Science news of the day thread.

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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Sun Oct 23, 2022 3:41 pm

Charles Darwin autograph manuscript could fetch £700,000 at auction

A rare manuscript containing a passage from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is to be sold at auction in November.

The document, which is expected to fetch between £530,000 and £700,000, is said to be the most significant autograph manuscript by Darwin to have appeared at auction.

In 2015, On the Origin of Species was voted the most influential academic book ever written, in a public poll.

In the 163 years since the work was published, some of Darwin’s notes and manuscript leaves have survived. But autographs by Darwin – who was known for obsessively revising his publications and discarding pages from working drafts – were extremely rare.

According to the the auction house Sotheby’s, the manuscript was mistaken as a leaf from a working draft of the third edition of On the Origin of Species.

It was written by Darwin in the autumn of 1865, four years after the publication of the third edition of Origin of Species, in response to a request from Hermann Kindt, the editor of the Autographic Mirror. Kindt had written to Darwin requesting a sample of his handwriting to reprint it in his magazine, which focused on the pre-eminent figures of the age, Sotheby’s said...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... at-auction
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by macdoc » Wed Oct 26, 2022 3:59 pm

Wow !! Talk about efficient....
Image
Bar-tailed godwit sets world record with 13,560km continuous flight from Alaska to southern Australia
Satellite tag data suggests five-month-old migratory bird did not stop during voyage which took 11 days and one hour to reach Tasmania
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -australia

and
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ird-flight

Wonder how they handle water intake :thinks:
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Thu Oct 27, 2022 7:56 am

Plastic-eating worms may offer solution to mounting waste, Stanford researchers discover

Consider the plastic foam cup. Every year, Americans throw away 2.5 billion of them. And yet, that waste is just a fraction of the 33 million tons of plastic Americans discard every year. Less than 10 percent of that total gets recycled, and the remainder presents challenges ranging from water contamination to animal poisoning.

Enter the mighty mealworm. The tiny worm, which is the larvae form of the darkling beetle, can subsist on a diet of Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene, according to two companion studies co-authored by Wei-Min Wu, a senior research engineer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford. Microorganisms in the worms' guts biodegrade the plastic in the process – a surprising and hopeful finding.

"Our findings have opened a new door to solve the global plastic pollution problem," Wu said.

The papers, published in Environmental Science and Technology, are the first to provide detailed evidence of bacterial degradation of plastic in an animal's gut. Understanding how bacteria within mealworms carry out this feat could potentially enable new options for safe management of plastic waste.

"There's a possibility of really important research coming out of bizarre places," said Craig Criddle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering who supervises plastics research by Wu and others at Stanford. "Sometimes, science surprises us. This is a shock."...

https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2015/pr-wo ... 92915.html
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Thu Oct 27, 2022 8:52 pm

Bumblebees get a buzz out of playing with balls, study finds

Image

Bumblebees are associated with lives of work rather than play, but researchers have for the first time observed the insects playing with balls for enjoyment, just like humans and dogs.

A team of UK scientists watched bees interacting with inanimate objects as a form of play and said the findings added to growing evidence that their minds are more complex than previously imagined.

Lars Chittka, a professor of sensory and behavioural ecology at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), said bees were “a million miles from the mindless, unfeeling creatures they are traditionally believed to be”.

She added: “There are lots of animals who play just for the purposes of enjoyment, but most examples come from young mammals and birds. This research provides a strong indication that insect minds are far more sophisticated than we might imagine.”

The findings, published in the journal Animal Behaviour, were based on a series of experiments where bumblebees were found to repeatedly roll balls when given the option, despite no apparent incentive to do so. Younger bees were found to roll more balls than older bees, while adult males rolled for longer than their female counterparts.

The researchers designed an experimental arena where 45 bumblebees were given the option of either walking through an unobstructed path to get a treat or going into areas with wooden balls.

According to the researchers, individual bees rolled balls between one and 117 times over the course of the experiment, and the repeated behaviour suggested ball rolling was rewarding, the team said...
C'mon you bees!
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by JimC » Fri Oct 28, 2022 3:26 am

Sounds more like obsessive/compulsive behaviour...
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Fri Oct 28, 2022 5:46 am

Guess that's playing with balls for ya.
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by macdoc » Mon Oct 31, 2022 7:37 am

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Haunting Portrait: NASA’s Webb Reveals Dust, Structure in Pillars of Creation
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/20 ... f-creation
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Mon Oct 31, 2022 8:27 pm

I didn't know you can do the slit experiment at home...

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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by rainbow » Tue Nov 01, 2022 5:43 pm

Brian Peacock wrote:
Mon Oct 31, 2022 8:27 pm
I didn't know you can do the slit experiment at home...

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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by macdoc » Thu Nov 03, 2022 1:17 am

NOV 2, 2022 7:00 AM
A Caustic Shift Is Coming for the Arctic Ocean
Scientists have already begun to observe the ecological effects of acidifying oceans on sea life. The changes ahead may be more drastic.
https://www.wired.com/story/a-caustic-s ... tm_term=P2
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by macdoc » Thu Nov 03, 2022 1:29 am

wow ….tracking a sewage sample to one person https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/statu ... 2388295680
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by macdoc » Thu Nov 03, 2022 7:52 am

Right out of Ministry for the Future
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/02/opin ... index.html
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by pErvinalia » Thu Nov 03, 2022 7:54 am

What's out of the ministry for the future?
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by pErvinalia » Thu Nov 03, 2022 8:57 am

Relevant to the quoteable remarks thread...

Crows Perform Yet Another Skill Once Thought Distinctively Human

Scientists demonstrate that crows are capable of recursion—a key feature in grammar. Not everyone is convinced

Crows are some of the smartest creatures in the animal kingdom. They are capable of making rule-guided decisions and of creating and using tools. They also appear to show an innate sense of what numbers are. Researchers now report that these clever birds are able to understand recursion—the process of embedding structures in other, similar structures—which was long thought to be a uniquely human ability.
Recursion is a key feature of language. It enables us to build elaborate sentences from simple ones. Take the sentence “The mouse the cat chased ran.” Here the clause “the cat chased” is enclosed within the clause “the mouse ran.” For decades, psychologists thought that recursion was a trait of humans alone. Some considered it the key feature that set human language apart from other forms of communication between animals. But questions about that assumption persisted. “There’s always been interest in whether or not nonhuman animals can also grasp recursive sequences,” says Diana Liao, a postdoctoral researcher at the lab of Andreas Nieder, a professor of animal physiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

....

This paper prompted Liao and her colleagues to investigate whether crows, with their renowned cognitive skills, might possess the capacity for recursion as well. Adapting the protocol used in the 2020 paper, the team trained two crows to peck pairs of brackets in a center-embedded recursive sequence. The researchers then tested the birds’ ability to spontaneously generate such recursive sequences on a new set of symbols. The crows also performed on par with children. The birds produced the recursive sequences in around 40 percent of trials—but without the extra training that the monkeys required. The results were published today in Science Advances.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... e=Facebook#
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Thu Nov 03, 2022 9:37 am

Magic mushrooms’ psilocybin can alleviate severe depression when used with therapy

The psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms can help alleviate severe depression when combined with psychotherapy, according to a trial that raises hopes for people failed by existing antidepressants.

Nearly a third of patients with severe depression went into rapid remission after a single 25mg dose of psilocybin followed by therapy sessions, which aimed to help patients identify causes and potential solutions to their depression, researchers said.

The results from the largest clinical trial yet into psilocybin and depression were described as “exceptional” by Prof Guy Goodwin, the chief medical officer at Compass Pathways, the mental healthcare firm that led the trial conducted at 22 sites across the UK, Europe and North America.

An estimated 100 million people worldwide have treatment-resistant depression, defined as a major depressive disorder that has not responded to at least two antidepressant treatments. About half of those affected are unable to perform routine daily tasks.

“Response rates in this group with treatment-resistant depression are usually between 10 and 20%,” Goodwin said. “We are seeing remission rates at three weeks of about 30% … that is a very satisfactory outcome.”

Dr James Rucker, a consultant psychiatrist at South London and Maudsley NHS foundation trust, who worked on the trial at King’s College London, said treatment-resistant depression placed a “staggering” burden on patients and those around them, with a total cost to the UK of £3.9bn a year...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... de-therapy
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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