Well, here we go...... I think we could see this coming. Somebody was gonna take a swing at it. What it'll amount to remains to be seen (pun intended as usual).
I don't really buy the "tired light" theory, nor 'adjustable' coupling constants - but apparently Dirac said it could be possible. I suspect this goes nowhere - but it may take a long time to find out for sure.
And I guess while we're on this stuff, possibly related:
Gosh, I hate to 'dilute' the above, but I think this also qualifies, as a follow-up to posts from July 2020 and Sept. 2021 in this thread, concerning the possibility of the peopling of this hemisphere earlier than "the standard model":
Pendants made from giant sloths suggest earlier arrival of people in the Americas (msn.com)
Here's the actual journal article:
The weight of evidence slowly continues to pile up that peeps were here way before 13-15,000 years ago.
I made the original post on this 'discovery', in this thread, back on Sept 23, 2021, for those who need the background. So this is the follow-up we knew was coming:
That's a lay version. Here's the original, and a link to an accompanying article:
Dating the arrival of humans in the Americas | Science
(Also since the earlier posts........there has been some additional DNA evidence of unexpected(?) linkages of a S.A. (not South Africa or South Australia or San Antonio) tribe or two in Amazonia - with archaic northern Asian (Siberia-ish) peoples. Fascinating stuff.)
Not surprising in the least. The âacceptedâ 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.
First actual drug to market using CRISPR:
FDA approves two gene therapies for sickle cell, bringing hope to thousands with the disease | CNN
(CRISPR was discussed at least a couple of times earlier in this thread, and maybe others, too.)
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
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.
Agree, great summary Katya. messenger RNA vaccines are the best thing to come out of the Covid pandemic. Very Nobel Prize worthy science.
Really interesting dark matter/black holes/cosmology theory discussion:
https://news.mit.edu/2024/exotic-black-holes-could-be-dark-matter-byproduct-0606
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/17/science/black-holes-dark-matter-scn/index.html
The actual paper:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.231402
[edit: I refer the dear reader(s) to earlier in this thread, Feb. 17, 2023 (and following) to see other (involved) discussion of black holes as a possible 'solution' to dark energy, via "cosmological coupling". But I'll provide just one tidbit from back then here:]
Don't know how this escaped my notice back in the summer............but this is a big deal. And yes, of course the Max Planck folks score again:
For context for those who need it:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.367.6480.838
The diagram therein, "Ghosts in the Family Tree" (sorry just a tad late for Halloween) is an excellent representation of current thinking.
This sort of adds clarity, whilst at the same time making the picture even more complex:
Homo juluensis: Possible new ancient human species uncovered by researchersIt's an update of a couple of preliminary articles from back in the Spring.
This all seems a bit too clear-cut (and it likely is), but it's from the gold-standard folks at Max Planck, so............it must be true? The fossil record is still so scant to make such statements - but they know their stuff:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwydgyy8120o
Expect to hear lots of debate about all this. Sooo much news coming out of archeogenetics work these days
Mega-powerful neutrino detected:
https://apnews.com/article/high-energy-neutrino-ghost-particle-c8177a5eabdcab2fd045d92e872e1fb1
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00444-1
We'll hear more about this quest as time goes on. Pretty scary/awe-inspiring how powerful forces in the universe are.....
And a rare case where CNN does a better job of reporting it than anywhere else I can find:
Neutrino: Mystery âghost particleâ from space detected in Mediterranean Sea | CNN
Hmm, this article doesnât answer the first question that pops into my head: how can such a particle pass through the universe without making a shit storm in its wake?
Well............it's complicated.......... That knowledge is 'out there', but not well understood. First of all, they have no charge; and their mass is tiny. Like really, really, REALLY tiny. And altho it can (and does) interact with the weak force, the effective range of the weak force is so ridiculously small, that a traveling neutrino will miss essentially all other particles it goes by/thru. Until it doesn't. And you're probably familiar with the fact that they can have three different "flavors", and 'sort of' (not well understood) 'cycle' thru those as they travel wherever they're going. (And it's actually even more complicated than that.) And different methods are needed to sort out the different flavor collisions that do occur (Nobel Prize work). One way to imagine it is to think of a collision "cross-section", not a point. Those are very, very tiny for neutrinos, since they are not affected by the strong force. I once heard it (very roughly) described as throwing a handful of sand thru a large spiderweb. Extremely crude, but the concept is pretty close.
The number of neutrinos passing thru our bodies each second is almost unimaginable. Well, *IS* unimaginable. And you may, or may not, have had a neutrino collision inside your body in your lifetime. Likely not?? Would be an interesting calculation/thought experiment.
I am *not* any kind of authority on this stuff. Used to know it better a couple of different times, but it's too much to keep fresh in one's brainbone very long - not to mention the knowledge of these crittters changes pretty often. Fascinating stuff - as are cosmic rays.
OK, this is the statement in the CNN article that is highly misleading:
âOne way I like to think about it is that the energy of this single neutrino is equivalent to the energy released by splitting not one uranium atom, or ten such atoms, or even a million of them,â said study coauthor Dr. Brad K. Gibson in an email. âThis one little neutrino had as much energy as the energy released by splitting one billion uranium atoms ⌠a mind-boggling number when we compare the energies of our nuclear fission reactors with this one single ethereal neutrino.â
It leaves out a lot of information. 1 billion uranium atoms isn't much. Sounds like a lot but there are 6,000 billion billion uranium atoms in one gram of uranium. So, if my math is good, this neutrino had as much energy as a very large nuclear reactor would produce in 1/500 millionth of a second.
"...30 times more active..."
"...came from outside the Milky Way galaxy..."
Maybe these are neutrinos released in conjunction with the X-ray photons of black holes' emissions...(Feynman diagram)? The black holes in question being the massive massive ancient Quasars
of our universe...
CRISPR 'news', but not really of the "big, big, BIG" variety. Actually more minorly pandering to the "Jurassic Park" crowd:
Hesitate to put this in a thread that has "news" in the title, but I'm gonna let this one in because the ramifications are so major - even tho the proof isn't fully wrapped up yet:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39jj9vkr34o
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8jwj90ejno
The search for life on other planets has always struck me as an odd obsession for a scientist, but I know that it is one of the most interesting to people at large. Anyway ...
Dimethyl sulfide can be produced from methanol and hydrogen sulfide in the presence of an aluminum oxide catalyst. Methanol can be produced in a variety of ways that don't involve living things.
The first article talks about the scientists being 99.7% certain of their results, seeming to imply that they are 99.7% that simple organisms produced the dimethyl sulfide. On my first reading of the article, I blamed the writer for the sensational interpretation. But, on reading it again, it's the scientists who are pushing the idea:
"There is still a 0.3% chance that it might be a statistical fluke," Prof Madhusudhan said. Suggesting life may exist on another planet was "a big claim if true", he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme, adding: "So we want to be really, really thorough, and make more observations, and get the evidence to the level that there is less than a one-in-a-million chance of it being a fluke."
Good lord.
The "obsession" has always seem just a bit overblown to me, too - but I understand it. And you are correct that it's the scientists that seem to be pushing the narrative. And yet.............that *is*, and has been, a key "human interest" story forever - almost literally. The "Are we alone?" question, which *may* also have religious twists/angles. One in my own family had been following the exoplanet search, while I was only amused by it. I mean, after all, we know they're there; we know (to about 10+ "sigmas") that there are planets "somewhere out there" in the goldilocks zone. So seeing these giant exoplanets close to stars, with zero chance of having 'normal' life on them, was just of (almost) no interest to me. But I guess ya gotta walk before you can run. But now we *are* getting incrementally closer, with this amazing spectroscopy, to seeing more of these absorption signals. And with more data to see as more targets are analyzed, more compounds to be seen (almost certainly), I do think this 'sense' (from the second article I linked) will continue to grow and find purchase. I guess we'll see đ, pun intended.
It would have been 'nice' if they had 'splained the sigmas to the non-science/math crowd, standard deviations, etc. - but I guess that's a decimal too far. đ LOL.
Edit/addendum: As to the scientists.............as you well know, Buzz, when one spends years or decades on a project, one can get enamored with the prospects, theories, etc. They 'want' their efforts to yield fruit. Hopefully they aren't letting that 'ambition' color their interpretation of their data. Again, we'll see đ.
With two trillion galaxies each with billions of stars, of course we are not alone. Simple math would indicate that even an accidental combination of atoms, elements, etc. would manage to produce several thousand civilizations. The scary part is that most of them may be more advanced than ours by several thousand, if not millions of years.
That is why people are interested.
Hard to argue with that math............BUT.....we don't *really* know the odds of each of the needed steps to get from the "chemical soup" to Bruce/Kaitlyn Jenner, or MrFixit or mrbuck, for examples. We've got guesses; but, for now at least, they're just very educated guesses.
You still have that cute little cowgirl outfit, sis? The one with the lasso? mrbuck would like that.
I don't have enough biochem knowledge to follow...
The Fermi Paradox thing pops up just in my headbone over and over and over..............even moreso since the plague came to town. SOOOO many ways for civilizations - the ones that actually get rolling well enough - to reach their end point - either from within, or from without. It's something that deeply intrigues me.
VERY VERY big news on the archeogenetics/paleoanthropology front....... Some genetic material ('only' mitochondrial DNA, not nuclear; and some protein fragments) from Harbin man. We've been waiting on this news for a while, and this result was somewhat expected, but truly unknown definitively.
Ancient DNA reveals âDragon Manâ fossilâs true identity | CNN
Denisovan mitochondrial DNA from dental calculus of the >146,000-year-old Harbin cranium: Cell
The proteome of the late Middle Pleistocene Harbin individual | Science
Expect more news to gradually follow, as researchers have been reevaluating old fossil samples in collections around the world, for possible Denisovan ancestry - unimagined at the time of collection.
Not much (yet) big news.......but certainly news of import - with much more coming in a few hours:
With the earth being flat, we can only see out in one direction. What's on the other side? (I'm not convinced it's just turtles)
Can they produce a picture that we could put 3-D glasses on and get some sort of perspective? I mean, a galaxy here, a meteor there, Milky Way stars?