List of All Articles with Tag 'science and tech'

A care home in Manchester has introduced VR as part of their activities roster for elderly residents, to help them 'unlock memories' and 'try' things they never got to. Downing House trialled the VR headsets on a one-off basis, and found it to be so successful (and bring residents so much joy) that they now offer it for an hour, once a month. "If you're getting a little bit older and you're a bit knackered, you can't climb Mount Kilimanjaro... but you can... with this", one resident, Bernard, joked in an interview with the BBC. Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter

The Northern Lights will be visible from the UK thanks to a large “cannibal” solar storm that is hitting the Earth. The aurora borealis (aka Northern Lights) are produced by when radiation from the Sun is deflected by the magnetic field of the Earth. Typically, the Northern Lights can be seen further north of the UK in the Nordic countries such as Iceland and Norway, as well as in northern parts of Canada. This is because when solar radiation hits the Earth, it is drawn to the Earth’s magnetic field, which runs north to south, and is directed towards to north and south poles. But, every now and then when there is a strong enough solar storm, they can also be seen further south in the UK because of the increased levels of solar radiation. From today (20 July), Brits stand a chance of catching a glimpse of the famous Nothern Lights once it turns dark. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Those in Scotland have the greatest chance of spotting the spectacle, however, they could also be viewed further south, but cloud cover and fewer hours of darkness mean it’s difficult to pinpoint cities with any great accuracy, says the Met Office. For the best chance to see the Northern Lights, experts recommend getting out of major cities. This is because, for the aurora borealis to be most visible, there must be minimal levels of light pollution which is not the case in built-up areas. The severity of the “cannibal” solar storm may be so strong that it disrupts radio signals and creates different weather patterns. Sean Elvidge, associate professor of space environment at the University of Birmingham, explained: “These storms manifest as major disturbances in Earth's magnetic field, potentially causing various space weather effects. “On one hand, they can result in radio blackouts, disrupting communication systems on our planet. On the other hand, these storms can produce awe-inspiring displays of natural beauty known as auroras.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

A Republican Congresswoman has shared an image of what appears to be a Batman balloon, claiming that it is an unidentified flying object, ahead of a debate on UFOs in Washington next week. Anna Paulina Luna tweeted about the material she has gathered for the House Oversight UFO hearing, consisting of pictures of several alleged sightings. But a number of Twitter users questioned the credibility of one of the images that shows an object in the air shaped like Batman’s face, leading to speculation that officials have confused a party balloon for a UFO. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “The military ‘leaked’ a photo of a Batman party balloon and claimed it was a UFO. That seriously made me doubt their ability to analyze anything,” said one person. Another said: “My father was a pilot for 20 years, they make mistakes all the time. I just showed you a picture of when a fighter pilot confused a Batman party balloon for a UFO that had no signs of propulsion.” But, one user who believes it is a UFO, said: “I think there is a massive difference between a hot air balloon and a Batman balloon you buy at Dollar Tree for $4.99 and I am pretty sure you know that! Pilots are not mistaking a Batman balloon as a UFO & the balloon ain’t making it to 25-30 thousand feet” “The pic with a blue background near the center is definitely a UFO and not just a party balloon,” argued another. The debate around UFOs is gaining pace in the US. The House Oversight Committee will hold a hearing on the issue next week after Republican congressmen and women promised to look deeper into the issue. It comes after unconfirmed claims from a former intelligence official that the US military had found crashed alien spacecraft. The Pentagon has said it hasn't discovered any information to substantiate this claim. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was asked on Monday if he believes in aliens, in light of the hearing. "I will continue to see," McCarthy said. "But I think if we had found a UFO, I think the Department of Defense would tell us because they would probably want to request more money." "I'd love to see whatever facts and information we have," McCarthy added. "I'm very supportive of letting the American people see what we have, where we go." Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Researchers have revealed where in the UK has the most crop circles, in a significant victory for fans of chasing potential alien hotspots. The mysterious crop circle phenomenon is often attributed to unidentified flying object landings or other paranormal forces, with wannabe alien hunters travelling from far and wide to study the markings when they appear. According to Bonusfinder and ukcropcircles.co.uk, the southwestern county of Wiltshire has seen by far the most crop circles since 2005, with a whopping 380 instances of the strange event. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hampshire was a distant second, with just 51 crop circles in the same period, followed by Oxfordshire with 35 crop circles. Monique Klinkenbergh, researcher and founder of the Crop Circle Visitor Centre and Exhibition, said the county’s sprawling landscape and relatively undisturbed countryside could be part of the reason for the flurry of potential extraterrestrial activity. “Crop circles seem to be attracted by ancient sites such as stone circles, long barrows, hill forts and other archaeological sites, for which Wiltshire is famous,” she said. “We have had so many different designs appearing, from small simple circles and ‘pictograms’ to extremely intricate and large patterns, sometimes with a very detailed and complex lay [the way the plants are flattened] on the ground. “Some crop circle patterns are familiar in design, suggesting they belong to a certain ‘school’ or ‘family-type’, such as Mathematical, Forms of Life, Religious, Astronomical, Codes and Mythology.” Klinkenbergh said invisible “Earth energies” are believed by some to run through ancient landmarks. That could be why the home of Stonehenge has so many crop circles, she said. However, she admitted that another far more mundane explanation could be at the heart of it: that they are manmade. Who would’ve thought it, eh? Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

They may not be as stylish as a DeLorean or as sturdy as a blue police box, but wormholes in space could hold the key to real-life time travel – and a team of experts think they’ve figured out how. The trio of scientists delved deep into the laws of physics and discovered that it might be possible for humans to one day zip across galaxies in a matter of seconds, or journey through time itself. Now, this is all to do with the general theory of relativity and quantum physics, so don’t expect to get your head around it too easily. However, in their paper, Valeri P. Frolov and Andrei Zelnikov of Canada’s University of Alberta, and Pavel Krtouš of Prague’s Charles University proposed that a specific kind of wormhole would “inevitably” be “transformed into a time machine” if it was subject to particular conditions. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter For the uninitiated, wormholes can be described as spacetimes in which a “kind of tunnel exists connecting distant parts in the universe”. The main problem with them is… they don’t actually exist. At least not in any tangible way. As Drs Eric Christian and Louis Barbier put it in an explainer for NASA: “Wormholes are allowed to exist in the math of ‘General Relativity’, which is our best description of the Universe. “Assuming that general relativity is correct, there may be wormholes. But no one has any idea how they would be created, and there is no evidence for anything like a wormhole in the observed Universe.” Still, numerous experts in the field of gravitation and general relativity have spent years or even decades working on them, including Stephen Hawking in his time. For their paper, Frolov, Krtouš, and Zelnikov explored what is known as a ring wormhole, which was first described in 2016 by theoretical physicist Gary Gibbons, of Cambridge University, and Mikhail Volkov of the University of Tours. Unlike the spherical contortions of spacetime we might attribute to black holes, the ring wormhole proposed by Gibbons and Volkov connects sections of the universe (or, indeed, different universes) which are generally described as “flat”, as ScienceAlert notes. Ring-shaped masses could potentially create some pretty remarkable distortions in what would otherwise be flat spacetime if you consider how their electrical and magnetic fields might interact. And so Frolov, Krtouš, and Zelnikov decided to consider two types of such wormholes: “a wormhole connecting to flat spaces; and a wormhole connecting two distant domains in the same space”. For the latter, they concluded that if a “massive thin shell” surrounded one of the mouths of the ring wormhole, a “closed timelike curve” would form. This, as the name suggests, would mean that any travelling object (or ray of light) would come back to the exact same point whence it began. In other words, you could travel in space and time and return to your point of departure. The most exciting aspect of ring wormholes, as the authors point out is that: “For the ring wormhole an observer passing through it moves in a flat (or practically flat spacetime), while in the case of ‘standard’ (spherical) wormholes he/she should pass a domain filled with the matter violating the null energy condition.” Even without knowing what the “null energy condition” is, you can appreciate that the first option sounds a lot simpler. Now, before you start calling yourself Marty McFly or making a list of all the past mistakes you’d like to correct, we should stress that we’re a long way off seeing the creation of a bonafide, buckle-your-seatbelt time machine. But at least, thanks to the efforts of experts like Frolov, Krtouš, and Zelnikov, we’re at least one step closer to going back in the future. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

We talk about climate change and the devastating effects of greenhouse gases on a daily basis, yet many of us have never heard of Eunice Newton Foote. The American scientist was the first person to realise the alarming impact of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, all the way back in 1856. So, to mark what would have been her 204th birthday, Google has dedicated today’s Doodle to the environmental pioneer. Head to the search engine and you’ll find an 11-part slideshow explaining Foote’s most significant work. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter It goes on to point out that her research was largely ignored for almost 100 years, and credits her with being the first person to “plant a seed of interest in the issue of climate change”. And for anyone wondering, her surname is no coincidence: her father was allegedly a distant relative of Sir Isaac Newton. In a blurb to its Doodle, Google points out that whilst science was Foote’s lifelong passion, she also dedicated time to campaigning for women’s rights. In 1848, she attended the first Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York State and became the fifth signatory of the Declaration of Sentiments — which demanded equality for women in social and legal status. Back then, women were largely shunned from the scientific community, but this didn’t stop Foote from conducting experiments on her own. After placing mercury thermometers in glass cylinders, she noticed that the cylinder containing carbon dioxide heated up the most and took the longest to cool down. As a result, she became the first scientist to draw a connection between rising CO2 levels and the warming of the atmosphere. After publishing her findings, Foote wrote a second paper on atmospheric static electricity for the journal ‘Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’. These were the first two physics studies to be published by a woman in the US, as Google notes. In 1856, a male scientist presented her work at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This then lead to further experiments which uncovered what is now known as the Greenhouse effect. And whilst none of us relish the fact this phenomenon exists, we should be eternally grateful to Foote for flagging it to us, all those years ago. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

If you’re anything like us, the first coffee of the day is the only thing that can get us up on a morning – and it turns out, there’s real science behind it. Everyone knows that coffee can give us a welcome caffeine hit, but it’s now been revealed that the drink also gives us an extra ‘special boost’ too. Scientists have claimed that the act of drinking a cup of joe gives the body a lift, making us more alert, which can’t be replicated merely with caffeine. In fact, new research shows that drinking hot coffee activates additional areas of the brain. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Scientists from the University of Minho in Portugal and elsewhere looked into the effects of coffee outside of just caffeine content as part of a study – and they found that plain caffeine didn’t have the same impact. In fact, a cup of coffee also influenced working memory and goal-directed behaviour. “There is a common expectation that coffee increases alertness and psychomotor functioning. When you get to understand better the mechanisms underlying a biological phenomenon, you open pathways for exploring the factors that may modulate it and even the potential benefits of that mechanism,” study co-author Nuno Sousa explained. Experts said that drinking coffee actually increased the connectivity in the brain’s more advanced nerve network controlling vision, and other parts involved in working memory, cognitive control and goal-directed behaviour – something not found when participants only took caffeine. Researchers also said that if subjects wanted to not just feel alert but ready to go, caffeine alone might not do the job. “Acute coffee consumption decreased the functional connectivity between brain regions of the default mode network, a network that is associated with self-referential processes when participants are at rest,” study co-author Maria Picó-Pérez said. “The subjects were more ready for action and alert to external stimuli after having coffee,” she added. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Back in the day, it’s said that people looked a lot older earlier in life than they do now. As it turns out, there’s a few reasons why. A video essay exploring the phenomenon from Vsauce posits a few explanations why we notice people looking older at a younger age in old footage and photographs. For one, the improvements in standards of living and advancements in healthcare over the years offer an obvious factor. There’s also subconscious bias surrounding fashions from years gone by and their connection with older generations. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter However, a study from 2018 also explored how biological ageing has changed in a short space of time. Did People Used To Look Older? www.youtube.com It found that human beings are actually biologically “younger” now than ever when it comes to changes in things like blood pressure – so there’s an actual physical difference between the generations that explains why people looked older sooner back in the day. The study explained that this is down to factors such as a fall in smoking, reading: "Over the past 20 years, the biological age of the U.S. population seems to have decreased for males and females across the age range. "However, the degree of change has not been the same for men and women or by age. Our results showed that young males experienced greater improvements than young females. This finding may explain why early adult mortality has decreased more for males than females, contributing to a narrowing of the gender mortality gap. Additionally, improvements were also larger for older adults than they were for younger adults." Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

If ever anyone needs proof that aliens exist, they need only turn to the bottom of the sea. No, we’re not talking about fragments of interstellar meteors or spacecraft, we’re not even talking about mysterious mermaids, we’re talking about the extraordinary creatures that lurk in the depths of our oceans. One of these incredible beasts has been captured on film, swimming more than 3,700ft (1,128m) below the surface of the Indian Ocean. What makes this “alien” so special is not just the fact it’s able to live so far beneath the waves, but the fact it can transform its appearance entirely in just the blink of an eye. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The jaw-dropping metamorphosis was recorded thanks to a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), which was exploring the sea off the East coast of Africa. In the clip, the creature – which looks more like a strange logo than a living being – can be seen floating serenely in the water. Then suddenly, 40 seconds into the video, it seems to shrink into a small black dot. On closer inspection, it’s clear that this isn’t a black dot but a jet-black jelly, decked out with streams of pulsating, technicoloured lights. The video was posted to YouTube by the user CaptainJRD back in 2013. In a caption, he explained that it was taken “at a depth of 3753 ft in the Indian Ocean within close proximity to a drill wellhead. “Near the end of the footage you can see the creature getting caught up in the output from the ROV thrusters. The video has not been altered,” he added. Alien looking creature transforming near Ocean floor at over 3700 feet.Video from ROV www.youtube.com The recording has been watched more than 5.8 million times, with viewers agreeing that it was the most “alien-looking creature” they’d ever seen. “If this isn’t one of the coolest things ever, I’m not sure what is,” one wrote. “Is no one gonna talk about how it looked like a disco ball after it transformed? This is an amazing discovery,” commented another. “This is why I never go more than 1000 ft underwater when I go to the beach,” joked a third. And a fourth added: “I’m a strong believer that everything deep deep down in the ocean looks like an alien. I also bet that there’s a lot of crazy species we’ve never seen before, hell I wouldn’t be that surprised if a 900 million-year-old dinosaur dwells at the bottom of the ocean.” Meanwhile, other commentators were quick to identify the creature, with most agreeing that it was a unique form of comb jelly. “For those wondering, this is a Bloodbelly Comb Jelly also called Lampocteis. Really beautiful creatures,” one wrote. Viewers also shared their dismay at what became of the stunning beast. Watch till the end of the video and you’ll see that no sooner does it execute its glorious transformation than it is brutally torn apart, apparently by a valve on the wellhead. “I became absolutely mesmerized. It was one of the most beautiful creatures I've ever seen, and then it suddenly just got ripped apart,” one commented. Hailing it as a “powerful video” another lamented: “The camera catches the most amazing, beautiful creature never seen before, just to see it torn to shreds by the oil blowout valve. “So very sad and also fitting for what we do to nature every second, everywhere on Earth.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

The floor of Crawford Lake in Ontario acts like a storybook, preserving Earth’s recent history in chronological order. Crawford Lake reveals the activities of local Iroquoian communities from the late 13th to 15th centuries, all the way through to the present day. This is because Crawford Lake is a meromictic lake, meaning that the dense bottom layer of water does not mix with the less dense upper layers. “The isolated bottom layer of water remains under disturbed, enabling the accumulation of clearly laminated valves which record precise information about the time during which they were deposited,” according to the Anthropocene Working Group. Experts have nominated Crawford Lake as representation for the start of the Anthropocene epoch, a proposed new geological era characterised by significant changes to the planet’s surface as a result of human behaviour. The Anthropocene is yet to be officially accepted as a unit of geologic time, but in 2016 a working group under the guidance of an International Commission on Stratigraphy subcommittee agreed that human behaviour has left scars so deep that they will remain evident even into the distant future. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter One of the most notable markers of the Anthropocene is the appearance of plutonium, a radioactive material that appeared in the mid-20th century as a result of hydrogen bomb tests. “The presence of plutonium gives us a stark indicator of when humanity became such a dominant force that it could leave a unique global ‘fingerprint’ on our planet,” explained Professor Andrew Cundy, Chair in Environmental Radiochemistry at the University of Southampton and member of the Anthropocene Working Group. “In nature, plutonium is only present in trace amounts. But in the early-1950s, when the first hydrogen bomb tests took place, we see an unprecedented increase and then spike in the levels of plutonium in core samples from around the world. We then see a decline in plutonium from the mid-1960s onwards when the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty came into effect.” Agreeing on a simple measure that defines the boundary between chapters in Earth’s history is just the first step. This measure requires agreement among scientists on a single location to define the boundaries. Known as the Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point, or a golden spike, plays a crucial role in standardising these borders between epochs. The Anthropocene Working Group has been evaluating potential golden spike sites, from Oued Akrech, Morocco, to Alano di Piave, Italy. After spending three years assessing the qualities of a dozen potential golden spikes for the Anthropocene, finally the AGW has landed on Crawford Lake. “Crawford Lake is so special because it allows us to see at annual resolution the changes in Earth history throughout two separate periods of human impact on this small lake,” micropalaeontologist Francine McCarthy of Brock University in Canada, a voting member of the AGW, said at a press briefing. The lake’s unique properties, such as its small size, depth, and lack of water mixing create sediments that precisely record environmental changes over the past millennia. To officially establish the Anthropocene in the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, the golden spike at Crawford Lake must undergo a series of voting by various commissions and unions. If successful, it will mark the moment when human activities permanently altered the planet. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

A mysterious new set of stars has been detected by Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope, which could shed new light on dark matter. Dark matter remains one of the most hotly debated elements in our solar system, and the new objects could change the way it is studied. Scientists believe the huge, newly-discovered stars are powered by illusive dark matter and shared their findings in the journal PNAS. “Discovering a new type of star is pretty interesting all by itself, but discovering it’s dark matter that’s powering this – that would be huge,” said study co-author Katherine Freese from The University of Texas in Austin. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The dark stars, known as JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0 and JADES-GS-z11-0 – were first identified as galaxies last December. It’s thought that they existed about 320-400 million years after the Big Bang, making them some of the earliest objects ever seen. The nature of dark matter continues to fascinate and mystify the scientific community. It’s believed that it could be formed by a new type of undiscovered particle, and the theorised component of the universe does not absorb, reflect or emit light. It’s also thought that suspected dark stars like these could explain a potential anomaly surrounding the number of large galaxies in the early universe. Currently, there are too many to fit the predictions of the theories surrounding the origins and the future of the universe. “It’s more likely that something within the standard model [of cosmology] needs tuning, because proposing something entirely new, as we did, is always less probable,” Dr Freese said. “But if some of these objects that look like early galaxies are actually dark stars, the simulations of galaxy formation agree better with observations,” she explained. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Ageing could soon be a thing of the past, following the latest development in chemical therapy and anti-ageing research. The research focuses on anti-ageing genes and adds to a previous study which won a Nobel Prize, focusing on small cell cultures. A team from Harvard Medical School is leading the study into genes called Yamanaka factors. The research focuses on turning cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which effectively turns the cell young again. If the research targeted cells in this fashion, it could ultimately reverse the physical impacts of ageing. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter There’s a great deal to consider when it comes to treatment like this, as the effect of ageing is a natural way the human body protects against harmful mutations like cancer. However, the new research published in the journal Aging claims that the process doesn’t create cells that are prone to cancer. The results showed that six chemical mixes were found that showed scientist could make cells biologically “younger” in the space of just seven days. After previous research conducted on mice, the team behind the study is looking to thake the study to human trials by 2024. David A. Sinclair is Professor in the Department of Genetics and lead scientist on the project. He released a statement saying: “Until recently, the best we could do was slow aging. New discoveries suggest we can now reverse it.” He added: “This process has previously required gene therapy, limiting its widespread use.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.