After a deluge of teasing press releases and premature speculation , we can finally share some Very Important NASA News: Today, the agency announced that a team of scientists has confirmed seven Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting TRAPPIST-1, a star located just 39 light-years away from our Sun. The six inner planets are… Read more…
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These Seven Earth-Sized Exoplanets Have Everyone Freaking Out Over Alien Life
When Disney got control of Star Wars , it announced that pretty much everything that wasn’t a TV show or movie was no longer canon. That swept away a long tradition of considering almost everything produced in this universe as connected and part of the same universe. But as the new canon has developed, not everything… Read more…
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Everything Star Wars Has Reintroduced From the Old Expanded Universe
The Earth and the moon share more than an orbit around the Sun. Turns out that bits of atmosphere manage to travel the 240, 000 miles out to our nearest celestial neighbor, and have been for more than 2 billion years, according to data gathered by Japan’s moon-orbiting Kaguya spacecraft. In a study published on Monday to the journal Nature Astronomy , planetary scientist Kentaro Terada of Osaka University observes that ionized oxygen particles escape from the upper atmosphere for five days every month to bombard the surface of the moon. Terada’s data suggests that oxygen atoms in the upper atmosphere are first ionized by ultraviolet light and then accelerated into the magnetosphere , the planet’s magnetic envelope. The magnetosphere extends more than 370, 000 miles away from the Sun, fully enveloping the moon’s own orbit around the Earth. For five days every month when the moon passes through the magnetosphere, it is blasted with these ionized particles. The Osaka University team estimates that every square centimeter of the moon’s exposed surface is struck by approximately 26, 000 oxygen ions every second over the five day period. While this isn’t enough for the moon to develop a breathable atmosphere of its own, this discovery suggests that the moon’s surface could hold clues to Earth’s ancient atmosphere — much like ice cores being dug out of the Greenland and Antarctic permafrost. Source: Science News
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Some of Earth’s oxygen escapes to the moon every month
A team of MIT researchers have created the world’s strongest and lightest material known to man using graphene. Futurism reports: Graphene, which was heretofore, the strongest material known to man, is made from an extremely thin sheet of carbon atoms arranged in two dimensions. But there’s one drawback: while notable for its thinness and unique electrical properties, it’s very difficult to create useful, three-dimensional materials out of graphene. Now, a team of MIT researchers discovered that taking small flakes of graphene and fusing them following a mesh-like structure not only retains the material’s strength, but the graphene also remains porous. Based on experiments conducted on 3D printed models, researchers have determined that this new material, with its distinct geometry, is actually stronger than graphene — making it 10 times stronger than steel, with only five percent of its density. The discovery of a material that is extremely strong but exceptionally lightweight will have numerous applications. As MIT reports: “The new findings show that the crucial aspect of the new 3-D forms has more to do with their unusual geometrical configuration than with the material itself, which suggests that similar strong, lightweight materials could be made from a variety of materials by creating similar geometric features.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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MIT Unveils New Material That’s Strongest and Lightest On Earth
If there wasn’t already a reason to develop a solution to drug-resistant “superbugs, ” there is now. Scientists have found bacteria on an American pig farm that resists carbapenems, a variety of antibiotics used only against germs that resist normal antibiotics. There was a similar incident with cattle earlier in 2016, but that bacteria couldn’t transmit its resistance to anything but its offspring — this strain could jump between bacteria without much trouble. Thankfully, the scientists didn’t find evidence of the bacteria reaching the pigs or their food supply. And while the bacteria would pose a threat to people who are already sick, it’s not normally dangerous to humans. That’s not exactly reassuring in the long term, though, and the team tells Popular Science that it wants to find methods of preventing this sort of contamination in the future. The group is also worried about the resistant bacteria’s origins. It’s unlikely that the resistance developed at the farm given the lack of antibiotics, so there’s a good chance that it came from something outside. Plenty of research is underway to develop both more sophisticated antibiotics and treatments that avoid antibiotics altogether. However, this discovery reinforces the need for short-term steps to prevent particularly stubborn bacteria from spreading, such as better procedures and preventative technology . Ideally, the medical community would buy enough time to have a true answer to superbugs before the best available options prove ineffective. Via: Popular Science Source: American Society for Microbiology
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Scientists find bacteria resistant to last-ditch drug treatments
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Inquisitr: The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) announced this week that a “remarkable” breakthrough has been made in the study of preventing and treating the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that leads to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), according to a press release posted on the agency’s official website. The breakthrough centers around the discovery of a powerful antibody named N6 that is highly effective in both binding to the surface of the HIV virus and neutralizing it. The former has proved elusive in the past. “Identifying broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV has been difficult because the virus rapidly changes its surface proteins to evade recognition by the immune system, ” the press release explains. The antibody was initially discovered in an HIV-positive person and has since proven to potentially neutralize 98 percent of HIV isolates, “including 16 of 20 strains resistant to other antibodies of the same class, ” according to the press release. Researchers have had previous success with other antibodies, but N6 appears to be more effective. The new discovery has potential benefits far beyond preventing and treating HIV as well. Studying exactly how N6 works could potentially lead to breakthroughs in other anti-viral antibodies. “Findings from the current study showed that N6 evolved a unique mode of binding that depends less on a variable area of the HIV envelope known as the V5 region and focuses more on conserved regions, which change relatively little among HIV strains, ” NIAID explains. “This allows N6 to tolerate changes in the HIV envelope, including the attachment of sugars in the V5 region, a major mechanism by which HIV develops resistance to other VRC01-class antibodies. Due to its potency, N6 may offer stronger and more durable prevention and treatment benefits, and researchers may be able to administer it subcutaneously (into the fat under the skin) rather than intravenously. In addition, its ability to neutralize nearly all HIV strains would be advantageous for both prevention and treatment strategies.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Scientists Discover Antibody That Neutralizes 98% of HIV Strains
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hacked: Earlier this month Hacked reported that a draft version of the much expected EmDrive paper by the NASA Eagleworks team, had been leaked. Now, the final version of the paper has been published. The NASA Eagleworks paper, titled “Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio-Frequency Cavity in Vacuum, ” has been published online as an open access “article in advance” in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)’s Journal of Propulsion and Power, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal. The paper will appear in the December print issue of the journal. The final version of the paper is very similar to the leaked draft. In particular, the NASA scientists confirm the promising experimental results: “Thrust data from forward, reverse, and null suggested that the system was consistently performing at 1.2 +/- 0.1 mNkW, which was very close to the average impulsive performance measured in air. A number of error sources were considered and discussed.” The scientists add that, though the test campaign was not focused on optimizing performance and was more an exercise in existence proof, it is still useful to put the observed thrust-to-power figure of 1.2 mN/kW in context. “[For] missions with very large delta-v requirements, having a propellant consumption rate of zero could offset the higher power requirements. The 1.2 mN/kW performance parameter is over two orders of magnitude higher than other forms of ‘zero propellant’ propulsion, such as light sails, laser propulsion, and photon rockets having thrust-to-power levels in the 3.33–6.67 uN/kW (or 0.0033–0.0067 mN/kW) range.” In other words, a modest thrust without having to carry fuel can be better, especially for long-distance space missions, than a higher thrust at the cost of having to carry bulky and heavy propellant reserves, and the EmDrive performs much better than the other “zero propellant” propulsion systems studied to date. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Final NASA Eagleworks Paper Confirms Promising EM Drive Results
This is a crazy combination of low-tech production methods, precision hand craftsmanship, graphic design and utter patience. Here craftsman Noboru Honma demonstrates a fabrication technique that yields CNC-like visual complexity, yet has been executed for centuries, long before the discovery of electricity: The technique was developed in the Hakone region of Japan during the Edo period (1600s to 1800s). You can learn more about this Hakone Yosegi-Zaiku technique at the Japanese Traditional Culture Promotion and Development Organization’s website .
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Japanese Craftsman Demonstrates Intricate Marquetry Technique
sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: A decade ago, a fossil hunter was combing the beach in southeastern England when he found a strange, brown pebble. The surface of it caught his eye: It was smooth and strangely undulating, and also slightly crinkly in some places. That oddly textured pebble, scientists report today, is actually an endocast — an impression preserved in the rock — that represents the first known evidence of fossilized brain tissue of a dinosaur (likely a close relative of Iguanodon, a large, herbivorous type of dinosaur that lived about 133 million years ago). Human brains and bird brains are packed tightly into the brain case, so that their convolutions leave an impression of the inside of the case. But dinosaur (and reptile) brains are more loosely fitted; they are surrounded within the brain case by membranes called meninges, tough sheaths that protect and support the brain. So an endocast of a dinosaur brain might be expected to show those structures — and it did. But beneath them, remineralized in calcium phosphate, the researchers also spied a pattern of tiny capillaries and other cortical tissues — the sort of fabric you’d expect for the cortex of a brain. That those textures were pressed up against the brain case doesn’t necessarily mean that dinosaurs were bigger-brained and smarter than we thought, however: Instead, the dinosaur had likely simply toppled over and been preserved upside down, its brain tissue preserved by surrounding acidic, low-oxygen waters that pickled and hardened the membranes and tissues, providing a template for mineralization. The structure of the brain, studied with scanning electron microscopes, reveal similarities to both birds and crocodiles. The researchers reported their findings in a Special Publication of the Geological Society of London. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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First-Ever Dinosaur Brain Tissue Found Preserved In a Pebble
(credit: Hefin Richards ) There has been yet another major data breach, this time exposing names, IP addresses, birth dates, e-mail addresses, vehicle data, and occupations of at least 58 million subscribers, researchers said. The trove was mined from a poorly secured database and then published and later removed at least three times over the past week, according to this analysis from security firm Risk Based Security. Based on conversations with a Twitter user who first published links to the leaked data , the researchers believe the data was stored on servers belonging to Modern Business Solutions , a company that provides data storage and database hosting services. Shortly after researchers contacted Modern Business Solutions, the leaky database was secured, but the researchers said they never received a response from anyone at the firm, which claims to be located in Austin, Texas. Officials with Modern Business Solutions didn’t respond to several messages Ars left seeking comment and additional details. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Breach exposes at least 58 million accounts, includes names, jobs, and more