Philippa Kaur

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  • 125 Shares119 Views

    in Humans

    Your saliva may determine which types of wine you prefer

    Wine drinkers have a lot of options when choosing their preferred varietyKlaus Vedfelt/Getty Images
    Variations in our salivary proteins may explain why different people can like different wines. Researchers have linked the concentrations of two types of proteins to how intense wine drinkers find a wine’s notes, such as fruity or floral, and their preferences for the alcoholic drink.
    A person’s wine preferences may at least partially come down to their cultural background, knowledge of the drink and individual taste. But Kate Howell at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues … More

  • 188 Shares99 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    A streak of light may not be a black hole fleeing its galaxy after all

    A trail of starlight thought to possibly indicate a runaway supermassive black hole may be something much more mundane: a spiral galaxy seen edge on, a new study finds.

    In February, astronomer Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University and colleagues reported spotting a line of stars near a compact galaxy in Hubble Space Telescope images. The researchers’ analysis suggested that three galaxies had interacted and merged, kicking a supermassive black hole out of its host galaxy (SN: 3/10/23). The black hole then traveled through a nearby gas cloud, the scenario goes, triggering the formation of stars in a line that points toward the home galaxy and revealing the black hole’s madcap escape.

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    But other researchers have been skeptical of this interpretation, with some suggesting that the scenario is too complex to explain the linear feature. In the new study, “we decided to explore what we thought was the most simple explanation,” says astronomer Ignacio Trujillo of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain.

    He was inspired by a data plot in the original study, which compared the velocities of the stars in the linear feature with their positions, a comparison known as a velocity curve. To him, it looked like a spiral galaxy’s plot of its pinwheel rotation, where the stars in the galactic disk all move at nearly the same speed, no matter if they appeared to travel toward or away from Earth (SN: 8/17/21). That, combined with van Dokkum and colleagues’ estimate of the feature’s mass — roughly 100 million suns, which was surprisingly large for a simple line of stars — implied that the object is actually a spiral galaxy viewed on its edge, Trujillo says.

    So he and his colleagues compared characteristics of the linear feature with those of a well-studied spiral galaxy called IC 5249, which astronomers know we see edge on from Earth. The team looked at the objects’ masses, surface brightnesses and general motions of stars. The properties of the galaxy and linear feature matched closely, the researchers report in the study, which is in press in Astronomy & Astrophysics and was also submitted April 24 at arXiv.org.

    For now, “the evidence is not conclusive either way,” says astrophysicist Christopher Conselice of the University of Manchester in England who studies galaxy evolution and was not involved in either study.

    “A black hole being ejected from a galaxy would be really cool,” Conselice says. “But I think the simple explanation is that it’s either an edge-on galaxy, or some kind of filament or tidal debris,” left over from some previous galaxy interaction.

    Van Dokkum still favors the black hole scenario, in part because of one new image. In the original Hubble images, the linear feature merely points toward a compact galaxy at its left. In a new ultraviolet image, from the Very Large Telescope in Chile, “you start to see that this feature is actually connected to the galaxy,” which strengthens the runaway black hole theory, he says.

    Trujillo and his colleagues suggest that the edge-on spiral galaxy and compact galaxy are independent structures but members of the same galaxy group, coincidentally close to each other from our viewpoint.

    The debate’s resolution may have to wait at least until this summer when better imagery from Hubble arrives. More

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    in Humans

    How maths reveals the best time to add milk for hotter tea

    Claire Plumridge
    PICTURE the scene: you are making a cup of tea for a friend who is on their way and won’t be arriving for a little while. But – disaster – you have already poured hot water onto a teabag! The question is, if you don’t want their tea to be too cold when they come to drink it, do you add the cold milk straight away or wait until your friend arrives?
    Luckily, maths has the answer. When a hot object like a cup of tea is exposed to cooler air, it will cool down by losing heat. This is the … More

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    in Humans

    DNA from 25,000-year-old tooth pendant reveals woman who wore it

    A pierced deer tooth discovered in Denisova cave in SiberiaMax Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
    DNA that seeped into an elk tooth pendant about 25,000 years ago has yielded clues about the ancient woman who wore it.
    The tooth, worn as a necklace bead, probably absorbed DNA from the person’s sweat as it lay against her chest and neck. Marie Soressi at Leiden University in the Netherlands and her colleagues were able to extract that DNA without damaging the tooth through a new process that took eight years to develop. The technique might reveal unprecedented details about the social customs and gender roles of ancient populations, says Soressi.
    “For the first time, we can link an object to individuals,” she says. “So, for example, were bone needles made and used by only women, or also men? Were those bone-tipped spears made and used only by men, or also by women? With this new technique, we can finally start talking about that and investigating the roles of individuals according to their biological sex or their genetic identity and family relationships.”Advertisement
    Scientists have often suspected that ancient tools, weapons, ornamental beads and other crafted artefacts contain DNA from the people who touched them. But getting DNA out of these objects typically means removing sections for analysis – causing permanent damage. “We absolutely didn’t want to do that,” says Soressi.
    To see if DNA could be coaxed out of ancient artefacts without destroying them, Soressi and her colleagues tested numerous combinations of chemicals and heating regimes on 10 previously excavated artefacts from Palaeolithic caves in France. They found that placing them in a sodium phosphate solution and raising the temperature incrementally from 21°C to 90°C (70°F to 194°F) led to the release of relatively large amounts of human DNA with no damage to the specimens.
    The team then tested the procedure on another 15 excavated bone specimens from one of the caves. Genetic sequencing revealed DNA from many different humans – probably the scientists and technicians who had worked with the artefacts across the years, says Soressi.
    To avoid such modern DNA contamination, the researchers then tried their technique on four tooth pendants excavated by colleagues in Russia and Bulgaria who wore sterile gloves and face masks. Their analysis revealed mostly animal DNA that matched the species used to make the pendants.
    One tooth pendant from Denisova cave in Russia, however, also contained human DNA fragments, primarily from a single individual. There was enough genetic material for the researchers to positively identify a female Homo sapiens, in addition to the elk (Cervus canadensis) that provided the tooth.
    While the human might have rubbed her DNA into the pendant if she had crafted it, the large quantity of DNA recovered suggests she was the individual who wore it, says Soressi. “As a porous material, that tooth was likely soaking in sweat,” she says. “It worked like a sponge, pulling in that human DNA and trapping it there for 25,000 years.”
    The DNA showed that the woman was closely related to an ancient tribe that, thus far, had only been found more than 1500 kilometres to the east.

    Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer at Tel-Aviv University, Israel, finds the paper “very exciting”, in part because it could help explain the purpose of ancient jewellery. For example, it might signal something about the identity of the wearer or their group, or their marital status, she says. “If we find them in different contexts on men, on women or children of this species or another species, or different age groups, that would give us some better clues about what they’re meant for.”
    The technique might also help resolve long-running scientific debates about whether certain artefacts were made and worn by Homo sapiens or Neanderthals, she adds.
    The study could open the door to DNA analyses of museum artefacts across the globe, says David Frayer at the University of Kansas. “Curators are often hesitant to allow their specimens to be damaged for DNA analysis, however small the extraction,” he says. “The absolute strength of this paper is that [their] procedure gets around that. If it can be extended to specimens cleaned long ago, this would represent a great leap forward for ancient DNA work.”

    Topics:DNA/ancient humans More

  • 150 Shares99 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    For the first time, astrophysicists have caught a star eating a planet

    A dusty belch is all that remains of a planet that was gobbled up by a star about 12,000 light-years away. It marks the first time anyone has seen a star in the act of eating a planet.

    A brief burst of light captured by a couple of telescopes was probably caused by a planet about 10 times the mass of Jupiter being swallowed by its sun, researchers report May 3 in Nature. It’s a dramatic end that is the eventual destiny of many planets, including Earth.

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    “Planetary engulfment has been predicted for a very long time, but their frequency was not well known,” says MIT astrophysicist Kishalay De. “So it was certainly exciting to realize we had found one.”

    The discovery came about as De was on the hunt for binary stars. He was using data from the Palomar Observatory in California to look for spots in the sky that showed rapid increases in brightness. Such fluctuations can be a sign of stars coming close enough together that one will suck matter from the other (SN: 2/6/14).

    One event from 2020 stood out. A spot of light rapidly got about 100 times as bright as it had been. It could have been the result of two stars merging. But a second look by NASA’s NEOWISE infrared space telescope suggested otherwise. Data from that observatory showed that the total amount of energy released in the flash was just one-thousandth what it would have been if two stars had merged, and that chilly dust surrounded the mash-up instead of hot plasma that would normally indicate a merger among stars.

    The low energy suggested that one of the objects, assuming it was a merger of some kind, wasn’t a star at all. Instead, it was probably a giant planet. As the star noshed on the planet, a stream of cold dust sailed away like cosmic breadcrumbs from a stellar snack. “I was indeed surprised when we connected the dots together,” De says.

    Planet-devouring stars are probably relatively common in the universe, says UCLA astrophysicist Smadar Naoz, who was not involved with the study. But the evidence, she says, has been circumstantial. Until now, astronomers have seen only signs of stars preparing for a planetary snack or debris left over from a presumed stellar meal.

    “One of the things that I found in the paper that I really liked was the detective work” that pieced together evidence from multiple telescopes to confirm that the star expanded outward to eat a planet, Naoz says.

    Naoz has pondered the ways that stars might gobble up planets. A star in the prime of life might consume a planet that wanders too close by in its orbit — think of that as a stellar lunch, Naoz says. A dying star, on the other hand, will swallow a planet as the star swells to become a red giant (SN: 4/7/20). That’s more like a cosmic dinner.

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    The planet-eating star in this study is turning into a red giant, but is still early in its transformation.  “I would say it’s early supper,” Naoz says.

    There’s a lot that’s still mysterious about stars munching on planets, De says. But upcoming observatories with large infrared cameras, he says, should let astronomers look for bright, long-lived infrared emissiosn that might reveal more planet-eating stars.

    Our sun will evolve into a red giant and consume the Earth in about 5 billion years. “Because the Earth is much smaller than Jupiter,” De says, “the effects will certainly be more subdued … so finding Earth-like engulfments will be challenging, but we are actively working on ideas to identify them.” More

  • 150 Shares149 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    Rocky planets might have been able to form in the early universe

    Rocky planets might have been forming since the beginning of the universe. A stellar nursery in a neighboring galaxy has the right materials for such planet formation, researchers report April 24 in Nature Astronomy.

    The overall chemical makeup of the tiny galaxy, called the Small Magellanic Cloud, is akin to that of the early universe. The finding suggests that rocky planets might have been able to develop in the relatively pristine chemical environment that pervaded the cosmos just a couple billion years after the Big Bang.

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    The Small Magellanic Cloud is one of the Milky Way’s nearest galactic neighbors, though it’s very different from our galaxy. The tiny galaxy has a much lower abundance of heavy metal elements — such as iron, magnesium and aluminum — which are all crucial to the formation of rocky planets. This low-metal environment also mimics that of the early universe, an epoch before stars had enough time to forge the heavy elements and blow them out into space.

    Because of the lack of these elements, astronomers have been unsure if rocky planets are able to form in the Small Magellanic Cloud. And previous telescopes did not have the ability to really probe young stars with a mass less than or equal to that of the sun, so astronomers couldn’t measure the star systems’ dust content, which is needed to infer if planets could be being born. But with the sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, astronomers can now gather more light and see smaller, fainter stars in greater detail (SN: 12/7/22).

    Astrophysicist Olivia Jones and colleagues used an infrared camera on JWST to look at a region of the Small Magellanic Cloud called NGC 346, where young stars are forming. “It’s the first time ever we’ve really been able to look at how solar-size stars form in an environment akin to the early universe,” says Jones, of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.

    The team detected signatures that suggest that lots of dust is orbiting and falling toward hundreds of stars in the region. As these dust grains orbit, they could begin to stick together and eventually accrete to create rocky planets.

    “One of the things we would love to understand better is how the environmental context impacts star formation and then, later on, the planet-forming populations around those young, forming stars,” says Michael Meyer, an astronomer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who was not involved in the research.

    Because the Small Magellanic Cloud is the nearest example of a cosmic region with a much different chemical composition than the Milky Way, he says, it provides the first touchstone to study how star and planet formation depend on the stellar environment.

    The low-metal stellar environment in the Small Magellanic Cloud is comparable to that of faraway galaxies that were developing around 11 billion years ago. During this time, a period called “cosmic noon,” there was a surge of star formation throughout the cosmos. If rocky planets could be accreting around stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, the researchers suggest, such worlds could have been forming in the early years of the universe as well.

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    The young stars in NGC 346 are also relative lightweights. One reason scientists are interested in studying the possibility of planet formation around low-mass stars is because they are the most common type of stars in the universe and the longest-lived, says Penn State astronomer Kevin Luhman, who was not involved in the research.

    “They offer the longest period of time in which life might form and survive on any planets around them,” Luhman says. “If the most common star in the universe lived for only a million years, then exploded, that would be kind of bad for life.” The fact that these types of stars can potentially form rocky planets, he says, is a good sign for life developing elsewhere in the universe.

    Follow-up research will focus on determining what chemical signatures can be found developing around the stars, Jones says. This could clue the researchers in to what the chemical elements are that make up any rocky planets. More

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    What is really going on when we microwave our food?

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    I LIVED happily without a microwave for 10 years, but, since acquiring one when I moved house last year, I have come to appreciate what a useful gadget it is. I have also realised that much of what I thought I knew about microwaves wasn’t quite right.
    Microwave ovens work using electromagnetic waves, also called microwaves, with wavelengths of 12 centimetres or so – much longer than visible light, but shorter than most radio waves. Microwaves create an oscillating magnetic field that puts certain molecules in a spin: namely, molecules like water, which have positively and negatively charged portions. Anything … More