Science

Axions are the most likely candidate for enigmatic dark matter that dominates the universe. Astrophysicists are searching for evidence of high-mass axions produced during supernovae. Scientists propose that a quick way to find these axions is to look for a gamma ray burst coincident with a neutrino burst from a nearby core collapse supernova. But we need a fleet of gamma ray telescopes to insure we capture these rare events.

Axions are the most likely candidate for enigmatic dark matter that dominates the universe. Astrophysicists are searching for evidence of high-mass axions produced during supernovae. Scientists propose that a quick way to find these axions is to look for a gamma ray burst coincident with a neutrino burst from a nearby core collapse supernova. But we need a fleet of gamma ray telescopes to insure we capture these rare events.

The world's thinnest spaghetti, about 200 times thinner than a human hair, has been created.

Researchers have developed a new durable plastic that won't pollute our oceans. The new material is as strong as conventional plastics and biodegradable, but what makes it special is that it breaks down in seawater. The new plastic is therefore expected to help reduce harmful microplastic pollution that accumulates in oceans and soil and eventually enters the food chain.

Researchers have developed a groundbreaking microscopy method that enables detailed three-dimensional (3D) RNA analysis at cellular resolution in whole intact mouse brains. The new method, called TRISCO, has the potential to transform our understanding of brain function, both in normal conditions and in disease, according to the new study.

Scientists have developed a new protective coating that significantly extends the life of perovskite solar cells, making them more practical for applications outside the lab.

Groups of wild chimpanzees with more complex tool-using behaviours tend to be genetically linked, providing evidence for cumulative culture in other apes

In the first hearing test of live baleen whales, the animals detected much higher frequency sounds than expected, forcing researchers to reconsider how these mammals respond to predators – and humans

I was working on a post in a desultory manner but decided to wait until tomorrow. Plus it’s snowing fairly heavily in Chicago so everything is a big mess of sloppy ice water.

BUT: this is excellent news if you have any neurons (click to read):

The NYT:

Matt Gaetz, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s contentious choice for attorney general who had faced a torrent of scrutiny, said on Thursday that he was withdrawing from consideration for the role.

“It is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on X. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle.”

Mr. Gaetz, who visited with Republican senators on Wednesday to help make a case for his selection, said in the post that the meetings were “excellent,” and that “momentum was strong.” But he added that “Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1,” referring to the Justice Department.

He added, “I remain fully committed to see that Donald J. Trump is the most successful President in history. I will forever be honored that President Trump nominated me to lead the Department of Justice and I’m certain he will Save America.”

Mr. Gaetz was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for sexual misconduct until he resigned from the House on Nov. 13, after Mr. Trump announced his intention to nominate him.

Mr. Trump, in a social media post, said he appreciated Mr. Gaetz’s attempts to win over senators and be confirmed as attorney general, adding that he thought Mr. Gaetz “was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the administration.”

House Republicans voted yesterday to block the Ethics Committee report on Gaetz, but the momentum for withdrawal was strong. I am glad because I always thought that Gaetz had the greatest potential to harm America among all the cabinet members, followed by Pete Hegseth (Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense), and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (proposed Secretary of Health and human services.

One down, two to go.

Spaghetti strands that are 200 times thinner than a human hair could be woven into bandages to help prevent infections

Chlorophyll (a naturally occurring pigment involved in photosynthesis)-inspired molecules hold promise for developing next-generation light-harvesting materials. However, achieving precise control over their assembly is challenging. Researchers have now revealed that attaching dendrons -- branched, tree-like structures -- can aid in self-assembly of chlorophyll's materials. They found that smaller dendrons lead to stacked, fiber-like structures, while larger dendrons create spherical chlorophyll particles, advancing the development of materials that mimic the light-harvesting efficiency of natural photosynthetic systems.

While astronomers have taken about two dozen zoomed-in images of stars in our galaxy, unveiling their properties, countless other stars dwell within other galaxies, so far away that observing even one of them in detail has been extremely challenging. Up until now.

Protein design aims to create customized antibodies for therapies, biosensors for diagnostics, or enzymes for chemical reactions. An international research team has now developed a method for designing large new proteins better than before and producing them with the desired properties in the laboratory. Their approach involves a new way of using the capabilities of the AI-based software Alphafold2, for which the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 2024.

Protein design aims to create customized antibodies for therapies, biosensors for diagnostics, or enzymes for chemical reactions. An international research team has now developed a method for designing large new proteins better than before and producing them with the desired properties in the laboratory. Their approach involves a new way of using the capabilities of the AI-based software Alphafold2, for which the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 2024.

Growing wood directly from stem cells could offer an alternative to cutting threatened hardwood trees, but it isn't clear if it has same properties as actual wood

Every now and then, astronomers will detect an odd kind of radio signal. So powerful it can outshine a galaxy, but lasting only milliseconds. They are known as fast radio bursts (FRBs). When they were first discovered a couple of decades ago, we had no idea what might cause them. We weren’t even sure if they were astronomical in origin. FRB’s were so localized and so short-lived, it was difficult to gather data on them. But with wide-field radio telescopes such as CHIME we can now observe FRBs regularly and have a pretty good idea of their source: magnetars.

Magnetars are neutron stars with immensely powerful magnetic fields. Now that we can localize FRBs, we have been able to match a few of them to the region of a neutron star. While most FRBs occur in distant galaxies, in 2020 we observed one within the Milky Way. The magnetar source also happened to be a pulsar, and astronomers were able to show that the FRB [correlated with a glitch in the pulsar’s rotation,](https://briankoberlein.com/blog/power-of-magnetism/) thus confirming the source. So we are fairly certain that FRBs are caused by neutron stars, but we are still uncertain about the exact mechanism.

One popular idea is that fast radio bursts are caused by magnetic realignments. This is what drives flares on the Sun. Over time, the Sun’s magnetic field lines can get twisted up until they snap into realignment, releasing energy. If a similar effect occurs on magnetars, the resulting snap would be much faster and more powerful. One difficulty with this idea is that FRBs are so short-lived that they are almost too fast for magnetic field lines to realign. So astronomers keep looking for new ideas, and one recently proposed argues that they are caused by impact events.

Distribution of FRB duration and ISB sizes compared. Credit: Pham, et al

Collisions have long been known as the source of high-energy events. For example, some supernovae are caused by the collisions of neutron stars. We also know that comets and asteroids occasionally impact the Sun, so we would expect similar impacts to occur on neutron stars. In this new work, the authors propose that FRBs are caused when an interstellar body collides with a neutron star. The impact would trigger a powerful electromagnetic burst. To support their argument, the authors looked at the distribution of FRBs arranged by duration. The timing of FRBs follows a distribution similar to the distribution of solar system bodies. Not only that, the duration of an FRB seems to match the hypothetical duration of an impact event based on an object’s size.

While the data does seem to support the idea of impact-based FRBs, the study doesn’t solve all the mysteries surrounding these powerful bursts. We know, for example, that some FRBs are repeaters, meaning they occur multiple times from the same source. Some studies have shown that repeating FRBs are quasi-periodic, which would be difficult to explain through random collisions. It’s possible that repeating and non-repeating FRBs are caused by different mechanisms, though the data is still inconclusive on that point.

Reference: Pham, Dang, et al. “Fast Radio Bursts and Interstellar Objects.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.09135 (2024).

The post Are Fast Radio Bursts Caused by Interstellar Objects Crashing Into Neutron Stars? appeared first on Universe Today.

Regular contributor Mark Sturtevant has once again sent us a batch of lovely insect photos, including some arachnids and one mammal). Mark’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The first part of this set are photographs from the gardens around my house, and then we move out to area parks. I live in eastern Michigan.

The lovely beetle shown in the first picture is a Lily Leaf Beetle (Lilioceris lilii). These become common on the lilies that the wife likes to grow, and they are a minor pest on them as they riddle the plants with holes. I had never seen the larvae, but while preparing this post I had learned that they hide under the leaves and I simply never looked there. The larvae are disgusting, as they cover themselves with their droppings as a deterrent. I should definitely photograph some next season!:

Next up is another example of Say’s Mantidfly (Dicromantispa sayi). In my last post I had shown a female, and this is a smaller male. This species of Mantidfly grows up by living and feeding inside the egg sacs of spiders, and there are always jumping spiders on our shed and that is where I find Mantidflies:

Back in the garden there is always drama of one kind or another. I was very elated one day to find a Cuckoo wasp foraging at the daisies, as shown in the next picture. I won’t be able to identify the species without careful inspection, but these beautiful wasps are usually challenging to photograph since they are normally very alert and active. I simply got lucky here. Cuckoo wasps are so-named because they are kleptoparasites in the nests of wasps or bees. Besides feeding on the provisions meant for the larvae of their hosts, they also eat the host eggs or larvae as well:

Predators commonly stay among the daisies in the garden, including the crab spiders shown in the next two pictures. I believe these are Misumenoides formosipes, based on the ridge that I could see just underneath the frontal eyes. The second picture shows one that has taken a Green Bottle Fly, Lucilia sericata:

Next are pictures taken from local parks. Here is one of our larger species of skipper butterfly, the Indigo Duskywing, Erynnis baptisiae. One can generally recognize skippers since they are usually moth-like butterflies, and they have distinctly hooked-shaped clubs on their antennae. In my younger years it was believed that skippers were a separate group from butterflies, but now they are found to be within the latter. And while we are at it, butterflies are now understood to be descended from moths, but let’s move on:

The remaining pictures were all taken on one day at a flower-filled and very productive meadow near where I work. There are more pictures from that park from this day, but those will have to wait for later.

First up is this extremely metallic Dogbane Beetle (Chrysochus auratus). These are vegetarian on a narrow range of host plants, including Dogbane, which makes the insects toxic:

The beetle shown in the next picture had me stumped for a while, but the distinctly “flabellate” antennae and an old field guide helped me to narrow it down. This is a kind of Wedge-shaped beetle, Macrosiagon limbata, and that surprised me since it does not resemble the one species that I know from this obscure family. This one is a male, identified by its antennae. Females will lay eggs on flowers, and the active larvae that hatch will clamber onto a passing bee to be taken back to the nest. There they will consume the larvae in the nest:

Many Bergamot flowers were in the field, and they were well tended by many of these clear-winged sphinx moths (Hemaris sp), and you can see tthat it is a bumble bee mimic:

The final insect-related pictures show why I spend much time carefully looking under leaves. I will likely never learn the species names of these insects, however. The white mass on the right is a bundle of cocoons from the Braconidae family of wasps, which are small wasps that are parasitoids inside the bodies of caterpillars. The term “parasitoid” is preferred here, rather than parasite, since the insects live inside the bodies of their hosts – parasite-like – but they quite deliberately and slowly kill their host, while parasites aren’t supposed to do that on purpose. The eviscerated caterpillar has fallen away, unfortunately, but while it was there it would be laying across the cocoons, still barely alive for a time, and actively “protecting” the cocoons in a strange example of how a hosts’ behavior is changed by parasitoid wasps. I have seen this many times, and you can see it as well in this very entertaining Ze Frank video that Jerry posted recently.

But that isn’t all. What are those black thingies to the left? Well, those are the pupae of a kind of hyperparasitic wasp – very small wasps that are parasitoids of the parasitoids. I had seen these mini-tombstones of pupae many times on plants, but this is the first time that I had enough context to understand the bigger picture about them. If you look carefully you will see an adult wasp among the pupae – a detail that I did not see at the time. Based on some findings in BugGuide, I suggest that this second group is from the Eulophidae family, as shown in the linked picture:

Next is a close-up of the Eulophid pupae. This required the Raynox 250 diopter lens to boost the power of the macro lens. The yellow stuff next to the pupae is called meconium, and they are the gut contents of the hyperparasitoid larvae. When a larva pupates, it will first purge its gut contents:

When I excitedly showed this amazing story to the wife, she was quite horrified.

After a pleasant and very productive afternoon spent in the flower-filled meadow, I noticed that I was being watched by a curious onlooker:

Using four telescopes linked together, astronomers have captured an astonishing image of a huge star more than 160,000 light years away

The FDA is proposing to order the removal of phenylephrine from oral cough and cold remedies.

The post FDA poised to reshape the cold remedy aisle first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

How do you weigh one of the largest objects in the entire universe? Very carefully, according to new research.

The cosmic web is the largest pattern found in nature. It is made of galaxies the same way your body is made of cells…if your cells were a million times smaller than they are. It is truly gigantic, with its individual parts stretching for millions of light-years at a time.

The intricate filaments of the cosmic web are made of hundreds of thousands of galaxies stretching hundreds of thousands of light-years between the clusters. They are like super highways, connecting one cluster to another.

Cosmologists aren’t just interested in the cosmic web because it’s pretty. It also encodes vital information about the universe. It has been growing for over 13 billion years and its properties are closely tied to the nature of dark matter and dark energy. If you change how much dark matter is in the universe or vary the strength of dark energy, then you can end up with radically different cosmic web patterns.

However, most of that information about dark matter and dark energy is very difficult to extract. This is because the cosmic web itself is a very complex structure. When it comes to the filaments, their width, length, and density all respond to the nature of dark matter and dark energy. But we have a very difficult time measuring those properties because most of the filaments are made of invisible dark matter.

Using a suite of simulations that tracked the evolution of both galaxies and dark matter, a team of researchers have developed a technique for weighing these giant filaments.

The technique relies on the relationship between the amount of dark matter and the motion of galaxies within the filament. All galaxies are moving, and some of them are moving in our direction and some are moving further away. The researchers found that there was a close relationship between the spread in these velocities and the amount of dark matter within that section of the filament. In other words, the higher the average speed of the galaxies, the more mass contained in the invisible dark matter.

This means that we can potentially go out and map filaments, measuring the spread ingGalaxy velocities along the length of those filaments, and map that result onto the mass of the underlying filament.

This is just the beginning of the new approach. The next step is to connect the filament mass to the properties of dark matter and dark energy, and then see if we can go out in the universe and learn something new.

The post Here’s How to Weigh Gigantic Filaments of Dark Matter appeared first on Universe Today.