Weird Science Thread

[LawBeefaroni]

Unusual ice circle forms in North Dakota river

Allen Schlag, a National Weather Service hydrologist in Bismarck, and Greg Gust, a weather service meteorologist in Grand Forks, said a combination of cold, dense air last weekend and an eddy in the river likely caused the disk.

"It's actually quite beautiful," Schlag said.

The cold, dense air -- the air pressure Saturday in nearby Fargo was a record high for the city for the month of November, according to Gust -- turned the river water into ice, but since the water was relatively warm it didn't happen all at once. Floating bits of ice got caught in the eddy and started to spin in a circle.

"It's not a continuous sheet of ice," Schlag said. "If you were to throw a grapefruit-size rock on it, it would go through. It's not a solid piece of ice -- it's a collection of ice cubes."

Loegering said the spinning disk had frozen up but was still visible in the river.

"I'm not sure how long it was there (spinning)," he said. "It had to be quite a long time. If you look at the picture, you can see growth rings on the disk."

[LawBeefaroni]

On the topic of swirling stuff...


Given this fossil (found in Idaho I think!):

And given the fact that it's from a shark, what would you guess that the shark looked like?

Spoiler:

Through the years there have been many theories.


Very recently, consensus settled on a buzz-saw looking monster:

In 1899, Russian geologist, Alexander Petrovich Karpinsky, gave this six-metre-long fish the name Helicoprion, meaning “spiral saw”, based on a fragmentary fossil found in Kazakhstan. Because the saw he was describing had been separated from the rest of the body, Karpinsky couldn’t be sure where it would have fit, so initially he suggested that it started in the fish’s mouth, and curled upwards along the snout as an external coiled mass of fused-together teeth. Think a sawfish’s saw, only curled upwards. Further guesses were made during the early 1900s by a number of researchers from around the world, including American palaeontologist Charles Rochester Eastman. Eastman had issues with the idea that such an unwieldy apparatus could have possibly sat inside this poor creature’s face. Publishing in a 1900 edition of The American palaeontologist, Eastman favoured the idea that the whorl protruded from somewhere along the length of the fish’s back, acting as some sort of defensive display, perhaps.

...

In 1950, a crucial Helicoprion whorl specimen was discovered by Danish palaeontologist Svend Erik Bendix-Almgreen in the Waterloo Mine near Montpelier, Idaho. Named IMNH 37899 and housed in the Idaho Museum of Natural History, it was first described by Bendix-Almgreen in 1966. It might have been seriously crushed and disarticulated, but along with the 117 discernible serrated tooth crowns sitting on a spiral with a diameter of 23 cm was some very telling cranial cartilage. This proved for the first time that at least some of the whorl was contained inside Helicoprion’s mouth.

But that didn’t limit the possibilities. Over the past fifty years, researchers have suggested that the whorl extended awkwardly from the lower lip, curling underneath the chin; sat inside the mouth where the tongue should be; or perhaps sat further down towards the throat.

Now a team led by Leif Tapanila from the Department of Geosciences at Idaho State University, and curator of the Idaho Museum of Natural History, have gained unprecedented insight into the structure of Helicoprion’s skull...

Behold the lastest (Feb 2013) interpretation of the Helicoprion!

[noxiousdog]

New Dark Matter theory

[Isgrimnur]

Wormholes!

Theoretical physicists have forged a connection between the concept of entanglement—itself a mysterious quantum mechanical connection between two widely separated particles—and that of a wormhole—a hypothetical connection between black holes that serves as a shortcut through space. The insight could help physicists reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general theory of relativity, perhaps the grandest goal in theoretical physics. But some experts argue that the connection is merely a mathematical analogy.
...
Kristan Jensen of the University of Victoria in Canada and Andreas Karch of the University of Washington, Seattle, start by imagining an entangled quark-antiquark pair residing in ordinary 3D space, as they described online on 20 November in Physical Review Letters. The two quarks rush away from each other, approaching the speed of light so that it becomes impossible to pass signals from one to the other. The researchers assume that the 3D space where the quarks reside is a hypothetical boundary of a 4D world. In this 3D space, the entangled pair is connected by a kind of conceptual string. But in the 4D space, the string becomes a wormhole.

Julian Sonner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge then builds upon Karch’s and Jensen’s work. He imagines a quark-antiquark pair that pops into existence in a strong electric field, which then sends the oppositely charged particles accelerating in opposite directions. Sonner also finds that the entangled particles in the 3D world are connected by a wormhole in the 4D world, as he also reported online on 20 November in Physical Review Letters.
...
But how big an insight is this? It depends on whom you ask. Susskind and Maldacena note that in both papers, the original quantum particles reside in a space without gravity. In a simplified, gravity-free 3D model of our world, there can’t be any black holes or wormholes, Susskind adds, so the connection to a wormhole in a higher dimensional space is mere mathematical analogy. The wormhole and entanglement equivalence “only makes sense in a theory with gravity,” Susskind says.

[Ralph-Wiggum]

Second code in DNA?

A research team at the University of Washington has discovered a second code hidden within the DNA, written on top of the other.

“Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture,” said team leader Dr. John Stamatoyannopoulos.

Whereas the first code describes how proteins are made, this second language instructs the cell on how genes are to be controlled. The discovery, published in Science on Friday, will enable improved diagnoses and treatments of disease.

Read more: Second Code Uncovered Inside the DNA | TIME.com http://science.time.com/2013/12/13/seco ... z2nNNg9ORY" target="_blank

It remains to be seen if these guys are right, but if so this is a BIG DEAL.

[stessier]

Here's the link to the paper in case there are any budding genomisits out there.

[Isgrimnur]

Icy roads in Wisconsin? Just use cheese brine to make that salt stick:

After snowstorms like the one that passed through Wisconsin over the weekend, snow plows clear the streets, and trucks spread salt to prevent the roads from icing over. Since this northern state gets a lot of snow, it requires a lot of salt. Now some counties, including its most populous, Milwaukee, are using a byproduct from the cheese-making process to reduce their salt bills. The salty water, called brine, can be mixed with rock salt and sprayed on the roads.
...
Emil Norby, who works for Polk County, told The New York Times, “If you put dry salt on a roadway, you typically lose 30 percent to bounce and traffic.” But by mixing the salt with the brine, the rural county saved $40,000 on its rock salt bill in 2009 (the year it started the experiment) and has increased that amount every year since.
...
But the type of cheese does matter. Jeffrey A. Tews, who manages this year’s brine-spraying experiment on Milwaukee’s south side, told The New York Times,

“You want to use provolone or mozzarella. Those have the best salt content. You have to do practically nothing to it.”
...
Milwaukee will be the first urban setting to try the brine-based system. A full report will come in the spring, along with the melt.

[Smoove_B]

Next time I'm lost in the woods, apparently all I need to do is look for some dog poop:

Dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the North-south axis under calm [magnetic field] MF conditions. This directional behavior was abolished under Unstable MF. The best predictor of the behavioral switch was the rate of change in declination, i.e., polar orientation of the MF.

[stessier]

Birds are really good at aerodynamics.

When a bird flies, it creates spinning loops of air behind it called vortices. Part of the vortex system pushes air upward—known as upwash—while the opposite side of the vortex pushes air downward—known as downwash. To fly with less effort, a bird should time its flapping to press its wings through the upwash created by the bird in front of it. It also wants to avoid the downwash.

By precisely recording the spacing of ibises in formation, along with the timing of their wingbeats, Portugal and colleagues were able to show that ibises time their wingbeats for maximum efficiency.

[Isgrimnur]

Genome sequencing hits the $1k per mark.

A thousand bucks is all it will cost to sequence an entire genome, thanks to the new HiSeq X Ten, a computer designed solely for that purpose.
...
HiSeq X Ten itself consists of 10 ultra-high-throughput sequencers, which cost US$1 million each, and can sequence five whole human genomes per day — six times faster than its predecessor — ushering in a new era for scientific and medical research.

From the ability to sequence a lot of genomes quickly and at low cost comes the potential to build a database of genomes, which would help identify genetic patterns that are more prone to health complications, for example. The bigger the genome database, the easier it will be to identify patterns. "To figure out cancer, we need to sequence hundreds of thousands of cancer genomes, and this is the way to do it," said Jay Flatley, Illumina's CEO.

So far, three companies have purchased the HiSeq X Ten: DNA sequencing company Macrogen in the US; the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; and Australia's own Garvan Institute of Medical Research.

[WYBaugh]

New species of antarctic anemone found

A research robot out on a routine test inadvertently stumbled upon a never-before-seen species of sea anemone living upside down in Antarctic ice. It's a remarkable discovery that could hint at the kind of life that might be found in the subsurface oceans of Europa.
The tiny sea anemones were discovered by a cylindrical robot called SCINI (Submersible Capable of under Ice Navigation and Imaging). The bot, which is part of the National Science Foundation's ANDRILL Antarctic drilling program, was sent down a hole drilled through 885 feet (270 meters) of the Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf.

[Isgrimnur]

antarctic anenome

Try repeating that rapidly.

[LawBeefaroni]

New species of antarctic anemone found

A research robot out on a routine test inadvertently stumbled upon a never-before-seen species of sea anemone living upside down in Antarctic ice. It's a remarkable discovery that could hint at the kind of life that might be found in the subsurface oceans of Europa.
The tiny sea anemones were discovered by a cylindrical robot called SCINI (Submersible Capable of under Ice Navigation and Imaging). The bot, which is part of the National Science Foundation's ANDRILL Antarctic drilling program, was sent down a hole drilled through 885 feet (270 meters) of the Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf.

I probably point this out too much, but why would it hint at the kind of life of Europa? Presumably the anemone found living on ice in the Antarctic evolved from cold water anemone living on the Antarctic ocean floor. They evolved from anemone in various other climates and so on. They also feed on things that evolved similarly. Life didn't rise independently on the ice and magically produce these anemone. Unless Europa has a history remarkably similar to Earth's, I'm not sure how these inform exobiology other than that they prove that yes, things can live on ice. Which I think we already knew.

Extremophiles are branches of Earth's tree of life. They are not independent and spontaneous pockets of life on Earth.

End rant.

[Ralph-Wiggum]

It's a silly assertion, but I think the logic behind it is that organisms living in similar environments often show convergent evolutionary adaptations. So something living on Europa may solve in the same manner the the problem of living under ice sheets. It's a huge stretch, but that's the thought process (well, the thought process after "how do we get headlines with this discovery").

[Isgrimnur]

120 papers retracted

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.
...
Labbé developed a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers. SCIgen was invented in 2005 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers — and, as they put it, “to maximize amusement” (see ‘Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper’). A related program generates random physics manuscript titles on the satirical website arXiv vs. snarXiv. SCIgen is free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people have done so, or for what purposes. SCIgen’s output has occasionally popped up at conferences, when researchers have submitted nonsense papers and then revealed the trick.

Labbé does not know why the papers were submitted — or even if the authors were aware of them. Most of the conferences took place in China, and most of the fake papers have authors with Chinese affiliations. Labbé has emailed editors and authors named in many of the papers and related conferences but received scant replies; one editor said that he did not work as a program chair at a particular conference, even though he was named as doing so, and another author claimed his paper was submitted on purpose to test out a conference, but did not respond on follow-up. Nature has not heard anything from a few enquiries.

[Isgrimnur]

Depressing national anthems linked to higher suicide rates:

“For most of the 20th Century, Hungary had the highest suicide rate in the world and, also, among immigrants to the United States, Hungarians had the highest suicide rates (Lester, 1994). Hungary is also known for the “suicide song”—“Gloomy Sunday”—which was written by a Hungarian (Rezso Seress) in 1933 and which was banned from radio stations since it seemed to induce people to commit suicide (Stack, Krysinska, & Lester, 2007–2008). Rihmer (1997) noted that the Hungarian national anthem was very sad and, in an informal study of suicide rates in European nations, declared that higher national suicide rates were associated with more low notes in national anthems.
...
Male and female suicides rates were weakly associated with the ratings of gloomy (Pearson rs = .30 and .42, respectively, one-tailed ps = .11 and .04), with the ratings of sad (rs = .23 and .40, respectively, ps = .18 and .05), and with the proportion of low notes (r = .63 and .54, respectively, ps = .003 and .01). The proportion of low notes was associated with the ratings of gloomy and sad (rs = .52 and .44, ps = .02 and .04, respectively). Thus, Rihmer’s suggestion was supported by the present analysis. It would be of interest to extend the present study to non-European nations.

[Smoove_B]

Titanimum golf clubs can ignite fires:

Scientists painstakingly re-created in the lab the course conditions on the days of the fires. Using high-speed cameras and electron microscopes, they found that if hit upon a rock, clubs containing titanium can produce sparks of up to 3,000 degrees that will burn for more than a second, said James Earthman, a chemical engineering and materials science professor and an author of the study.

"And that gives the spark plenty of time" to ignite nearby foliage, he said. "Titanium reacts violently with both oxygen and nitrogen in the air."

[Isgrimnur]

Daddy long legs: Have you seen my eyes? They're missing:

Harvestmen (also known as daddy long legs) aren’t spiders, and if you could (or wanted to) lean close enough, you’d be able to see one of the few physical features that distinguish them from their arachnid cousins. It’s in the eyes: Spiders usually have 6 or more, but the harvestman has only one set, tightly clustered on the top of its head, making it look like a cyclops. However, scientists report today in the journal Current Biology that the ancestors of modern harvestmen had an extra pair, called median eyes, located on either side of the front of their heads.

Because of their delicate bodies, fossils of harvestmen are rare. But the species is important for understanding all arthropods, because it was the first — arachnid or otherwise — to appear on land around 400 million years ago. Scientists assumed that harvestman species started diversifying shortly afterward. However, by comparing these extinct eyes to vestigial eyestalks found on the heads of several modern harvestman species, the scientists believe that the family didn’t start diversifying until about 305 million years ago. In addition to providing clues about the harvestman’s evolutionary history, this finding will also help scientists understand the evolution of eyes in all arachnids.

[Ralph-Wiggum]

Female penises!

Scientists have discovered four species of Brazilian insects in which the females possess a penis and the males possess a vagina. This announcement, made today in the journal Current Biology, represents the first documented instance of a "female penis" in the animal kingdom.

"The female penis is a completely novel structure," said Yoshizawa Kazunori, an entomologist at Japan's Hokkaido University and co-author of the study, in an email to The Verge. Except for producing the larger gametes and having an egg-laying apparatus, the females in these four species of winged insects, called Neotrogla, seem to have become "very masculine" over evolutionary time, Kazunori added. The appearance of such a novel structure is exceptionally rare, he said, and "may be comparable with the origin of insect wings."

Click the link for some hot insect-on-insect action pics!

[Isgrimnur]

Those Brazilians have always been a little freaky.

[Isgrimnur]

Asteroid with rings!

The cosmic bling was found around an object named Chariklo, which orbits in a region between Saturn and Uranus. At 155 miles across, or about the length of Massachusetts, Chariklo is the largest known asteroid in its neighborhood. Looking to get a better idea of its exact size and shape, astronomers trained their telescopes on the giant space rock as it passed in front on a distant star in June 2013. As Chariklo performed its eclipse, researchers noticed something odd: The star’s light flickered just a bit immediately before and after Chariklo’s pass.

The reason for this darkening was the asteroid’s two dense rings, which had briefly blocked the starlight. The thicker inner ring is about four miles wide, while the thinner outer ring is a little less than two miles. Spectroscopic analysis of the starlight also revealed that the rings are composed partially of water ice.

The ice rings reflect light like a mirror, a property that helps explain an earlier anomalous finding regarding Chariklo. After the asteroid was discovered in 1997, its brightness mysteriously dropped off and only came back again in 2008. What apparently happened was that, as Chariklo moved through its orbit, its ring system turned edge-on when viewed from Earth. As they turned back to face us with their flat side, they reflected light toward our planet and Chariklo’s brightness grew by 40 percent.

[Isgrimnur]

The truth behind the jackalope

Spoiler:

The Shope papillomavirus manifests as hard, keratinized horns on rabbits.

[Isgrimnur]

Drunk fish convince sober ones to follow them

It’s a good thing fish can’t operate a vehicle. Not only do drunk zebrafish swim extra fast, but they somehow get all the sober fish to follow them. Essentially, a drunk fish becomes the designated driver for the whole group.

Although a fish is only marginally like a human, fish can be convenient subjects for scientists who want to study the effects of alcohol. That’s because to get a fish tipsy, you don’t have to force it to drink anything. You only have to put a small concentration of alcohol into its tank. Maurizio Porfiri, an associate professor at the New York University Polytechnic Institute of Engineering, used this technique to show last year that drunk zebrafish don’t fear robotic predators.
...
Alcohol-exposed fish swam faster in a group than they did alone. This might be because moderate intoxication makes them hyperactive, as earlier studies found; they may overreact to the stimulus of seeing other fish nearby. Moderate amounts of alcohol are also known to lower fishes’ inhibitions, making zebrafish more aggressive and less afraid of unfamiliar things (or predators).

Meanwhile, the four sober fish didn’t ignore their intoxicated peer as it zipped around the tank: they followed it.
...
The very drunkest zebrafish, though, lost their leader status. Fish that had been exposed to the highest alcohol concentration began to lag behind the rest of the group, following instead of steering. Since higher alcohol doses have “sedative effects,” Porfiri says, the drunkest fish slow down and start to display “sluggishness in response to the rest of the group.”

[Isgrimnur]

Want to study wind turbine eddies in detail? Wait for it to snow.

As wind energy production expands around the world, engineers have identified a nagging problem: When a wind turbine spins, its blades create disturbances in the air that can reduce the amount of energy produced.

This turbulence, or "wake," can cut a wind farm's power output by 10 to 20 percent. But assessing the particulars of the problem has been difficult. Computer simulations and wind tunnels have helped, but it's difficult to see the phenomenon on a large, commercial-scale turbine in the real world because minute changes in air patterns are invisible to the naked eye.

Now, researchers at the University of Minnesota have hit upon a novel solution: To see how a utility-scale wind turbine chops into the surrounding air, watch it in a snowstorm.
...
The experiment came together around 2 a.m. one snowy morning in February of last year, when Hong's researchers positioned a spotlight behind a 2.5 megawatt wind turbine. The spotlight was fitted to cast a thin sheet of light that illuminated the snow as the turbine sliced through it.

Hong and his team were finally able to gather data showing how air behaves behind a utility-scale turbine, giving new insights into how the turbulence works. For instance, they found that the air disturbances that other researchers had detected occur closer to the turbine blades than described in previous studies.

[Isgrimnur]

Russia loses contact with satellite. The mission? Gecko space sex, among other things.

Researchers embarrassedly admitted to RIA Novosti that they’d lost the ability to control or communicate with Foton-M, a satellite launched six days ago with five geckos on board, with the express purpose of observing the geckos having space sex.

But at least they can still gather data. “The biological experiments started as soon as the satellite was launched. The scientific equipment used for the experiments operates properly. We receive the telemetry data from the spacecraft and analyze it,” Institute of Biomedical Problems press secretary Oleg Voloshin said, and please imagine that in a heavy Russian accent.

So, uh, why is Russia sending a satellite of love into space? And why lizards?

Foton-M was launched on July 19 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a mission to study the effect of weightlessness on plants and insects, and to conduct experiments on the growth of semiconductor crystals.

[Isgrimnur]

People still believe that getting a heart transpant will change their personality:

You might think that in this day and age, we would be past seeing the heart–an organ that pumps blood–as a center of a person’s personality. However, the authors of this study regularly dealt with real patients who worried that their personalities would change after a heart transplant. In fact, they report that some patients refuse hearts from the opposite sex, and others experience anxiety about their sense of self after having a heart transplant. To get a better handle on this phenomenon, the researchers surveyed heart transplant recipients to find out whether they thought their personalities changed after the surgery. The short answer? No. (Except for three people, who reported a distinct change in personality that they did not attribute to the life-changing experience of getting a new heart.) But our favorite response is from this patient: “’I love to put on earphones and play loud music, something I never did before. A different car, a good stereo-those are my dreams now. And I have thoughts now that I never had before.’ (remark: patient: 45 year old man, donor 17 year old boy).”
...
Six per cent (three patients) reported a distinct change of personality due to their new hearts. These incorporation fantasies forced them to change feelings and reactions and accept those of the donor. Verbatim statements of these heart transplant recipients show that there seem to be severe problems regarding graft incorporation, which are based on the age-old idea of the heart as a centre that houses feelings and forms the personality.”

No word on whether the donor was Maynard G. Krebs.

[Ralph-Wiggum]

A potential new engine system that requires no propellant.

Nasa is a major player in space science, so when a team from the agency this week presents evidence that "impossible" microwave thrusters seem to work, something strange is definitely going on. Either the results are completely wrong, or Nasa has confirmed a major breakthrough in space propulsion.

British scientist Roger Shawyer has been trying to interest people in his EmDrive for some years through his company SPR Ltd. Shawyer claims the EmDrive converts electric power into thrust, without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves around in a closed container. He has built a number of demonstration systems, but critics reject his relativity-based theory and insist that, according to the law of conservation of momentum, it cannot work.

However, a US scientist, Guido Fetta, has built his own propellant-less microwave thruster, and managed to persuade Nasa to test it out. The test results were presented on July 30 at the 50th Joint Propulsion Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. Astonishingly enough, they are positive.

Needless to say, this could be a huge breakthrough in space flight.

[coopasonic]

...and Kerbal Space Program just got a while lot easier.

[Pyperkub]

Validated by Guido Fetta? Hmm. .

[Isgrimnur]

He's-a no gud to me a-dead!

[AWS260]

Russia loses contact with satellite. The mission? Gecko space sex, among other things.

Sex geckos die in orbit

[Ralph-Wiggum]

But not surprising, the fruit flies lived and reproduced. I feel much better about the fruit flies in my kitchen now knowing that even sending them into space can't get rid of them.

[Isgrimnur]

Experts say the geckos may have frozen to death after the heating system broke down, Russian news agencies report.

Gecko-sicles.

"We can say with confidence that they died at least a week before the landing because their bodies were partly mummified," an official from Russia's Institute of Medical and Biological Problems told Itar-Tass news agency.

[Isgrimnur]

Three new mushroom species discovered ... for sale in a London supermarket.

They were found in a package of dried porcini mushrooms from a grocery store in "southwest greater London" that the scientists tested using a technique called DNA barcoding. Dentinger had previously used the technique while researching mushrooms at the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto.

The technique involves matching the DNA profile of a sample to a database of known species in order to identify the sample. But in three out of 15 pieces tested from the porcini mushroom package, no match was found.

"None of them had scientific names, so these were essentially new species to science," Dentiger told CBC science columnist Torah Kachur. "And we found three different species in the 15 pieces that we sampled from."

As it turns out, "porcini" is "a gastronomical label more than it is scientific," Kachur told CBC's The Homestretch. "What the Italians originally called porcinis were this unique flavour of nutty type of mushroom."

On the other hand, porcini mushrooms do tend to belong to a family of mushrooms known by scientists as boletes, which have tubes on their undersides instead of gills.

"Even though we don't necessarily know those species, all of them are certainly safe for consumption," Kachur said.

[Isgrimnur]

Tetraquark

In August 2003, an experiment at the KEKB particle accelerator in Japan found hints of an unexpected particle: A composite of elementary building blocks called quarks, it contained not two quarks like mesons or three like the protons and neutrons that constitute all visible matter, but four — a number that theoretical physicists had come to think the laws of nature did not permit. This candidate “tetraquark” disintegrated so quickly that it seemed a stretch to call it a particle at all. But as similar formations appeared in experiments around the world, they incited a fierce debate among experts about the correct picture of matter at the quantum scale.

Most believed tetraquarks were a new kind of miniature molecule — essentially, two orbiting mesons, each made of one regular quark and one antimatter quark, or antiquark — while a smaller contingent saw them as stand-alone particles in which the two quarks and two antiquarks overlapped in the same small volume of space.
...
And, to mixed reviews, the properties of Z(4430) clearly favor the underdog “diquark model” and the hypothesis that tetraquarks are genuine particles. The existence of such states would suggest a menagerie of exotic “hadrons,” or particles made of quarks, including groupings of more than four. It would also attest to subtle quantum interactions that may shape the cores of hypothetical “quark stars,” the piping hot quark soup thought to have saturated the infant universe, and, closer to home, the proton and neutron building blocks of ordinary matter.
...
But advocates of the rival molecular model disagree. To their minds, tetraquarks tell a novel but more conservative story of mesons engaging in chemistry below the ordinary atomic scale, without challenging the dogma that two- and three-quark particles are the only hadrons that exist. Z(4430), a tetraquark that looks unlike any combination of two types of mesons mingling as a molecule, certainly “makes it more difficult,” said Marek Karliner, a particle physicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. But, he said, the diquark model has troubles of its own.

[Isgrimnur]

Paralyzed Man Walks After Nose Cells Transplanted Into Spinal Cord

The same cells that give Darek Fidyka his sense of smell are also helping him walk again.

The Bulgarian man, who was paralyzed after a knife attack in 2010, can walk after doctors in Poland transplanted nerve cells from his nose into his severed spinal cord. The successful operation was the first of its kind for regenerative medicine, and Fidyka is believed to be the first man to walk again after having a completely severed spinal cord.
...
Doctors wanted to harness the regenerative capabilities of olfactory nerve cells, so they removed one of Fidyka’s olfactory bulbs in an operation two years ago. They took olfactory ensheathing cells from the bulb, and grew these regenerating cells in a petri dish. After two weeks, doctors injected the nose cells into the spinal cord. Doctors also transplanted four strips of Fidyka’s ankle nerve fibers to bridge the 8-milimeter gap in his severed spine, and allow a path for the cells to grow.

Within three months, the treatment was reaping rewards. Fidyka — paralyzed from the chest down — regained feeling in his lower extremities; his left leg developed muscle mass; and bladder, bowel and sexual functions even returned, the BBC reports. Most importantly, he can now walk once again with the assistance of a frame. Researchers published their results Tuesday in the journal Cell Transplantation.

[Isgrimnur]

Pop-up wetlands

When they're flying south for the winter, birds need to rest their weary wings—preferably somewhere with food and water. But due to California's agricultural development (not to mention its record-breaking drought), their preferred West Coast wetland stopovers are few and far between. So Matt Merrifield, a geographer with the Nature Conservancy of California, dove into geospatial data to help develop an alternative. The answer: flooded rice paddies.

After the September harvest, farmers flood their fields to break down leftover rice straw. That's water—but not on the right schedule. “We had to identify, very specifically in time and space, where there were a lot of birds but not a lot of water,” Merrifield says. So he overlaid migration data—crowdsourced from birders—with satellite images showing farmland water use. Then the Conservancy paid rice growers in the overlapping areas of California's Central Valley to keep certain fields flooded when the birds arrive in October.

The result: about 10,000 acres of popup wetlands for birds to visit en route from Alaska to South America, sited underneath them at the exact time they need a landing. “Eventually we want to do this not only in the Central Valley but up and down the Pacific Flyway,” Merrifield says. That should make for some happy birds.

[Isgrimnur]

Why are all of the magazines in doctor waiting rooms so old?

Main outcome measures Disappearance of magazines less than 2 months old versus magazines 3-12 months old, the overall rate of loss of magazines, and the rate of loss of gossipy versus non-gossipy magazines.

Conclusions General practice waiting rooms contain mainly old magazines. This phenomenon relates to the disappearance of the magazines rather than to the supply of old ones. Gossipy magazines were more likely to disappear than non-gossipy ones. On the grounds of cost we advise practices to supply old copies of non-gossipy magazines. A waiting room science curriculum is urgently needed.

[Ralph-Wiggum]

Happens when you put sexually frustrated seals on an island with penguins? This. Videos are alternatively hilarious and disturbing. NSFP*


*Not safe for penguins.

[Isgrimnur]

Hey, Smoove, I've got a dating tip for you.

Drunk birds ‘slur’ their songs

In a study published last week in PLOS ONE, researchers from the Oregon Health and Science University tempted zebra finches with spiked juice -- but not because they wanted to help the lab animals ring in the new year in style.

The researchers study birdsong to learn more about human speech. Birds learn to sing in much the same way that humans learn to talk (in fact, a recent study found that birdsong and speech even rely on the same genes). It's much easier to keep a bird in a cage and study its brain than it is to do the same with a human toddler, so birds give scientists some of our best insights into the brain mechanisms that make speech possible.
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"The most pronounced effects were decreased amplitude and increased entropy," the researchers wrote in the study. So in other words, their songs got quieter and less organized.

But not all parts of the song were equally affected. Zebra finch songs are made up of specific syllables -- ones with distinct acoustic structures. And some of those syllables seemed to be more garbled in tipsy trillers than others.

The researchers think this might mean that alcohol affects certain parts of the birds' brain circuitry more profoundly than others, leading the sounds produced by that part of the brain to end up sounding more sloppy. Further studies will explore that possibility, as well as whether or not alcohol consumption keeps birds from learning new songs.