Новости за 21.11.2018

Abraham Loeb, Sci American
On October 19, 2017, the first interstellar object, Oumuamua, was discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey. The experience was similar to having a surprise guest for dinner show up from another country. By examining this guest, we can learn about the culture of that country without the need to travel therea good thing in this case, given that it would take us a hundred thousand years to visit even the nearest star using conventional chemical rockets.

Jonathan Lambert, Quanta

Twilight falls on the Tanzanian plain. As the sky turns a deeper purple, a solitary spotted hyena awakens. She trots along the border of her clan's territory, marking the boundary with a sour paste from under her tail. She sniffs a passing breeze for hints of itinerant males interested in mating, giving little attention to her stomach's rumbling over the remnants of the previous night's hunt or the itch on her flank.

Martn Corredoira, Sci 2.0
Because its spirit seeks truth objectively rather than by imposition, science must enjoy academic freedom to be useful.The spirit of science is dialectic, in perpetual open discussion and debate about the nature of things. It is the opposite of religion, the opposite of fundamentalist positions and dogma, the opposite of politics or diplomacy.

Alison Klesman, Astronomy
The Arecibo Observatory is home to one of the largest, most powerful radio telescopes in the world. Spanning 1,000 feet (305 meters) in diameter, the huge telescope was used in 1974 for a unique purpose: to transmit a message from humanity to the stars.

Damian Bailey, The Conversation
NASA has made a commitment to send humans to Mars by the 2030s. This is an ambitious goal when you think that a typical round trip will anywhere between three and six months and crews will be expected to stay on the red planet for up to two years before planetary alignment allows for the return journey home.

Emily Conover, ScienceNews
Knotlike structures called skyrmions might help scientists untangle the inner workings of atomic nuclei, a new study suggests.A skyrmion is a tiny disturbance in a substance, a swirling pattern that, like a knot, is difficult to undo. In the 1960s, nuclear physicist Tony Skyrme suggested that these structures since named after him could represent protons and neutrons within a nucleus in theoretical calculations.

Amber Dance, Knowable

One day, about 11,000 years ago, a lone bull mastodon plodded through the shallows of a lake in what today is Michigan. Some time later, three females and a gamboling calf passed the same way. Luckily for paleontologists, clay-rich mud filled the animals' footprints, preserving the tracks and giving scientists insights into the mastodons' social structure.

Harriet Hall, Science-Based Medicine
Three years ago Mark Crislip wrote about leaky gut syndrome for SBM. He said, because of an almost complete lack of supporting basic science and few therapeutic clinical trials showing no effect, virtually no physician who has an understanding of the gastrointestinal physiology gives the disease credence. Nothing has changed.

Abraham Loeb, Scientific American
On October 19, 2017, the first interstellar object, Oumuamua, was discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey. The experience was similar to having a surprise guest for dinner show up from another country. By examining this guest, we can learn about the culture of that country without the need to travel therea good thing in this case, given that it would take us a hundred thousand years to visit even the nearest star using conventional chemical rockets.

Sam Knight, The New Yorker
In October, 2010, an Italian religious historian named Alberto Melloni stood over a small cherrywood box in the reading room of the Laurentian Library, in Florence. The box was old and slightly scuffed, and inked in places with words in Latin. It had been stored for several centuries inside one of the library's distinctive sloping reading desks, which were designed by Michelangelo.

Ryan Cooper, The Week
Money and power can protect you from many things in life. In some cases, they can even protect you from individual climate change-fueled natural disasters like the fires ravaging California. The Woolsey Fire in Southern California, for instance, burned down much of the wealthy city of Malibu but not the home of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who hired private firefighters to save their $60 million home, and also those of everyone on their street.

Eric Berger, Ars Technica
SpaceX and Elon Musk have been in the news a lot in recent days, both because of financial disclosures and the rocket company founder's musings on Twitter about his current space obsessionthe Big Falcon Rocket or BFR. There has been a lot to process, so here's our best attempt to make sense of what Musk has said and what it may really mean. Musk started breaking news about SpaceX rocket designs about two weeks ago, so we'll start there.

Mark Anderson, IEEE Spectrum
A decade ago, quantum computing was still something of a parlor game. Quantum-computer advocates could make bold claims about one promising technology or another because no one had yet figured out how to string together more than a handful of quantum bits (qubits).

Jamie Carter, Forbes
NASA has officially committed to the first flight of its supersonic test plane in just three years.By 2021 we can expect to see (but not hear) the X-59, a test aircraft for NASA's Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST).

Natalie Wolchover, Quanta

A ubiquitous quantum phenomenon has been detected in a large class of superconducting materials, fueling a growing belief among physicists that an unknown organizing principle governs the collective behavior of particles and determines how they spread energy and information.

The Conversation
You probably think of new technologies as electronics you can carry in a pocket or wear on a wrist. But some of the most profound technological innovations in human evolution have been made out of stone. For most of the time that humans have been on Earth, they've chipped stone into useful shapes to make tools for all kinds of work.

Sabine Hossenfelder, Backreaction
Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after the other is returning null results: No new particles, no new dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real news. But experimentalists are just poking in the dark. They have no clue where new physics may be to find. And their colleagues in theory development are of no help.

Linda Nordling, Undark
In February of last year, 64 healthy adult Kenyans checked into a university residence in the coastal town of Kilifi. After a battery of medical tests, they proceeded, one by one, into a room where a doctor injected them with live malaria parasites. Left untreated, the infection could have sickened or even killed them, since malaria claims hundreds of thousands of lives every year.

Ed Yong, The Atlantic
Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

Mitch Leslie, Science

No biologist would mistake the microscopic "cells" that chemical biologist Neal Devaraj and colleagues are whipping up at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), for the real thing. Instead of the lipid membrane that swaddles our cells, these cell mimics wear a coat of plasticpolymerized acrylate.

Mitch Jacoby, C & E News
Incandescent bulbs are one of the most energy-inefficient products in daily use, Joanna McKittrick says. Touch a regular old 100-W light bulb after it's been lit for a few minutes, and you'll see what she means.Less than 5% of the electrical energy that goes into the tungsten filament inside is converted to visible light, explains McKittrick, a luminescent materials specialist at the University of California, San Diego.

Korey Haynes, Discover
We don't need to be scared of everything that falls from space. In fact, literal tons of space rocks rain down daily, though that's mostly in the form of minuscule dust grains. But every 100 million years or so, catastrophe strikes in the form of a rock spanning miles.

The Conversation
In his 2015 book Faith versus Fact, the biologist and polemicist Jerry Coyne launched one of his many attacks on religion in the name of science: science and religion, he wrote, are incompatible in precisely the same way and in the same sense that rationality is incompatible with irrationality.