Новости за 21.10.2020

Eric Berger, Ars Technica
SpaceX engineers achieved another milestone early Tuesday morning when the company's Starship vehicle roared to life for the first time with multiple Raptor engines.At 3:13am local time in South Texas, a Starship prototype dubbed SN8, or Serial Number 8, fired three Raptor engines for several seconds during a static fire test. Although there was no immediate confirmation from the company, the test at the company's Boca Chica launch site appeared to be successful.

Ethan Siegel, Forbes
The Universe, according to our best understanding, just doesn't add up. Wherever we look from tiny subatomic scales all the way up to planetary, galactic, or even cosmic ones we find that everything is overwhelmingly made of matter, rather than antimatter.

Cosmos Magazine
The speed of plague transmission in London increased four-fold between the Black Death of 1348 and the Great Plague of 1665, according to a new study.In the 14th century the number of people infected during an outbreak doubled about every 43 days; 300 years later, it was every 11 days.

Athena Aktipis, Aeon Mag
In March 2019, we planted a garden full of monsters outside the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University (ASU). Their limbs rise out of the ground, reaching in every direction, doubling back on themselves as they expand and grow. These beautiful creatures are crested cacti plants with mutations that lead them to have gloriously wild growth patterns that have many parallels with cancer.

N. Wolchover, Quant

No sooner had the radical equations of quantum mechanics been discovered than physicists identified one of the strangest phenomena the theory allows.Quantum tunneling shows how profoundly particles such as electrons differ from bigger things. Throw a ball at the wall and it bounces backward; let it roll to the bottom of a valley and it stays there. But a particle will occasionally hop through the wall.

Daniel Garisto, Symmetry
Like racecars on a track, thousands of particles called muons zip around an experiment's giant 50-foot circular magnet at 99.9% of the speed of light. After making a few hundred laps in less than a millisecond, the muons decay and are soon replaced by another bunch.

Livia Gershon, S'sonian
Archaeologists digging under the remains of a demolished parking garage in Gloucester, England, have found the ruins of a 13th-century monastery, BBC News reports.

Heidi Ledford, Nature

When Jess Ojino Sosa-Garca looks out over the people being treated for COVID-19 in his hospital's intensive-care unit, one feature stands out: Obesity is the most important factor we see, he says.Sosa-Garca works at Hospital Mdica Sur in Mexico City, which has been battling a COVID-19 outbreak for six months.

George Dvorsky, Gizmodo
It was another long night aboard the International Space Station, as the crew had to deal with a series of minor problems, in what is starting to sound like a broken record.As always, we have to preface things by saying the crew is safe, and none of the new problems are particularly serious. They're more of an annoyance, but annoyances on the ISS seem to be in an abundance these days.

Rafi Letzter, Live Sci
Scientists may have observed the Higgs boson doing a new trick: creating pairs of muons.When the Higgs boson was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012, it was the final piece of Standard Model of particle physics puzzle, a particle that had been long theorized to exist alongside quarks, electrons, neutrinos, muons, gluons, photons and the other known particles, but never before seen.

Harriet Hall, Skep Inquirer
Lyme disease is an infection caused by Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria. It is transmitted to humans through the bite of infected blacklegged ticks. According to the CDC, typical symptoms include fever, headache, fatigue, and a characteristic skin rash called erythema migrans. If left untreated, infection can spread to joints, the heart, and the nervous system. A short course of antibiotics is usually curative.

Eric Berger, Ars

SpaceX engineers achieved another milestone early Tuesday morning when the company's Starship vehicle roared to life for the first time with multiple Raptor engines.At 3:13am local time in South Texas, a Starship prototype dubbed SN8, or Serial Number 8, fired three Raptor engines for several seconds during a static fire test. Although there was no immediate confirmation from the company, the test at the company's Boca Chica launch site appeared to be successful.

Katherine J. Wu, N.Y. Times
After millenniums of careful slicing and dicing, it might seem as though scientists have figured out human anatomy. A few dozen organs, a couple hundred bones and connective tissue to tie it all together.

Ryan Cross, C & E News
To the untrained eye, the tiny spots in the tumor cell wouldn't look like much. In fact, other scientists had noticed them in cancer before but had generally dismissed them as a mere curiosity. But to Paul Mischel, the fuzzy dots he saw under the microscope offered a tantalizing explanation for why some cancers are so hard to treat.

Peter Dockrill, Sci Alert
A giant, catastrophic tsunami in Alaska triggered by a landslide of rock left unstable after glacier melting is likely to occur in the next two decades, scientists fear - and it could happen within the next 12 months.

W. S. Roberts, The Scientist
Questions about the lives of extinct birds now perched in natural history museums have persisted long after their passing: What did they sound like? What did they look like in flight? What ecological niche did they inhabit?