At first, the rough patch on the roof of Mike’s mouth didn’t seem like anything to worry about. It didn’t hurt. But it didn’t go away. His dentist referred him to an ear, nose, and throat doctor, who did a biopsy, which was inconclusive.
In the same decade when gravitational waves and a neutron star merger have been observed, astronomers have now observed what they believe to be the first detection of a black hole swallowing a neutron star.
Last Wednesday, gravitational wave detectors in Italy and the US, called LIGO and Virgo, detected telltale ripples in space and time, traced to an event that happened 8,550 million trillion kilometers away from Earth.
Astronomers are analyzing the data from the detection to confirm the size of the two objects that came together to form such cataclysmic ripples, but the event is likely a black hole eating a neutron star.
High in the Himalayas of India, amid the snow-capped peaks, nestles a mystery. Roopkund Lake is a shallow body of water filled with human bones — the skeletons of hundreds of individuals. It’s these that give the lake its other name, Skeleton Lake, and no one knows how the remains came to be there.
One hypothesis is that some catastrophe, a single event such as a powerful storm, had befallen a large group of people. But DNA analysis of 38 of the skeletons has turned that idea on its head.
The remains appear to come from distinct groups of people from as far as the Mediterranean, and they arrived at the lake several times over a 1,000-year span.
As delicious as butter is—adding flavor and texture to almost any food—it’s not the healthiest thing to smear on toast or corn on the cob. Oil-based spreads like margarine are often considered a better heart-smart alternative, but food scientists at Cornell University have come up with what could be the ultimate butter substitute made primarily from water.
Researchers hope mobile devices can capture signs of imminent risk that a doctor’s questionnaire can’t.
BERKELEY, Calif., Aug. 20, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded a new patent (U.S. 10,385,360) to the University of California (UC), University of Vienna, and Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier covering nucleic acid molecules encoding single-molecule guide RNAs, as well as CRISPR-Cas9 compositions comprising single-molecule guide RNAs or nucleic acid molecules encoding single-molecule guide RNAs.
Over the past six months, UC’s U.S. CRISPR-Cas9 portfolio has sharply increased, and to date includes 11 separate patents for methods and compositions related to the gene-editing technology. Looking ahead, UC anticipates at least six additional related patents issuing in the near future, bringing UC’s total portfolio to 17 patents and spanning various compositions and methods including targeting and editing genes in any setting, such as within plant, animal, and human cells. The portfolio also includes patents related to the modulation of transcription.
“The USPTO has continually acknowledged the Doudna-Charpentier team’s groundbreaking work,” said Eldora L. Ellison, Ph.D., lead patent strategist on CRISPR-Cas9 matters for UC and a Director at Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox. “True to UC’s mission as a leading public university, the patent granted today and others in its CRISPR-Cas9 portfolio will be applied for the betterment of society.”
This is your movement, and your Party, of which I am only the steward. This kind of growth and flourishing of creativity are exactly what I need to see as milestones in the evolution of our participatory mechanisms.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-lqNO3hij_E
Shareena Z Hamzah does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Cranmer is a member of ATLAS, one of the two general-purpose experiments that, among other things, co-discovered the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He and other CERN researchers recently published a letter in Nature Physics titled “Open is not enough,” which shares lessons learned about providing open data in high-energy physics. The CERN Open Data Portal, which facilitates public access of datasets from CERN experiments, now contains more than two petabytes of information.
It could be said that astronomy, one of the oldest sciences, was one of the first fields to have open data. The open records of Chinese astronomers from 1054 A.D. allowed astronomer Carlo Otto Lampland to identify the Crab Nebula as the remnant of a supernova in 1921. In 1705 Edward Halley used the previous observations of Johannes Kepler and Petrus Apianus—who did their work before Halley was old enough to use a telescope—to deduce the orbit of his eponymous comet.
In science, making data open means making available, free of charge, the observations or other information collected in a scientific study for the purpose of allowing other researchers to examine it for themselves, either to verify it or to conduct new analyses.
Continue reading “With open data, scientists share their work” »
