World's Largest Antenna in China

A representative antenna


China has been slowly but steadily working its way to the top. Frequently making headlines with its space-related developments, the country now claims to be operating the world's largest antenna for its submarine operations.

What's special about the antenna is the fact that it was designed to maintain underwater communications over 1,900 miles (3,000 km), enough to reach Guam, the biggest U.S. military base in the western Pacific Ocean, according to the project’s lead engineer Zha Ming and his colleagues from the Wuhan Maritime Communication Research Institute, reports South China Morning Post.

While the gigantic antenna's current location remains unknown, the team said it lies somewhere 620 miles (1,000 km) south of Beijing, 1,242 miles (2,000 km) southeast of Dunhuang in northwest China, and 620 miles (1,000 km) east of Mianyang in the southwestern province of Sichuan.  READ MORE...

Muscles

 

Meaning of Life

After Pew Research Center published its findings about what makes life meaningful in 17 developed economies, the answers from Korea startled many.

Korea was abuzz over the weekend about the results of a survey conducted by Pew Research Center in spring about what makes life "meaningful, fulfilling or satisfying" in 17 developed economies.

The findings came out on Nov. 18, and the answers from Korea were startling. It was the only country where "material well-being" was given as the top source of life's meaning. In fourteen other countries the first choice was family.

Predictably, the news prompted much handwringing across Korea's ideological spectrum as proof of the country's decay, but for different reasons. "Korea is the only country like this," wrote musician and prominent cultural critic Sohn Yisang on Facebook, implying that too many Koreans are focused on "don 돈" (money), as he translated "material well-being".

The conservative daily Chosun Ilbo blamed policymakers in the current center-left government for turning Koreans this way: "in the last few years this country's citizens went through experiences that shook the very foundation of how happiness is understood."

The paper obviously wants to argue that the out-of-control price of real estate has made "people who can't afford to buy an apartment even by scraping together everything they've got...unhappy because they hear how other people are getting manifold richer through stock or apartment or cryptocurrency purchases."

I don't really see a clear connection between what the Chosun Ilbo is saying and the Pew survey, but whichever way one interprets this survey result, there is an agreement: the choice of material well-being as the top source of meaning in life speaks to a problem in Korea.  READ MORE...

Underwater

 

Cause of Alzheimer's

Scientists in California tried to study Alzheimer’s disease from a different perspective and the results may have led them to the cause of the disease.

Researchers at the University of California- Riverside (UCR) recently published results from a study that looked at a protein called tau. By studying the different forms tau proteins take, researchers discovered the difference between people who developed dementia and those who didn’t.

The tau protein was critical for researchers because they wanted to understand what the protein could reveal about the mechanism behind plaques and tangles, two critical indicators doctors look for when diagnosing people with Alzheimer’s.

By analyzing donated brain samples, researchers found that those with brain buildup, like plaques and tangles, but had no dementia had a normal form of tau. However, those who had a “different-handed” form of tau and developed plaques or tangles did have dementia.

Ryan Julian, a chemistry professor at UCR, said in a press release, “roughly 20% of people have the plaques, but no signs of dementia. This makes it seem as though the plaques themselves are not the cause.”

The amino acids that make up proteins like tau can either be right-handed or left-handed isomers, and normally proteins in living things are made from all left-handed amino acids, explained Julian.

However, most proteins only survive for less than 48 hours in the body, and if they hang around too long, certain amino acids can convert into the other-handed isomer. So that means a left-handed isomer could inadvertently convert into a right-handed isomer, which can lead to serious problems.

“If you try to put a right-handed glove on your left hand, it doesn’t work too well. It’s a similar problem in biology; molecules don’t work the way they’re supposed to after a while because a left-handed glove can actually convert into a right-handed glove that doesn’t fit,” said Julian.  READ MORE...

Diabolique

 

Small Animals

 

Robot Writes Poetry

Last week at the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Aidan Miller unveiled the world’s first highly-realistic humanoid robot artist, Ai-Da, who wrote poetry inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. 

Using algorithms programmed with Dante’s epic, the robot integrated his speech patterns alongside her lexicon of vocabulary to produce her own deeply moving work. 

The poetry debuted in conjunction with Eyes Wide Shut, an exhibit on surveillance, which was created by the robot as a response to an incident in Egypt when Ai-Da was detained by security. 

“The Ai-Da project was developed to address the debate over the ethics of further developing AI to imitate humans and human behavior,” Miller says. 

But in this undertaking, the creator realized that the project isn’t about finding the human in AI so much as locating how robotic humans are. 

He continues, “Ai-Da allows us to gain a new insight into our own patterns and our own habits, as we see her imitate them right in front of us.” Read more this enlightening project at CNN.

Just Flying Around

The Roof of the World

If it wasn't for an extinct relative of modern humans known as the Denisovans, some researchers suspect our own species might never have made their home on the highest and largest plateau in the world.

The Tibetan Plateau, sometimes called the Himalayan Plateau, is nicknamed 'the roof of the world' because it sits, on average, 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) above sea level.

This vast sweep of elevated land, which covers most of Tibet, along with parts of China, India, Pakistan, and several other countries in the region, is usually considered one of the last places that Homo sapiens settled permanently. Studies suggest there have been periods of occupation by various ancestors taking place over the past 160,000 years, but gaps in the record are hard to interpret.

Have there always been people up on the roof of the world, or is each period a resettlement by a new community?

A geneticist and an archaeologist have now suggested another timeline that works just as well with the limited evidence we have on hand.

The researchers incorporated both archaeological and genetic evidence to develop two, contrasting models of occupation: one continuous and one divided up over time. Crucially, the two models can be tested, potentially telling us one day how far back modern populations stretch.

In the discontinuous model, humans visited on and off for tens of thousands of years, until finally staying put around 9,000 years ago.

Alternatively, current evidence could also support permanent colonization that began on the plateau between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. If so, the long genetic lineage might have passed on some helpful tricks for living up where the air is thin.

According to recent DNA analyses, a single crossbreeding event between Denisovans and H. sapiens in East Asia, no sooner than 46,000 years ago, might have infused our species with the genes they needed to make their home in such a low oxygen environment.  READ MORE...

Flyover

 

Solar Flares Hitting Earth

In the Tom Hanks movie Finch, a massive solar flare destroys the ozone layer, annihilating almost all life on Earth (and leading to the invention of annoying robots). While a mass coronal ejection really could hit Earth at any time—a sun-like star 100 light years away called EK Draconis literally just launched one of these things—the good news is that even the worst solar storm probably wouldn’t be as terrible as Finch is (as a movie). The bad news: While it wouldn’t be “building annoying robots” bad, a coronal ejection could still be pretty awful.

Short of destroying the sun, there’s nothing humans can do to prevent solar flares—but you can still know what to expect, and prepare accordingly.

The Coronal Mass Ejection: A visually stunning catastrophe
According to NASA, Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are “large clouds of solar plasma and embedded magnetic fields released into space after a solar eruption.” If the Earth happens to be in the path of one of these ejections, and the ejection is powerful enough, things could get very crazy, very quickly.

The charged particles from the sun entering Earth’s magnetic field would cause geomagnetic storms, lighting up the sky with a brilliant aurora borealis that would be visible all over the Earth. Beautiful, for sure. But massively disruptive to our power system.

How bad could it get?
In 1859, the largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded hit Earth. The Carrington Event lit up the sky so brightly that people thought dawn had come. The “Northern Lights” were visible as far south as Cuba, and the nascent telegraph system went down, with telegraph operators reporting being shocked by their machines, or being able to still send messages, even though their power supplies were disconnected.  READ MORE...

C. S. I.

 

DID YOU KNOW???

 

Male Model

 

Comet Leonard Acting Strange

Comet Leonard is not brightening like scientists thought it would.

Comet Leonard shines bright in this image from the European Space Agency's Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre using the Calar Alto Schmidt telescope in Spain. It was created by stacking 90 5-second exposure images of the comet taken on Dec. 7, 2021 on top of each other. (Image credit: ESA/NEOCC)


Something strange is happening to skywatchers' most anticipated comet of the year.


Astronomers first spotted what's been dubbed Comet Leonard in January 2021, and soon skywatchers were eagerly anticipating December and January, when the comet was due to pass by first Earth, then the sun. 

But by late November, observers noticed something strange. The comet should be getting brighter as it approaches the sun — and it is, but apparently only because it's getting closer to Earth, not because it's becoming inherently brighter.


Instead, it seems to be fading.  READ MORE...

Owl Fluffing

 

Sleeping like Salvador Dali

Salvador Dalí used various napping techniques, including waking up in the N1 stage of sleep, in order to spark creativity. (Image credit: Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images)

A sleep technique described by surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and famous inventor Thomas Edison might actually work to inspire creativity, researchers have found.

To get the creativity boost, you essentially need to wake up just as a certain sleep stage sets in, where reality seems to blend into fantasy.

To use the technique, visionaries such as Dalí and Edison would hold an object, such as a spoon or a ball, while falling asleep in a chair. As they drifted off, the object would fall, make a noise and wake them up. Having spent a few moments on the brink of unconsciousness, they would be ready to start their work.

This early sleep stage, known as the hypnagogia state or N1, lasts only a few minutes before you drift off to deeper sleep, but it may be the "ideal cocktail for creativity," the researchers wrote in the study, published Dec. 8 in the journal Science Advances. Humans spend about 5% of a night's sleep in N1, but it's an extremely understudied sleep stage, said senior author Delphine Oudiette, a sleep researcher at the Paris Brain Institute.  READ MORE...

Beach Wheel

 

Mummies with Golden Tongues

It’s no secret that untold treasure lies beneath the city of El-Bahnasa, Egypt. An archaeological mission from Spain has now excavated the site for 30 years and found many tombs from different dynasties and papyrus texts that still puzzle experts. And last week, they unearthed two 2,500-year-old mummies with golden tongues.

According to The Times of Israel, the two mummies, a man and a woman, were each laid to rest in a limestone sarcophagus in what was then called Oxyrhynchus. They died around 525 B.C. at the tail-end of the Saite dynasty, which was the last time native Egyptians reigned over their kingdom before the Persian conquest in the 6th century B.C.

The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said golden tongues allowed the dead to speak to Osiris, the god of the underworld who judged travelers to the afterlife. While the 402 funerary figurines, amulets, and scarabs found within the tombs were also stunning, the state of the male sarcophagus captivated experts the most.

“This is very important because it’s rare to find a tomb that is totally sealed,” said excavation director Esther Pons Melado on Sunday.  READ MORE...