The Sci Tech World

Cancer has always been thought of as something that grows rapidly and uncontrollably, but this view may be wrong. New evidence suggests that cancer alternatively uses the "accelerator" and the "brake" in order to survive. If you plot the growth of prostate cancer tumour progression over years, you get a graph that looks something like this: The graph shows that prostate cancer cells alternate periods of rapid growth with periods of dormancy. In the above example, the tumour will grow to the point where it starts to produce symptoms and the patient seeks treatment – which usually involves cutting the tumour out. Surgery is often effective but, for some unfortunate patients, their cancer will return. At this point it is often treated with hormone therapy and chemotherapy. But even these treatments don't always spell the end of the cancer. For some patients, the cancer will recur after a period of dormancy. During the periods of dormancy, which could last several y...

China is due to launch the world’s 1st quantum communications satellite into space  July, as report by Digital Trends. The 500-kilogram (1,100 pounds) box of complex bolts is piece of the novel Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) mission, which will travel through the atmosphere on the extensive March 2D rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. This satellite aims to check the decidedly spooky phenomenon of quantum entanglement. As it turns out, 2 particles act as a co-dependent pair when they are alienated by large distances. Their properties are connected, or “mirrored,” and the 2 act as one individual system. Strangely, a measurement on one particle will be a measurement telling the entire entangled system; it is as if one particle in the pair “knows” what measurement has been conduct on the other, despite the fact that there is no way in which any physical in order is life form actively transmitted between the two particles This means that a satell...

NASA has been in fact busy on Mars lately. In the previous couple of years our total views about Mars changed radically: from a empty planet believed to be dry and dead, today we see Mars as the next top thing close to Earth. Abrubtly, all and sundry loves Mars, and everybody is talking about the red planet. But what do NASA researchers say about the red planet? There is water… liquid water on Mars! Not extended ago, NASA researchers at previous confessed that the red planet had real rivers of flowing water on its outside. According to Lujdendra Ojha, planetary researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology who completed the finding using pictures from NASA’s MRO, the red planet has liquid water on the surface. This ruling changed everything we thought about the red planet. And all of a unexpected the likelihood of Alien life anywhere on the red planet is not that far away. “Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we supposed of in the past … [and] liquid water has been discovered on...

For months, physicists have been silently freaking out over tantalising proof of a brand new atom lying outside the normal model of physics. First seen as a 'blip' in Large Hadron Collider data, the hunt is now on to corroborate its existence, which experts say would be "larger than the [discovery of the] Higgs boson". And physicists have presently made the case that another latest particle could be waiting to be discovered, by showing that the survival of a mysterious latest particle, which they're calling 'particle X', could explain a important conundrum in physics: where the heck all the absent lithium in the Universe went to. If you haven't heard about the container of the missing cosmic lithium, don't worry, we weren't across it either. But it turns out that scientists have intended all the lithium that should have shaped in the early Universe, and it's about three times more lithium than we watch today. For additional than a decade th...

On December 30, the global Union of Pure and practical Chemistry, or IUPAC, announced the bureaucrat discovery of four latest elements. But back in December, not any of these newbies yet had a name. That had to wait awaiting today. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 — fill out the seventh row of the episodic table of the elements. All are superheavies. That’s why they sit at the base right of the bench (see above). Naming rights classically go to those who find out an element. And that’s what happen here. Element 113 was exposed by scientists at RIKEN in Wako, Japan. They’ve ask to call it nihonium, to be shortened as Nh. This name comes from Nihon. It’s Japanese for “Land of the Rising Sun,” which is what a lot of people call Japan. Element 115 will turn out to be moscovium, abridged as Mc. It refers to the Moscow area. And that was where the combined organization for Nuclear Research is based (Dubna). It exposed number 115 in teamwork with researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Labor...

The Pawnee citizens took literally the thought that we are all star stuff. In their cosmology, which dates back at slightest 700 years, the first woman was born from the wedding of stars, and the first man from the union of the sun & moon. The stars themselves were sent by the creator god, Tirawa, who tasked them with investment up the sky. The brightest stars were entrust with Earth’s climate, which was thought to be the key to its fruitfulness. But this arrangement complete some lesser stars jealous, so they stole a sack of violent storm that belong to the brighter stars and emptied them on the Earth, and this is how loss came to the world. Today, the clouds, wind, and rain are motionless the principal ways that humans knowledge the sky, and that experience is altering. The Pawnee live through thunderstorms and tornadoes, but ours are probable to become more violent as climate alter worsens. And our night sky is altering too. As light pollution intensify, it’s emptying out of sta...

Good information alien hunters! A Kickstarter to fund a year-long study into KIC 8462852—the star voted most likely to harbor an higher alien civilization—just got funded. Alien megastructure or not, we may lastly get to the bottom of this bewildering, flickering star. This crowdfunding movement was set up in May by Yale astronomer Tabby Boyajian, and it manage to meet its $100,000 goal in just 30 days. A $10,000 surge in the previous 100 minutes of the campaign managed to put the plan over the top. The next step is to figure out the logistics, but Boyajian, who’s been leading the study into KIC 8462852, says observations could create as early as later this summer. The ultimate goal of the plan will be to decide why this star’s light dims at such irregular intervals, and at times by as a great deal as 20 percent. These huge dips in luminosity are way too great to be a passing planet, hence the doubt the anomaly is being caused by swarms of comets, a indistinct star, some unidentified a...

A team of reconstructive surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital has performed the world’s first penis and scrotum transplant to repair a US military veteran’s battle wounds sustained in Afghanistan. Better yet, it’s likely the patient will regain both urinary and sexual function. “We are hopeful that this transplant will help restore near-normal urinary and sexual functions for this young man,” said Professor W. P. Andrew Lee in a statement. Nine plastic surgeons and two urological surgeons performed the 14-hour surgery on March 26, transplanting the entire penis, scrotum (without testicles), and partial abdominal wall from a deceased donor. Surgeons also connected three arteries, four veins, and two nerves to provide blood flow and sensation, reports USA Today. “It’s a real mind-boggling injury to suffer, it is not an easy one to accept,” said the recipient, who chooses to remain anonymous. “When I first woke up, I felt finally more normal… [with] a level of confidence as well. Confidence...

Scientists have for the first time captured visual evidence of the existence of tubular plasma structures in the inner layers of the magnetosphere nearby the Earth. “For over 60 years, scientists believed these structures existed but by imaging them for the first time, we’ve provided visual evidence that they are really there,” Cleo Loi of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) and the School of Physics at the University of Sydney said. Loi is the lead author on this research, done as part of her award-winning undergraduate thesis and published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “The discovery of the structures is important because they cause unwanted signal distortions that could, as one example, affect our civilian and military satellite-based navigation systems. So we need to understand them,” she said. The plasma structures are explained in this clip: The region of space around the Earth occupied by its magnetic field, called the magnetosphere, is...

One is the loneliest figure, especially when you are a lone moon circling the planet full of humans. But let’s not lose hope here since NASA just announced that there might be a second moon come to stay you company. This newly exposed moon is smaller than our moon and goes about the Earth astonishingly irregularly, but motionless, two is quite improved than one. This second “moon,” is actually an asteroid called 2016 HO3 and it is at present locked into “a little dance” with Earth. It's being called as "Quasi-Moon". This latest moon has been dancing around for over a century currently. Its orbit is extremely elliptical, moving it to go a wee bit off tangent—between 38 and 100 times the distance of Earth’s primary moon—and bob up and down across Earth’s orbital plane. This new moon is skewed by about 8° and it orbits the Sun for 365.93 days, which is a little longer than-Earth’s 365.24 day-long year. NASA said: “Since 2016 HO3 loops around our planet, but never ventures ve...

Physicists in the US presently made the most precise measurement ever made of the present rate of growth of the Universe, but there is a problem: our Universe is expanding 8 percent quicker than our present laws of physics can give details. Currently astronomers are looking over once more at their measurements and if turn out to be right, this latest measurement will automatically force us to redefine how dark substance and dark energy have been manipulating the evolution of the Universe for the past 13.8 billion years, and that can’t be done without changing or addition something in the typical model of particle Physics. According to the present model of cosmology, the major influence on the growth of the Universe is the rivalry between dark substance and dark energy. While the gravitational pull of dark matter seem to be slowing down the growth of the Cosmos, dark energy appear to be pulling it in the opposite way to create it accelerate. Astrophysicists learned this with the help of...

The finding of manganese oxides in Martian rocks power tell us that the Red Planet was once extra Earth-like than before believed. A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters reveals that NASA's Curiosity rover experiential high levels of manganese oxides in Martian rocks, which could indicate that higher levels of atmospheric oxygen once existed on our adjacent planet. This hint of more oxygen in Mars' early on atmosphere adds to other Curiosity findings—such as proof of ancient lakes—revealing how Earth-like our adjacent planet once was. "The only ways on Earth that we know how to create these manganese materials involve atmospheric oxygen or microbes," said Nina Lanza, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and guide author on the learn published in the American Geophysical Union's journal. "Now we're considering manganese-oxides on Mars and wonder how the heck these could have shaped." Lanza uses the Los Alamos-developed ChemCam ...

China presently finished installing the previous piece in the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, which stretches the size of 30 soccer fields on the side of a mountain in the south-western area of Guizhou. The 500-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST for short, will be used to explore some of the majority mysterious objects in the Universe, such as black holes and pulsars, and will "search for intelligent life from outer space", according to China's state broadcaster CCTV. The US$185 million telescope will be able to detect radio waves coming from space in more detail than ever before, and will let us peer back in time to into the web of hydrogen gas that existed before galaxies formed in the early Universe. "FAST will enable Chinese astronomers to jump-start many scientific goals, such as surveying the neutral hydrogen in the Milky Way, detecting faint pulsars, and listening to probable signals from other civilisations," said Nan Rendong, u...

NASA's Curiosity rover suddenly put itself into a precautionary safe mode over the weekend, and is at present at a stand-still on the surface of Mars. Engineers still aren't sure what happen to make the rover control down, but early investigations suggest there power have been some kind of glitch between the camera and data dispensation software. The good news is that Curiosity is steady for the time being, and is communicating with opinion controllers. But in arrange to get it up and running again, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) team first require to figure out what went wrong. "The rover put itself into safe mode on July 2, ceasing the majority activities other than custody itself healthy and following a agreed sequence for resume communications," the JPL team wrote in a press release. "Preliminary in order indicates an unforeseen mismatch between camera software and data-processing software in the main computer." We'll probably recognize mor...

Physicists have move toward up with a latest way to predict what lies past the happening horizon of a black hole, and it could give us an extra precise idea of their mysterious center structures. Thanks to the first - and at present second - direct observation of gravitational waves emanating from what scientists think are black hole mergers, we’re breach to get our 1st real data that black holes do actually exist in reality, not currently theory. But even if we can show they in truth do physically exist, there’s no in receipt of around the fact that, thanks to their top gravitational pull, black holes swallow up amazing that falls beyond their event horizon. Not immobile light can escape the pull of a black hole, and that profits no instrument on Earth, no matter how sophisticated, can visualise what precisely is exit on in there. Wormholes? Singularity? All the pens? (Please let it be wormholes.) Study black holes is on the whole like liability science backwards. Usually you’ll obser...

Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be perfectly nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe. In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe—from the microscopic to the supermassive—may be ultimate doorways into alternate realities. According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn’t collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a “white hole” at the other end of the black one, the theory goes. In a paper published in the journal Physics Letters B, Indiana University physicist Nikodem Poplawski presents new mathematical models of the spiraling motion of matter falling into a black hole. His equations suggest such wormholes are viable alternatives to the “space-time singularities” that Albert Einstein predicted to be at the centers of black holes. According to Einstein’s equations for general relativity, s...

Footage which claims to demonstrate a small alien peeping out from a rock on the scarlet Planet has gone viral online. The video post on YouTube by Paranormal Crucible is at liberty ‘Tiny Alien Spotted On Mars?’ The channel is said to have dotted the humanoid in images uploaded online by NASA from the Curiosity Rover droid which is scouring the outside for signs of life - but appear to have missed it. Sign of life? A tiny alien or presently shading on a rock? A promotional blurb for the video said: "Interesting irregularity found by the rover, which looks like a little Martian. "I have colorised the picture and added eyes to the head so its easier to see, but all is there in the original picture, whatever it is it looks humanoid, remind me of the Atacama Alien, about the similar size too, this one is around 6 inches." It is the newest in a series of alleged tiny aliens found in NASA images of Mars, and a number of alien chasers claim the planet could be occupied by tiny ...

It's a Top news, shocking, yet amazing, and amusing to the world. But unfortunately, it has nothing to do with aliens stoners melding with Earth's plants. But, since you're currently reading, you'll roughly definitely be worried about this research that looked into the click and sharing behavior of social media users reading pleased (or not) and then sharing it on social media. I have notice long ago that more than a few of our followers will happily like, share and present an opinion on an article - all with no ever reading it. They waited to see if their followers would weigh in with an view without clicking the link, and they weren't disappointed. We've been hoping for a possibility to try it ourselves, and this seemed like the ideal opportunity. Yackler had some fun with the same article and manage to fool a group of people. A collection of computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National organization looked into a dataset of over 2.8 milli...

There is confirmation to indicate the Big Bang may have resulted from one more, earlier space collapsing in on itself, rather than from increasing from a point on much hot and dense material. in its place, the universe appear to be going through constant phases of growth (as it is at present) and reduction in a never-ending cycle. This theory of space formation, known as the Big Bounce, was 1st proposed almost a century ago. However, until now scientists have not been clever to explain how the space could transition between a contracting state and an increasing one without most important to an infinite point, where the laws of physics split down and the universe is totally destroyed. In a learn published in the journal Physical Review Letters, researchers say quantum workings could allow for a collapsing space to transition back to an increasing one – making the Big Bounce theory a option. In the space we see today, particles smaller than atoms behave in dissimilar ways to larger matte...

Stephen Hawking has been really worried newly and some might say that some of his newest statements have been somewhat dire. He appear to be worried about Alien beings and artificial intelligence and presently as he said in a statement last year, we evolve so slowly that it could just stomp us out. Now, in a latest interview with Spain’s newspaper ‘El Pais’, one of the majority significant researchers on Earth, Stephen Hawking said that he worries that there are Alien being out there that strength extinguish us. According to the world-renowned physicists, it strength be poorer than when Columbus reached to the Americas. Computers will surpass humans with AI at a number of point in the next 100 years. When that occurs, we require making sure the computers have objectives aligned with ours” "Such advanced aliens would probably become nomads, look to overcome and colonize whatsoever planets they can arrive at," Hawking told El Pais. "To my mathematical brain, the numbers al...

Doctors in a Canadian intensive care unit have stumbled on a very strange case - when life support was turned off for four terminal patients, one of them showed persistent brain activity even after they were declared clinically dead. For more than 10 minutes after doctors confirmed death through a range of observations, including the absence of a pulse and unreactive pupils, the patient appeared to experience the same kind of brain waves (delta wave bursts) we get during deep sleep. And it's an entirely different phenomenon to the sudden 'death wave' that's been observed in rats following decapitation. one patient, single delta wave bursts persisted following the cessation of both the cardiac rhythm and arterial blood pressure (ABP)," the team from the University of Western Ontario in Canada reports They also found that death could be a unique experience for each individual, noting that across the four patients, the frontal electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings ...

Whenever we've tried to test the effects that living in isolation without sunlight have on the body, a common thread has emerged: much longer sleep cycles. Back in 2015, Julie Beck over at The Atlantic pulled together the findings from a number of different experiments that all saw the participants involved drifting off for days at a time... and suffering some fairly acute mental stresses along the way too. Take cave explorers Josie Laures and Antoine Senni, for example, who lived underground for months in the 1960s. When they emerged from their self-imposed solitude (having stayed in separate caves), both thought much less time had passed than was actually the case, to the tune of several weeks. What's more, Senni would sometimes sleep for stretches of 30 hours at a time, then wake up believing he'd just had a short nap. Researchers on the surface kept in touch with the pair and monitored their vital statistics for any signs of deteriorating health, but they didn't off...

One of the chemical elements essential to life is phosphorus, but the latest research suggests there may be less of it in the wider Universe than we thought. That could be bad news for those hoping to find alien life out there in space. Scientists think that life-giving phosphorus – capable of triggering the chemical reactions necessary to spark the development of organisms – was carried to Earth via meteorites. With that in mind, it could point to the chances of life existing on other planets. Phosphorus is particularly important for the compound adenosine triphosphate, or ATP – the molecule cells use to store and transfer energy. For this new study, researchers examined readings from the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary islands. They measured the infrared light produced by phosphorus and iron in the Crab Nebula, the leftovers of a supernova some 6,500 light-years away from Earth. Comparing the readings to those previously taken from the Cassiopeia A (Cas A) supernova remnant,...

Caltech scientists have created a strain of bacteria that can make small but energy-packed carbon rings that are useful starting materials for creating other chemicals and materials. These rings, which are otherwise particularly difficult to prepare, now can be “brewed” in much the same way as beer. The bacteria were created by researchers in the lab of Frances Arnold, Caltech’s Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry, using directed evolution, a technique Arnold developed in the 1990s. The technique allows scientists to quickly and easily breed bacteria with the traits that they desire. It has previously been used by Arnold’s lab to evolve bacteria that create carbon-silicon and carbon-boron bonds, neither of which is found among organisms in the natural world. Using this same technique, they set out to build the tiny carbon rings rarely seen in nature. “Bacteria can now churn out these versatile, energy-rich organic structures,” Arnold says. “...

Theoretical physicists have confirmed that it's not just the information coded into our DNA that shapes who we are - it's also the way DNA folds itself that controls which genes are expressed inside our bodies. That's something biologists have known for years, and they've even been able to figure out some of the proteins responsible for folding up DNA. But now a group of physicists have been able to demonstrate for the first time through simulations how this hidden information controls our evolution. Let's back up for a second here, because although it's not necessarily news to many scientists, this second level of DNA information might not be something you're familiar with.As you probably learnt in high school, Watson and Crick discovered in 1953 that the DNA code that determines who we are is made up of a sequence of the letters G, A, C, and T. The order of these letters determines which proteins are made in our cells. So, if you have brown eyes, it's ...

For the first time, scientists have identified the existence of a new DNA structure never before seen in living cells. The discovery of what's described as a 'twisted knot' of DNA in living cells confirms our complex genetic code is crafted with more intricate symmetry than just the double helix structure everybody associates with DNA – and the forms these molecular variants take affect how our biology functions. "When most of us think of DNA, we think of the double helix," says antibody therapeutics researcher Daniel Christ from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia. "This new research reminds us that totally different DNA structures exist – and could well be important for our cells." The new DNA component the team identified is called the intercalated motif (i-motif) structure, which was first discovered by researchers in the 1990s, but up until now had only ever been witnessed in vitro, not in living cells. Now, thanks to Christ's ...

Vacuum birefringence is a weird quantum phenomenon that has only ever been observed on an atomic scale. It occurs when a neutron star is surrounded by a magnetic field so intense, its given rise to a region in empty space where matter randomly appears and vanishes. It is also sometimes referred to as the self-energy of the gauge boson. This polarization of light in a vacuum due to strong magnetic fields was first thought to be possible in the 1930s by physicists Werner Heisenberg and Hans Heinrich Euler as a product of the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED). The theory describes how light and matter interact. Now, for the first time ever, this strange quantum effect has been observed by a team of scientists from INAF Milan (Italy) and from the University of Zielona Gora (Poland). Using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), a research team led by Roberto Mignani observed neutron star RX J1856.5-375, which is about 400 light-years from Earth. Neutron ...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water. The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system. All of these seven planets could have liquid water -- key to life as we know it -- under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone. "This discovery could be a significant piece in the puzzle of finding habitable environments, places that are conducive to life," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "Answering the question 'are we alone' is a top science priority and finding so many planets like these for the first time in the habitable z...