It's raining plastic: microscopic fibers fall from the sky in Rocky Mountains




Discovery raises new questions about the amount of plastic waste permeating the air, water, and soil virtually everywhere on Earth

Plastic was the furthest thing from Gregory Wetherbee’s mind when he began analyzing rainwater samples collected from the Rocky Mountains. “I guess I expected to see mostly soil and mineral particles,” said the US Geological Survey researcher. Instead, he found multicolored microscopic plastic fibers.

The discovery, published in a recent study (pdf) titled “It is raining plastic”, raises new questions about the amount of plastic waste permeating the air, water, and soil virtually everywhere on Earth.

“I think the most important result that we can share with the American public is that there’s more plastic out there than meets the eye,” said Wetherbee. “It’s in the rain, it’s in the snow. It’s a part of our environment now.”

Rainwater samples collected across Colorado and analyzed under a microscope contained a rainbow of plastic fibers, as well as beads and shards. The findings shocked Wetherbee, who had been collecting the samples in order to study nitrogen pollution.

Is this plastic a biproduct of the production of plastic or plastic used materials. Or is it from the destruction of plastic via burning or some other means.

When you wash your clothes, then put them in the dryer, you know that ball of lint it catches? Well, most washers also do that, but don't have a filter. So that lint ball ends up in the waterways.

It also comes from wear and tear on plastic products. Plastic will break down into tinier and tinier bits, and it looks like they eventually become airborne. And it comes from the production of plastic, and many other sources.

Okay cool, makes sense. Just was trying to figure how the particles were getting there in the first place.

FDA approves new drug for treatment-resistant forms of tuberculosis that affects the lungs



For Immediate Release:
August 14, 2019

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved Pretomanid Tablets in combination with bedaquiline and linezolid for the treatment of a specific type of highly treatment-resistant tuberculosis (TB) of the lungs.

“The threat of antimicrobial-resistant infections is a key challenge we face as a public health agency,” said FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner Amy Abernethy, M.D., Ph.D. “The bacterium that causes tuberculosis can develop resistance to the antibiotics used to treat it. Multidrug-resistant TB and extensively drug-resistant TB are public health threats due to limited treatment options. New treatments are important to meet patient national and global health needs. That’s why, among our other efforts to address antimicrobial resistance, we’re focused on facilitating the development of safe and effective new treatments to give patients more options to fight life-threatening infections. This approval also marks the second time a drug is being approved under the Limited Population Pathway for Antibacterial and Antifungal Drugs, a pathway, advanced by Congress, to spur development of drugs targeting infections that lack effective therapies. We hope we continue to see more development of antibacterial drugs for treating serious or life-threatening infections in limited populations of patients with unmet medical needs.”

Scientists Discover New Cure for the Deadliest Strain of Tuberculosis

TSAKANE, South Africa — When she joined a trial of new tuberculosis drugs, the dying young woman weighed just 57 pounds.

Stricken with a deadly strain of the disease, she was mortally terrified. Local nurses told her the Johannesburg hospital to which she must be transferred was very far away — and infested with vervet monkeys.

“I cried the whole way in the ambulance,” Tsholofelo Msimango recalled recently. “They said I would live with monkeys and the sisters there were not nice and the food was bad and there was no way I would come back. They told my parents to fix the insurance because I would die.”

Five years later, Ms. Msimango, 25, is now tuberculosis-free. She is healthy at 103 pounds, and has a young son.

The trial she joined was small — it enrolled only 109 patients — but experts are calling the preliminary results groundbreaking. The drug regimen tested on Ms. Msimango has shown a 90 percent success rate against a deadly plague, extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis.

On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration effectively endorsed the approach, approving the newest of the three drugs used in the regimen. Usually, the World Health Organization adopts approvals made by the F.D.A. or its European counterpart, meaning the treatment could soon come into use worldwide.

Tuberculosis has now surpassed AIDS as the world’s leading infectious cause of death, and the so-called R strain is the ultimate in lethality. It is resistant to all four families of antibiotics typically used to fight the disease.

Only a tiny fraction of the 10 million people infected by TB each year get this type, but very few of them survive it.

Chemists make first-ever ring of pure carbon

Elusive 18-atom ‘cyclocarbon’ could be a step towards molecule-scale transistors.





Long after most chemists had given up trying, a team of researchers has synthesized the first ring-shaped molecule of pure carbon — a circle of 18 atoms.

The chemists started with a triangular molecule of carbon and oxygen, which they manipulated with electric currents to create the carbon-18 ring. Initial studies of the properties of the molecule, called a cyclocarbon, suggest that it acts as a semiconductor, which could make similar straight carbon chains useful as molecular-scale electronic components.

It is an “absolutely stunning work” that opens up a new field of investigation, says Yoshito Tobe, a chemist at Osaka University in Japan. “Many scientists, including myself, have tried to capture cyclocarbons and determine their molecular structures, but in vain,” Tobe says. The results appear in Science1 on 15 August.



Pure carbon comes in several different forms, including diamond, graphite and ‘nanotubes’. Atoms of the element can form chemical bonds with themselves in various configurations: for example, each atom can bind to four neighbours in a pyramid-shaped pattern, as in diamond; or to three, as in the hexagonal patterns that make up the single-atom-thick sheets of graphene. (Such a three-bond pattern is also found in bulk graphite as well as in carbon nanotubes and in the globular molecules called fullerenes.)

But carbon can also form bonds with just two nearby atoms. Nobel-prizewinning chemist Roald Hoffmann at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and others have long theorized that this would lead to pure chains of carbon atoms. Each atom might form either a double bond on each side — meaning the adjacent atoms share two electrons — or a triple bond on one side and a single bond on the other. Various teams have attempted to synthesize rings or chains based on this pattern.

Counterintuitive physics property found to be widespread in living organisms




Ever since the late 19th century, physicists have known about a counterintuitive property of some electric circuits called negative resistance. Typically, increasing the voltage in a circuit causes the electric current to increase as well. But under some conditions, increasing the voltage can cause the current to decrease instead. This basically means that pushing harder on the electric charges actually slows them down.

Due to the relationship between current, voltage, and resistance, in these situations the resistance produces power rather than consuming it, resulting in a "negative resistance." Today, negative resistance devices have a wide variety of applications, such as in fluorescent lights and Gunn diodes, which are used in radar guns and automatic door openers, among other devices.

Most known examples of negative resistance occur in human-engineered devices rather than in nature. However, in a new study published in the New Journal of Physics, Gianmaria Falasco and coauthors from the University of Luxembourg have shown that an analogous property called negative differential response is actually a widespread phenomenon that is found in many biochemical reactions that occur in living organisms. They identify the property in several vital biochemical processes, such as enzyme activity, DNA replication, and ATP production. It seems that nature has used this property to optimize these processes and make living things operate more efficiently at the molecular scale.

"This counterintuitive, yet common phenomenon has been found in a wealth of physical systems after its first discovery in low-temperature semiconductors," the researchers wrote in their paper. "We have shown that a negative differential response is a widespread phenomenon in chemistry with major consequences on the efficacy of biological and artificial processes."

As the researchers explained, a negative differential response can occur in biochemical systems that are in contact with multiple biochemical reservoirs. Each reservoir tries to pull the system to a different equilibrium point (like a balance point), so that the system is constantly exposed to competing thermodynamic forces.

Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change



Recently, the U.K. Met Office announced a revision to the Hadley Center historical analysis of sea surface temperatures (SST), suggesting that the oceans have warmed about 0.1 degree Celsius more than previously thought. The need for revision arises from the long-recognized problem that in the past sea surface temperatures were measured using a variety of error-prone methods such as using open buckets, lamb’s wool–wrapped thermometers, and canvas bags. It was not until the 1990s that oceanographers developed a network of consistent and reliable measurement buoys.

Then, to develop a consistent picture of long-term trends, techniques had to be developed to compensate for the errors in the older measurements and reconcile them with the newer ones. The Hadley Centre has led this effort, and the new data set—dubbed HadSST4—is a welcome advance in our understanding of global climate change.

But that’s where the good news ends. Because the oceans cover three fifths of the globe, this correction implies that previous estimates of overall global warming have been too low. Moreover it was reported recently that in the one place where it was carefully measured, the underwater melting that is driving disintegration of ice sheets and glaciers is occurring far faster than predicted by theory—as much as two orders of magnitude faster—throwing current model projections of sea level rise further in doubt.

These recent updates, suggesting that climate change and its impacts are emerging faster than scientists previously thought, are consistent with observations that we and other colleagues have made identifying a pattern in assessments of climate research of underestimation of certain key climate indicators, and therefore underestimation of the threat of climate disruption. When new observations of the climate system have provided more or better data, or permitted us to reevaluate old ones, the findings for ice extent, sea level rise and ocean temperature have generally been worse than earlier prevailing views.

Consistent underestimation is a form of bias—in the literal meaning of a systematic tendency to lean in one direction or another—which raises the question: what is causing this bias in scientific analyses of the climate system?

The question is significant for two reasons. First, climate skeptics and deniers have often accused scientists of exaggerating the threat of climate change, but the evidence shows that not only have they not exaggerated, they have underestimated. This is important for the interpretation of the scientific evidence, for the defense of the integrity of climate science, and for public comprehension of the urgency of the climate issue. Second, objectivity is an essential ideal in scientific work, so if we have evidence that findings are biased in any direction—towards alarmism or complacency—this should concern us We should seek to identify the sources of that bias and correct them if we can.

Wired for sound: A third wave emerges in integrated circuits



Optical fibres are our global nervous system, transporting terabytes of data across the planet in the blink of an eye.

As that information travels at the speed of light across the globe, the energy of the light waves bouncing around inside the silica and polymer fibres create tiny vibrations that lead to feedback packets of sound or acoustic waves, known as 'phonons'.

This feedback causes light to disperse, a phenomenon known as 'Brillouin scattering'.

For most of the electronics and communications industry, this scattering of light is a nuisance, reducing the power of the signal. But for an emerging group of scientists this feedback process is being adapted to develop a new generation of integrated circuits that promise to revolutionise our 5G and broadband networks, sensors, satellite communication, radar systems, defence systems and even radio astronomy.

"It's no exaggeration to say there is a research renaissance into this process under way," said Professor Ben Eggleton, Director of the University of Sydney Nano Institute and co-author of a review paper published today in Nature Photonics.

"The application of this interaction between light and sound on a chip offers the opportunity for a third-wave revolution in integrated circuits."

. . .
Professor Bahl said: "This paper outlines the rich physics that emerges from such a fundamental interaction as that between light and sound, which is found in all states of matter.

"Not only do we see immense technological applications, but also the wealth of pure scientific investigations that are made possible. Brillouin scattering of light helps us measure material properties, transform how light and sound move through materials, cool down small objects, measure space, time and inertia, and even transport optical information."

Professor Poulton said: "The big advance here is in the simultaneous control of light and sound waves on really small scales.

"This type of control is incredibly difficult, not least because the two types of waves have extremely different speeds. The enormous advances in fabrication and theory outlined in this paper demonstrate that this problem can be solved, and that powerful interactions between light and sound such as Brillouin scattering can now be harnessed on a single chip. This opens the door to a whole host of applications that connect optics and electronics."

Professor Steel said: "One of the fascinating aspects of integrated Brillouin technology is that it spans the range from fundamental discoveries in sound-light interactions at the quantum level to very practical devices, such as flexible filters in mobile communications."

A 127-year-old physics riddle solved



He solved a 127-year-old physics problem on paper and proved that off-centered boat wakes could exist. Five years later, practical experiments proved him right.

"Seeing the pictures appear on the computer screen was the best day at work I've ever had," says Simen Ådnøy Ellingsen, an associate professor at NTNU's Department of Energy and Process Engineering.

That was the day that Ph.D. candidate Benjamin Keeler Smeltzer and master's student Eirik Æsøy had shown in the lab that Ellingsen was right and sent him the photos from the experiment. Five years ago, Ellingsen had challenged accepted knowledge from 1887, armed with a pen and paper, and won.

He solved a problem regarding the so-called Kelvinangle in boat wakes, which has been unchallenged for 127 years. The boat wake is the v-shaped pattern that a boat or canoe makes when moving through the water. You've undoubtedly seen one at some point.

39 degrees

It has long been assumed that the angle of the v-shaped wake behind a boat should always be just below 39 degrees, as long as the water isn't too shallow. Regardless whether it's behind a supertanker or a duck, this should always be true. Or not. For like so many accepted facts, this turns out to be wrong, or at least not always the case. Ellingsen showed this.

"For me, it was a totally new field, and nobody told me it was hard," Ellingsen explained when he first made his discovery.




Boat wakes can actually have a completely different angle under certain circumstances, and can even be off-centered with respect to the direction of the boat. This can happen when there are different currents in different layers of water, known as shear flow. For shear flow, Kelvin's theory on boat wakes isn't applicable.

"It took the genius of people like Cauchy, Poisson and Kelvin to solve these wave problems for the first time, even for the simplest case of still water without currents. It's far easier for us to figure out the more general cases later, like we've done here,"Ellingsen explains.

Mathematical framework turns any sheet of material into any shape using kirigami cuts



Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a mathematical framework that can turn any sheet of material into any prescribed shape, inspired by the paper craft termed kirigami (from the Japanese, kiri, meaning to cut and kami, meaning paper).

Unlike its better-known cousin origami, which uses folds to shape paper, kirigami relies on a pattern of cuts in a flat paper sheet to change its flexibility and allow it to morph into 3-D shapes. Artists have long used this artform to create everything from pop-up cards to castles and dragons.

"We asked if it is possible to uncover the basic mathematical principles underlying kirigami and use them to create algorithms that would allow us to design the number, size and orientation of the cuts in a flat sheet so that it can morph into any given shape," said L. Mahadevan, de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Physics, and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, the senior author on the paper.

"Specifically, if we are given a general shape in two-or-three dimensions, how should we design the cut patterns in a reference shape so that we can get it to deploy to the final shape in one motion?" said Gary P. T. Choi, a graduate student at SEAS and first author of the paper. "In this work, we solve that problem by identifying the constraints that have to be satisfied in order to achieve this cut pattern, use a numerical optimization approach to determine the patterns, and then verify this experimentally."

A Chunk of Trinitite Reminds Us of the Sheer, Devastating Power of the Atomic Bomb





The first atomic bomb ever exploded was a test device, insouciantly nicknamed the Gadget. In mid-July 1945, American scientists had trucked the five-ton mechanism from their secret laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, 230 miles south, to a place known to the scientists as Trinity in a stretch of southern New Mexico desert called the Jornada del Muerto—the journey of death. There they hoisted it into a corrugated-steel shelter on a 100-foot steel tower, connected the tangle of electric cables that would detonate its shell of high explosives, and waited tensely through a night of lightning and heavy rain before retreating to a blockhouse five and a half miles away to begin the test countdown.

The rain stopped and just at dawn on July 16, 1945, the explosion delivered a multiplying nuclear chain reaction in a sphere of plutonium no larger than a baseball that yielded an explosive force equivalent to about 19,000 tons of TNT. The 100-million-degree fireball vaporized the steel tower down to its footings, swirled up desert sand, melted it and rained down splashes of greenish glass before rising rapidly to form the world’s first nuclear mushroom cloud.

. . .

It was primarily quartz and feldspar, tinted sea green with minerals in the desert sand, with droplets of condensed plutonium sealed into it.

Electric Dump Truck Produces More Energy Than It Uses



Electric vehicles are everywhere now. It’s more than just Leafs, Teslas, and a wide variety of electric bikes. It’s also trains, busses, and in this case, gigantic dump trucks. This truck in particular is being put to work at a mine in Switzerland, and as a consequence of having an electric drivetrain is actually able to produce more power than it consumes. (Google Translate from Portugese)

This isn’t some impossible perpetual motion machine, either. The dump truck drives up a mountain with no load, and carries double the weight back down the mountain after getting loaded up with lime and marl to deliver to a cement plant. Since electric vehicles can recover energy through regenerative braking, rather than wasting that energy as heat in a traditional braking system, the extra weight on the way down actually delivers more energy to the batteries than the truck used on the way up the mountain.

Kegan's Theory of the Evolution of Consciousness

Kegan (1982, 1994) saw the process of development as an effort to resolve the tension between a desire for differentiation and an equally powerful desire to be immersed in one's surroundings (Kegan, 1994). The evolutionary truces evident at each developmental stage of Kegan's (1982) model are "temporary solution[s] to the lifelong tension between the yearnings for inclusion and distinctness"

Kegan (Robert) introduced his theory of self-evolution in 1982 in his book, The Evolving Self. In his later book, In over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (1994), he presented a revised version of his theory and further discussion of the implications of his work for society. Kegan (1982) noted that Piaget's work served as inspiration for his own. Pointing out that Piaget had attended very little to emotion or to the process and experience of development, Kegan sought to address these omissions, drawing on the work of object-relation theorists such as Kernberg (1966), who explored how interpretations of self-other relationships evolved over time, and psychosocial theorists, particularly Erikson. Kegan especially valued "building strong intellectual bridges" (Scharmer, 2000, n.p.) to educational practice, leadership, and organizational development.

Kegan's Theory

The focus of Kegan's (1994) theory is the "evolution of consciousness, the personal unfolding of ways of organizing experience that are not simply replaced as we grow but subsumed into more complex systems of mind" (p. 9). Growth involves movement through five progressively more complex ways of knowing, which Kegan referred to as stages of development in 1982, orders of consciousness in 1994, and forms of mind in 2000. The process of growth involves an evolution of meaning that is marked by continual shifts from periods of stability to periods of instability, leading to ongoing reconstruction of the relationship of persons with their environments (Kegan, 1982). Each succeeding order consists of cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal components.

Kegan (1982, 1994) saw the process of development as an effort to resolve the tension between a desire for differentiation and an equally powerful desire to be immersed in one's surroundings (Kegan, 1994). The evolutionary truces evident at each developmental stage of Kegan's (1982) model are "temporary solution[s] to the lifelong tension between the yearnings for inclusion and distinctness" (p. 107). While initially stating that his ways of knowing alternated between favoring autonomy at one stage and favoring embeddedness at the next (Kegan, 1982), he later modified his view, stating that "each order of consciousness can favor either of the two fundamental longings" (Kegan, 1994, p. 221) and that neither position is better than the other. He suggested that increased differentiation could mean finding new ways to stay connected. Paradoxically, as people make meaning in a more differentiated way, they also develop the capacity to become closer to others.

. . .

Descriptions of Kegan's levels of consciousness follow. They have had different names in different iterations of his theory. We provide the numerical orders used in the 1994 version, as well as the names used for the later orders in the 2000 version. In addition to describing each order, we provide Kegan's (1982) suggestions regarding ways to challenge and support development to the next order.

Order 0. Kegan (1982) described newborn infants as "living in an objectless world, a world in which everything sensed is taken to be an extension of the infant" (p. 78). As a result, when the infant cannot see or experience something, it does not exist. By the time infants are eighteen months old, they begin to recognize the existence of objects outside themselves, propelling them into the next stage. Parents must remain steadfast as the child pushes against them to determine where the boundaries are between its self and the environment.

. . .