Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is nestled within a natural basin in China's remote southwestern Guizhou province.

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In The Not So Distant Future, Glow-In-The-Dark Trees Could Replace Street Lights
According to Daan Roosegaarde, the future of art and design is awash with spectacular innovation.

From giant vacuum cleaning systems aimed at eradicating smog to “smart” apparel that becomes translucent when the wearer is turned on, the Dutch artist/designer/architect has helped imagine some hair-raising projects that could propel us into a new era of aesthetics.

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NASA can't explain the 'impossible' cloud that's been spotted over Titan
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft just spotted a mysterious ice cloud over Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and its appearance challenges everything we thought we knew about the moon’s atmosphere.

First spotted decades ago by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, the cloud has reappeared for the second time, and it's somehow made up of compounds that barely exist in Titan’s atmosphere.

So where did it come from? "The appearance of this ice cloud goes against everything we know about the way clouds form on Titan," said lead researcher Carrie Anderson from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre.

Synthetic blood vessel breakthrough could transform children's heart surgery
A breakthrough in the manufacture of synthetic blood vessels has raised hopes that children born with serious heart defects could be treated in a single operation instead of multiple rounds of open heart surgery.

The landmark work comes from researchers in the US who made synthetic arteries that grow when they are implanted in the body, unlike the standard tissue grafts which are now used to correct faulty blood vessels.

Many children who are born with heart defects face a series of major operations over the course of their lives because the implants - known as conduits - that are used to replace their malformed blood vessels, do not grow in line with their heart and the rest of the body.

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@EverythingScience

Scientists testing HIV cure report 'remarkable' progress after patient breakthrough
UK scientists and clinicians working on a groundbreaking trial to test a possible cure for HIV infection say they have made remarkable progress after a test patient showed no sign of the virus following treatment.

The research, being carried out by five of Britain’s top universities with NHS support, is combining standard antiretroviral drugs with a drug that reactivates dormant HIV and a vaccine that induces the immune system to destroy the infected cells.

Antiretoviral drugs alone are highly effective at stopping the virus from reproducing but do not eradicate the disease, so must be taken for life.

Fifty patients are taking part in the trial. Early tests on the first person to complete the treatment show no signs of the virus in his blood, the Sunday Times reported.

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@EverythingScience

HIV cure close after disease 'vanishes' from blood of British man
A British man could become the first person in the world to be cured of HIV using a new therapy designed by a team of scientists from five UK universities.

The 44-year-old is one of 50 people currently trialling a treatment which targets the disease even in its dormant state.

Scientists told The Sunday Times that presently the virus is completely undetectable in the man’s blood and if it remains that way it will be the first complete cure.

"This is one of the first serious attempts at a full cure for HIV,” said Mark Samuels, managing director of the National Institute for Health Research Office for Clinical Research Infrastructure.

“We are exploring the real possibility of curing HIV. This is a huge challenge and it's still early days but the progress has been remarkable."

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@EverythingScience

Earth's atmosphere may never drop below 400 ppm CO2 again
The world has crossed a major greenhouse-gas milestone, and it may never turn back.

The Manua Loa Observatory in Hawaii has maintained a continuous record of atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels since 1958.

Right now we're at the low point in that cycle, just at the end of September. And, according to a post from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (which we first saw covered over at Motherboard), atmospheric CO2 is holding at 401 parts per million. That's the first time in recorded history that the annual carbon cycle has bottomed out at over 400 ppm. And it means the 2016 carbon trough is about 25% higher than the 1958 peak — just under 320 ppm.

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@EverythingScience

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Do black holes die?
There are some things in the universe that you simply can't escape. Death. Taxes. Black holes. If you time it right, you can even experience all three at once.

Black holes are made out to be uncompromising monsters, roaming the galaxies, voraciously consuming anything in their path. And their name is rightly deserved: once you fall in, once you cross the terminator line of the event horizon, you don't come out. Not even light can escape their clutches.

But in movies, the scary monster has a weakness, and if black holes are the galactic monsters, then surely they have a vulnerability. Right? 

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@EverythingScience

Quantum Teleportation Enters the Real World
Two separate teams of scientists have taken quantum teleportation from the lab into the real world.

Researchers working in Calgary, Canada and Hefei, China, used existing fiber optics networks to transmit small units of information across cities via quantum entanglement — Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.”

Stepping Outside the Lab

According to quantum mechanics, some objects, like photons or electrons, can be entangled. This means that no matter how far apart they are, what happens to one will affect the other instantaneously. To Einstein, this seemed ridiculous, because it entailed information moving faster than the speed of light, something he deemed impossible. But, numerous experiments have shown that entanglement does indeed exist. The challenge was putting it to use.

A few experiments in the lab had previously managed to send information using quantum entanglement. But translating their efforts to the real world, where any number of factors could confound the process is a much more difficult challenge. That’s exactly what these two teams of researchers have done. Their breakthrough, published in two separate papers today in Nature Photonics, promises to offer important advancements for communications and encryption technologies.

Both experiments encode a message into a photon and send it to a way station of sorts. There, the message is transferred to a different photon, which is entangled with a photon held by the receiver. This destroys the information held in the first photon, but transmits the information via entanglement to the receiver. When the way station measures the photon, it creates kind of key — a decoder ring of sorts — that can decrypt the entangled photon’s information. That key is then sent over an internet connection, where it is combined with the information contained within the entangled photon to reveal the message.

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@EverythingScience

DNA analysis reveals there are four distinct giraffe species, not one as previously thought
Some groups are as genetically different from one another as brown bears are from polar bears.

Researchers have long recognized only a single species of giraffe, thought to be made up of several subspecies. However, a research collaboration has now identified four distinct species. Conservation biologist Julian Fennessy of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, geneticist Axel Janke of the Senkenberg Research Institute, and their colleagues collected and analyzed samples from giraffes across the African continent. Their results appear in the journal Current Biology.


ResarchGate: When and why did you start genetically testing giraffes across Africa?

Julian Fennessy: When I approached Axel Janke to help with genetic testing on giraffe five years ago, l had been collecting giraffe DNA tissue samples for more than a decade. I was interested to know whether genetics would help answer some critical conservation concerns, including how similar or not giraffe (sub)species are, if past translocations of giraffe had “mixed” different (sub)species and if so, how this knowledge could be used to inform future translocations of giraffe into parks or other protected areas. Additionally, I thought there could possibly be a genetic grade among giraffe along a north-south axis, and that a population of giraffe in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley National Park could represent a link between these. This idea turned out to be incorrect.

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@EverythingScience

Horses can use symbols to talk to us
There will never be a horse like Mr. Ed, the talking equine TV star. But scientists have discovered that the animals can learn to use another human tool for communicating: pointing to symbols. They join a short list of other species, including some primates, dolphins, and pigeons, with this talent.

Scientists taught 23 riding horses of various breeds to look at a display board with three icons, representing wearing or not wearing a blanket. Horses could choose between a “no change” symbol or symbols for “blanket on” or “blanket off.” Previously, their owners made this decision for them. Horses are adept at learning and following signals people give them, and it took these equines an average of 10 days to learn to approach and touch the board and to understand the meaning of the symbols. All 23 horses learned the entire task within 14 days. They were then tested in various weather conditions to see whether they could use the board to tell their trainers about their blanket preferences.

The scientists report online in Applied Animal Behaviour Science that the horses did not touch the symbols randomly, but made their choices based on the weather. If it was wet, cold, and windy, they touched the "blanket on" icon; horses that were already wearing a blanket nosed the “no change” image. But when the weather was sunny, the animals touched the "blanket off" symbol; those that weren’t blanketed pressed the “no change” icon. The study’s strong results show that the horses understood the consequences of their choices, say the scientists, who hope that other researchers will use their method to ask horses more questions.
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@EverythingScience

Okay, but how do touch screens actually work?
I recently overheard a woman on the subway telling her friend that her toddler “swipes” everything in their house – the coffee table, books, plates and even her own mother, trying to make her disappear like an image on a touch screen. The story got me thinking that for many of us, our knowledge of what’s going on behind that glossy display isn’t much more than a toddler’s.

Before I started researching how touch screens worked, I figured there was one universal technology behind the “swipable” phenomenon. Instead it turns out there are half a dozen, and more being researched every day. The two most commonly used systems are resistive and capacitive touch screens. For the sake of simplicity, I will focus here on these two systems and finish with where experts think touch screen technology is headed...

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@EverythingScience

'Alien Megastructure' Star Keeps Getting Stranger

The more scientists learn about "Tabby's Star," the more mysterious the bizarre object gets.

Newly analyzed observations by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope show that the star KIC 8462852 — whose occasional, dramatic dips in brightness still have astronomers scratching their heads — has also dimmed overall during the last few years.

"The steady brightness change in KIC 8462852 is pretty astounding," study lead authorBen Montet, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement.

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@EverythingScience

The Fermi Paradox
Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old “existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour.” But everyone feels something.

Physicist Enrico Fermi felt something too—”Where is everybody?”

On the very best nights, we can see up to about 2,500 stars (roughly one hundred-millionth of the stars in our galaxy), and almost all of them are less than 1,000 light years away from us (or 1% of the diameter of the Milky Way).

When confronted with the topic of stars and galaxies, a question that tantalises most humans is, “Is there other intelligent life out there?” Let’s put some numbers to it—

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@EverythingScience

Great, Mysterious Balls of Fire Speed by Dying Star
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has seen planet-size cannonballs of hot gas whipping through the space near a dying star, but the origin of these plasma balls remains a mystery.

The high-speed blobs, each double the mass of Mars and twice as hot as the surface of the sun, are moving so fast in space that they would take only half an hour to go between the Earth and the moon (238,900 miles, or 384,472 kilometers), according to a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The observations suggest that these balls of fire have been appearing every 8.5 years for at least the last four centuries, the statement said.

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@EverythingScience

The Universe in 4 Minutes
Want to know the basics of the universe but only have 4 minutes to spare? Well this is the video for you!