Amazing Science

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the most sophisticated scientific observatory ever built by mankind. NASA, in collaboration with European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), launched and is operating this telescope. Launched in December 2021, the telescope was put in orbit in January 2022. The telescope is named after the administrator of NASA, James E. Webb who was the administrator during the Gemini and the Apollo programs. Previously, NASA had the deepest observations into the universe’s distant past using the Hubble Space Telescope which is powerful enough to observe and capture the night sky up to billions of light-years away called the Hubble Deep Fields. JWST is the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope with much sophistication and powerful infrared resolution technology.

On 11th July 2022, President Joe Biden released the first image from the James Web Space Telescope. The image peeks into thousands of galaxies in the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 revealing the distant past for us making it one of the sharpest images of the earliest universe.

Gaia’s data release 3 contains new and improved details for almost two billion stars in our galaxy. The catalog includes new information including chemical compositions, stellar temperatures, colors, masses, ages, and the speed at which stars move towards or away from us (radial velocity). Much of this information was revealed by the newly released spectroscopy data, a technique in which the starlight is split into its constituent colors. The data also includes special subsets of stars, like those that change brightness over time. Also new in this data set is the largest catalogue yet of binary stars, thousands of Solar System objects such as asteroids and moons of planets, and millions of galaxies and quasars outside the Milky Way. 

Binary stars, asteroids, quasars, and much more

Other papers that are published today reflect the breadth and depth of Gaia's discovery potential. A new binary star catalogue presents the mass and evolution of more than 800 thousand binary systems, while a new asteroid survey comprising 156 thousand rocky bodies is digging deeper into the origin of our Solar System. Gaia is also revealing information about 10 million variable stars, mysterious macro-molecules between stars, as well as quasars and galaxies beyond our own cosmic neighbourhood.

“Unlike other missions that target specific objects, Gaia is a survey mission. This means that while surveying the entire sky with billions of stars multiple times, Gaia is bound to make discoveries that other more dedicated missions would miss. This is one of its strengths, and we can’t wait for the astronomy community to dive into our new data to find out even more about our galaxy and its surroundings than we could’ve imagined,” says Timo Prusti, Project Scientist for Gaia at ESA.

More details on Gaia’s data releases 3 can be found here: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/data-release-3 

From 13 June 2022, 12:00 CEST onwards, the new Gaia data can be accessed at https://gea.esac.esa.int/archive/

Gaia’s data release 3 was presented today during a virtual media briefing at https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/ESA_Web_TV 

These data are summarized in a series of infographics: ​​https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia/Gaia_data_release_3_media_kit 

More in-depth stories on the new Gaia data can be found here: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dr3-stories

A series of scientific papers describing the data and their validation process will appear in a special issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics:

https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dr3-papers 

Imagine Bach's "Cello Suite No. 1" played on a strand of DNA.

This scenario is not as impossible as it seems. Too small to withstand a rhythmic strum or sliding bowstring, DNA is a powerhouse for storing audio files and all kinds of other media.

"DNA is nature's original data storage system. We can use it to store any kind of data: images, video, music -- anything," said Kasra Tabatabaei, a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and a coauthor on this study.

Expanding DNA's molecular makeup and developing a precise new sequencing method enabled a multi-institutional team to transform the double helix into a robust, sustainable data storage platform.

The team's paper appeared in Nano Letters in February 2022.

In the age of digital information, anyone brave enough to navigate the daily news feels the global archive growing heavier by the day. Increasingly, paper files are being digitized to save space and protect information from natural disasters.

From scientists to social media influencers, anyone with information to store stands to benefit from a secure, sustainable data lock box -- and the double helix fits the bill.

"DNA is one of the best options, if not the best option, to store archival data especially," said Chao Pan, a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a coauthor on this study.

Its longevity rivaled only by durability, DNA is designed to weather Earth's harshest conditions -- sometimes for tens of thousands of years -- and remain a viable data source. Scientists can sequence fossilized strands to uncover genetic histories and breathe life into long-lost landscapes.

Despite its diminutive stature, DNA is a bit like Dr. Who's infamous police box: bigger on the inside than it appears.

"Every day, several petabytes of data are generated on the internet. Only one gram of DNA would be sufficient to store that data. That's how dense DNA is as a storage medium," said Tabatabaei, who is also a fifth-year Ph.D. student.

Another important aspect of DNA is its natural abundance and near-infinite renewability, a trait not shared by the most advanced data storage system on the market today: silicon microchips, which often circulate for just decades before an unceremonious burial in a heap of landfilled e-waste.

"At a time when we are facing unprecedented climate challenges, the importance of sustainable storage technologies cannot be overestimated. New, green technologies for DNA recording are emerging that will make molecular storage even more important in the future," said Olgica Milenkovic, the Franklin W. Woeltge Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a co-PI on the study.

The human genome is littered with "selfish genetic elements," which do not seem to benefit their hosts, but instead seek only to propagate themselves. Selfish genetic elements can wreak havoc by, for instance, distorting sex ratios, impairing fertility, causing harmful mutations, and even potentially causing population extinction.

Biologists at the University of Rochester, including Amanda Larracuente, an associate professor of biology, and Daven Presgraves, a University Dean's Professor of Biology, have for the first time used population genomics to shed light on the evolution and consequences of a selfish genetic element known as Segregation Distorter (SD). In a paper published in the journal eLife, the researchers report that SD has caused dramatic changes in chromosome organization and genetic diversity.

Geckos are famous for having grippy feet that allow them to scale vertical surfaces with ease. They get this seeming superpower from millions of microscopic, hairlike structures on their toes.

VX is classified as a neurotoxin and an incredibly deadly chemical warfare agent that has been used in assassinations by some nations. It can cause permanent brain damage in those who survive exposure. These potentially life-saving findings are published in the July 2022 edition of Science Advances, with lab member Jim McCann serving as the paper's primary author. It outlines the design of two proteins that detect the neurotoxin by changing their shape in the presence of VX.

In collaboration with Douglas Pike and Vikas Nanda at Rutgers University, the CCNY team used a protein design program called ProtCAD to design 20 different proteins. According to Koder, the computer code was new and unlike anything the team had previously worked with, so it came as a bit of a surprise that two of their protein designs worked rather quickly.

"Having the first thing we tried with a small molecule actually just work was pretty great," Koder said. "In that absence of VX, all of the negative charges repel each other and then the protein unfolds. And it really extends, almost like a stick. When the protein binds VX it wraps all the way around the molecule becoming much more compact."

Previous detectors for this type of molecule often produced false positives from chemicals like insecticides. This new design can help prevent those misleading results, by scanning the entire molecular surface down to one hundred-millionth of a centimeter.

"We get this remarkable specificity because we're making contact with the whole molecule," said Koder. This work adds to a rapidly advancing field of biosensing technology used to detect the presence of incredibly small molecules called biomarkers.

Researchers have exceeded the current record for generating energy from a nuclear fusion reaction. It’s a big step toward solving the world power consumption crisis. Nuclear fusion is called the holy grail of energy production — because it could lead to a virtually unlimited source of safe and sustainable power.

The nuclear test happened at the world’s most powerful fusion plant — the JET Fusion facility in the UK. The record-breaking nuclear fusion reaction had a temperature of more than 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times hotter than the heart of the sun. The research team explained that the breakthrough is a landmark for this technology, and a key step toward developing practical nuclear fusion.

The difference between fusion and fission

Most nuclear reactors use fission — that’s when big unstable atoms like uranium are split in two, releasing lots of energy and radiation. Fission is the current technique used around the globe in nuclear power plants. But fusion is different. It involves forcing atoms of hydrogen together — fusing them to create: helium, lots of energy, and just a tiny bit of short-lived radiation.

Using fusion to create mini-suns inside reactors like this, is one of the greatest tech challenges humanity has ever faced. It holds the potential for producing almost unlimited supplies of energy, forever. The essential part of the test fusion reaction only lasted for 5 seconds — and only generated enough power to boil about 60 kettles of water — 11 mega-watts of power. But it’s an important proof of the science of fusion. The power output was more than double what was achieved in similar tests in year 1997.

Are we going to soon witness the creative genius of a virtual Picasso or Leonardo da Vinci? We could be on the way with the latest trend in the AI field: visual generative models. While systems like GPT-3 create text from text, others like DALL·E 2 — a wordplay between Spanish painter Salvador Dalí and Pixar’s cute robot WALL·E — can create visual art from just words and sentences. As you can see from the cover image of this article, this tech gives a new meaning to the idiom “an image is worth more than a thousand words.”

OpenAI, the company behind DALL·E 2, announced the model in April. In just a couple of months, it has sounded all the alarms that AI is getting too close to human-level visual creativity. It can create anything you can imagine — and anything you can’t — from a single sentence. 

And OpenAI isn’t alone. Just a month later, Google Brain announced Imagen, a similar — and even slightly better — model. And now, another team from Google Brain released yet another model called Parti. And that’s without mentioning all the projects coming from low-budget research groups that don’t count on the resources of the Googles and OpenAIs of the world. Some examples are brand new research labs like Midjourney, free apps like Dream, open-source alternatives like Hugging Face’s DALL·E mini (now called Craiyon), or the collab notebooks (e.g. disco diffusion) that originate from the work of a few independent researchers like Katherine Crowson and Ryan Murdock, who started the movement among digital artists.

Now that the tech is proven and the uncertainty removed, the whole AI community is in a race to build the next best text-to-image model. And they aren’t stopping anytime soon. This will have important consequences. Today, I’ll focus on how this technology will disrupt the visual arts. DALL·E 2, the main star of today’s issue, will accompany us on this journey.

Astronomers discovered a rocket body heading toward a lunar collision late last year. Impact occurred March 4, with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter later spotting the resulting crater. Surprisingly the crater is actually two craters, an eastern crater (18-meter diameter, about 19.5 yards) superimposed on a western crater (16-meter diameter, about 17.5 yards). A rocket body impacted the Moon on March 4, 2022, near Hertzsprung crater, creating a double crater roughly 28 meters wide in the longest dimension.

The double crater was completely unexpected and may indicate that the rocket body had large masses at each end. Typically a spent rocket has mass concentrated at the motor end; the rest of the rocket stage mainly consists of an empty fuel tank. Since the origin of the rocket body remains uncertain, the double nature of the crater may indicate its identity. The crater formed (5.226 degrees north, 234.486 degrees east, 1,863 meters elevation) in a complex area where the impact of ejecta from the Orientale basin event overlies the degraded northeast rim of Hertzsprung basin (536 kilometers diameter). The new crater is not visible in this view, but its location is indicated by the white arrow. LROC WAC mosaic, 110 kilometers width.

No other rocket body so far that crashed on the Moon has created double craters. The four Apollo SIV-B craters were somewhat irregular in outline (Apollos 13, 14, 15, 17) and were substantially larger (greater than 35 meters, about 38 yards) than each of the double craters. The maximum width (29 meters, about 31.7 yards) of the double crater of the mystery rocket body was near that of the S-IVBs.

LRO is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Launched on June 18, 2009, LRO has collected a treasure trove of data with its seven powerful instruments, making an invaluable contribution to our knowledge about the Moon. NASA is returning to the Moon with commercial and international partners to expand human presence in space and bring back new knowledge and opportunities.

Pigs are valuable large animal models for biomedical and genetic research, but insights into the tissue- and cell-type-specific transcriptome and heterogeneity remain limited. By leveraging single-cell RNA sequencing, scientists now generated a multiple-organ single-cell transcriptomic map containing over 200,000 pig cells from 20 tissues/organs. They were able to comprehensively characterize the heterogeneity of cells in tissues and to identify 234 cell clusters, representing 58 major cell types. In-depth integrative analysis of endothelial cells reveals a high degree of heterogeneity. They also identified several functionally distinct endothelial cell phenotypes, including an endothelial to mesenchymal transition subtype in adipose tissues. Intercellular communication analysis predicts tissue- and cell type-specific crosstalk between endothelial cells and other cell types through the VEGF, PDGF, TGF-β, and BMP pathways. Regulon analysis of single-cell transcriptome of microglia in pig and 12 other species further identifies MEF2C as an evolutionally conserved regulon in the microglia.

This important work describes the landscape of single-cell transcriptomes within diverse pig organs and identifies the heterogeneity of endothelial cells and evolutionally conserved regulon in microglia.

Researchers at Duke University are developing an artificial intelligence tool for toilets that would help providers improve care management for patients with gastrointestinal issues through remote patient monitoring.  The tool, which can be installed in the pipes of a toilet and analyzes stool samples, has the potential to improve treatment of chronic gastrointestinal issues like inflammatory bowel disease or irritable bowel syndrome, according to a press release. When a patient flushes the toilet, the mHealth platform photographs the stool as it moves through the pipes. That data is sent to a gastroenterologist, who can analyze the data for evidence of chronic issues.

A study conducted by Duke University researchers found that the platform had an 85.1 percent accuracy rate on stool form classification and a 76.3 percent accuracy rate on detection of gross blood. “Typically, gastroenterologists have to rely on patient self-reported information about their stool to help determine the cause of their gastrointestinal health issues, which can be very unreliable,” Deborah Fisher, MD, an associate professor of medicine at Duke and one of the study’s lead authors, said in the press release.

“Patients often can’t remember what their stool looks like or how often they have a bowel movement, which is part of the standard monitoring process,” she said. “The smart toilet technology will allow us to gather the long-term information needed to make a more accurate and timely diagnosis of chronic gastrointestinal problems.”

This remote patient monitoring platform has the potential to benefit both patients and healthcare providers. Patients won’t need to do anything out of the ordinary, and gastroenterologists won’t have to try and diagnose based on a patient’s description or recollection. “An IBD flare-up could be diagnosed using the smart toilet and the patient’s response to treatment could be monitored with the technology,” Sonia Grego, PhD, a lead researcher on the study and founding director of the Duke Smart Toilet Lab, said in the release. “This could be especially useful for patients who live in long-term care facilities who may not be able to report their conditions and could help improve initial diagnosis of acute conditions,”  The program makes use of something that nearly every American has at home. 

It’s not the first study to target the toilet. Back in 2019, researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology developed a  sensor-embedded toilet seat. The toilet seat was designed to allow care providers to remotely monitor a patient’s weight, heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygenation levels, and stroke volume.  Similar to the AI tool for toilet pipes, RIT’s smart toilet seat presents the ability to catch patients’ symptoms early enough before they could lead to something more severe.

With gastroenterology appearing on Doximity’s list of specialties that are least engaged in telehealth, this artificial intelligence software, once available to the public, could change minds. Gastroenterology usually requires in-person and hands-on interaction but using remote monitoring in this way might prove to be even more beneficial.

A Google engineer became convinced a large language model had become sentient and touched off a debate about how we should think about artificial intelligence.  Current AIs aren’t sentient, at least we don't think so. But they’re getting very good at faking sentience, and that’s scary enough.

Recently, the Washington Post’s Nitasha Tiku published a profile of Blake Lemoine, a software engineer assigned to work on the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) project at Google. LaMDA is a chatbot AI, and an example of what machine learning researchers call a “large language model,” or even a “foundation model.” It’s similar to OpenAI’s famous GPT-3 system, and has been trained on literally trillions of words compiled from online posts to recognize and reproduce patterns in human language.

LaMDA is a really good large language model. So good that Lemoine became truly, sincerely convinced that it was actually sentient, meaning it had become conscious, and was having and expressing thoughts the way a human might.  The LaMDA story arrived after a week of increasingly urgent alarm among people in the closely related AI safety universe. The worry here is similar to Lemoine’s, but distinct. AI safety folks don’t worry that AI will become sentient. They worry it will become so powerful that it could destroy the world.

The writer/AI safety activist Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essay outlining a “list of lethalities” for AI tried to make the point especially vivid, outlining scenarios where a malign artificial general intelligence (AGI, or an AI capable of doing most or all tasks as well as or better than a human) leads to mass human suffering. For instance, suppose an AGI “gets access to the Internet, emails some DNA sequences to any of the many many online firms that will take a DNA sequence in the email and ship you back proteins, and bribes/persuades some human who has no idea they’re dealing with an AGI to mix proteins in a beaker …” until the AGI eventually develops a super-virus that kills us all.

Holden Karnofsky had a similar piece, explaining how even an AGI “only” as smart as a human could lead to ruin. If an AI can do the work of a present-day tech worker or quant trader, for instance, a lab of millions of such AIs could quickly accumulate billions if not trillions of dollars, use that money to buy off skeptical humans, and, well, the rest is a Terminator movie. There are quite eminent AI researchers, like Ilya Sutskever or Stuart Russell, who consider artificial general intelligence likely, and likely hazardous to human civilization. There are others, like Yann LeCun, who are actively trying to build human-level AI because they think it’ll be beneficial, and still others, like Gary Marcus, who are highly skeptical that AGI will come anytime soon.

The first ever exoplanets were discovered 30 years ago around a rapidly rotating star, called a pulsar. Now, astronomers have revealed that these planets may be incredibly rare.

The processes that cause planets to form, and survive, around pulsars are currently unknown. A survey of 800 pulsars followed by the Jodrell Bank Observatory over the last 50 years has revealed that this first detected exoplanet system may be extraordinarily uncommon: less than 0.5% of all known pulsars could host Earth-mass planets.

Pulsars are a type of neutron star, the densest stars in the universe, born during powerful explosions at the end of a typical star’s life. They are exceptionally stable, rapidly rotating, and have incredibly strong magnetic fields. Pulsars emit beams of bright radio emission from their magnetic poles that appear to pulse as the star rotates. The extremely violent conditions surrounding the births and lives of pulsars make ‘normal’ planet formation unlikely, and many of these detected planets are exotic objects (such as planets made mostly of diamond) unlike those we know in our Solar System.

A team of astronomers at the University of Manchester performed the largest search for planets orbiting pulsars to date. In particular, the team looked for signals that indicate the presence of planetary companions with masses up to 100 times that of the Earth, and orbital time periods between 20 days and 17 years. Of the 10 potential detections, the most promising is the system PSR J2007+3120 with the possibility of hosting at least two planets, with masses a few times bigger than the Earth, and orbital periods of 1.9 and ~3.6 years.

The results of the work indicate no bias for particular planet masses or orbital periods in pulsar systems. However, the results do yield information of the shape of these planets’ orbits: in contrast to the near-circular orbits found in our Solar System, these planets would orbit their stars on highly elliptical paths. This indicates that the formation process for pulsar-planet systems is vastly different than traditional star-planet systems.

Discussing the motivation of her research, Iuliana Nițu, a PhD student at the University of Manchester explains: “Pulsars are incredibly interesting and exotic objects. Exactly 30 years ago, the first extra-solar planets were discovered around a pulsar, but we are yet to understand how these planets can form and survive in such extreme conditions. Finding out how common these are, and what they look like is a crucial step towards this.”

Researchers at the University of Cologne and Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic) have discovered the fastest known star, which travels around a black hole in record time. The star, S4716, orbits Sagittarius A*, the black hole in the center of our Milky Way, in four years and reaches a speed of around 8,000 kilometers per second. S4716 comes as close as 100 AU (astronomical unit) to the black hole—a small distance by astronomical standards. One AU corresponds to 149,597,870 kilometers. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

In the vicinity of the black hole at the center of our galaxy is a densely packed cluster of stars. This cluster, called S cluster, is home to well over a hundred stars that differ in their brightness and mass. S stars move particularly fast. "One prominent member, S2, behaves like a large person sitting in front of you in a movie theater: it blocks your view of what's important," said Dr. Florian Peissker, lead author of the new study. "The view into the center of our galaxy is therefore often obscured by S2. However, in brief moments we can observe the surroundings of the central black hole."

By means of continuously refining methods of analysis, together with observations covering almost twenty years, the scientist now identified without a doubt a star that travels around the central supermassive black hole in just four years. A total of five telescopes observed the star, with four of these five being combined into one large telescope to allow even more accurate and detailed observations. "For a star to be in a stable orbit so close and fast in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole was completely unexpected and marks the limit that can be observed with traditional telescopes," said Peissker.

Moreover, the discovery sheds new light on the origin and evolution of the orbit of fast-moving stars in the heart of the Milky Way. "The short-period, compact orbit of S4716 is quite puzzling," Michael Zajaček, an astrophysicist at Masaryk University in Brno who was involved in the study, said. "Stars cannot form so easily near the black hole. S4716 had to move inwards, for example by approaching other stars and objects in the S cluster, which caused its orbit to shrink significantly."

University of Chicago physicists have invented a "quantum flute" that, like the Pied Piper, can coerce particles of light to move together in a way that's never been seen before.

Described in two studies published in Physical Review Letters and Nature Physics, the breakthrough could point the way towards realizing quantum memories or new forms of error correction in quantum computers, and observing quantum phenomena that cannot be seen in nature.

Assoc. Prof. David Schuster's lab works on quantum bits—the quantum equivalent of a computer bit—which tap the strange properties of particles at the atomic and sub-atomic level to do things that are otherwise impossible. In this experiment, they were working with particles of light, known as photons, in the microwave spectrum.The system they devised consists of a long  cavity made in a single block of metal, designed to trap photons at microwave frequencies. The cavity is made by drilling offset holes— like holes in a flute.

"Just like in the musical instrument," Schuster said, "you can send one or several wavelengths of photons across the whole thing, and each wavelength creates a 'note' that can be used to encode quantum information." The researchers can then control the interactions of the "notes" using a master quantum bit, a superconducting electrical circuit. But their oddest discovery was the way the photons behaved together.

In nature, photons hardly ever interact—they simply pass through each other. With painstaking preparation, scientists can sometimes prompt two photons to react to each other's presence. "Here we do something even weirder," Schuster said. "At first the photons don't interact at all, but when the total energy in the system reaches a tipping point, all of a sudden, they're all talking to each other."

Chronic cough is globally prevalent across all age groups. This disorder is challenging to treat because many pulmonary and extra-pulmonary conditions can present with chronic cough, and cough can also be present without any identifiable underlying cause or be refractory to therapies that improve associated conditions. Most patients with chronic cough have cough hypersensitivity, which is characterized by increased neural responsiveness to a range of stimuli that affect the airways and lungs, and other tissues innervated by common nerve supplies.

Cough hypersensitivity presents as excessive coughing often in response to relatively innocuous stimuli, causing significant psychophysical morbidity and affecting patients’ quality of life. Understanding the mechanism(s) that contribute to cough hypersensitivity and excessive coughing in different patient populations and across the lifespan is advancing and has contributed to the development of new therapies for chronic cough in adults. Owing to differences in the pathology, the organs involved and individual patient factors, treatment of chronic cough is progressing towards a personalized approach, and, in the future, novel ways to endotype patients with cough may prove valuable in management.

An innovative scientific instrument, the Compact Color Biofinder, developed by a team of University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa researchers, may change the game in the search for signs of extraterrestrial life.

Europe's Gaia space camera tracks everything that shines or moves in our Milky Way galaxy.