Science

Researchers have turned carbon dioxide (CO2) into solid rock by injecting volcanic basalt rock with pressurised liquid CO2, and letting natural chemical reactions trigger the transformation.

The technique, which takes two years to achieve, gives scientists another option for capturing and storing the excess CO2 humans are pumping into the atmosphere – and could one day be scaled up to take significant levels of carbon out of circulation.

The research was conducted by a team from the the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and builds on a similar experiment in Iceland earlier this year, which dissolved CO2 in water and injected it into a basalt formation.

In the latest study, undiluted CO2 was used, and much more of it was stored at once: 1,000 tonnes of fluid carbon dioxide.

The PNNL team had already shown that the chemical reactions could happen in lab conditions, but until now, they didn't know how long the reactions would take in a real-world setting.

"Now we know that this mineral trapping process can occur very quickly, it makes it safe to store CO2 in these formations," says researcher Pete McGrail. "We know now that in a short period of time the CO2 will be permanently trapped."

On April 8, 2024, the shadow of the Moon will cross Mexico, the United States, and Canada. This spectacular total solar eclipse will amaze many millions of people. This is sure to be a record-setting astronomical event.

Anyone in the path of totality or if not planning to watch or excited for this eclipse event passing through America in a couple days?

For years, various studies have probed the links between air pollution and risk for diseases, especially heart and lung issues. More recently it’s been shown that people inhaling higher levels of air pollution may also be at higher risk for brain conditions like Alzheimer’s, worse decision-making, and depression.

Now one of the largest studies to date has focused on the connection between several forms of air pollution and the risk for developing late-life depression, with concerning results.

The paper, published in February in JAMA Network Open, tracked almost 9 million Medicare participants in the United States to look at the relationship between air pollution and the risk for developing depression in subsequent years. In this cohort study, researchers plotted people’s geographically-determined exposure to three separate air pollutants—PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone—and then watched to see who was diagnosed with depression.

Because the participants in this study were enrolled in Medicare, they were all at least 64 years old at the time they began the study (the average age was around 74). The population was 57% females. Additionally, in order to minimize the chances that people’s depression was a pre-existing issue, they didn’t start tracking new cases of depression until five years after people began the study.

At the conclusion of this study, the researchers found that all three forms of air pollution individually and in combination correlated with an increased risk for developing depression. It was notable that among the three air pollutants, higher levels of ozone exposure had the strongest link to developing late-life depression.

This study was certainly not the first to point out the association between mental health and air pollution exposure. However, the large sample size and differential categorization of the effects of the three different air pollutants make it relatively unique. It’s important to note that scientists aren’t fully certain as to the biological mechanisms that connect depression and air pollution, but activation of inflammatory pathways in the brain is a leading possibility.

Inflammation, once considered more an acute rather than chronic threat, has in recent years emerged as a potential driver of a wide variety of neurological and psychological conditions. Within the brain it's thought that inflammation could lead to a number of damaging effects including problems with neuron health as well as an unhealthy activation of immune cells called microglia.

Specific to air pollution, animal research has demonstrated that inhaled pollution significantly increased brain inflammatory markers, suggesting a lung-brain inflammatory mechanism. This is consistent with findings in humans. For example, in one 2016 study, researchers looked at brains of people after death and found that those exposed to more significant air pollution demonstrated higher levels of inflammatory markers in multiple parts of the brain including the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, two areas linked to Alzheimer's and depression symptoms.

Scientists in South Korea have announced a new world record for the length of time they sustained temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius — seven times hotter than the sun’s core — during a nuclear fusion experiment, in what they say is an important step forward for this futuristic energy technology.

Nuclear fusion seeks to replicate the reaction that makes the sun and other stars shine, by fusing together two atoms to unleash huge amounts of energy. Often referred to as the holy grail of climate solutions clean energy, fusion has the potential to provide limitless energy without planet-warming carbon pollution. But mastering the process on Earth is extremely challenging.

The most common way of achieving fusion energy involves a donut shaped reactor called a tokamak in which hydrogen variants are heated to extraordinarily high temperatures to create a plasma.

High temperature and high density plasmas, in which reactions can occur for long durations, are vital for the future of nuclear fusion reactors, said Si-Woo Yoon, director of the KSTAR Research Center at the Korean Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE), which achieved the new record.

Sustaining these high temperatures “has not been easy to demonstrate due to the unstable nature of the high temperature plasma,” he told CNN, which is why this recent record is so significant.

KSTAR, KFE’s fusion research device which it refers to as an “artificial sun,” managed to sustain plasma with temperatures of 100 million degrees for 48 seconds during tests between December 2023 and February 2024, beating the previous record of 30 seconds set in 2021.

New York, NY (October 02, 2019) Some people suffering from severe mental illness, particularly schizophrenia, hear “voices,” known as auditory hallucinations. This symptom, which afflicts more than 80% of patients, is among the most prevalent and distressing symptoms of schizophrenia. Patients “hear voices” speaking to them or about them without anyone actually being there. Auditory hallucinations, which usually begin in adolescence and young adulthood, “sound” very real to patients and can have a devastating impact on their quality of life because the “voices” are typically distressing and distracting, sometimes compelling the sufferer into suicidal or violent actions. Uncovering the biological origins of auditory hallucinations is essential for reducing their contribution to the disease burden of schizophrenia. To investigate the biological origins of hearing “voices” in patients with schizophrenia, a team led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai used ultra-high field imaging to compare the auditory cortex of schizophrenic patients with healthy individuals. They found that schizophrenic patients who experienced auditory hallucinations had abnormal tonotopic organization of the auditory cortex. Tonotopy is the ordered representation of sound frequency in the auditory cortex, which is established in utero and infancy and which does not rely on higher-order cognitive operations. The study findings, which appears this week in the Nature Partner Journal NJP Schizophrenia, suggest that the vulnerability to develop “voices” is probably established many years before symptoms begin.

“Since auditory hallucinations feel like real voices, we wanted to test whether patients with such experiences have abnormalities in the auditory cortex, which is the part of the brain that processes real sounds from the external environment,” says Sophia Frangou, MD, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “

Specifically, the research team used an ultra-high field scanner with a powerful 7 Tesla magnet to obtain high-resolution images of brain activity while study participants listened passively to tones across a range of very low to very high frequencies. In healthy brains, these sounds are processed in a very organized fashion; each frequency activates a specific part of the auditory cortex forming a tonotopic map. The team obtained tonotopic maps from 16 patients with schizophrenia with a history of recurrent auditory hallucination and 22 healthy study participants. They found that patients showed greater activation in response to most sound frequencies. Additionally, the mapping of most sound frequencies to parts of the auditory cortex appeared “scrambled” in patients with schizophrenia, suggesting that the normal processes for the organized representation of sound in the brain are disrupted in schizophrenia.

“Because the tonotopic map is established when people are still infants and remains stable throughout life, our study findings suggest that the vulnerability to develop “voices” is linked a deviance in the organization of the auditory system that occurs during infancy and precedes speech development and the onset of psychotic symptoms by many years. This is particularly exciting because it means that it might be possible to identify potential vulnerable individuals, such as the offspring of schizophrenia patients, very early on.”

In 2024, the first day of spring is Tuesday, March 19.

On the vernal equinox (March 19, 2024), the Sun will cross the celestial equator—an imaginary line in the sky above Earth’s equator—from south to north. This instant marks the March equinox everywhere on Earth. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the spring equinox; in the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the autumn equinox.

https://www.almanac.com/vernal-equinox-oddities

Plastics are now everywhere, with tiny fragments found in several major organs of the human body, including the placenta.

Given how easily the microscopic particles infiltrate our tissues, it's vital that we learn exactly what kinds of risks they could pose to our health.

Researchers have been busy studying the effects of microplastics in mini-replicas of organs, and in mice, to get a sense of how they might impact the human body. However, the concentrations of microplastics used in those studies might not reflect people's real-world exposure, and few studies have been done in humans.

Now, a small study in Italy has found shards of microplastics in fatty deposits surgically removed from patients who had an operation to open up their clogged arteries – and reported their health outcomes nearly 3 years later.

Removing fatty plaques from narrowed arteries in a procedure called a carotid endarterectomy reduces the risk of future strokes.

The team behind this new study, led by Raffaele Marfella, a medical researcher at the University of Campania in Naples, wondered how the risk of stroke – as well as heart attacks and death – compared between patients who had microplastics in their plaques and those who did not.

Following 257 patients for 34 months, the researchers found nearly 60 percent of them had measurable amounts of polyethylene in plaques pulled from their fat-thickened arteries, and 12 percent also had polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in extracted fat deposits.

PVC comes in both rigid and flexible forms, and is used to make water pipes, plastic bottles, flooring, and packaging. Polyethylene is the most commonly produced plastic, used for plastic bags, films, and bottles, too.

cross-posted from: https://hilariouschaos.com/post/19302

Stumbled upon this idea in some reading:

They include churches, cafes, bars, clubs, community centers, public libraries, gyms, bookstores, makerspaces, stoops, parks, theaters, and opera houses, among others.

Do you think there are a lack of them, or lack of utilization of them, or are there ways we could improve or participate in a "third place" in our lives more?

Possibly more evidence for the Giant-Impact hypothesis. Very interesting science especially if they also have evidence that it's the origin of plate tectonics.

The ocean absorbs 90% of the heat caused by human-driven climate change. Warming oceans are a huge problem for coral reefs as they require temperatures to stay within the range of 79-84F (26.1-28.8C) to remain healthy, grow, and reproduce. Current predictions estimate that 99% of coral could succumb to marine heatwaves by the 2030s if global temperatures continue to rise at the current rate.

This would have dramatic consequences not just for corals, but for the wider reef ecosystem. Although coral reefs only occupy 0.1% of the seafloor, 25% of all named marine species live in reef systems and an estimated one billion people benefit directly or indirectly from coral reefs. Coral ecosystems face a host of threats ranging from increasing ocean acidification to a rise in coral diseases but the steady and alarming increase in ocean surface temperatures poses the most ubiquitous and ominous problem.

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Coral restoration typically involves transplanting nursery-grown coral onto the damaged reef by hand using individual divers, a very time consuming and arduous process that can be expensive and hard to do on a large scale. Foster decided that a new approach was needed to scale up coral planting, incorporating lessons from her family's manufacturing business, such as automation and mass production.

The Thwaites Glacier, which is part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), is the widest glacier on Earth, and has a surface area of about 74,000 square miles, larger than the state of Florida and twice the size of Maine. Thwaites is also sometimes known as the Doomsday Glacier due to the impact it would have on global sea levels if it were to melt completely. It's thought that sea levels would rise by an average of 25 inches—over 2 feet—across the world if the glacier were to collapse entirely.

Hawaii's Kīlauea volcano is once again showing an increase in activity.

There have been increased earthquakes and ground deformation at the summit of the volcano ever since the early hours of January 31, an update from the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said.

For this reason, the volcano's alert level has been raised from yellow to orange, prompting scientists to keep a close eye on the volcano.

"At this time, it is not possible to say with certainty if this activity will lead to an eruption; the activity may remain below ground. However, an eruption in Kilauea's summit region, within Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park and away from infrastructure, is one potential outcome," the update said.

LPS, as the name suggests, causes the birds to become paralyzed, falling from the skies as they lose the ability to fly. The cause of the disease is unknown, with researchers having been unable to find a pathogen or environmental toxin responsible, according to the University of Sydney.

It seems to affect the birds only in the Australian summer months, between October and June, with the highest numbers being impacted in the months of December, January, and February. During this period, thousands of the birds are taken into care to be nursed back to health, which may be an intensive and long-term process.

Scientists are taking a closer look at a species of ant in Florida that decorates its nest with the skulls of other ants it has killed. As if that wasn't macabre enough, they have now discovered it kills its enemies by mimicking them, then spraying them with acid.

The Florida ant Formica archboldi has been the subject of study for more than 60 years. Their habitat is restricted to the Southeastern U.S., mainly found in Florida and parts of Alabama and Georgia.

Upon its discovery, experts soon noticed its nests were full of the decapitated heads of trap-jaw ants. Species from this carnivorous genus (Odontomachus) are known to be fearsome predators—so at first researchers thought maybe Florida ants moved into former trap-jaw nesting sites.

Alternative theories suggested the Florida ants were some sort of specialized predator that goes around hunting trap-jaw ants.

In a study published in the journal Insectes Sociaux, Adrian Smith, from North Carolina State University, has now analyzed what happens when the Florida ants attack jaw-trap ants. He found Florida ants chemically mimic the trap jaw ant by making a layer of wax that covers the surface of the ant the same as the wax that covers its prey.