An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Adapted pig hearts could be transplanted into patients within three years, according to a report citing the surgeon who pioneered heart transplantation in the UK. On the 40th anniversary of the first successful heart transplant, Sir Terence English told The Sunday Telegraph that his protege from that operation would try to replace a human kidney with a pig's this year. "If the result of xenotransplantation is satisfactory with porcine kidneys to humans, then it is likely that hearts would be used with good effects in humans within a few years," the 87-year-old said. "If it works with a kidney, it will work with a heart. That will transform the issue." The anatomy and physiology of a pig's heart is similar to that of a human's, so they are used as models for developing new treatments.

A NASA mission to explore the most tantalizing of Jupiter's 79 moons has been given the green light to proceed to the final stages of development. From a report: Europa -- which is slightly smaller than our own moon -- has long been considered a possible candidate in the hunt for alien life. Evidence suggests there is an ocean below the moon's thick, icy crust that might be tens of miles deep. Scientists believe this body of water could contain the right chemical cocktail for life and could even be home to some form of living organisms. Europa appears to have the hat-trick of conditions needed to kick off life: water, possibly chemistry, and energy in the form of tidal heating, a phenomenon arising from gravitational tugs acting on the moon. This could not only drive chemical reactions but also aid movement of chemical substances between rock, surface and ocean, possibly through hydrothermal vents.

It is proposed that the NASA mission, named Europa Clipper, will make a number of close flybys -- it cannot orbit the moon as Jupiter's radiation belt would fry its electronics -- carrying cameras and intruments to measure the moon's magnetic field. The mission will look for subsurface lakes and provide data on the thickness of the moon's icy crust. The team also hope to confirm the presence of plumes of water, previously detected by NASA's Galileo spacecraft and the Hubble space telescope. If confirmed, it would mean scientists would not need to find a way of hacking through the moon's icy crust to explore the makeup of the ocean.

A diet based on caloric restriction might make you live longer. It'll certainly feel like longer. Called Prolon, it's a five-day, $250 meal kit which arrives in a white cardboard container a little bigger than a shoebox. It involves eating about 800 calories each day. The idea is that temporarily shifts your body into a starvation state, prompting your cells to consume years of accumulated cellular garbage before unleashing a surge of restorative regeneration. The idea that starving yourself while still taking in crucial nutrients will let you live longer is not new. The practice, called caloric restriction, is the only proven way to extend life in a wide variety of creatures. There are currently trials underway to see if the diet might help protect human patients from the ravages of chemotherapy, too. However, experiments have found that doing it for extended periods is a problem, and probably not practical for most people. Research on the "fast-mimicking diet" is still limited, but the Prolon diet has been sold in 15 countries and tried by more than 150,000 people. Read how Adam Piore got on when he tried it out.

New submitter RhettLivingston writes: Real plans for the move of Starship Mk 2 from its current construction site in Cocoa to the Kennedy Space Center have finally emerged. A News 6 Orlando report identifies permit applications and observed preparations for the move,which will take a land and sea route. Barring some remarkably hasty road compaction and paving, the prototype will start its journey off-road, crossing a recently cleared path through vacant land to reach Grissom Parkway. It will then travel east in the westbound lanes of SR 528 for a short distance before loading to a barge in the Indian river via a makeshift dock. The rest of the route is relatively conventional, including offloading at KSC at the site previously used for delivery of the Space Shuttle's external fuel tanks. Given the recent construction of new facilities at the current construction site, it is likely that this will not be the last time this route is utilized. SpaceX declined to say how the company will transport the spacecraft or when the relocation will occur.

SpaceX's "Mk2" orbital Starship prototype is designed to test out the technologies and basic design of the final Starship vehicle -- a giant passenger spacecraft that SpaceX is making to take people to the Moon and Mars.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Wednesday, a gravitational wave called S190814bv was detected by the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and its Italian counterpart Virgo. Based on its known properties, scientists think there is a 99% probability that the source of the wave is a black hole that ate a neutron star. In contrast to black hole mergers, neutron star collisions do produce a lot of light. When a gravitational wave from a neutron star crash was detected in 2017, scientists were able to pinpoint bright emissions from the event -- called an optical counterpart -- in the days that followed the wave detection. This marked the dawn of a technique called "multi-messenger astronomy," in which scientists use multiple types of signals from space to examine astronomical objects.

Ryan Foley, an astronomer at UC Santa Cruz, was part of the team that tracked down that first optical counterpart, a feat that has not yet been repeated. He and his colleagues are currently scanning the skies with telescopes, searching for any light that might have been radiated by the new suspected merger of a black hole and neutron star. If the team were to pick up light from the event within the coming weeks, they would be witnessing the fallout of a black hole spilling a neutron star's guts while devouring it. This would provide a rare glimpse of the exotic properties of these extreme astronomical objects and could shed light on everything from subatomic physics to the expansion rate of the universe. "We've never detected a neutron star and a black hole together," said Foley. "If it turns out to be right, then we've confirmed a new type of star system. It's that fundamental." He added: "If you learn about how neutron stars are built, that can tell you about how atoms are built. This is something that is fundamental to everything in our daily life works."

WindBourne writes: Newt Gingrich and an eclectic band of NASA skeptics are trying to sell President Donald Trump on a reality show-style plan to jump-start the return of humans to the moon -- at a fraction of the space agency's estimated price tag. The proposal, whose other proponents range from an Air Force lieutenant general to the former publicist for pop stars Michael Jackson and Prince, includes a $2 billion sweepstakes pitting billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other space pioneers against each other to see who can establish and run the first lunar base, according to a summary of the plan shared with POLITICO. That's far less taxpayer money than NASA's anticipated lunar plan, which relies on traditional space contractors, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and is projected to cost $50 billion or more. Backers of the novel approach have briefed administration officials serving on the National Space Council, several members of the group confirmed, though they declined to provide specifics of the internal conversations.

"A team of physicists has uncovered a new state of matter -- a breakthrough that offers promise for increasing storage capabilities in electronic devices and enhancing quantum computing," according to an announcement from NYU: "Our research has succeeded in revealing experimental evidence for a new state of matter -- topological superconductivity," says Javad Shabani, an assistant professor of physics at New York University. "This new topological state can be manipulated in ways that could both speed calculation in quantum computing and boost storage...."

In their research, Shabani and his colleagues analyzed a transition of quantum state from its conventional state to a new topological state, measuring the energy barrier between these states.... "The new discovery of topological superconductivity in a two-dimensional platform paves the way for building scalable topological qubits to not only store quantum information, but also to manipulate the quantum states that are free of error," observes Shabani.

The research was funded, in part, by a grant from the U.S. Department of Defenseâ(TM)s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Sunday the New York Times reported that YouTube "radicalized" Brazil -- by "systematically" diverting users to conspiracy videos. Yet conventional wisdom in Brazil still puts the blame on WhatsApp, the Times reported in a follow-up story on Thursday shared by Slashdot reader AmiMoJo.

"Everything began to click into place when we met Luciana Brito, a soft-spoken clinical psychologist who works with families affected by the Zika virus." Her work had put her on the front lines of the struggle against conspiracy theories, threats and hatred swirling on both platforms. And it allowed her to see what we -- like so many observers -- had missed: that WhatsApp and YouTube had come to form a powerful, and at times dangerous, feedback loop of extremism and misinformation. Either platform had plenty of weaknesses on its own. But, together, they had formed a pipeline of misinformation, spreading conspiracy theories, campaign material and political propaganda throughout Brazil.

The first breakthrough came when we spoke to Yasodara Cordova, who at the time was a researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Illiteracy remains widespread in some parts of Brazil, she said, ruling out text-based social media or news sources for many people. And TV networks can be low-quality, which has helped drive YouTube's stunning growth in many parts of Brazil, particularly on mobile. But YouTube has had less success in poorer regions of Brazil for one simple reason: Users cannot afford the cellphone data. "The internet in Brazil is really expensive," Ms. Cordova said. "I think it's the fourth or fifth country in terms of internet prices."

WhatsApp has become a workaround. The messaging app has a deal with some carriers to offer free data on the app, and poorer users found that this offered them a way around YouTube's unaffordability. They would share snippets of YouTube videos that they found on WhatsApp, where the videos can be watched and shared for free. Ms. Cordova suspected that the WhatsApp-spread misinformation had often come from videos that first went viral on YouTube, where they had been boosted by the extremism-favoring algorithms that we documented in our story earlier this week... It was like an infection jumping from one host to the next.
Some of the videos blame the mosquito-bourne Zika virus on vaccines or suggest an international conspiracy, while some were "staged to resemble news reports or advice from health workers," the Times reports -- adding that as of Thursday the videos were still being recommended by YouTube's algorithm. (A spokesperson for YouTube "called the results unintended, and said the company would change how its search tool surfaced videos related to Zika.")

Researchers say conspiracy videos were even shown to people who'd searched for reputable information on the virus, the Times reports. "The videos often spread in WhatsApp chat groups that had been set up to share information and news about coping with Zika, turning users' efforts to take control of their families' health against them."

YouTube told the Times that their recommendation system now drives 70% of total time spent on YouTube -- and according to their article Thursday, Dr. Brito estimates that she now receives serious threats on her life about once a week.

"Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday evening 'Nuke Mars.' A few hours later he followed it up with 'T-shirt soon'," writes Business Insider.

BGR reports: Musk's tweet is a reference to the theory that by dropping one or more large bombs on Mars' poles, the CO2 locked away in the ice there would be released, giving the Martian atmosphere a much-needed boost... Making the planet's atmosphere denser could help it retain heat and bring it a small step closer to being habitable by human settlers. However, past research has suggested that bombing the planet's poles wouldn't release nearly enough CO2 to be worth the trouble. Elon Musk has publicly disagreed.

It's unclear why the SpaceX boss decided to bring this all up again, but he does have a habit of saying whatever he thinks will get a big reaction on Twitter. Oh, and apparently he's hoping to sell some shirts as well.

In any case, no space agency is ready to even begin preliminary planning for a crewed Mars mission, much less any long-term efforts to change the climate of the Red Planet. If that ever does happen, bombs may or may not play a role.
The article adds that scientists "aren't fully on board" with Musk's line of thinking, but the t-shirts really are available in the online SpaceX store. Late Friday Musk began promoting them with an optimistic tweet.

"Nuking Mars one T-shirt at a time."

schwit1 shares a report from Smithsonian: In the summer of 2015, when Smithsonian research zoologist Anna Phillips and other scientists were standing in slow-moving swamp water, letting leeches latch onto their bare legs or gathering them up in nets from muddy pond bottoms, they didn't realize that some of the bloodsuckers they'd collected belonged to an entirely new species. But in a just-published paper in the Journal of Parasitology, Phillips and her colleagues from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and the Royal Ontario Museum report that a previously unknown leech species, Macrobdella mimicus, is the first to be discovered on the continent in more than 40 years.

Parasitologists typically rely on the arrangement of pores on the bottom of leeches' bodies to help distinguish species. With a close inspection, the researchers noticed a subtle difference in the spacing of the leeches' accessory pores. (While leeches are hermaphrodites, they mate with other leeches, and accessory pores secrete mucus that allows the mating leeches to stick together.) M. decora had four accessory pores grouped in two rows of two, just like the outlier group, but the new species had a set of pores located several millimeters farther back on their body. The similar pore pattern, however, led Phillips and the other scientists to name the new species Macrobdella mimicus, after the Greek word for "imitator" or "actor." The new species is olive-green with orange spots, about as long as a cigarette and as wide as two. It has three jaws, each containing 56 to 59 teeth (fewer than M. decora), which it can use to bite and siphon blood from humans. Leeches like this species can suck two to five times their body weight in blood thanks to expandable pockets in their intestines, explains Phillips.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Excess heat given off by smartphones, laptops and other electronic devices can be annoying, but beyond that it contributes to malfunctions and, in extreme cases, can even cause lithium batteries to explode. To guard against such ills, engineers often insert glass, plastic or even layers of air as insulation to prevent heat-generating components like microprocessors from causing damage or discomforting users. Now, Stanford researchers have shown that a few layers of atomically thin materials, stacked like sheets of paper atop hot spots, can provide the same insulation as a sheet of glass 100 times thicker. In the near term, thinner heat shields will enable engineers to make electronic devices even more compact than those we have today, said Eric Pop, professor of electrical engineering and senior author of a paper published Aug. 16 in Science Advances. "To make nanoscale heat shields practical, the researchers will have to find some mass production technique to spray or otherwise deposit atom-thin layers of materials onto electronic components during manufacturing," adds Phys.Org.

"But behind the immediate goal of developing thinner insulators looms a larger ambition: Scientists hope to one day control the vibrational energy inside materials the way they now control electricity and light. As they come to understand the heat in solid objects as a form of sound, a new field of phononics is emerging, a name taken from the Greek root word behind telephone, phonograph and phonetics."

For years, Naval Research Laboratory meteorologist David Peterson has been obsessed with one of Earth's rarest atmospheric spectacles: thunderclouds formed by raging wildfires. Last week, he became one of the only people on Earth to fly straight through one. From a report: Peterson is the lead forecaster for Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ), a joint NASA and NOAA-led field campaign that's spending the summer intensively studying wildfire smoke from the ground, the air, and satellites. On August 8, he rode shotgun as NASA's DC-8 research aircraft passed directly through an anvil cloud as it was developing over the 45,000-acre Williams Flats fire currently burning in the Pacific Northwest.

Over the next few hours, the plane would conduct the most detailed reconnaissance ever from within a pyrotechnic weather system, making observations and collecting samples that will help researchers to better understand the nature of these dramatic events and how they can impact Earth's climate. "Just being there was the most amazing experience I've ever had while working in science," Peterson said. Pyrocumulonimbus clouds (pyroCbs) only form when conditions are just right -- you need a special combination of atmospheric instability, moisture, and loads of wildfire heat to create an updraft.

A team of researchers has synthesized the first ring-shaped molecule of pure carbon -- a circle of 18 atoms. Nature reports: The chemists started with a triangular molecule of carbon and oxygen, which they manipulated with electric currents to create the carbon-18 ring. Initial studies of the properties of the molecule, called a cyclocarbon, suggest that it acts as a semiconductor, which could make similar straight carbon chains useful as molecular-scale electronic components.

Chemist Przemyslaw Gawel of the University of Oxford, UK, and his collaborators have now created and imaged the long-sought ring molecule carbon-18. Using standard 'wet' chemistry, his collaborator Lorel Scriven, an Oxford chemist, first synthesized molecules that included four-carbon squares coming off the ring with oxygen atoms attached to squares. The team then sent their samples to IBM laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland, where collaborators put the oxygen -- carbon molecules on a layer of sodium chloride, inside a high-vacuum chamber. They manipulated the rings one at a time with electric currents (using an atomic-force microscope that can also act as a scanning-transmission microscope), to remove the extraneous, oxygen-containing parts. After much trial-and-error, micrograph scans revealed the 18-carbon structure. "I never thought I would see this," says Scriven. Alternating bond types are interesting because they are supposed to give carbon chains and rings the properties of semiconductors. The results suggest that long, straight carbon chains might be semiconductors, too, Gawel says, which could make them useful as components of future molecular-sized transistors. The paper has been published in the journal Science.

Lisa Zyga, writing for Phys.Org: Ever since the late 19th century, physicists have known about a counterintuitive property of some electric circuits called negative resistance. Typically, increasing the voltage in a circuit causes the electric current to increase as well. But under some conditions, increasing the voltage can cause the current to decrease instead. This basically means that pushing harder on the electric charges actually slows them down. Due to the relationship between current, voltage, and resistance, in these situations the resistance produces power rather than consuming it, resulting in a "negative resistance." Today, negative resistance devices have a wide variety of applications, such as in fluorescent lights and Gunn diodes, which are used in radar guns and automatic door openers, among other devices.

Most known examples of negative resistance occur in human-engineered devices rather than in nature. However, in a new study published in the New Journal of Physics, Gianmaria Falasco and coauthors from the University of Luxembourg have shown that an analogous property called negative differential response is actually a widespread phenomenon that is found in many biochemical reactions that occur in living organisms. They identify the property in several vital biochemical processes, such as enzyme activity, DNA replication, and ATP production. It seems that nature has used this property to optimize these processes and make living things operate more efficiently at the molecular scale. The researchers provided two examples of biological processes that have negative differential responses. The first example is substrate inhibition, which is a process used by enzymes to regulate their ability to catalyze chemical reactions: "When a single substrate molecule binds to an enzyme, the resulting enzyme-substrate complex decays into a product, generating a chemical current," writes Zyga. "On the other hand, when the substrate concentration is high, two substrate molecules may bind to an enzyme, and this double binding prevents the enzyme from producing more product. As an increase in substrate molecule concentration causes a decrease in the chemical current, this is a negative differential response."

The second example has to do with autocatalytic reactions -- "self-catalyzing" reactions, or reactions that produce products that catalyze the reaction itself: "Autocatalytic reactions occur throughout the body, such as in DNA replication and ATP production during glycolysis," writes Zyga. "The researchers showed that negative differential responses can arise when two autocatalytic reactions occur simultaneously in the presence of two different chemical concentrations (reservoirs) in an out-of-equilibrium system."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new organ involved in the sensation of pain has been discovered by scientists, raising hopes that it could lead to the development of new painkilling drugs. Researchers say they have discovered that the special cells that surround the pain-sensing nerve cells that extend into the outer layer of skin appear to be involved in sensing pain. The scientists say the finding offers new insight into pain and could help answer longstanding conundrums.

Writing in the journal Science, the researchers reveal how they examined the nature of cells in the skin that, they say, have largely been overlooked. These are a type of Schwann cell, which wrap around and engulf nerve cells and help to keep them alive. The study has revealed these Schwann cells have an octopus-like shape. After examining tissues, the team found the body of the cells sits below the outer layer of the skin, but that the cells have long extensions that wrap around the ends of pain-sensing nerve cells that extend up into the epidermis, the outer layer of the skin. The scientists were surprised at the findings because it has long been believed that the endings of nerve cells in the epidermis were bare or unwrapped. With the special Schwann cells and the nerves they engulf forming a mesh-like network, the researchers say they have essentially discovered a new pain-sensing organ. "It is a two-cell receptor organ: the nerve and Schwann cell together," Prof Patrik Ernfors, a co-author of the research from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, said.

Scientists who discovered aging appears to be related to the stiffness of the environment where cells live have reversed the process in rat brain stem cells. Newsweek reports: Researchers studied oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) in young and old rat brains, and found they were affected by stiffness in the organ caused by aging. These stem cells, meaning they can turn into other types of cell, are found in the central nervous system. The team also found that a protein called Piezo1, which senses how stiff its surroundings are, could be harnessed to trick stem cells into thinking they were in a younger, softer environment. Deleting the protein from the OPCs in older rat brains appeared to make them behave younger. Taking OPCs from older rats and putting them in younger rodents was also found to rejuvenate the cells.

Kevin Chalut, a biophysicist at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the study published in the journal Nature told Newsweek: "The study tells us that aging, at least for stem cells we studied, is not driven by anything intrinsic to the cell. It is instead driven by the environment. This was already known to be a factor, but the true significance here is to show that it is the stiffness of the environment alone that drives the aging of the stem cells. "This is rather remarkable because it suggests an entirely new way of thinking about what controls aging in stem cells, and furthermore, since stiffness is a single factor from the environment, it suggest a means to straightforwardly reverse aging in stem cells'" Chalut explained.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: People unjustly kept away from feline companionship due to an allergy are rejoicing this week, after news resurfaced of a potential vaccine that makes cats less able to cause allergies. But while this research is promising, a finished product won't be available any time soon. The vaccine in question is being developed by Swiss-based Hypocat and is the company's lead experimental and namesake drug. This April, Hypocat published results from a study on the vaccine. And it's this news that the internet has, for reasons lost to the void, started to buzz about again.

The study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, details a very clever strategy to tackle cat allergies. The vaccine doesn't try to desensitize the immune system of people allergic to cats, as other existing immunotherapies like allergy shots do. Rather, it attempts to train the immune system of cats to go after a specific protein, or allergen, that they naturally produce called Fel d 1. It's supposed to accomplish this trick by hitching a genetically modified version of the protein to a virus-like particle derived from a plant virus (only being a particle, it shouldn't be capable of causing disease). Some 90 percent of people with a cat allergy produce antibodies to Fel d 1. So if successful, the vaccine would basically turn cats hypoallergenic by greatly reducing the amount of Fel d 1 they make and eventually spew into our noses and mouths. While the company behind the vaccine says it's been in discussions with both U.S. and European drug approval agencies, Gizmodo notes that "even if these trials started today and the vaccine passed them with flying colors, you'll still have to wait years before it could hit the market."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: When she joined a trial of new tuberculosis drugs, the dying young woman weighed just 57 pounds. Stricken with a deadly strain of the disease, she was mortally terrified. Local nurses told her the Johannesburg hospital to which she must be transferred was very far away -- and infested with vervet monkeys. "I cried the whole way in the ambulance," Tsholofelo Msimango recalled recently. "They said I would live with monkeys and the sisters there were not nice and the food was bad and there was no way I would come back. They told my parents to fix the insurance because I would die." Five years later, Ms. Msimango, 25, is now tuberculosis-free. She is healthy at 103 pounds, and has a young son.

The trial she joined was small -- it enrolled only 109 patients -- but experts are calling the preliminary results groundbreaking. The drug regimen tested on Ms. Msimango has shown a 90 percent success rate against a deadly plague, extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis. On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration effectively endorsed the approach, approving the newest of the three drugs used in the regimen. Usually, the World Health Organization adopts approvals made by the F.D.A. or its European counterpart, meaning the treatment could soon come into use worldwide. Typically, patients in South Africa treated with this deadly strain of tuberculosis are required to take up to 40 daily pills for up to two years. "But in the trial Ms. Msimango joined, nicknamed Nix-TB, patients took only five pills a day for six months," the report says. "The pills contain just three drugs: pretomanid, bedaquiline and linezolid. Someday, the whole regimen might come in just one pill, as H.I.V. drugs do, one expert said."

EmagGeek writes: Peter Brannen has an interesting, if humbling take on the anthropocentric view of geology currently held by many scientists and governments, and the staggeringly arrogant assignment to humanity of its own epoch, despite all of human civilization fitting within a time period, on a geologic timescale, equivalent to that of the exposure time on a high speed camera. The idea of the Anthropocene is an interesting thought experiment. For those invested in the stratigraphic arcana of this infinitesimal moment in time, it serves as a useful catalog of our junk. But it can also serve to inflate humanity's legacy on an ever-churning planet that will quickly destroy -- or conceal forever -- even our most awesome creations. The article also ponders what will become of human civilization, and whether there will be any trace of it remaining when the (likely nonhuman) archaeologists of 100 million years from now go looking for new historical discoveries. An interesting read, for sure.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Plastic was the furthest thing from Gregory Wetherbee's mind when he began analyzing rainwater samples collected from the Rocky Mountains. "I guess I expected to see mostly soil and mineral particles," said the U.S. Geological Survey researcher. Instead, he found multicolored microscopic plastic fibers. The discovery, published in a recent study (pdf) titled "It is raining plastic", raises new questions about the amount of plastic waste permeating the air, water, and soil virtually everywhere on Earth. Rainwater samples collected across Colorado and analyzed under a microscope contained a rainbow of plastic fibers, as well as beads and shards. The findings shocked Wetherbee, who had been collecting the samples in order to study nitrogen pollution. "My results are purely accidental," he said, though they are consistent with another recent study that found microplastics in the Pyrenees, suggesting plastic particles could travel with the wind for hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometers. Other studies have turned up microplastics in the deepest reaches of the ocean, in UK lakes and rivers and in U.S. groundwater.