Tag: scientists
Scientists create wood transistor that runs at about 1Hz
NASA Seeks ‘Citizen Scientists’ to Listen to Space Noises
So NASA is now announcing “a new NASA-funded citizen science project called HARP — or Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas ” that has “turned those once-unheard waves into audible whistles, crunches, and whooshes…” Or, as the Washington Post puts it, “NASA wants your help listening in on the universe.”
From NASA’s news release:
In 2007, NASA launched five satellites to fly through Earth’s magnetic “harp” — its magnetosphere — as part of the THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). Since then, THEMIS has been gathering a bounty of information about plasma waves across Earth’s magnetosphere. “THEMIS can sample the whole harp,” said Michael Hartinger, a heliophysicist at the Space Science Institute in Colorado. “And it’s been out there a long time, so it has collected a lot of data.”
The frequencies of the waves THEMIS measures are too low for our ears to hear, however. So the HARP team sped them up to convert them to sound waves. By using an interactive tool developed by the team, you can listen to these waves and pick out interesting features you hear in the sounds… Preliminary investigations with HARP have already started revealing unexpected features, such as what the team calls a “reverse harp” — frequencies changing in the opposite way than what scientists anticipated…
“Data sonification provides human beings with an opportunity to appreciate the naturally occurring music of the cosmos,” said Robert Alexander, a HARP team member from Auralab Technologies in Michigan. “We’re hearing sounds that are literally out of this world, and for me that’s the next best thing to floating in a spacesuit.”
To start exploring these sounds, visit the HARP website.
“Think listening to years’ worth of wave patterns is a job for artificial intelligence? Think again,” writes the Washington Post.
In a news release, HARP team member Martin Archer of Imperial College London says humans are often better at listening than machines. “The human sense of hearing is an amazing tool,” Archer says. “We’re essentially trained from birth to recognize patterns and pick out different sound sources. We can innately do some pretty crazy analysis that outperforms even some of our most advanced computer algorithms.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hmmm, scientists hooked up a goldfish’s brain to a computer helmet
Scientists Discover First ‘Neutron-Rich’ Isotope of Uranium Since 1979
“We measured the masses of 19 different actinide isotopes with a high precision of one part per million level, including the discovery and identification of the new uranium isotope,” Toshitaka Niwase, a researcher at the High-energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) Wako Nuclear Science Center (WNSC) in Japan, told Live Science in an email. “This is the first new discovery of a uranium isotope on the neutron-rich side in over 40 years.” Niwase is the lead author of a study on the new uranium isotope, which was published March 31 in the journal Physical Review Letters…
Niwase and colleagues created the uranium-241 by firing a sample of uranium-238 at platinum-198 nuclei at Japan’s RIKEN accelerator. The two isotopes then swapped neutrons and protons — a phenomenon called “multinucleon transfer.” The team then measured the mass of the created isotopes by observing the time it took the resulting nuclei to travel a certain distance through a medium. The experiment also generated 18 new isotopes, all of which contained between 143 and 150 neutrons.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Million-year-old viruses help fight cancer, say scientists
Scientists have successfully engineered bacteria to fight cancer in mice
Researchers at Stanford Medicine have made a promising discovery that could lead to new cancer treatments in the future. Scientists conducted tests in which they altered the genomes of skin-based microbes and bacteria to fight cancer. These altered microbes were swabbed onto cancer-stricken mice and, lo and behold, tumors began to dissipate.
The bacteria in question, Staphylococcus epidermidis, was grabbed from the fur of mice and altered to produce a protein that stimulates the immune system with regard to specific tumors. The experiment seemed to be a resounding success, with the modified bacteria killing aggressive types of metastatic skin cancer after being gently applied to the fur. The results were also achieved without any noticeable inflammation.
“It seemed almost like magic,” said Michael Fischbach, PhD, an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford. “These mice had very aggressive tumors growing on their flank, and we gave them a gentle treatment where we simply took a swab of bacteria and rubbed it on the fur of their heads.”
This is yet another foray into the misunderstood world of microbiomes and all of the bacteria that reside there. Gut biomes get all of the press these days, but the skin also plays host to millions upon millions of bacteria, fungi and viruses, and the purpose of these entities is often unknown.
In this instance, scientists found that staph epidermidis cells trigger the production of immune cells called CD8 T cells. The researchers basically hijacked the S. epidermidis into producing CD8 T cells that target specific antigens. In this case, the antigens were related to skin cancer tumors. When the cells encountered a matching tumor, they began to rapidly reproduce and shrink the mass, or extinguish it entirely.
“Watching those tumors disappear — especially at a site distant from where we applied the bacteria — was shocking,” Fischbach said. “It took us a while to believe it was happening.”
As with all burgeoning cancer treatments, there are some heavy caveats. First of all, these experiments are being conducted on mice. Humans and mice are biologically similar in many respects, but a great many treatments that work on mice are a dud with people. Stanford researchers have no idea if S. epidermidis triggers an immune response in humans, though our skin is littered with the stuff, so they may need to find a different microbe to alter. Also, this treatment is designed to treat skin cancer tumors and is applied topically. It remains to be seen if the benefits carry over to internal cancers.
This is a major breakthrough. https://t.co/CgVYcf3lRY
— MIT Technology Review (@techreview) April 14, 2023
With that said, the Stanford team says they expect human trials to start within the next few years, though more testing is needed on both mice and other animals before going ahead with people. Scientists hope that this treatment could eventually be pointed at all kinds of infectious diseases, in addition to cancer cells.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/scientists-have-successfully-engineered-bacteria-to-fight-cancer-in-mice-165141857.html?src=rss
Scientists fear UK could see outbreaks of dengue fever – and this is why
Scientists Create Eco-Friendly Paint That Keeps the Surface Beneath Cool
Chanda and his team tested the impact this paint had on the temperature of buildings covered in structural paint versus commercial paints and they found that structural paint kept surfaces 20 to 30 degrees cooler. This, Chanda said, is a massive new tool that could be used to fight rising temperatures caused by global warming while still allowing us to have a bright and colorful world. Unlike white and black cars, structural paint’s ability to reflect heat isn’t determined by how dark the color is. Blue, black or purple structural paints reflect just as much heat as bright whites or beige. This opens the door for more colorful, cooler architecture and design without having to worry about the heat.
It’s not just cleaner, Chanda said. Structural paint weighs much less than pigmented paint and doesn’t fade over time like traditional pigments. “A raisin’s worth of structural paint is enough to cover the front and back of a door,” he said. Unlike pigments which rely on layers of pigment to achieve depth of color, structural paint only requires one thin layer of particles to fully cover a surface in color. This means that structural paint could be a boon for aerospace engineers who rely on the lowest weight possible to achieve higher fuel efficiency. The possibilities for structural paint are endless and Chanda hopes that cans of structural paint will soon be available in hardware stores.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mars scientists spent 6 years making the most detailed image of the planet
There’s no Google Earth for Mars — no way to zoom in for a closer look at your Martian neighbors’ new deck or pickup truck — but Caltech scientists have spent six years composing a 3D image of the Red Planet with the feel of the popular computer app.
The new tool, called the Global CTX Mosaic of Mars, has 5.7 trillion pixels of data — enough that mapmakers would need the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, California, to lay out a complete printed version, according to NASA. Each pixel covers about a parking space-size patch of Martian terrain, providing unprecedented image resolution. The highest resolution available at a global scale before this was 100 meters per pixel, making the new mosaic 20 times sharper.
Anyone can now zoom in on the planet and get a close-up of meteorite craters, dust devil tracks, extinct volcanoes, former riverbeds, and seemingly bottomless caves. The creators sought to make Earth’s neighbor, on average 140 million miles away, more accessible to researchers and the public, said Jay Dickson, the scientist who led the project.
“Schoolchildren can use this now. My mother, who just turned 78, can use this now,” he said in a statement. “The goal is to lower the barriers for people who are interested in exploring Mars.”
Buttons on the tool (found here) let users jump to popular landmarks, like the Gale and Jezero craters where NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are exploring.
“Schoolchildren can use this now. My mother, who just turned 78, can use this now. The goal is to lower the barriers for people who are interested in exploring Mars.”
The mosaic covers 99.5 percent of the planet using nearly 87,000 separate images taken between 2006 and 2020 by a camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The robotic spacecraft flies up to 250 miles above the red planet, while its black-and-white Context Camera captures expansive views.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
The team designed the tool so that each image in the mosaic connects directly to its original data. The scientists presented a paper on the tool at the 2023 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
Want more science and tech news delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter today.
To create the new mosaic, Dickson developed an algorithm to match images. The photos also needed to have similar lighting conditions and clear skies. Then, what the program couldn’t match — about 13,000 remaining pictures — he manually stitched together, a time-consuming three-year undertaking. Any leftover gaps in the mosaic represent areas blocked by clouds or areas that hadn’t been photographed before he started working on the project.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
So far, over 120 peer-reviewed science papers have used a test version of the map, released in 2018, for research purposes.
“Ideally, image mosaics should be held to the same scientific standards of traceability as the science that they facilitate,” the authors said in the paper. “All derived data should be traceable back to their source, all methods for the construction of the mosaic should be reported and known artifacts and other limitations of the product should be communicated. These standards have long been applied to the instruments that collect the data, and the science derived from image mosaics, but not to mosaic products themselves.”