Official "Science News" Thread

[science_man_88]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

New Human ‘Organ’ Was Hiding in Plain Sight | National Geographic

There would seem to be much overlap with the meridians of traditional Chinese medicine.

Why didn't they just ask a nephrologist with edema patients.

[ewmayer]

Frog skin secretions offer the first ray of hope in a deadly fungal epidemic | Popular Science

The disease is a skin infection, which is especially problematic for amphibians. Their skin is the entryway for water and electrolytes, and even the gases they need to breathe. Skin care for an amphibian is a matter of life and death.

“There's a disruption to the electrical functioning of the heart and they die from asystolic cardiac arrest,” Voyles says. It’s a kind of heart attack triggered by a chemical imbalance. The disrupted skin doesn’t allow vital components like sodium and potassium to stay in their proper proportions, so the heart stops beating.

How does a frog fight back against such fierce fungal foes? The researchers found that healthy frogs had altered their skin secretions to become more antimicrobial, and better able to fight off the fungal strain. Their study is published in this week’s Science.

The Forgotten Drink That Caffeinated North America for Centuries | Atlas Obscura

Cassina, or black drink, the caffeinated beverage of choice for indigenous North Americans, was brewed from a species of holly native to coastal areas from the Tidewater region of Virginia to the Gulf Coast of Texas. It was a valuable pre-Columbian commodity and widely traded…. William Aiton, an eminent British botanist and horticulturist, director of Kew Gardens, and ‘Gardener to His Majesty,’ is credited with giving cassina the scientific name it bears to this day: Ilex vomitoria. Ilex is the genus commonly known as holly. Vomitoria roughly translates to ‘makes you vomit.’
...
As the royal gardener, Aiton knew some of the richest and most powerful people in the British Empire. One of the most profitable and influential forces in that empire was the East India Company, which held a virtual monopoly on the tea trade. Its officers may well have worried that cassina represented a potential replacement for a lucrative British commodity, especially as it grew abundantly within regions then under the control of Spain and France.

Clever (mis)use of the Linnean naming system by Mr. Aiton in order to smear competition to the British East India Company's flagship product!

And speaking of caffeinated beverages, on the bad-science (or better, bad reading of the science) front:

California requires Starbucks and coffee shops to post cancer warning - Business Insider

[kladner]

California requires Starbucks and coffee shops to post cancer warning - Business Insider

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kladner

California requires Starbucks and coffee shops to post cancer warning

Although this does not involve a food additive, it brings to mind the "Delaney Clause,"

no additive shall be deemed to be safe if it is found to induce cancer when ingested by man or animal, or if it is found, after tests which are appropriate for the evaluation of the safety of food additives, to induce cancer in man or animal

because this (in)famous provision does not make any qualification as to the amount of the additive required to cause cancer. Although, apparently, the FDA did not invoke the Delaney Clause when it took cyclamates off the GRAS list (Generally Regarded As Safe), this particular ban led to a lot of ridicule of the idea of banning something which might cause cancer if you ingested a wholly improbable amount. I mean, geez -- you can die if you drink too much water in too short a time.

Sounds like something similar is going on with acrylamides. When do the cancer warnings go up for French fries, potato chips, biscuits, pastries, and everything else fried, baked, roasted, or braised? Good heavens, those lovely brown bits you scrape off the pan and into the liquid -- carcinogenic?? And here I'm rather fond of them. [Sorry!]

Yessirree, Bob, everything you eat and drink, as well as the air you breathe, all cause cancer. This leads to the conclusion that, if you avoid eating, drinking, and breathing, you won't get cancer. And this conclusion is correct, because you'll be dead within minutes!

BTW, I've seen news stories around Thanksgiving or Christmas, telling people NOT to pour the pan drippings from roasting a turkey down the drain -- it'll clog the pipes. No kidding. But then, they go on to advise people to put the pan drippings in the garbage. Good grief, you can't make turkey gravy without pan drippings! Telling people to throw that ambrosia in the garbage is a crime against humanity, by God!

[VictordeHolland]

Extreme magnification of an individual star at redshift 1.5 by a galaxy-cluster lens
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0430-3
Or if you prefer the DOI link:
doi:10.1038/s41550-018-0430-3

Redshift z = 1.49
That is somthing like 9 Giga lightyears in comoving distance (if I looked at the right graph??)

[rogue]

Newfound 'organ' had been missed by standard method for visualizing anatomy

Alzheimer’s memories could be switched back on with implant

Self-Driving Cars' Most Likely Future: Shared 'Robotaxis'

5 things we’ve learned about Saturn since Cassini died

Algorithms Can’t Tell When They’re Broken–And Neither Can We

Poor grades tied to class times that don’t match our biological clocks

Unhappiness Is a Palate-Cleanser

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by rogue

Algorithms Can’t Tell When They’re Broken–And Neither Can We

So all those of us who have spent a significant portion of our adult lives debugging code have been wasting our time?

[petrw1]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

So all those of us who have spent a significant portion of our adult lives debugging code have been wasting our time?

Some of us prefer to call it "job security".

[ewmayer]

The Crystals That May Have Helped Vikings Navigate Northern Seas | New York Times

If the Vikings oriented their ship with calcite, cordierite or tourmaline at least every three hours, the model showed, they had a 92 to 100 percent chance of getting within sight of Greenland. These are “surprisingly large success rates” for navigating in overcast conditions, the authors noted. The key to sunstone navigation is polarization, a process that filters light rays so they can only move in one plane. Sunlight starts out oscillating in multiple planes, but atmospheric particles create concentric rings of polarized light around the sun, even on cloudy days. Though some animals, like ants and crickets, can detect these patterns, polarization is practically indiscernible to the naked human eye…. The study’s authors hope to settle the score with the ultimate test: a round-trip voyage between Norway and Greenland, navigated by sun compass and sunstones.

Hidden medical text read for the first time in a thousand years | Phys.org

To recycle the limited material available for parchment, 11th-century scribes scrubbed and replaced the original text with layers of calcium, a rudimentary form of white-out, and then wrote a book of psalms on top of the original text. Earlier studies had revealed traces of the text beneath the hymns, but it was difficult to read the original translation of Galen – both texts were written in similar ink and the underlying text had been well-scrubbed.

"Seek ye the Castle aaaaarrrrrrrggghhhhhhhh..."

[retina]

https://phys.org/news/2018-04-quantu...ute-prime.html

Originally Posted by https://phys.org/news/2018-04-quantum-simulator-faster-route-prime.html

One of the interesting things about the new method is that it doesn't use any kind of computer, either classical or quantum. Instead it involves a physical quantum system—a "quantum simulator"—that, when encoded with the number to factor, exhibits a probability distribution of energy values that is equivalent to the probability distribution of the prime factor candidates of the encoded number.

<snip>

The physicists theoretically demonstrated that the proposed quantum simulator can factor numbers that are many orders of magnitude larger than those that have been factored with quantum computers. In their paper, they report the results of using their method to determine the probability distribution of the prime factors of a number with 24 digits. Further, the method does this with far fewer resources than required by classical factoring algorithms.

24 digits isn't particularly exciting, but it is nice to see a new method being explored.

[rogue]

8 things kids born in 2018 will never experience, thanks to technology

New Brain Maps With Unmatched Detail May Change Neuroscience

A letter we've seen millions of times, yet can't write

People use emotion to persuade, even when it could backfire

Aware or unaware: Exploring the brain during unconsciousness

The Mother of All Swipes

Pilgrimage as a Teaching Tool