mersenneforum.org - Official "Science News" Thread

A heaping helping of science-story goodness for your perusal pleasure in advance of the holidays:

o [url=https://phys.org/news/2018-12-amoeba-approximate-solutions-np-hard-problem.html]Amoeba finds approximate solutions to NP-hard problem in linear time[/url] | PhysOrg -- we need a catchy name for this burgeoning new field of microorganismic computation ... perhaps "primordial-soup-based computation"? "Slime-mold-pseudopod computation" is also good, but alas the initialism 'SMP' is already commonly used in the field to stand for symmetric multiprocessing. I kinda like the sound of "Traveling Salesamoeba Problem", though. And speaking of slimy goo...

o [url=https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07735-w]‘Transmissible’ Alzheimer’s theory gains traction[/url] | [i]Mouse tests confirm that sticky proteins associated with degenerative brain diseases can be transferred — but researchers say risks for humans are likely to be minimal.[/i]
[quote]Neuroscientists have amassed more evidence for the hypothesis that sticky proteins that are a hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases can be transferred between people under particular conditions — and cause new damage in a recipient’s brain.They stress that their research does not suggest that disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease are contagious, but it does raise concern that certain medical and surgical procedures pose a risk of transmitting such proteins between humans, which might lead to brain disease decades later.[/quote]
But on the good-news front re. amyloidosis, we have

o [url=https://science.slashdot.org/story/18/12/20/2310214/breakthrough-ultrasound-treatment-to-reverse-dementia-moves-to-human-trials]Breakthrough Ultrasound Treatment To Reverse Dementia Moves To Human Trials[/url] - Slashdot
[quote]An extraordinarily promising new technique using ultrasound to clear the toxic protein clumps thought to cause dementia and Alzheimer's disease is moving to the first phase of human trials next year. The innovative treatment has proven successful across several animal tests and presents an exciting, drug-free way to potentially battle dementia. The ultrasound treatment was first developed back in 2015 at the University of Queensland. The initial research was working to find a way to use ultrasound to temporarily open the blood-brain barrier with the goal of helping dementia-battling antibodies better reach their target in the brain. However, early experiments with mice surprisingly revealed the targeted ultrasound waves worked to clear toxic amyloid protein plaques from the brain without any additional therapeutic drugs.[/quote]

o [url=https://www.quantamagazine.org/milestone-experiment-proves-quantum-communication-really-is-faster-20181219/]Milestone Experiment Proves Quantum Communication Really Is Faster[/url] | Quanta Magazine[quote]This characteristic of quantum information — that it carries the potential to be read many ways but can ultimately be read only one way — dramatically reduces the amount of information that needs to be transmitted to solve the sampling matching problem. If Alice needs to send Bob 100 classical bits to ensure he can answer his question, she can accomplish the same objective in about 10 qubits, or quantum bits.

“It’s the sort of proof-of-principle stuff you have to do if you’re going to build up a real quantum network,” said Graeme Smith, a physicist at JILA in Boulder, Colorado, who works on quantum technology.

The new experiment is an unalloyed triumph over classical methods. The researchers went into the experiment knowing exactly how much information needed to be transmitted classically to solve the problem. They then indisputably demonstrated that it could be solved in a far leaner fashion by quantum means.[/quote]

o [url=https://www.quantamagazine.org/studies-rescue-ligos-gravitational-wave-signal-from-the-noise-20181213/]Studies Rescue LIGO’s Gravitational-Wave Signal From the Noise[/url] | Quanta Magazine

The leader of the skeptics' camp, Niels Bohr Institute emeritus professor Andrew Jackson (not to be confused with the guy on the $20 bill) is, shall we say, as yet unwilling to admit defeat:
[quote]In an email, Jackson called Green and Moffat’s paper, which was published in [i]Physics Letters B[/i] in September, “absolute rubbish.” When asked to elaborate, he appeared to wrongly characterize their argument and didn’t address the most important issues they raised about his team’s work. Jackson also dismissed the second set of findings by Alex Nielsen of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany, and three coauthors, whose paper appeared on the physics preprint site [i]arxiv.org[/i] in November and is under review by the [i]Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics[/i]. “We are in the process of writing a response to this latest paper,” Jackson wrote, so “I will not explain where they (once again) made their mistakes.”[/quote]
To be fair the LIGO team's "Figure 1 fudge" described in the article did leave them open to such seeming correlations being found.

o [url=https://www.wired.com/story/new-disease-next-global-epidemic/]A New Disease Is Testing Us for the Next Global Epidemic[/url] | WIRED
[quote]In the four years that the list has been published, no emerging infection has been serious enough to rise to the level of Disease X: a pathogen that could sweep the world before science catches up. But a new syndrome, acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM, is providing the first proof of the need for that warning. As perplexing to diagnose as it is to treat, AFM is demonstrating how difficult it can be to understand and predict any new disease. And the challenge of tracking an uncommon illness is giving us a glimpse of how our surveillance systems will struggle to counter the world-spanning epidemic that Disease X may turn out to be.

AFM is a polio-like paralysis that has affected almost 500 people in the United States since it first spiked in the late summer of 2014. The victims are overwhelmingly children, and their cases follow a consistent pattern: The victims come down with a mild illness that looks like a cold, recover, and then develop floppy weakness in at least one limb. This paralysis also can affect their breathing or swallowing and the muscles of their neck and face. Imaging studies show lesions in the spinal cord that correspond to the area of the body where the paralysis occurs. The damage seems to be long-lasting: At least some of the children who came down with the first cases four years ago haven’t recovered use of their limbs.

Beyond these known symptoms, AFM poses mystifying questions. Authorities haven’t been able to link it to a single disease organism. The 2014 cases occurred during an outbreak of a virus known as EV-D68, but this year some cases have been attributed to another virus called EV-A71, while many patients have no virus in their systems at all. (Those viruses are distantly related to polio; to be clear, no polio virus has been found in AFM patients.)

There’s no explanation for why the disease occurs in waves: 2014, 2016 and this year were bad years, but there were very few cases in 2015 and 2017. And no one has a solution for its randomness. In cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an entire family will fall ill with a mild respiratory illness, but once it passes, only a single child will develop paralysis while a sibling goes unscathed.

Any one of these cases is devastating to a family—but in aggregate AFM is a rare disease in the US, affecting 1 to 2 people per million nationwide. That makes ramping up research to understand it, or to treat it, unusually challenging. “Even the most experienced medical centers may be seeing only 10 cases of this a year,” says Thomas Clark, a medical epidemiologist and deputy director of the CDC’s division of viral diseases, who is leading the agency’s AFM response.[/quote]

o [url=https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-a-newfound-kingdom-means-for-the-tree-of-life-20181211/]What a Newfound Kingdom Means for the Tree of Life[/url] | Quanta
[quote]The tree of life just got another major branch. Researchers recently found a certain rare and mysterious microbe called a hemimastigote in a clump of Nova Scotian soil. Their subsequent analysis of its DNA revealed that it was neither animal, plant, fungus nor any recognized type of protozoan — that it in fact fell far outside any of the known large categories for classifying complex forms of life (eukaryotes). Instead, this flagella-waving oddball stands as the first member of its own ‘supra-kingdom’ group, which probably peeled away from the other big branches of life at least a billion years ago…. Impressive as this finding about hemimastigotes is on its own, what matters more is that it’s just the latest (and most profound) of a quietly and steadily growing number of major taxonomic additions. Researchers keep uncovering not just new species or classes but entirely new kingdoms of life — raising questions about how they have stayed hidden for so long and how close we are to finding them all.[/quote]