Octopus Overlords

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Thu Apr 15, 2021 4:56 pm Guardian

The whitest-ever paint has been produced by academic researchers, with the aim of boosting the cooling of buildings and tackling the climate crisis.

The new paint reflects 98% of sunlight as well as radiating infrared heat through the atmosphere into space. In tests, it cooled surfaces by 4.5C below the ambient temperature, even in strong sunlight. The researchers said the paint could be on the market in one or two years.
...
The new paint was revealed in a report in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Three factors are responsible for the paint’s cooling performance. First, barium sulphate was used as the pigment which, unlike conventional titanium dioxide pigment, does not absorb UV light. Second, a high concentration of pigment was used – 60%.

Third, the pigment particles were of varied size. The amount of light scattered by a particle depends on its size, so using a range scatters more of the light spectrum from the sun. Ruan’s lab had assessed more than 100 different materials and tested about 50 formulations for each of the most promising. Their previous whitest paint used calcium carbonate – chalk – and reflected 95.5% sunlight.
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The researchers said the ultra-white paint uses a standard acrylic solvent and could be manufactured like conventional paint. They claim the paint would be similar in price to current paints, with barium sulphate actually cheaper than titanium dioxide. They have also tested the paint’s resistance to abrasion, but said longer-term weathering tests were needed to assess its long-term durability.

Ruan said the paint was not a risk to people’s eyesight: “Our surface reflects the sunlight diffusely, so the power going in any particular direction is not very strong. It just looks bright white, a bit whiter than snow.”

Analysis of what’s known about the dinosaur leads to conclusion there were 2.5 billion over time.

How many Tyrannosaurus rexes roamed North America during the Cretaceous period?

That’s a question Charles Marshall pestered his paleontologist colleagues with for years until he finally teamed up with his students to find an answer.

What the team found, to be published this week in the journal Science, is that about 20,000 adult T. rexes probably lived at any one time, give or take a factor of 10, which is in the ballpark of what most of his colleagues guessed.

What few paleontologists had fully grasped, he said, including himself, is that this means that some 2.5 billion lived and died over the approximately 2 1/2 million years the dinosaur walked the earth.

A new species of bark spider from Madagascar that spins some of the largest webs on record has been discovered by two entomologists—Matjaz Kuntner and Ingi Agnarsson—research collaborators of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Females of the newly named species, Caerostris darwini or Darwin’s bark spider, cast giant webs across streams, rivers and lakes, suspending the web’s orb above water and attaching it to plants on each riverbank. Bridgelines of these water-spanning webs have been measured as long as 25 meters.

Scientists were in for a shock when they encountered a "real life river monster" -- a giant fish believed to be more than 100 years old.
Staff from the Alpena Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office caught the fish -- a female lake sturgeon measuring 6' 10" and weighing a whopping 240 pounds -- in the Detroit River in April.

The fish was released back into the river after processing, the service said.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Sat May 22, 2021 1:22 pm

US regulators have approved an Alzheimer’s drug from Biogen that split the scientific community, marking a significant moment for sufferers of the disease and their families.

Aducanumab is designed for patients suffering from mild to moderate Alzheimer’s. Biogen claims it reduces the progression of the disease by breaking up clumps of amyloid plaques that form in the brain. 

The treatment has been surrounded by controversy for years, and many scientists opposed its approval, saying it does not work.

To the human eye, most stationary objects appear to be just that—still, and completely at rest. Yet if we were handed a quantum lens, allowing us to see objects at the scale of individual atoms, what was an apple sitting idly on our desk would appear as a teeming collection of vibrating particles, very much in motion.

stessier wrote: ↑Sat May 29, 2021 8:10 pm Science!! (Going faster than the wind speed by only going directly downwind - no tacking)

In new research out this month in Cancer Cell, scientists at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI), part of Sinai Health, divide all cancers into two groups, based on the presence or absence of a protein called the Yes-associated protein, or YAP.

Rod Bremner, senior scientist at the LTRI, said they have determined that all cancers are present with YAP either on or off, and each classification exhibits different drug sensitivities or resistance. YAP plays an important role in the formation of malignant tumours because it is an important regulator and effector of the Hippo signaling pathway.

“Not only is YAP either off or on, but it has opposite pro- or anti-cancer effects in either context,” Bremner said. “Thus, YAPon cancers need YAP to grow and survive. In contrast, YAPoff cancers stop growing when we switch on YAP.”

Daehawk wrote: ↑Thu Jul 01, 2021 3:43 pm This is now my all time favorite video from him.

disarm wrote: ↑Tue Aug 24, 2021 11:00 pm That carburetor video is definitely cool. I had a very generic understanding of the concept before, but that clears up a lot of details. Now I need another twenty minutes to watch him visit the Holley factory and learn how a 4-barrel carb works

Kraken wrote: ↑Tue Aug 31, 2021 11:28 pm

Just a tardigrade going for a stroll.