sciencehabit shares a repot from Science.org: Scientists have captured fungal spores cruising in the inhospitable environment of the stratosphere, much higher than commercial aircraft fly. When brought back to the lab, the researchers found that some of the spores -- including pathogens of plants and people -- had survived intercontinental trips and could be cultured in the lab. Although spores and microbes have been detected in the stratosphere before, the new results come from a cheap, homespun sampling device dangled from weather balloons, the project could help researchers figure out what traits and conditions allow spores to survive a swing through the stratosphere and how they get up there in the first place. The work could also be a first step towards an atmospheric monitoring system that could nip emerging fungal pathogens in the bud, the study's authors reported at a conference of the European Geophysical Union.

After five preliminary flights, the team has already learned a lot. Based on DNA sequencing analysis, they identified spores from 235 genera, including fungi that infect blackberries and carrots in the United States and Japan, and one species, Naganishia albida, that can make immunocompromised people sick. In the lab, they were able to revive and culture spores from 15 different fungal species, among them several plant pathogens. Mostly, the results show that their sampler works. Now, the researchers want to set up regular flights to track airborne fungal biodiversity and seasonal variations. They also want to identify how events such as wildfires or volcanic eruptions inject spores into the stratosphere.

Researchers have discovered a mutation in the SIK3 gene that enables some people to function normally on just three to six hours of sleep. The finding, published this week in PNAS, adds to a growing list of genetic variants linked to naturally short sleepers.

When University of California, San Francisco scientists introduced the mutation to mice, the animals required 31 minutes less sleep daily. The modified enzyme showed highest activity in brain synapses, suggesting it might support brain homeostasis -- the resetting process thought to occur during sleep.

"These people, all these functions our bodies are doing while we are sleeping, they can just perform at a higher level than we can," said Ying-Hui Fu, the study's co-author. This marks the fifth mutation across four genes identified in naturally short sleepers. Fu's team hopes these discoveries could eventually lead to treatments for sleep disorders by revealing how sleep regulation functions in humans.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The European Union launched a drive on Monday to attract scientists and researchers to Europe with offers of grants and new policy plans, after the Trump administration froze U.S. government funding linked to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. "A few years ago, no one would have imagined that one of the biggest democracies in the world would cancel research programs under the pretext that the word diversity was in this program," French President Emmanuel Macron said at the "Choose Europe for Science" event in Paris. "No one would have thought that one of the biggest democracies in the world would delete with a stroke the ability of one researcher or another to obtain visas," Macron said. "But here we are."

Taking the same stage at the Sorbonne University, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU's executive branch would set up a "super grant" program aimed at offering "a longer-term perspective to the very best" in the field. She said that 500 million euros ($566 million) will be put forward in 2025-2027 "to make Europe a magnet for researchers." It would be injected into the European Research Council, which already has a budget of more than 16 billion euros ($18 billion) for 2021-2027.

Von der Leyen said that the 27-nation EU intends "to enshrine freedom of scientific research into law" with a new legal act. As "the threats rise across the world, Europe will not compromise on its principles," she said. Macron said that the French government would also soon make new proposals to beef up investment in science and research. [...] While not mentioning the Trump administration by name, von der Leyen said that it was "a gigantic miscalculation" to undermine free and open research. "We can all agree that science has no passport, no gender, no ethnicity, no political party," she said. "We believe that diversity is an asset of humanity and the lifeblood of science. It is one of the most valuable global assets and it must be protected." Macron said that science and research must not "be based on the diktats of the few."

Macron said that Europe "must become a refuge" for scientists and researchers, and he said to those who feel under threat elsewhere: "The message is simple. If you like freedom, come and help us to remain free, to do research here, to help us become better, to invest in our future."

Further reading:
75% of Scientists in Nature Poll Weigh Leaving US
NASA, Yale, and Stanford Scientists Consider 'Scientific Exile'

According to the Wall Street Journal, UnitedHealth Group has 1,000 AI applications in production for use in its insurance, health delivery and pharmacy divisions. From a report: UnitedHealth's AI transcribes conversations from clinician visits, summarizes data, processes claims and controls customer-facing chatbots. In addition, roughly 20,000 of the company's engineers use AI to write software, according to the report. Half of these applications use generative AI and the other half employ a more traditional version of the technology, said Chief Digital and Technology Officer Sandeep Dadlani, per the report. "Like other AI-powered tools, medical chatbots are more likely to provide highly accurate answers when thoroughly trained on high-quality, diverse datasets and when user prompts are clear and simple," Julie McGuire, managing director of the BDO Center for Healthcare Excellence & Innovation, told PYMNTS in April 2024. "However, when questions are more complicated or unusual, a medical chatbot may provide insufficient or incorrect answers. In some cases, a generative AI-powered medical chatbot could make up a study to justify a medical answer it wants to give."

Dr. Paul Offit, an expert on infectious disease and immunology, told the Guardian that "We're living in a post-herd-immunity world. I think the measles outbreak proves that. Measles — because it is the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases, the most contagious human disease really — it is the first to come back." Three large outbreaks in Canada, Mexico and the US now account for the overwhelming majority of roughly 2,300 measles cases across the World Health Organization's six-country Americas region, according to the health authority's update this week. Risk of measles is considered high in the Americas, and has grown 11-fold compared with 2024. Only slightly behind, data released earlier this week from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and WHO also noted that measles cases across Europe were up tenfold in 2024 compared to 2023. That data also indicated that the 2024 measles cases in Europe followed a seasonal pattern, which was not previously noted in 2021 through 2023. Of the European cases, which reportedly hit 35,212 for 2024, 87% were reported in Romania. The ECDC said the dip in vaccine rates has impacted the recent spike in measles, with only three countries, Hungary, Malta and Portugal, having coverage of 95% or more for both doses of the measles vaccine.

There's 9,000 satellites circling the earth, the Guardian points out, with projections over over 60,000 by 2040.

But "A new study shows that the emissions from expired satellites, as they fall to Earth and burn up, will be significant in future years, with implications for ozone hole recovery and climate." Most old satellites are disposed of by reducing their altitude and letting them burn up as they fall, releasing pollution into Earth's atmosphere such as aerosolised aluminium. To understand the impact of these growing emissions from expired satellites, researchers simulated the effects associated with an annual release of 10,000 tonnes of aluminium oxide by 2040 (the amount estimated to be released from disposal of 3,000 satellites a year, assuming a fleet of 60,000 satellites).

The results, which are published in Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, show that the re-entry material will accumulate at high latitudes and could result in temperature anomalies of up to 1.5C in the middle to upper atmosphere, reduction of wind speeds and ozone depletion, which could jeopardise ozone hole recovery.
"At present, impacts on the middle and the upper atmosphere are small," the researchers write, "but have the potential to increase." They argue that "to shed light upon the potential climate impacts of increased satellite reentry," an "expanded effort, including observations and modeling is needed."

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

"Researchers have created the first laboratory analog of the 'black hole bomb'," reports ScienceAlert, "a theoretical concept developed by physicists in the 1970s..."

There's no black hole involved; their experiment just simulates the "electromagnetic analogue" of the theoretical concept — the "exponential runaway amplification of spontaneously generated electromagnetic modes."

Or, as ScienceAlert puts it, "It doesn't, just to set your mind at ease, pose any danger. It consists of a rotating aluminum cylinder, placed inside layers of coils that generate magnetic fields that rotate around it, at controllable speeds." As Roger Penrose proposed in 1971, the powerful rotational energy of a spinning black hole could be used to amplify the energy of nearby particles. Then, physicist Yakov Zel'Dovich figured out that you didn't need a black hole to see this phenomenon in action. An axially symmetrical body rotating in a resonance chamber, he figured, could produce the same energy transfer and amplification, albeit on a much smaller scale. Later work by other physicists found that, if you enclose the entire apparatus in a mirror, a positive feedback loop is generated, amplifying the energy until it explodes from the system.

This concept was named the black hole bomb, and a team of physicists led by Marion Cromb of the University of Southampton in the UK now claim to have brought it to life. A paper describing their experiment has been uploaded to preprint server arXiv... [W]hat the team's experiment does is simulate it, using magnetic fields as a proxy for the particles, with the coils around the system acting as the reflector to produce the feedback loop. When they ran the experiment, they found that, when the cylinder is rotating faster than, and in the same direction as, the magnetic field, the magnetic field is amplified, compared to when there is no cylinder. When the cylinder rotates more slowly than the magnetic field, however, the magnetic field is dampened. This is a really interesting result, because it demonstrates a very clear amplification effect, based on the theories described decades ago...

Because we can't probe black holes directly, analogs such as this are an excellent way to understand their properties... [T]he experiment could represent a significant step towards better understanding the physics of the most gravitationally extreme objects in the Universe.
"The exponential amplification from noise supports theoretical investigations into black hole instabilities," the researchers write, "and is promising for the development of future experiments to observe quantum friction in the form of the Zeldovich effect seeded by the quantum vacuum..."

Long-time Slashdot reader piojo writes: Tim Friede, Wisconsin man, has been injecting himself with snake venom for 18 years to gain protection from his pet snakes. The antibodies he developed have formed two components of a three-part antivenom, which gives partial or total protection against 18 of 19 species of venomous snakes that were tested. Notably, the antivenom is ineffective against vipers.
From Australia's public broadcaster ABC: The team's results have been published today in the journal Cell... The new antivenom described in the study is very different to traditional antivenoms, according to Peter Kwong, a biochemist at Columbia University and one of the study's authors.
The scientists call their new antivenom "unparallel," according to the BBC, though the snake enthusiast (a former truck mechanic) had "initially wanted to build up his immunity to protect himself when handling snakes, documenting his exploits on YouTube." The team is trying to refine the antibodies further and see if adding a fourth component could lead to total protection against elapid snake venom... "Tim's antibodies are really quite extraordinary — he taught his immune system to get this very, very broad recognition," said Professor Peter Kwong [one of the researchers at Columbia University].
In a video interview, CNN shows footage of the man inducing snake bites (calling it "a classic do-not-try-this-at-home moment"). "I have a lot of notes in Excel files," he tells CNN, "where I hit these particular windows to where I know I can boost up before a bite."

"I don't just take the bite, because that can kill you. I properly boost up, and methodically take notes, and weigh the venomes out very specifically..."

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares this excerpt from a new article in Science magazine: At first, astronomers knew of only one cosmic scenario that fit the bill for the violent formation of "jewelry shop" elements [gold and sliver]: the collision of two ultra-dense stellar corpses called neutron stars.

Now, a second has stepped onto the scene.

As they report this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers have discovered signatures of this heavy element formation — called the r-process — in a giant flare first detected from a highly magnetic neutron star in 2004. The flare, which released more energy than our Sun does in a million years as it spewed electrically charged material, has remained shrouded in mystery since its discovery 20 years ago. Researchers quickly traced the outburst to a nearby magnetar, a special breed of neutron star whose magnetic fields are trillions times stronger than Earth's. But ten minutes after the massive flare, a second, fainter signal inexplicably came from the same star.

More r-process sources may still be looming in the dark. The new study accounts for about 10% of the Milky Way's heavy elements, suggesting that astronomers will have to scour the cosmos for even more places where the r-process is hiding. One potential spot is a rare type of supernova that births rapidly rotating neutron stars, says says Anirudh Patel, the new study's lead author and an astronomer at Columbia University. He hopes that with more observations, astronomers will be able to sharpen that picture.... "It's humbling to realize that these were made in such extreme astrophysical environments."

Astronomers may have found the best candidate yet for the elusive Planet Nine: a mysterious object in infrared sky surveys taken 23 years apart that appears to be more massive than Neptune and about 700 times farther from the sun than Earth. Space.com reports: [A] team led by astronomer Terry Long Phan of the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan has delved into the archives of two far-infrared all-sky surveys in search of Planet Nine -- and incredibly, they have found something that could possibly be Planet Nine. The Infrared Astronomy Satellite, IRAS, launched in 1983 and surveyed the universe for almost a year before being decommissioned. Then, in 2006, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched AKARI, another infrared astronomy satellite that was active between 2006 and 2011. Phan's team were looking for objects that appeared in IRAS's database, then appeared to have moved by the time AKARI took a look. The amount of movement on the sky would be tiny -- about three arcminutes per year at a distance of approximately 700 astronomical units (AU). One arcminute is 1/60 of an angular degree.

But there's an extra motion that Phan's team had to account for. As the Earth orbits the sun, our view of the position of very distant objects changes slightly in an effect called parallax. It is the same phenomenon as when you hold your index finger up to your face, close one eye and look at your finger, and then switch eyes -- your finger appears to move as a result of you looking at it from a slightly different position. Planet Nine would appear to move on the sky because of parallax as Earth moves around the sun. On any particular day, it might seem to be in one position, then six months later when Earth is on the other side of the sun, it would shift to another position, perhaps by 10 to 15 arcminutes -- then, six months after that, it would seem to shift back to its original position. To remove the effects of parallax, Phan's team searched for Planet Nine on the same date every year in the AKARI data, because on any given date it would appear in the same place, with zero parallax shift, every year. They then also scrutinized each candidate object that their search threw up on an hourly basis. If a candidate is a fast-moving, nearby object, then its motion would be detectable from hour to hour, and could therefore be ruled out. This careful search led Phan's team to a single object, a tiny dot in the infrared data.

It appears in one position in IRAS's 1983 image, though it was not in that position when AKARI looked. However, there is an object seen by AKARI in a position 47.4 arcminutes away that isn't there in the IRAS imagery, and it is within the range that Planet Nine could have traveled in the intervening time. In other words, this object has moved a little further along its orbit around the sun in the 23 or more years between IRAS and AKARI. The knowledge of its motion in that intervening time is not sufficient to be able to extrapolate the object's full orbit, therefore it's not yet possible to say for certain whether this is Planet Nine. First, astronomers need to recover it in more up-to-date imagery. [...] Based on the candidate object's brightness in the IRAS and AKARI images, Phan estimates that the object, if it really is Planet Nine, must be more massive than Neptune. This came as a surprise, because he and his team were searching for a super-Earth-size body. Previous surveys by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have ruled out any Jupiter-size planets out to 256,000 AU, and any Saturn-size planets out to 10,000 AU, but a smaller Neptune or Uranus-size world could still have gone undetected. Phan told Space.com that he had searched for his candidate in the WISE data, "but no convincing counterpart was found because it has moved since the 2006 position," and without knowing its orbit more accurately, we can't say where it has moved to. "Once we know the position of the candidate, a longer exposure with the current large optical telescopes can detect it," Phan told Space.com. "However, the follow-up observations with optical telescopes still need to cover about three square degrees because Planet Nine would have moved from the position where AKARI detected it in 2006. This is doable with a camera that has a large field of view, such as the Dark Energy Camera, which has a field of view of three square degrees on the Blanco four-meter telescope [in Chile]."

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the nearly two months since former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space, the billionaire has not said much publicly about his plans for the launch company. However, his intentions for Relativity now appear to be increasingly clear: He wants to have the capability to launch a significant amount of computing infrastructure into space.

We know this because Schmidt appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce during a hearing in April, speaking on the future of AI and US competitiveness. Among the topics raised then was the need for more electricity -- both renewable and non-renewable -- to power data centers that will facilitate the computing needs for AI development and applications. Schmidt noted that an average nuclear power plant in the United States generates 1 gigawatt of power.

"People are planning 10 gigawatt data centers," Schmidt said. "Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is. Many people think that the energy demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation. One of the estimates that I think is most likely is that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027, and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. These things are industrial at a scale that I have never seen in my life."

The FDA has approved gene-edited pigs for human consumption, potentially marking the first major commercial application of CRISPR technology in the food chain. Created by British company Genus, these pigs have had their DNA modified to remove the receptor that the porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) virus uses to enter cells, rendering them immune to 99% of known virus variants.

PRRS causes losses of approximately $300 million annually in the US alone by killing piglets and spreading rapidly through factory farms. According to Matt Culbertson, chief operating officer of Genus subsidiary Pig Improvement Company, the gene-edited pork could reach US markets sometime next year. Before launching sales to pig farms, Genus must secure regulatory approval in key export markets including Mexico, Canada, Japan, and China.

An invisible molecular cloud that could shed light on how stars and planets form has been detected surprisingly close to Earth. From a report: Named Eos after the Greek goddess of the dawn, the cloud of gas would appear huge in the night sky if visible to the naked eye. It measures roughly 40 moons in width and has a weight about 3,400 times the mass of the sun, researchers reported in a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"In astronomy, seeing the previously unseen usually means peering deeper with ever more sensitive telescopes -- detecting those smaller planets ... those more distant galaxies," said study coauthor Thomas Haworth, an astrophysicist at Queen Mary University of London. "This thing was pretty much in our cosmic backyard, and we've just missed it," he added. Molecular clouds are composed of gas and dust from which hydrogen and carbon monoxide molecules can form. Dense clumps within these clouds can collapse to form young stars. The article clarifies that Eos is 300 light-years away, which to be sure, is closer than any of the molecular clouds that we've known about previously.

A thought experiment involving a cat trapped in a steel box with a potentially lethal device, first proposed by physicist Erwin Schrodinger in 1935, remains at the center of scientific and philosophical debate as it marks its 90th anniversary.

The paradox, initially published in a technical review of quantum mechanics, presented a scenario where a cat could theoretically exist in a superposition of states -- both alive and dead simultaneously -- until observed, highlighting profound questions about quantum reality. "Schrodinger understood that under no circumstances could his cat be considered to be both alive and dead at the same time," science writer Jim Baggott noted in a recently published essay. Baggott co-authored "Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement" in 2024.

The thought experiment gained cultural traction largely through science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin's 1974 short story "Schrodinger's Cat," which wrestled with the paradox's philosophical implications. This sparked widespread appearances across literature, film, and television.

The paradox continues to divide physicists between those accepting quantum mechanics as a mathematical framework for prediction and others, like Einstein and Schrodinger himself, who considered the theory fundamentally incomplete.

NASA's SPHEREx space observatory has officially begun its two-year mission to map the entire sky in 102 infrared wavelengths, capturing about 3,600 images daily to create 3D maps of hundreds of millions of galaxies. Its goal is to unlock new insights into cosmic inflation, the origins of galaxies, and the building blocks of life in the Milky Way by using spectroscopy to analyze light and matter across the universe. From a press release: From its perch in Earth orbit, SPHEREx peers into the darkness, pointing away from the planet and the Sun. The observatory will complete more than 11,000 orbits over its 25 months of planned survey operations, circling Earth about 14.5 times a day. It orbits Earth from north to south, passing over the poles, and each day it takes images along one circular strip of the sky. As the days pass and the planet moves around the Sun, SPHEREx's field of view shifts as well so that after six months, the observatory will have looked out into space in every direction.

When SPHEREx takes a picture of the sky, the light is sent to six detectors that each produces a unique image capturing different wavelengths of light. These groups of six images are called an exposure, and SPHEREx takes about 600 exposures per day. When it's done with one exposure, the whole observatory shifts position -- the mirrors and detectors don't move as they do on some other telescopes. Rather than using thrusters, SPHEREx relies on a system of reaction wheels, which spin inside the spacecraft to control its orientation.

Hundreds of thousands of SPHEREx's images will be digitally woven together to create four all-sky maps in two years. By mapping the entire sky, the mission will provide new insights about what happened in the first fraction of a second after the big bang. In that brief instant, an event called cosmic inflation caused the universe to expand a trillion-trillionfold.