Fermilab’s DUNE experiment relies on deep neural networks to process petabytes of liquid-argon detector data.
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Producing spider silk is a biological feat using it to develop materials for drug delivery and wound care
If Spider-Man were real, he could help scientists revolutionize healthcare. Since he’s not, researchers develop creative ways to produce spider silk to study.
Oldest known giant rock scallop bead suggests California coastal trade began millennia earlier
Archaeologists have discovered two giant rock scallop beads that push back the clock on the first appearance of these high-status ornaments. The discovery shows that these prized marine beads were traded hundreds of miles from the California coast thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
Radiocarbon dating places one of the beads at roughly 8,500 years old, making it the oldest ever discovered. More unusually, they were found more than 42 miles (68 kilometers) from the nearest coast, extending the known range of these ornaments from the Channel Islands to the California interior.
“It’s cool that this is the oldest of its kind identified so far, but cooler still to view it as part of a broader Early Holocene cultural landscape seemingly well-established in this locale as much as 10,000 years ago,” said Barry A. Price, an archaeologist at Applied EarthWorks Inc. and one of the study’s authors, along with Simone Schinsing and Jasmine Kidwell. The study is published in California Archaeology.
An ultramassive white dwarf half Earth’s size may hold a rare oxygen-neon core
Astronomers have found evidence that one of the most massive white dwarfs known has an oxygen-neon core instead of the more common carbon-oxygen core. The finding is important because the composition of a white dwarf’s core determines how it will evolve. A paper outlining this discovery was published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Typically, white dwarfs have a mass of 0.5–0.7 times the sun’s mass. Such objects have a core made up mainly of carbon and oxygen (C/O core). When they have stellar companions, these dense objects can accumulate matter from them and eventually produce a Type Ia supernova. Ultramassive white dwarfs, with masses above roughly 1.05–1.1 times the sun’s mass, tell a different story that is not yet fully understood.
These more massive white dwarfs are thought to form from “ancestor” or progenitor stars in the range of about 8–10 times the sun’s mass. In these heavier progenitors, the core reaches higher temperatures and densities, allowing carbon to ignite and fuse further into oxygen and neon (O/Ne core). This does not happen in the cores of lower-mass stars, which stop fusing once they have built up carbon and oxygen, lacking the required core temperatures.
Scientists Find Two New Ways To Break Down “Forever Chemicals” in Water
An HZDR research team has developed methods for breaking down “forever chemicals.”
The carbon-fluorine bonds inside PFAS are among the strongest in chemistry, allowing these industrial pollutants to persist in water for years. Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) are testing two ways to break those bonds: hydrodynamic cavitation and cold atmospheric plasma combined with gas dispersion.
Analyses by experts at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) confirmed that both processes degraded per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and released fluoride. If developed into practical industrial systems, the methods could help limit the amount of these highly persistent chemicals entering rivers, lakes and oceans.
HypoxiaInduced Epas1Myl9/12 Axis Shapes the Pathology of Pulmonary Hypertension
BACKGROUND: Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a progressive cardiopulmonary disorder characterized by vascular remodeling, abnormal vasoconstriction of small lung arteries, and right heart failure. Hypoxia causes vascular damage, leading to vessel stenosis or occlusion by aberrant endothelial cells, hypertrophy of the tunica media, and thrombus formation. But the precise molecular mechanisms underlying the pathology of PH have been uncertain. METHODS: To investigate the pathogenic role of Myl (myosin light chain) 9/12 in PH, we utilized the Sugen/hypoxia mouse model, generated by administration of the VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor) receptor inhibitor SU5416 under hypoxic conditions (10% O2). Lung tissues of patients with PH and human lung microvascular endothelial cells were used to examine their endothelial changes.