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A team of scientists claims that the risk of common conditions like heart disease could be slashed by editing people's genomes at the embryo stage - but other biologists strongly disagree

Every fundamental particle in the universe fits into one of two groups called fermions and bosons, but now it seems there could be other particles out there that break this simple classification and were once thought to be impossible

Two species of marine molluscs dating back about 430 million years have been named Punk and Emo for their outlandish spiky appearance

A common sleep medication prevents mice from effectively clearing away waste and toxins from their brain during sleep

For decades, we studied only a tiny number of Antarctica's emperor penguins. Now robots and satellites are revealing surprising secrets about how they live

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “cheers,” isn’t particularly religious, but surely expresses the feelings of many people. (I for one will make no resolutions!) I don’t think the “booze is always bad for you” issue is yet settled, anyway.

Ecologist Susan Harrison of UC Davis has return with a fresh batch of photos. Susan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

Miscellaneous birds of late 2024

The only theme of this post is “birds I saw in late 2024 and haven’t used in a WEIT post yet.”  The first ones are from Shoreline Park in Mountain View, California.  Less than a mile from the Googleplex, 5 miles from Stanford University and 10 miles from Apple’s campus, this park lies on a stretch of southern San Francisco Bay that hosts many thousands of overwintering waterfowl and shorebirds.   Every year I get to enjoy its sights the day after Thanksgiving, when my siblings and their families gather for a meal and a birdwatching stroll.

American White Pelicans, Pelecanus erythrorhynchos, foraging along the shore in their majestically unhurried style:

Greater Yellowlegs, Tringa melanoleuca, staring into a very small abyss:

Snowy Egret, Egretta thula, looking like a movie star annoyed by paparazzi:

American Coot, Fulica americana, flaunting oversized webbed feet:

The next ones are from the vicinity of Davis, California.

Vermilion Flycatcher, Pyrocephalus rubinus, an immature male that excited the local birders since it’s a rare species in northern California:

Green Heron, Butorides virescens, casting a long shadow in an irrigation ditch:

Common Goldeneyes, Bucephala clangula, a group of females accompanied by one male lurking just out of sight:

Barrow’s Goldeneyes, Bucephala islandica, a more northerly species than the Common Goldeneye, distinguished by the female’s oranger beak and the male’s facial upside-down comma:

Osprey, Pandion haliaetus, watching for fish while also eyeing the humans watching it:

These two pictures are from Ashland, Oregon.

Oak Titmouse, Baeolophus inornatus, resembling Zippy the Pinhead:

Red-shouldered Hawk, Buteo lineatus, showing off a tessellated backside:

And the last is from Bodega Bay, California.

Belted Kingfisher, Megaceryle alcyon, my nearest thing to success at photographing this bold yet notoriously camera-averse bird:

Of all the unanswered questions in modern science, perhaps the most talked about is whether we are alone in the Universe. A new paper looks at another way we might be able to detect advanced civilisations and at its centre is the need for energy! The more advanced a civilisation becomes, the greater their need for energy and one of the most efficient ways, according to current theories, is to harness the energy from an actively feeding black hole. The paper suggests a civilisation feeding matter into a black hole could harvest energy from it, more excitingly perhaps, the process could be detectable within 17,000 light years! 

The search for intelligent life beyond Earth has been of fascination to scientists, philosophers and even inspired artists over the centuries. With hundreds of millions of stars in our Galaxy and billions of other galaxies across the cosmos, it seems the odds are in our favour of finding some other civilisations out there. 

Planets everywhere. So where are all the aliens? Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

The discovery of thousands of exoplanets in recent decades adds to the excitement so, researchers have directed radio telescopes and space probes on the search for aliens. Projects like SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has been scanning the sky looking for unusual patterns or messages that could reveal an advanced civilisation but despite the effort, there is a distinct lack of success, yet.

A different approach is to search for advanced civilisations based upon their energy signatures. It’s an innovative idea that seeks to identify civilisations based upon artificial patterns in the electromagnetic spectrum. We have certainly seen how human energy demand has increased as we have become more advanced and so theoretically any more advanced civilisations would need to harness energy on a scale far in excess of what we currently use. It may be that civilisations use giant megastructures like Dyson spheres to harness energy from stars and it’s the output from these or their impact on the light from a star that may be detectable.

Artist’s impression of a Dyson Sphere, an proposed alien megastructure that is the target of SETI surveys. Finding one of these qualifies in a “first contact” scenario. Credit: Breakthrough Listen / Danielle Futselaar

In a paper authored by Shant Baghram and published in the Astrophysical Journal, the team begin by categorising civilisations on the Kardashev Scale. It categorises advanced civilisations by measuring their technological advancement based upon the amount of energy they are capable of harnessing and using. They also propose an alternate scale based upon the Kardashev scale and the distance a civilisation is able to explore space, suggesting more advanced can explore further from host planet. 

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Credit: C. Padilla, NRAO/AUI/NSF

As a paper based purely on a theoretical model, they take the advanced civilisation’s category and explore the idea that they may use Dyson sphere’s around primordial black holes as an energy source. The team also propose observational techniques that may be employed to detect such structures using infrared and sub-millimetre signatures. They do assert however that telescopes like ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimetre/Sub-millimetre Array) is well placed to make observations and even to detect signatures and maybe even megastructures at distances of approximately 5.4 kiloparsecs (178 light years.)

Source : In Search of Extraterrestrial Artificial Intelligence Through Dyson Sphere–like Structures around Primordial Black Holes

The post We Could Search for Aliens Harvesting Energy from their Pet Black Hole appeared first on Universe Today.