Personality and mood combine to influence how animals feel about the world around them. Those who are proactive are optimistic, while reactive animals are more influenced by their environment.
A new study finds that, like humans, pigs can be optimists or pessimists, and that the pessimists are more strongly affected by their current environments. The results, described in the journal Biology Letters, hint that the complex interplay between personality and mood may extend far beyond the human experience.
“This finding demonstrates that humans are not unique in combining longer-term personality biases with shorter-term mood biases in judging stimuli,” the study authors wrote.
Is that glass half empty, or half full? Scientists already know that humans process information differently depending on their mood: If they’re feeling negative, they’ll tend to expect a worse outcome when facing ambiguous situations that could go either way; if they’re feeling positive, they may expect a better one. Mood, together with baseline personality, influences a person’s cognitive bias — patterns of thinking that may lead to deviations in good judgment.
An international team of astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope Interferometer to image the Eta Carinae star system in the greatest detail ever achieved. They found new and unexpected structures within the binary system, including in the area between the two stars where extremely high velocity stellar winds are colliding. These new insights into this enigmatic star system could lead to a better understanding of the evolution of very massive stars.
Led by Gerd Weigelt from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, a team of astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory to take a unique image of the Eta Carinaestar system in the Carina Nebula. This colossal binary system consists of two massive stars orbiting each other and is very active, producing stellar winds which travel at velocities of up to ten million kilometres per hour [1]. The zone between the two stars where the winds from each collide is very turbulent, but until now it could not be studied.
The power of the Eta Carinae binary pair creates dramatic phenomena. A “Great Eruption” in the system was observed by astronomers in the 1830s. We now know that this was caused by the larger star of the pair expelling huge amounts of gas and dust in a short amount of time, which led to the distinctive lobes, known as the Homunculus Nebula, that we see in the system today. The combined effect of the two stellar winds as they smash into each other at extreme speeds is to create temperatures of millions of degrees and intense deluges of X-ray radiation.
The central area where the winds collide is so comparatively tiny — a thousand times smaller than the Homunculus Nebula — that telescopes in space and on the ground so far have not been able to image them in detail. The team has now utilised the powerful resolving ability of the VLTI instrument AMBER to peer into this violent realm for the first time. A clever combination — an interferometer — of three of the four Auxiliary Telescopes at the VLT lead to a tenfold increase in resolving power in comparison to a single VLT Unit Telescope. This delivered the sharpest ever image of the system and yielded unexpected results about its internal structures.
The new VLTI image clearly depict the structure which exists between the two Eta Carinae-stars. An unexpected fan-shaped structure was observed where the raging wind from the smaller, hotter star crashes into the denser wind from the larger of the pair. “Our dreams came true, because we can now get extremely sharp images in the infrared. The VLTI provides us with a unique opportunity to improve our physical understanding of Eta Carinae and many other key objects”, says Gerd Weigelt.
A small galaxy 2 billion light-years away has been stripped of almost all its stars and gas after passing through a larger galaxy, leaving its supermassive black hole fleeing ‘nearly-naked’ at over 2,000 miles per second.
Astronomers made the bizarre discovery using the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array, and say the encounter occurred millions of years ago.
Now, the smaller galaxy is has been reduced to just shredded remains, consisting of a black hole and a small galactic remnant roughly 3,000 light years across.
The discovery was made using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). The array is part of the Long Baseline Observatory, and uses ten 2-meter-diameter dish antennas from Hawaii to St. Croix in the Caribbean.
These antennas work together to create a single, massive telescope capable of the greatest resolutions yet.
Astronomers operate this system from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Domenici Science Operations Center in Socorro, NM.
Rice University scientists have uncovered new details about how a repeating nucleotide sequence in the gene for a mutant protein may trigger Huntington’s and other neurological diseases.
Researchers at Rice’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics used computer models to analyze proteins suspected of misfolding and forming plaques in the brains of patients with neurological diseases. Their simulations confirmed experimental results by other labs that showed the length of repeating polyglutamine sequences contained in proteins is critical to the onset of disease.
The study led by Rice bioscientist Peter Wolynes appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Glutamine is the amino acid coded for by the genomic trinucleotide CAG. Repeating glutamines, called polyglutamines, are normal in huntingtin proteins, but when the DNA is copied incorrectly, the repeating sequence of glutamines can become too long. The result can be diseases like Huntington’s or spinocerebellar ataxia.
The number of repeats of glutamine can grow as the genetic code information is passed down through generations. That means a healthy parent whose huntingtin gene encodes proteins with 35 repeats may produce a child with 36 repeats. A person having the longer repeat is likely to develop Huntington’s disease.
Aggregation in Huntington’s typically begins only when polyglutamine chains reach a critical length of 36 repeats. Studies have demonstrated that longer repeat chains can make the disease more severe and its onset earlier.
The paper builds upon techniques used in an earlier study of amyloid beta proteins. That study was the lab’s first attempt to model the energy landscape of amyloid aggregation, which has been implicated in Alzheimer’s disease.
This time, Wolynes and his team were interested in knowing how the varying length of repeats — as few as 20 and as many as 50 — influenced how aggregates form. The Rice team found that at intermediate lengths between 20 and 30 repeats, polyglutamine sequences can choose between straight or hairpin configurations. While longer and shorter sequences form aligned fiber bundles, simulations showed intermediate sequences are more likely to form disordered, branched structures“We don’t know if branching is good or bad,” Wolynes said. “But it explains the weird shapes the experimentalists get in the test tube.”
Mutations that would encourage polyglutamine sequences to remain unfolded would raise the energy barrier to aggregation, they found. “What’s ironic is that while Huntington’s has been classified as a misfolding disease, it seems to happen because the protein, in the bad case of longer repeats, carries out an extra folding process that it wasn’t supposed to be doing,” Wolynes said.
The team’s ongoing study is now looking at how the complete huntingtin protein, which contains parts in addition to the polyglutamine repeats, aggregates.
Researchers led by Princeton scientists successfully operated a new instrument, the CHARIS spectrograph, which allows them to make detailed observations of planets orbiting distant stars. Above, a plot of data from CHARIS shows planets located around a star in the planetary system HR8799.
The instrument, dubbed CHARIS, was designed and built by a team led by N. Jeremy Kasdin, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. It allows astronomers to isolate light reflecting from planets larger than Jupiter and then analyze the light to determine details about the planets' size, age and atmospheric constituents. The recent observation is known in the astronomical community as a "first light," a first field test of the instrument on the telescope that demonstrates it is operating successfully.
"We couldn't have been more pleased by the results," said Kasdin. "CHARIS exceeded all of our expectations. I can't praise our team enough for their extremely hard work and dedication that made CHARIS a success. It is on track to be available for science observations starting in February 2017."
CHARIS, an acronym for the Coronagraphic High Angular Resolution Imaging Spectrograph, is part of a major effort in astronomy to find and analyze planets orbiting distant stars, known as exoplanets. Since the first discovery of an exoplanet in 1995, researchers have discovered over 1,000 such planets, a large majority coming from NASA's Kepler space observatory. Nearly all of those discoveries relied on using minute changes in stellar light to identify the presence of planets; as a result, those observations cannot tell scientists much about the planets themselves.
More recent projects have demonstrated the ability to capture light reflected from a planet and separate it from the light shining directly from its parent star. Those efforts allow scientists to examine the light and determine the chemical makeup of the planet's atmosphere in the same way that chemists use the spectrum of light (the wavelength or colors of light) to analyze the composition of material in a lab. The CHARIS project is part of that effort. Currently, CHARIS is the only spectrograph dedicated to exoplanet research on an 8-meter class telescope in the Northern Hemisphere.
"CHARIS is a key addition to the growing exoplanet imaging and characterization capabilities at Subaru Telescope," said Olivier Guyon, the leader of the adaptive optics program at Subaru and a faculty member at the University of Arizona. "With CHARIS spectra we can now do a lot more than simply detect planets: we can measure their temperatures and atmosphere compositions."
How can honeybees communicate the locations of new food sources? Austrian biologist, Karl Von Frisch, devised an experiment to find out! By pairing the direction of the sun with the flow of gravity, honeybees are able to explain the distant locations of food by dancing. "The Waggle Dance of the Honeybee" details the design of Von Frisch's famous experiment and explains the precise grammar of the honeybees dance language with high quality visualizations.
This video is a design documentary, developed by scientists at Georgia Tech's College of Computing in order to better understand and share with others, the complex behaviors that can arise in social insects. Their goal at the Multi-Agent Robotics and Systems (MARS) Laboratory is to harness new computer vision techniques to accelerate biologists' research in animal behavior. This behavioral research is then used, in turn, to design better systems of autonomous robots.
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have fabricated the first semiconductor-free, optically-controlled microelectronic device. Using metamaterials, engineers were able to build a microscale device that shows a 1,000 percent increase in conductivity when activated by low voltage and a low power laser.
The discovery paves the way for microelectronic devices that are faster and capable of handling more power, and could also lead to more efficient solar panels. The work was published Nov. 4 in Nature Communications.
The capabilities of existing microelectronic devices, such as transistors, are ultimately limited by the properties of their constituent materials, such as their semiconductors, researchers said. For example, semiconductors can impose limits on a device's conductivity, or electron flow. Semiconductors have what's called a band gap, meaning they require a boost of external energy to get electrons to flow through them. And electron velocity is limited, since electrons are constantly colliding with atoms as they flow through the semiconductor.
A team of researchers in the Applied Electromagnetics Group led by electrical engineering professor Dan Sievenpiper at UC San Diego sought to remove these roadblocks to conductivity by replacing semiconductors with free electrons in space. "And we wanted to do this at the microscale," said Ebrahim Forati, a former postdoctoral researcher in Sievenpiper's lab and first author of the study.
Non-human primates regain control of their paralyzed leg – as early as six days after spinal cord injury – thanks to a neuroprosthetic interface that acts as a wireless bridge between the brain and spine, bypassing the injury. A feasibility clinical study has begun in Switzerland to test the therapeutic effects of the spine-part of the interface in people with spinal cord injury.
On June 23rd, 2015, a primate with spinal cord injury regained control of its paralyzed leg with the help of a neuroprosthetic system called the “brain-spine interface” that bypassed the lesion, restoring communication between the brain and the region of the spinal cord. The results are published today in Nature.
The interface decodes brain activity associated with walking movements and relays this information to the spinal cord – below the injury – through electrodes that stimulate the neural pathways that activate leg muscles during natural locomotion.
The neuroprosthetic interface was conceived at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and developed together with an international network of collaborators including Medtronic, Brown University and Fraunhofer ICT-IMM. It was tested in collaboration with the University of Bordeaux, Motac Neuroscience and the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV).
“This is the first time that neurotechnology restores locomotion in primates,” says neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine who led the collaboration and holds the IRP chair in spinal cord repair. “But there are many challenges ahead and it may take several years before all the components of this intervention can be tested in people.”
A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.
The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.
A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region's future.
The same rift activity is slowly parting the Red Sea, too. Using newly gathered seismic data from 2005, researchers reconstructed the event to show the rift tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began "unzipping" the rift in both directions, the researchers explained in a statement today.
"We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this," said Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and co-author of the study.
The result shows that highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of in bits, as the leading theory held. And such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, Ebinger said.
"The whole point of this study is to learn whether what is happening in Ethiopia is like what is happening at the bottom of the ocean where it's almost impossible for us to go," says Ebinger. "We knew that if we could establish that, then Ethiopia would essentially be a unique and superb ocean-ridge laboratory for us. Because of the unprecedented cross-border collaboration behind this research, we now know that the answer is yes, it is analogous."
This article is about how a rift has formed in Ethiopia that is 35 miles in length and that it will form a new ocean in the region. They start to explain how that ocean ridges are formed from rifts and how that they are connect to the bottom of the ocean and that the red sea will eventually fill the rift and then become a ocean and it will connect all the water sources in the area. I chose this because I found it very cool and interested.
The article has all the elements of the where, when, how and looks forward to a possible next event. Its gives the rare opportunity of observing a natural process in real time.
Why does this remind me of Ice Age? Heck, I don't even LIKE Ice Age. It's one of my least favorite movies of all time besides Norm Of The North, but that's a topic for another day. So apparently, there's this huge rift in Ethiopia, and some scientists suspect this thing is gonna become an ocean. It's also pulling a Moses on us and parting the Red Sea. According to the article's information, this thing is obviously a divergent rift, pulling apart from itself. It's also quite volcanic. So until further information, I agree with the theory that this will make a new ocean.
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered a tsunami of stars and gas that is crashing midway through the disk of a spiral galaxy known as IC 2163. This colossal wave of material - which was triggered when IC 2163 recently sideswiped another spiral galaxy dubbed NGC 2207 - produced dazzling arcs of intense star formation that resemble a pair of eyelids.
"Although galaxy collisions of this type are not uncommon, only a few galaxies with eye-like, or ocular, structures are known to exist," said Michele Kaufman, an astronomer formerly with The Ohio State University in Columbus and lead author on a paper published today in the Astrophysical Journal.
Kaufman and her colleagues note that the paucity of similar features in the observable universe is likely due to their ephemeral nature. "Galactic eyelids last only a few tens of millions of years, which is incredibly brief in the lifespan of a galaxy. Finding one in such a newly formed state gives us an exceptional opportunity to study what happens when one galaxy grazes another," said Kaufman.
The interacting pair of galaxies resides approximately 114 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Canis Major. These galaxies brushed past each other - scraping the edges of their outer spiral arms - in what is likely the first encounter of an eventual merger.
Using ALMA's remarkable sensitivity and resolution, the astronomers made the most detailed measurements ever of the motion of carbon monoxide gas in the galaxy's narrow eyelid features. Carbon monoxide is a tracer of molecular gas, which is the fuel for star formation.
The data reveal that the gas in the outer portion of IC 2163's eyelids is racing inward at speeds in excess of 100 kilometers a second. This gas, however, quickly decelerates and its motion becomes more chaotic, eventually changing trajectory and aligning itself with the rotation of the galaxy rather than continuing its pell-mell rush toward the center.
In the double slit experiment, a particle travels on two different paths at the same time. Something similar can be observed when a helium atom is ionized with a laser beam. The ionization of helium can happen via two different processes, and this leads to characteristic interference effects. A team of scientists has now managed to observe the buildup up of these effects—even though this effect takes place on a time scale of femtoseconds.
It is definitely the most famous experiment in quantum physics: in the double slit experiment, a particle is fired onto a plate with two parallel slits, so there are two different paths on which the particle can reach the detector on the other side. Due to its quantum properties, the particle does not have to choose between these two possibilities, it can pass through both slits at the same time. Something quite similar can be observed when a helium atom is ionized with a laser beam.
Just like the two paths through the plate, the ionization of helium can happen via two different processes at the same time, and this leads to characteristic interference effects. In the case of the helium atom, they are called "Fano resonances". A team of scientists from TU Wien (Vienna, Austria), the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg (Germany) and Kansas State University (USA) has now managed to observe the buildup up of these Fano resonances—even though this effect takes place on a time scale of femtoseconds.
The experiment was performed in Heidelberg, the original proposal for such an experiment and computer simulations were developed by the team from Vienna, additional theoretical calculations came from Kansas State University. The study is published in Science. In the same issue of Science magazine, a team of scientists from France and Spain has published another paper, in which a complementary method of time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy is used to obtain a view on the Fano resonance.
What would happen if an electric current no longer flowed, but trickled instead? This was the question investigated by researchers working with Christian Ast at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. Their investigation involved cooling their scanning tunnelling microscope down to a fifteen thousandth of a degree above absolute zero. At these extremely low temperatures, the electrons reveal their quantum nature. The electric current is therefore a granular medium, consisting of individual particles. The electrons trickle through a conductor like grains of sand in an hourglass, a phenomenon that can be explained with the aid of quantum electrodynamics.
Flowing water from a tap feels like a homogeneous medium - it is impossible to distinguish between the individual water molecules. Exactly the same thing is true about electric current. So many electrons flow in a conventional cable that the current appears to be homogeneous. Although it is not possible to distinguish individual electrons, quantum mechanics says they should exist. So how do they behave? Under which conditions does the current not flow like water through a tap, but rather trickles like sand in an hourglass?
The hourglass analogy is very appropriate for the scanning tunneling microscope, where a thin, pointed tip scans across the surface of a sample without actually touching it. A tiny current flows nevertheless, as there is a slight probability that electrons "tunnel" from the pointed tip into the sample. This tunneling current is an exponential function of the separation, which is why the pointed tip is located only a few Ångström above the sample.
Minute variations in the tunneling current thus allow researchers to resolve individual atoms and atomic structures on surfaces and investigate their electronic structure. Scanning tunneling microscopes are therefore some of the most versatile and sensitive detectors in the whole of solid state physics.
Even under these extreme conditions – a tiny current of less than one billionth of the current that flows through a 100-watt light bulb – billions of electrons per second still flow. This is too many to discern individual electrons. The temperature was down at around a fifteen thousandth of a degree above absolute zero (i.e. at minus 273.135°C or 15 mK) before the scientists saw that the electric current consists of individual electrons.
At this low temperature, very fine structures, which the researchers had not expected, appear in the spectrum. "We could explain these new structures only by assuming that the tunneling current is a granular medium and no longer homogeneous," says Ast, who heads the group working with the scanning tunneling microscope. This is thus the first time that the full quantum nature of electronic transport in the scanning tunneling microscope has shown itself.
Mutations in genes for the RAS family of proteins are present in nearly 90 percent of pancreatic cancers and are also highly prevalent in colon cancer, lung cancer and melanoma, the most dangerous kind of skin cancer. The group of proteins include three members, K-RAS, H-RAS and N-RAS.
The prevalence of RAS mutations in human cancers and the dependence of tumors on RAS for survival has made a RAS a prime target for cancer research and drug discovery. Scientists and drug developers have long studied RAS oncogenes hoping to find a new treatment for cancer, but they have not yet been able to identify drugs that safely inhibit the oncogene's activity.
John O'Bryan, associate professor of pharmacology in the UIC College of Medicine, led a team of researchers that took a different approach to studying RAS, and discovered that a synthetic binding protein they call "NS1 monobody," which they created in the lab, can block the activity of the RAS proteins. "We did not look for a drug or specifically for an inhibitor," said O'Bryan, who is also a member of the University of Illinois Cancer Center and holds an appointment at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago. "We used monobody technology, a type of protein-engineering technology, to identify regions of RAS that are critical for its function."
Unlike conventional antibodies, monobodies are not dependent on their environment and can be readily used as genetically encoded inhibitors, O'Bryan said. "The beauty of the technology is that when a monobody binds a protein, it usually works as an inhibitor of that protein," he said.
Monobodies were developed by Shohei Koide, a co-author on the study who is professor of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology at New York University. They have been used to target a diverse array of proteins that include enzymes and receptors.
The researchers found that the NS1 monobody binds to an area of the RAS protein molecule that was not previously known to be important for its oncogenic activity. NS1 strongly inhibits oncogenic K-RAS and H-RAS function by blocking the ability of the protein to interact with an identical one to form a molecular pair. NS1 does not affect N-RAS.
O'Bryan says the findings, published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, provide important insight into long-standing questions about how RAS proteins function in cells. These insights may help guide the development of new therapeutic approaches to treating cancer by interfering with mutant RAS function in cancer cells.
An Australian kelp forest vanished with a slight warming of ocean temperatures and an incursion of tropical fish.
We’ve heard a lot lately about the destruction of tropical coral reefs brought on by a warming climate. And that’s a big deal — corals are the lynchpin of entire undersea ecosystems. When they go, the damage reverberates widely and ultimately, even people pay the price.
But something similar has been happening to corals’ more temperate cousins in many locations: Forests of kelp. These swaying seaweeds, too, anchor communities of diverse types of fish and other living organisms and, in turn, provide great value to humans through their contribution to fisheries. And recently, there has been some very troubling news for kelp. One forest was wiped out off the southwestern coast of Australia by extremely warm temperatures in 2011, an event that scientists called a “rapid climate-driven regime shift.” More recently, there has been massive death of giant kelp around Tasmania as well.
And now, new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates another way that a changing climate can devastate kelp. Adriana Vergés of the University of New South Wales in Sydney and her colleagues at institutions in Australia, Spain, and Singapore used underwater cameras to study kelp forests around the Solitary Islands, along the eastern Australian coast between Sydney and Brisbane.
This region is what Vergés calls “a famous place for being a tropical-temperate transition zone. We went there because that’s where we thought, if there’s something that is happening to the kelp, that is climate mediated, this is where it is going to be happening,” she said.
The last bits of data collected during NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft’s speedy flyby of Pluto last year are back on Earth, scientists said Thursday, marking the official end of the probe’s prime mission.
It took more than a year for New Horizons to send back the 50-plus gigabits of data collected around the time the spacecraft zipped by Pluto and its five moons on July 14, 2015.
The data downlinks came down at an average of about 2,000 bits per second — a fraction of the speed of a dial-up Internet connection — and were interrupted as the spacecraft conducted maneuvers and as ground antennas were needed by other deep space missions.
The long wait for scientists was part of the plan, as officials knew the data stored aboard the probe’s recorders could only come back to Earth a little at a time.
The final data fragment from the LEISA spectral camera within New Horizons’ Ralph instrument arrived at mission control at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, at 5:48 a.m. EDT (0948 GMT) Tuesday. The downlink came via an antenna at NASA’s Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia, NASA said in a statement. It took five hours and eight minutes for the data stream to travel the 3.4-billion-mile (5.5-billion-kilometer) gulf from New Horizons to Earth.
“The Pluto system data that New Horizons collected has amazed us over and over again with the beauty and complexity of Pluto and its system of moons,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “There’s a great deal of work ahead for us to understand the 400-plus scientific observations that have all been sent to Earth. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do—after all, who knows when the next data from a spacecraft visiting Pluto will be sent?”
Mission controllers will conduct a final data verification review before erasing the two data recorders aboard New Horizons, clearing room for future science observations from the spacecraft’s extended mission, which includes a close encounter with the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, a frozen world lurking a billion miles beyond Pluto discovered two years ago by scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope.
The next target for New Horizons measures just 13 to 25 miles (21 to 40 kilometers) across, and experts believe 2014 MU69 is a relic building block from left over from the ancient solar system. New Horizons will fly by the tiny world on Jan. 1, 2019, at a distance of about 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) during an extended mission phase approved by NASA earlier this year.
The 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to a trio of scientists for their pioneering work in developing molecular machines. These gadgets measure just a thousandth of a human hair in width, and they’re poised to revolutionize everything from manufacturing and materials to medicine and the functioning of the human body.
As a science, molecular nanotechnology is still in its infancy, but by awarding the Nobel Prize to these three scientists, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is acknowledging the technology’s huge potential.
In his historic 1959 lecture, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” physicist Richard Feynman introduced the world to the concept of nanotechnology. He envisioned a world where we could directly manipulate individual atoms, arranging and rearranging them into useful shapes and configurations. The concept was given an added boost in 1986 with the publication of K. Eric Drexler’s seminal book, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. Drexler’s ideas sent shockwaves through the chemistry world, with his super-futuristic ideas of smart materials that change shape, microscopic machines that produce and deliver medicines right inside the body, and rockets built from a single seed.
Many recent breakthroughs have inspired the development of increasingly sophisticated molecular machines, including “nanofish” that swim through bloodstreams, atom-sized data storage, and cyborg sperm, to name a few. Some experts think that nanotechnology will unleash a second Industrial Revolution, which will run alongside advances in robotics, mass automation, and artificial intelligence.
For the first time, an international team of scientists led by a researcher at the University of California, Riverside has modified the energy spectrum of acoustic phonons— elemental excitations, also referred to as quasi-particles, that spread heat through crystalline materials like a wave—by confining them to nanometer-scale semiconductor structures. The results have important implications in the thermal management of electronic devices.
Led by Alexander Balandin, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computing Engineering and UC Presidential Chair Professor in UCR's Bourns College of Engineering, the research is described in a paper published Thursday, Nov. 10, in the journal Nature Communications. The paper is titled "Direct observation of confined acoustic phonon polarization branches in free-standing nanowires."
The team used semiconductor nanowires from Gallium Arsenide (GaAs), synthesized by researchers in Finland, and an imaging technique called Brillouin-Mandelstam light scattering spectroscopy (BMS) to study the movement of phonons through the crystalline nanostructures. By changing the size and the shape of the GaAs nanostructures, the researchers were able to alter the energy spectrum, or dispersion, of acoustic phonons. The BMS instrument used for this study was built at UCR's Phonon Optimized Engineered Materials (POEM) Center, which is directed by Balandin.
Controlling phonon dispersion is crucial for improving heat removal from nanoscale electronic devices, which has become the major roadblock in allowing engineers to continue to reduce their size. It can also be used to improve the efficiency of thermoelectric energy generation, Balandin said. In that case, decreasing thermal conductivity by phonons is beneficial for thermoelectric devices that generate energy by applying a temperature gradient to semiconductors.
"For years, the only envisioned method of changing the thermal conductivity of nanostructures was via acoustic phonon scattering with nanostructure boundaries and interfaces. We demonstrated experimentally that by spatially confining acoustic phonons in nanowires one can change their velocity, and the way they interact with electrons, magnons, and how they carry heat. Our work creates new opportunities for tuning thermal and electronic properties of semiconductor materials," Balandin said.
Nuclear weapons are already scary enough, but when you dig deeper and find out how powerful the weapons truly are, they get even more terrifying. The weapons we’ve built after the first atomic bombs are so strong that you can basically use Hiroshima as a unit of measurement. The largest nuclear explosion in human history, the Tsar Bomba, detonated with a force of 50 megatons or the power of 3,333 Hiroshimas.
The Russians had another bomb planned that would have been double the force of the Tsar Bomba at 100 megatons (and 6,666 times the force of Hiroshima) but luckily they never tested it. I mean, the Tsar Bomba was already as scarily powerful as it can get, since it almost destroyed the plane that dropped it and shattered windows as far as Norway and Finland. (The bomb was tested at Novaya Zemlya in Northern Russia).
Even something like the B83 bomb (which is the largest nuke in the US arsenal) explodes with a mushroom cloud taller than where commercial airlines fly. The true scale of nuclear weapons is really something, man. Learn more about it with this video by RealLifeLore, which also shows what kind of damage these nukes would do if they were dropped on New York City.
The record-setting global temperatures seen in 2015 could be the “new normal” as soon as the 2020s.
The sweltering heat that smashed temperature records in 2015 will soon be par for the course. Depending on how much more carbon dioxide humans dump into the atmosphere, 2015 could become the “new normal” for global temperatures as soon as the 2020s, researchers estimate online November 4 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Even if there’s a sharp reduction in CO2 emissions, the record-setting year (SN: 2/20/16, p. 13) will seem typical by 2040.
Those predictions are based on defining “new normal” — previously an informal term — as a point in time when at least half of the following 20 years surpass the record. Climate scientist Sophie Lewis of Australian National University in Canberra and colleagues applied their new definition to several simulations of future climate.
When 2015’s record heat is the new normal, extremely hot years will be beyond anything humans have encountered so far, the researchers predict. That extreme heat could lead to more deadly heat waves (SN: 9/3/16, p. 5), wildfires (SN Online: 7/15/15) and other climate-related disasters.
If you aren't already reading this on your smartphone, take it out now. Imagine you and thousands of other people flinging your beloved gadgets into the depths of the nearest ocean. But rather than sinking to some watery demise, they swim off together like a school of electronic fish.
These submariner smartphones then get to work, sending images to the surface. With onboard sensors, they capture audio, temperature readings, even the chemical composition of the water and the various substances they encounter as they resolutely pull together something we don’t have—a detailed view of the 70 percent of the world we are largely ignorant of, our oceans.
The only fiction in that scenario is finding people willing to part with their phones.
The overarching concept—a network of connected devices swimming around the oceans sending back all kinds of data—is real. It is being realized by MIT PhD candidate Sampriti Bhattacharyya, 28, founder and CEO of underwater smart drone startup Hydroswarm.
The word ‘drone’ doesn’t do justice to Bhattacharyya’s vision. She is preparing to defend her thesis in mechanical engineering and robotics, and connection is at the core of how this polymath engineer thinks and designs. She describes her product as an underwater Internet of Things. An enormous flotilla of seaworthy, connected, learning machines that will enable new breakthroughs, new economies, and new opportunities, and will offers the chance to connect our entire globe—land, air, and sea—in a data-driven, digital continuum.
“That’s the future, right?” she says. “There has to be this unfolding of a collection of things that are all connected, where the data that we can gather all gets stitched together to create this very intense, high-fidelity structure that represents our world.” Connection is at the core of how this polymath engineer thinks, and how she designs.
It starts with connecting the technologies available to build her rotund drones: the sensors, the compute she can leverage, and the power sources to drive it. Many of these building blocks are commercially available either off the shelf or semi-customizable, so she can focus her development efforts on the magic sauce that makes her drone unique.
“It has to make sense, the math has to work,” Bhattacharyya says. “I can come up with an idea, but if there is a mismatch with the technologies, if it becomes just another high-concept, high-cost machine, then that is missing the mark for me. Do the economics make sense? Can I build hundreds or thousands of these? How can I, together with technology partners, push all of it—the compute, the security, and the efficiency—forward? It takes an ecosystem to make something big happen.”
Another connection is with the ocean environment in which these machines will operate. Bhattacharyya doesn’t want them to just survive the harsh deap-sea conditions but to move in harmony with the creatures, plants, and algae that exist there. “Whatever I design has to blend in,” she says. “It’s the negative aspect of disruptive technology that I am staying away from. You need to take responsibility as a technologist. That’s why my design has no propellers; it’s smooth to minimize noise disruption. If you are a fish, thousands of spinning propellers is no fun.”
Finally, there is the connection to people who might make use of Bhattacharrya’s underwater ecosystem. She wants the intelligence gathered from her ocean data farm to enable others to develop better aquaculture, tap into clean geothermal energy, and formulate new drugs. The underwater micro drones will gather data we’ve never before had access to and enable new insights to help us better understand the place where life first formed.
Once rampant in medieval Europe, leprosy dramatically declined by the end of the Middle Ages for reasons that are still unclear. About a century ago, leprosy in Europe virtually disappeared, at least among humans. Examining diseased red squirrels from England, Ireland, and Scotland, scientists at EPFL and the University of Edinburgh have now discovered that the same bacteria that cause leprosy in humans also infect red squirrels. The work is published in Science.
Leprosy is an infectious disease that mainly affects the skin, peripheral nerves, the upper respiratory tract, and the eyes. It is caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae and the recently discovered Mycobacterium lepromatosis. One of the most ancient diseases, leprosy has had an enormous social impact across multiple cultures throughout history. Largely controlled today thanks to antibiotics, there are still over 200,000 new cases of leprosy reported each year worldwide.
A little-known fact is that leprosy also affects animals, such as armadillos, which have reportedly caused a few cases of animal-to-human (or “zoonotic”) infections. Drawing from this evidence, the labs of Stewart Cole at EPFL and Anna Meredith at the University of Edinburgh carried out DNA tests on 110 red squirrels from England, Scotland, and Ireland. Some of these animals showed clinical symptoms of leprosy, while others did not; nonetheless, most were found to be infected with leprosy bacteria.
Surprisingly, red squirrels from Brownsea Island, off the south coast of England, were infected with a strain ofM. leprae that is closely related to one found in a skeleton of a leprosy victim that was buried in Winchester 730 years ago, just 70 km from Brownsea Island.
On the other hand, red squirrels from Scotland and Ireland and the Isle of Wight (South England) were found to be infected with the other leprosy bacterium, M. lepromatosis. This species causes leprosy in humans in Mexico, and further analysis showed that the two strains from Mexico and Europe diverged from a common ancestor around 27,000 years ago.
“It was completely unexpected to see that centuries after its elimination from humans in the UK M. lepraecauses disease in red squirrels,” says Stewart Cole. “This has never been observed before.”
A team of researchers from Copenhagen University have located a single mutation that causes the mysterious phenomenon of blue eyes. And all blue eyed people are genetically related to a person who lived in the Black Sea region sometime between 6 – 10,000 years ago.
The research was published in the Journal of Human Genetics. A mutation in a gene called OCA2 came into being nearly 8,000 years ago. It can be definitively traced back to an ancestor from the Black Sea.
Dr. Hans Eiberg claims that before this time, every human being had brown eyes. “A genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a ‘switch,’ which literally ‘turned off’ the ability to produce brown eyes,” Eiberg said. When blue-eyed peoples from Jordan, Denmark and Turkey were examined, their genetic difference was traced back to the maternal lineage according to Eiberg’s team.
The brown melanin pigment is still dominant. However, following the last Ice Age, Europeans developed this rare mutation that differentiated them from the rest of the human race. Ninety-five percent of Europeans in Scandinavian countries have blue eyes.
They are also found to have a greater range of hair and skin color.
Comparatively, Europe has a wider variety of hair color and skin pigment than is found in any other continent in the world. These mutations are recent as Europe was colonized only a few thousand years ago, say mainstream scientists.
What do you get if you cross aspirin with ibuprofen? Harvard chemistry professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik isn’t sure, but he’s trained software that could give him an answer by suggesting a molecular structure that combines properties of both drugs.
The AI program could help the search for new drug compounds. Pharmaceutical research tends to rely on software that exhaustively crawls through giant pools of candidate molecules using rules written by chemists, and simulations that try to identify or predict useful structures. The former relies on humans thinking of everything, while the latter is limited by the accuracy of simulations and the computing power required.
Aspuru-Guzik’s system can dream up structures more independently of humans and without lengthy simulations. It leverages its own experience, built up by training machine-learning algorithms with data on hundreds of thousands of drug-like molecules.
"It explores more intuitively, using chemical knowledge it learned, like a chemist would," says Aspuru-Guzik. "Humans could be better chemists with this kind of software as their assistant." Aspuru-Guzik was named to MIT Technology Review’s list of young innovators in 2010.
The new system was built using a machine-learning technique called deep learning, which has become pervasive in computing companies but is less established in the natural sciences. It uses a design known as a generative model, which takes in a trove of data and uses what it learned to generate plausible new data of its own.
Generative models are more typically used to create images, speech, or text, for example in the case of Google’s Smart Reply feature that suggests responses to e-mails. But last month Aspuru-Guzik and colleagues at Harvard, the University of Toronto, and the University of Cambridge published results from creating a generative model trained on 250,000 drug-like molecules.
The system could generate plausible new structures by combining properties of existing drug compounds, and be asked to suggest molecules that strongly displayed certain properties such as solubility, and being easy to synthesize.
A University at Buffalo research team has published a paper that implies that the rush to ban and demonize autonomous weapons or “killer robots” may be a temporary solution, but the actual problem is that society is entering into a situation where systems like these have and will become possible.
Killer robots are at the center of classic stories told in films such as “The Terminator” and the original Star Trek television series’ “The Doomsday Machine,” yet the idea of fully autonomous weapons acting independently of any human agency is not the exclusive license of science fiction writers.
Killer robots have a Pentagon budget line and a group of non-governmental organizations, including Human Rights Watch, is already working collectively to stop their development.
Governance and control of systems like killer robots needs to go beyond the end products. “We have to deconstruct the term ‘killer robot’ into smaller cultural techniques,” says Tero Karppi, assistant professor of media study, whose paper with Marc Böhlen, UB professor of media study, and Yvette Granta, a graduate student at the university, appears in the International Journal of Cultural Studies.
“We need to go back and look at the history of machine learning, pattern recognition and predictive modeling, and how these things are conceived,” says Karppi, an expert in critical platform and software studies whose interests include automation, artificial intelligence and how these systems fail. “What are the principles and ideologies of building an automated system? What can it do?”
By looking at killer robots we are forced to address questions that are set to define the coming age of automation, artificial intelligence and robotics, he says. “Are humans better than robots to make decisions? If not, then what separates humans from robots? When we are defining what robots are and what they do we also define what it means to be a human in this culture and this society,” Karppi says.
Last year, MIT researchers presented a system that automated a crucial step in big-data analysis: the selection of a "feature set," or aspects of the data that are useful for making predictions. The researchers entered the system in several data science contests, where it outperformed most of the human competitors and took only hours instead of months to perform its analyses.
Now, in a pair of papers at the IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics, the team described an approach to automating most of the rest of the process of big-data analysis—the preparation of the data for analysis and even the specification of problems that the analysis might be able to solve.
The researchers believe that, again, their systems could perform in days tasks that used to take data scientists months.
"The goal of all this is to present the interesting stuff to the data scientists so that they can more quickly address all these new data sets that are coming in," says Max Kanter MEng '15, who is first author on last year's paper and one of this year's papers.
"Data scientists want to know, 'Why don't you show me the top 10 things that I can do the best, and then I'll dig down into those?' So, these methods are shrinking the time between getting a data set and actually producing value out of it."
Both papers focus on time-varying data, which reflects observations made over time, and they assume that the goal of analysis is to produce a probabilistic model that will predict future events on the basis of current observations.
The first paper describes a general framework for analyzing time-varying data. It splits the analytic process into three stages: labeling the data, or categorizing salient data points so they can be fed to a machine-learning system; segmenting the data, or determining which time sequences of data points are relevant to which problems; and "featurizing" the data, the step performed by the system the researchers presented last year.
The second paper describes a new language for describing data-analysis problems and a set of algorithms that automatically recombine data in different ways, to determine what types of prediction problems the data might be useful for solving.
According to Kalyan Veeramachaneni, a principal research scientist at MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and senior author on all three papers, the work grew out of his team's experience with real data-analysis problems brought to it by industry researchers.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Your new post is loading...
