Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Sciworthy Newsletter-Summer 2024

"Delta Aquariids Meteor Shower and Health Benefits of Vitamin D."

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 18 July 2024, 1313 UTC,

Content and Source:  https://sciworthy.com/newsletter.

Please check link or scroll down to read your selections.  Thanks for joining us today.

Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

 

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Welcome to the Sciworthy summer newsletter! July in the northern hemisphere means long summer days, fireworks, barbecues, and insects. This year it also features a natural light show in the form of the Delta Aquariids meteor shower in the southern hemisphere and southern US. In this issue we explain this stunning celestial event and summarize recent summer-themed science articles on the health benefits of vitamin D, improving ice cream with nanoparticles, and more.
Fire in the Sky
As the Earth moves along its orbit around the Sun we once again collide with a debris cloud, forming a brilliant display of lights in the night sky.

by Ben Pauley 
Meteor showers are striking astronomical phenomena. Visible to the naked eye, they are often what people think of when they imagine stargazing: beautiful blue and white streaks seemingly falling away from the rest of the stars. From July 18 to August 21, the Southern Delta Aquariids meteor shower will be visible in the night sky from the southern hemisphere up to the southern United States.
 
Meteor showers are different from passing comets, though they share some similarities. Made of ice, dust, and rock, comets are either material left over from when the planets formed or objects captured from outside the solar system. While planets and many asteroids orbit the Sun in almost perfect circles, some comets briefly pass close to the Sun and then spend decades or centuries at the edges of the solar system before returning, in an elliptical orbit. Other comets pass near the Sun only once before sling-shotting out into deep space forever, in a hyperbolic orbit. Sunlight vaporizes chunks of comets as they approach, forming brightly-colored tails.
 
Meteor showers are what’s left of passing comets. They form when previously vaporized or dislodged bits of comets coalesce, creating pockets of space debris that Earth passes through at regular intervals. If these chunks are big enough when they collide with Earth’s atmosphere, they again vaporize, producing a light display with the characteristic streaking tail pattern.
 
To see the Southern Delta Aquariids meteor shower, look to the constellation Aquarius from sunset until 2 a.m. The best time to see it is on nights when the Moon is faint or absent during the shower's predicted peak, roughly July 30 through August 7.
Beach chairs, photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Vitamin D helps your immune system fight cancer. Scientists have shown that vitamin D, also known as the “sunshine vitamin,” helps our bodies absorb calcium and phosphorus for strong bones, and supports our immune system as an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant. Recent researchers have found it might also help our bodies fight cancer. Researchers from the UK showed that mice given extra vitamin D resisted some types of cancer and responded better to immunotherapy treatments than mice without it. They found that vitamin D enhanced the mice's immune response by altering their microbiomes to include more of a specific type of bacteria. They showed that humans with higher levels of vitamin D-induced genes were also more resistant to cancer. They suggested future scientists test whether the vitamin D-based immune response in humans is similarly linked to the microbiome.

Ice cream gets a boost from nanotechnology. Researchers are increasingly using nanomaterials in industries spanning healthcare to environmental protection. Nanomaterials are tiny particles about the size of a single strand of human DNA. They have unique physical and chemical characteristics due to their small size and high surface-to-volume ratio. Food scientists at the University of Tehran recently reviewed how nanoparticles can be incorporated into dairy products like ice cream. They suggested that nano-sized dairy particles can make ice cream tastier, creamier and more nutritious. Antimicrobial nanoparticles could even increase its shelf life. They concluded nanotechnology is a promising approach for improving ice cream, but cautioned that more research on safety and quality is needed to unlock its full potential.

Beach from above, photo by Alex Perez on Unsplash
Beaches are feeling the squeeze. Sandy shores and other coastal ecosystems are increasingly squeezed between rising sea levels and human development. Researchers from the Netherlands analyzed the distance between coastlines and natural and man-made barriers in transects spanning more than 200,000 beaches worldwide. They estimated that up to 30% of structure-free coastal zones could be lost by 2100 due to rising sea levels. But they also found that incorporating nature reserves along shorelines could relieve this squeeze by up to 7 times.
Butterfly, photo by Alfred Schrock on Unsplash

Tracking insects with AI. Global biodiversity is on the decline, but biologists need more effective ways of monitoring species to determine by how much. Insect populations are notoriously difficult to monitor because they’re so abundant and diverse. For this reason, most insect biodiversity data comes from groups that are easy to study, like butterflies and bees. To expand this dataset, an international team of scientists developed a new automated camera system to monitor nocturnal insects. Their system attracts moths with a light, photographs them with a camera, and uses AI to analyse the images and classify the species. It's also solar-powered, so they estimated it would work for up to 10 years at a time. They suggested researchers prioritize long-term, fully automated systems like this to determine how insect populations are responding to climate change, pollution, and other habitat threats.

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Live Science Newsletter

"July's full 'buck moon' rises this week-and signals a big lunar transition is on the way."

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 17 July 2024, 1350 UTC.

Content and Source:  https://www.livescience.com.

Please check link or scroll down to read your selections. Thanks for joining us today.

Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

 

July 17, 2024
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TOP SCIENCE NEWS
July's full 'Buck Moon' rises this week — and signals a big lunar transition is on the way
(Mark Miller Photos via Getty Images)
July's full moon — also known as the Buck Moon, the Thunder Moon and the Hay Moon — will be at its fullest on the night of July 21. It's the last "regular" full moon before a parade of four consecutive "supermoons" light up the sky.
Read More
HISTORY & ARCHAEOLOGY
Venus of Brassempouy: The 23,000-year-old ivory carving found in the Pope's Grotto
(Smudge Whisker via Alamy)
The palm-sized carving depicts a Neolithic woman wearing an ornate headpiece.
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ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS
'Dark comets' may be a much bigger threat to Earth than we thought, new study warns
(NASA/JPL-Caltech)
A strange class of space rock known as a "dark comet" has qualities of both asteroids and comets — and the hard-to-spot objects may pose a larger threat to Earth than we thought, according to new research.
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HEALTH
New fungal infection discovered in China
(TopMicrobialStock via Getty Images)
Scientists uncovered a species of fungi that had never before been seen in humans. They say warmer temperatures could drive its evolution, for the worse.
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ANIMALS
Secret of why Greenland sharks live so incredibly long finally revealed
(Doug Perrine / Alamy Stock Photo)
Surprising new research has revealed why the world's longest-living vertebrate, the Greenland shark, has such a lengthy lifespan. The findings could have big implications for the species' future.
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TECHNOLOGY
Razor-thin crystalline film 'built atom-by-atom' gets electrons moving 7 times faster than in semiconductors
(Jagadeesh Moodera, et al)
Scientists observed record-breaking electron mobility — seven times higher than in conventional semiconductors — with a material made from the same elements as quartz and gold.
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POLL QUESTION
What part of the brain lights up in response to ASMR?
Learn the answer (and what ASMR is) here.
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Tuesday, July 16, 2024

ScienceDaily.com Newsletter

"Your source for the latest research news."

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 16 July 2024, 1946 UTC.

Content and Source:  https://www.sciencedaily.com/newsletters.

Please check link or scroll down to read your selections.  Thanks for joining us today.

Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

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ScienceDaily: All - July 16, 2024

Today's top research news

 
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New research demonstrates potential for increasing effectiveness of popular diabetes, weight-loss drugs

A network of proteins found in the central nervous system could be harnessed to increase the effectiveness and reduce the side effects of popular diabetes and weight-loss drugs, according to new research.

Image: Alones/Shutterstock.com


American diets got briefly healthier, more diverse during COVID-19 pandemic, study finds

American diets may have gotten healthier and more diverse in the months following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study.


NASA's Webb investigates eternal sunrises, sunsets on distant world

Researchers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have finally confirmed what models have previously predicted: An exoplanet has differences between its eternal morning and eternal evening atmosphere. WASP-39 b, a giant planet with a diameter 1.3 times greater than Jupiter, but similar mass to Saturn that orbits a star about 700 light-years away from Earth, is tidally locked to its parent star. This means it has a constant dayside and a constant nightside -- one side of the planet is always exposed to its star, while the other is always shrouded in darkness.


A new neural network makes decisions like a human would

Researchers are training neural networks to make decisions more like humans would. This science of human decision-making is only just being applied to machine learning, but developing a neural network even closer to the actual human brain may make it more reliable, according to the researchers.


Scorching storms on distant worlds revealed

An international study reveals the extreme atmospheric conditions on the celestial objects, which are swathed in swirling clouds of hot sand amid temperatures of 950C. Using NASA's powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers set out to capture the weather on a pair of brown dwarfs -- cosmic bodies that are bigger than planets but smaller than stars.


JWST unveils stunning ejecta and CO structures in Cassiopeia A's young supernova

Researchers announced the latest findings from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of the supernova remnant, Cassiopeia A (Cas A). These observations of the youngest known core collapse supernova in the Milky Way provide insights into the conditions that lead to the formation and destruction of molecules and dust within supernova ejecta. The study's findings change our understanding of dust formation in the early universe in the galaxies detected by JWST 300 million years after the Big Bang.


New geological datings place the first European hominids in the south of the Iberian Peninsula 1.3 million years ago

One of the most important controversies about human evolution and expansion is when and by what route the first hominids arrived in Europe from the African continent. Now, geological dating techniques at the Orce sites (Baza basin, Granada, Spain) place the human remains found in this area as the oldest in Europe, at approximately 1.3 million years old. These results reinforce the hypothesis that humans arrived in Europe through the south of the Iberian Peninsula, through the Strait of Gibraltar, instead of returning to the Mediterranean via the Asian route.


Cosmic wrestling match

Our universe is around 13.8 billion years old. Over the vastness of this time, the tiniest of initial asymmetries have grown into the large-scale structures we can see through our telescopes in the night sky: galaxies like our own Milky Way, clusters of galaxies, and even larger aggregations of matter or filaments of gas and dust. How quickly this growth takes place depends, at least in today's universe, on a sort of wrestling match between natural forces: Can dark matter, which holds everything together through its gravity and attracts additional matter, hold its own against dark energy, which pushes the universe ever further apart?


Origins of creativity in the brain

New results could ultimately help lead to interventions that spark creative thought or aid people who have mental illnesses that disrupt these regions of the brain.


30-year risk of cardiovascular disease may help inform blood pressure treatment decisions

According to a new study, both 30-year risk for cardiovascular disease in addition to 10-year risk may be considered in making decisions about when to initiate high blood pressure medication.

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