Biggest Explosion Since the Big Bang

From: International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research


February 27, 2020 -- Scientists studying a distant galaxy cluster have discovered the biggest explosion seen in the Universe since the Big Bang.


The blast came from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy hundreds of millions of light-years away.


It released five times more energy than the previous record holder.


Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said the event was extraordinarily energetic.


"We've seen outbursts in the centres of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive," she said.


"And we don't know why it's so big.


"But it happened very slowly -- like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years."


The explosion occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, about 390 million light-years from Earth.


It was so powerful it punched a cavity in the cluster plasma -- the super-hot gas surrounding the black hole.


Lead author of the study Dr Simona Giacintucci, from the Naval Research Laboratory in the United States, said the blast was similar to the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, which ripped the top off the mountain.


"The difference is that you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas," she said.


Professor Johnston-Hollitt said the cavity in the cluster plasma had been seen previously with X-ray telescopes.


But scientists initially dismissed the idea that it could have been caused by an energetic outburst, because it would have been too big.


"People were sceptical because the size of outburst," she said. "But it really is that. The Universe is a weird place."


The researchers only realised what they had discovered when they looked at the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster with radio telescopes.


"The radio data fit inside the X-rays like a hand in a glove," said co-author Dr Maxim Markevitch, from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.


"This is the clincher that tells us an eruption of unprecedented size occurred here."


The discovery was made using four telescopes; NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA's XMM-Newton, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India.


Professor Johnston-Hollitt, who is the director of the MWA and an expert in galaxy clusters, likened the finding to discovering the first dinosaur bones.


"It's a bit like archaeology," she said.


"We've been given the tools to dig deeper with low frequency radio telescopes so we should be able to find more outbursts like this now."


The finding underscores the importance of studying the Universe at different wavelengths, Professor Johnston-Hollitt said.


"Going back and doing a multi-wavelength study has really made the difference here," she said.

Professor Johnston-Hollitt said the finding is likely to be the first of many.


"We made this discovery with Phase 1 of the MWA, when the telescope had 2048 antennas pointed towards the sky," she said.


"We're soon going to be gathering observations with 4096 antennas, which should be ten times more sensitive."


"I think that's pretty exciting."

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Story Source:

Materials provided by International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


                     https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200227114459.htm

One Photon Split into Three

Waterloo News


February 27. 2020 -- Researchers from the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo report the first occurrence of directly splitting one photon into three.


The occurrence, the first of its kind, used the spontaneous parametric down-conversion method (SPDC) in quantum optics and created what quantum optics researchers call a non-Gaussian state of light. A non-Gaussian state of light is considered a critical ingredient to gain a quantum advantage.


“It was understood that there were limits to the type of entanglement generated with the two-photon version, but these results form the basis of an exciting new paradigm of three-photon quantum optics,” said Chris Wilson, a principal investigator at IQC faculty member and a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Waterloo.


“Given that this research brings us past the known ability to split one photon into two entangled daughter photons, we’re optimistic that we’ve opened up a new area of exploration.”


“The two-photon version has been a workhorse for quantum research for over 30 years,” said Wilson. 
“We think three photons will overcome the limits and will encourage further theoretical research and experimental applications and hopefully the development of optical quantum computing using superconducting units.”


Wilson used microwave photons to stretch the known limits of SPDC. The experimental implementation used a superconducting parametric resonator. The result clearly showed the strong correlation among three photons generated at different frequencies. Ongoing work aims to show that the photons are entangled.


“Non-Gaussian states and operations are a critical ingredient for obtaining the quantum advantage,” said Wilson. “They are very difficult to simulate and model classically, which has resulted in a dearth of theoretical work for this application.”


The study Observation of Three-Photon Spontaneous Parametric Down-Conversion in a Superconducting Parametric Cavity was published in Physical Review X on January 16, 2020.


            https://uwaterloo.ca/news/news/quantum-researchers-able-split-one-photon-three

Human Bipedalism Is Ancient

Overlooked arch in the foot is key to its evolution and function

By William Weir, Yale News


February 26, 2020 -- A long-overlooked part of the human foot is key to how the foot works, how it evolved, and how we walk and run, a Yale-led team of researchers said.


The discovery upends nearly a century of conventional thinking about the human foot and could open new avenues to explore in evolutionary biology as well as guide new designs for robotic and prosthetic feet, said the study team.


The discovery, made by an international team of researchers and led by Yale engineer Madhusudhan Venkadesan, was published Feb. 26 in the journal Nature. The team was led jointly by Venkadesan, Shreyas Mandre from the University of Warwick, and Mahesh Bandi from the Okinawa Institute of Science & Technology (OIST).


When humans walk and run, the front of each foot repeatedly pushes on the ground with a force exceeding several times the body’s weight. Despite these strong forces, the human foot maintains its shape without severely bending. Such stiff feet — unique to humans among primates — were important for the evolution of bipedalism.


What makes human feet so stiff? According to conventional thinking, it’s mainly the longitudinal arch of the foot. This arch runs from heel to forefoot and is reinforced by elastic tissues underneath it. 
The arch and tissues create a bow-and-string structure that for nearly a century was considered the main source of the foot’s stiffness.


But the foot has a second arch that runs across the width of the midfoot, known as the transverse arch. 
Venkadesan and his colleagues investigated the transverse arch, which had not been studied previously. They performed a series of experiments, using mechanical mimics of the foot, cadaveric human feet, and fossil samples from long-extinct human ancestors and relatives (hominins). Their results show that the transverse arch is the main source of the foot’s stiffness.


The reason the transverse arch is so important can be found in your wallet. Take out a dollar bill, hold it at one end, and the dollar flops around. But press your thumb down to give the dollar some curvature, and it stands out straight.


“That type of effect also works in the foot,” said Venkadesan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science. “It’s not as simple as a sheet of paper because there are many other tissues and structures in the foot, but the principle turns out to be the same.”


Using mathematical analysis and experiments, they gleaned the mechanical principle for why curvature induces stiffness — namely that bending a curved structure causes the material to also stretch. Even a thin sheet of paper is quite stiff if you try to stretch it. The transverse curvature engages this stretching stiffness to stiffen the whole structure, explained the researchers.


Because the foot is a complicated, multi-functional structure, it is not possible to modify just the transverse arch to test the theory without affecting other parts. So, using experiments on mechanical mimics of the foot, the researchers came up with a novel idea to see whether the transverse arch works the same way in real human feet.


“We found that transverse springs, which mimic tissues spanning the width of your foot, are crucial for curvature-induced stiffness,” said Ali Yawar, a Ph.D. student in Venkadesan’s lab. “So we expected that stiffness would decrease in real human feet if we were to remove the transverse tissues and leave everything else untouched.”


Together with Steven Tommasini, a research scientist at the Yale School of Medicine, they conducted experiments on the feet of human cadavers.


“We found that the transverse arch, acting through the transverse tissues, is responsible for nearly half of the foot’s stiffness, considerably more than what the longitudinal arch contributes,” said Carolyn Eng, an associate research scientist in Venkadesan’s lab.


These results may also explain how the 3.66 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis, the same species as the fossil Lucy, could have walked and left a human-like footprint despite having no apparent longitudinal arch. Working with Andrew Haims, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine, the researchers developed a new technique to measure transverse curvature using partial skeletons of the foot. By applying this technique to fossil samples, including A. afarensis, they traced how the transverse arch evolved among early hominins.


“Our evidence suggests that a human-like transverse arch may have evolved over 3.5 million years ago, a whole 1.5 million years before the emergence of the genus Homo, and was a key step in the evolution of modern humans,” Venkadesan said.


The findings also open new lines of thought for podiatry, as well as the fields of evolutionary biology and robotics, the researchers said.


The other authors of the study are Marcelo Dias from Aarhus University and Dhiraj Singh from OIST.


        https://news.yale.edu/2020/02/26/overlooked-arch-foot-key-its-evolution-and-function

Artificial Intelligence Yields New Antibiotic

A deep-learning model identifies a powerful new drug that can kill many species of antibiotic-resistant bacteria


Massachusetts Institute of Technology – February 20, 2020 -- Using a machine-learning algorithm, MIT researchers have identified a powerful new antibiotic compound. In laboratory tests, the drug killed many of the world's most problematic disease-causing bacteria, including some strains that are resistant to all known antibiotics. It also cleared infections in two different mouse models.

The computer model, which can screen more than a hundred million chemical compounds in a matter of days, is designed to pick out potential antibiotics that kill bacteria using different mechanisms than those of existing drugs.


"We wanted to develop a platform that would allow us to harness the power of artificial intelligence to usher in a new age of antibiotic drug discovery," says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering. "Our approach revealed this amazing molecule which is arguably one of the more powerful antibiotics that has been discovered."


In their new study, the researchers also identified several other promising antibiotic candidates, which they plan to test further. They believe the model could also be used to design new drugs, based on what it has learned about chemical structures that enable drugs to kill bacteria.


"The machine learning model can explore, in silico, large chemical spaces that can be prohibitively expensive for traditional experimental approaches," says Regina Barzilay, the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).


Barzilay and Collins, who are faculty co-leads for MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Cell. The first author of the paper is Jonathan Stokes, a postdoc at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.


A new pipeline


Over the past few decades, very few new antibiotics have been developed, and most of those newly approved antibiotics are slightly different variants of existing drugs. Current methods for screening new antibiotics are often prohibitively costly, require a significant time investment, and are usually limited to a narrow spectrum of chemical diversity.


"We're facing a growing crisis around antibiotic resistance, and this situation is being generated by both an increasing number of pathogens becoming resistant to existing antibiotics, and an anemic pipeline in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries for new antibiotics," Collins says.


To try to find completely novel compounds, he teamed up with Barzilay, Professor Tommi Jaakkola, and their students Kevin Yang, Kyle Swanson, and Wengong Jin, who have previously developed machine-learning computer models that can be trained to analyze the molecular structures of compounds and correlate them with particular traits, such as the ability to kill bacteria.


The idea of using predictive computer models for "in silico" screening is not new, but until now, these models were not sufficiently accurate to transform drug discovery. Previously, molecules were represented as vectors reflecting the presence or absence of certain chemical groups. However, the new neural networks can learn these representations automatically, mapping molecules into continuous vectors which are subsequently used to predict their properties.


In this case, the researchers designed their model to look for chemical features that make molecules effective at killing E. coli. To do so, they trained the model on about 2,500 molecules, including about 1,700 FDA-approved drugs and a set of 800 natural products with diverse structures and a wide range of bioactivities.


Once the model was trained, the researchers tested it on the Broad Institute's Drug Repurposing Hub, a library of about 6,000 compounds. The model picked out one molecule that was predicted to have strong antibacterial activity and had a chemical structure different from any existing antibiotics. Using a different machine-learning model, the researchers also showed that this molecule would likely have low toxicity to human cells.


This molecule, which the researchers decided to call halicin, after the fictional artificial intelligence system from "2001: A Space Odyssey," has been previously investigated as possible diabetes drug. 
The researchers tested it against dozens of bacterial strains isolated from patients and grown in lab dishes, and found that it was able to kill many that are resistant to treatment, including Clostridium difficile, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The drug worked against every species that they tested, with the exception of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a difficult-to-treat lung pathogen.


To test halicin's effectiveness in living animals, the researchers used it to treat mice infected with A. baumannii, a bacterium that has infected many U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The strain of A. baumannii that they used is resistant to all known antibiotics, but application of a halicin-containing ointment completely cleared the infections within 24 hours.


Preliminary studies suggest that halicin kills bacteria by disrupting their ability to maintain an electrochemical gradient across their cell membranes. This gradient is necessary, among other functions, to produce ATP (molecules that cells use to store energy), so if the gradient breaks down, the cells die. This type of killing mechanism could be difficult for bacteria to develop resistance to, the researchers say.


"When you're dealing with a molecule that likely associates with membrane components, a cell can't necessarily acquire a single mutation or a couple of mutations to change the chemistry of the outer membrane. Mutations like that tend to be far more complex to acquire evolutionarily," Stokes says.


In this study, the researchers found that E. coli did not develop any resistance to halicin during a 30-day treatment period. In contrast, the bacteria started to develop resistance to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin within one to three days, and after 30 days, the bacteria were about 200 times more resistant to ciprofloxacin than they were at the beginning of the experiment.


The researchers plan to pursue further studies of halicin, working with a pharmaceutical company or nonprofit organization, in hopes of developing it for use in humans.


Optimized molecules


After identifying halicin, the researchers also used their model to screen more than 100 million molecules selected from the ZINC15 database, an online collection of about 1.5 billion chemical compounds. This screen, which took only three days, identified 23 candidates that were structurally dissimilar from existing antibiotics and predicted to be nontoxic to human cells.

In laboratory tests against five species of bacteria, the researchers found that eight of the molecules showed antibacterial activity, and two were particularly powerful. The researchers now plan to test these molecules further, and also to screen more of the ZINC15 database.


The researchers also plan to use their model to design new antibiotics and to optimize existing molecules. For example, they could train the model to add features that would make a particular antibiotic target only certain bacteria, preventing it from killing beneficial bacteria in a patient's digestive tract.


                   https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200220141748.htm

Non-Oxygen Breathing Animal Found

The tiny relative of the jellyfish is parasitic and dwells in salmon tissue


American Friends of Tel Aviv University – February 25, 2020 -- Researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) have discovered a non-oxygen breathing animal. The unexpected finding changes one of science's assumptions about the animal world.


A study on the finding was published on February 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by TAU researchers led by Prof. Dorothee Huchon of the School of Zoology at TAU's Faculty of Life Sciences and Steinhardt Museum of Natural History.


The tiny, less than 10-celled parasite Henneguya salminicola lives in salmon muscle. As it evolved, the animal, which is a myxozoan relative of jellyfish and corals, gave up breathing and consuming oxygen to produce energy.


"Aerobic respiration was thought to be ubiquitous in animals, but now we confirmed that this is not the case," Prof. Huchon explains. "Our discovery shows that evolution can go in strange directions. 

Aerobic respiration is a major source of energy, and yet we found an animal that gave up this critical pathway."


Some other organisms like fungi, amoebas or ciliate lineages in anaerobic environments have lost the ability to breathe over time. The new study demonstrates that the same can happen to an animal -- possibly because the parasite happens to live in an anaerobic environment.


Its genome was sequenced, along with those of other myxozoan fish parasites, as part of research supported by the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation and conducted with Prof. Paulyn Cartwright of the University of Kansas, and Prof. Jerri Bartholomew and Dr. Stephen Atkinson of Oregon State University.


The parasite's anaerobic nature was an accidental discovery. While assembling the Henneguya genome, Prof. Huchon found that it did not include a mitochondrial genome. The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell where oxygen is captured to make energy, so its absence indicated that the animal was not breathing oxygen.


Until the new discovery, there was debate regarding the possibility that organisms belonging to the animal kingdom could survive in anaerobic environments. The assumption that all animals are breathing oxygen was based, among other things, on the fact that animals are multicellular, highly developed organisms, which first appeared on Earth when oxygen levels rose.


"It's not yet clear to us how the parasite generates energy," Prof. Huchon says. "It may be drawing it from the surrounding fish cells, or it may have a different type of respiration such as oxygen-free breathing, which typically characterizes anaerobic non-animal organisms."


According to Prof. Huchon, the discovery bears enormous significance for evolutionary research.


"It is generally thought that during evolution, organisms become more and more complex, and that simple single-celled or few-celled organisms are the ancestors of complex organisms," she concludes. 
"But here, right before us, is an animal whose evolutionary process is the opposite. Living in an oxygen-free environment, it has shed unnecessary genes responsible for aerobic respiration and become an even simpler organism."


                 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200225114408.htm

Secret to Achieving Goals

Research has provided new insights into why people often make unrealistic plans that are doomed to fail.


Queen Mary University of London – February 20, 2020 -- The study, published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research, analysed the complex relationship between reward and effort in achieving goals, and identified two critical stages in the decision-making process.


The researchers found that when people first decide what to do they are motivated by rewards. However, once they begin to put plans into action, their focus turns to the difficulty of the effort they need to put in.


They suggest the key to achievable aims is to consider the effort needed when deciding what to do, and then remembering to focus on the rewards once the time comes to put the effort in.


To investigate the relationship between effort and reward, the research team designed experiments involving two different forms of effort, physical and mental.


Physical effort was measured by the action of squeezing a joystick whilst the ability for participants to solve simple mathematical equations tested mental effort.


Study participants were presented with different options that combined either high or low effort with high or low financial reward, and asked to select which one to pursue.


The scientists found that when selecting options participants were guided by the level of financial reward offered, but on execution of the task their performance was determined by the actual amount of effort they needed to exert.


The team observed that the results were similar for both the physical and mental effort-based experiments.


Dr Agata Ludwiczak, a Research Fellow from Queen Mary University of London and lead author of the study, said: "Common sense suggests the amount of effort we put into a task directly relates to the level of reward we expect in return. However, building psychological and economic evidence indicates that often high rewards are not enough to ensure people put in the effort they need to achieve their targets.


"We have found that there isn't a direct relationship between the amount of reward that is at stake and the amount of effort people actually put in. This is because when we make choices about what effort to put in, we are motivated by the rewards we expect to get back. But at the point at which we come to actually do what we had said we would do, we focus on the level of effort we have to actually put in rather than the rewards we hoped we would get."


Dr Osman, Reader in Experimental Psychology at Queen Mary, said: "If we aren't careful our plans can be informed by unrealistic expectations because we pay too much attention to the rewards. Then when we face the reality of our choices, we realise the effort is too much and give up. For example, getting up early to exercise for a new healthy lifestyle might seem like a good choice when we decide on our new year's resolutions, but once your alarm goes off on a cold January morning, the rewards aren't enough to get you up and out of bed."


                    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200220130520.htm

Simple, Fuel Efficient Rocket Engine

It could enable cheaper, lighter spacecraft through rotating detonation


University of Washington – February 18, 2020 -- It takes a lot of fuel to launch something into space. Sending NASA's Space Shuttle into orbit required more than 3.5 million pounds of fuel, which is about 15 times heavier than a blue whale.


But a new type of engine -- called a rotating detonation engine -- promises to make rockets not only more fuel-efficient but also more lightweight and less complicated to construct. There's just one problem: Right now this engine is too unpredictable to be used in an actual rocket.


Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a mathematical model that describes how these engines work. With this information, engineers can, for the first time, develop tests to improve these engines and make them more stable. The team published these findings Jan. 10 in Physical Review E.


"The rotating detonation engine field is still in its infancy. We have tons of data about these engines, but we don't understand what is going on," said lead author James Koch, a UW doctoral student in aeronautics and astronautics. "I tried to recast our results by looking at pattern formations instead of asking an engineering question -- such as how to get the highest performing engine -- and then boom, it turned out that it works."


A conventional rocket engine works by burning propellant and then pushing it out of the back of the engine to create thrust.


"A rotating detonation engine takes a different approach to how it combusts propellant," Koch said. 
"It's made of concentric cylinders. Propellant flows in the gap between the cylinders, and, after ignition, the rapid heat release forms a shock wave, a strong pulse of gas with significantly higher pressure and temperature that is moving faster than the speed of sound.


"This combustion process is literally a detonation -- an explosion -- but behind this initial start-up phase, we see a number of stable combustion pulses form that continue to consume available propellant. This produces high pressure and temperature that drives exhaust out the back of the engine at high speeds, which can generate thrust."


Conventional engines use a lot of machinery to direct and control the combustion reaction so that it generates the work needed to propel the engine. But in a rotating detonation engine, the shock wave naturally does everything without needing additional help from engine parts.


"The combustion-driven shocks naturally compress the flow as they travel around the combustion chamber," Koch said. "The downside of that is that these detonations have a mind of their own. Once you detonate something, it just goes. It's so violent."


To try to be able to describe how these engines work, the researchers first developed an experimental rotating detonation engine where they could control different parameters, such as the size of the gap between the cylinders. Then they recorded the combustion processes with a high-speed camera. Each experiment took only 0.5 seconds to complete, but the researchers recorded these experiments at 240,000 frames per second so they could see what was happening in slow motion.

From there, the researchers developed a mathematical model to mimic what they saw in the videos.


"This is the only model in the literature currently capable of describing the diverse and complex dynamics of these rotating detonation engines that we observe in experiments," said co-author J. Nathan Kutz, a UW professor of applied mathematics.


The model allowed the researchers to determine for the first time whether an engine of this type would be stable or unstable. It also allowed them to assess how well a specific engine was performing.


"This new approach is different from conventional wisdom in the field, and its broad applications and new insights were a complete surprise to me," said co-author Carl Knowlen, a UW research associate professor in aeronautics and astronautics.

Right now the model is not quite ready for engineers to use.


"My goal here was solely to reproduce the behavior of the pulses we saw -- to make sure that the model output is similar to our experimental results," Koch said. "I have identified the dominant physics and how they interplay. Now I can take what I've done here and make it quantitative. From there we can talk about how to make a better engine."


Mitsuru Kurosaka, a UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics, is also a co-author on this paper. 
This research was funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Office of Naval 
Research.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Washington. Original written by Sarah McQuate


                    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200218143706.htm

What Is the Hardest Language in the World to Lipread?

"We don't Know!"  Lipreading is more an art than a science!
A deep and thoughtful article is at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lipreading-around-the-world

Epidemics Seem to Start in China

By Ross Pomeroy, RCP Staff


The Asian Flu in 1956 killed between one and four million people worldwide. SARS in 2002 infected 8,098 and killed 774 in seventeen counties. H7N9 emerged ten years later to strike at least 1,223 people and kill four out of every ten of them. Now, the milder, yet more infectious COVID-19 has sickened more than 70,000 across the globe, resulting in 1,771 deaths.


All of these outbreaks originated in China, but why? Why is China such a hotspot for novel diseases?

"It’s not a big mystery why this is happening… lots of concentrated population, with intimate contact with lots of species of animals that are potential reservoirs, and they don’t have great hygiene required. It’s a recipe for spitting out these kinds of viruses," Dr. Steven Novella recently opined on an episode of the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.


South Central China is a noted "mixing vessel" for viruses, Dr. Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, told PBS in 2016. There's lots of livestock farming, particularly poultry and pigs, with limited sanitation and lax oversight. Farmers often bring their livestock to "wet markets" where they can come into contact with all sorts of exotic animals. The various birds, mammals, and reptiles host viruses that can jump species and rapidly mutate, even potentially infecting humans. Experts are pretty sure this is precisely what happened with the current COVID-19 coronavirus, which is why, on January 30th, China issued a temporary ban on the trade of wild animals.


There are also cultural reasons why China plays host to large outbreaks.


"Many Chinese people, even city dwellers, insist that freshly slaughtered poultry is tastier and more healthful than refrigerated or frozen meat," journalist Melinda Liu wrote for Smithsonian in 2017. 
"The public’s taste for freshly killed meat, and the conditions at live markets, create ample opportunity for humans to come in contact with these new mutations."


Moreover, when stricken with an illness, many Chinese first seek out traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), where practitioners regularly misdiagnose symptoms, then offer acupuncture or ineffective herbal or animal-based remedies as treatments. This drastically increases death rates during outbreaks and allows infected individuals to return to the public where they can infect more people. Widely viewed TCM posts in China have already misleadingly promoted an unproven liquid composed of honeysuckle, Chinese skullcap, and weeping forsythia as a treatment for COVID-19.


China is also notorious for its misinformation, secrecy, and censorship, which raises the chances that new diseases will fester and spread. Back in early January, Chinese government officials told the public that the new infection's spread had been effectively halted. This was not true. At the same time, the authoritarian regime bullied health experts who attempted to sound alarm. The young doctor Li Wenliang attempted to warn others about the new coronavirus. He was 'rewarded' with a threatening reprimand by police. Li subsequently caught COVID-19 and succumbed to the disease the first week of February.


There are some hopeful signs that China is doing away with some of the secrecy that hampered global responses to prior outbreaks. The government is sharing much more data than in past outbreaks, and Chinese scientists are publishing a great many papers accessible to the global community. Still, it remains to be seen how – or if – the country will institute policies meant to prevent future ones. Permanently banning the sale of live animals at public markets, instituting and enforcing food safety regulations, and discouraging the use of traditional Chinese medicine are options that should all be on the table.


Without countrywide action, it's a near certainty that China's 1.4 billion citizens will once again be exposed to novel and dangerous infectious diseases.


https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2020/02/18/why_do_new_disease_outbreaks_always_seem_to_start_in_china.html

Fuel Tank Debris in Boeing 737MAX Planes

‘Absolutely unacceptable’ discovery a new setback for US firm, which orders inspection


Boeing has ordered inspections of its entire fleet of grounded 737 Max planes after it found debris in the fuel tanks of some of the aircraft, in the latest setback for the US plane-maker.


The specialist aviation blog Leeham News, which first reported the discovery of the “foreign object debris” (FOD), said it was unlikely that the inspections would delay the recertification of the jets. 

However, it will take up to three days to inspect each plane because fuel must be drained and vapours dissipated before the fuel tanks can be opened.


Mark Jenks, the general manager of the 737 programme, said in a memo to employees that the debris was “absolutely unacceptable” and that the company was taking steps to address the problem in its production system.


           – The Guardian, February 19, 2020.  More at:


https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/19/boeing-737-max-debris-found-in-fuel-tanks-of-grounded-planes

The Novel Is Dying

The current Spectator publication has an elegant article by Joseph Bottum taken from his latest book.  This article describes the emergence of the novel during and after the renaissance and its current death throes in the world of art.  It is a serious and well-documented treatment of a distinct artistic change in temperament.  See:


https://spectator.us/joseph-bottum-death-novel/

New and Powerful PC Algorithm

Computer-based weather forecast: New algorithm outperforms mainframe computer systems


Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz – February 13, 2020 -- The exponential growth in computer processing power seen over the past 60 years may soon come to a halt. Complex systems such as those used in weather forecast, for example, require high computing capacities, but the costs for running supercomputers to process large quantities of data can become a limiting factor. Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Germany and Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano in Switzerland have recently unveiled an algorithm that can solve complex problems with remarkable facility -- even on a personal computer.


Exponential growth in IT will reach its limit


In the past, we have seen a constant rate of acceleration in information processing power as predicted by Moore's Law, but it now looks as if this exponential rate of growth is limited. New developments rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning, but the related processes are largely not well-known and understood. "Many machine learning methods, such as the very popular deep learning, are very successful, but work like a black box, which means that we don't know exactly what is going on. 
We wanted to understand how artificial intelligence works and gain a better understanding of the connections involved," said Professor Susanne Gerber, a specialist in bioinformatics at Mainz 
University. Together with Professor Illia Horenko, a computer expert at Università della Svizzera italiana and a Mercator Fellow of Freie Universität Berlin, she has developed a technique for carrying out incredibly complex calculations at low cost and with high reliability. Gerber and Horenko, along with their co-authors, have summarized their concept in an article entitled "Low-cost scalable discretization, prediction, and feature selection for complex systems" recently published in Science Advances. "This method enables us to carry out tasks on a standard PC that previously would have required a supercomputer," emphasized Horenko. In addition to weather forecasts, the research see numerous possible applications such as in solving classification problems in bioinformatics, image analysis, and medical diagnostics.


Breaking down complex systems into individual components


The paper presented is the result of many years of work on the development of this new approach. 
According to Gerber and Horenko, the process is based on the Lego principle, according to which complex systems are broken down into discrete states or patterns. With only a few patterns or components, i.e., three or four dozen, large volumes of data can be analyzed and their future behavior can be predicted. "For example, using the SPA algorithm we could make a data-based forecast of surface temperatures in Europe for the day ahead and have a prediction error of only 0.75 degrees Celsius," said Gerber. It all works on an ordinary PC and has an error rate that is 40 percent better than the computer systems usually used by weather services, whilst also being much cheaper.


SPA or Scalable Probabilistic Approximation is a mathematically-based concept. The method could be useful in various situations that require large volumes of data to be processed automatically, such as in biology, for example, when a large number of cells need to be classified and grouped. "What is particularly useful about the result is that we can then get an understanding of what characteristics were used to sort the cells," added Gerber. Another potential area of application is neuroscience. 

Automated analysis of EEG signals could form the basis for assessments of cerebral status. It could even be used in breast cancer diagnosis, as mammography images could be analyzed to predict the results of a possible biopsy.


"The SPA algorithm can be applied in a number of fields, from the Lorenz model to the molecular dynamics of amino acids in water," concluded Horenko. "The process is easier and cheaper and the results are also better compared to those produced by the current state-of-the-art supercomputers."


                     https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200213124214.htm

New and Different Antibiotics

McMaster University – February 12, 2020 -- A new group of antibiotics with a unique approach to attacking bacteria has been discovered, making it a promising clinical candidate in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.

The newly-found corbomycin and the lesser-known complestatin have a never-before-seen way to kill bacteria, which is achieved by blocking the function of the bacterial cell wall. The discovery comes from a family of antibiotics called glycopeptides that are produced by soil bacteria.


The researchers also demonstrated in mice that these new antibiotics can block infections caused by the drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus which is a group of bacteria that can cause many serious infections.


The findings were published in Nature today.


"Bacteria have a wall around the outside of their cells that gives them shape and is a source of strength," said study first author Beth Culp, a PhD candidate in biochemistry and biomedical sciences at McMaster.


"Antibiotics like penicillin kill bacteria by preventing building of the wall, but the antibiotics that we found actually work by doing the opposite -- they prevent the wall from being broken down. This is critical for cell to divide.


"In order for a cell to grow, it has to divide and expand. If you completely block the breakdown of the wall, it is like it is trapped in a prison, and can't expand or grow."


Looking at the family tree of known members of the glycopeptides, researchers studied the genes of those lacking known resistance mechanisms, with the idea they might be an antibiotic demonstrating a different way to attack bacteria.


"We hypothesized that if the genes that made these antibiotics were different, maybe the way they killed the bacteria was also different," said Culp.


The group confirmed that the bacterial wall was the site of action of these new antibiotics using cell imaging techniques in collaboration with Yves Brun and his team from the Université de Montréal.


Culp said: "This approach can be applied to other antibiotics and help us discover new ones with different mechanisms of action. We found one completely new antibiotic in this study, but since then, we've found a few others in the same family that have this same new mechanism."


The team is led by professor Gerry Wright of the David Braley Centre for Antibiotic Discovery within the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster.


The research was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Ontario Research 
Fund.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by McMaster University. Original written by Tina Depko. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


                    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200212131523.htm

New Electronic State of Matter

University of Pittsburgh discovery shows electrons can bind together in ways similar to how quarks combine to form neutrons and protons


February 13, 2020 -- A research team led by professors from the University of Pittsburgh Department of Physics and Astronomy has announced the discovery of a new electronic state of matter.

Jeremy Levy, a distinguished professor of condensed matter physics, and Patrick Irvin, a research associate professor are coauthors of the paper "Pascal conductance series in ballistic one-dimensional LaAIO3/SrTiO3 channels." The research focuses on measurements in one-dimensional conducting systems where electrons are found to travel without scattering in groups of two or more at a time, rather than individually.


'The study was published in Science on Feb. 14. A video outlining the paper's findings can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDjGiH8OnqU&feature=youtu.be


"Normally, electrons in semiconductors or metals move and scatter, and eventually drift in one direction if you apply a voltage. But in ballistic conductors the electrons move more like cars on a highway. The advantage of that is they don't give off heat and may be used in ways that are quite different from ordinary electronics. Researchers before us have succeeded in creating this kind of ballistic conductor," explained Levy.


"The discovery we made shows that when electrons can be made to attract one another, they can form bunches of two, three, four and five electrons that literally behave like new types of particles, new forms of electronic matter."


Levy compared the finding to the way in which quarks bind together to form neutrons and protons. An important clue to uncovering the new matter was recognizing that these ballistic conductors matched a sequence within Pascal's Triangle.


"If you look along different directions of Pascal's Triangle you can see different number patterns and one of the patterns was one, three, six, 10, 15, 21. This is a sequence we noticed in our data ,so it became a challenging clue as to what was actually going on. The discovery took us some time to understand but it was because we initially did not realize we were looking at particles made up of one electron, two electrons, three electrons and so forth. If you combine all this together you get the sequence of 1,3,6,10."


Levy, who is also director of the Pittsburgh Quantum Institute, noted that the new particles feature properties related to quantum entanglement, which can potentially be used for quantum computing and quantum redistribution. He said the discovery is an exciting advancement toward the next stage of quantum physics.


"This research falls within a larger effort here in Pittsburgh to develop new science and technologies related to the second quantum revolution," he said.


"In the first quantum revolution people discovered the world around them was governed fundamentally by laws of quantum physics. That discovery led to an understanding of the periodic table, how materials behave and helped in the development of transistors, computers, MRI scanners and information technology.


"Now in the 21st century, we're looking at all the strange predictions of quantum physics and turning them around and using them. When you talk about applications, we're thinking about quantum computing, quantum teleportation, quantum communications, quantum sensing--ideas that use properties of the quantum nature of matter that were ignored before."


https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-02/uop-psu021320.php

China's Communist Party Skews Research

Research, including medical research, is monitored and influenced by the Chinese Communist Party.  That meddling is increasing under the current leadership.


See:


https://theconversation.com/research-in-china-is-complicated-by-the-communist-partys-influence-says-researcher-who-worked-there-131277

New Knowledge About Planetesimals

New Horizons team uncovers a critical piece of the planetary formation puzzle


NASA – February 13, 2020 -- Data from NASA's New Horizons mission are providing new insights into how planets and planetesimals -- the building blocks of the planets -- were formed.


The New Horizons spacecraft flew past the ancient Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth (2014 MU69) on Jan. 1, 2019, providing humankind's first close-up look at one of the icy remnants of solar system formation in the vast region beyond the orbit of Neptune. Using detailed data on the object's shape, geology, color and composition -- gathered during a record-setting flyby that occurred more than four billion miles from Earth -- researchers have apparently answered a longstanding question about planetesimal origins, and therefore made a major advance in understanding how the planets themselves formed.


The team reports those findings in a set of three papers in the journal Science, and at a media briefing Feb. 13 at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle.


"Arrokoth is the most distant, most primitive and most pristine object ever explored by spacecraft, so we knew it would have a unique story to tell," said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "It's teaching us how planetesimals formed, and we believe the result marks a significant advance in understanding overall planetesimal and planet formation."


The first post-flyby images transmitted from New Horizons last year showed that Arrokoth had two connected lobes, a smooth surface and a uniform composition, indicating it was likely pristine and would provide decisive information on how bodies like it formed. These first results were published in Science last May.


"This is truly an exciting find for what is already a very successful and history-making mission" said Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division. "The continued discoveries of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft astound as it reshapes our knowledge and understanding of how planetary bodies form in solar systems across the universe."


Over the following months, working with more and higher-resolution data as well as sophisticated computer simulations, the mission team assembled a picture of how Arrokoth must have formed. 

Their analysis indicates that the lobes of this "contact binary" object were once separate bodies that formed close together and at low velocity, orbited each other, and then gently merged to create the 22-mile long object New Horizons observed.


This indicates Arrokoth formed during the gravity-driven collapse of a cloud of solid particles in the primordial solar nebula, rather than by the competing theory of planetesimal formation called hierarchical accretion. Unlike the high-speed collisions between planetesimals in hierarchical accretion, in particle-cloud collapse, particles merge gently, slowly growing larger.


"Just as fossils tell us how species evolved on Earth, planetesimals tell us how planets formed in space," said William McKinnon, a New Horizons co-investigator from Washington University in St. Louis, and lead author of an Arrokoth formation paper in Science this week. "Arrokoth looks the way it does not because it formed through violent collisions, but in more of an intricate dance, in which its component objects slowly orbited each other before coming together."


Two other important pieces of evidence support this conclusion. The uniform color and composition of Arrokoth's surface shows the KBO formed from nearby material, as local cloud collapse models predict, rather than a mishmash of matter from more separated parts of the nebula, as hierarchical models might predict.


The flattened shapes of each of Arrokoth's lobes, as well as the remarkably close alignment of their poles and equators, also point to a more orderly merger from a collapse cloud. Further still, Arrokoth's smooth, lightly cratered surface indicates its face has remained well preserved since the end of the planet formation era.


"Arrokoth has the physical features of a body that came together slowly, with 'local' materials in the solar nebula," said Will Grundy, New Horizons composition theme team lead from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and the lead author of a second Science paper. "An object like Arrokoth wouldn't have formed, or look the way it does, in a more chaotic accretion environment."


The latest Arrokoth reports significantly expand on the May 2019 Science paper, led by Stern. The three new papers are based on 10 times as much data as the first report, and together provide a far more complete picture of Arrokoth's origin.


"All of the evidence we've found points to particle-cloud collapse models, and all but rule out hierarchical accretion for the formation mode of Arrokoth, and by inference, other planetesimals," Stern said.


New Horizons continues to carry out new observations of additional Kuiper Belt objects it passes in the distance. New Horizons also continues to map the charged-particle radiation and dust environment in the Kuiper Belt. The new KBOs being observed now are too far away to reveal discoveries like those on Arrokoth, but the team can measure aspects such as each object's surface properties and shape. This summer the mission team will begin using large groundbased telescopes to search for new KBOs to study in this way, and even for another flyby target if fuel allows.


The New Horizons spacecraft is now 4.4 billion miles (7.1 billion kilometers) from Earth, operating normally and speeding deeper into the Kuiper Belt at nearly 31,300 miles (50,400 kilometers) per hour.


The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The Marshall Space Flight Center Planetary Management Office provides the NASA oversight for the New Horizons. Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio, directs the mission via Principal Investigator Stern, and leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by  NASA's  Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by NASA. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


                 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200213164317.htm