Thanks to the magnetic field of our planet, we are safe from the charged particles of the Sun, as it repels and traps them. However, there is an area on our planet, specifically over South America and the southern Atlantic Ocean, where the field is unusually weak. The area is called the South Atlantic Anomaly, or the SAA.
Currently, the SAA creates no visible impacts on daily life on the surface. However, recent observations and forecasts show that the region is expanding westward and continuing to weaken in intensity. It is also splitting -- recent data shows the anomaly's valley, or region of minimum field strength, has split into two lobes, creating additional challenges for satellite missions.
While the SAA does not pose any danger on daily life, it does pose a danger for low-Earth orbit satellites.
Learn more about the South Atlantic Anomaly, and how it affects satellites, over at Science Daily.
Multiple sclerosis is a terrible disease to have. A person who suffers from this disease has their nerves eaten away, and this causes serious disabilities. Worse, MS has no cure, but there are treatments which could speed up the person’s recovery. Now, it seems that a substance in cashew shells could be used in future treatments.
In laboratory experiments, a chemical compound found in the shell of the cashew nut promotes the repair of myelin, a team from Vanderbilt University Medical Center reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We see this as an exciting finding, suggesting a new avenue in the search for therapies to correct the ravages of MS and other demyelinating diseases,” said the paper’s senior author, Subramaniam Sriram, MBBS, William C. Weaver III Professor of Neurology and chief of the Division of Neuroimmunology.
Previous work led by Sriram showed that a protein called interleukin 33, or IL-33, induced myelin formation. IL-33 is, among other things, an immune response regulator, and multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disorder.
One of the things that we value much, especially in this day and age, is privacy. But cats couldn’t care less for such a human concept, and therefore don’t give a rip about it. So if ever you decide to take a cat to your home, be prepared to have your privacy compromised, as they will always follow you wherever you go.
Check out these pictures of hoomans who had their privacy compromised, over at Sad and Useless.
It seems that this dog is well aware of what he has done, and he doesn’t want to show it to her mom. What did he do? I won’t say it directly but it’s related to eating and carpets.
Apparently, he was out of his crate and home alone.
When biologist Kory Evans was digitizing X-rays of fish skeletons last August 10, he was not expecting to find something horrific in one particular wrasse. "Mondays aren't usually this eventful," he said on the tweet he posted on that day. What he found was “a "vampire" crustacean [that] had devoured, then replaced, its host's tongue.”
The buglike isopod, also called a tongue biter or tongue-eating louse, keeps sucking its blood meals from a fish's tongue until the entire structure withers away. Then the true horror begins, as the parasite assumes the organ's place in the still-living fish's mouth.
But how does this isopod do this? Find out over at Live Science.
On February 24, 1987, a supernova was detected on the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The supernova was dubbed SN 1987A. It seems that a star was formed following this massive explosion, and it didn’t collapse in on itself to form a black hole.
If confirmed to have survived, this star would then be the youngest star known to mankind, being only 33 years old.
To date, the youngest supernova remnant is the 330 years old Cassiopeia A, about 11,000 light-years away from Earth inside the Milky Way.
Analyzing high-resolution imagery from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, a team of astronomers was able to get a closer look at what was left behind following SN 1987A.
They found a hot “blob” inside the core of the supernova, likely a gas cloud shrouding the neutron star. The star itself would be far too small to be detected directly, as it’s extremely small and dense — the mass of 1.4 times the Sun inside a sphere that’s only 15 miles across.
More details about this stellar story over at Futurism.
(Image Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/A. Angelich. Visible light image: the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. X-Ray image: The NASA Chandra X-Ray Observatory/ Wikimedia Commons)
What would change if we humans could live for a million years? For Avi Loeb, it would change a lot of things, like how we process faculty appointments at our universities, as well as how we put candles on our birthday cakes. Aside from that, our perspective and goals would change as well, and we would probably be able to achieve greater things.
An extended life experience could make us wiser and more risk-averse since there is much more at stake. It would make little sense to send young soldiers to wars, or initiate wars in the first place.
This is just wishful thinking, however, but hey, it’s nice to try and widen our perspective once in a while.
Over the past weeks, some people have been given the privilege to test Starlink, a satellite-broadband service by SpaceX. Anonymized speed tests by these Starlink beta users were released by a Reddit user almost a week ago, and it seems that the satellite-broadband is showing promising speeds.
Beta users of SpaceX's Starlink satellite-broadband service are getting download speeds ranging from 11Mbps to 60Mbps, according to tests conducted using Ookla's speedtest.net tool. Speed tests showed upload speeds ranging from 5Mbps to 18Mbps.
The tests showed good ping speed as well.
SpaceX has told the Federal Communications Commission that Starlink would eventually hit gigabit speeds, saying in its 2016 application to the FCC that "once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1Gbps per user), low latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the US and globally." SpaceX has launched about 600 satellites so far and has FCC permission to launch nearly 12,000.
While 60Mbps isn't a gigabit, it's on par with some of the lower cable speed tiers and is much higher than speeds offered by many DSL services in the rural areas where SpaceX is likely to see plenty of interest.
In March, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said, "We're targeting latency below 20 milliseconds, so somebody could play a fast-response video game at a competitive level." SpaceX satellites have low-Earth orbits of 540km to 570km, making them capable of much lower latency than geostationary satellites that orbit at about 35,000km.
Studies that involve placebos usually do not inform the participants that what they’re taking is an inert substance. Instead, they are made to believe that what they’re taking is the real deal, and this triggers the placebo effect.
[It is] a kind of 'mind over matter' response that seems to induce physiological benefits, even where none should otherwise be felt.
But what happens when you tell the person beforehand that what he’ll be taking is a placebo? New research suggests that it still has a positive effect on the consumer: it helps reduce neural markers of emotional distress.
When researchers conduct experiments involving non-deceptive placebos, participants are clearly informed in advance that they'll only be given a placebo, but may also be told how placebos and the placebo effect can in certain circumstances deliver beneficial physiological outcomes, even in the absence of actual medication.
That knowledge – and people's belief and expectation that placebos may work for them – seems to be enough to trigger the placebo effect all on its own, and all without breaching any ethical boundaries.
That somewhat surprising phenomenon is something we might be able to exploit in real-world health treatments, researchers say.
Learn more details about this research over at ScienceAlert.
GPT-3 is the latest and largest AI language model of the AI company OpenAI, which it slowly introduced in mid-July. The predecessor to this algorithm, GPT-2, made headlines in February last year when the company withheld its release for fear that it would be abused. In November, however, OpenAI changed their minds and released it, as it stated that they did not detect any “strong evidence of misuse so far.”
The lab took a different approach with GPT-3; it neither withheld it nor granted public access. Instead, it gave the algorithm to select researchers who applied for a private beta, with the goal of gathering their feedback and commercializing the technology by the end of the year.
A man named Liam Porr submitted an application for the private beta.
He filled out a form with a simple questionnaire about his intended use. But he also didn’t wait around. After reaching out to several members of the Berkeley AI community, he quickly found a PhD student who already had access. Once the graduate student agreed to collaborate, Porr wrote a small script for him to run. It gave GPT-3 the headline and introduction for a blog post and had it spit out several completed versions.
Porr then posted his first blog. Titled “Feeling unproductive? Maybe you should stop overthinking”, the blog reached the number one spot in Hacker News. Porr continued posting AI-generated blogs such as this one with little to no editing.
“From the time that I thought of the idea and got in contact with the PhD student to me actually creating the blog and the first blog going viral—it took maybe a couple of hours,” he says.
And that’s the scary part for Porr, who studies computer science at the University of California, Berkeley: the process was “super easy.”
Porr says he wanted to prove that GPT-3 could be passed off as a human writer. Indeed, despite the algorithm’s somewhat weird writing pattern and occasional errors, only three or four of the dozens of people who commented on his top post on Hacker News raised suspicions that it might have been generated by an algorithm. All those comments were immediately downvoted by other community members.
Porr proved that AI models could be used to create mediocre, clickbait content, which would decrease the value of online content. He also proved the possibility that the language model could be misused, a fear that experts have for a long time.
Porr plans to do more experiments with GPT-3. But he’s still waiting to get access from OpenAI. “It’s possible that they’re upset that I did this,” he says. “I mean, it’s a little silly.”
If you think that social distancing is a practice made up because of our current situation, think again. Apparently, social distancing is a thing as well in animals, from finches to mandrills, and they practice it when they have to, in order to reduce the risk of disease transmission. This is according to this paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Science chatted with two of the study’s authors—Andrea Townsend, a behavioral ecologist at Hamilton College, and Dana Hawley, a biologist at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University—about how self-isolating works throughout the animal kingdom.
… some animals like house finches use very general behavioral cues, such as lethargy, to assess potential infections and avoid certain individuals.
In other cases, animals have evolved fairly complex cues to induce social distancing. The Caribbean spiny lobster [a social lobster that normally lives in groups] has evolved to detect a chemical cue in the urine of sick lobsters and avoid areas that these sick lobsters occupy.
Made up of over 2,000 old iPhones (mostly iPhone 6, 7, and 7 plus models) in various colors, and costing over $10,000, this 20 meter-long fence might just be the most expensive fence in the world. This fence was made by a man named Nguyễn Minh Hiền, when he was egged on by his nephew.
Of course, these iPhones are no longer in working condition. If they were, then the project would have cost around $1.3 million.
It seems that the idiom “raining cats and dogs” can also be used literally in situations such as this one.
On the morning of July 12, pensioner Gao Fenghua went out for a stroll with his golden retriever in the city of Harbin, China, when suddenly a cat seemingly fell out of the sky (but actually from an apartment) and hit Fenghua’s head, causing him to fall on the ground unconscious.
Fenghua spent 23 days in hospital before being discharged this week, with the old man still having to undergo physiotherapy treatment for the injuries sustained in the accident.
The cat in question apparently belongs to his neighbor according to the old man’s son.
Fenghua’s family members and the cat’s owner are reportedly trying to reach an agreement on compensation for the incident, although it’s unclear whether the authorities are involved in the discussions.
It is commonly thought that taste cells are very specific, only detecting one or two flavors. There are even taste cells that only respond to one compound, like taste cells that can only detect sweet sucralose or bitter caffeine. And so scientists were surprised to find supersensing cells in the taste buds of mice which can detect four of the five flavors that the buds recognize, namely, sweet, sour, umami, and bitter.
“The presence of these [newly discovered] cells completely disrupts how people think the taste bud works,” says Kathryn Medler, a neurophysiologist at the University at Buffalo in New York.
More details about the study, as well as its implications, over at ScienceNews.
On August 7, NASA’s Mars helicopter, called Ingenuity, received the first charge of its batteries from the power supply of the Perseverance Rover, according to a statement by NASA last August 13. This was the first time that the helicopter was charged in space, and it was a success.
"This was a big milestone, as it was our first opportunity to turn on Ingenuity and give its electronics a 'test drive' since we launched on July 30," Tim Canham, the operations lead for Mars Helicopter at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in the statement. "Since everything went by the book, we'll perform the same activity about every two weeks to maintain an acceptable state of charge."
Charging the batteries took eight hours, during which NASA tested and analyzed their performance. The batteries were charged only to 35% of their maximum level, in order to maintain optimal battery health, according to the statement.
The Perseverance rover is scheduled to land on the Red Planet on February 18, 2021. Some time after that, the Mars helicopter will detach itself from the rover, and take test flights. If successful…
...Ingenuity will prove that robotic flight is possible on Mars, opening the door for extensive aerial exploration on future missions.
