30 Dec 2024, by Christie Wilcox

When people work together, they can achieve great things. But if they can’t talk, they’re dumber than ants.

Both longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis) and humans can figure out how to work together to move an unwieldy object through a series of obstacles. So scientists pitted the two against each other. They had individuals and groups of different sizes of both species maneuver a T-shaped object through holes in walls, both of which were scaled to the body size of the participants.

This kind of puzzle is hard for ants because their pheromone-based communication doesn’t account for the kind of geometry needed to get the object through the doors. To make the experiments even more comparable, the team also took away the humans’ communication in some of the trials by making them wear sunglasses and masks and forbidding talking and gestures. So the people, like the ants, had to work together without language, relying on the forces generated by their fellow participants to figure out how to move the T-shaped piece.

The groups of ants were much better at solving the puzzle than individual ants, exhibiting what the researchers described as “emergent” collective memory—an intelligence greater than the sum of its parts. The groups of humans, on the other hand, often didn’t do better when working together, especially if they weren’t allowed to talk. In fact, multiple people sometimes performed worse than individuals—and worse than the ants.

The researchers posit that, in the absence of the ability to discuss and debate, individuals attempt to reach a consensus quickly rather than fully assessing the problem. This “groupthink,” they suggest, leads people toward fruitless “greedy” efforts where they directly pull the T toward the gaps in the wall, rather than the less obvious, correct solution of pulling the object into the space between first. Whereas the ants “excel in cooperation,” they write, humans need to be able to talk through their reasoning to avoid simply going with what they think the crowd wants.

In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage.

The closer you look at even stunningly simple things

We may not know everything that's next for science

You all getting furloughed in less than 24 hours, you will probably not see a paycheck until February

Your research program in shambles because of the next administration

You also might literally be fired next year, but we worry about that next year

But at least Ember is cute. Find more about her here https://orta.research.noaa.gov/noaa-canine-ambassador-ember-keeshond/

The international group of Nobel laureates and other experts warn that mirror bacteria, constructed from mirror images of molecules found in nature, could become established in the environment and slip past the immune defences of natural organisms, putting humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections.

Although a viable mirror microbe would probably take at least a decade to build, a new risk assessment raised such serious concerns about the organisms that the 38-strong group urged scientists to stop work towards the goal and asked funders to make clear they will no longer support the research.

Many molecules for life can exist in two distinct forms, each the mirror image of the other. The DNA of all living organisms is made from “right-handed” nucleotides, while proteins, the building blocks of cells, are made from “left-handed” amino acids. Why nature works this way is unclear: life could have chosen left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins instead.

A group of young students became bonafide biomedical scientists before they even started high school. Through a partnership with a nearby university, the middle schoolers collected and analyzed environmental samples to find new antibiotic candidates. One unique sample, goose poop collected at a local park, had a bacterium that showed antibiotic activity and contained a novel compound that slowed the growth of human melanoma and ovarian cancer cells in lab tests.

The study is published in the journal ACS Omega.

Study detects synergistic effect making substances more dangerous, raising alarm since humans are exposed to both

Few human-made substances are as individually ubiquitous and dangerous as PFAS and microplastics, and when they join forces there is a synergistic effect that makes them even more toxic and pernicious, new research suggests.

The study’s authors exposed water fleas to mixtures of the toxic substances and found they suffered more severe health effects, including lower birth rates, and developmental problems, such as delayed sexual maturity and stunted growth.

The enhanced toxic effects raise alarm because PFAS and microplastics are researched and regulated in isolation from one one another, but humans are virtually always exposed to both. The research also showed those fleas previously exposed to chemical pollution were less able to withstand the new exposures.

The findings “underscore the critical need to understand the impacts of chemical mixtures on wildlife and human health”, wrote the study’s authors, who are with the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.

PFAS are a class of about 15,000 compounds typically used to make products that resist water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down and accumulate, and are linked to cancer, kidney disease, liver problems, immune disorders, birth defects and other serious health problems.

Microplastics are tiny bits of plastic that are either intentionally added to products or are shed by plastic goods as they deteriorate. They have been found throughout human bodies, and can cross the blood-brain barrier. Research has linked them to developmental harms, hormone disruption cardiovascular disease and other health issues.

Plastic is often treated with PFAS, so microplastics can contain the chemical.

Researchers compared a group of water fleas that had never been exposed to pollution with another group that had been exposed to pollution in the past. Water fleas have high sensitivity to chemicals so they are frequently used to study ecological toxicity.

Both groups were exposed to bits of PET, a common microplastic, as well as PFOA and PFOS, two of the most common and dangerous PFAS compounds. The mixture reflected conditions common in lakes around the world.

The study’s authors found the mixture to be more toxic than PFAS and microplastics in isolation. They attributed about 40% of the increased toxicity to a synergy among the substances that makes them even more dangerous. The authors theorized the synergy has to do with the interplay in the charges of microplastics and PFAS compounds.

The remainder of the increased toxicity was attributed to simple addition of their toxic effects. Fleas exposed to the mixture showed a “markedly reduced number of offspring”, the authors said. They were also smaller at maturation and showed delayed sexual growth. The effects they observed “significantly advance” the understanding of exposure to multiple chemicals and substances, the authors wrote.

“It is imperative to continue investigating the toxicological impacts of these substances on wildlife to inform regulatory and conservation efforts,” they said.

A pale blue-green enigma, the planet Uranus has long fascinated astronomers precisely because of its extreme distance, some 1.6 billion miles (2.6 billion km) from Earth. While it is comparatively easy to gaze upon neighboring celestial bodies like the Moon and the planets Mars and Venus, Uranus is difficult to see without the most powerful telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope. As technology has advanced, it has unlocked more secrets of the strange, tilted planet (it orbits on its side compared to other planets in the solar system), from the fact that it may rain diamonds to discovering previously-unknown moons.

Now a trio of recent studies has revealed that one of its moons, Miranda, likely has a stirring ocean beneath its surface, meaning it could harbor extraterrestrial life, and that the planet’s own internal dynamics are more bizarre than we ever imagined.

In a study published in The Planetary Science Journal, University of North Dakota astronomer Caleb Strong explained that their research revealed Miranda likely has a subsurface ocean, which Strong described as “weird.”

“It was not expected based on previous estimates of its size, which means there are likely many surprises awaiting us in the Uranus system,” Strong told Salon.

He added that it is premature to assume the presence of oceans means there is life on the planet, telling Salon that “we really don't know enough about Miranda or the Uranus system to say. While interesting, the question of life is beyond the scope of our paper.”

Astrobiologists believe that extraterrestrial life, if it exists, would require a planet or planetary moon with water and carbon in order to form organic molecules, which is why there is interest in Miranda. The Miranda paper relied on images taken from the Voyager 2 probe, the one and only spacecraft to visit Uranus, to reach these conclusions. The Voyager 2 probe was also used by a recent study from the journal Nature Astronomy which used those images to learn about the magnetosphere of Uranus. A magnetosphere is the region around a planet where its magnetic field is dominant, protecting the planet from the Sun’s destructive particles. According to Jamie Jasinski, a space plasma physicist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, past space voyages have provided mysterious readings about the exact nature of the Uranus magnetosphere. Their new research transforms everything.

“Our findings change the view that the Uranus system is an extreme environment pertaining to intense radiation belts and a magnetosphere (or magnetic bubble) that has no plasma from the moons,” Jasinski said. “These were two major mysteries leftover from the Voyager 2 flyby, both of which can be reasonably explained by the arrival of an intense solar wind event that compressed the magnetosphere dramatically just before the flyby started i.e. squashing the magnetosphere to about 20% of its size.”

This finding has implications for another moon with an ocean, Enceladus, which orbits Saturn. Because of the strong magnetosphere of its host planet, the water on Enceladus is ionized and gets trapped within the Uranus magnetosphere. While scientists expected to see this same ionization near the Uranus moons, they were surprised to see a “vacuum magnetosphere” with no water ions. This made them speculate that the moons are inert with no ongoing activity, but that assumption was literally smashed when they realized a solar wind event had impacted Uranus several days before Voyager 2’s flyby. The astronomers realized that this could have increased the plasma loss and emptied the magnetosphere of evidence of lunar activity, and similarly could have explained the intense electron radiation belts they observed.

“If we had arrived a week earlier with Voyager 2, then the spacecraft would have made completely different measurements, and our discoveries would have been very different. Voyager 2 arrived at just the wrong time!” Jasinski said.

The scientists who studied Miranda also used Voyager 2 to discern features they may have otherwise missed.

“Miranda may have a thin ice shell (~30 km/18 miles), which would explain why it has the weird ridge structures that would have formed in response to severe tidal stress. And of course it may have a subsurface ocean,” Strong said. “Its subsurface ocean is likely to be relatively deep (~100 km/62 miles) compared to the estimated depth, say of the ocean on Saturn's moon Enceladus (~10 km/6 miles).”

The final recent paper was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Based on the data, also acquired from Voyager 2, researchers led by a University of California Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science speculates that the surface of Uranus is layered and, like oil and water, the two layers never mix.

“After working on this project for more than ten years, I opened my laptop one morning and could not believe my eyes,” Militzer said. “The materials in my computer simulations had formed two separate layers, a bit like oil and water. This was my ‘Eureka’ moment and became the basis of the new paper.”

As for the paper itself, it is “primarily about the interiors and the magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune, not about their atmospheres,” Militzer told Salon. “Their magnetic fields are disordered and do not have the well-defined north and south poles that we know from Earth, Jupiter and Saturn. This has been a long-standing puzzle since the Voyager 2 spacecraft detected this in 1986.”

This explains why both Uranus and its solar system neighbor, Neptune, have magnetic fields very different from the one we experience on Earth.

“Uranus and Neptune have disordered magnetic fields because they produce these fields in a thin water-rich layer in their mantles while our Earth generates its magnetic field in the core,” Militzer said.

As noted, it is extremely hard to make observations about Uranus because of its distance and the fact that we’ve only sent a probe to visit once. To make matters worse, it probably won't be until the 2040s before anything else we send there arrives. But that doesn’t mean scientists aren't making do with what they have, while revealing how truly weird this planetary system is.

*deleted because someone already posted it

Three hour Angela Collier video, if you're not feeling that but you're curious I suggest at least watching the first 22 minutes at 2x speed. No griping about the title unless you've watched at least that much.

An interdisciplinary team of scientists led by the University of Oxford has shed light on the appropriately named squirting cucumber’s aggressive and poorly understood seed dispersal method. A study published on November 25 in the journal PNAS suggests the findings could inspire bio-engineering innovations, like mechanisms for the precise release of medication. It also explains how it’s even possible for a cucumber to launch its seeds a distance 250 times the length of its body.

The world's thinnest spaghetti, about 200 times thinner than a human hair, has been created by a UCL-led research team. The spaghetti is not intended to be a new food but was created because of the wide-ranging uses that extremely thin strands of material, called nanofibers, have in medicine and industry.

In a new paper in Nanoscale Advances, the team describe making spaghetti just 372 nanometers (billionths of a meter) across using a technique called electrospinning, in which threads of flour and liquid are pulled through the tip of a needle by an electric charge.

"I don't think it's useful as pasta, sadly, as it would overcook in less than a second, before you could take it out of the pan."

BEIJING, Nov. 21 (Xinhua) -- An inflatable capsule has passed its in-orbit flight test aboard China's Shijian-19 satellite, according to the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) on Thursday.

The test was a complete success, CAST said.

The inflatable capsule is a new, multi-functional type of sealed capsule composed of a flexible skin. It is compressed and folded during launch, and unfolded and inflated after entering orbit.

It is lightweight and has a high folding efficiency, making it an effective way to build large sealed capsules in space.

During its carrying technology verification test, the product underwent an environmental assessment of its launch process and successfully completed a series of flight actions, including unlocking, inflating, unfolding and maintaining pressure.

Indicators such as capsule body bearing capacity, airtightness performance and interior capsule temperature met their technical verification expectations.

The technological achievements of the inflatable capsule will provide technical support for China's major space projects, such as its space station and manned lunar landing projects, CAST said.

There's an invisible monster on the loose, barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. It's likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes.

Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, like a cosmic Pac-Man, the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor. The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

"We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. "What we're seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship we're seeing the wake behind the black hole." The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to.

The black hole lies at one end of the column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy. There is a remarkably bright knot of ionized oxygen at the outermost tip of the column. Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole. "Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. How it works exactly is not really known," said van Dokkum.

"This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it," van Dokkum added. He was looking for globular star clusters in a nearby dwarf galaxy. "I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, 'oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.' When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn't look like anything we've seen before."

Because it was so weird, van Dokkum and his team did follow-up spectroscopy with the W. M. Keck Observatories

in Hawaii. He describes the star trail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual." This led to the conclusion that he was looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.

This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole.

Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole. This follows the old idiom: "two's company and three's a crowd." The three black holes mixing it up led to a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy. The original binary may have remained intact, or the new interloper black hole may have replaced one of the two that were in the original binary, and kicked out the previous companion.

When the single black hole took off in one direction, the binary black holes shot off in the opposite direction. There is a feature seen on the opposite side of the host galaxy that might be the runaway binary black hole. Circumstantial evidence for this is that there is no sign of an active black hole remaining at the galaxy’s core. The next step is to do follow-up observations with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the black hole explanation.

NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a wide-angle view of the universe with Hubble's exquisite resolution. As a survey telescope, the Roman observations might find more of these rare and improbable "star streaks" elsewhere in the universe. This may require machine learning using algorithms that are very good at finding specific weird shapes in a sea of other astronomical data, according to van Dokkum.

The research paper will be published on April 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.

China has unveiled the design of a new reusable shuttle to take cargo to and from the country's space station.

The Haolong space shuttle is being developed by the Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute under the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). It is one of two winning projects stemming from a call for proposals from China's human spaceflight agency, CMSA, to develop low-cost cargo spacecraft.

China currently uses its robotic Tianzhou spacecraft to send cargo to the Tiangong space station. But, taking a leaf out of NASA's book to encourage commercial resupply options for the International Space Station, CMSA wanted new, low-cost ideas that can also return experiments and other cargo to Earth, unlike the Tianzhou, which burns up on reentry.

Haolong will launch atop of a rocket and land horizontally on Earth on a runway. The space shuttle measures 32.8 feet (10 meters) long and 26.2 feet (8 m) wide, and weighs less than half of the Tianzhou capsule, which has a mass of up to 31,000 pounds (14,000 kilograms). The winged spacecraft is now in the engineering flight verification phase, meaning its design and systems are under review before being built.

(Update: the video seems not to work for me, but I found the right video on youtube showing how a flight would work.)

https://www.carbonbrief.org/state-of-the-climate-2024-will-be-first-year-above-1-5c-of-global-warming/