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So, I said I'd do this a few days ago. I apologize for the delay:
Science advances not when someone exclaims "Eureka!" but when someone cocks their head and says, "well now, that's unexpected". There are a number of issues that caused astronomers, astrophysicists and cosmologists to say "well, I wasn't expecting that". I'll only take two because they are the easiest to explain and require no math to get to an understanding. The first is the concept of gravity lensing. Gravity lensing is caused when the light of a very distant object is warped around an intervening mass like, say, a galaxy. As everyone knows, light moves from point A to point B and, as everyone is aware of from the idea of black holes, light can be affected by gravity. When this happens at astronomical distances what happens is that the object either appears as either a ring (known as an Einstein ring) or it'll appear slightly offset from where the object actually is. Now, if we know the approximate mass of a galaxy (which can be estimated from its size and density of stars) then we can know about how much refraction there should be. The problem then is that astronomers see more lensing than can strictly speaking inferred from the masses in between them and some distant light source. This begs the question of *why* this is happening. The second concept is the spin of a galaxy. This is a bit more complicated. Think of a spiral galaxy like a solar system writ large. In the center of the galaxy is a hugely massive orbit (a supermassive black hole) and most of the mass of the galaxy is in that bulge in the center. Then there's the spiral arms. Calculating the rotational speed of a galaxy of a given size *should* be a pretty straightforward application of Newton's and Kepler's laws that work very well when applied to solar systems. The basic idea here is that the closer to the gravitational center an object is, the faster it rotates and the farther out it is, the slower it rotates. Except that's *not* what we see. Instead we see a near uniform rotational speed even at the outer extremities of the galaxy--for instance where our solar system is in relation to the rest of the Milky Way. Again, this begs the question of *why*. Now, the proposed answer is that there is some 'missing' matter that we can't directly observe. This missing matter is called 'dark matter'. Why dark? Because it does not interact strongly with the electromagnetic force (light in all its form and splendor). Ordinary matter (the kind of stuff we and everything we can see) will interact with the electromagnetic force. For instance, someone walking into the room where you currently sit reading this can see you because all of the matter that makes you you is reflecting electromagnetism in the visible portion of the spectrum. Dark matter doesn't do that. Instead if it interacts with light at all it does so very weakly and all evidence, so far, is that it does not interact with it at all. If this were all that there was to dark matter it would be almost impossible to find but fortunately this isn't the case. Dark matter *does* interact with itself and when it does it splits off into exotic particles that were predicted by physicists who started working on the problem. The experiment aboard the ISS (International Space Station) detected the kinds of particles that the theory predicted which is usually a sign that we're on the right track. Dark matter and dark energy are *not* the same thing and shouldn't be confused with one another. Cheers Aj |
You're forgiven.
Understood that well, thank you. |
Dark energy
So since I mentioned dark energy I thought I would go ahead and talk about this subject as well. There's another problem in cosmology and it is this: the expansion of the Universe isn't slowing down. To understand why this is a problem it's necessary to go back to the very beginning: the Big Bang. So according to the prevailing model, at one point the whole of the Universe was contained in a space about the size of what is called the Planck length (10^-43 or 1 with 43 zeroes in front of it) which is the smallest anything existing can be said to be. For reasons that may forever be beyond our understanding this fantastically small object suddenly became *much* larger. This is the Big Bang. In the first few moments of the Universe spacetime grew hugely. Things settled down after a while, the balance of matter-antimatter tipped in favor of matter and it started to get cold enough for atoms to start to form. After the rapid inflation expansion started to slow down a bit and matter started clumping together to form stars and galaxies and all the rest of the things observable in the Universe.
Now, here's where things get interesting. Gravity is *always* attractive and is caused by the warping of spacetime by the presence of mass. The consequence of this is that what we should see is that over time, the expansion of the Universe should slow down and then, possibly, reverse coming together in a Big Crunch (or as Douglas Adams put it in Restaurant at the End of the Universe, a gnab gib). The problem is that we aren't observing this. In fact, not only has the expansion continued but it is still accelerating. This cries out for explanation. That explanation is dark energy. *Some* form of energy, that we lack the means to detect at present levels of technology, is pushing the Universe apart. We don't know precisely what it is but there is a damn lot of the stuff whatever it is. This more or less seals the fate of the universe. Eventually what will happen is that all of the galaxies will be so far apart from one another that they will be too faint to see. How do we know that the galaxies are all rushing away from one another? (on the whole, the Milky Way is going to eventually collide with the Andromeda galaxy because the greater mass of our galaxy is pulling the Andromeda galaxy toward us) We know because of what is called red shift. This is simply the familiar Doppler effect applied to light. When a siren is approaching you the pitch increases and as it speeds away from you the pitch decreases. The same thing happens to light (although we can't detect it because the distances light travels here on Earth can never be far enough to see any kind of shifting) but at the astronomical level stars or galaxies moving away from us have their light shifted toward the red part of the spectrum. The more red shift the farther away you are from the observed object. Cheers Aj |
'Dark Lightning'
Scientists are further investigating a phenomenon called 'dark lightning' : "Dark lightning that is almost invisible within clouds may regularly blast airline passengers with large numbers of gamma rays, scientists find." Although it sounds ominous, the effects on the body may not be dangerous. The full article can be read at http://www.livescience.com/28594-dar...assengers.html
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http://news.yahoo.com/ancient-creatu...183441713.html
Australopithecus sediba, human and apelike creature. |
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vera cool...
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Earth's core far hotter than thought http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/image...rtwork-spl.jpg New measurements suggest the Earth's inner core is far hotter than prior experiments suggested, putting it at 6,000C - as hot as the Sun's surface. |
Soft Drink Consumption Tied To Increased Type 2 Diabetes Risk
Soft Drink Consumption Tied To Increased Type 2 Diabetes Risk. Bloomberg News (4/25, Torsoli) reports, “Just one soft drink consumed daily can raise the risk of diabetes by 22 percent,” according to a study published April 24 in Diabetologia. The study found that “a mere 12 ounces serving size of sugar-sweetened soft drink a day may increase the chance of developing type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease.”
Reuters (4/25, Kelland) reports that researchers analyzed data from some 350,000 individuals in the UK, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, France, and Germany who had provided information on the amount of naturally and artificially sweetened soft drinks consumed on a daily basis. MyHealthNewsDaily (4/25, Rettner) reports, “In the study, people who drank a 12-ounce sugar-sweetened soda daily were 18 percent more likely to develop type 2 diabetes over a 16-year period compared with those who did not consume soda.” In addition, “people who drank two sodas daily were 18 percent more likely to have a stroke than those who drank one; those who drank three sodas daily saw the same risk increase compared with those who drank two, and so on.” Notably, “the results held even after the researchers took into account risk factors for type 2 diabetes, such as age and physical activity levels, body mass index (BMI) and the total daily calorie intake.” MedPage Today (4/25, Petrochko) points out, “Compared with those who consumed lower levels of sugary soft drinks, high-level consumers were more likely to be male, physically active, less educated, smokers, and have a higher waist circumference,” whereas “juice and nectar high consumers were mostly younger, female, physically active, former smokers, and better educated than those with lower juice and nectar consumption.” Even though “soft drink consumption was linked with diabetes incidence, there was no association between diabetes and consumption of juices and nectars.” |
4th-Grade 'Science Test' Goes Viral: Creationism Quiz Claims Dinosaurs Lived With People
The Huffington Post | By Meredith Bennett-Smith Posted: 04/26/2013 1:48 pm EDT | Updated: 04/26/2013 4:38 pm EDT Dinosaurs hung out with humans; God created dinosaurs on the sixth day; the "behemoth" described in the Bible's Book of Job actually refers to a brontosaurus. These are some of the unscientific beliefs behind what appears to be a fourth-grade science quiz posted recently online. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...tml?ref=topbar no wonder idiots get elected to office......... |
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The World's Leading Science Cities
Science and technology are key drivers of economic growth. But where are the world's leading science cities? A new study published in Nature's Scientific Reports ranks the top cities for physics research around the world. Much has been made of declining U.S. economic and technological dominance and "the rise of the rest" of the world. Their findings indicate that the U.S. has lost substantial ground as the global center for physics. In the 1960s, the U.S. accounted for 85.6 percent of physics papers tracked by the authors; in the past decade, U.S. output has declined to 36.7 percent. "Physics knowledge was highly localized in a few cities in the eastern and western coasts of the USA and in a few areas of Great Britain and Northern Europe," they write. "In 2009 the picture is completely different with many producer cities in central and southern parts of the USA, Europe and Japan." The big takeaway: While science is becoming more distributed globally, its production at the highest level remains incredibly concentrated and spiky. Indeed, the world's leading centers of physics have remained essentially the same for the past three decades. While Chinese cities have risen as consumers of scientific knowledge (alongside their economic growth), it remains to be seen if they can become leading producers of it. Read More: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/job...-physics/5403/ |
Fascinating
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The Scariest Picture in the World
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpe...041_modest.jpg
I know, it doesn't look scary. It's actually kind of beautiful which is why I'm using it as my current desktop background. But what *is* it? It's a map of orbits of every *known* Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA). In other words, the map of every rock larger than 460 feet that has an orbit that passes uncomfortably close to the Earth. Close, because we're talking about space here, means within 5 million miles. To give you a sense of scale, the Moon is ~250,000 miles from the Earth. Five million seems like a lot of distance but when you consider that when it is at its closest, Venus is 38 million miles away. So we're talking very big numbers. The problem is that Earth has a serious gravitational pull and something within 5 million miles of the Earth is certainly going to be influenced by its gravity. How many objects are we talking about? Around 1,400! That's when it gets scary. The reason why the size matters is that mass matters. Earth actually gets hit on occasion by fairly small pieces of rock but it's the large pieces that wreak havoc on the planet. That said, nothing in that graphic is in any real serious danger of hitting the planet in the next century. But longer out...? Something around 1,000 feet strikes the Earth approximately every 80,000 years. To give you sense of scale here, the asteroid that most likely blasted a chunk out of the Yucatan peninsula and likely delivered the coup de grace to the dinosaurs was somewhere in the range of 6 miles in diameter. Think Manhattan hitting the Earth. Image page Cheers Aj |
Guess this is where I post this
Brain-eating amoebas: What you need to know
Naegleria fowleri: A look at the brain-eating amoeba and how to avoid it. Rex Features A look at brain tissue infected with Naegleria fowleri. MSN News 3 hr ago | By Heather Smith, MSN News of MSN News Florida health officials have issued a warning for swimmers after a boy contracted Naegleria fowleri. Here's what you need to know about the deadly amoeba. The Florida Department of Health has issued a warning for swimmers after a 12-year-old boy in the southwestern part of the state contracted a rare brain infection caused by Naegleria Fowleri (N. fowleri) while knee boarding with some friends in a water-filled ditch. Officials said that high water temperatures and low water levels combine to create the perfect breeding ground for N. fowleri, and warned the public "to be wary when swimming, jumping or diving in freshwater." This latest case of infection comes less than a month after an Arkansas girl ended up in a hospital, fighting for her life. Here, we look at what it is and how to avoid the sometimes deadly brain-eating amoeba. What is it? N. fowleri is an amoeba that lives in warm freshwater, such as ponds, lakes and hot springs. It also thrives in the soil around it. Normally, it eats the bacteria found in these places, but when presented with the opportunity, it will eat brains. There is no evidence of this organism living in salt water. It is an amoeba belonging to the groups Percolozoa or Heterolobosea. The amoeba invades the body and causes a rare brain infection known as primary amebic meningoencephalitis, or PAM, that eats away at brain tissue and is usually fatal, according to the Centers for Disease Control. How do you get it? N. fowleri invades the central nervous system through the nose. From there, the amoeba moves the along olfactory nerve fibers into the brain, where it uses its suckers to devour brain cells. It's difficult to treat because by the time it's been diagnosed, it's already caused significant damage. N. fowleri is most often caught by people who have been swimming underwater, but it's also thought to be transmitted through inhaling infected dust. Last year, two people died in Louisiana after they used tap water to flush out their sinuses. Where does it thrive? Freshwater — especially warm freshwater. Most cases have occurred in Southern or Southwestern states, especially Texas and Florida. It's been known to show up in swimming pools and hot tubs that haven't been properly chlorinated. Last month, a popular water park in Arkansas voluntarily closed after a 12-year old girl who swam there was diagnosed with N. fowleri How can you avoid them? N. fowleri infections are very rare — they've only killed 128 Americans between 1962 and 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control. But you can reduce your risk of catching it by keeping your head out of the water when you're swimming in water that hasn't been chlorinated. If you're flushing your sinuses, be sure to use distilled or recently boiled water. How is it treated? N. fowleri is treated with antifungals, antibiotics and steroids. The most recent survivor, a 12-year-old girl infected at an Arkansas water park, was also treated with an experimental breast cancer drug. —— Join MSN News on social Share your point of view with us on Facebook Get the latest news and updates on Twitter See photos and videos on Tumblr |
Mars as large as the moon? Not hardly!
As Phil Plaitt points out in this article, every year around this time people start spreading this Internet meme that Mars will look as large as the Moon in the night sky. It's a hoax. It will always be a hoax because Mars *never* gets close enough to Earth to look as large as the Moon. At its closest pass Mars gets within 35 million miles of Earth. At its farthest point (where it is now) it is about 210 million miles from Earth (it's currently on the far side of the Sun from us). Mars is a relatively small planet. It is half the size of Earth. The moon is about half the size of Mars. The moon is just next door (250,000 miles) compared with with the 35 million miles between Earth and Mars at their closest. So in order for this meme to be true, an object only twice the size of our moon would have to appear to be the same size even though Mars is two and a half orders of magnitude farther away from Earth! That's not optically *possible*. With the naked eye Mars can only ever look like a tiny dot in the sky. If it ever *were* in an orbit that would make it look the same size as the Moon that would be a very interesting day on Earth (interesting, here, in the "Oh God, Oh God, we're all gonna die" sense).
So if you see a meme on Facebook telling you that if you go outside sometime in the next week it'll appear as if the planet has two moons, know that someone is pulling your leg because they are. Cheers Aj |
It was pointed out to me that 2.5 orders of magnitude might be a little difficult for people to grasp intuitively so to give you a sense of scale I'll use this. I live in Portland, OR but I work in Hillsboro, OR. That's about 20 miles one-way, door-to-door from home to office. One order of magnitude would be ten times that far or 200 miles. That would put me in Grants Pass, OR or just north of Seattle, WA. Two orders of magnitude would be 2000 miles away so that would be in the Detroit, MI region. Two and half orders of magnitude would be 3000 miles or somewhere in northern Maine.
So to understand the scale of distance between the Moon and Earth compared to Mars and Earth, do this; take a city that is around 25 miles from you. Find a city that is ten times that distance (one order of magnitude) away. Now, find a city that is 100 times further away (two orders of magnitude). Now find another city that is half-again as far away (two and half orders of magnitude) and THAT is the ratio of distance scaled down to terrestrial scales. . So, to scale, the Earth is as far away from Mars as Portland, OR is from northern Maine. The Earth is as far away from the Moon as Portland, OR is from Seattle WA. Quote:
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'World's largest volcano discovered beneath Pacific
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/image...7_69715376.jpg The Tamu massif is comparable in size to Olumpus Mons on Mars Scientists say that they have discovered the single largest volcano in the world, a dead colossus deep beneath the Pacific waves. A team writing in the journal Nature Geoscience says the 310,000 sq km (119,000 sq mi) Tamu Massif is comparable in size to Mars' vast Olympus Mons volcano - the largest in the Solar System. The structure topples the previous largest on Earth, Mauna Loa in Hawaii. The massif lies some 2km below the sea. It is located on an underwater plateau known as the Shatsky Rise, about 1,600km east of Japan. It was formed about 145 million years ago when massive lava flows erupted from the centre of the volcano to form a broad, shield-like feature. The researchers doubted the submerged volcano's peak ever rose above sea level during its lifetime and say it is unlikely to erupt again. "The bottom line is that we think that Tamu Massif was built in a short (geologically speaking) time of one to several million years and it has been extinct since," co-author William Sager, from the University of Houston, US, told the AFP news agency. "One interesting angle is that there were lots of oceanic plateaus (that) erupted during the Cretaceous Period (145-65 million years ago) but we don't see them since. Scientists would like to know why." Prof Sager began studying the structure two decades ago, but it had been unclear whether the massif was one single volcano or many - a kind that exists in dozens of locations around the planet. While Olympus Mons on Mars has relatively shallow roots, the Tamu Massif extends some 30 km (18 miles) into the Earth's crust. And other volcanic behemoths could be lurking among the dozen or so large oceanic plateaux around the world, he thought. "We don't have the data to see inside them and know their structure, but it would not surprise me to find out that there are more like Tamu out there," said Dr Sager. "Indeed, the biggest oceanic plateau is Ontong Java plateau, near the equator in the Pacific, east of the Solomons Islands. It is much bigger than Tamu -- it's the size of France." The name Tamu comes from Texas A&M University, where Prof Sager previously taught before moving to the University of Houston. |
Volcanic sleeping giant opens North Korean co-operation
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/image...0_69678690.jpg A crater lake at the summit threatens to create dangerous mud flows in the event of an eruption Scientists from the UK, US and North Korea have joined forces to monitor the volcano responsible for one of the largest eruptions in history. The volcano straddles the border between North Korea and China, and has been largely dormant since erupting a little over a thousand years ago. Despite being at the top of the list of big eruptions, Mount Paektu remains obscure and enigmatic. Details of the collaborative effort have been outlined in Science journal. The international group of geologists has begun working on the volcano following a spate of recent earthquake activity that could indicate it is waking from slumber. Surprisingly, the volcano is relatively unknown in the West, not helped by the fact that it takes a confusing array of names. In China it is known variously as Tianchi or Changbaishan, but its Korean name is Baegdu-san or Mount Paektu, while the Japanese call it Hakuto-san. Around two thirds of the volcano lies in North Korea, with the remainder is in Chinese territory, and an estimated 30,000 tourists visit its Chinese flank each day, around twice the number visiting Mount Fuji in Japan. In 940 AD, the volcano exploded in a huge eruption, known as the "millennium eruption" that threw ash vast distances. Measurements of ash deposits from that eruption measured in Japan indicate that this was one of the two largest known volcanic eruptions on Earth since that period, matched only by the Tambora eruption in Indonesia, in 1815 AD. Dr James Hammond from Imperial College London, and Prof Clive Oppenheimer from the University of Cambridge have begun a collaborative study with North Korean scientists, aiming to understand the structure of the subterranean magma chamber lying beneath the volcanic mountain. Explaining the origins of the project, Dr Hammond told BBC News: "The whole region is quite worried about the volcano because it has shown signs of activity, so the North Koreans put a lot of effort into watching it, and basically said 'do you want to come to Korea, could you bring some equipment?'" http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/image...8_69678692.jpg UK seismometers, deployed on the volcano's flanks, will reveal its structure and activity The team has deployed a set of seismometers that can record earth tremors associated with the movement of magma beneath the volcano. Organising a scientific collaboration in North Korea has not been without logistical and bureaucratic hurdles, but Dr Hammond continued: "What made it possible was having great people involved who were passionate about doing this, at all levels, from the scientists on the ground to those higher up where the decisions get made." The study will help scientists understand why the volcano is there, which is something of a geological mystery, and why rock is melting at its heart, possibly stoking a future threat. "This project is not about monitoring the volcano or predicting when the eruption will happen, but is about understanding what happened during the millennium eruption and also looking at what its state is now, using geophysical techniques. This will help us understand what is driving the volcano," Dr Hammond explained. Prof James Gill, from University of California, Santa Cruz, has been working on the Chinese side of the volcano for some years, but is not involved in the new study. He told BBC News: "The volcano has erupted big time in the past, and were it to happen again, the Chinese, South Korean and Japanese economies could all be affected. "There was a crisis in 2002-2005 when the seismicity picked up, the gas chemistry of the fumaroles changed, the volcano inflated, and it might have erupted. It may still be dangerous. "The North Korean underground nuclear test site is only 70km or so away, so when the last test took place, the South Koreans were concerned that this might set off the volcano. "One of the world's biggest volcanoes is sat in a backwater of the Cold War." Prof Gill described some of the difficulties of carrying out field work at a militarised border, sampling rocks under armed escort. The new collaboration with the North Koreans is something of a landmark in current scientific co-operation with the isolated state. This is not the only volcano that Prof Oppenheimer and Dr Hammond have worked on in difficult circumstances. They have previously studied volcanoes that straddle the border of Eritrea and Ethiopia. Like Mount Paektu, that investigation also ran into challenges due to the local political situation, but underlines the fact that natural hazards pay no attention to political differences. |
Amazing!
I am certainly not a scientist, but holy crap; I can see a lot of possibilities in this discovery! Absolutely incredible....
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-sli092513.php Seeing light in a new light Scientists create never-before-seen form of matter Harvard and MIT scientists are challenging the conventional wisdom about light, and they didn't need to go to a galaxy far, far away to do it. Working with colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, a group led by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic have managed to coax photons into binding together to form molecules – a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical. The work is described in a September 25 paper in Nature. The discovery, Lukin said, runs contrary to decades of accepted wisdom about the nature of light. Photons have long been described as massless particles which don't interact with each other – shine two laser beams at each other, he said, and they simply pass through one another. "Photonic molecules," however, behave less like traditional lasers and more like something you might find in science fiction – the light saber. "Most of the properties of light we know about originate from the fact that photons are massless, and that they do not interact with each other," Lukin said. "What we have done is create a special type of medium in which photons interact with each other so strongly that they begin to act as though they have mass, and they bind together to form molecules. This type of photonic bound state has been discussed theoretically for quite a while, but until now it hadn't been observed. "It's not an in-apt analogy to compare this to light sabers," Lukin added. "When these photons interact with each other, they're pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what's happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies." To get the normally-massless photons to bind to each other, Lukin and colleagues, including Harvard post-doctoral fellow Ofer Fisterberg, former Harvard doctoral student Alexey Gorshkov and MIT graduate students Thibault Peyronel and Qiu Liang couldn't rely on something like the Force – they instead turned to a set of more extreme conditions. Researchers began by pumped rubidium atoms into a vacuum chamber, then used lasers to cool the cloud of atoms to just a few degrees above absolute zero. Using extremely weak laser pulses, they then fired single photons into the cloud of atoms. As the photons enter the cloud of cold atoms, Lukin said, its energy excites atoms along its path, causing the photon to slow dramatically. As the photon moves through the cloud, that energy is handed off from atom to atom, and eventually exits the cloud with the photon. "When the photon exits the medium, its identity is preserved," Lukin said. "It's the same effect we see with refraction of light in a water glass. The light enters the water, it hands off part of its energy to the medium, and inside it exists as light and matter coupled together, but when it exits, it's still light. The process that takes place is the same it's just a bit more extreme – the light is slowed considerably, and a lot more energy is given away than during refraction." When Lukin and colleagues fired two photons into the cloud, they were surprised to see them exit together, as a single molecule. The reason they form the never-before-seen molecules? An effect called a Rydberg blockade, Lukin said, which states that when an atom is excited, nearby atoms cannot be excited to the same degree. In practice, the effect means that as two photons enter the atomic cloud, the first excites an atom, but must move forward before the second photon can excite nearby atoms. The result, he said, is that the two photons push and pull each other through the cloud as their energy is handed off from one atom to the next. "It's a photonic interaction that's mediated by the atomic interaction," Lukin said. "That makes these two photons behave like a molecule, and when they exit the medium they're much more likely to do so together than as single photons." While the effect is unusual, it does have some practical applications as well. "We do this for fun, and because we're pushing the frontiers of science," Lukin said. "But it feeds into the bigger picture of what we're doing because photons remain the best possible means to carry quantum information. The handicap, though, has been that photons don't interact with each other." To build a quantum computer, he explained, researchers need to build a system that can preserve quantum information, and process it using quantum logic operations. The challenge, however, is that quantum logic requires interactions between individual quanta so that quantum systems can be switched to perform information processing. "What we demonstrate with this process allows us to do that," Lukin said. "Before we make a useful, practical quantum switch or photonic logic gate we have to improve the performance, so it's still at the proof-of-concept level, but this is an important step. The physical principles we've established here are important." The system could even be useful in classical computing, Lukin said, considering the power-dissipation challenges chip-makers now face. A number of companies – including IBM – have worked to develop systems that rely on optical routers that convert light signals into electrical signals, but those systems face their own hurdles. Lukin also suggested that the system might one day even be used to create complex three-dimensional structures – such as crystals – wholly out of light. "What it will be useful for we don't know yet, but it's a new state of matter, so we are hopeful that new applications may emerge as we continue to investigate these photonic molecules' properties," he said. |
Quote:
Cheers Aj |
http://news.yahoo.com/black-hole-ind...161159470.html
Black hole ingestion captured by radio telescope. |
I follow this guy's blog -- Sean Carroll. He's a theoretical physicist. Used to be at Caltech. I don't think he's anywhere now. Not sure.
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/ Anyway, he had a good article about the Nobel in the NYTimes recently. No Physicist is an Island |
When We Lose Antibiotics, Here’s Everything Else We’ll Lose Too
This week, health authorities in New Zealand announced that the tightly quarantined island nation — the only place I’ve ever been where you get x-rayed on the way into the country as well as leaving it — has experienced its first case, and first death, from a strain of totally drug-resistant bacteria... |
I have been thinking
My mother took DES:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol and I have begun to find studies (as it was given from the 1940's-1971 and beyond off label) because the off spring of the women who were given the drug are now old enough to follow regarding the higher incidence of autoimmune disease, reproductive issues (structural and getting pregnant), mood disorders such as bi polar and depression and finally because of the timing of when it was introduced to the mother (week 8 through the birth) variances in the neurobiology regarding the influx and time of hormones in the brain on gender expression, sexuality and (at this point) in DES sons, more incidences of transitioning. I am as much interested in the impact of the drug on automimmune diseases and mood disorders as gender expression because my sister and ex (who are one day apart in age) have suffered similar trajectories (mine has been a little different) the were born in 1952 and I was born in 1949 and there might have been different dosing and different strenghts because of the similarities in their reproductive organs being affected, their autoimmune, etc. Neither of them is as masculinized in id as I am but interestingly, because there have also been studies regarding hormones and handedness, we are all left handed. I am getting more and more into the neurobiology of the brain, etc. as I teach human behavior and development and include more current literatire. So I was just curious if anyone knows if their mother took DES and if they have an autoimmune diseases. For my sister this has been difficult to correlate and she is very sick with lupus and one large study in Sweden has found a correlation. Thank you in advance if you should decide to respond |
I love this! This indeed meets the definition of exploration of a different kind...
The biodegradable burial pod that turns your body into a tree
By Paula Erizanu, CNN Updated 7:44 AM ET, Wed May 3, 2017 (CNN) Your carbon footprint doesn't end in the grave. While you rest in peace, the wood, the synthetic cushioning and the metals generally used in traditional coffins -- as well as the concrete around reinforced graves -- continue to litter the earth. "A lot of energy also goes into producing these materials, which are used for a very short time and then buried. They're not going to break down very fast," says Jennifer DeBruyen, an Associate Professor of Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science at the University of Tennessee. Italian designers Raoul Bretzel and Anna Citelli might have a solution. They call it Capsula Mundi -- "world's capsule" in Latin -- and it's an egg-shaped, organic casket that's suitable for ashes, too. Once buried, they say, the biodegradable plastic shell breaks down and the remains provide nutrients to a sapling planted right above it. Bretzel and Citelli believe that death is as closely related to consumerism as life. Their goal? To create cemeteries full of trees rather than tombstones, reduce waste, and create new life out of death. The idea for the Capsula Mundi came in 2003, when the pair saw tons of furniture trashed at the end of Milan's famous design fair, "Salone del Mobile." "It was a big competition to design new things, but almost nobody cared about future impact or whether anyone would actually use these things", Bretzel said. "We started thinking about projects that could have an environmental aspect. Death is part of our life but at design fairs nobody cares about that because it's one side of our life that we don't want to look at. We don't like to think of death as part of life." The science behind it The designers are launching the first version of their product, which is for ashes only. A later model will be suitable for bodies, to be encapsulated in the fetal position. Bacteria in the soil first break down the bio-plastic, then the ashes gradually come into contact with the soil, without changing its chemical balance too dramatically. While the burial of ashes may be environmentally friendly, cremation has its critics: "It's a very energy-demanding process," says DeBruyen. On top of that, older dental fillings can release polluting mercury, which is why some crematoriums have installed mercury filters. Although sowing a seed on top of the Capsula may sound like an attractive concept, Jacqueline Aitkenhead-Peterson, Associate Professor in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at Texas A&M University, suggests more mature trees should be used. "Because the body will purge within a year in a buried environment, the nutrients are released into the soil quite quickly, so a decently sized tree planted on top would be key. Capturing these nutrients is also important to protect groundwater," she said. But would it really benefit the environment? DeBruyen seems to think so: "The problem with traditional burials is that they're completely anaerobic. The remains are buried deep and sealed in a coffin. There's a lot of incomplete degradation." "These pods may help maintain some oxygen flow into the system. The other thing they bring to the whole system is carbon [from the starch-based bioplastic]. One of the constraints and challenges with decomposing a human body is that it's very nitrogen rich. And so, the microbes that are trying to break down all that nitrogen need some carbon to balance it out." https://i2.cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/a...xlarge-169.jpg http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/03/world/...ndi/index.html |
Fascinating!
SCIENCE
In the Bones of a Buried Child, Signs of a Massive Human Migration to the Americas Carl Zimmer. JAN. 3, 2018 The girl was just six weeks old when she died. Her body was buried on a bed of antler points and red ocher, and she lay undisturbed for 11,500 years. Archaeologists discovered her in an ancient burial pit in Alaska in 2010, and on Wednesday an international team of scientists reported they had retrieved the child’s genome from her remains. The second-oldest human genome ever found in North America, it sheds new light on how people — among them the ancestors of living Native Americans — first arrived in the Western Hemisphere. The analysis, published in the journal Nature, shows that the child belonged to a hitherto unknown human lineage, a group that split off from other Native Americans just after — or perhaps just before — they arrived in North America. “It’s the earliest branch in the Americas that we know of so far,” said Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, a co-author of the new study. As far as he and other scientists can tell, these early settlers endured for thousands of years before disappearing. The study strongly supports the idea that the Americas were settled by migrants from Siberia, and experts hailed the genetic evidence as a milestone. “There has never been any ancient Native American DNA like it before,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the study. The girl’s remains were unearthed at the Upward Sun River archaeological site in the Tanana River Valley in central Alaska. Ben A. Potter, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska, discovered the site in 2006. It was apparently home to short-lived settlements that appeared and disappeared over thousands of years. Every now and then, people arrived to build tent-like structures, fish for salmon, and hunt for hare and other small game. In 2010, Dr. Potter and his colleagues discovered human bones at Upward Sun River. Atop a hearth dating back 11,500 years were the cremated bones of a 3-year-old child. Digging into the hearth itself, archaeologists discovered the remains of two infants. The two infants were given names: the baby girl is Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay (“sunrise girl-child,” in Middle Tanana, the dialect of the local community), and the remains of the other infant, or perhaps a fetus, is Yełkaanenh T’eede Gaay (“dawn twilight girl-child”). The Healy Lake Village Council and the Tanana Chiefs Conference agreed to let scientists search the remains for genetic material. Eventually, they discovered mitochondrial DNA, which is passed only from mother to child, suggesting each had different mothers. Moreover, each infant had a type of mitochondrial DNA found also in living Native Americans. That finding prompted Dr. Potter and his colleagues to begin a more ambitious search. They began collaborating with Dr. Willerslev, whose team of geneticists has built an impressive record of recovering DNA from ancient Native American bones. Among them are the 12,700-year-old Anzick Child, the oldest genome ever found in the Americas, and the Kennewick Man, an 8,500-year-old skeleton discovered in a riverbank in Washington State. Questions over his lineage provoked a decade-long legal dispute between scientists, Native American tribes and the Army Corps of Engineers. Living Native Americans descend from two major ancestral groups. The northern branch includes a number of communities in Canada, such as the Athabascans, along with some tribes in the United States like the Navajo and Apache. The southern branch includes the other tribes in the United States, as well as all indigenous people in Central America and South America. Both the Anzick Child and Kennewick Man belonged to the southern branch, Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues have found. So he was eager to see how the people of Upward Sun River might be related. But the remains found there represented a huge scientific challenge. The search for DNA in the cremated bones ended in failure, and Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues managed to retrieve only fragments from the remains of Yełkaanenh T’eede Gaay, the youngest of the infants. But the researchers had better luck with Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay. Eventually, they managed to put together an accurate reconstruction of her entire genome. To analyze it, Dr. Willerslev and Dr. Potter collaborated with a number of geneticists and anthropologists. Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay, they discovered, was more closely related to living Native Americans than to any other living people or to DNA extracted from other extinct lineages. But she belonged to neither the northern or southern branch of Native Americans. Instead, Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay was part of a previously unknown population that diverged genetically from the ancestors of Native Americans about 20,000 years ago, Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues concluded. They now call these people Ancient Beringians. Beringia refers to Alaska and the eastern tip of Siberia, and to the land bridge that joined them during the last ice age. Appearing and disappearing over the eons, it has long been suspected as the route that humans took from Asia to the Western Hemisphere. There has been little archaeological evidence, however, perhaps because early coastal settlements were submerged by rising seas. Thanks to her unique position in the Native American family tree, Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay has given scientists a clear idea how this enormous step in human history may have happened. Her ancestors — and those of all Native Americans — started out in Asia and share a distant ancestry with Chinese people. In the new study, the scientists estimate those two lineages split about 36,000 years ago. The population that would give rise to Native Americans originated somewhere in northeast Siberia, Dr. Willerslev believes. Archaeological evidence suggests they may have hunted for woolly rhino and other big game that ranged over the grasslands. “It wasn’t such a bad place as we kind of imagine it or as we see it today,” he said. In fact, Siberia appears to have attracted a lot of genetically distinct peoples, and they interbred widely until about 25,000 years ago, the researchers determined. About a third of living Native American DNA can be traced to a vanished people known as the ancient north Eurasians, known only from a genome recovered from the 24,000-year-old skeleton of a boy. But the flow of genes from other Asian populations dried up about 25,000 years ago, and the ancestors of Native Americans became genetically isolated. About 20,000 years ago, the new analysis finds, these people began dividing into genetically distinct groups. First to split off were the Ancient Beringians, the people from whom Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay descended. About 4,000 years later, the scientists estimate, the northern and southern branches of the Native American tree split. According to Ripan Malhi, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois and a co-author of the new study, these genetic results support a theory of human migration called the Beringian Standstill model. Based on previous genetic studies, Dr. Malhi has argued that the ancestors of Native Americans did not rush across Beringia and disperse across the Americas. Instead, they lingered there for thousands of years, their genes acquiring increasingly distinctive variations. But while the new study concludes early Native Americans were isolated for thousands of years, as Dr. Malhi had predicted, it doesn’t pinpoint where. “The genetics aren’t giving us locations, with the exception of a few anchor points,” said Dr. Potter. Indeed, while the co-authors of the new study agree on the genetic findings, they disagree on the events that led to them. “Most likely, people were in Alaska by 20,000 years ago, at least,” said Dr. Willerslev. He speculated that the northern and southern branches split afterward, about 15,700 years ago as the ancestors of Native Americans expanded out of Alaska, settling on land exposed by retreating glaciers. Dr. Potter, however, argues that the lineage that led to Native Americans started splitting into three main branches while still in Siberia, long before reaching Alaska. Pointing to the lack of archaeological sites in Beringia from 20,000 years ago, he believes it was too difficult for people to move there from Asia at that time. “That split took place in Asia somewhere — somewhere not in America,” Dr. Potter said. If he is right, the mysterious earliest settlers of this hemisphere didn’t arrive in a single migration. Instead, the Ancient Beringians and the ancestors of the tribes we know today took separate journeys. “Even if there was a single founding population, there were two migrations,” he said. But these scenarios all depend on timing estimated from changes in DNA, which “can be very sensitive to errors in the data,” Dr. Reich cautioned. More tests are required to be confident that the Ancient Beringians actually split from other Native Americans 20,000 years ago, he said. NOTE: Long article, rest at link: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/s...a-siberia.html |
PUBLIC RELEASE: 8-SEP-2017
A Female Viking Warrior STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY War was not an activity exclusive to males in the Viking world. A new study conducted by researchers at Stockholm and Uppsala Universities shows that women could be found in the higher ranks at the battlefield. Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, who led the study, explains: "What we have studied was not a Valkyrie from the sagas but a real life military leader, that happens to be a woman". The study was conducted on one of the most iconic graves from the Viking Age. It holds the remains of a warrior surrounded by weapons, including a sword, armour-piercing arrows, and two horses. There were also a full set of gaming pieces and a gaming board. "The gaming set indicates that she was an officer", says Charlotte, "someone who worked with tactics and strategy and could lead troops in battle". The warrior was buried in the Viking town of Birka during the mid-10th century. Isotope analyses confirm an itinerant life style, well in tune with the martial society that dominated 8th to 10th century northern Europe. Anna Kjellström, who also participated in the study, has taken an interest in the burial previously. "The morphology of some skeletal traits strongly suggests that she was a woman, but this has been the type specimen for a Viking warrior for over a century why we needed to confirm the sex in any way we could." And this is why the archaeologists turned to genetics, to retrieve a molecular sex identification based on X and Y chromosomes. Such analyses can be quite useful according to Maja Krezwinska: "Using ancient DNA for sex identification is useful when working with children for example, but can also help to resolve controversial cases such as this one". Maja was thus able to confirm the morphological sex identification with the presence of X chromosomes but the lack of a Y chromosome. Jan Storå, who holds the senior position on this study, reflects over the history of the material: "This burial was excavated in the 1880's and has served as a model of a professional Viking warrior ever since. Especially, the grave-goods cemented an interpretation for over a century". It was just assumed she was a man through all these years. "The utilization of new techniques, methods, but also renewed critical perspectives, again, shows the research potential and scientific value of our museum collections". The study is a part of the ongoing ATLAS project, which is a joint effort by Stockholm University and Uppsala University, supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences) and Vetenskapsrådet (The Swedish Research Council), to investigate the genetic history of Scandinavia. ### More information The article "A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics" is published in American Journal of Physical Anthropology: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...jpa.23308/full Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, Dept. Archaeology, Uppsala, Phone: 46-(0)8-519 55 724, 46-(0)70-371 07 17, E-mail: charlotte.hedenstierna-jonson@arkeologi.uu.se Anna Kjellström, Dept. Archaeology & Classic Studies, Stockholm University, Phone 46-(0)73-756 50 91 Maja Krezwinska, Dept. Archaeology & Classic Studies, Stockholm University, Phone 46-(0)8-16 49 72 https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea...-aoa090817.php |
Speaking of Science
NASA lost contact with a satellite 12 years ago. An amateur just found its signal. By Avi Selk January 31 at 6:31 PM NASA confirmed an incredible discovery Tuesday — that an amateur radio astronomer, on the hunt for a classified government satellite, stumbled upon signals from a spacecraft that had been thought lost 12 years earlier, raising hope that NASA can resurrect a mission that changed our understanding of the “invisible ocean” around the Earth. 1. Lost IMAGE was a machine designed to “see the invisible,” as one of the mission's lead scientists once put it. It was a squat and boxy thing, like many satellites, with a long technical name — Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration — that obscured its plain and noble purpose: to map the roiling sphere of electric gas around the Earth that protects us from the sun, and which we had never seen in full before. Before IMAGE launched in 2000, humans had known only for a few decades that a magnetosphere surrounded the planet. In an essay before the launch, the mission's lead investigator, James L. Burch, called it an “invisible ocean . . . where nothing tangible — no snow or sand or tree or even a cloud — records titanic currents and pulses.” The sphere shields our planet from the sun's harsh winds while letting through its light. Like an ocean, its plasma ripples and flows in a solar wind. But also like an ocean, it is prone to storms — solar disruptions so violent they can knock out satellites and even power grids on Earth. IMAGE was built, Burch wrote, to send home images of the global magnetosphere for the first time in history and help predict those storms. For five years, it astonished us. The satellite beamed back pictures of an enormous solar storm in the summer of 2000 and allowed scientists to essentially live-stream “weather” in space. The sphere around the Earth proved to be a much stranger place than had been thought. IMAGE discovered that the Earth spits out jets of its own atmosphere to defend itself from space storms — like a squid shooting ink — the Dallas Morning News wrote in 2002. It discovered cracks in the Earth's magnetic field, tracked down the source of mysterious radiation and imaged 100,000-volt charged particles whipping around the circumference of the globe. And in the last month of 2005 — on the same day the U.S. president addressed the nation from the Oval Office, promising an end to a still-young Iraq War — IMAGE stopped sending pictures. The satellite had suddenly gone invisible itself. The scientists tried to figure out why. A tripped breaker in the radio was their best guess. But without a radio, they couldn't tell it to turn itself back on. After a month of silence from IMAGE, NASA published a news release that declared the satellite's mission a great success — one that was now over. “The craft's power supply subsystems failed,” the agency wrote, “rendering it lifeless.” NASA was wrong. IMAGE was not dead, but it would circle Earth for more than a decade before a man with no professional astronomy training — one who did not always accept the official explanation of events — heard its call. 2. Contact The 21st century moved into its second decade, and space exploration changed. New machines were sent into orbit, and some of them, like IMAGE, were lost too. In the first month of 2018, an unknown government agency used a private company to launch a secret satellite, code-named “Zuma.” It was nothing like IMAGE; it was a machine intended to be invisible to most of the world. And it failed immediately. No one has said publicly what, exactly, went wrong during the Jan. 7 launch, whether Zuma crashed back into an ocean or simply died in space. Its fate and purpose have become a mystery of the new Space Age — and all of this bothered Scott Tilley very much. Tilley is a 47-year-old electrical engineer who lives on the west coast of Canada. His hobby is radio astronomy. In a sense, it's also his cause. “Space is not owned by anybody,” Tilley told The Washington Post. “Anybody should be able to look up and know those little dots moving across the night sky are not bombs.” Secret military satellites and classified orbits bother him, so he has banded together with a small group of fellow amateurs across the world to to track down every satellite whose operators don't want it to be seen. Maybe Zuma was in pieces at the bottom of an ocean, Tilley thought. But maybe not. So he began to scan. He used no telescope, listening instead for radio signals out there, in the invisible ocean. When Tilley caught a signal after a week of searching, on Jan. 20, he almost ignored it. Whatever it was, it was orbiting much higher than Zuma was supposed to be. There are hundreds of active satellites in space, most of which didn't interest him. “I didn't think of it much more,” he wrote on his blog. But as he continued to scan for Zuma, he came across the signal again — stronger this time — and out of curiosity checked it against a standard catalogue. The signal matched for IMAGE. But IMAGE was supposed to be dead. Tilley had to Google the old satellite to find out what it was, as it had been all but forgotten on Earth. Eventually, he came across a decade-old NASA report on the mission's failure. “Once I read through the failure report and all the geeky language the engineers use, I immediately understood what had happened,” Tilley told Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News. Then he rushed to contact NASA himself. 3. Answers That old news release announcing the death of IMAGE had not actually been the end of its story on Earth. A week later, in early 2006, NASA quietly convened a board of experts to pore over the satellite's entire data set and figure out what went wrong. They worked for months. When their final report was released, the board still figured IMAGE had tripped a power breaker and essentially bricked itself, like a bad iPhone. But they had come up with a theory for how the satellite might be fixed. Or rather how it might fix itself. IMAGE was solar-powered and designed so that if its battery ever drained enough, it would try to reset its computer and flip the breaker back. The board thought this was most likely to happen in late 2007, when IMAGE's orbit would put it in the Earth's shadow from the sun — from the satellite's point of view, a deep eclipse. But the theory didn't pan out. When NASA tried to the contact IMAGE after the eclipse, it remained as silent as ever, so the agency closed down the mission for good. And then, a decade later, Tilley found the machine chirping away. After his discovery, another independent astronomer, Cees Bassa, looked for IMAGE's signal in years of old data. He hypothesized that while the 2007 eclipse didn't manage to reset the satellite, another one did the trick, probably sometime between 2014 and 2016. “Most likely the battery efficiency degraded such over the IMAGE lifetime that during the less deep eclipses the battery drained sufficiently to lead to the reset and bring the transmitter aboard IMAGE back to life,” Bassa wrote. NASA hasn't confirmed that. In fact, the agency was initially skeptical that the signal Tilley found actually came from IMAGE. After Tilley contacted NASA last week, scientists trained antennas at the Goddard Space Flight Center on the object. Initial tests showed its orbit, frequency, oscillation and spin rate all matched their old, lost satellite. Even so, NASA was cautious in its public updates, writing Sunday that it still wanted to analyze the signal's encoded data before it could be sure. Meanwhile, astronomers amateur and professional were getting excited. “The team is collectively holding their breath,” Patricia Reiff, an investigator on the original mission, told Science Magazine. On his blog, Tilley quoted from an email sent to him by Burch, the lead investigator on the IMAGE mission, who wrote so many years ago of a machine to map an invisible sea. “Very excited,” Burch wrote to Tilley. Confirmation finally came Tuesday. It came couched in the technical jargon of space science and was no less momentous for it. “On the afternoon of Jan. 30, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, successfully collected telemetry data from the satellite,” NASA wrote. “The signal showed that the space craft ID was 166 — the ID for IMAGE. “The NASA team has been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational.” Translation: There is hope that IMAGE will one day tell us more about the “ocean” it's been adrift in for more than 12 years. “I really hope the scientists who built this thing and put it in space are able to repurpose this and put it back into action,” Tilley told CBC News. “And we get the benefit of all the beautiful science coming home.” He was named nowhere in NASA's news release, except as an anonymous “amateur astronomer.” But that's fine. He found the thing, when the professionals might have left it in the dark forever. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...rainbow&wpmm=1 |
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Nat Geo has an upcoming special Feb. 6th about this find: The lost treasures of the Maya Snake King
Sprawling Maya network discovered under Guatemala jungle
2 February 2018 https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/736/cp...ixmayanpic.png A split image with one side showing an aerial look on Mayan ruins in Guatemala's northern jungle, and the other side showing a digital landscape that strips away the forest canopy to reveal structures under the ground. WILD BLUE MEDIA/CHANNEL 4 * The Maya city of Tikal was found to be just a fraction of an immense hidden metropolis. * Researchers have found more than 60,000 hidden Maya ruins in Guatemala in a major archaeological breakthrough. * Laser technology was used to survey digitally beneath the forest canopy, revealing houses, palaces, elevated highways, and defensive fortifications. The landscape, near already-known Maya cities, is thought to have been home to millions more people than other research had previously suggested. The researchers mapped over 810 square miles (2,100 sq km) in northern Peten. Archaeologists believe the cutting-edge technology will change the way the world will see the Maya civilisation. "I think this is one of the greatest advances in over 150 years of Maya archaeology," said Stephen Houston, Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology at Brown University. Mr Houston told the BBC that after decades of work in the archaeological field, he found the magnitude of the recent survey "breathtaking". He added, "I know it sounds hyperbolic but when I saw the [Lidar] imagery, it did bring tears to my eyes." Most structures are believed to be stone platforms for pole-and-thatch homes. Results from the research using Lidar technology, which is short for "light detection and ranging", suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilisation more akin to sophisticated cultures like ancient Greece or China. "Everything is turned on its head," Ithaca College archaeologist Thomas Garrison told the BBC. He believes the scale and population density has been "grossly underestimated and could in fact be three or four times greater than previously thought". How does Lidar work? Described as "magic" by some archaeologists, Lidar unveils archaeological finds almost invisible to the naked eye, especially in the tropics. It is a sophisticated remote sensing technology that uses laser light to densely sample the surface of the earth. Millions of laser pulses every four seconds are beamed at the ground from a plane or helicopter. The wavelengths are measured as they bounce back, which is not unlike how bats use sonar to hunt. The highly accurate measurements are then used to produce a detailed three-dimensional image of the ground surface topography. Revolutionary treasure map The group of scholars who worked on this project used Lidar to digitally remove the dense tree canopy to create a 3D map of what is really under the surface of the now-uninhabited Guatemalan rainforest. "Lidar is revolutionising archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionised astronomy," Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Tulane University archaeologist, told National Geographic. "We'll need 100 years to go through all [the data] and really understand what we're seeing." The Lidar images have surprised surveyors Archaeologists excavating a Maya site called El Zotz in northern Guatemala, painstakingly mapped the landscape for years. But the Lidar survey revealed kilometres of fortification wall that the team had never noticed before. "Maybe, eventually, we would have gotten to this hilltop where this fortress is, but I was within about 150 feet of it in 2010 and didn't see anything," Mr. Garrison told Live Science. While Lidar imagery has saved archaeologists years of on-the-ground searching, the BBC was told that it also presents a problem. "The tricky thing about Lidar is that it gives us an image of 3,000 years of Mayan civilisation in the area, compressed," explained Mr Garrison, who is part of a consortium of archaeologists involved in the recent survey. "It's a great problem to have though, because it gives us new challenges as we learn more about the Maya." Hidden insights Maya civilisation, at its peak some 1,500 years ago, covered an area about twice the size of medieval England, with an estimated population of around five million. "With this new data it's no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there," said Mr Estrada-Belli, "including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable." Most of the 60,000 newly identified structures are thought to be stone platforms that would have supported the average pole-and-thatch Maya home. The archaeologists were struck by the "incredible defensive features", which included walls, fortresses and moats. They showed that the Maya invested more resources into defending themselves than previously thought, Mr Garrison said. One of the hidden finds is a seven-storey pyramid so covered in vegetation that it practically melts into the jungle. Another discovery that surprised archaeologists was the complex network of causeways linking all the Maya cities in the area. The raised highways, allowing easy passage even during rainy seasons, were wide enough to suggest they were heavily trafficked and used for trade. "The idea of seeing a continuous landscape, but understanding everything is connected across many square miles is amazing," said Mr Houston. "We can expect many further surprises," he added. The Lidar survey was the first part of a three-year project led by a Guatemalan organisation that promotes cultural heritage preservation. It will eventually map more than 5,000 sq miles (14,000 sq km) of Guatemala's lowlands. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42916261 |
Science is truly amazing!
This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It’s Taking Over Europe
By Carl Zimmer FEB. 5, 2018 https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018...-master768.jpg The marbled crayfish is a mutant species that clones itself, scientists report. The population is exploding in Europe, but the species appears to have originated only about 25 years ago. Frank Lyko, a biologist at the German Cancer Research Center, studies the six-inch-long marbled crayfish. Finding specimens is easy: Dr. Lyko can buy the crayfish at pet stores in Germany, or he can head with colleagues to a nearby lake. Wait till dark, switch on head lamps, and wander into the shallows. The marbled crayfish will emerge from hiding and begin swarming around your ankles. “It’s extremely impressive,” said Dr. Lyko. “Three of us once caught 150 animals within one hour, just with our hands.” Over the past five years, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues have sequenced the genomes of marbled crayfish. In a study published on Monday, the researchers demonstrate that the marble crayfish, while common, is one of the most remarkable species known to science. Before about 25 years ago, the species simply did not exist. A single drastic mutation in a single crayfish produced the marbled crayfish in an instant. The mutation made it possible for the creature to clone itself, and now it has spread across much of Europe and gained a toehold on other continents. In Madagascar, where it arrived about 2007, it now numbers in the millions and threatens native crayfish. “We may never have caught the genome of a species so soon after it became a species,” said Zen Faulkes, a biologist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who was not involved in the new study. The marbled crayfish became popular among German aquarium hobbyists in the late 1990s. The earliest report of the creature comes from a hobbyist who told Dr. Lyko he bought what were described to him as “Texas crayfish” in 1995. The hobbyist — whom Dr. Lyko declined to identify — was struck by the large size of the crayfish and its enormous batches of eggs. A single marbled crayfish can produce hundreds of eggs at a time. Soon the hobbyist was giving away the crayfish to his friends. And not long afterward, so-called marmorkrebs were showing up in pet stores in Germany and beyond. As marmorkrebs became more popular, owners grew increasingly puzzled. The crayfish seemed to be laying eggs without mating. The progeny were all female, and each one grew up ready to reproduce. In 2003, scientists confirmed that the marbled crayfish were indeed making clones of themselves. They sequenced small bits of DNA from the animals, which bore a striking similarity to a group of crayfish species called Procambarus, native to North America and Central America. Ten years later, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues set out to determine the entire genome of the marbled crayfish. By then, it was no longer just an aquarium oddity. For nearly two decades, marbled crayfish have been multiplying like Tribbles on the legendary “Star Trek” episode. “People would start out with a single animal, and a year later they would have a couple hundred,” said Dr. Lyko. Many owners apparently drove to nearby lakes and dumped their marmorkrebs. And it turned out that the marbled crayfish didn’t need to be pampered to thrive. Marmorkrebs established growing populations in the wild, sometimes walking hundreds of yards to reach new lakes and streams. Feral populations started turning up in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia and Ukraine in Europe, and later in Japan and Madagascar. Sequencing the genome of this animal was not easy: No one had sequenced the genome of a crayfish. In fact, no one had ever sequenced any close relative of the crayfish. Dr. Lyko and his colleagues struggled for years to piece together fragments of DNA into a single map of its genome. Once they succeeded, they sequenced the genomes of 15 other specimens, including marbled crayfish living in German lakes and those belonging to other species. The rich genetic detail gave the scientists a much clearer look at the freakish origins of the marbled crayfish. It apparently evolved from a species known as the slough crayfish, Procambarus fallax, which lives only in the tributaries of the Satilla River in Florida and Georgia. The scientists concluded that the new species got its start when two slough crayfish mated. One of them had a mutation in a sex cell — whether it was an egg or sperm, the scientists can’t tell. Normal sex cells contain a single copy of each chromosome. But the mutant crayfish sex cell had two. Somehow the two sex cells fused and produced a female crayfish embryo with three copies of each chromosome instead of the normal two. Somehow, too, the new crayfish didn’t suffer any deformities as a result of all that extra DNA. It grew and thrived. But instead of reproducing sexually, the first marbled crayfish was able to induce her own eggs to start dividing into embryos. The offspring, all females, inherited identical copies of her three sets of chromosomes. They were clones. Now that their chromosomes were mismatched with those of slough crayfish, they could no longer produce viable offspring. Male slough crayfish will readily mate with the marbled crayfish, but they never father any of the offspring. In December, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues officially declared the marbled crayfish to be a species of its own, which they named Procambarus virginalis. The scientists can’t say for sure where the species began. There are no wild populations of marble crayfish in the United States, so it’s conceivable that the new species arose in a German aquarium. All the marbled crayfish Dr. Lyko’s team studied were almost genetically identical to one another. Yet that single genome has allowed the clones to thrive in all manner of habitats — from abandoned coal fields in Germany to rice paddies in Madagascar. In their new study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, the researchers show that the marbled crayfish has spread across Madagascar at an astonishing pace, across an area the size of Indiana in about a decade. Thanks to the young age of the species, marbled crayfish could shed light on one of the big mysteries about the animal kingdom: why so many animals have sex. Only about 1 in 10,000 species comprise cloning females. Many studies suggest that sex-free species are rare because they don’t last long. In one such study, Abraham E. Tucker of Southern Arkansas University and his colleagues studied 11 asexual species of water fleas, a tiny kind of invertebrate. Their DNA indicates that the species only evolved about 1,250 years ago. There are a lot of clear advantages to being a clone. Marbled crayfish produce nothing but fertile offspring, allowing their populations to explode. “Asexuality is a fantastic short-term strategy,” said Dr. Tucker. In the long term, however, there are benefits to sex. Sexually reproducing animals may be better at fighting of diseases, for example. If a pathogen evolves a way to attack one clone, its strategy will succeed on every clone. Sexually reproducing species mix their genes together into new combinations, increasing their odds of developing a defense. The marbled crayfish offers scientists a chance to watch this drama play out practically from the beginning. In its first couple decades, it’s doing extremely well. But sooner or later, the marbled crayfish’s fortunes may well turn. “Maybe they just survive for 100,000 years,” Dr. Lyko speculated. “That would be a long time for me personally, but in evolution it would just be a blip on the radar.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/s...es-europe.html |
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If we could predate on this exploding mutant species, sounds like they just discovered a very much needed new protein source. |
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I have Huntington's it is called HUntingtons Disease, my CAG repeat is 40, i am interested in speaking with you perhaps because it seems you are knowledgeable about huntington's disease. I am 6th generation. Gaea |
What New Science Techniques Tells Us About Ancient Women Warriors
What New Science Techniques Tells Us About Ancient Women Warriors
Recent studies show that man was not always the hunter. By Annalee Newitz Mx. Newitz is a contributing Opinion writer for the New York Times Jan. 1, 2021 https://i.postimg.cc/VsFWgFZr/02newitz-super-Jumbo.jpg Claire Merchlinsky Though it’s remarkable that the United States finally is about to have a female vice president, let’s stop calling it an unprecedented achievement. As some recent archaeological studies suggest, women have been leaders, warriors and hunters for thousands of years. This new scholarship is challenging long-held beliefs about so-called natural gender roles in ancient history, inviting us to reconsider how we think about women’s work today. In November a group of anthropologists and other researchers published a paper in the academic journal Science Advances about the remains of a 9,000-year-old big-game hunter buried in the Andes. Like other hunters of the period, this person was buried with a specialized tool kit associated with stalking large game, including projectile points, scrapers for tanning hides and a tool that looked like a knife. There was nothing particularly unusual about the body — though the leg bones seemed a little slim for an adult male hunter. But when scientists analyzed the tooth enamel using a method borrowed from forensics that reveals whether a person carries the male or female version of a protein called amelogenin, the hunter turned out to be female. With that information in hand, the researchers re-examined evidence from 107 other graves in the Americas from roughly the same period. They were startled to discover that out of 26 graves with hunter tools, 10 belonged to women. Bonnie Pitblado, an archaeologist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, told Science magazine that the findings indicate that “women have always been able to hunt and have in fact hunted.” The new data calls into question an influential dogma in the field of archaeology. Nicknamed “man the hunter,” this is the notion that men and women in ancient societies had strictly defined roles: Men hunted, and women gathered. Now, this theory may be crumbling. While the Andean finding was noteworthy, this was not the first female hunter or warrior to be found by re-examining old archaeological evidence using fresh scientific techniques. Nor was this sort of discovery confined to one group, or one part of the world. Three years ago, scientists re-examined the remains of a 10th-century Viking warrior excavated in Sweden at the end of the 19th century by Hjalmar Stolpe, an archaeologist. The skeleton had been regally buried at the top of a hill, with a sword, two shields, arrows and two horses. For decades, beginning with the original excavation, archaeologists assumed the Viking was a man. When researchers in the 1970s conducted a new anatomical evaluation of the skeleton, they began to suspect that the Viking was in fact a woman. But it wasn’t until 2017, when a group of Swedish archaeologists and geneticists extracted DNA from the remains, that the sex of the warrior indeed proved to be female. The finding led to controversy over whether the skeleton was really a warrior, with scholars and pundits protesting what they called revisionist history. Although the genetic sex determination thus was indisputable (the bones of the skeleton had two X chromosomes), these criticisms led the Swedish researchers to examine the evidence yet again, and present a second, more contextual analysis in 2019. Their conclusion again was that the person had been a warrior. The naysayers raised fair points. In archaeology, as the researchers admitted, we can’t always know why a community buried someone with particular objects. And one female warrior does not mean that many women were leaders, just as the reign of Queen Elizabeth I was not part of a larger feminist movement. Challenges to “man the hunter” have emerged in new examinations of the early cultures of the Americas as well. In the 1960s, an archaeological dig uncovered in the ancient city of Cahokia, in what is now southwestern Illinois, a 1,000-to-1,200-year-old burial site with two central bodies, one on top of the other, surrounded by other skeletons. The burial was full of shell beads, projectile points and other luxury items. At the time, the archaeologists concluded that this was a burial of two high-status males flanked by their servants. But in 2016 archaeologists conducted a fresh examination of the grave. The two central figures, it turned out, were a male and a female; they were surrounded by other male-female pairs. Thomas Emerson, who conducted the study with colleagues from the Illinois State Archaeological Survey at the University of Illinois, alongside scientists from other institutions, said the Cahokia discovery demonstrated the existence of male and female nobility. “We don’t have a system in which males are these dominant figures and females are playing bit parts,” as he put it. Armchair history buffs love to obsess about mythical societies dominated by female warriors, like Amazons and Valkyries. Let’s be clear. These findings don’t reveal an ancient matriarchy. But neither do they reaffirm the idea of societies in which men dominate completely. What they indicate is a lot more mundane and relatable: Some women were warriors and leaders; many weren’t. There was inequality, but it wasn’t absolute, and there were a lot of shifts over time. When it comes to female power, and gender roles, the past was as ambiguous as the present. Annalee Newitz (@annaleen), a science journalist and a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the forthcoming “Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/o...gtype=Homepage |
SpaceX
Team is targeting 9:15 p.m. EST for tonight's Falcon 9 launch. SpaceX is targeting 9:15 p.m. EST on Thursday, January 7 for launch of the Turksat 5A mission from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. There is a back-up opportunity available on Friday, January 8, with a four-hour launch window opening at 8:28 p.m. EST, or 01:28 UTC on January 9. Falcon 9’s first stage booster previously supported launch of GPS III Space Vehicle 03 and two Starlink missions. Following stage separation, SpaceX will land Falcon 9’s first stage on the Just Read the Instructions droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. Falcon 9’s fairing is also flight-proven: one half previously supported the GPS III Space Vehicle 03 mission and the other flew aboard the ANASIS-II mission. |
Radishes In Space
Astronauts Harvest Radish Crop on International Space Station https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/f...?itok=4ublnVsg On Nov. 27, 2020, NASA astronaut and Expedition 64 Flight Engineer Kate Rubins checks out radish plants growing for the Plant Habitat-02 experiment that seeks to optimize plant growth in the unique environment of space and evaluate nutrition and taste of the plants. Credits: NASA https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/f...?itok=A5G36ykl Photo documentation of the Plant Habitat-02 investigation aboard the International Space Station on Nov. 30, 2020. Plant Habitat-02 uses the Advanced Plant Habitat to cultivate radishes, a model plant that is nutritious and edible and has a short cultivation time. This research could help optimize plant growth in the unique environment of space, as well as evaluation of nutrition and taste of the plants. Credits: NASA By Linda Herridge NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center (Editor's Note: This feature was updated on Dec. 11, 2020) On Nov. 30, 2020, NASA astronaut Kate Rubins harvested radish plants growing in the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) aboard the International Space Station. She meticulously collected and wrapped in foil each of the 20 radish plants, placing them in cold storage for the return trip to Earth in 2021 on SpaceX’s 22nd Commercial Resupply Services mission. The plant experiment, called Plant Habitat-02 (PH-02), is the first time NASA has grown radishes on the orbiting laboratory in the APH. NASA selected radishes because they are well understood by scientists and reach maturity in just 27 days. These model plants are also nutritious and edible, and are genetically similar to Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant related to cabbage that researchers frequently study in microgravity. “Radishes are a different kind of crop compared to leafy greens that astronauts previously grew on the space station, or dwarf wheat which was the first crop grown in the APH,” said Nicole Dufour, NASA APH program manager at Kennedy Space Center. “Growing a range of crops helps us determine which plants thrive in microgravity and offer the best variety and nutritional balance for astronauts on long-duration missions.” The structure of the experiment will allow NASA to identify the optimum balance of care and feeding needed to produce quality plants. While growing inside the habitat, the radishes required little maintenance from the crew. Unlike previous experiments in NASA’s APH and Vegetable Production System (Veggie), which used porous clay material preloaded with a slow-release fertilizer, this trial relies on precisely defined quantities of provided minerals. Such precision allows for a better comparison of nutrients provided to and absorbed by the plants. The chamber also uses red, blue, green and broad-spectrum white LED lights to provide a variety of light to stimulate plant growth. Sophisticated control systems deliver water, while control cameras and more than 180 sensors in the chamber allow researchers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to monitor the plant growth as well as regulate moisture levels, temperature, and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration. The study’s principal investigator, Karl Hasenstein, a professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, has conducted plant experiments with NASA since 1995. From this project, Hasenstein hopes to learn how space conditions like weightlessness affect plant growth, and how well the light response and metabolism resembles “Earth-grown” plants. “Radishes provide great research possibilities by virtue of their sensitive bulb formation,” Hasenstein said. “We can grow 20 plants in the APH, analyze CO2 effects, and mineral acquisition and distribution.” The team has set up a control population of plants in the ground control plant habitat unit in the International Space Station Environmental Simulator (ISSES) chamber inside Kennedy’s Space Station Processing Facility. Radishes have been growing under nearly identical conditions in the ISSES since Nov. 17, and researchers will harvest the control crop Dec. 15 for comparison with the radishes grown on station. This historic harvest does not mean the experiment is over, Dufour added. “The APH has two science carriers, so shortly after the first harvest, the second carrier will be used to repeat the experiment by planting another set of radish seeds,” she said. “Replicating the plant experiment increases the sample size and improves scientific accuracy.” The researchers credit two partner organizations with helping make the mission a success. Hasenstein highlighted the contracted support team from Techshot. Teams from this mission, integration, and support contractor helped shape the payload from the beginning and guided it through the path to space. Project scientists also assist the principal investigator with the experiment and made it possible for researchers to interact with payloads even when they aren’t at the center. Likewise, Dufour cited Sierra Nevada Corporation’s team in Madison, Wisconsin, for remotely monitoring the telemetry from the APH flight unit and helping tweak performance parameters. She said their dedication contributed to the success of the flight implementation. With plans to explore the Moon and someday Mars, NASA knows astronauts will need to grow their own food to support long-duration missions far from home. As part of the Artemis program, NASA plans to establish sustainable exploration on and around the Moon by the end of the decade. “It’s a privilege to help lead a team that is paving the way to the future of space crop production for NASA’s exploration efforts,” Dufour said. “I’ve worked on APH since the beginning, and each new crop that we’re able to grow brings me great joy because what we learn from them will help NASA send astronauts to Mars and bring them back safely.” The Biological and Physical Sciences (BPS) Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington provides funding for Veggie, the APH, and related investigations. Source: nasa.gov Website: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/astrona...-space-station Date: December 11, 2020 |
SpaceX - Third Mission of 2021
SpaceX Falcon 9 launch of Transporter-1 rideshare mission with 143 spacecraft |
The International Space Station
Spot the Station Over the Super Bowl The International Space Station’s orbital path will take it within sighting range of Tampa, Florida at 7:15 p.m. EST on Sunday, Feb. 7. Weather permitting, the sighting opportunity will be about the same time two football teams will be competing to win Super Bowl LV. |
Rover on Mars
NASA releases first images taken by Mars Perseverance rover after historic landing. |
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