Missão japonesa a asteróide

Colocou dois Rovers na superfície com sucesso:
https://www.publico.pt/2018/09/28/ciencia/noticia/ha-novas-imagens-incluindo-um-video-enviadas-pelos-robos-japoneses-que-aterraram-num-asteroide-1845590

Ética e software?

A obediência foi estudada há muito. E tornou-se mais uma vez notícia quando empresas como o FB (ou os fabricantes de carros) falharam na parte ética:
https://www.infoq.com/articles/ethics-psychological-perspective

Citando:
"Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. He set up his first experiment in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. At first he wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures, as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II. But he soon discovered all people responded the same way.

Experiments

In his first experiments, volunteers were introduced to another participant (who was in on the experiment). Their roles were defined by drawing straws (even though this was fixed). The volunteer would always be the teacher and the confederate would always be the learner.

They were then both taken to separate rooms, the learner would then be strapped to an electric chair and ordered to learn a list of word pairs. The teacher, positioned in a room with an electric shock generator,  would then test the learner by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its pair. The learner was primed to give mainly wrong answers. The teacher was instructed to give an electric shock for every mistake and to increase the shock level with each error (note: no real shock were giving, merely the illusion that the teachers were giving shocks). The range of shocks started at 15V and led up to 450V. When the teacher refused to administer a shock, the experimenter was to give a series of orders to ensure they continued."

(...)

"The strongest base to start making a company more ethical is to start with the individual. Companies become ethical one person at a time, one decision at a time. We all want to be seen as good people, known as our moral identity, which comes with the responsibility to have to act like it, even as our memories of our less ethical doings will fade over time.

We have to believe that doing the right thing is the only option. Luckily ethics comes with strong emotions like guilt, fear, regret and pride. Learning to recognise and not ignore these emotions helps build the self-belief to act and strengthen that inner compass.

On Speaking Up

Last but not least, if something needs to change, you need to speak up. If you see something that is going wrong, it is time to be brave and say something. Decide whether you will speak to your boss, your team lead or an advisory function (compliance or human resource). Talk to your personal network for support and guidance. "

Jam com Vai...

E Nuno e Dweezil:

http://loudwire.com/steve-vai-52-hour-guitar-jam/

Mapa das células?

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-build-detailed-map-cells-within-human-body

Citando:
"The National Institutes of Health’s Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP)issued its first set of research funding awards to develop an open, global framework that will support research community efforts to map the adult human body at the level of individual cells. (...)

Through the research awards, HuBMAP investigators will:

Generate, standardize, and validate extensive data sets on cell organization and variability using existing technologies;

Develop new tools and techniques to construct high-resolution tissue maps; and

Coordinate program activities, manage HuBMAP data, and build an atlas of tissue maps."

CRISPR e exterminação?

https://futurism.com/gene-drive-mosquitos-crispr/

Citando:
"
Scientists Wiped Out a Mosquito Population by Hacking Their DNA With CRISPR

For their study, published Monday in the journal Nature Biotechnology, the researchers used CRISPR to modify the gene responsible for determining sex in 150 male mosquitoes. That alteration made the male gene dominant — the idea was, over time, that the population would stop producing females, driving them to collapse.

The researchers added these genetically altered mosquitoes to a caged population of 450 unaltered male and female mosquitoes to reproduce with them. The hack worked: Subsequent generations of females exhibited male and female characteristics, couldn’t bite, and couldn’t lay eggs. By the eighth generation, there were no longer any females in the population at all.

WILD CARD

This is the first time scientists have seen a gene drive effectively suppress an entire population.

But knowing that the technology works is only one part of the battle. We also need to figure out whether it could cause any unintended side effects if it’s unleashed outside the lab."

Paul Simon retira-se

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/feeling-lost-with-paul-simon-one-last-time

TESS, Kepler e os exoplanetas (NASA)

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/get-ready-for-a-flood-of-new-exoplanets-tess-has-already-spotted-two/

Citando:
"TESS images a single area for roughly a month before moving on to the next. Over the course of a year, this will allow it to capture most of the sky in a single hemisphere; it will switch to the other hemisphere for its second year of observations. Should the hardware still be operational at the two-year mark, it will have imaged most of the sky, and a similar cycle will likely start again.

This cadence creates some trade offs. If a planet's orbit is such that it doesn't pass in front of its star during the month TESS happens to be pointing that way, we'll miss it (unless it's part of the small overlap between separate areas). This will bias us toward finding planets with short orbital periods, where a transit is guaranteed to happen whenever TESS gets around to pointing at it. Short enough orbits mean we can observe multiple transits during that month, confirming the planet's existence without the need for follow-on observations."

Fóssil Animal recordista?

Mais antigo:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/09/21/oldest-known-animal-fossil-dickinsonia-revealed-scientists/1377436002/

Citando:
"The Dickinsonia, an animal with an oval body that could grow to more than 4 feet in length, lived 558 million years ago, according to research published Friday in the journal Science. The now-extinct animal probably lived in warm shallow seas possibly alongside other squishy Ediacaran critters, National Geographic reports. 

For more than 75 years, scientists have been fighting over what a Dickinsonia really was, said Australian National University associate professor Jochen Brocks, who was involved in the research. Was it an amoeba or an animal? Evolution gone wrong? Or maybe a plant?"

Polvos e MDMA?

Parece que sim (apesar de serem poucos):
https://gizmodo.com/scientists-gave-mdma-to-octopuses-and-what-happened-was-1829191638

Arqueologia galáctica e perturbação na Via Láctea

https://phys.org/news/2018-09-gaia-milky.html

Estrela de neutrões, Infra-vermelhos e Hubble

https://www.slashgear.com/hubble-discovery-could-change-our-understanding-of-neutron-star-evolution-19546375/

Citando:
"The discovery indicates two possibilities according to the scientists. One theory is that there is a disc of dust surrounding the neutron star and the other has to do with a strong wind coming off the neutron star and hitting gas in interstellar space that the star is moving through. The neutron star in question is called RX J0806.4-4123."

Reacções das plantas aos ataques

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/science/plant-defenses.html

Citando:
"The messages start at the point of attack, where glutamate initiates a wave of calcium that propagates through the plant’s veins, or plumbing system. The deluge turns on stress hormones and genetic switches that open plant arsenals and prepare the plant to ward off attackers — with no thought or movement.

Like animals, plants are eukaryotes — multicellular organisms — that split from a common ancestor called Luca billions of years ago. To survive, we all sense threats, relay messages about them within our bodies or tissues and respond to these challenges. Our actions vary, adapted for the lifestyles we maintain in different environments, but much of our basic cellular machinery is the same. Biology kept it that way: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

One mechanism our cells share is fluctuating levels of calcium ions, which carry an electrical charge. In humans, this charge assists in controlling when your neurons fire messages. Changes in calcium ions make your heart beat or your muscles contract so you can get up and leave when something threatens you.

Plants, obviously, can’t run away. But researchers knew that genes that make receptors kind of like those for glutamate initiate electrical signals that travel through plants after being wounded. They turn on genes elsewhere in the plant, allowing them to respond."

Saúde mental e música

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151022094959.htm

Citando:
""Some ways of coping with negative emotion, such as rumination, which means continually thinking over negative things, are linked to poor mental health. We wanted to learn whether there could be similar negative effects of some styles of music listening," explains Emily Carlson, a music therapist and the main author of the study.

Participants were assessed on several markers of mental health including depression, anxiety and neuroticism, and reported the ways they most often listened to music to regulate their emotions. Analysis showed that anxiety and neuroticism were higher in participants who tended to listen to sad or aggressive music to express negative feelings, particularly in males. "This style of listening results in the feeling of expression of negative feelings, not necessarily improving the negative mood," says Dr. Suvi Saarikallio, co-author of the study and developer of the Music in Mood Regulation (MMR) test."

Ultrassons a 100€?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180911110232.htm

Citando:
"Engineers have developed a new ultrasound transducer, or probe, that could dramatically lower the cost of ultrasound scanners to as little as $100. Their patent-pending innovation -- no bigger than a Band-Aid -- is portable, wearable and can be powered by a smartphone."

Metástases e mutações comuns

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180906141313.htm

Citando:
"A tumor composed of billions of cells is riddled with genetic mutations; cancer cells and normal cells acquire multiple mutations as they divide. Identifying the driver mutations that significantly contribute to cancer development is critical to precision oncology, in which doctors aim to treat a patient's cancer based on its genetic composition.

"Doctors might take a sample of the primary tumor and find some mutation -- call it mutation X -- in a driver gene and then treat it with a drug that targets that driver gene to specifically kill all cells that have mutation X," Reiter said. "But what if that particular mutation is only present in some of the metastases of the patient?" Only the metastases composed of cells with mutation X would respond to treatment and shrink or go extinct; those without mutation X would continue to grow. In the end, the doctor wouldn't see a remission of the patient's cancer if driver mutations were different across its metastases. "So that's why it's very important for us to know whether or not the driver gene mutations are the same across all metastases of the patient," Reiter said."

Mapa detalhado da Antártida

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/antarctica-now-is-worlds-best-mapped-continent
Citando:
"REMA "provides the first high-resolution, high-accuracy terrain dataset of approximately 98% of the contiguous continental land mass of Antarctica, extending [from the South Pole] to 88°S," the project website states.

The map, built with data extracted from satellite imagery, is not just static. Ongoing input will provide scientists with the most detailed overview of shifting landscape patterns in Antarctica ever—from changes in snow cover, ice flow, glacier thickness, and all manner of geological activity."

Novos peixes?

A 7000m de profundidade:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180910142440.htm

Citando:
"The Hadal Trenches are one of the last great frontiers in marine science and the deepest places on Earth.

Mostly located around the Pacific rim in areas where tectonic plate collide and plunge, the seafloor reaches depths close to 11,000 metres (~7 miles) in some areas.

The Atacama Trench, a trench almost 6000 km long and more than 8000 m deep, runs along the west coast of South America.

Newcastle University scientists and engineers have been pioneering technology for the exploration of these ultra-deep environments for the last five years and have to date completed nearly 250 deployments of their novel 'lander' systems.

Using two full-ocean depth (11,000 m) capable landers equipped with HD cameras and traps the Newcastle team assessed the animals found within the trench."

Ganhar 14 vezes a lotaria?

A fórmula do economista que ganhou 14 vezes a lotaria foi revelada

Linha da história

https://www.sohistoria.com.br/ef2/linhatempo/

Imagem de como o foguete de ida a Marte pode parecer

... não oficial:
http://www.thisisinsider.com/spacex-mars-spaceship-big-falcon-rocket-diagram-2018-9

Andromeda mais pequena do que se pensava

http://www.astronomy.com/news/magazine/2018/02/adromeda-is-the-same-size-as-the-milky-way

Citando:
"Both the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy (M31) are giant spiral galaxies in our local universe. And in about 4 billion years, the Milky Way and Andromeda will collide in a gravitational sumo match that will ultimately bind them forever. 

Because astronomers previously thought that Andromeda was up to three times as massive as the Milky Way, they expected that our galaxy would be easily overpowered and absorbed into our larger neighbor. But now, new research suggests we’ve overestimated our opponent. 

In a study published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of Australian astronomers announced that Andromeda is not actually the heavyweight we once thought it was. Instead, they found that our nearest galactic neighbor is more or less the same mass as the Milky Way — some 800 billion times the mass of the Sun. 

To determine the heft of the Andromeda galaxy, the team used a technique that calculates the speed required for a quick-moving star to escape the gravitational pull of its host galaxy. This required speed needed for ejection is known as an object’s escape velocity. 

“When a rocket is launched into space, it is thrown out with a speed of [6.8 miles per second (11 kilometers per second)] to overcome the Earth’s gravitational pull,” said Prajwal Kafle, an astrophysicist from the University of Western Australia branch of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, in a press release. “Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is over a trillion times heavier than our tiny planet Earth, so to escape its gravitational pull, we have to launch with a speed of [342 miles per second (550 kilometers per second)]. We used this technique to tie down the mass of Andromeda.” 

This is not the first time a galaxy’s weight has been recalculated based on analyzing the escape velocities of objects within it. In 2014, Kafle used a similar technique to revise down the mass of the Milky Way, showing that our galaxy has much less dark matter — a mysterious form of matter that has gravity but does not interact with light — than previously thought."

Salvar o mundo?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/06/save-earth-disposable-coffee-cup-green

Citando:
"The problems we face are structural: a political system captured by commercial interests, and an economic system that seeks endless growth. Of course we should try to minimise our own impacts, but we cannot confront these forces merely by “taking responsibility” for what we consume. Unfortunately, these are issues that the BBC in general and David Attenborough in particular avoid. I admire Attenborough in many ways, but I am no fan of his environmentalism. For many years, it was almost undetectable. When he did at last speak out, he avoided challenging power – either speaking in vague terms or focusing on problems for which powerful interests are not responsible. This tendency may explain Blue Planet’s skirting of the obvious issues."

Ventos em galáxias?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/galactic-wind-stars-galaxies-big-bang-milky-way-alma-a8525806.html

Citando:
"ALMA was able to pin down the effect in the galaxy known as SPT2319-55 using gravitational lensing, the process by which gravity bends light and in doing so magnifies events that would otherwise be impossible to observe using existing technology.

This technique has previously allowed scientists to identify planets far beyond the Milky Way for the first time."

A última imagem da Cassini

... mesmo:
https://www.cnet.com/news/sorry-this-mind-blowing-view-wasnt-cassinis-last-image/

Paul Simon e os sonhos

https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=644544793

Citando:
"On what's going through his mind these days

"What I'm really interested in on a personal level are my dreams. I have a long history, really going back to like when I'm four, of violence dreams. Those dreams, they got so intense a few years ago that I took a trip down to Brazil to see this healer, John of God.""

Impressora 3D de... Metal?

https://phys.org/news/2018-09-simple-d-printer-metal.html

Citando:
"Unlike conventional metals, bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) have a super-cooled liquid region in their thermodynamic profile and are able to undergo continuous softening upon heating—a phenomenon that is present in thermoplastics, but not conventional metals. Prof. Schroers and colleagues have thus shown that BMGs can be used in 3-D printing to generate solid, high-strength metalcomponents under ambient conditions of the kind used in thermoplastic 3-D printing.

The new work could side-step the obvious compromises in choosing thermoplastic components over metal components, or vice-versa, for a range of materials and engineering applications. Additive manufacturing of metal components has been developed previously, where a powder bed fusion process is used, however this exploits a highly-localized heating source, and then solidification of a powdered metal shaped into the desired structure. This approach is costly and complicated and requires unwieldy support structures that are not distorted by the high temperatures of the fabrication process."

As auroras de Saturno (Hubble)

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/amazing-nasa-images-give-best-view-ever-of-saturns-stunning-aurora-a3927436.html

Citando:
"Astronomers using the ESA Hubble Space telescope took a series of shots using ultraviolet light, resulting in composites that show a wider range of light than humans can see with the naked eye.

NASA described them as "the most comprehensive picture so far of Saturn’s Aurora Borealis".

The images were taken last year over a period of seven months, as the Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph allowed scientists to monitor the behaviour of the auroras for an extended period."

O hexágono de Saturno (Cassini)

http://sci.esa.int/cassini-huygens/60589-saturn-s-famous-hexagon-may-tower-above-the-clouds

Foto:
http://sci.esa.int/cassini-huygens/60593-greyscale-cassini-views-of-saturn-famous-hexagon/

Citando:
"The long-lived international Cassini mission has revealed a surprising feature emerging at Saturn's northern pole as it nears summertime: a warming, high-altitude vortex with a hexagonal shape, akin to the famous hexagon seen deeper down in Saturn's clouds. This suggests that the lower-altitude hexagon may influence what happens up above, and that it could be a towering structure spanning hundreds of kilometres in height."

Um tiro no porta-aviões

Não, um tiro na corveta:

https://www.cmjornal.pt/portugal/detalhe/video-mostra-corveta-afonso-cerqueira-a-afundar-nas-aguas-da-madeira

Museu nacional brasileiro ardeu

Vergonha?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/fire-engulfs-brazil-national-museum-rio