mindblowingscience

[mindblowingscience]

It's the most fundamental of processes—the evaporation of water from the surfaces of oceans and lakes, the burning off of fog in the morning sun, and the drying of briny ponds that leaves solid salt behind. Evaporation is all around us, and humans have been observing it and making use of it for as long as we have existed. And yet, it turns out, we've been missing a major part of the picture all along. In a series of painstakingly precise experiments, a team of researchers at MIT has demonstrated that heat isn't alone in causing water to evaporate. Light, striking the water's surface where air and water meet, can break water molecules away and float them into the air, causing evaporation in the absence of any source of heat. The astonishing new discovery could have a wide range of significant implications. It could help explain mysterious measurements over the years of how sunlight affects clouds, and therefore affect calculations of the effects of climate change on cloud cover and precipitation. It could also lead to new ways of designing industrial processes such as solar-powered desalination or drying of materials.

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#Science #Chemistry #Physics #Light #Evaporation

[mindblowingscience]

Holy shit, they got Voyager 1 working again!

15 billion miles away and NASA was able to tweak code packages on one of the onboard computers and it worked and Voyager 1 is sending signals back to earth for the first time since November.

Incredible!

[mindblowingscience]

Humans have modified their bodies in various ways throughout history, tattooing, piercing, scarring, implanting, or even deforming parts of their anatomy. In spite of its ubiquity, it's not always clear why. Cultural traditions are a strong factor, as are beauty standards, which vary across time and place. A new analysis of remains of individuals who lived in Viking Age Gotland around a thousand years ago suggests that their own body modifications reinforced social identities.

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#Science #Archaeology #Vikings #Teeth #Body Modification #Sweden #Denmark

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What if there was plastic-like material that could absorb excess nutrients from water and be used as a fertilizer when it decomposes? That product—a "bioplastic" material—has been created by University of Saskatchewan (USask) chemistry professor Dr. Lee Wilson and his research team, as detailed in a paper recently published in RSC Sustainability. The research team includes Ph.D. candidate Bernd G. K. Steiger, BSc student Nam Bui and postdoctoral fellow trainee Bolanle M. Babalola. "We've made a bioplastic material that functions as an absorbent and it takes phosphate out of water, where elevated levels of phosphate in surface water is a huge global water security issue," he said. "You can harvest those pellets and distribute them as an agricultural fertilizer."

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#Science #Bioplastics #Chemistry #Tech #stem

[mindblowingscience]

Planetary atmospheres are typically leaky things. Think about it – with no impenetrable barrier to hold it back against the void, some of it is bound to seep away and dissipate into the very tenuous medium in the between parts of space. Earth loses about 90 tonnes of atmospheric material every day. That's not enough to make a dent, but it does give us a few clues about why some of the other planets are the way they are. Venus, for example, is thought to have once been a temperate world like Earth, with liquid water on its surface. Now, it's a scorching hell-planet choked in clouds of carbon dioxide that rain sulfuric acid.

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#Science #Space #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Planetary Science #Atmosphere #Venus

[mindblowingscience]

NASA's delayed Dragonfly drone mission to Saturn's largest moon Titan is on track to launch in July 2028, the space agency confirmed late Tuesday (April 16). The highly anticipated decision greenlights the mission team to proceed to final mission design and testing in preparation for the revised launch date. The car-sized Dragonfly, which is being built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, will reach Titan in 2034. For the next 2.5 years, the nuclear-powered drone is expected to perform one hop every Titan day — 16 days to us Earthlings — hunting for prebiotic chemical processes at various pre-selected locations on the frigid moon, which is known to contain organic materials. 

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#Titan #NASA #Dragonfly mission #Space #Astronomy #stem #Saturn

[mindblowingscience]

Bumblebees can surprisingly withstand days underwater, according to a study published Wednesday, suggesting they could withstand increased floods brought on by climate change that threaten their winter hibernation burrows. The survival of these pollinators that are crucial to ecosystems is "encouraging" amid worrying global trends of their declining populations, the study's lead author Sabrina Rondeau told AFP. With global warming prompting more frequent and extreme floods in regions around the world, it poses "an unpredictable challenge for soil-dwelling species, particularly bees nesting or overwintering underground", co-author Nigel Raine of the University of Guelph said in a statement. Rondeau said she first discovered queen bumblebees could withstand drowning by accident. She had been studying the effect of pesticide residues in soil on queen bumblebees that burrow underground for the winter when water accidentally entered the tubes housing a few of the bees. "I freaked out," said Rondeau, who had been conducting the experiment for her doctoral studies. "It was only a small proportion… so it was not that big of a deal, but I didn't want to lose those bees." To her "shock", she said, they survived. "I've been studying bumblebees for a very long time. I've talked about it to a lot of people and no one knew that this was a possibility," she said.

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#Science #Bees #bumblebee #Insects #Biology #zoology #stem

[mindblowingscience]

The scientific paper is linked in the article:

The potential of quantum computing is immense, but the distances over which entangled particles can reliably carry information remains a massive hurdle. The tiniest of disturbances can make a scrambled mess of their relationship. To circumvent the problem, quantum computing researchers have found ways to stabilize long lengths of optical fibers or used satellites to preserve signals through the near-vacuum of space.

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[mindblowingscience]

The potential of quantum computing is immense, but the distances over which entangled particles can reliably carry information remains a massive hurdle. The tiniest of disturbances can make a scrambled mess of their relationship. To circumvent the problem, quantum computing researchers have found ways to stabilize long lengths of optical fibers or used satellites to preserve signals through the near-vacuum of space.

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#Science #Technology #Physics #Quantum Physics #Quantum Computing

[mindblowingscience]

Plastic is a very complex material that can contain many different chemicals, some of which can be harmful. This is also true for plastic food packaging. "We found as many as 9,936 different chemicals in a single plastic product used as food packaging," said Martin Wagner, a professor at NTNU's Department of Biology. Wagner has been working with chemicals in plastic products for several years. He is part of a research group at NTNU that has now published its findings in two articles in Environmental Science & Technology. Ph.D. candidates Molly McPartland and Sarah Stevens from NTNU are the lead authors of both studies. In one study, the researchers looked at 36 different plastic products that are used to package food. These products came from five countries; the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Germany and Norway. "In most of these plastic products, we found chemicals that can affect the secretion of hormones and metabolism," Wagner said.

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#Plastic #Plastic Pollution #Chemistry #science #biology #stem

[mindblowingscience]

I know it wasn’t your fault, but I just wanted to tell you how glad I am that you’re back! You are literally one of my favorite blogs on tumblr, please don’t let assholes discourage you.

Thank you! I appreciate the support. 🥹

[mindblowingscience]

While details are understandably slim today, life on Earth is thought to have arisen about 4 billion years ago from a fateful blend of organic compounds popularly known as primordial soup. Just how – and where – the ingredients for this proto-biological entree were generated is still a field of debate, given the timeline and surface conditions on a cooling baby Earth. Crucial materials like amino acids, lipids, and sugars can form in the depths of space, as recent research has shown, and have been delivered to the early Earth via meteorites and comets. According to a new study by a team from Germany and France, that scenario is not only plausible, but offers the most likely explanation for how Earth obtained certain building blocks of life, some of which would have formed more efficiently in interstellar space.

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#Science #Space #Comets #Biology #Chemistry #astronomy #stem

[mindblowingscience]

The Lunar Environment Monitoring Station (LEMS) is one of the first three potential payloads NASA selected for the Artemis 3 mission, which will land humans on the moon in 2026 for the first time in more than 50 years. The compact, autonomous seismometer is designed to withstand the long, cold lunar night and operate during the day, continuously monitoring ground motion from moonquakes in the region around the lunar south pole, where Artemis 3 astronauts will land. LEMS is expected to operate on the lunar surface for at least three months and up to two years, demonstrating its capability to measure the moon's geophysical activity unassisted over long periods of time, according to a statement from NASA. 

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#Science #Geology #Moonquakes #Space #artemis mission #stem

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Removing part of the brain’s temporal lobe is the only treatment available to the millions of people with a form of epilepsy that medications often don’t alleviate. But even that approach fails a third of the time. A new study from Stanford Medicine researchers and their colleagues offers an explanation and suggests a more effective approach to treatment. They found that a previously overlooked region of the hippocampus, the fasciola cinereum, appears to be involved in instigating and propagating seizures. Removing or inhibiting the fasciola cinereum may help those patients who don’t find relief after surgery.

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#Science #Health #Neurology #Epilepsy #Brains #Surgery

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While foraging, animals including humans and monkeys are continuously making decisions about where to search for food and when to move among possible sources of sustenance. "Foraging behavior is something we perform daily when we go to the grocery store to pick up food, and we make choices based on the degree of reward each choice provides. It's a classical problem common to every species on the planet," said Valentin Dragoi, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, professor of neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College and scientific director of the Methodist/Rice Center for Neural Systems Restoration. In a paper published in Nature Neuroscience, Dragoi and collaborators investigate the brain processes involved in searching for food.

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#Science #Foraging #Primates #Neuroscience #Biology #anthropology

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Japan is on track to beam solar power from space to Earth next year, two years after a similar feat was achieved by U.S. engineers. The development marks an important step toward a possible space-based solar power station that could help wean the world off fossil fuels amid the intensifying battle against climate change.  Speaking at the International Conference on Energy from Space, held here this week, Koichi Ijichi, an adviser at the Japanese research institute Japan Space Systems, outlined Japan's road map toward an orbital demonstration of a miniature space-based solar power plant that will wirelessly transmit energy from low Earth orbit to Earth.

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#Japan #Solar Energy #Solar Power #astronomy #Space #stem

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A new analysis of fossilized vertebrae discovered in western India has revealed the existence of a giant snake species that may have measured some 11 to 15 meters (36.1 to 49.2 feet) in length when fully grown. The researchers behind the work, from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, acknowledge some uncertainty in their estimations, but they suggest the newly identified reptile they've named Vasuki indicus may have equaled the size of the largest snake in history, the Titanoboa, which died out some 58 million years ago. Compared with snake species still slithering around today, V. indicus is way ahead. As far as verified measurements go, the longest living snake right now measures a paltry 7.67 meters.

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#Science #Snakes #herpetology #paleontology #India #Biology #Zoology #Animals #snakes