An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered an entirely new kind of quantum entanglement, a phenomenon that causes particles to become weirdly linked, even across vast cosmic distances, reports a new study. The discovery allowed them to capture an unprecedented glimpse of the bizarre world inside atoms, the tiny building blocks of matter. The mind-bending research resolves a longstanding mystery about the nuclei of atoms, which contain particles called protons and neutrons, and could help shed light on topics ranging from quantum computing to astrophysics. The exciting discoveries took place at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a specialized facility at Brookhaven in New York that can accelerate charged atoms, known as ions, to almost light speed. When these ions collide -- or even just pass near each other -- their interactions expose the inner workings of atoms, which are governed by the trippy laws of quantum mechanics. [...]

Now, for the first time ever, scientists at Brookhaven have captured interference patterns that are created by the entanglement of two particles with different charges, a breakthrough that has opened up a completely new window into the mysterious innards of atoms that make up visible matter in the universe, according to a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances. "There's never been any measurement in the past of interference between distinguishable particles," said Daniel Brandenburg, a physics professor at the Ohio State University who co-authored the new study, in a call with Motherboard. "That's the discovery; the application is that we get to use it to do some nuclear physics." Brandenburg and his colleagues achieved this milestone with the help of a sensitive detector called the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC, or STAR, that captured interactions between gold ions that were boosted to the brink of light speed. Clouds of photons, which are particles that carry light, surround the ions and interact with another type of particle, called gluons, that hold atomic nuclei together. These encounters between the photons and the gluons set off a chain of events that ultimately created two new particles, called pions, which have opposite charges -- one positive and one negative. When these pions careened into the STAR detector, the precision instrument measured some of their key properties, such as velocity and angle of impact, which were then used to probe the size, shape, and arrangement of gluons inside the atomic nuclei with a precision that has never been achieved before.

Scientists have imaged atomic nuclei at lower energies before, but attempts to probe these structures at high energies has always produced a puzzling result. Nuclei in these experiments look way bigger than they should, according to models, an outcome that has puzzled scientists for decades. Now, the STAR collaboration has now solved this mystery by pinpointing a blurring effect that is linked to the photons in the experiment. Essentially, past studies captured one-dimensional glimpses of nuclei that did not account for important patterns in photons, such as their polarization direction. The new study included this polarization information, allowing Brandenburg and his colleagues to probe the nuclei from two angles, parallel and perpendicular to the photon's motion, producing a two-dimensional view that matches theoretical predictions. What's more, the team is even able to make out the rough positions of key particles in the nucleus, such as protons and neutrons, as well as the distribution of gluons. It also offers a new way to unravel persistent mysteries about the behavior of atoms at high energies. [...] Brandenburg hopes to repeat this technique, and versions of it, at RHIC and other facilities like the Large Hadron Collider, in order to tease out the long-hidden details inside atomic nuclei.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Askern Medical Practice, a general practitioner surgery based in Doncaster, UK, managed to muddle its Christmas holiday message to patients by texting them they'd been diagnosed with "aggressive lung cancer with metastases." The message went out to patients of the medical facility -- there are reportedly about 8,000 of them -- on December 23, 2022. It asked patients to fill out a DS1500 form, which is used to help terminal patients expedite access to benefits because they may not have time for the usual bureaucratic delay.

About an hour after thoroughly alarming recipients of the not-so-glad tidings, the medical facility reportedly apologized in a follow-up text message. "Please accept our sincere apologies for the previous text message sent," the message reads, as reported by the BBC. "This has been sent in error. Our message to you should have read, 'We wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.' In case of emergency please contact NHS 111." On Tuesday, the surgery took its apology public via its Facebook page. The surgery characterized the errant text message as both an administrative error and a computer-related error, without clarifying just how the mistake occurred. "While no data was breached, we can confirm an admin staff error was made, for which we apologized immediately upon becoming aware," Askern Medical Practice said in its post. "We would like to once again apologize sincerely to all patients for the distress caused. We take patient communication, confidentiality and data protection very seriously."

"We also pride in looking after our patients," the medical facility's apology continued. "We would like to reassure all our patients that the text message was a mistake (it was an internal patient supportive task amongst admin staff to act upon) and not related to you as a patient in any way. This was an isolated computer-related error for which we are extremely regretful, and steps are being taken to prevent a reoccurrence."

U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will on Wednesday announce plans to force school pupils in England to study math up to the age of 18, according to a Downing Street briefing. The initiative attempts to tackle innumeracy and better equip young people for the workplace. CNBC reports: In his first speech of 2023, Sunak is expected to outline plans for math to be offered through alternative qualification routes. Comparatively, traditional A-Levels subject-based qualifications allow high school students in England to elect academic subjects to study between the ages of 16 and 18. [...] Sunak's education proposals would only affect pupils in England. Education is a devolved issue, with Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish authorities managing their own systems.

School-based education in England is only compulsory up to the age of 16, after which children can choose to pursue further academic qualifications such as A-Levels or alternative qualifications, or vocational training. The prime minister is expected to say in his Wednesday speech that the issue of mandatory math is "personal" for him. "Every opportunity I've had in life began with the education I was so fortunate to receive. And it's the single most important reason why I came into politics: to give every child the highest possible standard of education," he will say.

Sunak attended prestigious fee-paying institutions -- the Stroud School and Winchester College -- before studying at Oxford University. He is expected to acknowledge that the planned overhaul will be challenging and time consuming, with work beginning during the current parliamentary term and finishing in the next.

Better management of nitrogen-rich fertilisers through alternating crops, optimising use and other measures can yield huge environmental and health benefits, but must boost food production at the same time, researchers warned Wednesday. From a report: Reducing nitrogen pollution from global croplands is a "grand challenge," the group of international researchers said in a study in Nature outlining a dozen urgently-needed reforms. The intensive use of chemical fertilisers helped fuel the four-fold expansion of the human population over the last century, and will be crucial for feeding 10 billion people by 2050.

But the bumper crops of what was once called the Green Revolution have come at a terrible cost. Today, more than half the nitrogen in fertilisers seeps into the air and water, leading to deadly pollution, soil acidification, climate change, ozone depletion and biodiversity loss. "Given the multiple health, climate and environmental impacts of reactive nitrogen, it has to be reduced in all the mediums such as air and water," lead author Baojing Gu, a professor at Zhejiang University, told AFP. The benefits of doing so far outstrip the costs, he added.

The world is naturally awash in nitrogen, which is critical for the survival of all life on Earth, especially plants. Nearly 80 percent of Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen, albeit in a gaseous form (N2) of little direct use to most organisms. It is made available to plants when microbes that live within plants or soils turn it into ammonia through biological nitrogen fixation. This process funnels some 200 million tonnes of nitrogen into the soil and oceans every year.

Walt Cunningham, one of the early Apollo astronauts, died Tuesday after complications from a fall. He was 90. NPR reports: Walt Cunningham flew in space just one time. His flight in 1968 was an important -- and often forgotten one -- for the lunar program. Cunningham was the lunar module pilot of the first manned Apollo mission that went to space. Apollo 7's 11-day trip around the Earth was a key stepping stone to NASA's march to the moon. "The real accomplishment, of course, was the first manned landing on the moon," Cunningham told NPR in 2016. "But that was the fifth of what I've always described as five giant steps. The first one was the Apollo 7 mission, of course. Complete test of the Apollo spacecraft."

The launch came after a difficult time for NASA. Just 21 months before, a fire on the launchpad killed three astronauts during a test of Apollo 1. In the interim, NASA changed many procedures and the command module underwent a series of safety improvements. Cunningham said in 2016 that if Apollo 7 had not gone well, the U.S. wouldn't have landed on the moon before the end of the 1960s. "Historically, what the public doesn't realize," he said, "It is still the longest, most ambitious, most successful first test flight of any new flying machine ever."

"There were so many things that had to be tested," he recalled. During the flight, the crew test-fired the engine that would place Apollo into and out of lunar orbit, simulated docking maneuvers and did the first-ever live television broadcast from an American spacecraft. "It was hard to imagine that we could get through all those things [in an 11-day mission] without something going wrong and saying, 'hey you need to gotta come home," Cunningham said. The mission was deemed a success but it was the last time these astronauts would fly in space. There was tension between Apollo 7's commander, Wally Schirra, and mission control. As the flight dragged on, Schirra caught a cold and so did astronaut Donn Eisele and the crew's squabbles worsened with ground controllers. Despite that, Cunningham said, "As I look back on it, it was a job, a challenge, and a task that in the end was very well done."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Immune therapies have rewritten the game when it comes to cancer treatment, earning the "fifth pillar" label next to more tried and true treatments like radiation therapy, surgery, and chemotherapy. And no immunotherapy has garnered quite the same excitement as CAR T-cell therapy, first approved in 2017 by the Food and Drug Administration to treat a form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. At the time, then-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb called the approval "a new frontier in medical innovation," and it seemed like the possibilities for CAR T were near-endless. Flash-forward almost six years, and six therapies have been approved for blood cancers, including lymphomas, leukemia, and multiple myeloma. There's no question that when CAR T works, it works incredibly well. But why it doesn't work for the majority of patients or cancer types has befuddled researchers.

CAR T therapies also haven't yet been expanded to treat solid tumors, which make up the majority of cancers. The immune therapy hasn't been able to crack physical barriers, idiosyncratic tumor cells, and a suppressive microenvironment that characterize these cancers. But a new generation of CAR T therapies are emerging, equipped with highly effective small molecules that scientists hope will solve their low success rate for both blood cancers and solid tumors. Known as "armored CAR T," these infusions have been boosted with additional layers of protection and cancer-fighting proteins. Early research shows that the armored flavor of CAR T might have what it takes for immunotherapy to go the extra mile.

Briefly, immunotherapy can boost or restore the body's immune system by lowering cancer cells' defenses, priming the immune system's T cells to destroy tumors, or -- in the case of CAR T-cell therapy -- genetically editing a patient's T cells. Scientists do this by isolating a patient's T cells from their blood and inserting a gene for a chimeric antigen receptor -- a type of synthetic protein that has been specially made to bind to another protein present on the surface of that patient's cancer cells. Then, upon infusing these modified T cells back into a patient, the immune fighters will recognize and destroy the tumor cells when the patient's normal T cells have failed. That, at least, is the idea. But when CAR T doesn't work, a few factors could be at play. One, Lim said, is the tumor microenvironment, the set of chemicals and structures present in solid cancers that naturally suppress pushback from the body's immune system. Tumor heterogeneity is also a factor -- depending on the type and stage of cancer, tumor cells may not express the protein that the CAR T cells' receptors have been designed to recognize, blocking the ability of the CAR T cells to attack the cancer Finally, there are physical barriers on the outside of a solid tumor that can even prevent the T cells from entering inside to destroy the cancer. Armored CAR T is meant to overcome these difficulties. With this form of therapy, not only are T cells engineered to express a tumor cell's surface protein, they are also given potent cargo often in the form of small proteins called cytokines. If deployed on their own, such molecules can be toxic -- but pairing them with T cells designed to release them at the tumor site and nowhere else represents a promising new strategy. Jakub Svodoba, an oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania, "is helping to lead a clinical trial using armored CAR T-cell therapy to treat patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma for whom previous CAR T therapy has failed," reports the Daily Beast. "Last month, he presented findings that the first seven patients treated with this therapy all responded to it and were alive eight months after receiving it. Svoboda said an important additional finding was that toxicities experienced by the patients -- a concern with cytokines -- were comparable to those from traditional CAR T therapy."

Wendell Lim, a cellular and molecular pharmacology researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and his team are also working on an armored CAR-T therapy, with the potential for it to be used to treat solid tumors. "In a paper published in Science on Dec. 16, he and his colleagues designed T cells to release a cytokine directly to the tumors of mice with pancreatic cancer and melanoma," reports the Daily Beast. "In the study, they wrote that these cancers are 'nearly completely resistant' to treatment with traditional CAR T, but releasing a cytokine allowed the engineered T cells to get past the tumor microenvironment -- effectively solving one of the issues that has set the therapy back."

Weather records have been falling across Europe at a disconcerting rate in the last few days, say meteorologists. From a report: The warmest January day ever was recorded in at least eight European countries including Poland, Denmark, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Belarus, Lithuania and Latvia, according to data collated by Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist who tracks extreme temperatures. In Korbielow, Poland, the mercury hit 19C (66F) -- a temperature the Silesian village is more used to in May, and 18C above the 1C annual average for January. In Javornik in the Czech Republic it was 19.6C, compared with an average of 3C for this time of year.

Temperatures in Vysokaje, Belarus, would normally hover around zero at this time of year. On Sunday they reached 16.4C, beating the country's previous record January high by 4.5C. Elsewhere on the continent, local records were broken at thousands of individual measuring stations, with nearly 950 toppled in Germany alone from 31 December to 2 January, Herrera said. Northern Spain and the south of France basked in beach weather, with 24.9C in Bilbao, its hottest ever January day, and records broken at stations in Cantabria, Asturias and the Basque region. Only Norway, Britain, Ireland, Italy and the south-east Mediterranean posted no records.

Dozens of once crystal-clear streams and rivers in Arctic Alaska are now running bright orange and cloudy, and in some cases they are becoming more acidic. From a report: This otherwise undeveloped landscape now looks as if an industrial mine has been in operation for decades, and scientists want to know why. Roman Dial, a professor of biology and mathematics at Alaska Pacific University, first noticed the stark water-quality changes while doing field work in the Brooks Range in 2020. He spent a month with a team of six graduate students, and they could not find adequate drinking water. "There's so many streams that are not just stained, they're so acidic that they curdle your powdered milk," he said. In others, the water was clear, "but you couldn't drink it because it had a really weird mineral taste and tang."

Dial, who has spent the last 40 years exploring the Arctic, was gathering data on climate-change-driven changes in Alaska's tree line for a project that also includes work from ecologists Patrick Sullivan, director of the Environment and Natural Resources Institute at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and Becky Hewitt, an environmental studies professor at Amherst College. Now the team is digging into the water-quality mystery. "I feel like I'm a grad student all over again in a lab that I don't know anything about, and I'm fascinated by it," Dial said. Most of the rusting waterways are located within some of Alaska's most remote protected lands: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, the Kobuk Valley National Park, and the Selawik Wildlife Refuge. The phenomenon is visually striking.

"It seems like something's been broken open or something's been exposed in a way that has never been exposed before," Dial said. "All the hardrock geologists who look at these pictures, they're like, 'Oh, that looks like acid mine waste.'" But it's not mine waste. According to the researchers, the rusty coating on rocks and streambanks is coming from the land itself. The prevailing hypothesis is that climate warming is causing underlying permafrost to degrade. That releases sediments rich in iron, and when those sediments hit running water and open air, they oxidize and turn a deep rusty orange color. The oxidation of minerals in the soil may also be making the water more acidic. The research team is still early in the process of identifying the cause in order to better explain the consequences. "I think the pH issue" -- the acidity of the water -- "is truly alarming," said Hewitt.

The new year has just begun, but the cosmos are already set to make history in 2023. From a report: A comet discovered less than a year ago has traveled billions of miles from its believed origins at the edge of our solar system and will be visible in just a few weeks during what will likely be its only recorded appearance. The comet, C/2022 E3 (ZTF), was first seen in March 2022 as it made its way through Jupiter's orbit. According to NASA, it's a long-period comet believed to come from the Oort Cloud, the most distant region of Earth's solar system that's "like a big, thick-walled bubble made of icy pieces of space debris" that can get even bigger than mountains. The inner edge of this region is thought to be between 2,000 and 5,000 astronomical units (AUs) from the sun -- between 186 billion and 465 billion miles.

This means that C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has made a rare, once-in-a-lifetime journey to be close to Earth. "Most known long-period comets have been seen only once in recorded history because their orbital periods are so, well, long," NASA says. "Countless more unknown long-period comets have never been seen by human eyes. Some have orbits so long that the last time they passed through the inner solar system, our species did not yet exist."

Now, the recently discovered E3 comet, which has been seen with a bright greenish coma and "short broad" dust tail, is set to make its closest approach to the sun on January 12. It will make its closest approach to Earth on February 2. Astrophotographer Dan Bartlett managed to capture an image of the comet in December from his backyard in California. He was able to see "intricate tail structure" in the comet's plasma tail, he said, and "conditions are improving."

Long-time geriatrician James Kirkland is a Mayo clinic researcher joining "a growing movement to halt chronic disease by protecting brains and bodies from the biological fallout of aging," reports Ars Technica.

"While researchers like Kirkland don't expect to extend lifespan, they hope to lengthen 'health span,' the time that a person lives free of disease." One of their targets is decrepit cells that build up in tissues as people age. These "senescent" cells have reached a point — due to damage, stress or just time — when they stop dividing, but don't die. While senescent cells typically make up only a small fraction of the overall cell population, they accounted for up to 36 percent of cells in some organs in aging mice, one study showed. And they don't just sit there quietly. Senescent cells can release a slew of compounds that create a toxic, inflamed environment that primes tissues for chronic illness. Senescent cells have been linked to diabetes, stroke, osteoporosis and several other conditions of aging.

These noxious cells, along with the idea that getting rid of them could mitigate chronic illnesses and the discomforts of aging, are getting serious attention. The U.S. National Institutes of Health is investing $125 million in a new research effort, called SenNet, that aims to identify and map senescent cells in the human body as well as in mice over the natural lifespan. And the National Institute on Aging has put up more than $3 million over four years for the Translational Geroscience Network multicenter team led by Kirkland that is running preliminary clinical trials of potential antiaging treatments. Drugs that kill senescent cells — called senolytics — are among the top candidates. Small-scale trials of these are already underway in people with conditions including Alzheimer's, osteoarthritis and kidney disease.

"It's an emerging and incredibly exciting, and maybe even game-changing, area," says John Varga, chief of rheumatology at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, who isn't part of the Translational Geroscience Network. But he and others sound a note of caution as well, and some scientists think the field's potential has been overblown. "There's a lot of hype," says Varga. "I do have, I would say, a very healthy skepticism." He warns his patients of the many unknowns and tells them that trying senolytic supplementation on their own could be dangerous....

So far, evidence that destroying senescent cells helps to improve health span mostly comes from laboratory mice. Only a couple of preliminary human trials have been completed, with hints of promise but far from blockbuster results.
In conjunction with SpaceX and Axiom Space, Kirkland and a colleague also are investigating how space radiation affects senescence indicators in astronauts, the article points out . "They hypothesize that participants in future long-term missions to Mars might have to monitor their bodies for senescence or pack senolytics to stave off accelerated cellular aging caused by extended exposure to radiation."

CNN reports: Mars may seem like a dry, desolate place, but the red planet transforms into an otherworldly wonderland in winter, according to a new video shared by NASA....

"Enough snow falls that you could snowshoe across it," said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement from a NASA release. "If you were looking for skiing, though, you'd have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface."

So far, no orbiters or rovers have been able to see snow fall on the red planet because the weather phenomenon only occurs at the poles beneath cloud cover at night. The cameras on the orbiters can't peer through the clouds, and no robotic explorers have been developed that could survive the freezing temperatures at the poles. [ -190 degrees Fahrenheit, or -123 degrees Celsius) ] However, the Mars Climate Sounder instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can detect light that's invisible to the human eye. It has made detections of carbon dioxide snow falling at the Martian poles. The Phoenix lander, which arrived on Mars in 2008, also used one of its laser instruments to detect water-ice snow from its spot about 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) away from the Martian north pole....

"Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped," Piqueux said. "Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair."

Ice and carbon dioxide-based frosts also form on Mars, and they can occur farther away from the poles. The Odyssey orbiter (which entered Mars' orbit in 2001) has watched frost forming and turning to a gas in the sunlight, while the Viking landers spotted icy frost on Mars when they arrived in the 1970s. At the end of winter, the season's buildup of ice can thaw and turn into gas, creating unique shapes that have reminded NASA scientists of Swiss cheese, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, spiders and other unusual formations.
That's just the beginning, according to a press release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab: This "thawing" also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing.
And they also note that the camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter also captured some surprisingly colorful images of sand dunes covered by frost

To hear the first results from the James Webb Telescope, 200 astronomers descended on the Space Telescope Science Institute for three days in December, reports the New York Times, with an update on what may be 2022's biggest science story. The $10 billion telescope "is working even better than astronomers had dared to hope" -- and astronomers are ecstatic: At a reception after the first day of the meeting, John Mather of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Webb's senior project scientist from the start, raised a glass to the 20,000 people who built the telescope, the 600 astronomers who had tested it in space and the new generation of scientists who would use it. "Some of you weren't even born when we started planning for it," he said. "Have at it!"
Launched on Christmas one year ago, the Webb telescope "is seven times as powerful as its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope," the Times reports -- sharing what was revealed in that auditorium in December: One by one, astronomers marched to the podium and, speaking rapidly to obey the 12-minute limit, blitzed through a cosmos of discoveries. Galaxies that, even in their relative youth, had already spawned supermassive black holes. Atmospheric studies of some of the seven rocky exoplanets orbiting Trappist 1, a red dwarf star that might harbor habitable planets. (Data suggest that at least two of the exoplanets lack the bulky primordial hydrogen atmospheres that would choke off life as we know it, but they may have skimpy atmospheres of denser molecules like water or carbon dioxide.) "We're in business," declared Bjorn Benneke of the University of Montreal, as he presented data of one of the exoplanets.

Megan Reiter of Rice University took her colleagues on a "deep dive" through the Cosmic Cliffs, a cloudy hotbed of star formation in the Carina constellation, which was a favorite early piece of sky candy. She is tracing how jets from new stars, shock waves and ionizing radiation from more massive nearby stars that were born boiling hot are constantly reshaping the cosmic geography and triggering the formation of new stars. "This could be a template for what our own sun went through when it was formed," Dr. Reiter said in an interview.

Between presentations, on the sidelines and in the hallways, senior astronomers who were on hand in 1989 when the idea of the Webb telescope was first broached congratulated one another and traded war stories about the telescope's development. They gasped audibly as the youngsters showed off data that blew past their own achievements with the Hubble.
The telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. And appropriately for New Year's Eve, the article concludes with a look to the future: Thus far the telescope, bristling with cameras, spectroscopes and other instruments, is exceeding expectations. (Its resolving power is twice as good as advertised.) The telescope's flawless launch, Dr. Rigby reported, has left it with enough maneuvering fuel to keep it working for 26 years or more. "These are happy numbers...."

The closing talk fell to Dr. Mather. He limned the telescope's history, and gave a shout-out to Barbara Mikulski, the former senator of Maryland, who supported the project in 2011 when it was in danger of being canceled. He also previewed NASA's next big act: a 12-meter space telescope called the Habitable Worlds Observatory that would seek out planets and study them.

If humankind detects a message from an advanced civilisation, "It would be a transformative event for humankind," writes the Guardian, "one the world's nations are surely prepared for.

"Or are they?" "Look at the mess we made when Covid hit. We'd be like headless chickens," says Dr John Elliott, a computational linguist at the University of St Andrews. "We cannot afford to be ill-prepared, scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless, for an event that could happen at any time and which we cannot afford to mismanage."

This frank assessment of Earth's unreadiness for contact with life elsewhere underpins the creation of the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) post-detection hub at St Andrews. Over the next month or two, Elliott aims to bring together a core team of international researchers and affiliates. They will take on the job of getting ready: to analyse mysterious signals, or even artefacts, and work out every aspect of how we should respond.... "After the initial announcement, we'd be looking at societal impact, information dissemination, the media, the impact on religions and belief systems, the potential for disinformation, what analytical capabilities we'll need, and much more: having strategies in place, being transparent with everything we've discovered — what we know and what we do not know," says Elliott....

Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist and professor of science communication at the University of Westminster, said the new hub at St Andrews is "an important step in raising awareness at how ill-prepared we currently are" for detecting a signal from an alien civilisation. But he added that any intelligent aliens were likely to be hundreds if not thousands of light years away, meaning communication time would be on the scale of many centuries. "Even if we were to receive a signal tomorrow, we would have plenty of breathing space to assemble an international team of diverse experts to attempt to decipher the meaning of the message, and carefully consider how the Earth should respond, and even if we should.

"The bigger concern is to establish some form of international agreement to prevent capable individuals or private corporations from responding independently — before a consensus has formed on whether it is safe to respond at all, and what we would want to say as one planet," he said.

Slashdot reader guest reader shares some interesting research from the University of Missouri: Nearly 10,000 years ago, humans settling in the Fertile Crescent, the areas of the Middle East surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, made the first switch from hunter-gatherers to farmers. They developed close bonds with the rodent-eating cats that conveniently served as ancient pest-control in society's first civilizations.

A new study at the University of Missouri found this lifestyle transition for humans was the catalyst that sparked the world's first domestication of cats, and as humans began to travel the world, they brought their new feline friends along with them.

Leslie A. Lyons, a feline geneticist and Gilbreath-McLorn endowed professor of comparative medicine in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, collected and analyzed DNA from cats in and around the Fertile Crescent area, as well as throughout Europe, Asia and Africa, comparing nearly 200 different genetic markers.... Lyons added that while horses and cattle have seen various domestication events caused by humans in different parts of the world at various times, her analysis of feline genetics in the study strongly supports the theory that cats were likely first domesticated only in the Fertile Crescent before migrating with humans all over the world....

Lyons, who has researched feline genetics for more than 30 years, said studies like this also support her broader research goal of using cats as a biomedical model to study genetic diseases that impact both cats and people, such as polycystic kidney disease, blindness and dwarfism.... "[A]nything we can do to study the causes of genetic diseases in cats or how to treat their ailments can be useful for one day treating humans with the same diseases," Lyons said.

Remember when MIT researchers did fMRI brain scans measuring the blood flow through brains to determine which parts were engaged when programmers evaluated code? MIT now says that a new paper (by many of the same authors) delves even deeper: Whereas the previous study looked at 20 to 30 people to determine which brain systems, on average, are relied upon to comprehend code, the new research looks at the brain activity of individual programmers as they process specific elements of a computer program. Suppose, for instance, that there's a one-line piece of code that involves word manipulation and a separate piece of code that entails a mathematical operation. "Can I go from the activity we see in the brains, the actual brain signals, to try to reverse-engineer and figure out what, specifically, the programmer was looking at?" asks Shashank Srikant, a PhD student in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "This would reveal what information pertaining to programs is uniquely encoded in our brains." To neuroscientists, he notes, a physical property is considered "encoded" if they can infer that property by looking at someone's brain signals.

Take, for instance, a loop — an instruction within a program to repeat a specific operation until the desired result is achieved — or a branch, a different type of programming instruction than can cause the computer to switch from one operation to another. Based on the patterns of brain activity that were observed, the group could tell whether someone was evaluating a piece of code involving a loop or a branch. The researchers could also tell whether the code related to words or mathematical symbols, and whether someone was reading actual code or merely a written description of that code.....

The team carried out a second set of experiments, which incorporated machine learning models called neural networks that were specifically trained on computer programs. These models have been successful, in recent years, in helping programmers complete pieces of code. What the group wanted to find out was whether the brain signals seen in their study when participants were examining pieces of code resembled the patterns of activation observed when neural networks analyzed the same piece of code. And the answer they arrived at was a qualified yes. "If you put a piece of code into the neural network, it produces a list of numbers that tells you, in some way, what the program is all about," Srikant says. Brain scans of people studying computer programs similarly produce a list of numbers. When a program is dominated by branching, for example, "you see a distinct pattern of brain activity," he adds, "and you see a similar pattern when the machine learning model tries to understand that same snippet."
But where will it all lead? They don't yet know what these recently-gleaned insights can tell us about how people carry out more elaborate plans in the real world.... Creating models of code composition, says O'Reilly, a principal research scientist at CSAIL, "is beyond our grasp at the moment." Lipkin, a BCS PhD student, considers this the next logical step — figuring out how to "combine simple operations to build complex programs and use those strategies to effectively address general reasoning tasks." He further believes that some of the progress toward that goal achieved by the team so far owes to its interdisciplinary makeup. "We were able to draw from individual experiences with program analysis and neural signal processing, as well as combined work on machine learning and natural language processing," Lipkin says. "These types of collaborations are becoming increasingly common as neuro- and computer scientists join forces on the quest towards understanding and building general intelligence."

Closing out a record-setting year, SpaceX launched a $186 million Israeli Earth-imaging satellite early Friday, the California rocket builder's 61st and final Falcon 9 launch of 2022 and its seventh this month, both modern-day records. From a report: Since the rocket's debut in 2010, SpaceX has chalked up 194 Falcon 9 launches overall -- 198 including four triple-core Falcon Heavies -- putting together a string of 179 straight successful flights since the company's only in-flight failure in 2015. This year's flight total falls one short of doubling last year's. Even more flights are expected in 2023, including two NASA astronaut ferry flights to the International Space Station, at least two commercial crew flights, two station cargo flights, and the maiden orbital launch of SpaceX's huge Super Heavy/Starship rocket.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Name a type of organic matter and chances are some type of organism has evolved to eat it. Plants, meat, algae, insects and bacteria are all consumed by different creatures, but now scientists have discovered something new on the menu -- viruses. Since viruses are found absolutely everywhere, it's inevitable that organisms will consume them incidentally. But researcher John DeLong at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln wanted to find out if any microbes actively ate viruses, and whether such a diet could support the physiological growth of individuals and the population growth of a community. "They're made up of really good stuff: nucleic acids, a lot of nitrogen and phosphorous," said DeLong. "Everything should want to eat them. So many things will eat anything they can get ahold of. Surely something would have learned how to eat these really good raw materials."

To test the hypothesis, DeLong and his team collected samples of pond water, isolated different microbes, and then added large amounts of chlorovirus, a freshwater inhabitant that infects green algae. Over the next few days the team tracked the population size of the viruses and the other microbes to see if the latter was eating the former. And sure enough, one particular microbe seemed to be snacking on the viruses -- a ciliate known as Halteria. In water samples with no other food source for the ciliates, Halteria populations grew by about 15 times within two days, while chlorovirus levels dropped 100-fold. In control samples without the virus, Halteria didn't grow at all.

These experiments show that the newly coined term "virovory" can now take its place among herbivory, carnivory et al, with Halteria crowned the first known virovore. But of course, it's unlikely to be the only one out there, and the researchers plan to continue investigating the phenomenon, including its effects on food webs and larger systems like the carbon cycle. The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

NASA is exploring whether SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft can potentially offer an alternative ride home for some crew members of the International Space Station after a Russian capsule sprang a coolant leak while docked to the orbital lab. Reuters reports: NASA and Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, are investigating the cause of a punctured coolant line on an external radiator of Russia's Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, which is supposed to return its crew of two cosmonauts and one U.S. astronaut to Earth early next year. But the Dec. 14 leak, which emptied the Soyuz of a vital fluid used to regulate crew cabin temperatures, has derailed Russia's space station routines, with engineers in Moscow examining whether to launch another Soyuz to retrieve the three-man team that flew to ISS aboard the crippled MS-22 craft. If Russia cannot launch another Soyuz ship, or decides for some reason that doing so would be too risky, NASA is weighing another option.

"We have asked SpaceX a few questions on their capability to return additional crew members on Dragon if necessary, but that is not our prime focus at this time," NASA spokeswoman Sandra Jones said in a statement to Reuters. It was unclear what NASA specifically asked of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capabilities, such as whether the company can find a way to increase the crew capacity of the Dragon currently docked to the station, or launch an empty capsule for the crew's rescue. But the company's potential involvement in a mission led by Russia underscores the degree of precaution NASA is taking to ensure its astronauts can safely return to Earth, should one of the other contingency plans arranged by Russia fall through.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: Take a grand tour of the solar system tonight (Dec. 28) as each of the planets in the solar system will be visible at the same time. As 2022 comes to an end, skywatchers can take in the rare sight of all of the planets in our solar system (aside from Earth) together in the sky. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all currently visible simultaneously with the naked eye. The two outermost planets, Uranus and Neptune, can meanwhile be observed with binoculars or a telescope.

The five planets visible with the naked eye -- Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, in that order -- will line up in the sky starting from the southwestern horizon. Mercury, the smallest planet in the solar system, will be difficult to see with the eye, but it's possible if dark sky conditions are right. Uranus, visible only through binoculars or a telescope, can be found between Mars and Jupiter, while Neptune will be visible through optics between Saturn and Jupiter. The Virtual Telescope Project is hosting a free "grand tour of the solar system" livestream starting at 12:30 p.m. EST (1730 GMT) on Wednesday (Dec. 28). The live webcast is also available on their YouTube channel.

The report notes that this "grand tour" happens roughly every one to two years, on average. "In June 2022, skywatchers were treated to five planets -- Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn -- arranged in a rare alignment the likes of which hadn't occurred since 1864," the report adds.

Over the last 20 years, there has been twice as much sea level rise on Italy's Amalfi coast as on Spain's Costa del Sol, a study shows. From a report: Researchers combined data from tide gauges and satellites with ice melt measurements to model sea level change across the Mediterranean basin since 1960. To their surprise, they found that sea level fell by about 9mm between 1960 and 1989, owing to increased atmospheric pressure over the basin. But since 1989, ocean warming and land ice melting have driven rapid sea level rise, reaching an average rate of 3.6mm a year in the Mediterranean basin over the last two decades. The rise has not been spread evenly, however. Their findings, which are published in JGR Oceans, show that the Adriatic, Aegean and Levantine seas have risen by 8cm over two decades, while the Cretan passage in the eastern Mediterranean has risen by half this amount.