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Astronomers have detected the universe's first molecule. "Helium hydride (HeH), a combination of helium and hydrogen, was spotted some 3000 light-years from Earth by an instrument aboard the airborne Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a telescope built into a converted 747 jet that flies above the opaque parts of Earth's atmosphere," reports Science Magazine. The findings have been reported in the journal Nature. From the report: HeH has long been thought to mark the "dawn of chemistry," as the remnants of the big bang cooled to about 4000 K and ions began to team up with electrons to form neutral atoms. Researchers believe that in that primordial gas, neutral helium reacted with hydrogen ions to form the first chemical bond joining the very first molecule. In 1925, chemists synthesized HeH in the lab. In the 1970s, theorists predicted that the molecule may exist today, most likely formed anew in planetary nebulae, clouds of gas ejected by dying sunlike stars. But decades of observations failed to find any, casting doubts on the theory.

To find the elusive molecule, astrochemists search for characteristic frequencies of light it emits, particularly a spectral line in the far infrared typically blocked by Earth's atmosphere. But a far-infrared spectrometer aboard SOFIA allowed them to find that signature for the first time, in a planetary nebula called NGC 7027, the researchers report today in Nature. The result shows this unlikely molecule -- involving typically unreactive helium -- can be created in space. With this cornerstone confirmed, it appears that the evolution of the following 13 billion years of chemistry stands on firmer ground.

Astronomers have detected the universe's first molecule. "Helium hydride (HeH), a combination of helium and hydrogen, was spotted some 3000 light-years from Earth by an instrument aboard the airborne Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a telescope built into a converted 747 jet that flies above the opaque parts of Earth's atmosphere," reports Science Magazine. The findings have been reported in the journal Nature. From the report: HeH has long been thought to mark the "dawn of chemistry," as the remnants of the big bang cooled to about 4000 K and ions began to team up with electrons to form neutral atoms. Researchers believe that in that primordial gas, neutral helium reacted with hydrogen ions to form the first chemical bond joining the very first molecule. In 1925, chemists synthesized HeH in the lab. In the 1970s, theorists predicted that the molecule may exist today, most likely formed anew in planetary nebulae, clouds of gas ejected by dying sunlike stars. But decades of observations failed to find any, casting doubts on the theory.

To find the elusive molecule, astrochemists search for characteristic frequencies of light it emits, particularly a spectral line in the far infrared typically blocked by Earth's atmosphere. But a far-infrared spectrometer aboard SOFIA allowed them to find that signature for the first time, in a planetary nebula called NGC 7027, the researchers report today in Nature. The result shows this unlikely molecule -- involving typically unreactive helium -- can be created in space. With this cornerstone confirmed, it appears that the evolution of the following 13 billion years of chemistry stands on firmer ground.

Scientists have uncovered the first strong evidence that the amount of plastic polluting the oceans has risen vastly in recent decades -- by analyzing 60 years of log books for plankton-tracking vessels. Nature reports: Data recorded by instruments known as continuous plankton recorders (CPRs) -- which ships have collectively towed millions of kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean -- show that the trackers have become entangled in large plastic objects, such as bags and fishing lines, roughly three times more often since 2000 than in preceding decades. This is the first time that researchers have demonstrated the rise in ocean plastics using a single, long-term data set, says Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "I'm excited that this has been finally done," he says. The analysis was published on 16 April in Nature Communications.

Van Sebille says that because the study focused on large plastic items, it doesn't reveal much about the quantity of microplastics -- fragments fewer than 5 millimetres long -- in the oceans. These tiny contaminants come from sources such as disposable plastic packaging, rather than from fishing gear. Nevertheless, he adds, the study demonstrates that fisheries play a major part in plastic pollution, and will provide useful baseline data for tracking whether policy changes affect the levels of plastic in the oceans. "As fisheries become more professional, especially in the North Sea, hopefully we might see a decrease," he says.

Scientists have uncovered the first strong evidence that the amount of plastic polluting the oceans has risen vastly in recent decades -- by analyzing 60 years of log books for plankton-tracking vessels. Nature reports: Data recorded by instruments known as continuous plankton recorders (CPRs) -- which ships have collectively towed millions of kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean -- show that the trackers have become entangled in large plastic objects, such as bags and fishing lines, roughly three times more often since 2000 than in preceding decades. This is the first time that researchers have demonstrated the rise in ocean plastics using a single, long-term data set, says Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "I'm excited that this has been finally done," he says. The analysis was published on 16 April in Nature Communications.

Van Sebille says that because the study focused on large plastic items, it doesn't reveal much about the quantity of microplastics -- fragments fewer than 5 millimetres long -- in the oceans. These tiny contaminants come from sources such as disposable plastic packaging, rather than from fishing gear. Nevertheless, he adds, the study demonstrates that fisheries play a major part in plastic pollution, and will provide useful baseline data for tracking whether policy changes affect the levels of plastic in the oceans. "As fisheries become more professional, especially in the North Sea, hopefully we might see a decrease," he says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Scientists have detected tiny pieces of plastic falling out of the air like artificial dust. A first-of-its-kind study finds these particles have blown in on the wind from at least 100 kilometers away and likely much farther. This is a clear indication that atmospheric transport is yet another way plastic pollution is being distributed around the planet, even to remote areas. "And it suggests that this is a far bigger problem than we have currently thought about," says study co-author Deonie Allen, of the Ecole Nationale Superieure Agronomique de Toulouse (ENSAT).

The study, published Monday in Nature Geoscience, is one of only a handful that have attempted to measure how much plastic is falling from the atmosphere. It marks the first wave in what is likely to be a flood of such studies in the coming years, in an effort to fill in the picture of how microplastics move around the environment and how humans might be exposed to them. Allen and her colleagues knew microplastics had been found in rivers and sediments in the French Pyrenees, but no one had determined the sources. The bulk could not have come from local sources because of the small human population and limited industrial activity, so Allen was struck by a key question: "Why haven't we looked up?" That is what she and her colleagues did, taking advantage of atmospheric measuring equipment already in place in the Pyrenees and sampling over five months. They found plastic fibers, films and shards, all in a range of sizes. Most of the polymers that turned up in the samples were polystyrene, polyethylene and polypropylene, which are all common in single-use plastic products such as bags and foam food containers. The study used computer models of atmospheric currents to attempt to backtrace the air that brought the microplastics in the Pyrenees, which is considered a pristine environment. It was clear that the relatively small towns and villages nearby "were unlikely to account for all of the plastic they detected, which suggests the ultimate sources are more distant," reports Scientific American.

The final findings of the NASA Twins Study, which compared 50-year-old astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a year aboard the International Space Station in 2015, and his identical twin brother, who stayed on Earth, were published in Science. Gizmodo reports: NASA found that Scott Kelly was about as mentally, physically, and genetically healthy as his brother during his trip to space, and that the vast majority of small changes spotted in Scott (relative to himself before the mission) went back to normal within six months time. But the differences seen in Scott while up in space and after his return home could provide NASA important leads on how to keep astronauts safe during longer missions to Mars and beyond.

Preliminary results from the study were released in 2017. But it was the second round of findings, released in January 2018, that really caught the attention of media outlets, some of which misrepresented what was found. In particular, outlets like Newsweek reported that a whopping "seven percent of [Scott Kelly's] genes did not return to normal after he landed." Others implied that Scott Kelly had become a different person from his twin brother. But the researchers were never talking about a seven percent difference between the twins' genes. They were saying that some of Scott Kelly's genes had changed in their expression -- the carrying out of instructions in a cell's genome -- during his time up in space. And that roughly 7 percent of this overall change in gene expression could still be seen six months after he returned home. The remaining change in gene expression six months out was actually closer to 10 percent, but NASA clarified that this was still a relatively tiny change in his epigenetics. "Given that the majority of the biological and human health variables remained stable, or returned to baseline, these data suggest that human health can be mostly sustained over this duration of spaceflight," said NASA in a statement.

Major Blud writes: A newly discovered extinct species of human has been found in the Philippines. It's been named Homo Luzonensis after the island of Luzon where it was found. Homo Erectus has long thought to have been the first member of our direct line to leave the African homeland -- around 1.9 million years ago. The physical features of Homo Luzonensis are a mixture of those found in very ancient human ancestors and in more recent people. This could mean primitive human relatives left Africa and made it all the way to South-East Asia, something not previously thought possible, since Luzon was only ever accessible by sea. The paper detailing the discovery has been published in the journal Nature.

A new study has found that electrical brain stimulation can temporarily reverse a decline in memory as a result of aging. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares the findings via a report from The Guardian: The study focused on a part of cognition called working memory, the brain system that holds information for short periods while we are making decisions or performing calculations. Working memory is crucial for a wide variety of tasks, such as recognizing faces, doing arithmetic and navigating a new environment. Working memory is known to steadily decline with age, even in the absence of any form of dementia. One factor in this decline is thought to be a disconnection between two brain networks, known as the prefrontal and temporal regions. In young people, the electrical brain activity in these two regions tends to be rhythmically synchronized, which scientists think allows information to be exchanged between the two brain areas. However, in older people the activity tends to be less tightly synchronized. This may be as result of deterioration of the long-range nerve connections that link up the different parts of the brain.

In the study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, 42 people aged 20 -- 29 and 42 people aged 60 -- 76 were assessed in a working memory task. The older group were slower and less accurate on the tests. The scientists then subjected them all to 25 minutes of non-invasive brain stimulation. This aimed to synchronize the two target brain regions by passing gentle pulses of electricity through the scalp and into the brain. After the intervention, working memory in the older adults improved to match the younger group and the effect appeared to last for 50 minutes after the stimulation. Those who had scored worst to start with showed the largest improvements.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today, highlighting the key findings from a new study published in the journal Nature: Thanks to global warming, our planet's glaciers continue to melt away, losing up to 390 billion tons of ice and snow per year, a new study suggests. The largest losses were glaciers in Alaska, followed by the melting ice fields in southern South America and glaciers in the Arctic. Glaciers could almost disappear in some mountain ranges by the end of the century, including those in the U.S. The world's seas have risen about an inch in the past 50 years just due to glacier melt alone, according to the study. Since 1961, the world has lost 10.6 trillion tons of ice and snow, the study reported. Melted, that's enough to cover the lower 48 U.S. states in about 4 feet of water.

AmiMoJo shares a report from Gizmodo: Plenty of cat owners will happily tell you their felines are capable of responding to their own names, but the scientific jury remains ambivalent on the matter. A fascinating new experiment suggests this might actually be true for some cats, and it's a capacity very much tied to the social environment in which the cat lives. The new research, published today in Scientific Advances, doesn't mean cats understand the human conception of a name, but it does show that at least some cats can distinguish their names from other words. Prior research has shown that cats can recognize human gestures, facial expressions, and vocal cues. Slashdot reader sciencehabit adds: Give this a shot at home: Say four random words to your cat -- separated by about 15 seconds -- with the same length and intonation as its name. Then say its actual name. If it swivels its ears or perks up its head, chances are it knows what you call it. That's essentially what researchers did in a new study. The scientists saw similar responses when the cat's name came after the names of other felines he lived with, or when a stranger spoke the words. The findings are the first to experimentally show that cats have some understanding of what we are saying to them, the team concludes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Successive ocean heat waves are not only damaging Australia's Great Barrier Reef, they are compromising its ability to recover, raising the risk of "widespread ecological collapse," a new study has found. The 2,300-kilometer-long (1,500 mile) reef has endured multiple large-scale "bleaching" events caused by above-average water temperatures in the last two decades, including back-to-back occurrences in 2016 and 2017. The new study, released Wednesday in the journal Nature, examined the number of adult corals which survived these two events and how many new corals they created to replenish the reef in 2018.

The answer was as bleak as it was stark: "Dead corals don't make babies," the study's lead author, Terry Hughes, said in a press release. Scientists working on the study found the loss in adult corals caused a "crash in coral replenishment" on the reef, as heat stresses brought about by warming ocean temperatures impacted the ability of coral to heal. "The number of new corals settling on the Great Barrier Reef declined by 89% following the unprecedented loss of adult corals from global warming in 2016 and 2017," said Hughes. Scientists working on the report say they would expect coral recruitment to recover over the next 5 to 10 years, as more corals reach sexual maturity, but only in the absence of another bleaching event. However, with sea temperatures continuing to rise this seems a near-impossiblity.

kenh shares a report from NBC News: A major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study finds. The Jakobshavn (YA-cob-shawv-en) glacier around 2012 was retreating about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) and thinning nearly 130 feet (almost 40 meters) annually. But it started growing again at about the same rate in the past two years, according to a study in Monday's Nature Geoscience. Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary.

A natural cyclical cooling of North Atlantic waters likely caused the glacier to reverse course, said study lead author Ala Khazendar, a NASA glaciologist on the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project. Khazendar and colleagues say this coincides with a flip of the North Atlantic Oscillation -- a natural and temporary cooling and warming of parts of the ocean that is like a distant cousin to El Nino in the Pacific. The water in Disko Bay, where Jakobshavn hits the ocean, is about 3.6 degrees cooler than a few years ago, study authors said. While this is "good news" on a temporary basis, this is bad news on the long term because it tells scientists that ocean temperature is a bigger player in glacier retreats and advances than previously thought, said NASA climate scientist Josh Willis, a study co-author. Over the decades the water has been and will be warming from man-made climate change, he said, noting that about 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the oceans.

A new study suggests that instead of the traditional four sleep stages we generally understand the brain moves through, there are in fact at least 19 different identifiable brain patterns transitioned through while sleeping. New Atlas reports: Traditionally scientists have identified four distinct stages our brain transitions through in a general sleep cycle -- three non-REM sleep phases (N1-3) that culminate in an REM phase. The four stages have been classically determined and delineated using electroencephalographic (EEG) brainwave recordings. The new research set out to more comprehensively record whole-brain activity in a number of subjects by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The study began by studying 57 healthy subjects in an fMRI scanner. Each subject was asked to lie in the scanner for 52 minutes with their eyes closed. At the same time, each subject was tracked using an EEG. This allowed the researchers to compare traditional brainwave sleep cycle data with that from the fMRI.

Due to the limited duration of the fMRI data, no subjects were found to enter REM sleep, however, 18 subjects did completely transition from wakefulness through the three non-REM sleep phases according to the EEG data. Highlighting the complexity of brain activity during our wake-to-sleep cycle the researchers confidently chronicled 19 different recurring whole-brain network states. Mapping these whole-brain states onto traditional EEG-tracked sleep phases revealed a number of compelling correlations. Wakefulness, N2 sleep and N3 sleep all could be represented by specific whole brain states. The range of different fMRI-tracked brain states did reduce as subjects fell into deeper sleep phases, with two different fMRI brain states correlating with N2 sleep, and only one with N3. However, N1 sleep as identified by EEG data, the earliest and least clearly defined sleep phase, did not consistently correspond with any fMRI brain state. The researchers conclude from this data that N1 is actually a much more complex sleep phase than previously understood. This phase, a strange mix of wakefulness and sleep, seemed to encompass a large range of the 19 different whole-brain network states identified in the fMRI data. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: For decades, scientists have debated whether the birth of new neurons -- called neurogenesis -- was possible in an area of the brain that is responsible for learning, memory and mood regulation. A growing body of research suggested they could, but then a Nature paper last year raised doubts. Now, a new study published today in another of the Nature family of journals -- Nature Medicine -- tips the balance back toward "yes." In light of the new study, "I would say that there is an overwhelming case for the neurogenesis throughout life in humans," Jonas Frisen, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, said in an e-mail. Frisen, who was not involved in the new research, wrote a News and Views about the study in the current issue of Nature Medicine.

The researchers, from Spain, tested a variety of methods of preserving brain tissue from 58 newly deceased people. They found that different methods of preservation led to different conclusions about whether new neurons could develop in the adult and aging brain. Brain tissue has to be preserved within a few hours after death, and specific chemicals used to preserve the tissue, or the proteins that identify newly developing cells will be destroyed, said Maria Llorens-Martin, the paper's senior author. Other researchers have missed the presence of these cells, because their brain tissue was not as precisely preserved, says Llorens-Martin, a neuroscientist at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain. Jenny Hsieh, a professor at the University of Texas San Antonio who was not involved in the new research, said the study provides a lesson for all scientists who rely on the generosity of brain donations. "If and when we go and look at something in human postmortem, we have to be very cautious about these technical issues."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: For decades, scientists have debated whether the birth of new neurons -- called neurogenesis -- was possible in an area of the brain that is responsible for learning, memory and mood regulation. A growing body of research suggested they could, but then a Nature paper last year raised doubts. Now, a new study published today in another of the Nature family of journals -- Nature Medicine -- tips the balance back toward "yes." In light of the new study, "I would say that there is an overwhelming case for the neurogenesis throughout life in humans," Jonas Frisen, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, said in an e-mail. Frisen, who was not involved in the new research, wrote a News and Views about the study in the current issue of Nature Medicine.

The researchers, from Spain, tested a variety of methods of preserving brain tissue from 58 newly deceased people. They found that different methods of preservation led to different conclusions about whether new neurons could develop in the adult and aging brain. Brain tissue has to be preserved within a few hours after death, and specific chemicals used to preserve the tissue, or the proteins that identify newly developing cells will be destroyed, said Maria Llorens-Martin, the paper's senior author. Other researchers have missed the presence of these cells, because their brain tissue was not as precisely preserved, says Llorens-Martin, a neuroscientist at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain. Jenny Hsieh, a professor at the University of Texas San Antonio who was not involved in the new research, said the study provides a lesson for all scientists who rely on the generosity of brain donations. "If and when we go and look at something in human postmortem, we have to be very cautious about these technical issues."

A new study points toward lifelong neuron formation in the human brain's hippocampus, with implications for memory and disease. From a report: For decades, scientists have debated whether the birth of new neurons -- called neurogenesis -- was possible in an area of the brain that is responsible for learning, memory and mood regulation. A growing body of research suggested they could, but then a Nature paper last year raised doubts. Now, a new study published today in another of the Nature family of journals -- Nature Medicine -- tips the balance back toward "yes." In light of the new study, "I would say that there is an overwhelming case for the neurogenesis throughout life in humans," Jonas Frisen, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, said in an e-mail. Frisen, who was not involved in the new research, wrote a News and Views about the study in the current issue of Nature Medicine.

A new study points toward lifelong neuron formation in the human brain's hippocampus, with implications for memory and disease. From a report: For decades, scientists have debated whether the birth of new neurons -- called neurogenesis -- was possible in an area of the brain that is responsible for learning, memory and mood regulation. A growing body of research suggested they could, but then a Nature paper last year raised doubts. Now, a new study published today in another of the Nature family of journals -- Nature Medicine -- tips the balance back toward "yes." In light of the new study, "I would say that there is an overwhelming case for the neurogenesis throughout life in humans," Jonas Frisen, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, said in an e-mail. Frisen, who was not involved in the new research, wrote a News and Views about the study in the current issue of Nature Medicine.

Long-time Slashdot reader colinwb writes: A team of researchers has published a letter in Nature (2019) estimating the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud" to a precision of one per cent; Arxiv (2019).

The Arxiv abstract: In the era of precision cosmology, it is essential to empirically determine the Hubble constant with an accuracy of one per cent or better. At present, the uncertainty on this constant is dominated by the uncertainty in the calibration of the Cepheid period — luminosity relationship (also known as Leavitt Law). The Large Magellanic Cloud has traditionally served as the best galaxy with which to calibrate Cepheid period-luminosity relations, and as a result has become the best anchor point for the cosmic distance scale. Eclipsing binary systems composed of late-type stars offer the most precise and accurate way to measure the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud. Currently the limit of the precision attainable with this technique is about two per cent, and is set by the precision of the existing calibrations of the surface brightness — colour relation. Here we report the calibration of the surface brightness-colour relation with a precision of 0.8 per cent. We use this calibration to determine the geometrical distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud that is precise to 1 per cent based on 20 eclipsing binary systems. The final distane is 49.59 +/- 0.09 (statistical) +/- 0.54 (systematic) kiloparsecs.

In 2013 a team of researchers (including several of the current researchers) published a letter in Nature (2013) which estimated the distance with a precision of two per cent; Arxiv (2013).

Another team of researchers has also posted their recent research on Arxiv (2019) in which they provide a 1% foundation for the determination of the Hubble Constant.

All the links are to abstracts; the full letters to Nature are paywalled, but the Arxiv abstracts have links to PDFs which seem to be complete and accessible.

Long-time Slashdot reader memnock quotes Nature: In the next month or so, orange trees across Florida will erupt in white blossoms, signalling the start of another citrus season. But this year, something different will be blowing in the winds. Farmers are preparing to spray their trees with hundreds of thousands of kilograms of two common antibiotics to combat citrus greening, a bacterial disease that has been killing Florida citrus trees for more than a decade.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is in the process of allowing growers to use streptomycin and oxytetracycline as routine treatments, spraying trees several times per year, beginning with the 'first flush' of leaves this spring. Growers in the state could end up using as much as 440,000 kilograms of the drugs. Although the compounds, which are both used in human medicine, have been sprayed on other crops in the past and applied in limited amounts to citrus groves, the scale of this application has researchers and public-health advocates alarmed....

There is little publicly available science on the long-term use of these drugs in crop settings... Critics are particularly galled because there is also little convincing evidence that spraying will keep the scourge at bay.
One Florida public radio station reports that environmental groups have delivered a petition with more than 45,000 signatures to the EPA, urging them to halt the expanded use of antibiotics.

"The fear is an increase in antibiotic-resistant diseases for humans."

Since 2016, Microsoft has been working with the University of Washington to develop the first device to automatically encode digital information into DNA and back to bits again. "So far, DNA storage has been carried out by hand in the lab," reports MIT Technology Review. But now Microsoft and researchers at the University of Washington "say they created a machine that converts electronic bits to DNA and back without a person involved." From the report: The gadget, made from about $10,000 in parts, uses glass bottles of chemicals to build DNA strands, and a tiny sequencing machine from Oxford Nanopore to read them out again. According to a publication on March 21 in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, the team was able to store and retrieve just a single word -- "hello" -- or five bytes of data. What's more, the process took 21 hours, mostly because of the slow chemical reactions involved in writing DNA. While the team considered that a success for their prototype, a commercially useful DNA storage system would have to store data millions of times faster.

More than 850 scientists and statisticians told the authors of a Nature commentary that they are endorsing an idea to ban "statistical significance." Critics say that declaring a result to be statistically significant or not essentially forces complicated questions to be answered as true or false. "The world is much more uncertain than that," says Nicoole Lazar, a professor of statistics at the University of Georgia. An entire issue of the journal The American Statistician is devoted to this question, with 43 articles and a 17,500-word editorial that Lazar co-authored.

"In the early 20th century, the father of statistics, R.A. Fisher, developed a test of significance," reports NPR. "It involves a variable called the p-value, that he intended to be a guide for judging results. Over the years, scientists have warped that idea beyond all recognition, creating an arbitrary threshold for the p-value, typically 0.05, and they use that to declare whether a scientific result is significant or not. Slashdot reader apoc.famine writes: In a nutshell, what the statisticians are recommending is that we embrace uncertainty, quantify it, and discuss it, rather than set arbitrary measures for when studies are worth publishing. This way research which appears interesting but which doesn't hit that magical p == 0.05 can be published and discussed, and scientists won't feel pressured to p-hack.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have grown a miniature brain in a dish with a spinal cord and muscles attached, an advance that promises to accelerate the study of conditions such as motor neurone disease. The lentil-sized grey blob of human brain cells were seen to spontaneously send out tendril-like connections to link up with the spinal cord and muscle tissue, which was taken from a mouse. The muscles were then seen to visibly contract under the control of the so-called brain organoid. The research is is the latest in a series of increasingly sophisticated approximations of the human brain grown in the laboratory -- this time with something approaching a central nervous system attached.

The scientists used a new method to grow the miniature brain from human stem cells, which allowed the organoid to reach a more sophisticated stage of development than previous experiments. The latest blob shows similarities, in terms of the variety of neurons and their organisation, to the human foetal brain at 12-16 weeks of pregnancy. However, the scientists said the structure was still too small and primitive to have anything approaching thoughts, feelings or consciousness. While a fully developed human brain has 80-90 billion neurons, the organoid has a couple of million, placing it somewhere between a cockroach and a zebrafish in terms of volume of grey matter. After growing the organoid, the scientists "used a tiny vibrating blade to cut it into half millimeter-thick slices which were placed on a membrane, floating on a nutrient-rich liquid," reports The Guardian. "This meant the entire slice had access to energy and oxygen and it continued developing and forming new connections when it was kept in culture for a year. Alongside the organoid, the scientists added in a 1mm-long spinal cord, taken from a mouse embryo, and the surrounding back muscle. The brain cells automatically began to send out neuronal connections, linked up with the spinal cord and began sending electrical impulses, which caused the muscles to twitch."

The study has been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Leading scientists have called for a global moratorium on the use of powerful DNA editing tools to make genetically modified children. The move is intended to send a clear signal to maverick researchers, and the scientific community more broadly, that any attempt to rewrite the DNA of sperm, eggs or embryos destined for live births is not acceptable. Beyond a formal freeze on any such work, the experts want countries to register and declare any plans that scientists may put forward in the future, and have these discussed through an international body, potentially run by the World Health Organization. Alongside technical debates about the possible benefits of creating genetically modified babies, the scientists said no decisions should be made to go ahead without broad public support. Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, calls for the moratorium with 16 other experts in the journal Nature. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Feng Zhang, who helped discover and develop the most common gene editing tool, CRISPR, contributed to the article.

The call comes four months after Chinese researcher He Jiankui used human embryos modified with CRISPR to create twin girls resistant to HIV.

It started 29 weeks ago when 16-year-old Swede Greta Thunberg began skipping school on Fridays to protest climate change by standing outside of her nation's parliament building. Today, kids from more than 110 countries, including the United States, are following Thunberg's lead and will play hooky from classes for something they think is ultimately more important: preventing the warming of their planet. Live updates, from The Guardian. Further reading: Thousands of scientists are backing the kids striking for climate change.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have discovered that broken DNA builds up in brain cells in the daytime and repair work reverses the damage only during sleep. For an act so universal, sleep has enormous benefits. Found in organisms from flies to worms and jellyfish, it restores the body and helps learning and memory. But despite extensive research, the purpose of sleep is still mysterious. Lior Appelbaum from Bar-Ilan University and his student, David Zada, reasoned that if sleep had evolved in all organisms with a nervous system, then it might be working at the level of individual neurons.

To find out, they genetically engineered small, transparent zebrafish so the chromosomes in their neurons carried colorful chemical tags. The researchers then used a powerful, specialized microscope to watch how the chromosomes moved in the neurons, and how often DNA was broken, when the fish were awake and asleep. When the fish were awake, the chromosomes did not move much and broken strands of DNA built up in the neurons, as part of the normal wear and tear of life. If the fish were sleep-deprived, by tapping on their tank for example, some of the neurons accumulated so much genetic damage they were in danger of dying off. But, when the fish fell asleep, the picture changed. The scientists noticed that the chromosomes changed shape far more often in sleeping fish, and that DNA damage in their neurons plummeted. The same happened when the researchers added a sleep-inducing drug to the tank, causing the fish to fall asleep in the daytime. "Appelbaum said that chromosomes are constantly changing shape to allow the cells' natural repair mechanisms to mend DNA damage at different points," the report adds. "When awake, the repair work cannot keep up with the rate at which damage builds up, but in the calm hours of sleep, the repair mechanisms have a chance to get on top of the job." The study has been published in Nature Communications.

"Scientists have managed to turn CO2 from a gas back into solid 'coal'," reports The Independent, "in a breakthrough which could potentially help remove the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere." Long-time Slashdot reader bbsguru shared their report: The research team led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, developed a new technique using a liquid metal electrolysis method which efficiently converts CO2 from a gas into solid particles of carbon. Published in the journal Nature Communications, the authors say their technology offers an alternative pathway for "safely and permanently" removing CO2 from the atmosphere....

RMIT researcher Dr Torben Daeneke said: "While we can't literally turn back time, turning carbon dioxide back into coal and burying it back in the ground is a bit like rewinding the emissions clock...." Lead author, Dr Dorna Esrafilzadeh said the carbon produced by the technique could also be used as an electrode.

"A side benefit of the process is that the carbon can hold electrical charge, becoming a supercapacitor, so it could potentially be used as a component in future vehicles," she said. "The process also produces synthetic fuel as a by-product, which could also have industrial applications."
More coverage from Fast Company, Science magazine, and the CBC.

Joe_NoOne (Slashdot reader #48,818) shares this update from Nature: The DNA of life on Earth naturally stores its information in just four key chemicals -- guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, commonly referred to as G, C, A and T, respectively. Now scientists have doubled this number of life's building blocks, creating for the first time a synthetic, eight-letter genetic language that seems to store and transcribe information just like natural DNA.

In a study published on 22 February in Science, a consortium of researchers led by Steven Benner, founder of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida, suggests that an expanded genetic alphabet could, in theory, also support life. "It's a real landmark," says Floyd Romesberg, a chemical biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. The study implies that there is nothing particularly "magic" or special about those four chemicals that evolved on Earth, says Romesberg. "That's a conceptual breakthrough," he adds... Benner says that the work shows that life could potentially be supported by DNA bases with different structures from the four that we know, which could be relevant in the search for signatures of life elsewhere in the Universe...

The researchers call the resulting eight-letter language 'hachimoji' after the Japanese words for 'eight' and 'letter'. The additional bases are each similar in shape to one of the natural four, but have variations in their bonding patterns. The researchers then conducted a series of experiments that showed that their synthetic sequences shares properties with natural DNA that are essential for supporting life... Benner's group previously showed that strands of DNA that included Z and P were better at binding to cancer cells than sequences with just the standard four bases. And Benner has set up a company which commercialises synthetic DNA for use in medical diagnostics.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Chemists have stumbled across a new way to separate reflected light into the colors of the rainbow -- a phenomenon known as iridescence. The surprisingly simple technique, which is something of a hybrid of previously known ones, could have applications both scientific and aesthetic. In iridescence, an object reflects different colors at different angles, separating white light into its constituent colors.

Now, [researchers] at Pennsylvania State University in State College report producing iridescence in a new way. They happened across the effect in early 2017, when they cooked up micron-size spherical droplets containing two types of oil in which the lighter oil formed a lentil-shaped upper layer the researchers hoped to use as a lens. But surprisingly, when illuminated from above, the edges of the lentils glowed with a color that depended on their size and the angle at which they were viewed, the team reports today in Nature. Clarity came only with the computer simulations performed [the researchers]. Their analysis showed the iridescence emerges through a new mechanism that blends certain elements of the previously known ones. [...] Engineers already use thin-films and refractive particles to create iridescence in video displays, paints, and decorative wall coverings. With its simplicity and adjustability, the new effect could open ways to color the world. The effect can be explained in a much simpler system: "water droplets that condense and hang from the underside of the lid of a petri dish. Light waves entering near one edge of a droplet can bounce two or more times off the dome of the droplet before emerging near the other edge -- much as light reflects off the back of a raindrop in a rainbow. However, the light waves entering at slightly different distances from the center of the droplet can bounce different numbers of times. And waves bouncing different numbers of times can interfere and reinforce each other, as in diffraction or thin-film interference. As a result, different colors emerge at different angles, which can be controlled by changing the size of the droplet."

If atmospheric CO2 levels exceed 1,200 parts per million (ppm), it could push the Earth's climate over a "tipping point", finds a new study. This would see clouds that shade large part of the oceans start to break up. From a report: According to the new paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, this could trigger a massive 8C rise in global average temperatures -- in addition to the warming from increased CO2. The only similar example of rapid warming at this magnitude in the Earth's recent history is the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55m years ago, when global temperatures increased by 5-8C and drove widespread extinction of species on both the oceans and land.

However, scientists not involved in the research caution that the results are still speculative and that other complicating factors could influence if or when a tipping point is reached. The threshold identified by the researchers -- a 1,200ppm concentration of atmospheric CO2 -- is three times current CO2 concentrations. If fossil fuel use continues to rapidly expand over the remainder of the century, it is possible levels could get that high. The Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 scenario (RCP8.5), a very high emissions scenario examined by climate scientists, has the Earth's atmosphere reaching around 1,100ppm by the year 2100. But this would require the world to massively expand coal use and eschew any climate mitigation over the rest of this century. Further reading: A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth's climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century.

A new adsorbent material "soaks up uranium from seawater, leaving interfering ions behind," reports the ACS's Chemical & Engineering News, in an article shared by webofslime: The world's oceans contain some 4 billion metric tons of dissolved uranium. That's roughly 1,000 times as much as all known terrestrial sources combined, and enough to fuel the global nuclear power industry for centuries. But the oceans are so vast, and uranium's concentration in seawater is so low -- roughly 3 ppb -- that extracting it remains a formidable challenge... Researchers have been looking for ways to extract uranium from seawater for more than 50 years...

Nearly 20 years ago, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) confirmed that amidoxime-functionalized polymers could soak up uranium reliably even under harsh marine conditions. But that type of adsorbent has not been implemented on a large scale because it has a higher affinity for vanadium than uranium. Separating the two ions raises production costs. Alexander S. Ivanov of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, together with colleagues there and at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and other institutions, may have come up with a solution. Using computational methods, the team identified a highly selective triazine chelator known as H2BHT that resembles iron-sequestering compounds found in bacteria and fungi.... H2BHT exhibits little attraction for vanadium but has roughly the same affinity for uranyl ions as amidoxime-based adsorbents do.

"Researchers in Argentina have discovered a new Sauropod with unusually long spikes protruding forward from its body," writes Slashdot reader dryriver. The findings have been published in the journal Scientific Reports. ScienceAlert reports: Living 140 million years ago in the early Lower Cretaceous, the newly discovered herbivore Bajadasaurus pronuspinax had a thing for growing spikes. It was part of the Sauropod family, but looked a little like a small Brontosaurus crossed with a porcupine. "The sauropods are the big dinosaurs with long necks and long tails, but specifically this is a small family within the sauropods which were about 9 or 10 meters in length," paleontologist Pablo Gallina from the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Argentina told Agencia EFE. Bajadasaurus was a species of this small family, called Dicraeosauridae, all of which have similar spines on their necks. When the researchers discovered the fossils of this previously unknown dinosaur in Patagonia, Argentina, the remains included not only most of the skull, but a whole spine bone. This gave the researchers the chance to investigate what these spines might have been used for. "We believe that the long and sharp spines -- very long and thin -- on the neck and back of Bajadasaurus and Amargasaurus cazaui (another dicraeosaurid) must have been to deter possible predators," explained Gallina to AFP.'

Titanium "has long been touted as the metal of the future," writes Dwell, "due to its strength, rust resistance, and amazing lightness." But can careful atom-stacking lead to something better?

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have discovered a way to create a new "metallic wood" material that is as strong as titanium, but five times lighter, reports Dwell. "So far, the researchers have built a sheet of nickel with nanoscale pores that is almost 70 percent empty space... It was created by building tiny plastic spheres, suspending them in water, allowing the water to evaporate, and then electroplating the spheres with nickel. Researchers then dissolved the plastic spheres, producing an incredibly strong, porous metal that floats on water."
Researchers are also considering the possibility of filling its empty space with an energy-storing material. "For example, a prosthetic leg made from this material and infused with anode and cathode materials, could also be a battery."

Zorro shares a report from the Smithsonian: A recent study used machine learning technology to analyze eight leading models of human origins and evolution, and the program identified evidence in the human genome of a "ghost population" of human ancestors. The analysis suggests that a previously unknown and long-extinct group of hominins interbred with Homo sapiens in Asia and Oceania somewhere along the long, winding road of human evolutionary history, leaving behind only fragmented traces in modern human DNA. The study, published in Nature Communications, is one of the first examples of how machine learning can help reveal clues to our own origins. By poring through vast amounts of genomic data left behind in fossilized bones and comparing it with DNA in modern humans, scientists can begin to fill in some of the many gaps of our species' evolutionary history. "The new data suggest that the mysterious hominin was likely descended from an admixture of Neanderthals and Denisovans (who were only identified as a unique species on the human family tree in 2010)," the report adds. "Such a species in our evolutionary past would look a lot like the fossil of a 90,000-year-old teenage girl from Siberia's Denisova cave. Her remains were described last summer as the only known example of a first-generation hybrid between the two species, with a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father."

Zorro shares a report from the Smithsonian: A recent study used machine learning technology to analyze eight leading models of human origins and evolution, and the program identified evidence in the human genome of a "ghost population" of human ancestors. The analysis suggests that a previously unknown and long-extinct group of hominins interbred with Homo sapiens in Asia and Oceania somewhere along the long, winding road of human evolutionary history, leaving behind only fragmented traces in modern human DNA. The study, published in Nature Communications, is one of the first examples of how machine learning can help reveal clues to our own origins. By poring through vast amounts of genomic data left behind in fossilized bones and comparing it with DNA in modern humans, scientists can begin to fill in some of the many gaps of our species' evolutionary history. "The new data suggest that the mysterious hominin was likely descended from an admixture of Neanderthals and Denisovans (who were only identified as a unique species on the human family tree in 2010)," the report adds. "Such a species in our evolutionary past would look a lot like the fossil of a 90,000-year-old teenage girl from Siberia's Denisova cave. Her remains were described last summer as the only known example of a first-generation hybrid between the two species, with a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father."

Zorro shares a report from the Smithsonian: A recent study used machine learning technology to analyze eight leading models of human origins and evolution, and the program identified evidence in the human genome of a "ghost population" of human ancestors. The analysis suggests that a previously unknown and long-extinct group of hominins interbred with Homo sapiens in Asia and Oceania somewhere along the long, winding road of human evolutionary history, leaving behind only fragmented traces in modern human DNA. The study, published in Nature Communications, is one of the first examples of how machine learning can help reveal clues to our own origins. By poring through vast amounts of genomic data left behind in fossilized bones and comparing it with DNA in modern humans, scientists can begin to fill in some of the many gaps of our species' evolutionary history. "The new data suggest that the mysterious hominin was likely descended from an admixture of Neanderthals and Denisovans (who were only identified as a unique species on the human family tree in 2010)," the report adds. "Such a species in our evolutionary past would look a lot like the fossil of a 90,000-year-old teenage girl from Siberia's Denisova cave. Her remains were described last summer as the only known example of a first-generation hybrid between the two species, with a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father."

Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: A new kind of magnet, theorized for decades, may now have been experimentally proven to exist. And it could eventually lead to better data storage devices. In a normal magnet, the magnetic moments of individual grains align with each other to generate a magnetic field. In contrast, in the new "singlet-based" magnet, magnetic moments are temporary in nature, popping in and out of existence. Although a singlet-based magnet's field is unstable, the fact that such magnets can more easily transition between magnetic and non-magnetic states can make them well-suited for data storage application. Specifically, they could operate more quickly and with less power than conventional devices, says Andrew Wray, a materials physicist at New York University who led the research. Now, Wray and his colleagues have discovered the first example of a singlet-based magnet that is robust -- one made from uranium antimonide (USb2). "It ends up taking very little energy to create spin excitons for uranium antimonide," Wray says. "This is essential for the singlet-based magnet, because if it took a lot of energy, then there wouldn't be enough spin excitons to condense, stabilize one another, and give you a magnet." The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

From Nature magazine: Female Aedes aegypti, like other mosquito species, feed on blood to get the protein they need to produce their eggs, and spread diseases such as dengue in the process. But once the mosquitoes have had their blood fix, they stop biting until they've laid their eggs several days later. Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist at the Rockefeller University in New York City, wondered whether she could hijack this biological process to switch off a mosquito's appetite.

Previous research had suggested that a mosquito's desire to feed is controlled by neuropeptides, molecules used by the nervous system to communicate. Vosshall and her team suspected that neuropeptide Y (NPY) receptors might be particularly important, because they form part of the molecular pathway involved in food-seeking behaviour for many animals -- including humans. Some human appetite-suppressant drugs already target the NPY receptors, so Vosshall decided to take a "completely zany" approach: feed these drugs to mosquitoes and see what happens. The method worked: mosquitoes that fed on a solution containing NPY-activating drugs were much less likely to approach a human-scented 'lure' than were the control group, and their appetites remained suppressed for two days. Further reading: A New Way to Keep Mosquitoes From Biting.

Necroloth writes: You probably thought that if you were looking at our galaxy from the outside and at a distance, you would see a thin disc of stars that orbit around a central region, but the further away from the inner regions of the Milky Way you are, the less the pull of gravity. At the outer disc, the hydrogen atoms that make up the Milky Way's gas disc are, as a consequence, warped into an S-like shape, no longer pulled together in a thin plane. A group of astronomers from Australia and China have built their "intuitive and accurate three-dimensional picture" by mapping 1339 classical Cepheids. There's a quick animation of the galaxy on the @NatureAstronomy twitter here. The study has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

From a report: The quest to extend the periodic table is not over, but it is grinding to a halt. Since Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev published his periodic table 150 years ago, researchers have been adding elements to it at the average rate of one every two or three years. Having found all the elements that are stable enough to persist naturally, researchers started to create their own, and are now up to element 118, oganesson. Although they still hope to find more, they agree that prospects of venturing beyond element 120 are dim.

"We're reaching the area of diminishing returns in the synthesis of new elements, at least with our current level of technology," says Jacklyn Gates, who works on heavy-element chemistry at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. As a result, research on the edge of the periodic table is shifting focus. Rather than chasing new elements, scientists are going back to deepen their understanding of the superheavy ones -- roughly speaking, those with an atomic number above 100 -- that they have already made.

Studying the chemical properties of these elements could show whether the most massive ones obey the organizing principle of the table -- which sorts elements into groups with similar behaviours on the basis of periodically recurring patterns of chemical reactivity. And although the heaviest elements decay in less than the blink of an eye, researchers still hope that they might arrive at the fabled 'island of stability': a hypothesized region of element-land where some superheavy isotopes -- atoms that have the same number of protons in their nucleus, but differing numbers of neutrons -- might exist for minutes, days or even longer.

PolygamousRanchKid quotes LiveScience: A laser pulse bounced off a rubidium atom and entered the quantum world -- taking on the weird physics of "Schrodinger's cat." The laser pulses didn't grow whiskers or paws. But they became like the famous quantum-physics thought experiment Schrodinger's cat in an important way: They were large objects that acted like the simultaneously dead-and-alive creatures of subatomic physics -- existing in a limbo between two simultaneous, contradictory states.

"In our experiment, the [laser cat] was sent to the detector immediately, so it was destroyed right after its creation," said Bastian Hacker, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, who worked on the experiment. But it didn't have to be that way, Hacker told Live Science. "An optical state can live forever. So if we had sent the pulse out into the night sky, it could live for billions of years in its [cat-like] state." That longevity is part of what makes these pulses so useful, he added. A long-lived laser cat can survive long-term travel through an optical fiber, making it a good unit of information for a network of quantum computers... In the new experiment, described in a paper published Jan. 14 in the journal Nature Photonics, researchers created laser pulses that are in superposition between two possible quantum states. They called the little pulses "flying optical cat states...."

"Cat states can encode quantum information in a way that allows [us] to detect optical loss and correct for it. Although every optical transmission has losses, the information can be transmitted perfectly."

dryriver writes: There is good news for people who have limited or no ability to speak, due to having suffered a stroke for example. Researchers at Columbia University have managed to turn brain signals in the auditory cortex of test subjects into somewhat intelligible speech using a vocoder-like system with audio output cleaned up by neural networks. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. Here's an excerpt from the Zuckerman Institute's press release, which contains example audio of a number sequence being turned into robotic speech: "In a scientific first, Columbia neuroengineers have created a system that translates thought into intelligible, recognizable speech. By monitoring someone's brain activity, the technology can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity. This breakthrough, which harnesses the power of speech synthesizers and artificial intelligence, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain. It also lays the groundwork for helping people who cannot speak, such as those living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or recovering from stroke, regain their ability to communicate with the outside world."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created super-thin, bendy materials that absorb wireless internet and other electromagnetic waves in the air and turn them into electricity. The lead researcher, Tomas Palacios, said the breakthrough paved the way for energy-harvesting covers ranging from tablecloths to giant wrappers for buildings that extract energy from the environment to power sensors and other electronics. Details have been published in the journal Nature. Palacios and his colleagues connected a bendy antenna to a flexible semiconductor layer only three atoms thick. The antenna picks up wifi and other radio-frequency signals and turns them into an alternating current. This flows into the molybdenum disulphide semiconductor, where it is converted into a direct electrical current. [M]olybdenum disulphide film can be produced in sheets on industrial roll-to-roll machines, meaning they can be made large enough to capture useful amounts of energy.

Ambient wifi signals can fill an office with more than 100 microwatts of power that is ripe to be scavenged by energy-harvesting devices. The MIT system has an efficiency of between 30% and 40%, producing about 40 microwatts when exposed to signals bearing 150 microwatts of power in laboratory tests. "It doesn't sound like much compared with the 60 watts that a computer needs, but you can still do a lot with it," Palacios said. "You can design a wide range of sensors, for environmental monitoring or chemical and biological sensing, which operate at the single microwatt level. Or you could store the electricity in a battery to use later."

dryriver writes: In the past, Neanderthal humans were believed to be largely close-distance hunters. A new paper in the journal Nature, based on actual outdoor tests with multiple test subjects throwing two wooden spears closely mimicking ancient spears found in various places at a target, surmises that spear throwing Neanderthals may in fact have been able to kill animals at distances of 60 feet or even greater. The authors found that targeting a wooden spear accurately at that distance takes skill, and even worked out the impact velocity of Neanderthal spears at such a distance. Nevertheless, Neanderthals with sufficient practice in spear throwing may very well have been capable of killing at distances far greater than previously thought. This changes the assumption that Neanderthals needed to get very close to animals in order to have a chance of killing them.

NASA and the National Science Foundation helped fund something amazing. Slashdot reader astroengine writes: For the first time, scientists have created a computer model that can simulate the evolution of a solar flare, from thousands of miles below the photosphere to the eruption itself in the lower corona -- the sun's multimillion degree atmosphere. And the results are not only scientifically impressive, the visualization is gorgeous....

[W]ith increasingly-sophisticated solar observatories (such as NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory), we are getting an ever more detailed look at what's going on inside the sun's deep atmosphere and, with improvements of theoretical models and increases in computer processing power, simulations of the corona are looking more and more like the real thing... Rather than forcing their simulation to generate flares, they re-enacted the conditions of the sun that were observed and just let their simulation run to create its own flares. "Our model was able to capture the entire process, from the buildup of energy to emergence at the surface to rising into the corona, energizing the corona, and then getting to the point when the energy is released in a solar flare," said NCAR scientist Matthias Rempel in a statement. "This was a stand-alone simulation that was inspired by observed data. "
They're calling it "a three-dimensional radiative magnetohydrodynamic simulation of a solar flare," and Discover magazine breaks down the colors in the image -- for example, green shows the hottest plasma, with temperatures over 10 million K (or nearly 18 million F).

"A single flare can release the equivalent of millions of hydrogen bombs all going off at the same time."

Reader schwit1 shares a report: Research funding for diseases that predominantly affect people living in poverty hit a record high in 2017, according to a report released on 23 January by Policy Cures Research, a global-health think tank in Sydney, Australia. At US$3.6 billion, investments into 'neglected' diseases were higher than in any year since 2007. A surge from 2016 to 2017 included a rise in funding to fight neglected diseases generally, as opposed to targeting individual maladies.

Anna Doubell, director of research at Policy Cures Research, says that the launch of several trials testing new Ebola drugs, diagnostics and vaccines in response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa between 2014 and 2016 might be giving donors hope that investments into neglected diseases pay off. "The amount of progress made in a short period of time after the Ebola outbreak might have brought in optimism about what is possible," Doubell says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Science may never tell us what lies round the next corner, but researchers have come up with the nearest thing: a computer program that turns a normal digital camera into a periscope. In a demonstration of "computational periscopy" a U.S. team at Boston University showed they could see details of objects hidden from view by analyzing shadows they cast on a nearby wall. Vivek Goyal, an electrical engineer at the university, said that while the work had clear implications for surveillance he hoped it would lead to robots that could navigate better and boost the safety of driverless cars.

In the latest feat, Goyal and his team used a standard digital camera and a mid-range laptop. The researchers, writing in the journal Nature, describe how they pieced together hidden scenes by pointing the digital camera at the vague shadows they cast on a nearby wall. If the wall had been a mirror the task would have been easy, but a matt wall scatters light in all directions, so the reflected image is nothing but a blur. They found that when an object blocked part of the hidden scene, their algorithms could use the combination of light and shade at different points on the wall to reconstruct what lay round the corner. In tests, the program pieced together hidden images of video game characters -- including details such as their eyes and mouths -- along with colored strips and the letters "BU." The program takes about 48 seconds to work out a hidden scene from a digital image, but the researchers believe it could be sped up with a faster computer. Eventually, it may be fast enough to run on video footage.

Goyal also said "it is even conceivable for humans to be able to learn to see around corners with their own eyes; it does not require anything superhuman."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Slow-moving, hulking ships crisscross miles of ocean in a lawn mower pattern, wielding an array of 12 to 48 air guns blasting pressurized air repeatedly into the depths of the ocean. The sound waves hit the sea floor, penetrating miles into it, and bounce back to the surface, where they are picked up by hydrophones. The acoustic patterns form a three-dimensional map of where oil and gas most likely lie. The seismic air guns probably produce the loudest noise that humans use regularly underwater, and it is about to become far louder in the Atlantic. As part of the Trump administration's plans to allow offshore drilling for gas and oil exploration, five companies have been given permits to carry out seismic mapping with the air guns all along the Eastern Seaboard, from Central Florida to the Northeast, for the first time in three decades. The surveys haven't started yet in the Atlantic, but now that the ban on offshore drilling has been lifted, companies can be granted access to explore regions along the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. And air guns are now the most common method companies use to map the ocean floor.

Some scientists say the noises from air guns, ship sonar and general tanker traffic can cause the gradual or even outright death of sea creatures, from the giants to the tiniest — whales, dolphins, fish, squid, octopuses and even plankton. Other effects include impairing animals' hearing, brain hemorrhaging and the drowning out of communication sounds important for survival, experts say. So great is the growing din in the world's oceans that experts fear it is fundamentally disrupting the marine ecosystem, diminishing populations of some species as the noise levels disturb feeding, reproduction and social behavior. A 2017 study, for example, found that a loud blast, softer than the sound of a seismic air gun, killed nearly two-thirds of the zooplankton in three-quarters of a mile on either side. Tiny organisms at the bottom of the food chain, zooplankton provide a food source for everything from great whales to shrimp. Krill, a tiny crustacean vital to whales and other animals, were especially hard hit, according to one study.

TechCrunch's Devin Coldeway picks apart a new study by Oxford scientists that questions the basis of thousands of papers and analyses with conflicting conclusions on the effect of screen time on well-being. "The researchers claim is that the science doesn't agree because it's bad science," Coldeway writes. "So is screen time good or bad? It's not that simple." From the report: Their concern was that the large data sets and statistical methods employed by researchers looking into the question -- for example, thousands and thousands of survey responses interacting with weeks of tracking data for each respondent -- allowed for anomalies or false positives to be claimed as significant conclusions. It's not that people are doing this on purpose necessarily, only that it's a natural result of the approach many are taking. "Unfortunately," write the researchers in the paper, "the large number of participants in these designs means that small effects are easily publishable and, if positive, garner outsized press and policy attention."

In order to show this, the researchers essentially redid the statistical analysis for several of these large data sets (Orben explains the process here), but instead of only choosing one result to present, they collected all the plausible ones they could find. For example, imagine a study where the app use of a group of kids was tracked, and they were surveyed regularly on a variety of measures. The resulting (fictitious, I hasten to add) paper might say it found kids who use Instagram for more than two hours a day are three times as likely to suffer depressive episodes or suicidal ideations. What the paper doesn't say, and which this new analysis could show, is that the bottom quartile is far more likely to suffer from ADHD, or the top five percent reported feeling they had a strong support network. [...] Ultimately what the Oxford study found was that there is no consistent good or bad effect, and although a very slight negative effect was noted, it was small enough that factors like having a single parent or needing to wear glasses were far more important. "[T]he study does not conclude that technology has no negative or positive effect; such a broad conclusion would be untenable on its face," Coldeway writes. "The data it rounds up are simply inadequate to the task and technology use is too variable to reduce to a single factor. Its conclusion is that studies so far have in fact bee inconclusive and we need to go back to the drawing board."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A rapid rise in temperature on ancient Earth triggered a climate response that may have prolonged the warming for many thousands of years, according to scientists. Their study, published online in Nature Geoscience, provides new evidence of a climate feedback that could explain the long duration of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which is considered the best analogue for modern climate change. The findings also suggest that climate change today could have long-lasting impacts on global temperature even if humans are able to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Increased erosion during the PETM, approximately 56 million years ago, freed large amounts of fossil carbon stored in rocks and released enough carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere to impact temperatures long term, researchers said. Scientists found evidence for the massive carbon release in coastal sediment fossil cores. They analyzed the samples using an innovative molecular technique that enabled them to trace how processes like erosion moved carbon in deep time. Global temperatures increased by about 9 to 14.4 degrees Fahrenheit during the PETM, radically changing conditions on Earth. Severe storms and flooding became more common, and the warm, wet weather led to increased erosion of rocks. As erosion wore down mountains over thousands of years, carbon was released from rocks and transported by rivers to oceans, where some was reburied in coastal sediments. Along the way, some of the carbon entered the atmosphere as greenhouse gas.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Friedrich Simmel and Aurore Dupin, researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), have for the first time created artificial cell assemblies that can communicate with each other. The cells, separated by fatty membranes, exchange small chemical signaling molecules to trigger more complex reactions, such as the production of RNA and other proteins. Scientists around the world are working on creating artificial, cell-like systems that mimic the behavior of living organisms. Friedrich Simmel and Aurore Dupin have created such artificial cell assemblies in a fixed spatial arrangement. The highlight is that the cells are able to communicate with each other.

Gels or emulsion droplets encapsulated in thin fat or polymer membranes serve as the basic building blocks for the artificial cells. Inside these 10- to 100-micron units, chemical and biochemical reactions can proceed uninhibited. The research team used droplets enclosed by lipid membranes and assembled them into artificial multicellular structures called micro-tissues. The biochemical reaction solutions used in the droplets can produce RNA and proteins, giving the cells a of a kind of gene expression ability. Small signal molecules can be exchanged between cells via their membranes or protein channels built into the membranes. This allows them to couple with each other temporally and spatially. The systems thus become dynamic, as in real life. Chemical pulses thus propagate through the cell structures and pass on information. The signals can also act as triggers, allowing initially identical cells to develop differently. "Our system is the first example of a multicellular system in which artificial cells with gene expression have a fixed arrangement and are coupled via chemical signals. In this way, we achieved a form of spatial differentiation," says Friedrich Simmel, Professor of Physics of Synthetic Biosystems at Technical University of Munich.