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Jun 8, 2019
This ‘Universe in a Box’ Has Enough Astronomical Data to Fill 30,000 Wikipedias
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: computing, space
Adding to the largest astronomical data set ever assembled online, the Pan-STARRS telescope has posted 1.6 petabytes of data.
Jun 8, 2019
Synopsis: Scanning Earth’s Interior with Neutrinos
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: biotech/medical, materials
Future neutrino experiments may provide tomographic scans of Earth’s interior by viewing solar neutrinos that pass through our planet’s layers.
The Sun showers Earth with neutrinos, but this “glow” doesn’t dim when the Sun goes down. At night, solar neutrinos penetrate Earth, impinging detectors from below. Like x rays in a medical scanner, these planet-traversing neutrinos might offer information about the material they pass through. New theoretical calculations show that future experiments, such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), could characterize the different layers inside Earth with neutrino-based tomography.
Jun 8, 2019
Researchers discover meat-eating plant in Ontario, Canada
Posted by Genevieve Klien in category: food
Call it the “Little Bog of Horrors.” In what is believed to be a first for North America, biologists at the University of Guelph have discovered that meat-eating pitcher plants in Ontario’s Algonquin Park wetlands consume not just bugs but also young salamanders.
Jun 8, 2019
“Sun in a box” would store renewable energy for the grid
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: energy, sustainability
Design for system that provides solar- or wind-generated power on demand should be cheaper than other leading options.
Jun 8, 2019
Undersea Robots Are Helping Save the Great Barrier Reef
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: drones, robotics/AI
Jun 8, 2019
Scientists Solved Bizarre Mystery Of ‘The Galaxy Without Dark Matter’
Posted by Genevieve Klien in category: cosmology
The NGC1052-DF2 ultra-diffuse galaxy was first discovered and presented as the ‘galaxy without dark matter’. Astronomers from Spain found new evidence disputing the previous estimates of the galaxy’s mass and distance.
Jun 8, 2019
Human body is a mosaic pattern of DNA mutations, say researchers
Posted by Xavier Rosseel in category: biotech/medical
Researchers have discovered that the human body’s 3 trillion cells aren’t clones of a single DNA sequence, as is widely believed. Instead, the cells of the human body contain a plethora of altered DNA, called mutations. These multiply to produce patches of tissue, called “somatic clones,” inside the ‘normal’ tissue. The scientific term for this phenomenon is mosaicism.
Jun 8, 2019
NASA is opening the space station to $35,000-a-night visits. A tourist who paid Russia $30 million to get there a decade ago says it’s a ‘seismic shift.’
Posted by Heather Blevins in category: space
Richard Garriott, who spent two weeks visiting the space station in 2008, said NASA used to fight the idea of private ISS visitors.
Jun 8, 2019
$180 million DNA ‘barcode’ project aims to discover 2 million new species
Posted by Derick Lee in category: biotech/medical
For centuries biologists have identified new species at a painstakingly slow pace, describing specimens’ physical features and other defining traits, and often trying to fit a species into the tree of life before naming and publishing it. Now, they have begun to determine whether a specimen is likely a novel species in hours—and will soon do so at a cost of pennies. It’s a revolution driven by short stretches of DNA—dubbed barcodes in a nod to the familiar product identifiers—that vary just enough to provide species-distinguishing markers, combined with fast, cheap DNA sequencers.
As massive global effort launches, portable DNA sequencers also allow species identification in the field.