Science & Technology

Astrophysicists Publish Instructions For a Do-It-Yourself Wormhole

Have you ever sat in bad rush hour traffic (isn’t that redundant?) and said to yourself, “I could get out of this if I had a wormhole”? Me neither, but apparently some astrophysicists have and they’ve developed and published a set of step-by-step do-it-yourself instructions for building one – along with the prerequisite admonishments that these are for informational purposes only and you shouldn’t try this at home. HA! Let’s get started with our wormhole.

“We construct traversable wormholes by starting with simple four-dimensional classical solutions respecting the null energy condition and containing a pair of oppositely charged black holes connected by a non-traversable wormhole. We then consider the perturbative back-reaction of bulk quantum fields in Hartle-Hawking states. Our geometries have zero cosmological constant and are asymptotically flat except for a cosmic string stretching to infinity that is used to hold the black holes apart. Another cosmic string wraps the non-contractible cycle through the wormhole, and its quantum fluctuations provide the negative energy needed for traversability.”

OK, so all we need are a couple of oppositely charged black holes and two cosmic strings. For where to order those online, you might want to check with Zicao Fu, Brianna Grado-White, and Donald Marolf, authors of “Traversable Asymptotically Flat Wormholes with Short Transit Times,” a preprint paper published recently in arXiv.org. Fu is a PhD candidate, Grado-White a graduate student and Marolf a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their paper does indeed give step-by-step instructions, including the supporting documents and mathematical formulas, for building a wormhole that doesn’t have the instability problem most wormholes have.

“But this wormhole-via-charged-black-holes has two issues. One, it’s still unstable, and if something or someone actually tries to use it, it falls apart. The other is that the two oppositely charged black holes will be attracted to each other — both through gravitational and electric forces — and if they fall together you just get a single, big, neutrally charged and altogether useless black hole.”

Fortunately for those of us who are not astrophysicists, astrophysicist, Paul Sutter at The (trademark pending) Ohio State University has a simple explanation in Live Science. His good news is that charged black holes are real. His bad news is that using a pair with opposite charges means they want to come together right now over me. (John Lennon would have LOVED the idea of wormholes.) The good news is, a cosmic string – extremely thin 1-dimensional topological defects which may have formed during the early days of the universe – could be used to keep them separated … not perfectly, but better than the referee between contestants in a professional wrestling match. The paper suggests getting two cosmic strings and forming a closed loop between the black holes. The loop would then vibrate and churn the space around them until the energy goes negative, creating a negative mass that would stabilize the wormhole, allowing matter (cars?) or even just messages (Anybody home? Marco!) to pass through.

The bad news is (you knew there was more), cosmic strings are hypothetical. However, Sutter gives one more tantalizing bit of good news:

“Still, there’s no reason they can’t exist, so they’re fair game.”

Fair game? Game on! Stop wasting your time honking your horn in that traffic jam and start figuring out a way to get some black holes and a couple of cosmic strings.

Source: Mysterious Universe

Science & Technology

DNA would not be unique: there may be millions of possible genetic molecules

A team of scientists used a computer program to discover more than 1 million molecules that could store genetic information, just like DNA.

DNA and its cousin RNA store genetic information and allow life as we know it, but what if millions of lesser known chemicals could do exactly the same?

A new study suggests that more than 1 million similar chemicals could encode biological information in the same way as DNA does. The new study could point the way to new goals for pharmaceutical drugs, explain how life on Earth evolved and even help us find ways to live beyond our planet, according to the authors.

Jay Goodwin, chemist at Emory University and co-author of the study, said in a release:

It is really exciting to consider the potential of alternative genetic systems … that could possibly have arisen and evolved in different environments, perhaps even on other planets or moons within our solar system. ”

DNA and RNA, the two known types of nucleic acids contain chemical bits called nucleotides, which bind in a particular order and transmit different data, depending on their sequence, similar to individual letters within a written sentence. Some natural and artificial molecules mimic the basic structure of DNA, but so far, no one had tried to count how many of these similarities could exist, the authors wrote.

DNA is only one among millions of possible genetic molecules — Credit: lisichik / Pixabay

Jim Cleaves, chemist at Tokyo Institute of Technology said in a statement:

There are two types of nucleic acids in biology. We wanted to know if there is one more to find or even a million more. The answer is that there seems to be many, many more than expected. ”

Simulating DNA-like molecules

The authors designed a computer program to generate chemical formulas for molecules similar to nucleic acids. In DNA, nucleotides are joined in different pairs and joined in a line, so scientists made sure that their generated molecules could be formed in the same way. In the end, his program gathered more than 1,160,000 different molecules that met these basic criteria.

Markus meringer, chemist at German Aerospace Center in Cologne, said in a statement:

“We were surprised by the result of this calculation. It would be very difficult to estimate a priori that there are more than one million scaffolds similar to nucleic acids. Now we know, and we can start analyzing some of these in the laboratory. ”

The multitude of similarities can clarify the story of how life arose on Earth, before DNA and RNA dominated the world of biology. Theoretically, evolution may have performed “tests” with some of these other molecules before establishing nucleic acids as the best carriers of genetic data, the authors suggested.

The similar ones can also boost future medical advances, they added. According to the statement, drugs that resemble nucleotides are already used to undermine dangerous viruses and malignant cancer cells in the human body. With a library of structurally similar molecules at hand, drug developers could adopt similar DNA as an important weapon in the fight against disease.

Pieter Burger, biochemist of the Emory University said in a statement:

It is absolutely fascinating to think that through the use of modern computational techniques we could find new medicines by looking for alternative molecules to DNA and RNA that can store hereditary information. ”

The scientific study has been published in Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling.

Source: Live science

Science & Technology

Biochemist David Dimer: “Life could have originated in a puddle under the shadow of a volcano”

University of California biochemist David Dimer has been studying the world at the cellular level for over 40 years. Most of all, as Dimer himself says, he is impressed by cell membranes surrounded by fatty membranes. The scientist is convinced that these membranes became the reason for the appearance of life on Earth.

“For life to appear, simple molecules had to become more complex. The process of complication led to the appearance of RNA, a chemical chain consisting of repeating subunits. There were terrible conditions on young Earth, but the membranes provided the necessary reactions, ”explained Dimer.

According to the biochemist, primary cell membranes “absorbed” chemicals on Earth, acting as microscopic chemical laboratories. Most of the reactions were unsuccessful, but a tiny fraction of them nevertheless led to the appearance of the first biological molecules.

“On the early Earth, there were all the necessary ingredients for the emergence of life, so that only stable favorable conditions were needed to trigger reactions. Life could have originated in a puddle under the shadow of a volcano, as there was a lot of chemistry and a comfortable temperature, ”added Dimer.

An ideal place for the origin of life, the biochemist considers the foot of the volcanic massifs that can be observed today in Iceland. Such areas were well suited for the appearance of protocells due to the regular cycle of heating and cooling of fresh water with an abundance of chemical elements.

Science & Technology

Scientists create a virus “capable” of destroying any kind of cancer

An Australian company called Imugene has created a virus that can eliminate all types of cancer. So far it has been tested on Petrie plates and mice, where it worked by reducing tumors and killing diseased cells. Human tests should start soon.

Although it seems strange that a virus is used to treat a disease, this is possible and scientists have been doing it for years. A modified herpes virus has been implemented to treat some types of skin cancer.

Now, scientists are using cowpox virus as the basis for their cancer treatment, called CF33. The first tests on mice have reduced tumor cells, so Imugene believes that the next logical step is to perform experiments on humans, in order to verify the effectiveness of the treatment.

During the next tests, which will take place next year in Australia and other countries, the treatment will be implemented in some types of specific cancers, such as triple negative breast cancer, melanoma, lung cancer, bladder cancer, gastric cancer and intestinal.

Professor Yuman Fong, a cancer treatment specialist, told the Daily Telegraph that there is evidence that some viruses could fight cancer since the early 1900s when people were vaccinated against rabies and their cancer disappeared. entered the reference phase.

However, it was feared that just as the virus was toxic to cancer, it was also to humans, but now things are different and could be the best way to attack cancerous tumors.

In Imugene experiments, patients will observe that the virus will be injected directly into their tumors, where it will multiply to the point of destroying it. The immune system itself should therefore be alerted to other cancer cells in the body, attacking and eliminating them.

This is very promising, but it will take years before the health strategy is used in hospitals, because it remains to be seen how the immune system reacts to the virus itself. Furthermore, cancer cells mutate to survive, and this is how they have become resistant to treatments such as chemotherapy and immunotherapy.