An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Scientists have trained a computer to analyze the brain activity of someone listening to music and, based only on those neuronal patterns, recreate the song. The research, published on Tuesday, produced a recognizable, if muffled version of Pink Floyd's 1979 song, "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)." [...] To collect the data for the study, the researchers recorded from the brains of 29 epilepsy patients at Albany Medical Center in New York State from 2009 to 2015. As part of their epilepsy treatment, the patients had a net of nail-like electrodes implanted in their brains. This created a rare opportunity for the neuroscientists to record from their brain activity while they listened to music. The team chose the Pink Floyd song partly because older patients liked it. "If they said, 'I can't listen to this garbage,'" then the data would have been terrible, Dr. Schalk said. Plus, the song features 41 seconds of lyrics and two-and-a-half minutes of moody instrumentals, a combination that was useful for teasing out how the brain processes words versus melody.

Robert Knight, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the leader of the team, asked one of his postdoctoral fellows, Ludovic Bellier, to try to use the data set to reconstruct the music "because he was in a band," Dr. Knight said. The lab had already done similar work reconstructing words. By analyzing data from every patient, Dr. Bellier identified what parts of the brain lit up during the song and what frequencies these areas were reacting to. Much like how the resolution of an image depends on its number of pixels, the quality of an audio recording depends on the number of frequencies it can represent. To legibly reconstruct "Another Brick in the Wall," the researchers used 128 frequency bands. That meant training 128 computer models, which collectively brought the song into focus. The researchers then ran the output from four individual brains through the model. The resulting recreations were all recognizably the Pink Floyd song but had noticeable differences. Patient electrode placement probably explains most of the variance, the researchers said, but personal characteristics, like whether a person was a musician, also matter.

The data captured fine-grained patterns from individual clusters of brain cells. But the approach was also limited: Scientists could see brain activity only where doctors had placed electrodes to search for seizures. That's part of why the recreated songs sound like they are being played underwater. [...] The researchers also found a spot in the brain's temporal lobe that reacted when volunteers heard the 16th notes of the song's guitar groove. They proposed that this particular area might be involved in our perception of rhythm. The findings offer a first step toward creating more expressive devices to assist people who can't speak. Over the past few years, scientists have made major breakthroughs in extracting words from the electrical signals produced by the brains of people with muscle paralysis when they attempt to speak.

A genetically altered pig kidney transplanted into a brain-dead man has continued to function for 32 days, an advance toward the possible use of animal organs in humans, surgeons at NYU Langone Health said Wednesday. The Washington Post reports: The kidney was not rejected in the minutes after it was transplanted -- a problem in xenotransplantation, the use of organs from a different species. It began producing urine and took over the functions of a human kidney such as filtering toxins, the physicians said at a news conference. Also Wednesday, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine published a similar case study, of a brain-dead patient who received two pig kidneys that underwent 10 gene alterations earlier this year. The kidneys were not rejected and continued to function for seven days. The results were peer-reviewed and published in the journal JAMA Surgery.

In the NYU Langone transplant, the specially bred pig from which the kidney was procured required just one genetic alteration, to remove a protein that human immune systems attack shortly after surgery. Surgeons also implanted the pig's thymus gland, which helps train the immune system, by sewing it under the outer layer of the kidney, and used immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection later on. Managing the condition of the brain-dead man, who on Wednesday still had a heart beat and was breathing with the aid of a ventilator, for an extended period of time also requires extensive efforts by critical care personnel. But the work has revealed information about longer-term use of animal organs, the doctors said. The researchers expect to follow the patient for another month.

With the results released Wednesday, both Montgomery and Locke said they can envision moving toward the early stage of clinical trials to identify the safety of transplanting pig kidneys into live humans. [...] The genetic alteration in the NYU Langone study knocked out a carbohydrate molecule known as Alpha-gal, for short. Humans do not produce the substance and create high levels of antibodies against it, which has in the past proven a formidable obstacle to xenotransplantation. "Now that it can be completely removed from the pig, that allows us to move forward," Montgomery said. Still, the team said, pigs have 1,000 proteins that humans don't, and it can take 10 to 14 days to see how a person's immune system reacts to them. Getting beyond that stage with this patient at NYU Langone is a first sign that long-term viability of the organ and patient is possible, they said.

One of the most productive scientific collaborations of the 21st century is pulling apart, as deteriorating relations between the U.S. and China lead researchers to sever ties. From a report: The decoupling, which began in recent years with investigations into Chinese researchers in the U.S., has accelerated as tensions have risen between the superpowers. Now some U.S. lawmakers are pushing to let a landmark agreement to cooperate on science and technology, signed in 1979 and renewed routinely since, expire this month. China has built itself into a powerful engine of scientific discovery in recent decades, partly with American help, and many in Washington fear that China could gain a security and military advantage unless the U.S. takes decisive steps to cut off cooperation in scientific research.

Many scientists warn, however, that Washington would be severing ties as China is making its greatest contributions to scientific advancements, and cutting it off risks slowing American progress in critical areas such as biotechnology, clean energy and telecommunications. While the U.S. remains the world's pre-eminent science power, fundamental scientific research has grown borderless in the era of globalization, much as business has. More than 40% of America's scientific production -- measured by the number of high-quality papers that U.S.-based scientists produce -- involves cooperation with researchers abroad, according to Clarivate, a London-based data firm that tracks global scientific research. China and the U.S. are each other's No. 1 partner in producing scientific research, with collaborative research between the two consistently among the most-cited papers across fields, according to an analysis of Clarivate's data by Caroline Wagner, a professor of public policy at Ohio State University.

China launched what is thought to be the world's first geosynchronous orbit synthetic aperture radar satellite on Saturday. SpaceNews reports: A Long March 3B rocket lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 1:36 p.m. Eastern (1736 UTC) Aug. 12. The Land Exploration-4 01 (Ludi Tance-4 (01)) satellite successfully entered geosynchronous transfer orbit, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., (CASC) announced within an hour of liftoff. Few details of the satellite were provided by CASC. However the group's "blue book" outlining plans for 2023 released in January noted the launch of a "high-orbit 20-meter [resolution] SAR satellite."

The L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite will provide all-day, all-weather observation of China and surrounding areas, boosting the country's disaster prevention, reduction, and relief capabilities. The land observation satellite series and "high-orbit SAR technology" are listed in the country's Medium and Long Term Development Plan for Civilian Space Infrastructure (2015-2025). The plan includes establishing high and medium resolution optical and synthetic aperture radar constellations for a range of land, marine and atmospheric monitoring. The series is separate from the China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS), which consists of Gaofen ("high resolution") satellites. China's Gaofen-4 satellite is a GEO optical satellite. SAR at GEO, while providing much lower resolution than satellites in low Earth orbit, can provide constant coverage and imagery despite cloud cover.

It is not yet known what orbital scheme the Land Exploration-4 (01) satellite will enter. An inclined GEO orbit would produce a "figure eight" ground track over the area of intended coverage. Chinese academics from the Beijing Institute of Technology have produced a study of various schemes, while others have published research into modified signal models for GEO SAR. The (01) designation suggests China could launch other SAR satellites into geosynchronous orbits. The satellite was developed by the China Academy of Spacecraft Technology (CAST.)

Amazon said on Tuesday its online pharmacy will automatically apply manufacturer-sponsored coupons to more than 15 insulin and diabetes medicines to help patients access discounts pledged by the drug industry. From a report: With the new program, patients using Amazon Pharmacy will no longer have to search for and manually enter coupons from the three largest insulin makers, Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and Sanofi, to lower the cost of their insulin to as little as $35 for a month's supply, the company said.

Novo, Lilly and Sanofi announced in March that they would slash their insulin prices by at least 70% by or in 2024, but a report from Senator Elizabeth Warren released last month said some patients were finding it difficult to get already discounted generic insulin from pharmacies at the promised lower price. Despite Lilly lowering the list price of its Insulin Lispro to $25 per vial in May, patients were still being quoted as much as $330 for the medicine, were not being told about cheaper options when they went to pharmacies, and were finding it difficult to use Lilly's savings program, Warren's report found. Vin Gupta, Amazon Pharmacy's Chief Medical Officer, said the report highlighted the need to make it easier for patients to get their insulin at the lowest possible prices.

"Earlier this year, after 15 years of searching, scientists finally heard the background hum of low-frequency gravitational waves that fill our universe," writes Space.com.

"Now, the hard work of searching for the source of these ripples in spacetime can begin." Currently, the primary suspects in this case are pairings of supermassive black holes with masses millions, or even billions, of times that of the sun. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't room for a few unusual suspects, which could potentially point us toward new physics....

[G]ravitational waves detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) express wavelengths that are thousands of miles (or km) in length and hold frequencies of milliseconds to seconds. The new gravitational waves detected by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), by contrast, have wavelengths on a scale of trillions of miles (or km). This is similar to the distance between the sun and its neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, a staggering 20 light-years in length. Plus, NANOGrav gravitational wavelengths have frequencies on scales of years instead of mere seconds. Practically, what this means is scientists need to build over 15 years of NANOGrav data to confirm a low-frequency gravitational wave detection.

But, when it happens, it's worth the wait. That's because these results have the capacity to point us toward new information about our universe... "The detection of low-frequency gravitational waves means they're from very different sources to the LIGO and Virgo sources, which are stellar mass black holes and neutron star mergers," Scott Ransom, a National Radio Astronomy Observatory astronomer and former chair of NANOGrav, told Space.com... Ransom is part of a collaboration of researchers that believe low-frequency gravitational waves, including those detected by NANOGrav, may originate from a pretty incredible source. They could come from, the team argues, hundreds of thousands of supermassive black hole pairings that, over the 13.8-billion-year course of cosmic history, came close enough together that they've merged...

"For many decades, theorists have hypothesized that supermassive black hole binaries should produce a signal with characteristics just like what NANOGrav and other pulsar timing arrays are seeing," Luke Zoltan Kelly, a Northwestern University theoretical astrophysicist and NANOGrav researcher, told Space.com. "For most of the community, supermassive black hole binaries are a natural best guess for what's producing the gravitational wave background...." Zoltan Kelley pointed out to Space.com that besides binaries, there are a number of new models in cosmology and in particle physics that, under the right circumstances, could also produce a similar gravitational wave background to that detected by NANOGrav. For example, axion or 'fuzzy' dark matter, cosmic strings, inflationary phase transitions, and many others," the Northwestern astrophysicist said.

"What's really exciting about these possibilities is that each of these models is an attempt to explain some of the biggest current mysteries of our universe."

What to make of the news that early research appears unable to duplicate the much-ballyhooed claims for the LK99 superconductor?

"The episode revealed the intense appetite in Silicon Valley for finding the next big thing," argues the Washington Post, "after years of hand-wringing that the tech world has lost its ability to come up with big, world-changing innovations, instead channeling all its money and energy into building new variations of social media apps and business software..." [M]any tech leaders are nervous that the current focus on consumer and business software has led to stagnation. A decade ago, investors prophesied that self-driving cars would take over the roads by the mid-2020s — but they are still firmly in the testing phase, despite billions of dollars of investment. Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have had multiple hype cycles of their own, but have yet to fundamentally change any industry, besides crime and money laundering. Tech meant to help mitigate climate change, like carbon capture and storage, has lagged without major advances in years. Meanwhile, Big Tech companies used their huge cash hoards to snap up smaller competitors, with antitrust regulators only recently beginning to clamp down on consolidation. Over the last year, as higher interest rates have cut into the amount of venture capital and slowing growth has caused companies to pull back spending, a massive wave of layoffs has swept the industry, and companies such as Google that previously said they'd invest some of their profits in big, risky ideas have turned away from such "moonshots..."

Room-temperature superconductors would be especially relevant to the tech industry right now, which is busy burning billions of dollars on new computer chips and the energy costs to run them to train the AI models behind tools like ChatGPT and Google's Bard. For years, computer chips have gotten smaller and more efficient, but that progress has run up against the limits of the physical world as transistors get so small some are now just one atom thick.

Science magazine reports: Roughly one in five people are born with at least one copy of a gene variant called APOE4 that makes them more prone to heart disease and Alzheimer's disease in old age. That the variant is so common poses an evolutionary mystery: If it decreases our fitness, why hasn't APOE4 been purged from the human population over time?

Now, a study of nearly 800 women in a traditional society in the Amazon finds that those with the disease-promoting variant had slightly more children. Such a fertility benefit may have allowed the gene to persist during human evolution despite its harmful effects for older people today...

The Tsimané data also allowed the team to home in on how APOE4 may boost fertility: Women carrying it were slightly heavier that those without it, started bearing children about 1 year earlier, and had their next child a few months sooner. That fits with being more resistant to parasites, says siological anthropologist Benjamin Trumble . "Being in a better immune state means that you can then devote more calories towards growing faster, and then you're able to reproduce faster."
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.

A retired Technical Fellow from Rockwell Collins "released a 65-page paper that details an easy-to-understand, relatively inexpensive, and feasible plan to turn an asteroid into a space habitat," reports Universe Today (in an article republished at Science Alert): Dr. David W. Jensen breaks the discussion into three main categories — asteroid selection, habitat style selection, and mission strategy to get there (i.e., what robots to use)... He eventually settled on a torus as the ideal habitat type and then dives into calculations about the overall station mass, how to support the inner wall with massive columns, and how to allocate floor space.

All important, but how exactly would we build such a massive behemoth? Self-replicating robots are Dr. Jensen's answer. The report's third section details a plan to utilize spider robots and a base station that can replicate themselves. He stresses the importance of only sending the most advanced technical components from Earth and using materials on the asteroid itself to build everything else, from rock grinders to solar panels...

With admittedly "back-of-the-envelope" calculations, Dr. Jensen estimates that the program would cost only $4.1 billion. That is far less than the $93 billion NASA plans to spend on the Apollo program. And the result would be a space habitat that provides 1 billion square meters of land that didn't exist before. That's a total cost of $4.10 per square meter to build land — in space. Possibly even more impressive is the timeline — Dr. Jensen estimates that the entire construction project could be done in as little as 12 years. However, it will still take longer to fill the habitat with air and water and start regulating its temperature.

Science magazine reports: Researchers have shown how to conduct thousands of rapid molecular screenings simultaneously, using light to identify target molecules snared on top of an array of tiny silicon blocks. In theory, the tool could be used to spot 160,000 different molecules in a single square centimeter of space. Developed to spot gene fragments from the SARS-CoV-2 virus and other infectious organisms, the technology should also be able to identify protein markers of cancer and small molecules flagging toxic threats in the environment...

"[P]revious sensors have not been able to detect a wide range of target molecules," from very low to very high abundance, says Jennifer Dionne, an applied physicist at Stanford University. In hopes of getting around these problems, Dionne and her colleagues turned to an optical detection approach that relies on metasurfaces, arrays of tiny silicon boxes — each roughly 500 nanometers high, 600 nanometers long, and 160 nanometers wide — that focus near-infrared light on their top surface. This focusing makes it easy for a simple optical microscope to detect the shift in the wavelength of light coming from each silicon block, which varies depending on what molecules sit on top...

[T]he technique could allow doctors to detect viral infections without first having to amplify the genetic material from a patient, Dionne says. Perhaps as important, she notes, an array can be designed to reveal how much target DNA has bound, making it possible to detect in minutes not just whether a particular virus is present, but how intense the infection is. Such information could help doctors tailor their treatments. Current tests can also do this, but they normally take several hours to amplify the genetic material and quantify the results.

Dionne and her colleagues have formed a company called Pumpkinseed Bio to commercialize their new detectors, specifically aimed at detecting minute levels of proteins and other molecules that can't readily be amplified to make them easier to detect. And because only a small number of silicon blocks would be needed to spot individual target molecules, researchers should be able to craft arrays to track a multitude of disease biomarkers simultaneously. "We hope to look at many disease states at the same time," says Jack Hu, a former graduate student in Dionne's lab and head of the new startup. "That's the vision."
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.

The CBC reports that "Some parts of the Halifax harbour turned a bright shade of pink on Thursday — for science."

After researchers dumped in 500 litres of safe, water-soluble dye, "boats, drones and underwater robots were then deployed to map the movement of the dye, so researchers can understand where materials spread and how quickly they do so." The CTV calls it "part of long-term research project that could help reverse some of the world's greenhouse gas emissions" by Dalhousie University and the climate-solutions research organization Planetary Technologies: The move is the first step, says Katja Fennel, an oceanographer at Dalhousie, before researchers release alkaline material into the water this fall. That material will effectively act as an antacid for the ocean, helping to neutralize the additional acidic carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world's oceans. "The purpose is to actually induce the ocean to take up atmospheric CO2 — CO2 from the air — and help us reduce legacy carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere," Fennel told CTV News.
To track the uptake of carbon dioxide, researchers need to account for the movement of water. So "The ultimate goal here is to test an idea for a technology that would help us reduce atmospheric CO2," one oceanographer leading the research told the CBC, "and could be one tool in the toolbox for fighting climate change..."

They point out that the ocean holds 50 times as much CO2 as is in the atmosphere, and call the experiment "cutting edge...world-leading research... Ocean alkalinity enhancement has the greatest potential, actually, in terms of storing carbon permanently and safely at a scale that is relevant for global climate."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam for sharing the article.

The Verge writes that "LK-99 hasn't turned out to be the miraculous superconductor some people initially claimed it was..." [T]he results so far indicate that LK-99 is not a superconductor, at room temperature or otherwise. A slew of research groups have released studies that counter claims originally made about LK-99. "With a great deal of sadness, we now believe that the game is over. LK99 is NOT a superconductor, not even at room temperatures (or at very low temperatures). It is a very highly resistive poor quality material. Period. No point in fighting with the truth," the University of Maryland's Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC) posted on August 7th... [The last words of their tweet? "Data have spoken."]

Labs hurriedly published their own results on ArXiv, the same server for preprints (papers that haven't undergone peer review) where the original papers on LK-99 first appeared. Now, a body of evidence has piled up that disproves claims about LK-99. "There is no sign of superconductivity in LK-99 at room temperature," says one preprint from the CSIR-National Physical Laboratory in India. (That was one of the papers cited by the University of Maryland's Condensed Matter Theory Center this week when it posted that "the game is over....") [H]opes that levitation meant that LK-99 is a superconductor were dashed this week after another preprint posed another explanation for why the material might float. The International Center for Quantum Materials in China found evidence that the material is ferromagnetic. That means it can be magnetized and then attracted or repelled by other magnetic materials (iron, for example, is ferromagnetic)...

[T]here are already well over a dozen papers on ArXiv casting doubt on LK-99. "There may be room temperature superconductors to find, but this does not seem to be one," Chris Grovenor, professor of materials at the University of Oxford and director of the Centre for Applied Superconductivity, tells The Verge in an email.
The Washington Post reports that one of physicists who co-authored the discovery paper "countered in an email that other research groups' failure to replicate their results are probably because they lack 'know how' in developing the sample the same way."

An international team of scientists has developed a new technology that can help detect (or even treat) cancer in hard-to-reach places, such as the colon. The team has published a paper in Science for the technique dubbed CATCH, or cellular assay for targeted, CRISPR-discriminated horizontal gene transfer. Engadget reports: For their lab experiments, the scientists used a species of bacterium called Acinetobacter baylyi. This bacterium has the ability to naturally take up free-floating DNA from its surroundings and then integrate it into its own genome, allowing it to produce new protein for growth. What the scientists did was engineer A. baylyi bacteria so that they'd contain long sequences of DNA mirroring the DNA found in human cancer cells. These sequences serve as some sort of one-half of a zipper that locks on to captured cancer DNA. For their tests, the scientists focus on the mutated KRAS gene that's commonly found in colorectal tumors. If an A. baylyi bacterium finds a mutated DNA and integrates it into its genome, a linked antibiotic resistance gene also gets activated. That's what the team used to confirm the presence of cancer cells: After all, only bacteria with active antibiotic resistance could grow on culture plates filled with antibiotics.

While the scientists were successfully able to detect tumor DNA in mice injected with colorectal cancer cells in the lab, the technology is still not ready to be used for actual diagnosis. The team said it's still working on the next steps, including improving the technique's efficiency and evaluating how it performs compared to other diagnostic tests. In the future, the technology could also be used for targeted biological therapy that can deploy treatment to specific parts of the body based on the presence of certain DNA sequences.

A UCLA-led study of NASA's DART mission found that the collision launched a cloud of boulders from its surface. "The boulder swarm is like a cloud of shrapnel expanding from a hand grenade," said Jewitt, lead author of the study and a UCLA professor of earth and planetary sciences. "Because those big boulders basically share the speed of the targeted asteroid, they're capable of doing their own damage." From a news release: In September 2022, NASA deliberately slammed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos to knock it slightly off course. NASA's objective was to evaluate whether the strategy could be used to protect Earth in the event that an asteroid was headed toward our planet. Jewitt said that given the high speed of a typical impact, a 15-foot boulder hitting Earth would deliver as much energy as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Fortunately, neither Dimorphos nor the boulder swarm have ever posed any danger to Earth. NASA chose Dimorphos because it was about 6 million miles from Earth and measured just 581 feet across -- close enough to be of interest and small enough, engineers reasoned, that the half-ton Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, planetary defense spacecraft would be able to change the asteroid's trajectory.

When it hurtled into Dimorphos at 13,000 miles per hour, DART slowed Dimorphos' orbit around its twin asteroid, Didymos, by a few millimeters per second. But, according to images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the collision also shook off 37 boulders, each measuring from 3 to 22 feet across. None of the boulders is on a course to hit Earth, but if rubble from a future asteroid deflection were to reach our planet, Jewitt said, they'd hit at the same speed the asteroid was traveling -- fast enough to cause tremendous damage. The research, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, found that the rocks were likely knocked off the surface by the shock of the impact. A close-up photograph taken by DART just two seconds before the collision shows a similar number of boulders sitting on the asteroid's surface -- and of similar sizes and shapes -- to the ones that were imaged by the Hubble telescope. The boulders that the scientists studied, among the faintest objects ever seen within the solar system, are observable in detail thanks to the powerful Hubble telescope.

Russia has successfully launched Luna 25, the country's first lunar lander in 47 years. From a report: The uncrewed spacecraft lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast, Russia. Hitching a ride aboard a Soyuz-2 Fregat rocket, Luna 25 took flight at 8:10 a.m. local time Friday, or 7:10 p.m. ET Thursday. Residents of a Russian village were temporarily evacuated Friday morning since there is a "one in a million chance" that one of Luna 25's rocket stages could fall there, according to Reuters.

The spacecraft is expected to first enter an orbit around Earth before transferring to a lunar orbit and ultimately descending to the surface of the moon. Russia's last lunar lander, Luna 24, landed on the moon on August 18, 1976. Luna 25 and India's Chandrayaan-3 mission, which launched in mid-July, are both expected to land at the lunar south pole on August 23, and it's a race to see which country will land first, according to Reuters. But Roscomos said the two missions are not expected to cause a problem for each other because their specific landing zones differ, Reuters reported.