Astrophysicists make observations consistent with the predictions of an alternative theory of gravity
Oct 2022, phys.org
"Puzzling discovery"
New method developed for counting stars:
MOND - MOdified Newtonian Dynamics, also called
MoND - Modified Newtonian Dynamics, (see what they did there)
"According to Newton's laws of gravity, it's a matter of chance* in which of the tails a lost star ends up," explains Dr. Jan Pflamm-Altenburg of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics. "So both tails should contain about the same number of stars. However, in our work we were able to prove for the first time that this is not true: In the clusters we studied, the front tail always contains significantly more stars nearby to the cluster than the rear tail."*I thought they said God doesn't roll dice?!
via University of Bonn: Pavel Kroupa et al, Asymmetrical tidal tails of open star clusters: stars crossing their cluster's práh challenge Newtonian gravitation, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2022). doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stac2563
Image credit: AI Art - Fur Covered Jelly Bean - 2022
Unique features of octopus create 'an entirely new way of designing a nervous system'
Nov 2022, phys.org
Totally unexpected about the octopus nervous system: a structure by which the intramuscular nerve cords (INCs), which help the animal sense its arm movement, connect arms on the opposite sides of the animal. The startling discovery provides new insights into how invertebrate species have independently evolved complex nervous systems.
via University of Chicago Medical Center: Adam Kuuspalu et al, Multiple nerve cords connect the arms of octopuses, providing alternative paths for inter-arm signaling, Current Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.11.007
Researcher finds a sweet new way to print microchip patterns on curvy surfaces
Nov 2022, phys.org
It was only as a last resort that he had even tried burying microscopic magnetic dots in hardened chunks of sugar—hard candy, basically—and sending these sweet packages to colleagues in a biomedical lab. The sugar dissolves easily in water, freeing the magnetic dots for their studies without leaving any harmful plastics or chemicals behind.By chance, Zabow had left one of these sugar pieces, embedded with arrays of micromagnetic dots, in a beaker, and it did what sugar does with time and heat—it melted, coating the bottom of the beaker in a gooey mess."No problem," he thought. He would just dissolve away the sugar, as normal. Except this time when he rinsed out the beaker, the microdots were gone. But they weren't really missing; instead of releasing into the water, they had been transferred onto the bottom of the glass where they were casting a rainbow reflection.Could regular table sugar be used to bring the power of microchips to new and unconventional surfaces?
(Yes)
via National Institute of Standards and Technology: G. Zabow, Reflow transfer for conformal three-dimensional microprinting, Science (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.add7023
New measurements of galaxy rotation lean toward modified gravity as an explanation for dark matter
Dec 2022, phys.org
Modified Newtonian dynamics (MoND) or modified gravity model:
Rather than the force of attraction as a pure inverse square relation, gravity has a small remnant pull regardless of distance. This remnant is only about 10 trillionths of a G, but it's enough to explain galactic rotation curves.So the author of this paper looked at high-resolution velocity curves of 152 galaxies as observed in the Spitzer Photometry and Accurate Rotation Curves (SPARC) database. He found a shift in agreement with AQUAL. The data seems to support modified gravity over standard dark matter cosmology.
via Sejong University Department of Physics and Astronomy, Korea: Kyu-Hyun Chae, Distinguishing Dark Matter, Modified Gravity, and Modified Inertia with the Inner and Outer Parts of Galactic Rotation Curves, arXiv (2022). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2207.11069
Post Script:
A subtitled world: Uncovering the secrets of tickertape synesthesia
Feb 2023, phys.org
Tickertape synesthesia - transcribing the speech of others into text, automatically and involuntarily, these sounds will appear as imaginary subtitles floating before your eyes
A previous study estimated that up to 1.4% of the population could experience involuntary subtitles when hearing a human voice, but this figure remains uncertain. It's challenging to detect TTS subjects, who are generally unaware that they are distinguishable from the average person.
"Several participants in the study were shocked to learn that not everyone has built-in subtitles,"
Even more surprising: some subjects report that when they watch a foreign movie, a second level of subtitles—a product of their synesthesia—appears above the subtitles embedded in the video. Others have subtitled dreams and nightmares, which provide their oneiric activity with a cinematic dimension. Finally, since one-third of the participants knew of other cases of TTS in their family, the emergence of this form of synesthesia might have a genetic basis.
AKA "Orthographic representations"
via Paris Brain Institute: abien Hauw et al, Subtitled speech: Phenomenology of tickertape synesthesia, Cortex (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2022.11.005
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