Science news of the day thread.

[Brian Peacock]

Wonder how much we'll have to pay for this unlimited free energy?

[macdoc]

Where ever did you get the notion it was free?

unlimited clean energy

always the negative eh Brian ?

[L'Emmerdeur]

Mr Musk and others putting up huge fleets of rapidly deorbiting planned obsolescent space junk, meanwhile an orbiting antique is still operational.

'Mysteries in polar orbit – space's oldest working hardware still keeps its secrets'

The oldest functional off-Earth space hardware? Well, that is a great question for those into pub quizzes, aka bar trivia. 1977's Voyagers hold some impressive records beside those golden discs, just not that one. Any guesses?

Astronomers are still bouncing range-finding lasers off the reflectors left on the Moon by Apollo 11, but fancy mirrors hardly count.

Nope. The best contender is from 1974 and wasn't even launched by NASA or the Soviets. It's still in orbit, still functioning remarkably well, it celebrates its 50th birthday this month, and, lastly, has the suitably prize-winning name of Oscar.

Its full name is AMSAT-OSCAR 7, known to its friends as Oscar 7, and it is remarkable for many reasons – not least of which are two great mysteries that may never be resolved. For a tiny box built on a budget that shames shoestrings for their conspicuous wealth, it pioneered some amazing technologies, got amazingly lucky more than once, and repaired itself after two decades of being dead (perhaps).

...

The first mystery is unambiguously attested. In 2002, 21 years after the satellite died, a British radio ham picked up telemetry signals proclaiming it had returned to life. One of the shorted cells in the battery had somehow gone open circuit, letting all the power from those fortuitously robust solar cells to flow back into the electronics. Oscar 7 worked again, providing it was in sunlight, and since it's in a polar orbit that rarely dips into eclipse, that's most of the time. The problem? Those kinds of batteries never do that. They stay short circuited. This one didn't, and nobody knows why.

The second mystery or theory also says Oscar-7 came back to life, only this time claiming the revival happened mere months after it went to sleep in the summer of 1981. In December of that year, the Polish Communist Party declared martial law in that country due to widespread protests by the Solidarity organization. This included confiscating all two-way radio equipment and aggressively controlling the telephone system. In response, a network of scientists, engineers and technicians in universities and television repair shops started building clandestine equipment and used it to organize protests and strikes across regions, until martial law was rescinded in 1983. It was one of the big triggers for the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is well documented. So, what to make of claims (Polish) that the clandestine radio network somehow "reactivated" Oscar-7 and used it within Poland and to communicate with the West?

(usw)

[macdoc]

Happy Holidays courtesy NASA

[macdoc]

'Large Head People': Mysterious New Form of Ancient Human Emerges
Hina shahDecember 03, 2024
A "provocative" new piece in Nature has proposed a whole new group of ancient humans – cousins of the Denisovans and Neanderthals – that once lived alongside Homo sapiens in eastern Asia more than 100,000 years ago.

Representation of an ancient human skull. (ansap/Getty Images)

The brains of these extinct humans, who probably hunted horses in small groups, were much bigger than any other hominin of their time, including our own species.

Paleoanthropologist Xiujie Wu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and anthropologist Christopher Bae from the University of Hawai'i have called this new group the Juluren, meaning "large head people".

In the past, some scientists have attributed the Juluren (Homo juluensis) fossils to Denisovans (pronounced duh-nee-suh-vns), who are a group of ancient humans, related to Neanderthals, that once lived alongside and even mated with modern humans in parts of Asia.

But Wu and Bae have taken a closer look, and they say the features of some fossils found in China cannot be easily assigned to modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, or Homo erectus, the hominins that came before our own species.

Their mosaic of traits hint at a mix of ancestry between various hominin groups, all living in the same regions of Asia between 300,000 and 50,000 years ago.

"Collectively, these fossils represent a new form of large brained hominin," concluded Wu and Bae in the journal PaleoAnthropology earlier this year.

"Although we started this project several years ago, we did not expect being able to propose a new hominin (human ancestor) species and then to be able to organize the hominin fossils from Asia into different groups," says Bae.

Anthropologist John Hawks who was not involved in the research calls Bae and Wu's recent commentary "provocative", and in his blog earlier this year, he reviewed their study and agreed that while evidence of the Juluren is limited, the human record in Asia is "more expansive than most specialists have been assuming."

Until very recently, all hominin fossils found in China that did not match Homo erectus or Homo sapiens were lumped together. Compared to hominin fossils in Africa and Europe, the human fossil record in eastern Asia is poorly differentiated and described.

"Calling all these groups by the same name makes sense only as a contrast to recent humans, not as a description of their populations across space and time," writes Hawks on his blog.

"I see the name Juluren not as a replacement for Denisovan, but as a way of referring to a particular group of fossils and their possible place in the network of ancient groups."
more
https://www.scihb.com/2024/12/large-hea ... -form.html

[L'Emmerdeur]

Image Credit: NASA

'NASA finds Orion heatshield cracks won't cook Artemis II crew'

NASA's investigation into damage found on the heatshield of the Artemis Mission's Orion module two years ago has concluded that the technique used to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere meant gas became trapped in the shield's outer ablative material, causing concerning cracks.

On Thursday, the aerospace org announced that it concluded that if the module changes its re-entry method, the spacecraft will be safe for crewed flight without a redesign. Accordingly, it announced new target launch dates for its Artemis II crewed test flight and Artemis III crewed lunar landing.

Both dates slipped around seven months – to April 2026 and mid-2027 respectively – to provide time to address the Orion environmental control and life support systems.

As for the heat shield, NASA determined the gasses generated inside the heat shield's Avcoat material were unable to vent and dissipate as expected.

[macdoc]

Cotton-and-squid-bone sponge can soak up 99.9% of microplastics, scientists say
Filter performs well in removing plastic pollution from water and Chinese researchers say it appears to be scalable
A sponge made of cotton and squid bone that has absorbed about 99.9% of microplastics in water samples in China could provide an elusive answer to ubiquitous microplastic pollution in water across the globe, a new report suggests.

Just as importantly, the filter’s production appears to be scalable, the University of Wuhan study authors said in the paper, which was peer-reviewed and published in the journal Science Advances. That would address a problem that has stymied the use of previous microplastic filtration systems that were successful in controlled settings, but could not be scaled up.
more
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... squid-bone

[L'Emmerdeur]

Spending more time reading science news vs politics these days. Here's some potentially excellent science/medical news.

'How this cancer drug could make radiation a slam dunk therapy'

Radiation is one of the most effective ways to kill a tumor. But these therapies are indiscriminate, and they can damage healthy tissues.

Now, UC San Francisco scientists have developed a way to deliver radiation just to cancerous cells. The therapy combines a drug to mark the cancer cells for destruction and a radioactive antibody to kill them.

It wiped out bladder and lung tumors in mice without causing lethargy or weight loss – the typical side effects of radiation therapy.

“This is a one-two punch,” said Charly Craik, PhD, a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF and co-senior author of the study, which appears Dec. 10 in Cancer Research. “We could potentially kill the tumors before they can develop resistance.”

usw

[Sean Hayden]

That's fascinating--forming alliances with our immune systems and giving them upgrades.

[macdoc]

Good article - I had 17 rounds of radiation ....each one deeper into tissue. First rounds I thought ...piece of cake....last four rounds ...brutal - like an internal sunburn you can't itch. Rode the mcycle to all the rad sessions...not the chemo. Saved me $20 parking each time. Took a while for the internal itch to go away and a year for the general malaise to get healed.
Spent Canadian winters in Western Cape S Africa...huge help. Simple low stress life, no car, walk or bicycle around the small town of Montagu, salt water pool out the door, super simple efficiency apt and terrific views Just enough internet to keep the biz going.
My office

The view

Simple life


Americans are always gobsmacked when I say my biggest expense for my cancer treatment, 6 chemo, 3 spinal chemo and 17 radiation was the parking.

[pErvinalia]

That's just what big Science wants you to think.

[Brian Peacock]

[macdoc]

It's why honest peer review is so critical. General populace are not in a position to judge science positions. It REQUIRES peer review or at the very least peer assessment/commentary.
I do notice that many articles these days go out of their way to get views from
"not associated with the authors or the project"....to give a trained scientist viewpoint but not one that stands to gain.
That's a positive step for the science press to take in between formal peer review and "what the fuck to think IS correct"