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Research

U=(N/T)M*G: Jello

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Jupiter, space, Jello, discoveries, plot bunnies   That title is a little misleading, I know. It’s actually in reference to what my astrophysicist friend told me about the bigger planet in our system. The ridiculously awesome Jupiter. A couple years back, the probe Juno inserted into Jupiter’s orbit with the simple, massive, mission of gathering data. Scientists, and the world, were astounded by the sheer amount of weirdness and awesome we learned. The cyclones at the poles, the wonky electromagnetic field, the sci-fi-esque core. The core and ground are the parts that really stuck with me. Metallic hydrogen. When I … Read more

STUDY: Sound Has a Negative Mass

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sound waves - pixabay

Sound has negative mass, and all around you it’s drifting up, up and away — albeit very slowly. That’s the conclusion of a paper submitted on July 23 to the preprint journal arXiv, and it shatters the conventional understanding that researchers have long had of sound waves: as massless ripples that zip through matter, giving molecules a shove but ultimately balancing any forward or upward motion with an equal and opposite downward motion. That’s a straightforward model that will explain the behavior of sound in most circumstances, but it’s not quite true, the new paper argues. [The Mysterious Physics of … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Dyson

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The Sun lights up the sphere from the outside, and it hangs like a great golden topaz in the Universe, a jewel in the vast blackness. Surrounded by other jewels of sodalite and jasper and pale, pale rubies. The star is visible, a hazy globe of fire, its largest attendant planets vague dots through the translucent wall. That’s the first image which came to mind when I read this newest piece to come out of the science community. New Horizons, the probe we sent out to Pluto back when it was still a planet (Viva la Pluto!), has confirmed there’s … Read more

STUDY: When Robots Beg For Their Lives

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robot - pixabay

Robots designed to interact socially with humans are slowly becoming more and more common. They’re appearing as receptionists, tour guides, security guards, and porters. But how good are we at treating these robots as robots? A growing body of evidence suggests not good at all. Studies have repeatedly shown we’re extremely susceptible to social cues coming from machines, and a recent experiment by German researchers demonstrates that people will even refuse to turn a robot off — if it begs for its life. In the study, published in the open access journal PLOS One, 89 volunteers were recruited to complete … Read more

FOR WRITERS: Designer Babies

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FOR WRITERS Today’s writer topic comes from QSFer Aidee Ladnier: We’ve all heard the scare tactics of politicians warning of the dangers of designer babies, but genetically modified humans are literally due to be born in the next decade. Medical science has made our lives longer and healthier. But what if scientists modify those things that make us fundamentally who we are? Why is it okay to make sure a child is not born with a genetic disease that will kill them prematurely (like cystic fibrosis) but not okay to give an child a higher IQ which would give it … Read more

SCIENCE: Storing Data in DNA

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DNA - Pixabay

Government intelligence agencies have a plan to build computers that store information inside DNA and other organic molecules. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a group within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that develops technologies for U.S. intelligence services, announced plans to develop “tabletop”-sized machines that can store and retrieve data from large batches of polymers — a term that refers to a wide variety of long, stringlike molecules. Polymers can store data in the sequence of individual atoms or groups of atoms. The project, which was reported by Nextgov, is an attempt to solve a basic … Read more

SCIENCE: Did Most Men Die Off 7,000 Years Ago?

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warrior - pixabay

Modern men’s genes suggest that something peculiar happened 5,000 to 7,000 years ago: Most of the male population across Asia, Europe and Africa seems to have died off, leaving behind just one man for every 17 women. This so-called population “bottleneck” was first proposed in 2015, and since then, researchers have been trying to figure out what could’ve caused it. One hypothesis held that the drop-off in the male population occurred due to ecological or climatic factors that mainly affected male offspring, while another idea suggested that the die-off happened because some males had more power in society, and thus … Read more

SCIENCE: There’s a Brain in Your Butt

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colon - pixabay

You’re reading these words because you have a brain in your head. But did you know you also have a brain in your butt? OK, not a literal brain — more of an autonomous matrix of millions of neurons that can, somehow, control intestinal muscle movements without any help from your central nervous system. And these neurons don’t actually live in your butt, but they do live in your colon, or large intestine — that tube-like organ that connects the small intestine to the rectum and shepherds what remains of the food you ate through the final leg of the … Read more

SCIENCE: Sperm in Outer Space

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sperm - pixabay

For the first time, err, officially, NASA will set loose human sperm in outer space. The Micro-11 mission, which made its way to space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket’s Dragon resupply capsule, amounts to a bunch of containers of frozen human and bull sperm. Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), scientists will thaw the sperm, according to a NASA statement, and then study it to see how weightlessness affects its ability to move and prepare to fuse with an egg. “Previous experiments with sea urchin and bull sperm suggest that activating movement happens more quickly in microgravity,” NASA officials … Read more

SCIENCE: Scientists Find Young Cells in Old Brains

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neurons - pixabay

Your brain keeps making new nerve cells, even as you get older. That’s a big deal. For decades, researchers believed that aging brains stop making new cells. But recent research has offered strong evidence to the contrary, and a new paper published today (April 5) in the journal Cell Stem Cell tries to put the notion to bed entirely. Aging brains, the researchers showed, produce just as many new cells as younger brains do. “When I went to medical school, they used to teach us that the brain stops making new cells,” said lead study author Dr. Maura Boldrini, a … Read more