A Cosmic Web Connecting the Universe Shapes Dark Matter in Galaxies, Study Finds

Galaxies located at cosmic web “nodes” assemble dark matter earlier, and are more enriched with heavy elements, compared with those that are further away.

Our universe is connected by a cosmic web made of giant threads of dark matter and gas that stretch across millions of light years and intersect at “nodes” populated by dense clusters of galaxies. This vast network shapes the distribution and evolution of galaxies in fundamental ways that scientists are trying to unravel with ever-sharper observations and advanced simulations.

Now, a team led by Callum Donnan, a postgraduate student in astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, have identified a key correlation between the chemical makeup of galaxies and their location within the cosmic web. Using both real-life observations and computer simulations, the team found that “galaxies closer to nodes [display] higher chemical enrichment than those farther away,” a discovery that reveals some of the mysterious dynamics that link the universe, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy.

“It’s been postulated for a while that there is a link between how galaxies evolve and their position in the cosmic web,” said Donnan in an email. “Getting observational evidence however has been difficult due to the need for large, dense spectroscopic surveys covering much of the sky. Results from this have come recently but how the gas properties link to the cosmic web hadn’t been explored in much detail before.”

To home in on this question, Donnan and his colleagues examined galaxies within about a billion light years of the Milky Way observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico, which covers a huge area of the sky. The team studied the elemental makeup of gasses in the interstellar spaces within these real-life galaxies, a property that is known as gas-phase metallicity.

The results revealed that galaxies close to the nodes of the cosmic web were richer in “metals,” which in astronomy refers to any element heavier than helium. A weaker correlation was also observed with proximity to the web’s filaments, which are the threads that stretch across the universe and link nodes together. The team ran sophisticated cosmological simulations using the IllustrisTNG platform, which supported the observational findings.

Absolutely bonkers experiment measures antiproton orbiting helium ion

In Wednesday's issue of Nature, a new paper describes a potentially useful way of measuring the interactions between normal matter and exotic particles, like anti-protons and unstable items like kaons or elements containing a strange quark. The work is likely to be useful, as we still don't understand the asymmetry that has allowed matter to be the dominant form in our Universe.

But the study is probably most notable for the surprising way that it collected measurements. A small research team managed to put an antiproton in orbit around the nucleus of a helium atom that was part of some liquid helium chilled down to where it acted as a superfluid. The researchers then measured the light emitted by the antiproton's orbital transitions.
Why would anyone want to do this?

There are many reasons you'd want to get precise measurements of this sort of thing. For one, the measurements will be sensitive to the properties of antimatter and strange quarks, which are short lived and are often created in environments that make precision measurements challenging. In addition, this system involves interactions between antimatter and regular matter, which can be difficult to capture due to their violent ends. Finally, the specific interactions here—between an atomic nucleus and an object in the orbitals that surround it—are sensitive to properties that are fundamental to the Universe.

In this case, the antimatter was an antiproton. As it's the opposite of a proton, it has a negative charge. From the perspective of the nucleus, the antiproton looks a lot like a morbidly obese electron: It will occupy orbitals with precise energies around the nucleus but with a different shape from those occupied by the electron. And just like an electron, the antiproton can shift between orbitals by absorbing or emitting a photon.

The energy of the emitted photons provides information about the interactions between the antiproton and the atomic nucleus. That information is what the researchers were after.

Doing these measurements presented a significant challenge, however, and not just because of the tendency of matter and antimatter to annihilate each other. Any motion by the atoms being studied will typically cause the photon to be red- or blue-shifted relative to its actual value. In a high-energy environment, this process will turn what should be a sharp peak at a specific wavelength into an imprecise blur that doesn't give us useful answers.

The subsidies were for ethanol derived from corn, I believe.

Researchers Uncover How Sugar Substitutes (Artificial Sweeteners) Disrupt Liver Detoxification




In laboratory experiments, sweeteners impaired protein that rids the body of toxins and processes drugs.

Results from a new study suggest that two sugar substitutes disrupt the function of a protein that plays a vital role in liver detoxification and the metabolism of certain drugs. These sugar substitutes, also known as non-nutritive sweeteners, provide a sweet taste with few or no calories.

“With an estimated 40% of Americans regularly consuming non-nutritive sweeteners, it’s important to understand how they affect the body,” said Laura Danner, a doctoral student at the Medical College of Wisconsin. “In fact, many people don’t realize that these sweeteners are found in light or zero-sugar versions of yogurts and snack foods and even in non-food products like liquid medicines and certain cosmetics.”

Danner presented the new research at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology annual meeting during the Experimental Biology (EB) 2022 meeting, which was held April 2-5, 2022, in Philadelphia.

In their new work, the researchers studied the non-nutritive sweeteners acesulfame potassium and sucralose using liver cells and cell-free assays, which allow the study of cellular processes such as transport.

They found that acesulfame potassium and sucralose inhibited the activity of P-glycoprotein (PGP), which is also known as multidrug resistance protein 1 (MDR1). PGP is part of a family of transporters that work together to cleanse the body of toxins, drugs, and drug metabolites.