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Scythian arrowheads and Bronze Age dwelling uncovered in Ukraine

Archaeologists in Ukraine recently uncovered a glut of arrowheads, spinning wheels and ceramic fragments that date to the late sixth century and early fifth century B.C., a time when Scythian nomads, renowned for their skill as mounted archers, occupied the area.

The Scythians were a culturally related group of nomadic tribes that occupied large regions of grassland between China and the northern coast of the Black Sea from about 800 B.C. to 300 A.D. The fifth-century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus claimed that all Scythians descended from the hero Heracles and a creature that was half-woman and half-snake, with whom Heracles had a son named Scythes. However, modern archaeological and genetic analyses suggest that the Scythians actually emerged from various Siberian, East Asian and Yamnaya Eurasian groups, and that the tribes were ethnically diverse.

Remnants of Scythian culture can be found at the Bilsk Historical and Cultural Reserve near the village of Bilsk in the Poltava province of central Ukraine. There, between the rivers Vorskla and Sukha Hrunia, lay the remains of a 12,300-acre (5,000 hectare) settlement from which a wealth of artifacts have been excavated in recent decades, according to Ukraїner (opens in new tab), a media project aimed at sharing cultural stories of Ukraine.

Human-made earthen ramparts can still be found at the fortified settlement, which many scholars associate with the ancient city of Gelonus, an important trading hub that Herodotus described in his writings.

Related: Did the Amazon female warriors from Greek mythology really exist?

This newfound artifact is a spindle whorl, a disc used to weight spindles when hand-spinning yarn. (Image credit: Ukrinform)

In the current excavations, archaeologists exploring the reserve discovered 40 objects that date to the Scythian period, including fragments of locally-made Scythian ceramics and Greek tableware likely made in ancient Attica and Olbia, according to an Aug. 21 statement by Ukrinform (opens in new tab), Ukraine’s state information and news agency. The team also uncovered grain and garbage pits, as well as evidence of “various economic buildings,” the statement notes.

The team has not uncovered any ancient dwellings in the area, as “probably, they were destroyed during the development of a quarry that operated in this area in the past years,” Ihor Korost, director of the Bilsk Historical and Cultural Reserve, told Ukrinform.

However, the archaeologists did discover the remains of a Late Bronze Age dwelling that measured about 76 square yards (64 square meters) at a nearby site; this dwelling predates the Scythian artifacts and buildings.

“Just imagine, it is more than 3,300 years old!” Korost told Ukrinform of the dwelling. “Further research of the site will make it possible to determine its exact age, establish the stages of development, and features of settlement.”

Originally published on Live Science.

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/08/30/scythian-arrowheads-and-bronze-age-dwelling-uncovered-in-ukraine/

Rival teams of male dolphins form the animal world’s biggest social networks, long-running study finds | Science

Anthropologists have long celebrated and puzzled over humans’ ability to cooperate. Our special talent lies in forming nested cooperative networks that involve unrelated individuals: family, community, city, state, nation, and allied nations. Not even our closest relative, the chimpanzee, does this. But over the past 4 decades, researchers have shown that another animal does: the sea-going Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus) of Shark Bay in Western Australia.

Unrelated male dolphins deploy their social smarts to build complex alliances that boost their chances of reproductive success. A new study concludes these are the largest such complex cooperative societies outside of humans. Moreover, they appear to have evolved in a different way from our own. “It’s an exciting finding that helps bridge the immense, perceived gap between humans and other animals,” says Mauricio Cantor, a behavioral ecologist at Oregon State University who was not involved in the study.

In an exploration of dolphin society launched in 1982, behavioral ecologist Richard Connor, now affiliated with Florida International University, and his team have been following more than 200 male dolphins in the exceptionally clear waters of Shark Bay, recording which males spend the most time together. Over the years, they have found that males form close relationships with one or two other males, and that these partnerships are nested inside a larger alliance, which in turn are nested inside yet another alliance—rather like being a member of “a platoon, a company, and a regiment,” notes Harvard University primatologist Richard Wrangham, who is not part of the team. The male dolphins cooperate in order to capture and defend fertile female dolphins from other groups of males. A lone male cannot corral a female; he needs partners.

In the new study, the team analyzed data collected between 2001 and 2006 on 121 individual males, revealing a super-connected social network with every male connected to one another either directly or indirectly. The males even cultivate relationships with males outside of their three-level alliances, forming the biggest network known in any nonhuman species, and thereby increasing their reproductive success, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Each male had on average 22 allies; some had as many as 50.

Male dolphins form bonds by swimming and diving side-by-side, petting, holding flippers, engaging in sex, whistling to each other when apart, forming “teams,” and coming to one another’s aid should rivals attempt to spirit away a female. Those with the strongest social bonds spend the most time with females, thus increasing their chances of reproducing. “They’re making strategic social decisions,” says Connor, who suspects dolphins use their big brains in part to remember which individuals came to their aid and which ones fled during fights.

Cooperation isn’t exactly rare in the animal kingdom—animals from social insects to lions, wolves and spotted hyenas, and many primates cooperate; some, such as chimpanzees and bonobos, even do so with nonrelatives. (And unrelated female bonobos have recently been reported to form coalitions with outsiders against males). But none of these species form “multilevel alliances to accomplish goals,” says Athena Aktipis, a cooperation theorist at Arizona State University. “It’s interesting and cool that the dolphins do.”

Wrangham adds that Connor’s decadeslong study constitutes some of the most compelling support for the “social brain hypothesis,” the idea that the need to keep track of numerous social relationships drove the evolution of large brains and intelligence. The dolphins provide “a dramatic demonstration of the positive correlation between brain size and social complexity,” he says.

Anthropologists have argued that human intergroup cooperation is unique and tied to the evolution of bonds between males and females and the role of males in taking care of offspring. These long-lasting pair bonds lead to extended social networks because both partners have relatives interested in ensuring the survival of their genes. But in dolphins, as in chimpanzees, males and females don’t form lasting pairs and males don’t help with parenting. “Our results show that intergroup alliances can emerge without these behaviors, and from a social and mating system that is more chimpanzee-like,” Connor says.

In other words, there’s more than one way for these highly complex alliances to evolve, says Frans de Waal, an emeritus primatologist at Emory University. “It’s good to ponder that there may be multiple evolutionary paths to this outcome.”

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/08/30/rival-teams-of-male-dolphins-form-the-animal-worlds-biggest-social-networks-long-running-study-finds-science/

#Animal #biggest #dolphins #Finds #Form #longrunning #male #Networks #rival #science #social #Study #teams #worlds

Slow turn off of Ytterbium atomic beam in a trapped ion experiment. (We were testing our Yb oven to make sure it's working as expected.)

Slow turn off of Ytterbium atomic beam in a trapped ion experiment. (We were testing our Yb oven to make sure it’s working as expected.)

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/08/29/slow-turn-off-of-ytterbium-atomic-beam-in-a-trapped-ion-experiment-we-were-testing-our-yb-oven-to-make-sure-its-working-as-expected/

#gifs

Polystyrene dissolved in gasoline to create a sticky gooey putty

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/08/29/polystyrene-dissolved-in-gasoline-to-create-a-sticky-gooey-putty/

#chem #gifs #reaction

A new measuring tool for physicists

An illustration of the device, which consists of two superconducting circuits: a cold high frequency circuit (in blue) and a hot low frequency circuit (in red). Here, the current that flows in the red circuit generates an oscillating magnetic field which leads to the photon-pressure coupling. By sending in a strong signal to the blue high-frequency circuit, this one is transformed into an amplifier capable of detecting radio-frequency photons flowing in the red circuit with much higher sensitivity. Credit: Delft University of Technology

Physicists from TU Delft, ETH Zürich and the University of Tübingen have built a quantum scale heat pump made from particles of light. This device brings scientists closer to the quantum limit of measuring radio frequency signals, which may be useful in the hunt for dark matter. Their work will be published as an open-access article in Science Advances on Aug. 26.

If you bring two objects of different temperature together, such as putting a warm bottle of white wine into a cold chill pack, heat usually flows in one direction, from hot (the wine) to cold (the chill pack). And if you wait long enough, the two will both reach the same temperature, a process known in physics as reaching equilibrium: a balance between the heat flow one way and the other.

If you are willing to do some work, you can break this balance and cause heat to flow in the “wrong” way. This is the principle used in your refrigerator to keep your food cold, and in efficient heat pumps that can steal heat from the cold air outside to warm your house. In their publication, Gary Steele and his co-authors demonstrate a quantum analog of a heat pump, causing the elementary quantum particles of light, known as photons, to move “against the flow” from a hot object to a cold one.

Dark matter signals

While the researchers had already used their device as a cold bath for hot radio-frequency photons in a previous study, they have now managed to simultaneously turn it into an amplifier. With the built-in amplifier, the device is more sensitive to radio-frequency signals, just like what happens with amplified microwave signals coming out of superconducting quantum processors.

“It’s very exciting, because we can get closer to the quantum limit of measuring the radio frequency signals, frequencies that are hard to measure otherwise. This new measuring tool might have lots of applications, one of them being to look for dark matter,” Steele says.

A quantum heat pump

The device, known as a photon pressure circuit, is made from superconducting inductors and capacitors on a silicon chip cooled to only a few millidegrees above absolute zero temperature. While this sounds very cold, for some of photons in the circuit, this temperature is very hot, and they are excited with thermal energy. Using photon pressure, the researchers can couple these excited photons to higher frequency cold photons, which in previous experiments allowed them to cool the hot photons into their quantum ground state.

In this new work, the authors add a new twist: by sending an extra signal into the cold circuit, they are able to create a motor which amplifies the cold photons and heats them up. At the same time, the extra signal “pumps” the photons preferentially in one direction between the two circuits. By pushing photons harder in one direction than the other, the researchers are able to cool the photons in one part of the circuit to a temperature that is colder than the other part, creating a quantum version of the heat pump for photons in a superconducting circuit.

Cooling radio waves to their quantum ground state

More information: Ines Corveira Rodrigues, Parametrically enhanced interactions and non-reciprocal bath dynamics in a photon-pressure Kerr amplifier, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq1690. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq1690

Provided by Delft University of Technology

Citation: Quantum heat pump: A new measuring tool for physicists (2022, August 26) retrieved 29 August 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-08-quantum-tool-physicists.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/08/29/a-new-measuring-tool-for-physicists/

Variety of whales visit NSW Far South Coast, intriguing marine experts, citizen scientists

Whale watching on the NSW Far South Coast is in full swing and citizen scientists are being encouraged to report sightings of some of the more reclusive species, such as the Bryde’s whale.

Key points:

Whale watching season on the NSW Far South Coast is in full swing

Sightings of quieter whales, including Bryde’s and dwarf minke, have excited local tourism operators

Citizen scientists are being encouraged to share their sightings on social media

August coincides with the start of the annual ‘humpback highway’ migration period, with plenty of them already making a splash off the coast of towns such as Merimbula, Bermagui, and Eden.

But it is the unexpected number of Bryde’s whales feeding off the coast of Merimbula and Bermagui that have caught local tourism operators off guard.

“Every day for the past month we’ve had at least four to five sightings on most trips,” Sapphire Coastal Adventures owner Simon Millar said.

“We always see them every year but we’ve never seen so many of them as we have this year.”

“They’ve hung around for a really prolonged period of time as well.”

Whale watchers on the NSW Far South Coast are seeing more Bryde’s whales than ever before.(Supplied: Sapphire Coastal Adventures)

The Bryde’s whale, pronounced ‘broo-dess’, is considered by whale watching operators to be less social than the humpback, making daily encounters, usually during a feeding frenzy, all the more special.

Sightings of southern right whales, including a “salt and peppery” calf earlier this month, have also been considered valuable in learning more about the species population post-whaling.

But a recent sighting of curious dwarf minke mugging a cruise line off the coast of Eden has also been considered a first.

“Although dwarf minkes are very inquisitive animals, in our experience they’ve been fairly shy when it comes to coming across to the boat,” said Lana Wills, co-owner at Cat Balou Cruises.

“This particular encounter was so wonderful because this juvenile dwarf minke swam around the boat for over 20 minutes.

“We’ve not had that experience before.”

Bryde’s whales in a feeding frenzy off the NSW Far South Coast.(Supplied: South Coast Pix)

Citizen scientists at the ready

Humpback, dwarf minke, and southern right whales are making their return journey south to Antarctica, but the migration patterns of the Bryde’s whale are not as well known.

Wildlife scientist Vanessa Pirotta said, although the recent encounters with both Bryde’s and dwarf minke whales on the far south coast were not unusual, the more citizen scientists in the field documenting the population, movement and behaviour of whales, the better.

This dwarf minke whale was spotted off the coast of Eden.(Supplied: Cat Balou Cruises)

“Some of the behaviours that we’re documenting for the first time in Australian waters might be indicative of behaviours that were here previous to when their population was nearly hunted to extinction,” Dr Pirotta said.

“So we might be seeing re-emerging behaviours or new behaviours documented simply because our communications are better thanks to social media.”

Dr Pirotta said members of the public who spotted whales were encouraged to take a photo or video and put it on social media, or report their sighting to a whale watching operator who might be able to relay the information to a scientist.

At the same time, the public is being reminded to always keep a safe distance from the whales.

“Whales and dolphins are protected in Australian waters, which means you must adhere to specific rules when watching whales on a boat and also flying drones around these animals,” she said.

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New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/08/28/variety-of-whales-visit-nsw-far-south-coast-intriguing-marine-experts-citizen-scientists/

White House requires immediate public access to all U.S.-funded research papers by 2025 | Science

A decadeslong battle over how best to provide public access to the fruits of research funded by the U.S. government has taken a major turn.

President Joe Biden’s administration announced yesterday that, by the end of 2025, federal agencies must make papers that describe taxpayer-funded work freely available to the public as soon as the final peer-reviewed manuscript is published. Data underlying those publications must also be made freely available “without delay.”

Many details of the new policy, including exactly how the government will fund immediate public access, remain to be decided. But it significantly reshapes and expands existing—and fiercely contested—U.S. access rules that have been in place since 2013. Most notably, the White House has substantially weakened, but not formally eliminated, the ability of journals to keep final versions of federally funded papers behind a subscription paywall for up to 1 year.

Many commercial publishers and nonprofit scientific societies have long fought to maintain that 1-year embargo, saying it is critical to protecting subscription revenues that cover editing and production costs and fund society activities. But critics of paywalls argue that they obstruct the free flow of information, have enabled price gouging by some publishers, and force U.S. taxpayers to “pay twice”—once to fund the research and again to see the results. Since the late 1990s, the critics have lobbied Congress and the White House to require free and immediate “open access” to government-funded research.

The Biden administration has heeded those pleas, although the new policy does not expressly embrace the term open access—it uses the words “public access.” It is “de facto an open-access mandate,” says Stefano Bertuzzi, CEO of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), which publishes 16 journals. And many open-access advocates are applauding it.

“This is an enormous leap forward,” says Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, one of the oldest open-access advocacy groups in the United States. “Getting rid of that embargo is huge.”

The embargo and related policies “were pure sellouts of the public interest,” tweeted molecular biologist Michael Eisen of the University of California, Berkeley, a prominent critic of U.S. access policies and co-founder of the PLOS journals, which have helped pioneer an open-access business model in which authors pay a fee to make their papers immediately free to all. “The best thing I can say about this new policy is that publishers will hate it.”

Many publishers say they support a transition to immediate public access but criticized the new U.S. policy. “We would have preferred to chart our own course to open access without a government mandate,” Bertuzzi says. Six of ASM’s journals are already fully open access, with the rest to follow by 2027.

The Association of American Publishers, a leading trade group, complained in a statement that the policy arrived “without formal, meaningful consultation or public input … on a decision that will have sweeping ramifications, including serious economic impact.” (White House officials say they met with large and small publishers over the past year to discuss the change.)

Others took a wait-and-see approach. Sudip Parikh, CEO of AAAS, which publishes the Science family of journals, says “it is too soon to tell if this guidance will impact our journals.” (AAAS publishes a fully open-access journal, Science Advances, and in 2021 its paywalled Science journals began to allow authors to deposit the peer-reviewed, almost-final version of manuscripts in institutional repositories on publication.)

The impact of the new requirement could vary depending on which of the more than 20 U.S. funding agencies underwrite the author’s research. Each agency must finalize its policy by the end of 2024 and implement it by the end of 2025.

The policy is not intended to mandate any particular business model for publishing, said Alondra Nelson, acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), in an interview with ScienceInsider. For example, it will not require federally funded researchers to publish only in pay-to-publish open-access journals. Researchers who publish in subscription journals might be able to satisfy the rule by depositing the almost-final, peer-reviewed, and accepted version into a public depository or other agency-approved outlet. Journals will still be able to keep their final, published version of a paper behind a paywall. (But some researchers say only the final published version is adequate for scholarly purposes. The not-quite-final, “author-accepted” versions might lack final editing, typesetting, and formatted data tables.)

Nelson says OSTP is acutely aware of concerns about who will pay the costs associated with the new policy, especially if publishing in a pay-to-publish journal becomes a widespread practice. Some fear the U.S. policy—combined with similar policies adopted in Europe and elsewhere—could accelerate the rise of such journals, ultimately making publishing more difficult for authors with modest or no grant funding, especially ones who work in underresourced institutions and in developing countries.

OSTP says in a blog post it wants “to ensure that public access policies are accompanied by support for more vulnerable members of the research ecosystem.” Agencies could, for example, allow researchers to use grant funds to cover open-access publishing costs—as some do already—or could fund the expansion of public repositories, Nelson says. “We’re not naïve about the challenges we face,” she says. “Implementation on any new policy is key.”

The new policy reflects the profound changes that have rocked academic publishing since the U.S. public access debate began in earnest more than 25 years ago. Then, subscription-based print journals were the primary means of disseminating research results, and publishers fiercely resisted any policy change that threatened an often highly profitable business model. But pressure from university libraries tired of paying rising subscription fees, and patient groups angry about having to pay to read taxpayer-funded biomedical studies, helped catalyze serious discussion of policy change. At the same time, the rise of the internet fueled publishing experiments, such as open-access journals and the posting of freely accessible “preprints” that have not been peer reviewed.

In Washington, D.C., these shifts prompted both Republicans and Democrats to urge the federal government to revise its access policies. In 2013, then-President Barack Obama attempted to strike a compromise—via the 1-year embargo rule—between publishers and open-access advocates.

But many—including Biden, then Obama’s vice president—were not happy with that deal. In a 2016 speech, for example, Biden noted, “The taxpayers fund $5 billion a year in cancer research, but once it’s published, nearly all of that sits behind [pay]walls. Tell me how this is moving the [scientific] process along more rapidly.”

The administration of former President Donald Trump also considered requiring immediate public access. And several developments in recent years increased the pressure for a revamp. In 2019, the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s “Cancer Moonshot” research program, which Biden helped create under Obama, required grantees to make papers developed with its funding free to read. In 2018, a group of European science funders called Coalition S unveiled a similar policy, which takes full effect in January 2025. (Coalition S imposes an additional requirement that publishers give up copyright; the existing and new U.S. policies do not.) And in 2020, publishers agreed to make all papers relevant to COVID-19 open access, at least temporarily.

Now, the new U.S. rules will apply to a substantial share of the world’s academic literature—and hundreds of thousands of new scholarly papers will become freely available to all with no delay. In 2020, OSTP estimates federal research funds produced 195,000 to 263,000 published articles, or some 7% to 9% of the 2.9 million papers published worldwide that year. And because the policy now applies to any federal agency that funds research—and not just those that spend $100 million or more annually—the free material could also include work funded by the national endowments for the arts and humanities. OSTP says agencies also could decide that the rule covers other materials, such as book chapters and conference proceedings, that are peer reviewed.

How the change will ultimately affect the finances of specific journals, publishers, and researchers is hard to predict, analysts say. In some journals, for example, just a small fraction of papers might be the product of U.S. funding. And university libraries might still be willing to pay subscription fees, even if their faculty can read the same papers elsewhere for free, if publishers offer a better interface, search functions, or other services.

Bertuzzi, however, says the new policy is likely to have a global impact that will be hard to ignore, because “the U.S. government is the 800-pound gorilla in the room.”

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/08/28/white-house-requires-immediate-public-access-to-all-u-s-funded-research-papers-by-2025-science/

#access #House #papers #Public #requires #Research #science #USfunded #White

Instagram says precise location is never shared

Responding to viral claims online, Instagram says it does not give out users’ exact locations.

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/08/28/instagram-says-precise-location-is-never-shared/

What is cross training? | Live Science

You’ve probably heard of cross training in the context of exercise, as this method of training has become popular among elite and recreational athletes alike. Cross training involves incorporating different types of exercise into a workout routine. So, instead of running on one of the best treadmills (opens in new tab) every day, an athlete could mix it up with rowing (opens in new tab), HIIT classes, and Pilates (opens in new tab).

To learn more about the benefits of cross training and how to incorporate it into an exercise routine, Live Science spoke to Benjamin Rose, an exercise physiologist and fitness trainer at Trainer Academy.

What is cross training?

“Cross training is an exercise program that combines a variety of activities to help you attain your fitness objectives,” said Rose, speaking with Live Science. “Cross training may help you perform better overall, avoid injuries and stay with your program by mixing up your daily aerobic workouts and including strength training into your weekly running/walking regimen.”

Expert answer provided by

Benjamin Rose

Exercise physiologist

Ben is the co-founder of TrainerAcademy.org. He is an exercise physiologist and a fitness trainer, with 10+ years of experience in the fitness industry. Among other disciplines, he is an expert in sports conditioning and strength training.

In brief, cross training means incorporating different types of movement into a workout routine, instead of focusing on one exercise. This has numerous benefits.

For example, performing different types of movements (cycling, rowing, lifting weights) subjects the muscles, joints, bones and connective tissues to different stresses, loads and motions. This helps prevent muscle imbalances and overuse injuries.

(Image credit: Getty)

Every type of exercise has slightly different demands as well, so cross training can ensure that a person is training across the different components of fitness (opens in new tab) (training things like flexibility and mobility, as well as cardiovascular endurance and strength).

Rose also explained that while sticking to one particular exercise could help an athlete achieve a “personal best”, it might limit their overall fitness progress.

“After repeating the same exercise for months, your body gets adept at doing such actions. Although that is excellent for competition, it restricts your total level of fitness and lessens the real conditioning you receive throughout training,” said Rose. “You merely maintain a particular level of fitness rather than always becoming better.”

How to pick a cross training exercise

Cross training can be thought of as any modality of exercise other than a person’s primary sport activity. For example runners could try activities like cycling, swimming, cross-country skiing, hiking, jump-roping, lifting weights, yoga, Zumba, rollerblading and tennis.

“It’s a good idea to choose a cross-training exercise that targets one or two of the five components of fitness that you aren’t already concentrating on,” said Rose.

These five health-related components of fitness include muscular endurance, muscular strength, cardiovascular fitness, flexibility and body composition.

(Image credit: Getty)

A person who primarily runs or rides a bike—which mainly trains cardiovascular endurance and muscular endurance—might want to add cross-training exercises that build muscular strength or flexibility.

Are there any downsides?

Rose said there aren’t any downsides to cross training—other than the fact that it may take time away from a person’s “main” sport. The other thing to be careful of is overdoing it.

“Although incredibly useful, cross training may sometimes exhaust athletes,” said Rose, who notes that this happens when a person adds too much volume or intensity to their cross training.

How to start

Rose said that it’s entirely up to the exerciser as to how intense they want their cross-training workouts to be, and that it’s usually helpful to think about them in the context of an overall training program.

The goal of adding cross training to a workout program is to enhance fitness, add balance and variety, and improve areas of fitness that have been neglected. For example, if a person normally does relatively long endurance workouts—perhaps cycling or riding a spin bike—at a moderate intensity, they should ideally do short, vigorous cross-training workouts like HIIT training, using plyometric exercises like jump-roping, burpees and jump squats.

(Image credit: Getty)

With this in mind, Rose advised the following: “Keep cross-training sessions short, frequent, and intense. Limit cross training to two times a week, for no more than an hour.”

As with any sort of change to a workout routine or introduction of a new type of exercise, increase the frequency, intensity and duration slowly to be safe.

This article is not meant to offer medical advice and readers should consult their doctor or healthcare professional before adopting any diet or exercise regime.

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/08/27/what-is-cross-training-live-science/

How to find music and videos with zero plays

There’s a lot of content out there on the web—and not all of it can be a Stranger Things– or Taylor Swift-level smash hit. In fact, there are plenty of videos and songs online that no one has ever seen or heard.

If you want to add some intrigue and adventure to your online media consumption, you can become a digital explorer and have the honor of calling yourself the first to lay eyes (or ears) on these rare obscurities.

A warning, though: you’re likely to come across a lot of garbage in your travels. After all, there might be a reason a lot of these videos and songs have zero plays. Still, there’s always the chance of discovering something truly special, because who wants to follow the crowd when it comes to finding videos and music?

It’s far better to be a pioneer—at least for a little while. Then you can go back to watching and listening to the same stuff as everyone else.

Spotify

The tool you need to find songs with zero plays on Spotify is called Forgotify, which promises access to millions of tracks that no one has ever heard before. Uploading tunes to the Spotify library is not particularly difficult or expensive, so there’s a long tail of unheard material.

Open Forgetfy and click Start Listening. The platform will give you a random song with zero plays straight away—you can click the play button to hear a preview, or hover over the track and select Play on Spotify to play the song there in its entirety. Forgetify will take you to the Spotify web player, which will ask you to sign in if you’re not already.

[Related: Where to find new Spotify playlists when you don’t want to make your own]

Once you’ve listened to a song (and disqualified it from being featured on Forgotify ever again) you’ve got two options. Click Share if you want to let other people know about the song you’ve just found on social media or via a direct message, or click Next if you’re ready to move on to something else.

During our time experimenting with Forgotify, we came across all kinds of styles and genres of music, from folk to dance. There was a lot of foreign music, many remixes, a lot of live stuff, and what seemed to be an a capella song recorded live at a wedding. You might not always be blown away, but you certainly won’t be bored.

Sadly, as far as we can tell, this is only something you can do on Spotify, and there aren’t any equivalent tools for the likes of Apple Music and Tidal. That’s perhaps down to the extra access Spotify gives developers to build on top of its platform, which includes metadata such as the number of plays a song has.

YouTube

When it comes to YouTube, there are a couple of tools that you can turn to to find videos with very low play counts—either zero or not much more than that. The first is PetitTube, which couldn’t be any easier to use. Simply open up the site in your web browser, and a video will start playing.

Once the first video has finished, another one will automatically be queued up—and then another, and another. If you want to, you can sit back and spend hours watching videos that haven’t been seen by anyone else. Underneath each clip, you’ll see options that allow you to like or dislike the video on YouTube.

You get the same sort of service from Astronaut, which comes with an interesting spiel about the journey you’re about to go on when you start watching. Click Go, and as with PetitTube, the site will then take you through a never-ending succession of videos with zero or very few views to their name.

[Related: How to only watch the best bits and other tricks to upgrade your YouTube experience]

What Astronaut does differently, though, is switching between videos at a faster rate—every ten seconds or so. That’s helpful for keeping everything moving, but if you want to stop and watch a video in full, then you’ll need to click the button underneath the clip. Meanwhile, you get an animated backdrop of views from space to fit in with the Astronaut name.

The quality here varies even more than it does on Spotify. Anyone can upload anything to YouTube for free, so expect to see a lot of badly shot and plain confusing material, a lot of music, and a lot of home videos. It’s oddly fascinating, as you switch from forests to parties to lecture halls to dining rooms to golf courses to churches from all across the world.

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/08/27/how-to-find-music-and-videos-with-zero-plays/

A rare multi-colored blanket octopus was filmed swimming in Philippine waters showing its fully unfurled tentacle membranes in order to appear larger and more threatening to the intrusive diver. This octopus has false eyes opposite its real eyes to give the eerie appearance of full-circle eyesight.

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/08/27/a-rare-multi-colored-blanket-octopus-was-filmed-swimming-in-philippine-waters-showing-its-fully-unfurled-tentacle-membranes-in-order-to-appear-larger-and-more-threatening-to-the-intrusive-diver-this/

#educational #gifs

Enterprise separating from a 747 on it's first Flight Test

Enterprise separating from a 747 on it’s first Flight Test

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/08/26/enterprise-separating-from-a-747-on-its-first-flight-test/

#gifs #space

Study reports on the safety, efficacy of tecovirimat in treating monkeypox -- LiveScience.Tech

A UC Davis Health study finds that the antiviral tecovirimat appears to be safe and effective for the treatment of monkeypox symptoms and skin lesions. The study is one of the earliest studies to assess and report the outcomes of treating patients with monkeypox with this antiviral.

Tecovirimat (TPOXX) is an FDA-approved antiviral drug for the treatment of smallpox. It limits viral spread in the body by inhibiting the work of the protein involved in the release of the enveloped virus. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) allowed physicians to prescribe tecovirimat on a compassionate use basis to treat adults and children with orthopoxvirus infections, including monkeypox.

In a research letter published in JAMA, UC Davis infectious disease experts presented insights on 25 patients with monkeypox who were given tecovirimat therapy.

“We have very limited clinical data on the use of tecovirimat for monkeypox infection. There is much to learn about the natural progression of the disease and how tecovirimat and other antivirals may affect it,” said lead author Angel Desai. She is an adult infectious disease specialist at UC Davis Health.

Treating monkeypox with tecovirimat

The recent global outbreak of monkeypox has led to more than 45,500 cases as of August 22, 2022. While symptoms usually resolve on their own in 2-4 weeks, a recent study showed that 13% of patients needed hospitalization.

The new study included patients referred to UC Davis Medical Center, primarily through the Sacramento County Department of Public Health, between June 3 and August 13, 2022.

Patients with skin lesions in multiple body parts or in sensitive areas such as the face or genital region were offered oral tecovirimat treatment. The treatment was weight-based, given every 8 or 12 hours, and was taken within 30 minutes of a high-fat meal.

The researchers collected clinical data at the first in-person evaluation for treatment and by in-person or telephone interview on day 7 and day 21 following the beginning of therapy.

In total, 25 patients with confirmed monkeypox infection completed a course of tecovirimat therapy. All were male. Their age ranged between 27 and 76 years (the median age was 40). Nine patients had HIV.

Only one patient had the smallpox vaccine (taken more than 25 years ago) and four others received a dose of JYNNEOS vaccination after symptoms started.

Symptoms in patients with monkeypox, MPX

The study found that 92% of patients had lesions in their genital or anal area. While all patients had painful lesions, around half had fewer than 10 lesions over their entire body.

On average, the patients had symptoms or lesions for 12 days before they started their antiviral treatment. Fever was the most common symptom (76% of the patients), followed by fatigue (32%), sore throat (20%) and chills (20%). Other symptoms included backache (12%), muscle pain (8%), nausea (4%) and diarrhea (4%).

All patients completed the tecovirimat therapy and tolerated their treatment well. They were treated for two weeks, except for one patient who was treated for 21 days.

On day 7 of therapy, 40% of patients had healed from their lesions. By day 21, 92% had healed and were pain-free.

The most reported adverse events on day 7 of therapy included: fatigue (28%), headache (20%), nausea (16%), itching (8%) and diarrhea (8%).

“We have to be very careful in how we interpret the data. It is hard to differentiate the side effects due to therapy from those caused by the infection,” said infectious diseases expert and co-author George Thompson. Thompson is a professor at the UC Davis School of Medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases, and the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology.

The study was small and did not include a control group. So, assessing antiviral efficacy in terms of symptom duration and severity was limited. Also, the time from symptom onset to starting the antiviral therapy varied among the patients.

The researchers called for large-scale studies to explore antiviral efficacy dosing and adverse events. Coauthors on this study are Sonja Neumeister, Anna Arutyunova, Katelyn Trigg and Stuart H. Cohen.

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/08/26/study-reports-on-the-safety-efficacy-of-tecovirimat-in-treating-monkeypox-livescience-tech/

New encryption tool is designed to thwart quantum computers

An encryption tool co-created by a University of Cincinnati math professor will soon safeguard the telecommunications, online retail and banking and other digital systems we use every day. Credit: Andrew Higley/UC

An encryption tool co-created by a University of Cincinnati math professor will soon safeguard the telecommunications, online retail and banking and other digital systems we use every day.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology chose four new encryption tools designed to thwart the next generation of hackers or thieves. One of them, called CRYSTALS-Kyber, is co-created by UC College of Arts and Sciences math professor Jintai Ding.

“It’s not just for today but for tomorrow,” Ding said. “This is information that you don’t want people to know even 30 or 50 years from now.”

Ding’s algorithm was designed to withstand probing from quantum computers, which harness the power of quantum mechanics to speed calculations. The faster the calculations, the more quickly a security system can be breached.

“Given enough time, you can decrypt any system,” Ding said. “But if it takes 10,000 years, nobody cares.”

The institute, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, selected CRYSTALS-Kyber among three other tools.

Symmetric encryption uses math to protect sensitive electronic information, from the texts we send to financial documents we share. Public-key systems help the sender and receiver to create a shared secret key, which is used to encrypt and decipher data to deter uninvited third parties.

“The implications are very profound,” Ding said. “Without a modern encryption system, we don’t have the internet. We don’t have secure communications. No online banking. No software updates. Our whole digital society relies on modern cryptography.”

Among the advantages NIST cited for CRYSTALS-Kyber was its efficiency.

“It can’t be too slow,” Ding said. “You don’t want lag time. You want to read your message immediately.”

Likewise, you don’t want the encryption to take up valuable computer storage.

The federal agency also chose three algorithms to verify people’s identities during digital transactions.

“The sister of Kyber is called Dilithium, which is used for authentication. They’re used together sometimes and sometimes they’re used separately,” Ding said.

The names might ring familiar to fans of “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.” Kyber crystals power lightsabers while dilithium crystals power the warp drive of the USS Enterprise. Ding credited his collaborators for the colorful names.

“Encryption is not as easy to understand as ‘Star Wars,'” he joked.

The need for improved cybersecurity can’t be overstated, said Richard Harknett, chairman of UC’s Center for Cyber Strategy and Policy.

“Quantum technology has the potential to undermine the fundamentals of how we securely exchange digital data,” Harknett said. “Professor Jintai Ding has been a leader in this field for decades and has worked consistently to solve this looming threat. He and his team have provided NIST with a solution that will benefit global security.

“We are fortunate to have Dr. Ding, whose vision has driven cryptography to a new level. UC talks about next lives here. Dr. Ding has proven it does.”

The standards adopted by the United States often become the de facto standards around the world, Ding said. So the new cybersecurity could have far-reaching implications.

Ding took a circuitous route to studying cryptography. His expertise as a tenured professor of math at UC was in quantum algebra. But in 2001, he read about a quantum computer created by MIT physicist Isaac Chuang.

“I was amazed. I immediately realized that we have to replace all the existing key code systems protecting our data,” he said. “I gave up what I was doing and switched to cryptography. UC gave me a lot of support.”

Implementing the new security is expected to take years because it’s not as easy as installing a software patch. But its protections could last for a generation.

Even as encryption tools get more powerful, others are working on new attacks to crack them.

“This is a game we’ll keep playing,” Ding said. “We can never be complacent.”

NIST announces first four quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms

Provided by University of Cincinnati

Citation: New encryption tool is designed to thwart quantum computers (2022, August 26) retrieved 26 August 2022 from https://techxplore.com/news/2022-08-encryption-tool-thwart-quantum.html

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/08/26/new-encryption-tool-is-designed-to-thwart-quantum-computers/

Friday night fish frys define Wisconsin. What happens when climate change adjusts the menu?

On any given Friday night in Wisconsin, you’re probably eating fish.

A weekly offering of fried fish stands out as a cultural institution in a state known for its beer, football, and cheese. The Wisconsin fish fry— a regional dish consisting of battered and fried fish, generally served with fries or potato pancakes, cabbage or coleslaw, rye bread or a dinner roll, and topped off with a lemon slice —has been a hearty Friday night staple of local bars, village halls, and supper clubs.

This dish is more than just a line on a menu, it’s how people have defined their Friday nights for decades.

A perch basket at Highland Howie’s Pub and Grill in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Chef Suvan Keomanyvong said the restaurant has used Lake Michigan perch in the past, but has had to source farm-raised perch from Europe in recent years due to the lake’s declining population. Livescience.Tech / John McCracken

Now, fish frys will have to adapt to a changing climate. From the Hatch green chiles in New Mexico to gumbo in Louisiana, climate change is altering regional food traditions across the country.

Wisconsin lakes are warming and becoming more hospitable to invasive species and extreme weather conditions thanks to a global rise in temperature, challenging the future of this statewide ritual. Commonly fried fish species like perch, lake trout, and whitefish have declined, causing Wisconsin restaurants to look beyond their own lakes for certain fish, or abandon some altogether.

Two Great Lakes — Michigan and Superior — touch Wisconsin’s shores and have experienced a steady rise in temperature since 1995. Even the deepest depths of the lake system are starting to warm up and the average maximum ice cover on the Great Lakes has dropped over 20 percent in the last 50 years.

The fish fry is predicated on Wisconsin “geography, religion, and history,” said Terese Allen, an expert on the state’s culinary history and a co-author of Flavor of Wisconsin: An Informal History of Food and Eating in the Badger State.

Cooking fish for large groups predates settlers, with evidence of Indigenous fishing practices dating back thousands of years in the Great Lakes. Allen said when Indigenous communities and colonizers intermingled in a region “surrounded by and intertwined with waterways,” the settlers found preparing fish in mass to be a useful skill. Many immigrants who settled the state were also Catholic and wouldn’t eat meat on Fridays, a factor in the dish’s growth and popularity.

Fish frys boomed during Prohibition, Allen said, as taverns would sell fried fish for cheap to get customers in the door during a time when bars struggled to survive. By the 1960s, in a post-Prohibition era and the end of the Friday meat ban for Catholics, Wisconsinites across the state were hooked.

Presidential hopeful George McGovern shakes hands with a cook at a hall where a fish fry was being held in Milwaukee on March 31, 1972. Paul Shane / AP Photo

As a definition for the uninitiated, Allen said a fish fry is simply an “end-of-the-work-week rite, in restaurants plain and simple to fancy, that brings people together to celebrate everyday life. It’s not a holiday, but it is a regular special occasion.”

It used to be that the fish for those occasions came from the state’s shorelines. Unfortunately, years of overharvesting and strained ecosystems led to a rapid decline in fish populations in these lakes. By the turn of the 20th century, a growing interest in commercial fishing across all Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior) led to the near-death of Atlantic salmon, lake trout, and ciscoes, with whitefish on a rapid decline. In 1954, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission was formed to protect and manage fish populations, protect the lakes from overharvesting, manage water quality, and fight another persistent problem — invasive species.

Two invasive species have caused lasting effects on Wisconsin fish; sea lampreys and zebra mussels. Sea lampreys are a parasitic fish famed for their rows of sharp teeth and funnel-shaped mouths, also known as the vampire fish, and have been called North America’s first invasive species. Sea lamprey nearly decimated all Great Lakes fish life, dropping the average catch weight from 15 million pounds down to a dismal 300,000 by the 1960s, according to the fishery commission. Baby vampire fish are killed using a set of chemicals known as lampricides, but climate change has made it harder to terminate these bloodsuckers. A study found that rising lake temperatures make lamprey larvae more resistant to chemicals meant to kill them.

A worker displays a sea lamprey attached to the side of a recently caught fish. Lampreys are an invasive species found across Lake Michigan and Superior becoming more resilient in warming lake temperatures. Courtesy of Red Cliff Fisheries Department / Ian Harding

Yellow perch used to be caught, doused in batter, and fried by the bushel in the Great Lakes region until zebra mussels invaded. Zebra mussels are natives of Russian and Ukrainian freshwater systems and by the 1980s, found their way to Wisconsin’s lakes and bays. Spawning perch and zebra mussels both feed on and fight over phytoplankton and zooplankton.

This feud has left yellow perch populations in freefall from a few decades ago, with Lake Michigan perch on a continued decline, according to the Wisconsin DNR. Zebra mussels, much like a lamprey, will thrive in a warmer climate, according to a 2020 Hydrobiologia study, especially in northern higher North American latitudes, such as Wisconsin lakes. The infestation of zebra mussels has reached over 250 lakes in Wisconsin and once they set up shop, the invasive species is hard to get rid of.

Besides invasive species, extreme weather events on lakes, such as turbulent windstorms, are already harming Lake Michigan fish. The loss of ice cover has caused lakes to thaw faster and expose still developing fish to the elements. “If you have loss of ice cover, then you’re going to potentially have more wind events that could cause turbulence [and] could potentially bury eggs,” said Abby Lynch, a fish biologist and researcher with the United States Geological Survey’s Climate Adaptation Science Center.

Lynch’s research focuses on how climate change is impacting inland fish across the globe. Given the complexity of a given lake’s ecosystem, she said factors such as increased precipitation and periods of drought will also change how fish survive. Lake temperatures, she added, are a major concern when looking at the future of fish populations.

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