Subject: Big, big, BIG (science) news
Date: Mon May 15 18:05:35 2023
User: olblue
Message:Commercial fusion power in five years? I wouldn't count on it.
Date: Mon May 15 21:22:41 2023
User: MrFixit
Message:The last two paras :
Andrew Holland, head of the Fusion Industry Association, said nothing about fusion has been easy and that the power purchase contract likely had clauses regarding the timing of the delivery of electricity. But he said the deal shows trust is building.
"The business world is starting to understand that fusion is coming and perhaps sooner than a lot of people thought," Holland said in an interview. "It's a vote of confidence that Helion is on its way, as are other companies building their proof-of-concept machines now."
Date: Fri Jun 2 05:03:24 2023
User: TNmountainman
Message:A special edition of "Science" has just been published, concerning the 'evolution' of primate DNA, etc. It's an astoundingly ambitious project, as befits a special edition.
Here's a more-or-less lay version of the story, which many here may want to go to to understand the implications:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-primate-genome-project-reveals-hidden-evolutionary-secrets/ar-AA1c0c2M?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=645f27a5368b46cfa25e016742be3709&ei=39
Over 800 individual primates were sequenced, from 233 species. A truly massive project, leveraging comparative genetics to a level never imagined until very recently. There's lots and lots to be learned from all this, including peering into how some genetic mutations cause disease, and some don't. The repercussions and further studies to branch off this work will go on very far into the future.
Link: The massive primate genome project unfurled
Date: Sat Jun 3 06:36:55 2023
User: TNmountainman
Message:Back to physics...........
This (hyperlink) is of course just a theory, with a model, but it should be noted that the Schwinger Effect *was* observed a year or so ago. Sorta.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-023-01978-9
I actually think this makes sense - as much as anything concerning mega- and micro-scale quantum effects can.
[I actually just found a quite good (mostly) lay level article/description of this phenomenon - in, of all places, Yahoo!. I'll follow with a separate post with that link.]
Link: Black holes not required for Hawking radiation?
Date: Sat Jun 3 06:44:04 2023
User: TNmountainman
Message:This really is a superb explanation (as far as it goes) for this theory. And altho it *is* on Yahoo!, they've just taken it from "LiveScience". Those of you who fairly recently reviewed vacuum energy on my recommendation relevant to another article will have a head start here. 😊
[Edit/addition -- I sort of hesitate to say this...........but the "comments" section for this article is moderately 'entertaining'. Sort of befitting for a Yahoo! article, I guess, but with the occasional (pun intended) particle of physics thrown in.]
Link: Hawking radiation may not be so limited as we thought
Date: Tue Jun 6 05:37:28 2023
User: TNmountainman
Message:Some impressive work done in those squirrely caves in S. Africa where h. naledi lived. Go back, in this thread, to Apr. 19, 2019 to see my previous post. And/or recall the "Nova" show about this hominid. This whole puzzle just keeps getting interesting-er and interesting-er.
(As of now only in pre-print.)
Link: new discoveries about homo naledi
Date: Mon Jun 26 05:35:56 2023
User: TNmountainman
Message:It's been over 9 years now since I started this thread with a post about the proof of gravitational waves. Now........Thursday........there will be an "announcement" about whether or not *gravitational* wave background has been detected. This will be the gravitational analogy of the famous CMB (cosmic microwave background) nailed down back in the '60s. So a very big deal - assuming they've shown it to be the case. If not.................then there will have to be some new "back to the blackboard" head-scratching.
Normally I wouldn't post this 'preview', but it really does a rather good (like *really* good) job of (woman)'splaining the science. This is a project involving several different gravity wave detectors around the world, so a lot of planning and coordination has gone into this.
Link: gravitational wave background detection?
Date: Thu Jun 29 05:52:46 2023
User: TNmountainman
Message:And.................yes, they're 'real'. 67 pulsars used in the timing. Many papers being published in various journals about the study. Amazing stuff.....
Link: gravitational wave background confirmed
Date: Wed Jul 5 22:54:42 2023
User: Dr.Bombay
Message:Yes, lots of interesting things to read here. It would seem like some set of scientists will be considered, and likely win, a Noble prize for this. But, it might be hard to pick out the winners from the large set of scientists on this.
One question I haven't seen asked (or answered) was if the technology to detect these long-wavelength gravitational waves actually sitting around for a long time? The concept is pretty straightforward: see if pulsars keep a steady pulse beat or if they waver slightly due to gravitational waves? Seems like a much easier nut to crack than the LIGO (and others since) detectors that found the short-wavelength gravitational waves.
And, the result kind of confirms what the JWST has already been indicating: we have been off in our understanding of the early universe. This seems to re-enforce what the Webb data has been showing.
Date: Thu Jul 6 02:59:07 2023
User: TNmountainman
Message:Dr. B, I'm a little unclear about your last paragraph. Would you mind elucidating further on the "we have been off" comment. I'm not saying that's wrong, just unsure what specifically you're referring to. Obviously, since we have FAR FAR FAR from complete knowledge of all the gears, our understanding has giant holes (beyond the black ones) in it. And yes, there are 'surprises' all the time. Are you referring to the latest galaxy distance/degree of development 'news'? The (somewhat?) surprising thought that these largest rotating black holes are maybe even bigger than expected? (Altho nobody really knew....)
As to the technology.......................yes, once the first, and then the second LIGO-like devices were up and running, it became easier to build on that. So yes, the theory of pulsars' timing varying by these waves is nothing brand spanking new at all. But we had to wait on the LIGO detector(s) to be able to confirm the theory. So it's a matter, as I understand it, of matching up the gravity waves with the tiny discrepancies of the gravity waves' effects which intervene between the 67 pulsars and earth. And yes, I agree, that once LIGO was shown to 'work', then this step was way easier than that one. And a lot of the data they had already been collecting for over a decade, hoping this would be possible. The ('other') astonishing things (to me) are: a) why/how can something so big (the pulsars) be so regular?; b) that we can calculate the distance between these pulsars and earth to withing about 30m (!!); c) that these newly-detected waves have frequencies on the order of *one billionth* of a hertz(!); and d) that we can measure nanoseconds so accurately. None of those are truly news, but to me always astonishing.
Date: Thu Jul 6 12:01:14 2023
User: Dr.Bombay
Message:I read where the “hum” of the GWB is louder than was expected implying there were more and larger SMBHs than theories of the early universe after the Big Bang predicted.
Date: Fri Oct 6 06:34:22 2023
User: TNmountainman
Message:[accidental posting; no new content]
Date: Wed Oct 11 21:42:55 2023
User: Dr.Bombay
Message:Not surprising in the least. The “accepted” date for the first hominids in the Americas gained traction based on weak evidence and momentum gave it way more credibility than it deserved. I would not be surprised if the real date ends up being even earlier - 30, 40, or more thousand years ago.
Date: Mon Dec 11 19:37:12 2023
User: Katya
Message:Interesting news coming out of the UK about mRNA vaccines.
The technology that allows the use of mRNA came out of work by two scientists at the U of Pennsylvania (who are receiving the Nobel Prize for it this year) that paved the way for the use of mRNA to make vaccines. Normally foreign RNA is recognized by the immune system as foreign and is destroyed. These researchers Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissmann discovered that by substituting one of the bases in RNA uridine with a pseudouridine the altered mRNAs would survive long enough in the body for ribosomes to copy them and generate proteins.
In the case of the Covid-19 vaccines the desired protein is the spike protein of the virus. What the researchers at Cambridge discovered is that sometimes because of the pseudouridine substitution the ribosomes would make a mistake and generate a nonsense protein instead of the desired spike protein. Ribosomes read the bases in mRNA three at a time (a codon) to put an amino acid into the protein and what would occur about 6% of the time was a so-called frameshift mutation (i.e. one base off so reading the wrong three bases each time after the error) leading to a nonsense protein. These proteins apparently cause no harm and are destroyed by the body, though sometimes immune reactions to them are generated. Frameshift mutations happen sometimes even with normal mRNAs but less frequently. Researchers further found that this is particularly likely to occur when there were two or three pseudouridines in a row. So at least a partial fix is readily available. Since there is more than one codon that can code for a particular amino acid to be put into the protein codons can be used that don't include multiple pseucouridines in a row.Researchers have generated an algorithm to do that while generating the synthetic mRNAs.
This research has no implications that the vaccines are unsafe or less effective as a result. Other researchers caution that this finding may have implications for other uses of artifical mRNAs, for example in cancer vaccines.
https://www.science.org/content/article/mrna-vaccines-may-make-unintended-proteins-there-s-no-evidence-harm
Date: Tue Dec 12 00:21:23 2023
User: TNmountainman
Message:That's really elegant stuff there. And great summary, Katya. Just amazing the tools we've developed, and the ways we can 'make' our bodies also work in our favor.
Date: Wed Dec 13 11:45:56 2023
User: Dr.Bombay
Message:Agree, great summary Katya. messenger RNA vaccines are the best thing to come out of the Covid pandemic. Very Nobel Prize worthy science.
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