An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers led by Osaka University and National Taiwan University created a system of nanoscale silicon resonators that can act as logic gates for light pulses. ... [The scientists] have increased the nonlinearity of silicon 100,000 times by creating a nano-optical resonator, so that all-optical switches can be operated using a continuous low-power laser. They accomplished this by fabricating tiny resonators from blocks of silicon less than 200 nm in size. Laser light with a wavelength of 592 nm can become trapped inside and rapidly heat the blocks, based on the principle of Mie resonance. "A Mie resonance occurs when the size of a nanoparticle matches a multiple of the light wavelength," author Yusuke Nagasaki says. With a nanoblock in a thermo-optically induced hot state, a second laser pulse at 543 nm can pass with almost no scattering, which is not the case when first laser is off. The block can cool with relaxation times measured in nanoseconds. This large and fast nonlinearity leads to potential applications for GHz all-optical control at the nanoscale. "Silicon is expected to remain the material of choice for optical integrated circuits and optical devices," senior author Junichi Takahara says. The current work allows for optical switches that take up much less space than previous attempts. This advance opens the way for direct on-chip integration as well as super-resolution imaging. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

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A Slashdot reader writes: Denmark plans to cull its entire population of roughly 15 million minks in farms after the animals spread a mutation of the coronavirus to humans. The country's prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said at a press conference Wednesday that the mutated virus could spread to other countries and it "may pose a risk to the effectiveness of a future vaccine." "We have a great responsibility towards our own population, but with the mutation that has now been found, we have an even greater responsibility for the rest of the world as well," she said. The mutated virus was found in a dozen people who got infected by minks. Half of the 783 human Covid-19 cases in northern Denmark "are related to mink," Health Minister Magnus Heunicke said. Mike Ryan, the head of the emergencies program for the World Health Organization, has called for scientific investigations of the "complex, complex issue" of people outside of China infecting minks, which in turn transmitted the virus back to humans. Kare Molbak, a director at the research center Statens Serum Institut, said the worst-case scenario would be "a new pandemic, starting all over again out of Denmark." "That's why we have to take this extremely seriously," Molbak said. There are between 15 million and 17 million minks in Denmark, one of the world's main mink fur exporters. According to government estimates, culling the country's mink population could cost up to $785 million. National police head Thorkild Fogde urged that 'it should happen as soon as possible."

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Many industries use heat-intensive processes that generally require the burning of fossil fuels, but a surprising green fuel alternative is emerging in the form of metal powders. Ground very fine, cheap iron powder burns readily at high temperatures, releasing energy as it oxidizes in a process that emits no carbon and produces easily collectable rust, or iron oxide, as its only emission. From a report: If burning metal powder as fuel sounds strange, the next part of the process will be even more surprising. That rust can be regenerated straight back into iron powder with the application of electricity, and if you do this using solar, wind or other zero-carbon power generation systems, you end up with a totally carbon-free cycle. The iron acts as a kind of clean battery for combustion processes, charging up via one of a number of means including electrolysis, and discharging in flames and heat. Recently, Swinkels Family Brewers in the Netherlands has become the first business in the world to put this process to work at an industrial scale. The company has been working with the Metal Power Consortium and researchers at TU Eindhoven to install a cyclical iron fuel system at its Brewery Bavaria that's capable of providing all the heat necessary for some 15 million glasses of beer a year.

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The U.S. reported 103,087 new daily coronavirus infections on Wednesday, setting a single-day record for cases, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project. From a report: This is the first time the U.S. has reported over 100,000 new cases in a single day -- a reminder of the high stakes of the election as votes continue to be tabulated. Wednesday's record comes a day after Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Ohio set their own state records as voters went to the polls. The state of play: The U.S. set its previous daily record for cases -- 97,000 -- on Oct. 30. The COVID Tracking Project recorded 1,116 new deaths and 2,802 new hospitalizations over the past 24-hour stretch.

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schwit1 writes: The coronavirus was first reported to have originated at an animal market in Wuhan, China... While an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus could help prevent future pandemics, China is not allowing the W.H.O. to conduct an independent probe of the matter, according to internal documents and interviews by the New York Times. "It was an absolute whitewash," Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Times regarding the agency's investigation. "But the answer was, that was the best they could negotiate with Xi Jinping."

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GPS isn't waterproof. The navigation system depends on radio waves, which break down rapidly in liquids, including seawater. To track undersea objects like drones or whales, researchers rely on acoustic signaling. But devices that generate and send sound usually require batteries -- bulky, short-lived batteries that need regular changing. Could we do without them? From a report: MIT researchers think so. They've built a battery-free pinpointing system dubbed Underwater Backscatter Localization (UBL). Rather than emitting its own acoustic signals, UBL reflects modulated signals from its environment. That provides researchers with positioning information, at net-zero energy. Though the technology is still developing, UBL could someday become a key tool for marine conservationists, climate scientists, and the U.S. Navy. These advances are described in a paper being presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Hot Topics in Networks workshop, by members of the Media Lab's Signal Kinetics group.

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omfglearntoplay shares a report from ScienceAlert: Playing through the greenery and litter of a mini forest's undergrowth for just one month may be enough to change a child's immune system, according to a small new experiment. When daycare workers in Finland rolled out a lawn, planted forest undergrowth such as dwarf heather and blueberries, and allowed children to care for crops in planter boxes, the diversity of microbes in the guts and on the skin of young kids appeared healthier in a very short space of time. Compared to other city kids who play in standard urban daycares with yards of pavement, tile and gravel, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds at these greened-up daycare centers in Finland showed increased T-cells and other important immune markers in their blood within 28 days. "We also found that the intestinal microbiota of children who received greenery was similar to the intestinal microbiota of children visiting the forest every day," says environmental scientist Marja Roslund from the University of Helsinki. Prior research has shown early exposure to green space is somehow linked to a well-functioning immune system, but it's still not clear whether that relationship is causal or not. The experiment in Finland is the first to explicitly manipulate a child's urban environment and then test for changes in their micriobiome and, in turn, a child's immune system. While the findings don't hold all the answers, they do support a leading idea -- namely that a change in environmental microbes can relatively easily affect a well-established microbiome in children, giving their immune system a helping hand in the process. The study was published in the journal Science Advances.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: In April, Guoping Feng and colleagues at MIT, along with [Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist and bioengineer at Stanford University] demonstrated a minimally invasive optogenetic system that required drilling a small hole in the skull, then being able to control opsin-expressing neurons six millimeters deep into the brain using blue light. This approach used of a type of opsin that slowly activates neurons in a step-wise manner. In the most recent study [published in the journal Nature Biotechnology], Deisseroth and colleagues sought to instead enable both deep and fast optogenetics without surgery. The Stanford team expressed in the brain cells of mice a powerful new opsin called ChRmine (pronounced like the deep-red color "carmine"), discovered by Deisseroth's group last year in a marine organism. Then, they shined a red light outside the skull and were able to activate neural circuits in the midbrain and brainstem at depths of up to 7 millimeters. With the technique, the scientists turned on and off brain circuits with millisecond precision. "It really worked well, far better than we even expected might be possible," says Deisseroth. The team then tested the effectiveness of the system. In one instance, they used light to quickly and precisely stop seizures in epileptic mice, and in another to turn on serotonin-producing neurons to promote social behavior in mice. Most optogenetic techniques involve injecting viruses with an opsin gene of choice directly into the brain with a needle. To avoid this, the Stanford team used a type of PHP virus developed at CalTech that can be injected in the blood. The virus then crosses the blood-brain barrier to deliver its payload, an opsin gene, to brain cells. In this case, even the delivery of the gene is noninvasive -- no needle penetrates the brain. Deisseroth's team is now testing the non-invasive technique in fish and collaborating with others to apply it to non-human primates. They're also working with the Seattle-based Allen Institute to develop mouse lines bred with ChRmine in their cells.

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Kiuas writes: Researchers from the Technical University of Munich and the University of Helsinki have discovered a second receptor (called neuropilin-1) which is used by the SARS-CoV-2 virus to enter into human cells via the nasal cavity. The discovery is important as it helps explain the rapid spread of the virus, and also helps define a potential target for antirviral intervention... The study itself was published in the Science magazine on the 20th of October. More details announced by the University of Helsinki: "That SARS-CoV-2 uses the receptor ACE2 to infect our cells was known, but viruses often use multiple factors to maximize their infectious potential" says Dr. Giuseppe Balistreri, head of the research group Viral Cell Biology at the University of Helsinki involved in the study. "Unlike the main receptor ACE2, which is present in low levels, Neuropilin-1 is very abundant in the cells of the nasal cavity. This is a strategically important localization possibly contributing to the efficient infectivity of this new coronavirus, which has caused a major pandemic, spreading rapidly around the world", Balistreri explains... By specifically blocking neuropilin-1 with antibodies, the researchers were able to significantly reduce infection in laboratory cell cultures. "If you think of ACE2 as a door lock to enter the cell, then neuropilin-1 could be a factor that directs the virus to the door. ACE2 is expressed at very low levels in most cells. Thus, it is not easy for the virus to find doors to enter. Other factors such as neuropilin-1 might help the virus finding its door", says Balistreri... Balistreri cautiously concludes "it is currently too early to speculate whether blocking directly neuropilin could be a viable therapeutic approach, as this could lead to side effects. This will have to be looked at in future studies. Currently our laboratory is testing the effect of new molecules that we have specifically designed to interrupt the connection between the virus and neuropilin. Preliminary results are very promising and we hope to obtain validations in vivo in the near future."

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fahrbot-bot shares a report from Gizmodo: The diabolical ironclad beetle, in addition to having one of the coolest names in the animal kingdom, boasts one of the toughest natural exoskeletons. A team of scientists has finally figured out the secret behind this extra durable armor and how these insects can survive getting run over by a car. As wise people often say, a reed that bends in the wind is stronger than a mighty tree that breaks during a storm. New research published today in Nature suggests the diabolical ironclad beetle (Phloeodes diabolicus) is an adherent of these sage words. Their exoskeletons are extra tough, but when the pressure literally gets to be too much, their protective shells take on an elastic quality that results in a kind of stretching rather than breaking. The scientists who made this discovery -- a team from Purdue University and the University of California-Irvine -- say the unique strategy employed by the diabolical ironclad beetle could inspire the creation of innovative materials, namely components capable of dissipating energy to prevent catastrophic breakage. According to the experiments, diabolical ironclad beetles can withstand an applied force of 150 newtons, which is 39,000 times its body weight. "If we were to compare this to humans (not a great example, given the vastly different scales involved, but fun nonetheless), that would require a 200-pound person to endure the crush of 7.8 million pounds," the report says. "A tire passing overhead would inflict 100 newtons of force, which explains how these beetles can survive run-ins with cars. The researchers say other beetle species can't handle even half of this load."

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James Randi, a Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims, has passed away Tuesday "due to age-related causes." He was 92. Slashdot reader trinarybit first shared the news. The Washington Post reports: An inveterate skeptic and bristly contrarian in his profession, Mr. Randi insisted that magic is based solely on earthly sleight of hand and visual trickery. He scorned fellow magicians who allowed or encouraged audiences to believe their work was rooted in extrasensory or paranormal powers. In contrast, the bearded, gnomish Mr. Randi cheerfully described himself as a "liar" and "cheat" in mock recognition of his magician's skills at duping people into thinking they had seen something inexplicable -- such as a person appearing to be cut in half with a saw -- when it was, in fact, the result of simple physical deception. He was equally dismissive of psychics, seers and soothsayers. Still, he was always careful to describe himself as an investigator, not a debunker, and insisted he was always open to the possibility of supernatural phenomena but simply found no evidence of it after decades of research. To put his money where his mouth was, Mr. Randi and the research organization he helped found in 1976, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, offered payouts ranging up to $1 million to anyone who could demonstrate a supernatural or paranormal phenomenon under mutually agreed, scientifically controlled conditions. While he had many takers, he said, none of them earned a cent. Randi was featured in a handful of Slashdot stories over the years, including a two-part interview where he answered your questions.

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From a report: There's a myriad of reasons to replace cow's milk with alternatives like nut milks, oat milk, or soy milk, but for those who enjoy the experience of consuming animal-sourced dairy products, the alternatives just aren't the same. So Impossible Foods, makers of the Impossible Burger and other plant-based meat alternatives, are working on another food replacement that looks, tastes, and behaves like cow's milk. During a virtual press conference this morning where Impossible Foods revealed it was doubling the size of its Silicon Valley-based research and development team over the next year while also launching what it calls the "Impossible Investigator project" to entice leading scientists to contribute to its cause, the company also gave the world its first look at its new plant-based cow's milk alternative that hasn't yet been dubbed with a catchy marketing name. (Although you can probably safely assume that Impossible Milk is an option being considered.) Like the company's flagship Impossible Burgers, Impossible Foods' new milk alternative is made with stable proteins sourced from plants. The idea is that it not only properly mixes with other liquids (like hot coffee) without forming precipitates that can alter the texture and drinking experience, but that it can also be whipped into a foam and used as an ingredient in other food products without having to modify a recipe as is often required with other substitutes.

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nickwinlund77 quotes Live Science: Scientists have measured the shortest unit of time ever: the time it takes a light particle to cross a hydrogen molecule. That time, for the record, is 247 zeptoseconds. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second, or a decimal point followed by 20 zeroes and a 1. Previously, researchers had dipped into the realm of zeptoseconds; in 2016, researchers reporting in the journal Nature Physics used lasers to measure time in increments down to 850 zeptoseconds. This accuracy is a huge leap from the 1999 Nobel Prize-winning work that first measured time in femtoseconds, which are millionths of a billionths of seconds. It takes femtoseconds for chemical bonds to break and form, but it takes zeptoseconds for light to travel across a single hydrogen molecule (H2). To measure this very short trip, physicist Reinhard Dörner of Goethe University in Germany and his colleagues shot X-rays from the PETRA III at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), a particle accelerator in Hamburg. The researchers set the energy of the X-rays so that a single photon, or particle of light, knocked the two electrons out of the hydrogen molecule. (A hydrogen molecule consists of two protons and two electrons.) The photon bounced one electron out of the molecule, and then the other, a bit like a pebble skipping over the top of a pond. These interactions created a wave pattern called an interference pattern, which Dörner and his colleagues could measure with a tool called a Cold Target Recoil Ion Momentum Spectroscopy (COLTRIMS) reaction microscope.

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Apparently Twinkies aren't immortal. After discovering that his 8-year-old Twinkies "tasted like old sock," biologist Colin Purrington sent them to a pair of scientists -- Brian Lovett and Matt Kasson from West Virginia University in Morgantown -- to study the kind of fungus growing on them. An anonymous reader shares the report from NPR: The researchers immediately thought some kind of fungus was involved in attacking the 8-year-old Twinkies, because they've studied fungi that kill insects and dry them out in a similar way. Plus, the reddish blotch on one Twinkie seemed to have a growth pattern that's typical of fungi. [...] They noticed that the wrapping on the mummified Twinkie seemed to be sucked inward, suggesting that the fungus got in before the package was sealed and, while the fungus was consuming the Twinkie, it was using up more air or oxygen than it was putting out. "You end up with a vacuum," Lovett says. "And very well that vacuum may have halted the fungus's ability to continue to grow. We just have the snapshot of what we were sent, but who knows if this process occurred five years ago and he just only noticed it now." A quick examination with a magnifying scope revealed fungal sporulation on both the marred and mummified Twinkies, again suggesting the involvement of fungi. The researchers used a bone marrow biopsy tool to sort of drill through the tough outer layer of the gray, mummified Twinkie. "We certainly hit the marrow of the Twinkie and quickly realized that there was still some cream filling on the inside," Kasson says. From the Twinkie marked with just a dark circle of mold, they were able to grow up a species of Cladosporium. "Cladosporium is one of the most common, airborne, indoor molds worldwide," says Kasson, who cautions that they haven't done a DNA analysis to confirm the species. So far, however, no fungi have grown from the sample taken out of the mummified Twinkie. "It may be that we don't have any living spores despite this wonderful, rare event that we've witnessed," Lovett says. "Spores certainly die, and depending on the fungus, they can die very quickly." They're not giving up, though. They'll fill lab dishes with all kinds of sweet concoctions to try to coax something back to life from the mysterious Twinkie mummy.

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schwit1 shares a report from Phys.Org: A team of physicists led by Professor Patrick Windpassinger at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has successfully transported light stored in a quantum memory over a distance of 1.2 millimeters. They have demonstrated that the controlled transport process and its dynamics has only little impact on the properties of the stored light. The researchers used ultra-cold rubidium-87 atoms as a storage medium for the light as to achieve a high level of storage efficiency and a long lifetime. The controlled manipulation and storage of quantum information as well as the ability to retrieve it are essential prerequisites for achieving advances in quantum communication and for performing corresponding computer operations in the quantum world. Optical quantum memories, which allow for the storage and on-demand retrieval of quantum information carried by light, are essential for scalable quantum communication networks. In their recent publication, Professor Patrick Windpassinger and his colleagues have described the actively controlled transport of such stored light over distances larger than the size of the storage medium. Some time ago, they developed a technique that allows ensembles of cold atoms to be transported on an 'optical conveyor belt' which is produced by two laser beams. The advantage of this method is that a relatively large number of atoms can be transported and positioned with a high degree of accuracy without significant loss of atoms and without the atoms being unintentionally heated. The physicists have now succeeded in using this method to transport atomic clouds that serve as a light memory. The stored information can then be retrieved elsewhere. Refining this concept, the development of novel quantum devices, such as a racetrack memory for light with separate reading and writing sections, could be possible in the future. The findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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Joe2020 shares a report from Science News: Now, scientists have found the first superconductor that operates at room temperature -- at least given a fairly chilly room. The material is superconducting below temperatures of about 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit), physicist Ranga Dias of the University of Rochester in New York and colleagues report October 14 in Nature. The team's results "are nothing short of beautiful," says materials chemist Russell Hemley of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who was not involved with the research. However, the new material's superconducting superpowers appear only at extremely high pressures, limiting its practical usefulness. Dias and colleagues formed the superconductor by squeezing carbon, hydrogen and sulfur between the tips of two diamonds and hitting the material with laser light to induce chemical reactions. At a pressure about 2.6 million times that of Earth's atmosphere, and temperatures below about 15 degrees C, the electrical resistance vanished. That alone wasn't enough to convince Dias. "I didn't believe it the first time," he says. So the team studied additional samples of the material and investigated its magnetic properties. Superconductors and magnetic fields are known to clash -- strong magnetic fields inhibit superconductivity. Sure enough, when the material was placed in a magnetic field, lower temperatures were needed to make it superconducting. The team also applied an oscillating magnetic field to the material, and showed that, when the material became a superconductor, it expelled that magnetic field from its interior, another sign of superconductivity. The scientists were not able to determine the exact composition of the material or how its atoms are arranged, making it difficult to explain how it can be superconducting at such relatively high temperatures. Future work will focus on describing the material more completely, Dias says.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Working with her Stanford colleague, Michal Kosinski, [Pin Pin Tea-makorn, ]a PhD student at Stanford] scoured Google, newspaper anniversary notices and genealogy websites for photos of couples taken at the start of their marriages and many years later. From these they compiled a database of pictures from 517 couples, taken within two years of tying the knot and between 20 and 69 years later. To test whether couples' faces grew alike over time, the researchers showed volunteers a photo of a "target" person accompanied by six other faces, one being their spouse, with the other five faces selected at random. The volunteers were then asked to rank how similar each of the six faces were to the target individual. The same task was then performed by cutting-edge facial recognition software. In the original study in 1987, the late psychologist Robert Zajonc, at the University of Michigan, had volunteers rank the photos of only a dozen couples. He concluded that couples' faces became more alike as their marriages went on, with the effect being greater the happier they were. The explanation, psychologists have argued, is that sharing lives shapes people's faces, with diet, lifestyle, time outdoors, and laughter lines all having a part to play. However, writing in Scientific Reports, Tea-makorn and Kosinski describe how they found no evidence for couples looking more alike as time passed. They did, however, look more alike than random pairs of people at the start of their relationship. Tea-makorn said people may seek out similar-looking partners, just as they look for mates with matching values and personalities.

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Two scientists have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the tools to edit DNA. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna are the first two women to share the prize, which honours their work on the technology of genome editing. From a report: Their discovery, known as Crispr-Cas9 "genetic scissors", is a way of making specific and precise changes to the DNA contained in living cells. They will split the prize money of 10 million krona ($1,110,400). The women's technology has been transformative for basic science research and it could also be used to treat, or even cure, inherited illnesses. Prof Charpentier, from the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, said it was an emotional moment when she learned about the award. "When it happens, you're very surprised, and you think it's not real. But obviously it's real," she said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: For despite having evolved facial expressions that tug on the heartstrings of owners, researchers have found that unlike humans, dogs do not have brain regions that respond specifically to faces. "It's amazing dogs do so well when it comes to reading emotions and identify from faces, despite the fact that they seem not to have a brain designed for having a focus on [them]," said Dr Attila Andics, co-author of the study from Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary. Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience, Andics and colleagues report how they scanned the brains of 20 family dogs, including labradors and border collies, and 30 humans with each shown six sequences of 48 videos of either the front or the back of a human or dog head. The team found particular regions of the dog's brain showed differing activity depending on the species shown, with a greater response to dog videos. However, there was no difference in any region when dogs were shown a human or dog face compared with the back of its head. By contrast, regions of the human brain showed different activity depending whether a face or the back of a head was shown, with faces generally generating a stronger response. A small subset of these regions also showed a difference between species, in general showing a stronger response to humans. Andics said the further analysis showed the dog brain was primarily focused on whether the animal was looking at a dog or a human, whereas the human brain was mainly focused on whether there was a face.

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Uncertainty can be hard for humans. It drives anxiety, an emotion neuroscientists are trying to understand and psychologists are trying to better treat. From a report: Under the threat of a virus, job insecurity, election uncertainty, and a general pandemic life-in-limbo that is upending school, holidays and more, people are especially anxious. Before the pandemic, anxiety was already climbing in the U.S., especially among young adults, according to a recent study. Add the pandemic and its many unknowns: 35% of adults in the Household Pulse Survey reported symptoms of anxiety disorder in July. (In the first half of 2019, it was roughly 8%.) "We have anxiety for a reason," says Stephanie Gorka, who studies the neurobiology of anxiety and treatments for anxiety-related disorders and phobias at the Ohio State University. Anxiety alerts people to pay attention to their environment and is key to our survival, but if it is chronic or excessive, it can have negative health consequences, she says. But how exactly the brain responds to uncertainty and leads to anxiety is unclear.

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