Tag: science

Tiny animal survives after 24,000 years frozen in Siberian permafrost: “A big step forward”

A lot has changed on Earth in just the last few decades, but for a recently revived microscopic creature, it has tens of thousands of years to catch up on. 

In a new study published this week in the journal Current Biology, researchers report the surprising survival story of a bdelloid rotifer, a tiny freshwater creature that is common all over the world. The multicellular animals can only be seen under a microscope, but they are capable of surviving through drying, freezing, starvation and low oxygen.

Now, researchers have learned that these animals are not only resilient, but they can persist for extreme lengths of time — at least 24,000 years — in Siberian permafrost. Earlier evidence suggested they could survive for only a decade. 

“Our report is the hardest proof as of today that multicellular animals could withstand tens of thousands of years in cryptobiosis, the state of almost completely arrested metabolism,” study author Stas Malavin said in a statement. 

The Soil Cryology Lab in Pushchino, Russia used a drilling rig to collect the minuscule organism from nearly a dozen feet below one of the most remote Arctic locations. Researchers then deduced its age using radiocarbon dating. 

After the organism thawed, it was capable of reproducing asexually using a process called parthenogenesis. Repeating the freezing and thawing process dozens of times, researchers found that the animal innately performs a process to protect its cells and organs from the formation of ice crystals at extremely low temperatures.

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MIT Engineers Have Discovered a Completely New Way of Generating Electricity

A new material made from carbon nanotubes can generate electricity by scavenging energy from its environment.

MIT engineers have discovered a new way of generating electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create a current simply by interacting with liquid surrounding them.

The liquid, an organic solvent, draws electrons out of the particles, generating a current that could be used to drive chemical reactions or to power micro- or nanoscale robots, the researchers say.

“This mechanism is new, and this way of generating energy is completely new,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. “This technology is intriguing because all you have to do is flow a solvent through a bed of these particles. This allows you to do electrochemistry, but with no wires.”

In a new study describing this phenomenon, the researchers showed that they could use this electric current to drive a reaction known as alcohol oxidation — an organic chemical reaction that is important in the chemical industry.

Strano is the senior author of the paper, which appears today (June 7, 2021) in Nature Communications. The lead authors of the study are MIT graduate student Albert Tianxiang Liu and former MIT researcher Yuichiro Kunai. Other authors include former graduate student Anton Cottrill, postdocs Amir Kaplan and Hyunah Kim, graduate student Ge Zhang, and recent MIT graduates Rafid Mollah and Yannick Eatmon.

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China’s Advanced ‘Artificial Sun’ Fusion Reactor Just Broke a New World Record

China has achieved a new milestone in humanity’s experiments to harness the power of the stars.

On Friday, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ fusion machine reached 120 million degrees Celsius (216 million degrees Fahrenheit) and clung onto this for 101 seconds.

The last time EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak or HT-7U) held onto a writhing loop of plasma for so long was in 2017, but the temperature only reached a mere 50 million °C.

In 2018, the reactor held gas heated beyond the 100 million degree benchmark regarded as crucial for generating power, but could only sustain the plasma for around 10 seconds.

Now that it’s held plasma at eight times the temperature of the Sun’s core of 15 million °C for such a long period, the new record has nudged the world ever slightly closer to this elusive, yet highly sought-after clean power source.

“The breakthrough is significant progress, and the ultimate goal should be keeping the temperature at a stable level for a long time,” Southern University of Science and Technology physicist Li Miao told the Global Times.

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Physicists Have Broken The Speed of Light With Pulses Inside Hot Plasma

Sailing through the smooth waters of vacuum, a photon of light moves at around 300 thousand kilometers (186 thousand miles) a second. This sets a firm limit on how quickly a whisper of information can travel anywhere in the Universe.

While this law isn’t likely to ever be broken, there are features of light which don’t play by the same rules. Manipulating them won’t hasten our ability to travel to the stars, but they could help us clear the way to a whole new class of laser technology.

Physicists have been playing hard and fast with the speed limit of light pulses for a while, speeding them up and even slowing them to a virtual stand-still using various materials like cold atomic gases, refractive crystals, and optical fibers.

This time, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the University of Rochester in New York have managed it inside hot swarms of charged particles, fine-tuning the speed of light waves within plasma to anywhere from around one-tenth of light’s usual vacuum speed to more than 30 percent faster.

This is both more – and less – impressive than it sounds.

To break the hearts of those hoping it’ll fly us to Proxima Centauri and back in time for tea, this superluminal travel is well within the laws of physics. Sorry.

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NASA scientists detect evidence of parallel universe where time runs backward


In a scenario straight out of “The Twilight Zone,” a group of NASA scientists working on an experiment in Antarctica have detected evidence of a parallel universe — where the rules of physics are the opposite of our own, according to a report.

The concept of a parallel universe has been around since the early 1960s, mostly in the minds of fans of sci-fi TV shows and comics, but now a cosmic ray detection experiment has found particles that could be from a parallel realm that also was born in the Big Bang, the Daily Star reported.

The experts used a giant balloon to carry NASA’s Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, or ANITA, high above Antarctica, where the frigid, dry air provided the perfect environment with little to no radio noise to distort its findings.

A constant “wind” of high-energy particles constantly arrives on Earth from outer space.

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The graveyard of meaningless terms has gained another resident: “Science”

Back in 2014, HuffPost ran an article that discussed 12 words that have been so overused and misused that “they really don’t mean anything anymore.” Words like “literally,” “awesome,” “honestly,” and “unbelievable” all rightly made the list.

I’d like to submit a 2021 revision, suggesting that we add the word “science” to the archive. Whatever it once meant, over the course of this last year mankind has watched it be sautéed, filleted, and utterly obliterated on the altar of Covid, face masks, and vaccines to the point it has become void of any objective definition.

Just in recent days the butchery of science has become epic.

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