It was a video of a waving robot that attracted NASA to the world's most isolated city. Engineers at Woodside Petroleum Ltd. in Perth, Australia, were just "messing around" teaching a toy robot to wave when they filmed it, Chief Technology Officer Shaun Gregory told a conference recently, but NASA liked what it saw. From a report: The U.S. space agency got in touch, and the two are now studying how to use robot technology to tackle problems in remote and difficult locations. This sort of collaboration represents exactly what Australia's largest state is trying to achieve. With some of the world's biggest resource companies operating in the region, the state aims to become a hot spot for developing technology to help miners and oil explorers cut costs and boost efficiency. "Western Australia has the opportunity to cement a place as the world's epicenter of resources technology and innovation," Mike Henry, the incoming chief executive officer of mining giant BHP Group, said at the inaugural Resources Technology Showcase in Perth last week. "Whether its autonomous haulage, robotics, drones, big data or artificial intelligence, we're changing the way we work."

sciencehabit writes: Climate change doubters have a favorite target: climate models. They claim that computer simulations conducted decades ago didn't accurately predict current warming, so the public should be wary of the predictive power of newer models. Now, the most sweeping evaluation of these older models -- some half a century old -- shows most of them were indeed accurate. "How much warming we are having today is pretty much right on where models have predicted," says the study's lead author, Zeke Hausfather, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.

The researchers compared annual average surface temperatures across the globe to the surface temperatures predicted in 17 forecasts. Those predictions were drawn from 14 separate computer models released between 1970 and 2001. In some cases, the studies and their computer codes were so old that the team had to extract data published in papers, using special software to gauge the exact numbers represented by points on a printed graph. Most of the models accurately predicted recent global surface temperatures, which have risen approximately 0.9C since 1970. For 10 forecasts, there was no statistically significant difference between their output and historic observations, the team reports today in Geophysical Research Letters. Seven older models missed the mark by as much as 0.1C per decade. But the accuracy of five of those forecasts improved enough to match observations when the scientists adjusted a key input to the models: how much climate-changing pollution humans have emitted over the years.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Green energy advocates may soon be turning blue. A new membrane could unlock the potential of 'blue energy,' which uses chemical differences between fresh- and saltwater to generate electricity. If researchers can scale up the postage stamp -- size membrane in an affordable fashion, it could provide carbon-free power to millions of people in coastal nations where freshwater rivers meet the sea. Blue energy's promise stems from its scale: Rivers dump some 37,000 cubic kilometers of freshwater into the oceans every year. This intersection between fresh- and saltwater creates the potential to generate lots of electricity -- 2.6 terawatts, according to one recent estimate, roughly the amount that can be generated by 2,000 nuclear power plants. By pumping positive ions to the other side of a semipermeable membrane, researchers can create two pools of water: one with a positive charge, and one with a negative charge. If they then dunk electrodes in the pools and connect them with a wire, electrons will flow from the negatively charged to the positively charged side, generating electricity.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The gene editing performed on Chinese twins to immunize them against HIV may have failed and created unintended mutations, scientists have said after the original research was made public for the first time. Excerpts from the manuscript were released by the MIT Technology Review to show how Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui ignored ethical and scientific norms in creating the twins Lula and Nana, whose birth in late 2018 sent shockwaves through the scientific world.

He made expansive claims of a medical breakthrough that could "control the HIV epidemic", but it was not clear whether it had even been successful in its intended purpose -- immunizing the babies against the virus -- because the team did not in fact reproduce the gene mutation that confers this resistance. A small percentage of people are born with immunity because of a mutation in a gene called CCR5 and it was this gene that He had claimed to have targeted using a powerful editing tool known as Crispr which has revolutionized the field since 2012. Fyodor Urnov, a genome-editing scientist at the University of California, Berkeley told the MIT Technology Review: "The claim they have reproduced the prevalent CCR5 variant is a blatant misrepresentation of the actual data and can only be described by one term: a deliberate falsehood. "The study shows that the research team instead failed to reproduce the prevalent CCR5 variant." While the team targeted the right gene, they did not replicate the "Delta 32" variation required, instead creating novel edits whose effects are not clear.

In August of last year, NASA sent a spacecraft hurtling toward the inner Solar System, with the aim of getting some answers about the mysterious star at the center of our cosmic neighborhood. Now more than a year later, that tiny robot has started to decode some of the mysteries surrounding our Sun's behavior, after venturing closer to our parent star than any human-made object has before. From a report: That spacecraft is NASA's Parker Solar Probe, a car-sized vehicle designed to withstand temperatures of more then 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Its various instruments are protected by an extra hardy heat shield, designed to keep the spacecraft relatively cool as it gets near our balmy host star. Already, the Parker Solar Probe has gotten up close and personal with the Sun, coming within 15 million miles of the star -- closer than Mercury and any other spacecraft sent to the Sun before. "We got into the record books already," Adam Szabo, the mission scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for Parker Solar Probe, tells The Verge.

Before the spacecraft's launch, researchers were particularly interested in learning more about what's coming out of the Sun. Energetic particles and plasma are continuously streaming from the Sun at all times -- a phenomena that's been dubbed solar wind. This highly energized material makes its way to Earth, causing the dazzling display of the aurora borealis. If we get too much of this stuff, it can sometimes muck up our spacecraft in orbit and even mess with our electric grid. There's still a lot we don't know about solar wind, such as what is accelerating this material so much that it can break free from the Sun. Learning the origins of the wind could help us better predict how it will impact us here on Earth.

Climate-fueled disasters have forced about 20 million people a year to leave their homes in the past decade -- equivalent to one every two seconds -- according to a new report from Oxfam. From a news report: This makes the climate the biggest driver of internal displacement for the period, with the world's poorer countries at the highest risk, despite their smaller contributions to global carbon pollution compared to richer nations. People are seven times more likely to be internally displaced by floods, cyclones and wildfires than volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, and three times more likely than by conflict, according to the report released Monday, The issue is one of a raft of topics set to be discussed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP 25, which starts on Monday in Madrid. Oxfam is calling on the international community to do more to fund recovery programs for poorer countries affected by the climate emergency, which is set to intensify as extreme weather events are projected to increase in both severity and frequency.

A NASA satellite has found India's Vikram lander, which crashed on the lunar surface in September. The Guardian reports: Nasa released an image taken by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that showed the site of the spacecraft's impact and associated debris field, with parts scattered over almost two dozen locations spanning several kilometers. In a statement, Nasa said it had released a mosaic image of the site on 26 September, inviting the public to search it for signs of the lander.

It added that a person named Shanmuga Subramanian contacted the LRO project with a positive identification of debris -- with the first piece found about 750 meters north-west of the main crash site. Blasting off in July, emerging Asian giant India had hoped with its Chandrayaan-2 ("moon vehicle 2") mission to become just the fourth country after the U.S., Russia and regional rival China to make a successful moon landing, and the first on the lunar south pole.

At its peak, one meltwater lake drained the equivalent of an Olympic-size swimming pool every three seconds. From a report: A cerulean lake consisting of glacial meltwater on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet, located about 18 miles from where the Store Glacier meets the sea in west Greenland, briefly became one of the world's tallest waterfalls during the course of five hours in July 2018. The waterfall, like many others on the ice sheet's surface, was triggered by cracks in the ice sheet. In the case of this one meltwater lake that scientists closely observed in July 2018, the water cascaded more than 3,200 feet to the underbelly of the glacier, where the ice meets bedrock. There, the water can help lubricate the base of the ice sheet, helping the ice move faster toward the sea.

The observations of scientists, armed with aerial drones and other high-tech equipment, of the partial lake drainage that resulted could help researchers better understand how surface melting of the ice sheet could affect its melt rate, and improve global sea level rise projections. Scientists are keenly interested in how meltwater on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet -- the largest contributor to global sea level rise -- acts to speed up the movement of ice toward the sea by lubricating the underside of the ice surface. The new study, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that scientists are underestimating the number of melt ponds that partially, and rapidly, drain into the ice sheet each year. This means tweaks may be needed to the computer models used to predict sea level rise from Greenland.

Some doctors say that medical students and residents are turning to YouTube to fill in gaps in their training. The video-sharing platform hosts tens of thousands of surgery-related videos, and the number keeps climbing every year. CNBC reports: CNBC found tens of thousands of videos showing a wide variety of medical procedures on the Google-owned video platform, some of them hovering around a million views. People have livestreamed giving birth and broadcast their face-lifts. One video, which shows the removal of a dense, white cataract, has gone somewhat viral and now has more than 1.7 million views. Others seem to have found crossover appeal with nonmedical viewers, such as a video from the U.K.-based group Audiology Associates showing a weirdly satisfying removal of a giant glob of earwax. Doctors are uploading these videos to market themselves or to help others in the field, and the amount is growing by leaps and bounds. Researchers in January found more than 20,000 videos related to prostate surgery alone, compared with just 500 videos in 2009.

The videos are a particular boon for doctors in training. When the University of Iowa surveyed its surgeons, including its fourth-year medical students and residents, it found that YouTube was the most-used video source for surgical preparation by far. But residents and medical students are not the only ones tuning in. Experienced doctors, like Stanford Hospital's vascular surgeon Dr. Oliver Aalami said he turned to YouTube recently ahead of a particularly difficult exposure. There's one problem with this practice that will be familiar to anybody who's searched YouTube for tips on more mundane tasks like household repairs. How can doctors tell which videos are valid and which contain bogus information? "[O]ne recent study found more than 68,000 videos associated with a common procedure known as a distal radius fracture immobilization," the report adds. "The researchers evaluated the content for their technical skill demonstrated and educational skill, and created a score. Only 16 of the videos even met basic criteria, including whether they were performed by a health-care professional or institution. Among those, the scores were mixed. In several cases, the credentials of the person performing the procedure could not be identified at all."

Other studies are finding that YouTube's algorithm is highly ranking videos where the technique isn't optimal.

Giant tortoises can learn and remember tasks, and master lessons much faster when trained in groups. From a report: Tamar Gutnick and Michael Kuba at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and Anton Weissenbacher at Schonbrunn Zoo in Vienna trained Galapagos tortoises (Chelonoides nigra) and Aldabra tortoises (Aldabrachelys gigantea) to bite a ball of a particular colour -- blue, green or yellow. When tested three months later, the tortoises recalled the task. The authors tested three of the tortoises again after nine years and found that all three responded to toys of the correct colour. The researchers also found that both species of tortoise could be conditioned with fewer training sessions if they were taught in groups than if learning occurred in isolation, hinting that tortoises learn from watching their peers.

A new project aims to make LibGen, which hosts 33 terabytes of scientific papers and books, much more stable. From a report: It's hard to find free and open access to scientific material online. The latest studies and current research huddle behind paywalls unread by those who could benefit. But over the last few years, two sites -- Library Genesis and Sci-Hub -- have become high-profile, widely used resources for pirating scientific papers. The problem is that these sites have had a lot of difficulty actually staying online. They have faced both legal challenges and logistical hosting problems that has knocked them offline for long periods of time. But a new project by data hoarders and freedom of information activists hopes to bring some stability to one of the two "Pirate Bays of Science." Library Genesis (LibGen) contains 33 terabytes of books, scientific papers, comics, and more in its scientific library. That's a lot of data to host when countries and science publishers are constantly trying to get you shut down.

Last week, redditors launched a project to better seed, or host, LibGen's files. "It's the largest free library in the world, servicing tens of thousands of scientists and medical professionals around the world who live in developing countries that can't afford to buy books and scientific journals. There's almost nothing else like this on Earth. They're using torrents to fulfill World Health Organization and U.N. charters. And it's not just one site index -- it's a network of mirrored sites, where a new one pops up every time another gets taken down," user shrine said on Reddit. Shrine is helping to start the project. Two seedbox companies (services that provide high-bandwidth remote servers for uploading and downloading data), Seedbox dot io and UltraSeedbox, stepped in to support the project. A week later, LibGen is seeding 10 terabytes and 900,000 scientific books thanks to help from Seedbox.io and UltraSeedbox.

Amazon's next big step in health care is with voice transcription technology that's designed to allow doctors to spend more time with patients and less time at the computer. At Amazon Web Services' re:Invent conference on Tuesday, the company is launching a service called Amazon Transcribe Medical, which transcribes doctor-patient interactions and plugs the text straight into the medical record. From a report: "Our overarching goal is to free up the doctor, so they have more attention going to where it should be directed," said Matt Wood, vice president of artificial intelligence at AWS. "And that's to the patient." At last year's re:Invent, AWS introduced a related service called Amazon Comprehend Medical, which "allows developers to process unstructured medical text and identify information such as patient diagnosis, treatments, dosages, symptoms and signs, and more," according to a blog post. Wood said the two services are linked and can be used together. Voice-to-text transcription is one of the many areas where Amazon is battling with cloud rivals Microsoft and Google. All three companies operate speech assistants that can in real time translate spoken words and sentences and offer text translation. Businesses can use the technology in a variety of ways to weave into their applications.

[...] A big challenge for Amazon, a huge consumer company with tons of customer data, is ensuring that its health-care tools are compliant with privacy rules and regulations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and when it comes to transcription, maintaining an extremely high level of accuracy to avoid problematic outcomes or potential liability. Imagine, for instance, if the machine learning system inputs the term "hyper" instead of "hypo," or if doctors noticed so many inaccuracies that they ended up doing the work manually anyway. Wood said the service is HIPAA compliant. He said it took a lot of work for the technology to correctly annotate the "domain specific language and abbreviations" that are common in the medical field, and added that the accuracy is very high. Amazon hasn't published research showing how its accuracy compares with other offerings, but Wood said the company hasn't ruled it out.

Researchers have identified a metal that conducts electricity without conducting heat - an incredibly useful property that defies our current understanding of how conductors work. From a report: The metal, found in 2017, contradicts something called the Wiedemann-Franz Law, which basically states that good conductors of electricity will also be proportionally good conductors of heat, which is why things like motors and appliances get so hot when you use them regularly. But a team in the US showed this isn't the case for metallic vanadium dioxide (VO2) - a material that's already well known for its strange ability to switch from a see-through insulator to a conductive metal at the temperature of 67 degrees Celsius (152 degrees Fahrenheit). "This was a totally unexpected finding," said lead researcher Junqiao Wu from Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division back in January 2017. "It shows a drastic breakdown of a textbook law that has been known to be robust for conventional conductors. This discovery is of fundamental importance for understanding the basic electronic behaviour of novel conductors." Not only does this unexpected property change what we know about conductors, it could also be incredibly useful - the metal could one day be used to convert wasted heat from engines and appliances back into electricity, or even create better window coverings that keep buildings cool.

"The desperate search for ways to help the world's coral reefs rebound from the devastating effects of climate change has given rise to some radical solutions," reports the Washington Post. There's coral "nurseries" in the Caribbean, while Hawaiian scientists are trying to breed a new and more resilient type of coral.

But at least one team focused on the herbivorous fish which improve the microbiomes around the reefs -- party by eating the seaweed that would otherwise compete with the coral. And they think the solution lies in sounds: On Friday, British and Australian researchers rolled out another unorthodox strategy that they say could help restoration efforts: broadcasting the sounds of healthy reefs in dying ones. In a six-week field experiment, researchers placed underwater loudspeakers in patches of dead coral in Australia's Great Barrier Reef and played audio recordings taken from healthy reefs... The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that twice as many fish flocked to the dead coral patches where healthy reef sounds were played compared with the patches where no sound was played... According to the study, the number of species present in the reef patches where healthy sounds were played increased by 50 percent over the other patches. The new fish populations included species from all parts of the food web, such as scavengers, herbivores and predatory fish. Importantly, the fish that arrived at the patches tended to stay there...

The technique, if it can be replicated on larger scales, could offer scientists another tool to revive coral reefs around the world that have been ravaged by climate change, overfishing and pollution in recent years. Scientists have warned that climate change may already be accelerating too fast for some reefs to recover at all and that conservation efforts are not keeping pace with the devastation. Severe coral bleaching triggered by extreme heat waves killed off 50 percent of the Great Barrier Reef, the planet's largest coral reef, in 2016 and 2017. Such bleaching events -- which occur when the nutrient-rich and color-providing algae that live in corals are expelled because of heat stress -- are occurring four times as frequently as they did in the 1980s, as The Washington Post has reported.

Lasrick writes: You may remember the explosion at VECTOR, once a center of Soviet biological warfare research. Filippa Lentzos, senior research fellow jointly appointed in the Departments of War Studies and of Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London, just posted an update on what happened after the explosion. Her research focuses on biological threats and on the security and governance of emerging technologies in the life sciences, and she's been covering the accident since it first happened in September.
The article examines the facility's history as the center of the Soviet Union's biological warfare effort -- and how forthcoming Russian officials were in the wake of the September incident: Global public health and security officials were concerned the explosion might have affected labs holding dangerous viruses... An international legal framework (the International Health Regulations) obligates countries to notify the World Health Organization of events constituting a public health risk. In the case of the VECTOR explosion, where, as far as we know, no staff were infected and there were no signs of a disease outbreak to suggest there might be a public health risk, the incident would not require formal notification. Informal communications are always encouraged, however, and, according to another source, once prompted, Russian officials did also communicate through more formal channels following the incident at VECTOR to reassure the international public health community.

The explosion had occurred in a decontamination room where staff change into and out of the personal protective gear worn in high containment labs. The area was being renovated at the time of the incident and there were no biohazardous substances in the room. While the windows had been blown out, there was no structural damage to the building itself. One contractor had been taken to hospital with severe burns and was in intensive care, but there were no public health risks stemming from the explosion...

The international community does not yet know with any certainty what really happened at VECTOR that day. If it really was an accidental gas explosion with no resulting health or security risks, the situation seems to have been handled appropriately. But given Russia's history of covering up biological warfare research and secrecy around major accidents, national and local officials needed to show even more transparency than they did.

"A new photo shows the solar system's second confirmed interstellar visitor in an impressive new light," writes Space.com.

elainerd (Slashdot reader #94,528) quotes their report: A team of astronomers from Yale University in Connecticut imaged Comet 2I/Borisov last Sunday (Nov. 24) using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, revealing the object's tail to be nearly 100,000 miles (160,000 kilometers) long. That's about 14 times Earth's diameter, and more than 40% the distance from our planet to the moon. "It's humbling to realize how small Earth is next to this visitor from another solar system," Yale astronomy professor Pieter van Dokkum said in a statement. Borisov's tail dwarfs its body, of course; researchers think the comet's nucleus is just 1 mile (1.6 km) or so across.

The comet was discovered in late August by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov. Analysis of the object's speed and trajectory revealed that it came into our solar system from afar, making it the second known interstellar interloper after the mysterious body 'Oumuamua, which was first spotted in October 2017. Astronomers didn't see 'Oumuamua until it had already zoomed past Earth on its way toward the outer solar system, limiting the opportunity for detailed study. But Comet Borisov is a more obliging target.

Software developer nickwinlund77 writes: A new study following Nick Lane, et al.'s protocell study mentioned on Slashdot offers an explanation for how ''protocells'' could have emerged on early Earth, eventually leading to the cells we know today.

The work suggests that molecules called cyclophospholipids may have been the ingredient necessary for protocells to form important internal structures called vesicles, which likely kicked off the evolutionary process.

Are protocells basically a form of preliminary software-like 'code' in evolutionary biology?

"Synthetic biologists have performed a biochemical switcheroo," reports Science magazine: They've re-engineered a bacterium that normally eats a diet of simple sugars into one that builds its cells by absorbing carbon dioxide (CO2), much like plants. The work could lead to engineered microbes that suck CO2 out of the air and turn it into medicines and other high-value compounds.

"The implications of this are profound," says Dave Savage, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the work. Such advances, he says, could "ultimately make us change the way we teach biochemistry...."

In all, the evolved bacteria picked up 11 new genetic mutations that allowed them to survive without eating other organisms, the team reports today in Cell. "It really shows how amazing evolution can be, in that it can change something so fundamental as cellular metabolism," Milo says.
"The bacteria were given just enough sugar so they wouldn't starve to death," explains long-time Slashdot reader Tangential, "but had access to plenty of CO2 and formate.

"The process of evolution says that life finds a way to cope with stressful conditions like these, and some of the bacteria soon turned to the CO2 as a food source."

A mix of silkworms' proteins acts as a scaffold for 3-D-printed tissues and organs. From a report: Many research groups are testing "ink" made from silk proteins to print human tissues, implants and perhaps even organs. The process is a less costly alternative to conventional 3-D printing with collagen, a key protein in the body's natural scaffolding. Researchers in Assam, a state in India, are investigating using local silkworm species for the task -- they recently submitted a patent for bioinks using a combination of proteins extracted from local species Antheraea assamensis and Samia ricini, as well as the commonly used Bombyx mori. The scientists have woven them into synthetic structures ranging from blood vessels to liver lobes; in a paper published in September in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, they described mimicking the cartilage of an entire ear. Silk is a natural polymer, a substance with long, repeating molecular chains. It is mechanically strong and completely biodegradable, well suited for applications in tissue engineering.

To use it, researchers draw liquid silk from the silkworm's glands or dissolve silk fibers in solvents. They carefully mix the gelatinous liquid with a patient's stem cells, then build structures layer by layer with a 3-D printer. After implantation, the cells grow and replace the silken scaffold, which eventually degenerates into amino acids. Extracting and purifying collagen from animal remains, a common medical source, is complex and expensive. "Compared with collagen, silks have an immense advantage in terms of supply and processing. Local sourcing is also a clear plus in their use in India," says David Kaplan, who heads the department of biomedical engineering at Tufts University and is not involved in the new research. Silk from domesticated silkworms has been used widely in bioprinting, but Biman B. Mandal's laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati in Assam is among the first to incorporate wild silks.

From love songs to dance tunes to lullabies, music made in disparate cultures worldwide displays certain universal patterns, according to a study by researchers who suggest a commonality in the way human minds create music. From a report: The study focused on musical recordings and ethnographic records from 60 societies around the world including such diverse cultures as the Highland Scots in Scotland, Nyangatom nomads in Ethiopia, Mentawai rain forest dwellers in Indonesia, the Saramaka descendants of African slaves in Suriname and Aranda hunter-gatherers in Australia. Music was broadly found to be associated with behaviors including infant care, dance, love, healing, weddings, funerals, warfare, processions and religious rituals. The researchers detected strong similarities in musical features across the various cultures, according to Samuel Mehr, a Harvard University research associate in psychology and the lead author of the study published in the journal Science. "The study gives credence to the idea that there is some sort of set of governing rules for how human minds produce music worldwide. And that's something we could not really test until we had a lot of data about music from many different cultures," Mehr said.