science

An unusually strong solar storm headed toward Earth could produce northern lights in the U.S. this weekend and potentially disrupt power and communications.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a rare geomagnetic storm watch — the first in nearly 20 years. That was expected to become a warning Friday night, when the effects of the solar outburst were due to reach Earth. NOAA already has alerted operators of power plants and spacecraft in orbit to take precautions.

NOAA said the sun produced strong solar flares beginning Wednesday, resulting in five outbursts of plasma capable of disrupting satellites in orbit and power grids here on Earth. Each eruption — known as a coronal mass ejection — can contain billions of tons of plasma and magnetic field from the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona.

The flares seem to be associated with a sunspot that’s 16 times the diameter of Earth, according to NOAA. An extreme geomagnetic storm in 2003 took out power in Sweden and damaged power transformers in South Africa.

The latest storm could produce northern lights as far south in the U.S. as Alabama and Northern California, according to NOAA.

Researchers have mapped a tiny piece of the human brain in astonishing detail. The resulting cell atlas, which was described today in Science1 and is available online, reveals new patterns of connections between brain cells called neurons, as well as cells that wrap around themselves to form knots, and pairs of neurons that are almost mirror images of each other.

The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimetre, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. It incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes of data. “It’s a little bit humbling,” says Viren Jain, a neuroscientist at Google in Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the paper. "How are we ever going to really come to terms with all this complexity?"

preprint version because scihub doesn't have it yet https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10120732/

Abstract

Transformer models such as GPT generate human-like language and are predictive of human brain responses to language. Here, using functional-MRI-measured brain responses to 1,000 diverse sentences, we first show that a GPT-based encoding model can predict the magnitude of the brain response associated with each sentence. We then use the model to identify new sentences that are predicted to drive or suppress responses in the human language network. We show that these model-selected novel sentences indeed strongly drive and suppress the activity of human language areas in new individuals. A systematic analysis of the model-selected sentences reveals that surprisal and well-formedness of linguistic input are key determinants of response strength in the language network. These results establish the ability of neural network models to not only mimic human language but also non-invasively control neural activity in higher-level cortical areas, such as the language network.

The decline in sperm counts is a growing concern worldwide, with rates plummeting by as much as 52% since the 1970s. This alarming trend has far-reaching implications for human health and reproduction, raising questions about the future of fertility and the potential consequences for individuals, families, and society as a whole.

News coverage: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240219-zombie-deer-disease-risks-for-humans

Abstract

This only seems to be available as an abstract. I've tried tracking down the full study through my university's journal access but can't seem to find it. Can anyone else?

https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jvi.00549-24

https://medium.com/p/2587fc2d6932 In a recent study conducted by researchers from the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli in Italy, a surprising discovery was made: microplastics were found within arterial plaques. These tiny plastic particles, measuring less than 5 millimeters in length, were present in approximately 60% of the plaques removed from patients with atherosclerosis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydnaviriformidae#Life_cycle

Parasitoid wasps serve as hosts for the virus, and Lepidoptera serve as hosts for these wasps. The female wasp injects one or more eggs into its host along with a quantity of virus. The virus and wasp are in a mutualistic symbiotic relationship: expression of viral genes prevents the wasp's host's immune system from killing the wasp's injected egg and causes other physiological alterations that ultimately cause the parasitized host to die. Transmission routes are parental.[2]

Hehehe

There's no simple way to simply copy and paste stuff. if you're interested - check the page.

(A) Detail of skin pattern of a giant pufferfish, which bears resemblance to B. (B) A computational simulation for a simple reaction-diffusion system.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that the organized formation of subretinal drusenoid deposits (SDDs) may be a Turing pattern. Methods: A Java-based computational model of an inferred reaction-diffusion system using paired partial differential equations was used to create topographic images. Reaction kinetics were varied to...

[continues]

In an investigation into mysterious illnesses in dairy cows in Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico, tests on unpasteurized milk and nasal swabs have revealed highly pathogenic avian flu in Kansas and Texas, according to a statement today from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS).

The cow's symptoms included decreased milk production, low appetite, and other symptoms. APHIS said the infections were primarily seen in older dairy cows. The new development comes less than a week after Minnesota veterinary officials detected H5N1 avian flu in baby goats at a farm where the virus had been detected in a backyard poultry flock.

The Texas Department of Agriculture said today that the disease has been working its way through the Texas panhandle, puzzling the agriculture industry. It said the cows had flulike symptoms, including fever and thick and discolored milk.

Sporadic outbreaks continue to be reported in US poultry flocks, along with numerous H5N1 detections in a variety of wild birds across many states. Along with the unidentified illnesses, the farms had also reported dead wild birds on the properties. The virus was found in milk samples from sick cows at two dairy farms in Kansas and Texas and in an oropharyngeal sample from another dairy in Texas.

"Based on findings from Texas, the detections appear to have been introduced by wild birds," APHIS said, adding that initial testing by the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, have found no changes that would make the virus more transmissible in humans.

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about the once in a lifetime nova that's supposed to happen in 2024 and will be visible with a naked eye

Links:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13668

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10011

https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.13858

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_Coronae_Borealis

T Coronae Borealis (T CrB), is a recurrent nova in the constellation Corona Borealis.[11] It was first discovered in outburst in 1866 by John Birmingham,[12] although it had been observed earlier as a 10th magnitude star.[13] It may have been observed in 1217 and in 1787 as well

On 20 April 2016, the Sky and Telescope website reported a sustained brightening since February 2015 from magnitude 10.5 to about 9.2. A similar event was reported in 1938, followed by another outburst in 1946.[22] By June 2018, the star had dimmed slightly but still remained at an unusually high level of activity. In March or April 2023, it dimmed to magnitude 12.3.[23] A similar dimming occurred in the year before the 1946 outburst, indicating that it will likely erupt between March and September 2024.[24]

In the video, he says that it should be bright enough to see in a city and that light pollution likely won't impact it.

Four light years may seem like an unfathomably long distance, but in comparison to the size of our galaxy, it's practically right next door. In fact, it's close enough that the Alpha Centauri system has nearly the same constellations as we do, just subtly warped due to the relatively small parallax factor.

The only caveat is that they're missing the brightest star in Centaurus, having traded it for an additional bright star in Cassiopeia on the opposite side of the sky. The Sun's stellar magnitude is 0.5 from that distance, that's about as bright as Betelgeuse in Orion.

I don't think we'll ever be so lucky that our closest star system just happens to contain a planet with alien life on it. That said, it's so surreal to think about even just the possibility of a life harboring planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. I'm imagining those creatures looking at the Sun in their night sky and wondering themselves about the existence of neighboring aliens.

(To clarify, Alpha Centauri is actually a triple star system close enough together to look like a single star to the naked eye. Alpha Centauri A and B are both sun-like stars with a roughly similar mass and brightness. Proxima Centauri is the nearest of the three, and it's a red dwarf with confirmed planets.)