Hail science! (general science thread)

[Nordstern]

We have a space thread, a plague thread, an economics thread (money is a science, i don't care what you say LALALALA) but no thread for general science news. So let's start things off.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-...e-their-vision

Kalberer and Knight are two of the first patients treated in a landmark study designed to try to restore vision to patients such as them, who suffer from a rare genetic disease.

The study involves the revolutionary gene-editing technique called CRISPR, which allows scientists to make precise changes in DNA. Doctors think CRISPR could help patients fighting many diseases. It's already showing promise for blood disorders such as sickle cell disease and is being tested for several forms of cancer.

But in those experiments, doctors take cells out of the body, edit them in the lab and then infuse the genetically edited cells back into patients.

The experiment Knight and Kalberer volunteered for marks the first time scientists are using CRISPR to edit DNA when it's still inside patients' bodies.

"This is the very first time that anyone's ever actually tried to do gene-editing from inside the body," said Dr. Lisa Michaels, chief medical officer at the company sponsoring the study, Editas Medicine of Cambridge, Mass. "We're actually delivering the gene-editing apparatus to the part of the body where the disease takes place in order to correct it."

This is huge. By sidestepping the need to extract stem cells and reimplant them, this has the potential to allow massive amounts of gene therapy at lower cost. And if we can start treatments shortly after birth (or even in utero), a substantial load could be taken off healthcare systems decades down the line.

[Nordstern]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innov...ets-180978822/

It’s 3:00 a.m. on the island of Malta, and in the stillness before most residents wake to begin their day, a shark is about to give birth. This is especially strange, not just because it’s happening on land, but because the shark in question is dead.

Surrounded by vendors preparing for the start of their day at the wholesale fish market in Valletta, Greg Nowell carefully runs his fingers along the belly of the shark: a small-spotted catshark, a compact, slender creature only half a meter long, with cream-colored skin covered in a galaxy of black dots. Where the shark’s skin is thin around its internal organs and womb, Nowell presses inward with a finger and feels something rigid and hard. He pushes, gently, encouraging the object back toward the cloaca, the opening shared by the shark’s intestinal, urinary, and reproductive tracts. With a gentle pop, it emerges: a tiny egg case, no longer than Nowell’s pinkie finger, yellowish-brown in color and—though it might not look it—likely still thrumming quietly with life.

Nowell will do this for dozens more sharks before the morning is through. As vendors begin scaling bream and filleting grouper around him, he’ll move between plastic totes, each stacked several layers deep with sharks packed in ice, identifying females and feeling for their eggs. Each egg that he finds is dropped carefully into a container of salt water for transport back to his office. There, Nowell and the team at the organization that he founded, Sharklab-Malta, will try to give each unborn shark another shot at living.

Sharklab-Malta is one of at least three groups around the Mediterranean taking on the unlikely role of nursemaid to several species of sharks and their close relatives, skates. By collecting and raising babies from females that wind up in fishing nets—most often as by-catch—and then on fishmongers’ counters, the groups hope to make a small difference in a world that has not been kind to sharks.

Guy goes through fish markets to harvest shark eggs from by-catch, raises them, then releases them into the wild.

[Elriche Oshego]

[Lallante]

Guaranteed this will descend into breathy futurism nonsense along the lines of "solar roads" or "wind generator walls" cooked up by morons and reported upon credulously by terrible journos (and in some cases even supported tokenistically by government grants).

[Keckers]

(and in some cases even supported tokenistically by government grants).

Like 5k grants for air source heat pumps which are almost always inadequately sized and fitted to buildings with inadequate insulation?

[Dee Jiensai]

Guaranteed this will descend into breathy futurism nonsense along the lines of "solar roads" or "wind generator walls" cooked up by morons and reported upon credulously by terrible journos (and in some cases even supported tokenistically by government grants).

Only if you let it.

A cosmological model that doesn’t require dark matter has overcome a major hurdle in matching observations from the cosmic microwave background.

[NoirAvlaa]

Hey have u guys heard of SOLAR FREAKING ROADWAYS?

Sent from my Pixel 5 using Tapatalk

[Keckers]

Guaranteed this will descend into breathy futurism nonsense along the lines of "solar roads" or "wind generator walls" cooked up by morons and reported upon credulously by terrible journos (and in some cases even supported tokenistically by government grants).

Only if you let it.

A cosmological model that doesn’t require dark matter has overcome a major hurdle in matching observations from the cosmic microwave background.

Hmm I'll wait for a sixty symbols video to explain this to me

[evil edna]

When will science stop people from trying to fuck anthropomorphic horses

[dzajic]

Guaranteed this will descend into breathy futurism nonsense along the lines of "solar roads" or "wind generator walls" cooked up by morons and reported upon credulously by terrible journos (and in some cases even supported tokenistically by government grants).

Only if you let it.

A cosmological model that doesn’t require dark matter has overcome a major hurdle in matching observations from the cosmic microwave background.

It won't open at all on mobile. Is it MOND or something else, and it's it something new or just another unprovable math masturbation that has no purpose but to generate PhDs over a 40 year period?

[Lallante]

Interesting article. It's an extension of MOND (modified newtonian dynamics) which isnt inconsistent with the CMB.

It's just replacing one mystery (dark matter) with another though (why does gravitation force cause different levels of acceleration either side of a 10^-10 m/s^2 threshold?). To put it another way its replacing Dark Matter with Dark Force, with Dark Force callibrated to replicate Dark Matter's effects. A bit of a handwave, albeit the calibration is difficult and impressive.

[August]

Guaranteed this will descend into breathy futurism nonsense along the lines of "solar roads" or "wind generator walls" cooked up by morons and reported upon credulously by terrible journos (and in some cases even supported tokenistically by government grants).

Only if you let it.

A cosmological model that doesn’t require dark matter has overcome a major hurdle in matching observations from the cosmic microwave background.

.... has no purpose but to generate PhDs over a 40 year period?

I see you're a man of taste.

[dzajic]

Guaranteed this will descend into breathy futurism nonsense along the lines of "solar roads" or "wind generator walls" cooked up by morons and reported upon credulously by terrible journos (and in some cases even supported tokenistically by government grants).

Only if you let it.

A cosmological model that doesn’t require dark matter has overcome a major hurdle in matching observations from the cosmic microwave background.

.... has no purpose but to generate PhDs over a 40 year period?

I see you're a man of taste.

All the books by very serious people (Hawking, Throne, Lederman...) from late '70es early '80es about how "string theory is going to solve everything in 5 to 10 years" , when that timespan had already past when I read them in mid '90es, may have made me a bit jaded towards modern theoretical work. If I'm not mistaken only "predicated by theory by only now confirmed" elementary particles since I was born are top quark and Higgs boson. Physics has been stuck with a set of unprovables... While cosmology has actually been getting worse. Yes sure we have much more precise guess on the age of the universe. But. In '80es people were scratching their heads about dark matter, than late '90es got us dark energy. 2000 to today has been a million tiny potentials holes in the standard model but neither something definite nor a comprehensive GUT or TOE.

Which hopefully next generation of big huge ground based telescopes (giant Magellan, Thirty Meter...) may make an effort at, if satellite mega-constellations don't permanently disable ground based astronomy.


Edit. On one hand, I had no right to complain since I chickened out on real science and decided to study to become a mundane engineer.
Otoh, other fields are not doing much better. Friend from high school is molecular bio PhD, did some post grad in states, now in Deutschland. Focuses on brain chemistry and Parkinson's disease. Millions of mice have been slaughtered, thousands of different proteins studied. Thousands upon thousands of scientific papers published. We still know neither the cause nor have a cure.

[Timaios]

I wonder how much this is also about the incentives for the researchers - we are incentivized to produce papers, not solutions? We'd love to provide solutions, but all funding is short-term and to get the next funding, you need to produce papers and so the cycle continues? But I don't know if science policy is the right thing to discuss in this thread. =D

[Lilalaunebör]

Guaranteed this will descend into breathy futurism nonsense along the lines of "solar roads" or "wind generator walls" cooked up by morons and reported upon credulously by terrible journos (and in some cases even supported tokenistically by government grants).

Only if you let it.

A cosmological model that doesn’t require dark matter has overcome a major hurdle in matching observations from the cosmic microwave background.

.... has no purpose but to generate PhDs over a 40 year period?

I see you're a man of taste.

All the books by very serious people (Hawking, Throne, Lederman...) from late '70es early '80es about how "string theory is going to solve everything in 5 to 10 years" , when that timespan had already past when I read them in mid '90es, may have made me a bit jaded towards modern theoretical work. If I'm not mistaken only "predicated by theory by only now confirmed" elementary particles since I was born are top quark and Higgs boson. Physics has been stuck with a set of unprovables... While cosmology has actually been getting worse. Yes sure we have much more precise guess on the age of the universe. But. In '80es people were scratching their heads about dark matter, than late '90es got us dark energy. 2000 to today has been a million tiny potentials holes in the standard model but neither something definite nor a comprehensive GUT or TOE.

Which hopefully next generation of big huge ground based telescopes (giant Magellan, Thirty Meter...) may make an effort at, if satellite mega-constellations don't permanently disable ground based astronomy.


Edit. On one hand, I had no right to complain since I chickened out on real science and decided to study to become a mundane engineer.
Otoh, other fields are not doing much better. Friend from high school is molecular bio PhD, did some post grad in states, now in Deutschland. Focuses on brain chemistry and Parkinson's disease. Millions of mice have been slaughtered, thousands of different proteins studied. Thousands upon thousands of scientific papers published. We still know neither the cause nor have a cure.

There are, from my vantage point, two approaches to molecular bio: trial and error, and computational. Trial and error is expensive and sometimes seen as unethical. Computational lacks reliable model simplifications to bridge the gap from molecule to organism. So people try to scrape by on whatever they can find, because the posssible payoffs (material and otherwise) are huge.

[Hel OWeen]

I wonder how much this is also about the incentives for the researchers - we are incentivized to produce papers, not solutions? We'd love to provide solutions, but all funding is short-term and to get the next funding, you need to produce papers and so the cycle continues?

(Disclaimer: I have no scientific background other than what I learned in school and from being interested in science)

Curious question: while that is true, isn't it also true that scientists rummage this treasure trove of papers for their own research and hence are able to progress the insight into the specific area? Something like "standing on the shoulder of giants".

But I don't know if science policy is the right thing to discuss in this thread. =D

I personally can't think of a better suited thread.

But what about politics & science? Something like this: COP26: Document leak reveals nations lobbying to change key climate report

In recent years - well, relatively recent at least, we had two events in which politics followed the advice of science and prevented a disaster in the making for large parts of humanity: the ozone hole and COVID. It worked out quite well (though everything could be better, of course); mankind even invented cool new stuff while dealing with it. So I don't understand why politics doesn't do that more often. I guess I'm not greedy enough to understand the thinking/acting behind it.

[Spartan Dax]

I wonder how much this is also about the incentives for the researchers - we are incentivized to produce papers, not solutions? We'd love to provide solutions, but all funding is short-term and to get the next funding, you need to produce papers and so the cycle continues?

(Disclaimer: I have no scientific background other than what I learned in school and from being interested in science)

Curious question: while that is true, isn't it also true that scientists rummage this treasure trove of papers for their own research and hence are able to progress the insight into the specific area? Something like "standing on the shoulder of giants".

Yeah latest example I saw of exactly that was a video on Sulphur-lithium battery research where the researchers dug up a paper on Saccharos stabilizing sulphur complexes from the 90's. After that they basically added sugar to see what happened which yielded "promising" results.

[Cosmin]

Yeah latest example I saw of exactly that was a video on Sulphur-lithium battery research where the researchers dug up a paper on Saccharos stabilizing sulphur complexes from the 90's. After that they basically added sugar to see what happened which yielded "promising" results.

And then nothing of note came out of it. Nowadays it seems that new tech requires much more money poured into developing it into a product and that's not done because it's likely more expensive than throwing in a face lift of existing tech (e.g. "better" li-ion) and just selling that instead.

Remember we had to have a global pandemic for a rather new tech to be bombarded with monies for an actual end-product to come out (i.e. mRNA vaccines). Apparently this heralds a "new era" albeit this tech was previously available but nobody was interested in it because it was "useless" (read: unprofitable). My bad that article is from 2018, so that's ONE example of things going well for something deemed as promising, albeit I kind of doubt it would have without the pandemic


So we'll probably have better battery tech when we run out of cobalt or some other crap that is present in li-ion and not present in S-Li-ion (idk if it's cobalt or something else). At the moment the industries seem to be making do with "faster horses" rather than going for a car to replace the horse.

[Nordstern]

Elephants have evolved to be tuskless because of ivory poaching, a study finds: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/22/10483...oaching-africa

WASHINGTON — A hefty set of tusks is usually an advantage for elephants, allowing them to dig for water, strip bark for food and joust with other elephants. But during episodes of intense ivory poaching, those big incisors become a liability.

Now researchers have pinpointed how years of civil war and poaching in Mozambique have led to a greater proportion of elephants that will never develop tusks.

During the conflict from 1977 to 1992, fighters on both sides slaughtered elephants for ivory to finance war efforts. In the region that's now Gorongosa National Park, around 90% of the elephants were killed.

The survivors were likely to share a key characteristic: half the females were naturally tuskless — they simply never developed tusks — while before the war, less than a fifth lacked tusks.

Like eye color in humans, genes are responsible for whether elephants inherit tusks from their parents. Although tusklessness was once rare in African savannah elephants, it's become more common — like a rare eye color becoming widespread.

After the war, those tuskless surviving females passed on their genes with expected, as well as surprising, results. About half their daughters were tuskless. More perplexing, two-thirds of their offspring were female.

The years of unrest "changed the trajectory of evolution in that population," said evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton, based at Princeton University.

Researchers pinpoint when the Vikings came to Canada. It was exactly 1,000 years ago: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/21/10477...ived-in-canada

Kuitems and Dee didn't set out to definitively find the official date Icelandic travelers came to North America.

Their research all started nearly four years ago when the two wanted to test their new method of radiocarbon dating, which examines tree rings for rare solar storms.

"The method sort of came first and the archaeological example came second," Dee said.

In 993, unusual cosmic ray activities resulted in a worldwide dip in atmospheric radiocarbon that can be observed in individual tree rings. In other words, if a tree was alive in 993, using carbon dating techniques on its tree rings — even long after the tree's death — can reveal exactly which year it was cut by locating the ring with the carbon anomaly, then simply counting outward.

The two said they had an inkling that the Viking journey to North America likely happened around 993. They deduced that the items collected from the settlement in Newfoundland would be a good starting point.

[Dee Jiensai]

Possible cheap(ish) large scale CO2 splitting process discoverd.

Big if true.