Ongoing important Science news thread

[Ozy_Flame]

####ing magnets, how do they work

[Mike F]

New form of matter from chummy photons makes lightsabres a real possibility.

Story

See, photons -- which are the elementary particles of light -- tend to be massless and kind of aloof. If you shoot two laser beams at each other, the photons just pass right through each other without so much as a hello or a high five.

But when the researchers fired a few photons into a vacuum chamber with a cloud of extremely cold rubidium atoms to take advantage of an effect called a Rydberg blockade, the photons started hanging out and even left the chamber together as the first "photonic molecule" -- a sort of quantum bromance -- ever observed.

And it's that bond between new particle bros that creates the new form of matter, which bears a resemblance to that most awesome weapon from a galaxy far, far away.

"It's not an in-apt analogy to compare this to lightsabers," said Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin in a news release. "When these photons interact with each other, they're pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what's happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies."

[pylon]

What I wouldn't do to get to be on board one of these boats. These scientists are trying to unravel the mystery of Great White Migratory patterns. Who knew a wet towel, was Great White Kryptonite?

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/04/tech/i...html?hpt=hp_t5

[T@T]

Originally Posted by pylon

What I wouldn't do to get to be on board one of these boats. These scientists are trying to unravel the mystery of Great White Migratory patterns. Who knew a wet towel, was Great White Kryptonite?

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/04/tech/i...html?hpt=hp_t5

Saw the TV show with this group, very amazing and the way they do it makes it seem not all that dangerious.

[Knut]

This next bit of News is dream crushing... No cloned Dinosaurs from Amber.

http://scitechdaily.com/researchers-...ear-half-life/

A new study of fossils in New Zealand has discovered that cloning dinosaurs or organisms that have been extinct for millions of years is highly improbable, since the half-life of DNA is 521 years.

Although I guess Life... ahhhh... finds a way.

[4X4]

In case you didn't notice, APOD is back up, and if you scroll back, they actually posted every day during this government shutdown business.

[Nyah]

An incredibly well-preserved, 1.8-million-year-old skull from Dmanisi, Georgia suggests the evolutionary tree of the genus Homo may have fewer branches than previously believed.

http://io9.com/this-skull-may-have-j...-ev-1447413218

[Ozy_Flame]

http://qz.com/137221/a-plan-to-turn-...ve-to-wi-fi/#!

Synopsis: Researchers have begun to transmit data as light instead of radio waves. This could lead to way faster wifi, and possibly making it more cheaper (transmission through lightbulbs).

It would not replace wifi, but could certainly provide range boosting opportunities and reduce the need for an expensive router in the home.

[Nehkara]

NASA has successfully tested a new laser communication system. They sent data to and received data from the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer using the system. The unit on-board the spacecraft is called the Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration.

They were able to achieve speeds of 622 Mbps!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10...moon_and_back/

[troutman]

NASA directed the lasers at two Lunar Explorers, Moon Unit Alpha and Moon Unit Zappa.

[onetwo_threefour]

What about Dweezil?

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by Hesla

This next bit of News is dream crushing... No cloned Dinosaurs from Amber.

http://scitechdaily.com/researchers-...ear-half-life/




Although I guess Life... ahhhh... finds a way.

As long as it isn't human

We just become snacks

[carom]

saw this today and though it was interesting. Didn't know where else to put this.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health...to_create.html

I had never heard of this and thought it was interesting.

It’s sort of a long story,” he began, sighing. “But basically, as you know, the material wasn’t what we thought it was.”

For Uncle Bob—and most of the Western world—the story began in 1966, when Boris Deryagin presented his findings at a conference in London. But it really started decades earlier, when a series of obscure papers had hinted that water sometimes behaved weirdly in certain experimental conditions.

it was simply a reminder that humans guide scientific research, not robots. And humans are subject to desires, which make objectivity really hard to achieve. … it did reveal something fundamentally true about the character of the human mind.

[photon]

Neat

[Vulcan]

Excavation of Human Ancestor Fossils Begins in South African Cave.

The environmental instability of the time "creates a much more experimental world," Potts added. "Not a 'cradle of humankind'—that's too nurturing. I now prefer the term 'cauldron of humankind.'

"And it's much more of a series of broiling events and a churning process full of this sort of experimentation."

As the landscape changed, diversifying populations could meet back up and essentially jump back into the gene pool together, creating hybrids.

Potts doesn't suggest hybridization explains all the mixed characteristics in fossils like A. sediba, but says it's a piece of the puzzle that shouldn't be forgotten when trying to trace which species absolutely did or did not contribute to the human family line.

So I guess there isn't one human line of ancestors.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...mpaign=Content

[photon]

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic....their-fathers/

Now a fascinating new study reveals that it’s not just nurture. Traumatic experiences can actually work themselves into the germ line. When a male mouse becomes afraid of a specific smell, this fear is somehow transmitted into his sperm, the study found. His pups will also be afraid of the odor, and will pass that fear down to their pups.

“Parents transfer information to their offspring, and they do so even before the offspring are conceived,” said Brian Dias, a postdoctoral fellow in Ressler’s lab, at an engaging talk about this unpublished data on Tuesday at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego.

And why, evolutionarily, would a parent pass down such specific information? “So that when the offspring, or descending generations, encounter that environment later in life, they’ll know how to behave appropriately,” Dias said.

...

His team performed an in vitro fertilization (IVF) experiment in which they trained animals to fear acetophenone and then 10 days later harvested their sperm. They sent the sperm to another lab across campus where it was used to artificially inseminate female mice. Then the researchers looked at the brains of the offspring. ”What is striking is that the neuroanatomical results still persist after IVF,” Dias said. “There’s something in the sperm.”

Truly astounding if true, LOTS of skepticism about it at this point.

[Nyah]

Maven is going to be launching soon (within the hour) for another Mars mission:

MAVEN is set to launch at 1:28 EST from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. At the time of this article’s publication, there is a 60 percent chance the mission will be a “go” during the two-hour-long launch window, due to weather. If MAVEN does not get off the ground during the next 20 days, NASA will not be able to try again until 2016 when the planets will once again be so favorably aligned.

You can watch the launch here:

http://www.iflscience.com/space/miss...99s-atmosphere

Here's a cool photo of Maven on the Launch pad in Florida a couple nights ago. The full moom in the background just adds to the photo:



EDIT: Launch successful. You can still watch live feel of where Maven is right now over (moving away from) Earth.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by photon

Truly astounding if true, LOTS of skepticism about it at this point.

So Lamarkian (sp?) evolution reborn? I don't doubt there is a lot of skepticism, I thought there had been a lot of work refuting that theory.

[photon]

Yeah, smacks of Lamarckism, but that's kind of semantics, since any method for this to happen (some kind of epigenetics or something) still is Darwinian in nature, just because the mechanism is outside DNA doesn't mean selection and such doesn't come into play. Still I'm sure this is already on some website proclaiming the death of the theory of evolution.

[Old Yeller]

I've read some really interesting science in this thread, but all that "science" pales in comparison to this ground breaking study just released:

Cats recognise their owners' voices but never evolved to care, says study

Carried out by Atsuko Saito and Kazutaka Shinozuka, the study tested twenty housecats in their own homes; waiting until the owner was out of sight and then playing them recordings of three strangers calling their names, followed by their owner, followed by another stranger.

The researchers then analysed the cats’ responses to each call by measuring a number of factors including ear, tail and head movement, vocalization, eye dilation and ‘displacement’ – shifting their paws to move.

When hearing their names’ being called the cats displayed “orientating behaviour” (moving their heads and ears about to locate where the sound was coming from) and although they showed a greater response to their owner’s voices than strangers’, they declined to move when called by any of the volunteers.

“These results indicate that cats do not actively respond with communicative behavior to owners who are calling them from out of sight, even though they can distinguish their owners’ voices,” write Saito and Shinozuka. “This cat–owner relationship is in contrast to that with dogs.”

It's actually kind of an interesting but brief article dealing with domestication differences between cat vs dog.. but I just really like the headline.


Also the fact that the Japanese needed to spend money to confirm this.