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Egyptians Discover Fossil Of New Amphibious Whale

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Egyptian scientists have discovered the fossil of a new species of amphibious whale that dates back 43 million years, a member of the research team said.

"This is a species that was not known" previously, said Hesham Sallam, an Egyptian palaeontologist from the team.

"This is the first time that an Arab research team, specifically an Egyptian one, is in charge of documenting such a discovery," he said on television late Thursday.

The fossil was found in the Fayum region, a part of Egypt that was once covered by sea and is home to Whale Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The newly discovered species, which was more than three metres (10 feet) long and weighed about 600 kilograms (about 1,320 pounds), has been named Phiomicetus anubis.

Researchers Discover Remains of Four-legged Amphibious Whale in Egypt's Fayoum - Daily News Egypt

upstart writes:

upstart writes:

Astra Rocket 3.3 launch fails - SpaceNews:

WASHINGTON — Astra's third attempt to reach orbit failed Aug. 28 when its Rocket 3.3 vehicle struggled to get off the launch pad and eventually failed in flight.

The small launch vehicle, designated LV0006 by Astra, ignited its five first-stage engines at about 6:35 p.m. Eastern from Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska on Kodiak Island. Various issues, including taking additional time to load propellant and update software configurations, delayed the launch from the opening of the window at 4 p.m. Eastern.

The rocket, instead of immediately ascending vertically, tipped and moved sideways, hovering just about the ground. It took nearly 20 seconds for the sideways motion to stop, at which point the rocket started to ascend.

The rocket continued going up until about two and a half minutes after liftoff, near the end of the first-stage burn. Onboard video broadcast on the launch webcast showed the engines shutting down and the vehicle tumbling, with a call to "terminate" heard on the launch audio.

The company did not immediately provide additional information about the cause of the failure. "Today, after a successful launch and liftoff, Astra's launch vehicle experienced an anomaly in flight," Chris Kemp, co-founder and chief executive of Astra, said in a brief message at the end of the launch webcast.

"While we regret we were unable to accomplish all mission objectives for the Space Force, our team captured a tremendous amount of data from the flight," he added, stating that the company would work with the Federal Aviation Administration, which licensed this launch, to investigate the failure.

YouTube video.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Over the past decade, the Japan Coast Guard has occasionally spotted patches of milky blue water about 5 kilometers (3 miles) north of South Iwo Jima island. The discolored water has been a subtle reminder that the summit of an active volcano—Fukutoku-Okanoba—lurks about 25 meters (80 feet) below the water surface.

On August 13, 2021, there was much more than just discolored water. A photograph taken by a Coast Guard aircraft flying near the volcano showed a towering plume of gas rising several kilometers into the air—a sure sign that explosive “Surtseyan” eruptions were happening.

Satellite observations and follow-up flights filled in more details. The Japanese geostationary satellite Himawari 8 was among the first satellites to observe the eruption, showing its beginning stages at about 21:00 UTC (6 a.m. local time) on August 12, 2021. When NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor on the Terra satellite acquired its first image of the event on August 13, it showed a bright plume—likely steam and volcanic gases—streaming from the vent and stretching hundreds of kilometers to the west.

The longevity and vigor of the plume surprised some scientists. “What was remarkable about this eruption is that it went straight from being a submarine event to an eruption cloud reaching the lower boundary of the stratosphere,” explained Andrew Tupper, a meteorologist with Natural Hazards Consulting and a specialist in hazards to aviation. “That is not very common for this type of volcano. We normally see lower-level plumes from submarine eruptions.”

[...] “Aviation and marine warning systems for remote submarine volcanoes are still very much developing,” said Tupper. “Combining cutting-edge satellite data with surface observations gives us the best possible chance to respond in time.”

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upstart writes:

The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's next great observatory, passes final ground tests:

NASA and its partners working on the James Webb Space Telescope have completed their final tests of the giant observatory and are now preparing it for a trip to a South American spaceport for a launch later this year.

Conceived more than 30 years ago as a successor of the then new Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb will be the largest observatory ever to be put in orbit. It is designed to use its infrared eyes to peer further into the universe's history than ever before. With its 6.5-meter in diameter gold-plated mirror, the telescope will attempt to answer questions about the formation of first stars and galaxies out of the darkness of the early universe.

At 44 feet (13.2 meters) long and 14 feet (4.2 m) wide, the telescope is about the size of a large tractor-trailer truck, fitted with intricate sun shades that could cover a tennis court once unfolded.

The program faced many delays, not just due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but seems finally on track to start producing ground-breaking astronomical observations. The testing, which took place at the facilities of prime contractor Northrop Grumman in California, made sure that nothing would go wrong with the more than $10 billion spacecraft during launch and once in space.

"NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has reached a major turning point on its path toward launch with the completion of final observatory integration and testing," Gregory Robinson, Webb's program director at NASA headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. "We have a tremendously dedicated workforce who brought us to the finish line, and we are very excited to see that Webb is ready for launch and will soon be on that science journey."

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wirelessduck writes:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-28/china-thorium-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor-energy/100351932

Scientists in China are about to turn on for the first time an experimental reactor that's believed by some to be the Holy Grail of nuclear energy — safer, cheaper and with less potential for weaponisation.

Construction on the thorium-based molten salt reactor was expected to be finished this month with the first tests to begin as early as September, according to a statement from the Gansu provincial government.

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upstart writes:

$15 drug gets COVID patients off oxygen support in under week – study:

Fourteen out of 15 severe COVID-19 patients who were treated in an investigator-initiated interventional open-label clinical study of the drug TriCor (fenofibrate)[*] didn't require oxygen support within a week of treatment and were released from the hospital, according to the results of a new Hebrew University of Jerusalem study.

Fenofibrate is an FDA-approved oral medication. The results were published on Researchsquare.com and are currently under peer review.

Specifically, the team that was led by HU's Prof. Yaakov Nahmias carried out the study at Israel's Barzilai Medical Center in coordination with the hospital's head of the Infectious Disease Unit, Prof. Shlomo Maayan, and with support from Abbott Laboratories.

[...] The 15 treated patients all had pneumonia and required oxygen support. They were also older with multiple comorbidities, ranging from diabetes and obesity to high blood pressure.

"The results were dramatic," Nahmias told The Jerusalem Post. "Progressive inflammation markers, which are the hallmark of deteriorative COVID-19, dropped within 48 hours of treatment. Moreover, 14 of the 15 severe patients didn't require oxygen support within a week of treatment." The 15th patient was off oxygen within 10 days.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Tropical Storm Ida swirled toward a strike on Cuba on Friday as a rapidly intensifying storm that could speed across warm Gulf waters and slam into Louisiana as a Category 3 hurricane on Sunday, the National Hurricane Center warned.

[...] An even greater danger will then begin over the Gulf, where forecasts were aligned in predicting Ida will strengthen very quickly into a major hurricane, reaching 120 mph (193 kph) before landfall in the Mississippi River delta late Sunday, the hurricane center said.

If that forecast holds true, Ida would hit 16 years to the day since Hurricane Katrina landed as a Category 3 storm with 125 mph (201 kph) winds near the riverside community of Buras in Plaquemines Parish, just down the Mississippi from New Orleans. Buras and New Orleans are among the places that show the highest probabilities for getting hit with hurricane-force winds from Ida, the national hurricane center said.

[...] A hurricane watch for New Orleans and an emergency declaration for the state of Louisiana were declared. Category 3 hurricanes are capable of causing devastating damage.

"Unfortunately, all of Louisiana's coastline is currently in the forecast cone for Tropical Storm Ida, which is strengthening and could come ashore in Louisiana as a major hurricane as Gulf conditions are conducive for rapid intensification," said Gov. John Bel Edwards.

"By Saturday evening, everyone should be in the location where they intend to ride out the storm," the governor added.

You can follow the storm's progress via the National Hurricane Center's forecasts for Ida and the National Weather Service forecasts for New Orleans.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

You often hear people say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I bring this up because of an interesting—if infuriating—thread I read this morning about Texas' plan to widen I-35 as it cuts through the heart of Austin.

Unsurprisingly, the state wants to build more lanes, which it thinks will ease congestion. At some points, this could leave I-35 as much as 20 lanes wide; this will require bulldozing dozens of businesses along the way. An alternative that would have buried 12 lanes of the highway in two levels of underground tunnels was apparently considered too costly.

But it would be wrong to single out this 8-mile proposal as an outlier.

[...] The infuriating bit is that the evidence is pretty clear: these are deeply misguided policies. While it seems intuitive that the solution to three lanes of gridlock is to spread the same number of cars over four lanes, it fails because of a phenomenon called induced demand.

Reducing traffic might make sense if the only variable were the number of road lanes. But it isn't—as Ray Kinsella was told in Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come." Except this time, "they" refers to more cars. When people know a particular route is congested, some of them will choose not to drive. But once you tell everyone that you've added more lanes to that road, that latent demand has an outlet—at which point the traffic jams return, but now with even more cars in them.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

As climate change continues to do more damage to our planet, scientists are working to find more efficient and cleaner ways to power the earth. One appealing alternative to common petrochemical processes that generate significant greenhouse gases and other waste products could come from biological systems.

Recent work from Northwestern Engineering's Michael Jewett and researchers from the University of Texas at Austin has led to advances in understanding of biochemical pathways and increased rates of chemical production by biological systems. The findings could bring us closer to implementing sustainable alternatives to synthesizing materials, fuels, and other oil-derived products.

The paper [...] describes the development of optimized in vitro biosynthesis (biochemical production) processes that use cell extracts from engineered strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast).

[...] Decades of metabolic studies and genetic tool development make S. cerevisiae a highly controllable framework for biochemical production. Beyond historical applications in baking and brewing, this yeast has been engineered to produce innumerable target molecules used in industrial and therapeutic applications.

However, cellular production systems have an internal tug-of-war between making more cells and making the engineered product. Jewett's group avoids these growth and viability constraints by breaking the biological machinery out of cells and using the extracted material for cell-free biochemical reactions, which enables the optimization of levers that are not easily tuned in living cells.

Journal Reference:
Blake J. Rasor, Xiunan Yi, Hunter Brown, et al. An integrated in vivo/in vitro framework to enhance cell-free biosynthesis with metabolically rewired yeast extracts [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25233-y)

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

ESA [European Space Agency] safeguards Europe's guaranteed access to space through its Future Launchers Preparatory Programme, FLPP.

FLPP oversees system studies and research activities to foster new and disruptive technologies which have the potential to reduce cost, improve performance, improve reliability, or on their ability to fulfill the specific needs of an identified service, system, demonstrator or mission.

Within FLPP, demonstrators and studies hone emerging technologies to give Europe's space transportation a valuable head-start as they begin the demanding work of turning the chosen design into reality.

Integrated demonstrators are built by combining multiple technologies into one system or subsystem so that industry can use the technology with confidence.

FLPP carries out projects in propulsion, materials and processes, reusability, structures and mechanisms, avionics and Guidance Navigation Control (GNC), and future end-to-end systems and missions.

upstart writes:

More people are poisoning themselves with horse-deworming drug to thwart COVID:

Prior to the pandemic, ivermectin had been used for decades to prevent and treat parasitic infections in people and animals. At low concentrations, the drug interferes with specific ion channels that are found in parasitic nematode worms, but not in people or animals. The ion channel disruption in nematodes results in paralysis and keeps the worms from feeding and reproducing. As such, ivermectin is routinely used in small animals, such as dogs and cats, to prevent heartworm infections. In large livestock animals—including cattle, horses, pigs, and sheep—it's used as a deworming drug.

In humans, the FDA has approved ivermectin tablets to treat conditions caused by parasitic intestinal worms as well as topical formulations for some external parasites, like head lice. But it's critical to note that the ivermectin drugs available to people involve relatively small doses and are in formulations known to be safe for human use. The over-the-counter livestock drugs, on the other hand, are not formulated for human use and have much larger doses for the animals' much larger bodies. At higher concentrations, ivermectin begins to interfere with not just nematode ion channels, but other types of critical channels in humans and animals, like neurotransmitter channels. This can be extremely dangerous.

[...] But the petri dish data has yet to translate into any convincing clinical data that the drug is actually useful against COVID-19 in whole people. Studies in humans have been small and produced inconsistent results. Meta-analyses aimed at weeding out potential clinical benefits have struggled with faulty data, and some have been retracted.

takyon writes:

Imagination Technologies to design RISC-V cores:

Now better known for its PowerVR embedded GPUs, Imagination Technologies tried to enter the CPU market by purchasing MIPS Technologies and introducing microAptiv, interAptiv, and proAptiv cores in 2012.

It did not end up well, as the company had to sell its MIPS technology a few years later, and the MIPS architecture is now barely supported. But Imagination is now working on getting back into the CPU space by designing RISC-V cores.

[...] a May 2021 report by the Financial Times claims Imagination expects to invest up to $150m over the next two years to target a fresh push into the processor design market, specifically citing the RISC-V architecture.

Press release.

Also at Tom's Hardware.

See also: QEMU 6.1 Released With RISC-V Improvements, AMD Emulation Fixes

Related: Imagination Technologies Acquired for $675 Million, MIPS to be Sold Off
Wave Computing Acquires MIPS Technologies
Imagination Announces B-Series GPU IP: Scaling up with Multi-GPU

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upstart writes:

The Science of Underground Kingdoms:

Next, Andrade's team set about analyzing what the ants were actually doing as they worked, and a few patterns emerged. For one, Andrade says, the ants tried to be efficient as possible. That meant they dug their tunnels along the inside edges of the cups, because the cup itself would act as part of their tunnels' structures, resulting in less work for them. They also dug their tunnels as straight as possible.

"That makes sense because a straight line is the shortest path between two points," Andrade says. "And with them taking advantage of the sides of the container, it shows that the ants are very efficient at what they do."

The ants also dug their tunnels as steeply as they possibly could, right up to what's known as the angle of repose. That angle represents the steepest angle that a granular material—a material made of individual grains—can be piled up before it collapses.

To understand the angle of repose, picture a child building a sand castle at the beach. If the child uses dry sand, every scoop of sand they add will slide down the sides of the pile they've already made. More sand will make the pile taller, but also wider, and it will never get steeper. On the other hand, if the child uses wet sand, they will be able to pile the sand steeply enough to build walls, and towers, and all the other things a sand castle might have. Wet sand has a higher angle of repose than dry sand, and every granular material has an angle that is unique to it. The ants, Andrade says, can tell how steep that angle is for whatever they're digging in, and they don't exceed it. That, too, makes sense, he says.

"If I'm a digger, and I'm going to survive, my digging technique is going to align with the laws of physics, otherwise my tunnels are going to collapse and I'm going to die," he says.

Citation: "Unearthing real time 3D ant tunneling mechanics," appears in the August 23 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22002/D1.1996

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Science Shows Attractiveness Pays Off at Work – But There's a Trick To Level the Playing Field:

Beautiful people are more likely to get hired, receive better performance evaluations and get paid more—but it's not just because of their good looks, according to new research from the University at Buffalo School of Management.

The study [...] found that while a "beauty premium" exists across professions, it's partially because attractive people develop distinct traits as a result of how the world responds to their attractiveness. They build a greater sense of power and have more opportunities to improve nonverbal communication skills throughout their lives.

[...] "What we found was that while good looking people have a greater sense of power and are better nonverbal communicators, their less-attractive peers can level the playing field during the hiring process by adopting a powerful posture."

[...] In the second study, the researchers asked certain participants to strike a 'power pose' by standing with their feet shoulder-width apart, hands on hips, chest out and chin up during their pitch. With this technique, the less attractive people were able to match the level of nonverbal presence that their more attractive counterparts displayed naturally.

Journal Reference:
Min-Hsuan Tu, Elisabeth K. Gilbert, Joyce E. Bono. Is beauty more than skin deep? Attractiveness, power, and nonverbal presence in evaluations of hirability, Personnel Psychology (DOI: 10.1111/peps.12469)

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owl writes:

WaPo link (may be paywalled): https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/07/30/oak-mites-bite-cicadas-dc/

Archive.is link (no paywall): https://archive.is/AEi6a

The incessant, shrieking sounds of cicadas may no longer be afflicting the Washington region, but experts say the insects may be bringing a new nuisance — oak leaf itch mites. And they bite.

"We wake up at night just scratching," said Cynthia Palmer of Arlington, speaking for herself and her 16-year-old daughter. Palmer said she has 12 to 15 bites all over her body and finds new ones daily. "It's like we have splotches of white paint all over us now that we're using the calamine [lotion]. The sores are red and swollen, so it's not pretty."

Across the region, residents are noticing these unfamiliar bites, mostly on their upper bodies, and are freaking out. They are rushing to doctors for help, pleading for a cure to the painful itching.

Gene Kritsky, the dean of behavioral and natural sciences at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, has an explanation: These microscopic mites are feeding on the billions of cicada eggs produced across the D.C. region and dropping out of trees. If you happen to be under or near these oak trees, those mites may land on you and bite.

Original Submission