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RandomFactor writes:

Researchers lead by Gwendel Fève, a physicist at Sorbonne University in Paris, have discovered the first experimental evidence that certain quasi-particles are 'anyons', members of a third kingdom of particles that are not fermions or bosons.

Every last particle in the universe — from a cosmic ray to a quark — is either a fermion or a boson. These categories divide the building blocks of nature into two distinct kingdoms.

While Quasi-particles demonstrating fractional quantum hall effect and displaying a fraction of the charge of a single electron had been observed before, this research is the first that demonstrates that they match predicted anyon behavior.

In 1984, a seminal two-page paper by [Frank A Wilzczek], Daniel Arovas and John Robert Schrieffer showed that these quasiparticles had to be anyons. But scientists had never observed anyon-like behavior in these quasiparticles. That is, they had been unable to prove that anyons are unlike either fermions or bosons, neither bunching together nor totally repelling one another.

That's what the new study does. In 2016, three physicists described an experimental setup that resembles a tiny particle collider in two dimensions. Fève and his colleagues built something similar and used it to smash anyons together. By measuring the fluctuations of the currents in the collider, they were able to show that the behavior of the anyons corresponds exactly with theoretical predictions.

"Everything fits with the theory so uniquely, there are no questions," said Dmitri Feldman, a physicist at Brown University who was not involved in the recent work. "That's very unusual for this field, in my experience."

Journal Reference:
H. Bartolomei, M. Kumar, R. Bisognin, et al. Fractional statistics in anyon collisions [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz5601)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

After decades of research, meteorologists still have questions about how hurricanes develop. Now, Florida State University researchers have found that even the smallest changes in atmospheric conditions could trigger a hurricane, information that will help scientists understand the processes that lead to these devastating storms.

"The whole motivation for this paper was that we still don't have that universal theoretical understanding of exactly how tropical cyclones form, and to really be able to forecast that storm-by-storm, it would help us to have that more solidly taken care of," said Jacob Carstens, a doctoral student in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science.

The research by Carstens and Assistant Professor Allison Wing has been published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.

[...] The simulations started with mostly uniform conditions spread across the imaginary box where the model played out. Then, researchers added a tiny amount of random temperature fluctuations to kickstart the model and observed how the simulated clouds evolved.

Despite the random start to the simulation, the clouds didn't stay randomly arranged. They formed into clusters as the water vapor, thermal radiation and other factors interacted. As the clusters circulated through the simulated atmosphere, the researchers tracked when they formed hurricanes. They repeated the model at simulated latitudes between 0.1 degrees and 20 degrees north, representative of areas such as parts of western Africa, northern South America and the Caribbean. That range includes the latitudes where tropical cyclones typically form, along with latitudes very close to the equator where their formation is rare and less studied.

The scientists found that every simulation in latitudes between 10 and 20 degrees produced a major hurricane, even from the stable conditions under which they began the simulation. These came a few days after a vortex first emerged well above the surface and affected its surrounding environment.

Journal Reference
Jacob D. Carstens, Allison A. Wing. Tropical Cyclogenesis From Self‐Aggregated Convection in Numerical Simulations of Rotating Radiative‐Convective Equilibrium [open], Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (DOI: 10.1029/2019MS002020)

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' Turns 120:

Playwright, chicken farmer and children's book author L. Frank Baum published "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" 120 years ago Sunday. The book would sell out its first run of 10,000 copies in eight months and go on to sell a total of 3 million copies before it fell into the public domain in 1956.

Baum would try his hand at other children's books but returned to his Oz characters time and time again, adapting them for a stage production in 1902 that ran for a while on Broadway and toured the country. Baum would write a total of 14 Oz novels, but his biggest success – a 1939 movie version – would come long after his death.

Baum's intent was to create a fairy tale along the lines of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. Baum also admired the character of Alice in Lewis Carroll's work and chose a similar young girl to be his fictional hero.

[...] A portion of the success of the book has been attributed to Baum's illustrator, W.W. Denslow, who he worked with closely on the project. Denslow, in fact, was given partial ownership of the copyright of the book. This caused problems later when Denslow and Baum had a falling out while working on the 1902 stage adaptation.

The most popular adaptation of Baum's first Oz book was the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland.

Wikipedia has many more details on the story and the film.

[Aside: I had heard only the land of Oz was filmed in Technicolor because it was so much more costly than black and white. I've been unable to corroborate. Are there any Soylentils here who can confirm or deny it? --Ed.]

Original Submission

NickM writes:

From the latest blog post of Derek Lowe :

One of the big (and so far unanswered) questions about the coronavirus epidemic is what kind of immunity people have after becoming infected. This is important for the idea of “re-infection” (is it even possible?) and of course for vaccine development. We’re getting more and more information in this area, though, and this new paper is a good example. A team from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, UNC, UCSD, and Mt. Sinai (NY) reports details about the T cells of people who have recovered from the virus.

[...] So overall, this paper makes the prospects for a vaccine look good: there is indeed a robust response by the adaptive immune system, to several coronavirus proteins. And vaccine developers will want to think about adding in some of the other antigens mentioned in this paper, in addition to the Spike antigens that have been the focus thus far. It seems fair to say, though, that the first wave of vaccines will likely be Spike-o-centric, and later vaccines might have these other antigens included in the mix. But it also seems that Spike-protein-targeted vaccines should be pretty effective, so that’s good. The other good news is that this team looked for the signs of an antibody-dependent-enhancement response, which would be bad news, and did not find evidence of it in the recovering patients (I didn’t go into these details, but wanted to mention that finding, which is quite reassuring). And it also looks like the prospects for (reasonably) lasting immunity after infection (or after vaccination) are good. This, from what I can see, is just the sort of response that you’d want to see for that to be the case. Clinical data will be the real decider on that, but there’s no reason so far to think that a person won’t have such immunity if they fit this profile.

Onward from here, then – there will be more studies like this coming, but this is a good, solid look into the human immunology of this outbreak. And so far, so good.

Be sure to read the article if you’ve been wondering what your thymus has done for you lately.

Journal Reference
Alba Grifoni, Daniela Weiskopf. Targets of T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in humans with COVID-19 disease and unexposed individuals, Cell (DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.05.015)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The brain is a master of forming patterns, even when it involves events occurring at different times. Take the phenomenon of trace fear conditioning—scientists can get an animal to notice the relationship between a neutral stimulus and an aversive stimulus separated by a temporal chasm (the trace) of a few or even tens of seconds. While it's a well-established protocol in neuroscience and psychology labs, the mechanism for how the brain bridges the time gap between two related stimuli in order to associate them is "one of the most enigmatic and highly investigated" questions, says Columbia University neuroscientist Attila Losonczy.

If the first stimulus is finished, the information about its presence and identity "should be somehow maintained through some neuronal mechanism," he explains, so it can be associated with the second stimulus coming later.

Losonczy and his colleagues have recently investigated how this might occur in a study published May 8 in Neuron. They measured the neural activity in the hippocampal CA1 region of the brain—known to be crucial for the formation of memories—of mice exposed to trace fear conditioning. The team found that associating the two events separated by time involved the activation of a subset of neurons that fired sparsely every time mice received the first stimulus and during the time gap that followed. The pattern emerged only after mice had learned to associate both stimuli.

The study highlights "the important question of how we link memories across time," says Denise Cai, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who was not involved in the work. Studying the basic mechanisms of temporal association is critical for understanding how it goes wrong in disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or Alzheimer's disease, she says.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

New evidence shows giant meteorite impacts formed parts of the Moon's crust:

New research published today in the journal Nature Astronomy reveals a type of destructive event most often associated with disaster movies and dinosaur extinction may have also contributed to the formation of the Moon's surface.

A group of international scientists led by the Royal Ontario Museum has discovered that the formation of ancient rocks on the Moon may be directly linked to large-scale meteorite impacts.

The scientists conducted new research of a unique rock collected by NASA astronauts during the 1972 Apollo 17 mission to the Moon. They found it contains mineralogical evidence that it formed at incredibly high temperatures (in excess of 2300 °C/ 4300 °F) that can only be achieved by the melting of the outer layer of a planet in a large impact event.

In the rock, the researchers discovered the former presence of cubic zirconia, a mineral phase often used as a substitute for diamond in jewellery. The phase would only form in rocks heated to above 2300 °C, and though it has since reverted to a more stable phase (the mineral known as baddeleyite), the crystal retains distinctive evidence of a high-temperature structure. An interactive image of the complex crystal used in the study can be seen here using the Virtual Microscope.

While looking at the structure of the crystal, the researchers also measured the age of the grain, which reveals the baddeleyite formed over 4.3 billion years ago. It was concluded that the high-temperature cubic zirconia phase must have formed before this time, suggesting that large impacts were critically important to forming new rocks on the early Moon.

Journal Reference
L. F. White, A. Černok, J. R. Darling, et al. Evidence of extensive lunar crust formation in impact melt sheets 4,330 Myr ago, Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-1092-5)

Original Submission

martyb writes:

All About That Bass – Marble Machine X Keeps Growing:

If you play a string instrument and ever used a capo — the clamping little helper device to smack the pitch up — you may have found yourself wishing that you could use it on any arbitrary fret on each string. Sure, there are partial capos and the spider capo to select individual strings, but you're still limited to transpose along a single fret. Well, [Martin]'s Cyber Capos, a mechanical construct of four arms sliding along the neck, serve exactly that purpose, which allows him to free up his hands for other things while the marbles keep bouncing.

But you don't have to be a bass player, or any musician really, to appreciate [Martin]'s build videos. We praised his general attitude and hacker-like spirit already the first time we mentioned the Marble Machine, and just watching him getting excited about his work and the appreciation for people supporting and assisting in the project, while embracing his mistakes, is a genuine delight.

Cyber Bass - YouTube Video #1
Cyber Bass - YouTube Video #2

Previously:
(2016-03-02) Wintergatan - a Programmable Music Box With 2,000 Marbles

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Note: Dell has two models of the Alienware Area-51m. The Alienware Area-51m R1 was released in January of 2019. It is now announcing the Alienware Area-51m R2. Though both are upgradable, the upgrades are not interchangeable between these two releases.

Alienware's Upgradeable Laptop Still Holds Tons of Promise, But Not at That Price:

Dell really wants you to choose its Alienware Area-51m over a high-end desktop. The company has called it a "desktop replacement" since the model's inception, and not without reason: in addition to upgrading your memory and storage, you have the option to upgrade your CPU and GPU too. You can still do that with the upcoming Alienware Area-51m R2, which will be available June 9, 2020, but a starting price of over $3,000 is not a cost-effective desktop replacement. You also can't upgrade the soon-to-be previous model with a 10th-gen Intel processor or a RTX Super graphics card, but there's a good reason why. (I'll get into that in a bit.)

The Alienware Area-51m R2 comes with up to an Intel Core i9-10900K, Nvidia RTX 2080 Super, 64GB DDR4-2933 RAM, multiple single, double, and RAID storage options up to 4TB, and a 4K 60Hz display. I assume that $3,050 starting price includes the lowest-performing components available to configure the Area-51m R2, though. Otherwise, that $3,050 price tag would be a steal for all the above features and components. Most likely, you'll get the following for that price: Intel Core i7-10700, Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti, 8GB DDR4 2933MHz RAM, 256GB NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD, and a 17.3-inch FHD 1080 144Hz 300 nit display.

The R1 model is still available and at a lower price, but...

But what you don't get with the Area-51m R1 is the ability to upgrade the processor and graphics card to an Intel 10th-gen and RTX 2070 Super or RTX 2080 Super. That's because of some architectural design changes. Intel has a new motherboard chipset, the Z490, for its 10th-gen desktop processors on a new LGA 1200 layout. The previous motherboard chipset, Z390, has a LGA 1151 layout. This means that a 10th-gen Intel CPU will not physically fit into the last-gen socket on the motherboard; the new chips have 1,200 pins where the older ones have 1,151 pins.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow2736:

U.S. Government Proposed Manipulating CDC Guidelines to Avoid Mask Shortages: Whistleblower:

The U.S. government proposed manipulating information about whether N95 masks worked to fight the spread of coronavirus in the general public, according to Dr. Richard Bright, a whistleblower who testified publicly for the first time on Thursday. The deception was an effort to avoid shortages and keep masks available for U.S. health care workers, but likely had a ripple effect throughout the country, leaving many people to believe that all masks are useless or even harmful during a pandemic. Bright's testimony is the first confirmation from a high-ranking official that the U.S. government actively sought to distribute incorrect information about N95 masks during the covid-19 pandemic.

Dr. Bright told the House Subcommittee on Health on Thursday about his attempts to warn others in the Department of Health and Human Services about the pending shortage of masks in January and early February, just as the novel coronavirus was spreading outside of China. Bright said that officials at the meeting simply said they would change the recommendations put out by the CDC to discourage the general public from buying masks.

"I indicated we know there will be a critical shortage of these supplies. We need to do something to ramp up production," Dr. Bright, the former top vaccine specialist at HHS, said of a meeting with HHS officials on February 7.

"They indicated if we notice there is a shortage, that we will simply change the CDC guidelines to better inform people who should not be wearing those masks, so that would save those masks for our health care workers," Dr. Bright testified.

"My response was, 'I can not believe you can sit and say that with a straight face'," Bright said. "That was absurd."

[...] Dr. Bright's entire 6-hour testimony is available on YouTube, and it's quite damning.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Software developed by SMU stops ransomware attacks:

Engineers from SMU's Darwin Deason Institute for Cybersecurity have developed software that detects ransomware attacks before attackers can inflict catastrophic damage.

[...] Unlike existing methods, such as antivirus software or other intrusion detection systems, SMU's new software works even if the ransomware is new and has not been used before.

SMU's detection method is known as sensor-based ransomware detection because the software doesn't rely on information from past ransomware infections to spot new ones on a computer. In contrast, existing technology needs signatures of past infections to do its job.

"With this software we are capable of detecting what's called zero-day ransomware because it's never been seen by the computer before," said Mitch Thornton, executive director of the Deason Institute and professor of electrical and computer engineering in SMU's Lyle School of Engineering. "Right now, there's little protection for zero-day ransomware, but this new software spots zero-day ransomware more than 95 percent of the time."

[...] "The results of testing this technique indicate that rogue encryption processes can be detected within a very small fraction of the time required to completely lock down all of a user's sensitive data files," Taylor noted. "So the technique detects instances of ransomware very quickly and well before extensive damage occurs to the victim's computer files."

[...] SMU's software functions by searching for small, yet distinguishable changes in certain sensors that are found inside computers to detect when unauthorized encryptions are taking place.

[...] Use of the computer's own devices to spot ransomware "is completely different than anything else that's out there," Taylor said.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

New tool helps distinguish the cause of blood clots:

A new tool using cutting-edge technology is able to distinguish different types of blood clots based on what caused them, according to a study published in eLife.

The tool could help physicians diagnose what caused a blood clot and help them select a treatment that targets cause to break it up. For example, it could help them determine if aspirin or another kind of anti-clotting drug would be the best choice for a person who has just had a heart attack or stroke.

[...] To develop a more effective approach to identifying different types of blood clots, Zhou and her colleagues took blood samples from a healthy individual and then exposed them to different clotting agents. The team captured thousands of images of the different types of clots using a technique called high-throughput imaging flow cytometry.

They next used a type of machine-learning technology called a convolutional neural network to train a computer to identify subtle differences in the shape of different types of clots caused by different molecules. They tested this tool on 25,000 clot images that the computer had never seen before and found it was also able to distinguish most of the clot types in the images.

Finally, they tested whether this new tool, which they named the intelligent platelet aggregate classifier (iPAC), can diagnose different clot types in human blood samples. They took blood samples from four healthy people, exposed them to different clotting agents, and showed that iPAC could tell the different types of clots apart.

"We showed that iPAC is a powerful tool for studying the underlying mechanism of clot formation," Zhou says. She adds that, given recent reports that COVID-19 causes blood clots, the technology could one day be used to better understand the mechanism behind these clots too, although much about the virus currently remains unknown.

Journal Reference
Yuqi Zhou, Atsushi Yasumoto, Cheng Lei, et al. Intelligent classification of platelet aggregates by agonist type, (DOI: 10.7554/eLife.52938)

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

The United Launch Alliance and the U.S. Space Force are targeting Sunday morning for launching the secretive reusable X-37B spaceplane back into orbit for a sixth mission.

Watch live here (launch is scheduled for 9:14am Eastern time)

The launch was originally planned for 8:24 AM EDT Saturday May 16th but was scrubbed due to weather.

To date the space plane has spent a total of 2,865 days in orbit, with the longest mission running for 780 days and ending in October 27th, 2019. The details of the current mission are, as with previous missions, mostly undisclosed, however this mission has a notable difference:

This mission will have even more experiments than usual, thanks to the addition of a new service module — a cylindrical structure attached to the bottom of the spaceplane that will be packed with technology to be tested on orbit. "This will be the first X-37B mission to use a service module to host experiments," Randy Walden, director and program executive officer for the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, said in a statement. "The incorporation of a service module on this mission enables us to continue to expand the capabilities of the spacecraft and host more experiments than any of the previous missions."

Information on a few of the experiments has been made public:

Tagging along with the X-37B is a small satellite called FalconSat-8 developed by the US Air Force Academy that carries five experimental payloads. The spaceplane will supposedly deploy the FalconSat-8 when it reaches orbit. NASA is also sending two experiments up on this flight to study how space radiation degrades certain materials as well as seeds needed for food. And the US Naval Research Laboratory has included an experiment that will "transform solar power into radio frequency microwave energy" that can then be sent to the ground for use.

A tribute to COVID-19 victims, first responders, and front-line workers has been added to the side of the Atlas V rocket that will be used for the launch.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA's 'Artemis Accords' set forth new and old rules for outer space cooperation

NASA's plan to return to the Moon is ambitious enough on its own, but the agency is aiming to modernize international cooperation in space in the process. Today it published a summary of the "Artemis Accords," a new set of voluntary guidelines that partner nations and organizations are invited to join to advance the cause of exploration and industry globally.

Having no national affiliation or sovereignty of its own, space is by definition lawless. So these are not so much space laws as shared priorities given reasonably solid form. Many nations already take part in a variety of agreements and treaties, but the progress of space exploration (and soon, colonization and mining, among other things) has outpaced much of that structure. A fresh coat of paint is overdue and NASA has decided to take up the brush.

[...] First, the rules that could be considered new. NASA and partner nations agree to:

• Publicly describe policies and plans in a transparent manner.
• Publicly provide location and general nature of operations to create "Safety Zones" and avoid conflicts.
• Use international open standards, develop new such standards if necessary and support interoperability as far as is practical.
• Release scientific data publicly in a full and timely manner.
• Protect sites and artifacts with historic value. (For example, Apollo program landing sites, which have no real lawful protection.)
• Plan for the mitigation of orbital debris, including safe and timely disposal of end-of-life spacecraft.

Also at The Verge, Ars Technica, and Reuters.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for TurkeyWaddle:

Medieval arrows caused injuries similar to gunshot wounds, study finds:

The English longbow was a powerful medieval weapon said to be able to pierce an opponent's armor and may have been a decisive factor in several key military victories, most notably the Battle of Agincourt. A recent paper published in the Antiquaries Journal by a team of archaeologists at the University of Exeter in the UK has yielded evidence that longbow arrows created similar wounds to modern-day gunshot wounds and were capable of penetrating through long bones.

Historians continue to debate just how effective the longbow was in battle. There have been numerous re-enactment experiments with replicas, but no medieval-period longbows have survived, although many 16th-century specimens were recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose. The University of Exeter's Oliver Creighton, who led the latest study, and his co-authors argue that such experiments are typically done over shorter ranges, so the arrows are not fully stable and spinning in flight. This, in turn, would affect the kinds of injuries combatants sustained. He and his team believe their analysis shows the importance of osteological evidence in helping to resolve such debates.

It's relatively rare to find direct evidence of violent trauma from weapons to skeletal remains in medieval burial sites, with the exception of mass burials from known historical battles. The best-known such sites are associated with the 1361 Battle of Visby in Gotland, Sweden, and the 1461 Battle of Towton in North Yorkshire, England. Per the authors, data from these sites has yielded useful information on "the realities of medieval warfare—how people fought and were killed, which weapons were used and what sorts of injuries these caused, and what armor (if any) was worn." Evidence of trauma specifically caused by arrowheads is even rarer.

The current study examined 22 bone fragments and three teeth, all showing clear signs of trauma. All were collected during the excavation of the burial ground of a medieval Dominican friary in Exeter from 1997 to 2007, to prepare for the construction of the Princesshay shopping district. Established in 1232 and officially consecrated in 1259, the friary's burial grounds likely included wealthy, high-status laypersons, according to the authors.

[...] "These results have profound implications for our understanding of the power of the medieval longbow; for how we recognize arrow trauma in the archaeological record; and for where battle casualties were buried," Creighton told Medievalists.net. "In the medieval world, death caused by an arrow in the eye or the face could have special significance. Clerical writers sometimes saw the injury as a divinely ordained punishment, with the 'arrow in the eye' which may or may not have been sustained by King Harold II on the battlefield of Hastings in 1066 the most famous case in point. Our study brings into focus the horrific reality of such an injury."

DOI: Antiquaries Journal, 2020. 10.1017/S0003581520000116 (About DOIs).

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Powerful new AI technique detects and classifies galaxies in astronomy image data:

Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have developed a powerful new computer program called Morpheus that can analyze astronomical image data pixel by pixel to identify and classify all of the galaxies and stars in large data sets from astronomy surveys.

Morpheus is a deep-learning framework that incorporates a variety of artificial intelligence technologies developed for applications such as image and speech recognition. Brant Robertson, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics who leads the Computational Astrophysics Research Group at UC Santa Cruz, said the rapidly increasing size of astronomy data sets has made it essential to automate some of the tasks traditionally done by astronomers.

"There are some things we simply cannot do as humans, so we have to find ways to use computers to deal with the huge amount of data that will be coming in over the next few years from large astronomical survey projects," he said.