Amazing Science

Astronomers have spotted wildly wobbling jets of particles spewing out of a black hole, and they think this unusually rapid motion could be happening because the black hole's strong gravity is warping space around it. 

The black hole, named V404 Cygni, is located about 8,000 light-years from Earth and is relatively small as far as black holes go — only nine times the mass of Earth's sun. It is part of a binary system in which it and a sun-like star orbit one another. The black hole is constantly siphoning material from its stellar companion, and as that material gets sucked in, it forms an accretion diskaround the black hole. 

Some of the particles falling into the black hole escape through relativistic jets, long beams of energetic plasma that flow from the black hole's axis of rotation at more than half the speed of light. Astronomers have seen black hole jets before but have never seen jets that wobble as rapidly as those from V404 Cygni, which were observed oscillating over time periods of only a few minutes. 

"We've never seen this effect happening on such short time scales," James Miller-Jones, a researcher with the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) who led the new study, said in a statement. 

Miller-Jones and colleagues observed V404 Cygni using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a network of 10 radio telescopes spread out across the globe that are owned and operated by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The black hole has been the subject of observations since 1938, when it released a bright burst of energy. Its most recent outburst, in 2015, spawned a new wave of interest in the black hole, and it was then that Miller-Jones and his team began the observations for this study. 

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite (TESS) has spotted the long tails of extrasolar comets orbiting the very young star beta Pictoris.

Beta Pictoris is one of the brightest stars in the sky and the second brightest star in the constellation Pictor, about 63 light-years away from Earth. Also known as HD 39060, the star is estimated to be about 23 million years old and is known to host a gas giant, beta Pictoris b.

The star also harbors a warped debris disk composed of dust and gas that could, in time, evolve into a torus of icy bodies much like Solar System’s Kuiper Belt. The disk is easily seen because it is tilted edge-on and is especially bright due to a very large amount of starlight-scattering dust.

“Because of its close proximity and circumstellar disk, the beta Pictoris system can be considered an ideal test bed to study the formation and evolution of planetary systems, including minor bodies such as exocomets and exomoons,” said Universität Innsbruck astronomer Sebastian Zieba and colleagues.

The researchers analyzed data from TESS and found three transits of short-period exocomets in front of beta Pictoris. “We use data collected by TESS from October 19, 2018 to February 1, 2019 in Sectors 4 through 7,” they said.

Bedbugs are blood-sucking parasites in the family Cimicidae. A multinational research team led by University of Sheffield, the University Museum Bergen and Dresden University has compared the DNA of dozens of bedbug species and discovered that bedbugs are 50 million years older than bats — a mammal that scientists had previously believed to be their first host 50-65 million years ago.

“To think that the pests that live in our beds today evolved more than 100 million years ago (Cretaceous period) and were walking the Earth side by side with dinosaurs, was a revelation,” said University of Sheffield’s Professor Mike Siva-Jothy, co-author of the study.

“It shows that the evolutionary history of bed bugs is far more complex than we previously thought.” Professor Siva-Jothy and colleagues spent 15 years collecting samples from wild sites and museums around the world, dodging bats and buffaloes in African caves infected with Ebola and climbing cliffs to collect from bird nests in South East Asia.

“The first big surprise we found was that bedbugs are much older than bats, which everyone assumed to be their first host,” said co-lead author Dr. Steffen Roth, a researcher at the University Museum Bergen. “It was also unexpected to see that evolutionary older bedbugs were already specialized on a single host type, even though we don’t know what the host was at the time when T. rex walked the Earth.”

The brain's capacity for simultaneously learning and memorizing large amounts of information while requiring little energy has inspired an entire field to pursue brain-like - or neuromorphic - computers. Researchers at Stanford University and Sandia National Laboratories previously developed one portion of such a computer: a device that acts as an artificial synapse, mimicking the way neurons communicate in the brain.

In a paper published online by the journal Science on April 25, the team reports that a prototype array of nine of these devices performed even better than expected in processing speed, energy efficiency, reproducibility and durability.

Looking forward, the team members want to combine their artificial synapse with traditional electronics, which they hope could be a step toward supporting artificially intelligent learning on small devices.

"If you have a memory system that can learn with the energy efficiency and speed that we've presented, then you can put that in a smartphone or laptop," said Scott Keene, co-author of the paper and a graduate student in the lab of Alberto Salleo, professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford who is co-senior author. "That would open up access to the ability to train our own networks and solve problems locally on our own devices without relying on data transfer to do so."

Our first picture of a black hole was a huge moment for science. But we can’t stop there. We need better pictures that deliver more information. That’s how we’ll learn even more about these strange, rule-breaking behemoths. Now a group of astronomers from the Radboud University in the city of Nijmegen, Netherlands, along with the … Continue reading "The Black Hole Picture Could Be So Much Better If You Add Space Telescopes".

Now a group of astronomers from the Radboud University in the city of Nijmegen, Netherlands, along with the European Space Agency and other partners, are developing a plan to get much sharper pictures of black holes.

The Event Horizon Telescope’s (EHT) first picture of a black hole was a scientific triumph and a feat of cooperation, engineering, and technology. Throw in our species’ innate curiosity about nature, too. It’s a potent, effective mix.

But, the picture was kind of blurry, wasn’t it? It’s still a triumph, and lots of research and new papers will result from it. But could it be even better?

The group of scientists has a plan for launching radio telescopes into space to get clearer images of black holes. They’ve published a paperin the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics detailing their plans. Their end goal? To test Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, again.

Tweaking the design of microring sensors enhances their sensitivity without adding more implementation complexity.

Optical sensing is one of the most important applications of light science. It plays crucial roles in astronomy, environmental science, industry and medical diagnoses. 

Despite the variety of schemes used for optical sensing, they all share the same principle: The quantity to be measured must leave a “fingerprint” on the optical response of the system. The fingerprint can be its transmission, reflection or absorption. The stronger these effects are, the stronger the response of the system.

While this works well at the macroscopic level, measuring tiny, microscopic quantities that induce weak response is a challenging task. Researchers have developed techniques to overcome this difficulty and improve the sensitivity of their devices. Some of these techniques, which rely on complex quantum optics concepts and implementations, have indeed proved useful, such as in sensing gravitational waves in the LIGO project. Others, which are based on trapping light in tiny boxes called optical resonators, have succeeded in detecting micro-particles and relatively large biological components.

Nonetheless, the ability to detect small nano-particles and eventually single molecules remains a challenge. Current attempts focus on a special type of light trapping devices called microring or microtoroid resonators — these enhance the interaction between light and the molecule to be detected. The sensitivity of these devices, however, is limited by their fundamental physics.

In their article “Sensing with Exceptional Surfaces in Order to Combine Sensitivity with Robustness” published in Physical Review Letters (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.153902), physicists and engineers from Michigan Technological University, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Central Florida propose a new type of sensor. They are based on the new notion of exceptional surfaces: surfaces that consist of exceptional points.

Researchers discover surprising dielectric insulator for next-gen devices.

Mixing two brittle materials to make something flexible defies common sense, but Rice University scientists have done just that to make a novel dielectric.

Dielectrics are the polarized insulators in batteries and other devices that separate positive and negative electrodes. Without them, there are no electronic devices. The most common dielectrics contain brittle metal oxides and are less adaptable as devices shrink or get more flexible. So Rice scientists developed a dielectric poised to solve the problem for manufacturers who wish to create next-generation flexible electronics.

Until now, manufacturers had to choose between brittle dielectrics with a high constant (K)—the material’s ability to be polarized by an electric field—or flexible low-K versions. The material created at Rice has both. Rice materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and graduate student and lead author Sandhya Susarla combined sulfur and selenium to synthesize a dielectric that retains the best properties of high-K ceramics and polymers and low-K rubber and polyvinyl.

“We were surprised by this discovery because neither sulfur or selenium have any dielectric properties or have a ductile nature,” Susarla said. “When we combined them, we started playing with the material and found out that mechanically, it behaved as a compliant polymer.”

Their results appear in Science Advances.

Imagine a technology that could target pesticides to treat specific spots deep within the soil, making them more effective at controlling infestations while limiting their toxicity to the environment.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego and Case Western Reserve University have taken a step toward that goal. They discovered that a biological nanoparticle—a plant virus—is capable of delivering pesticide molecules deeper below the ground, to places that are normally beyond their reach.

The work could help farmers better manage difficult pests, like parasitic nematodes that wreak havoc on plant roots deep in the soil, with less pesticide. The work is published May 20 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

"It sounds counterintuitive that we can use a plant virus to treat plant health," said Nicole Steinmetz, a professor of nanoengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and senior author of the study. "This is an emerging field of research in nanotechnology showing that we can use plant viruses as pesticide delivery systems. It's similar to how we're using nanoparticles in medicine to target drugs towards sites of disease and reduce their side effects in patients."

Pesticides are very sticky molecules when applied in the field, Steinmetz explained. They bind strongly to organic matter in the soil, making it difficult to get enough to penetrate deep down into the root level where pests like nematodes reside and cause damage.

NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter made the first definitive detection beyond our world of an internal magnetic field that changes over time, a phenomenon called secular variation. Juno determined the gas giant's secular variation is most likely driven by the planet's deep atmospheric winds.

The discovery will help scientists further understand Jupiter's interior structure—including atmospheric dynamics—as well as changes in Earth's magnetic field. A paper on the discovery was published today in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"Secular variation has been on the wish list of planetary scientists for decades," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "This discovery could only take place due to Juno's extremely accurate science instruments and the unique nature of Juno's orbit, which carries it low over the planet as it travels from pole to pole."

Characterizing the magnetic field of a planet requires close-up measurements. Juno scientists compared data from NASA's past missions to Jupiter (Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and Ulysses) to a new model of Jupiter's magnetic field (called JRM09). The new model was based on data collected during Juno's first eight science passes of Jupiter using its magnetometer, an instrument capable of generating a detailed three-dimensional map of the magnetic field.

A team of British scientists and engineers have created a full scale model for a car they intend to drive more than 1,000 mph. 

The model, named the Bloodhound SuperSonic Car (SSC), was built by a team of aerodynamic experts, who took three years to build it. Recently shown off to the world at the Farnborough International Air Show, the 42-foot-long Bloodhound resembles a bright blue missile with wheels. 

For now, it's just a model, but the wheels are in motion to create the real deal. According to an article from the BBC, aerospace manufacturer Hampson Industries "will begin building the rear of the vehicle in the first quarter of 2011." Apparently, another deal to create the front end of the car is close to being finalized. 

Not surprisingly, news that there may soon exist a car capable of hitting four digits on the speedometer moved the search needle. Immediately, online lookups for "bloodhound car," "supersonic car," and "bloodhound car pictures" roared into breakout status. 

Of course, nobody makes an obscenely fast car just to take its picture. As soon as the Bloodhound is fully assembled, hopefully by late 2011 or early 2012, the team will attempt to sniff out a new world land speed record. The current record belongs to the Thrust SuperSonic Car, which hit 763 mph back in 1997. 

Incidentally, several of the key people involved in the Thrust vehicle also worked on the Bloodhound, including driver Andy Green, who is also a Fighter Pilot in the Royal Air Force. Here, Mr. Green discusses some of the car's impressive/terrifying capabilities. One fact to wet your appetite: The Bloodhound has a grand total of 135,000 horsepower, which is equal to 180 times the power of a formula one car. Buckle up!

If you've seen dental plaque or pond scum, you've met a biofilm. Among the oldest forms of life on Earth, these ubiquitous, slimy buildups of bacteria grow on nearly everything exposed to moisture and water.

In recent months, Goddard researchers have begun investigating ways NASA could benefit from machine-learning techniques. Their projects run the gamut, everything from how machine learning could help in making real-time crop forecasts or locating wildfires and floods to identifying instrument anomalies.

Other NASA researchers are tapping into these techniques to help identify hazardous Martian and lunar terrain, but no one is applying artificial intelligence to identify biofabrics in the field, said Heather Graham, a University of Maryland researcher who works at Goddard's Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory and is the brainchild behind the project.

The possibility that these organisms might live or had once lived beneath or on the surface of Mars is possible. NASA missions discovered gullies and lake beds, indicating that water once existed on this dry, hostile world.

The presence of water is a prerequisite for life, at least on Earth. If life took form, their fossilized textures could be present on the surfaces of rocks. It's even possible that life could have survived on Mars below the surface, judging from some microbes on Earth that thrive miles underground.

"It can take a couple hours to receive images taken by a Mars rover, even longer for more distant objects," Graham said, adding that researchers examine these images to determine whether to sample it. "Our idea of equipping a rover with sophisticated imaging and machine-learning technologies would give it some autonomy that would speed up our sampling cadence. This approach could be very, very useful."

Teaching algorithms to identify biofabrics begins first with a laser confocal microscope, a powerful tool that provides high-resolution, high-contrast images of three-dimensional objects. Recently acquired by Goddard's Materials Branch, the microscope is typically used to analyze materials used in spaceflight applications. While rock scanning wasn't the reason Goddard bought the tool, it fits the bill for this project due to its ability to acquire small-scale structure.

Kent scans rocks known to contain biofabrics and other textures left by life as well as those that don't. Machine-learning expert Burcu Kosar and her colleague, Tim McClanahan, plan to take those high-resolution images and feed them into commercially available machine-leaning algorithms or models already used for feature recognition.

"This is a huge, huge task. It's data hungry," Kosar said, adding that the more images she and McClanahan feed into the algorithms, the greater the chance of developing a highly accurate classifying system that a rover could use to identify potential lifeforms. "The goal is to create a functional classifier, combined with a good imager on a rover." The project is now being supported by Goddard's Internal Research and Development program and is a follow-on to an effort Kent initially started in 2018 under another Goddard research program.

"What we did was take a few preliminary studies to determine if we could see different textures on rocks. We could see them," Kent said. "This is an extension of that effort. With the IRAD, we're taking tons of images and feeding them into the machine-learning algorithms to see if they can identify a difference. This technology holds a lot of promise."

Researchers from Radbound University have determined that hunting is responsible for a 40% average decline of large mammals in the remaining small percentage of intact tropical forests.

An estimated 20% of tropical forests in the world remain undisturbed by logging or deforestation. However, increased human accessibility to these areas has made hunting the biggest threat to mammals in these environments.

Unlike deforestation, overhunting goes undetected by remote-sensing techniques, and hunting impacts (specifically, “defaunation” — the loss of species or decline in animal populations) in remote areas have only recently been discussed because of this prior lack of data.

The research team from Radbound have, for the first time, documented the spatial patterns of mammal defaunation caused by hunting, and have located specific areas where impacts of hunting are the highest. They did so by using a newly developed hunting regression model, which takes 40 years worth of socio-economic data, like human population density and hunters’ access points, as well as species traits of over 300 mammal species, into account.

These hunting hotspots include West and Central Africa (specifically Cameroon), Central America, northwestern regions of South America, and areas in Southeast Asia (specifically Thailand, Malaysia and southwest regions of China). Their data is published in PLOS Biology.

In the 1970s, Rich Isaacson was presented with what seemed like a crazy idea: using lasers to detect gravitational waves. It became the biggest project the National Science Foundation had ever funded.

Imagine spending 40 years and more than a billion dollars on a gamble. That's what one U.S. government science agency did. It's now paying off big time, with new discoveries about black holes and exotic neutron stars coming almost every week. And while three physicists shared the Nobel Prize for the work that made this possible, one of them says the real hero is a former National Science Foundation staffer named Rich Isaacson, who saw a chance to cultivate some stunning research and grabbed it.

"The thing that Rich Isaacson did was such a miracle," says Rainer Weiss, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the 2017 Nobel laureates. "I think he's the hero. He's a singular hero. We just don't have a good way of recognizing people like that. Rich was in a singular place fighting a singular war that nobody else could have fought." Without him, Weiss says, "we would've been killed dead on virtually every topic." He and his fellow laureate Kip Thorne recently donated money to create a brand-new American Physical Society award in Isaacson's honor.

This unlikely story begins back in the 1960s, when Isaacson was a doctoral student and got interested in one of Albert Einstein's predictions. In 1916, Einstein theorized that any time two massive objects crash together, shock waves should move through the very fabric of the universe. These gravitational waves through space and time are like the ripples you see in water when you toss in a pebble.

"For my thesis, I showed how gravitational waves behave like other kinds of waves, like light and radar, X-rays," Isaacson says. His calculations showed that these waves weren't just some mathematical obscurity but something that conceivably could be measured. "It showed exactly how Einstein's theory worked in detail in making gravitational waves," Weiss says. "And it was done in such a way that it was mathematically correct and nobody could dispute it anymore."

Einstein, who'd gone back and forth on the question of gravitational waves, thought that they'd most likely never be detected — the distortions they create in space are just too tiny.

Isaacson was more optimistic. "I imagined that sometime in my career, we would see it," he says. He just didn't realize that trying to see it would become his career.

Back in the early 1970s, Isaacson took a job at the fledgling National Science Foundation, working to review funding proposals. And Weiss wanted money for a crazy idea he was pursuing: trying to detect gravitational waves using lasers. Lasers could, in theory, be used to measure very, very small distortions in space — like changes that were a thousandth of the width of an atomic nucleus. "Most people said, 'Holy mackerel! He must be nuts. You can't do that,' " Weiss recalls.

The technology was just too hard. Plus, no one even knew what in the universe could spew out gravitational waves strong enough to be measured like that. Normally, says Weiss, "with those two things ... that proposal would have been dead on arrival. But it wasn't that way with Rich." Because Isaacson had studied gravitational waves, he saw the potential. So he personally shepherded this research for almost three decades. It became the biggest project the National Science Foundation had ever funded. And it finally succeeded.

Mars 2020 can’t analyze every rock it encounters in detail, so researchers are proposing ways to determine the best places to look for fossilized life on the Red Planet.

When most people imagine hunting for fossils, they probably think of finding dinosaur bones laid down in layers of rock. But the vast majority of life – and therefore fossils – across Earth’s history has been microorganisms. These tiny lifeforms, either plants, animals or fungi, can be smaller than the width of a human hair. But with the right tools, the fossilized records of these tiny creatures reveal insights into the history of a planet. Even planets that aren’t Earth.

A group of Swedish scientists led by Magnus Ivarsson point out in research published May 1 in Frontiers in Earth Science that instruments already planned for upcoming space missions like the Mars 2020 rover could detect tiny fossils on Mars, if they exist. But Mars 2020 can’t analyze every rock it encounters in detail, so the researchers propose a few ways to determine the best places to look on the Red Planet.

Earthly Beginnings

The researchers point out that most fossils studied on Earth are found in sedimentary rock, which is laid down in layers that slowly hardens into true rock. But most of Mars is made up of volcanic rock, more like the material that lines the bottom of Earth’s ocean floors. This kind of rock does contain fossils on Earth, though they’re harder to find.

Volcanic rocks have lots of cracks and crevices, and micro-organisms are adept at working their way into those cracks, or making more pathways of their own. When they die, they remain inside the rock where they can be preserved for millions of years.

It stands to reason, the researchers point out, that these are the kinds of fossils we should expect to find on Mars, where volcanic rocks dominate.

Of course, there’s no proof that there was ever life on Mars. But the planet might have been a much wetter, more hospitable environment a few billion years ago. There’s even evidence that Mars might have experienced significant flooding just one billion years ago. And organic materials, molecules life as we know it needs in order to function, have been found on the Red Planet as well. So, Mars may have had an environment friendly to life in the past. But even Earth only developed multicellular lifeforms in the past half billion years or so — if life ever existed on Mars, it was likely exceedingly tiny, and buried inside rocky crevices.

The Voynich manuscript, sometimes described as the ‘world’s most mysterious text,’ may be written in proto-Romance, a language that arose from a blend of spoken Latin (Vulgar Latin) and other languages across the Mediterranean during the early Medieval period following the collapse of the Roman Empire and subsequently evolved into the many Romance languages. The manuscript originates from Castello Aragonese, an island castle and citadel off Ischia, Italy, and was compiled by a Dominican nun as a source of reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon, according to research by University of Bristol’s Dr. Gerard Cheshire.

The Voynich manuscript, named after the Polish-American antiquarian book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912, is a small book 23.5 x 16.2 cm of about 240 pages.

Nearly every page of the manuscript contains scientific and botanical drawings in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red. The vellum used in the book was carbon dated to 1404-1438.

Although the purpose and meaning of the manuscript had eluded scholars for decades, it took Dr. Cheshire two weeks to identify the language and writing system of the famously inscrutable document. “I experienced a series of ‘Eureka!’ moments whilst deciphering the code, followed by a sense of disbelief and excitement when I realized the magnitude of the achievement, both in terms of its linguistic importance and the revelations about the origin and content of the manuscript,” Dr. Cheshire said.

“The Voynich manuscript is written in proto-Romance — ancestral to today’s Romance languages including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan and Galician. The language used was ubiquitous in the Mediterranean during the Medieval period, but it was seldom written in official or important documents because Latin was the language of royalty, church and government. As a result, proto-Romance was lost from the record, until now.”

“The manuscript’s alphabet is a combination of unfamiliar and more familiar symbols. It includes no dedicated punctuation marks, although some letters have symbol variants to indicate punctuation or phonetic accents. All of the letters are in lower case and there are no double consonants. It includes diphthong, triphthongs, quadriphthongs and even quintiphthongs for the abbreviation of phonetic components. It also includes some words and abbreviations in Latin.”

According to new research, a nearby binary neutron-star merger gave birth to 0.3% of the Earth’s heaviest elements, including gold, platinum and uranium; such an event may have occurred about 1,000 light-years away from the Pre-solar Nebula, approximately 80 million years before the formation of our Solar System.

“This means that in each of us we would find an eyelash worth of these elements, mostly in the form of iodine, which is essential to life,” said Dr. Imre Bartos, an astrophysicist in the Department of Physics at the University of Florida.

“A wedding ring, which expresses a deep human connection, is also a connection to our cosmic past predating humanity and the formation of Earth itself, with about 10 milligrams of it likely having formed 4.6 billion years ago.”

To arrive at their conclusion, Dr. Bartos and his colleague, Columbia University astrophysicist Szabolcs Marka, compared the composition of meteorites to numerical simulations of our Milky Way Galaxy. “Meteorites forged in the early Solar System carry the traces of radioactive isotopes,” Dr. Bartos said. “As these isotopes decay they act as clocks that can be used to reconstruct the time they were created,” Dr. Marka said.

The scientists found that a single neutron-star collision could have occurred about 80 million years before the formation of the Solar System, in our own neighborhood, about 1,000 light-years from the Pre-solar Nebula. “If a comparable event happened today at a similar distance from the Solar System, the ensuing radiation could outshine the entire night sky,” Dr. Marka said.

The rogue code can disable safety systems designed to prevent catastrophic industrial accidents. It was discovered in the Middle East, but the hackers behind it are now targeting companies in North America and other parts of the world, too.

As an experienced cyber first responder, Julian Gutmanis had been called plenty of times before to help companies deal with the fallout from cyberattacks. But when the Australian security consultant was summoned to a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2017, what he found made his blood run cold.

The hackers had deployed malicious software, or malware, that let them take over the plant’s safety instrumented systems. These physical controllers and their associated software are the last line of defense against life-threatening disasters. They are supposed to kick in if they detect dangerous conditions, returning processes to safe levels or shutting them down altogether by triggering things like shutoff valves and pressure-release mechanisms.

The malware made it possible to take over these systems remotely. Had the intruders disabled or tampered with them, and then used other software to make equipment at the plant malfunction, the consequences could have been catastrophic. Fortunately, a flaw in the code gave the hackers away before they could do any harm. It triggered a response from a safety system in June 2017, which brought the plant to a halt. Then in August, several more systems were tripped, causing another shutdown.

Other notable attacks:

• 2010 � Stuxnet - Developed by America’s National Security Agency, working in conjunction with Israeli intelligence, the malware was a computer worm, or code that replicates itself from computer to computer without human intervention. Most likely smuggled in on a USB stick, it targeted programmable logic controllers which govern automated processes, and caused the destruction of centrifuges used in the enrichment of uranium at a facility in Iran.
• 2013 �️‍♂️ Havex - Havex was designed to snoop on systems controlling industrial equipment, presumably so that hackers could work out how to mount attacks on the gear. The code was a remote access Trojan, or RAT, which is cyber-speak for software that lets hackers take control of computers remotely. Havex targeted thousands of US, European, and Canadian businesses, and especially ones in the energy and petrochemical industries.
• 2015 ⚡️ BlackEnergy - BlackEnergy, which is another Trojan, had been circulating in the criminal underworld for a while before it was adapted by Russian hackers to launch an attack in December 2015 on several Ukranian power companies that helped trigger blackouts. The malware was used to gather intelligence about the power companies’ systems, and to steal log-in credentials from employees.
• 2016 ⚡️ CrashOverride - Also known as Industroyer, this was developed by Russian cyber warriors too, who used it to mount an attack on a part of Ukraine’s electrical grid in December 2016. The malware replicated the protocols, or communications languages, that different elements of a grid used to talk to one another. This let it do things like show that a circuit breaker is closed when it’s really open. The code was used to strike an electrical transmission substation in Kiev, blacking out part of the city for a short time.

Scientists create an extraordinary, alien form of super hot ice. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have created an extremely bizarre form of "superionic ice" which they have also dubbed as "ice XVIII".

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have created an extremely bizarre form of "superionic ice" which they have also dubbed as "ice XVIII". Its properties are quite extraordinary, one can even say that it is out of this world, something you'd only see in a sci-fi novel.

The term "ice XVIII" came from a science fiction classic called Cats Cradle which was written by American writer Kurt Vonnegut. The climax of the story is where all of the world's ocean freezes over when it came into contact with a bizarre form of water, invented by one of the characters, known as "ice-nine" which is solid at room temperature.

The "superionic ice" that researchers recently invented though doesn't freeze bodies of water that it comes into contact with, still, it is extremely extraordinary since it only exists at incredibly hot temperatures (around 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit) and extreme pressures 4 million times greater than Earth's atmospheric pressure. The creation of the "superionic ice" itself is done by using half a dozen giant laser beams to create shockwaves of increasing intensity that could flash-freeze tiny amounts of water.

"We designed the experiments to compress the water so that it would freeze into solid ice, but it was not certain that the ice crystals would actually form and grow in the few billionths of a second that we can hold the pressure-temperature conditions," said Marius Millot, co-lead author on the paper.

The science behind the experiment is complicated and it is explained in detail in Nature journal. Initially, the team demonstrated this form of ice via computer simulation. "Computer simulations have proposed a number of different possible crystalline structures for superionic ice. Our study provides a critical test to numerical methods." But this is the very first time they have actually created and imaged it on Earth.

How can we find an ocean on an exoplanet? Will we be able to find signatures of oceans on Earth-like planets in the coming decades?

In the coming decades, there are plentiful opportunities and ideas for space-based missions that may be able to detect life on other planets – the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST),LUVOIR, the Origins Space Telescope, HabEx, and more. But, what would those signs of life look like, and what do we need to actually detect these biosignatures with confidence? These are two of the key questions astronomers face as they prepare to choose the next big space telescopes.

Given that we only have one example of life in the universe (as of today), an exoplanet must mirror the thermal and chemical properties of Earth to be deemed habitable. One of the main ways to judge if a planet is habitable is to look at its atmosphere, finding out more about its temperature and what it’s made of.vWe can glean lots of information about a planet’s atmosphere through spectroscopy, such as what molecules may be present, if there are clouds or hazes, what its temperature may be, and more.

In particular, modern surveys are concerned with finding water, oxygen, and other compounds that signal habitability in the atmospheres of these exoplanets. However, transmission spectroscopy (what JWST will be capable of) only allows us to see the very upper layers of an atmosphere. This isn’t very interesting for finding water, considering that, on Earth, all our water vapor is concentrated in the very bottom layers of our atmosphere. Today’s paper focuses on a different avenue for finding water on exoplanets: oceans.

You may ask – why focus on finding oceans? Water is one of the key necessities for life as we know it, and a large body of water like an ocean may be one of the most unambiguous indicators of exoplanet habitability. Research groups like the Virtual Planetary Laboratory are exploring not only atmospheric biosignatures, but also other signals, such as in today’s paper where they investigate the detectability of “ocean glint”.

Environmental conditions, lifestyle choices, chemical exposure, and foodborne and airborne pathogens are among the external factors that can cause disease. In contrast, internal genetic factors can be responsible for the onset and progression of diseases ranging from degenerative neurological disorders to some cancers.

A team led by Ivaylo Ivanov of Georgia State University used the 200-petaflop IBM AC922 Summit system, the world's smartest and most powerful supercomputer, to develop an integrative model of the transcription preinitiation complex (PIC), a complex of proteins vital to gene expression. Results from this work are published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

Gene expression involves the conversion of genetic information that originates in DNA to produce functional molecules such as proteins—the building blocks of all living organisms—through steps known as transcription and translation. Because gene mutations can interfere with gene expression and cause disease, biomedical scientists are particularly interested in making sense of the connection between a patient's unique genetic makeup, or genotype, and the external manifestation of a disease, or phenotype.

A better understanding of the complex relationship between a genotype and a phenotype could reveal how mutations cause genetic diseases and thus inform the development of more effective treatments. Researchers do not yet fully comprehend how inherited mutations affect protein function.

"Like a broken gear in a machine, mutational changes break down the function of the defective protein, a process that involves alterations in both structure and dynamics," Ivanov said. "This confluence of factors presents a challenge for conventional structural biology methods."

Throughout the complex and highly regulated process of gene transcription, enzymes called Pol I, Pol II, and Pol III—referred to collectively as RNA polymerases—play a significant role. Pol II helps mediate protein synthesis, the process of transforming genetic information into proteins.

During initiation—the first step of transcription—Pol II and a host of general transcription factors (GTFs) assemble in a region of DNA called a promoter to form the PIC. Opening the promoter depends on transcription factor II human (TFIIH), a GTF consisting of multiple protein chains, which has the ability to unwind the double helix strands of DNA to initiate transcription. TFIIH also contributes to DNA repair.

Because the biochemical pathways responsible for gene expression and repair are intertwined, understanding the molecular mechanism behind this process is crucial to advancing biomedical applications. For example, the presence of mutations in three subunits of TFIIH directly leads to severe genetic diseases, including autoimmune and neurological disorders.

Previous attempts to characterize the PIC have been limited by incomplete models. The most complete model of the PIC to date, the team's new version provides superior insights into the structural organizations of these proteins, which transcribe genes and repair DNA.

Many ways to approach the Riemann Hypothesis have been proposed during the past 150 years, but none of them have led to conquering the most famous open problem in mathematics. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that one of these old approaches is more practical than previously realized.

"In a surprisingly short proof, we've shown that an old, abandoned approach to the Riemann Hypothesis should not have been forgotten," says Ken Ono, a number theorist at Emory University and co-author of the paper. "By simply formulating a proper framework for an old approach we've proven some new theorems, including a large chunk of a criterion which implies the Riemann Hypothesis. And our general framework also opens approaches to other basic unanswered questions."

The paper builds on the work of Johan Jensen and George Pólya, two of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century. It reveals a method to calculate the Jensen-Pólya polynomials—a formulation of the Riemann Hypothesis—not one at a time, but all at once. "The beauty of our proof is its simplicity," Ono says. "We don't invent any new techniques or use any new objects in math, but we provide a new view of the Riemann Hypothesis. Any reasonably advanced mathematician can check our proof. It doesn't take an expert in number theory."

Although the paper falls short of proving the Riemann Hypothesis, its consequences include previously open assertions which are known to follow from the Riemann Hypothesis, as well as some proofs of conjectures in other fields.

Co-authors of the paper are Michael Griffin and Larry Rolen—two of Ono's former Emory graduate students who are now on the faculty at Brigham Young University and Vanderbilt University, respectively—and Don Zagier of the Max Planck Institute of Mathematics.

"The result established here may be viewed as offering further evidence toward the Riemann Hypothesis, and in any case, it is a beautiful stand-alone theorem," says Kannan Soundararajan, a mathematician at Stanford University and an expert on the Riemann Hypothesis.

The 28,000-year-old remains of a woolly mammoth, named ‘Yuka’, were found in Siberian permafrost. Here scientists recovered the less-damaged nucleus-like structures from the remains and visualized their dynamics in living mouse oocytes after nuclear transfer.

Proteomic analyses demonstrated the presence of nuclear components in the remains. Nucleus-like structures found in the tissue homogenate were histone- and lamin-positive by immunostaining. In the reconstructed oocytes, the mammoth nuclei showed the spindle assembly, histone incorporation and partial nuclear formation; however, the full activation of nuclei for cleavage was not confirmed.

DNA damage levels, which varied among the nuclei, were comparable to those of frozen-thawed mouse sperm and were reduced in some reconstructed oocytes. This work provides a platform to evaluate the biological activities of nuclei in extinct animal species.

Machine learning advances go above and beyond what has presently been achieved in medicine, the findings showed. Machine learning is overtaking humans in predicting death and heart attack, suggesting a continued maturation of the technology and a potential for increased efficiency among caregivers in the healthcare system, finds a study presented at the International Conference on Nuclear Cardiology and Cardiac.

By repeatedly analysing 85 variables in 950 patients with known six-year outcomes, an algorithm "learned" how imaging data interacts. It then identified patterns correlating the variables to death and heart attack with more than 90 percent accuracy.

Machine learning, the modern bedrock of artificial intelligence, is used every day. Google's search engine, face recognition on smartphones, self-driving cars, Netflix and Spotify recommendation systems all use machine learning algorithms to adapt to the individual user.

Study author Dr. Luis Eduardo Juarez-Orozco said these advances go above and beyond what has presently been achieved in medicine, where providers need to be cautious when weighing risks and outcomes. The data, she said, is not yet being used to its full potential.

Doctors use risk scores to make treatment decisions. But these scores are based on just a handful of variables and often have modest accuracy in individual patients. Through repetition and adjustment, machine learning can exploit large amounts of data and identify complex patterns that may not be evident to humans.

The study enrolled 950 patients with chest pain who underwent the center's usual protocol to look for coronary artery disease. A coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) scan yielded 58 pieces of data on presence of coronary plaque, vessel narrowing, and calcification. Those with scans suggestive of disease underwent a positron emission tomography (PET) scan which produced 17 variables on blood flow. Ten clinical variables were obtained from medical records including sex, age, smoking and diabetes.

During an average six-year follow-up there were 24 heart attacks and 49 deaths from any cause. The 85 variables were entered into a machine learning algorithm called LogitBoost, which analysed them over and over again until it found the best structure to predict who had a heart attack or died.

The predictive performance using the 10 clinical variables alone -- similar to current clinical practice -- was modest, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.65 (where 1.0 is a perfect test and 0.5 is a random result). When PET data were added, AUC increased to 0.69. The predictive performance increased significantly when CCTA data were added to clinical and PET data, giving an AUC 0.82 and more than 90 percent accuracy.

Astronomers have concluded that the planet orbiting Barnard's Star might have an atmosphere despite the star's being an M-dwarf.

The closest exoplanet to us, if we include only single stars like the Sun, is the planet around Barnard’s Star, Barnard’s Star-b (“BSb”). (The planet Promixa Centauri-b is closer, but Proxima Cen is part of a triple-star system with Alpha and Beta Centauri, and understanding the evolutionary development of the planet is more complicated.) BSb orbits at a distance similar to that of Mercury around the Sun, but Barnard’s Star is a cool M-dwarf star and so despite the planet being close to the star it probably resides near the snow line – the distance where stellar irradiation is weak enough to allow volatile elements to condense onto the planet’s surface. This makes BSb an especially interesting planet and possibly a keystone for future progress understanding planet formation and atmospheric evolution.

Extreme stellar activity and winds, especially in M dwarf stars, play an important role in the development of a planet and its atmosphere. These kinds of activity are linked to a star’s magnetic activity, but unfortunately models are still unable to predict how atmospheric initial conditions evolve under intense radiation environments. Nevertheless, progress has been made using simple models. In the case of Proxima Centauri b, scientists have found that it is probably subject to wind pressures ten thousand times larger than occur at the Earth. Might stellar wind effects also be disrupting any atmosphere on Barnard’s Star b?

Astronomers Julian Alvarado-Gomez, Cecilia Garraffo, Jeremy Drake, and Sofia Moschou and their colleagues conclude otherwise. The scientists note that BSb is much farther away from its star than is Promixa Cen b, well outside of the domain of the star’s corona. Moreover, an analysis of Barnard Star’s rotation and other properties implies that it is much older, between about seven and ten billion years, and any magnetic field processes should be considerably smaller. The astronomers conclude that although today the planet Barnard’s Star b may have a relatively mild space climate (comparable, nevertheless, to bad space weather conditions for Earth), in its early years it probably did undergo significant disruption. Today, however, BSb might retain an atmosphere that could studied.

• Publication: “Breezing through the Space Environment of Barnard’s Star b,” Julian D. Alvarado-Gomez and Cecilia Garraffo, Jeremy J. Drake, Benjamin P. Brown, Jeffrey S. Oishi, Sofia P. Moschou, and Ofer Cohen, ApJ 2019.

A relatively simple process could help turn the tide of climate change while also turning a healthy profit. That's one of the hopeful visions outlined in a new Stanford-led paper that highlights a seemingly counterintuitive solution: converting one greenhouse gas into another.

The study, published in Nature Sustainability on May 20, describes a potential process for converting the extremely potent greenhouse gas methane into carbon dioxide, which is a much less potent driver of global warming. The idea of intentionally releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere may seem surprising, but the authors argue that swapping methane for carbon dioxide is a significant net benefit for the climate.

"If perfected, this technology could return the atmosphere to pre-industrial concentrations of methane and other gases," said lead author Rob Jackson, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor in Earth System Science in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.

The basic idea is that some sources of methane emissions—from rice cultivation or cattle, for example—may be very difficult or expensive to eliminate. "An alternative is to offset these emissions via methane removal, so there is no net effect on warming the atmosphere," said study coauthor Chris Field, the Perry L. McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

In 2018, methane—about 60 percent of which is generated by humans—reached atmospheric concentrations two and a half times greater than pre-industrial levels. Although the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is much greater, methane is 84 times more potent in terms of warming the climate system over the first 20 years after its release.

Most scenarios for stabilizing average global temperatures at 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels depend on strategies for both reducing the overall amount of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere and removing what's already in the atmosphere through approaches such as tree planting or underground sequestration. However, removing other greenhouse gases, particularly methane, could provide a complementary approach, according to the study's authors, who point to the gas's outsized influence on the climate.