Lifeboat Foundation

In Earth’s crust, tectonic blocks slide and grind past each other like enormous ships loosed from anchor. Earthquakes are generated along these fault zones when enough stress builds for a block to stick, then suddenly slip.

These slips can be aided by several factors that reduce friction within a fault zone, such as hotter temperatures or pressurized gases that can separate blocks like pucks on an air-hockey table. The decreasing friction enables one tectonic block to accelerate against the other until it runs out of energy. Seismologists have long believed this kind of frictional instability can explain how all crustal earthquakes start. But that might not be the whole story.

In a study published today in Nature Communications, scientists Hongyu Sun and Matej Pec, from MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), find that ultra-fine-grained crystals within fault zones can behave like low-viscosity fluids. The finding offers an alternative explanation for the instability that leads to crustal earthquakes. It also suggests a link between quakes in the crust and other types of temblors that occur deep in the Earth.

When physicist Tyler Cocker joined Michigan State University in 2018, he had a clear goal: build a powerful microscope that would be the first of its kind in the United States.

Having accomplished that, it was time to put the microscope to work.

“We knew we had to do something useful,” said Cocker, Jerry Cowen Endowed Chair in Experimental Physics in the College of Natural Science’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. “We’ve got the nicest microscope in the country. We should use this to our advantage.”

P.E.I. will be making a vaccine that prevents shingles free for seniors next year.

The two dose Shingrix vaccine will be available for Islanders who are 65 and older beginning in January.

Erin MacKenzie, executive director of the P.E.I. Pharmacists Association, said one dose of the vaccine usually costs around $180.

Neuroscience biweekly vol. 46, 10th November — 24th November.

“It’s amazing that you can still find areas of the brain that are important for basic survival behaviors that we had never before implicated,” Betley says. “And these brain regions are important in robust ways.” The work, shared in the journal Nature, suggests that neurons in the cerebellum’s anterior deep cerebellar nuclei (aDCN) are involved in helping animals regulate their meal size. Since its start, Betley’s lab has unraveled a variety of neural circuits related to how the brain regulates food intake. That work as well as other research has implicated areas of the hindbrain and hypothalmus in this control.

Well beyond Descartes and his mind-body duality, new questions have emerged that are as exciting as they are nebulous: Does quantum physics play a role in how the brain works? Or, more profoundly, is the mind, viewed as a collection of possible brain states, sustained by quantum effects? Or can it all be treated using classical physics?

There is nothing better than mixing two great mysteries to produce an even bigger one.

In 2012, astronomers announced a startling result: The had used Hubble to very carefully measure the motion of the Andromeda galaxy, and found that it appeared to heading very nearly directly toward the Milky Way at 100 kilometers per second. They predicted that in about 4 billion years the two galaxies would collide, and chaos would ensue.

In 2019, an update to the measurements indicated that Andromeda was sliding to the side a little bit more than previously thought, delaying the inevitable collision by about 600 million years.

Continue reading “Uncertain future: Is Andromeda going to collide with the Milky Way or not?” »

Scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collaborators have shown that they can manipulate single skyrmions—tiny magnetic vortices that could be used as computing bits in future ultra-dense information storage devices—using pulses of electric current, at room temperature.

Skyrmions—tiny particles that can be moved under small electric currents several orders lower than those used for driving magnetic domain walls—are being studied in the hope of developing promising applications in data storage devices with low energy consumption. The key to creating spintronics devices is the ability to effectively manipulate, and measure, a single tiny vortex.

Most research to date has focused on the dynamics for skyrmions a micrometer or more in size or skyrmion clusters stabilized below room temperature. For the current research, published in Nature Communications, the researchers used a thin magnetic plate made up of a compound of cobalt, zinc, and manganese, Co₉Zn₉Mn₂, which is known as a chiral-lattice magnet. They directly observed the dynamics of a single skyrmion, with a size of 100 nanometers, at room temperature using Lorentz transmission electron microscopy. They were able to track the motions of the skyrmion and control its Hall motion directions by flipping the magnetic field, when they subjected it to ultrafast pulses of electric current—on the scale of nanoseconds.

A dead star is spinning so rapidly, it officially has the fastest known spin rate of any star of its kind.

It’s a white dwarf star, named LAMOST J024048.51+195226.9 (J0240+1952 for short) and located 2,015 light-years away, and it has an insane rotation rate of just 25 seconds. That pips the previous record holder by a significant margin – CTCV J2056-3014, with a spin rate of 29 seconds.

It also bears a close similarity to another fast white dwarf, AE Aquarii, which has a spin rate of 33 seconds.

Mapping the human connectomics.

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Continue reading “Mapping the Human Brain — (Intro)” »