26 Feb Water in the solar system: How much Earth has versus Europa and Pluto

Earth seems drenched with water from mountaintop to ocean bottom. But our home planet is a desert compared to some places the solar system, both in terms of its total water volume and the amount of liquid on Earth relative to its size.

Consider Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa, which is smaller than Earth’s moon. Scientists recently used 20-year-old Voyager data to find even more evidence that Europa has twice as much water as our planet. Even tiny Pluto may have an ocean nearly as large as Earth’s.

Steve Vance, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has kept a close eye on research about ocean worlds over the years. He has rounded up estimates of ice thickness and ocean depth throughout the solar system to calculate roughly how much water may exist.

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26 Feb World’s largest bee, Megachile pluto, thought extinct, has been spotted for the first time since 1981

Scientists were delighted when a team of researchers recently found the world’s largest bee (Megachile pluto) in Indonesia.
Scientists feared it might be extinct — until now.

One of the first images of a living Wallace’s giant bee. Megachile pluto is the world’s largest bee, which is approximately 4 times longer than a European honey bee. A group of researchers made a stunning "rediscovery" of the elusive critter and took the first photos and video of a living Wallace’s giant bee on January 25, 2019.

The team — composed of natural history photographer Clay Bolt, entomologist Eli Wyman, behavioral ecologist Simon Robson and ornithologist Glenn Chilton — spent years studying the bee and slogged around in humid Indonesia forests for days before stumbling upon one.

The rediscovery has renewed hope that more of the region’s forests are home to the rare species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies this species as "vulnerable" due to mining and quarrying.

Only two other lucky fellows are documented to have seen it in person before. The first was British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered the giant bee in 1858 while exploring the tropical Indonesian island of Bacan. Entomologist Adam Messer became the second in 1981.

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26 Feb AI, big data and precision medicine in cancer: challenges to face

While AI and big data are more and more used to tackle cancer, experts caution: there cannot be exceptionalism for AI in medicine. It requires rigorous studies, publication of the results in peer-reviewed journals, and clinical validation in a real-world environment, before implementation in patient care.

2019 has begun with news regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data in cancer. In the UK, the NHS has started a collaboration with Kheiron Medical to AI algorithms to try to diagnose breast cancer as competently or more than human radiologists, launching a trial on historic scans, Financial Times reports. In the US, Recursion Pharmaceuticals has announced the in-licensing of a clinical-stage drug candidate (REC-2282) for Neurofibromatosis type 2 or NF2, a rare hereditary cancer predisposition syndrome. The drug was identified using their artificial intelligence and big data platform. Many companies – including Google – are developing their own AI and data systems for a better assessment of cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: cancerworld.net

26 Feb Dubai Police starts training on flying motorbikes

Dubai Police now have a revamped model of the hoverbike — and they’ve taken it for a test flight.

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19 Feb Massive collision in the exoplanetary system Kepler 107

Since, in 1995 the first extrasolar planet was discovered almost 4,000 planets have been found around the nearest stars. This allows us to study a large variety of configurations for these planetary systems. The evolution of the planets orbiting other stars can be affected, mainly, by two phenomena: the evaporation of the upper layers of the planet due to the effect of the X-rays and ultraviolet emitted by the central star, and by the impacts of other celestial bodies of the size of a planet.

The former effect has been observed a number of times in extrasolar systems, but until now there have been no proof of the existence of major impacts, as has apparently occurred in the Kepler 107 system.

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19 Feb Artificial Intelligence Study of Human Genome Finds Unknown Human Ancestor

A recent study used machine learning technology to analyze eight leading models of human origins and evolution, and the program identified evidence in the human genome of a “ghost population” of human ancestors. The analysis suggests that a previously unknown and long-extinct group of hominins interbred with Homo sapiens in Asia and Oceania somewhere along the long, winding road of human evolutionary history, leaving behind only fragmented traces in modern human DNA.

The study, published in Nature Communications, is one of the first examples of how machine learning can help reveal clues to our own origins. By poring through vast amounts of genomic data left behind in fossilized bones and comparing it with DNA in modern humans, scientists can begin to fill in some of the gaps of our species’ evolutionary history.

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19 Feb More than thousand new objects and phenomena detected in the night sky

Casual stargazers may look at the black area among stars and think that there’s nothing there except empty space. But the night sky hides many secrets invisible to the naked eye.

Less than a year into its mission, a sky-survey camera in Southern California shows just how full the sky is. The Zwicky Transient Facility, based at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, has identified over a thousand new objects and phenomena in the night sky, including more than 1,100 new supernovae and 50 near-Earth asteroids, as well as binary star systems and black holes.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.washington.edu

12 Feb New computational method helps to detect any human virus

Computational method helps scientists examine microbes at a larger, more comprehensive scale than previously possible.

During the Zika virus outbreak of 2015–16, public health officials scrambled to contain the epidemic and curb the pathogen’s devastating effects on pregnant women. At the same time, scientists around the globe tried to understand the genetics of this mysterious virus. The problem was, there just aren’t many Zika virus particles in the blood of a sick patient. Looking for it in clinical samples can be like fishing for a minnow in an ocean.

A new computational method developed by Broad Institute scientists helps overcome this hurdle. Built in the lab of Broad Institute researcher Pardis Sabeti, the “CATCH” method can be used to design molecular “baits” for any virus known to infect humans and all their known strains, including those that are present in low abundance in clinical samples, such as Zika. The approach can help small sequencing centers around the globe conduct disease surveillance more efficiently and cost-effectively, which can provide crucial information for controlling outbreaks.

The new study was led by MIT graduate student Hayden Metsky and postdoctoral researcher Katie Siddle, and it appears online in Nature Biotechnology.

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12 Feb Scientists Develop First Fabric to Automatically Cool or Insulate Depending on Conditions

Despite decades of innovation in fabrics with high-tech thermal properties that keep marathon runners cool or alpine hikers warm, there has never been a material that changes its insulating properties in response to the environment. Until now.

University of Maryland researchers have created a fabric that can automatically regulate the amount of heat that passes through it. When conditions are warm and moist, such as those near a sweating body, the fabric allows infrared radiation (heat) to pass through. When conditions become cooler and drier, the fabric reduces the heat that escapes. The development was reported in the February 8, 2019 issue of the journal Science.

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