Gigantic Alien Comet Spotted Heading Straight for the Sun

Scientists think it may have come from another solar system

By Ben Turner for Livc Science

 January 30, 2023 –- Scientists have spotted an enormous, 'alien' comet streaking straight towards the sun. 

The 3.7 mile-wide (6 kilometers) space iceball, called 96P/Machholz 1, is thought to have come from somewhere outside our solar system, and is being monitored by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft as it zips toward our star inside the orbit of Mercury, leaving an icy trail in its wake. 

Comet tails are primarily composed of gas, which trickles behind the frozen clumps of ice and gas as they are heated by the sun’s radiation. In 2008, an analysis of the material shed by 150 comets found that 96P/Machholz 1 contained less than 1.5% of the expected levels of the chemical cyanogen, while also being low in carbon — leading astronomers to conclude that it could be an interloper from another solar system. Now, its plunge towards the sun might reveal even more of its secrets. 

"96P is a very atypical comet, both in composition and in behavior, so we never know exactly what we might see," Karl Battams, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC, told spaceweather.com. "Hopefully we can get some beautiful science out of this and share [it] with everyone as soon as we can."

David Machholz first spotted the eponymous comet in 1986 using a homemade cardboard telescope. Most comets that fall towards the sun tend to be smaller than 32 feet (10 meters) wide, and consequently get burned up as they approach our star. 

But the gigantic size of Machholz 1 (it is more than two-thirds the height of Mount Everest) appears to protect it from complete evaporation, and the SOHO has spotted the comet making five close passes around the sun since its discovery. The icy interloper's closest approach to the sun will come on Tuesday (Jan 31.) when it will near our star at a distance three times closer than Mercury.

The comet may have found itself on its strange orbit after being ejected from its original solar system by the gravity of a giant planet. Then, after a considerable amount of time wandering the cosmos, an accidental rendezvous with Jupiter could have bent its trajectory to ensnare it around our sun. Other theories also suggest that the comet might not be alien, but may have formed in poorly-understood regions of the solar system or had its cyanogen blasted off by repeat journeys around the sun.

SOHO has spotted more than 3,000 comets since its December 1995 launch, although the spacecraft’s primary mission is to observe the sun for violent eruptions called coronal mass ejections, or solar flares that can cause geomagnetic storms on Earth. The most powerful of these storms can disrupt our planet's magnetic field enough to send satellites tumbling to Earth, and scientists have warned that extreme geomagnetic storms could even cripple the internet.

         Gigantic 'alien' comet spotted heading straight for the sun | Live Science

  

Black Swans Could Be Entirely Wiped Out by a Single Virus, Scientists Warn

From:  Science Alert

By David Nield

January 30, 2023 -- The genetic make-up of the iconic Australian black swan (Cygnus atratus) leaves it extremely vulnerable to viruses such as avian flu, research from the University of Queensland reports.

The threat is thought to be so severe that it could wipe out the species entirely.

The discovery comes after the distinctive bird's genome was sequenced for the first time in 2021.

Ordinarily, this achievement would be something to celebrate from a scientific perspective – but a comparison with closely-related northern hemisphere white swans has revealed that certain key immune genes are missing from its DNA.

That's likely to be, at least partly, down to the way that the black swan is isolated geographically. These animals haven't had the same exposure to pathogens that are found outside of southeast and southwest Australia, the areas where it primarily lives and breeds.

"[B]lack swans are extremely sensitive to highly pathogenic avian influenza – HPAI which is often referred to as bird flu - and can die from it within three days," says microbiologist Kirsty Short from the University of Queensland in Australia.

"Our data suggests that the immune system of the black swan is such that, should any avian viral infection become established in its native habitat, their survival would be in peril."

The team used powerful computer software to compare the genes of the black swan with the closely-related mute swan (Cygnus olor), found in the Northern hemisphere. Tens of thousands of genes were compared in total in the search for differences.

It was discovered that a class of proteins in the toll-like receptor 7 (TLR7) family were not being activated as they should. These parts of the genome have been associated with protecting against bird flu and other pathogens.

In other words, the gene for guarding against the bird flu virus is there, it's just not being switched on when needed – and that puts the black swan under threat.

The team also identified an unregulated inflammatory response to infection that could be dangerous.

"We currently don't have HPAI in Australia, but it has spread from Asia to North America, Europe, North Africa, and South America. When it was introduced to new locations, such as Chile and Peru, thousands of wild seabirds perished," says Short.

During the course of their research, the study authors also identified another gene – SLC45A2 – that may be responsible for black swans being black rather than white.

In fact, as mutations of this gene leads to loss of pigment – the same gene has previously been linked to albinism in humans – it suggests the white swan is the newer variant, and that the ancestral swans of both species were black.

The good news is that knowing more about the vulnerability of these birds is going to help in efforts to protect them. Either through selective breeding, or through immunotherapy treatments, this TLR7 gap in the immune defenses could be filled.

Right now, the black swan is one of the species that conservationists are least worried about, with a population worldwide of up to a million. Those numbers could drastically change in a short period of time, however.

"The risk to one of Australia's most unique and beautiful birds is very real, and we need to be prepared if we hope to protect it," says Short.

The research has been published in Genome Biology.

https://www.sciencealert.com/black-swans-could-be-entirely-wiped-out-by-a-single-virus-scientists-warn

 

Meteorites Reveal Likely Origin of Earth's Volatile Chemicals

By analyzing meteorites, researchers have uncovered the likely far-flung origin of Earth's volatile chemicals, some of which form the building blocks of life.

From:  Imperial College London

January 27, 2023 -- They found that around half the Earth's inventory of the volatile element zinc came from asteroids originating in the outer Solar System -- the part beyond the asteroid belt that includes the planets Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. This material is also expected to have supplied other important volatiles such as water.

Volatiles are elements or compounds that change from solid or liquid state into vapour at relatively low temperatures. They include the six most common elements found in living organisms, as well as water. As such, the addition of this material will have been important for the emergence of life on Earth.

Prior to this, researchers thought that most of Earth's volatiles came from asteroids that formed closer to the Earth. The findings reveal important clues about how Earth came to harbour the special conditions needed to sustain life.

Senior author Professor Mark Rehkamper, of Imperial College London's Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said: "Our data show that about half of Earth's zinc inventory was delivered by material from the outer Solar System, beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Based on current models of early Solar System development, this was completely unexpected."

Previous research suggested that the Earth formed almost exclusively from inner Solar System material, which researchers inferred was the predominant source of Earth's volatile chemicals. In contrast, the new findings suggest the outer Solar System played a bigger role than previously thought.

Professor Rehkamper added: "This contribution of outer Solar System material played a vital role in establishing the Earth's inventory of volatile chemicals. It looks as though without the contribution of outer Solar System material, the Earth would have a much lower amount of volatiles than we know it today -- making it drier and potentially unable to nourish and sustain life."

The findings are published today in Science.

To carry out the study, the researchers examined 18 meteorites of varying origins -- eleven from the inner Solar System, known as non-carbonaceous meteorites, and seven from the outer Solar System, known as carbonaceous meteorites.

For each meteorite they measured the relative abundances of the five different forms -- or isotopes -- of zinc. They then compared each isotopic fingerprint with Earth samples to estimate how much each of these materials contributed to the Earth's zinc inventory. The results suggest that while the Earth only incorporated about ten per cent of its mass from carbonaceous bodies, this material supplied about half of Earth's zinc.

The researchers say that material with a high concentration of zinc and other volatile constituents is also likely to be relatively abundant in water, giving clues about the origin of Earth's water.

First author on the paper Rayssa Martins, PhD candidate at the Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said: "We've long known that some carbonaceous material was added to the Earth, but our findings suggest that this material played a key role in establishing our budget of volatile elements, some of which are essential for life to flourish."

Next the researchers will analyse rocks from Mars, which harboured water 4.1 to 3 billion years ago before drying up, and the Moon. Professor Rehkamper said: "The widely held theory is that the Moon formed when a huge asteroid smashed into an embryonic Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. Analysing zinc isotopes in moon rocks will help us to test this hypothesis and determine whether the colliding asteroid played an important part in delivering volatiles, including water, to the Earth."

This work was funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC -- part of UKRI) and Rayssa Martins is funded by an Imperial College London Presidents' PhD Scholarship.

        https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230127131132.htm

  

Wind Turbines Taller Than the Statue of Liberty Are Falling Over

Breakdowns of towers and blades have bedeviled manufacturers in the US and Europe.

From:  Sustainability/Businessweek from Bloomberg

By Ryan Beene and Josh Saul

January 23, 2023 -- On a calm, sunny day last June, Mike Willey was feeding his cattle when he got a call from the local sheriff’s dispatcher. A motorist had reported that one of the huge turbines at a nearby wind farm had collapsed in dramatic fashion. Willey, chief of the volunteer fire department in Ames, 90 miles northwest of Oklahoma City, set out to survey the scene.

The steel tower, which once stood hundreds of feet tall, was buckled in half, and the turbine blades, whose rotation took the machine higher than the Statue of Liberty, were splayed across the wheat field below. The turbine, made by General Electric Co., had been in operation less than a year. “It fell pretty much right on top of itself,” Willey says.

Another GE turbine of the same model collapsed in Colorado a few days later. That wind farm’s owner-operator, NextEra Energy Inc., later attributed it to a blade flaw and said it and GE had taken steps to prevent future mishaps. A spokesperson for GE declined to say what went wrong in both cases in a statement to Bloomberg.

The instances are part of a rash of recent wind turbine malfunctions across the US and Europe, ranging from failures of key components to full collapses. Some industry veterans say they’re happening more often, even if the events are occurring at only a small fraction of installed machines. The problems have added hundreds of millions of dollars in costs for the three largest Western turbine makers, GE, Vestas Wind Systems and Siemens Energy’s Siemens Gamesa unit; and they could result in more expensive insurance policies—a potential setback for the push to abandon fossil fuels and fight climate change.

The race to add production lines for ever-bigger turbines is cited as a major culprit by people in the industry. “We’re seeing these failures happening in a shorter time frame on the newer turbines, and that’s quite concerning,” says Fraser McLachlan, chief executive officer of London-based GCube Underwriting Ltd., which insures about $3.5 billion in wind assets in 38 countries. If the failure rate keeps climbing, he says, insurance premiums could increase or new coverage limits could be imposed.

Vestas, GE and Siemens Gamesa have confirmed in statements to Bloomberg and in recent calls with analysts that the push to rapidly develop more powerful turbines has led to challenges. The companies say they are focusing on improving manufacturing operations and have acknowledged that it’s time to tap the brakes on the introduction of designs. “Rapid innovation strains manufacturing and the broader supply chain,” GE CEO Larry Culp said on an earnings call in October. “It takes time to stabilize production and quality on these new products.”

There’s no publicly available industrywide data on turbine failures, making it tough to paint a complete picture of changes in their performance over time. But Vestas and GE have said the shares of their machines in the field that are unable to produce power are elevated, even if it’s still a small proportion of their installed fleets. Siemens Energy revised its earnings outlook for 2023 downward this month, citing higher-than-expected costs caused by flaws in Siemens Gamesa’s installed turbines.

Because wind farms often generate power from scores of turbines across a site, they can continue to produce electricity even if one or more machines go down, limiting the fallout. Still, examples of the machines going awry have garnered public attention. A massive 784-foot-tall turbine in Germany collapsed in September 2021. A big new turbine in Lithuania fell in March 2022. And a blade partially detached on one in Sweden last July.

Orsted A/S, the world’s largest developer of offshore wind farms, asked authorities in April to stop maritime traffic near some of its sites after blades fell from one of its turbines off the coast of Denmark.  Shares of Siemens Gamesa, the manufacturer, tumbled on the news.

Larger turbines have helped propel a global expansion that’s seen the installed wind generation capacity surpass 840 gigawatts in 2021, up from less than 100 gigawatts in 2007, according to BloombergNEF data. With builders designing blades as long as a football field to capture more wind energy, developers can install fewer turbines to generate the same amount of power. That’s helped keep project costs down, which is a big reason the price of wind electricity has fallen dramatically in the past decade.

But soaring material costs and supply-chain woes have recently squeezed the balance sheets at leading manufacturers, threatening to slow investment and potentially hobbling the development of the US offshore wind industry before it really gets going. The quality stumbles add to the turbine makers’ challenges.

Siemens Gamesa encountered issues that led to design changes and delays while ramping up production of its largest onshore wind machine, known as the 5.X. In a statement, Siemens Gamesa said it’s addressing the quality and reliability of its products in order to “improve the value proposition to customers.”

Vestas Wind Systems A/S saw annual warranty provisions jump from roughly €600 million in 2019 to almost €1.2 billion in 2020 and 2021. The Danish company says the supply chain wasn’t ready to handle the pace of product introductions by manufacturers, which has contributed to project delays, cost increases and quality challenges. “We need a profitable and scalable wind industry to create a net-zero future, and this requires we continue to mature the entire value chain of renewables,” the company said in a statement.

GE, which reports fourth-quarter earnings on Jan. 24, took a $500 million charge in the third quarter to cover warranty costs and repairs on its turbines. The company has installed turbines capable of producing 40 gigawatts of wind power since 2017, introducing several more powerful machines along the way.

These days manufacturers are focused on producing machines with better reliability, at scale. In an interview this month, Henrik Andersen, the Vestas CEO, said that turbines are big enough for now, and that increasing production will be the key challenge of the next decade. Siemens Gamesa’s CEO Jochen Eickholt has told investors the company is working to increase standardization among its products, to prune a portfolio that had become too broad. GE’s Culp said in the October earnings call that his company is likewise shifting to “workhorse products, so we and our suppliers can implement more repeatable manufacturing processes.”

The pressure to invest in green projects is so intense that breakdown fears haven’t yet slowed the flood of money into wind farms, says Oliver Metcalfe, head of wind research at BloombergNEF. The failure issue has become a concern for bankers and other creditors, however, who may begin to demand higher interest rates, he says. “There’s a hesitancy among insurers and lenders about these big models that haven’t been tested yet,” Metcalfe says. “The technology alarm bells are ringing.”

          https://archive.is/YmAEg#selection-4067.332-4074.2

  

New AI Tool Makes Speedy Gene Editing Possible

An artificial intelligence program may enable the first simple production of customizable proteins called zinc fingers to treat diseases by turning genes on and off. The researchers who designed the tool say it promises to accelerate the development of gene therapies on a large scale

From:  NYU Langone Health / NYU Grossman School of Medicine

January 26, 2023 -- The researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the University of Toronto who designed the tool say it promises to accelerate the development of gene therapies on a large scale.

Illnesses including cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease, and sickle cell anemia are caused by errors in the order of DNA letters that encode the operating instructions for every human cell. Scientists can in some cases correct these mistakes with gene editing methods that rearrange these letters.

Other conditions are caused, not by a mistake in the code itself, but by problems in how the cellular machinery reads DNA (epigenetics). A gene, which provides the recipe for a particular protein, often partners with molecules called transcription factors that tell the cell how much of that protein to make. When this process goes awry, over- or underactive genes contribute to diabetes, cancer, and neurological disorders. As a result, researchers have been exploring ways to restore normal epigenetic activity.

One such technique is zinc-finger editing, which can both change and control genes. Among the most abundant protein structures in the human body, zinc fingers can guide DNA repair by grabbing onto scissor-like enzymes and directing them to cut faulty segments out of the code.

Similarly, zinc fingers can also hook onto transcription factors and pull them toward a gene segment in need of regulation. By customizing these instructions, genetic engineers can tailor any gene's activity. A drawback, however, is that artificial zinc fingers are challenging to design for a specific task. Since these proteins attach to DNA in complex groups, researchers would need to be able to tell -- out of countless possible combinations -- how every zinc finger interacts with its neighbor for each desired genetic change.

The study authors' new technology, called ZFDesign, overcomes this obstacle by using artificial intelligence (AI) to model and design these interactions. The model is based on data generated by the screen of nearly 50 billion possible zinc finger-DNA interactions in the researchers' labs. A report on the tool is publishing online Jan. 26 in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

"Our program can identify the right grouping of zinc fingers for any modification, making this type of gene editing faster than ever before," says study lead author David Ichikawa, PhD, a former graduate student at NYU Langone Health.

Ichikawa notes that zinc-finger editing offers a potentially safer alternative to CRISPR, a key gene-editing technology with applications that range from finding new ways to kill cancer cells to designing more nourishing crops. Unlike the entirely human-derived zinc fingers, CRISPR, which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat, relies on bacterial proteins to interact with genetic code. These "foreign" proteins could trigger patients' immune defense systems, which may attack them like any other infection and lead to dangerous inflammation.

The study authors add that besides posing a lower immune risk, the small size of zinc-finger tools may also provide more flexible gene therapy techniques compared with CRISPR by enabling more ways to deliver the tools to the right cells in patients.

"By speeding up zinc-finger design coupled with their smaller size, our system paves the way for using these proteins to control multiple genes at the same time," says study senior author Marcus Noyes, PhD. "In the future, this approach may help correct diseases that have multiple genetic causes, such as heart disease, obesity, and many cases of autism."

To test the computer's AI design code, Noyes and his team used a customized zinc finger to disrupt the coding sequence of a gene in human cells. In addition, they built several zinc fingers that successfully reprogrammed transcription factors to bind near a target gene sequence and turn up or down its expression, demonstrating that their technology can be used for epigenetic changes.

Noyes, an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at NYU Langone, cautions that, while promising, zinc fingers can be difficult to control. Since they are not always specific to a single gene, some combinations can affect DNA sequences beyond a particular target, leading to unintended changes in genetic code.

As a result, Noyes says the team next plans to refine their AI program so it can build more precise zinc-finger groupings that only prompt the desired edit. Noyes is also a member of NYU Langone's Institute for System Genetics.

Funding for the study was provided by National Institutes of Health grants R01GM118851 and R01GM133936. Further funding was provided by Canadian Institutes of Health Research Project grant PJT-159750, the Compute Canada Resource Allocation, the Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarship, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship.

Noyes is a co-founder of TBG Therapeutics, a company that develops methods to design zinc fingers and apply them to treatments for diseases with genetic components. NYU Langone has patents pending (PCT/US21/30267, 63145929) for these tools and approaches, from which both Noyes and NYU Langone may benefit financially. The terms and conditions of these relationships are being managed in accordance with the policies of NYU Langone.

In addition to Noyes, other NYU investigators involved in the study were Manjunatha Kogenaru, PhD; April Mueller, BS; David Giganti, PhD; Gregory Goldberg, PhD; Samantha Adams, PhD; Jeffrey Spencer, PhD; Courtney Gianco; Finnegan Clark, BS; and Timothee Lionnet, PhD. Other study investigators included Osama Abdin, BS; Nader Alerasool, PhD; Han Wen, MS; Rozita Razavi, PhD, MPH; Satra Nim, PhD; Hong Zheng, PhD; Mikko Taipale, PhD; and Philip Kim, PhD, at the University of Toronto. Study lead author David Ichikawa is at the Pandemic Response Lab in Long Island City, N.Y.

        New AI tool makes speedy gene-editing possible -- ScienceDaily

  

Humans Can Recognize and Understand Chimpanzee and Bonobo Gestures, Study Finds

People playing an online game correctly identified more than half of common great ape gestures

From:  PLOS

January 24, 2023 -- Humans retain an understanding of gestures made by other great apes, even though we no longer use them ourselves, according to a study by Kirsty E. Graham and Catherine Hobaiter at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, publishing January 24^thin the open access journal PLOS Biology.

The discovery of gestures used by great apes provided the first evidence of intentional communication outside human language, and over 80 such signals have now been identified. Many of these gestures are shared across non-human apes, including distantly related apes such as chimpanzees and orangutans. However, despite humans being more closely related to chimpanzees and bonobos, these ape gestures are no longer thought to be present in human communication.

Researchers tested people's understanding of the 10 most common gestures used by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) using an online game. Over 5,500 participants were asked to view 20 short videos of ape gestures and select the meaning of the gesture from four possible answers. They found that participants performed significantly better than expected by chance, correctly interpreting the meaning of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures over 50% of the time. Providing participants with contextual information about what the apes in the video were doing only marginally increased their success rate in interpreting the meaning of the gesture.

Video playback experiments have traditionally been used to test language comprehension in non-human primates, but this study reversed the paradigm to assess humans' abilities to understand the gestures of their closest living relatives for the first time. The results suggest that although we no longer use these gestures, we may have retained an understanding of this ancestral communication system. The authors say that it remains unclear whether our ability to understand specific great ape gestures is inherited, or whether humans and other great apes share an ability to interpret meaningful signals because of their general intelligence, physical resemblance, and similar social goals.

Graham adds, "All great apes use gestures, but humans are so gestural -- using gestures while we speak and sign, learning new gestures, pantomiming etc. -- that it's really hard to pick out shared great ape gestures just by observing people. By showing participants videos of common great ape gestures instead, we found that people can understand these gestures, suggesting that they may form part of an evolutionarily ancient, shared gesture vocabulary across all great ape species including us."

Humans can recognize and understand chimpanzee and bonobo gestures, study finds: People playing an online game correctly identified more than half of common great ape gestures -- ScienceDaily

  

Altered Speech May Be The First Sign of Parkinson's Disease

Researchers attempted to identify early symptoms of Parkinson's disease using voice data. In their study, the researchers used artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze and assess speech signals, where calculations are done and diagnoses made in seconds rather than hours.

From:  Kaunas University of Technology [in Lithuania]

January 24, 2023 -- The diagnosis of Parkinson's disease has shaken many lives. More than 10 million people worldwide are living with it. There is no cure, but if symptoms are noticed early, the disease can be controlled. As Parkinson's disease progresses, along with other symptoms speech changes.

Lithuanian researcher from Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), Rytis Maskeliūnas, together with colleagues from the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LSMU), tried to identify early symptoms of Parkinson's disease using voice data.

Parkinson's disease is usually associated with loss of motor function -- hand tremors, muscle stiffness, or balance problems. According to Maskeliūnas, a researcher at KTU's Department of Multimedia Engineering, as motor activity decreases, so does the function of the vocal cords, diaphragm, and lungs: "Changes in speech often occur even earlier than motor function disorders, which is why the altered speech might be the first sign of the disease."

Expanding the AI language database

According to Professor Virgilijus Ulozas, at the Department of Ear, Nose, and Throat at the LSMU Faculty of Medicine, patients with early-stage of Parkinson's disease, might speak in a quieter manner, which can also be monotonous, less expressive, slower, and more fragmented, and this is very difficult to notice by ear. As the disease progresses, hoarseness, stuttering, slurred pronunciation of words, and loss of pauses between words can become more apparent.

Taking these symptoms into account, a joint team of Lithuanian researchers has developed a system to detect the disease earlier.

"We are not creating a substitute for a routine examination of the patient -- our method is designed to facilitate early diagnosis of the disease and to track the effectiveness of treatment," says KTU researcher Maskeliūnas.

According to him, the link between Parkinson's disease and speech abnormalities is not new to the world of digital signal analysis -- it has been known and researched since the 1960s. However, as technology advances, it is becoming possible to extract more information from speech.

In their study, the researchers used artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse and assess speech signals, where calculations are done and diagnoses made in seconds rather than hours. This study is also unique -- the results are tailored to the specifics of the Lithuanian language, in this way expanding the AI language database.

The algorithm will become a mobile app in the future

Speaking about the progress of the study, Kipras Pribuišis, lecturer at the Department of Ear, Nose, and Throat at the LSMU Faculty of Medicine, emphasises that it was only carried out on patients already diagnosed with Parkinson's: "So far, our approach is able to distinguish Parkinson's from healthy people using a speech sample. This algorithm is also more accurate than previously proposed."

In a soundproof booth, a microphone was used to record the speech of healthy and Parkinson's patients, and an artificial intelligence algorithm "learned" to perform signal processing by evaluating these recordings. The researchers highlight that the algorithm does not require powerful hardware and could be transferred to a mobile app in the future.

"Our results, which have already been published, have a very high scientific potential. Sure, there is still a long and challenging way to go before it can be applied in everyday clinical practice," says Maskeliūnas.

According to the researcher, the next steps include increasing the number of patients to gather more data and determining whether the proposed algorithm is superior to alternative methods used for early diagnosis of Parkinson's. In addition, it will be necessary to check whether the algorithm works well not only in laboratory-like environments but also in the doctor's office or in the patient's home.

        Altered speech may be the first sign of Parkinson's disease -- ScienceDaily

Viagra Linked to Much Lower Risk of Death in Men, But Questions Remain

From:  Science Alert, January 23, 2023

By Felicity Nelson

Men taking Viagra for erectile dysfunction could be saving themselves from an early death, according to the results of a recently published observational study.

Funded by the pharmaceutical company Sanofi, the investigation looked back at 14 years' worth of medical records on more than 23,000 American men who had been prescribed a phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitor (PDE-5i), such as the common erectile dysfunction medication Viagra.

Men who choose to take medications like Viagra could just happen to be healthier to begin with. Or their ability to engage in sexual activity following treatment might have caused the benefits to cardiac health seen in the study, as opposed to a more direct influence of the drug, the researchers said.

Nevertheless, the study hints at the potential positive impact of PDE-5i on heart health in the general male population.

"Phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors are not only safe but may have important cardioprotective properties," the researchers said. "[These findings] suggest an urgent need for an adequately powered, prospective randomized placebo-controlled trial."

Cardiologist Deepak Bhatt, the director of Mount Sinai Heart in New York, said the study was interesting but "a randomized clinical trial in which many patients with cardiovascular disease were randomly given either Viagra or a placebo (a 'blank') would be necessary to know whether there are any real cardiovascular benefits to the drug".

"While it is possible that Viagra may have some cardiovascular benefits, that would require further investigation, and this current study does not prove it," he told ScienceAlert.

"Rather, it is more likely that the patients in this study who were placed on Viagra by their doctors were less likely to have heart disease, because if patients have severe heart disease, they are often not placed on Viagra in the first place," he said.

"The study is observational so it will not have the impact that a clinical trial would have," Nial Wheate, a pharmaceutical chemist at the University of Sydney in Australia, told ScienceAlert.

Viagra was also shown to be an effective treatment for pulmonary arterial hypertension and was approved by the FDA for this indication in 2005 under the brand name Revatio. (In people with this condition, the arteries between the heart and the lungs become blocked, increasing the blood pressure and putting more strain on the right side of the heart.)

"We've known about the cardiovascular benefits of these types of drugs for quite some time," said Wheate. "The fact that it has benefits to do with your heart is not at all surprising. Good, but not surprising."

Pharmaceutical companies often fund studies "at arm's length", such as Sanofi's involvement in this instance, said Professor Wheate. "I'm confident the results are real," he said.

The next step would be to conduct a large clinical trial in a controlled environment to confirm the result, he said.

This study was published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine

Viagra Linked to Much Lower Risk of Death in Men, But Questions Remain 

UK Treasury Considering Plans for Digital Pound, Economic Secretary Says

From WikiNews on Monday, January 16, 2023

Andrew Griffith, Economic Secretary to HM Treasury, told members of the United Kingdom House of Commons Tuesday the government was considering a "digital pound", with public consultations on the attributes and regulation of digital assets expected in the coming weeks.

Speaking before Parliament's Treasury Select Committee, Griffith reported the government was "a long way down the road [...] to establish a regime for the wholesale use, for payment purposes, of stablecoins", cryptocurrencies less susceptible to price fluctuations by being pegged to traditional assets.

While affirming commitments for the UK to become a cryptocurrency hub, Griffith said creating regulations for a digital pound would be "a long lead-time activity."

Griffith told the Committee the first use of a digital pound would likely be for settling financial transactions wholesale, but suggested public policy considerations meant a private, fiat-based stablecoin could probably do the job first.

Nevertheless, he said: "We have got to get them [public policy issues] right. I would rather be right than be first".

Griffith expressed the desire that a regulatory regime, Britain's first for crypto assets, would be included in the Financial Services and Markets Bill, which is being debated in the House of Lords. He said embracing "potentially disruptive game-changing technology" could "challenge but also turbocharge" the UK's fintech and financial industries.

Digital currencies are being explored by central banks worldwide, with China testing a digital yuan in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, and the European Union (EU) due to publish draft legislation to establish and regulate a digital euro later this year.

The European Central Bank is due to complete its two-year investigation phase for a digital euro in July, when it will be followed by three years of implementation.

Consumer protection has come under scrutiny during the 'crypto winter' precipitated by a fall in the value of Bitcoin and the collapse of major exchange FTX.  The EU has previously laid out the world's first comprehensive ruleset for regulating crypto markets, which may enter effect in 2024. Griffith indicated the UK's rules could be broader to cover decentralised finance, and that the public consultation over regulating crypto assets would be part of a "research and exploration" phase with the government and the Bank of England.

This includes "at least" six discussions with industry members to "expose us as regulators and decision makers" and uphold Britain's "strong financial reputation".

UK Treasury considering plans for digital pound, economic secretary says - Wikinews, the free news source

Researchers Uncover 92 Fossil Nests From Some of India's Largest Dinosaurs

Researchers Uncover 92 Fossil Nests From  Some of India's Largest Dinosaurs

Fossilized eggs reveal details of titanosaur reproduction, nesting, and early life

From:  PLOS

The discovery of more than 250 fossilized eggs reveals intimate details about the lives of titanosaurs in the Indian subcontinent, according to a study published January 18, 2022 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Harsha Dhiman of the University of Delhi, New Delhi and colleagues.

The Lameta Formation, located in the Narmada Valley of central India, is well-known for fossils of dinosaur skeletons and eggs of the Late Cretaceous Period. Recent work in the area uncovered 92 nesting sites containing a total of 256 fossil eggs belonging to titanosaurs, which were among the largest dinosaurs to have ever lived. Detailed examination of these nests has allowed Dhiman and colleagues to make inferences about the life habits of these dinosaurs.

The authors identified six different egg-species (oospecies), suggesting a higher diversity of titanosaurs than is represented by skeletal remains from this region. Based on the layout of the nests, the team inferred that these dinosaurs buried their eggs in shallow pits like modern-day crocodiles. Certain pathologies found in the eggs, such as a rare case of an "egg-in-egg," indicate that titanosaur sauropods had a reproductive physiology that parallels that of birds and possibly laid their eggs in a sequential manner as seen in modern birds. The presence of many nests in the same area suggests these dinosaurs exhibited colonial nesting behavior like many modern birds. But the close spacing of the nests left little room for adult dinosaurs, supporting the idea that adults left the hatchlings (newborns) to fend for themselves.

Details of dinosaur reproductive habits can be difficult to determine. These fossil nests provide a wealth of data about some of the largest dinosaurs in history, and they come from a time shortly before the age of dinosaurs came to an end. The insights gleaned from this study contribute significantly to paleontologists' understanding of how dinosaurs lived and evolved.

Harsha Dhiman, lead author of the research, adds: "Our research has revealed the presence of an extensive hatchery of titanosaur sauropod dinosaurs in the study area and offers new insights into the conditions of nest preservation and reproductive strategies of titanosaur sauropod dinosaurs just before they went extinct."

Guntupalli V.R. Prasad, co-author and leader of the research team, adds: "Together with dinosaur nests from Jabalpur in the upper Narmada valley in the east and those from Balasinor in the west, the new nesting sites from Dhar District in Madhya Pradesh (Central India), covering an east-west stretch of about 1000 km, constitute one of the largest dinosaur hatcheries in the world."

          https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230118195852.htm

  

Stars Disappear Before Our Eyes

Light pollution is robbing us of the night sky

From:  Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA)

January 19, 2023 -- A startling analysis from Globe at Night -- a citizen science program run by NSF's NOIRLab -- concludes that stars are disappearing from human sight at an astonishing rate. The study finds that, to human eyes, artificial lighting has dulled the night sky more rapidly than indicated by satellite measurements. The study published in the journal Science showcases the unique contributions that citizen scientists can make in essential fields of research.

From the glowing arc of the Milky Way to dozens of intricate constellations, the unaided human eye should be able to perceive several thousand stars on a clear, dark night. Unfortunately, growing light pollution has robbed about 30% of people around the globe and approximately 80% of people in the United States of the nightly view of their home galaxy. A new paper published in the journal Science concludes that the problem is getting rapidly worse.

New citizen-science-based research sheds alarming light on the problem of 'skyglow' -- the diffuse illumination of the night sky that is a form of light pollution. The data for this study came from crowd-sourced observations collected from around the world as part of Globe at Night, a program run by NSF's NOIRLab and developed by NRAO astronomer Connie Walker. The research reveals that skyglow is increasing more rapidly than shown in satellite measurements of Earth's surface brightness at night.

"At this rate of change, a child born in a location where 250 stars were visible would be able to see only abound100 by the time they turned 18," said Christopher Kyba, a researcher at the German Research Centre for Geosciences and lead author of the paper detailing these results.

Light pollution is a familiar problem that has many detrimental effects, not only on the practice of astronomy. It also has an impact on human health and wildlife, since it disrupts the cyclical transition from sunlight to starlight that biological systems have evolved alongside. Furthermore, the loss of visible stars is a poignant loss of human cultural heritage. Until relatively recently, humans throughout history had an impressive view of the starry night sky, and the effect of this nightly spectacle is evident in ancient cultures, from the myths it inspired to the structures that were built in alignment with celestial bodies.

Despite being a well-recognized issue, however, the changes in sky brightness over time are not well documented, particularly on a global scale.

Globe at Night has been gathering data on stellar visibility every year since 2006.* Anyone can submit observations through the Globe at Night web application on a desktop or smartphone. After entering the relevant date, time and location, participants are shown a number of star maps. They then record which one best matches what they can see in the sky without any telescopes or other instruments.

This gives an estimate of what is called the naked eye limiting magnitude, which is a measure of how bright an object must be in order to be seen. This can be used to estimate the brightness of skyglow, because as the sky brightens, the fainter objects disappear from sight.

The authors of the paper analyzed more than 50,000 observations submitted to Globe at Night between 2011 and 2022, ensuring consistency by omitting entries that were affected by factors including cloud cover and moonlight. They focused on data from Europe and North America, since these regions had a sufficient distribution of observations across the land area as well as throughout the decade studied. The paper notes that the sky is likely brightening more quickly in developing countries, where satellite observations indicate the prevalence of artificial lighting is growing at a higher rate.

After devising a new method to convert these observations into estimates of the change in skyglow, the authors found that the loss of visible stars reported by Globe at Night indicates an increase in sky brightness of 9.6% per year over the past decade. This is much greater than the roughly 2% per year global increase in surface brightness measured by satellites.

"This shows that existing satellites aren't sufficient to study how Earth's night is changing," said Kyba. "We've developed a way to 'translate' Globe at Night observations of star visibility made at different locations from year to year into continent-wide trends of sky brightness change. That shows that Globe at Night isn't just an interesting outreach activity, it's an essential measurement of one of Earth's environmental variables."

Existing satellites are not well suited to measuring skyglow as it appears to humans, because there are no current instruments monitoring the whole Earth that can detect wavelengths shorter than 500 nanometers, which corresponds to the color cyan, or greenish blue. Shorter wavelengths, however, contribute disproportionately to skyglow, because they scatter more effectively in the atmosphere. White LEDs, now increasingly commonly used in high-efficiency outdoor lighting, have a peak in emission between 400 and 500 nanometers.

"Since human eyes are more sensitive to these shorter wavelengths at nighttime, LED lights have a strong effect on our perception of sky brightness," said Kyba. "This could be one of the reasons behind the discrepancy between satellite measurements and the sky conditions reported by Globe at Night participants."

Beyond wavelength differences, space-based instruments do not measure light emitted horizontally very well, such as from illuminated signs or windows, but these sources are significant contributors to skyglow as seen from the ground. Crowd-sourced observations will therefore always be invaluable for investigating the direct human effects of sky brightness.

"The increase in skyglow over the past decade underscores the importance of redoubling our efforts and developing new strategies to protect dark skies," said Walker. "The Globe at Night dataset is indispensable in our ongoing evaluation of changes in skyglow, and we encourage everyone who can to get involved to help protect the starry night sky."

* From 2006 to 2010, Globe at Night data were collected based on a paper rather than an online form, so they were incompatible and were not included in this analysis.

          https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230119141539.htm

  

A 500-Year-Old 'Paradox' by Leonardo da Vinci Has Finally Been Solved, Study Says

A mystery of fluid physics first noticed by da Vinci has puzzled scientists for centuries, and we now have an answer.

By Becky Ferreira for Vice

January 18, 2023 -- More than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci was watching air bubbles float up through water—as you do when you’re a Renaissance-era polymath—when he noticed that some bubbles inexplicably started spiraling or zigzagging instead of making a straight ascent to the surface.

For centuries, nobody has offered a satisfying explanation for this weird periodic deviation in the motion of some bubbles through water, which has been called “Leonardo’s paradox.” 

Now, a pair of scientists think they may have finally solved the longstanding riddle by developing new simulations that match high-precision measurements of the effect, according to a study published on Tuesday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The results suggest that bubbles can reach a critical radius that pushes them into new and unstable paths due to interactions between the flow of water around them and the subtle deformations of their shapes.

“The motion of bubbles in water plays a central role for a wide range of natural phenomena, from the chemical industry to the environment,” said authors Miguel Herrada and Jens Eggers, who are fluid physics researchers at the University of Seville and the University of Bristol respectively, in the study. “The buoyant rise of a single bubble serves as a much-studied paradigm, both experimentally and theoretically.”

“Yet, in spite of these efforts, and in spite of the ready availability of enormous computing power, it has not been possible to reconcile experiments with numerical simulations of the full hydrodynamic equations for a deformable air bubble in water,” the team continued. “This is true in particular for the intriguing observation, made already by Leonardo da Vinci, that sufficiently large air bubbles perform a periodic motion, instead of rising along a straight line.”

Indeed, bubbles are so ubiquitous in our daily lives that it can be easy to forget that they are dynamically complicated and often tricky to experimentally study. Rising air bubbles in water are influenced by a host of intersecting forces—such as fluid viscosity, surface friction, and any surrounding contaminants—that contort the shapes of the bubbles and shift the dynamics of the water flowing around them.

What da Vinci noted, and other scientists have since confirmed, is that air bubbles with a spherical radius that is much smaller than a millimeter tend to follow a straightforward upward path through water, whereas larger bubbles develop a wobble that results in periodic spiral or zigzag trajectories. 

Herrada and Eggers used the Navier–Stokes equations, which are a mathematical framework for describing the motion of viscous fluids, to simulate the complex interplay between the air bubbles and their watery medium. The team were able to pinpoint the spherical radius that triggers this tilt—0.926 millimeters, which is about the size of a pencil tip—and describe the possible mechanism behind the squiggly motion.

A bubble that has exceeded the critical radius becomes more unstable, producing a tilt that changes the curvature of the bubble. The shift in curvature increases the velocity of water around the surface of the bubble, which kicks off the wobble motion. The bubble then returns to its original position due to the pressure imbalance created by the deformations in its curved shape, and repeats the process on a periodic cycle.

In addition to resolving a 500-year-old paradox, the new study could shed light on a host of other questions about the mercurial behavior of bubbles, and other objects that defy easy categorization.

“While it was previously believed that the bubble’s wake becomes unstable, we now demonstrate a new mechanism, based on the interplay between flow and bubble deformation,” Herrada and Eggers concluded in the study. “This opens the door to the study of small contaminations, present in most practical settings, which emulate a particle somewhere in between a solid and a gas.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ad9eb/a-500-year-old-paradox-by-leonardo-da-vinci-has-finally-been-solved-study-says

 

How Crocs Can Go Hours Without Air

Crocodilian hemoglobin: Experiments on Ancient Proteins Find Mutations more Numerous and Nuanced than Once Thought

From:  University of Nebraska-Lincoln

January 12, 2023 -- The crocodilian edition of hemoglobins -- the scuba tanks of the blood -- work so well that crocs can go hours without air. The hyper-efficiency of that adaptation has led some biologists to wonder why, of all the jawed vertebrates, crocodilians were the lone group to hit on such an optimal solution to making the most of a breath. After resurrecting the hemoglobin of ancient crocodilian ancestors, a team may have an answer.

It can pogo-stick along at 50-plus miles per hour, leaping 30-odd feet in a single bound. But that platinum-medal athleticism falls by the wayside at a sub-Saharan riverside, the source of life and death for the skittish impala stilling itself for a drink in 100-degree heat. A Nile crocodile has silently baptized itself in that same muddy river for the past hour. When the unseen apex predator lashes from the water to seize the impala, its infamous teeth latch onto a hindquarter, jaws clenching with 5,000 pounds of force. Yet it's the water itself that does the killing, with the deep-breathed reptile dragging its prey to the deep end to drown.

The success of the croc's ambush lies in the nanoscopic scuba tanks -- hemoglobins -- that course through its bloodstream, unloading oxygen from lungs to tissues at a slow but steady clip that allows it to go hours without air. The hyper-efficiency of that specialized hemoglobin has led some biologists to wonder why, of all the jawed vertebrates in all the world, crocodilians were the lone group to hit on such an optimal solution to making the most of a breath.

By statistically reconstructing and experimentally resurrecting the hemoglobin of an archosaur, the 240-million-year-old ancestor of all crocodilians and birds, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Jay Storz and colleagues have gleaned new insights into that why. Rather than requiring just a few key mutations, as earlier research suggested, the unique properties of crocodilian hemoglobin stemmed from 21 interconnected mutations that litter the intricate component of red blood cells.

That complexity, and the multiple knock-on effects that any one mutation can induce in hemoglobin, may have forged an evolutionary path so labyrinthine that nature failed to retrace it even over tens of millions of years, the researchers said.

"If it was such an easy trick -- if it was that easy to do, just making a few changes -- everyone would be doing it," said Storz, a senior author of the study and Willa Cather Professor of biological sciences at Nebraska.

All hemoglobin binds with oxygen in the lungs before swimming the bloodstream and eventually releasing that oxygen to the tissues that depend on it. In most vertebrates, hemoglobin's affinity for capturing and holding oxygen is dictated largely by molecules known as organic phosphates, which, by attaching themselves to the hemoglobin, can coax it into releasing its precious cargo.

But in crocodilians -- crocodiles, alligators and their kin -- the role of organic phosphates was supplanted by a molecule, bicarbonate, that is produced from the breakdown of carbon dioxide. Because hardworking tissues produce lots of carbon dioxide, they also indirectly generate lots of bicarbonate, which in turn encourages hemoglobin to dispense its oxygen to the tissues most in need of it.

"It's a super-efficient system that provides a kind of slow-release mechanism that allows crocodilians to efficiently exploit their onboard oxygen stores," Storz said. "It's part of the reason they're able to stay underwater for so long."

As postdoctoral researchers in Storz's lab, Chandrasekhar Natarajan, Tony Signore and Naim Bautista had already helped decipher the workings of the crocodilian hemoglobin. Alongside colleagues from Denmark, Canada, the United States and Japan, Storz's team decided to embark on a multidisciplinary study of how the oxygen-ferrying marvel came to be.

Prior efforts to understand its evolution involved incorporating known mutations into human hemoglobin and looking for any functional changes, which were usually scant. Recent findings from his own lab had convinced Storz that the approach was flawed. There were plenty of differences, after all, between human hemoglobin and that of the ancient reptilian creatures from which modern-day crocodilians evolved.

"What's important is to understand the effects of mutations on the genetic background in which they actually evolved, which means making vertical comparisons between ancestral and descendant proteins, rather than horizontal comparisons between proteins of contemporary species," Storz said. "By using that approach, you can figure out what actually happened."

So, with the help of biochemical principles and statistics, the team set out to reconstruct hemoglobin blueprints from three sources: the 240-million-year-old archosaur ancestor; the last common ancestor of all birds; and the 80-million-year-old shared ancestor of contemporary crocodilians. After putting all three of the resurrected hemoglobins through their paces in the lab, the team confirmed that only the hemoglobin of the direct crocodilian ancestor lacked phosphate binding and boasted bicarbonate sensitivity.

Comparing the hemoglobin blueprints of the archosaur and crocodilian ancestors also helped identify changes in amino acids -- essentially the joints of the hemoglobin skeleton -- that may have proved important. To test those mutations, Storz and his colleagues began introducing certain croc-specific mutations into the ancestral archosaur hemoglobin. By identifying the mutations that made archosaur hemoglobin behave more like that of a modern-day crocodilian, the team pieced together the changes responsible for those unique, croc-specific properties.

Counter to conventional wisdom, Storz and his colleagues discovered that evolved changes in hemoglobin's responsiveness to bicarbonate and phosphates were driven by different sets of mutations, so that the gain of one mechanism was not dependent on the loss of the other. Their comparison also revealed that, though a few mutations were enough to subtract the phosphate-binding sites, multiple others were needed to eliminate phosphate sensitivity all together. In much the same way, two mutations seemed to directly drive the emergence of bicarbonate sensitivity -- but only when combined with or preceded by other, easy-to-miss mutations in remote regions of the hemoglobin.

Storz said the findings speak to the fact that a combination of mutations might yield functional changes that transcend the sum of their individual effects. A mutation that produces no functional effect on its own might, in any number of ways, open a path to other mutations with clear, direct consequences. In the same vein, he said, those later mutations might influence little without the proper stage-setting predecessors already in place. And all of those factors can be supercharged or waylaid by the environment in which they unfold.

"When you have these complex interactions, it suggests that certain evolutionary solutions are only accessible from certain ancestral starting points," Storz said. "With the ancestral archosaur hemoglobin, you have a genetic background that makes it possible to evolve the unique properties that we see in hemoglobins of modern-day crocodilians. By contrast, with the ancestor of mammals as a starting point, it may be that there's some way that you could evolve the same property, but it would have to be through a completely different molecular mechanism, because you're working within a completely different structural context."

For better or worse, Storz said, the study also helps explain the difficulty of engineering a human hemoglobin that can mimic and approach the performance of the crocodilian.

"We can't just say, 'OK, it's mainly due to these five mutations. If we take human hemoglobin and just introduce those mutations, voilà, we'll have one with those same exact properties, and we'll be able to stay underwater for two hours, too,'" Storz said. "It turns out that's not the case.

"There are lots of can't-get-there-from-here problems in the tree of life."

Storz, Natarajan and Bautista conducted the study with Signore, now at the University of Manitoba; Aarhus University's Angela Fago; Mississippi State University's Federico Hoffmann; and Yokohama City University's Jeremy Tame. The researchers detailed their findings in the journal Current Biology, receiving support from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

          https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230112134747.htm