Sreys Blog Posts

The bottom of the sea can be a gassy place. Underwater volcanoes and vents spew carbon dioxide (CO2) near the crevices where tectonic plates rift apart. Hungry bacteria convert decomposing creatures of the deep into natural methane. And, new research from Japan reminds us, enormous, miles-wide reservoirs of greenhouse gases lurk in untouched pockets just below the seafloor.  In a study published Aug. 19 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters , a team of researchers discovered one such pocket at the bottom of the Okinawa Trough, a massive submarine basin sitting southwest of Japan where the Philippine Sea plate is slowly sinking below the Eurasian plate. Using seismic waves to map the trough’s structure, the team found a huge gas pocket stretching at least 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) wide and potentially containing more than 100 million tons (90.7 million metric tons) of CO2, methane or some combination of the two.  Depending on its contents, this massive stash of seafloor...

Researchers can guess where you’re from by how colors make you feel By Eva Frederick Sep. 24, 2019 , 7:01 PM Whether you see red, feel blue, or go green with envy may depend on what country you call home, a new study suggests. And when given data on how a person associated colors with emotions, researchers could correctly predict where they were from 80% of the time. The scientists surveyed 711 people from China, Germany, Greece, and the United Kingdom. Volunteers read the word for 12 colors, such as “green” and “turquoise.” They then indicated which of 20 emotions the colors brought to mind, and how strongly the color was tied to the feeling. Across the board, the colors that inspired the most emotion were red, black, and pink, whereas brown and purple had weaker associations. Black was associated with sadness across all countries, for example, and red with positive emotions like love and pleasure, along with negative feelings such as anger and hate , the researchers report today ...

At the center of our galaxy is a supermassive black hole which, apparently, likes to blow bubbles.  Ballooning out of both poles of the galactic center, two gargantuan orbs of gas stretch into space for 25,000 light-years apiece (roughly the same as the distance between Earth and the center of the Milky Way), though it’s visible only in ultra powerful X-ray and gamma-ray light. Scientists call these cosmic gas orbs the Fermi bubbles and know that they’re a few million years old. What caused this bout of galactic indigestion, however, is one of our galaxy’s biggest mysteries.  Now, by looking for evidence of this violent bubble-blowing event in the scorched clouds of gas in one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, researchers have reconstructed a plausible explanation for the bubbles’ birth. According to a study to be published Oct. 8 in the preprint journal arXiv.org, the Fermi bubbles were created by an epic flare of hot, nuclear energy that shot out of the galaxy’s pol...

DNA sequencing advances have found evidence of many new microbes, but they have been difficult to fish from their complex microbiomes and grown in labs. New ‘reverse genomics’ method brings previously hidden bacteria to life By Jon Cohen Sep. 30, 2019 , 11:00 AM In the past decade, increasingly powerful genetic techniques have found hordes of microbial DNA in everything from the human gut to a scoop of seawater. But researchers have struggled to grow most of the microbes in the lab because of the complexity of mimicking their natural environments. Now, a novel “reverse genomics” strategy has found a way to fish out some of these stealthy bacteria from fluids taken from the human mouth and cultivate them in the lab—an advance that promises to clarify how they maintain health and ward off disease. “I find the study inspiring, something we couldn’t even imagine in the early 1980s,” says Norman Pace, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who wasn’t involved with the...

Even though I’m a classic introvert , it was normal for me in my teens and early twenties to spend almost every weekend with friends. Now, in my mid-thirties, the perfect weekend is one with zero social plans. I’m not the only one who’s slowing down socially with age. Take, for example, my extroverted college friend who ran through her contact list, making phone calls to chitchat, every time she was alone in her car. She couldn’t be without human contact for even the 10 or 15 minutes it took to drive to the grocery store. These days, as a 30-something, she’s content to spend most nights at home with her family. I haven’t gotten one of her infamous calls in years. So what gives? Do we get more introverted as we get older? Probably, according to Susan Cain, author of the bestselling book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking — and this is actually a good thing. Let me explain. Why We Become More Introverted With Age In a post on Quiet Revolution , Cain...

Giant molecules can be in two places at once, thanks to quantum physics . That’s something that scientists have long known is theoretically true based on a few facts: Every particle or group of particles in the universe is also a wave — even large particles, even bacteria , even human beings, even planets and stars. And waves occupy multiple places in space at once. So any chunk of matter can also occupy two places at once. Physicists call this phenomenon “quantum superposition,” and for decades, they have demonstrated it using small particles. But in recent years, physicists have scaled up their experiments, demonstrating quantum superposition using larger and larger particles. Now, in a paper published Sept. 23 in the journal Nature Physics , an international team of researchers has caused molecule made up of up to 2,000 atoms to occupy two places at the same time. To pull it off, the researchers built a complicated, modernized version of a series of famous old experiments that fi...

Gallery of Space Time Travel/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic ‘Planet Nine’ may actually be a black hole By Sid Perkins Sep. 27, 2019 , 1:10 PM For nearly 5 years, growing numbers of scientists have blamed the weird orbits of distant solar system objects on the gravitational effects of an as-yet-undiscovered “Planet Nine” that lies in the icy realm far beyond Neptune. But a pair of physicists is now floating an intriguing idea that could offer a new way to search for the object: What if that supposed planet is actually a small black hole? Previous studies have suggested Planet Nine, which some astronomers refer to as “Planet X,” has a mass between five and 15 times that of Earth and lies between 45 billion and 150 billion kilometers from the sun. At such a distance, an object would receive very little light from the sun, making it hard to see with telescopes. To detect objects of that mass, whether planets or black holes, astronomers can look for weird blobs o...