2 clinical trials, which means the drug has been administered to its first human patient.

IPF is a chronic lung disease that makes it more difficult to breathe, starving the body of much-needed oxygen. IPF is currently regarded as incurable, but treatable. 

“Generative A.I.” is the level of artificial intelligence that can accept fairly broad commands from a human user and create a complex finished product. Such A.I. systems grow more powerful and useful as they “learn” by accumulating information. DALL-E, the computer art program that can fulfill instructions like “Show me what the Peanuts characters would look like if Picasso drew them” is a popular example.

Creating a new medicine is a daunting task. The design stage includes a great deal of labor-intensive research that could hopefully be completed more quickly by A.I.

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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends — and it’s philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0

A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is still an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.

What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a key study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference.

“It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof,” says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn’t the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: “There’s been a lot of progress in the field.”

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US approves chicken made from cultivated cells, the nation’s first ‘lab-grown’ meat

For the first time, U.S. regulators on Wednesday approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer “lab-grown” meat to the nation’s restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves.

The Agriculture Department gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, firms that had been racing to be the first in the U.S. to sell meat that doesn’t come from slaughtered animals — what’s now being referred to as “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” meat as it emerges from the laboratory and arrives on dinner plates.

The move launches a new era of meat production aimed at eliminating harm to animals and drastically reducing the environmental impacts of grazing, growing feed for animals and animal waste.

“Instead of all of that land and all of that water that’s used to feed all of these animals that are slaughtered, we can do it in a different way,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and chief executive of Eat Just, which operates Good Meat.

The companies received approvals for federal inspections required to sell meat and poultry in the U.S. The action came months after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration deemed that products from both companies are safe to eat. A manufacturing company called Joinn Biologics, which works with Good Meat, was also cleared to make the products.

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Federal judge rules MA student’s ‘there are only two genders’ T-shirt ‘invades the rights of others,’ is NOT protected by free speech

On Friday, a federal judge in Massachusettes ruled a shirt that read “THERE ARE ONLY TWO GENDERS” could be construed as bullying of a protected class and is not protected speech after a 12-year-old and his father filed suit against officials in the Middlesbrough Public School district for First and Fourteenth Amendment rights violations. 

Judge Indira Talwani said in the court ruling, the boy and his father had “not established a likelihood of success on the merits where he is unable to counter Defendants’ showing that enforcement of the Dress Code was undertaken to protect the invasion of the rights of other students to a safe and secure educational environment.” 

“School administrators were well within their discretion to conclude that the statement ‘THERE ARE ONLY TWO GENDERS’ may communicate that only two gender identities–male and female–are valid, and any others are invalid or nonexistent,” the ruling continued, “and to conclude that students who identify differently, whether they do so openly or not, have a right to attend school without being confronted by messages attacking their identities.”

Trans and gender non-conforming students are considered a protected class under Massachusetts law, and while this shirt does not constitute the bullying of a single student, the ruling says that the school was justified because it could make “a group of potentially vulnerable students” not feel safe. 

Citing multiple precedents, the judge ruled that “A school need not tolerate student speech that is inconsistent with its basic educational mission, [ ] even though the government could not censor similar speech outside the school.” So there was no constitutional violation that occurred. 

In reaction to the ruling, defense attorney Marina Medvin wrote on Twitter, “As someone who grew up in the USSR getting her teeth drilled without novocaine the idea that today’s US kids complain and prohibit— with the help of judges— another kid from wearing a shirt stating a scientific fact b/c it hurts their feelings is just…”

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Synthetic human embryos are created in the lab with NO egg or sperm: Scientists announce historic breakthrough raising hopes for new treatments for miscarriage and rare genetical disorders – but development poses huge ethical dilemmas

Human embryos made without eggs or sperm have been created in a scientific breakthrough which is bound to raise serious ethical and legal questions.

They were produced in a joint project between Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology and resemble embryos in the earliest stages of human development.

They do not have the beginnings of a brain or a beating heart, but do include cells which would go on to form the placenta and yolk sac.

Scientists believe that their finding could provide significant insight and aid research into rare genetic disorders and the biological causes of miscarriage.

But the synthetic embryos are not covered by laws in the UK or in most countries around the world, meaning that they come with serious ethical and legal issues regarding the use of human embryos in a lab.

Until this breakthrough, scientists had to adhere to the 14-day rule which meant they were limited to allowing embryos to develop in a lab for a maximum of two weeks.

After this point researchers would have to wait until further along its development to pick up their study, relying on pregnancy scans and embryos donated to research. 

The desire to understand this period of an embryo’s development – which starts at day 14 and ends around day 28 – was the main motivation behind the work to create synthetic human embryos.

Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a fellow at the University of Cambridge, described the work yesterday at the International Society for Stem Cell Research’s annual meeting in Boston: ‘We can create human embryo-like models by the reprogramming of [embryonic stem] cells.’

Before the talk, she told The Guardian: ‘It’s beautiful and created entirely from embryonic stem cells.’

While it is not yet clear if the synthetic embryos could continue developing beyond their early stages, implanting them into a patient’s womb would be illegal and there is no near-term prospect of them being used for medical purposes.

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Researchers Warn Fake Sugar ‘Irreversibly Alters Human DNA’

A new study on Sucralose – the toxic but popular sugar-free sweetener – has found that one of the main ingredients ‘irreversibly alters human DNA.’

New health and safety findings revealed in the study show sucralose, also known as Splenda, is “genotoxic,” meaning it breaks up human DNA.

That’s on top of other damning evidence revealed in the study published May 29 in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health.

Theepochtimes.com reports: How sucralose can damage DNA is a metabolic process. When the sweetener is digested, it forms a metabolite called sucralose-6-acetate. But the product itself has also been found to contain trace amounts of this chemical compound. Taken together, the results of this study and previous research implicate sucralose in a range of detrimental health issues. 

“This is not acceptable. We can’t have genotoxic compounds in our food supply,” Susan Schiffman, corresponding author of the study, told The Epoch Times. “I think if it was presented to the FDA today, they would not approve it. The original claims made to the FDA, they just aren’t true. I don’t know how they missed it.” 

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Quantum Theory’s ‘Measurement Problem’ May Be a Poison Pill for Objective Reality

Imagine a physicist observing a quantum system whose behavior is akin to a coin toss: it could come up heads or tails. They perform the quantum coin toss and see heads. Could they be certain that their result was an objective, absolute and indisputable fact about the world? If the coin was simply the kind we see in our everyday experience, then the outcome of the toss would be the same for everyone: heads all around! But as with most things in quantum physics, the result of a quantum coin toss would be a much more complicated “It depends.” There are theoretically plausible scenarios in which another observer might find that the result of our physicist’s coin toss was tails.

At the heart of this bizarreness is what’s called the measurement problem. Standard quantum mechanics accounts for what happens when you measure a quantum system: essentially, the measurement causes the system’s multiple possible states to randomly “collapse” into one definite state. But this accounting doesn’t define what constitutes a measurement—hence, the measurement problem.

Attempts to avoid the measurement problem—for example, by envisaging a reality in which quantum states don’t collapse at all—have led physicists into strange terrain where measurement outcomes can be subjective. “One major aspect of the measurement problem is this idea … that observed events are not absolute,” says Nicholas Ormrod of the University of Oxford. This, in short, is why our imagined quantum coin toss could conceivably be heads from one perspective and tails from another.

But is such an apparently problematic scenario physically plausible or merely an artifact of our incomplete understanding of the quantum world? Grappling with such questions requires a better understanding of theories in which the measurement problem can arise—which is exactly what Ormrod, along with Vilasini Venkatesh of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and Jonathan Barrett of Oxford, have now achieved. In a recent preprint, the trio proved a theorem that shows why certain theories—such as quantum mechanics—have a measurement problem in the first place and how one might develop alternative theories to sidestep it, thus preserving the “absoluteness” of any observed event. Such theories would, for instance, banish the possibility of a coin toss coming up heads to one observer and tails to another.

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