Science News
The amateur who helped Einstein see the light
Eccentric engineer played crucial role in theory of gravitational lensing
by Tom Siegfried
Generally speaking, general relativity is not the sort of physics that offers much fodder for amateurs. Its mathematical intricacies were too much even for Einstein at first. He struggled for years to find the equations that showed how general relativity could describe gravity, finally succeeding in 1915.
But a couple of decades later, an eccentric amateur noticed a consequence of Einstein’s theory and induced him to push his math a bit further. Einstein’s math, the amateur asserted, implied that gravity could distort light like a lens. Nowadays such “gravitational lensing” is a valuable tool exploited by astronomers to probe the cosmos. But in the 1930s, virtually nobody knew anything about it, except for a restaurant dishwasher named Rudi W. Mandl.
Physicists and historians have often noted that it was Mandl who persuaded Einstein to take gravitational lensing seriously. Some, notably Jürgen Renn, have even documented the crucial role that Science News Letter (the pre-1967 incarnation of Science News) played in the gravitational lens drama. But rarely have any of these accounts provided much more than a cursory description of who Mandl was, and nobody seems to have cared about whatever happened to him.
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Science leaders make investment case
By Jonathan Amos
Leaders of the UK's science community have made a robust pitch to have the nation's research budget raised.
Royal Society President Sir Paul Nurse said Britain needed a vibrant knowledge economy and the way to achieve that was to invest more in the nation's acknowledged science excellence.
Public R&D spend as a percentage of GDP currently stands at 0.49 - one of the lowest figures among advanced nations.
Sir Paul said ministers should lift this to 0.67% during this parliament.
This would bring spending into line with the OECD average.
"Increasing the spend by the amount we're saying would be an increase of 0.03% to 0.04% each year, and that's got to be in the accounting error of the Treasury's calculations," he told reporters.
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Technology News
Amazon Is Banning Apple TV and Chromecast. And That’s Gross
Brian Barret
Amazon has quietly informed its marketplace sellers that as of October 29, it will no longer sell the Google Chromecast or Apple TV. In doing so, it will absent the second and fourth best-selling streaming boxes from its digital shelves.
The move, first reported by Bloomberg Businessweek and confirmed to WIRED, comes in advance of the release of the next-generation versions of those products. The new Chomecast is already available for order from the Google Store, while the new Apple TV ships later this month.
Perhaps as surprising as the decision itself was Amazon’s rationale. Rather than the obvious motivation of not wanting to enable the success of two powerful competitors to its streaming Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, an Amazon spokesperson provided the following statement:
“Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime. It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion.”
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Data breach hits 15M T-Mobile customers
A hack of Experian, the company that handles credit checks for the wireless carrier, results in the loss of Social Security numbers, birth dates and names.
by Roger Cheng
Hackers stole the personal data of 15 million T-Mobile customers by going after the company that processes the wireless carrier's credit checks.
The company, Experian, said on Thursday that it experienced a breach that nabbed customer data from September 1, 2013, to September 16, 2015. The stolen data includes names, birth dates, addresses, and Social Security and drivers' license numbers, but not credit card or payment information, Experian said.
Experian stores the data when it runs a check on a customer's credit score to determine whether they qualify for service, and what promotions they're able to take advantage of.
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Environmental News
Plastic oceans: What do we know?
David Shukman Science editor
As England prepares to introduce a charge for plastic bags - long after many other countries - it's a good moment to catch up on the latest research into plastic in the oceans.
Images of seals, turtles and seabirds trapped in plastic rings, ropes and sheeting always have the power to shock.
And on a visit to Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, I saw for myself how the island's magnificent albatrosses were eating plastic waste that often proved fatal to them.
The tropical beaches were littered with the bodies of albatross chicks whose bellies were filled with everything from old toothbrushes to cigarette lighters to fragments of plastic toys.
One particularly moving sight was a baby albatross chick with a small plastic hook jammed in its beak - its parents would have mistaken the object for food.
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Ancient ecosystem response to 'big five' mass extinction
Ingenious modeling shows that the stability of ancient ecosystems depended on species with important, big-picture roles in food web
California Academy of Sciences
As the planet faces the dawn of a sixth mass extinction, scientists are searching for clues about the uncertain road ahead by exploring how ancient ecosystems collapsed and bounced back from traumatic upheavals. A new study follows the lengthy collapses and revival of South African ecosystems during one of the "big five" mass extinctions, the Permian-Triassic event, revealing unexpected results about the types of animals that were most vulnerable to extinction, and the factors that might best predict community stability during times of great change. The study's authors--including Peter Roopnarine, PhD, of the California Academy of Sciences--say inventive, cutting-edge modeling techniques helped highlight the critical importance of understanding food webs (knowing "who eats what") when trying to predict what communities look like before, during, and after a mass extinction. The thought-provoking study is the first of its kind, and is published today in Science.
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Medical News
Sperm protein may offer target for male contraceptive
by Meghan Rosen
For 65 years, birth control pills have been exclusively for women. But men may be a step closer to getting in on the action, researchers report October 1 in Science.
A newly identified sperm protein, called PPP3CC/PPP3R2, could give scientists a promising target for developing male contraceptives. The protein resides in sperm tails and helps sperm push through the tough outer membrane of an egg.
Blocking the protein with drugs for two weeks made mice infertile, though they were still able to have sex. And just a week after stopping the drug treatment, fertility recovered. Blocking the sperm protein in humans could lead to reversible and fast-acting birth control options for men, the researchers write.
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Gut bacteria could predict asthma in kids
By Sarah C. P. Williams
Dirty diapers are the unlikeliest of crystal balls, but they could hold the answer to why some children develop asthma. Just four types of gut bacteria in the stool seem to make all the difference, predicting who will get the disease and who won’t, researchers say. The finding could help identify children at high risk of asthma, and it could also lead to the development of probiotic mixtures that prevent the disease.
The new study “puts a lot of epidemiological observations from over the years into a new perspective,” says asthma researcher Marsha Wills-Karp of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, who was not involved in the latest work.
A growing body of research has led to a new appreciation over the last decade for how the microbiome—the collection of bacteria and viruses that live in the human body—shapes people’s health. And studies have hinted that differences between young babies’ microbiomes, caused by birth methods, diet, environment, and antibiotic exposure, might affect their chances of developing diseases such as asthma and allergies.
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Space News
Ceres mountains and craters named for food
Crop deities and harvest celebrations provide inspiration for dwarf planet's monikers
By Christopher Crockett
Tubers, maize and even eggplants are finally getting the astronomical recognition they deserve. Or at least that’s true for the deities that look after the crops and celebrations of their harvest. Fifteen craters and mountains on the dwarf planet Ceres were officially named on September 21 after various spirits and celebrations of things that grow, befitting a world named after the Roman goddess of agriculture.
The International Astronomical Union officially recognizes a crater in the north as Takel, a Malaysian goddess of tubers. The Mayan god Ghanan now watches over not just maize but a crater near Ceres’ north pole. And an Albanian festival that marks the first day of the eggplant harvest marks the mountain Ysolo Mons.
Given the lack of liquid water on the airless Ceres, gathering an assortment of divine beings is probably the only way to get anything to grow there.
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Early satellite TV predictions highlighted instant communication potential
Excerpt from the October 16, 1965, issue of Science News Letter
By Bethany Brookshire
Satellite TV predicted — Thirty-thousand-watt satellites transmitting radio and television directly into homes without the need for ground stations are the prediction of Radio Corporation of America board chairman David Sarnoff…. Such satellites could handle three TV and three radio channels at once, with little modification necessary in present home antennas. “When we can communicate instantly to everybody, everywhere,” he said, “we will set in motion a force whose ultimate political, social and economic impact upon mankind cannot be calculated today….” — Science News Letter, October 16, 1965
UPDATE:
Communication satellites provided global coverage just in time for televising the first moon landing, in 1969. Cable companies began using satellites to send TV programming from station to station in 1975, and the following year, a Stanford electrical engineer built an antenna to receive the first home transmission. Now, satellite TV, phone and Internet make instant communication an everyday experience with the world-changing impact that Sarnoff foresaw.
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Odd News
30-Foot Fingernails: The Curious Science of World's Longest Nails
by Elizabeth Palermo, Associate Editor
A man in India earned a Guinness World Record this week for doing, well, nothing at all. He didn't eat a bunch of hot dogs or jump off a building. All he did was forgo basic hygiene, by growing out his fingernails for an astonishingly long time.
Shridar Chillal hasn't trimmed his claws in 62 years. The last time he put scissor to nail was 1952 (to place that in perspective, Harry Truman was president of the United States at the time, and gas cost 20 cents a gallon). As a result of Chillal's refusal to trim, each of the fingers on his left hand ends in a swirling mass of keratin that cumulatively measures about 30 feet (9 meters) long.
Chillal's extreme fingernails raise questions — lots of questions. How does he cut his food or answer his iPhone, for example? Furthermore, how is this even possible? Here are answers to three of the most pressing fingernail-related queries.
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