Astronomy
Russia's Monkeys-to-Mars Mission Draws PETA Protest
The word from Russia is that the country wants to send monkeys to the Red Planet by 2017. But waving the red flag on such a plan are the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
A few months ago, it was reported that researchers from the Russian Academy of Science are busy training four macaque monkeys to make a long-distance trek to the Red Planet.
Researcher Inessa Kozlovskaya is the leader of the team responsible for teaching the monkeys at the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Educating the animals includes joystick training and tapping into the cognitive thinking and learning skills of the animals.
While the sojourn to Mars of the monkeys would take six-months, it wasn't immediately clear whether there's any provision to return the animals back to Earth.
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"There's no reason to repeat the dark days of early space exploration, in which dogs and primates died in horrific ways, all alone in a tiny shuttle hurtling through space," [Harriet Barclay, European Outreach Liaison of the PETA Foundation] said. "Laika, the husky-mix dog who was sent into space on [the former Soviet Union's] Sputnik 2 in 1957, died of overheating and panic within hours of take-off. Others animals sent into space have died of suffocation, frozen to death or burned up on impact," she adds.
Measuring Gravity's Pull At The Surface Of Distant Stars
For distant stars with planets orbiting them, this gravitational information is key in determining whether any of those planets can harbor life.
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Knowing the surface gravity of a star is essentially knowing how much you would weigh on that star. If stars had solid surfaces on which you could stand, then your weight would change from star to star. The Sun is hotter than a sauna, but don't expect to lose weight there. You'd weigh 20 times more than on Earth. A red giant star (the far-future fate of our Sun) has a much weaker pull at its surface, so you'd be 50 times lighter.
The new method allows scientists to measure surface gravity with an accuracy of about four per cent, for stars too distant and too faint to apply current techniques. Since surface gravity depends on the star's mass and radius (just as your weight on Earth depends on its mass and radius), this technique will enable astronomers to better gauge the masses and sizes of distant stars. It will play an exciting role in the study of planets beyond the Solar System, many so distant that even the basic properties of the stars they orbit can't be measured accurately.
"If you don't know the star, you don't know the planet," said study co-author, UBC Professor Jaymie Matthews. "The size of an exoplanet is measured relative to the size of its parent star. If you find a planet around a star that you think is Sun-like but is actually a giant, you may have fooled yourself into thinking you've found a habitable Earth-sized world. Our technique can tell you how big and bright is the star, and if a planet around it is the right size and temperature to have water oceans, and maybe life."
Biology
Second Contagious Form Of Cancer Found In Tasmanian Devils
Transmissible cancers -- cancers which can spread between individuals by the transfer of living cancer cells -- are believed to arise extremely rarely in nature. One of the few known transmissible cancers causes facial tumours in Tasmanian devils, and is threatening this species with extinction. Today, scientists report the discovery of a second transmissible cancer in Tasmanian devils. The discovery, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, calls into question our current understanding of the processes that drive cancers to become transmissible.
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In 1996, researchers observed Tasmanian devils in the north-east of the island with tumours affecting the face and mouth; soon it was discovered that these tumours were contagious between devils, spread by biting. The cancer spreads rapidly throughout the animal's body and the disease usually causes the death of affected animals within months of the appearance of symptoms. The cancer has since spread through most of Tasmania and has triggered widespread devil population declines. The species was listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2008.
To date, only two other forms of transmissible cancer have been observed in nature: in dogs and in soft-shell clams. Cancer normally occurs when cells in the body start to proliferate uncontrollably; occasionally, cancers can spread and invade the body in a process known as 'metastasis'; however, cancers do not normally survive beyond the body of the host from whose cells they originally derived. Transmissible cancers, however, arise when cancer cells gain the ability to spread beyond the body of the host that first spawned them, by transmission of cancer cells to new hosts.
Now, a team led by researchers from the University of Tasmania, Australia, and the University of Cambridge, UK, has identified a second, genetically distinct transmissible cancer in Tasmania devils.
"The second cancer causes tumours on the face that are outwardly indistinguishable from the previously-discovered cancer," said first author Dr Ruth Pye from the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at the University of Tasmania. "So far it has been detected in eight devils in the south-east of Tasmania."
"Until now, we've always thought that transmissible cancers arise extremely rarely in nature," says Dr Elizabeth Murchison from the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge, a senior author on the study, "but this new discovery makes us question this belief.”
Australian Blue-Banded Bees Filmed Headbanging Flowers 350 Times a Second
The team, headed by Harvard University scientist Callin Switzer, compared the pollination techniques of Australian blue banded bees with North American eastern bumblebees, which are commonly used overseas to commercially pollinate tomato plants.
“We compare buzz-pollination on Solanum lycopersicum (cherry tomatoes) by two bees that fill similar niches on different continents – in Australia, Amegilla murrayensis (blue-banded bee), and in North America, Bombus impatiens (common eastern bumblebee),” [...]
While bumblebees grabbed the anther of the tomato plant flower with their mandibles before tensing their wing muscles to shake the pollen out, super slow motion footage revealed the blue banded bee from down under prefers a ‘hands-free’ approach.
The scientists found that by recording the audio frequency and duration of the bees’ buzz, they were able to prove the bee vibrates the flower at a higher frequency than North American bumblebees and spend less time per flower.
“We found that Amegilla murrayensis buzzes at significantly higher frequencies (350 Hz) than Bombus impatiens (240 Hz) and flaps its wings at higher frequencies during flight,” they wrote in the paper. “There was no difference in the length of a single buzz, but A. murrayensis spent less time on each flower, as B. impatiens buzzed the flower several times before departing, whereas A. murrayensis typically buzzed the flower only once.”
Chemistry
Chemists Develop Fully Recyclable Polymer
“More than 200 pounds of synthetic polymers are consumed per person each year – plastics probably the most in terms of production volume. And most of these polymers are not biorenewable,” said Prof. Eugene Chen of CSU’s Department of Chemistry.
“The big drive now is to produce biorenewable and biodegradable polymers or plastics. That is, however, only one part of the solution, as biodegradable polymers are not necessarily recyclable, in terms of feedstock recycling.”
Writing in the journal Nature Chemistry, Prof. Chen and his colleague, Miao Hong, describe synthesizing a polymer that, when reheated for about an hour, converts back to its original molecular state, ready for reuse.
Their starting feedstock was gamma-butyrolactone (GBL), a monomer that scientists had declared non-polymerizable.
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They employed specifically designed reaction conditions, including low temperature, to make the poly(GBL), and heat between 428 – 572 degrees Fahrenheit (220 – 300 degrees Celsius) to convert the polymer back into the original monomer, GBL, demonstrating the thermal recyclability of the polymer.
“This work established relationships between the poly(GBL) structure and its thermal and dynamic mechanical properties, and it demonstrated the complete thermal recyclability of poly(GBL) back into its monomer, which thereby opens up unique opportunities for discovering new sustainable (renewable and recyclable) biomaterials based on the ROP (ring-opening polymerization) of other five-membered lactones,” Prof. Chen and Ms Hong said.
Asphalt Roads Could De-Ice Themselves
Every winter some 20 million tons of salt are dumped on America's roads. The sodium chloride melts ice or prevents its formation, helping to prevent accidents. But road salt has its downsides. "This is actually not very economical, because salt is mainly corrosive." Seda Kizilel, a chemical engineer at Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey. She says salt's corrosive effects don't discriminate—they affect "vehicles and also nature, plants, microorganisms."
So Kizilel and her colleagues designed a road substance that can de-ice itself. They started with a polymer called SBS, commonly added to strengthen asphalt. They whipped up an emulsion of SBS with potassium formate, an alternative salt that's been studied as a more environmentally friendly de-icer than regular road salt. Then they added that emulsion to bitumen--the sticky black stuff in asphalt.
They subjected their creation and regular bitumen to the winter weather conditions that typically lead to black ice. Turns out the hybrid compound delayed ice formation 10 minutes longer than the control. And the samples continued releasing salt for more than two months. [...]
Of course, 10 minutes of de-icing is a nice head start—but it's not going to put salt truck drivers out of business. "But we're saying that, during the first 10 to 15 minutes, when the road becomes very icy, this material and this release of salt from this functional bitumen is going to be very useful and potentially eliminate many accidents on the roads." The next step, she says, is to pave a test surface and drive on it--to literally see what happens when the rubber meets the road.
Ecology
The Economic Benefits Of Mercury Reductions
Mercury pollution is a global problem with local consequences: Emissions from coal-fired power plants and other sources travel around the world through the atmosphere, eventually settling in oceans and waterways, where the pollutant gradually accumulates in fish. Consumption of mercury-contaminated seafood leads to increased risk for cardiovascular disease and cognitive impairments.
In the past several years, a global treaty and a domestic policy have been put in place to curb mercury emissions. But how will such policies directly benefit the U.S.?
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Overall, while both policies are projected to lead to roughly the same amount of reductions in mercury deposited on U.S. soil compared to a no-policy case, Americans’ consumption of mercury by 2050 are estimated to be 91 percent lower under the global treaty, compared to 32 percent under U.S. policy alone. The researchers say these numbers reflect the U.S. commercial fish market, 90 percent of which is sourced from Pacific and Atlantic Ocean basins — regions that are heavily influenced by emissions from non-U.S. sources, including China.
From their projections of reduced mercury consumption, the researchers estimated health impacts to the U.S. population under both policies, then translated these impacts into economic benefits. They characterized these in two ways: projected lifetime benefits from an individual’s reduced exposure to mercury, including willingness to pay for lowering the risk of a fatal heart attack, cost savings from avoided medical care, and increased earnings; and economy-wide benefits, or the associated productivity gains of a national labor force with improved IQ and fewer heart attacks, as a result of reduced exposure to mercury.
British Army Is Deployed As Flooding Submerges Northern England
The British Army stepped in on Sunday to help evacuate hundreds of people from waterlogged homes across the country, as swollen rivers and heavy rainfall brought misery to parts of the north and unleashed a spate of political recriminations.
Accustomed to heavy rainfall, Britain has been hit several times by flooding recently, but the effects of the latest episode have spread beyond rural areas, leaving parts of York, Leeds and Manchester submerged.
Threatened by its two rising rivers, York became the focus for emergency workers over the weekend as floodwaters engulfed many shops and pubs and came close to the ancient city’s historical buildings.
The military, which had already been deployed in Cumbria, joined the police and mountain rescue teams in York on Sunday to help people from their homes and to bolster the city’s flood defenses with sandbags. Twenty roads were closed, and around 3,500 properties were thought to be vulnerable to the rising waters.
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Liz Truss, the environment secretary, conceded that flood defenses had been “overwhelmed,” and Mr. Cameron promised to review spending plans, attempting to pre-empt criticism of the country’s state of preparedness. “You should look at what you’ve spent, look at what you’ve built, look at what you’re planning to spend, look at what you’re planning to build, and ask whether it’s in the right places, whether it’s enough, whether we’re doing everything we can to try and help,” Mr. Cameron said.
Physics
Researchers Explain Why It's Nearly Impossible To Separate Two Interleaved Phonebooks
Many people are familiar with the friction enigma of two interleaved phonebooks, in which all of the pages of two phonebooks are overlapped, one by one, with the books' spines facing outward. Trying to separate the books by pulling on their spines is incredibly difficult due to the massive amount of friction between the pages. A Mythbusters episode showed that the interleaved phonebooks are strong enough to lift a car, and that nothing less than two military tanks can separate them (while tearing many of the pages).
According to a group of scientists who have studied this puzzle, many of the simple explanations of this demonstration are wrong. For instance, one explanation often given is that the weight of the pages pushing down on the pages below them is what generates the large friction force, but this explanation fails to explain why the demonstration works equally as well when carried out in the vertical or horizontal direction.
Now a team of researchers, Héctor Alarcón, et al., from France and Canada have developed a model that reveals how the amount of force required to pull the books apart depends on the number of pages, the page thickness, and the overlapping distance. These relationships were determined by performing dozens of carefully controlled experiments on a vertical pulling device.
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The interleaved phonebook demonstration is important because it is just one example of many interleaved assemblies, and these are found in many diverse areas: surgical sutures, adhesive proteins, and the interactions between DNA and viruses all involve friction through interleaving sheets of some sort. Another more familiar example is the way that a sailor can tie a large ship to a dock post simply by wrapping a rope around the post several times. The friction between the loops of rope creates such a strong connection that no ship can pull it loose, and pulling only makes it tighter. The results may also have applications for controlling the friction in micro- and nano- scale mechanical devices.
Our Favourite Pictures Of 2015
Stunning images of the most cutting-edge physics research go a long way to capturing the interest of people, and each year at Physics World we feast our eyes on many of them. [At the link] are 10 of our favourite pictures from this year. From the first-ever images of Pluto to self-assembling nanoflowers to stormy ripples in the night sky, these images are simultaneously beautiful and informative, and we hope you enjoy them.
Social Science
Diaspora And Music: Rebuilding Jewish Culture In Shanghai During A Time Of Exile
During World War II, thousands of Jews were forced into exile to escape the horror that Hitler brought eventually upon them when he came to power in 1933. Most went to the United States, Latin America, and Palestine, but there was a portion that went to Shanghai (at the time China did not require visas). While living in Shanghai, the Jews managed to preserve their heritage by building a “musical life” from the ground up, and they ended up influencing the residents of Shanghai with their musical tradition as well.
The Eastern Europe to Shanghai Jewish Diaspora was set into motion when Hitler came to power and slowly began his crusade to eliminate the Jews via ethnic cleansing. The diaspora began after the violent pogrom Kristallnacht (1938), the start of the violence against the Jews. The Jews fled to different parts of the world, but an enclave settled in Shanghai, China.
To be a refugee in a country with such a disparate culture might normally begin a terribly disjunctured acculturation process, but it was not so. In fact, Shanghai was undergoing sociopolitical changes amenable to exiled people. At that time Shanghai was a city with three different governments: the International Settlement (Americans), French Concession, and the Chinese Nationalist Government. Within these three governments the city contained large communities of ethnic Japanese and White Russian residents. When the Jews diffused into the area there wasn’t much resistance from the people in the city (Yating 2004). This was a relaxed, free metropolis that the Jews could come to in their time of greatest need.
After the Jews arrived they began to rebuild their lives by constructing synagogues, religious schools, and forming their own ethnic enclave. During this time Jewish musicians slowly began to make their way into the musical life of Shanghai mainly by performing at clubs, bars, cabarets, dramas, and operas. Mainly the music of the Jews was contained within their enclaves for the sake of salvaging a piece of their original homeland. When performed outside of their communities, the music was modified to European art music in order to appeal to a larger audience. After some time musicians slowly began to infiltrate and occupy lead orchestra positions in the Shanghai municipal orchestra with musicians, composers, and conductors. They had performers like Raya Zomina, Herbert Zernik, Lilly Flohr, Ferdinand Adler, and so many more. Jewish music was making its comeback in this strange new land and it wasn’t going to be silenced that easily—even as began to occupy the areas around the Shanghai, China.
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Finally the WWII ended and this started the “Farewell Period” for the musical life of the Jews of Shanghai. Most of the music composed directly after war was dedicated to the Shanghai people and government for providing a haven for them in their greatest time of need. It was also dedicated to the deaths of Jewish musicians and composers during the war. Their music was used for soul food, political ideals, identity and ethnicity by social institutions in a form of flexible resistance to Japanese control. After the war the Nationalist Chinese Government slowly lost traction to communist insurgents, and once again the Jews were forced to emigrate. They dispersed to Western countries and by the late 1950s a once flourishing community had completely disappeared from Shanghai. Even though they were forced out of Shanghai, the Jews left behind an echo of their musical life that can still be heard today.
Flooding
True or false: If your best friend is terrified of spiders, the best thing you can do to help her is lock her in a room with a tarantula until she stops freaking out.
Believe it or not, a lot of psychologists will tell you that the correct answer to that is True. The technique is called 'flooding', and it has a solid base in behavioral therapy. The underlying theory behind flooding is that a phobia is a learned fear, and needs to be unlearned by exposure to the thing that you fear.
By definition, a phobia is an unreasoning fear to a non-dangerous thing or situation. Somehow this non-dangerous thing has become associated with the panic response usually associated with mortal danger. By forcing the phobic to confront their fear, therapists reason, they will learn that there is nothing dangerous about it.
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Flooding in its purest form involves forced, prolonged exposure to the actual stimulus that provoked the original trauma. In real practice, that can be problematic, if not completely impossible. It isn't really practical to fill a room with snakes and spiders, for example, and force someone to sit in it for hours.
In the mid-1960s, Thomas Stampfl, pioneered a technique called 'implosion therapy' to treat phobias. He found that phobic patients who were bombarded with detailed descriptions of the situations that they feared for six to nine continuous hours lost their fear of those situations. His research was expanded upon and refined by Zev Wanderer, who used biofeedback machines to monitor patients listening to verbal descriptions of what they most feared. By concentrating on the phrases that sparked the most intense reactions, Wanderer reduced the time needed for the first flooding session from nine hours to about two hours. Patients then returned for further sessions, usually as short as half an hour.