Oldest material on Earth found inside meteorite

Dust grains date from 7 billion years ago, 2.5 billion years before sun and Earth formed



A meteorite that crashed into rural southeastern Australia in a fireball in 1969 contained the oldest material ever found on Earth, stardust that predated the formation of our solar system by billions of years, scientists say.

The oldest of 40 tiny dust grains trapped inside the meteorite fragments retrieved around the town of Murchison in Victoria state dated from about seven billion years ago, about 2.5 billion years before the sun, Earth and rest of our solar system formed, the researchers said.

In fact, all of the dust specks analyzed in the research came from before the solar system's formation — thus known as presolar grains — with 60 per cent of them between 4.6 and 4.9 billion years old, and the oldest 10 per cent dating to more than 5.6 billion years ago.

Human Body Temperature Is Getting Cooler, Study Finds

In 1851, a German doctor named Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich took the temperatures of some 25,000 patients in the city of Leipzig and concluded that the average human body temperature sits at 37 degrees Celsius, or 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Though variations are known to exist from person to person, Wunderlich’s standard remains a benchmark for medical professionals today. But a new study published in eLife suggests that in the United States, at least, average temperatures are going down—a trend that can be observed in medical records spanning more than 150 years.

Previous research indicated that Wunderlich’s average may have run a little high. In a 1992 study of 148 patients, for instance, scientists at the University of Maryland measured an average temperature of 36.8 degrees Celsius, or 98.2 degrees Fahrenheit. More recently, a 2017 study of around 35,000 British patients found that the mean oral temperature clocked in at 36.6 degrees Celsius, or 97.9 degrees Fahrenheit. Some experts concluded that Wunderlich’s measurements had simply been inaccurate. But according to the new paper, authored by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine, human bodies are actually cooling.

The team looked at three large temperature datasets from three distinct periods. The first was compiled from medical records, military records and pension records of Union Army veterans; the data was obtained between 1862 and 1930. The researchers also consulted measurements from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey I, spanning from 1971 to 1975, and the Stanford Translational Research Integrated Database Environment, which consists of data from adult patients who visited Stanford Health Care between 2007 and 2017.

In total, the researchers studied 677,423 temperature measurements, collected over the course of 157 years and covering 197 birth years. They found that men born in the early 19th century display temperatures 0.59 degrees Celsius higher than men today, representing a decrease of 0.03 degrees Celsius per birth decade. Women’s temperatures have gone down 0.32 degrees Celsius since the 1890s, representing a 0.029 degree Celsius decline per birth decade—a rate similar to the one observed among male patients.

Was this a true cooling trend, or could the discrepancies simply be chalked up to improvements in thermometer technology? To find out, the scientists looked for patterns within each dataset, assuming that similar thermometers were used to take temperatures during a given historical period. Sure enough, they observed that measurements decreased at a similar rate. When it came to veterans of the Civil War, for instance, temperatures were higher among people born earlier, decreasing by 0.02 degrees Celsius with each birth decade.

Cardiff researchers have now discovered T-cells equipped with a new type of T-cell receptor (TCR) which recognises and kills most human cancer types, while ignoring healthy cells.

This TCR recognises a molecule present on the surface of a wide range of cancer cells as well as in many of the body’s normal cells but, remarkably, is able to distinguish between healthy cells and cancerous ones, killing only the latter.

The researchers said this meant it offered “exciting opportunities for pan-cancer, pan-population” immunotherapies not previously thought possible.

“A Frankenstein material” is teeming with — and ultimately made by — photosynthetic microbes. And it can reproduce.

U.S. drinking water widely contaminated with 'forever chemicals': environment watchdog

The contamination of U.S. drinking water with man-made “forever chemicals” is far worse than previously estimated with some of the highest levels found in Miami, Philadelphia and New Orleans, said a report on Wednesday by an environmental watchdog group.

The chemicals, resistant to breaking down in the environment, are known as perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Some have been linked to cancers, liver damage, low birth weight and other health problems.

The findings here by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) show the group's previous estimate in 2018, based on unpublished U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data, that 110 million Americans may be contaminated with PFAS, could be far too low.

“It’s nearly impossible to avoid contaminated drinking water from these chemicals,” said David Andrews, a senior scientist at EWG and co-author of the report.

The chemicals were used in products like Teflon and Scotchguard and in firefighting foam. Some are used in a variety of other products and industrial processes, and their replacements also pose risks.

Trump rolls back US water pollution controls

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Under the new regulations, landowners and property developers will be able to pour pesticides, fertilizers and other pollutants directly into millions of miles of the nation's waterways for the first time in decades.

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But the administration's own data shows that real estate developers and those in other non-farming industries are poised reap the greatest rewards was the president's rollback, by applying for permits to encroach on previously protected waterways, the Associated Press reported.

The new rules are already facing court challenges from environmental groups and Democratic-led states. "This will be the biggest loss of clean water protection the country has ever seen," Blan Holman, a federal water policy specialist at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told the New York Times.

"This puts drinking water for millions of Americans at risk of contamination from unregulated pollution. This is not just undoing the Obama rule. This is stripping away protections that were put in place in the '70s and '80s that Americans have relied on for their health," he said.

In the summer of 1935, the physicists Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger engaged in a rich, multifaceted and sometimes fretful correspondence about the implications of the new theory of quantum mechanics. The focus of their worry was what Schrödinger later dubbed entanglement: the inability to describe two quantum systems or particles independently, after they have interacted.

Until his death, Einstein remained convinced that entanglement showed how quantum mechanics was incomplete. Schrödinger thought that entanglement was the defining feature of the new physics, but this didn’t mean that he accepted it lightly. ‘I know of course how the hocus pocus works mathematically,’ he wrote to Einstein on 13 July 1935. ‘But I do not like such a theory.’ Schrödinger’s famous cat, suspended between life and death, first appeared in these letters, a byproduct of the struggle to articulate what bothered the pair.

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You've probably heard of Schrödinger's cat, the unfortunate feline in a box that is simultaneously alive and dead until the box is opened to reveal its actual state. Well, now wrap your mind around Schrödinger's time, a situation in which one event can simultaneously be the cause and effect of another event.

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