[CENTRAAL] Wetenschap & Technologie in het Nieuws 3

SCIENTISTS FIND 'SUPERHENGE' THAT COULD BE FIVE TIMES THE AREA OF STONENHENGE

Whoa.


A formation of around 90 stone monoliths has been found 3 kilometres northeast of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, Britain, and archaeologists suspect it could be part of the largest Neolithic site ever discovered.

Dated to over 4,500 years old, the sandstone blocks were detected under less than a metre of earth, and scientists in the UK are now using a combination of remote sensing and geophysical imaging technology to construct an underground map of the area. "We don't think there's anything quite like this anywhere else in the world," lead researcher and archaeologist Vince Gaffney from the University of Bradford told BBC News. "This is completely new and the scale is extraordinary."

The monument is located at Durrington Walls, the site of a large Neolithic settlement that could have contained up to 1,000 houses between 2525 and 2470 BC.

Around 30 intact stones reaching about 4.5 m tall have so far been identified, along with the fragments or foundation pits of another 60. Noting its "extraordinary scale", the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes team behind the discovery has nicknamed the immediate area 'Superhenge', suggesting that it could cover up to five times the area of Stonehenge. They say it could have been constructed at the same time as Stonehenge, or perhaps even earlier.

"What we are starting to see is the largest surviving stone monument, preserved underneath a bank, that has ever been discovered in Britain and possibly in Europe," Gaffney told Ian Sample at The Guardian. "This is archaeology on steroids."

While the stones have yet to be excavated, the researchers have found evidence that they’ve been shaped like those found in settlements nearby. Named sarsen stones, these sandstone formations have been found throughout Britain, particularly on Salisbury Plain and the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire, the BBC reports, and it's thought that they were originally carved upright before being pushed over and incorporated into the circular enclosure of Stonehenge. A similar technique could have been employed for the formations at Superhenge.

"All the monuments have a relationship with each other," David Jacques, an archaeologist from from the University of Buckingham, who was involved in the discovery of another formation near Stonehenge called Blick Mead, told the BBC. "So rather than just 'atomising' them and looking at them as individual entities there are deliberate lines of sight or knowledge that things are just over the hill. When you put that together in the late Neolithic - there's something vibrant, exciting and dynamic [about the find]."

The findings were announced yesterday at the launch of the 2015 British Science Festival at the University of Bradford.


http://www.sciencealert.c(...)e-area-of-stonehenge

NWS / [BREAKING] NASA: Groot nieuws over Mars, live-uitzending maandag 17:30

quote:

Op maandag 28 september 2015 10:05 schreef ExperimentalFrentalMental het volgende:

[..]

W&T / [CENTRAAL] MARS - De Missies! Deel 10

Ik doe niet aan centrale topics.

Opening van de Delta Flume in Delft

Plastic-eating worms may offer solution to mounting waste, Stanford researchers discover



Mealworms munch on Styrofoam, a hopeful sign that solutions to plastics pollution exist. Wei-Min Wu, a senior research engineer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, discovered the larvae can live on polystyrene. (Photo: Yu Yang)

An ongoing study by Stanford engineers, in collaboration with researchers in China, shows that common mealworms can safely biodegrade various types of plastic.

Consider the plastic foam cup. Every year, Americans throw away 2.5 billion of them. And yet, that waste is just a fraction of the 33 million tons of plastic Americans discard every year. Less than 10 percent of that total gets recycled, and the remainder presents challenges ranging from water contamination to animal poisoning.

Enter the mighty mealworm. The tiny worm, which is the larvae form of the darkling beetle, can subsist on a diet of Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene, according to two companion studies co-authored by Wei-Min Wu, a senior research engineer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford. Microorganisms in the worms' guts biodegrade the plastic in the process – a surprising and hopeful finding.

Bron: http://news.stanford.edu/(...)plastics-092915.html

Researchers Make Artificial Cells That Can Replicate Themselves



Scientists have a pretty good theory for how life on Earth began: Meteorites that bombarded our planet brought simple carbon-based compounds called amino acids. Eventually, slowly, these chemicals combined to make cells, which were then able to replicate and become the increasingly complex forms of life that we have today. But researchers didn't quite understand the mechanisms through which the earliest life forms evolved; though these cells were able to replicate, they were not yet alive. Now a team of Japanese biologists has created artificial cells similar to those that might have first existed on Earth to better understand how they might have started to divide and evolve, according to a study published today in Nature Communications.

Bron: http://www.popsci.com/res(...)replicate-themselves

'Zeno effect' verified: Atoms won't move while you watch

PHYSICISTS JUST SENT A QUANTUM MESSAGE ACROSS 2KM, SETTING A NEW RECORD

Whoa.

Researchers in the US have set a new quantum record, using photons to carry messages between two electrons almost 2 km (1.2 miles) apart.

This is a really big deal, because it brings us a step closer to figuring out how to send quantum entangled particles over long distances, which is what we need to accomplish in order to set up an unhackable quantum communication network - the kind that’s of so much interest to governments and banks.

But let’s back up a second here, because you’re probably wondering why we need to use photon messengers to transport quantum information – after all, the very basis of quantum systems is entanglement, which means that two or more particles are inextricably linked no matter how far apart they are.

When we’re talking about quantum computers, the information is stored in the spin of an electron. And when two electrons are entangled, it means whatever happens to one entangled electron will immediately be reflected in its partner even if they’re located on opposite sides of the Universe. This is what Einstein called spooky action at a distance.

That's all relatively simple, and quantum entanglement has already allowed information to be passed over great distances. But here's the problem – to entangle electrons, scientists need to have them together before sending them across great distances, which isn’t entirely practical when you’re talking about setting up communication between hundreds and thousands of electrons, each housed inside their own separate atoms inside quantum computers all over the world.

So in this case, to transmit information between two electrons that have never met, researchers need to entangle them from a distance. This can be achieved by correlating photons with an electron’s spin, and then sending the photons to run into each other and pass on the message.

In the past, this process has worked over a distance of several metres, but scientists have struggled to send messages any further, because photons have the tendency of changing their orientation (known as their polarisation) while travelling via optical fibres, and as soon as that happens, the correlation with the electron’s spin – and the message – is lost.

But now a team from Stanford University has managed to keep that correlation across almost 2 km of optical fibres, setting a new record for the transmission of quantum information.

“Electron spin is the basic unit of a quantum computer," said lead research Leo Yu. "This work can pave the way for future quantum networks that can send highly secure data around the world."

So how do you preserve quantum information in photons that tend to change their polarisation all the time? Instead of correlating the polarisation to the electron’s spin, Yu and his team created a time-stamp, so that they could correlate the arrival time of a photon with the spin of an electron.

They set up this correlation between two photons and two electrons, with each pair separated by 2km of optical fibres. Each of these photons were sent through the cable so they could meet in the middle at a ‘beam splitter’ and interact, passing each other’s message back to their respective electrons.

Of course, that posed a challenge in itself, as journalist Bethany Augliere explains for Stanford: “Photons do not normally interact, just two flashlights beams passing through one another, so the researchers had to mediate this interaction called the ‘two-photon interference’.”

To do that, the team had to make sure that the two photons had the same wavelength, which they did by passing the photons through something called a 'quantum down-converter' before they headed along the optical fibre.

That quantum down-converter matched both their wavelengths, allowing them to interact, and also helping them to travel further along the cable.

“Quantum supercomputers promise to be exponentially faster and more powerful than traditional computers, and can communicate with immunity to hacking or spying,” said Yu.

And now we’re finally getting closer to building networks that could link these devices, which is pretty exciting.

The research has been published in Nature Nanotechnology.

http://www.sciencealert.c(...)setting-a-new-record

Terrafugia's flying car model has been approved for tests in US airspace

NEW GENETIC THEORY MIGHT PAVE WAY TO UNDERSTANDING HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

Scientists from Imperial College believe that intelligence may be influenced by two networks of genes, possibly controlled by a master regulatory system



The researchers found that genes that influenced the intelligence and ability of healthy people were the same ones that impaired cognitive ability and caused epilepsy when mutated. Photograph: Science Picture Co./Corbis

British scientists believe they have made a huge step forward in the understanding of the mechanisms of human intelligence. That genetic inheritance must play some part has never been disputed. Despite occasional claims later dismissed, no-one has yet produced a single gene that controls intelligence.

But Michael Johnson of Imperial College London, a consultant neurologist and colleagues report in Nature Neuroscience that they may have discovered a very different answer: two networks of genes, perhaps controlled by some master regulatory system, lie behind the human gift for lateral thinking, mental arithmetic, pub quizzes, strategic planning, cryptic crosswords and the ability to laugh at limericks.

As usual, such research raises potentially politically-loaded questions about the nature of intelligence. “Intelligence is a composite measure of different cognitive abilities and how they are distributed in a population. It doesn’t measure any one thing. But it is measurable,” Dr Johnson said.

About 40% of the variation in intelligence is explained by inheritance. The other factors are not yet certain. But the scientists raise the distant possibility that armed with the new information they may be able to devise ways to modify human intelligence.

“The idea of ultimately using drugs to affect cognitive performance is not in any way new. We all drink coffee to improve our cognitive performance,” Dr Johnson said. “It’s about understanding the pathways that are related to cognitive ability both in health and disease, especially disease so one day we could help people with learning disabilities fulfil their potential. That is very important.”

The two networks, known just as M1 and M3, one with roughly 1000 genes, the other with more than a 100, also play a role in neurodevelopmental illnesses such as epilepsy, schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder. The functions do not seem to overlap, and the role of each network has yet to be settled.

“We know that genetics plays a major role in intelligence but until now haven’t known which genes are relevant. This research highlights some of the genes involved in human intelligence and how they interact with each other,” Dr Johnson said. “What’s exciting about this is that the genes we have found are likely to share a common regulation, which means that potentially we can manipulate a whole set of genes whose activity is linked to human intelligence.”

The discovery is testament to the power of patience, patients and the assembly of huge sets of data. The Imperial College scientists started with evidence from 100 mouse brains, 122 samples of human brain, and 102 whole human brains preserved postmortem. Such indicators of a genetic connection between neurodevelopmental problems or memory and understanding were then checked against records of 6,732 people in the “Generation Scotland” family health study, which tracks the life history of thousands of volunteers, and repeated in 1,003 healthy people who had volunteered to take part in a study called the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936.

It assessed a range of cognitive abilities – among them memory, attention, processing speed and reasoning – and then it combined the results with genetic information donated by healthy people who had taken IQ tests, and from people with autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability. Included in the research were studies of people who had undergone neurosurgery for epilepsy.

Then the scientists then harnessed massive computing power to see what the data could tell them. They found that the genes that influenced the intelligence and ability of healthy people were the same ones that impaired cognitive ability and caused epilepsy when mutated. If researchers understand what may go wrong in the interplay of inheritance that delivers human reasoning or memory, they might – the possibility for the moment is only theoretical – be able to devise new ways to deliver help.

“Traits such as intelligence are governed by large groups of persons working together - like a football team made up of players in different position,” he said. “We found that some of these genes overlap with those that cause severe childhood onset epilepsy or intellectual disability,”

The researchers may have identified a pool of players in a team: they still have to identify how the players co-operate, which are the key players and precisely what game is being played.

“Eventually we hope that this sort of analysis will provide new insights into better treatments for neurodevelopmental disease such as epilepsy, and ameliorate or treat the cognitive impairments associated with these devastating diseases.”

http://www.theguardian.co(...)n-intelligence#img-1

STEPHEN HAWKING JUST PUBLISHED A NEW SOLUTION TO THE BLACK HOLE INFORMATION PARADOX

How black holes can erase information, but also retain it.


Last year, British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking hinted at research he and a couple of colleagues were working on that could solve the infamous black hole information paradox, which states that information about matter that gets destroyed by a black hole, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, is supposed to be fundamentally conserved, according to our understanding of quantum mechanics.

Now, that paper has finally been posted online, and as hinted by Hawking back in August, the solution to this paradox could be black hole ‘hairs’ that form on the event horizon, making a kind of two-dimensional holographic imprint of whatever’s been sucked in. He says the existence of these hairs is provable, and their existence could win him a Nobel Prize.

But let’s back up a bit, because there’s a lot to wrap your head around here.

First, the black hole information paradox. The problem with black holes is that according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, because of what we know about how gravity interacts with the Universe and everything in it, all information that crosses the boundary of a black hole - called the event horizon - is lost forever. Not even light is protected from this, which is how black holes got their name.

Then in the 1970s, Hawking proposed that the Universe is filled with 'virtual particles' that, according to what we know about how quantum mechanics works, blink in and out of existence and annihilate each other as soon as they come in contact - except if they happen to appear on either side of a black hole's event horizon. As Devin Powell explains over at Smithsonian.com, in this scenario, one particle gets swallowed up, and the other radiates away into space.

"The escaping radiation steals energy from the black hole as it departs, so that the black hole loses mass over time. It eventually evaporates out of existence," says Powell. "According to Hawking’s calculations, the lingering radiation - the only trace of a vanished black hole - contains no useful information about how the black hole formed and what it ate."

So when a black hole disappears, according to what Hawking proposes, information is lost forever, which is a problem, because quantum mechanics states that information can never be lost. Hence the paradox.



In 1973, American theoretical physicist John Wheeler coined the phase, "black holes have no hair", which went on to spark a great debate over whether black holes were 'bald' and featureless, or had 'hair'.

The 'hair vs no hair' debate goes like this: if black holes are bald, it means there will be no discernible difference between any of them, regardless of what information they’ve sucked up - they all have the same mass, electric charge, and angular momentum, and no other distinguishing features.

On the other hand, if black holes have hair - or as Michael Byrne describes them at Motherboard, "minute deformities in space-time" - then we can obtain some kind of information about what an individual black hole has consumed.

Hawking has been arguing on the 'hair' side for years, and is now saying that it can solve the black hole information paradox.

"I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon," Hawking said at a conference back in August 2015. "The message of this lecture is that black holes ain't as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe."

In the paper, which has been published online at arXiv.org, Hawking and his colleagues, University of Cambridge physicist Malcolm J. Perry and Harvard University physicist Andrew Strominger, argue that they’ve made some concrete, provable steps towards explaining how information can escape a black hole after being sucked in.

"We show that when a charged particle goes in, it adds a soft photon to the black hole. So it adds ‘hair' to the black hole," Strominger told Seth Fletcher at Scientific American.

The idea is that when charged particles get sucked into a black hole, their information leaves behind a kind of two-dimensional holographic imprint on the event horizon. This means that while all the physical components of an object would be so totally obliterated by a black hole encounter, its blueprint lives on.

So as light particles (photons) are ejected by the black hole - a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation - they can pick up the information blueprint from the event horizon and carry it with them back into the Universe. "The information about ingoing particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form," Hawking said in August. "This resolves the information paradox. For all practical purposes, the information is lost."

We heard all this back in August, but now that the paper has been published online, Hawking, Perry, and Strominger’s arguments can undergo the process of peer review. As the paper has yet to be submitted to a scientific journal, the peer-review process will remain informal, with scientists welcomed to submit their criticisms.

And we’re already starting to hear them, as Devin Powell explains over at Smithsonian.com:

"No one has yet reported a mistake in the calculations, but concerns have begun to pop up that the theory is at best incomplete. Sabine Hossenfelder of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics questions how much information the proposed soft hair could encode. She also points out that the paper does not explain how the hairs, which would disappear with the black hole once it evaporated, would transfer their information to the radiation that remains."


"I am not at all convinced that the new idea proposed by Hawking, Perry, and Strominger solves the information loss problem," Hossenfelder writes at her blog, Backreaction. "But it seems an interesting avenue that is worth further exploration."

As Perry admitted, he, Hawking, and Strominger are not 100 percent sure if this is the right answer to the black hole information paradox, but their paper is now out there for their peers to pick over everything and help them figure it out. "We’re saying that it’s a step on the way," he concludes.

For more info, head to Seth Fletcher’s interview with Strominger over at Scientific American, where the two discuss many particulars in the paper at great length. One thing’s for sure, while the details of the paper might be beyond the scope of the average person, they’re ensuring that today and the months ahead will be a great time to be alive if you’re a theoretical physicist.

http://www.sciencealert.c(...)-information-paradox

Oppassen met het eten van sneeuw!

Why You Shouldn't Eat ANY Snow, Not Just Yellow Snow



You know the saying: Don’t eat yellow snow. Unfortunately, a new study published in the journal Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts, suggests that you shouldn’t actually eat any snow at all, if you can avoid it. Snow has been found to act as a rather effective sink for tiny particles that are found primarily in car exhaust fumes, so any consumption of it is effectively like eating a pollution-flavored Popsicle.

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Bron / hele artikel.

EXTENSIVE TWIN STUDY FINDS NO LINK BETWEEN MARIJUANA USE AND IQ DECLINE IN TEENS

Smoking pot probably doesn’t make you stupid.

The largest ever longitudinal twin study involving more than 3,000 adolescents from around the world has found little evidence to suggest that adolescent marijuana use has a direct effect on intellectual decline.

The study analysed the results of two separate studies that traced the lives of American adolescent twins over a decade, and both found that teens who engaged in regular marijuana use lost no more IQ points over time than their non-using twin siblings.

The perceived link between dwindling intelligence and marijuana use can most recently be traced to a 2012 study by Duke University researchers, who concluded that frequent and heavy marijuana use is likely associated with a decline in IQ.

But a follow-up study - also published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - revealed that many confounding factors that have also been linked to IQ decline, such as cigarette and alcohol use, low socio-econimc status, and mental illness, were never accounted for.

"Although it would be too strong to say that the results have been discredited, the methodology is flawed and the causal inference drawn from the results premature," lead author of the follow-up study, Ole Rogeber from the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Norway, concluded.

So despite the commonly held belief that smoking pot makes you stupid, we really haven’t seen much concrete evidence to back the claim up. And now researchers from a number of universities across the US have analysed the findings of two previous reports that investigated the relationship between marijuana use and intelligence decline in twins, and found no measurable link either.

One report, known as the the Risk Factors for Antisocial Behaviour (RFAB) study from Southern California, measured the IQ of 789 twins aged of 9-10 years in 2001, then tested them again on five separate occasions over the course of the next 10 years. The Minnesota Twin Family Study (MTFS) traced 2,277 teenaged twins, testing them once in 1990-1996 when they were 9 -11 years old, and again in 1999-2006.

The teenagers had their IQs tested, their vocabularies and general knowledge measured, and were asked to fill out confidential surveys about their marijuana use and instances of binge drinking, and the use of other drugs, such as opioid painkillers and cocaine.

"We also examined a subset of discordant twin pairs in which one sibling had never used marijuana before and the cotwin had frequently used marijuana (i.e., greater than 30 lifetime uses and/or a period of daily use)," the researchers report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to Emily Underwood at Science, marijuana users lost about four IQ points over the course of the study, but their twin siblings that weren’t using marijuana experienced a similar pattern of decline, which suggests that some other factor was at play.

"Our findings lead us to believe that this ‘something else’ is related to something about the shared environment of the twins, which would include home, school, and peers," statistician and lead author, Nicholas Jackson from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, told her.

The researchers did find that marijuana users fared more poorly than abstainers in tests of vocabulary and general knowledge, but could not find any link to usage frequency and amount, which again suggested that something else was at play.

"If smoking pot harmed test scores, the researchers reasoned, people who'd smoked more pot should show poorer trends than those who'd smoked less," the Associated Press reports. "But that's not what the data revealed. Among users, those who'd smoked more than 30 times or used it daily for more than a six-month stretch didn't do worse."

Jackson and his team suspect that what could be going on is that kids who are doing badly in school, or declining in performance, could be more likely to give marijuana a try. "[C]hildren who are predisposed to intellectual stagnation in middle school are on a trajectory for future marijuana use," the study says.

The study does have its limitations - the facts that the teens were asked to self-report their marijuana use and IQ score doesn't necessarily equal intelligence should not be considered lightly. But it does make a convincing case that in lieu of any actual evidence that the chemicals in marijuana are somehow actively causing a decline in intelligence, future research should look into possible factors that could make a teenager more likely to use the drug, and what real effects it could be having, on things other than intelligence.

"We desperately need more research on the effects that marijuana has on the brain," Jackson told Science.

http://www.sciencealert.c(...)-iq-decline-in-teens

Hoera, een nieuw priemrecord:

2^74.207.281 − 1 schijnt dus een priemgetal te zijn.

Maja, wie gaat dat ooit controleren?

http://www.nytimes.com/20(...)mersenne-primes.html

quote:

Why we eat so much

His experiment, published in the journal Psychological Science, was simple, but ingenious. He worked with two severely amnesic patients, whose memory had been damaged by illness and who had difficulty recalling things that happened more than a minute before, and fed them a meal. At least 1o minutes later, he fed them another. And at least 10 minutes after that, he fed them a third. He repeated the experiment on three separate occasions, and each time the same thing happened: They eagerly ate the food that was served to them. One of the participants even announced, after having a third lunch, that he planned to "go for a walk and get a good meal."

[ Bericht 72% gewijzigd door Perrin op 29-01-2016 17:19:28 ]

SCIENTISTS HAVE BRED MALE MICE WITH NO Y CHROMOSOMES - AND THEY STILL CAN REPRODUCE
So what’s the Y chromosome do then?


For the first time, researchers have managed to breed male mice (testicles and all) with no trace of a Y chromosome. And not only are they healthy, they’ve been able to reproduce - with a little help.

The finding seems to go against one of the most fundamental principles of biology - if an organism inherits an X chromosome from its father, it's female, and if it inherits a Y chromosome, it's male. The Y chromosome has come to be known as the very symbol of masculinity, but over the past few years, scientists have found evidence that maybe it isn’t going to be around forever - over the course of human evolution, it's has been shrinking at an alarming rate.

"The X bears about 1,600 genes with varied functions. But the Y has hardly any genes; maybe 50, and only 27 of these are in the male-specific part of the Y," geneticist Jenny Graves from La Trobe University in Australia writes at The Conversation.

"Many are present in multiple copies, most of them inactive, lying in giant loops of DNA. Most of the Y is made of repetitive 'junk DNA'. Thus the human Y shows all the signs of a degraded chromosome near the end of its life."

Now, we’re talking about a timespan of 166 million years, so that means the Y chromosome has been losing about 10 of its 1,600-odd genes every 1 million years. It’s still got about 4.5 million years left on it, Graves calculates, which means your manhood as you know it is under no threat.

But what would vertebrate life look like without the Y chromosome?

Back in 2013, researchers led by reproductive biologist Monika Ward from the University of Hawaii wanted to figure out exactly how the Y chromosome influenced a growing embryo to develop into a male. They narrowed all the genes down to just two genes: SRY and Eif2s3y.

Discovered in 1990, the SRY gene is responsible for initiating the development of testes - babies with Y chromosomes that have mutated SRY genes have been found to develop into females. Eif2s3y, on the other hand, is responsible for kick-starting the production of sperm. And there you have it, testes and sperm all taken care of. Congratulations, you’re a boy.

But could an organism still be a male with the capacity to reproduce, even without these two genes? That’s what Ward and her team set out to discover more recently, and bred mice with only X chromosomes and switched out these two seemingly crucial Y chromosome genes for X chromosome genes with a similar function.

Kaleigh Rogers explains at Motherboard:

"SRY was replaced with a gene that is usually activated by SRY, and is 'next in line', Ward said. Instead of leaving SRY to activate this gene, the researchers activated it manually. Eif2s3y was replaced by over-expressing the X chromosome gene that works in tandem to tell the mouse to start producing sperm."

The resulting males aren’t exactly the virile studs a potential female suitor would be interested in though - not only are their testes smaller than usual, but their sperm are all messed up too. Their sperm were all tail-less, which meant it was impossible for these males to reproduce without some serious assistance.

“The researchers were able to successfully produce offspring using in vitro fertilisation," says Rogers. "The male offspring of the no-Y-chromosome mice were completely infertile, but the female offspring were able to reproduce normally and even produce completely fertile male sons."

Interestingly, it took at least five copies of the X chromosome version of the Eif2s3y to produce these sad excuses for sperm, when only one copy of the Eif2s3y genes from Y chromosomes are needed to produce lots of healthy sperm. "This indicates that the Y chromosome gene is the strong one," Ward told Tina Hesman Saey at Science News.

That’s important, because it makes a case for whether or not the Y chromosome is going to stick around indefinitely, or drop out of the human genome in the next few million years or so.

"Our work does not support that the Y chromosome will disappear," Ward told Herman Saey, because it’s so much more efficient than the X-chromosome substitutes, so it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, from am evolutionary standpoint, to get rid of it.

But Graves says the results of the study only further prove her point that humans could feasibly lose the Y chromosome. "[It’s] a lovely example of how you can lose even a really important gene", she said of the study, adding that it "give[s] us useful information about what happens at the end of the life of the Y chromosome".

It’s true that many vertebrates have evolved entirely different systems for reproducing, without the X = female, Y = male system. So far, two species of rodent have been found breeding in the wild with zero Y chromosomes, as have some reptiles. And some species of birds and snakes have adopted a completely completely different kind of sex gene, with ZZ males and ZW females.

But there’s something to the Y chromosome, and Ward intends to figure it out. "All of the other genes on the Y chromosome are responsible for something - male fitness, sperm production, sperm count," she told Motherboard. "We’re not trying to eradicate the Y chromosome or males. I’m actually looking forward to many years of studying it, so I want Y chromosomes."

http://www.sciencealert.c(...)-can-still-reproduce

quote:

The world's first robot-run farm will harvest 30,000 heads of lettuce daily

The Japanese lettuce production company Spread believes the farmers of the future will be robots.

So much so that Spread is creating the world's first farm manned entirely by robots. Instead of relying on human farmers, the indoor Vegetable Factory will employ robots that can harvest 30,000 heads of lettuce every day.

Don't expect a bunch of humanoid robots to roam the halls, however; the robots look more like conveyor belts with arms. They'll plant seeds, water plants, and trim lettuce heads after harvest in the Kyoto, Japan farm.

"The use of machines and technology has been improving agriculture in this way throughout human history," J.J. Price, a spokesperson at Spread, tells Tech Insider. "With the introduction of plant factories and their controlled environment, we are now able to provide the ideal environment for the crops."

Scientists May Have Just Figured Out Why Time Moves Forward, Not Backwards



Griffith University Associate Professor Joan Vaccaro has put forward a suggestion on why there’s a difference between the future and the past. According to her calculations, the laws of physics don’t have to distinguish between time and space, but since we don't experience time in the same way as space, something must make time different. And she thinks the answer is in a special class of quantum phenomena.

Certain quantum phenomena don’t behave in the same way if you’re going forward or backward in time, and she suggested that these are the key to understanding the arrow of time – the "asymmetry", or one-way direction, of time. And she said that in particular, subatomic particles known as K and B mesons could provide some interesting information. Her research is published in the Proceedings of The Royal Society A.

http://www.iflscience.com(...)y-time-moves-forward

British researchers get green light to genetically modify human embryos

quote:

Britain’s first genetically modified human embryos could be created within months, after scientists were granted permission by the fertility regulator to carry out the procedure.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) regulator approved a licence application by Kathy Niakan, a stem cell scientist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, to perform so-called genome editing on human embryos.

The decision permits Niakan to study the embryos for 14 days for research purposes only. It does not permit them to be implanted into women. Niakan’s research is aimed at finding the genes at play in the early days of human fertilisation.

The decision was greeted positively by the Francis Crick Institute and British scientists but was met with anger and disqmay by those concerned that rapid advances in the field of genome editing is precluding proper consideration of the ethical implications.

Paul Nurse, director of the institute, said: “I am delighted that the HFEA has approved Dr Niakan’s application. Dr Niakan’s proposed research is important for understanding how a healthy human embryo develops and will enhance our understanding of IVF success rates, by looking at the very earliest stage of human development – one to seven days.”

The work, using embryos donated by couples with a surplus after IVF treatment, will look at the fertilised egg’s development from a single cell to about 250 cells. The basic research could help scientists understand why some women lose their babies before term and provide better clinical treatments for infertility, using conventional medical methods.

Niakan will use a powerful genome editing procedure called Crispr-Cas9 to switch genes on and off in early stage human embryos. She will then look for the effects the modifications have on the development of the cells that go on to form the placenta.

Crispr-Cas9 has revolutionised biomedical research since its invention three years ago. It allows scientists to make precise changes to DNA, and has the potential to transform the treatment of genetic disorders by correcting faulty genes.

https://www.theguardian.c(...)green-light-research

Beste mensen ,

Ik doe een onderzoek aan de Vrije Universiteit van Amsterdam over werkprestatie van werknemers. Hieronder vind je de link naar de vragenlijst (duurt -/+ 8 min). Vul hem ajb in! Bedankt voor de moeite!

http://fppvu.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_09i6HpJ1jLYzA7r

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Op maandag 9 november 2015 08:09 schreef ExperimentalFrentalMental het volgende:

Gedachten lezen
Ondanks dat hersensignalen worden gemeten, lijken geen plannen te bestaan om echt gedachten van mensen te gaan uitlezen. Het leger heeft plannen om het systeem in te zetten voor patroonherkenning in afbeeldingen die zijn vergaard door veiligheidsdiensten.
(HLN)

Uhu

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Op woensdag 17 februari 2016 08:53 schreef ExperimentalFrentalMental het volgende:
16-02-2016

Dankzij deze technologie blijft de geschiedenis van de mensheid voor altijd bewaard

Fabrication process for 5D optical storage

De Bijbel, ‘Opticks’ van Newton, de Universele Verklaring van de Rechten van de Mens: deze documenten staan in een klein nano-gestructureerd glas gegrift, om voor altijd bewaard te blijven.

Wetenschappers van de universiteit van Southhampton hebben een grote stap voorwaarts gemaakt in de ontwikkeling van een digitale opslag. Hun nieuwe technologie kan gegevens miljarden jaren op rij veilig bewaren. De wetenschappers gebruikten nano-gestructureerd glas, waarop ze met een laser gegevens in 5D kunnen bewaren.

“Alles wat we hebben geleerd zal niet vergeten worden”

Eigenschappen
De ontwikkelde technologie beschikt over een aantal ongekende eigenschappen. Zo kan er wel 360 TB data op een glaasje gezet worden en blijft het glazen schijfje en de inhoud zelfs bij temperaturen van 1000 graden Celsius nog bewaard. Ook heeft het een vrijwel onbeperkte levensduur bij kamertemperatuur. Omdat het een hele veilige en stabiele vorm is van het opslaan van draagbaar geheugen, zou deze nieuwe technologie heel nuttig zijn voor organisaties die grote archieven hebben. Denk hierbij aan nationale archieven, musea en bibliotheken.

[ afbeelding ]
Universele Verklaring van de Rechten van de Mens opgeslagen in 5D. Credits: University of Southampton

Documenten
De technologie was voor het eerst experimenteel aangetoond in 2013, toen een 300 kb digitale kopie van een tekstbestand met succes werd opgenomen in 5D. Nu zijn belangrijke documenten uit de menselijke geschiedenis, zoals de Universele Verklaring van de Rechten van de Mens, het boek ‘Opticks’ van Newton en de Bijbel opgeslagen als digitale kopieën die het menselijk ras zouden kunnen overleven.
De documenten werden opgenomen met behulp van een ultrasnelle laser, die extreem snelle en korte lichtpulsen produceert. De bestanden werden geschreven in drie lagen van nanogestructureerde punten die 5 micrometer (een miljoenste van een meter) uit elkaar liggen.

“Het is erg spannend om je te bedenken dat we een technologie hebben gecreëerd die documenten en informatie kan bewaren voor toekomstige generaties,” zegt professor Peter Kazansky. “Deze technologie kan het laatste bewijs van onze beschaving veiligstellen; alles wat we hebben geleerd zal niet vergeten worden.”

(scientias.nl)

Geen idee waarom ze een Bijbel voor altijd zouden willen bewaren.

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Delftse onderzoekers filmen touwtje dat dna inpakt van 45 miljoenste millimeter

Als eerste ter wereld zijn Delftse onderzoekers erin geslaagd een minuscuul touwtje te filmen dat een cruciale rol speelt bij het inpakken van dna tot chromosomen - de bekende X-vormige 'worstjes' die bij delende cellen zichtbaar worden. Een technisch hoogstandje: het touwtje is niet meer dan 45 miljoenste millimeter groot.

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Scientists trace mystery 'alien' radio signals back to galaxy six billion light years away

For the first time, scientists have successfully traced mysterious “fast radio bursts” (FRBs), which have been speculated to be signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, to a galaxy six billion light years away.
Just 17 such radio blasts have been recorded since 2007 when they were first discovered. Each one came from space and lasted a few milliseconds at the most, emitting as much energy as the Sun in about 10,000 years.

Scientists are not sure what causes these bursts. The first step in establishing their origin was to estimate the distance to the object where it originated.

Astronomer Evan Keane from the UK’s Jodrell Bank Observatory, who led the scientific team that published the new findings in the journal Nature, was able to record one of the most recent radio burst called FRB 150418 on April 18, 2015 with the help of the Parkes radio telescope in Australia. It lasted less than one millisecond, the shortest of them all.

The process of pinpointing its location was long. First Australia’s telescope located the radio afterglow in space and then a second 8.2-meter-long telescope in Hawaii, known as the Subaru Telescope, helped trace the origin of the wave to an elliptical galaxy, which is an off-spherical concentration of stars believed to be relatively old.

Some have speculated that the bursts could be a signal sent by extraterrestrial intelligence. “Nope! Sorry,” Keane said in response to this theory, as quoted by AFP.

The radio waves most likely originate from two colliding neutron stars, which at some point were orbiting each other before merging, according to Keane. Due to the composition of the galaxy, it is more likely that a collision of two dead stars caused the radio bursts, rather than the explosion of a supernova, astronomers say.

Read more
This illustration shows the thick dust torus that astronomers believe surrounds supermassive black holes and their accretion discs. (ESA / V. Beckmann (NASA-GSFC)Mystery radio waves from deep space captured LIVE, sender unknown
Keane is now working with his team to determine how much material the radio wave passed through before being recorded on Earth. According to the astronomer, this could answer some of the biggest scientific mysteries, such as the measurements of the cosmic microwave background.

Scientists plan to use such radio bursts in the future to create a map that could help detail the magnetic fields between various galaxies and determine what type of matter exists in space.

The discovery might also shed some light on the “missing matter question” question. Scientists believe that the universe consists of 70 percent dark energy, 25 percent undetermined dark matter, and around five percent ordinary matter or, more specifically, what planets and stars are made of.

Astronomers are currently only able to identify half of the ordinary matter, while the other half is labelled as “missing matter.”

zie ook:
Mysterieus ruimtesignaal opgevangen

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New Alzheimer’s treatment fully restores memory function

Australian researchers have come up with a non-invasive ultrasound technology that clears the brain of neurotoxic amyloid plaques - structures that are responsible for memory loss and a decline in cognitive function in Alzheimer’s patients.

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The most depressing discovery about the brain, ever

Denial is business-as-usual for our brains. More and better facts don’t turn low-information voters into well-equipped citizens. It just makes them more committed to their misperceptions. In the entire history of the universe, no Fox News viewers ever changed their minds because some new data upended their thinking. When there’s a conflict between partisan beliefs and plain evidence, it’s the beliefs that win. The power of emotion over reason isn’t a bug in our human operating systems, it’s a feature.

Wow:

Images of Earth From a Year in Space

NASA's Graveyards: Haunting Images Reveal Remnants of the Space Race

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Op woensdag 2 maart 2016 15:26 schreef Perrin het volgende:
Wow:

Images of Earth From a Year in Space

[ afbeelding ]

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160303133510.htm

Hubble breaks cosmic distance record: Sees universe soon after Big Bang



By pushing the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to its limits astronomers have shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the distance to the most remote galaxy ever seen in the Universe. This galaxy existed just 400 million years after the Big Bang and provides new insights into the first generation of galaxies.

NASA discovers first wormhole in our galaxy

Italiaans bericht maar ff translate naar Engels en je komt een heel eind

ik zeg: 1 april grap

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How ancient horse-dung bacteria is helping us locate where Hannibal crossed the Alps

Despite thousands of years of hard work by brilliant scholars, the great enigma of where Hannibal crossed the Alps to invade Italy remained unsolved. But now it looks like we may just have cracked it – all thanks to modern science and a bit of ancient horse poo. As a microbiologist, I was part of the team that carried out the research.