[raydan]

Cornell researchers see atoms at record resolution

$1:

In 2018, Cornell researchers built a high-powered detector that, in combination with an algorithm-driven process called ptychography, set a world record by tripling the resolution of a state-of-the-art electron microscope.

As successful as it was, that approach had a weakness. It only worked with ultrathin samples that were a few atoms thick. Anything thicker would cause the electrons to scatter in ways that could not be disentangled.

Now a team, again led by David Muller, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering, has bested its own record by a factor of two with an electron microscope pixel array detector (EMPAD) that incorporates even more sophisticated 3D reconstruction algorithms.

The resolution is so fine-tuned, the only blurring that remains is the thermal jiggling of the atoms themselves.

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/0 ... resolution

[bootlegga]

Solar windows, shingles and cladding? The building itself is now the solar panel

[DrCaleb]

$1:

Bill Gates' next generation nuclear reactor to be built in Wyoming


Billionaire Bill Gates' advanced nuclear reactor company TerraPower LLC and PacifiCorp (PPWLO.PK) have selected Wyoming to launch the first Natrium reactor project on the site of a retiring coal plant, the state's governor said on Wednesday.

TerraPower, founded by Gates about 15 years ago, and power company PacifiCorp, owned by Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway (BRKa.N), said the exact site of the Natrium reactor demonstration plant is expected to be announced by the end of the year. Small advanced reactors, which run on different fuels than traditional reactors, are regarded by some as a critical carbon-free technology than can supplement intermittent power sources like wind and solar as states strive to cut emissions that cause climate change.

"This is our fastest and clearest course to becoming carbon negative," Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon said. "Nuclear power is clearly a part of my all-of-the-above strategy for energy" in Wyoming, the country's top coal-producing state.

The project features a 345 megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor with molten salt-based energy storage that could boost the system's power output to 500 MW during peak power demand. TerraPower said last year that the plants would cost about $1 billion.

Late last year the U.S. Department of Energy awarded TerraPower $80 million in initial funding to demonstrate Natrium technology, and the department has committed additional funding in coming years subject to congressional appropriations.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy ... 021-06-02/

[DrCaleb]

$1:

Underwater avalanche continued for two days

Scientists are reporting what they say is the longest sediment avalanche yet measured in action.

It occurred underwater off West Africa, in a deep canyon leading away from the mouth of the Congo River.

Something in excess of a cubic kilometre of sand and mud descended into the deep.

This colossal flow kept moving for two whole days and ran out for more than 1,100km across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

The event would have gone unrecorded were it not for the fact that the slide broke two submarine telecommunications cables, slowing the internet and other data traffic between Nigeria and South Africa in the process.

And also because of the prescient action of researchers who had lined the length of the Congo Canyon with instruments capable of measuring current and sediment velocities.

"We had a series of oceanographic moorings that were hit by the event, which broke them from their seafloor anchors so that they popped up to send us an email," said Prof Peter Talling from Durham University, UK.

"This thing gradually got faster and faster. Because it erodes the seabed as it goes, it picks up sand and mud, which makes the flow denser and even quicker. So, it has this positive feedback where it can build and build and build," he told BBC News.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57382529

[DrCaleb]

$1:

DNA Jumps Between Animal Species. No One Knows How Often.

To survive in the frigid ocean waters around the Arctic and Antarctica, marine life evolved many defenses against the lethal cold. One common adaptation is the ability to make antifreezing proteins (AFPs) that prevent ice crystals from growing in blood, tissues and cells. It’s a solution that has evolved repeatedly and independently, not just in fish but in plants, fungi and bacteria.

It isn’t surprising, then, that herrings and smelts, two groups of fish that commonly roam the northernmost reaches of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, both make AFPs. But it is very surprising, even weird, that both fish do so with the same AFP gene — particularly since their ancestors diverged more than 250 million years ago and the gene is absent from all the other fish species related to them.

A March paper in Trends in Genetics holds the unorthodox explanation: The gene became part of the smelt genome through a direct horizontal transfer from a herring. It wasn’t through hybridization, because herring and smelt can’t crossbreed, as many failed attempts have shown. The herring gene made its way into the smelt genome outside the normal sexual channels.

Laurie Graham, a molecular biologist at Queen’s University in Ontario and lead author on the paper, knows she’s making a bold claim in arguing for the direct transfer of a gene from one fish to another. That kind of horizontal DNA movement once wasn’t imagined to happen in any animals, let alone vertebrates. Still, the more she and her colleagues study the smelt, the clearer the evidence becomes.

Nor are the smelt unique. Recent studies of a range of animals — other fish, reptiles, birds and mammals — point to a similar conclusion: The lateral inheritance of DNA, once thought to be exclusive to microbes, occurs on branches throughout the tree of life.

Sarah Schaack, an evolutionary genomicist at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, believes these cases of horizontal transfer still have “a pretty big wow factor” even among scientists, “because the conventional wisdom for so long was that it was less likely or impossible in eukaryotes.” But the smelt discovery and other recent examples all point to horizontal transfers playing an influential role in evolution.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/dna-jump ... -20210609/

[DrCaleb]

[DrCaleb]

$1:

Why People Fall For Conspiracy Theories

Think of a conspiracy theorist. How do they see the world? What stands out to them? What fades into the background? Now think of yourself. How does the way you see things differ? What is it about the way you think that has stopped you from falling down a rabbit hole?

Conspiracy theories have long been part of American life, but they feel more urgent than ever. Innocuous notions like whether the moon landing was a hoax feel like child’s play compared to more impactful beliefs like whether vaccines are safe (they are) or the 2020 election was stolen (it wasn’t). It can be easy to write off our conspiracy theorist friends and relatives as crackpots, but science shows things are far more nuanced than that. There are traits that likely prime people to be more prone to holding these beliefs, and you may find that when you take stock of these traits, you aren’t far removed from your cousin who is convinced the world is run by lizard people.

Let’s begin our tour of cognitive fallacies by going bird-watching. Picture, if you will, avid bird-watcher Fivey Fox at their two favorite spying spots. In one habitat, there are more cardinals than bluebirds — a 60:40 ratio — so Fivey calls that habitat “Big Red.” In the other habitat, “Big Blue,” there is an opposite ratio of bluebirds to cardinals (60 bluebirds, 40 cardinals).

In the interactive below, you initially can’t see which spot Fivey is bird-watching in, but you can see what bird they spot. After each sighting, Fivey notes the bird in their notebook, and then you decide whether you have seen enough to guess the correct habitat or you’d like to see more birds. Have a go!

Did you get it right? Actually, who cares! I am more interested in how you made your decision.

That game measures a trait known as the jumping-to-conclusions bias. If you made your choice about the habitat after seeing just one or two birds, you demonstrated that trait, even if you made the right decision. The bias indicates a tendency to make up one’s mind about things quickly, often with very little evidence. One study found that people with this bias were more likely to endorse conspiracy beliefs than people without it, and it’s also been found to be correlated with harboring delusions.

It’s not surprising that someone who tends to make up their mind about something after reviewing very little evidence would be more likely to believe in a conspiracy theory. But if you fall into this category, don’t freak out. It doesn’t mean you’re destined to fall for b.s. the rest of your life. This is only one piece of the puzzle. It’s important to recognize what these kinds of studies can and can’t tell us. Many of the studies only observe a correlation — which we all know does not necessarily equal causation — between certain traits and conspiracy theories. Just because people who believe conspiracy theories are also more likely to have trait X doesn’t mean that it’s trait X that’s making them susceptible — the two might just go together. And even if there is a causal effect, that still doesn’t mean that everyone with trait X will subscribe to a conspiracy theory, or that everyone who doesn’t have trait X is immune to b.s.

“It’s all probabilistic,” said Joshua Hart, a professor of psychology at Union College who has studied the personality traits of people prone to believe conspiracy theories. Hart said when you consider the population as a whole, you can see these traits are correlated with harboring beliefs in conspiracies, but at the individual level, any single trait doesn’t necessarily predispose someone to falling down the rabbit hole. “I don’t think any one of them is going to tip the scale.”

Still, this research is useful and helps us establish a richer picture of who is susceptible to conspiracy theories. Take another exercise, where participants were shown the results of a series of coin tosses.

Patterns can be illusory

Participants were shown 10 sequences of 10 coins each. After each sequence, they were asked whether they thought the results were random or predetermined, on a 7 point scale (with 1 meaning completely random and 7 meaning completely determined). Take a look at the sequence above: How would you rate that? Click on the footnote to see the answer.1

This particular exercise was used in a 2018 study to measure something called illusory pattern perception: the tendency to see patterns where there are none. Respondents who believed there was some kind of predetermined pattern to the coin toss sequences were more likely to believe conspiracy theories. The researchers tried a few other methods of measuring illusory pattern perception — such as having participants try to detect patterns in abstract modern art paintings — and found similar results. Another study found this trait is also associated with people who ascribe profundity to randomly generated nonsense statements. Once again, these findings jibe with what you may presuppose about conspiracy theorists: Making connections between unrelated events or symbols is a key marker of many conspiracy theories.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/wh ... -theories/

[DrCaleb]

$1:

Keep an eye out for rare electric-blue noctilucent clouds in the northern sky

Sightings reported from several provinces, including Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba




It's that time of year again, when skywatchers get the chance to see a rare, shimmering type of cloud in the evening sky.

Noctilucent clouds (NLCs), or polar mesospheric clouds, are breathtaking to see. And these are no ordinary clouds. They form in the highest part of our atmosphere, at an altitude of 80 kilometres.

NLCs aren't all that well understood. However, researchers believe they're caused by meteor dust in our upper atmosphere.

They're most prominent in the Northern Hemisphere from roughly June to July (although they can occur from May to August) and need three things to be present: an increase in water vapour, very cold temperatures and particles on which the water vapour can freeze, such as leftover dust from meteors (and sometimes by particles left over from rocket launches).

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/noctilu ... -1.6069959

[bootlegga]

I woke up one night a couple years ago and saw weird lights in the sky, so I took a video of them north of Edmonton. They are spectacular.

[DrCaleb]

$1:

Major ocean-observing satellite starts providing science data

After six months of check-out and calibration in orbit, the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite will make its first two data streams available to the public on June 22. It launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Nov. 21, 2020, and is a U.S.-European collaboration to measure sea surface height and other key ocean features, such as ocean surface wind speed and wave height.

One of the sea surface height data streams that will be released is accurate to 2.3 inches (5.8 centimeters) and will be available within hours of when the instruments aboard Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich collect it. A second stream of data, accurate to 1.4 inches (3.5 centimeters), will be released two days after collection. The difference in when the products become available balances accuracy with delivery timeliness for tasks like forecasting the weather and helping to monitor the formation of hurricanes. More datasets, which will be accurate to about 1.2 inches (2.9 centimeters), are slated for distribution later this year and are intended for research activities and climate science including tracking global mean sea level rise.

The satellite, named after former NASA Earth Science Division Director Michael Freilich, collects its measurements for about 90% of the world's oceans. It is one of two satellites that compose the Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Continuity of Service) mission. The second satellite, Sentinel-6B, is slated for launch in 2025. Together, they are the latest in a series of spacecraft starting with TOPEX/Poseidon in 1992 and continuing with the Jason series of satellites that have been gathering precise ocean height measurements for nearly 30 years.

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-major-oce ... ience.html

[DrCaleb]

$1:

See the Highest-Resolution Atomic Image Ever Captured




Behold the highest-resolution image of atoms ever seen. Cornell University researchers captured a sample from a crystal in three dimensions and magnified it 100 million times, doubling the resolution that earned the same scientists a Guinness World Record in 2018. Their work could help develop materials for designing more powerful and efficient phones, computers and other electronics, as well as longer-lasting batteries.

The researchers obtained the image using a technique called electron ptychography. It involves shooting a beam of electrons, about a billion of them per second, at a target material. The beam moves infinitesimally as the electrons are fired, so they hit the sample from slightly different angles each time—sometimes they pass through cleanly, and other times they hit atoms and bounce around inside the sample on their way out. Cornell physicist David Muller, whose team conducted the recent study, likens the technique to playing dodgeball against opponents who are standing in the dark. The dodgeballs are electrons, and the targets are individual atoms. Though Muller cannot see the targets, he can see where the “dodgeballs” end up, thanks to advanced detectors. Based on the speckle pattern generated by billions of electrons, machine-learning algorithms can calculate where the atoms were in the sample and what their shapes might be.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... -captured/

[raydan]

See my post at the top of this page.

[DrCaleb]

D'oh!

[raydan]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

D'oh!

...and you call yourself a Mod.

[DrCaleb]

The story had yesterday's date. So I didn't check back a month to see if it was a dupe.