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Cheddar Man's remains had been unearthed 115 years ago in Gough's Cave, located in Somerset's Cheddar Gorge. Subsequent examination has shown that the man was short by today's standards - about 5ft 5in - and probably died in his early 20s.

Dark skinned and blue eyed , Cheddar Man is showing that early Britain wasnt as white as many think

A cutting-edge scientific analysis shows that a Briton from 10,000 years ago had dark brown skin and blue eyes.Researchers from London's Natural History Museum extracted DNA from Cheddar Man, Britain's oldest complete skeleton, which was discovered in 1903.University College London researchers then used the subsequent genome analysis for a facial reconstruction.

It underlines the fact that the lighter skin characteristic of modern Europeans is a relatively recent phenomenon.No prehistoric Briton of this age had previously had their genome analysed.As such, the analysis provides valuable new insights into the first people to resettle Britain after the last Ice Age.

No-one's entirely sure why pale skin evolved in these farmers, but their cereal-based diet was probably deficient in Vitamin D. This would have required agriculturalists to absorb this essential nutrient from sunlight through their skin.

And he was lactose intolerant.
 

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GreyCrow said:

Cheddar Man's remains had been unearthed 115 years ago in Gough's Cave, located in Somerset's Cheddar Gorge. Subsequent examination has shown that the man was short by today's standards - about 5ft 5in - and probably died in his early 20s.

Dark skinned and blue eyed , Cheddar Man is showing that early Britain wasnt as white as many think

A cutting-edge scientific analysis shows that a Briton from 10,000 years ago had dark brown skin and blue eyes.Researchers from London's Natural History Museum extracted DNA from Cheddar Man, Britain's oldest complete skeleton, which was discovered in 1903.University College London researchers then used the subsequent genome analysis for a facial reconstruction.

It underlines the fact that the lighter skin characteristic of modern Europeans is a relatively recent phenomenon.No prehistoric Briton of this age had previously had their genome analysed.As such, the analysis provides valuable new insights into the first people to resettle Britain after the last Ice Age.

No-one's entirely sure why pale skin evolved in these farmers, but their cereal-based diet was probably deficient in Vitamin D. This would have required agriculturalists to absorb this essential nutrient from sunlight through their skin.

And he was lactose intolerant.
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I think I am a throwback :)
 
Zoom in close on the centre of the picture above, and you can spot something you perhaps never thought you'd be able to see: A single atom.

This strontium atom is emitting light after being excited by a laser, and it's the winner of the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) photography award. The EPSRC announced the winners of its fifth annual contest yesterday. Winning photographer David Nadlinger, graduate student at the University of Oxford, was just excited to be able to show off his research.

"It's exciting to find a picture that resonates with other people that shows what I spend my days and nights working on," Nadlinger told me. The best part, to him, was "the opportunity to excite people about my research, more than winning a competition".

Nadlinger traps atoms as part of his research on quantum computing. The laser light causes the atom to emit photons, which could be collected using a longer exposure. He took the photo through a window into the vacuum of the ion trap.
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https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/02/picture-of-single-trapped-atom-wins-uk-science-photography-prize/

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About time!!! Plastic-eating enzyme holds promise in fighting pollution — scientists

This enzyme was discovered over two years ago, but these scientists have modified it to make it work faster :thumbsu:

Scientists in Britain and the United States say they have engineered a plastic-eating enzyme that could one day help in the fight against pollution. The enzyme is able to digest polyethylene terephthalate, or PET — a form of plastic patented in the 1940s and now used in millions of tonnes of plastic bottles. PET plastics can persist in the environment for hundreds of years and currently pollute large areas of land and sea worldwide.
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Plastic pollution is one of my pet hates, it adversely affects all life forms and it really is a stain on humanity :thumbsdown:
 

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This is concerning: Mysterious rise in emissions of ozone-damaging chemical

Scientists have detected an unexpected rise in atmospheric levels of CFC-11, a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) highly damaging to the ozone layer. Banned by the Montreal Protocol in 1987, CFC-11 was seen to be declining as expected but that fall has slowed down by 50% since 2012. Researchers say their evidence shows it's likely that new, illegal emissions of CFC-11 are coming from East Asia. These could hamper the recovery of the ozone hole and worsen climate change.
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CFC-11 is also known as trichlorofluoromethane, and is one of a number of CFCs that were initially developed as refrigerants during the 1930s. They were also used as propellants in aerosol sprays and in solvents. However, it took many decades for scientists to discover that when CFCs break down in the atmosphere, they release chlorine atoms that are able to rapidly destroy ozone molecules.
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I found this interesting (as a physicist of Adelaide university): Ramsay Fellow to build world's fastest charging battery

I can understand some of the quirks of quantum mechanics (e.g. wave-particle duality, tunnelling, uncertainty principle) and they have practical consequences and applications, but these quantum batteries sound crazy. I'd love to know how they'll be built!
 
Microfossils, possibly world's oldest, had biological characteristics

August 16, 2018, Goldschmidt Conference

Scientists have confirmed that the 3.4 billion year old Strelley Pool microfossils had chemical characteristics similar to modern bacteria. This all but confirms their biological origin and ranks them amongst the world's oldest microfossils. The work is presented at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Boston, with simultaneous publication in the peer-reviewed journal Geochemical Perspectives Letters.

A team of scientists, led by Dr. Julien Alleon (IMPMC, Paris, France; and MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA) have been able to show that the chemical residuals from ancient microfossils match those of younger bacterial fossils, and so are likely to have been laid down by early life forms.

They compared the results of synchrotron-based X-ray absorption spectroscopy analysis of the Strelley Pool microfossils with more recent ones from the Gunflint Formation (1.9 billion years old, found on the shores of Lake Superior, Ontario, Canada) and with modern bacteria.All showed similar absorption features, indicating that the residual chemicals were made from the same building blocks, thereby supporting a biological origin.

Dr. Jullien Alleon said: "There are a couple of important points which come out of this work. Firstly, we demonstrate that the elemental and molecular characteristics of these 3.4 Ga microfossils are consistent with biological remains, slightly degraded by fossilization processes. This effectively supports the biological origin of the Strelley Pool microfossils. There are competing claims over which microfossils are actually the world's oldest, this analytical strategy needs to be applied to other ancient samples to help settle the controversy.

Secondly, it is remarkable that these echoes of past life have survived the extreme conditions they have experienced over the last 3.4 billion years: we know from the molecular structure of the microfossils that they have been exposed to temperatures of up to 300 °C for long periods. And yet we are still able to see signs of their original chemistry. This is a step forward to confirming that these are indeed the oldest fossils yet discovered."

Commenting, Professor Vickie Bennett (Australian National University) said: "This is exciting work with the new types of analyses providing compelling evidence that the cherts contain biogenic microfossils. This is in line with other observations for early life from the Strelley Pool rocks, including stromatolites interpreted as microbial mats, and further confirming that the minimum age for life on Earth is 3.4 billion years.

The techniques used here are not applicable to the older rocks that host the claims for the oldest terrestrial life, as these rocks were exposed to much higher temperatures. These samples include the 3.7 billion year old stromatolites from Isua, Greenland and the 4.1 billion year old Canadian microfossils. However, this work shows how quickly the field is developing and that new capabilities for testing and confirming earlier evidence of life are in reach".

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-08-microfossils-possibly-world-oldest-biological.html#jCp
 
Mind blown. Again.

Synopsis: How to Create a Ghost Chemical Bond
September 12, 2018

A series of electric and magnetic pulses applied to an atom could cause one of its electrons to behave as if “bonded” to an empty point in space.
PhysRevLett.121.113203

M. Eiles/Purdue University

It goes without saying that a chemical bond requires, at the bare minimum, two consenting atoms. But a proposed experiment might reduce that requirement to just one, providing researchers with a new perspective on unusual chemical bonds. Matthew Eiles and colleagues at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, have come up with a way to construct a so-called trilobite bond—named after the electronic wave function’s resemblance to fossils of the long-extinct arthropod—by carefully manipulating a Rydberg atom, an atom with one electron in a highly excited state.

Normally, scientists have observed trilobite bonds in special types of diatomic molecules, such as Rb2 and Cs2. In these cases, one of the atoms is in a Rydberg state, while the other is in its ground state. Because the Rydberg’s pumped-up outer electron occupies a very distant orbital, these “trilobite molecules” are unusually large, about 1000 times larger than typical diatomic molecules. Using numerical analyses, Eiles and colleagues show that through a precise sequence of alternating electric and magnetic field pulses, the electronic wave function of a Rydberg hydrogen atom can be sculpted to match that of a trilobite molecule. This leaves the excited electron strongly localized to a point in space, dozens of nanometers from the nucleus. The wave function should persist , in effect temporarily bonding the Rydberg atom to a nonexistent “ghost” atom.

Experimentalists will need to figure out how to accommodate the stringent requirements for synchronizing the pulses and blocking external fields. If these hurdles could be overcome and a ghost bond is produced, the system could be observed via electron- or x-ray-scattering experiments. While applications are speculative, the team imagines that it might be possible to see if such a preformed bond modifies chemical reaction rates in some way.

This research is published in Physical Review Letters.

https://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.113203
 
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