Tag Archives: 2019

Science

Astronomers Are About to Make a Massive Announcement About Something in The Milky Way

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In two weeks’ time, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is going to present the world with new information about our Milky Way.

It’s anyone’s guess what the announcement will be, but based on what we know of their recent efforts, there’s reason to get excited – the results being presented are from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, which was responsible for producing the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019.

 

For years now the EHT project has been studying the heart of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, which is most likely home to a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A*.

Whatever they’ve found out, they’re making a big deal out of it.

Since the scientists are hosting simultaneous press conferences around the globe, it’s a good chance what they are keeping under wraps is the next instalment after the historic 2019 moment of the first black hole reveal.

A conference will be streamed about the findings online on 12 May 2022 at 15:00 CEST (13:00 UTC, 9:00 EST), followed by a YouTube event with six astronomers from around the world. Press releases will include “extensive supporting audiovisual material” (eek!).

If astronomers have managed to produce a direct image of Sgr A*’s event horizon, it will be a historic moment you don’t want to miss.

Black holes are extremely difficult to image because they are quite literally invisible, absorbing all electromagnetic radiation. All that we can hope to see is the event horizon; essentially, the black hole’s outline, which represents where light can no longer escape the black hole’s gravitational forces.

 

But Sgr A* is obscured by a cloud of dust and gas, which makes it particularly difficult to study.

If astronomers have imaged the black hole’s horizon, it should appear as a glowing donut. This is the black hole’s accretion disc, a ring of gas and dust that gives off extreme radiation as it falls into the abyss.

(EHT Collaboration)

ESO’s press release is promising something “groundbreaking”, which is the same wording they used before announcing the first direct image of a black hole in 2019.

This black hole was at the center of the galaxy M87, and it has a mass 6.5 billion times that of our Sun. Its event horizon has a radius of roughly 20 billion kilometers, and it’s really far away.

Experts compare taking a direct image of it to observing an object 1 millimeter in size from a distance of 13,000 kilometers away (8,000 miles).

Srg A* is much closer to us, being at the heart of our own galaxy. However, it is rather small for a supermassive black hole, only 4.3 million times bigger than the Sun. It’s only detectable because it’s relatively much closer to Earth than M87*.

So if astronomers have finally captured an image of its event horizon, it certainly would be groundbreaking.

We can’t wait to see what the ESO is about to show us: watch this space. You can find more details about the announcement here.

 

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Health

STDs in The US Are Dramatically Increasing, And There’s a Key Factor to Blame

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Reported cases of many types of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) went up in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the frequency of screenings decreased, an official report said Tuesday.

 

The pandemic worsened an underlying trend of increasing STDs over the past decade, blamed on declining public health funding, said Jonathan Mermin, a doctor and senior official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which authored the report.

Reported cases of gonorrhea and primary and secondary syphilis were up 10 percent and 7 percent respectively, compared to 2019.

Syphilis among newborns, known as congenital syphilis, also increased, with reported cases up nearly 15 percent from 2019, and 235 percent from 2016. Preliminary data indicate primary and secondary syphilis and congenital syphilis cases continued to increase in 2021 as well.

Reported cases of chlamydia declined 13 percent from 2019 but experts suspect this is misleading – since the disease is often asymptomatic and detected through screening, such as routine pap smears.

Overall, 2.4 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis were reported.

COVID-19 “came at a very difficult time for STI control,” Mermin told reporters on a call.

“We already had a strained, crumbling public health infrastructure. There are many communities in the United States that do not have STI specialty clinics. What that led to was an exacerbation of the already increasing trends.”

 

“The consequences of congenital syphilis are the most severe,” he added. “They include lifelong physical and mental health problems, miscarriage or stillbirth.”

Reported cases of STDs initially decreased during the early months of 2020 when lockdowns enforced social distancing, but they resurged by the end of the year.

Factors blamed for the spike include reduced frequency of in-person healthcare services resulting in less screening; diversion of health workers from STD work to respond to the COVID pandemic; STD test and lab supply shortages; and lapses in health insurance due to unemployment.

Leandro Mena, another senior CDC official, added that social and economic factors, such as poverty and insurance status, resulted in worse STD outcomes.

Over half of reported STDs were among 16 to 24-year-olds. Racial minorities including Black, Hispanic and Native American people were disproportionately impacted, while 42 percent of cases of primary and secondary syphilis were among gay and bisexual males.

Public funding for local sex health clinics has been in decline for several years, and the data showed the worst affected states are often also the least economically developed, such as Mississippi.

Around half of gonorrhea cases were estimated to be resistant to at least one antibiotic, but the CDC doesn’t believe antibiotic resistance is a driver of rising cases at this time.

© Agence France-Presse

 

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Science

Declassified Government Data Reveal an Interstellar Object Exploded in The Sky in 2014

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A fireball that blazed through the skies over Papua New Guinea in 2014 was actually a fast-moving object from another star system, according to a recent memo released by the US Space Command (USSC).

 

The object, a small meteorite measuring just 1.5 feet (0.45 meter) across, slammed into Earth’s atmosphere on 8 January 2014, after traveling through space at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) – a speed that far exceeds the average velocity of meteors that orbit within the solar system, according to a 2019 study of the object published in the preprint database arXiv.

That 2019 study argued that the wee meteor’s speed, along with the trajectory of its orbit, proved with 99 percent certainty that the object had originated far beyond our solar system – possibly “from the deep interior of a planetary system or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy,” the authors wrote.

But despite their near certainty, the team’s paper was never peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, as some of the data needed to verify their calculations was considered classified by the US government, according to Vice.

Related: What happens in intergalactic space?

Now, USSC scientists have officially confirmed the team’s findings. In a memo dated March 1 and shared on Twitter on April 6, Lt. Gen. John E. Shaw, deputy commander of the USSC, wrote that the 2019 analysis of the fireball was “sufficiently accurate to confirm an interstellar trajectory.”

This confirmation retroactively makes the 2014 meteor the first interstellar object ever detected in our solar system, the memo added.

 

The object’s detection predates the discovery of ‘Oumuamua – a now-infamous, cigar-shaped object that is also moving far too fast to have originated in our solar system – by three years, according to the USSC memo. (Unlike the 2014 meteor, ‘Oumuamua was detected far from Earth and is already speeding out of the solar system, according to NASA.)

Amir Siraj, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University and the lead author of the 2019 paper, told Vice that he still intends to get the original study published, so that the scientific community can pick up where he and his colleagues left off. Because the meteorite ignited over the South Pacific Ocean, it’s possible that shards of the object landed in the water and have since nestled on the seafloor, he added.

While locating these scraps of interstellar debris might be a nigh-impossible task, Siraj said he is already consulting with experts about the possibility of mounting an expedition to recover them.

“The possibility of getting the first piece of interstellar material is exciting enough to check this very thoroughly and talk to all the world experts on ocean expeditions to recover meteorites,” Siraj told Vice.

Read more about the 2014 meteor at Vice.com.

Related content:

15 unforgettable images of stars

8 ways we know that black holes really do exist

The 15 weirdest galaxies in our universe

This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.

 



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Health

The 3rd Leading Global Cause of Death Is Likely Not What You Think, New Study Reveals

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Antibiotic resistance is often seen as a ‘future problem’, but newly published data have revealed it’s affecting far, far more lives than you might imagine.

In fact, the new estimates show that in 2019, there were 4.95 million deaths associated with bacterial antimicrobial resistance, making it the third leading cause of death worldwide.

 

Drugs that kill bacteria are undeniably one of humanity’s greatest discoveries. Since Alexander Fleming discovered antibacterial activity in the fungi Penicillium all the way back in 1928, we no longer have to worry about death from rose bush scratches or gonorrhea. In the decades following, antibiotics have saved millions and millions of lives worldwide.

But bacteria have been developing resistance to antibiotics long before we started using them, as they’re a naturally evolved biological weapon for warfare between microbes. Continually using the same antibiotics over and over provides bacteria with the opportunity to adapt to them even faster, leading to an increasing number of infections no longer responding to traditional (or even last-resort) antibiotics.

Unfortunately, the more bacterial species don’t respond to antibiotics, the more patients will succumb to resistant infections – and researchers are sounding the alarm that we’re now annually losing more people to antimicrobial resistance than to HIV/AIDS or malaria.

“These new data reveal the true scale of antimicrobial resistance worldwide, and are a clear signal that we must act now to combat the threat,” says University of Washington health economist Chris Murray, who co-authored the new research.

 

“Previous estimates had predicted 10 million annual deaths from antimicrobial resistance by 2050, but we now know for certain that we are already far closer to that figure than we thought. We need to leverage this data to course-correct action and drive innovation if we want to stay ahead in the race against antimicrobial resistance.”

The researchers analyzed data on 23 different bacterial species (including E. coli, S. pneumoniae and S. aureus) and 88 microbe-drug combinations from 204 countries. This ended up covering 471 million records of infection, which they then used to create statistical models to estimate the scale of antimicrobial resistance.

The team explored two counterfactual scenarios. In the first, all drug-resistant infections were replaced with no infections, which the team explained is the number of deaths associated with antimicrobial resistance.

In the second scenario, they replaced all drug-resistant infections with drug-susceptible infections, leading to an estimation of deaths directly caused by antimicrobial resistance.

The team concluded that in 2019, 4.95 million deaths were associated with drug-resistant bacterial infections, of which 1.27 million deaths were directly caused by antimicrobial resistance – a huge burden in all areas of the world, but particularly impacting low- and middle-income countries.

Rate of deaths attributable to and associated with bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019. (Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators, The Lancet, 2022)

These calculations suggested that only stroke and heart disease caused more deaths than antimicrobial resistance that year.

The authors note that, to their knowledge, this is the first time such a global estimate has been carried out at all. Because there are gaps in data from some parts of the world, and serious difficulties in carrying out the surveillance of antimicrobial resistance, there are some limitations to their modelling. But the conclusion is clear: we have a major global health problem.

 

“The threat of antimicrobial resistance has long been signaled. And the steps needed to tackle antimicrobial resistance – boosting public awareness, better surveillance, improved diagnostics, more rational use of antibiotics, access to clean water and sanitation, embracing One Health, and investments in new antimicrobials and vaccines – have been consistently recommended. But action has been episodic and uneven, resulting in global inequities in antimicrobial resistance,” The Lancet editors add in an editorial accompanying the research.

“Innovation has been extremely slow. Vaccines are available for only one of the six leading pathogens described in the study. The clinical pipeline for antibiotics is too small to tackle the increasing emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance.”

The authors of both the editorial and the original study urge leaders to move antimicrobial resistance higher up on their agendas. Without urgent action, they caution, we’ll be seeing even higher levels of preventable deaths in the years to come.

The research has been published in The Lancet.

 

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Science

Artificial Intelligence Has Found an Unknown ‘Ghost’ Ancestor in The Human Genome

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Nobody knows who she was, just that she was different: a teenage girl from over 50,000 years ago of such strange uniqueness she looked to be a ‘hybrid’ ancestor to modern humans that scientists had never seen before.

 

Only recently, researchers have uncovered evidence she wasn’t alone. In a 2019 study analysing the complex mess of humanity’s prehistory, scientists used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify an unknown human ancestor species that modern humans encountered – and shared dalliances with – on the long trek out of Africa millennia ago.

“About 80,000 years ago, the so-called Out of Africa occurred, when part of the human population, which already consisted of modern humans, abandoned the African continent and migrated to other continents, giving rise to all the current populations”, explained evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain.

As modern humans forged this path into the landmass of Eurasia, they forged some other things too – breeding with ancient and extinct hominids from other species.

Up until recently, these occasional sexual partners were thought to include Neanderthals and Denisovans, the latter of which were unknown until 2010.

But in this study, a third ex from long ago was isolated in Eurasian DNA, thanks to deep learning algorithms sifting through a complex mass of ancient and modern human genetic code.

 

Using a statistical technique called Bayesian inference, the researchers found evidence of what they call a “third introgression” – a ‘ghost’ archaic population that modern humans interbred with during the African exodus.

“This population is either related to the Neanderthal-Denisova clade or diverged early from the Denisova lineage,” the researchers wrote in their paper, meaning that it’s possible this third population in humanity’s sexual history was possibly a mix themselves of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

In a sense, from the vantage point of deep learning, it’s a hypothetical corroboration of sorts of the teenage girl ‘hybrid fossil’ identified in 2018; although there’s still more work to be done, and the research projects themselves aren’t directly linked.

“Our theory coincides with the hybrid specimen discovered recently in Denisova, although as yet we cannot rule out other possibilities”, one of the team, genomicist Mayukh Mondal from the University of Tartu in Estonia, said in a press statement at the time of discovery.

That being said, the discoveries being made in this area of science are coming thick and fast.

Also in 2018, another team of researchers identified evidence of what they called a “definite third interbreeding event” alongside Denisovans and Neanderthals, and a pair of papers published in early 2019 traced the timeline of how those extinct species intersected and interbred in clearer detail than ever before.

 

There’s a lot more research to be done here yet. Applying this kind of AI analysis is a decidedly new technique in the field of human ancestry, and the known fossil evidence we’re dealing with is amazingly scant.

But according to the research, what the team has found explains not only a long-forgotten process of introgression – it’s a dalliance that, in its own way, informs part of who we are today.

“We thought we’d try to find these places of high divergence in the genome, see which are Neanderthal and which are Denisovan, and then see whether these explain the whole picture,” Bertranpetit told Smithsonian.

“As it happens, if you subtract the Neanderthal and Denisovan parts, there is still something in the genome that is highly divergent.”

The findings were published in Nature Communications.

A version of this article was originally published in February 2019.

 

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Science

Largest Underwater Eruption Ever Recorded Gives Birth to Massive New Volcano

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A huge seismic event that started in May of 2018 and was felt across the entire globe has officially given birth to a new underwater volcano.

Off the eastern coast of the island of Mayotte, a gigantic new feature rises 820 meters (2,690 feet) from the seafloor, a prominence that hadn’t been there prior to an earthquake that rocked the island in May 2018.

 

“This is the largest active submarine eruption ever documented,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

The new feature, thought to be part of a tectonic structure between the East African and Madagascar rifts, is helping scientists understand deep Earth processes about which we know relatively little.

The seismic rumbles of the ongoing event started on 10 May 2018. Just a few days later, on 15 May, a magnitude 5.8 quake struck, rocking the nearby island. Initially, scientists were perplexed; but it didn’t take long to figure out that a volcanic event had occurred, the likes of which had never been seen before.

The signals pointed to a location around 50 kilometers from the Eastern coast of Mayotte, a French territory and part of the volcanic Comoros archipelago sandwiched between the Eastern coast of Africa and the Northern tip of Madagascar.

So a number of French governmental institutions sent a research team to check it out; there, sure enough, was an undersea mountain that hadn’t been there before.

Led by geophysicist Nathalie Feuillet of the University of Paris in France, the scientists have now described their findings in a new paper.

 

The team began monitoring the region in February of 2019. They used a multibeam sonar to map an 8,600-square-kilometer area of seafloor. They also placed a network of seismometers on the seafloor, up to 3.5 kilometers deep, and combined this with seismic data from Mayotte.

Between 25 February and 6 May 2019, this network detected 17,000 seismic events, from a depth of around 20 to 50 kilometers below the ocean floor – a highly unusual finding, since most earthquakes are much shallower. An additional 84 events were also highly unusual, detected at very low frequencies.

Armed with this data, the researchers were able to reconstruct how the formation of the new volcano may have occurred. It started, according to their findings, with a magma reservoir deep in the asthenosphere, the molten mantle layer located directly below Earth’s lithosphere.

Chronology of the eruption. (Feuillet et al., Nature Geoscience, 2021)

Below the new volcano, tectonic processes may have caused damage to the lithosphere, resulting in dykes that drained magma from a reservoir up through the crust, producing swarms of earthquakes in the process. Eventually, this material made its way to the seafloor, where it erupted, producing 5 cubic kilometers of lava and building the new volcano.

The low-frequency events were likely generated by a shallower, fluid-filled cavity in the crust that could have been repeatedly excited by seismic strain on faults close to the cavity.

 

As of May 2019, the extruded volume of the new volcanic edifice is between 30 and 1,000 times larger than estimated for other deep-sea eruptions, making it the most significant undersea volcanic eruption ever recorded.

“The volumes and flux of emitted lava during the Mayotte magmatic event are comparable to those observed during eruptions at Earth’s largest hotspots,” the researchers wrote.

“Future scenarios could include a new caldera collapse, submarine eruptions on the upper slope or onshore eruptions. Large lava flows and cones on the upper slope and onshore Mayotte indicate that this has occurred in the past.

“Since the discovery of the new volcanic edifice, an observatory has been established to monitor activity in real time, and return cruises continue to follow the evolution of the eruption and edifices.”

The research has been published in Nature Geoscience.

 

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