Origin of Information —“Something Very Old, Very Powerful and Very Special has Been Unleashed on Earth” | The Daily Galaxy.
“Humans are strange…We are the aliens,” observes Columbia University astrophysicist, Caleb Scharf, noting that humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. “We also have a truly outsize impact on the planetary environment without much in the way of natural attrition to trim our influence (at least not yet).
Like a Sudden Invasion by Extraterrestrials
First-of-its-kind study shows how engineered immune cells move faster to attack the tumor.
A groundbreaking study led by engineering and medical researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities shows how engineered immune cells used in new cancer therapies can overcome physical barriers to allow a patient’s own immune system to fight tumors. The research could improve cancer therapies in the future for millions of people worldwide.
The research is published in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal published by Nature Research.
As the need for urgent climate solutions grows, scientists want to put more research into a technology known as solar geoengineering — the idea of chemically altering the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from Earth.
It is seen as a potential method of cooling the planet and offsetting climate change. But could such a technology curtail a climate catastrophe — or become the cause of it?
Those against solar geoengineering fear unintended consequences, including irreversible changes to weather patterns, and many climate activists are wary of using the Earth’s atmosphere as a testing ground. Last month in Sweden, an experiment led by Harvard University researchers was cancelled following opposition by environmental and indigenous groups. Researchers had planned on testing a high-altitude balloon that could be used to disperse reflective aerosol particles into the atmosphere.
In this episode of The Stream, we’ll learn more about solar geoengineering and the debate surrounding it.
Scientists have successfully grown a bundle of human stem cells into a tiny artificial “heart” the size of a sesame seed.
The pulsating mass is the first self-organizing miniature organ to resemble the human heart, including a hollow chamber enclosed by a wall of cardiac-like tissue.
Simple heart-like organs, or cardioids, have been built in the lab before, but only using a scaffold, a mold, or a matrix for the cells to assemble around.
A team of North Hollywood High School science students emerged victorious Saturday over scholars from 63 other schools nationwide in this year’s U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science National Science Bowl Championship.
The win marks North Hollywood High’s second National Science Bowl championship, following the title captured in 2001.
The school has placed among the top five teams 12 times at the national event.
Many features in Jupiter’s highly dynamic atmosphere are short lived, but the April 2021 observation from the JunoCam instrument (top image) revealed that nearly one year after its discovery, the remnant of Clyde’s Spot had not only drifted away from the Great Red Spot but had also developed into a complex structure that scientists call a folded filamentary region. This region is twice as big in latitude and three times as big in longitude as the original spot, and has the potential to persist for an extended period of time.
The lower image was taken on June 2, 2020, around 3:56 a.m. when the spacecraft was about 28000 miles (45000 kilometers) from Jupiter’s cloud tops. The upper image was taken on April 15, 2021, at 4:58 p.m. PDT (7:58 p.m. EDT). At the time, the spacecraft was about 16800 miles (27000 kilometers) from Jupiter’s cloud tops, at a latitude of about 30 degrees South. Another citizen scientist, Kevin M. Gill, processed both images from raw JunoCam data.
JunoCam’s raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at https://missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing. More information about NASA citizen science can be found at https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience and https://www.nasa.gov/solve/opportunities/citizenscience.
Virgin Galactic on Saturday made its first rocket-powered flight from New Mexico to the fringe of space in a manned shuttle, as the company forges toward offering tourist flights to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere.
High above the desert in a cloudless sky, the VSS Unity ignited its rocket to hurtle the ship and two pilots toward space. A live feed by NASASpaceFlight.com showed the ship accelerating upward and confirmed a landing later via radar.
Virgin Galactic announced that its VSS Unity shuttle accelerated to three times the speed of sound and reached an altitude of just over 55 miles (89 kilometers) above sea level before making its gliding return through the atmosphere.
We have developed and tested a secure new computer processor that thwarts hackers by randomly changing its underlying structure, thus making it virtually impossible to hack.
Last summer, 525 security researchers spent three months trying to hack our Morpheus processor as well as others. All attempts against Morpheus failed.
This study was part of a program sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Program Agency to design a secure processor that could protect vulnerable software. DARPA released the results on the program to the public for the first time in January 2021.
Here’s how to create a single model, rather than a set of related but separate models, to power a process or product.
Physicists in Germany say they have found definitive evidence for the existence of superfluidity in an extremely cold 2D gas of fermions. Their experiment involved confining a few thousand lithium atoms inside a specially-designed trap, and they say that the finding could help shed light on the role of reduced dimensionality in high-temperature superconductors.
Understanding the mechanisms that allow electrical current to flow without resistance inside cuprate materials at ambient pressure and at temperatures of up to 133 K is one of the biggest outstanding challenges in condensed-matter physics. Although scientists can explain the process behind more conventional, lower-temperature superconductivity, they are still trying to work out how the phenomenon can take place at high temperatures in what are essentially 2D materials (cuprates being made up of layers of copper oxide). Such low-dimensional materials are prone to fluctuations that prevent the long-range coherence thought to be essential for superconductivity.
2D Fermi gases can serve as model systems to try and help clear up this mystery, having strong and tuneable correlations between their constituent fermions that can mimic interactions in superconductors. Macroscopic quantum phenomena such as Bose-Einstein condensation involve large numbers of bosons – particles with integer spin – co-existing in a single quantum state. Fermions, in contrast, have half-integer spin and are subject to the Pauli exclusion principle – which precludes multiple particles sharing quantum states. But fermions can get around this restriction by pairing up and combining their spins.
