Official "Science News" Thread

[Nick]

A US university faces a fine of $8,500 for apparently losing a small amount of weapons-grade plutonium.
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said Idaho State University is unable to account for 1 gram (0.03oz) of the material.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44007709

... but they did notice a suspicious-looking DeLorean car during their search

[ET_]

Originally Posted by Nick

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44007709

... but they did notice a suspicious-looking DeLorean car during their search

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_Transfer

[rogue]

The Small Satellites Paving The Way For Low-Cost Exploration Of Deep Space

Decoding the brain's learning machine

Drones can take scientists to strange new places—like inside whale snot

Dan­cer's brains dis­play brain fre­quen­cies linked to emo­tion and memory pro­cesses

Can You Overdose on Happiness?

Artificial Intelligence Is Cracking Open the Vatican's Secret Archives

Facial recognition may be coming to a police body camera near you

Researchers Find Fear and Courage Switches in Brain

[tServo]

From Rogue:

Facial recognition may be coming to a police body camera near you

That is, IF they turn them on

[rogue]

To Help The Body Fight Chronic Disease, Scientists Learn To Decode Brain Signals

Cells Talk in a Language That Looks Like Viruses

Harvard scientists reveal the genetic roadmap to building an entire organism from a single cell

Facebook’s AI-created virtual memories are magically haunting

Math Explains How Brain Makes Sense of Sounds

Scientists train spider to jump on demand to discover secrets of animal movement

The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period

Hail the matriarch: the world’s only colony-building beetle

Troubled Times for Alternatives to Einstein’s Theory of Gravity

How can we be sure AI will behave? Perhaps by watching it argue with itself.

[rogue]

How Income Affects the Brain

The Cerebral Mystique

Smarter Brains Run on Sparsely Connected Neurons

MAKING MUSIC BUILDS A MORE EFFICIENT BRAIN

Scientists Made Snails Remember Something That Never Happened to Them

The Weird Science Behind Chain Restaurant Menus

How We Perceive Color

The Weird, Dangerous, Isolated Life of the Saturation Diver

How the Father of Computer Science Decoded Nature’s Mysterious Patterns

[ewmayer]

Every Cell in Your Body Has the Same DNA. Except It Doesn’t | NYT

Fascinating stuff.

[retina]

Eficient (sic) cost-effective cooling solution for high performance chips

"Our new impingement chip cooler is actually a 3D printed 'showerhead' that sprays the cooling liquid directly onto the bare chip," ...

[rogue]

The Case Against Geniuses

The Future of AI Depends on High-School Girls

You can learn a lot about health — and crime — through sweat

THE LINK BETWEEN CREATIVITY AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

A Chemist Shines Light on a Surprising Prime Number Pattern

The Way You See Color Depends on the Language You Speak

A new study links early childhood obesity to lower IQ scores

Can simulating evolution on a computer explain our enormous brains?

Gamers Built a “Digital Museum” That Unlocked New Secrets of the Brain

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by rogue

A Chemist Shines Light on a Surprising Prime Number Pattern

From the article: "The main advantage of the prime diffraction pattern, said Jonathan Keating of the University of Bristol, is that ‘it is evocative’ and ‘makes a connection with different ways of thinking.’ But the esteemed number theorist Andrew Granville of the University of Montreal called Torquato and company’s work ‘pretentious’ and ‘just a regurgitation of known ideas.'"

[ewmayer]

Personally, I dont understand this nitrogen fixation on the part of the scientific community, but a couple articles on the topic:

Plants repeatedly got rid of their ability to obtain their own nitrogen | Ars Technica

Plants, like all living things, need nitrogen to build amino acids and other essential biomolecules. Although nitrogen is the most abundant element in air, the molecular form of nitrogen found there is largely unreactive. To become useful to plants, that nitrogen must first be "fixed," or busted out of its molecular form and linked with hydrogen to make ammonia. The plants can then get at it by catalyzing reactions with ammonia.

But plants can't fix nitrogen. Bacteria can.

Some legumes and a few other plants have a symbiotic relationship with certain bacterial species. The plants build specialized structures on their roots called nodules to house and feed the bacteria, which in turn fix nitrogen for the plants and assure them a steady supply of ammonia. Only 10 families of plants have the ability to do this, and even within these families, most genera opt out. Ever since the symbiosis was discovered in 1888, plant geneticists have wondered: why? If you could ensure a steady supply of nitrogen for use, why wouldn't you?
...
"Use it or lose it" applies to genes as much as (or maybe even more than) anything else. Genes involved in biological processes are lost if the trait they confer is unused or unnecessary. For most of the time that plants have lived on this planet, nitrogen has been limiting, so symbiosis should have been favored. But it was jettisoned at least eight different times. Maybe it was too energetically costly for most plants to keep: maybe housing and feeding the bacteria wasn't worth it, or non-nitrogen fixing bacteria took advantage and moved in.

Mystery of Earth's Missing Nitrogen Solved - Scientific American

Experts used to think nearly all nitrogen in soil came directly from the atmosphere, sequestered by microbes or dissolved in rain. But it turns out scientists have been overlooking another major source of this element, which is crucial to plant growth: up to a quarter of the nitrogen in soil and plants seeps out of bedrock, according to a study published in April in Science.

Apart from a few scattered studies, “the [research] community never thought to look at the rocks,” says lead study author Benjamin Z. Houlton, a global ecologist at the University of California, Davis. This discovery has implications beyond understanding the planet’s nitrogen cycle; it could also alter climate models. It suggests plants in certain areas may be able to grow faster and larger than previously thought and could thus absorb more carbon dioxide, Houlton says.
...
William Schlesinger, a biogeochemist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., who was not involved in the study, says he once measured substantial nitrogen levels in rocks but did not “put two and two together.” He had assumed this was not a widespread or important source of the soil nutrient. But Schlesinger cautions against overinterpreting the significance of the new findings, noting that the amount of nitrogen entering soils via synthetic fertilizers dwarfs that from rocks. He thinks the discovery should be incorporated into global models for nitrogen and carbon but adds, “I don’t think it’s going to rewrite our understanding of climate change.”