Новости за 01.08.2017

Douglas Fox, Aeon Magazine
Leonid Moroz has spent two decades trying to wrap his head around a mind-boggling idea: even as scientists start to look for alien life in other planets, there might already be aliens, with surprisingly different biology and brains, right here on Earth. Those aliens have hidden in plain sight for millennia. They have plenty to teach us about the nature of evolution, and what to expect when we finally discover life on other worlds.

Mitch Leslie, Science News
Prions are insidious proteins that spread like infectious agents and trigger fatal conditions such as mad cow disease. A protein implicated in diabetes, a new study suggests, shares some similarities with these villains. Researchers transmitted diabetes from one mouse to another just by injecting the animals with this protein. The results don't indicate that diabetes is contagious like a cold, but blood transfusions, or even food, may spread the disease.

E. Howell, Seeker
We've all had that feeling of leaving the house and wondering if we left the stove on or forgot to lock the door. In space, an anxious astronaut might worry that an unoccupied space station might be losing oxygen or an experiment is failing because the power went out.That's why NASA is expanding the use of automation on Deep Space Gateway, a lunar space station for astronauts traveling to far away destinations such as Mars. Deep Space Gateway is set for launch in 2020 and might... Читать дальше...

H. Johnston, P-World
Evidence for the extra space-like dimensions predicted by string theory could be found within BoseEinstein condensates (BECs) according to Sergio Gutirrez, Abel Camacho and Hctor Hernndez of Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa in Mexico City.String theories and some other theories that try to describe physics beyond the Standard Model rely on the existence of extra dimensions. These dimensions are so small (about 1035 m) that they have been impossible to detect... Читать дальше...

Jesse Emspak, NS
Dark matter hitting black holes could be the source of some fast radio bursts mysterious blasts of radio waves that come from billions of light years away, first detected 10 years ago.The stuff we see in space stars, planets and gas only makes up about 18 percent of the mass of the universe. The rest is dubbed dark matter, which can't be seen except through its gravitational interactions with everything else.Nobody knows exactly what dark matter is, but one hypothesis is that... Читать дальше...

Ashley Yeager, ScienceNews
Venus may have been all wet early on.New simulations suggest that if the now-hellish planet had just the right amount of cloud cover, carbon dioxide and water to start with, Venus could have formed an ocean. The result, published online July 18 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, provides a new clue to whether Venus could have ever supported life.

Adam Rogers, Wired
Adam Russell, an anthropologist and program manager at the Department of Defense's mad-science division Darpa, laughs at the suggestion that he is trying to build a real, live, bullshit detector. But he doesn't really seem to think it's funny. The quite serious call for proposals Russell just sent out on Darpa stationery asks peopleanyone! Even you!for ways to determine what findings from the social and behavioral sciences are actually, you know, true. Or in his construction: credible.

Robin McKie, The Guardian
The topic has become the mainstay of dystopian science fiction. Our world is afflicted by widespread infertility and childless civilisations are left hovering on the brink of collapse. Children of Men and The Handmaid's Tale provide perfect examples of these unsettling narratives.Yet the scenarios outlined in these books and dramatisations may be less fanciful than is first supposed. Indeed, reaction to a study of male infertility, published last week, suggests we may already be hurtling towards such a fate.

John Seewer, Associated Press
Satellites in space and a robot under Lake Erie's surface are part of a network of scientific tools trying to keep algae toxins out of drinking water supplies in the shallowest of the Great Lakes.It's one of the most wide-ranging freshwater monitoring systems in the U.S., researchers say, and some of its pieces soon will be watching for harmful algae on hundreds of lakes nationwide.

Chad Orzel, Forbes
I've been wrapped up in writing a new book, so I didn't notice this right when it was published, but a couple of weeks ago there was a paper in Physical Review Letters titled Experimental Evidence for Quantum Tunneling Time that's worth a mention here. This is, as the title suggests, an investigation of one of the signature weird effects of quantum physics, namely the phenomenon of "tunneling" where a particle encountering a barrier can end up on the other side even though it... Читать дальше...

Leah Rosenbaum, Seeker
The first human embryos in the United States have been edited by the CRISPR-Cas9 system, according to an exclusive report by the MIT Technology Review. The results of the research haven't been published yet, so it's hard to establish exactly what happened. But if true, the research could herald a new era in human gene editing and experimentation.The experiment would be the first of its kind in the US, but not in the world. In 2015, scientists in China announced that they... Читать дальше...

Darrin Durant, The Conversation
Florida recently passed a law which authorizes county residents to challenge use or adoption of instructional materials in schools. It's been described as anti-science by individual scientists and USA's National Center for Science Education.From climate change to vaccination, genetic modification and energy security, anti-science is used as a critical phrase implying a person or group is rejecting science outright.