First glimpse of the elusive isotope nitrogen-9

Physicists might have spotted an elusive isotope of nitrogen that stretches the definition of a nucleus. Nitrogen-9’s nucleus is composed of a helium-like core of two protons and two neutrons, surrounded by five ‘unbound’ protons — a wildly unbalanced arrangement that stretches the nuclear glue of the strong force to breaking point. The five untethered protons quickly escape and the isotope lasts a mere 10⁻²¹ seconds. The boundary beyond which an isotope is too lopsided to live is called the ‘drip line’. If the evidence of ⁹N is confirmed, it will test the limit of just where the drip line might be.

Menopausal chimpanzees deepen the mystery of why women stop reproducing

The females in a group of wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are the first non-human primates to be documented experiencing menopause. Toothed whales, such as orcas (Orcinus orca), are the only other wild mammals in which females are known to live long beyond their reproductive years. In captive animals, this seems to be more common: females in 6 out of 20 mammalian orders for which there are data experience cessation of ovulation. This includes European badgers (Meles meles), house mice (Mus musculus) and horses (Equus caballus). Why only some animals experience menopause is still a mystery.

Mars contains surprise layer of molten rock

In the interior of Mars, a layer of molten rock envelops the liquid-metal core, which is smaller than previously thought. Scientists discovered the unique layer by analysing the seismic energy that vibrated through the planet after a meteorite impact. The seismic waves’ speed depends on the types of material that they are travelling through. The molten-rock layer might be left over from a magma ocean that once covered the planet.

AI ‘breakthrough’: neural net has human-like ability to generalise language

An artificial intelligence (AI) system mimics the human ability to quickly fold new words into an existing vocabulary and use them in fresh contexts. By being programmed to learn from its mistakes, the neural network outperformed the chatbot ChatGPT at making generalisations about language, scoring as well as — and sometimes even better than — human volunteers.

The Moon could be 40 million years older

A lunar rock collected by Apollo 17 astronauts suggests that the Moon formed 40 million years earlier than thought. The Moon was born when a Mars-sized object slammed into Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, although the exact timeline of when the molten Moon solidified remains unclear. A re-analysis of one of these rock samples discovered what might be the oldest lunar material: 4.46-billion-year-old zircon crystals.

How grammar influences perception

Indigenous Australians who speak Murrinhpatha have shown how our mental processes can be shaped by the structure of our language. Murrinhpatha has free word order: subjects, objects and verbs can occur anywhere in a sentence. Eye-tracking studies show that Murrinhpatha speakers shown pictures of an event focus on the elements in a different order than English speakers do — all within milliseconds. Murrinhpatha is now thriving because of elders who survived brutal policies of forced assimilation. But many other Indigenous languages are dying or extinct, threatening to curtail our understanding of the diverse ways that humans can think.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics, thinking is the mental projection of the meanings of language. What we perceive is sensory impacts interpreted in terms of the meanings of language.

Brain-inspired chip supercharges AI

A computer chip with “mind-blowing” energy efficiency could speed up artificial intelligence (AI). The computing units in IBM’s NorthPole chip are wired together in a network inspired by connections between parts of the human brain. This eliminates the need to frequently access external memory, which is one of the major bottlenecks for faster processing. It beat existing AI machines by a substantial margin in benchmark image-recognition tests and consumed much less power.

Eight-billion-year journey for energy blast

When the Universe was around half the age it is today, a blast of fast radio waves — maybe caused by the collision of several galaxies — shot out into the void. Some eight billion years later, in 2022, astronomers detected it on Earth. The unusual reading is older and more powerful than we thought fast radio waves could be, and might lead to a better understanding of the parts of the Universe that are currently invisible to our telescopes.

‘Dark photons’ hint at nature of dark matter

Indirect evidence of ‘dark photons’ has been spotted in the shrapnel of thousands of particle-smashing experiments. This could provide a glimpse into the mysterious nature of dark matter — which seems to make up most of the mass of the universe but is almost impossible to observe, other than by its gravitational effects. Dark photons, if they exist, could weakly interact with normal matter, offering a window into the dark sector.

Neanderthals hunted cave lions

A spear mark on the 48,000-year-old skeleton of a cave lion (Panthera spelaea) is the oldest evidence of Neanderthals hunting the ice-age predators. The puncture crater on the big cat’s rib, initially thought to be a bite mark made by another animal, is probably the result of a fatal stab with a wooden spear. And Neanderthal hunters were probably after more than just meat: a set of cave-lion bones from about 190,000 years ago shows that care had been taken to preserve the cat’s paws and claws as part of the pelt.

The largest map of the human brain ever made

More than 3,000 cell types — many of them new to science — have been revealed in the largest-ever atlas of human neurones and other brain cells. One team that contributed to the huge project, which involved hundreds of scientists, sequenced the RNA of more than three million cells. Another uncovered links between certain types of brain cell and neuropsychiatric disorders.

AI reads text from ancient Herculaneum scroll for the first time

A 21-year-old undergraduate student has cracked a method for reading charred, unopenable scrolls from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum. Luke Farritor trained a machine-learning algorithm on fragments of unrolled scrolls, detecting spots where the ink causes a tiny difference in texture. He then analysed closed scrolls that had been penetrated using X-ray computed tomography scans. The breakthrough could unlock the contents of hundreds of never-before-seen writings that were buried by Mount Vesuvius in October AD 79.

Asteroid sample ferried to Earth is rich in the building blocks of life

Samples of asteroid Bennu that were returned to Earth by the OSIRIS-REx mission contain some of the building blocks of life — carbon and water, trapped inside the crystal structure of clay minerals. And this is just what’s on the surface of the sample container — it hasn’t even been opened yet.

Further evidence points to footprints in New Mexico being the oldest sign of humans in Americas

Fossilised human footprints might be the oldest direct evidence that people lived in the Americas thousands of years earlier than thought — as early as 23,000 years ago. Researchers analysed pollen and sediment from the footprints and found that their ages matched estimates from 2021 that were based on the ages of seeds stuck in the fossils. The finding supports the idea that people skirted down the Pacific coast of the Americas after crossing the Bering land bridge, rather than waiting until ice-age glaciers retreated from inland routes. The timeline is also supported by indirect evidence, such as pendants carved from animal remains, but the footprints in New Mexico are special because they were undoubtedly made by people.

New kind of quantum computer made using high-resolution microscope

A new kind of quantum computer uses a high-resolution microscope to control titanium atoms sitting on a surface. The spins of the atoms’ electrons act as quantum bits (qubits), which are key to performing quantum computations. Researchers used microwave signals from a scanning tunnelling microscope to perform a simple two-qubit operation, which took just nanoseconds — faster than is possible with most other types of qubit. But the approach is unlikely to compete with the leading technologies, which are already being scaled up to hundreds of qubits.

Same-Sex Behaviour Evolved in Many Mammals to Reduce Conflict, Study Suggests

Same-sex sexual behaviour probably evolved independently several times in mammals as a way to smooth out social relationships when they started living in groups. An analysis of more than 6,000 mammalian species found that about 4% exhibited same-sex behaviours — including courtship, mating and forming long-term bonds — and these were particularly prevalent in non-human primate species. The researchers caution that the findings can’t explain the evolution of sexual orientation in humans.

Blogger Comments:

Firstly, evolution doesn't happen 'in order to' (purpose); it happens 'because' (reason).

Secondly, the only thing that survives from generation to generation is genes, and genes are passed on through heterosexual behaviour, not homosexual behaviour, so homosexual behaviour does not 'evolve' in species through natural selection. 

Instead, homosexual orientation can be explained developmentally through chromosomal crossover, or at least, some process of genetic recombination. That is, if a child inherits genes that probabilise sexual attraction from its opposite sex parent, then attraction to its same sex will be probabilised, as when a male inherits from the female, and the female from the male.