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NASA finds Earth microbes could survive on the Moon
NASA scientists found that microbes brought by astronauts could survive in cold, shadowed niches around the Moon’s South Pole, potentially complicating future searches for pristine lunar chemistry. Some refuges may be no larger than a footprint, while one hardy fungus could even withstand limited exposure to sunlight.
Type 1 Diabetes May Actually Be Two Different Diseases, Massive International Study Finds
Identifying distinctive types of conditions like diabetes is helpful in two ways.
It means treatments can be personalized more precisely to individuals, and gives researchers a better idea of how to make those treatments more effective going forward.
When it comes to type 1 diabetes, there are two genetic patterns called HLA-DR3 and HLA-DR4 that are associated with a higher risk of the disease. However, while the end result is the same (type 1 diabetes), the early signs differ between the two patterns.
The Way You Draw Can Reveal Parkinson’s Disease With Up to 99% Accuracy, Study Reveals
The warning signs of Parkinson’s appear to be all around us.
Scientists have found clues to the disease’s emergence in people’s hair, in their blood, and in their earwax too.
The way you talk, your mental health, and even where you live have all shown varying links to the condition, which affects movement and muscle control.
Embedded platinum channels bring nanoscale spin-based thermoelectric conversion to bulk materials
A joint research team from NIMS and the University of Tokyo has developed a new composite in which three-dimensional nano-interfaces are distributed throughout the material by coating the surfaces of magnetic-insulator powders with a metal and sintering them. Using this structure, the team succeeded in observing thermoelectric conversion driven by spins in an insulator, a phenomenon previously observed only at nanoscale thin-film interfaces, in a macroscale material.
This research was published in Nature Communications.
Thermoelectric conversion, which uses the vast amounts of waste heat and unused heat around us as electrical energy, is one of the key technologies for improving energy-use efficiency and achieving carbon neutrality. The spin Seebeck effect is a physical phenomenon discovered in Japan in 2008 in which applying a temperature gradient to a magnetic material enables thermoelectric conversion via spin currents.
Salt may have helped turn Earth into a frozen world 700 million years ago
Earth may have been pushed deeper into a global deep freeze by something surprisingly ordinary: salt. Around 700 million years ago, Earth entered periods of extreme glaciation known as Snowball Earth, when ice is thought to have spread across much or potentially all of the planet’s surface. Scientists have long known that expanding ice could have helped drive this transition: As bright ice replaces darker ocean water, more sunlight is reflected back into space, causing the planet to cool further and allowing even more ice to form.
Now, Aksel Samuelsberg, from University of Tromsø—The Arctic University of Norway, and colleagues have identified another possible feedback that could have amplified this cooling: salt crystals accumulating on the surface of sea ice. Their modeling suggests that these crystals could have made the frozen surface even more reflective, helping temperatures fall rapidly during the early stages of a Snowball Earth event.