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    Travis Korte

    Travis Korte

    Research Analyst, Center for Data Innovation

  • Weird Magnetic Star May Test Einstein Theory

    Dale Frail couldn’t resist the prospect of watching a black hole swallow its prey. Frail, who is in charge of the Very Large Array (VLA) of radio telescopes near Socorro in New Mexico, had seen a report last month about a long-lived X-ray flare emanating from the centre of the Milky Way, home to a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Astronomers were speculating that the flare might be a sign that a gas cloud they had been tracking had begun its death spiral into the black hole.

  • Mathematician Claims Breakthrough In Centuries-Old Problem

    Researchers hoping to get ‘2’ as the answer for a long-sought proof involving pairs of prime numbers are celebrating the fact that a mathematician has wrestled the value down from infinity to 70 million. “That’s only [a factor of] 35 million away” from the target, quips Dan Goldston, an analytic number theorist at San Jose State University in California who was not involved in the work. Primes abound among smaller numbers, but they become less and less frequent as one goes towards larger numbers.

  • Tiny 'Bug' May Turn Tables On Death-Dealing Insect

    For thousands of years, mosquitoes have made people sick. In a new study, researchers report that giving mosquitoes an infection of their own—with a strange bacterium that tinkers with the insects' sex lives—may prevent mosquitoes from transmitting malaria. "I'm quite jealous," says entomologist Scott O'Neill of Monash University in Australia, who was not involved in the work.

  • WATCH: Robotic Insect Flies Like The Real Thing

    A robot as small as a housefly has managed the delicate task of flying and hovering the way the actual insects do. “This is a major engineering breakthrough, 15 years in the making,” says electrical engineer Ronald Fearing, who works on robotic flies at the University of California, Berkeley. The device uses layers of ultrathin materials that can make its wings flap 120 times a second, which is on a par with a housefly's flapping rate.

  • Consciousness Glimpsed In Babies HOW Young?

    For decades, neuroscientists have been searching for an unmistakable signal of consciousness in electrical brain activity. Studies on adults show a particular pattern of brain activity: When your senses detect something, such as a moving object, the vision center of your brain activates, even if the object goes by too fast for you to notice. Scientists see a spike in brain activity when the senses pick something up, and another signal, the "late slow wave," when the prefrontal cortex gets the message.

  • 'Nanosuits' Protect Creatures From Harsh Environment

    Imaging specimens with electron microscopy imposes conditions that are typically deadly for living things, such as a high vacuum. Researchers have found that the beam of a scanning electron microscope can turn a thin coating that occurs naturally on the larvae of some insects into a sort of miniature spacesuit that can keep the animals alive in a vacuum for up to an hour. Takahiko Hariyama, a biologist at the Hamamatsu University School of Medicine in Japan, and his collaborators describe the results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

  • Fossils May Show Traces Of Ancient Supernova

    Sediment in a deep-sea core may hold radioactive iron spewed by a distant supernova 2.2 million years ago and preserved in the fossilized remains of iron-loving bacteria. If confirmed, the iron traces would be the first biological signature of a specific exploding star. Shawn Bishop, a physicist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, reported preliminary findings on 14 April at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver, Colorado.

  • What Lives At Bottom Of Mariana Trench?

    It was called the Mariana Trench, and at the very, very bottom was the lowest point on Earth’s surface, the Challenger Deep. In 1989, James Cameron had fun imagining what might be at the bottom of a similar canyon when he made the “The Abyss”, which imagined quite a lot at the bottom of an unspecified Caribbean trench. In February and March, he descended to the bottom of both the New Britain and Mariana Trenches, lights and 3-D Hi-Def cameras blazing, in a slender, lime-green sub called the Deepsea Challenger.

  • Bed Bug Folk Remedy Really Works, Research Shows

    Those suffering from bedbugs may try freezing, burning, or poisoning the pests, often to no avail. Now, researchers have provided evidence that a Balkan folk remedy is effective—and inflicts a deliciously nasty end on the itch-inducing bloodsuckers. For centuries, people in the Balkans protected themselves against bedbugs—among them the common species Cimex lectularius seen on the left—by scattering bean plant leaves next to their beds, then burning the leaves in the morning.

  • 'Firewall' Theory Casts Doubt On Einstein

    In March 2012, Joseph Polchinski began to contemplate suicide — at least in mathematical form. A string theorist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, Polchinski was pondering what would happen to an astronaut who dived into a black hole. According to the then-accepted account, he wouldn’t feel anything special at first, even when his fall took him through the black hole’s event horizon: the invisible boundary beyond which nothing can escape.

  • Old Skulls Show Puzzling Link Between Brazilians, Pacific Islanders

    Indigenous people that lived in southeastern Brazil in the late 1800s shared some genetic sequences with Polynesians, an analysis of their remains shows. The finding offers some support for the possibility that Pacific islanders traded with South America thousands of years ago, but researchers say that the distinctive DNA sequences, or haplogroups, may have entered the genomes of the native Brazilians through the slave trade during the nineteenth century.

  • Tiny Gene Device Seen As Big Advance For Biocomputing

    For the first time, synthetic biologists have created a genetic device that mimics one of the widgets on which all of modern electronics is based, the three-terminal transistor. Like standard electronic transistors, the new biological transistor is expected to work in many different biological circuit designs. Together with other advances in crafting genetic circuitry, that should make it easier for scientists to program cells to do everything from monitor pollutants and the progression of disease to turning on the output of medicines and biofuels.

  • Odd Space Objects Could Be New Type Of Planet

    Mysterious dense bodies outside the Solar System could be the remnants of ice giants similar to Neptune that wandered too close to their suns, according to results presented this week at a meeting on exoplanets at the Royal Society in London. Among the most puzzling finds of NASA’s Kepler space mission to find exoplanets, which launched in 2009, are bodies too heavy for their size. In some of the rare cases in which astronomers can estimate both the mass and the size of distant planets discovered by the probe, the objects have radiuses similar to that of Earth but are denser than pure iron.

  • Antarctic Life Discovery Called Into Question

    Just days after Russian scientists announced that they had found a previously unidentified species of bacteria in Antarctica's subglacial Lake Vostok, the discovery has been called into question. On 7 March, the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute's Sergei Bulat, who led the Russian team that drilled through 4 kilometers of ice to the surface of the lake last year,  told Russian news agency RIA Novosti that they had found a previously unidentified species of bacteria in lake samples collected during an expedition in January. That they had found life at all was exciting and a reversal of the team's earlier stance from a decade ago that Vostok might be barren.

  • Stone-Age Jewelry Reveals Ancient Fashion Trend

    The 2013 Academy Awards were, as always, as much about making appearances as about making films, as red carpet watchers noted fashion trends and faux pas. Both Jessica Chastain and Naomi Watts wore Armani, although fortunately not the same dress. A new study of ancient beaded jewelry from a South African cave finds that ancient humans were no different, avoiding outdated styles as early as 75,000 years ago.

  • Bizarre Brain Mashup Yields Brainy Rodents, Evolution Insights

    Mice transplanted with a once-discounted class of human brain cells have better memories and learning abilities than normal counterparts, according to a new study. Far from a way to engineer smarter rodents, the work suggests that human brain evolution involved a major upgrade to cells called astrocytes. Astrocytes are one of several types of glia, the other cells found alongside neurons in the nervous system.

  • LISTEN: This Is What Ants Sound Like

    A new study shows that even ant pupae—a stage between larvae and adult—can communicate via sound, and that this communication can be crucial to their survival. "What's very cool about this paper is that researchers have shown for the first time that pupae do, in fact, make some sort of a sound," says Phil DeVries, an entomologist at the University of New Orleans in Louisiana who was not involved in the study. M. scabrinodis pupae create brief pulses of sound by scraping their hind leg against a specialized spike on their abdomen.

  • WATCH: Scientists Solve Mystery Of Cockroach Grooming

    When scientists restrained American cockroaches or prevented grooming by gluing mouthparts for 24 hours, they noticed a shiny, waxy buildup on the antennae that clogs the tiny pores that lead to odor-sensing cells. Measurements of the electrical activity in those cells in response to sex-attractant and food odors showed that the gunk interfered with the roach's sense of smell, they report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The insects appear to produce wax continuously, likely to keep from drying out, and grooming helps remove the excess as well as dust and other foreign chemicals that land on the antennae and get trapped in the gunk.

  • EXPLAINED: Surprising Reason Skin Gets Pruney In Water

    A long soak in the tub can wreak havoc on your fingertips, transforming your smooth digits into wrinkly eyesores. It helps us get a stronger grip on slippery objects, especially those underwater. Scientists long thought that wrinkly fingers were caused by osmosis—swelling of the outer layer of the skin as water seeped into cells.

  • Weird Mammal Thought To Be Extinct In Australia May Not Be

    A critically endangered mammal thought to be extinct in Australia since the last ice age may still exist there, a new study suggests. That speculation comes from the discovery that at least one long-beaked echidna, an egg-laying mammal thought to exist only in New Guinea, was found in Australia in 1901 and that native Aborigine populations reported seeing the animal more recently. The 1901 specimen, described in the Dec. 28 issue of the journal Zookeys, had been shot and stuffed and was lying in a drawer, long forgotten, in the Natural History Museum in London.