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  • #61
    Einstein letter containing famous equation sells for $1.2M


    A letter from the famous physicist Albert Einstein that includes one of few known examples of his equation, E = mc2, sold for more than $1.2 million at an auction this week.

    The auction began on May 13 and officially ended Thursday, with an anonymous buyer identified as a document collector winning the letter in the over million-dollar bid.

    Bobby Livingston, executive vice president at Boston-based RR Auction, which oversaw the bidding process, told The Associated Press that the letter sold for far more than the $400,000 they had initially predicted.

    The one-page, handwritten letter, which recently became public, was sent to Polish American physicist Ludwik Silberstein and is dated Oct. 26, 1946, according to an image of the letter and description included on RR Auction's website.

    “It’s an important letter from both a holographic and a physics point of view,” Livingston told the news agency.

    The letter to Silberstein, who was widely known for challenging Einstein’s theories, included the groundbreaking equation that went on to influence the field of physics, showing that mass and energy are interchangeable and that time is not an absolute.

    According to RR auction, Einstein wrote in the letter, "Your question can be answered from the E = mc2 formula, without any erudition.”

    The auction website said Einstein in his later years explained on-camera that his famous equation “followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are but different manifestations of the same thing.”

    “Furthermore, the equation E is equal to m c-squared, in which energy is put equal to mass multiplied by the velocity of light squared, showed that a very small amount of mass may be converted into a very large amount of energy, and vice versa,” Einstein explained.

    RR Auction noted that according to archivists at the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, there are only three other known examples of Einstein writing out the famous equation.

    Livingston told the AP that the letter auctioned Friday was found among Silberstein’s personal archives that were sold by his descendants.

    Five parties were initially engaged in a bidding war over the letter, Livingston said, though it eventually came down to two prospective buyers.: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-brief...-sells-for-12m - https://inews.co.uk/news/world/alber...850000-1014682

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    • #62
      Blind man has sight partly restored after pioneering treatment

      A blind man has had his sight partly restored after a form of gene therapy that uses pulses of light to control the activity of nerve cells – the first successful demonstration of so-called optogenetic therapy in humans.

      The 58-year-old man, from Brittany in northern France, was said to be “very excited” after regaining the ability to recognise, count, locate and touch different objects with the treated eye while wearing a pair of light-stimulating goggles, having lost his sight after being diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa almost 40 years ago.

      The breakthrough marks an important step towards the more widespread use of optogenetics as a clinical treatment. It involves modifying nerve cells (neurons) so that they fire electrical signals when they’re exposed to certain wavelengths of light, equipping neuroscientists with the power to precisely control neuronal signalling within the brain and elsewhere.

      Christopher Petkov, a professor of comparative neuropsychology at Newcastle University medical school, said: “This is a tremendous development to restore vision using an innovative approach. The goal now is to see how well this might work in other patients with retinitis pigmentosa.”

      This group of rare, genetic disorders, which involves the loss of light-sensitive cells in the retina, affects more than 2 million people worldwide, and can lead to complete blindness.

      The new technique aims to restore visual function at the late stages of the disease, by injecting a harmless virus that has been modified to carry the genetic instructions for making a light-responsive algal protein, into the eye. These instructions are inserted into specific eye cells called retinal ganglion cells, bypassing the damaged retinal cells, and allowing visual information to be transmitted to the brain when the modified cells are exposed to light.

      The light is delivered into the patient’s eye using goggles that capture images from the real world and transform them into pulses at the specific wavelength the gene therapy protein responds to in real time, enabling the man to see.

      The study, published in Nature Medicine, describes the first patient treated as part of an international study investigating the safety and tolerability of the treatment. Two patients have also had the treatment in London.

      It takes time for the eye cells to start producing the protein and for the brain to become accustomed to the new system. Prof José-Alain Sahel at the University of Pittsburgh school of medicine, who co-led the study, said: “Initially, the patient couldn’t see anything with the system, and obviously this must have been quite frustrating. And then spontaneously, he started to be very excited, reporting that he was able to see the white stripes [of a zebra crossing] across the street.”

      His vision improved with further training, although it is not completely restored and he still cannot recognise faces. However, the treatment was well tolerated, and the results expected to be long-lasting.

      “I think there’s a new scientific field [being] born here, namely visual rehabilitation,” said the study co-leader Prof Botond Roska at the University of Basel in Switzerland. “What these ganglion cells are telling the brain is not the normal activity of the ganglion cells. What we are getting into is [teaching] the brain of a 60-year-old a new language.”

      Prof Gero Miesenböck, the director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at the University of Oxford, who co-won the Brain prize in 2013 for the invention and refinement of optogenetics, said: “The study represents a significant milestone in therapeutic applications of optogenetics. There has been much speculation – and also a rather large amount of hype – about such applications since the early days of the technology, which originated 20 years ago as a research tool.”

      There are still major obstacles to overcome before optogenetic treatment can be used more widely, including identifying the relevant brain cells to be modified, and finding ways to safely introduce light sources into the brain.

      Miesenböck said: “If optogenetic treatments for other neurological and psychiatric indications are to become a reality, we need to advance our fundamental understanding of the relevant brain structures. This, not technological issues, is the most serious obstacle to wider optogenetic applications.”: https://www.theguardian.com/science/...ring-treatment


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      • #63
        New dinosaur species confirmed as largest ever found in Australia



        A new dinosaur species discovered in Australia's Queensland region is the largest dinosaur ever found in the country — and it's among the biggest in the world, researchers announced Monday in the journal PeerJ.

        The big picture: Australotitan cooperensis, nicknamed Cooper, is believed to have walked the Earth 90 million years ago. Scientists estimate that Cooper would have "weighed about 70 tons, measured two stories tall and extended to about the length of a basketball court," the New York Times notes.
        • Cooper's bones were first discovered in Australia's Eromanga Basin in 2007, but paleontologists from the Queensland Museum and Eromanga Natural History Museum have only just officially classified it, according to the Guardian.

        What they're saying: "We're pretty excited about it because it's just the start of what we think might be a new wave of discoveries of very large dinosaur species in Australia," said study co-author Scott Hocknull, a paleontologist at Brisbane's Queensland Museum, to the Times.: https://www.axios.com/new-dinosaur-s...77f7562e0.html

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        • #64
          A sinkhole larger than a football field has appeared in Mexico — and it's still growing



          A huge sinkhole that emerged on farmland in Central Mexico is continuing to grow in size and is swallowing a brick and cinder block home.

          The sinkhole first appeared in the town of Santa María Zacatepec in Mexico’s Puebla State, east of Mexico City, last month and has continued to expand.

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          The Associated Press reports the large hole is more than 400 feet across, larger than a football field, and a home located on the land is beginning to collapse into it.

          The family that lives in the home has been evacuated.

          “It’s a very hard time for us. It hurts, because this is all that we have,” Magdalena Xalamigua Xopillacle, who lives in the home, told the news outlet.

          “At times we feel sick from so much sadness,” she said.

          The sinkhole measured about 16 feet in diameter when it first appeared then quickly grew over the course of hours, and then days. The Associated Press reports the edge of the hole is about 50 feet deep and the bottom is filled with water that appears to have strong currents.

          While some residents said the sinkhole may be a consequence of excessive groundwater use by factories in the area, officials said it could have been caused by an underground river.

          Authorities have advised people to stay away from the area and have secured the land with soldiers. https://thehill.com/changing-america...ball-field-has
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          • #65
            Nuclear bomb detectors uncover secret population of blue whales hiding in Indian Ocean


            Scientists have discovered an entirely new population of pygmy blue whales in the Indian Ocean, which have managed to evade detection for decades despite their enormous size.

            Researchers uncovered the secretive cetaceans by analyzing acoustic data collected by an underwater nuclear bomb detection array, which revealed a unique song scientists had never heard before.

            The new population of pygmy blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda) — a smaller subspecies of blue whale that reaches a maximum length of 79 feet (24 meters) — is now called the Chagos population, after a group of islands in the Indian Ocean near the group's lair.

            "We are still discovering missing populations of the largest animal that has ever lived," senior author Tracey Rogers, a marine ecologist at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, told Live Science. "It's a testament to the difficulty of studying life in the ocean."

            Bomb detectors

            "Blue whales are generally hard to find," lead author Emmanuelle Leroy, a postdoctoral fellow at UNSW, told Live Science. "They were brought to the edge of extinction by industrial whaling and they are recovering very slowly."

            Currently, about 5,000 to 10,000 blue whales exist in the Southern Hemisphere, compared with the pre-whaling population of about 350,000 there, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. The few that remain are often solitary and are spread across large geographic areas, making them easy to miss, Leroy said.

            "The best way to study them is through passive acoustic monitoring," Leroy said. "But this means that we need to have hydrophones recording in the different parts of the ocean."

            In the Indian Ocean, in particular, there are limited scientific acoustic arrays set up. So the team turned to underwater nuclear bomb detectors belonging to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) — an international group that uses a global underwater acoustic relay network to detect illegal nuclear bomb tests in the oceans. This gave the researchers access to a long-term dataset of noises across the Indian Ocean.

            "The CTBTO data is an important international asset," Rogers said. "I think it's cool that the same system that keeps the world safe from nuclear bombs is available to researchers and allows a host of scientists, including us, to do marine science that would not be possible without such sophisticated hydroacoustic arrays."

            A distinct song

            "This new whale song has been a dominant part of the soundscape in the Central Equatorial Indian Ocean for the past nearly 18 years."

            After analyzing the data, the researchers discovered a particular blue whale song that had not previously been heard before.

            "Blue whale songs are very simple in the way that they are the repetition of the same pattern," Leroy said. "But each blue whale subspecies and population has a different song type."

            In general, blue whale songs are long, have a low frequency — sometimes below what humans are capable of hearing (below 20 hertz) — high intensity and are repeated at regular intervals. But different groups of whales have calls that differ in duration, structure and the number of distinct sections.

            The Chagos song, belonging to the new pygmy population, has three sections, the first of which is the most complex, followed by two basic parts.

            "This new whale song has been a dominant part of the soundscape in the Central Equatorial Indian Ocean for the past nearly 18 years," Rogers said. Because of the song's prevalence, the researchers are confident that the song belongs to an entirely new population and not just a few lone individuals. However, the exact size of this new population remains a mystery.

            "Unfortunately, we have no idea of the pygmy blue whale population's size," Leroy said. "Acoustic [surveys] cannot give us this information yet."

            "Finding a new population of pygmy blue whales in the Southern Hemisphere is exciting," Rogers said. "It increases the global population that we did not realize was there before."

            Visual identification is still needed to definitively confirm the existence of the Chagos population, but the researchers are confident that this will only be a matter of time.

            In December 2020, another study using acoustic surveys, of which Rogers and Leroy were co-authors, uncovered another new population of blue whales near Oman.

            "This now takes us to five pygmy blue whale populations in the Indian Ocean," Rogers said, making the area a hotspot for the subspecies.

            These discoveries "would not have been possible" without acoustic surveys, Rogers said.

            The study was published online April 22 in the journal Scientific Reports.: https://www.livescience.com/secret-b...iscovered.html

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            • #66
              Scientists discover fossil of giant rhino thought to have been as big as six elephants/"This is the largest mammal ever to have lived on land."



              A team of paleontologists working in China discovered a new species of a prehistoric giant rhino believed to have been the largest mammal to have ever lived on land.

              Paleontologists discovered the fossils in the Linxia basin of Gansu Province. The hornless giant rhino is known as the Paraceratherium linxiaense, or Linxia Giant Rhino, according to the study published in Communications Biology on June 17.

              The giant rhino is estimated to have weighed 24 tons and was approximately the size of six elephants, according to Deng Tao, the leader of the Chinese and U.S. team. With a 26-foot-long body, the animal’s head hung about 23 feet above the ground.

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              "The skull was more than [3 feet] long, and it was very rare for a skull of that size to be preserved,” Deng told CNN. "This is the largest mammal ever to have lived on land.”

              The giant rhino mostly inhabited China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Pakistan, as well as some parts of Eastern Europe, according to Deng.

              "Animal migration is linked to climate change. So 31 million years ago, when the Mongolian plateau dried up, they moved south," Deng said. "Then the weather got wet and they went back to the north. Therefore, this discovery is of great significance to the study of the whole plateau uplift process, climate, and environment.": https://thehill.com/changing-america...-rhino-thought - https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/sc...ia-2021-06-18/


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              • #67
                DentalSlim Diet Control: Researcher defends weight-loss device after it sparks ridicule on social media



                A new weight-loss device which uses magnets to stop people opening their mouths enough to eat solids has been labelled "creepy and bizarre" by critics.

                But Dunedin researchers who developed the device are defending the invention, saying those panning the weight loss tool have misunderstood its intention.

                Otago University and United Kingdom researchers developed the world-first device, which uses magnets to lock the mouth almost shut, to help fight the global obesity epidemic.

                DentalSlim Diet Control is an intra-oral device fitted by a dental professional to the upper and lower back teeth.

                It used magnetic devices with unique custom-manufactured locking bolts.

                The device was being widely ridiculed after being shared on social media, with Twitter users calling it "creepy" and "bizarre".

                Lead researcher, University of Otago Health Sciences pro-vice-chancellor Prof Paul Brunton, said it was not intended to be used for general weight loss purposes, but instead for specific cases where there was a clinical need to lose weight quickly.

                "Sometimes the first step [of losing weight] is quite difficult ... so it was developed with a view of being an additional treatment that could be used in selected cases where it's appropriate."

                Brunton said feedback from colleagues in the field had been positive.

                The device allows the wearer to open their mouths only about 2mm, restricting them to a liquid diet, but it allows free speech and does not restrict breathing.

                Participants in a Dunedin trial lost an average of 6.36kg in two weeks and were motivated to continue with their weight loss journey.

                PB: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/dental...MS43F37MO7G6I/


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                • #68
                  Puerto Rican man named oldest man alive

                  A Puerto Rican man was named the oldest man alive on Wednesday by Guinness World Records.

                  The 112-year-old man, Emilio "Don Millo" Flores Márquez, was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, on Aug. 8, 1908.

                  As an added fun fact, the editor-in-chief of Guinness World Records, Craig Glenday, noted that Flores Márquez was "born, interestingly, on the 8th day of the 8th month in the 8th year of the 20th century!"

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                  Flores Márquez was the oldest of 11 children and began working on his father’s sugarcane farm at a young age because of this.

                  “I was the oldest of the children, so I did everything. I scrubbed, I took care of the boys, I did everything,” Flores Márquez said.

                  Flores Márquez was married to Andrea Perez for 75 years before she passed in 2020. The father of four also has five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren and now lives in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico.

                  And as for Flores Márquez’s secret to a long and happy life?

                  "My father raised me with love, loving everyone. He always told me and my siblings to do good, to share everything with others,” Flores Márquez said. “Besides, Christ lives in me.": https://thehill.com/changing-america...t-person-alive

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                  • #69
                    12-year-old Indian American becomes youngest chess grandmaster in history

                    A 12-year-old Indian American boy has become the youngest chess grandmaster in history.

                    According to Chess.com, Abhimanyu Mishra, who is 12 years and 4 months old, acquired the record after winning his June 30 game against 15-year-old Leon Luke Mendonca.

                    “Finally checkmated the biggest opponent (ongoing pandemic ) which stopped me for 14 months,” Mishra tweeted after he won. “Thanks everybody for all your love and support. Looking forward for World cup.”

                    The record was previously held for 19 years by Sergey Karjakin, who reached chess grandmaster at the age of 12 years and 7 months old.

                    A chess grandmaster is a title awarded to players by the International Chess Federation who have earned an Elo rating of at least 2500 and achieved at least three GM norms, or grandmaster norms, such as defeating a grandmaster.: https://thehill.com/changing-america...youngest-chess

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                    • #70
                      "Super Mario 64" sells for record $1.56 million at auction



                      A copy of revolutionary 1996 classic "Super Mario 64" sold for $1.56 million at auction on Sunday, a record for video games.

                      Why it matters: Prices for boxed copies of games have exploded in recent years.
                      • The "Mario" game was part of a nearly 500-item auction sold by Heritage Auctions, which doesn't even have a bona fide gaming category yet.
                      • Heritage graded that copy of "Mario" as A++, noting "the condition of this copy is just so breathtaking that we're really at a loss here." So even if you still have the game in its shrinkwrap, your copy probably has more dents in the box.
                      • An A+ version of the game sold through Heritage in January for $38,400.

                      By the numbers: Other notable sales from Heritage's auction included...
                      More recent games sold well, though not quite as well:
                      Someone even bought an early-90s U.S. Army training device that amounts to a replica M16 that can plug into a Super Nintendo.
                      • That sold on Friday for $18,600.

                      Flashback: Classic games expert Chris Kohler called it a "retro game gold rush" back in 2019, as collector money that used to go to comic books, coins and cards moved to video games.
                      https://www.axios.com/video-games-ma...111ed8af2.html

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                      • #71

                        Tropical Storm Elsa unearths ancient megalodon teeth


                        Tropical Storm Elsa unearthed a special surprise for one avid shark tooth hunter.

                        Jacob Danner found his first megalodon tooth three weeks ago along Florida’s Fernandina Beach and was riding that high when he went out to look again on Thursday after Tropical Storm Elsa had torn through the state, finding a second, even bigger megalodon tooth. The first was 3 inches in height while the second was 4 inches.

                        “It makes you want to spend your whole day hunting, thinking that more must be out there,” Danner told CNN.

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                        According to the Smithsonian, the megalodon was an ancient shark that lived in the ocean between 23 and 3.6 million years ago. At nearly 60 feet in length and weighing close to 50 tons, the megalodon was roughly three times the size of the modern great white shark.

                        And Danner isn’t the only one who Elsa helped.

                        In South Carolina, a 5-year-old tourist discovered his own megalodon tooth while vacationing in North Myrtle Beach.

                        Hans Sues, senior scientist for the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, said it makes sense that the tropical storm would unearth some of these ancient teeth as the aggressive wind and rain from the storm can “scoop up a lot of seafloor sediment in shallow water and then deposit it on beaches, providing a feast for beachcombers.”: https://thehill.com/changing-america...ient-megalodon - https://twitter.com/CNNweather/statu...15787709603840

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                        • #72
                          Morocco unearth Stone Age hand-axe dating back 1.3 million years


                          An international team of archaeologists announced Wednesday that they had uncovered the oldest Stone Age hand-axe manufacturing site in North Africa.

                          Discovered in Morocco the site, dates back 1.3 million years.

                          Researchers on the team told journalists in Rabat that the find pushes back in time the start of the Acheulian stone tool industry associated with human ancestor Homo erectus by hundreds of thousands of years.

                          In the outskirts of Casablanca, Morocco's economic capital, this site was discovered during excavations at a quarry.

                          Abderrahim Mohib, co-director of the Franco-Moroccan "Prehistory of Casablanca" programme, said the new discovery "contributes to enriching the debate on the emergence of the Acheulian in Africa."

                          According to Mohib, the Casablanca site has been investigated for decades and has yielded one of the richest assemblages of Acheulians in Africa.

                          "It is very important because we are talking about prehistoric time, a complex period for which little data exists."

                          Mahib said the study was also able to establish the "earliest human presence in Morocco" which was made up of "variants of Homo erectus".

                          Creating tools according to the shape one wants, as shown in the latest find, was a "very important technological advance," he said.

                          In the past, the Acheulian stone tool industry was regarded as an ancient presence in Morocco dating back 700,000 years.

                          In 1969, the site of Thomas Quarry I became famous when half a human jaw or mandible was found in a cave there. Now, new finds mean the Acheulian was nearly twice as old as first thought.

                          The finding is based on a study of stone tools excavated from the site that the 17-member discovery team, comprised of Moroccan, French and Italian researchers.

                          The news was called a 'chronological rebound' by Moroccan archaeologist Abdelouahed Ben Ncer.

                          He said the beginning of the Acheulian in Morocco is now close to the South and East African start dates of 1.6 million and 1.8 million years ago respectively.

                          French Foreign Ministry, Paul-Valery Montpellier 3 University, and the Moroccan Institute of Archaeology (INSAP) collaborated to develop the "Prehistory of Casablanca" programme.

                          The project also involved French and Italian laboratories.

                          Palaeolithic age begins more than three million years ago and ends more than 12,000 years ago, making it the longest period of prehistory.: https://www.wionews.com/world/scient...-africa-401282 - https://www.france24.com/en/africa/2...-million-years
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                          • #73
                            28,000-year-old cave lion cub found in perfect condition


                            Researchers say a cave lion cub believed to be the best preserved ice age animal ever discovered dates back to more than 28,000 years ago.

                            A study published in the journal Quaternary details the discovery of two mummified baby cave lions in the Siberian Arctic by local mammoth tusk collectors in 2017 and 2018. The extinct cave lions were widely spread throughout eastern Siberia in the late Pleistocene period and were a bigger relative of the African lions that live today.

                            Researchers initially thought the two cubs, believed to be 1 or 2 months old when they died, were siblings as they were discovered just dozens of feet from one another. But the new study found they differ in age by around 15,000 years.

                            One female cub nicknamed “Sparta” dates back about 28,000 years ago while “Boris,” a male, is more than 43,000 years old, according to radiocarbon dating.

                            The study details how Sparta was preserved in permafrost in near-perfect condition. The cub’s fur is mostly intact, along with her teeth, skin, soft tissue and organs.

                            “Sparta is probably the best preserved Ice Age animal ever found, and is more or less undamaged apart from the fur being a bit ruffled. She even had the whiskers preserved. Boris is a bit more damaged, but still pretty good,” Love Dalen, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Centre for Paleogenetics in Stockholm and author of the study, told CNN.

                            “Given their preservation they must have been buried very quickly. So maybe they died in a mudslide, or fell into a crack in the permafrost,” Dalen said.

                            Researchers found that the coat of the cave lions was much like that of the modern African lion cub, but with a long thick fur undercoat that likely helped them adapt to the harsh conditions of the region.: https://thehill.com/changing-america...und-in-perfect

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                            • #74
                              ^nice find
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                              • #75
                                Very Lucky
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