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A surprising discovery about the black hole V404 Cygnus is expanding our understanding of black holes, the objects they can host, and the way they form.

Researchers have trained an AI process to predict potential active ingredients with special properties. Therefore, they derived a chemical language model -- a kind of ChatGPT for molecules. Following a training phase, the AI was able to exactly reproduce the chemical structures of compounds with known dual-target activity that may be particularly effective medications.

Researchers have trained an AI process to predict potential active ingredients with special properties. Therefore, they derived a chemical language model -- a kind of ChatGPT for molecules. Following a training phase, the AI was able to exactly reproduce the chemical structures of compounds with known dual-target activity that may be particularly effective medications.

In the face of rising CO2 levels, scientists are searching for sustainable ways of pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, so-called direct air capture. A new type of porous material, a covalent organic framework (COF) with attached amines, stands out because of its durability and efficient adsorption and desorption of CO2 at relatively low temperatures. The material would fit into carbon capture systems currently used for point source capture.

Researchers are designing new ways to make spectrometers that are ultra-small but still very powerful, to be used for anything from detecting disease to observing stars in distant galaxies.

Researchers are designing new ways to make spectrometers that are ultra-small but still very powerful, to be used for anything from detecting disease to observing stars in distant galaxies.

A research team has used nitrogen isotope analysis to demonstrate that 385 million years old corals from the Eifel and Sauerland regions had symbionts. This finding represents the earliest evidence of photosymbiosis in corals. Photosymbiosis might explain why ancient coral reefs grew to massive sizes despite being in nutrient-poor environments.

An international research team has pioneered a new technique to identify and characterize atomic-scale defects in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), a two-dimensional (2D) material often dubbed 'white graphene' for its remarkable properties. This advance could accelerate the development of next-generation electronics and quantum technologies.

Nestled on the slopes of Cerro La Negra at an elevation of 13,000 feet is an unusual-looking observatory. Known as the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory, it looks like a tightly packed collection of grain silos, which is essentially what it is. But rather than holding grain, the silos are each filled with 188,000 liters of water and four photomultiplier tubes. While it’s an unusual setup, it’s what you need to observe high-energy gamma rays from deep space.

Rather than observing the gamma rays directly, the observatory uses an effect known as [Cherenkov radiation. Essentially, when a high-energy gamma ray strikes Earth’s atmosphere, it triggers the emission of a shower of particles moving at nearly light speed. They move so fast that they travel faster than light can move through water. So when these particles pass through a water silo, they emit Cherenkov radiation. HAWC is particularly sensitive to TeV gamma rays, which are the highest energy gamma rays produced in the cosmos. And with such a large number of detectors, HAWC can pinpoint the origin of these TeV gamma rays better than any other observatory, as a recent study shows.

It’s a bit rare for a high-energy gamma ray to strike Earth, so the team gathered seven years of observations, capturing 100 gamma ray events, each with an energy of more than 100 TeV. While that doesn’t sound like a lot, it is enough data for the team to determine their origin. The particles are coming from the center of our galaxy! Of course, many of you won’t be the least surprised. After all, there is a supermassive black hole in that area, so naturally it would produce high-energy particles. But this discovery helps us understand what’s going on.

The HAWC observatory seen in 2014. Credit: Wikipedia user Jordanagoodman

In order for TeV gamma rays to reach us across 30,000 light years, our galactic black hole must produce even higher energy particles. Specifically, it must produce protons in the PeV energy range. Peta electron volts, which is a thousand times more energy than the gamma rays we see. These PeV protons then collide with interstellar gas molecules to produce gamma rays. This means there must be a mystery PeVatron source. We know that PeV protons can be produced in the most violent astrophysical phenomena, such as supernovae and black hole mergers, but these can’t explain what we observe.

To further understand the source, the team looks forward to the construction of the Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory (SWGO), which will be a facility similar to HAWC, but in the Atacama region of northern Chile. By combining observations from both, we should be able to localize the galactic source of PeV protons.

Reference: Albert, A., et al. “Observation of the Galactic Center PeVatron beyond 100 TeV with HAWC.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters 973.1 (2024): L34.

The post There's a Particle Accelerator at the Center of the Milky Way appeared first on Universe Today.

Researchers have managed to encode enormous amounts of information, including images, into DNA at a rate hundreds of times faster than was previously possible

Google DeepMind has been using its AI watermarking method on Gemini chatbot responses for months – and now it’s making the tool available to any AI developer

The systems we use to produce food have many problems, from horrifying waste to their dependence on fossil fuels. Vaclav Smil explains how to fix them

A nearby star that exploded some 3 million years ago could have removed all dust smaller than a millimetre from the outer solar system

I was up at 4 a.m. to get to Midway two hours before my flight to Vegas (yes, I’m compulsively early, but never in my life have I missed a flight, train, or bus).

Thanks to TSA Pre-Check, I breezed through security in two minutes, and, thank Ceiling Cat, did not get groped.  At the first gate I encountered there was a crowd of older men, many in wheelchairs, and all wearing hats and tags around their neck. The gate was also full of men in orange shirt whose duty was to push the men in wheelchairs onto the plane.  On the table to the side were free donuts and coffee (I did not partake).

I asked one of the women shepherding the men what was going on. She replied that this was an “Honor Flight”.  I asked what that meant, and learned that, once a month, Southwest flies a planeload of veterans—most from Vietnam but a few from WWII—to D.C. for a ceremony, presumably at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.  After that, Southwest flies them home. It’s all for free, and there’s a waiting list.

This is why Southwest is my favorite airline, though it plans some changes in 2025. The passengers on the Honor Flight.

To be sure, I felt a bit weird about honoring men fighting and dying in a futile and unjust war (I was a conscientious objector and worked in a hospital instead of going into the srevice), but on the other hand I have the customary respect for people who risk their lives at the behest of their country.

Now I’m cooling my heels at Midway Airport with about an hour until boarding the four-hour Dishonor Flight to Vegas. I have two Dunkin Donuts and a very large coffee, as well as a copy of a book I’m reviewing and a short novel to read on the plane: The Vegetarian, by Han Kang.

I’ll add some news that I read this morning.

*At the NYT, famed election prognosticator Nate Silver gives his gut feeling about who will win the election. I’ll quote a bit (the piece is archived here.) It’s not pretty:

Yet when I deliver this unsatisfying news, I inevitably get a question: “C’mon, Nate, what’s your gut say?”

So OK, I’ll tell you. My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats.

But I don’t think you should put any value whatsoever on anyone’s gut — including mine. Instead, you should resign yourself to the fact that a 50-50 forecast really does mean 50-50. And you should be open to the possibility that those forecasts are wrong, and that could be the case equally in the direction of Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris.

Nate’s reasons:

Instead, the likely problem is what pollsters call nonresponse bias. It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them.

Nonresponse bias can be a hard problem to solve. Response rates to even the best telephone polls are in the single digits — in some sense, the people who choose to respond to polls are unusual. Trump supporters often have lower civic engagement and social trust, so they can be less inclined to complete a survey from a news organization. Pollsters are attempting to correct for this problem with increasingly aggressive data-massaging techniques, like weighing by educational attainment (college-educated voters are more likely to respond to surveys) or even by how people say they voted in the past. There’s no guarantee any of this will work.

If Mr. Trump does beat his polling, there will have been at least one clear sign of it: Democrats no longer have a consistent edge in party identification — about as many people now identify as Republicans.

. . . There’s also the fact that Ms. Harris is running to become the first female president and the second Black one. The so-called Bradley effect — named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who underperformed his polls in the 1982 California governor’s race, for the supposed tendency of voters to say they’re undecided rather than admit they won’t vote for a Black candidate — wasn’t a problem for Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012. Still, the only other time a woman was her party’s nominee, undecided voters tilted heavily against her. So perhaps Ms. Harris should have some concerns about a “Hillary effect.”

It’s hard for me to believe that people would take sex and race into account these days (Silver apparently believes that sex is more important than race), but if Harris loses, we’ll never know.  Finally, Silver proffers a spoonful of sugar by theorizing about how Harris could underperform in the polls and win the election. One more prediction, and you can read the whole article at the archived link above:

Here’s another counterintuitive finding: It’s surprisingly likely that the election won’t be a photo finish.

With polling averages so close, even a small systematic polling error like the one the industry experienced in 2016 or 2020 could produce a comfortable Electoral College victory for Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump. According to my model, there’s about a 60 percent chance that one candidate will sweep at least six of seven battleground states.

It’s no secret that I’m not a huge fan of Harris, who I think would not be the candidate if we had longer to vet the Democrats, but I’m even less of a fan of Trump, and would be embarrassed before foreigners to admit that someone who dances for half an hour onstage, boasts about grabbing women’s genitals, is subject to five indictments, and curses badly about Harris (I believe I heard him say, before an office, that she was a “shit Vice President—that such a person could be elected to the highest office in the land.

*And the Free Press reports that a lot of the $90 million donated to Black Lives Matter after George Floyd’s death has been embezzled, and for hedonistic purposes:

The spectacular rise and fall of BLM has surprisingly little in common with earlier civil rights campaigns, other than, perhaps, good intentions. How BLM’s leaders exploited George Floyd’s murder to raise millions that they then put into their own pockets more closely resembles the stories of famous grifters like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos or Sam Bankman-Fried’s foray into “effective altruism.”

. . . . And BLM four years later? It looks like little more than a hustle.

The latest proof point came earlier this month when Tyree Conyers-Page—a.k.a. Sir Maejor Page, the 35-year-old former leader of the BLM chapter of Greater Atlanta—was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison for money laundering and wire fraud. Pocketing the $450,000 raised from 18,000 donors to “fight for George Floyd” and the “movement,” Page spent lavishly on himself, splurging on tailored suits, nightclub bar tabs, an evening with a prostitute, and, as he texted to a friend, “a big-ass cribo” that he bought in Ohio after he “won the lottery.”

 . . . There are actually two [parent networks of BLM]: BLM Global Network Foundation and BLM Grassroots. The latter was formed in 2019 as an umbrella organization of local chapters of the group and is co-directed by Melina Abdullah. Since then, media reports have accused Abdullah and other chapter leaders of using Grassroots’ coffers to pay for vacations to Jamaica and her own personal expenses. (She hasn’t been charged with a crime.)

Abdullah has denied the allegations, but at least $8.7 million in donations is unaccounted for. The answer to where the money went may come soon. California attorney general Rob Bonta has demanded that Grassroots turn over delinquent tax filings and late fees before Sunday, October 27. If it doesn’t, the organization’s tax-exempt status will be revoked.

And about BLM Global, which was “founded in July 2013 by activists Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi as an online platform in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012.”

As the national face of BLM, Cullors was suddenly in great demand. She inked a deal with Warner Bros. to create animated kids’ programming, documentaries, dramas, and comedies about structural racism and inequality—none of which were ever made. She and the foundation also spent a big chunk of those donations on an enviable real estate portfolio. They acquired a $6 million Los Angeles mansion, which Cullors used in early 2021 for a Biden inauguration party as well as her son’s birthday party. She and BLM Global paid $6.3 million for a mansion in Canada, which they named “the Wildseed Centre for Arts and Activism” (“a transfeminist, queer affirming space politically aligned with supporting Black liberation work across Canada”). They also dropped $3.2 million on four luxury properties, including a 3.2-acre estate in Georgia that boasted a runway for private aircraft. And BLM Global handed out money to a coterie of Cullors’ friends and relatives, including $778,000 for “services” to an arts group run by Damon Turner, the father of Cullors’ son, and $1.6 million to a security firm owned by her brother Paul. The foundation also cut checks totaling $205,000 to a company run by Cullors and her spouse as well as a $211,000 payout to Asha Bandele, the friend who helped Cullors write her memoir.

There’s more, and this is really depressing:

And yet, a husk of BLM still exists, and is focused on what might be the organization’s final cause: anti-Zionism.

About all of this what can one say but “Oy gewalt!”?

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “latter,”, came with a list of Qur’anic verses:

2.19, 4.43 and 5.90 if you’re interested.

And yes, what Jesus says is true, as is his riposte when Mo explains abrogation. This is one of the issues that’s an Achilles Heel for Islam, as is the statement by Jesus (Matthew 16:28):

Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.

Jesus, you didn’t come back! (Of course theologians can parse the verse so it appears metaphorical.)

A recent meta-analysis of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy concludes that the evidence “confirms” EMDR is effective in treating depression. It is a great example of the limitations of meta-analysis, and how easy it is to create essentially a false narrative using poor quality research. EMDR was “developed” by Dr. Francine Shapiro in 1987. It is the notion that bilateral […]

The post EMDR Is Still Dubious first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Everything you need to know about Rwanda's outbreak of Marburg virus, which has been described as one of the deadliest human pathogens

In a wetland on the south coast of England, archaeologists dug up one of the oldest and most complete wooden tools ever found in Britain, which is around 3500 years old

Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who has worked on the JWST, catalogues the science behind its most stunning images in her new book, Webb's Universe. Here's her pick of the telescope’s best shots

Between 2011 and 2018, NASA’s Dawn mission conducted extended observations of Ceres and Vesta, the largest bodies in the Main Asteroid Belt. The mission’s purpose was to address questions about the formation of the Solar System since asteroids are leftover material from the process, which began roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Ceres and Vesta were chosen because Ceres is largely composed of ice, while Vesta is largely composed of rock. During the years it orbited these bodies, Dawn revealed several interesting features on their surfaces.

This included mysterious flow features similar to those observed on other airless bodies like Jupiter’s moon Europa. In a recent study, Michael J. Poston, a researcher from the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI), recently collaborated with a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to attempt to explain the presence of these features. In the paper detailing their findings, they outlined how post-impact conditions could temporarily produce liquid brines that flow along the surface, creating curved gullies and depositing debris fans along the impact craters’ walls.

Michael J. Poston, the lead author of the study, is the Group Leader of Laboratory Studies (Space Science) at the SwRI. He was joined by a team of researchers from NASA JPL at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Airborne Snow Observatories, including Jennifer Scully – a NASA JPL planetary geologist and an Associate on the Dawn science mission team. The paper that describes their findings, “Experimental Examination of Brine and Water Lifetimes after Impact on Airless Worlds,” was published on October 21st in The Planetary Science Journal.

The planetoid Vesta, which was studied by the Dawn probe between July 2011 and September 2012. Credit: NASA

Airless bodies are frequently struck by asteroids, meteorites, and other debris that form impact craters and cause temporary atmospheres to form above them. On icy bodies or those with sufficient amounts of volatile elements (possibly beneath the surface), this will trigger temporary outflows of liquid water. However, water and other volatiles (like ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane, etc.) will lose stability in strong vacuum conditions. For their study, the team sought to examine how long liquid could potentially flow on the surfaces of airless bodies (such as Ceres and Vesta) before refreezing.

To this end, they simulated the pressures that ice on Vesta experiences after a meteoroid impact and how long it would take the liquid released from the subsurface to refreeze. “We wanted to investigate our previously proposed idea that ice underneath the surface of an airless world could be excavated and melted by an impact and then flow along the walls of the impact crater to form distinct surface features,” said Scully in a recent SwRI press release.

To this end, the team placed liquid-filled sample containers in a modified test chamber at NASA JPL to simulate the rapid pressure decreases that occur after an impact on airless bodies. In so doing, they were able to simulate how liquid behaves as the temporary atmosphere created by an impact dissipates. According to their results, the pressure drop was so fast that test liquids immediately and dramatically expanded, ejecting material from the sample containers. As Poston explained:

“Through our simulated impacts, we found that the pure water froze too quickly in a vacuum to effect meaningful change, but salt and water mixtures, or brines, stayed liquid and flowing for a minimum of one hour. This is sufficient for the brine to destabilize slopes on crater walls on rocky bodies, cause erosion and landslides, and potentially form other unique geological features found on icy moons.”

This image of the Cornelia Crater on Vesta shows lobate deposits (right) and curvilinear gullies (indicated by white arrows, left). Credit: SwRI/NASA JPL-Caltech/Poston et al. (2024)

These findings could help explain the origins of similar features on other airless bodies, like Europa’s smooth plains and the spider-like feature in its Manannán impact crater (which is due to “dirty ice” existing alongside “pure” water ice). They could also shed light on post-impact processes on bodies with very thin atmospheres, like Mars. This includes its gullies, which have dark features that flow downhill, and fan-shaped debris deposits that form in the presence of flowing water. Last, the study could support the existence of subsurface water in other inhospitable environments throughout the Solar System.

“If the findings are consistent across these dry and airless or thin-atmosphere bodies, it demonstrates that water existed on these worlds in the recent past, indicating water might still be expelled from impacts,” said Poston. “There may still be water out there to be found.” This could have profound implications for future missions to these bodies, including NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. This mission launched on October 14th, 2024, and will establish orbit around Europa by April 2030.

Further Reading: SwRI, The Planetary Science Journal

The post New Research Reveals Provides Insight into Mysterious Features on Airless Worlds appeared first on Universe Today.