The science behind RHCs liver thread

Just reading Harari and Homo Deus atm. He postulates that we've evolved three forms of humanism to replace religion (or faith, he regards humanism - or all isms, including political isms ) as religions. These are Liberal humanism, socialist/communist liberalism, and evolution/Darwinist liberalism (sort of attached to Nazism and Nietsche in his view). He offers no judgement that I've read so far, butit can be said that all structures are responses to trying to organise huge societal structures when, if truth be told, we're evolutionary only designed to live in groups of of a 100 or so hunter gatherers. Hmmm.

PS, poor Darwin - every ****er with a zealotry, closed minded belief system has used him as the justification for inflicting their wishes on their fellow humans.

 

I'm not remotely well read in the area but I am concerned that we've entered another phase where an individuals opinion is sacrosanct regardless of how it was formed. As a species this is unproductive.

Regarding the article..Having studied politics, history and English Lit. I recognise the claims made in it. It's why I eventually dropped English as we seemed to be discussing the post modernist, feminist Marxist etc interpretations of texts more than the the text it's itself..many of the texts predated these ideas..IMO this belonged more in a politics or sociology class than a literature classroom.

Having spoken with younger ones about their history lessons at school it concerns me there's been a similar move away from an empirical approach to a humanities tilt.

While I think the results of a study of history can be discussed in these terms actually approaching such a study with an active bias leads to revisionism.

 

Btw having watched the Brain series as suggested. Does anyone know of any experiments carried out attempting to send signals directly to the brain outside of its standard senses..beyond the limited colour spectrum or sound wave spectrum for example. Say infrared rather than through a device that creates an image for the eye...allows the brain/eye to send/receive information.

I'm thinking Geordie La Forge visor here lol

 

I don't, but there is exciting research with microchips in blind peoples' brains linked with glasses (which will eventually become contact lenses) that can see light and dark and shades. No definition, really, but that will inevitably come.

I remember when I did psychology A level, in the Gross textbook there were examples of people who'd had eyesight restored, and some who'd gained vision having been born blind. Their brains had to learn to 'fill in the gaps', which is something our visual cortexes do all the while without us knowing. Do you know babies start seeing things upside down, before the brain learns to adjust things?

Fascinating stuff.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/...ted-scotland-animals-flee-melting-arctic-ice/

One for Sisu.

 

CRISPR had a life before it became a gene-editing tool
Natural CRISPR systems immunize bacteria from invading viruses, and more
BY
ROSIE MESTEL
9:00AM, APRIL 5, 2017

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WEAPONS OF MASS EVOLUTION Bacteria and archaea armed with CRISPR systems have been at war with viruses for eons. Here, hordes of viruses known as phages assault a bacterium to turn it into a virus-making factory.

AMI IMAGES/SCIENCE SOURCE

Magazine issue: Vol. 191 No. 7, April 15, 2017, p. 22

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It is the dazzling star of the biotech world: a powerful new tool that can deftly and precisely alter the structure of DNA. It promises cures for diseases, sturdier crops, malaria-resistant mosquitoes and more. Frenzy over the technique — known as CRISPR/Cas9 — is in full swing. Every week, new CRISPR findings are unfurled in scientific journals. In the courts, universities fight over patents. The media report on the breakthroughs as well as the ethics of this game changer almost daily.

But there is a less sequins-and-glitter side to CRISPR that’s just as alluring to anyone thirsty to understand the natural world. The biology behind CRISPR technology comes from a battle that has been raging for eons, out of sight and yet all around us (and on us, and in us).

The CRISPR editing tool has its origins in microbes — bacteria and archaea that live in obscene numbers everywhere from undersea vents to the snot in the human nose. For billions of years, these single-celled organisms have been at odds with the viruses — known as phages — that attack them, invaders so plentiful that a single drop of seawater can hold 10 million. And natural CRISPR systems (there are many) play a big part in this tussle. They act as gatekeepers, essentially cataloging viruses that get into cells. If a virus shows up again, the cell — and its offspring — can recognize and destroy it. Studying this system will teach biologists much about ecology, disease and the overall workings of life on Earth.

But moving from the simple, textbook story into real life is messy. In the few years since the defensive function of CRISPR systems was first appreciated, microbiologists have busied themselves collecting samples, conducting experiments and crunching reams of DNA data to try to understand what the systems do. From that has come much elegant physiology, a mass of complexity, surprises aplenty — and more than a little mystery.

Spoiled yogurt
The biology is complicated, and its basic nuts and bolts took some figuring out. There are two parts to CRISPR/Cas systems: the CRISPR bit and the Cas bit. The CRISPR bit — or “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” — was stumbled on in the late 1980s and 1990s. Scientists then slowly pieced the story together by studying microbes that thrive in animals’ guts and in salt marshes, that cause the plague and that are used to make delicious yogurt and cheese.

None of the scientists knew what they were dealing with at first. They saw stretches of DNA with a characteristic pattern: short lengths of repeated sequence separated by other DNA sequences now known as spacers. Each spacer was unique. Because the roster of spacers could differ from one cell to the next in a given microbe species, an early realization was that these differences could be useful for forensic “typing” — investigators could tell whether food poisoning cases were linked, or if someone had stolen a company’s yogurt starter culture.

Close encounters
Bacteria use CRISPR/Cas as a form of immunity or self-defense against invaders. A bacterium builds a library of genetic material from past invaders so that, if the same invader attacks again, the bacterium and its offspring can disable it.

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L. MARRAFFINI/NATURE 2015, ADAPTED BY J. HIRSHFELD


But curious findings piled up. Some of those spacers, it turned out, matched the DNA of phages. In a flurry of reports in 2005, scientists showed, to name one example, that strains of the lactic acid bacterium Streptococcus thermophilus contained spacers that matched genetic material of phages known to infect Streptococcus. And the more spacers a strain had, the more resistant it was to attack by phages.

This began to look a lot like learned or adaptive immunity, akin to our own antibody system: After exposure to a specific threat, your immune system remembers and you are thereafter resistant to that threat. In a classic experiment published in Science in 2007, researchers at the food company Danisco showed it was so. They could see new spacers added when a phage infected a culture of S. thermophilus. Afterward, the bacterium was immune to the phage. They could artificially engineer a phage spacer into the CRISPR DNA and see resistance emerge; when they took the spacer away, immunity was lost.

This was handy intel for an industry that could find whole vats of yogurt-making bacteria wiped out by phage infestations. It was an exciting time scientifically and commercially, says Rodolphe Barrangou of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who did a lot of the Danisco work. “It was not just discovering a cool system, but also uncovering a powerful phage-resistance technology for the dairy industry,” he says.

The second part of the CRISPR/Cas system is the Cas bit: a set of genes located near the cluster of CRISPR spacers. The DNA sequences of these genes strongly suggested that they carried instructions for proteins that interact with DNA or RNA in some fashion — sticking to it, cutting it, copying it, unraveling it. When researchers inactivated one Cas gene or another, they saw immunity falter. Clearly, the two bits of the system — CRISPR and Cas — were a team.

It took many more experiments to get to today’s basic model of how CRISPR/Cas systems fight phages — and not just phages. Other types of foreign DNA can get into microbes, including circular rings called plasmids that shuttle from cell to cell and DNA pieces called transposable elements, which jump around within genomes. CRISPRs can fend off these intruders, as well as keep a microbe’s genome in tidy order.

The process works like this: A virus injects its genetic material into the cell. Sensing this danger, the cell selects a little strip of that genetic material and adds it to the spacers in the CRISPR cluster. This step, known as immunization or adaptation, creates a list of encounters a cell has had with viruses, plasmids or other foreign bits of DNA over time — neatly lined up in reverse chronological order, newest to oldest.

Older spacers eventually get shed, but a CRISPR cluster can grow to be long — the record holder to date is 587 spacers in Haliangium ochraceum, a salt-loving microbe isolated from a piece of seaweed. “It’s like looking at the last 600 shots you had in your arm,” says Barrangou. “Think about that.”

New spacer in place, the microbe is now immunized. Later comes targeting. If that same phage enters the cell again, it’s recognized. The cell has made RNA copies of the relevant spacer, which bind to the matching spot on the genome of the invading phage. That “guide RNA” leads Cas proteins to target and snip the phage DNA, defanging the intruder.

All stripes of CRISPR
Scientists have divided the array of known CRISPR systems into five types and 16 subtypes based on DNA sequence data. The distribution of types differs in archaea and bacteria.

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K.S. MAKAROVA ET AL/NAT. REV. MICROBIO. 2015, ADAPTED BY J. HIRSHFELD


Researchers now know there are a confetti-storm of different CRISPR systems, and the list continues to grow. Some are simple — such as the CRISPR/Cas9 system that’s been adapted for gene editing in more complex creatures (SN: 4/15/17, p. 16) — and some are elaborate, with many protein workhorses deployed to get the job done.

Those who are sleuthing the evolution of CRISPR systems are deciphering a complex story. The part of the CRISPR toolbox involved in immunity (adding spacers after phages inject their genetic material) seems to have originated from a specific type of transposable element called a casposon. But the part responsible for targeting has multiple origins — in some cases, it’s another type of transposable element. In others, it’s a mystery.

The downsides
Given the power of CRISPR systems to ward off foes, one might think every respectable microbe out there in the soils, vents, lakes, guts and nostrils of this planet would have one. Not so.

Numbers are far from certain, partly because science hasn’t come close to identifying all the world’s microbes, let alone probe them all for CRISPRs. But the scads of microbial genetic data accrued so far throw up interesting trends.

Tallies suggest that CRISPR systems are far more prevalent in known archaea than in known bacteria — such systems exist in roughly 90 percent of archaea and about 35 percent of bacteria, says Eugene Koonin, a computational evolutionary biologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Archaea and bacteria, though both small and single-celled, are on opposite sides of the tree of life.

Perhaps more significantly, Koonin says, almost all the known microbes that live in superhot environments have CRISPRs. His group’s math models suggest that CRISPR systems are most useful when microbes encounter a big enough variety of viruses to make adaptive memory worth having. But if there’s too much variety, and viruses are changing very fast, CRISPRs don’t really help — because you’d never see the same virus again. The superhot ecosystems, he says, seem to have a stable amount of phage diversity that’s not too high or low.

And CRISPR systems have downsides. Just as people can develop autoimmune reactions against their own bodies, bacteria and archaea can accidentally make CRISPR spacers from bits of their own DNA — and risk chewing up their own genetic material. Researchers have seen this happen. “No immunity comes without a cost,” says Rotem Sorek, a microbial genomicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

But mistakes are rare, and Sorek and his colleagues recently figured out why in the microbe they study. The researchers reported in Nature in 2015 that CRISPR spacers are created from linear bits of DNA — and phage DNA is linear when it enters cells. The bacterial chromosome is protected because of its circular form. Should it break and become linear for a spell, such as when it’s being replicated, it contains signals that ward off the Cas proteins.

There are other negatives to CRISPR systems. It’s not always a bonus to keep out phages and other invaders, which can sometimes bring in useful things. Escherichia coli O157:H7, of food poisoning fame, can make humans sick because of toxin genes it harbors that were brought in by a phage, to name just one of myriad examples. Even CRISPR systems themselves are spread around the microbial kingdom via phages, plasmids or transposable elements.

For microbes that lack CRISPR systems, there are many other ways to repel foreign DNA — as much as 10 percent of a microbial genome may be devoted to hawkish warfare, and new defense systems are still being uncovered.

Countermeasures
The war between bacteria and phages is two-sided, of course. Just as a microbe wants to keep doors shut to protect its genetic integrity and escape destruction, the phage wants in.

And so the phage fights back against CRISPRs. It genetically morphs into forms that CRISPRs no longer recognize. Or it designs bespoke artillery. Microbiologist Joe Bondy-Denomy, now at the University of California, San Francisco, happened upon such customized weapons as a grad student in the lab of molecular microbiologist Alan Davidson at the University of Toronto. The team knew that the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which lives in soil and water and can cause dangerous infections, has a vigorous CRISPR system. Yet some phages didn’t seem fazed by it.

That’s because those phages have small proteins that will bind to and interfere with this or that part of the CRISPR machinery, such as the Cas enzyme that cuts phage DNA. The binding disables the CRISPR system, the researchers reported in 2015 in Nature. Bondy-Denomy and others have since found anti-CRISPR genes in other phages and other kinds of interloping DNA. The genes are so common, Davidson says, that he wonders how many CRISPR systems are truly active.

In an especially bizarre twist, microbiologist Kimberley Seed of the University of California, Berkeley found a phage that carries its own CRISPR system and uses it to fight back against the cholera bacterium it invades, she and colleagues reported in 2013 in Nature. It chops up a segment of bacterial DNA that normally inhibits phage infection.

Of course, in this never-ending scuffle one would expect the microbes to again fight back against the phages. “It’s something I often get asked: ‘Great, the anti-CRISPRs are there, so where are the anti-anti-CRISPRs?’ ” Bondy-Denomy says. Nobody has found such things yet.

Evolution drivers
It’s one thing to study CRISPR systems in well-controlled lab settings, or in just one type of microbe. It’s another to understand what all the various CRISPRs do to shape the ecosystem of a bubbling hot spring, human gut, diseased lung or cholera-tainted river. Estimates of CRISPR abundance could drop as more sampling is done, especially of dark horse microbes that researchers know little about.

In a 2016 report in Nature Communications, for example, geomicrobiologist Jill Banfield of UC Berkeley and colleagues detected 1,724 microbes in Colorado groundwater that had been treated to boost the abundance of types that are difficult to isolate. CRISPR systems were much rarer in this sample than in databases of better-known microbes.

Tallying CRISPRs is just the start, of course. Microbial communities — including those inside our own guts, where there are plenty of CRISPR systems and phages — are dynamic, not frozen. How do CRISPRs shape the evolution of phages and microbes in the wild? Banfield’s and Barrangou’s labs teamed up to watch as S. thermophilus and phages incubated together in a milk medium for hundreds of days. The team saw bacterial numbers fall as phages invaded; then bacteria acquired spacers against the phage and rallied — and phage numbers fell downward in turn. Then new phage populations sprang up, immune to S. thermophilusdefenses because of genetic changes. In this way, the researchers reported in 2016 in mBio, CRISPRs are “one of the fundamental drivers of phage evolution.”

CRISPR systems can be picked up, dropped, then picked up again by bacteria and archaea over time, perhaps as conditions and needs change. The bacterium Vibrio cholerae is an example of this dynamism, as Seed and colleagues reported in 2015 in the Journal of Bacteriology. The older, classical strains of this medical blight harbored CRISPRs, but these strains went largely extinct in the wild in the 1960s. Strains that cause cholera today do not have CRISPRs.

Nobody knows why, Seed says. But scientists stress that it is a mischaracterization to paint the relationship between microbes and phages, plasmids and transposable elements as a simplistic war. Phages don’t always wreak havoc; they can slip their genomes quietly into the bacterial chromosome and coexist benignly, getting copied along with the host DNA. Phages, plasmids and transposable elements can confer new, useful traits — sometimes even essential ones. Indeed, such movement of DNA across species and strains is at the heart of how bacteria and archaea evolve.

So it’s about finding balance. “If you incorporate too much foreign DNA, you cannot maintain a species,” says Luciano Marraffini, a molecular microbiologist at the Rockefeller University in New York City whose work first showed that DNA-cutting was key to CRISPR systems. But you do need to let some DNA in, and it’s likely that some CRISPR systems permit this: The system he studies in Staphylococcus epidermidis, for example, only goes after phages that are in their cell-killing, or lytic, state, he and colleagues reported in 2014 in Nature.

Story continues after graphic

Two roads to travel
Phages don’t always destroy the microbes they invade. Many have two states: They can co-opt a cell’s protein-, RNA- and DNA-making systems to mass produce more of themselves, in what is called the “lytic” cycle, ultimately killing the cell. Or they can insert their genetic material into the host chromosome, to be passively copied each time the cell divides, in the “lysogenic” cycle. That incorporated genetic material can sometimes be useful to the bacterium.

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E. OTWELL


Sources: Ron Feiner et al/Nat. Rev. Microbiol. 2015; “The Lytic and Lysogenic Cycles of Bacteriophages.” Boundless Biology, August 2016. bit.ly/boundless-phage

Beyond defense
One thing is very clear about CRISPR systems: They are perplexing in many ways. For a start, the spacers in a microbe should reflect its own, individual story of the phages it has encountered. So you’d think there would be local pedigrees, that a bacterium sampled in France would have a different spacer cluster from a bacterium sampled in Argentina. This is not what researchers always see.

Take the nasty P. aeruginosa. Rachel Whitaker, a microbial population biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studies Pseudomonas samples collected from people with cystic fibrosis, whose lungs develop chronic infections. She’s found no sign that two patients living close to each other carry more-similar P. aeruginosa CRISPRs than two patients thousands of miles apart. Yet surely one would expect nearby CRISPRs to be closer matches, because the Pseudomonas would have encountered similar phages. “It’s very weird,” Whitaker says.

Others have seen the same thing in heat-loving bacteria sampled from very distant bubbling hot springs. It’s as if scientists don’t truly understand how bacteria spread around the world — there could be a strong effect of far-flung passage by air or wind, says Konstantin Severinov, who studies CRISPR systems at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

Invaders with benefits

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NIAID/FLICKR (CC BY 2.0); Y_TAMBE/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 3.0)


Sometimes there are rewards when foreign DNA gets into a cell. The ability to evade antibiotics and resist heavy metals has been traced to genes from phages, plasmids and transposable elements.

• Staphylococcus aureus (top left), Salmonella typhimurium and other disease-causing bacteria have become resistant to antibiotic drugs with the help of resistance genes carried in on plasmids, transposable elements and phage DNA. Multiple genes are often transferred together.
• Escherichia coli O157:H7 contains Shiga toxins, a gift from phage DNA, among other imported traits that make the bacterium dangerous.
• Strains of E. coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa (top right), Bacillus subtilisand others are resistant to heavy metals, such as mercury, arsenic and chromium. These bacteria are found in polluted waters and in hospitals, where heavy metals are used as disinfectants. Plasmids and transposable elements often transferred the resistance.
• Rhizobium leguminosarum and other rhizobia can pull nitrogen from the air and make it available to plants because of genes on plasmids that the bacteria harbor.

— Rosie Mestel

Another weirdness is the differing vigor of CRISPR systems. Some are very active. Molecular biologist Devaki Bhaya of the Carnegie Institution for Science’s plant biology department at Stanford University sees clear signs that spacers are frequently added and dropped in the cyanobacteria of Yellowstone’s hot springs, for example. But other systems are sluggish, and E. coli, that classic workhorse of genetics research, has a respectable-looking CRISPR system — that is switched off.

It may have been off for a long time. Some 42,000 years ago, a baby woolly mammoth died in what is now northwestern Siberia. The remains, found in 2007, were so well-preserved that the intestines were intact and E. coli DNA could be extracted.

In research published in Molecular Ecology in January, Severinov’s team found surprising similarities between the spacers in the mammoth-derived E. coli CRISPR cluster and those in modern-day E. coli. “There was no turnover in all that time,” Severinov marvels. If the CRISPR system isn’t active, why does E. coli bother to keep it?

That quandary leads neatly to what some researchers refer to as an intellectually “scandalous situation.”

In some cases, the genetic sequence of spacers nicely matches phage DNA. But overall, only a fraction (around 1 to 2 percent) of the spacers scientists know about have been matched to a virus or a plasmid. In E. coli, the spacers don’t match common, classic phages known to infect the bacterium. “Is it the case that there is a huge, unknown amount of viral dark matter in the world?” says Koonin — or are phages evolving superfast? “Or is it something completely different?”

Faced with this conundrum, some researchers strongly suspect — and have evidence — that CRISPR systems may do more than defend; they may have other jobs. Communication, perhaps. Or turning genes on and off.

But some microbes’ CRISPR sequences do make sense, especially if looking at the spacers most recently added, and others may be clues to phages still undiscovered. So even as they scratch their heads about many things CRISPR, scientists are also excited by the stories CRISPR clusters can tell about the viruses and other bits of DNA that bacteria and archaea encounter and that they choose, for whatever reason, to note for the record. What do microbes pay attention to? What do they ignore?

CRISPRs offer a bright new window on such questions and, indeed, already are unearthing novel phages and facts about who infects whom in the microscopic world.

“We can catalog everything that’s out there. But we don’t really know what matters,” says Bondy-Denomy. “CRISPRs can help us understand.”

 

Great book read whilst I was in hospital 'Antimatter' by Frank Close. Paul Dirac was a genius

 

He thought he had intestinal worms. What he actually had was Chinese food!
By Seriously Science | April 6, 2017 6:00 am
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Image: Flickr/Roland Tanglao

If my body could play an April Fool’s joke on me, my guess it would be this one. Here, a 32 year old patient was horrified to notice “worms” in his poop. And like any sane person would, he carefully fished a sample of the worm-laden poop out of the toilet to bring to his doctor. Given the patient’s travel history, the doctor suspected a hookworm infection, and sent the sample off to the lab. Turns out the “worms” were mung bean sprouts from the previous night’s Chinese food. As the authors note: “When analyzing stool contents, even if parasitic infections are suspected, taking a careful history of the patient’s diet can help make a diagnosis. In this case, microbiologic analysis might have been avoided had a connection been made between the stool contents and the patient’s dinner the night before. Knowledge of the different varieties of bean sprouts could also have aided in making the final diagnosis.”

 

BBC 4 tonight. Jim Al-Khalili presents a documentary on The Beginning (of the universe). Should be excellent. The Large Hadron Collider features

 

Squabbles in star nurseries result in celestial fireworks
Images of streamers of gas and dust reveal power of explosive interactions
BY
ASHLEY YEAGER
9:00AM, APRIL 7, 2017

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STELLAR FIRECRACKER An interaction of young stars in Orion Molecular Core 1 ripped apart a stellar nursery, sending stars, gas and dust shooting into space. In this image — a composite of data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and the Gemini South telescope, both in Chile — gas moving quickly toward Earth is blue, while slower-moving gas is redder.

J. BALLY; B. SAXTON (NRAO, AUI, NSF), ALMA (ESO, NAOJ, NRAO); GEMINI OBSERVATORY/AURA

• An interstellar game of chicken between two young stars about 500 years ago has produced some fantastic celestial fireworks, new images released on April 7 by the European Southern Observatory reveal.

Whether or not the stellar duo collided is unclear. But their close encounter sent hundreds of streamers of gas, dust and other young stars shooting into space like an exploding firecracker. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, John Bally of the University of Colorado Boulder and colleagues made the first measurements of the velocities of carbon monoxide gas in the streamers. From the data, they identified the spot where the stars probably interacted and determined that the encounter ripped apart the stellar nursery in which the stars were born. Such a cataclysmic event flung nursery debris into space at speeds faster than 540,000 kilometers an hour.

The dueling stars were born in a stellar nursery called Orion Molecular Core 1, about 1,500 light-years from Earth behind the Orion Nebula. There, gas weighing 100 suns collapses under its own gravity, making the material dense enough for embryotic stars to take shape. Gravity can pull those stellar seeds toward each other, with some grazing or colliding with each other and violently erupting. In this case, the encounter produced a kick as powerful as the energy the sun emits over 10 million years.

This explosion may have initially released a burst of infrared light lasting years to decades. If so, such spars among young stars might explain mysterious infrared flashes observed in other galaxies, the scientists suggest.

 

Huge Large Hadron Collider experiment gets 'heart transplant'
By Paul RinconScience editor, BBC News website

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  Image copyrightCERN

Image captionReplacing the CMS's pixel detector should help scientists search for signs of new physics
One of the Large Hadron Collider's huge experiments has been given what's described as a "heart transplant".

Officials said the replacement of a key component inside the CMS experiment represented the first major upgrade to the LHC - the world's biggest machine.

Engineers have been carefully installing the new "pixel tracker" in CMS in a complex and delicate procedure on Thursday 100m underground.

It should boost the hunt for signs of new physics phenomena.

The LHC is a particle accelerator that pushes two particle beams to near the speed of light and smashes them together so that scientists can look for signs of new physics phenomena in the debris - including new sub-atomic particles.

More than 1,200 "dipole" magnets steer the beam around a 27km-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border. At certain points around the ring, the beams cross, allowing collisions to take place. Large experiments like CMS and Atlas then record the outcomes of these encounters, generating more than 10 million gigabytes of data every year.

360-degree tour of the LHC

The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) pixel tracker is designed to disentangle and reconstruct the paths of particles emerging from the collision wreckage.

"It's like substituting a 66 megapixel camera with a 124 megapixel camera," Austin Ball, technical co-ordinator for the CMS experiment, told BBC News.

In simple terms, the pixel detector takes images of particles which are superimposed on top of one another, and then need to be separated.

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Image copyrightMAXIMILIEN BRICE / CERN
Image captionThe structure of CMS has been pulled apart to allow access to its "heart"

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Image copyrightMAXIMILIEN BRICE / CERN
Image captionThe complexity of the operation means it has been taking place in stages
As the LHC's performance has been boosted in the past few years, "rather than having 25 or 30 protons collide with each other, yielding 25 or 30 superimposed pictures, we're now expecting to have to deal with 50 or 60 superimposed pictures", said Mr Ball. This required a "step up" in technology, he explained.

"There are limits to the camera analogy - it's a 3D imaging system. But the point is that the new system is more powerful at disentangling the effects of having multiple collisions superimposed on top of each other," the CMS technical co-ordinator said.

"We were looking ahead when we decided to build this device and install it now. But as it turns out, the performance of the accelerator has improved so rapidly over the past couple of years that this is the time we need to make the change to exploit the accelerator's full potential - for new physics, and the study of existing physics."

Engineers began pulling apart the experiment's structure just before Christmas, when the LHC shuts down for the winter. A delicate and painstaking process, it took the team until last week to be in a position to replace the pixel detector. It also allows for some spectacular views of the technology that makes up CMS.

One half of the pixel detector was installed on Tuesday. On Thursday morning, the second half of the device - which weighs a few tens of kilos - left its cleanroom to be picked up by a crane and lowered 100m into the cavern hewn out of the local Molasse sandstone to house the CMS experiment.

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Image copyrightMAXIMILIEN BRICE / CERN

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Image copyrightCERN
Image captionCMS is one of two "multi-purpose" experiments recording collision data at the LHC
At the bottom, it was placed on a platform with slide mechanisms that allow access to the central part of CMS. At around 09:00 GMT (10;00 local time), engineers began the roughly hour-long process of inserting the hardware into its final location inside the experiment. After that, engineers connect the cooling system that keeps the detector at its operating temperature below -10C.

CMS and its counterpart Atlas are the two "multi-purpose" experiments at the LHC. Staffed by separate - and competing - teams of physicists, they provided the crucial evidence that led to the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson, announced in 2012.

The Higgs was the last major jigsaw piece in the theory of particle physics known as the Standard Model (SM). But the hoped-for signs of physical phenomena beyond the Standard Model, such as evidence for dark matter or supersymmetry - a theorised extension to the SM which invokes a range of new sub-atomic particles - have taken longer than expected to reveal themselves at the LHC.

The change to CMS should help physicists in that endeavour, said Mr Ball: "We have to make sure that our detectors can keep up with what's being thrown at them... we're trying to access rarer processes, and to do that you need to produce and record more collisions between protons."

"Very often, only slight deviations from theoretical predictions are the clues to new things we should be looking for."

 

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DIGEST: Futurism, Chicago Tribune, Marie Claire, OZY
HARVARD THINKS IT’S FOUND THE NEXT EINSTEIN — AND SHE’S 23

• Published on March 29, 2017

• By Kat Merck | March 23, 2017

Harvard University believes the world’s next Einstein is among us — and she’s a millennial.

At age 23, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski is already one of the most well-known and accomplished physicists in the U.S.

The Cuban-American Chicago native graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in just three years with a 5.0-grade point average, the highest possible, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard with full academic freedom — meaning she can pursue her own study on her own terms without staff interference.

Pasterski first attracted the attention of the scientific and academic community after single-handedly building her own single-engine airplane in 2008, at age 14, and documenting the process on YouTube.

MIT professors Allen Haggerty and Earll Murman saw the video and were astonished. “Our mouths were hanging open after we looked at it,” Haggerty recalls. “Her potential is off the charts.”

At age 16, she piloted the aircraft herself over Lake Michigan, becoming the youngest person ever to fly their own plane.

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Credit: Source.

“I couldn’t believe it,” recalls Peggy Udden, an executive secretary at MIT. “Not only because she was so young, but a girl.”

Pasterski had first flown a plane at age 9, an experience she casually relayed to a teacher at her public high school, the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora. The teacher replied: “That’s nice, but what have you done lately?”

“That’s become my mantra ever since,” Pasterski told the Chicago Tribune in a 2016 interview. “That’s nice, but what have you done lately?”

An only child, Pasterski admits she’s not on social media and, unlike the majority of her peers, has never had a boyfriend, smoked a cigarette, or drunk an alcoholic beverage. Instead, she spends her free time exploring the concepts of quantum gravity, black holes, and spacetime, the mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum.

Among the papers she’s published, which are listed along with other accomplishments on her website, PhysicsGirl.com: “Semiclassical Virasoro Symmetry of the Quantum Gravity S-Matrix,” “Gaussian Measures and the QM Oscillator,” and “Low’s Subleading Soft Theorem as a Symmetry of QED.”

Her work in the physics community has led to standing job offers from Amazon entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin, and NASA, among others.

Though Pasterski herself is a standout, her interest is part of a larger trend of millennials — especially women — graduating with degrees in physics.

In 1999, the number of physics graduates was at its lowest point in four decades. However, according to the American Institute of Physics, 8,081 bachelor’s degrees in physics were awarded in 2015—the highest number ever recorded. Some theorize the increase is a direct result of more women enrolling in and staying with physics as a major.

“Be optimistic about what you believe you can do,” Pasterski told Marie Claire earlier this year. “When you’re little, you say a lot of things about what you’ll do or be when you’re older—I think it’s important not to lose sight of those dreams.”

 

#meandziggywould

 

I would too as long as I got there before you.

 

That's a Feynmann Diagram at the to[p left of the blackboard in the top photo

 

Cats are decidedly aloof floof bags, and their thought processes are fairly mysterious. Consequently, they are the subject of numerous scientific studies.

Thanks to a brand new study by the University of Lincoln, we have now unlocked the secrets of their facial expressions. They’ll have nothing to hide from us now.

As reported in the journal Behavioural Processes, the team took a good look at 29 domestic cats contained within a Canadian animal shelter. Specifically, they used a complex computer software package called CatFACS (Facial Action Coding System) to detect the smallest changes in a furry companion’s facial expressions, with and without human interaction.

According to their analysis, cat facial expressions largely oscillate between “relaxed engagement, fear and frustration.” In this case, happiness or sadness doesn’t come into it. Cats are either pondering, plotting, afraid, or angry, which will make sense to plenty of cat owners.

Through an anthropomorphic lens, blinking and half-blinking cats may appear to be either indifferent or unimpressed with the seemingly stupid actions of their tall human landlords. However, this study describes blinking excessively as a fearful expression.

As expected, hissing – along with some thorough nose-licking – indicates frustration, as does a prominent revealing of their tongue and a flattening of their ears. Meowing loudly, mouth stretching, and the dropping of the jaw are also markers of an angry kitty.

When they are chilled out, they tend to tilt their head and gaze at things to the right of them, not the left. The latter suggests, quite curiously, that they are fearful of something.

Importantly, the researchers highlighted the possible limitations of their rather novel study.

“Cat faces are often covered in hair,” the team note. “This can make distinguishing the nuances of facial expression in cats, in general, challenging,” although they claim that their algorithm is able to somewhat circumvent this issue.

This study was also based on rescue cats, not those living with humans, so their behavior could be described as outside the norm.

Chances are that domestic cats in actual homes have a wider range of behaviors while lacking others – so until a more comprehensive study is conducted, you’ll have to assume that you’ll never quite know what your cat is plotting based on its frustratingly adorable face.

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Ermahgerd. Ingus Kruklitis/Shutterstock

Other recent cat-flavored studies have concluded that they’re living longer than ever before, may be afraid of cucumbers, and that they love solving puzzles. They’re little lion incarnates, they know our voice but like to ignore it, and there’s a chance they understand the laws of physics.

They’re also nicer than we think they are, but unlike dogs, they don’t dream of us – they dream of murdering things. Bet that’ll give you paws for thought.



#zingywould

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/moons-of-jupiter-and-saturn-may-be-habitable/?ftag=YHF4eb9d17&yptr=yahoo

 

Did they find Carling on the surface ??

 

No. They're habitable.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/17/huge-spider-web-blankets-field-new-zealand/