Wandering Adventure Party

TIL my boss thinks I’m an LLM

Very cool! I know someone who had an awful time getting this diagnosed.

History Channel: “Trilobite with alien DNA.”

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Terrible to see, great this was discovered.

I can go one step further. They provided their own handy summary. Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The longest-lived mammals on Earth, bowhead whales, contain longevity secrets that scientists hope could be applied to our own biology. A new study analyzes gene repairing proteins and found that bowhead whales contain 100 times the concentration of CIRBP, a protein that repairs genetic damage known as double-strand breaks. They also found that the specimens subjected to colder temperatures tended to produce more of these proteins, a nifty trick for a species that lives in arctic waters.

@jeffowski I translate 19th century German folklore, and I can confirm.The most gruesome tale I have come across was about a "miracle doctor" who promised to revive a dead infant for just long enough so that it could receive the emergency baptism that had been denied to it.

#meme #media #science

Wonder if it’s also seen in ME/CFS sufferers.

Electrons inside solid materials behave in a surprisingly similar way. When they gain extra energy (for instance, when the material is struck by other electrons), they can sometimes break free from the solid. This process has been known for decades and forms the basis of many technologies. However, until recently, scientists had been unable to calculate it with precision. Researchers from several groups at TU Wien have now found the solution. Just as the frog must find the right opening, an electron also needs to locate a specific “exit,” known as a “doorway state.” … The key discovery is that energy alone cannot determine whether an electron escapes. There are quantum states above the energy threshold that still fail to lead out of the material, a fact missing from earlier models. “From an energetic point of view, the electron is no longer bound to the solid. It has the energy of a free electron, yet it still remains spatially located where the solid is,” says Richard Wilhelm. The electron behaves like the frog that jumps high enough but fails to find the exit. “The electrons must occupy very specific states – so-called doorway states,” explains Prof. Florian Libisch from the Institute for Theoretical Physics. “These states couple strongly to those that actually lead out of the solid. Not every state with sufficient energy is such a doorway state – only those that represent an ‘open door’ to the outside.”

When the current GOP admin started dismantling science in the USA, it occurred to me that a positive outcome might be the decentralization of science.

Awwww! ~fire-up the grill~

Neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Chinese had video recording or even photography, which seems to be the metaphor that allows people to explain what they do or don’t have. I must have relatively weak mental imagery? I can imagine seeing an apple, or recall the visual memory of my fruit bowl, but I’m hard-pressed to extract any definitive visual information from it, like I could if I really was looking at it. I’m visualizing the fruit bowl, but how many apples am I visualizing exactly? If I decide I’m visualizing two, now I’ve lost the relationship between the banana and the orange. I can see the Mona Lisa, but where do her arms go, actually? Maybe sort of crossed somewhere? What’s going on behind her, some kind of green-brown pointy trees? Nope, there’s her cheek again and some paint cracks. It’s less like looking at a picture and more like dreaming of one.

Another Astrum, another banger. What to you think? Could we find another Earth-like planet within our lifetime? Or any life later at all? Maybe with in a far-off exoplanet or even within the Sol System (out solar system)? Well, we can only hope. I certainly have a feeling that we may.

The 20-foot-long Ran submersible used pulsed sound waves (advanced multibeam sonar) on the ice to map its features, but because of its subantarctic location, Wåhlin and her team couldn’t communicate with the AUV or track its movements with GPS. After 14 missions—some lasting a couple hours and others stretching longer than a day—Ran mapped around 50 square miles of ice, and the structures imaged were more complex than anyone imagined. “The mapping has given us a lot of new data that we need to look at more closely,” Wåhlin said in a press statement. “It is clear that many previous assumptions about melting of glacier undersides are falling short. Current models cannot explain the complex patterns we see. But with this method, we have a better chance of finding the answers.” The secret structures are melt patterns in the underside of the ice shelf. These surveys were conducted in 2022, and the team returned earlier this year to see what changes to the ice shelf had occurred. That’s when Wåhlin and her team’s worst fears were realized—Ran didn’t emerge at the pre-planned rendezvous point. The team suspects that the AUV either ran aground or became the target of some curious seals. Yeah, probe broke under the ice shelf and didn’t come back. I have to say, Popular Mechanics has become complete shit with headlines like this. I mean, the article is fine for what it is, a story about a group using and self piloting submersible to study glacial melting from below. But that headline is one of the worst click-bait pieces of shit I’ve ever read.

What if our physics are just part of the simulation? What if actual physics are just obscured by the simulation and we just need to go deeper to simulate reality. The very nature of unfalsifiability aside, I understand that we cannot currently make a plan to simulate the universe- we dont have the hardware for it. Am I missing anything more profound? This may well be over my head.

Picobarn? Why not square picometers? Even Wikipedia says a barn is a non-SI unit

SHOCKED I SAY!!!

Stark racial and ethnic disparities in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias (ADRD) have been documented, largely attributable to the impact of social and structural drivers of health. The structural drivers of health include the institutions, practices, cultural norms, and policies that dictate the inequitable distribution of the social determinants of health (SDoH), defined as the conditions where people live, work, play, and age, and consist of various forms of systemic oppression including structural racism. The overlapping effects of race and place on health have been studied extensively, with an increased focus on the operationalization and measurement of “place-effects” on health through neighborhood characteristics and the built environment. Previous studies have demonstrated associations of place-based SDoH with cardiometabolic health and cognition. However, research studying the relationship of place-based SDoH with ADRD-associated neuroimaging and plasma biomarkers is still limited. Biomarkers serve as proxies for underlying pathological changes and can play a crucial role in the detection of etiology underlying cognitive decline and ADRD. More specifically, neuroimaging biomarkers of brain structure and function, assessed using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), are helpful in the early detection of disease processes and prognosis for progression. Additionally, numerous blood-based biomarkers have recently emerged as candidates for improved diagnosis and management of ADRD, along with a demonstrated need to examine varying SDoH profiles in correlation with these biomarkers due to observed differences in biomarker levels by medical comorbidities. Plasma biomarkers have been associated with brain health differences assessed with neuroimaging, most notably with lower total gray matter brain volume and higher amyloid deposition. Importantly, abnormal plasma amyloid β 42/40 ratio helps in identifying those with higher dementia risk, while phosphorylated-Tau 181 has been shown to increase with clinical severity of AD.

Chemists from the University of Warwick and Monash University have discovered a powerful new antibiotic called pre-methylenomycin C lactone, found as an intermediate compound in the production of methylenomycin A[^1]. This molecule shows remarkable potency against drug-resistant bacteria, demonstrating over 100 times greater activity against Gram-positive pathogens compared to methylenomycin A[^2]. The compound proves particularly effective against Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), with no observed resistance development in Enterococcus faecium under conditions where vancomycin resistance typically emerges[^1]. “Methylenomycin A was originally discovered 50 years ago and while it has been synthesized several times, no-one appears to have tested the synthetic intermediates for antimicrobial activity!” said Professor Greg Challis[^2]. The team identified the compound by deleting specific genes in Streptomyces coelicolor, a well-studied soil bacterium[^1]. The researchers have developed a scalable synthetic route for producing pre-methylenomycin C lactone, positioning it for further development as a potential treatment against antimicrobial-resistant infections[^1]. [^1]: Medical Dialogues - Scientists discover hidden antibiotic 100 times stronger against superbugs [^2]: University of Warwick - New antibiotic for drug-resistant bacteria found hiding in plain sight