Slashdot Mirror

schwit1 quotes Nature: Something strange is going on at the top of the world. Earth's north magnetic pole has been skittering away from Canada and towards Siberia, driven by liquid iron sloshing within the planet's core. The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world's geomagnetism experts into a rare move. [T]hey are set to update the World Magnetic Model, which describes the planet's magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones. The most recent version of the model came out in 2015 and was supposed to last until 2020 -- but the magnetic field is changing so rapidly that researchers have to fix the model now.

"The error is increasing all the time," says Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) National Centers for Environmental Information.... By early 2018, the World Magnetic Model was in trouble. Researchers from NOAA and the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh had been doing their annual check of how well the model was capturing all the variations in Earth's magnetic field. They realized that it was so inaccurate that it was about to exceed the acceptable limit for navigational errors.
Nature's article was updated on January 9th to inform readers that the release of the corrected World Magnetic Model, which should restore accuracy through the end of 2019, has now been postponed from January 15th to January 30th -- "due to the ongoing US government shutdown."

Long-time Slashdot reader Futurepower(R) shares this article about a newly-published study which counters previous theories that neurons stop developing after adolescence: Healthy men and women continue to produce new neurons throughout life, suggesting older people remain more cognitively and emotionally intact than previously believed, researchers found. For decades it was thought that adult brains were hard-wired and unable to form new cells. But a Columbia University study found older people continued to produce neurons in the hippocampus -- a part of the brain important for memory, emotion and cognition -- at a similar rate to young people....

However, the researchers also noted fewer blood vessels and connections between cells in the older brains, which Ms Boldrini said "may be linked to compromised cognitive-emotional resilience" in the elderly.
The article suggests these newest findings may be hotly debated.

"They come just a month after a University of California study suggested adults do not develop new neurons."

Astronomers have detected 13 high-speed bursts of radio waves coming from deep space -- including one that regularly repeats. While the exact sources remain unknown, the new bevy of mysterious blasts does offer fresh clues to where and why such flashes appear across the cosmos. From a report: Fast radio bursts, as they are known to scientists, are among the universe's most bizarre phenomena. Each burst lasts just thousandths of a second, and they all appear to be coming from far outside our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Since these bursts were discovered in 2007, their cause has remained a puzzle. Based on estimations of the known range of their frequencies and an understanding of activity in the universe, scientists expect that nearly a thousand of them happen every day. But to date, only a handful have been found.

Now, a team using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, has announced the additional 13 new detections, including an especially rare repeating burst. Until now, only one other repeating fast radio burst was known to exist. "The repeater," as it being called, and its 12 counterparts came from a region of space some 1.5 billion light-years away, the team reports today in the journal Nature. All 13 new bursts have the lowest radio frequency yet detected, but they were also brighter than previously seen fast radio bursts, leading the team to think the low frequency has something to do with the sources' environment.

A gene editing technique has been used to produce asexual rice, which could carry traits such as high yields and drought resistance. From a report: After more than 20 years of theorizing about it, scientists have tweaked a hybrid variety of rice so that some of the plants produce cloned seeds. No plant sex necessary. The feat, described earlier this month in Nature, is encouraging for efforts to feed an increasingly crowded world. Crossing two good varieties of grain can make one fabulous one, combining the best versions of genes to give crops desirable traits such as higher yields. But such hybrid grain marvels often don't pass along those coveted genetic qualities to all seeds during reproduction. So farmers who want consistently higher yields have to pay for new hybrid seeds every year.

This new lab version of hybrid rice would preserve those qualities through self-cloning, says study coauthor Venkatesan Sundaresan, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Davis. Though 400 kinds of plants, including some blackberries and citruses, have developed self-cloning seeds naturally, re-creating those pathways in crop plants has "been harder than anyone expected," Sundaresan says. He and his colleagues got the idea for the new research while studying "how a fertilized egg becomes a zygote, this magical cell that regenerates an entire organism," as Sundaresan puts it. The researchers discovered that modifying two sets of genes caused the japonica rice hybrid called Kitaake to clone its own seeds. First the team found that in a fertilized plant egg, only the male version of a gene called BABY BOOM1 found in sperm triggered the development of a seed embryo. So the scientists inserted a genetic starter switch, called a promoter, that let the female version of the same gene do the same job. No male would be necessary to trigger an embryo's development.

Three decades ago, David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton, and Ronald Williams wrote about a foundational weight-calculating technique -- backpropagation -- in a monumental paper titled "Learning Representations by Back-propagating Errors." Backpropagation, aided by increasingly cheaper, more robust computer hardware, has enabled monumental leaps in computer vision, natural language processing, machine translation, drug design, and material inspection, where some deep neural networks (DNNs) have produced results superior to human experts. Looking at the advances we have made to date, can DNNs be the harbinger of superintelligent robots? From a report: Demis Hassabis doesn't believe so -- and he would know. He's the cofounder of DeepMind, a London-based machine learning startup founded with the mission of applying insights from neuroscience and computer science toward the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- in other words, systems that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human can. "There's still much further to go," he told VentureBeat at the NeurIPS 2018 conference in Montreal in early December. "Games or board games are quite easy in some ways because the transition model between states is very well-specified and easy to learn. Real-world 3D environments and the real world itself is much more tricky to figure out ... but it's important if you want to do planning."

Most AI systems today also don't scale very well. AlphaZero, AlphaGo, and OpenAI Five leverage a type of programming known as reinforcement learning, in which an AI-controlled software agent learns to take actions in an environment -- a board game, for example, or a MOBA -- to maximize a reward. It's helpful to imagine a system of Skinner boxes, said Hinton in an interview with VentureBeat. Skinner boxes -- which derive their name from pioneering Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner -- make use of operant conditioning to train subject animals to perform actions, such as pressing a lever, in response to stimuli, like a light or sound. When the subject performs a behavior correctly, they receive some form of reward, often in the form of food or water. The problem with reinforcement learning methods in AI research is that the reward signals tend to be "wimpy," Hinton said. In some environments, agents become stuck looking for patterns in random data -- the so-called "noisy TV problem."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: We seem to be on the cusp of a revolution in storage. Various technologies have been demonstrated that have speed approaching that of current RAM chips but can hold on to the memory when the power shuts off -- all without the long-term degradation that flash experiences. Some of these, like phase-change memory and Intel's Optane, have even made it to market. But, so far at least, issues with price and capacity have kept them from widespread adoption. But that hasn't discouraged researchers from continuing to look for the next greatest thing. In this week's edition, a joint NIST-Purdue University team has used a material that can form atomically thin sheets to make a new form of resistance-based memory. This material can be written in nanoseconds and hold on to that memory without power. The memory appears to work via a fundamentally different mechanism from previous resistance-RAM technologies, but there's a small hitch: we're not actually sure how it works. The two mechanisms used to change the resistance have been reported in the journal Nature Materials.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: We seem to be on the cusp of a revolution in storage. Various technologies have been demonstrated that have speed approaching that of current RAM chips but can hold on to the memory when the power shuts off -- all without the long-term degradation that flash experiences. Some of these, like phase-change memory and Intel's Optane, have even made it to market. But, so far at least, issues with price and capacity have kept them from widespread adoption. But that hasn't discouraged researchers from continuing to look for the next greatest thing. In this week's edition, a joint NIST-Purdue University team has used a material that can form atomically thin sheets to make a new form of resistance-based memory. This material can be written in nanoseconds and hold on to that memory without power. The memory appears to work via a fundamentally different mechanism from previous resistance-RAM technologies, but there's a small hitch: we're not actually sure how it works. The two mechanisms used to change the resistance have been reported in the journal Nature Materials.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The quantum internet is starting small, but growing. Researchers have created a network that lets four users communicate simultaneously through channels secured by the laws of quantum physics, and they say it could easily be scaled up. Soren Wengerowsky at the University of Vienna and his colleagues devised a network that uses quantum key distribution (QKD) to keep messages secure [the link is paywalled]. The general principle of QKD is that two photons are entangled, meaning their quantum properties are linked. Further reading: Nature.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have developed a universal cancer test that can detect traces of the disease in a patient's bloodstream. The cheap and simple test uses a color-changing fluid to reveal the presence of malignant cells anywhere in the body and provides results in less than 10 minutes. The test has a sensitivity of about 90%, meaning it would detect about 90 in 100 cases of cancer. It would serve as an initial check for cancer, with doctors following up positive results with more focused investigations. The test was made possible by the Queensland team's discovery that cancer DNA and normal DNA stick to metal surfaces in markedly different ways. This allowed them to develop a test that distinguishes between healthy cells and cancerous ones, even from the tiny traces of DNA that find their way into the bloodstream.

Healthy cells ensure they function properly by patterning their DNA with molecules called methyl groups. These work like volume controls, silencing genes that are not needed and turning up others that are. In cancer cells, this patterning is hijacked so that only genes that help the cancer grow are switched on. While the DNA inside normal cells has methyl groups dotted all over it, the DNA inside cancer cells is largely bare, with methyl groups found only in small clusters at specific locations. Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the Queensland team described a series of tests that confirmed the telltale pattern of methyl groups in breast, prostate and colorectal cancer as well as lymphoma. They then showed that the patterns had a dramatic impact on the DNA's chemistry, making normal and cancer DNA behave very differently in water. The suspect DNA is added to water containing tiny gold nanoparticles, which turn the water pink. "If DNA from cancer cells is then added, it sticks to the nanoparticles in such a way that the water retains its original color," The Guardian reports. "But if DNA from healthy cells is added, the DNA binds to the particles differently, and turns the water blue."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Rising sea levels could become overwhelming sooner than previously believed, according to the authors of the most comprehensive study yet of the accelerating ice melt in Greenland. Run-off from this vast northern ice sheet -- currently the biggest single source of meltwater adding to the volume of the world's oceans -- is 50% higher than pre-industrial levels and increasing exponentially as a result of manmade global warming, says the paper, published in Nature on Wednesday. Almost all of the increase has occurred in the past two decades -- a jolt upwards after several centuries of relative stability. This suggests the ice sheet becomes more sensitive as temperatures go up.

The researchers used ice core data from three locations to build the first multi-century record of temperature, surface melt and run-off in Greenland. Going back 339 years, they found the first sign of meltwater increase began along with the industrial revolution in the mid-1800s. The trend remained within the natural variation until the 1990s, since when it has spiked far outside of the usual nine- to 13-year cycles.

UK academic publisher Springer Nature has filed a complaint against Sci-Hub, a site that provides open access to scientific research papers. "The Moscow City Court was told that Sci-Hub is infringing the company's copyrights and should, therefore, be subjected to blocking," reports TorrentFreak. "Listing 'bulletproof' hosting company Quasi Networks and U.S.-based CloudFlare as facilitating access to the site, Springer Nature complained that three specific works were being made available illegally by Sci-Hub." From the report: As the above table obtained from the Court shows, the research papers cover topics of interest to the medical community in the spheres of heart and brain health -- Effect of glucose-lowering therapies on heart failure, Nitric oxide signaling in cardiovascular health and disease, and Lactate in the brain: from metabolic end-product to signaling molecule. These would ordinarily sit behind paywalls but thanks to Sci-Hub, their contents are available for everyone to absorb for free. It's a situation that's unacceptable to Springer Nature and the Moscow City Court was sympathetic to the company's complaints. As a result, several Sci-Hub and Library Genesis domains (gen.lib.rus.ec, www.libgen.io, scihub.unblocked.gdn, lgmag.org, libgen.unblocked.gdn, sci-hub.tw and libgen.io) are now being rendered inaccessible by Russian Internet Service Providers.

UK academic publisher Springer Nature has filed a complaint against Sci-Hub, a site that provides open access to scientific research papers. "The Moscow City Court was told that Sci-Hub is infringing the company's copyrights and should, therefore, be subjected to blocking," reports TorrentFreak. "Listing 'bulletproof' hosting company Quasi Networks and U.S.-based CloudFlare as facilitating access to the site, Springer Nature complained that three specific works were being made available illegally by Sci-Hub." From the report: As the above table obtained from the Court shows, the research papers cover topics of interest to the medical community in the spheres of heart and brain health -- Effect of glucose-lowering therapies on heart failure, Nitric oxide signaling in cardiovascular health and disease, and Lactate in the brain: from metabolic end-product to signaling molecule. These would ordinarily sit behind paywalls but thanks to Sci-Hub, their contents are available for everyone to absorb for free. It's a situation that's unacceptable to Springer Nature and the Moscow City Court was sympathetic to the company's complaints. As a result, several Sci-Hub and Library Genesis domains (gen.lib.rus.ec, www.libgen.io, scihub.unblocked.gdn, lgmag.org, libgen.unblocked.gdn, sci-hub.tw and libgen.io) are now being rendered inaccessible by Russian Internet Service Providers.

UK academic publisher Springer Nature has filed a complaint against Sci-Hub, a site that provides open access to scientific research papers. "The Moscow City Court was told that Sci-Hub is infringing the company's copyrights and should, therefore, be subjected to blocking," reports TorrentFreak. "Listing 'bulletproof' hosting company Quasi Networks and U.S.-based CloudFlare as facilitating access to the site, Springer Nature complained that three specific works were being made available illegally by Sci-Hub." From the report: As the above table obtained from the Court shows, the research papers cover topics of interest to the medical community in the spheres of heart and brain health -- Effect of glucose-lowering therapies on heart failure, Nitric oxide signaling in cardiovascular health and disease, and Lactate in the brain: from metabolic end-product to signaling molecule. These would ordinarily sit behind paywalls but thanks to Sci-Hub, their contents are available for everyone to absorb for free. It's a situation that's unacceptable to Springer Nature and the Moscow City Court was sympathetic to the company's complaints. As a result, several Sci-Hub and Library Genesis domains (gen.lib.rus.ec, www.libgen.io, scihub.unblocked.gdn, lgmag.org, libgen.unblocked.gdn, sci-hub.tw and libgen.io) are now being rendered inaccessible by Russian Internet Service Providers.

dmoberhaus writes: Researchers at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed an atomic clock that is so precise that our models of Earth's gravity aren't accurate enough to keep up with it. As detailed in a paper published this week in Nature, the atomic clock could pave the way for creating an unprecedented map of the way the Earth's gravity distorts spacetime and even shed light on the development of the early universe. "The level of clock performance being reported is such that we don't actually know how to account for it well enough to support the level of performance the clock achieves," Andrew Ludlow, a physicist at NIST and the project lead on the organization's new atomic clock, told me on the phone. "Right now the state of the art techniques aren't quite good enough so we're limited by how well we understand gravity on different parts of the Earth."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The first ever "solid state" plane, with no moving parts in its propulsion system, has successfully flown for a distance of 60 meters, proving that heavier-than-air flight is possible without jets or propellers. The flight represents a breakthrough in "ionic wind" technology, which uses a powerful electric field to generate charged nitrogen ions, which are then expelled from the back of the aircraft, generating thrust. Steven Barrett, an aeronautics professor at MIT and the lead author of the study published in the journal Nature, said the inspiration for the project came straight from the science fiction of his childhood.

In the prototype plane, wires at the leading edge of the wing have 600 watts of electrical power pumped through them at 40,000 volts. This is enough to induce "electron cascades", ultimately charging air molecules near the wire. Those charged molecules then flow along the electrical field towards a second wire at the back of the wing, bumping into neutral air molecules on the way, and imparting energy to them. Those neutral air molecules then stream out of the back of the plane, providing thrust. The end result is a propulsion system that is entirely electrically powered, almost silent, and with a thrust-to-power ratio comparable to that achieved by conventional systems such as jet engines. "I was a big fan of Star Trek, and at that point I thought that the future looked like it should be planes that fly silently, with no moving parts -- and maybe have a blue glow," said Barrett. "But certainly no propellers or turbines or anything like that. So I started looking into what physics might make flight with no moving parts possible, and came across a concept known as the ionic wind, which was first investigated in the 1920s."

"This didn't make much progress in that time. It was looked at again in the 1950s, and researchers concluded that it couldn't work for aeroplanes. But I started looking into this and went through a period of about five years, working with a series of graduate students to improve fundamental understanding of how you could reduce ionic winds efficiently, and how that could be optimized."

A new study conducted by Indian University researchers found that "relatively few accounts are responsible for a large share of the traffic that carries misinformation," with just 6 percent of Twitter accounts identified as bots responsible for 31 percent of "low-credibility" content. "Bots amplify the reach of low-credibility content, to the point that it is statistically indistinguishable from that of fact-checking articles," researchers wrote. NBC News reports: The study analyzed 14 million tweets that linked to more than 400,000 articles from May 2016 until the end of March 2017. Of those articles, 389,569 were from "low credibility sources" that had been repeatedly flagged by fact-checking organizations for containing misinformation, as well as 15,053 articles that originated from "fact-checking sources." Of that sample, over 13.6 million tweets linked to "low-credibility sources" and around 1.1 million tweets linked to known fact-checking sources, leading researchers to attribute greater virality with "fake news." To achieve maximum exposure, the study found that "social bots" used two methods to manipulate users into trusting the linked article's validity.

"First, bots are particularly active in amplifying content in the very early spreading moments, before an article goes 'viral,'" researchers wrote. "Second, bots target influential users through replies and mentions." Users struggled to differentiate bots from other human users, as humans "have retweeted bots who post low-credibility content almost as much as they retweet other humans," according to the researchers. The researchers noted that social media platforms have moved to address the spread of misinformation by bots, but said "their effectiveness is hard to evaluate."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: A team of researchers conducted their analysis using data stored in something called the UK Biobank. More than 500,000 people have contributed blood, urine and saliva samples to the biobank, which scientists can use to answer various research questions. The volunteers also filled out questionnaires asking a variety of health-related questions, including how much coffee they drink. Part of what determines our sensitivity to bitter substances is determined by the genes we inherit from our parents. So the researchers used genetic analysis of samples from the biobank to find people who were more or less sensitive to three bitter substances: caffeine, quinine (think tonic water) and a chemical called propylthiouracil that is frequently used in genetic tests of people's ability to taste bitter compounds.

Then they looked to see if people sensitive to one or more of these substances drank more or less coffee than people who were not sensitive. To the researchers' surprise, people who were more sensitive to caffeine reported increased coffee consumption compared with people who were less sensitive. The result was restricted to the bitterness of caffeine. People sensitive to quinine and propylthiouracil -- neither of which is in coffee -- tended to drink less coffee. The effect of increased caffeine sensitivity was small: it only amounted to about two tablespoons more coffee per day. But by analyzing so many samples, the researchers were able to detect even small differences like that. The reason may be that people "learn to associate that bitter taste with the stimulation that coffee can provide," says one of the study authors.

Hurricane Harvey swamped Houston with seven days of pounding rain last August. When scientists went back to look at historical weather patterns, they reported Harvey dumped 20 percent more rain than it typically would have. The culprit: climate change. From a report: High-resolution climate simulations of 15 tropical cyclones in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans found that warming in the ocean and atmosphere increased rainfall by between 5% and 10%, although wind speeds remained largely unchanged. This situation is set to worsen under future anticipated warming, however. Researchers found that if little is done to constrain greenhouse gas emissions and the world warms by 3C to 4C this century then hurricane rainfall could increase by a third, while wind speeds would be boosted by as much as 25 knots.

"Climate change has exacerbated rainfall and is set to enhance the wind speed," said Christina Patricola, who undertook the study with her Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory colleague Michael Wehner. "My hope is that this information can be used to improve our resilience to the kinds of extreme weather events we are going to have in the future." The research, published in the journal Nature, used climate models to see how factors such as air and ocean temperatures have influenced hurricanes. Projections into the future were then made, based upon various levels of planetary warming. The findings suggest that enormously destructive storms have already been bolstered by climate change and similar events in the future are on course to be cataclysmic.

Freshly Exhumed writes: A new approach to controlling magnetism in a microchip could open the doors to memory, computing, and sensing devices that consume drastically less power than existing versions. The approach could also overcome some of the inherent physical limitations that have been slowing progress in this area until now.

Researchers at MIT and at Brookhaven National Laboratory have demonstrated that they can control the magnetic properties of a thin-film material simply by applying a small voltage. Changes in magnetic orientation made in this way remain in their new state without the need for any ongoing power, unlike today's standard memory chips, the team has found. The new finding is being reported today in the journal Nature Materials, in a paper by Geoffrey Beach, a professor of materials science and engineering and co-director of the MIT Materials Research Laboratory; graduate student Aik Jun Tan; and eight others at MIT and Brookhaven.

As silicon microchips draw closer to fundamental physical limits that could cap their ability to continue increasing their capabilities while decreasing their power consumption, researchers have been exploring a variety of new technologies that might get around these limits. One of the promising alternatives is an approach called spintronics, which makes use of a property of electrons called spin, instead of their electrical charge. Because spintronic devices can retain their magnetic properties without the need for constant power, which silicon memory chips require, they need far less power to operate. They also generate far less heat -- another major limiting factor for today's devices.

Built from the bottom up, synthetic cells and other creations are starting to come together and could soon test the boundaries of life. From a report: Researchers have been trying to create artificial cells for more than 20 years -- piecing together biomolecules in just the right context to approximate different aspects of life. Although there are many such aspects, they generally fall into three categories: compartmentalization, or the separation of biomolecules in space; metabolism, the biochemistry that sustains life; and informational control, the storage and management of cellular instructions.

The pace of work has been accelerating, thanks in part to recent advances in microfluidic technologies, which allow scientists to coordinate the movements of minuscule cellular components. Research groups have already determined ways of sculpting cell-like blobs into desired shapes; of creating rudimentary versions of cellular metabolism; and of transplanting hand-crafted genomes into living cells. But bringing all these elements together remains a challenge.

[...] Research groups have made big strides recreating several aspects of cell-like life, especially in mimicking the membranes that surround cells and compartmentalize internal components. That's because organizing molecules is key to getting them to work together at the right time and place. Although you can open up a billion bacteria and pour the contents into a test tube, for example, the biological processes would not continue for long. Some components need to be kept apart, and others brought together. "To me, it's about the sociology of molecules," says Cees Dekker, a biophysicist also at Delft University of Technology. For the most part, this means organizing biomolecules on or within lipid membranes. Schwille and her team are expert membrane-wranglers.

Starting about a decade ago, the team started adding Min proteins, which direct a bacterial cell's division machinery, to sheets of artificial membrane made of lipids. The Mins, the researchers found, would pop on and off the membranes and make them wave and swirl1. But when they added the Mins to 3D spheres of lipids, the structures burst like soap bubbles, says Schwille. Her group and others have overcome this problem using microfluidic techniques to construct cell-sized membrane containers, or liposomes, that can tolerate multiple insertions of proteins -- either into the membranes themselves or into the interior.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via MIT Technology Review: A lumpy disc of dark-gray steel covers a bench in the lab space of Boston Metal, an MIT spinout located a half-hour north of its namesake city. It's the company's first batch of the high-strength alloy, created using a novel approach to metal processing. Instead of the blast furnace employed in steelmaking for centuries, Boston Metal has developed something closer to a battery. Specifically, it's what's known as an electrolytic cell, which uses electricity -- rather than carbon -- to process raw iron ore.

If the technology works at scale as cheaply as the founders hope, it could offer a clear path to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions from one of the hardest-to-clean sectors of the global economy, and the single biggest industrial source of climate pollution. After working on the idea for the last six years, the nine-person company is shifting into its next phase. If it closes a pending funding round, the startup plans to build a large demonstration facility and develop an industrial-scale cell for steel production. The process to produce steel results in around 1.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere annually, "adding up to around 5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to a recent paper in Science," MIT Technology Review reports.

The electrolytic cell that Boston Metal developed was realized after it was proposed to be used to extract oxygen from the moon's surface. "The by-product was molten metal," the report says. "But producing something like steel would require an anode made from cheap materials that wouldn't corrode under high temperatures or readily react with iron oxide. In 2013, [MIT chemist] Sadoway and MIT metallurgy researcher Antoine Allanore published a paper in Nature concluding that anodes made from chromium-based alloys might check all those boxes."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The amount of energy required to "mine" one dollar's worth of bitcoin is more than twice that required to mine the same value of copper, gold or platinum, according to a new paper, suggesting that the virtual work that underpins bitcoin, ethereum and similar projects is more similar to real mining than anyone intended. One dollar's worth of bitcoin takes about 17 megajoules of energy to mine, according to researchers from the Oak Ridge Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio, compared with four, five and seven megajoules for copper, gold and platinum.

Other cryptocurrencies also fair poorly in comparison, the researchers write in the journal Nature Sustainability, ascribing a cost-per-dollar of 7MJ for ethereum and 14MJ for the privacy focused cryptocurrency monero. But all the cryptocurrencies examined come off well compared with aluminium, which takes an astonishing 122MJ to mine one dollar's worth of ore. [...] To account for the wild fluctuations in cryptocurrency price, and therefore effort expended by miners, the researchers used a median of all the values between January 1, 2016 and June 30, 2018, and attempted to account for the geographic dispersal of bitcoin miners. "Any cryptocurrency mined in China would generate four times the amount of CO2 compared to the amount generated in Canada," they write, highlighting the importance of such country-dependent accounting.

Two of the world's largest biomedical research funders have backed a plan to make all papers resulting from work they fund open access on publication by 2020. From a report: On 5 November, the London-based Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, announced they were both endorsing 'Plan S,' adding their weight to an initiative already backed by 13 research funders across Europe since its launch in September. The plan was spearheaded by Robert-Jan Smits, the European Commission's special envoy on open access. The Wellcome Trust, which gave out $1.4 billion in grants in 2016-17, is also the first funder to detail how it intends to implement Plan S. Its approach suggests that journals may not need to switch wholesale to open-access (OA) models by 2020 to be compliant with Plan S -- if the initiative's other backers decide on a similar line.

The biomedical charity already has an OA policy, but in some cases it allows an embargo of up to six months after publication before papers have to be made free to read. The organization says that by 1 January 2020, it will ban all such embargoes. Wellcome-funded work will not be able to appear in Nature, Science and other influential subscription journals unless these publications permit Wellcome-funded papers to be published under OA terms. Researchers that the charity funds could still publish in subscription journals, says Robert Kiley, Wellcome's head of open research. But only if those journals agree that the authors can immediately deposit their accepted manuscript in the PubMed Central repository under a liberal publishing licence. Some publishers, such as the Royal Society in London, already allow this.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: We learn it at high school: Release two objects of different masses in the absence of friction forces and they fall down at the same rate in Earth's gravity. What we haven't learned, because it hasn't been directly measured in experiments, is whether antimatter falls down at the same rate as ordinary matter or if it might behave differently. Two new experiments at CERN, ALPHA-g and GBAR, have now started their journey towards answering this question.

After months of round-the-clock work by researchers and engineers to put together the experiments, ALPHA-g and GBAR have received the first beams of antiprotons, marking the beginning of both experiments. ALPHA-g began taking beam on October 30, after receiving the necessary safety approvals. ELENA sent its first beam to GBAR on July 20, and since then the decelerator and GBAR researchers have been trying to perfect the delivery of the beam. The ALPHA-g and GBAR teams are now racing to commission their experiments before CERN's accelerators shut down in a few weeks for a two-year period of maintenance work.

Doctors in Switzerland have used an electrical device to help three paralyzed men walk again. The device was inserted around the men's spines to boost the signals from their brains to their legs. The study has been published in the journal Nature. The BBC reports: The first patient to be treated was 30-year-old Swiss man David M'zee, who suffered a severe spinal injury seven years ago in a sporting accident. David's doctor said he would never walk again. However, thanks to an electrical implant developed by a team at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), he can walk more than half a mile with the implant turned on. Two other men have also managed to walk again, to varying degrees. Gertan Oskan, a 35-year-old engineer from the Netherlands, was knocked over by a car seven years ago. His doctors told him on his birthday that he would be paralyzed for life. He is now beginning to regain some movement. Sebastian Tobler, a 48-year-old man from Germany, was a keen cyclist who loved being out in the countryside before he was knocked off his bike. Now he's back on a specially adapted bike that is powered mostly by his hands -- but also partly by his legs.

Scientists are warning that if human beings continue to mine the world's wildernesses for resources and convert them into cities and farms at the pace of the previous century, the planet's few remaining wild places could disappear in decades. From a report: Today, more than 77 percent of land on earth, excluding Antarctica, has been modified by human industry, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, up from just 15 percent a century ago. The study, led by researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, paints the first global picture of the threat to the world's remaining wildernesses -- and the image is bleak. "We're on a threshold where whole systems could collapse and the consequences of that would be catastrophic," said James R. Allan, one of the study's authors. In the study, Mr. Allan and his colleagues urged the participants of a United Nations conference on biological diversity, scheduled for next month in Egypt, to protect all of the world's remaining wilderness areas. "We cannot afford to lose more," he said. "We must save it in its entirety."

Jeffrey M. Perkel, writing for Nature: Perched atop the Cerro Pachon ridge in the Chilean Andes is a building site that will eventually become the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). When it comes online in 2022, the telescope will generate terabytes of data each night as it surveys the southern skies automatically. And to crunch those data, astronomers will use a familiar and increasingly popular tool: the Jupyter notebook. Jupyter is a free, open-source, interactive web tool known as a computational notebook, which researchers can use to combine software code, computational output, explanatory text and multimedia resources in a single document. Computational notebooks have been around for decades, but Jupyter in particular has exploded in popularity over the past couple of years. This rapid uptake has been aided by an enthusiastic community of user-developers and a redesigned architecture that allows the notebook to speak dozens of programming languages -- a fact reflected in its name, which was inspired, according to co-founder Fernando Perez, by the programming languages Julia (Ju), Python (Py) and R.

[...] For data scientists, Jupyter has emerged as a de facto standard, says Lorena Barba, a mechanical and aeronautical engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Mario Juric, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle who coordinates the LSST's data-management team, says: "I've never seen any migration this fast. It's just amazing." Computational notebooks are essentially laboratory notebooks for scientific computing. Instead of pasting, say, DNA gels alongside lab protocols, researchers embed code, data and text to document their computational methods. The result, says Jupyter co-creator Brian Granger at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, is a "computational narrative" -- a document that allows researchers to supplement their code and data with analysis, hypotheses and conjecture. For data scientists, that format can drive exploration.

dmoberhaus writes: Researchers have found that if Bitcoin is adopted at rates similar to technologies like credit cards, its energy consumption could increase global temperatures by 2C in just 16 years. This is well beyond the limit of catastrophic climate change proposed by the UN. Motherboard spoke to an expert on Bitcoin and energy about the study's implications.

In what is referred to as the "Moral Machine Experiment", a survey of more than two million people from nearly every country on the planet, people preferred to save humans over animals, young over old, and more people over fewer. From a report: Since 2016, scientists have posed this scenario to folks around the world through the "Moral Machine," an online platform hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that gauges how humans respond to ethical decisions made by artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, the team behind the Moral Machine released responses from more than two million people spanning 233 countries, dependencies and territories. They found a few universal decisions -- for instance, respondents preferred to save a person over an animal, and young people over older people -- but other responses differed by regional cultures and economic status.

The study's findings offer clues on how to ethically program driverless vehicles based on regional preferences, but the study also highlights underlying diversity issues in the tech industry -- namely that it leaves out voices in the developing world. The Moral Machine uses a quiz to give participants randomly generated sets of 13 questions. Each scenario has two choices: You save the car's passengers or you save the pedestrians. However, the characteristics of the passengers and pedestrians varied randomly -- including by gender, age, social status and physical fitness. What they found: The researchers identified three relatively universal preferences. On average, people wanted: to spare human lives over animals, save more lives over fewer, prioritize young people over old ones. When respondents' preferences did differ, they were highly correlated to cultural and economic differences between countries. For instance, people who were more tolerant of illegal jaywalking tended to be from countries with weaker governance, nations who had a large cultural distance from the U.S. and places that do not value individualism as highly. These distinct cultural preferences could dictate whether a jaywalking pedestrian deserves the same protection as pedestrians crossing the road legally in the event they're hit by a self-driving car. Further reading: The study; and MIT Technology Review.

Brines suffused with the life-giving gas could offer hope for past and even present microbes on the Red Planet, according to a new study. From a report: New research suggests our neighboring world could hide enough oxygen in briny liquid water near its surface to support microbial life, opening up a wealth of potentially habitable regions across the entire planet. Although the findings do not directly measure the oxygen content of brines known to exist on the Red Planet, they constitute an important step toward determining where life could exist there today. Aerobic respiration, which relies on oxygen, is a key component of present-day life on Earth. In this process, cells take in oxygen and break it down to produce energy to drive metabolism.

Mars's very low levels of atmospheric oxygen have led many scientists to dismiss the possibility of aerobic respiration there today, but the new research brings this possibility back into play. The study appears in the October 22 edition of Nature Geoscience. "Our work is calling for a complete revision for how we think about the potential for life on Mars, and the work oxygen can do, implying that if life ever existed on Mars it might have been breathing oxygen," says lead study author Vlada Stamenkovic, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. "We have the potential now to understand the current habitability." Although Mars is today a freeze-dried desert, it possesses abundant reserves of subsurface water ice, as well as some amount of liquid water in the form of brines. The brines' high salt content lowers the temperature at which they freeze, allowing them to remain liquid even on Mars's frigid surface.

In their new study, Stamenkovic and his colleagues coupled a model of how oxygen dissolves in brines with a model of the Martian climate. Their results revealed that pools of salty liquid at or just beneath the surface could capture the meager amounts of oxygen from the Red Planet's atmosphere, creating a reservoir that microbes might metabolically utilize. According to the research, Martian brines today could hold higher concentrations of oxygen than were present even on the early Earth -- which prior to about 2.4 billion years ago harbored only trace amounts of the gas in its air.

Layzej writes: Back in 2005, solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev made a $10,000 bet that global temperatures, driven primarily by changes in the Sun's activity, would fall over the next decade. The bet would compare the then record hot years between 1998 to 2003 with that between between 2012 and 2017. With temperatures falling from their peak during the 1998 super El-Nino, and solar output continuing to fall, this seemed like a sure bet. The results are now in and all datasets show that climate modeler James Annan is the clear winner.

At the time of the wager, Annan had supposed that the reputation of the scientists involved would be enough to ensure payment once the bet was settled. Unfortunately, as was the case with Alfred Russel Wallace's famous 1870 bet against flat-Earthers, the losing parties have refused to pay up.
"More precisely, Bashkirtsev is refusing to pay," writes the climate modeler on his blog, "and Mashnich is refusing to even reply to email.

"With impressive chutzpah, Bashkirtsev proposed we should arrange a follow-up bet which he would promise to honour."

OneHundredAndTen writes: A new article in Nature reports of a new, extremely precise measurement of the electric dipole moment of the electron. The conclusion is that, within the margin of error of the measurement, the electron remains a perfect sphere. This implies that supersymmetric theories keep running out of corners to hide, that another nail is driven into their coffin, and that string theory looks less and less compelling. By lighting up the molecules with lasers, "the scientists were able to interpret how other subatomic particles alter the distribution of an electron's charge," reports Scientific American. "The symmetrical roundness of the electrons suggested that unseen particles aren't big enough to skew electrons into squashed oblong shapes, or ovals. These findings once again confirm a long-standing physics theory, known as the Standard Model, which describes how particles and forces in the universe behave."

A new study from Nature Plants has identified the one climate-related issue that can unite people from myriad political backgrounds -- beer. From a report: Led by Wei Xie, an agricultural scientist at Peking University, the paper finds that regions that grow barley, the primary crop used to brew beer, are projected to experience severe droughts and heat waves due to anthropogenic climate change. According to five climate models that used different projected temperature increases for the coming century, extreme weather events could reduce barley yields by 3 to 17 percent. Barley harvests are mostly sold as livestock fodder, so beer availability could be further hindered by the likely prioritization of grain yields to feed cattle and other farm animals, rather than for brewing beer.

The net result will be a decline in affordable access to beer, which is the most commonly imbibed alcoholic beverage in the world. Within a few decades, this luxury may be out of reach for hundreds of millions of people, including those in affluent nations where breweries are a major industry. Price spikes are estimated to range from $4 to over $20 for a standard six-pack in nations like the US, Ireland, Denmark, and Poland.

bbsguru shares a report from New Atlas: Slow-motion video has always been fun to watch, with the best rigs usually shooting on the scale of thousands of frames per second. But now the world's fastest camera, developed by researchers at Caltech and INRS, blows them out of the water, capturing the world at a mind-boggling 10 trillion frames per second -- fast enough to probe the nanoscale interactions between light and matter. For the new imaging technique, the team started with compressed ultrafast photography (CUP), a method that it is capable of 100 billion fps. That's nothing to scoff at by itself, but it's still not fast enough to really capture what's going on with ultrafast laser pulses, which occur on the scale of femtoseconds. A femtosecond, for reference, is one quadrillionth of a second.

So the team built on that technology by combining a femtosecond streak camera and a static camera, and running it through a data acquisition technique known as Radon transformation. This advanced system was dubbed T-CUP. For the first test, the camera proved its worth by capturing a single femtosecond pulse of laser light, recording 25 images that were each 400 femtoseconds apart. Through this process, the team could see the changes in the light pulse's shape, intensity and angle of inclination, in much slower motion than ever before.

Huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to avoid dangerous climate change, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of the food system's impact on the environment. From a report: In western countries, beef consumption needs to fall by 90% and be replaced by five times more beans and pulses. The research [PDF] also finds that enormous changes to farming are needed to avoid destroying the planet's ability to feed the 10 billion people expected to be on the planet in a few decades. Food production already causes great damage to the environment, via greenhouse gases from livestock, deforestation and water shortages from farming, and vast ocean dead zones from agricultural pollution. But without action, its impact will get far worse as the world population rises by 2.3 billion people by 2050 and global income triples, enabling more people to eat meat-rich western diets.

According to a report published in the journal Nature Geoscience, Jupiter's Moon Europa may be home to a forest of tall, jagged ice spikes, which may complicate future missions looking for possible alien microbes. ScienceAlert reports: Few moons in the Solar System are as intriguing as Jupiter's moon Europa. A global ocean of salt water almost certainly surrounds the moon - and it holds more water than any ocean on Earth. Above this immense sea, where surface temperatures dip to minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit (-184 degrees Celsius), a crust of water ice forms a shell. Astronomers predict that Jupiter, which bombards the moon with intense radiation, causes the entire moon to groan with gravity's tug. Europa's liquid water is a tempting target for future missions looking for possible alien microbes. But before a future lander can search for microscopic ET, the probe might have to contend with a forest of tall, jagged ice spikes. Their research suggests Europa is an icy hedgehog world, covered in ice formations rarely found on Earth. On our planet, ice takes several forms, as varied as needle ice, rime, parking lot slush and more exotic lumps.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Gene editing to correct faulty DNA in human embryos has taken a step closer to becoming a reality, with scientists showing it is possible to correct genetic problems in mice before they are born. Researchers used a form of the gene-editing tool Crispr-Cas9 to introduce a mutation into a gene that would otherwise cause lethal liver failure in mice. While the approach has previously been shown to work in mice after birth, the latest study showed it was also possible to make the all-important tweak before they were born. Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, a team of researchers in the US report how they conducted a series of experiments to explore the use of gene editing in mouse fetuses using a modified form of Crispr that can alter single "base pairs" -- the molecules that couple up to form the rungs of the DNA double helix -- but only cuts one strand of DNA when making a change.

After showing it was possible to make a change at a particular spot in the DNA of liver cells in mouse fetuses, the team focused on a condition known as hereditary tyrosinemia type 1. This is a genetic disease that prevents the body from breaking down an amino acid called tyrosine as it should, and can cause death if left untreated. The team took mice with a genetic mutation that produced a similar condition to hereditary tyrosinemia type 1 and bred them, with the mothers kept on a drug called nitisione. The team then injected 26 of the fetuses with a virus carrying the genetic instructions for making the gene-editing tool, and 27 of them with the same virus but without information for the tool. After birth the baby mice no longer received the drug, and the team watched what happened. "In the non-treated mice, they all died by 21 days of life," said Dr William Peranteau, a pediatric and fetal surgeon at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who co-led the study. "However, those that had been treated were able to survive until the end of the study at three months, and looked very similar to another group that had not been injected with anything and were kept on the drug. No gene editing was seen in the mothers who had given birth to the mice.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Four years ago, IBM announced that it was investing $3 billion over the next five years into the future of nanoelectronics with a broad project it dubbed "7nm and Beyond." With at least one major chipmaker, GlobalFoundries, hitting the wall at the 7-nm node, IBM is forging ahead, using graphene to deposit nanomaterials in predefined locations without chemical contamination. In research described in the journal Nature Communications, the IBM researchers for the first time electrified graphene so that it helps to deposit nanomaterials with 97% accuracy.

"As this method works for a wide variety of nanomaterials, we envision integrated devices with functionalities that represent the unique physical properties of the nanomaterial," said Mathias Steiner, manager at IBM Research-Brazil. "We also can envision on-chip light detectors and emitters operating within a distinct wavelength range determined by the optical properties of the nanomaterial." As an example, Steiner explained that if you wanted to modify the spectral performance of an optoelectronic device, you could simply replace the nanomaterial while keeping the manufacturing process flow the same. If you take the method one step further, you could assemble different nanomaterials in different places doing multiple passes of assembly to create on-chip light detectors operating in different detection windows at the same time.

From a report: For the first time, an international team of researchers has used a quantum computer to create artificial life -- a simulation of living organisms that scientists can use to understand life at the level of whole populations all the way down to cellular interactions. With the quantum computer, individual living organisms represented at a microscopic level with superconducting qubits were made to "mate," interact with their environment, and "die" to model some of the major factors that influence evolution. The new research, published in Scientific Reports on Thursday, is a breakthrough that may eventually help answer the question of whether the origin of life can be explained by quantum mechanics, a theory of physics that describes the universe in terms of the interactions between subatomic particles. Modeling quantum artificial life is a new approach to one of the most vexing questions in science: How does life emerge from inert matter, such as the "primordial soup" of organic molecules that once existed on Earth?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new study led by UC San Diego's Katharine Ricke published in Nature Climate Change found that not only is the global social cost of carbon dramatically higher than the federal estimate ($37 per ton) -- probably between $177 and $805 per ton, most likely $417 -- but that the cost to America is around $50 per ton. That's the second-highest in the world behind India's $90, and is also higher than the current federal estimate for the global social cost of carbon. That's a remarkable conclusion worth repeating. Ricke's team found that the cost of carbon pollution to just the United States is probably higher than its government's current estimate of costs to the entire world. And the actual global cost is more than 10 times higher than the federal estimate.

[The Guardian's Dana Nuccitelli] asked Ricke to describe her team's approach in this study: To calculate social cost of carbon, you need to answer four questions in sequence:
1. How would the economy change with no climate change (including GHG emissions)?
2. How does the Earth system respond to emissions of carbon dioxide?
3. How does the economy respond to changes in the Earth system?
4. How should we value losses today vs. in (for example) 100 years?

The team answered these questions using four "modules": a socio-economic module to answer the first question, a climate module to address the second, a damages module to investigate the third, and a discounting module to tackle the fourth.

That study detailed the relationship between a country's average temperature and its per capita GDP, finding a sweet spot around 13C (55F). That's the optimal temperature for human economic productivity. Economies in countries with lower average temperatures like Canada and Russia would benefit from additional warming, but it would slow economic growth for nations closer to the equator with hotter temperatures. The United States is currently right near the peak temperature, whereas many European countries like Germany, the UK, and France are 3-5C cooler, and a bit below the ideal economic temperature. So, continued global warming is worse for the US economy than Europe's.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new study led by UC San Diego's Katharine Ricke published in Nature Climate Change found that not only is the global social cost of carbon dramatically higher than the federal estimate ($37 per ton) -- probably between $177 and $805 per ton, most likely $417 -- but that the cost to America is around $50 per ton. That's the second-highest in the world behind India's $90, and is also higher than the current federal estimate for the global social cost of carbon. That's a remarkable conclusion worth repeating. Ricke's team found that the cost of carbon pollution to just the United States is probably higher than its government's current estimate of costs to the entire world. And the actual global cost is more than 10 times higher than the federal estimate.

[The Guardian's Dana Nuccitelli] asked Ricke to describe her team's approach in this study: To calculate social cost of carbon, you need to answer four questions in sequence:
1. How would the economy change with no climate change (including GHG emissions)?
2. How does the Earth system respond to emissions of carbon dioxide?
3. How does the economy respond to changes in the Earth system?
4. How should we value losses today vs. in (for example) 100 years?

The team answered these questions using four "modules": a socio-economic module to answer the first question, a climate module to address the second, a damages module to investigate the third, and a discounting module to tackle the fourth.

That study detailed the relationship between a country's average temperature and its per capita GDP, finding a sweet spot around 13C (55F). That's the optimal temperature for human economic productivity. Economies in countries with lower average temperatures like Canada and Russia would benefit from additional warming, but it would slow economic growth for nations closer to the equator with hotter temperatures. The United States is currently right near the peak temperature, whereas many European countries like Germany, the UK, and France are 3-5C cooler, and a bit below the ideal economic temperature. So, continued global warming is worse for the US economy than Europe's.

A trio of laser scientists have won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work using intense beams to capture superfast processes and to manipulate tiny objects. From a report: The laureates include Donna Strickland, who is the first woman to win the award in 55 years. Strickland, at the University of Waterloo, Canada, will share half the 9 million Swedish krona (US$1 million) prize with her former supervisor, Gerard Mourou, from the Ecole Polytechnique, in Palaiseau, France. The other half of the prize went to Arthur Ashkin, of Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey.

Strickland and Mourou pioneered a way to produce the shortest, most intense pulses of light ever created, which are now used throughout science to unravel processes that previously appeared instantaneous, such as the motion of electrons within atoms, as well as in laser-eye surgery. Ashkin won the prize for his pioneering development of 'optical tweezers', beams of laser light that can grab and control microscopic objects such as viruses and cells. Further reading: The Guardian.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Scientists from the Energy Materials and Surface Sciences Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) believe they've found a winning formula in a new method to fabricate low-cost high-efficiency solar cells. Prof. Yabing Qi and his team from OIST in collaboration with Prof. Shengzhong Liu from Shaanxi Normal University, China, developed the cells using the materials and compounds that mimic the crystalline structure of the naturally occurring mineral perovskite. They describe their technique in a study published in the journal Nature Communications. Perovskite offers a more affordable solution, Prof. Qi says. Perovskite was first used to make solar cells in 2009 by Prof. Tsutomu Miyasaka's research team at Toin University of Yokohama, Japan, and since then it has been rapidly gaining importance. The fabrication method he and his research team have developed produces perovskite solar cells with an efficiency comparable to crystalline silicon cells, but it is potentially much cheaper than making silicon solar cells.

To make the new cells, the researchers coated transparent conductive substrates with perovskite films that absorb sunlight very efficiently. They used a gas-solid reaction-based technique in which the substrate is first coated with a layer of hydrogen lead triiodide incorporated with a small amount of chlorine ions and methylamine gas -- allowing them to reproducibly make large uniform panels, each consisting of multiple solar cells. In developing the method, the scientists realized that making the perovskite layer 1 micron thick increased the working life of the solar cell significantly. In addition, a thicker coating not only boosted the stability of the solar cells but also facilitated the fabrication processes, thereby lowering its production costs. The team is now working on increasing the size of their newly designed solar cell prototype to large commercial-sized panels that can be several feet long. They have reportedly built a working model of their new perovskite solar modules, thanks to funding from OIST's Technology Development and Innovation Center, but "the process of upscaing has reduced the efficiency of the cells from 20% to 15%," reports Phys.Org. "[T]he researchers are optimistic that they will be able to improve the way they work in the coming years and successfully commercialize their use."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: For the first time, scientists have demonstrated that a controversial new kind of genetic engineering can rapidly spread a self-destructive genetic modification through a complex species. The scientists used the revolutionary gene-editing tool known as CRISPR to engineer mosquitoes with a "gene drive," which rapidly transmitted a sterilizing mutation through other members of the mosquito's species. After mosquitoes carrying the mutation were released into cages filled with unmodified mosquitoes in a high-security basement laboratory in London, virtually all of the insects were wiped out, according to a report in Nature Biotechnology. The mosquitoes were created in the hopes of using them as a potent new weapon in the long, frustrating fight against malaria. Malaria remains one of the world's deadliest diseases, killing more than 400,000 people every year, mostly children younger than 5 years old. What's encouraging is that the mosquitos reportedly did not appear to further mutate in a way that would diminish the effectiveness of the engineered mutation. "But the researchers stressed that many years of additional research are needed to further test the safety and effectiveness of the approach before anyone attempts to release these mosquitos or any other organisms created this way into the wild," reports NPR.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: At least five people whose legs were completely paralyzed are walking again, two of them with no outside help, thanks to a specialized program of therapy and a pain stimulator implanted in their spines, researchers reported Monday. It's the latest and most dramatic advance in a new approach to treating spinal cord injuries developed at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. The reports show that electrical stimulation of the spine, when combined with a very intense and specialized training program, can re-educate the body and help move the legs even though signals from the brain are cut off.

The stimulator is implanted into the epidural layer surrounding the spinal cord, and sends controlled signals into the bundle of nerve tissue. The team also employs intense training techniques to try to get the body to make sense of the signals. "There were three types of training sessions: stepping on a treadmill, over-ground standing, and over-ground walking, with each type of session performed daily," the team wrote in their report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Two still need support and help from human trainers, but Marquis and another patient, 23-year-old Kelly Thomas of Citrus County, Florida, can walk alone using a walker or a cane. A second team at the Mayo Clinic reports somewhat similar results using the Louisville approach. In their study, published Monday in Nature Medicine, they report on one of two patients they have treated, who can walk with the assistance of physical trainers.

In a multi-'cat' experiment, the textbook interpretation of quantum theory seems to lead to contradictory pictures of reality, physicists claim. New submitter Lanodonal shares a report: In the world's most famous thought experiment, physicist Erwin Schrodinger described how a cat in a box could be in an uncertain predicament. The peculiar rules of quantum theory meant that it could be both dead and alive, until the box was opened and the cat's state measured. Now, two physicists have devised a modern version of the paradox by replacing the cat with a physicist doing experiments -- with shocking implications.

Quantum theory has a long history of thought experiments, and in most cases these are used to point to weaknesses in various interpretations of quantum mechanics. But the latest version, which involves multiple players, is unusual: it shows that if the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, then different experimenters can reach opposite conclusions about what the physicist in the box has measured. This means that quantum theory contradicts itself.

The conceptual experiment has been debated with gusto in physics circles for more than two years -- and has left most researchers stumped, even in a field accustomed to weird concepts. "I think this is a whole new level of weirdness," says Matthew Leifer, a theoretical physicist at Chapman University in Orange, California. The authors, Daniela Frauchiger and Renato Renner of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, posted their first version of the argument online in April 2016. The final paper [PDF] appears in Nature Communications on 18 September.

In a multi-'cat' experiment, the textbook interpretation of quantum theory seems to lead to contradictory pictures of reality, physicists claim. New submitter Lanodonal shares a report: In the world's most famous thought experiment, physicist Erwin Schrodinger described how a cat in a box could be in an uncertain predicament. The peculiar rules of quantum theory meant that it could be both dead and alive, until the box was opened and the cat's state measured. Now, two physicists have devised a modern version of the paradox by replacing the cat with a physicist doing experiments -- with shocking implications.

Quantum theory has a long history of thought experiments, and in most cases these are used to point to weaknesses in various interpretations of quantum mechanics. But the latest version, which involves multiple players, is unusual: it shows that if the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, then different experimenters can reach opposite conclusions about what the physicist in the box has measured. This means that quantum theory contradicts itself.

The conceptual experiment has been debated with gusto in physics circles for more than two years -- and has left most researchers stumped, even in a field accustomed to weird concepts. "I think this is a whole new level of weirdness," says Matthew Leifer, a theoretical physicist at Chapman University in Orange, California. The authors, Daniela Frauchiger and Renato Renner of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, posted their first version of the argument online in April 2016. The final paper [PDF] appears in Nature Communications on 18 September.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: An international team of researchers led by Princeton physicist Zahid Hasan has discovered a quantum state of matter that can be "tuned" at will -- and it's 10 times more tuneable than existing theories can explain. This level of manipulability opens enormous possibilities for next-generation nanotechnologies and quantum computing. Hasan and his colleagues, whose research appears in the current issue of Nature, are calling their discovery a "novel" quantum state of matter because it is not explained by existing theories of material properties. The classical phases of matter -- solids, liquids and gases -- arise from interactions between atoms or molecules. In a quantum phase of matter, the interactions take place between electrons, and are much more complex.

[Hasan] and his colleagues arranged atoms on the surface of crystals in many different patterns and watched what happened. They used various materials prepared by collaborating groups in China, Taiwan and Princeton. One particular arrangement, a six-fold honeycomb shape called a "kagome lattice" for its resemblance to a Japanese basket-weaving pattern, led to something startling -- but only when examined under a spectromicroscope in the presence of a strong magnetic field [...]. All the known theories of physics predicted that the electrons would adhere to the six-fold underlying pattern, but instead, the electrons hovering above their atoms decided to march to their own drummer -- in a straight line, with two-fold symmetry. The decoupling between the electrons and the arrangement of atoms was surprising enough, but then the researchers applied a magnetic field and discovered that they could turn that one line in any direction they chose. Without moving the crystal lattice, [one] could rotate the line of electrons just by controlling the magnetic field around them.

Iwastheone shares a report from Space.com: The weird hexagon swirling around Saturn's north pole is much taller than scientists had thought, a new study suggests. Researchers have generally regarded the 20,000-mile-wide (32,000 kilometers) hexagon -- a jet stream composed of air moving at about 200 mph (320 km/h) -- as a lower-atmosphere phenomenon, restricted to the clouds of Saturn's troposphere. But the bizarre structure actually extends about 180 miles (300 km) above those cloud tops, up into the stratosphere, at least during the northern spring and summer, a new study suggests. The hexagon, which surrounds a smaller circular vortex situated at the north pole, has existed for at least 38 years; NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft spotted the sharp-cornered feature when they flew by Saturn in 1980 and 1981, respectively. Scientists started to get much more detailed looks at the hexagon in 2004, when NASA's Cassini spacecraft began orbiting the ringed planet. But Cassini's hexagon observations were pretty much confined to the troposphere for a decade after its arrival; springtime didn't come to Saturn's north until 2009, and low temperatures in the stratosphere continued to compromise measurements by the probe's Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) instrument for another five years.

The formation of a stratospheric hexagon appears to be tied to the warming brought on by the change of seasons, the research team wrote in the new study. Indeed, Cassini spied a vortex high above the south pole during its early years at Saturn, when that hemisphere was enjoying summer. (Saturn takes 30 Earth years to orbit the sun, so seasons on the ringed planet last about 7.5 years apiece.) But the southern stratospheric vortex wasn't hexagonal. And neither, for that matter, is the vortex that spins around the south pole lower down, in the tropospheric clouds, the researchers said. "This could mean that there's a fundamental asymmetry between Saturn's poles that we're yet to understand, or it could mean that the north polar vortex was still developing in our last observations and kept doing so after Cassini's demise," study lead author Leigh Fletcher, of the University of Leicester in England, said in a statement.

Scientists from Harvard and Google have fed a neural network with historical seismological data "and more accurately predicted where 'more than 30,000 mainshock-aftershock pairs' from an independent dataset occurred, more accurately than previous ways like the Coulomb forecast method," reports Engadget. "That's because the AI method takes multiple aspects of stress shifts into account versus Coulomb's singular approach." From the report: This model isn't ready for primetime yet, though. The scientists note that their study only counts one type of aftershock triggering when making predictions (static stress changes), rather than accounting for static and dynamic stress changes. "The combination of static and dynamic stress changes leads to a spatial distribution of aftershocks that differs from the pattern caused by static stress changes alone," Nature writes. Then there's the fact that the models don't take complex faults into account when making predictions. The science journal explains this shortcoming as such: "This could explain why the authors see no evidence of a lack of aftershocks near faults -- caused by an overall decrease in stress -- despite the fact that this feature is readily apparent in situations in which data and circumstances allow it to be clearly observed."