https://archive.is/K5mdP

Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold. Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other.

But our modern knowledge tells us the basic difference between an atom of lead and an atom of gold: the lead atom contains exactly three more protons. So can we create a gold atom by simply pulling three protons out of a lead atom?

As it turns out, we can. But it’s not easy.

While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold. Extremely small amounts, in fact: a total of some 29 trillionths of a gram.

A German experiment proved that simple concrete spheres make fantastic batteries. Now, California plans to submerge a 9-meter diameter sphere in the ocean and is already planning versions of 30 meters. - farmingdale-observer.com/2025/…

You might think that a power plant could easily start generating power, but in reality, only a limited number of facilities have everything they need to handle a black start. That's because it takes power to make power. Facilities that boil water have lots of powered pumps and valves, coal plants need to pulverize the fuel and move it to where it's burned, etc. In most cases, black-start-rated plants have a diesel generator present to supply enough power to get the plant operating. These tend to be smaller plants, since they require proportionally smaller diesel generators.

The initial output of these black start facilities is then used to provide power to all the plants that need an external power source to operate. This has to be managed in a way that ensures that only other power plants get the first electrons to start moving on the grid, otherwise the normal demand would immediately overwhelm the limited number of small plants that are operating. Again, this has to be handled by facilities that need power in order to control the flow of energy across the grid. This is why managing the grid will never be as simple as "put the hardware on the Internet and control it remotely," given that the Internet also needs power to operate.

The load-shedding that happened in Texas during the 2021 Snowpacolypse was (according to ERCOT) to avoid this precise situation. It was sold (somewhat retroactively) as millions being without power for a week was better than the months a black start could take.

In 1924, motivated by the rising eugenics movement, the United States passed the Johnson–Reed Act, which limited immigration to stem “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions”. A century later, at a campaign event last October, now US President Donald Trump used similar eugenic language to justify his proposed immigration policies, stating that “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now”.

If left unchallenged, a rising wave of white nationalism in many parts of the globe could threaten the progress that has been made in science — and broader society — towards a more equitable world1.

As scientists and members of the public, we must push back against this threat — by modifying approaches to genetics education, advocating for science, establishing and leading diverse research teams and ensuring that studies embrace and build on the insights obtained about human variation.

In March, Kat Bolstad returned from an Antarctic expedition where she had used a new camera system specially built to search for the elusive colossal squid.

No one had captured footage of one of these animals swimming in the deep sea. She didn’t spot one on this voyage either.

On the day she left the ship, though, Dr. Bolstad, a deep sea cephalopod biologist, learned about a recent video taken on March 9 from the South Sandwich Islands. A team searching for new marine life and remotely using a Schmidt Ocean Institute submersible, had happened upon a young cephalopod, and people wanted Dr. Bolstad’s help identifying it.

The juvenile was about 30 centimeters long (a little less than a foot), with a transparent body, delicate arms and brown spots. It was a colossal squid.

“Pretty much as soon as I saw the footage, I knew there was a good chance,” Dr. Bolstad, a cephalopod biologist at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, said. She consults remotely for Schmidt’s Antarctic work.

It’s been 100 years since the colossal squid was formally described in a scientific paper. In its adult form, the animal is larger than the giant squid, or any other invertebrate on Earth, and can grow to 6 or 7 meters long, or up to 23 feet.

https://archive.is/ZoGpY

Archive link

In my experiments I’ve found that the most rigid thinkers have genetic dispositions related to how dopamine is distributed in their brains.

Rigid thinkers tend to have lower levels of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex and higher levels of dopamine in their striatum, a key midbrain structure in our reward system that controls our rapid instincts. So our psychological vulnerabilities to rigid ideologies may be grounded in biological differences.

In fact, we find that people with different ideologies have differences in the physical structure and function of their brains. This is especially pronounced in brain networks responsible for reward, emotion processing, and monitoring when we make errors.

For instance, the size of our amygdala — the almond-shaped structure that governs the processing of emotions, especially negatively tinged emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, danger and threat — is linked to whether we hold more conservative ideologies that justify traditions and the status quo.

https://archive.is/UrZ0a

Evolutionary biologists have tended to view each of these transitions as a contingent event. But within the functional-information framework, it seems possible that such jumps in evolutionary processes (whether biological or not) are inevitable.

In these jumps, Wong pictures the evolving objects as accessing an entirely new landscape of possibilities and ways to become organized, as if penetrating to the “next floor up.” Crucially, what matters — the criteria for selection, on which continued evolution depends — also changes, plotting a wholly novel course. On the next floor up, possibilities await that could not have been guessed before you reached

https://archive.ph/H5h3n

Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe asteroid 2024 YR4, which earlier this year seemed to be at risk of hitting Earth in 2032. Earth is now safe, but astronomers are cheering on a possible collision with the moon

The coronavirus membrane protein (M) is the main organizer of coronavirus assembly1,2,3. Here, we report on an M-targeting molecule, CIM-834, that blocks the assembly of SARS-CoV-2. CIM-834 was obtained through high-throughput phenotypic antiviral screening followed by medicinal-chemistry efforts and target elucidation. CIM-834 inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 (including a broad panel of variants) and SARS-CoV. In SCID mice and Syrian hamsters intranasally infected with SARS-CoV-2, oral treatment reduced lung viral titres to nearly undetectable levels, even (as shown in mice) when treatment was delayed until 24 h before the end point. Treatment of infected hamsters prevented transmission to untreated sentinels. Transmission electron microscopy studies show that virion assembly is completely absent in cells treated with CIM-834. Single-particle cryo-electron microscopy reveals that CIM-834 binds and stabilizes the M protein in its short form, thereby preventing the conformational switch to the long form, which is required for successful particle assembly. In conclusion, we have discovered a new druggable target in the replication cycle of coronaviruses and a small molecule that potently inhibits it.

We show that the human brain contains diverse mitochondrial phenotypes driven by both topology and cell types. Compared with white matter, grey matter contains >50% more mitochondria. Moreover, the mitochondria in grey matter are biochemically optimized for energy transformation, particularly among recently evolved cortical brain regions. Scaling these data to the whole brain, we created a backwards linear regression model that integrates several neuroimaging modalities11 to generate a brain-wide map of mitochondrial distribution and specialization.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20241729

Rice University researchers have developed an innovative solution to a pressing environmental challenge: removing and destroying per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), commonly called “forever chemicals.” A study led by James Tour, the T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Chemistry and professor of materials science and nanoengineering, and graduate student Phelecia Scotland unveils a method that not only eliminates PFAS from water systems but also transforms waste into high-value graphene, offering a cost-effective and sustainable approach to environmental remediation. This research was published March 31 in Nature Water.

The morning is sunny and uncharacteristically mild for mid-March as we tramp through the crunchy remains of snow, which up until a few days earlier obscured the carpet of dead leaves and was crisscrossed with coyote tracks. We stop in front of a small tree with an odd contraption strapped to its trunk. It’s made of a section of white plastic pipe anchored to a piece of lumber by a long bolt that the pipe can rotate around like a propeller blade. The pipe is sealed on the bottom end with duct tape and filled with dog treats.

It’s a puzzle of sorts, one that Raymond designed to test the coyotes’ problem-solving abilities as part of her PhD work at the University of Alberta. To solve it, coyotes need to rotate the pipe with a nose or paw until the treats spill out. She peers into the top of the pipe. “No treats!” An animal has solved the puzzle. She unlocks a motion-triggered trail camera strapped to a nearby tree and begins scanning the videos on its small screen to see who figured it out. After about a minute, she sighs: “It was probably this squirrel.” Squirrels usually get the treats by chewing through the duct tape. Mice sometimes dive into the top of the pipe, eating the treats and then exiting via small holes near the bottom—which Raymond made, presciently, as rodent escape hatches. She returns every few days to restock the treats.

In winter 2024, Raymond deployed the pipe puzzles for four weeks at a time at 26 sites across Edmonton, and 14 more at Elk Island National Park, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of the city. By comparing the results from the two locations, Raymond hopes to understand if there are cognitive differences between urban coyotes and their counterparts living in more natural settings. During the first round of deployments, her cameras captured 461 videos of coyotes; 140 of those showed coyotes displaying interest in a puzzle or interacting with it in some way. The experiment is ongoing, but patterns are already emerging. “We’re finding that urban coyotes are a lot bolder,” she says. “They’re much quicker to approach puzzles. They are less fearful of them.”

In 13 of those 140 interactions, the coyotes successfully solved the puzzle. While that may sound unremarkable, Raymond wasn’t initially sure the notoriously wary canids would be willing to interact with the puzzles at all. Notably, each of the 13 instances took place in the city. “It seems that this willingness to approach and explore is critical,” says conservation behaviorist Colleen St. Clair, Raymond’s advisor at the University of Alberta. “You can’t get food from a novel source unless you’re willing to approach it.”

Raymond isn’t sure yet whether the park coyotes were unable to solve the puzzles, or if the animals were just too cautious to persist long enough. The results from this year’s puzzle deployments may answer that question, but there are already clues. Test locations in the city ranged from less developed places—like the middle of golf courses with a lot of forested cover—to areas with more roads, buildings, and people, such as the neighborhood pocket park or a thin, forested strip between industrial yards. Coyotes across the city showed similar willingness to investigate the puzzles. But, tellingly, the majority of coyotes who successfully solved puzzles did so in the most urbanized sites.

Traditionally, scientists have tried to determine what animals’ minds are capable of by devising laboratory experiments to test them in captivity. This approach has the benefit of control: Researchers can keep every aspect of the experiment consistent while testing their subject’s reaction to a single changing variable. But captivity has major, often negative, impacts on animals’ behavior, limiting the conclusions scientists can draw. And the studies provide little insight into how animals actually live their lives in the wild.

Researchers like Raymond, Thornton, and Stanton are helping pioneer a different approach: testing the cognition of wild animals on their own turf, in ways that reflect the real challenges of living in urban environments. As Stanton puts it: “How can we test them in the places that they live, with questions that matter?”

Getting to know the minds of the animals in our midst has several potential benefits. It could show us how to minimize conflict between humans and urban wildlife, and could also answer intriguing scientific questions about how animals think and use their cognitive abilities to adapt to rapidly changing environments. What scientists learn might even change the way we think about the animals sharing our space—and our relationships with them.

Nearly half (47%) of all clinical trials remain unpublished.

Whether a trial is published and how long it takes is influenced by whether there are positive results, how large the trial is and if it is single- or multi-centred, and which type of organisation has funded the trial.

Publication bias is a problem because it means that the information available to people making important health-related decisions for themselves, their relatives or their patients is not complete and may even be misleading. For example, if negative results have not been published, there is a danger that the decision-makers may not be aware of possible harms linked to the intervention.

In 1856, decades before the term “greenhouse gas” was coined, Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated the greenhouse effect in her home laboratory. She placed a glass cylinder full of carbon dioxide in sunlight and found that it heated up much more than a cylinder of ordinary air. Her conclusion: more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere results in a warmer planet.

(Eunice was also a suffragate)

Interesting look into why we can't remember most things before about 4, but that the memories can in theory be triggered.