Tag: science

Atmospheric rivers

the solution to the california drought: atmospheric rivers:

Geologic evidence shows that truly massive floods, caused by rainfall alone, have occurred in California every 100 to 200 years. Such floods are likely caused by atmospheric rivers: narrow bands of water vapor 2 km above the ocean that extend for 1000s of km.

in fact, this happened in 1862

The cataclysm cut off telegraph communication with the East Coast, swamped the state’s new capital, and submerged the entire Central Valley under 4.5m of water.

2023-05-05: Also known as an Arkstorm.

Climate change is expected to increase the risk of severe flooding from a hypothetical ARkStorm, with runoff 200 to 400% above historical values for the Sierra Nevada in part due to a decrease in the portion of precipitation that falls as snow, as well as an increase in the amount of water that storms can carry. The likelihood of the event outlined in the ARkStorm scenario is now once every 25-50 years, with projected economic losses of over $1 trillion

Relativistic hydrodynamics

Researchers document their discovery of electrons in graphene behaving like a fluid. To make this observation, the team improved methods to create ultra-clean graphene* and developed a new way to measure its thermal conductivity. When the strongly interacting particles in graphene were driven by an electric field, they behaved not like individual particles but like a fluid that could be described by hydrodynamics. “Physics we discovered by studying black holes and string theory, we’re seeing in graphene. This is the first model system of relativistic hydrodynamics in a metal.”

Gene Expression Modeling

ML uncovers unknown features of multi-drug-resistant pathogen

Even though the model built with ADAGE was relatively simple, it had no trouble learning which sets of P. aeruginosa genes tend to work together or in opposition. To the researchers’ surprise, the ADAGE system also detected differences between the main laboratory strain of P. aeruginosa and strains isolated from infected patients. “That turned out to be one of the strongest features of the data”.

“We expect that this approach will be particularly useful to microbiologists researching bacterial species that lack a decades-long history of study in the lab. Microbiologists can use these models to identify where the data agree with their own knowledge and where the data seem to be pointing in a different direction … and to find completely new things in biology that we didn’t even know to look for.”

Too much evidence

more evidence can reduce confidence. The basic idea is simple. We expect that in most processes there will normally be some noise so absence of noise suggests a kind of systemic failure. The police are familiar with one type of example. When the eyewitnesses to a crime all report exactly the same story that reduces confidence that the story is true. Eyewitness stories that match too closely suggests not truth but a kind a systemic failure, namely the witnesses have collaborated on telling a lie.

Intelligent Evolution

A computer scientist and biologist propose to unify the theory of evolution with learning theories to explain the “amazing, apparently intelligent designs that evolution produces.” “This simple step from evolving traits to evolving correlations between traits is crucial; it moves the object of natural selection from fit phenotypes (which ultimately removes phenotypic variability altogether) to the control of phenotypic variability. Learning theory is not just a different way of describing what Darwin already told us. It expands what we think evolution is capable of. It shows that natural selection is sufficient to produce significant features of intelligent problem-solving.”

Most interesting scientific news?

“Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.’ We now live in a world in which the rate of change is the biggest change.” Science has thus become a big story, if not the big story: news that will stay news.”

Super-Earth in our solar system?

It doesn’t seem to be part of the Proxima Centauri system, it must be closer and correspondingly smaller. With just 2 observations it isn’t possible to determine the object’s orbit, so we can only guess at its distance and size. One possibility (and the one I think most likely) is that it’s an extreme trans-Neptunian object ~100 astronomical units away from the Sun, which is further than Sedna at 86 AU. This would make it the most distant known object in the solar system, but likely smaller than Pluto.

Another possibility (which seems more likely to the object’s discoverers) is that it is ~300 AU away and ~1.5 times the size of Earth, making it the first “super-Earth” found in our solar system. Observations of trans-Neptunian objects have led to some speculation that 1 or 2 super-Earths could lurk in the outer solar system, so it’s not out of the question. There’s reason to be cautious of this idea, however, because of its location. Proxima Centauri is ~42 degrees away from the ecliptic. Most large solar system lay within a few degrees of the ecliptic, and even Sedna’s orbit is only inclined ~12 degrees from it.

A third possibility is that the object is a cool brown dwarf ~20k AU away. Such an object should also be visible in the infrared, so there would still be the question as to why it wasn’t discovered by earlier infrared sky surveys. Its proximity to Proxima Centauri would seem to make such an object easy to find.

Gout returns

These dietary problems are translating to a resurgence of a handful of preventable diseases. In the U.K., 3m people are malnourished, and malnutrition-related hospitalizations spiked by 50%. 100k patients were hospitalized with gout. Gout—typically related to a buildup of uric acid due to over-consuming alcohol and rich foods—is a problem in the US, as well. The prevalence of gout in the US has steadily risen over the past 20 years, affecting more than 8m Americans in 2011.