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The science behind RHCs liver thread

Discussion in 'Liverpool' started by Prince Knut, Apr 30, 2016.

  1. luvgonzo

    luvgonzo Pisshead

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    So is the Earth flat?
     
    #721
  2. Red Hadron Collider

    Red Hadron Collider The Hammerhead

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    Erm: no.
     
    #722
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  3. jenners04

    jenners04 I must not post porn!

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    How do you know?

    You walked it :bandit:
     
    #723
    luvgonzo likes this.
  4. Red Hadron Collider

    Red Hadron Collider The Hammerhead

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    What do you think the ****ing horizon is?
     
    #724
  5. jenners04

    jenners04 I must not post porn!

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    The flat part of the earth :bandit:
     
    #725
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  6. Red Hadron Collider

    Red Hadron Collider The Hammerhead

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    Yeah. Whatever you say.
     
    #726
  7. Red Hadron Collider

    Red Hadron Collider The Hammerhead

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    More than 100 new gut bacteria discovered in human microbiome

    STUDY WILL HELP UNDERSTAND ROLE OF MICROBIOME IN HEALTH AND DISEASE
    February 8, 2019 Staff Editor Editor's Choice, Pharma & Human Health 0
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    Scientists working on the gut microbiome* have discovered and isolated more than 100 completely new species of bacteria from healthy people’s intestines. The study from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Hudson Institute of Medical Research, Australia, and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute, has created the most comprehensive collection of human intestinal bacteria to date. This will help researchers worldwide to investigate how our microbiome keeps us healthy, and its role in disease.

    Reported today (4th February) in Nature Biotechnology, the new resource will allow scientists to detect which bacteria are present in the human gut, more accurately and faster than ever before. This will also provide the foundation to develop new ways of treating diseases such as gastrointestinal disorders, infections and immune conditions.

    About 2 per cent of a person’s body weight is due to bacteria and the intestinal microbiome is a major bacterial site and an essential contributor to human health. Imbalances in our gut microbiome can contribute to diseases and complex conditions such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome allergies and obesity. However, as many species of gut bacteria are extremely difficult to grow in the laboratory, there is a huge gap in our knowledge of them.

    In this study, researchers studied faecal samples from 20 people from the UK and Canada, and successfully grew and DNA sequenced 737 individual bacterial strains from these. Analysis of these isolates revealed 273 separate bacterial species, including 173 that had never previously been sequenced. Of these, 105 species had never even been isolated before.

    Dr Samuel Forster, first author on the paper from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Hudson Institute of Medical Research, Australia, said:

    “This study has led to the creation of the largest and most comprehensive public database of human health-associated intestinal bacteria. The gut microbiome plays a major in health and disease. This important resource will fundamentally change the way researchers study the microbiome.”

    Standard methods to understand how the gut microbiome impacts on human health involves sequencing the DNA from mixed samples of gut bacteria to try to understand each component. However, these studies have been severely hampered by the lack of individually isolated bacteria and reference genomes from them.

    The new culture collection and reference genomes will make it much cheaper and easier for researchers to determine which bacteria are present within communities of people and research their role in disease.

    Dr Rob Finn, an author from EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute, said:

    “For researchers trying to find out which species of bacteria are present in a person’s microbiome, the database of reference genomes from pure isolates of gut bacteria is crucial. Then if they want to test a hypothesis, for example that a particular species is enriched in a certain disease, they can get the isolate itself from the collection and physically test in the laboratory if this species seems to be important.”

    Dr Trevor Lawley, Senior author from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said:

    “This culture collection of individual bacteria will be a game-changer for basic and translational microbiome research. By culturing the unculturable, we have created a resource that will make microbiome analysis faster, cheaper and more accurate and will allow further study of their biology and functions. Ultimately, this will lead us towards developing new diagnostics and treatments for diseases such as gastrointestinal disorders, infections and immune conditions.”
     
    #727
  8. Red Hadron Collider

    Red Hadron Collider The Hammerhead

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    Google plastic eating mushrooms <yikes> <yikes> <yikes>
     
    #728
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  9. Treble

    Treble Keyser Söze

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    "fungi rarely get the attention they deserve" <laugh>
     
    #729
  10. Red Hadron Collider

    Red Hadron Collider The Hammerhead

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    The M87 black hole image showed the best way to measure black hole masses
    Its diameter suggests the black hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun
    BY
    LISA GROSSMAN
    6:00AM, APRIL 22, 2019
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    SUPERMASSIVE SOURCE The gases and stars in galaxy M87, shown in this composite image from the Chandra X-ray telescope and the Very Large Array, gave different numbers for the mass of the galaxy’s supermassive black hole.

    N. WERNER, E. MILLION ET AL/KIPAC/CXC/NASA, F. OWEN/NSF/AUI/NRAO


    SPONSOR MESSAGE
    The measure of a black hole is what it does with its stars.

    That’s one lesson astronomers are taking from the first-ever picture of a black hole, released on April 10 by an international telescope team (SN Online: 4/10/19). That image confirmed that the mass of the supermassive black hole in the center of galaxy M87 is close to what astronomers expected from how nearby stars orbit — solving a long-standing debate over how best to measure a black hole’s mass.

    The black hole in M87, which is located about 55 million light-years from Earth, is the first black hole whose mass has been calculated by three precise methods: measuring the motion of stars, the swirl of surrounding gases and now, thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope imaging project, the diameter of the black hole’s shadow.

    In 1978, the first mass estimates to track the motions of stars whipping around the great gravitational center found that the stars must be orbiting something containing about 5 billion times the mass of the sun. A more precise estimate in 2011 using a similar stellar technique bumped its heft up to 6.6 billion times the mass of the sun.



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    SHADOW SIZE The Event Horizon Telescope captured the first image of M87’s black hole. That image showed that the black hole’s mass is about 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun, close to what astronomers expected based on the galaxy’s stars.
    EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE COLLABORATION
    Meanwhile, astronomers in 1994 made another estimate by tracing how gases closer to the black hole than the stars swirl around the behemoth. That technique suggested that the black hole was 2.4 billion solar masses, which was revised in 2013 to 3.5 billion solar masses.
    For years, it wasn’t clear which technique got closer to the truth.

    Now the EHT picture showing a glowing orange ring of gases and dust around the black hole has solved the conflict. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the diameter of the dark space in the center of the image — the black hole’s shadow — is directly related to its mass.

    “Bigger black holes cast bigger shadows,” EHT team member Michael Johnson, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said April 12 at a talk at MIT. “Easy check, we can see whether one or the other of these [mass measuring methods] is correct.” The shadow of M87’s black hole yielded a diameter of 38 billion kilometers, which let astronomers calculate a mass of 6.5 billion suns — very close to the mass suggested by the motion of stars.

    The size of the shadow also negated the idea that the black hole is a wormhole, a theoretical bridge between distant points in spacetime (SN: 5/31/14, p. 16). If M87’s black hole had been a wormhole, theory predicts it should look smaller than it does. “It’s a stunning confirmation” of general relativity, Johnson said. “We instantly rule out all these exotic possibilities.”

    The mass confirmation may boost confidence in current simulations for how black holes develop, says Priyamvada Natarajan, a Yale University astrophysicist who was not involved with the EHT project. Most black hole mass estimates already use the stellar technique, in part because it’s easier to track a galaxy’s stars from farther away.



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    STARS AND STREAKS Astrophysicists have used both stars and gases to weigh in on the mass of the black hole in the galaxy NGC 4258, shown in this composite image.
    P.OGLE ET AL/CALTECH/CXC/NASA, R.GENDLER, STSCI/NASA, CALTECH-JPL/NASA, VLA/NRAO/NSF
    Two other black holes whose masses have been measured in multiple ways, the Milky Way’s Sagittarius A* and the galaxy NGC 4258’s black hole, also suggest the star method works better. “These three cases now offer renewed faith in our current method,” Natarajan says.
    That faith won’t solve the most pressing black hole problems, such as how black holes grew so big so fast in the early universe — at least not right away (SN Online: 3/16/18). The gas versus star measurement of the M87 black hole mass differed by only a factor of two, which is not enough to explain how it got so massive in the first place. A black hole could double its mass in about a million years, at most.

    “What we don’t know is how we get supermassive black holes within a billion years,” says Hannalore Gerling-Dunsmore, a former Caltech physicist who is joining the University of Colorado Boulder later this year. She was not on the EHT team. “Once you’re already that big, what’s a million years between friends?”
     
    #730

  11. Red Hadron Collider

    Red Hadron Collider The Hammerhead

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    Giant, active galaxies from the early universe may have finally been found
    The behemoths date to within 2 billion years after the Big Bang
    By
    Maria Temming
    1:00pm, August 7, 2019
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    KEEN EYES Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile (pictured), astronomers found a slew of previously overlooked massive galaxies from the first 2 billion years of cosmic history.

    © 2019 Kohno et al.


    Sponsor Message
    Astronomers may finally have laid eyes on a population of enormous but elusive galaxies in the early universe.

    These hefty, star-forming galaxies are shrouded in dust, which hid them from previous searches that used starlight. Now observations of radiation emitted by that interstellar dust have revealed dozens of massive, active galaxies from when the universe was younger than 2 billion years, researchers report online August 7 in Nature. These galaxies may be the long-sought precursors to heavyweight galaxies seen later in the universe’s history, as well as the most massive galaxies around today.

    “Discovering massive galaxies at such early times is very exciting,” says Christina Williams, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson not involved in the work.

    Big, inactive galaxies have been found dating back to a couple billion years after the Big Bang (SN Online: 3/14/14). But the formation of those gentle giants has remained mysterious. That’s because astronomers expect such massive, inactive galaxies to originate from big, star-forming powerhouses, and surveys of the earliest cosmos hadn’t uncovered a population of such star-forming progenitor galaxies.

    Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile to examine distant galactic dust emissions, astronomers identified 39 star-forming galaxies from when the universe was about 1 billion to 2 billion years old. These galaxies, which boast an average mass of about 40 billion suns and form about 200 new suns per year, are about as common as the large, inactive galaxies seen slightly later in cosmic history.

    Detection by dust
    Because they tend to be thick with dust that masks their starlight, massive, star-forming galaxies from the very distant, very early universe are invisible to telescopes like Hubble (left). ALMA, on the other hand, peered at radiation emitted by the obscuring dust itself to pick out dozens of massive galaxies from the ancient universe (four shown at right).

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    © 2019 Wang et al.
    “This is definitely a plausible population that could give rise to the quiescent galaxies,” says Karl Glazebrook, an astronomer at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, not involved in the work.

    The newly identified galaxies are also embedded in that early era’s most massive dark matter halos — blobs of invisible, unidentified particles that surround galaxies (SN: 3/3/18, p. 8). The finding suggests that those ancient galaxies are the ancestors of today’s biggest galaxies, which now sit in the most massive dark matter halos, says study coauthor Tao Wang, an astronomer at the University of Tokyo. These modern descendants may include behemoths like M87, home to the first black hole ever imaged (SN: 4/27/19, p. 6).

    Astronomer Caitlin Casey at the University of Texas at Austin calls the new galaxy detections “exciting and tantalizing.” But she cautions that the current analysis of ALMA observations, in which she was not involved, gives only rough estimates of how far these galaxies date back in cosmic history. Further investigations with ALMA or NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2021, could help cinch the galaxies’ precise ages and roles in galactic evolution.

    The discovery of such big, star-forming galaxies when the universe was less than 2 billion years old fits well with past observations of big, quiescent galaxies later in cosmic history. But these observations don’t jibe with current theories of galaxy formation. In computer simulations, the universe at 2 billion years old contains too few massive galaxies to explain ALMA’s observations, says Williams, the Arizona astronomer. “This is a surprise the universe had for us.”

    Wang and colleagues now plan to take a larger census of ancient massive galaxies with ALMA. That work could give theorists more information about how to tweak cosmological simulations to match early-universe observations.
     
    #731
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  12. Prince Knut

    Prince Knut GC Thread Terminator

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    Бог в помощь!

    Godspeed Alexi Leonov, first man to walk in space. I was due to meet him a couple of years ago in Pontefract, but, like Gene Cernan the year before, he had to pull out due to ill health, and like Gene Cernan, I now never will. That is their loss.

    Seriously, we will miss these pioneers, and history will be amazed that we didn't honour and fete them more than we did. <applause>

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-50017409
     
    #732
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  13. saintKlopp

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    It's also a shame that there's a growing cult of anti-intellectual conspiracy theorists claiming the whole thing is fake.
     
    #733
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  14. Red Hadron Collider

    Red Hadron Collider The Hammerhead

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    I know. Extremely ****ing annoying <grr>
     
    #734
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  15. Prince Knut

    Prince Knut GC Thread Terminator

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    Talking of Sisu, he came back for about six months a year ago. Still a slave to the last loopy conspiratorial, alt-right echo-chamber as he ever was. The one about the Van Allen belts was funny, especially when Tobes quoted Van Allen himself as saying he found their theories on the belts' radiation an 'Assemblage of entertaining nonsense'. Though it actually started off with him (Sisu) pointing to the Charlie Duke family photograph left on the moon after 16, as being proof positive it was faked as 'It would have been fried to pieces by now, 40-odd years later, had that really been left on the moon'. 'Do you really think Duke took the picture of the picture recently? That would be some ****ing telescopic lens to see that much detail of the Descartes Highlands from Earth. Ping, pow... off went one graph from some site, then a video from another...

    The latest I saw was some dickhead in the comments section of The Express saying the TV pictures were faked because you'd need to have an outside broadcast van up there to transmit to the whole of the earth, and Nixon's phone call too because he was on a landline in the Oval Office. I kid you not.
     
    #735
  16. Prince Knut

    Prince Knut GC Thread Terminator

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    Some theorise the whole universe is a two-dimensional hologram. Leonard Susskind, for one.
     
    #736
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  17. saintKlopp

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    Fools - they didn't see the phone cable trailing behind the Saturn 5.
    Sadly, there are a host of crackpot conspiracy theories gaining ground because of the internet. Young Earth, flat Earth, fake moon landings, fake space, mud flood, illuminati, chemtrails, space Jews (honest), lizard people, and all sorts of dopey ideas. They are utterly irrational, entirely without foundation and often contradictory to one another, but some people lap them up because they have one thing in common - they contradict the view of reality that the mysterious, ubiquitous and omnipotent "They" are trying to foist on us to keep us all compliant.
    Some are anti-authoritarian, anti-intellectual halfwits who dismiss as fake anything they can't understand - which is just about everything. Some are religious fundamentalists who insist that anything that isn't in (their interpretation of) the Bible is a Satanic lie.
    In the past they'd have been haranguing people on street corners with leaflets and getting laughed at but now they have a global network of fellow-travellers to find support in. They're still getting laughed at, but they don't feel alone any more.

    Sisu was no fool, so I never really understood why he was so keen on this stuff. Perhaps it was some serious drugs.
     
    #737
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  18. Prince Knut

    Prince Knut GC Thread Terminator

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    Absolutely. The last time he was back he was claiming he was doing a physics degree (in Finland?). In the next breath he'd hoist up yet another doctored, ludicrous graph on climate change denial that any child could pull to pieces - naturally enough, Saxton and Kustard believed and 'liked' them. His basic premise was that it had been 'proved' that CO2 could only go so high before it reversed and was 'good' for the climate. I think someone pointed out that Venus proves otherwise. And the graph was originally produced by the Koch Foundation...

    He strenuously maintained that the industrial amounts of skank he smoked enabled his brain to function on a level that us mere 'sheeple' couldn't comprehend. Yeah, a different reality, unquestionably.
     
    #738
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  19. Red Hadron Collider

    Red Hadron Collider The Hammerhead

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    Is this you, Donga?
     
    #739
  20. Red Hadron Collider

    Red Hadron Collider The Hammerhead

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    See Cheese for quiz info <grr>
     
    #740

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