Science News Scientists have just come up with an incredible device. It can do a full body scan in some cases as fast as 20 seconds, shows much more detail than ever before, and uses less radiation than any other scan. It is a combination of a PET scan and an X-Ray. One thing it should be able to do besides being an incredible medical tool, is ease people’s anxiety with crawling in a tube and having to stay there for much longer periods of time. The last time I took a scan I was in a tube for about 15 minutes and because of the type of scan it was, my nose was almost touching the inside of the tube. This should be a godsend to those with claustrophobia. Even though they will still have to get into a tube it will be over very fast. Scientists are saying the scan is 40 times more sensitive than current scanners. Scientists are finding out the Earth’s mantle is a lot wetter than first thought. While scientists were studying the Mariana Trench, which is the deepest part of the ocean, they discovered the plates under the ocean are not only moving, but they are allowing water to seep deeper into the planet. This is going to change the way science thinks about the water cycle on Earth. Since it is hotter the deeper into the earth we go, some of the water doesn’t reach a lot lower as liquid. The minerals boil out of it and they go deeper into the earth. The scientists found hydrated rock extended at least 20 miles below the ocean floor. They had previously thought this rock only extended 3 to 4 miles below the ocean. Scientists had built an antenna at the Antarctic. The idea was to capture particles hitting the earth, such as exotic particles from space, then something happened which was totally unexpected. The antenna began to register exotic particles as it was designed to do, but they were coming from below not above. Scientists soon realized what this meant. It meant they were capturing exotic particles which traveled through the earth and were coming out the other side. Scientists knew low energy particles like neutrinos could pass through dense matter, but never knew a high-powered exotic particle could do this. They were stunned. It is believed this could lead to a new kind of physics. More particles are needed before a conclusion can be made, but for now this is all very strange. Scientists in Japan have created the most powerful magnetic field ever created. When they were testing it, it blew the door off their lab. The field was about 400 times more powerful than that created by an MRI. The Russians had created a magnetic field about 2.5 times more powerful than the Japanese one, but it immediately blew up. The door on the lab had been made of iron. Magnetic fields can be used to study semiconductors. Sometimes scientists think they know everything about a subject because it has been studied for a long time. Photosynthesis is one of those subjects. This is the system where plants and cyanobacteria change light into energy. A new type of photosynthesis has been discovered and it goes against everything we thought we knew about the subject. The reason for this is it doesn’t need visible light. Scientists had thought this was impossible, because red light below visible was thought to not contain enough energy to be useful. Cyanobacteria have been found which can switch off their chlorophyll-a and change to chlorophyll-f which can get energy in not visible red light. Scientists have figured out how to develop Artificial Intelligence using only 1/100 the amount of energy. They are using circuitry based on the brain’s cells. Engineers have built a neural network which resembles ours very closely. This new neural network was compared to ones already in use and it worked just as well even with only a fraction of the power use the others had. The system is also faster for another reason, the software and hardware in use was designed to work perfectly together, something the other AI experiments didn’t do. I think most of us use batteries, and there is nothing more annoying than when a battery goes dead just when it is needed for an important task. This could be a thing of the past if a new battery makes it to market. The new battery is said to be able to power devices for about 100 years. Yes, you read that correctly. The down side is the battery would be nuclear. NASA wants to develop this battery to power sensors. There is a prototype out there already which contains a semiconductor made from a diamond with a radioactive chemical which fuels it. It is being said this battery has the potential to power devices like pacemakers, and other devices. Whatever device it is in would come with a permanent battery in it and you would never have to replace it. Russians scientists have stated the technology is safe to use and we don’t have to worry about radiation and by the way the battery is 10 times more powerful than a chemical battery of the same size. The Russians are working on improving the battery even more. Remember the movie Back to the Future? If you do you probably remember the DeLorean car/time machine with the flux capacitor, well we now have one. This one will not let you travel through time however, but it is thought it could make quantum computing more viable. The question is why? The answer is it breaks one of the laws of physics which states if you reversed time, you would see what just happened in reverse. The law is called time-reversed symmetry. I don’t know how this applies, but scientists seem to be excited about it. How does one improve the accuracy of an atomic clock which might only lose a tiny fraction of a second in a million years? They might experiment with time crystals. An ordinary crystal has its atoms arranged in a repeating system, but time crystals are different. These crystals were discovered in 2016 and their atoms spin. They first spin in one direction than in the other when a pulse is applied. According to scientists atomic clock accuracies are not the only thing they could improve, but also other devices like gyroscopes, magnetometers and probably quantum technologies. A new study seems to contradict what has been previously thought. It states human can still grow new neurons well into old age. Previously it was thought neuron growth stopped after childhood.
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