Lifeboat Foundation

Physicists believe that at the tiniest scales, space emerges from quanta. What might these building blocks look like?

BEIJING (Reuters) — China launched its first privately developed rocket from a launchpad in northwestern China on Thursday, state media said, the latest milestone in the country’s ambitious space exploration program.

“Chongqing Liangjiang Star” rocket, developed by Chinese private firm OneSpace Technology, takes off from a launchpad in an undisclosed location in northwestern China May 17, 2018. Wan Nan/Chongqing Ribao via REUTERS.

Red is the highest level of alert to aviation, meaning that either an eruption is forecast to be imminent with significant emission of ash into the atmosphere likely — as is the case currently in Hawaii — or an eruption is underway with significant emission of ash into the atmosphere. Either way, this could mean disruptions are possible in aviation around the big island of Hawaii for the foreseeable future, depending on what happens.

Ash clouds from volcanoes can clog the engines of airplanes and cause them to malfunction — or stop working altogether. According to this article from the World Organization of Volcano Observatories:

In the air, beneath the ocean’s surface, and on land, microbes are the minute but mighty forces regulating much of the planet’s biogeochemical cycles. To better understand their roles, scientists work to identify these microbes and to determine their individual contributions. While advances in sequencing technologies have enabled researchers to access the genomes of thousands of microbes and make them publicly available, no similar shift has occurred with the task of assigning functions to the genes uncovered.

To help overcome this bottleneck, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), including researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), have developed a workflow that enables large-scale, genome-wide assays of gene importance across many conditions. The study, “Mutant Phenotypes for Thousands of Bacterial Genes of Unknown Function,” has been published in the journal Nature and is by far the largest functional genomics study of bacteria ever published.

“This is the first really large, systematic experimental effort to try to assign functions to bacterial genes of unknown function,” said study senior author and biologist Adam Deutschbauer of Berkeley Lab’s Biosciences Area. “We are tackling the problem that biology is up against and recognizes: It is super easy to sequence, but we cannot currently assign confident functions for the majority of genes identified by sequencing. Our experimental data provides an anchor that other researchers could use to make a more informed inference about protein function.”

Continue reading “Exploration of diverse bacteria signals big advance for gene function prediction” »

For the first time, scientists used experimental data to estimate the pressure inside a proton

By

Emily Conover

Continue reading “The inside of a proton endures more pressure than anything else we’ve seen” »

An international team of astronomers has identified a rare laser phenomenon shining from the heart of the planetary nebula Menzel 3, otherwise known as the Ant Nebula. The discovery suggests the presence of an as yet unseen companion star, hiding at the core of the chaotic cosmic structure.

Menzel 3 is located roughly 8,000 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Norma. Discovered by Donald Menzel in the 1920s, it was given the moniker of the Ant Nebula, owing to its apparent similarity to the head and thorax of a garden ant.

The striking object belongs to a specific family of diffuse bodies known as planetary nebula. Despite their suggestive name, the formation of these beautiful structures has nothing to do with planets, and is instead rooted in the demise of middleweight stars similar to our Sun.

Scientists at the research consortium CaloriCool are closer than ever to the materials needed for a new type of refrigeration technology that is markedly more energy efficient than current gas compression systems. Currently, residential and commercial cooling consumes about one out of every five kilowatt-hours of electricity generated in the U.S., but a caloric refrigeration system could save as much as 30 percent in energy usage.

DARPA calls on researchers to autonomously explore the innards of Earth. Get ready for high drama and some fantastical-looking robots.

The system’s inventors claim it predicts outbreaks up to three months in advance.