PJH Studios

Category: Science

Do anything related to science biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc

  • A roof paint blocks 97% of sunlight and pulls water from the air

    A roof paint blocks 97% of sunlight and pulls water from the air.

    Researchers at the University of Sydney and commercial start-up Dewpoint Innovations have created a nano-engineered polymer coating that not only reflects up to 97% of the sun’s rays, but also passively collects water. In tests, it was able to keep indoors up to 6 °C (~11 °F) cooler than the air outside.

    That temperature differential results in water vapor condensing on the surface – like the fogging on a cold mirror – producing a steady trickle of droplets.

    In trials on the roof of the Sydney Nanoscience Hub, the coating captured dew more than 30% of the year, generating as much as 390 mL of water per square meter (roughly 13 fluid ounces per 10.8 square feet) daily. This might not sound like a lot, but a 12-sq-m (about 129-sq-ft) section of treated roof could produce around 4.7 L (around 1.25 US gallons) of water per day under optimal conditions.

  • Axolotls are nifty

    Axoltls are weird, alien and fascinating creatures that can regrow limbs.

    Biologists have long been fascinated by the ability of salamanders to regrow entire limbs. Now Harvard researchers have solved part of the mystery of how they accomplish this feat—by activating stem cells throughout the body, not just at the injury site.

    In a paper published in the journal Cell, researchers documented how this body-wide response in axolotl salamanders is triggered by the sympathetic nervous system—the iconic “fight or flight” network. The study raises the possibility that these mechanisms might one day be manipulated to regenerate human limbs and organs.

  • Sea otters stealing surfboards

    A very real alliteration: sea otters stealing surfboards.

    On Wednesday, Isabella Orduna was catching some waves at Steamer Lane, a popular surf spot off Santa Cruz, Calif., when she felt a small nip on her foot.

    Startled, Ms. Orduna, a 21-year-old college student, rolled into the water. The moment she surfaced, she saw a “big, fuzzy, chunky bear of an otter” sitting on her board, she said. “I was like, wow, what do I do now?”

    The hijacking of Ms. Orduna’s surfboard was the first of two such incidents reported this week at Steamer Lane. On Thursday, another surfer had their board commandeered by a sea otter.

  • Sleep is a spectrum

    We’ve known that sleep has cycles, but more research is showing that how we sleep is more nuanced and may exist as a spectrum.

    It’s still largely mysterious how the brain manages to move between these states safely and efficiently. But studies targeting transitions both into and out of sleep are starting to unravel the neurobiological underpinnings of these in-between states, yielding an understanding that could explain how sleep disorders, such as insomnia or sleep paralysis, can result when things go awry.

    Sleep has been traditionally thought of as an all-or-nothing phenomenon, Lewis said. You’re either awake or asleep. But the new findings are showing that it’s “much more of a spectrum than it is a category.”

  • Climate change, creating hybrid species

    One of the consequences of climate change is the creation of hybrid species.

    Hybrid species are surprisingly common in the plant kingdom, but less so among animals, with around 10 to 15 percent of bird species known to hybridize. But as the ranges of animals shift due to changes in global climate, the likelihood of encounters between species that have never interacted before increases, which may lead to new ecological communities. “It’s an interesting sign of what is potentially to come in climate change and biodiversity shifts,” Stokes says.

  • Hampsters getting an MRI

    Veterinary medicine has to get creative to provide treatment. Here’s a video of a hampster getting an MRI.

  • Covid altering immune systems?

    One idea is that Covid may be altering our immune systems.

    Malgorzata Gasperowicz, a Calgary based developmental biologist, says that if immunity debt fully explained rising infection counts we’d expect to see a uniform rebound across all pathogens. But we don’t, she says.

    For instance, a 2024 study of more than 4000 viral cases from Ontario, Canada,4 found higher rates of bacterial infections in people recovering from covid-19 than in those recovering from influenza or RSV—although study groups weren’t perfectly matched by age or clinical setting, limiting direct comparisons.

    Jeimy says that many infants and toddlers admitted to hospital with rare infections since 2022 weren’t yet born when pandemic restrictions were in place, and they therefore couldn’t be experiencing immunity debt. They were, however, likely exposed to SARS-CoV-2.

    Wolfgang Leitner, chief of the Innate Immunity Section at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), speculates that covid-19 may somehow impair the immune system’s “memory” of past infections, potentially making even healthy people more vulnerable to future pathogens. He wonders whether the virus leaves lasting scars on the immune system’s T cell defences. “But that’s just (my) hypothesis,” he emphasises in an email.

  • Will o the wisps explained

    We may finally have a full explanation into how will ‘o wisps work. We knew methane and other swamp gasses were involved, but how did they ignite?

    As with the static electricity produced by stroking hair, fur, or carpet in the right conditions, the microlightning results from a buildup of opposing charges until the field created is strong enough to make them leap a gap.

    High-speed imaging reveals the source of the charge as the surface of tiny bubbles of methane, which become either positively or negatively charged as they move through water, split, and combine. The charge concentration appears to survive the bubbles’ escape to the air. When the spark jumps the gap between a neighboring positive and negatively charged bubble, it leads to non-thermal oxidation, releasing energy from the chemical reaction between methane and oxygen, but mostly as blue-violet light rather than heat.

  • Treat anxiety by microdosing LSD

    More research suggesting that LSD can treat anxiety based disorders.

    A rigorous new study finds that a single dose of LSD can ease anxiety and depression for months.

    The study involved 198 adults with generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, a disabling form of anxiety that affects about 1 in 10 people over the course of a year.

    Participants who got lower doses of LSD (25 or 50 micrograms) did no better than those who got a placebo. But people who received higher doses (100 or 200 micrograms) responded quickly, a team reports in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

  • Cheating at stone skimming championship

    Who knew you could cheat at stone skimming?