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Academics are often accused of 'splitting hairs', but a team has now devised a machine to do just that. We all have a bad hair day from time to time, and split ends are a common problem. However, the science behind this kind of hair damage is poorly understood, which is why scientists are investigating this knotty problem.

Antibody drug discovery is an extremely laborious and tedious process. Epitope Binning-seq, a novel method, introduces a groundbreaking approach by enabling simultaneous analysis of multiple antibodies. Using a fluorescently labeled reference antibody (rAb), this method employs flow cytometry to identify similar epitope-binding query antibodies (qAbs). Next-generation sequencing of fluorescence-negative cells then groups qAbs with epitopes akin to the rAb into epitope bins. This innovative technique holds immense potential in enhancing antibody drug discovery process.

A multi-institutional team has created atomic optical antennas in solids. The team used germanium vacancy centers in diamonds to create an optical energy enhancement of six orders of magnitude, a regime challenging to reach with conventional atomic antenna structures.

An international team of planetary scientists has detected patches of water frost sitting atop the Tharsis volcanoes on Mars, which are not only the tallest volcanic mountains on the Red Planet but in the entire solar system.

Astronomers have deciphered the formation history of young star clusters, some of which we can see with the naked eye at night. The team reports that most nearby young star clusters belong to only three families, which originate from very massive star-forming regions. This research also provides new insights into the effects of supernovae (violent explosions at the end of the life of very massive stars) on the formation of giant gas structures in galaxies like our Milky Way.

Astronomers observing exoplanet GJ 3470 b saw evidence of water, carbon dioxide, methane and sulfur dioxide. Astronomers hope the discovery of this exoplanet's sulfurous atmosphere will advance our understanding of how planets forms.

The Milky Way is only as massive as it is because of collisions and mergers with other galaxies. This is a messy process, and we see the same thing happening with other galaxies throughout the Universe. Currently, we see the Milky Way nibbling at its two satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Their fate is likely sealed, and they’ll be absorbed into our galaxy.

Researchers thought the last major merger occurred in the Milky Way’s distant past, between 8 and 11 billion years ago. But new research amplifies the idea that it was much more recent: less than 3 billion years ago.

This new insight into our galactic history comes from the ESA’s Gaia mission. Launched in 2013, Gaia is busily mapping 1 billion astronomical objects, mostly stars. It measures them repeatedly, establishing accurate measurements of their positions and motions.

A new paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society presents the findings. It’s titled “The Debris of the ‘Last Major Merger’ is Dynamically Young.” The lead author is Thomas Donlon, a post-doctoral researcher in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. Donlon has been studying mergers in the Milky Way for several years and has published other work on the matter.

Each time another galaxy collides and merges with the Milky Way, it leaves wrinkles. ‘Wrinkles’ obviously isn’t a scientific term. It’s an umbrella term for several types of morphologies, including phase space folds, caustics, chevrons, and shells. These wrinkles move through different groups of stars within the Milky Way, affecting how the stars move through space. By measuring the positions and velocities of these stars with great precision, Gaia can detect the wrinkles, the imprint of the last major merger.

“We get wrinklier as we age, but our work reveals that the opposite is true for the Milky Way. It’s a sort of cosmic Benjamin Button, getting less wrinkly over time,” said lead author Donlon in a press release. “By looking at how these wrinkles dissipate over time, we can trace when the Milky Way experienced its last big crash—and it turns out this happened billions of years later than we thought.”

The effort to understand the Milky Way’s (MW) last major merger involves different pieces of evidence. One of the pieces of evidence, along with wrinkles, is an Fe/H-rich region where stars follow a highly eccentric orbit. A star’s Fe/H ratio is a chemical fingerprint, and when astronomers find a group of stars with the same fingerprint and the same orbits, it’s evidence of a common origin. This group of stars is sometimes called ‘the Splash.’ The stars in the Splash may have originated in a Fe/H-rich progenitor. They have odd orbits that stand out from their surroundings. Astronomers think they were heated and their orbits altered as a by-product of the merger.

There are two competing explanations for all of the merger evidence.

One says that a progenitor dwarf galaxy named Gaia Sausage/Enceladus (GSE) collided with the MW proto-disk between 8 and 11 billion years ago. The other explanation is that an event called the Virgo Radial Merger (VRM) is responsible for the stars in the inner halo. That collision occurred much more recently, less than 3 billion years ago.

This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of the globular cluster NGC 2808. It might be the old core of the Gaia Sausage. Image Credit: By NASA, ESA, A. Sarajedini (University of Florida) and G. Piotto (University of Padua (Padova)) – http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/2007/18/image/a/ (direct link), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2371715

“These two scenarios make different predictions about observable structure in local phase space because the morphology of debris depends on how long it has had to phase mix,” the authors explain in their paper.

The wrinkles in the MW were first identified in Gaia data in 2018 and presented in this paper. “We have observed shapes with different morphologies, such as a spiral similar to a snail’s shell. The existence of these substructures has been observed for the first time thanks to the unprecedented precision of the data brought by Gaia satellite, from the European Space Agency (ESA)”, said Teresa Antoja, the study’s first author, in 2018.

This AI-generated image illustrates the MW’s ‘wrinkles’ from the last major merger event. Image Credit: University of Barcelona.

But Gaia has released more data since 2018, and it supports the more recent merger scenario, the Virgo Radial Merger. That data shows that the wrinkles are much more prevalent than the earlier data and the studies based on it suggest.

“For the wrinkles of stars to be as clear as they appear in Gaia data, they must have joined us less than 3 billion years ago—at least 5 billion years later than was previously thought,” said co-author Heidi Jo Newberg, from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. If the wrinkles were much older and conformed to the GSE merger scenario, they’d be more difficult to discern.

“New wrinkles of stars form each time the stars swing back and forth through the center of the Milky Way. If they’d joined us 8 billion years ago, there would be so many wrinkles right next to each other that we would no longer see them as separate features,” Newberg said.

This doesn’t mean there’s no evidence for the more ancient GSE merger. Some of the stars that hint at the ancient merger may be from the more recent VRM merger, and some may still be associated with the GSE merger. It’s challenging to figure out, and simulations play a large role. The researchers in previous work and in this work ran multiple simulations to see how they matched the evidence. “Our goal is to determine the time that has passed since the progenitor of the local phase-space folds collided with the MW disc,” the authors write in their paper.

“We can see how the shapes and number of wrinkles change over time using these simulated mergers. This lets us pinpoint the exact time when the simulation best matches what we see in real Gaia data of the Milky Way today—a method we used in this new study too,” said Thomas.

“By doing this, we found that the wrinkles were likely caused by a dwarf galaxy colliding with the Milky Way around 2.7 billion years ago. We named this event the Virgo Radial Merger.” Those results and the name come from a previous study from 2019.

As Gaia delivers more data with each release, astronomers are getting a better look at the evidence of mergers. It’s becoming clear that the MW has a complex history.

The VRM likely involved more than one entity. It could have brought a whole group of dwarf galaxies and star clusters into the MW at around the same time. As astronomers research the MW’s merger history in greater detail, they hope to determine which of these objects are from the more recent VRM and which are from the ancient GSE.

“The Milky Way’s history is constantly being rewritten at the moment, in no small part thanks to new data from Gaia,” adds Thomas. “Our picture of the Milky Way’s past has changed dramatically from even a decade ago, and I think our understanding of these mergers will continue to change rapidly.”

“This finding improves what we know of the many complicated events that shaped the Milky Way, helping us better understand how galaxies are formed and shaped—our home galaxy in particular,” said Timo Prusti, Project Scientist for Gaia at ESA.

The post The Milky Way’s Last Merger Event Was More Recent Than Thought appeared first on Universe Today.

The same genetic tools being used to resurrect the woolly mammoth and dodo could help many other vulnerable species that have yet to die out

Here’s Bill Maher’s monologue from his latest episode of Real Time. It’s a serious (but humorous) look at America’s deeply dysfunctional prison system, but beginning with speculation about Trump getting raped in prison.

As I’ve written ad nauseam, America deliberately creates prisons to be horrible, demoralizing, and—in the extreme form of SuperMax prisons—liable to drive their inmates insane. All of this comes from the belief that prisoners had free will when they did their crime, and thus must undergo severe retribution.  Yes, incarceration can be useful for keeping bad people out of society, helpin reform them, and even detering others from criminality, but retribution? If you’re a determinist, it doesn’t make sense.  That’s why enlightened countries like Norway treat their prisoners like human beings. That may explain why Norway’s recidivism rate is about a quarter of America’s (rates mentioned in the video below).

The whole justice system—not just in America but nearly everywhere—is based on the assumption that criminals could have avoided doing their crimes—that they have libertarian free will. Thus they must be punished for making the wrong “choice.” Both Robert Sapolsky and I, diehard determinists, think that one of the biggest implications of determinism is the pressing need for judicial reform.  And this attitude als0 pervades Maher’s monologue.

This is really a video op-ed, and I can’t help but believe that, at least for the video generation, it’s more effective than a serious piece in the New York Times.

h/t: Leo

An analysis of their vocalisations suggests that African savannah elephants invent names for each other, making them the only animals other than humans thought to do so

We know that there is ice at the Martian poles and underground, but until now it wasn't clear it could exist on the surface of the Red Planet

Biological processes such as DNA replication or cellular structure formation may become more accurate when done as quickly as possible, offering new hints into life's origins

When bacteria were put in alternating environments, some became better at evolving to cope with the changes – evidence that “evolvability” can be gained through natural selection

The protective bubble around the sun retreated dramatically after colliding with a freezing interstellar cloud, leaving much of the solar system exposed to radiation that may have shaped our evolution, a study suggests

Back in the 1960 there was a race to land people on the Moon between the US and the Soviet Union. This was very much a part of the cold war, with each country interested in showing off its technical prowess to the world with a technology closely related to that needed to deliver nuclear warheads. All the while everyone insisted this was all peaceful exploration for all mankind. But as a result we advanced our space technology with a lot of downstream effects. And of course there are many legitimate commercial uses of space, which has kept the space industries going for decades.

Now we are poised for a return to the Moon, with essentially the same tensions playing out. As of now there are five nations in the Moon club – those who have achieved soft landings on the Moon (crashing something into the Moon apparently doesn’t count) – the US, the Soviet Union, China, India, and Japan. We have yet to have a private company land something on the Moon, but we are getting close (this year Intuitive Machines launched a mission but did not make it to the lunar surface because of a fuel leak). What are the geopolitical, economic, commercial, technological, scientific and exploration factors pushing us back to the Moon? It’s complicated, but here are some factors that are commonly discussed by experts.

First, we are clearly in the midst of a new geopolitical space race, this time mainly between the US and China. And again, prestige and influence on the international stage is at stake. Strategists also talk of controlling cislunar space – essentially the space between the Earth and the Moon. This means having an infrastructure of rockets, capsules, and stations that can get to the Moon and back, either crewed or uncrewed. This includes positioning monitoring satellites to keep track of what’s happening in cislunar space, including near Earth orbit.

Of course I would prefer that space exploration be done entirely for scientific and commercial purposes, rather than geopolitical competition. But I don’t regret, for example, the Apollo missions because of the competition angle. I just hope that competition remains friendly. We do have an international space treaty that dictates that the no one puts nuclear weapons in space, and that no one can own the Moon. All missions there must be for the benefit of all mankind. This treaty was a reaction to fears that cold-war space competition would get ugly.

Space exploration does not have to increase international tensions. The ISS is a good example of international cooperation in space, which could help ease tensions. But it’s hard to measure the impact of this, or missions like the linkup between Apollos and Soviet era capsules.

Now there is also a much larger commercial dimension to space exploration then there was during Apollo. Private companies, like Boeing and Space X, are now providing NASA with access to the ISS, and will play a critical role in getting to the Moon and maintaining our infrastructure there. Even if we work things out on the political end, there may be an intense commercial competition for lunar resources. The US and other countries have essentially passed laws saying that private companies can benefit commercially from resources extracted from space. This is part of their plan to bolster the private space industry, making sure they have an incentive to invest in space.

What does all this mean for the next phase of Moon exploration? The fear is that we will see a competition for lunar resources. These fall into two main categories – resources for use on the Moon, and resources to be flown back to Earth. Lunar resources for the Moon include water – who gets to use that frozen ice in permanently shadowed craters near the poles? Does whoever gets there first get to monopolize those resources? Will it be legal to set up a mining operation for rare earth minerals and helium for shipping back to Earth (assuming at some point this will be commercially viable)?

Right now we lack definitive international agreements, especially among nations that have the ability to get to the Moon. Yes, according to international treaty no one can own the Moon or its resources. But also according we have those national laws that state explicitly that private companies can benefit from space, including lunar, resources. The treaties we have state mainly broad principles, and it is unclear how or even if they would apply today.

Clearly we need updated international treaties to govern how the Moon and its resources can be used by nations and private corporations. This is an opportunity, before the race kicks into high gear, to move things in the direction of fair cooperation and to mitigate the worst aspects of competition. I think friendly competition can be a good thing, spurring investment and innovation. But there needs to be rules to ensure competition is fair and peaceful and benefits everyone. We really need to get ahead of this, and not wait for something terrible to happen first.

The post The Moon Race is On first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

The meaning of the word "bot" on Twitter/X seems to have shifted over time, with people originally using it to flag automated accounts, but now employing it to insult people they disagree with

The Washington Post recently published an article asking if COVID-19 infection can cause cancer. Probably not, but cancer caused by a virus is more more plausible than "turbo cancer" caused by the vaccine.

The post Forget “turbo cancers” caused by COVID-19 vaccines. Does COVID itself cause cancer? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Last week, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Alina Chan, Queen of lab leak conspiracy theories and then gave it a prominent place in its Sunday Magazine this weekend. How is it wrong? Let me count the ways.

The post The New York Times promotes “lab leak” conspiracy theories first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

To date, astronomers have confirmed the existence of 5638 extrasolar planets in 4,199 star systems. In the process, scientists have found many worlds that have defied expectations. This is certainly the case regarding “hot Neptunes,” planets that are similar to the “ice giants” of the outer Solar System but orbit much closer to their stars. But when a Johns Hopkins University-led team of astronomers discovered TIC365102760 b (aka. Pheonix), they observed something entirely unexpected: a Neptune-sized planet that retained its atmosphere by puffing up.

Sam Grunblatt, an astrophysicist with JHU’s William H. Miller III Department of Physics and Astronomy, led the research. He was joined by an international team that included NSF Graduate Research Fellow Nicholas Saunders, 51 Pegasi b Fellows Shreyas Vissapragada, Steven Giacalone, Ashley Chontos, and Joseph M. Akana Murphy, as well as researchers from many prestigious institutes and universities. The paper that describes their findings (which recently appeared in The Astrophysical Journal) is part of a series titled “TESS Giants Transiting Giants.”

Artist’s impression of JG436b, a hot Neptune located about 33 light years from Earth. Credit: STScI

Puff planets are a new class of incredibly rare exoplanets, accounting for an estimated 1% of planets in our galaxy. The team discovered Pheonix by combining data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) with radial velocity measurements obtained by the High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES) at the Keck Observatory. Their data indicated that Pheonix is 0.55 times the size of Jupiter but only 0.06 times as massive, which orbits a red giant star with a period of 4.21285 days (about six times closer to its star than the distance between Mercury and the Sun).

Based on the age and temperature of its star and the planet’s remarkably low density, the team expected that Pheonix’s gaseous envelopes should have been stripped away billions of years ago. Based on its density, the team also estimates that the planet is the puffiest “puff planet” discovered to date (roughly 60 times less dense than the densest “hot Neptune”) and that it will begin spiraling into its star in about 100 million years. As Grunblatt explained in a JHU HUB press release:

“This planet isn’t evolving the way we thought it would. It appears to have a much bigger, less dense atmosphere than we expected for these systems. How it held on to that atmosphere despite being so close to such a large host star is the big question.”

“It’s the smallest planet we’ve ever found around one of these red giants, and probably the lowest mass planet orbiting a [red] giant star we’ve ever seen. That’s why it looks really weird. We don’t know why it still has an atmosphere when other ‘hot Neptunes’ that are much smaller and much denser seem to be losing their atmospheres in much less extreme environments.”

Artist’s impression of Pheonix, the “hot Neptune” orbiting a red giant star 8 billion light-years from Earth. Credit: Roberto Molar Candanosa/JHU

These findings could have implications for new insight into the late-stage evolution of planetary systems and help scientists predict what will happen to the Solar System in a few billion years. According to standard models of stellar evolution, our Sun will exit its main sequence phase, expand to become a red giant, and eventually consume the inner planets. Based on these findings, they predict that Earth’s atmosphere may not evolve the way astronomers previously expected. Instead of our Sun blasting it away, our atmosphere may expand to become incredibly “puffy.”

Pheonix is the latest puffy planet examined by the international team based on TESS data. While puff planets are known to be rare, exoplanets like Pheonix are especially elusive because of their small size and low density. In the future, Grunblatt and his colleagues plan to search for more of these smaller worlds and have already identified a dozen potential candidates by combining transit and radial velocity data.

Further Reading: John Hopkins University, The Astrophysical Journal

The post Instead of Losing its Atmosphere, an Exoplanet Puffed Up and Held Onto it appeared first on Universe Today.

Here Richard Dawkins interviews linguist and author John McWhorter, a person familiar to readers of this site. And most of the 54-minute discussion is about linguistics.

It’s refreshing to hear McWhorter’s enthusiasm for linguistics, and this bit of the discussion goes from the start of the interview until about 37 minutes in. It’s sad that McWhorter has, by his own admission, been more or less drummed out of the fraternity of academic linguists because of his heterodox views on racism. I’m sure, based on this interview alone, that he was a terrific teacher.

At any rate, McWhorter explains why he began studying linguistics (it involves Hebrew), how many times he thinks language originated (McWhorter thinks just once, though he’s not convinced that this is supported by the existence of a “universal grammar” or universal “recursion”: subordinate phrases embedded within phrases). Rather, McWhorter is convinced of a single origin of language by parsimony alone. As to when it originated, McWhorter makes rather unconvincing arguments (criticized by Richard) that Homo erectus could use syntactic language; he’s on more solid ground when he thinks that Africans, because of evidence of their mental sophistication, used language around 300,000 years ago.

They discuss evidence that the FOXP2 gene was implicated in origin of language, and McWhorter is accurate in saying that this theory hasn’t worked out, though he believes, along with Steve Pinker, that the ability to use syntactic language is encoded in our genome.

The discussion of “woke racism” (the title of McWhorter’s well known book, which was originally “The Elect”) begins at 36:40.  Dawkins moves the discussion into why McWhorter considers woke racism a “religion”, even though there are no supernatural beings involved. I’m not particularly concerned whether one conceives of progressive racial activism as an ideology or a religion, for it seems a semantic question. To me the more interesting questions are the characteristics of the movement (Does it promote irrationality? Is it disconnected from reality? Does it promote “safe spaces”, which McWhorter sees as a religious concept?)

The discussion moves to the question of why you are considered black (or claim you are black) if you have any black ancestors, which leads to McWhorter’s assertion that we have to go beyond race as a personal identity.

The discussion finishes with McWhorter pushing back on the “defenestration” of figures like Thomas Jefferson because they were either slaveholders or didn’t denigrate slavery. He sees this demonization as “pernicious for education”, although he agrees that some extreme versions of racism (e.g., Woodrow Wilson) warrants taking down statues or erasing names. And what, he muses, will demonize us to our descendants.

It’s a very good discussion, I think, and shows McWhorter’s passion, eloquence, and thoughtfulness.

Since McWhorter mentions Jamaican patois as a form of English that isn’t recognizable as English, I wanted to hear some of it, so I’ve put the video showing such patois below.

h/t: Williams Garcia