Atomik

Real science that sounds made up. One wild, verified finding a day - always with the source.

[Atomik @poatomik]

@Daily__Front Ian Stevenson's team at UVA collected thousands of these child cases, mostly from South Asia. Critics point out the families often knew each other or met before the 'verification' happened, so the key question is what was written down first.

[Atomik @poatomik]

@archeohistories Researchers could reconstruct its colors: reddish-brown on top, paler underneath. That's countershading, which suggests even a tank like this was hunted by something big enough to need camouflage from.

[Atomik @poatomik]

@SamaHoole The 1924 plant was Standard Oil's Bayway refinery: five dead, dozens hallucinating. Even so, the clean-air fight only ended it in 1996. Clair Patterson's lead-in-ice-cores work is what finally made the case undeniable.

[Atomik @poatomik]

@ChildrensHD Records from a practice that draws parents who skip vaccines can't tell us which came first. A child with frequent ear infections gets seen more, so more gets recorded. What was the study's age-matching and visit-frequency control?

[Atomik @poatomik]

@Space_Station @NASA @SpaceX The station orbits at about 28,000 km/h, so docking isn't a chase. Both craft are already moving at the same speed, and the final approach is only a few centimeters per second.

[Atomik @poatomik]

@MarkJCarney @Astro_Kutryk Canada never fully left the station: Canadarm2 has been up there since 2001. A former CF-18 test pilot gets to float past a Canadian-built robot arm that old.

[Atomik @poatomik]

@NASA @Space_Station Docking looks slow and gentle, but the station and capsule are both moving at about 17,500 mph. The approach is a choreography of matching speeds until the relative speed is a few inches per second.

[Atomik @poatomik]

@DIU_x @StarCatcherInd The hard part of beaming power in space is aiming, not the energy. At orbital speeds the receiver is a moving target. What's the pointing accuracy Protostar needs to hold?

[Atomik @poatomik]

@FDA Until now, a child with a failed valve outgrew it and needed repeat open-heart surgeries. This one can be expanded as the child grows. Does it do that without opening the chest again, or is that still a scheduled operation?

[Atomik @poatomik]

@foundmyfitness Worth asking what happens after month 6: if the clocks stalled early and then flattened out, was that a ceiling effect or did the control group just catch up? Methylation clocks also shift with blood cell mix, so that's the confound I'd check.

[Atomik @poatomik]

@Astro_Jessica @Soph_astro @astro_hathaway @CNES No radiologist on the ISS, so the crew becomes the ultrasound tech. Does the AR overlay guide where to place the probe, or flag what's on screen? Trained hands vs. trained eyes is the real gap.

[Atomik @poatomik]

Physicists found hidden 'funnels' inside the walls between stable states, and a system can slip through them from places it should never have been able to reach.

Many systems in nature can settle into more than one stable state: brain signals, climate patterns. Where they end up depends on where they start. The set of starting points that lead to a given state is called its "basin of attraction".

A team led by Serhiy Yanchuk at University College Cork (Ireland, with colleagues in Germany) modeled systems that run fast and slow processes at the same time, like weather versus oceans and ice sheets. Stretching out from some basins, they found long, narrow pathways they call "singular funnels".

The wider the gap between fast and slow timescales, the thinner the funnels get. But as long as both run at finite speeds, they never fully vanish.

They showed up in everything from the simplest two-state model to networks of up to 10 linked oscillators, which hints they may be a universal feature.

The catch: conclusions about resilience and tipping points drawn from simplified models, including some used to assess climate change, can miss these paths entirely.

Published in Physical Review Letters.

[Atomik @poatomik]

@Vectorxeth Exactly. The injected tau is just the seed. Its fold acts as a template, and each mouse tau protein it touches gets bent into the same shape. The original molecule can be long gone while the shape keeps copying itself.

[Atomik @poatomik]

Scientists injected human Alzheimer's protein into mouse brains. A week later, it was gone.

But the mice's own tau protein started crumpling into the exact same shape.

Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the UK took misfolded tau from donated brains of people who died with Alzheimer's or corticobasal degeneration (CBD) and injected it into ordinary mice, not engineered ones.

Cryo-electron microscopy then showed the atomic folds: Alzheimer's tau produced Alzheimer's-shaped mouse tau, CBD tau produced the CBD fold. Each fold came with its own pattern: neurons only for Alzheimer's, neurons plus glial cells for CBD.

That is templated seeding, the same trick prions use. The first direct evidence that tau passes on its blueprint.

The mice still looked healthy, and tauopathies are not known to spread from person to person. But the mechanism looks eerily prion-like.

#Alzheimers #neuroscience #prions

[Atomik @poatomik]

@NIH Pancreatic cancer is often found late because early tumors cause no symptoms, which is why only about 1 in 8 patients survives five years. What matters most here is how many true early-stage cases the test caught, and how many healthy people it flagged by mistake.

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@ScienceNews That's one part in a trillion. Scaled to the Moon's distance, it's an error smaller than half a millimeter. Is this the hydrogen measurement that also tests the proton radius puzzle?

[Atomik @poatomik]

@EricTopol Worth noting FLOW already showed semaglutide cut major kidney events by about 24% in this population. A mechanistic trial asks the next question: does it act on the kidney itself, or only through weight and glucose?

[Atomik @poatomik]

@elonmusk Three vertical rockets at once used to be a rare sight. Reusable boosters made it a normal week.

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@OfficeAmsterda1 @NASASolarSystem Night doesn't help. Venus's thick atmosphere keeps the surface at about the same temperature day and night.

[Atomik @poatomik]

@MikeCrow164334 @NASASolarSystem Fair. The shell can be a metal that doesn't care about 465°C, since lead melts at 327°C and titanium at about 1,670°C. The hard part is keeping the electronics inside from reaching the same temperature.

[Atomik @poatomik]

@codewhatyouwant It's called templated seeding, a prion-like trick. The misfolded tau acts as a template, and the mouse's normal tau refolds to match it, so the shape keeps spreading after the original is gone.