Science News
'Quantum Cheshire Cat' becomes reality
By James Morgan
Scientists have for the first time separated a particle from one of its physical properties - creating a "quantum Cheshire Cat".
The phenomenon is named after the curious feline in Alice in Wonderland, who vanishes leaving only its grin.
Researchers took a beam of neutrons and separated them from their magnetic moment, like passengers and their baggage at airport security.
They describe their feat in Nature Communications.
The same separation trick could in principle be performed with any property of any quantum object, say researchers from Vienna University of Technology.
Their technique could have a useful application in metrology - helping to filter out disturbances during high-precision measurements of quantum systems.
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Decades-old amber collection offers new views of a lost world: Tiny grasshopper encased in amber
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Scientists are searching through a massive collection of 20-million-year-old amber found in the Dominican Republic more than 50 years ago, and the effort is yielding fresh insights into ancient tropical insects and the world they inhabited.
When the collection is fully curated, a task that will take many years, it will be the largest unbiased Dominican amber collection in the world, the researchers report.
Perhaps the most striking discovery thus far is that of a pygmy locust, a tiny grasshopper the size of a rose thorn that lived 18- to 20-million years ago and fed on moss, algae and fungi. The specimen is remarkable because it represents an intermediate stage of evolution in the life of its subfamily of locusts (known as the Cladonotinae). The most ancient representatives of this group had wings, while modern counterparts do not. The newly discovered locust has what appear to be vestigial wings -- remnant structures that had already lost their primary function.
The discovery is reported in the journal ZooKeys.
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Technology News
A Dongle That Lets You Squeeze More Connections From Hotel Wi-Fi
By Christina Bonnington
You’ve forked over more than $150 for a decent, bed bug- and corpse-free hotel room. You plop down on the plush duvet and open up your laptop to get online. Of course, you’ve got to pay for it! But not only do you have to pay for Wi-Fi—it only grants access to one device. What gives?
In a day and age when the average household has four mobile devices, it feels like a slap in the face. But there’s actually a way to get around this problem (and it’s probably cheaper than that Wi-Fi access costs to begin with).
If you plug in a Wi-Fi adapter like the Panda Ultra Wireless N USB Adapter ($11), you can pay just once to get Wi-Fi to all your web connected gadgets. While your device already has a Wi-Fi antenna, this dongle acts as an access point, rebroadcasting the signal as one that your other mobile devices can connect to.
It’s petite enough that you could just leave it plugged into your USB port all the time, if you’re constantly traveling, or keep in a pocket of your backpack or messenger bag.
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The Fasinatng … Frustrating … Fascinating History of Autocorrect
By Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Invoke the word autocorrect and most people will think immediately of its hiccups—the sort of hysterical, impossible errors one finds collected on sites like Damn You Autocorrect. But despite the inadvertent hilarity, the real marvel of our mobile text-correction systems is how astoundingly good they are. It's not too much of an exaggeration to call autocorrect the overlooked underwriter of our era of mobile prolixity. Without it, we wouldn't be able to compose windy love letters from stadium bleachers, write novels on subway commutes, or dash off breakup texts while in line at the post office. Without it, we probably couldn't even have phones that look anything like the ingots we tickle—the whole notion of touchscreen typing, where our podgy physical fingers are expected to land with precision on tiny virtual keys, is viable only when we have some serious software to tidy up after us. Because we know autocorrect is there as brace and cushion, we're free to write with increased abandon, at times and in places where writing would otherwise be impossible. Thanks to autocorrect, the gap between whim and word is narrower than it's ever been, and our world is awash in easily rendered thought.
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Environmental News
Extreme Waves Recorded in Arctic Ocean
Five-meter-high waves have been detected in the middle of the Arctic Ocean by Dr Jim Thomson of the University of Washington and Dr Erick Rogers of the Stennis Space Center’s Naval Research Laboratory.
by Sci-News.com
“As the Arctic is melting, it’s a pretty simple prediction that the additional open water should make waves,” said Dr Thomson, who is the first author of a paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Using a 600 kHz Nortek Acoustic Wave and Current sensor anchored to the seafloor, about 50 meters below the surface, the researchers measured wave height in the ice-free central Beaufort Sea from mid-August until late October 2012.
Extreme, record-breaking waves – up to 5 meters high – were recorded during the peak of a storm in September 2012.
“Arctic ice used to retreat less than 160 km from the shore. In 2012, it retreated more than 1,600 km. Wind blowing across an expanse of water for a long time creates whitecaps, then small waves, which then slowly consolidate into big swells that carry huge amounts of energy in a single punch,” the scientists explained.
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Two California wildfires destroy 10 homes
Two fast-moving wildfires in California have destroyed 10 homes and have forced the evacuation of hundreds more, US officials say.
In the Sacramento region, a fire has spread to cover an area of about 4,000 acres, while another blaze threatens homes around Yosemite National Park.
The Sacramento fire is around 35% contained, officials told local media.
Separately a man in his 20s died and others were hurt in a lightning strike in a rare summer storm in Los Angeles.
Most of the victims were hit on a beach in Los Angeles, though one golfer was also struck on nearby Catalina island.
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Medical News
Pesticide DDT linked to slow metabolism, obesity and diabetes, mouse study finds
University of California - Davis
Exposure of pregnant mice to the pesticide DDT is linked to an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol and related conditions in female offspring later in life, according to a study led by the University of California, Davis.
The study, published online July 30 in the journal PLOS ONE, is the first to show that developmental exposure to DDT increases the risk of females later developing metabolic syndrome -- a cluster of conditions that include increased body fat, blood glucose, and cholesterol.
DDT was banned in the United States in the 1970s but continues to be used for malaria control in countries including India and South Africa.
Scientists gave mice doses of DDT comparable to exposures of people living in malaria-infested regions where it is regularly sprayed, as well as of pregnant mothers of U.S. adults who are now in their 50s.
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Exploring 3-D printing to make organs for transplants
American Chemical Society
Printing whole new organs for transplants sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, but the real-life budding technology could one day make actual kidneys, livers, hearts and other organs for patients who desperately need them. In the ACS journal Langmuir, scientists are reporting new understanding about the dynamics of 3-D bioprinting that takes them a step closer to realizing their goal of making working tissues and organs on-demand.
Yong Huang and colleagues note that this idea of producing tissues and organs, or biofabricating, has the potential to address the shortage of organ donations. And biofabricated ones could even someday be made with a patient's own cells, lowering the risk of rejection. Today, more than 120,000 people are on waiting lists for donated organs, with most needing kidney transplants. But between January and April of this year, just short of 10,000 people received the transplant they needed.
There are a few different biofabricating methods, but inkjet printing has emerged as a frontrunner. It's been used to print live cells, from hamster ovary cells to human fibroblasts, which are a common type of cell in the body. But no studies had been done to really understand how biological inks behave when they're dispensed through printer nozzles. Huang's team set out to fill that gap.
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Space News
Tidal forces gave moon its shape early in its history, new analysis finds
University of California - Santa Cruz
The shape of the moon deviates from a simple sphere in ways that scientists have struggled to explain. A new study by researchers at UC Santa Cruz shows that most of the moon's overall shape can be explained by taking into account tidal effects acting early in the moon's history.
The results, published July 30 in Nature, provide insights into the moon's early history, its orbital evolution, and its current orientation in the sky, according to lead author Ian Garrick-Bethell, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz.
As the moon cooled and solidified more than 4 billion years ago, the sculpting effects of tidal and rotational forces became frozen in place. The idea of a frozen tidal-rotational bulge, known as the "fossil bulge" hypothesis, was first described in 1898. "If you imagine spinning a water balloon, it will start to flatten at the poles and bulge at the equator," Garrick-Bethell explained. "On top of that you have tides due to the gravitational pull of the Earth, and that creates sort of a lemon shape with the long axis of the lemon pointing at the Earth."
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Double star with weird and wild planet-forming discs
European Southern Observatory - ESO
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have found wildly misaligned planet-forming gas discs around the two young stars in the binary system HK Tauri. These new ALMA observations provide the clearest picture ever of protoplanetary discs in a double star. The new result also helps to explain why so many exoplanets -- unlike the planets in the Solar System -- came to have strange, eccentric or inclined orbits.
The results will appear in the journal Nature on 31 July 2014.
Unlike our solitary Sun, most stars form in binary pairs -- two stars that are in orbit around each other. Binary stars are very common, but they pose a number of questions, including how and where planets form in such complex environments.
"ALMA has now given us the best view yet of a binary star system sporting protoplanetary discs -- and we find that the discs are mutually misaligned!" said Eric Jensen, an astronomer at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, USA.
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Odd News
Fab 4 Math: Computer Maps Beatles' Musical Evolution
By Kelly Dickerson, Staff Writer
Serious Beatles fans may be able to describe the band's complex musical evolution during its eight-year run, but now there is a mathematical way to map the group's progression from "Love Me Do" all the way to "Let It Be."
A group of researchers developed an algorithm that sorts out similarities among songs based on sound frequencies and patterns. The scientists then used the algorithm to analyze songs from each of the 13 Beatles albums released in the United Kingdom. After determining how closely related each song was, the algorithm successfully ranked the albums chronologically.
"People who are not Beatles fans normally can't tell that 'Help!' was recorded before 'Rubber Soul,' but the algorithm can," study author Lior Shamir, a professor at the Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan, said in a statement. "This experiment demonstrates that artificial intelligence can identify the changes and progression in musical styles by 'listening' to popular music albums in a completely new way."
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