https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0lw0nxw71po Now for the first time scientists researching the brain of a fly have identified the position, shape and connections of every single one of its 130,000 cells and 50 million connections.       ..read more

Quote Abstract When a pulse of light traverses a material, it incurs a time delay referred to as the group delay. Should the group delay experienced by photons be attributed to the time they spend as atomic excitations? However reasonable this connection may seem, it appears problematic when the frequency of the light is close to the atomic resonance, as the group delay becomes negative in this regime. To address this question, we use the cross-Kerr effect to probe the degree of atomic excitation caused by a resonant transmitted photon, by measuring the phase shift on a separate beam that is ..read more

An interesting study looks at factors related to COVID-19 refusal. There has been an ongoing debate whether hesitancy was fueled by lack of good information or whether there are other drivers. This study focuses on how folks process information and found an important impact in the form of deliberate ignorance: Quote Vaccine hesitancy was a major challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. A common but sometimes ineffective intervention to reduce vaccine hesitancy involves providing information on vaccine effectiveness, side effects, and related probabilities. Could biased processing of this info ..read more

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/science/ig-nobel-prize-ceremony-2024-intl-scli/index.html CNN —  The world still holds many unanswered questions. But thanks to the efforts of the research teams awarded the IG Nobel Prize on Thursday, some of these questions – which you might not even have thought existed – now have answers. We now know that many mammals can breathe through their anuses, that there isn’t an equal probability that a coin will land on head or tails, that some real plants somehow imitate the shapes of neighboring fake plastic plants, that fake medicine which cau ..read more

LQG (loop quantum gravity) predicts the minutest dependence of the speed of light on frequency, which would be best detectable on large populations of high-energy photons with very long astrophysical paths. A good candidate to test this would be a very far away (=> very early) gamma ray burst. GRB 221009A stepped forward some years ago. Quote Very recently, the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) reported the observation of the very early TeV afterglow of the brightest-of-all-time GRB 221009A, recording the highest photon statistics in the TeV band ever from ..read more

The stratigraphic record is very sparse to missing for the period when it was thought that there may have been an intense ice age of the magnitude tojustify the name Snowball Earth. This report suggests that this was about 720 mya. It also suggests that the full stratigraphy is to be found on some remote Scottish Islands. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj9l2mrn43jo Quote A cluster of Scottish islands could help solve one of our planet's greatest mysteries, scientists say. The Garvellach islands off the west coast of Scotland are the best record of Earth entering its biggest ever ice age ..read more

Brain Scientists Finally Discover the Glue that Makes Memories Stick for a Lifetime   The persistence of memory is crucial to our sense of identity, and without it, there would be no learning, for us or any other animal. It’s little wonder, then, that some researchers have called how the brain stores memories the most fundamental question in neuroscience. A milestone in the effort to answer this question came in the early 1970s, with the discovery of a phenomenon called long-term potentiation, or LTP. Scientists found that electrically stimulating a synapse that connects two neurons cause ..read more

New paper regarding Hubble contention https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06153 Edit forgot to add a few years back local cluster measurements by HOLICOW were not matching up to CMB measurements. The bulk of the research as to cause from what I've been able to gather have been in regards to local group calibrations similar to the above paper ..read more

The WHO has (again) declared the rapid spread of mpox across 13 countries in Africa an emergency over fears of a global spread.    Quote The threat this time is deadlier. Since the beginning of this year, the Democratic Republic of Congo alone has reported 15,600 mpox cases and 537 deaths. Those most at risk include women and children under 15. “The detection and rapid spread of a new clade of mpox in eastern D.R.C., its detection in neighboring countries that had not previously reported mpox, and the potential for further spread within Africa and beyond is very worrying,” said&nbs ..read more

Scientists find humans age dramatically in two bursts – at 44, then 60 US findings suggesting ageing is not a slow and steady process could explain spikes in health issues at certain ages If you have noticed a sudden accumulation of wrinkles, aches and pains or a general sensation of having grown older almost overnight, there may be a scientific explanation. Research suggests that rather than being a slow and steady process, aging occurs in at least two accelerated bursts. The study, which tracked thousands of different molecules in people aged 25 to 75, detected two major waves of age-relat ..read more