Its not a snake. Its a roundworm that infect snakes usually.
A neurosurgeon in Australia pulled a wriggling 3-inch roundworm from the brain of a 64-year-old woman last year—which was quite the surprise to the woman’s team of doctors and infectious disease experts, who had spent over a year trying to identify the cause of her recurring and varied symptoms.
the roundworm was one known to infect snakes—specifically carpet pythons endemic to the area where the woman lived—as well as the pythons’ mammalian prey
The study conducted in close collaboration with Andrea Alù and his group at CUNY Advanced Science Research Center is the result of a major international collaboration. Experiments conducted at CCNY and ASRC were complemented by measurements taken at the University of Washington in the group of Prof. Xiaodong Xu by Dr. Geoffrey Diederich. Theoretical support was provided by Dr. Akashdeep Kamra and Prof. Francisco J. Garcia-Vidal from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Dr. Matthias Florian from the University of Michigan. The materials were grown by Prof. Zdenek Sofer and Kseniia Mosina at the UCT Prague and the project was further supported by Dr. Julian Klein at MIT. The work at CCNY was supported through the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation (NSF) – Division of Materials Research, the NSF CREST IDEALS center, DARPA, and the German Research Foundation.
I love reading about discovering a new species but it always makes me wonder how much longer these things are going to last with a such a quick changing environment once ocean temperatures start to rise. Are these species part of a chain of natural processes, like the honeybee and pollination, and we didn’t know it, or are they just along for the ride?
Scientists have GOT to stop allowing religion-flavored nicknames for phenomena. It imports a bunch of inappropriate connotations and confuses the message. “God particle”, “demon particle”, etc. What is this clownshoes nonsense?
Any time you see any science article -- especially cosmology stuff -- claim some law of nature is being "proved wrong" or breaking down or failing or anything like that.... it just means an edge case was found that has some tiny but statistically significant deviation from our models. It means there's a missing piece of the puzzle that until recently was so inconsequential that we didn't even know we were overlooking it, but that the rest of the picture is becoming so sharply focused that its absence can no longer be overlooked. Or it means the observational data simply had errors in it.
"THE SCIENTISTS WERE WRONG" in all of its various forms makes for great clickbait, but it's only clickbait. We're highly, highly unlikely to be finding any new models for cosmology that totally upend our understanding of the universe as we continue to shine light through the fog at the edge of our understanding. There's vanishingly few cases of a scientist being genuinely wrong, and even fewer cases where the theory they were wrong about has any meaningful mass appeal.
Articles like this one set my hackles up. I get it, but "an observed system does not move precisely according to the predictions of our current best models of general relativity" isn't much of a headline, especially when the research was published by a guy who's heavily invested in proving MOND right in spite of compelling evidence that dark matter exists and the modified mechanical formulas aren't needed.
MOND does not describe all observed phenomena, but neither does dark matter and dark energy. We simply don’t know the truth in this area. In my opinion too much money in physics is thrown on the needle in a haystack search for dark matter.
Does MOND actually address dark energy in any way? I don't think it does or is even particularly intended to do so. As far as I know, MOND does not even pretend to have an explanation for Hubble expansion, but if there's some fringe of it trying to do so I'd be interested to see. There's no particular need to introduce dark energy into this discussion though. It's mostly just a different thing.
Dark matter is an extraordinarily strong theory that has a lot of pretty clear confirming evidence. Euclid is out there right now gathering the exact kind of observational data needed to further advance our understanding, which is very exciting since we know there's fuzzy edges at the fringes that need to be brought into focus.
This paper aside, MOND basically explains the motion of galaxies and little else. Dark Matter explains the motion of galaxies AND a litany of other observable phenomenon. The cutting edge of MOND, as it exists now, still relies on dark matter to explain most of those phenomenon. It has no explanation for the absence of dark matter in galaxies but its presence in things like galactic clusters to trigger lensing effects or the lack of isotropy in the CMB.
I imagine this is how Curtis felt debating Shapley though. One side of the debate shows that their theory explains FAR more, but does require we vastly expand our horizon of understanding. The other says no, I can come up with an alternate explanation one at a time until we do not have to expand our horizon. Ad hoc theories are inherently weak and should be met with skepticism.
Yeah, sorry, you are right. I am just pissed about all these CERN presentations on how they ruled out another tiny bit of the vast space of dark matter candidates on conferences. They get so much funding for this stuff without any theoretical prediction guiding them, like they had for the Higgs Boson.
Thought exactly the same before I read the article to the end. But they are very differentiated in interpreting their discovery and clearly point of that their findings only make better predictions for very specific cases. They explicitly also explain what cases stay unaffected. The title is of course totally misleading, gravity is not breaking down. But to anyone with an inkling of physics, the message 'we found phenomena on a stellar scale that defy explanation by general relativity" is not far behind and would actually be true :)
I'm all for trying to find ways to cut down on e-waste, but I don't think this is it and it being water soluble could potentially shorten lifespan of devices because they could unintentionally disintegrate when it comes in contact with water.
This also doesn't really fix the problem if electronics end up in a landfill as there's still plastic, glass and batteries that'll sit there plus lead is still a problem if it does use lead solder.
At best, it only helps if a device is properly recycled and it doesn't really do much if it isn't. The best solution is still to not needlessly buy new devices and use what you have for a bit longer and companies should support their devices longer. I doubt the latter will happen though because pretty much every company will favor profits over the environment and they'll continue to greenwash to say how they're carbon neutral. Unless you go with something super cheap, most smartphones should easily last 5+ years and then not providing software or security updates after a couple of years is purely a business decision.
Before anyone even says it, the rise in transgender people is not a shocking trend any more than the rise in left-handed people was when being left-handed started to become socially acceptable (see attached image). The same thing happened with autism as diagnosis procedures and education about autism became more wide-spread. Just like that and every other situation where there's a spike, it doesn't mean that it will continue forever or that it's a crisis. It's just people being their true selves because society has grown to accept them.
There are no easy quick fixes and i'd be wary of experimenting on such a massive scale. It's like the other method, blocking sunlight to the planet, sounds like a great idea until everything reliant on photosynthesis starts dying off.
Most of the legitimate "block sunlight" proposals involve cloud seeding or spreading long-lasting particulates high in the upper atmosphere. The goal of these projects is to reflect 1-2% of sunlight, which would significantly cool the climate, but plants would hardly notice. In fact, organisms like reef systems would greatly appreciate it, as they're dying off at an extraordinary rate.
The forest are also dying from being too hot and dry. Any respite from the insane heat of summer would be well received. It’s so much harder than it was 20 years ago!
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