Cop Car's Beat

Oh, yuck!

"Oh, yuck!" was what popped into my head when first I read the header of the item, below, from Slashdot.org. Of course, I would be in line to try out the product. I postulate that should I try it out on Hunky Husband, he would (not knowing its origin) pronounce that his portion was gristly.

 

3D-Printed Plant-Based Steaks Could Arrive In 2021 (engadget.com) 27

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday July 02, 2020 @06:00AM from the what-to-expect dept.

In 2021, Israeli startup Redefine Meat plans to launch a 3D printer that will allow customers to produce plant-based flank steak at home. Engadget reports: Redefine Meat says that through 3D printing, it's able to create plant-based meat with the same "appearance, texture and flavor of animal meat," according to its website. Texture specifically seems to be the 3D printer's hallmark achievement. "You need a 3D printer to mimic the structure of the muscle of the animal," Redefine Meat CEO Eshchar Ben-Shitrit told Reuters.

3D printing differs from other methods companies have used for reproducing meat taste and texture. Both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat use combinations of plant-based proteins, oils and binders, like methylcellulose and potato starch, to achieve a realistic texture for their ground beef and patties -- though the texture of ground beef is arguably easier to achieve than that of steak. Atlast Food uses mushroom fibers to emulate animal tissue in its meatless bacon.

 

More from Slashdot.org - black matter found - NOT

The diamond stamp cell that was used to create black nitrogen

Christian Wißler

Never-Before-Seen 'Black Nitrogen' Plugs Puzzle in Periodic Table (newatlas.com) 32

Posted by msmash on Friday June 05, 2020 @07:30PM from the unravelling-mysteries dept.

Researchers at the University of Bayreuth have created a form of nitrogen that's never been seen before. Nicknamed "black nitrogen," the new substance is crystalline, occurs in two-dimensional sheets, and could one day be useful in advanced electronics. From a report: Strangely enough, the idea that black nitrogen didn't exist has long been considered a mystery. The periodic table is arranged in recurring "periods" where each column is made up of elements with similar properties. Those at the top have the fewest protons and the lowest weight, and each successive element in the group gains protons and weight. Under high pressure, elements on the top of a column usually take on structures similar to elements further down the group. These different forms are known as allotropes. Ozone is an allotrope of oxygen, for example, while graphite and diamond are both allotropes of carbon. But nitrogen only has one allotrope -- dinitrogen -- and doesn't have any that resemble heavier elements in its group. This was always considered a bit weird, but now a new study has found a previously-unknown allotrope that shows that nitrogen isn't an exception to the rule, as has long been believed.

More from Slashdot.org - a great lunar and/or a great COVID-19 project?

NASA Contemplates Turning a Moon Crater Into a Giant, Powerful Telescope (cnet.com) 59

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday April 09, 2020 @03:00AM from the decisions-decisions dept.

NASA has selected a lunar-crater radio telescope idea to receive funding through its NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, the agency announced on Tuesday. The Phase I award goes to projects in very early stages of development. CNET reports: Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, a robotics technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is the mind behind the moon dream. Making it happen would require sending robots to the far side of the moon and using the machines to deploy a wire mesh over a crater. Bandyopadhyay's proposal lists the benefits of locating a telescope on the far side of the moon, including that "the moon acts as a physical shield that isolates the lunar-surface telescope from radio interferences/noises from Earth-based sources, ionosphere, Earth-orbiting satellites, and sun's radio-noise during the lunar night."

The moon telescope project is one of 23 concepts that received part of a $7 million investment through NIAC. The Phase I award consists of $125,000 to fund a nine-month study of the idea. Other concepts include investigating solar sails, lunar landing pads and a robotic explorer for Saturn's moon Enceladus. NASA pointed out that these projects will mostly require a decade or more of technology development, and that they are not official NASA missions

 

70 Coronavirus Vaccines in Development, 3 Candidates Already Undergoing Human Trials (theprint.in) 3

Posted by msmash on Monday April 13, 2020 @04:10PM from the moving-forward dept.

There are 70 coronavirus vaccines in development globally, with three candidates already being tested in human trials, according to the World Health Organization, as drugmakers race to find a cure for the deadly pathogen. From a report: The furthest along in the clinical process is an experimental vaccine developed by Hong Kong-listed CanSino Biologics and the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, which is in phase 2. The other two being tested in humans are treatments developed separately by U.S. drugmakers Moderna and Inovio Pharmaceuticals, according to a WHO document. Progress is occurring at unprecedented speed in developing vaccines as the infectious pathogen looks unlikely to be stamped out through containment measures alone. The drug industry is hoping to compress the time it takes to get a vaccine to market -- usually about 10 to 15 years -- to within the next year.

From Hunky Husband's alma mater

Hunky Husband sent me this link to a posting about research being conducted at his alma mater.

From that Missouri University of Science & Technology * posting comes the excerpt, below.

"Researchers at Missouri S&T are developing an airborne-biohazard system that could help screeners spot air travelers with lung diseases due to coronavirus and other viruses. Professors in electrical and computer engineering are using machine learning to build a robust system to alert authorities to airborne biohazards as travelers pass through TSA security checkpoints.

"Assistant professor Dr. Jie Huang and visiting professor Dr. Rex E. Gerald II, their lead graduate student Chen Zhu, and assistant research professor Dr. Qingbo Yang are working on the prototype. Dr. Donald Wunsch, who has expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), recently joined the research effort."

Interesting to us was the fact that Donald Wunsch is involved. He taught the only college class that HH and I ever attended together. As seniors, we took an advanced engineering math class from Dr Wunsch - before he completed his PhD, as I recall. A couple of years, later, HH and I attended a class at Boeing on techniques to improve our memory capabilities.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

*    University of Missouri School of Mines & Metallurgy in our day - Although I did not finish my degree, there, not only did HH get his BSEE (1959) degree there but Elder Brother earned his BSChE (1959) and my late Younger Brother earned his BSEE (1962), MSEE (196?), and PhD GGph (1972) there.

Life without oxygen

I was guided by Slashdot.org to this site from which the following images and text are taken.

NATURE

Scientists Find The First-Ever Animal That Doesn't Need Oxygen to Survive

 

MICHELLE STARR

25 FEB 2020

Some truths about the Universe and our experience in it seem immutable. The sky is up. Gravity sucks. Nothing can travel faster than light. Multicellular life needs oxygen to live. Except we might need to rethink that last one.

....

 Henneguya salminicola (Stephen Douglas Atkinson)

It's a cnidarian, belonging to the same phylum as corals, jellyfish and anemones. Although the cysts it creates in the fish's flesh are unsightly, the parasites are not harmful, and will live with the salmon for its entire life cycle.

Tucked away inside its host, the tiny cnidarian can survive quite hypoxic conditions. But exactly how it does so is difficult to know without looking at the creature's DNA - so that's what the researchers did.

They used deep sequencing and fluorescence microscopy to conduct a close study of H. salminicola, and found that it has lost its mitochondrial genome. In addition, it's also lost the capacity for aerobic respiration, and almost all of the nuclear genes involved in transcribing and replicating mitochondria.

....

(Stephen Douglas Atkinson)

They've lost most of the original jellyfish genome, but retaining - oddly - a complex structure resembling jellyfish stinging cells. They don't use these to sting, but to cling to their hosts: an evolutionary adaptation from the free-living jellyfish's needs to the parasite's. You can see them in the image above - they're the things that look like eyes.

....

Cleaning out the Clutter

A few months ago, I took Hunky Husband into our workshop to see what he wanted done with piles of stuff that were sitting about, not having been moved since we moved into this house 20 years ago. He didn't see anything without which he couldn't live, so I started getting rid of the stuff - partly through placing it in recycle/hazardous waste/ecycle, partly by taking it to Goodwill or the Disabled American Veteran resale shops, and partly through trashing. I made great progress in the first couple of weeks, then my time got diverted to other projects - and I forgot all about it.

Thursday, I decided to replace a towel ring in my bathroom with an 18"-long towel bar. To do this, I retrieved level, steel tape, screw drivers, hex drivers etcetera from the workshop (plus my drill and bits from my sewing room - don't ask!) In the process, I realized that there was still much "stuff" to get out of the workshop. Today, I've focused on getting rid of a large box of stuff that was sitting on the floor and, somehow, stumbled across some vacuum tubes. Well...I've long (perhaps 65 years) had a soft heart for vacuum tubes. But...they gotta go! We have only one piece of equipment that uses vacuum tubes and it, too, is on the "get rid of" list.

Above is a photo of the tubes - and a handful of crystals (at the bottom of the photo) that would be used in fixed-frequency radio frequency oscillators. Woo-hoo. Some of the vacuum tubes are possibly from among a large box of tubes that I bought (at the price of a month's rent) as a freshman in college. That would have been 1955-56. I'm smart enough, now, to realize that the guy who sold them to me had probably stolen them from the US Army (Ft Leonard Wood - near our school); but, I was naïve in those days. And, no, I had no real use for the vacuum tubes at the time, but they were cute! HH has told me that, having imbibed too much one evening during the months in which we dated, I regaled him with my design for a transmitter that I would build to use some of those tubes.

How did the towel bar installation go? Well, the towel bar came with plastic inserts for use in hollow-wall construction. As it happened, one end of the towel bar was to be situated into an area that had something inside the hollow wall. Since I was unsure what was inside that part of the wall and didn't wish to injure the sewer pipe that might possibly run through that area, I came up with a work-around. I used heftier plastic sleeves than had been supplied, cut them off at the pointy end, installed them to act as bearings on the drywall, and used shorter (and larger diameter) screws than had been supplied.

Since I am rarely forethoughtful enough to take "before" photos, I'll give a photo of another towel ring that is in that bathroom. The ring in the photo normally holds a clean wash cloth. The "after" photo shows the installed towel bar. A hand towel gets bunched up in the towel ring, slowing down drying of the towel. (Since the wash cloth that is kept in the towel ring is always dry, being replaced, daily, drying time is not an issue.) The towel bar is long enough that the towel can be spread out, if required, or another wash cloth would fit in the available space.

 

 
 

Three Body Problem

This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-47, the first transiting circumbinary system.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

One graduate-level course, alone, nearly convinced me to give up the study of physics altogether. I felt that I spent 30 years in a one-semester class on the three body problem; thus, I found the following item from Slashdot.org really interesting - if 50 years too late!

AI Cracks Centuries-Old 'Three Body Problem' In Under a Second (livescience.com) 122

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday November 09, 2019 @02:34PM from the matters-of-great-gravity dept.

 

Long-time Slashdot reader taiwanjohn shared this article from Live Science: The mind-bending calculations required to predict how three heavenly bodies orbit each other have baffled physicists since the time of Sir Isaac Newton. Now artificial intelligence (A.I.) has shown that it can solve the problem in a fraction of the time required by previous approaches.

Newton was the first to formulate the problem in the 17th century, but finding a simple way to solve it has proved incredibly difficult. The gravitational interactions between three celestial objects like planets, stars and moons result in a chaotic system -- one that is complex and highly sensitive to the starting positions of each body. Current approaches to solving these problems involve using software that can take weeks or even months to complete calculations. So researchers decided to see if a neural network -- a type of pattern recognizing A.I. that loosely mimics how the brain works -- could do better.

The algorithm they built provided accurate solutions up to 100 million times faster than the most advanced software program, known as Brutus. That could prove invaluable to astronomers trying to understand things like the behavior of star clusters and the broader evolution of the universe, said Chris Foley, a biostatistician at the University of Cambridge and co-author of a paper to the arXiv database, which has yet to be peer-reviewed.

 

Slashdot.org's wise saying of the day: "Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're guessing."

Photon momentum - linear and angular

Johanne Kepler, German astronomer, suggested that "ships and sails proper for heavenly air should be fashioned" to allow space travel. That was about 400 years ago. He was a bit off in his analysis; but, about 250 years later, James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that photons imparted momentum to the surfaces on which they impinged.¹

I recall reading a science fiction story, "The Winds of Space", in my teenage years; but, I can find no evidence that it actually existed. Somehow in the succeeding years, I may have become confused with a short story that was published in 1963².

Yesterday, Slashdot.com led me to an article in Science³ that contains the latest news on the properties of light. Below are excerpts from the article.

Structured Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Light beams carry both energy and momentum, which can exert a small but detectable pressure on objects they illuminate. In 1992, it was realized that light can also possess orbital angular momentum (OAM) when the spatial shape of the beam of light rotates (or twists) around its own axis. Although not visible to the naked eye, the presence of OAM can be revealed when the light beam interacts with matter. OAM beams are enabling new applications in optical communications, microscopy, quantum optics, and microparticle manipulation. To date, however, all OAM beams—also known as vortex beams—have been static; that is, the OAM does not vary in time. Here we introduce and experimentally validate a new property of light beams, manifested as a time-varying OAM along the light pulse; we term this property the self-torque of light.

….

CONCLUSION

We have theoretically predicted and experimentally generated light beams with a new property that we call the self-torque of light, where the OAM content varies extremely rapidly in time, along the pulse itself. This inherent property of light opens additional routes for creating structured light beams. In addition, because the OAM value is changing on femtosecond time scales, at wavelengths much shorter than those of visible light, self-torqued HHG [High Harmonic Generation] beams can be extraordinary tools for laser-matter manipulation on attosecond time and nanometer spatial scales.

In conclusion, I'll have to say that I just don't see it ; ) Thankfully, I don't have to understand all of the new developments to realize how valuable they may come to be. Well done to the huge team responsible.

__________________________

1. Historical data are from A Brief History of Solar Sails
2. Clarke, Arthur C. The Wind From the Sun. 1963
3. Generation of extreme-ultraviolet beams with time-varying orbital angular momentum. Science

Elusive Neutrino - 10 fun facts

A couple of years ago, I had a short posting, Elusive Neutrino¹, which included reference to a couple of books^{2, 3} that I had found interesting. Just for fun, today, I'm posting an excerpt from the All Things Neutrino website developed and owned by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory  |  Managed by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. (The link to the website is included in the right-hand sidebar under 4 Fun & Enlightenment.)

Ten quick facts about neutrinos:

1. Trillions of the harmless particle stream through you every second, night or day.
2. They are the second most abundant particle in the universe (after particles of light called photons).
3. Neutrinos rarely interact with anything—a lightyear of lead would stop only about half of the neutrinos coming from the sun.
4. About 15 billion neutrinos from the Big Bang are in the average room.
5. Neutrinos interact only through two of the four known forces: the weak force and gravity.
6. So far, scientists have discovered three flavors of neutrinos: electron (ν_e), muon (ν_μ), and tau (ν_τ).
7. They oscillate, or change flavor, as they travel.
8. Their masses are very tiny, but not yet known.
9. Their speed is very close to the speed of light, but also not known exactly.
10. They could be the reason that matter exists in the universe.

I had been noodling about various places on the Internet to see if the next solar eclipse will provide an opportunity "to look for lunar neutrino occultation, getting a tomograph of the moon's interior" as Stu of Eunoia had opined in a comment to my previously cited posting. Alas, I think not.

_______________________________

1. List of particles - Wikipedia
2. Solomey, Nickolas. The Elusive Neutrino: A Subatomic Detective Story; ISBN-13: 978-0716750802; ISBN-10: 0716750805
3. Al-Khalili, Jim. Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed

Helium hydride

From NASA's SOFIA page, an excerpt:

April 17, 2019

 

The Universe’s First Type of Molecule Is Found at Last

Illustration of planetary nebula NGC 7027 and helium hydride molecules. In this planetary nebula, SOFIA detected helium hydride, a combination of helium (red) and hydrogen (blue), which was the first type of molecule to ever form in the early universe. This is the first time helium hydride has been found in the modern universe.

Credits: NASA/SOFIA/L. Proudfit/D.Rutter

The first type of molecule that ever formed in the universe has been detected in space for the first time, after decades of searching. Scientists discovered its signature in our own galaxy using the world’s largest airborne observatory, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, as the aircraft flew high above the Earth’s surface and pointed its sensitive instruments out into the cosmos.

When the universe was still very young, only a few kinds of atoms existed. Scientists believe that around 100,000 years after the big bang, helium and hydrogen combined to make a molecule called helium hydride for the first time. Helium hydride should be present in some parts of the modern universe, but it has never been detected in space — until now.

SOFIA found modern helium hydride in a planetary nebula, a remnant of what was once a Sun-like star. Located 3,000 light-years away near the constellation Cygnus, this planetary nebula, called NGC 7027, has conditions that allow this mystery molecule to form. The discovery serves as proof that helium hydride can, in fact, exist in space. This confirms a key part of our basic understanding of the chemistry of the early universe and how it evolved over billions of years into the complex chemistry of today. The results are published in this week’s issue of Nature.

….

Helium hydride is a finicky molecule. Helium itself is a noble gas making it very unlikely to combine with any other kind of atom. But in 1925, scientists were able to create the molecule in a laboratory by coaxing the helium to share one of its electrons with a hydrogen ion.

….

ADDITION OF 4/27/2019 - Ethan Siegel's further treatment on the subject is quite interesting. He blogs at Starts with a Bang!