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Science thread for space and earth and life and just all of that
I'm debating whether I want to go a bit out of town tonight to watch the meteor storm, which may or may not be a bust. I did have dreams about it last night and it was rad, so I might have to go.
Really wish I didn't have to drive as far to get away from the light pollution around here.
I'm debating whether I want to go a bit out of town tonight to watch the meteor storm, which may or may not be a bust. I did have dreams about it last night and it was rad, so I might have to go.
Really wish I didn't have to drive as far to get away from the light pollution around here.
We had near perfect weather and only had a small amount of hazy clouds in the area so I was able to see a handful from my deck. But it was unfortunately a far cry from the dozens per second they were hoping for.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
Yeah, I ended up going to the mountains to get some clearer skies and less light pollution for that letdown. Knew it was a possibility, but I would have kicked myself if I hadn't gone and it ended up being spectacular. I did see a couple of pretty good ones though, nice orange color that lasted a couple seconds and left a streak for a second.
So uhhhhhh the last 16 years of Alzheimer's treatment research might have been based on a largely falsified study, which would explain why none of the drugs designed to treat the thing that paper convinced people was a targetable primary cause have worked in human trials
Sweeney Tomtry The Substanceit changed my lifeRegistered Userregular
edited July 2022
Last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) narrowly approved the use of Aduhelm, a new drug from Biogen that the company has priced so highly that it’s expected to drive up the price of Medicare for everyone in America, even those who never need this drug. Aduhelm was the first drug to be approved that fights the accumulation of those "amyloid plaques" in the brain. What makes the approval of the $56,000-a-dose drug so controversial is that while it does decrease plaques, it doesn’t actually slow Alzheimer’s.
What intrigued Schrag when he came back to this seminal work were the images. Images in the paper that were supposed to show the relationship between memory issues and the presence of Aβ*56 appeared to have been altered. Some of them appeared to have been pieced together from multiple images. Schrag shied away from actually accusing this foundational paper of being a “fraud,” but he definitely raised “red flags.” He raised those concerns, discreetly at first, in a letter sent directly to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Only when that letter failed to generate a response did Schrag bring his suspicions to others.
Now Science has concluded its own six-month review, during which it consulted with image experts. What they found seems to confirm Schrag’s suspicions
Exciting for two reasons: first is that definite Denisovan remains and signs are so sparse, found only in Denisova Cave itself, and Tibet so far. Second is that Denisovan DNA has only been found in Australian Aborigines and Pacific Islanders, so it had been hypothesized before that Denisovans may have ranged more through Asia and Denisova Cave may actually have represented their furthest northwestern limits.
There's still also the possibility that other fossils that have already been discovered and labeled as "Neanderthal" or "archaic human" and then stuffed in a drawer may also be Denisovan, as that was actually the case for the Tibetan fossil.
+8
FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
NASA putting SLS/Orion on the launch pad for Artemis moonshot.
For the first time, astronomers have captured a photograph of a star so distant that nothing we do could ever affect it — even in the very fullness of time.
It lies beyond the affectable universe.
Let me explain:
Okay, so this is a doozy.
We have, for the first time, seen the light of a star* Billions of light years away. Capital 'B', Billions.
This is not easy to do.
For reference, the Milky way is about 50,000 LY across. Andromeda, our neighbour galaxy, is about 2 million LY away.
This star is 28 Billion light years away. More than 10,000 times more distant than Andromeda.
Now, normally you can't see anything this far away. Seeing a single star system beyond our immediate neighbourhood even within the Milky Way is difficult. Seeing a star in another galaxy is usually right out... unless we get exceptionally lucky with some gravitational lensing, magnifying a single point like, well, a magnifying lens hundreds of light years wide, bringing that light to a single point focussed here on Earth. Even then, seeing individual stars in other galaxies is still exceptionally novel and rare, a fluke on a cosmologically infintesimal scale. Fortunately, we have an entire universe to search through and get lucky.
So, we've been able to pick out the light from this star 28 billion light years away. The light didn't travel for 28 Billion years to get to us here, though. I mean, for starters, the universe is only about 13 Billion years old. The light was able to reach us because the universe used to be much smaller, and it used to be closer.
Which is also why it is now beyond our ability to ever affect it, ever.
Even if we shot back a message at the speed of light, back the other way through the gravitational lens... it would never reach its destination. The universe's expansion means that actually right now, any message, light, information we send out - will only get so far before the expansion of the universe means it won't ever get any further. That limit - essentially, a sort of event horizon for Earth - is about 15 billion light years. Nothing that happens on Earth will ever propogate more than 15 billion light years away.
So we can see this star thanks to a momentary fluke of galactic harmony - but will never be able to pass any information back.
Anyway, space is really big and fucks with your head.
*:
it might be binary (or more) star system. But basically a single star *system*, which probably has one star, but might be more than that.
Finally got another paper from the Tanis site that formed minutes after the Chicxulub impact. The fossils found there all show consistent evidence of having died in the spring. This was something that actually had been hypothesized before due to patterns such as greater species diversity among a lot of older lines in the southern hemisphere and migratory birds mostly being Southern Hemisphere-ancestry birds that fly north rather than the other way around.
The seasonal timing of the catastrophic end-Cretaceous bolide impact places the event at a particularly sensitive stage for biological life cycles in the Northern Hemisphere. In many taxa, annual reproduction and growth take place during spring. Species with longer incubation times, such as non-avian reptiles, including pterosaurs and most dinosaurs, were arguably more vulnerable to sudden environmental perturbations than other groups (for example, birds). Southern Hemisphere ecosystems, which were struck during austral autumn, appear to have recovered up to twice as fast as Northern Hemisphere communities, consistent with a seasonal effect on biotic recovery.
Also I'm glad there's still work being done there, since there was the big announcement of the site and then only little dribs and drabs after that (like this abstract from a colloquium that's just no-selling that they found a pterosaur egg when there had been paleontologists who believed that pterosaurs were already in decline if not extinct already by KT), despite all the hints of even more amazing finds there.
+6
BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
Check back in this evening to watch the DART mission smack the shit out of some smug asteroid who has it coming. Impact is estimated just before 7:15 EDT, stream starts at 6:00.
lol main stream is running a trailer for the mission, "in a galaxy where asteroids have pummeled planets for billions of years, one planet... strikes back" the planets usually win actually
+1
JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Seems like it would send a stronger message to all the other rocks if we weren't picking on the little one.
+2
FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
Getting closer and closer to finding out if this asteroid is torus shaped with a hole in the middle so we're going to end up scoring the solar system's greatest ever nothing-but-net shot as DART threads the target perfectly.
Posts
Really wish I didn't have to drive as far to get away from the light pollution around here.
We had near perfect weather and only had a small amount of hazy clouds in the area so I was able to see a handful from my deck. But it was unfortunately a far cry from the dozens per second they were hoping for.
You can explain that.
So uhhhhhh the last 16 years of Alzheimer's treatment research might have been based on a largely falsified study, which would explain why none of the drugs designed to treat the thing that paper convinced people was a targetable primary cause have worked in human trials
$56k a dose for this
Steam
Exciting for two reasons: first is that definite Denisovan remains and signs are so sparse, found only in Denisova Cave itself, and Tibet so far. Second is that Denisovan DNA has only been found in Australian Aborigines and Pacific Islanders, so it had been hypothesized before that Denisovans may have ranged more through Asia and Denisova Cave may actually have represented their furthest northwestern limits.
There's still also the possibility that other fossils that have already been discovered and labeled as "Neanderthal" or "archaic human" and then stuffed in a drawer may also be Denisovan, as that was actually the case for the Tibetan fossil.
Okay, so this is a doozy.
We have, for the first time, seen the light of a star* Billions of light years away. Capital 'B', Billions.
This is not easy to do.
For reference, the Milky way is about 50,000 LY across. Andromeda, our neighbour galaxy, is about 2 million LY away.
This star is 28 Billion light years away. More than 10,000 times more distant than Andromeda.
Now, normally you can't see anything this far away. Seeing a single star system beyond our immediate neighbourhood even within the Milky Way is difficult. Seeing a star in another galaxy is usually right out... unless we get exceptionally lucky with some gravitational lensing, magnifying a single point like, well, a magnifying lens hundreds of light years wide, bringing that light to a single point focussed here on Earth. Even then, seeing individual stars in other galaxies is still exceptionally novel and rare, a fluke on a cosmologically infintesimal scale. Fortunately, we have an entire universe to search through and get lucky.
So, we've been able to pick out the light from this star 28 billion light years away. The light didn't travel for 28 Billion years to get to us here, though. I mean, for starters, the universe is only about 13 Billion years old. The light was able to reach us because the universe used to be much smaller, and it used to be closer.
Which is also why it is now beyond our ability to ever affect it, ever.
Even if we shot back a message at the speed of light, back the other way through the gravitational lens... it would never reach its destination. The universe's expansion means that actually right now, any message, light, information we send out - will only get so far before the expansion of the universe means it won't ever get any further. That limit - essentially, a sort of event horizon for Earth - is about 15 billion light years. Nothing that happens on Earth will ever propogate more than 15 billion light years away.
So we can see this star thanks to a momentary fluke of galactic harmony - but will never be able to pass any information back.
Anyway, space is really big and fucks with your head.
*:
Finally got another paper from the Tanis site that formed minutes after the Chicxulub impact. The fossils found there all show consistent evidence of having died in the spring. This was something that actually had been hypothesized before due to patterns such as greater species diversity among a lot of older lines in the southern hemisphere and migratory birds mostly being Southern Hemisphere-ancestry birds that fly north rather than the other way around.
Also I'm glad there's still work being done there, since there was the big announcement of the site and then only little dribs and drabs after that (like this abstract from a colloquium that's just no-selling that they found a pterosaur egg when there had been paleontologists who believed that pterosaurs were already in decline if not extinct already by KT), despite all the hints of even more amazing finds there.
That's reasonable, clouds are pretty quiet.
name the probe to uranus
Because Uranus deserves the baddest dragon
https://youtu.be/DoRp7nRIOpo
at least they know the crew capsule escape system works
Wew, commercial spaceflight!
glad there was no one in it to get hurt at least
Check back in this evening to watch the DART mission smack the shit out of some smug asteroid who has it coming. Impact is estimated just before 7:15 EDT, stream starts at 6:00.
https://youtu.be/-6Z1E0mW2ag
3DS Friend Code: 0216-0898-6512
Switch Friend Code: SW-7437-1538-7786
Super nice dude too.
space rockkkkkks
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
Animated GIF of observations of the impact from the ATLAS project observatory in South Africa.
I was certain this was gonna fade to black and then be the beginning of Skyrim.
was expecting it to zoom in on a dickbutt
Thanks, brave little space robot. You did good, and we're proud of you.