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New Webb images, New dinosaur, New Breast Cancer Blood Test, New Epoch, all new science news [1]
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Date: 2022-07-09
Stories in this digest include:
First images from the Webb telescope to be made public
What science knows about cleaning surfaces
Weekend exercise is just fine
Testing for metastatic breast cancer with a 15-minute blood test
Pacific sediment radioactive particles mark new epoch
Math solution explained
New dinosaur, Meraxes
‘Sand batteries’ offer storage solution
Two halves (of a bike wheel) make a whole
Three citizen science projects
Daily Kos
The audacity of the Webb telescope to catch starlight that cannot be seen
by ARodinFan
From orbit a million miles above the center of the Earth solarsystem.nasa.gov/..., the Webb Telescope has begun the task of collecting and photographing ancient infrared light. The first images of the early universe captured by the Webb will be made public later this week. Expect the spectacular. More than two thousand years removed from the Antikythera mechanism historyofyesterday.com/..., the Webb Telescope is the latest and most expensive tool yet for trying to understand the universe and our place in it. (FYI MTG this is Cosmology not Cosmetology). ... The Webb’s mirrors have 6 times the light gathering area of the Hubble Space Telescope and detect light in infrared spectrum. which is capable of passing through interstellar dust clouds that hamper observations in the visible light range www.space.com/..... The JWST mission is expected to continue for the next 20 years and is destined to change they way we understand the universe and our place in it. Completing this space telescope was not just a technological and engineering challenge, it also required great political foresight and determination. The project was plagued by cost overruns and in 2011 there was a serious move by Republicans to kill the project. Four Democrats deserve recognition for their successful efforts to restore funding needed to complete the Webb Space Telescope after House Republicans tried to kill the project — Thanks to Senator Barbara Mikulski (D -Maryland) spacenews.com/..., and Representatives Adam Schiff (D-CA) Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Donna Edwards (D-MD) the JWST is now a reality. Below is the list of cosmic objects that Webb targeted for these first observations, which will be released in NASA’s live broadcast beginning at 10:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 12. Each image will simultaneously be made available on social media as well as on the agency’s website. These listed targets below represent the first wave of full-color scientific images and spectra the observatory has gathered, and the official beginning of Webb’s general science operations. They were selected by an international committee of representatives from NASA, ESA, CSA, and the Space Telescope Science Institute. Carina Nebula
WASP-96 b (spectrum)
Southern Ring Nebula
Stephan’s Quintet .
SMACS 0723
The Atlantic
How are we possibly still disinfecting things?
by Yasmin Tayag
Two weeks into the pandemic, a box of Cheerios sent me into an existential tailspin. I’d just returned from an unnerving trip to a New York City supermarket, where bandanna-masked customers with carts full of toilet paper dodged one another like bandits. As I unpacked my groceries, I was gripped by fear. If I don’t Lysol the living daylights out of this cardboard, I wondered, will I die? I kept up the cleaning for weeks. My garbage bin, like so many in America, turned into a disposable-wipe repository. It took until May 2020 for the CDC to confirm that the coronavirus is rarely transmitted by touching things. My Cheerios boxes became markedly less soggy, but even then, other, more public surfaces—elevator buttons, subway poles, shopping-cart handles—remained in a continuous wash cycle. I knew this because signs everywhere told me they had recently been cleaned. Today, it’s well understood that because the coronavirus spreads through the air, good ventilation and air filtration are far more effective at disrupting transmission than wiping down surfaces. Best practices for avoiding infection during a surge include opening a window when gathering indoors, opting for outdoor dining, and masking. In March, the Biden administration made air quality a pillar of its COVID response (finally). Meanwhile, study after study has found that the risk posed by lingering virus on surfaces is low compared with the threat it poses in the air. Which raises the question: Why in the world is so much cleaning still happening?
Science Alert
Huge study finds that getting all your exercise on the weekend is probably fine
by Peter Dockrill
The Breast Cancer Site
Liquid biopsy detects cancer DNA within 5 hours in blood of metastatic breast cancer patients
by Michelle Milliken
When a patient with metastatic breast cancer undergoes a new treatment to keep the disease in check, it’s important to know how well it’s working and if the treatment should continue. A new tool in development by Johns Hopkins could make this process easier. Researchers at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have created an automated liquid biopsy that they say can detect the presence of cancer DNA within five hours in the blood of metastatic breast cancer patients. The test is currently a prototype for research use only, but there is hope that oncologists could use it to determine the effectiveness of treatment more quickly. The research team shared information on the Liquid Biopsy for Breast Cancer Methylation (LBx-BCM), as it’s called, in the journal Cancer Research Communications. LBx-BCM can work with a commercially available molecular testing platform called GeneXpert to detect the chemical tag methylation in one or more of nine genes altered in breast cancers. The sample can be taken in less that 15 minutes by a lab technician. The researchers say this simple and effective test could give oncologists an alternative to imaging to determine if chemotherapy is working. It could be particularly helpful for smaller tumors, as imaging isn’t as good at detecting changes in them.
Science Alert
Radioactive particles in Pacific sediment could mark the beginning of a new epoch
by David Nield
The Anthropocene is the name some scientists are giving to the current geological epoch, marked by the point in time when human activity started having a significant impact on the geology and ecosystems of Earth – not least through climate change. Now scientists think they have precisely determined the beginning of the Anthropocene through particular biomarkers – radioactive material discovered in marine sediments and corals in the northwest Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Japan. That material comes from atomic tests carried out in the region during the 1950s and represents a clear change in the ocean environment. Based on the collected data, the research team proposes that the Anthropocene epoch began in 1954. "Our task was to find clear indications of fallout from the 1950s up to 1963 when testing largely stopped. We took core samples from the bay area, and there are clear signals of the plutonium from fallouts," says geoscientist Yusuke Yokoyama from the University of Tokyo in Japan. "However, we also collected coral skeletons from the island of Ishigaki, southwest of Okinawa, which contained fallout. Comparing sediments to corals allows us to more accurately date the signatures we see in the sediments.
Popular Mechanics
Solution: Can you solve the age of this dead mathematician?
by Richard Malena
‘Here lies Diophantus,' the wonder behold.
Through art algebraic, the stone tells how old:
'God gave him his boyhood one-sixth of his life,
One twelfth more as youth while whiskers grew rife;
And then yet one-seventh ere marriage begun;
In five years there came a bouncing new son.
Alas, the dear child of master and sage
After attaining half the measure of his father's age—chill fate took him.
After consoling his fate by the science of numbers for four more years, he reached his end.'
First, let’s solve this using our basic fraction skills. Once we’ve appreciated the poem, we can break everything down into a basic sum: Diophantus’s Life = Boyhood + Whiskers + Before Marriage + 5 + Son’s Life + 4... Each of these segments can be seen as a fractional value of A, the final age of Diophantus. Substituting in the hints from the poem gives us a new equation. Cleaning up this equation doesn’t take too long. We just need to find a common denominator and add like terms. So, fractions tell us that the solution is 84. But you might be wondering why 84 shows up in the problem before the equation is fully solved. That’s because the problem in itself is a Diophantine equation! We can solve the entire problem with just whole numbers and a little bit of logic.
*Diophantine problems have fewer equations than unknowns and involve finding integers that solve simultaneously all equations (Wikipedia).
Smithsonian Magazine
Paleontologists uncover new dinosaur with tiny arms like T.rex
by Riley Black
If Tyrannosaurus rex is known for anything more than bone-crushing bites, it’s the dinosaur’s tiny arms. Paleontologists have been stumped about the dinosaur’s anatomical quirk for over a century now. But Tyrannosaurus was hardly the only dinosaur to evolve itty bitty appendages. An international team of paleontologists have just described Meraxes gigas, a huge meat-eating dinosaur with surprisingly short forelimbs, today in Current Biology. “It was a big surprise,” says Universidad Nacional de Río Negro paleontologist Juan Canale, starting with the day Meraxes was discovered. When paleontologists search for new dinosaur fossils, it often takes many days or weeks in a field season to locate a noteworthy find. That the best find of a trip will be on the last afternoon of the last day is a common paleo superstition. But the bones of Meraxes were found on the first day of a 2012 field trip. The team found a large carnivorous dinosaur with four long-necked, herbivorous dinosaurs nearby Canale says, all in the same rock layer.
Euronews.green
‘Sand batteries’ could be key breakthrough in storing solar and wind power year-round
by Lottie Lynn
Solar energy stored in ‘sand batteries’ could help get Finns through the long cold winter, which is set to be even tougher after Russia stopped its gas and electricity supplies. The new technology has been devised by young Finnish engineers Tommi Eronen and Markku Ylönen, founders of Polar Night Energy, but could be used worldwide. Though a number of other research groups are testing the limits of sand as green energy storage, the pair are the first ones to successfully rig it to a commercial power station. Around 100 tonnes of the fine stuff, piled high inside a silo, went live at a power plant in the southwestern town of Kankaanpää in late May - just as Putin cut the country off in retaliation for joining NATO.
Laughingsquid.com
Engineer splits rear wheel of his bicycle in half in order to show how two halves make a whole
by Lori Dorn
Be sure to watch the video!
The Q engineer Sergii Gordieiev, who enjoys experimenting with the physics of bikes, split the rear wheel of his bicycle in half and rode it to demonstrate how two halves make a whole. This is how regular math looks: 0.5+0.5=1 so, in bikematics it sould works [sic] as well. Gordieiev amusingly acted out his reason for splitting the wheel in two and then went about making it all fully functional for everyday use. I bet you have never seen anything like this and yes, it’s fully working bicycle you can ride every day.
Zooniverse
Here are some citizen science projects to work on:
Genome Detectives
Check out the Genome Detectives project ( on 13th July 2022 . Take a trip down a double helix (that's DNA)! Become a Genome Detective and help us classify important features of genes from more than 100 disease-causing bacteria, identifying mutants/variants in the PubMLST genome database. Your efforts will help inform the development and use of vaccines, and identify bacteria that may be resistant to antibiotics. By extending our "community curation” approach beyond scientists, you can contribute to wider scientific discoveries that inform health promotion and policy.Check out the Genome Detectives project (
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/charrod/genome-detectives ) now or join our launch event online or in Oxford, UK Notes from Nature - Big Bee Bonanza!
The results of the project will be useful both to bee conservation biologists and the public at large. These results can be leveraged for educational, creative, or research projects, and our researchers will use these data to help understand why bees are declining. Help us save the bees!
Get involved and give the project a try: We are pleased to announce the launch of the Big Bee Bonanza specimen digitization and bee measurement campaign! Big Bee Bonanza is the newest project in the Notes from Nature organization . Big Bee is a network of natural history collections and bee biologists led by natural history collections and museums across the United States. There are two kinds of expeditions in the Big Bee Bonanza. Similar to other Notes from Nature projects, you can work on label digitization where the information from museum specimen bee labels is transcribed. The second kind of exhibition is the measurement of bee body size using a novel measurement tool. The measurement you take approximates bee body weight and you get to see bees up close from all over the world. The best part is that you will get up close to beautiful bees.The results of the project will be useful both to bee conservation biologists and the public at large. These results can be leveraged for educational, creative, or research projects, and our researchers will use these data to help understand why bees are declining. Help us save the bees!Get involved and give the project a try:
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/md68135/notes-from-nature-big-bee-bonanza Food Glorious Food: using Tweets to understand our food system Food is an important aspect of people’s lives and at times of crisis or uncertainty this is no exception. We need your help to make the food system more resilient in the future. The more we understand about consumers’ experiences of food during a time of crisis, the more we can support people with their food needs. During covid-19 lockdown, people used social media more than ever before to communicate their experiences and opinions on food. We have gathered tweets from the Twitter platform and we need your help to understand which tweets are or are not to do with food before we are able to analyse them further. Get involved and give the project a try:
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/hughdickinson/food-glorious-food-using-tweets-to-understand-our-food-system
We welcome your content! Please feel free to share quotes from articles, links, tweets, and your own analysis in the comments below.
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