Science & TechnologyS


Cassiopaea

High-speed moving fusion plasma turbulence discovered for the first time

National Institutes of Natural Sciences
Sci Tech Daily
Fri, 27 May 2022 12:00 UTC
stellarator
© Justin RuckmanInside Japan's Large Helical Device (LHD) stellarator, built to test plasma fusion confinement.
New insights into understanding turbulence in fusion plasmas.

In order to achieve fusion in a power plant, it is necessary to stably confine a plasma of more than 100 million degrees Celsius in a magnetic field and maintain it for a long time.

A research group led by Assistant Professor Naoki Kenmochi, Professor Katsumi Ida, and Associate Professor Tokihiko Tokuzawa of the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS), Japan, using measuring instruments developed independently and with the cooperation of Professor Daniel J. den Hartog of the University of Wisconsin, USA, discovered for the first time in the world that turbulence moves faster than heat when heat escapes in plasmas in the Large Helical Device (LHD). One characteristic of this turbulence makes it possible to predict changes in plasma temperature, and it is expected that observation of turbulence will lead to the development of a method for real-time control of plasma temperature in the future.
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Beaker

Gene-editing experiment turns cute hamsters into 'aggressive' beasts

Patrick Reilly
New York Post
Sun, 29 May 2022 00:00 UTC
syrian hamster
© ShutterstockResearchers said they chose to work with Syran hamsters they're social structure is similar to that of humans.
A gene-editing experiment conducted on hamsters turned the adorable, furry pets into "aggressive" little monsters, researchers said.

Scientists at Northwestern University used controversial CRISPR technology to remove hormone vasopressin and its receptor, Avpr1a, from a group of the critters with the expectation that would increase cooperation between the critters, according to the study.

The hypothesis was wrong.

"We were really surprised at the results," H. Elliot Albers, one of the lead researchers in the study, told Metro.

"We anticipated that if we eliminated vasopressin activity, we would reduce both aggression and social communication."

Once gene-spliced, the hamsters exhibited "high levels of aggression towards other same-sex individuals," the professor said, regardless of sexuality or genotype.

Behaviors included chasing, biting and pinning, the study found.

Researchers said they chose to work with Syrian hamsters because their social structure is similar to that of humans.

"We don't understand this system as well as we thought we did," Albers concluded.

Comment: No, they don't and neither do they understand that CRISPR is a rather unpredictable tool to be using...

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Galaxy

Russia planning to send nuclear-powered 'space tug' to Jupiter

Victor Tangermann
Futurism
Sat, 28 May 2022 20:59 UTC
space tug jupiter
© RoscosmosThe journey could take over four years.
Russia's space agency Roscosmos has announced that it's planning to send a nuclear-powered "space tug" as far as Jupiter in 2030.

According to state-owned news agency TASS, the mission of the uncrewed transport and energy module, dubbed "Zeus," will last for about 50 months.

"Together with the Russian Academy of Sciences, we are now making calculations about this flight's ballistics and payload," Roscosmos executive director for long-term programs and science Alexander Bloshenko told reporters over the weekend, as quoted by the outlet.

It's yet another announcement of an ambitious deep space mission by Russia's space agency, rounding out an already packed schedule between now and the end of this decade. The country is also looking to get its own orbital space station off the ground and land a probe on the south pole of the Moon by the end of the year.

Comment: See also:

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Fire

New clues as to why the Hunga-Tonga eruption was so massive

Gregory Barber
Wired
Sat, 28 May 2022 12:31 UTC
Tonga volcano
© Planet Labs PBC / APThe Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano, January 7, 2022
Just how big was the January eruption of the Hunga-Tonga volcano? Four months of intensive science has only bumped up the scale. You could point to the audible booms that interrupted the night in Alaska, 6,000 miles away. Or perhaps to the tsunamis in the Caribbean, created by a rare form of acoustic wave that hopped over continents and stirred up the seas. In space, the weather changed too, NASA scientists said earlier this month, with winds from the blast accelerating up to 450 miles per hour as they left the atmosphere's outermost layers. This briefly redirected the flow of electrons around the planet's equator, a phenomenon that had previously been observed during geomagnetic storms caused by solar wind.

Which is why, when researchers started scouring the ocean floor immediately surrounding the volcano, they expected to find a gnarly landscape. Surely it would be reshaped by the blast and littered with debris. Scientists believe that the explosion was the result of an incendiary recipe: hot, gaseous magma meeting cold, salty sea water. But how exactly did those two ingredients come together with such force? Some of the leading theories centered on the idea of a landslide or other collapse of the volcano's slopes that helped water intrude into the magma chamber. That would also help explain the tsunami that killed three people on nearby Tongan islands. A massive shift in submarine rock also means displacing a massive amount of water.
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Blue Planet

Is Earth's core rusting?

Jiuhua Chen, Shanece S. Esdaille
EOS Org
Wed, 25 May 2022 00:00 UTC
Owl Rock
© Owl Rock G. Lamar/Flickr/CC BY 2.0Owl Rock in Arizona’s Monument Valley gets its red color from iron oxide minerals. Recent experiments suggest that iron oxides may also be forming far below Earth’s surface, at the interface between the core and the lower mantle.
If subduction carries hydrous minerals deep into Earth's mantle, they may "rust" the iron outer core, forming vast sinks of oxygen that can later be returned to the atmosphere.

Iron on Earth's surface — whether in simple nails or mighty girders — reacts gradually when exposed to moist air or oxygenated water through a chemical reaction known as oxidation. The reddish-brown product of this reaction, rust, can consist of various forms of hydrous (water-bearing) iron oxides and iron oxide-hydroxide materials. In nature, the red rocks found in the arid climes of the southwestern United States and elsewhere similarly owe their color to the iron oxide mineral hematite, whereas in wetter environments, iron ore minerals like hematite weather to form the iron oxide-hydroxide mineral goethite (FeOOH).

Deep below Earth's surface — 2,900 kilometers deep, to be precise — is a mass of mostly molten iron forming the planet's outer core. Could it rust as well?
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Robot

Do androids dream of electric schools? Israel experiments with robot teachers

Maya Margit/The Media Line
The Jerusalem Post
Thu, 26 May 2022 14:10 UTC
robotic teacher
© CourtesyThe robotic teacher that Dr. Chen Giladi is developing with the Israeli Education Ministry's research and development department.
Robots could be coming to a classroom near you.

Israel is testing out robotic teachers in a groundbreaking project that aims to uncover whether androids could one day become an inextricable part of every child's education.

Teaching Israel's next generation - with robots

The innovative venture, which combines robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, is being carried out by the Education Ministry's research and development department.

Comment: As creepy as it sounds (and looks, from the picture), if the goal is to use these robots to help in teaching, rather than replace live human teachers, it may not be so bad. It wouldn't be that different from using computers in education - it's a tool. The problem comes in if and when they decide a robot can do as good as, or better than, a live human. As convincing as AI may be in the future, children are likely never going to learn from a soulless collection of algorithms as they will from a person.

See also:

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Laptop

'The Game is Over!' Google's DeepMind says it is close to achieving 'human-level' artificial intelligence - but it still needs to be scaled up

Jonathan Chadwick
Mailonline
Wed, 18 May 2022 07:30 UTC
DeepMind
DeepMind, a British company owned by Google, may be on the verge of achieving human-level artificial intelligence
  • DeepMind expert suggests the hardest tasks to create a human-like AI are solved
  • The London firm wants to build an 'AGI' that has the same intelligence as humans
  • This week DeepMind unveiled a program capable of achieving over 600 tasks
DeepMind, a British company owned by Google, may be on the verge of achieving human-level artificial intelligence (AI).

Nando de Freitas, a research scientist at DeepMind and machine learning professor at Oxford University, has said 'the game is over' in regards to solving the hardest challenges in the race to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI).

AGI refers to a machine or program that has the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can, and do so without training.

According to De Freitas, the quest for scientists is now scaling up AI programs, such as with more data and computing power, to create an AGI.
Earlier this week, DeepMind unveiled a new AI 'agent' called Gato that can complete 604 different tasks 'across a wide range of environments'. Gato uses a single neural network - a computing system with interconnected nodes that works like nerve cells in the human brain. It can chat, caption images, stack blocks with a real robot arm and even play the 1980s home video game console Atari, DeepMind claims.

Comment: See also:

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Bizarro Earth

Swarm unveils mysterious magnetic waves deep down


European Space Agency
Mon, 23 May 2022 18:24 UTC
Magnetic waves across Earth’s outer core
© ESAMagnetic waves across Earth’s outer core.
While volcanic eruptions and earthquakes serve as immediate reminders that Earth's insides are anything but tranquil, there are also other, more elusive, dynamic processes happening deep down below our feet. Using information from ESA's Swarm satellite mission, scientists have discovered a completely new type of magnetic wave that sweeps across the outermost part of Earth's outer core every seven years. This fascinating finding, presented today at ESA's Living Planet Symposium, opens a new window into a world we can never see.

Earth's magnetic field is like a huge bubble protecting us from the onslaught of cosmic radiation and charged particles carried by powerful winds that escape the Sun's gravitational pull and stream across the Solar System. Without our magnetic field, life as we know it would not exist.

Understanding exactly how and where our magnetic field is generated, why it fluctuates constantly, how it interacts with solar wind and, indeed, why it is currently weakening, is not only of academic interest but also of benefit to society. For example, solar storms can damage communication networks and navigation systems and satellites, so while we can't do anything about changes in the magnetic field, understanding this invisible force helps to be prepared.

Most of the field is generated by an ocean of superheated, swirling liquid iron that makes up Earth's outer core 3000 km under our feet. Acting like the spinning conductor in a bicycle dynamo, it generates electrical currents and the continuously changing electromagnetic field.

ESA's Swarm mission, which comprises three identical satellites, measures these magnetic signals that stem from Earth's core, as well as other signals that come from the crust, oceans, ionosphere and magnetosphere.
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Info

DARPA launches 'Ouija' project to study radio signals in Earth's atmosphere with satellites

Elizabeth Howell
Space.com
Wed, 18 May 2022 21:25 UTC
Timelapse view of the ionosphere
© NASAA timelapse view of the ionosphere as seen from the International Space Station, with city lights shining below.
The U.S. military plans to launch satellites to learn more about how radio signals behave in part of the Earth's atmosphere.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has set up a new program, called Ouija, which will use sensors on "low-orbiting satellites" to track high-frequency radio waves in the ionosphere. DARPA has a solicitation for proposals available now for one part of the proposal and plans to release a second solicitation at another date.

The ionosphere is best known as the atmospheric zone where auroras roam, depending upon solar activity and the Earth's magnetic field. The Ouija program will focus on a region of the ionosphere roughly 125 miles to 185 miles (300 to 400 kilometers) in altitude — well below the orbit of the International Space Station, which zooms around our planet at an average height of 250 miles (400 km).

Characterizing how radio waves behave in this space will be crucial to help future warfighters work effectively, DARPA officials said in an April 22 statement. Signal propagation in the ionosphere is notoriously unpredictable, due to the high density of charged particles (mainly electrons) that can alter the path of radio signals.
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Archaeology

Scientists discover "ghost" fossils - "completely unexpected"


SciTech Daily
Fri, 20 May 2022 16:38 UTC
ghost fossils
© Scientists Discover "Ghost" Fossils - "Completely Unexpected"The images show the impressions of a collapsed cell-wall covering (a coccosphere) on the surface of a fragment of ancient organic matter (left) with the individual plates (coccoliths) enlarged to show the exquisite preservation of sub-micron-scale structures (right). The blue image is inverted to give a virtual fossil cast, i.e., to show the original three-dimensional form. The original plates have been removed from the sediment by dissolution, leaving behind only the ghost imprints.
Discovery of 'ghost' fossils reveals plankton resilience to past global warming events.

An international team of researchers has discovered a new type of fossilization.

An international team of scientists from University College London (UCL), the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Natural History Museum (London), and the University of Florence has found a remarkable type of fossilization that has remained almost entirely unnoticed until now.

The fossils are microscopic imprints, or "ghosts," of single-celled plankton, called coccolithophores, that lived in the seas millions of years ago, and their discovery is revolutionizing our understanding of how climate change affects plankton in the oceans.

Coccolithophores are important in today's oceans, providing much of the oxygen we breathe, supporting marine food webs, and locking carbon away in seafloor sediments. They are a type of microscopic plankton that surround their cells with hard calcareous plates, called coccoliths, and these are what normally fossilize in rocks.
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