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upstart writes:

Rerun of supernova blast expected to appear in 2037:

[...] looking far beyond the solar system, astronomers have added a solid prediction of an event happening deep in intergalactic space: an image of an exploding star, dubbed Supernova Requiem, which will appear around the year 2037. Although this rebroadcast will not be visible to the naked eye, some future telescopes should be able to spot it.

It turns out that this future appearance will be the fourth-known view of the same supernova, magnified, brightened, and split into separate images by a massive foreground cluster of galaxies acting like a cosmic zoom lens. Three images of the supernova were first found from archival data taken in 2016 by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

The multiple images are produced by the monster galaxy cluster's powerful gravity, which distorts and magnifies the light from the supernova far behind it, an effect called gravitational lensing. First predicted by Albert Einstein, this effect is similar to a glass lens bending light to magnify the image of a distant object.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/the-stormy-relationship-between-solar-power-and-the-weather/

Solar panels have a love-hate relationship with nature.They need to be placed in exposed locations that get a lot of sunlight, but cloudy weather obviously reduces their production. Less obviously, more extreme weather—from snowstorms to hurricanes—can damage or even break solar hardware altogether. New research performed by Sandia National Laboratories and published in Applied Energy showcases how weather events can reduce the amount of energy produced by the United States' solar farms.

[...] Unpublished NREL research also suggests ways in which solar panels can better withstand extreme weather, Walker said. Methods include water-tight enclosures, modules mounted on three rails (rather than two), thicker glass, wind-calming fences, marine-grade steel, and through-bolting (rather than clamps). "It turns out that clamps are the smoking gun in a lot of module liberations, as it's called when a [photovoltaic] module blows off a rack," he said.

Applied Energy, 2021. DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.117508 (About DOIs)

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upstart writes:

Storage galore: New PS5 update finally lets users add more space for games:

Players will be able to add specific M.2 SSDs to the PS5 with a new system update rolling out [...], two months after a beta that featured the option was made available to users who signed up.

As detailed in a post on the PlayStation Blog, the update gives users the option to increase the PS5's overall storage capacity by installing a PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD (ranging from 250GB to 4TB) that fits certain technical and dimensional requirements. Once the M.2 drive is installed, the new storage space can be used to copy, download, update, and play PS4 and PS5 games as well as media applications. The result will essentially add a second, fully functional internal drive to the console.

This is a big step up over the "cold-storage" solution that was added to the system in April, which allowed last-gen games to run straight from a standard platter-based external hard drive or SSD via USB—and notably kept players from doing the same for PS5 games. As a result, the feature did little more than let players free up space for PS5 games by storing PS4 games on an external drive... or just letting PS5 downloads collect dust in storage, which Sony said still allowed for faster transfers back to internal storage than redownloading from scratch. For PS5 players, this did little to alleviate problems with the console's internal 667GB of available space.

martyb writes:

Late last night (~10 PM UTC), the security certificates for SoylentNews.org expired. (Out-of-date certs result in nasty warning messages being displayed by your browser.)

Please accept my apologies for any inconvenience the outage caused.

Unfortunately, that was after I (and others on staff who could do anything about it) had gone to bed.

I had personally updated the certs in the past, but the last time was years ago. (TheMightyBuzzard had previously — and subsequently — handled getting and applying updated certs.) It had been so long that I could not find my notes on the process. (Note to self: it helps to look in the correct directory tree!)

Thankfully, audioguy appeared and was able to get things updated.

Please join me in thanking him for getting things straightened out!

P.S. The current certs are due to expire December 14, 2021, Please feel free to remind us as that date approaches!

P.P.S. The technical staff is aware of various automated solutions to renewals but made a conscious decision to do them manually. Remember that people make mistakes but to really foul things up use a computer!

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owl writes:

NYT Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/science/kea-beak-tools.html

Archive Link: https://archive.is/rwG10

Many animals are known to use tools, but a bird named Bruce may be one of the most ingenious nonhuman tool inventors of all: He is a disabled parrot who has designed and uses his own prosthetic beak

Bruce is a kea, a species of parrot found only in New Zealand. He is about 9 years old, and when wildlife researchers found him as a baby, he was missing his upper beak, probably because it had been caught in a trap made for rats and other invasive mammals the country was trying to eliminate. This is a severe disability, as kea use their dramatically long and curved upper beaks for preening their feathers to get rid of parasites and to remove dirt and grime.

But Bruce found a solution: He has taught himself to pick up pebbles of just the right size, hold them between his tongue and his lower beak, and comb through his plumage with the tip of the stone. Other animals use tools, but Bruce's invention of his own prosthetic is unique.

Researchers published their findings Friday in the journal Scientific Reports. Studies of animal behavior are tricky — the researchers have to make careful, objective observations and always be wary of bias caused by anthropomorphizing, or erroneously attributing human characteristics to animals.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Will it be safe for humans to fly to Mars?

Sending human travelers to Mars would require scientists and engineers to overcome a range of technological and safety obstacles. One of them is the grave risk posed by particle radiation from the sun, distant stars and galaxies.

Answering two key questions would go a long way toward overcoming that hurdle: Would particle radiation pose too grave a threat to human life throughout a round trip to the red planet? And, could the very timing of a mission to Mars help shield astronauts and the spacecraft from the radiation?

In a new article published in the peer-reviewed journal Space Weather, an international team of space scientists, including researchers from UCLA, answers those two questions with a "no" and a "yes."

That is, humans should be able to safely travel to and from Mars, provided that the spacecraft has sufficient shielding and the round trip is shorter than approximately four years. And the timing of a human mission to Mars would indeed make a difference: The scientists determined that the best time for a flight to leave Earth would be when solar activity is at its peak, known as the solar maximum.

The scientists' calculations demonstrate that it would be possible to shield a Mars-bound spacecraft from energetic particles from the sun because, during solar maximum, the most dangerous and energetic particles from distant galaxies are deflected by the enhanced solar activity.

Journal Reference:
M. I. Dobynde, Y. Y. Shprits, A. Y. Drozdov, et al. Beating 1 Sievert: Optimal Radiation Shielding of Astronauts on a Mission to Mars [open], Space Weather (DOI: 10.1029/2021SW002749)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tesla Opens NM Showroom on Tribal Land, Avoiding Direct-Sale Ban:

Tesla opened a sales, service, and delivery center in New Mexico on Native American land.

[...] The move allows it to bypass legislation that bars automakers from selling their vehicles straight to consumers in the state, rather than through third-party dealers, the publication reported. Nambé Pueblo in Santa Fe County isn't subject to the state law.

Prospective customers can test Teslas at the center, and Tesla owners can take their cars there for repairs, the report said.

This is the first Tesla sales, service, and delivery center in the state, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said.

[...] To make the center in New Mexico, Tesla repurposed a defunct casino in Nambé Pueblo, Grisham said.

Phillip Perez, the governor of Nambé Pueblo, told the publication, "We are proud to be the first tribe to have Tesla on Indian lands."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SpaceX Crew Dragon, Falcon 9 roll out to the pad for historic Inspiration4 launch

On the morning of September 12th, SpaceX rolled the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft that will support the world's first fully private orbital spaceflight to the launch pad they'll soon lift off from.

Scheduled to launch no earlier than (NET) 8pm EDT on Wednesday, September 15th (02:00 UTC 16 Sept), the mission – deemed Inspiration4 by the billionaire funding it – will be both SpaceX and the world's first crewed orbital spaceflight without a single professional astronaut aboard. Instead, billionaire Shift4 found Jared Isaacman, Ph.D. geologist and science communicator Sian Proctor, engineer Christopher Sembroski (standing in for a friend), and physician's assistant and childhood cancer survivor Hayley Arceneaux will be along for the ride.

Inspirati④n.

upstart writes:

SpaceX:

SpaceX is targeting a five-hour launch window on Wednesday, September 15, opening at 8:02 p.m. EDT (Thursday, September 16 at 00:02 UTC) for launch of the Inspiration4 mission – the world's first all-civilian human spaceflight to orbit – aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft from historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Approximately three days after liftoff, Dragon and the Inspiration4 crew will return to Earth and splash down at one of several possible landing sites off the Florida coast.

SpaceX's webcast for launch of the Inspiration4 mission will go live ~4 hours before liftoff.

[*] YouTube link to SpaceX Inspiration4 Launch.

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upstart writes:

Taking lessons from a sea slug, study points to better hardware for artificial intelligence:

For artificial intelligence to get any smarter, it needs first to be as intelligent as one of the simplest creatures in the animal kingdom: the sea slug.

A new study has found that a material can mimic the sea slug's most essential intelligence features. The discovery is a step toward building hardware that could help make AI more efficient and reliable for technology ranging from self-driving cars and surgical robots to social media algorithms.

The study, publishing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted by a team of researchers from Purdue University, Rutgers University, the University of Georgia and Argonne National Laboratory.

"Through studying sea slugs, neuroscientists discovered the hallmarks of intelligence that are fundamental to any organism's survival," said Shriram Ramanathan, a Purdue professor of materials engineering. "We want to take advantage of that mature intelligence in animals to accelerate the development of AI."

Two main signs of intelligence that neuroscientists have learned from sea slugs are habituation and sensitization. Habituation is getting used to a stimulus over time, such as tuning out noises when driving the same route to work every day. Sensitization is the opposite – it's reacting strongly to a new stimulus, like avoiding bad food from a restaurant.

Zhen Zhang, Sandip Mondal, Subhasish Mandal, Jason M. Allred, Neda Alsadat Aghamiri, Alireza Fali, Zhan Zhang, Hua Zhou, Hui Cao, Fanny Rodolakis, Jessica L. McChesney, Qi Wang, Yifei Sun, Yohannes Abate, Kaushik Roy, Karin M. Rabe, Shriram Ramanathan

DOI https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2017239118

Original Submission

upstart writes:

International project seeks to eliminate HIV in kids:

The Pediatric Adolescent Virus Elimination Collaboratory will receive a total of up to $27.6 million over five years, the National Institutes of Health announced. The group plans to develop and test new early-intervention strategies that are designed to provide children remission and a cure from HIV without relying on the antiretroviral therapies that are currently used to treat both children and adults living with HIV.

The potential effectiveness of such strategies will initially be evaluated using the monkey form of HIV in nonhuman primate newborns at OHSU's Oregon National Primate Research Center and at Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center. The collaboration will also focus on developing procedures, tools and techniques, such as imaging, that are specifically designed for infants, children and adolescents living with HIV.

[...] More information about this and other new pediatric HIV research funded by the National Institutes of Health is available in announcements from the NIH and Emory University.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Ebola vaccine regimen generates strong immune response in children and adults in a clinical trial in Sierra Leone:

Results support the use of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine regimen for Ebola virus disease prevention

Johnson & Johnson's two-dose Ebola vaccine regimen is safe, well tolerated and produces a strong immune response in people over the age of one, according to two new papers published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

The EBOVAC-Salone study provides important further evidence for the potential of the regimen using the Ad26.ZEBOV and MVA-BN-Filo vaccines to be used as a protective measure against Ebola virus disease for both children and adults.

Conducted in Sierra Leone, the study is the first to assess the safety and tolerability of this vaccine regimen in a region affected by the 2014-2016 West African Ebola outbreak, which was the worst on record. It is also the first study reporting the evaluation of this vaccine regimen in children.

[...] The authors found that the vaccine regimen was well tolerated and induced antibody responses to Zaire ebolavirus 21 days after the second dose in 98% of participants, with the immune responses persisting in adults for at least two years.

During the 2014-16 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, 28,652 cases and 11,325 deaths from Ebola were reported. Approximately 20% of cases were in children under 15 years, and children younger than five years are at a higher risk of death than adults.

owl writes:

https://www.zmescience.com/other/fahrenheit-vs-celsius-did-the-u-s-get-it-right-after-all/

At face value, measuring the temperature using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit seems to make a lot of face sense. After all, the freezing point of water is a perfect 0 degrees Celsius — not the inexplicable 32 degrees in Fahrenheit. Also, the boiling point of water in Celsius is right at 100 degrees (Okay, 99.98, but what's a couple hundredths of a degree among friends?) — instead of the awkward 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

Celsius is also part of the much-praised metric system. It seems as though every developed country in the world has adopted the metric system except for the United States, which still clings to tge [sic] older, more traditional measurements. Finally, scientists prefer to use Celsius (when they're not using Kelvin, which is arguably the most awkward unit of measurement for temperature). If it's good enough for scientists, it should be good enough for everybody else, right?

Not necessarily. Fahrenheit may be the best way to measure temperature after all. Why? Because most of us only care about air temperature, not water temperature.

[...] Fahrenheit is also more precise. The ambient temperature on most of the inhabited world ranges from -20 degrees Fahrenheit to 110 degrees Fahrenheit — a 130-degree range. On the Celsius scale, that range is from -28.8 degrees to 43.3 degrees — a 72.1-degree range. This means that you can get a more exact measurement of the air temperature using Fahrenheit because it uses almost twice the scale.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Prehistoric humans rarely mated with their cousins:

At present-day, more than ten percent of all global marriages occur among first or second cousins. While cousin-marriages are common practice in some societies, unions between close relatives are discouraged in others. In a new study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the University of Chicago investigated how common close parental relatedness was in our ancestors.

The researchers re-analyzed previously published DNA data from ancient humans that lived during the last 45,000 years to find out how closely related their parents were. The results were surprising: Ancient humans rarely chose their cousins as mates. In a global dataset of 1,785 individuals only 54, that is, about three percent, show the typical signs of their parents being cousins. Those 54 did not cluster in space or time, showing that cousin matings were sporadic events in the studied ancient populations. Notably, even for hunter-gatherers who lived more than 10,000 years ago, unions between cousins were the exception.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/leaked-documents-reveal-the-special-rules-facebook-uses-for-5-8m-vips/

Facebook had a problem on its hands. People were making posts that got caught in the company's automated moderation system or were taken down by its human moderators. The problem wasn't that the moderators, human or otherwise, were wrong to take down the posts. No, the problem was that the people behind the posts were famous or noteworthy, and the company didn't want a PR mess on its hands.

So Facebook came up with a program called XCheck, or cross check, which in many instances became a de facto whitelist. Over the years, XCheck has allowed celebrities, politicians, athletes, activists, journalists, and even the owners of "animal influencers" like "Doug the Pug" to post whatever they want, with few to no consequences for violating the company's rules.

"For a select few members of our community, we are not enforcing our policies and standards," reads an internal Facebook report published as part of a Wall Street Journal investigation. "Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences."

"Few" must be a relative term at Facebook, as at least 5.8 million people were enrolled in the program as of last year, many of them with significant followings. That means a large number of influential people are allowed to post largely unchecked on Facebook and Instagram.

Original Submission

takyon and looorg write:

Firm raises $15m to bring back woolly mammoth from extinction

Ten thousand years after woolly mammoths vanished from the face of the Earth, scientists are embarking on an ambitious project to bring the beasts back to the Arctic tundra. The prospect of recreating mammoths and returning them to the wild has been discussed – seriously at times – for more than a decade, but on Monday researchers announced fresh funding they believe could make their dream a reality.

The boost comes in the form of $15m (£11m) raised by the bioscience and genetics company Colossal, co-founded by Ben Lamm, a tech and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has pioneered new approaches to gene editing.

The scientists have set their initial sights on creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid by making embryos in the laboratory that carry mammoth DNA. The starting point for the project involves taking skin cells from Asian elephants, which are threatened with extinction, and reprogramming them into more versatile stem cells that carry mammoth DNA. The particular genes that are responsible for mammoth hair, insulating fat layers and other cold climate adaptions are identified by comparing mammoth genomes extracted from animals recovered from the permafrost with those from the related Asian elephants. These embryos would then be carried to term in a surrogate mother or potentially in an artificial womb. If all goes to plan – and the hurdles are far from trivial – the researchers hope to have their first set of calves in six years.

[...] The project is framed as an effort to help conserve Asian elephants by equipping them with traits that allow them to thrive in vast stretches of the Arctic known as the mammoth steppe. But the scientists also believe introducing herds of elephant-mammoth hybrids to the Arctic tundra may help restore the degraded habitat and combat some of the impacts of the climate crisis. For example, by knocking down trees, the beasts might help to restore the former Arctic grasslands.

Pleistocene Park.

Also at NYT and CNBC.

Previously: Woolly Mammoth Genome Sequenced
Resurrection of the Woolly Mammoth Could Begin in Two Years
Analysis Supports Conservation of Existing Species Rather Than De-Extinction of Mammoths
Mammoth DNA Activates Briefly in Mouse Eggs

Original Submission