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science

SCIENCE: The Paradox of Earth’s Inner Core

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Earth's core - NASA

Earth’s Inner Core Shouldn’t Technically Exist Earth’s solid inner core formed about one billion years ago. Researchers are getting closer to figuring out how it happened. One day, about a billion years ago, Earth’s inner core had a growth spurt. The molten ball of liquid metal at the center of our planet rapidly crystallized due to lowering temperatures, growing steadily outward until it reached the roughly 760-mile (1,220 kilometers) diameter to which it’s thought to extend today. That’s the conventional story of the inner core’s creation, anyway. But according to a new paper published online this week in the journal … Read more

SCIENCE: Thousands of Mysterious Maya Structures Discovered in Guatemala

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Guatemala - Mayan Structures

An aerial survey over northern Guatemala has turned up over 60,000 new Maya structures, including pyramids, causeways, house foundations and defensive fortifications. It’s a watershed discovery that has already led archaeologists to new sites to excavate and explore. The findings may also revise estimates of how many ancient Maya once lived in the region upward by “multiple factors,” said Tom Garrison, an archaeologist who specializes in the Maya culture and is part of the consortium that funded and organized the survey. Far more ancient Maya lived on the landscape than there are people in the region today, Garrison told Live … Read more

SCIENCE: How to Stop Light

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light - pixabay

Light moves fast. That’s kind of the whole point of light, at least the way most people think about it. Light shoots through the 93 million miles between Earth and the sun in just 8 minutes, it carries information all around the world nearly instantly, and its top speed of 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers/s) turns out to be the absolute speed limit of the entire universe. But there are some physicists interested in turning that trait of light on its head, and slowing it way down. And in a new paper, published Jan. 3 in the journal Physical … Read more

SCIENCE: Are We Living in a Hologram?

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Hologram - Pixabay

In the late 1990s, theoretical physicists uncovered a remarkable connection between two seemingly unrelated concepts in theoretical physics. That connection is almost inscrutably technical, but it might have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of gravity and even the universe. To illustrate this connection, we’re going to start at — of all places — a black hole. Researchers have found that when a single bit of information enters a black hole, its surface area increases by a very precise amount: the square of the Planck length (equal to an incredibly small 1.6 x 10^-35 meters on a side). At first blush, … Read more

SCIENCE: Ancient Virus May Be Responsible for Human Consciousness

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virus - pixabay

You’ve got an ancient virus in your brain. In fact, you’ve got an ancient virus at the very root of your conscious thought. According to two papers published in the journal Cell in January, long ago, a virus bound its genetic code to the genome of four-limbed animals. That snippet of code is still very much alive in humans’ brains today, where it does the very viral task of packaging up genetic information and sending it from nerve cells to their neighbors in little capsules that look a whole lot like viruses themselves. And these little packages of information might … Read more

SCIENCE: One Step Closer to Cloning Humans

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monkey clones

For the first time, researchers have used the cloning method that produced Dolly the sheep to create two healthy monkeys, bringing science an important step closer to being able to do the same with humans. Since Dolly’s birth in 1996, scientists have cloned nearly two dozen kinds of mammals, including dogs, cats, pigs, cows and polo ponies, and have also created human embryos with this method. But until now, they have been unable to make babies this way in primates, the category that includes monkeys, apes and people. “The barrier of cloning primate species is now overcome,” declared Muming Poo … Read more

SCIENCE: Space Viruses

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space viruses - pixabay

You probably think about viruses only when you’re sick, but there’s a group of microbiologists who want to change that. In fact, they want you to consider the possibility that viruses may be found in space. In a recent review, published online Jan. 10 in the journal Astrobiology, a trio of scientists from the U.S. and Japan posited that viruses may be spread across interplanetary space. Those researchers want to convince astrobiologists to devote more time looking for these curious molecular machines. A virion — the form a virus takes outside of a host — consists of genetic material encapsulated in … Read more

SCIENCE: Levitating With Sound

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tractor beam

A little plot bunny offered with love to all our sci fi writers: A new “tractor beam” can levitate large objects in midair, using only sound. So far, researchers have floated spheres as large as 0.6 inches (16 millimeters) in diameter and moved orbs as large as 0.8 inches (2 cm) on a tabletop using tornadoes of sound waves. Theoretically, vortices made by an array of 200 speakers by 200 speakers could hold up objects as large as 31 inches (80 cm) in diameter. “This is new to acoustics,” said study co-author Mihai Caleap, a senior research associate in engineering … Read more

SCIENCE: There Are Zombie Deer?

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Zombie Deer

Deer in at least 22 U.S. states and parts of Canada have died from a neurological disease called “chronic wasting disease,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But could this illness, which is sometimes dubbed “zombie deer disease,” spread to people, just as “mad cow disease” has done in the past? Chronic wasting disease can cause a number of symptoms in animals, including drastic weight loss, a lack of coordination, drooling, listlessness or a “blank” facial expression, and a lack of fear of people, according to the CDC. It infects members of the deer (cervid) family, … Read more

TECH: Thinnest Mirrors in the World Use Quantum ‘Excitons’ to Reflect Light

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Thin Mirror

Two separate teams of scientists have built the thinnest mirrors in the world: sheets of molybdenum diselenide (MoSe2), each just a single atom wide. The mirrors were developed at the same time at Harvard University and the Institute for Quantum Electronics in Zurich, and described in a pair of papers published Thursday (Jan. 18) in the journal Physical Review Letters. These engineering feats push the limits of what’s possible in this physical universe, the researchers said. Despite approaching the minimum thickness an object could possibly have and remain reflective under the laws of physics, the tiny mirrors reflected a great … Read more