Official "Science News" Thread

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

For the history around that story, I highly recommend Dava Sobel's Longitude to anyone who's not yet read it.

I second that!

[kladner]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/...-more-sociable

What happens when you give an octopus MDMA? It sounds like a question that might flit through the meandering mind of someone who had been dabbling in psychedelics. But now the matter has become the focus of an unlikely-sounding scientific experiment to uncover the ancient origins of social behaviour.

By showing that the normally antisocial sea creature became friendly and tactile after being given MDMA, also known as ecstasy, scientists believe they have made a link between the social behaviours of humans and a species from which we are separated by more than 500m years of evolution.

[masser]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018...mon-diet-tips/

[rogue]

Sex, Lies, and Grappling Hooks: How Parasitic Beetles Trick Bees

Scientists Gave MDMA to Octopuses—and What Happened Was Profound

What "Ouija" actually means, and how the game has changed

The ‘Real You’ is a Myth

These underwater kidnappers wear sea snails like backpacks

Hey, Spock! Real-Life 'Planet Vulcan' Discovered

The Couple Who Helped Decode Dyslexia

[rogue]

Discovery of Galileo’s long-lost letter shows he edited his heretical ideas to fool the Inquisition

DEXTEROUS NEANDERTHALS: OUR ANCIENT RELATIVES HAD THE HANDS OF PRECISION WORKERS

558m-year-old fossils identified as oldest known animal

Why Helicopters Are Flying Mountain Goats Over Washington State

'Bestie,' 'twerk' among 300 words added to Scrabble dictionary

How does your brain keep the world from disappearing when you blink?

Researchers Uncover the Mathematics of Brain Waves

Unlocking the secret of how the brain encodes speech

[rogue]

Researchers Create New Font That Helps Boost Memory

A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon

He Got Schizophrenia. He Got Cancer. And Then He Got Cured.

10 Problems Only Smart People Have

Fossil of Oldest Flowering Tree in North America Discovered. And It Was Huge.

THE HEROES OF SCIENCE WHO ARE UNLOCKING THE BRAIN

Multiple uses for empty plastic bottles during disaster relief and beyond

Leaving your brain to science: don’t let myths dissuade you

[ewmayer]

o How the mushroom dream of a ‘long-haired hippie’ could help save the world’s bees | The Seattle Times: A study published Thursday details a promising and novel approach to help stop the viruses killing honeybees, which pollinate much of the food we rely on: mushrooms.

o Deep in Human DNA, a Gift From the Neanderthals - The New York Times -- No, it's not the "hold my beer" gene.

o Mysterious Cosmic Rays Shooting from the Ground in Antarctica Could Break Physics - Motherboard

In the early 60s, the Soviet physicist Gurgen Askaryan theorized that when a high energy particle interacted with a dense dielectric medium—a type of insulating material that doesn’t conduct electricity—it would produce a shower of secondary charged particles whose radiation can be detected by standard radio antennas. This interaction, now known as the Askaryan effect, allows physicists to detect particles that hardly interact with normal matter (like neutrinos) by observing their secondary effects.

The goal of the ANITA mission was to use an array of antennas to detect the Askaryan radiation produced from high energy neutrinos interacting with the Antarctic ice sheet. Unlike photons, neutrinos don’t lose their energy as they propagate through the universe. This means that they can carry information from beyond the photon horizon (the limit that photon sources are still detectable from Earth) and provide a window onto the farthest reaches of the universe.

Furthermore, some models of physics that are “Beyond the Standard Model” predict the existence of incredibly small extra dimensions. Some of these theories predict that when cosmic rays interact with ice this produces micro black holes that open into these dimensions, which could be detected via the Askaryan effect.

Although the first ANITA mission didn’t detect any evidence of micro black holes, it did detect the Askaryan effect, the first time this had ever been observed from electron interactions with ice. Yet the researchers working on ANITA also got more than they bargained for when they also detected cosmic rays that appeared to be shooting out of the Antarctic ice sheet.

The first ANITA mission detected two “upward-pointing cosmic ray-like events” during its month-long sojourn above Antarctica. Unlike the cosmic rays that come from space and are reflected off the Antarctic ice sheet, which produce vertically polarized pulses of radiation, the two anomalous cosmic rays had nearly horizontal planes of polarization. This suggested that they either didn’t originate in space—or if they did, the radiation was produced by particles that had traveled all the way through Earth. In either case, this type of cosmic ray had never been observed before.

Got a chuckle out of this:

These deficiencies in the model have led some physicist to begin thinking about physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM). You may have heard of some of these exotic theories, such as string theory or M-theory, but so far there isn’t much evidence to support one theoretical version of BSM physics over another.

The ongoing frustration of the exotic-theorists prompts me to suggest they modify the term to "beyond the damn Standard Model". It's a form of perverse theoretical self-flagellation, it is. :)

[rogue]

Why some fish are really bad at swimming

Science Meets Legend: The Story of Our Search for Bigfoot

How Kindness Changes Your Brain, According To New Research

California’s almond harvest has created a golden opportunity for bee thieves

Time-traveling illusion tricks the brain

Hubble Space Telescope is in trouble after gyroscope failure

The Average Person Can Recognize 5,000 Faces

A Geyser Erupted in Yellowstone and 80 Years of Human Trash Poured Out

[rogue]

How Exercise Might “Clean” the Alzheimer’s Brain

Dream On: Study Shows How the Brain Learns While You Sleep

Largest-ever galaxy supercluster from early universe spotted/

HOW CHICAGO LIFTED ITSELF OUT OF THE SWAMP AND BECAME A MODERN METROPOLIS

The banana is dying. The race is on to reinvent it before it's too late

How do dogs process words? Brain study investigates

For Sale: Haunted Shoes. Very Cursed.

Scientists discover the region of the brain that registers excitement over a preferred food option

Bad Mother Suckers

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by rogue

HOW CHICAGO LIFTED ITSELF OUT OF THE SWAMP AND BECAME A MODERN METROPOLIS

<snip>
While the canal established Chicago as a major city, it also created problems whose solutions required still more engineering. One such issue arrived on April 29, 1849, when the John Drew, from New Orleans, carried cholera into the city. Within hours of the boat’s arrival, its captain and several passengers died. The disease spread rapidly throughout the city, sending physicians rushing from patient to patient to soothe fevers, cramps, and diarrhea. One-tenth of the city’s 29,000 residents contracted the disease and 678 died.
<snip>
So, in 1855, officials mounted a dramatic attempt to rescue their city with another massive engineering project by hiring Ellis Sylvester Chesbrough, an engineer renowned for his work on Boston’s water system, to raise Chicago out of the muck.
<snip>
In 1865, Chesbrough and state officials decided to manage Chicago’s water pollution by enacting an old proposal: making a deep cut through the Illinois and Michigan Canal and, this time, actually reversing the Chicago River and sending the city’s sewage down the canal, away from Lake Michigan.
<snip>

There was a program on public television not long ago that included reversing the Chicago River as a modern marvel. One of the people described Chesbrough like this:

Ellis Chesbrough was the kind of guy who would propose things that people, when they’d hear it, they’d go, ‘You want to do what?'

[ewmayer]

Identifying the source of perytons at the Parkes radio telescope | arXiv.org

That surely must be a strong candidate for "funniest scientific-paper abstract of all time" - rather reminiscent of Penzias and Wilson's reporting of the issues caused by a certain "white dielectric material" in their original CMB detector at Murray Hill, NJ.