Science

One of the most important, yet least understood, concepts in all of physics. Head to https://brilliant.org/veritasium to start your free 30-day trial, and th...

TOKYO -- A Japanese research team is making progress on the development of a groundbreaking medication that may allow people to grow new teeth, with c

A breathtaking scientific revolution is taking place – biotechnology has been progressing at stunning speed, giving us the tools to eventually gain control over biology. On the one hand solving the deadliest diseases while also creating viruses more dangerous than nuclear bombs, able to devastate humanity.

Webb turned its gold-coated mirror toward Saturn this week.

Photoferrotrophic Bacteria Initiated Plate Tectonics in the Neoarchean

Nine cut marks on a 1.45 million-year-old hominin bone suggest another hominin, possibly of the same species, slashed the bone to strip the flesh and eat it.

Today, at exactly 17.11 CEST, the European Space Agency’s newest mission was launched in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA. Called Euclid, the 2-tonne, 4.5-m-tall and 3.1-m-in-diameter space telescope will be used to map the geometry of the Universe, in particular to explore the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Euclid has been a CERN-recognised experiment since 2015 and will use key software and computing infrastructure provided by CERN to process vast amounts of data. Understanding the evolution of the Universe is a fundamental challenge in modern physics. Astronomical observations show that the Universe’s rate of expansion is not constant, and scientists believe that dark energy could be the culprit, while dark matter governs the large-scale structure of the Universe. As their names suggest, dark matter and dark energy are “invisible” to current telescopes, because they do not interact with light in the way that normal – or “visible” – matter does. Scientists instead use telescopes like Euclid to look for their effects on observable matter, such as measuring their redshifts to study the tiny deformations of galaxy shapes and the distribution of galaxies over space and time. Euclid will be the most comprehensive investigation to date, scanning optical light from billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light years away, covering almost a third of the sky. The aim is to create a map through time and space of the large-scale structure of the Universe. To do this, the mission requires vast amounts of data and data-processing capabilities. This is where CERN, which is used to processing and storing data from millions of high-energy particle collisions per second, comes in. CERN is involved in the Euclid programme’s science ground segment (SGS). The SGS will process and analyse Euclid data and merge it with data from ground-based telescopes to study the properties of dark energy and dark matter. The SGS will process over 850 Gbits of compressed images per day, the largest of any ESA mission to date, producing at the end more than tens of petabytes of reduced data. “Given the complexity of the infrastructure and the pressure in analysing the data as fast as possible, the support and expertise of CERN is of high relevance,” says Luca Valenziano, Euclid Consortium representative at CERN. “The data will be processed in a distributed infrastructure of nine data centres. CERN provides the means to efficiently deploy the software to these data centres using the CernVM-FS tool, and will continue to support the Euclid SGS in this way during its mission lifetime.” CERN’s involvement is not limited to a technological contribution, as theoretical physics at the Laboratory has strong ties with the science of Euclid. “The exact properties of galaxy density fluctuations depend on the entire history of the Universe, and cosmologists at CERN have been working on developing theoretical frameworks to predict them,” explains Marko Simonović, from CERN’s Theoretical Physics department. “Tools developed among other places at CERN will be used by the Euclid collaboration to make comparisons of data and theory and test theories beyond standard models of cosmology and particle physics. Any new discovery in cosmology would indirectly be a new discovery in particle physics.” CERN is part of the Euclid consortium, an organisation that brings together about 2000 scientists in 300 laboratories in 17 different countries in Europe, USA, Canada and Japan. It is responsible for designing and building the NISP and VIS instruments, for gathering all ground-based complementary data, developing the survey strategy and the data processing pipeline to produce all calibrated images and catalogues and the scientific exploitation of the data. Read more: Euclid to link the largest and smallest scales (CERN Courier) Euclid mission page (ESA) Euclid consortium website

The Scattering Light Imaging (SLI) technique provides a cost-effective, high-resolution method to map neural connections in the brain. The technique, which involves analyzing light scattering patterns in thin brain slices, offers more detailed results than existing methods like dMRI, and is more acc

Four individuals have agreed to be locked inside NASA's Mars simulator for just over a year. And they're being paid surprisingly little.

One of the most important, yet least understood, concepts in all of physics.

It encapsulated the fact that a species could have high mortality at one point in its life cycle, then low mortality at another, while a complementary species might have low mortality at the first point and high mortality at the second. The more similar this term was for two species, the more likely it was that a pair could live alongside each other despite competing for space and nutrition.

TLDR: There are way more species than you might expect in a system with inter-species competition because different lifespans allow for niches to exist across time as well.

The actual paper

On a muggy June night in Greenwich Village, more than 800 neuroscientists, philosophers and curious members of the public packed into an auditorium. They came for the first results of an ambitious investigation into a profound question: What is consciousness?

To kick things off, two friends — David Chalmers, a philosopher, and Christof Koch, a neuroscientist — took the stage to recall an old bet. In June 1998, they had gone to a conference in Bremen, Germany, and ended up talking late one night at a local bar about the nature of consciousness.

Using an extensive computer simulation of the climate, the global economy and the global energy system, researchers at Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) have been analyzing different ways of mitigating climate change, together with colleagues from the US, China, Ireland, Finland and Sweden.

People with a common history – often due to significant geographic or social barriers – often share genetics and language. New research finds that even a dialect can act as a barrier within a group.

By studying how the arachnids respond to static electricity, researchers may have found a new reason to dread the bloodsucking creatures.

On average, a single person can shed anywhere from 50 to 100 strands of hair per day. This contributes to a sizeable amount of waste which may take years to decompose into its natural form, or end up in incinerators, waste streams and dumps which produces toxic fumes including ammonia and sulfur dioxide during the decomposition process. Landfills of hair waste can leach toxic chemicals into bodies of water, harming marine wildlife and potentially lead to algal blooms. Furthermore, human hair can be breeding grounds for pathogens, putting nearby communities at risk of disease outbreaks.

As the human population increases, there will be increasing pressure to manage human hair waste. Instead of sending hair waste to the incinerator or landfill, it is worthwhile to repurpose hair waste for other potential applications.

The sexual division of labor among human foraging populations has typically been recognized as involving males as hunters and females as gatherers. Recent archeological research has questioned this paradigm with evidence that females hunted (and went to war) throughout the Homo sapiens lineage, though many of these authors assert the pattern of women hunting may only have occurred in the past. The current project gleans data from across the ethnographic literature to investigate the prevalence of women hunting in foraging societies in more recent times. Evidence from the past one hundred years supports archaeological finds from the Holocene that women from a broad range of cultures intentionally hunt for subsistence. These results aim to shift the male-hunter female-gatherer paradigm to account for the significant role females have in hunting, thus dramatically shifting stereotypes of labor, as well as mobility.

Researchers have demonstrated a new material for single-molecule electronic switches, which can effectively vary current at the nanoscale in response to external stimuli.

This material meets almost all of the requirements needed to serve in single-molecule electronic devices: it is stable in ambient conditions, can be cycled on/off many times, is conductive (although not as conductive as metal) and has different molecular states accessible to be utilized.

My friend's daughter is doing a project on biological immortality. It would be great if you could help her by answering a short survey.

She writes:

"This is a part of the primary research for my EPQ, titled: "To what extent does telomere biology hold the key to achieving biological immortality?"

By completing this form, you will be helping me to gather data for the second half of my project, which involves an evaluation of public understanding and perspectives on biological immortality. The results will be analysed and used as a source of information for my final dissertation."

An evolutionary analysis of behavioural traits across primate species may shed light on the question of whether humans are violent by nature

Part of a new low-cost British radar spacecraft is to be knitted from a gold-plated tungsten yarn.

Observations of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos have shown that they mostly originate from extragalactic sources such as active galaxies. However, gamma ray observations show bright emission from within the Milky Way galaxy, and astrophysical gamma rays and neutrinos are expected to be produced by the same physical processes. The IceCube Collaboration searched for neutrino emission from within the Milky Way (see the Perspective by Fusco) and found evidence of extra neutrinos emitted along the plane of the Galaxy, which is consistent with the distribution of gamma-ray emission. These results imply that high-energy neutrinos can be generated by nearby sources within the Milky Way.

-Editor’s summary from the Science article

For the first time, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has produced an image of the Milky Way using neutrinos—tiny, ghostlike astronomical messengers with energies millions to billions of times higher than those produced by the fusion reactions that power stars

In a time of income inequality and ruthless politics, people with outsized power or an unrelenting willingness to browbeat others often seem to come out ahead.

New research from Dartmouth, however, shows that being uncooperative can help people on the weaker side of the power dynamic achieve a more equal outcome—and even inflict some loss on their abusive counterpart.