The Science Thread

Hmmmm. The interstitium certainly isn't news to me.

pibbur who suspects the independent hasn't got the complete picture. And who will try to get more information.

The Interstitium isn't a new discovery, it shows up in science books dated from 2010.

It might not have been considered an organ before though.

azarhal said:

The Interstitium isn't a new discovery, it shows up in science books dated from 2010.

It might not have been considered an organ before though.

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I learned about it in med school back in the 70's.

Whether you consider it an organ or not - the functions mentioned are well known. I'm also sceptical about the claim that it wasn't discovered due to preparation techniques - there is a lot of different techniques used for preparing slides.

It isn't rare for media to get only part of what a scientific study is about, and some researchers like to exaggerate a bit, making the news more sensational than it really is.

I would think this is one group of researchers reaching a conclusion (which may be only partly communicated to or understood by the Independent). To establish the existence of a new organ, to establish consensus, requires much more than that.

pibbur who is a bit unsure of whether he should have written this or not.

PS. I'll try to find the published paper (if it's published at the time of writing). DS.

I guess I've still learned something today…!
It's interesting that it was reported so inaccurately and on so many details. The Independent is usually not overly sensationalist in its reporting (albeit all papers are to some degree of course…).
Interesting stuff though. I should drop by this thread to spread inadvertant misinformation more often!

Pongo said:

... I should drop by this thread to spread inadvertant misinformation more often!

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Do that, whether its (in)advertant (mis)information or not.

pibbur

PS. There may of course be something to it, but we need more information. I'll try and see what I can find. DS.

This seems to be the source. Let's have the good doctor inspect it.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23062-6

Thank you. I'll look into it, but give me a couple of days.

pibbur whose interstitial fluid space is probably a bit short of water at the moment because he's thirsty (intracellular hyperosmotic dehydration affects the extracellular fluid spaces as well)

I think I've come up with an intuitive approach to the Dark Matter aka "where the heck is all that mass that should be there ?" problem :

It's not a problem. In my opinion, Black Holes distort the very fabric of timespace so much that it *appears* that there should be so much more mass when in fact there isn't.

Because mass is kind of "bound" to timespace - or even an x amount of mass is bound to an y amount of timespace.

It's like rolling a "fish-eye" glass-ball which works like a looking glass over some words - or, in this case, over the value of how much mass this universe should contain - and make the words or the numreric values *appear* to be so much bigger when in fact they aren't. Black Holes distort timespace of *this* universe so much that they also interfere with the math calculating the overall mass of the universe - because they act like some sort of "mass lens" aka "mass looking glass" because they are so dense ( = accumulate so much mass & gravity) that they distort - so to say - the field in which mass is embeded in.
So, there is in fact no mass missing, it only appears to be so, because Black Holes play a trick with our eyes err math calculations.

I think there should even be a natural contant [number] that tells us how much a timespace field is distorted by a certain amount of mass and/or gravity (or, as I prefer to say in the case of Black Holes : "massgravity" or "gravitymass").

The other solution would be, of course : All of that "missing mass" is indeed accumulated in Black Holes. That would be the shortest solution of the problem.

I hope this was understandable … given that English isn't my first language.

I am of two minds when it comes to posts like this one. It's good that people are engaged in science, and spend time thinking about, like here, the universe. On the other hand, without the mathematics, there's no foundation for what you write and thus it's little more than speculations.

So, while you clearly know a thing or two about cosmology, which is good, I can't see how your speculations can be discussed as more than unqualified guessing. Like it would also be if I came up with a "theory" (which I don't).

I don't want to discourage you, and maybe I shouldn't have written this. Maybe you should read a bit more. I recommend the book "The road to reality" (2004) by Roger Penrose, which is a thorough presentation on modern physics, and also thoroughly presents the mathematics involved (which may make it a bit difficult, and boring for people not interested in math). It's a bit old, still there is lots of useful stuff in there.

pibbur who is reading it at the moment.

PS. I think your English is no worse than mine. Don't know if that is any "comfort". DS.

An interesting transparent galaxy that appears not to rely on dark matter. The plot thickens.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43543195

My own feeling about dark matter is that it seems like just a placeholder answer to the missing mass question.

The trouble is, it seems to express itself in so many ways that fit the explanation of large amounts of invisible mass in specific places, that it's increasingly difficult to think of how else to explain it.

It's sort of like a deus ex machina. We can't explain the missing mass, so it must be this new thing we don't see, with no way of actually directly observing it. And there is no way to measure or find it on Earth. It just seems entirely implausible and a cop out. Why not just accept the possibility we may not really understand mass distribution in the universe or gravitation completely.

A similar construct is dark energy - the "explanation" for why the we see the universe is expanding faster than it should given our understanding of its mass. It just feels fake to me.

I know, not very scientific. But this is my feeling given the sketchy explanations I've read over the years. I don't have anything better to offer, except this feeling there are things missing in our understanding of cosmology that shouldn't be glossed over by the creation of concepts that perfectly fit the observables without any other underlying physical explanation or direct measurement.

I see it all very similar to the flat earth theory, which was literally regarded as hard science as little as six hundred years ago, and quantum mechanics. In five hundred years or so, it will be very interesting to see what solutions there are to many questions now, and what kind of curious, brand new queries our future generations will endeavour to solve. Science!!

The way I look at it, I make a bit of a distinction between the cases of dark matter and dark energy. What we refer to as dark energy I think fits pretty fairly under your criticism. We made observations that turned our understanding on its head, and we really don't have a clue what it is - could be a new fundamental force, or that spacetime is different than we thought, or an indication of something wrong with the theories that requires a new revolution. It really is just kind of a placeholder term.

I think dark matter is quite different, in that there seems to be more and more evidence accumulating, from different directions, that it really is some sort of weakly interacting particle that we haven't quite pinned down yet. The latest I've seen is from the observations of the earliest gas clouds and star formations - the clouds are far colder and darker than they should be, and they suspect that interactions with dark matter particles carried some their heat away.

So, I think dark matter is a lot closer to something we're closing in on, and have some fairly clear ideas about, whereas dark energy really is just a hole in our understanding.

Or perhaps our measurement techniques aren't quite accurate enough yet. This is something scientists are typically loath to admit.

For sure, but it does seem that they're stacking up evidence, without having quite found the smoking gun just yet. The ISS has found an excess of positrons flying about, which they suspect are due to dark matter, and the Fermi telescope has detected too much gamma radiation coming from the galactic core, which could also be explained by annihilations with the proposed particles. There's quite a lot of stuff pointing in the same direction.

Carnifex said:

I see it all very similar to the flat earth theory, which was literally regarded as hard science as little as six hundred years ago, and quantum mechanics. In five hundred years or so, it will be very interesting to see what solutions there are to many questions now, and what kind of curious, brand new queries our future generations will endeavour to solve. Science!!

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That the earth was spherical was known more than 2000 years ago. The circumference was estimated somewhat inaccurately as early as 240 by Eratosthenes.

Apart from that, perhaps I've too much belief in authorities. Most of what I know stems from popularized presentations in TV show, publications, or web sites. I haven't read the source material, I don't know the models and the mathematics involved. And I've only seen a very small part of the experimental results. I really can't see how i can have a qualified opinion about these things. Well, I can have opinions of course, but it would largely be based on … guessing. Doesn't mean that I don't have questions.

I know something about medicine, so in that field I can and do have qualified opinions, but not in advanced physics and cosmology.

Of course, you may know much more abut it than I. Claiming that you don't - well that would be another case of guessing, wouldn't it?

pibbur who knows nothing. and tries not to take himself too seriously.

For me, I will become a believer when they directly measure or detect dark matter here on Earth.

Thrasher said:

For me, I will become a believer when they directly measure or detect dark matter here on Earth.

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Could take time. Took around 40 years from the Higgs boson was postulated till it was found. But it was considered to be very likely that it would be found, considering the experimental support for the Standard Model as a whole. But of copurse, we couldn't be sure before we found it.

pibbur who is ready to believe anything as long as it's true