NASA Has Released New Images Of Jupiter, Taken By The Juno Spacecraft.

Fascinating, even if you are unable to grasp the mathematical depths, details are for professional thinkers on the field, enjoy the surface, is pretty enjoyable too.

Mathematicians Bridge Finite-Infinite Divide

A surprising new proof is helping to connect the mathematics of infinity to the physical world. (Quanta Magazine)

Images by Lucy Reading-Ikkanda

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Generated ice cream flavors: now it’s my turn

Last week, I featured new ice cream flavors generated by Ms. Johnson’s coding classes at Kealing Middle School in Austin, Texas. Their flavors were good - much better than mine, in fact. In part, this was because they had collected a much larger dataset than I had, and in part this was because they hadn’t accidentally mixed the dataset with metal bands.

(the three at the bottom were mine)

But not only are Ms. Johnson’s coding class adept with textgenrnn, they’re also generous - and they kindly gave me their dataset of 1,600 ice cream flavors. They wanted to see what I would come up with.

So, I fired up char-rnn, a neural network framework I’ve used for a lot of my text-generating experiments - one that starts from scratch each time, with no memory of its previous dataset. There was no chance of getting metal band names in my ice cream this time.

But even so, I ended up with some rather edgy-sounding flavors. There was a flavor in the input dataset called Death by Chocolate, and I blame blood oranges for some of the rest, but “nose” was nowhere in the input, candied or otherwise. Nor was “turd”, for that matter. Ice cream places are getting edgy these days, but not THAT edgy.

Bloodie Chunk Death Bean Goat Cookie Peanut Bat Bubblegum Cheesecake Rawe Blueberry Fist Candied Nose Creme die Mucki Ant Cone Apple Pistachio  mouth Chocolate Moose Mange Dime Oil Live Cookie Bubblegum Chocolate Basil Aspresso Lime Pig Beet Bats Blood Sundae Elterfhawe Monkey But Kaharon Chocolate Mouse Gun Gu Creamie Turd

Not all the flavors were awful, though. The neural network actually did a decent job of coming up with trendy-sounding ice cream flavors. I haven’t seen these before, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if I did someday.

Smoked Butter Lemon-Oreo Bourbon Oil Strawberry Churro Roasted Beet Pecans Cherry Chai Grazed Oil Green Tea Coconut Root Beet Peaches Malted Black Madnesss Chocolate With Ginger Lime and Oreo Pumpkin Pomegranate Chocolate Bar Smoked Cocoa Nibe Carrot Beer Red Honey Candied Butter Lime Cardamom Potato Chocolate Roasted Praline Cheddar Swirl Toasted Basil Burnt Basil Beet Bourbon Black Corn Chocolate Oreo Oil + Toffee Milky Ginger Chocolate Peppercorn Cookies & Oreo Caramel Chocolate Toasted Strawberry Mountain Fig n Strawberry Twist Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Road Chocolate Peanut Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate  Japanese Cookies n'Cream with Roasted Strawberry Coconut

These next flavors seem unlikely, however.

Mann Beans Cherry Law Rhubarb Cram Spocky Parstita Green Tea Cogbat Cheesecake With Bear Peanut Butter Cookies nut Butter Brece Toasterbrain Blueberry Rose The Gone Butter Fish Fleek Red Vanill Mounds of Jay Roasted Monster Dream Sweet Chocolate Mouse Cookies nutur Coconut Chocolate Fish Froggtow Tie Pond Cookies naw Mocoa Pistachoopie Garl And Cookie Doug Burble With Berry Cake Peachy Bunch Kissionfruit Bearhounds Gropky Pum Stuck Brownie Vanilla Salted Blueberry Bumpa Thyme Mountain Bluckled Bananas Lemon-Blueberry Almernuts Gone Cream with Rap Chocolate Cocoa Named Honey

For the heck of it, I also used textgenrnn to generate some more ice creams mixed with metal bands, this time on purpose. 

Swirl of Hell Person Cream Dead Cherry Tear Nightham Toffee

For the rest of these, including the not-quite-PG flavors, enter your email here.

Mars in the Loop : This composite of images spaced some 5 to 9 days apart, from late April (bottom right) through November 5 (top left), traces the retrograde motion of ruddy-colored Mars through planet Earth’s night sky. To connect the dots and dates in this 2018 Mars retrograde loop, just slide your cursor over the picture (and check out this animation). But Mars didn’t actually reverse the direction of its orbit. Instead, the apparent backwards motion with respect to the background stars is a reflection of the motion of the Earth itself. Retrograde motion can be seen each time Earth overtakes and laps planets orbiting farther from the Sun, the Earth moving more rapidly through its own relatively close-in orbit. On July 27, Mars was near its favorable 2018 parihelic opposition, when Mars was closest to the Sun in its orbit while also opposite the Sun in Earth’s sky. For that date, the frame used in this composite was taken during the total lunar eclipse. via NASA

source [x]

why this happen

Glutamate, an essential food for the brain

Glutamate is an amino acid with very different functions: in the pancreas, it modulates the activity of the pancreatic ß-cells responsible for insulin production, whereas in the brain it is the main excitatory neurotransmitter. In recent years, it has been suspected to play an additional role in the functioning of the brain. By discovering how the brain uses glutamate to produce energy, researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) confirm this hypothesis and highlight unexpected links with the rest of the body. To read in Cell Reports.

Unlike other organs, the brain cannot draw its energy from lipids, an energy resource widely present in the body. The blood-brain barrier, which protects it from the pathogens and toxins circulating in the blood, indeed limits the passage of these lipids. Moreover, while most of the organs in the human body have the ability to store glucose by increasing their mass, the brain, prisoner of the cranial bones, cannot count on these variations in volume. Unable to store its food, it depends on sugar supplied in real-time by the rest of the body. This distribution of energy is controlled by the liver.

Pierre Maechler, professor at the Faculty of Medicine at UNIGE, and his team therefore decided to verify if glutamate was indeed an energy source for the brain. To do so, the researchers analyzed the role of the glutamate dehydrogenase enzyme in the brain. In mutant form, this enzyme, encoded by the Glud1 gene, is responsible for a congenital hyperinsulinism syndrome, a severe disease affecting at the same time the endocrine pancreas, the liver and the brain. Individuals affected by this syndrome suffer from intellectual disability and have a high risk of epilepsy. “We have suppressed the Glud1 gene in the brain of mice. In the absence of glutamate dehydrogenase, we observed that the brain was no longer able to convert glutamate into energy, even though the amino acid was present in the brain,” explains Melis Karaca, first author of this study.

Priority to the brain

Devoid of the energy supplied by cerebral glutamate, the brain sends signals to the liver to requisition a compensatory proportion of glucose, at the expense of the rest of the body. This is why the transgenic mice also showed a growth deficit and muscle atrophy. “This clearly shows how the brain works in a just-in-time manner and that each percent of energy resources is essential for its proper functioning,” highlights Professor Pierre Maechler. “If a part of this energy disappears, the brain serves itself first and the rest of the body suffers. The liver must then make more glucose by drawing upon muscle protein, resulting in loss of muscle mass. Knowing that the brain uses glutamate as an energy resource allows us to reflect on other ways to overcome a potential shortfall. ”

Scientists also suspect a correlation between the Glud1 gene and some neurodevelopmental disorders, particularly epilepsy and schizophrenia. They are currently pursuing their research by introducing in mice the same Glud1 mutation detected in epileptic patients. At the same time, another group is working with schizophrenic patients to assess the way their brain uses glutamate.

Women scientists made up 25% of the Pluto fly-by New Horizon team. Make sure you share this, because erasing women’s achievements in science and history is a tradition. Happens every day.

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http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20150712

Magnetospheres: How Do They Work?

The sun, Earth, and many other planets are surrounded by giant magnetic bubbles.

Space may seem empty, but it’s actually a dynamic place, dominated by invisible forces, including those created by magnetic fields.  Magnetospheres – the areas around planets and stars dominated by their magnetic fields – are found throughout our solar system. They deflect high-energy, charged particles called cosmic rays that are mostly spewed out by the sun, but can also come from interstellar space. Along with atmospheres, they help protect the planets’ surfaces from this harmful radiation.

It’s possible that Earth’s protective magnetosphere was essential for the development of conditions friendly to life, so finding magnetospheres around other planets is a big step toward determining if they could support life.

But not all magnetospheres are created equal – even in our own backyard, not all planets in our solar system have a magnetic field, and the ones we have observed are all surprisingly different.

Earth’s magnetosphere is created by the constantly moving molten metal inside Earth. This invisible “force field” around our planet has an ice cream cone-like shape, with a rounded front and a long, trailing tail that faces away from the sun. The magnetosphere is shaped that way because of the constant pressure from the solar wind and magnetic fields on the sun-facing side.

Earth’s magnetosphere deflects most charged particles away from our planet – but some do become trapped in the magnetic field and create auroras when they rain down into the atmosphere.

We have several missions that study Earth’s magnetosphere – including the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, Van Allen Probes, and Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (also known as THEMIS) – along with a host of other satellites that study other aspects of the sun-Earth connection.

Mercury, with a substantial iron-rich core, has a magnetic field that is only about 1% as strong as Earth’s. It is thought that the planet’s magnetosphere is stifled by the intense solar wind, limiting its strength, although even without this effect, it still would not be as strong as Earth’s. The MESSENGER satellite orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015, helping us understand our tiny terrestrial neighbor.

After the sun, Jupiter has by far the biggest magnetosphere in our solar system – it stretches about 12 million miles from east to west, almost 15 times the width of the sun. (Earth’s, on the other hand, could easily fit inside the sun.) Jupiter does not have a molten metal core like Earth; instead, its magnetic field is created by a core of compressed liquid metallic hydrogen.

One of Jupiter’s moons, Io, has intense volcanic activity that spews particles into Jupiter’s magnetosphere. These particles create intense radiation belts and the large auroras around Jupiter’s poles.

Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon, also has its own magnetic field and magnetosphere – making it the only moon with one. Its weak field, nestled in Jupiter’s enormous shell, scarcely ruffles the planet’s magnetic field.

Our Juno mission orbits inside the Jovian magnetosphere sending back observations so we can better understand this region. Previous observations have been received from Pioneers 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, Ulysses, Galileo and Cassini in their flybys and orbits around Jupiter.

Saturn’s moon Enceladus transforms the shape of its magnetosphere. Active geysers on the moon’s south pole eject oxygen and water molecules into the space around the planet. These particles, much like Io’s volcanic emissions at Jupiter, generate the auroras around the planet’s poles. Our Cassini mission studies Saturn’s magnetic field and auroras, as well as its moon Enceladus.

Uranus’ magnetosphere wasn’t discovered until 1986 when data from Voyager 2’s flyby revealed weak, variable radio emissions. Uranus’ magnetic field and rotation axis are out of alignment by 59 degrees, unlike Earth’s, whose magnetic field and rotation axis differ by only 11 degrees. On top of that, the magnetic field axis does not go through the center of the planet, so the strength of the magnetic field varies dramatically across the surface. This misalignment also means that Uranus’ magnetotail – the part of the magnetosphere that trails away from the sun – is twisted into a long corkscrew.

Neptune’s magnetosphere is also tilted from its rotation axis, but only by 47. Just like on Uranus, Neptune’s magnetic field strength varies across the planet. This also means that auroras can be seen away from the planet’s poles – not just at high latitudes, like on Earth, Jupiter and Saturn.

Does Every Planet Have a Magnetosphere?

Neither Venus nor Mars have global magnetic fields, although the interaction of the solar wind with their atmospheres does produce what scientists call an “induced magnetosphere.” Around these planets, the atmosphere deflects the solar wind particles, causing the solar wind’s magnetic field to wrap around the planet in a shape similar to Earth’s magnetosphere.

What About Beyond Our Solar System?

Outside of our solar system, auroras, which indicate the presence of a magnetosphere, have been spotted on brown dwarfs – objects that are bigger than planets but smaller than stars.

There’s also evidence to suggest that some giant exoplanets have magnetospheres. As scientists now believe that Earth’s protective magnetosphere was essential for the development of conditions friendly to life, finding magnetospheres around exoplanets is a big step in finding habitable worlds.  

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