Science X Newsletter Week 13

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Here is your customized Phys.org Newsletter for week 13:

	DNA reveals the origins of modern Europeans Europe is famously tesselated, with different cultural and language groups clustering in different regions. But how did they all get there? And how are they related?
	Engineering students use sound waves to put out fires Two engineering students at George Mason University have found a way to use sound waves to quash fires and have built a type of extinguisher using what they have learned that they hope will revolutionize fire fighting technology. Viet Tran a computer engineering major and Seth Robertson, an electrical engineering major, chose to investigate the possibility of using sound to put out fires as a senior research project and now believe they have found something that might really work.
	Universe may be on the brink of collapse (on the cosmological timescale) (Phys.org)—Physicists have proposed a mechanism for "cosmological collapse" that predicts that the universe will soon stop expanding and collapse in on itself, obliterating all matter as we know it. Their calculations suggest that the collapse is "imminent"—on the order of a few tens of billions of years or so—which may not keep most people up at night, but for the physicists it's still much too soon.
	Quantum experiment verifies Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance' An experiment devised in Griffith University's Centre for Quantum Dynamics has for the first time demonstrated Albert Einstein's original conception of "spooky action at a distance" using a single particle.
	Researchers take another step in bringing back a wooly mammoth (Phys.org)—A team of researchers working at Harvard University has taken yet another step towards bringing to life a reasonable facsimile of a woolly mammoth—a large, hairy elephant-like beast that went extinct approximately 3,300 years ago. The work by the team has not been published as yet, because as team lead George Church told The Sunday Times, recently, they believe they have more work to do before they write up their results.
	3,000 atoms entangled with a single photon Physicists from MIT and the University of Belgrade have developed a new technique that can successfully entangle 3,000 atoms using only a single photon. The results, published today in the journal Nature, represent the largest number of particles that have ever been mutually entangled experimentally.
	Landmark study proves that magnets can control heat and sound Researchers at The Ohio State University have discovered how to control heat with a magnetic field.
	Climate change does not cause extreme winters, new study shows Cold snaps like the ones that hit the eastern United States in the past winters are not a consequence of climate change. Scientists at ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology have shown that global warming actually tends to reduce temperature variability.
	Wandering Jupiter accounts for our unusual solar system Long before Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars formed, it seems that the inner solar system may have harbored a number of super-Earths—planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. If so, those planets are long gone—broken up and fallen into the sun billions of years ago largely due to a great inward-and-then-outward journey that Jupiter made early in the solar system's history.
India's frugal Mars mission extended by six months India's famously frugal Mars mission has been extended by around six months thanks to a surplus of fuel on board the spacecraft, the country's space agency said Tuesday.
	Study demonstrates desalination with nanoporous graphene membrane Less than 1 percent of Earth's water is drinkable. Removing salt and other minerals from our biggest available source of water—seawater—may help satisfy a growing global population thirsty for fresh water for drinking, farming, transportation, heating, cooling and industry. But desalination is an energy-intensive process, which concerns those wanting to expand its application.
	Galaxy clusters collide—dark matter still a mystery When galaxy clusters collide, their dark matters pass through each other, with very little interaction. Deepening the mystery, a study by scientists at EPFL and the University of Edinburgh challenges the idea that dark matter is composed of particles.
	NASA's Curiosity rover finds fresh signs of ingredients for life on Mars Mars's life-friendly past just got friendlier. Using samples previously collected by the NASA rover Curiosity, scientists have discovered evidence of nitrates in Martian rock: nitrogen compounds that on Earth are a crucial source of nutrients for living things.
	Theory of the strong interaction verified The fact that the neutron is slightly more massive than the proton is the reason why atomic nuclei have exactly those properties that make our world and ultimately our existence possible. Eighty years after the discovery of the neutron, a team of physicists from France, Germany, and Hungary headed by Zoltán Fodor, a researcher from Wuppertal, has finally calculated the tiny neutron-proton mass difference. The findings, which have been published in the current edition of Science, are considered a milestone by many physicists and confirm the theory of the strong interaction. As one of the most powerful computers in the world, JUQUEEN at Forschungszentrum Jülich was decisive for the simulation.
	Seeing the (UV) light: Previously undetected difference in human mutation rate unique to Europeans (Phys.org)—Although humans are a single species, not all genetic variation is shared between populations – and the ability to sequence our entire genome has allowed scientists to catalogue mutations that occur in one ethnic group alone. These so-called population-private mutations give researchers a unique window into recent human history. Recently, graduate student Kelley Harris – a scientist at University of California, Berkeley – revealed a previously undetected difference between Europeans and other ethnic groups by comparing population-private mutation frequencies from Europe, Asia, and Africa, finding that Europeans experience higher rates of a specific mutation type that has known associations with UV light exposure. Harris concludes that while it is unclear whether the excess mutations are harmful or directly related to the UV sensitivity of light skin, her results demonstrate that the human mutation rate has evolv! ed on a much faster timescale than previously believed, with implications for cancer genetics, anthropology and other fields of inquiry.
	Atlantic Ocean overturning found to slow down already today The Atlantic overturning is one of Earth's most important heat transport systems, pumping warm water northwards and cold water southwards. Also known as the Gulf Stream system, it is responsible for the mild climate in northwestern Europe. Scientists now found evidence for a slowdown of the overturning—multiple lines of observation suggest that in recent decades, the current system has been weaker than ever before in the last century, or even in the last millennium.
	Colliding stars explain enigmatic 17th century explosion New observations made with APEX and other telescopes reveal that the star that European astronomers saw appear in the sky in 1670 was not a nova, but a much rarer, violent breed of stellar collision. It was spectacular enough to be easily seen with the naked eye during its first outburst, but the traces it left were so faint that very careful analysis using submillimetre telescopes was needed before the mystery could finally be unravelled more than 340 years later. The results appear online in the journal Nature on 23 March 2015.
	Mathematicians solve 60-year-old problem A team of researchers, led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Yuri Lvov, has found an elegant explanation for the long-standing Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) problem, first proposed in 1953, investigated with one of the world's first digital computers, and now considered the foundation of experimental mathematics.
	New insights found in black hole collisions New research provides revelations about the most energetic event in the universe—the merging of two spinning, orbiting black holes into a much larger black hole.
	Ultra-thin silicon films create vibrant optical colors A new technology, which creates a rainbow of optical colors with ultra-thin layers of silicon, has been recently demonstrated by a research group at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).

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