Science

Scientists have captured remarkable footage of the young of a mouse-sized marsupial, called a fat-tailed dunnart, making their way to their mother’s pouch soon after being born

Observations by NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) show the infrared light emitted by the dust, water, organic molecules, and carbon dioxide contained within comet 3I/ATLAS’s coma.

So we did that. And we found nothing. So far, with all of our experiments around the world, we find no evidence of missing momentum, and no signs of towers of gravitons slipping away into hidden dimensions.

Astronomers used the XRISM x-ray satellite to observe two supermassive black holes in two separate galaxy clusters. Researchers know that SMBH have powerful effects on star formation and galaxy evolution. The observations reveal new details in how it all works.

Building the human story based on a few artefacts is tricky – particularly for wooden tools that don’t preserve well, or cave art that we don’t have the technology to date. Columnist Michael Marshall explores how we determine what came first in the timeline of our species

Once considered an oddity of quantum physics, time crystals could be a good building block for accurate clocks and sensors, according to new calculations

Networks of molecules in our body behave as though they have goals and desires. Understanding this phenomenon could solve the origins of life and mind in one fell swoop

No, I’m not Martin Luther King, Jr., but I did fall asleep at my desk an hour ago because of my raging insomnia.  I did sleep well, however, for I had a very vivid dream, and dreams occur only during deep, restful sleep. This was a weird one, and though I’m not a Freudian who interprets dreams, I have no idea why my neurons created this scenario:

I was in a restaurant with tables and partitions between them, and at the partition by the next table was George Harrison with a guitar, singing “Blackbird.” That in itself was weird because that song is solely a Paul McCartney song, written and sung by him alone. But Paul McCartney himself was also there, standing right next to me at a partition with his arm around my waist. As Harrison got to the last line, “You were only waiting for this moment to arise,” McCartney leaned over and gave me a big wet kiss on the cheek. Then I woke up.

Before I fell asleep, I was dispirited at the state of America, and of my friends, all of which depresses me. Between our crazy President doing one stupid thing or another, and my Facebook page having all my friends saying constantly how bad Trump (and ICE) is, I cannot get away from American politics and its divisiveness.

Why do I keep looking, you ask? I will give Mencken’s quote from his great 1949 collection, Chrestomathy (everyone should have this book):

Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?
A: Why do men go to zoos?

Here’s Macca singing “Blackbird”; this, at least cheers me up (the last line of the song here differs from that above):

Electric vehicle batteries are typically retired once they reach about 80 per cent of their original capacity, but they could be repurposed in electricity grids to balance out slumps in renewable generation

Today we have some urban arthropod photos taken in Scotland by Marcel van Oijen. Marcel’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Urban wildlife in Scotland: 11 insects and 1 spider

Marcel van Oijen

This website recently hosted pictures of vertebrates in our Edinburgh garden. This time we show some of our favourite arthropod visitors. Unlike the vertebrates, which we see year-round, insects in Scotland are easiest to spot in the summer, followed by spiders in autumn. The following pictures were taken between mid-July and mid-September.

When we walk on the grass in summer, we see small bits of straw rising up and landing a meter or so away. Those are Straw Grass Moths (Agriphila straminella), one of the 2500 moth species in the UK. Grass moths are micromoths of about 1 cm length. When they land on the grass, they immediately freeze and allow themselves to be photographed from up close:

Once or twice a year we put out the moth trap to see what lives in our garden. The trap is just an open box with a lamp above. The moths fly toward the light and hide in the box, allowing us to admire them the next morning. Mornings are relatively cold, so most boxed moths hesitate to fly away even when we carefully take them out and take pictures. It is still not fully clear why moths are drawn to artificial light, but flight analysis suggests they treat lamps and natural light sources in the same way . We see Orange Swift Moths (Triodia sylvina) quite often. They are doing well, populations are increasing and expanding further into Scotland, but they are yet to reach Ireland.

Scalloped Oak Moth is another common species (Crocallis elinguaria):

There are 57 species of butterfly in the U.K. of which 35 breed in Scotland. We see Comma butterflies (Polygonia c-album) more and more each year:

There are two insects in this picture! Notice the huge size difference between the Buff-Tailed Bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) and the Highland Midge (Culicoides impunctatus). The cute little midge is the reason why we don’t go wild camping in the Scottish Highlands in the summer, but in Edinburgh they are still fairly rare:

This is the most common hoverfly species in the U.K. (Helophilus pendulus):

The Peacock (Aglais io) is found all across Eurasia, and we see it very often. It is beautiful (but we like the moths more):

Like many larger butterflies, the Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta) lets itself easily be photographed if you slowly move toward it, staying as low as you can:

The macromoth species that we see the most is the Large Yellow Underwing (Noctua pronuba). You can see that this one is nearing the end of its lifetime:

I find it difficult to take pictures of flies, so was happy to see this Common Siphona Fly (Siphona geniculata) land on the flower that I had just focused on:

The Eyed Ladybird (‘Ladybug’ in American) (Anatis ocellata) is one of the prettiest aphid-eaters:

And this is the only spider for today: a subadult of the Lesser Garden Spider (Metellina segmentata). Seeing it is a sign that autumn has come:

Setting a limit for global warming didn't succeed in galvanising climate action quickly enough – now we should focus on making the annual average temperature rise clear for all to see, says Bill McGuire

The Moon has a long history of being smacked by large rocks. Its pock-marked, cratered surface is evidence of that. Scientists expect that, as part of those impacts, some debris would be scattered into space - and that we should be able to track it down. But so far, there have been startlingly few discoveries of these Lunar-origin Asteroids (LOAs) despite their theoretical abundance. A new paper from Yixuan Wu and their colleagues at Tsinghua University explains why - and how the Vera Rubin Observatory might help with finding them.

Mars’ water disappeared somewhere, but scientists have been disagreeing for years about where exactly it went. Data from rovers like Perseverance and Curiosity, along with orbiting satellites such as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and ExoMars have shown that Mars used to be a wet world with an active hydrodynamic cycle. Obviously it isn’t anymore, but where did all the water go? A new paper that collects data from at least six different instruments on three different spacecraft provides some additional insight into that question - by showing that dust storms push water into the Red Planet’s atmosphere, where it is actively destroyed, all year round.

A long-standing mystery in spintronics has just been shaken up. A strange electrical effect called unusual magnetoresistance shows up almost everywhere scientists look—even in systems where the leading explanation, spin Hall magnetoresistance, shouldn’t work at all. Now, new experiments reveal a far simpler origin: the way electrons scatter at material interfaces under the combined influence of magnetization and an electric field.

The potential effects of the current ICE actions on public health

The post The ICEmen Cometh first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have created an AI system that can interpret brain MRI scans in just seconds, accurately identifying a wide range of neurological conditions and determining which cases need urgent care. Trained on hundreds of thousands of real-world scans along with patient histories, the model achieved accuracy as high as 97.5% and outperformed other advanced AI tools.

Time may feel smooth and continuous, but at the quantum level it behaves very differently. Physicists have now found a way to measure how long ultrafast quantum events actually last, without relying on any external clock. By tracking subtle changes in electrons as they absorb light and escape a material, researchers discovered that these transitions are not instantaneous and that their duration depends strongly on the atomic structure of the material involved.

Time may feel smooth and continuous, but at the quantum level it behaves very differently. Physicists have now found a way to measure how long ultrafast quantum events actually last, without relying on any external clock. By tracking subtle changes in electrons as they absorb light and escape a material, researchers discovered that these transitions are not instantaneous and that their duration depends strongly on the atomic structure of the material involved.

Why are planets rarely found orbiting a pair of stars? UC Berkeley and American University of Beirut physicists find that general relativity makes the orbit of a tight binary pair precess. As the orbit shrinks because of tidal effects, the precesion increases. Eventually the precession matches the orbital precession of any circumbinary planet, creating a resonance that makes the planet’s orbit wildly eccentric. The planet either gets expelled from the system or is engulfed by one of the stars.

The lines worn into an engraved limestone object from the Netherlands are consistent with the idea that it was a Roman game board, according to an AI analysis