Science

Artificial intelligence can provide critical insights into how complex mixtures of chemicals in rivers affect aquatic life -- paving the way for better environmental protection.

Quantum teleportation could provide near-instant communication over long distances. But, inside Internet cables, photons needed for teleportation are lost within the millions of light particles required for classical communications. A new study quantified light scattering to find exact areas to place photons to keep them safe from other particles. The approach successfully worked in experiments carrying regular Internet traffic.

Quantum teleportation could provide near-instant communication over long distances. But, inside Internet cables, photons needed for teleportation are lost within the millions of light particles required for classical communications. A new study quantified light scattering to find exact areas to place photons to keep them safe from other particles. The approach successfully worked in experiments carrying regular Internet traffic.

There is more research than ever focused on reflecting sunlight away from the planet to cool the climate – but there are still far more questions than answers about the effects

A US ban on the video-sharing app TikTok is set to take effect in early 2025 – but the country's Supreme Court and President-elect Donald Trump could still change that

An experiment showing that quantum and classical communication can be carried out through the same fibre at the same time may open the door to building a quantum internet with existing infrastructure

It’s another slow day as the year creeps snailwise to its end, and I’m feeling dolorous and had another bad bout of insomnia last night. The good news is that there’s nothing intellectual afoot that I feel compelled to write about.  The other good news is that you get to take a QUIZ, one pointed out in the NYT but located another site that’s free.  Here’s what the NYT says (archived here):

Now, from IDR Labs, comes the social media-friendly Food Social Class Test, a casual online survey based on a data-driven academic report published in 2020 by Silvia Bellezza and Jonah Berger at the University of Pennsylvania. That work was broadly derived from research into the connections between social class and the things we choose to put in our mouths — a link explored in the early 1980s by the French academic and intellectual Pierre Bourdieu.

Mr. Bourdieu’s work sharply skewered myths of social mobility in a postindustrial society. He found, unsurprisingly, that in many ways those at the top of the capitalist food chain go to considerable lengths to safeguard and maintain social privilege and generational wealth.

Which brings us to the twice-baked potato topped with melted Cheddar and bacon bits: Reader, I took the test.

In it, each of the 35 menu options is offered as a silhouetted photo with a bar beneath it for rating a selection. Users are encouraged to rate such things as a Cheddar-topped baked potato by indicating the degree to which they “agree” or “disagree” with it. Though there are plenty of things with which this reporter quibbles on a daily basis, seldom has a baked potato provoked him to argument.

. . .Simply select menu items with caloric values in the low triple digits and you are quickly aligned with high-class culinary ways. If it is true that you can never be too rich or too thin, as the Duchess of Windsor is believed to have remarked, it goes without saying that you cannot achieve the latter benchmark by scarfing down Sloppy Joes. We live, after all, in an Ozempic era.

So never mind the fried fish sticks, the potato chips, the defrosted pizza, the chicken nuggets, or the hot dog with all the trimmings. Forget the Mac ’n Cheese or even the Truffle Mac ’n Cheese, presumably featured on the survey as a snob trap. Adding two small discs of fragrant fungus to a dish that is otherwise a gloppy, glutinous cholesterol nightmare does not significantly elevate it on the class scale.

That seems rather snobbish to me; I just like food that tastes good, and that’s how I rated them.

Here’s the site and the first example. Click on the “Food Test” icon below to take the quiz (and you know you will!):

One example: here’s the first of 35 items I chose. You have five choices for each item: really bad, bad, so-so (leave it in the middle), tasty, and REALLY tasty. Just move the cursor to one of the four spaces or leave it in the middle:

And here’s my result: I have “upper middle class” food choices. I don’t know what to think about that (I added the arrow).

In truth, I liked nearly everything, but somethings more than others (I wasn’t keen on the truffle mac ‘n’ cheese, which is like putting a pig in a fur coat, or on the tuna tartare tacos, a bad concept). Take it yourself and let us know how you did in the comments below. I wonder if anybody will come out “lower class”.  I urge readers to take the test because I want to know how people do!

Neutrinos are tricky little blighters that are hard to observe. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica was built to detect neutrinos from space. It is one of the most sensitive instruments built with the hope it might help uncover evidence for dark matter. Any dark matter trapped inside Earth, would release neutrinos that IceCube could detect. To date, and with 10 years of searching, it seems no excess neutrinos coming from Earth have been found!

Neutrinos are subatomic particles which are light and carry no electrical charge. Certain events, such as supernovae and solar events generate vast quantities of neutrinos. By now, the universe will be teeming with neutrinos with trillions of them passing through every person every second. The challenge though is that neutrinos rarely interact with matter so observing and detecting them is difficult. Like other sub-atomic particles, there are different types of neutrino; electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos, with each associated with a corresponding lepton (an elementary particle with half integer spin.) Studying neutrinos of all types is key to helping understand fundamental physical processes across the cosmos. 

Chinese researchers are working on a new neutrino observatory called TRIDENT. They built an underwater simulator to develop their plan. Image Credit: TRIDENT

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory began capturing data in 2005 but it wasn’t until 2011 that it began full operations. It consists of over 5,000 football-sized detectors arranged within a cubic kilometre of ice deep underground. Arranged in this fashion, the detectors are designed to capture the faint flashes of Cherenkov radiation released when neutrinos interact with the ice. The location near the South Pole was chosen because the ice acts as a natural barrier against background radiation from Earth. 

A view of the IceCube Lab with a starry night sky showing the Milky Way and green auroras. Photo By: Yuya Makino, IceCube/NSF

Using data from the IceCube Observatory, a team of researchers led by R. Abbasi from the Loyola University Chicago have been probing the nature of dark matter. This strange and invisible component of the universe is thought to make up 27% of the mass-energy content of the universe. Unfortunately, dark matter doesn’t emit, absorb or reflect light making it undetectable by conventional means. One train of thought is that dark matter is made up of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs.) They can be captured by objects like the Sun leading to their annihilation and transition into neutrinos. It’s these, that the team have been hunting for. 

The paper published by the team articulates their search for muon neutrinos from the centre of the Earth within the 10 years of data captured by IceCube. The team searched chiefly for WIMPs within the mass range of 10GeV to 10TeV but due to the complexity and position of the source (the centre of the Earth,) the team relied upon running Monte Carlo simulations. The name is taken from casino’s in Monaco and involves running many random simulations. This technique is used where exact calculations are unable to compute the answer and so the simulations are based on the concept that randomness can be used to solve problems.

After running many simulations of this sort, the team found no excess neutrino flux over the background levels from Earth. They conclude however that whilst no evidence has been found yet, that an upgrade to the IceCube Observatory may yield more promising results as they can probe lower neutrino mass events and hopefully one day, solve the mystery of the nature of dark matter. 

Source : Search for dark matter from the centre of the Earth with ten years of IceCube data

The post IceCube Just Spent 10 Years Searching for Dark Matter appeared first on Universe Today.

A new type of norovirus is causing a very high number of cases in countries like England, just as a large trial of an mRNA vaccine is starting up

The Ingenuity autonomous helicopter surpassed all expectations to fly dozens of missions over several years on the Red Planet, only stopping this year when an accident damaged one of its rotors

Hundreds of community websites run for fans of everything from cycling to Sunderland AFC may be forced to shut down by the UK's Online Safety Act, which is designed to protect children from harmful content

A newly described species of giant pitcher plant is one of the biggest ever found, with leaves covered in fur the same colour as orangutans

Blazing the Trail, a new podcast from the Australian Museum, delves into topics from how language evolved to the implications of harnessing fire

If RFK Jr. "researches" vaccines, he will certainly "discover" they cause autism. It's possible that this "research" will be used as justification to revoke authorization for vaccines. That's always been the endgame.

The post Trusting RFK Jr. to Research Vaccines is Like Trusting a Hungry Python to Babysit a Kitten first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

We asked New Scientist writers to pick their favourite sci-fi short story. From H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine to Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild, via stories from George R. R. Martin and Ursula K. Le Guin, here are the results

A team of astronomers have detected a surprisingly fast and bright burst of energy from a galaxy 500 million light years away. The burst of radiation peaked in brightness just after 4 day and then faded quickly. The team identified the burst, which was using the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey with supporting observations from the Gran Telescopio Canarias, as the result of a small black hole consuming a star. The discovery provides an exciting insight into stellar evolution and a rare cosmic phenomenon. 

Black holes are stellar corpses where the gravity is so intense that nothing, not even light can escape. They form when massive stars collapse under their own gravity at the end of their life forming an infinitely small point known as a singularity. The region of space around the singularity is bounded by the event horizon, the point beyond which, nothing can escape. Despite the challenges of observing them, they can be detected by observing the effects of their gravity on nearby objects like gas clouds. There are still many mysteries surrounding black holes so they remain an intense area of study. 

3D rendering of a rapidly spinning black hole’s accretion disk and a resulting black hole-powered jet. Credit: Ore Gottlieb et al. (2024)

A team of astronomers led by Claudia Gutiérrez from the Institute of Space Sciences and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalina used data from the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS) to explore transient events. The CRTS was launched in 2004 and is a wide field survey that looks for variable objects like supernova and asteroids. It uses a network of telescopes based in Arizona to scan large areas of sky to detect short-lived events. It has been of great use providing insights into the life cycle of stars and the behaviour of distant galaxies. 

The 60 inch Mt. Lemmon telescope is one of three telescopes used in the Catalina Sky Survey. Image: Catalina Sky Survey, University of Arizona.

The team detected the bright outburst in a galaxy located 500 million light years away and published their results in the Astrophysical Journal. The event took place in a tiny galaxy about 400 times less massive than the Milky Way. The burst was identified as CSS161010, it reached maximum brightness in only 4 days and 2.5 days later had it’s brightness reduced by half. Subsequent work revealed that previous detection had been picked up by the All-Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae. Thankfully the detection was early enough to allow follow up observations by other ground based telescopes. Typically these types of events are difficult to study due to their rapid evolution.

Only a handful of events like CSS161010 have been detected in recent years but until now  their nature was a mystery. The team led by Gutiérrez have analysed the spectral properties and found hydrogen lines revealing material travelling at speeds up to 10% of the speed of light. The changes observed in the hydrogen emission lines is similar to that seen in active galactic nuclei where supermassive black holes exist. The observation suggests it relates to a black hole, although not a massive one.

The brightness of the object reduced 900 times over the following two months. Further spectral analysis at this time still revealed blue shifted hydrogen lines indicating high speed gas outflows. This was not something usually seen from supernova events suggesting a different origin. The team believe that the event is the result of a small black hole swallowing a star. 

Source : Astronomers detected a burst caused by a black hole swallowing a star

The post Star Devouring Black Hole Spotted by Astronomers appeared first on Universe Today.

A brotherly research duo has discovered that when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produces top quarks -- the heaviest known fundamental particles -- it regularly creates a property known as magic.

Meet the brown dwarf: bigger than a planet, and smaller than a star. A category of its own, it’s one of the strangest objects in the universe.

Brown dwarfs typically are defined to have masses anywhere from 12 times the mass of Jupiter right up to the lower limit for a star. And despite their names, they are not actually brown. The largest and youngest ones are quite hot, giving off a steady glow of radiation. In fact, the largest brown dwarfs are almost indistinguishable from red dwarfs, the smallest of the stars. But the smallest, oldest, and coldest ones are so dim they can only be detected with our most sensitive infrared telescopes.

Unlike stars, brown dwarfs don’t generate their own energy through nuclear fusion, at least not for very long. Instead they emit radiation from the leftover heat of their own formation. As that heat escapes, the brown dwarf continues to dim, sliding from fiery red to mottled magenta to invisible infrared. The greater the mass at its birth, the more heat it can trap and the longer it can mimic a proper star, but the ultimate end fate is the same for every single brown dwarf, regardless of its pedigree.

At first it may seem like brown dwarfs are just extra-large planets, but they get to do something that planets don’t. While brown dwarfs can’t fuse hydrogen in their cores – that takes something like 80 Jupiter masses to accomplish – they can briefly partake in another kind of fusion reaction.

In the cooler heart of a brown dwarf, deuterium, which is a single proton and neutron, can convert into Helium-3, and in the process release energy. This process doesn’t last long; in only a few million years even the largest brown dwarfs use up all their available deuterium, and from there they will just cool off.

As for their size, they tend not to be much larger in diameter than a typical gas giant like Jupiter. That’s because unlike a star, there isn’t an additional source of energy, and thereby pressure, to prop themselves up. Instead, all that’s left is the exotic quantum force known as degeneracy pressure, which means that you can only squeeze so many particles into so small a volume. In this case, brown dwarfs are very close to the limit for degeneracy pressure to maintain their size given their mass.

This means that despite outweighing Jupiter, they won’t appear much larger. And unlike Jupiter, they are briefly capable of nuclear fusion. After that, however, they spend the rest of their lives wandering the galaxy, slowly chilling out.

The post What Makes Brown Dwarfs So Weird? appeared first on Universe Today.

Researchers have found evidence of magnetic fields associated with a disc of gas and dust a few hundred light-years across deep inside a system of two merging galaxies known as Arp220. They say these regions could be the key to making the centres of interacting galaxies just right for cooking lots of hydrogen gas into young stars.

Scientist have begun to reveal the particle-level processes that create the type of auroras that dance rapidly across the sky. The Kinetic-scale Energy and momentum Transport experiment -- KiNET-X -- lifted off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on May 16, 2021, in the final minutes of the final night of the nine-day launch window.