AI helps crack salt water ’s curious electrical properties
Water is a near-universal solvent, able to dissolve substances ranging from limestone to the sugar in your coffee. That chemical superpower originates, oddly enough, in water’s electrical properties. It can oppose and almost entirely cancel electric fields—including attractions among dissolved ions that might otherwise pull them together. Curiously, dissolving salt in water weakens that electrical response. Now, a team of physicists has figured out exactly why this happens, using state-of-the-art computer simulations bolstered by artificial intelligence (AI).
“This is a fundamental property of water and one can...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 28, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Grown from scratch, simulated magnetic fields could explain cosmic mystery
Far beyond the magnet on your refrigerator door, out past the magnetic fields of Earth, the Sun, and the Milky Way, are invisible field lines that permeate the barren voids between galaxies. But the genesis of these expansive fields has remained a mystery.
Some have proposed that they arose as a result of the big bang, but a
new study
adds support to an alternative hypothesis: These fields can be born relatively easily, anywhere and anytime in the universe. The study relies on computer simulations that illustrate how gravity can stir up charged particles in ways that generate tiny magnetic seeds, which beco...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 28, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
A spectacular superconductor claim is making news. Here ’s why experts are doubtful
This week, social media has been aflutter over a claim for a new superconductor that works not only well above room temperatures, but also at ambient pressure. If true, the discovery would be one of the biggest ever in condensed matter physics and could usher in all sorts of technological marvels, such as levitating vehicles and perfectly efficient electrical grids. However,
the two related papers
, posted to the arXiv preprint server by Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim of South Korea’s Quantum Energy Research Centre and colleagues on 22 July, are short on detail and have left many physicists skeptical. The researche...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 27, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Farmers are being paid millions to trap carbon in their soils. Will it actually help the planet?
Lance Unger has been doing things a little differently lately on his farm near the Wabash River in southwestern Indiana. After last fall’s harvest, rather than leaving his fields fallow, he sowed some of them with cover crops of oats and sorghum that grew until the winter cold killed them off. And before planting corn and soybeans this spring, Unger drove a machine to shove aside yellowing stalks—last season’s “trash,” as he calls it—rather than tilling the soil and plowing the stalks under.
For these efforts, a Boston-based company called Indigo paid Unger $26,232 in late 2021 and an even larger chunk la...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 27, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Ship noises prove a nuisance for arctic narwhals
The Arctic Ocean is a noisy place. Creatures of the deep have learned to live with the cacophony of creaking ice sheets and breaking icebergs, but humanmade sources of noise from ships and oil and gas infrastructure are altering that natural submarine soundscape. Now, a research team has found that even subtle underwater noise pollution can
cause narwhals to make shallower dives and cut their hunts short
.
The research, published today in
Science Advances
, uncovers “some really great information on a species we know very little about,” says Ari Friedlaender, an ocean ecologist at the U...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 26, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Ancient people in China systematically mined and burned coal up to 3600 years ago
Long before coal fueled the Industrial Revolution, ancient societies around the world were already exploiting its power to smelt metal or heat water for toasty baths.
Now, excavations at a Bronze Age site in northwestern China show people were burning coal on a large scale up to 3600 years ago, 1 millennium earlier than previously thought. The research,
reported today in
Science Advances
, also traces where the coal came from and how a shortage of other fuel may have encouraged ancient people to turn to this new energy source.
In the past, knowledge of ancient coal usage was “based on who a...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 26, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
This fish delivers a nasty sting. Could it also save lives?
Ocean-goers along the Pacific Northwest’s rugged shorelines know to give the prickly Korean rockfish a wide berth. A type of scorpionfish, it can deliver a toxic strike with its spines. But according to a new study, the fish may possess the ability to heal as well as harm. A protein it produces can kill drug-resistant bacteria, the authors say, and could one day be used to treat infections in people with cystic fibrosis.
The discovery “sets the stage” for scientists to develop better tools to combat antibiotic resistance, says Nicole Iovine, an infectious disease expert at the University of Florida who was not ...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 24, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Where do deep-sea creatures live? Where they won ’t dissolve
Vast muddy seabeds cover more than 60% of the planet, collectively making them Earth’s largest habitat. At first glance, these frigid, sunless depths all seem more or less the same. Yet the animals that live there, kilometers below the surface, prefer some regions over others, according to a new study. What accounts for their preferences? It’s nothing they can see or sense, the authors say, but an invisible and life-threatening limit imposed by seawater chemistry.
This limit demarcates where an important component of many kinds of marine life, calcium carbonate, naturally dissolves. Researchers have long known th...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 24, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Legal challenges multiply to law reshaping Mexico ’s science funding system
Mexico’s controversial new science law, which seeks to reshape government research funding and governance, is facing a flurry of legal challenges.
The nation’s Supreme Court last week agreed to hear a lawsuit brought by federal lawmakers who opposed the measure and allege its enactment violates Mexico’s constitution. The move came just days after a lower court ordered the government to temporarily stop implementing the law while it hears one of dozens of challenges brought by researchers.
Government officials say they have yet to receive the order, issued by a district court judge in the northern state of...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 21, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Curry may have landed in Southeast Asia 2000 years ago
Even after 2000 years, the stone slab still smelled of nutmeg. Unearthed in an ancient village in southern Vietnam, the cookware—roughly the size and shape of an anvil—was likely used to grind the spice, along with other ingredients familiar in today’s curries. The discovery, reported today in
Science Advances
, marks
the earliest known example of spice processing in mainland Southeast Asia
. It also suggests that visitors from India and Indonesia may have introduced their culinary traditions to the region millennia ago.
“For decades, we have known of the strong Indian influence on Southea...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 21, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
News at a glance: Ben Franklin ’s anticounterfeiting, science’s English language barrier, and disclosing stigmatized identities to students
INFECTIOUS DISEASES
Drugmaker expands access to TB drug
A man with tuberculosis undergoes an electrocardiogram at an Indian clinic that treats drug-resistant TB.
UNIT PARANJPE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson (J&J) last week agreed to help make a therapy critical to fighting drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) more widely available and affordable. J&J said it would allow competitors to market generic versions of the lifesaving drug, bedaquiline, in 44 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where the company...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 20, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Warning signs detected hours ahead of big earthquakes
Established earthquake warning systems provide at best
just a minute or two of notice
—and that’s only if the shaking doesn’t start under your feet. Decades of searching for a better warning sign—fluctuations in the
geochemistry of groundwater
, electromagnetic effects in the upper atmosphere, and even changes in animal behavior—have failed. Many question whether such a precursor signal even exists.
Now, researchers say they
have identified nearly imperceptible shifts
along fault zones up to 2 hours before large earthquakes, according to a report today in
Science
. Al...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 20, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Is a ‘polyepidemic’ humanity’s next big threat? Childhood vaccine crusader shares concerns for future
By the start of 2011, the year epidemiologist Seth Berkley became CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the ambitious nonprofit had over its 11-year history supported the immunization of 288 million children in poor countries. But it also had a $3.7 billion funding gap between its plans and donor financial pledges. Making matters worse, an internal battle raged about how much it should invest in strengthening health systems versus more technological solutions, such as new or improved vaccines, favored by its main funder, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “It was a crisis,” Berkley says.
Berkley plans to step ...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 20, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Explainer: Why the U.S. has banned funding for Chinese lab at center of pandemic origin dispute
In a move that has more symbolic than practical impact, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has imposed new sanctions on a Chinese lab at the center of the debate about the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A nine-page
HHS memo
made public by a House subcommittee that
’s investigating the pandemic
’s origin suspends and proposes debarment of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)
“from participating in United States Federal Government procurement and nonprocurement programs.” In effect, this bars WIV from receiving U.S. government funding now and po...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 20, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
One in five people who contract the COVID-19 virus don ’t get sick. A gene variant may explain why
SARS-CoV-2 kills some of the people it infects and makes many others miserable. But a fortunate few skate through a bout of COVID-19 without suffering symptoms. One key to avoiding illness, according to a new study, is a version of a particular immune system gene that only some people carry. When individuals with this gene variant are exposed to common coronaviruses that cause colds, the research shows, they gain protection against SARS-CoV-2.
“I love this paper,” says immunologist Shane Crotty of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, who wasn’t connected to the research. The study, he says, provides “the st...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 19, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
