The inside of future nuclear fusion energy reactors will be among the harshest environments ever produced on Earth. What’s strong enough to protect the inside of a fusion reactor from plasma-produced heat fluxes akin to space shuttles reentering Earth’s atmosphere?
Physicists’ latest achievement with neutral atoms paves the way for new quantum computer designs.
In the quest to develop quantum computers, physicists have taken several different paths. For instance, Google recently reported that their prototype quantum computer might have made a specific calculation faster than a classical computer. Those efforts relied on a strategy that involves superconducting materials, which are materials that, when chilled to ultracold temperatures, conduct electricity with zero resistance. Other quantum computing strategies involve arrays of charged or neutral atoms.
Now, a team of quantum physicists at Caltech has made strides in work that uses a more complex class of neutral atoms called the alkaline-earth atoms, which reside in the second column of the periodic table. These atoms, which include magnesium, calcium, and strontium, have two electrons in their outer regions, or shells. Previously, researchers who experimented with neutral atoms had focused on elements located in the first column of the periodic table, which have just one electron in their outer shells.
O,.o circa 2019.
PARIS (Reuters) — A Paris zoo showcased a mysterious new organism on Wednesday, dubbed the “blob”, a yellowish unicellular small living being which looks like a fungus but acts like an animal.
This newest exhibit of the Paris Zoological Park, which goes on display to the public on Saturday, has no mouth, no stomach, no eyes, yet it can detect food and digest it.
Continue reading “Paris zoo unveils the ‘blob’, an organism with no brain but 720 sexes” »
What if extinct animals could be brought back to life? Scientists have managed to reawaken cells from a 28,000 year old woolly mammoth.
A NASA geophysics satellite’s long space odyssey is nearly at an end.
The Orbiting Geophysics Observatory 1 spacecraft, or OGO-1, launched in September 1964 to study Earth’s magnetic environment and how our planet interacts with the sun. The satellite gathered data until 1969, was officially decommissioned in 1971 and has been zooming silently around Earth on a highly elliptical two-day orbit ever since.
In this Review, Suhre, McCarthy and Schwenk describe how combining genetics with plasma proteomics is providing notable insights into human disease. As changes in the circulating proteome are often an intermediate molecular readout between a genetic variant and its organismal effect, proteomics can enable a deeper understanding of disease mechanisms, clinical biomarkers and therapeutic opportunities.
In a landmark study, scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have mapped the immense envelope of gas, called a halo, surrounding the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor. Scientists were surprised to find that this tenuous, nearly invisible halo of diffuse plasma extends 1.3 million light-years from the galaxy—about halfway to our Milky Way—and as far as 2 million light-years in some directions. This means that Andromeda’s halo is already bumping into the halo of our own galaxy.
They also found that the halo has a layered structure, with two main nested and distinct shells of gas. This is the most comprehensive study of a halo surrounding a galaxy.
“Understanding the huge halos of gas surrounding galaxies is immensely important,” explained co-investigator Samantha Berek of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “This reservoir of gas contains fuel for future star formation within the galaxy, as well as outflows from events such as supernovae. It’s full of clues regarding the past and future evolution of the galaxy, and we’re finally able to study it in great detail in our closest galactic neighbor.”
Both shocking and intriguing for the possibilities of gynogenesis reproduction in which sperm is used from one creature to fertilize an egg, but its DNA is ignored.
A team of researchers working at Hungary’s National Agricultural Research and Innovation Centre, Research Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture, has accidentally bred a new kind of fish—dubbed the sturddlefish by some observers, it is a cross between an American Paddlefish and a Russian Sturgeon. In their paper published in the journal Genes, the group describes accidentally breeding the fish and what they learned by doing so.
In the past, scientists and others have bred animals from different species for various reasons, from research to utility—mules (crossed between donkeys and horses) are considered to have beneficial traits from both animals, and ligers (a cross between lions and tigers) have helped researchers understand their respective genetic backgrounds. In this new effort, the researchers claim that they were not trying to create a new type of fish, they were instead attempting to apply gynogenesis (a type of reproduction in which sperm is used from one creature to fertilize an egg, but its DNA is ignored) using American paddlefish and Russian sturgeon. To their surprise, the eggs produced fish that grew to adults.
Continue reading “Researchers accidentally breed sturddlefish” »
One of, if not the oldest visible form of life, to which we owe much of our original Oxygen rich environment, these Stromatolites are under threat.
Agriculture has threatened an area holding an exceptional array of microbes.
Continue reading “Watch: Threatened pools in Mexican desert hold clues to early life” »
The more you rely on unaccountable, opaque, and closed source epistemic vaccines, the more you will end up with a supercult. I’m personally guaranteeing it.
Final warning. This is military-grade techniques being applied to American citizens and if you don’t see a problem with it, you will when we start going after your academics, journalists, intellectuals, scientists, and peers with the same techniques. And you can fucking bet we will.
