An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ohio State News: Scientists who study glacier ice have found viruses nearly 15,000 years old in two ice samples taken from the Tibetan Plateau in China. Most of those viruses, which survived because they had remained frozen, are unlike any viruses that have been cataloged to date. The findings, published today in the journal Microbiome, could help scientists understand how viruses have evolved over centuries. For this study, the scientists also created a new, ultra-clean method of analyzing microbes and viruses in ice without contaminating it. The researchers analyzed ice cores taken in 2015 from the Guliya ice cap in western China. The cores are collected at high altitudes -- the summit of Guliya, where this ice originated, is 22,000 feet above sea level. The ice cores contain layers of ice that accumulate year after year, trapping whatever was in the atmosphere around them at the time each layer froze. Those layers create a timeline of sorts, which scientists have used to understand more about climate change, microbes, viruses and gases throughout history. Researchers determined that the ice was nearly 15,000 years old using a combination of traditional and new, novel techniques to date this ice core. When they analyzed the ice, they found genetic codes for 33 viruses. Four of those viruses have already been identified by the scientific community. But at least 28 of them are novel. About half of them seemed to have survived at the time they were frozen not in spite of the ice, but because of it.

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Another scorching summer heat wave was set to peak across portions of the western United States early this week, with air so dry that rain from thunderstorms evaporated before reaching the ground and smoke from wildfires delayed hundreds of flights at one of the region's largest airports. From a report: Temperatures reached the upper 90s and lower 100s in parts of the Northern Rockies on Monday, and forecasters warned of "dry thunderstorms," which bring lightning that can spark fires, but no rain to quench them. It was the fourth major heat wave to afflict parts of the West since early June, bringing dangerously hot temperatures and helping fuel the deepening drought and exploding wildfires across the region. An excessive heat warning was also in effect for parts of Montana and Wyoming through Thursday, the National Weather Service said. Glasgow, a town in northern Montana, hit 110 degrees on Monday, the Weather Service said. By 2:45 p.m. local time, Billings, toward the southern portion of the state, was officially hotter than Death Valley, Calif., at 110.4 degrees. Weather officials in Billings took advantage of the toasty temperatures and baked a batch of cookies on the dashboard of a car. "It may have taken 5 hours but we have fully baked cookies," they shared on Twitter. Lander, in central Wyoming, reached a record 100 degrees on Monday, according to the Weather Service. In 130 years, it was only the 21st day in Lander to reach triple digits. Parts of Idaho, including Boise and Twin Falls, saw much needed rain showers.

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Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares news from Science magazine: When a giant space rock struck the waters near Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, it sent up a blanket of dust that blotted out the Sun for years, sending temperatures plummeting and killing off the dinosaurs. The impact also generated a tsunami in the Gulf of Mexico that some modelers believe sent an initial tidal wave up to 1500 meters (or nearly 1 mile) high crashing into North America, one that was followed by smaller pulses. Now, for the first time, scientists have discovered fossilized megaripples from this tsunami buried in sediments in what is now central Louisiana. "It's great to actually have evidence of something that has been theorized for a really long time," says Sean Gulick, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin. Gulick was not involved in the work, but he co-led a campaign in 2016 to drill down to the remains of the impact crater, called Chicxulub... Cores from the 2016 drilling expedition helped explain how the impact crater was formed and charted the disappearance and recovery of Earth's life. In 2019, researchers reported the discovery of a fossil site in North Dakota, 3000 kilometers north of Chicxulub, that they say records the hours after the impact and includes debris swept inland from the tsunami. "We have small pieces of the puzzle that keep getting added in," says Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist at the University of Vigo who was not involved with the new study. "Now this research is another one, giving more evidence of a cataclysmic tsunami that probably inundated [everything] for thousands of miles."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: By making alterations to the plastic manufacturing process, scientists hope to produce forms of the ubiquitous material that can break down far more safely and quickly in the environment than current versions do. Researchers in China have now demonstrated a new example of this that degrades in just a week when exposed to sunlight and oxygen, which they believe could make for electronics that are easier to dispose of at the end of their lives. The new material came about when study author Liang Luo from China's Huazhong University of Science and Technology was working on an advanced type of chemical sensor, as reported by PNAS. The materials scientist was developing a novel polymer film that changed color in response to pH levels. This process was driven by the material's unique molecular structure, with the chains of monomers giving the film its deep red color, and taking it away when these bonds were broken. Through his team's experiments, Luo found that the deep red color of the film quickly faded away and the material broke apart after several days in the sunlight. Breaking apart these bonds is a common objective in research efforts to better recycle plastics, and in doing so Luo may have inadvertently conjured up a promising, environmentally friendly version of the material. The molecular makeup of the plastic means it wouldn't be suited for use in soda bottles or shopping bags, as it is only stable as a functional material in the dark and without oxygen. But exposed to sunlight and air, it disintegrates rapidly and completely decomposes within a week, leaving no environmentally damaging microplastic fragments behind. A byproduct of the process is naturally occurring succinic acid, however, which could potentially be upcycled for commercial use in pharmaceuticals or food.

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From the Washington Post: When we are young, our skills tend to improve with age and experience. But once we are well into adulthood, it may start to feel as if it's all downhill. With every advancing year, we become slightly more forgetful, somewhat slower to respond, a little less energetic. Yet there is at least one important exception: In the emotional realm, older people rule supreme. For the past 20 years, Susan Turk Charles, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine, has been monitoring the shifting moods, the sense of satisfaction, the moments of contemplation and the occasional outbursts of anger, sadness and despair of people of all ages — with a special interest in how we handle and experience emotions as we grow older. She and her colleagues have found that, on average, older people have fewer but more satisfying social contacts and report higher emotional well-being.... "I took a class from Laura Carstensen at Stanford, and she was the first to say that there was more development after age 18. She was finding that unlike physical fitness or cognition, where you may see slowing or declines, emotional regulation and experience are often as good, if not better, as we age... Some neuroscientists believe that because we're processing information a little slower with age, that makes us think before we act. We do see a decline with age in overall mass of the brain's frontal lobe, the part that is responsible for emotion regulation, complex reasoning and speed of processing. But researchers also find that older adults often exhibit greater prefrontal cortex activity than younger adults when processing emotions. "A lot of work has found that older people have a positive bias, even without realizing they're doing this. Their default mode is 'Don't sweat the small stuff.' Older people more often let go of a situation they experience as negative, especially with friends and family. So it is picking their battles that we think older adults are better at..." Q: Centenarians report overall high levels of emotional well-being. Some may wonder whether it might just be that people who have more positive attitudes, or encounter less adversity, live longer. "It is true that people with satisfying relationships and positive emotions live longer. Researchers have looked at what could explain this, and they find that psychological well-being is related to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol and better cardiovascular health." Asked for suggestions, the researcher proposes an inner strategy that "takes you away from focusing on the future and reminds you that the present moment is the most important."

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Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares new from SciTechDaily: For the first time, University of Basel researchers have equipped an ultrathin semiconductor with superconducting contacts. These extremely thin materials with novel electronic and optical properties could pave the way for previously unimagined applications. Combined with superconductors, they are expected to give rise to new quantum phenomena and find use in quantum technology.... With a view to future applications in electronics and quantum technology, researchers are focusing on the development of new components that consist of a single layer (monolayer) of a semiconducting material. Some naturally occurring materials with semiconducting properties feature monolayers of this kind, stacked to form a three-dimensional crystal. In the laboratory, researchers can separate these layers — which are no thicker than a single molecule — and use them to build electronic components. These ultrathin semiconductors promise to deliver unique characteristics that are otherwise very difficult to control, such as the use of electric fields to influence the magnetic moments of the electrons. In addition, complex quantum mechanical phenomena take place in these semiconducting monolayers that may have applications in quantum technology... A team of physicists, led by Dr. Andreas Baumgartner in the research group of Professor Christian Schönenberger at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the Department of Physics of the University of Basel, has now fitted a monolayer of the semiconductor molybdenum disulfide with superconducting contacts for the first time... "In a superconductor, the electrons arrange themselves into pairs, like partners in a dance — with weird and wonderful consequences, such as the flow of the electrical current without a resistance," explains Baumgartner, the project manager of the study. "In the semiconductor molybdenum disulfide, on the other hand, the electrons perform a completely different dance, a strange solo routine that also incorporates their magnetic moments. Now we would like to find out which new and exotic dances the electrons agree upon if we combine these materials." Mehdi Ramezani, lead author of the study, says that "In principle, the vertical contacts we've developed for the semiconductor layers can be applied to a large number of semiconductors."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Scientists at KAIST have fabricated a laser system that generates highly interactive quantum particles at room temperature. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Photonics, could lead to a single microcavity laser system that requires lower threshold energy as its energy loss increases. The system, developed by KAIST physicist Yong-Hoon Cho and colleagues, involves shining light through a single hexagonal-shaped microcavity treated with a loss-modulated silicon nitride substrate. The system design leads to the generation of a polariton laser at room temperature, which is exciting because this usually requires cryogenic temperatures. The researchers found another unique and counter-intuitive feature of this design. Normally, energy is lost during laser operation. But in this system, as energy loss increased, the amount of energy needed to induce lasing decreased. Exploiting this phenomenon could lead to the development of high efficiency, low threshold lasers for future quantum optical devices. [...] The key is the design and materials. The hexagonal microcavity divides light particles into two different modes: one that passes through the upward-facing triangle of the hexagon and another that passes through its downward-facing triangle. Both modes of light particles have the same energy and path but don't interact with each other. However, the light particles do interact with other particles called excitons, provided by the hexagonal microcavity, which is made of semiconductors. This interaction leads to the generation of new quantum particles called polaritons that then interact with each other to generate the polariton laser. By controlling the degree of loss between the microcavity and the semiconductor substrate, an intriguing phenomenon arises, with the threshold energy becoming smaller as energy loss increases.

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A team of Korean scientists may have found a way to desalinate seawater in minutes. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: When using membranes to filter seawater, the membrane must remain dry for long periods of time. If the membrane becomes wet, the filtration process becomes ineffective and allows large amounts of salt to pass through the membrane. For long term operations, progressive membrane wetting has been observed regularly, which be resolved by changing the membrane. Researcher Yunchul Woo and his team at the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) have now developed a membrane that is less susceptible to wetting and is stable in the long term. The membrane is made of nanofibers that have been fabricated into a three-dimensional hierarchical structure, This was achieved by using a type of nanotechnology called electrospinning. Using this technology, the researchers were able to fabricate a membrane that is highly hydrophobic -- i.e. water repellent. The hydrophobic nature of the membrane is helpful because it is designed to not allow water molecules to pass. Instead, a temperature difference is applied on the two sides of the membrane that causes water from one end to evaporate into water vapor. The membrane allows water vapor to pass, which then condenses onto the cooler side. Called, membrane distillation, this is a commonly used method of desalination using membranes. Since the salt particles are not converted to the gaseous state, they are left out on one side of the membrane, giving highly purified water on the other side. The Korean researchers also used silica aerogel in their membrane fabrication process which further enhanced the flow of water vapor through the membrane, providing quicker access to desalinated water. The team tested their technology for continuous operation for 30 days and found that the membrane continued to filter out 99.9 percent salt without any wetting issues. The study has been published in the Journal of Membrane Science.

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It's far from a done deal, but plans by European physicists to build a huge new gravitational wave observatory with a radical design received a boost last week. From a report: The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), which advises European governments on research priorities, added the $2.25 billion observatory, called the Einstein Telescope, to a road map of large science projects ripe for progress. Developers hope the move will give them the political validation needed to transform the Einstein Telescope idea into a project. "This isn't a promise of any funding, but it shows the clear intention to pursue this," says Harald Luck, a gravitational wave physicist at Leibniz University Hannover and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and co-chair of the Einstein Telescope steering committee. âoeIt is more of a political commitment." U.S. gravitational wave physicists welcomed the announcement, too, as they think it may bolster their plans to build a pair of detectors even bigger than the Einstein Telescope in a project called Cosmic Explorer. "In the U.S., I think the momentum is going to start to build," says David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and a physicist at the California Institute of Technology.

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Endurance22 will launch early next year with aim of locating and surveying wreck in the Weddell Sea. From a report: The location of Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance has been one of the great maritime mysteries since the ship became trapped in ice and sank in 1915. Finding this symbol of the "heroic age" of polar exploration at the bottom of the Weddell Sea was long thought impossible because of the harshness of the Antarctic environment -- "the evil conditions," as Shackleton described them. Now a major scientific expedition, announced on Monday, is being planned with a mission to locate, survey and film the wreck. Endurance22 will launch early next year, in a vessel that will brave the most treacherous frozen waters, pounding its way through miles of pack ice. The effects of climate change will make the expedition a little less difficult, with melting ice easing the vessel's passage. An international team of scientists with expertise in the study of ice and climate will be onboard, advancing knowledge of the Antarctic environment. Mensun Bound, its director of exploration, headed the 2019 search for the Endurance that had to be called off because of extreme weather conditions, after an underwater vehicle became trapped beneath the ice. He told the Guardian: "There's a complexity of emotions all swishing around within me. On the one hand, there's great excitement. On the other, for the last three years, I've had to carry this persistent sadness in me that we didn't find it last time. It's never far from my thoughts. That ship is always teasing my imagination." Bound said global warming in the Antarctic is "absolutely devastating," but that the melting ice "has improved our chances" of discovering the shipwreck.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Behold the highest-resolution image of atoms ever seen. Cornell University researchers captured a sample from a crystal in three dimensions and magnified it 100 million times, doubling the resolution that earned the same scientists a Guinness World Record in 2018. Their work could help develop materials for designing more powerful and efficient phones, computers and other electronics, as well as longer-lasting batteries. The researchers obtained the image using a technique called electron ptychography. It involves shooting a beam of electrons, about a billion of them per second, at a target material. The beam moves infinitesimally as the electrons are fired, so they hit the sample from slightly different angles each time -- sometimes they pass through cleanly, and other times they hit atoms and bounce around inside the sample on their way out. Cornell physicist David Muller, whose team conducted the recent study, likens the technique to playing dodgeball against opponents who are standing in the dark. The dodgeballs are electrons, and the targets are individual atoms. Though Muller cannot see the targets, he can see where the "dodgeballs" end up, thanks to advanced detectors. Based on the speckle pattern generated by billions of electrons, machine-learning algorithms can calculate where the atoms were in the sample and what their shapes might be. Previously, electron ptychography had only been used to image extremely flat samples: those merely one to a few atoms thick. The new study, published in Science, now allows it to capture multiple layers tens to hundreds of atoms thick. That makes the technique much more relevant to materials scientists, who typically study the properties of samples with a thickness of about 30 to 50 nanometers. (That range is smaller than the length your fingernails grow in a minute but many times thicker than what electron ptychography could image in the past.) "They can actually look at stacks of atoms now, so it's amazing," says Andrew Maiden, an engineer at the University of Sheffield in England, who helped develop ptychography but was not involved with the new study. "The resolution is just staggering."

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The most severe heat wave in the history of the Pacific Northwest is nearing its climax. The National Weather Service had predicted it would be "historic, dangerous, prolonged and unprecedented," and it is living up to its billing as it rewrites the record books. From a report: On Sunday, Portland, Ore., soared to its highest temperature in more than 80 years of record-keeping: 112 degrees. This new mark occurred just one day after hitting 108, which had broken the previous all-time record of 107. Seattle surged to 104 degrees Sunday, surpassing the old record of 103. The extraordinary heat swelled north of the international border as Canada saw its highest temperature recorded Sunday afternoon, when Lytton in British Columbia surged to 116 degrees. For perspective, that is just 1 degree from the all-time record in Las Vegas. While temperatures may have peaked Sunday afternoon in a few places, many were expected to turn even hotter on Monday or Tuesday, breaking all-time records (a number of which were initially broken Saturday and/or Sunday).

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The discovery of a huge fossilised skull that was wrapped up and hidden in a Chinese well nearly 90 years ago has forced scientists to rewrite the story of human evolution. Shmoodling writes: Analysis of the remains has revealed a new branch of the human family tree that points to a previously unknown sister group more closely related to modern humans than the Neanderthals. The extraordinary fossil has been named a new human species, Homo longi or "Dragon man," by Chinese researchers, although other experts are more cautious about the designation. "I think this is one of the most important finds of the past 50 years," said Prof Chris Stringer, research leader at the Natural History Museum in London, who worked on the project. "It's a wonderfully preserved fossil." The skull appears to have a remarkable backstory. According to the researchers, it was originally found in 1933 by Chinese labourers building a bridge over the Songhua River in Harbin, in China's northernmost province, Heilongjiang, during the Japanese occupation. To keep the skull from falling into Japanese hands it was wrapped and hidden in an abandoned well, resurfacing only in 2018 after the man who hid it told his grandson about it shortly before he died. Details are published in three papers in The Innovation.

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Scientists have managed to slow down the atoms almost to a complete stop in the largest macro-scale object yet. The research has been published in the journal Science. New Atlas reports: The temperature of a given object is directly tied to the motion of its atoms -- basically, the hotter something is, the more its atoms jiggle around. By extension, there's a point where the object is so cold that its atoms come to a complete standstill, a temperature known as absolute zero (-273.15 C, -459.67 F). Scientists have been able to chill atoms and groups of atoms to a fraction above absolute zero for decades now, inducing what's called the motional ground state. This is a great starting point to then create exotic states of matter, such as supersolids, or fluids that seem to have negative mass. Understandably, it's much harder to do with larger objects, because they're made up of more atoms which are all interacting with their surroundings. But now, a large international team of scientists has broken the record for largest object to be induced into a motional ground state (or extremely closely to one, anyway). Most of the time, these experiments are done with clouds of millions of atoms, but the new test was performed on a 10-kg (22-lb) object that contains almost an octillion atoms. Strangely enough, that "object" isn't just one thing itself but the combined motion of four different objects, with a mass of 40 kg (88 lb) each. The researchers conducted the experiment at LIGO, a huge facility famous for detecting gravitational waves as they wash over Earth. It does this by beaming lasers down two 4-km (2.5-mile) tunnels, and bouncing them back with mirrors -- and those mirrors were the objects that the new study cooled to a motional ground state. The photons of light in LIGO's lasers exert tiny bumps on the mirrors as they bounce off, and these disturbances can be measured in later photons. Since the beams are constant, the scientists have plenty of data about the motions of the atoms in the mirrors -- meaning they can then design the perfect counteracting forces. To do so, the researchers attached electromagnets to the back of each mirror, which reduced their collective motion almost to the motional ground state. The mirrors moved less than one-thousandth the width of a proton, essentially cooling down to a crisp 77 nanokelvins -- a hair above absolute zero. The team says that this breakthrough could enable new quantum experiments on the macro scale.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Few harbingers of old age are clearer than the sight of gray hair. As we grow older, black, brown, blonde or red strands lose their youthful hue. Although this may seem like a permanent change, new research reveals that the graying process can be undone -- at least temporarily. In a study published today in eLife, a group of researchers provide the most robust evidence of this phenomenon to date in hair from around a dozen people of various ages, ethnicities and sexes. It also aligns patterns of graying and reversal to periods of stress, which implies that this aging-related process is closely associated with our psychological well-being. The researchers [...] developed a technique to digitize and quantify the subtle changes in color, which they dubbed hair pigmentation patterns, along each strand. These patterns revealed something surprising: In 10 of [the 14 participants], who were between age nine and 39, some graying hairs regained color. The team also found that this occurred not just on the head but in other bodily regions as well. "When we saw this in pubic hair, we thought, 'Okay, this is real,'" [Martin Picard, a mitochondrial psychobiologist at Columbia University] says. "This happens not just in one person or on the head but across the whole body." He adds that because the reversibility only appeared in some hair follicles, however, it is likely limited to specific periods when changes are still able to occur. Most people start noticing their first gray hairs in their 30s -- although some may find them in their late 20s. This period, when graying has just begun, is probably when the process is most reversible, according to [study co-author Ralf Paus, a dermatologist at the University of Miami]. In those with a full head of gray hair, most of the strands have presumably reached a "point of no return," but the possibility remains that some hair follicles may still be malleable to change, he says. In a small subset of participants, the researchers pinpointed segments in single hairs where color changes occurred in the pigmentation patterns. Then they calculated the times when the change happened using the known average growth rate of human hair: approximately one centimeter per month. These participants also provided a history of the most stressful events they had experienced over the course of a year. This analysis revealed that the times when graying or reversal occurred corresponded to periods of significant stress or relaxation. In one individual, a 35-year-old man with auburn hair, five strands of hair underwent graying reversal during the same time span, which coincided with a two-week vacation. Another subject, a 30-year-old woman with black hair, had one strand that contained a white segment that corresponded to two months during which she underwent marital separation and relocation -- her highest-stress period in the year.

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For some time, a collaboration of biologists, chemists and physicists centered at the Universities of Oldenburg (Germany) and Oxford (UK) have been gathering evidence suggesting that the magnetic sense of migratory birds such as European robins is based on a specific light-sensitive protein in the eye. In the current edition of the journal Nature, this team demonstrate that the protein cryptochrome 4, found in birds' retinas, is sensitive to magnetic fields and could well be the long-sought magnetic sensor. Phys.Org reports: First author Jingjing Xu, a doctoral student in Henrik Mouritsen's research group in Oldenburg, took a decisive step toward this success. After extracting the genetic code for the potentially magnetically sensitive cryptochrome 4 in night-migratory European robins, she was able, for the first time, to produce this photoactive molecule in large quantities using bacterial cell cultures. Christiane Timmel's and Stuart Mackenzie's groups in Oxford then used a wide range of magnetic resonance and novel optical spectroscopy techniques to study the protein and demonstrate its pronounced sensitivity to magnetic fields. The team also deciphered the mechanism by which this sensitivity arises -- another important advance. "Electrons that can move within the molecule after blue-light activation play a crucial role," explains Mouritsen. Proteins like cryptochrome consist of chains of amino acids: robin cryptochrome 4 has 527 of them. Oxford's Peter Hore and Oldenburg physicist Ilia Solov'yov performed quantum mechanical calculations supporting the idea that four of the 527 -- known as tryptophans -- are essential for the magnetic properties of the molecule. According to their calculations, electrons hop from one tryptophan to the next generating so-called radical pairs which are magnetically sensitive. To prove this experimentally, the team from Oldenburg produced slightly modified versions of the robin cryptochrome, in which each of the tryptophans in turn was replaced by a different amino acid to block the movement of electrons. Using these modified proteins, the Oxford chemistry groups were able to demonstrate experimentally that electrons move within the cryptochrome as predicted in the calculations -- and that the generated radical pairs are essential to explain the observed magnetic field effects. Hore says "if we can prove that cryptochrome 4 is the magnetic sensor we will have demonstrated a fundamentally quantum mechanism that makes animals sensitive to environmental stimuli a million times weaker than previously thought possible."

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Wired published a long extract from Amit Katwala's book Quantum Computing: How It Works and How It Could Change the World — explaining how it's already being put to use to explore some of science's biggest secrets by simulating nature itelf: Some of the world's top scientists are engaged in a frantic race to find new battery technologies that can replace lithium-ion with something cleaner, cheaper and more plentiful. Quantum computers could be their secret weapon... Although we've known all the equations we need to simulate chemistry since the 1930s, we've never had the computing power available to do it... In January 2020, researchers at IBM published an early glimpse of how quantum computers could be useful in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Computing era. Working with the German car manufacturer Daimler on improving batteries for electric vehicles, they used a small-scale quantum computer to simulate the behaviour of three molecules containing lithium, which could be used in the next generation of lithium-sulphur batteries that promise to be more powerful and cheaper than today's power cells.. Some other examples: "Chemistry challenges just waiting for a quantum computer powerful and reliable enough to crack them range from the extraction of metals by catalysis through to carbon dioxide fixation, which could be used to capture emissions and slow climate change. But the one with the potential for the biggest impact might be fertiliser production... Some plants rely on bacteria which use an enzyme called nitrogenase to 'fix' nitrogen from the atmosphere and incorporate it into ammonia. Understanding how this enzyme works would be an important step towards...creating less energy-intensive synthetic fertilisers." "Solar panels are another area where quantum computers could help, by accelerating the search for new materials. This approach could also help to identify new materials for batteries, and superconductors that work at room temperature, which would drive advances in motors, magnets and perhaps even quantum computers themselves...." "Quantum computing could help scientists model complex interactions and processes in the body, enabling the discovery of new treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's, or a quicker understanding of new diseases such as Covid-19. Artificial intelligence is already being used by companies such as DeepMind to gain insight into protein folding — a key facet of growth and disease — and quantum computers will accelerate this effort."

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Immortality and everlasting youth are the stuff of myths, according to new research which may finally end the eternal debate about whether we can live for ever. From a report: Backed by governments, business, academics and investors in an industry worth $110bn -- and estimated to be worth $610bn by 2025 -- scientists have spent decades attempting to harness the power of genomics and artificial intelligence to find a way to prevent or even reverse ageing. But an unprecedented study has now confirmed that we probably cannot slow the rate at which we get older because of biological constraints. The study, by an international collaboration of scientists from 14 countries and including experts from the University of Oxford, set out to test the "invariant rate of ageing" hypothesis, which says that a species has a relatively fixed rate of ageing from adulthood. "Our findings support the theory that, rather than slowing down death, more people are living much longer due to a reduction in mortality at younger ages," said Jose Manuel Aburto from Oxford's Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, who analysed age-specific birth and death data spanning centuries and continents. "We compared birth and death data from humans and non-human primates and found this general pattern of mortality was the same in all of them," said Aburto. "This suggests that biological, rather than environmental factors, ultimately control longevity. The statistics confirmed, individuals live longer as health and living conditions improve which leads to increasing longevity across an entire population. Nevertheless, a steep rise in death rates, as years advance into old age, is clear to see in all species."

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If someone created a flying machine capable of tracking you down by listening for your voice, you might be creeped out. But what if you were pinned under a pile of rubble after a natural disaster and first responders couldn't locate you? Maybe then a human-seeking drone wouldn't be such a terrible idea. From a report: That concept is the focus for engineers at Germany's Fraunhofer FKIE institute, who've built a drone prototype designed to find people by detecting human screams and listening for other signs of distress. One of the lead engineers, Macarena Varela, showcased their progress last week at an annual conference hosted by the Acoustic Society of America. While it's easy to imagine human-seeking drones in a sci-fi horror movie, Varela says the gadget would be ideal for post-disaster scenarios, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and wildfires. They could hover over an area that rescue crews have difficulty getting to and pinpoint where people may be trapped. "[Drones] can cover a larger area in a shorter period of time than rescuers or trained dogs on the ground," Varela said. "If there's a collapsed building, it can alert and assist rescuers. It can go places they can't fly to or get to themselves." Unmanned aerial vehicles or drones are commonly used for search-and-rescue missions when disasters strike. Most often, they take aerial images of structural damage. Some have thermal imaging capabilities to scan for body heat, while larger drones can deliver medical supplies and other goods to people in isolated areas. But researchers are finding more novel uses for an extra set of eyes in the sky -- and noses. The University of Washington imagines drones that use smell to locate disaster survivors. The Aerospace Corporation is working on drones that can visually identify dogs and share their location with rescue teams. The University of Zurich developed a drone to change shape midflight to fit into oddly shaped crevices. Locating people using aerial acoustics presents its share of challenges. An auditory system would need to decipher between human cries and sounds that often happen in nature, such as animal calls and wind. It might also need to recognize patterns associated with kicking, clapping or other ways people try to get the attention of rescue teams.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Elephants possess an incredibly rich repertoire of communication techniques, including hundreds of calls and gestures that convey specific meanings and can change depending on the context. Different elephant populations also exhibit culturally learned behaviors unique to their specific group. Elephant behaviors are so complex, in fact, that even scientists may struggle to keep up with them all. Now, to get the animals and researchers on the same page, a renowned biologist who has been studying endangered savanna elephants for nearly 50 years has co-developed a digital elephant ethogram, a repository of everything known about their behavior and communication. [Joyce Poole, co-founder and scientific director of ElephantVoices, a nonprofit science and conservation organization, and co-creator of the new ethogram] built the easily searchable public database with her husband and research partner Petter Granli after they came to realize that scientific papers alone would no longer cut it for cataloging the discoveries they and others were making. The Elephant Ethogram currently includes more than 500 behaviors depicted through nearly 3,000 annotated videos, photographs and audio files. The entries encompass the majority, if not all, of typical elephant behaviors, which Poole and Granli gleaned from more than 100 references spanning more than 100 years, with the oldest records dating back to 1907. About half of the described behaviors came from the two investigators' own studies and observations, while the rest came from around seven other leading savanna elephant research teams. While the ethogram is primarily driven by Poole and Granli's observations, "there are very few, if any, examples of behaviors described in the literature that we have not seen ourselves," Poole points out. The project is also just beginning, she adds, because it is meant to be a living catalog that scientists actively contribute to as new findings come in. Poole and Granli believe the exhaustive, digitized Elephant Ethogram is the first of its kind for any nonhuman wild animal. The multimedia-based nature of the project is important, Poole adds, because with descriptions based only on the written word, audio files or photographs, "it is hard to show the often subtle differences in movement that differentiate one behavior from another." Now that the project is online, Poole hopes other researchers will begin contributing their own observations and discoveries, broadening the database to include cultural findings from additional savanna elephant populations and unusual behaviors Poole and Granli might have missed.

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