French volunteers who lived in a cave with no phones, clocks, or sunlight for 40 days say it was 'great'
Julian Kossoff
Business Insider Sun, April 25, 2021, 10:40 AM
french cave volunteers
Volunteers leave the Lombrives cave after spending 40 days in the cave in Ussat-les-Bains, southern of France, on April 24, 2021. Fred Scheiber/AFP via Getty Images
French volunteers have emerged from a cave after spending 40 days with no clocks or phones.
They took part in the Deep Time project, which explored the limits of human isolation.
Two-thirds of the group say they wanted to stay in the cave for longer.
Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
Fifteen volunteers have emerged from a cave in the southwest of France after spending 40 days without clocks, phones, or sunlight for a human isolation experiment.
The group of eight men and seven women lived in the Lombrives cave as part of a $1.4 million project called Deep Time, which set out to explore the limits of human adaptability to isolation. The project, led by the Human Adaption Institute, ended on Saturday after 40 days.
Social media footage from the day shows the smiling volunteers emerging from the cave to a round of applause while wearing special sunglasses to protect their eyes after so long in the dark.
Related: 22 inventions that could save the earth
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During their time in the cave, the volunteers slept in tents and made their own electricity with a pedal bike since there was no natural light. They also drew water from a well 146 ft below the earth.
Since there was no sunlight, the team had to follow their biological clocks to know when to sleep, eat, or do daily tasks.
To no one's surprise, they quickly lost their sense of time.
Project director Christian Clot, who was also part of the group, told reporters Saturday: "And here we are! We just left after 40 days … For us, it was a real surprise," according to the Guardian.
One volunteer said they thought he had been underground for 23 days.
The group had no communication with the outside world and was not able to use phones or other electronic devices.
One volunteer, math teacher Johan Francois, said he ran 6-mile circles in the cave to stay fit. He told reporters he had "visceral urges" to leave the cave, according to the BBC.
But other volunteers felt differently, with two-thirds saying they wanted to stay in the cave for longer.
"For once in our lives, it was as if we could press pause," Marina Lançon, one of seven women to take part in the experiment, said, according to the Guardian. "For once in our lives, we had time and could stop to live and do our tasks. It was great."
However, Lançon did admit to feeling happy to be outdoors and hear birdsong again.
French and Swiss scientists at the Human Adaption Institute monitored the volunteers closely during their time in the cave. They would regularly check the team's sleeping patterns, social interactions, and cognitive functions via sensors.
The volunteers' brain activity was also collected before and after they entered the cave.
The scientists behind the project say it will help them understand how people can adapt to extreme living conditions and being in complete isolation.
"Our future as humans on this planet will evolve," Clot said after emerging from the cave. "We must learn to better understand how our brains are capable of finding new solutions, whatever the situation."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fr ... 53324.html
Articles of Interest in Science
New Renewable Fuel May be 3 Times More Powerful Than Gasoline
Editor OilPrice.com
Sun, June 6, 2021, 6:00 PM
The U.S. Department of Energy is now backing continued research of an incredible fuel that has up to three times the energy content of gasoline.
More importantly, it could be the only fuel on earth that produces zero emissions when burned.
Until recently, this remarkable fuel was considered too dangerous and expensive to be used commercially…
But a new technological breakthrough appears to have made the adoption of this super fuel much more likely.
And one little-known company – Headed by an ex NASA Engineer - AmmPower Corp. (CSE:AMMP; OTC: AMMPF) – appears to be miles ahead of the competition…
In a market that’s projected to grow to over $81 billion.
Not a bad position to be in when the DOE has expressed its commitment to continued research for the comprehensive development, demonstration, and commercialization of this energy source.
This up-and-coming energy source harnesses the second-most widely used inorganic chemical in the world…
So supply shouldn’t be an issue.
But getting your hands on the technology that makes this all possible… well we think that is no easy task.
HARNESSING A RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCE THAT MAY BE 3X MORE POWERFUL -- AND CLEANER -- THAN GASOLINE
Throughout the history of the energy industry, new--more powerful--sources of energy have started off small … and then come to dominate the industry for a time.
From coal ... to petroleum ... to natural gas... And now, renewables.
Each new energy source had a scientific problem to overcome before widespread adoption.
With coal, the advancement of the steam engine in the 19th century dramatically improved the efficiency of coal mining and transport during the Industrial Revolution.
With petroleum, the Scottish chemist James Young devised a method to refine paraffin from crude oil for easy transport.
With natural gas, it was being able to cool it to -160° C to form Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) so it could be used for profitable and safe transportation in ships.
For decades, scientists have been researching how to bring one new energy source – an energy source with nearly three times more energy than gasoline--online.
And now one unknown company (with a former NASA scientist at the helm) may have figured out the next stage of the renewable story…
In short: We think this company could become one of the biggest beneficiaries of a new market that might take over renewables...
A market that is projected to grow to $81 billion by 2025.
For decades, lithium had been thought to be the solution to the clean energy movement.
Unfortunately, it has been proven that lithium will not be able to provide enough power for long-range trucks... ocean-going freighters... military vehicles...trains… planes... jets, and more.
Why? The story of energy transitions through history has been a constant move toward fuels that are more energy-dense and convenient to use than the fuels they replaced.
Fossil fuels are the most energy-dense, making them hard to replace.
At 53.1 MJ/kg, natural gas boasts the highest energy density of any fossil fuel, followed by gasoline at 45.8MJ/kg, and coal at 30.2MJ/kg.
Lithium-ion batteries--one of the most effective ways to store renewable energy--can only afford an energy density of 0.504MJ/kg. That’s 91 times less energy density than gasoline!
So, while lithium could become the predominant energy carrier for small vehicles like cars and small vans...
It simply doesn't appear to have enough power density to become practical for HEAVY industries.
But now finally... scientists may be able to harness a NEW renewable replacement that CAN easily power heavy industry.
So, what has nearly 3X more energy than gasoline?
And is a widely used inorganic chemical?
HYDROGEN.
But, until now, the technology didn't exist to transport it safely and economically.
That's where AmmPower Corp. (CSE:AMMP; OTC: AMMPF) comes in...
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 00038.html
Editor OilPrice.com
Sun, June 6, 2021, 6:00 PM
The U.S. Department of Energy is now backing continued research of an incredible fuel that has up to three times the energy content of gasoline.
More importantly, it could be the only fuel on earth that produces zero emissions when burned.
Until recently, this remarkable fuel was considered too dangerous and expensive to be used commercially…
But a new technological breakthrough appears to have made the adoption of this super fuel much more likely.
And one little-known company – Headed by an ex NASA Engineer - AmmPower Corp. (CSE:AMMP; OTC: AMMPF) – appears to be miles ahead of the competition…
In a market that’s projected to grow to over $81 billion.
Not a bad position to be in when the DOE has expressed its commitment to continued research for the comprehensive development, demonstration, and commercialization of this energy source.
This up-and-coming energy source harnesses the second-most widely used inorganic chemical in the world…
So supply shouldn’t be an issue.
But getting your hands on the technology that makes this all possible… well we think that is no easy task.
HARNESSING A RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCE THAT MAY BE 3X MORE POWERFUL -- AND CLEANER -- THAN GASOLINE
Throughout the history of the energy industry, new--more powerful--sources of energy have started off small … and then come to dominate the industry for a time.
From coal ... to petroleum ... to natural gas... And now, renewables.
Each new energy source had a scientific problem to overcome before widespread adoption.
With coal, the advancement of the steam engine in the 19th century dramatically improved the efficiency of coal mining and transport during the Industrial Revolution.
With petroleum, the Scottish chemist James Young devised a method to refine paraffin from crude oil for easy transport.
With natural gas, it was being able to cool it to -160° C to form Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) so it could be used for profitable and safe transportation in ships.
For decades, scientists have been researching how to bring one new energy source – an energy source with nearly three times more energy than gasoline--online.
And now one unknown company (with a former NASA scientist at the helm) may have figured out the next stage of the renewable story…
In short: We think this company could become one of the biggest beneficiaries of a new market that might take over renewables...
A market that is projected to grow to $81 billion by 2025.
For decades, lithium had been thought to be the solution to the clean energy movement.
Unfortunately, it has been proven that lithium will not be able to provide enough power for long-range trucks... ocean-going freighters... military vehicles...trains… planes... jets, and more.
Why? The story of energy transitions through history has been a constant move toward fuels that are more energy-dense and convenient to use than the fuels they replaced.
Fossil fuels are the most energy-dense, making them hard to replace.
At 53.1 MJ/kg, natural gas boasts the highest energy density of any fossil fuel, followed by gasoline at 45.8MJ/kg, and coal at 30.2MJ/kg.
Lithium-ion batteries--one of the most effective ways to store renewable energy--can only afford an energy density of 0.504MJ/kg. That’s 91 times less energy density than gasoline!
So, while lithium could become the predominant energy carrier for small vehicles like cars and small vans...
It simply doesn't appear to have enough power density to become practical for HEAVY industries.
But now finally... scientists may be able to harness a NEW renewable replacement that CAN easily power heavy industry.
So, what has nearly 3X more energy than gasoline?
And is a widely used inorganic chemical?
HYDROGEN.
But, until now, the technology didn't exist to transport it safely and economically.
That's where AmmPower Corp. (CSE:AMMP; OTC: AMMPF) comes in...
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 00038.html
Scientists find hundreds of examples of mysterious radio blasts coming from deep in the universe
Andrew Griffin
Wed, June 9, 2021, 11:23 AM
Scientists say they have found hundreds more examples of mysterious blasts of radio energy coming from deep in the universe.
The number of the fast radio bursts catalogued has dramatically increased, after a Canadian telescope detected 535 new examples.
Fast radio bursts are intensely powerful, but extremely short, blasts of energy that reach us from unknown sources in the distant universe. Researchers have been looking for their source for years, since they were first discovered in 2007, with only 140 examples of them to go by.
Now, however, that number has quadrupled. Researchers using a Canadian telescope known as CHIME say they have found 535 examples in its first year of operation, between 2018 and 2019.
As well as vastly expanding the current catalogue of FRBs, it has led to the discovery of what appear to be specific kinds of them: some repeat, while others don’t. Of the sources, 18 seem to repeat and the rest do not – and those that repeat have different characteristics, lasting a little longer and emitting in more focused frequencies.
Researchers have assembled the findings into a new FRB catalogue, which they hope can be used to further understand where the blasts are coming from.
“Before CHIME, there were less than 100 total discovered FRBs; now, after one year of observation, we’ve discovered hundreds more,” said CHIME member Kaitlyn Shin, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Physics, in a statement.
“With all these sources, we can really start getting a picture of what FRBs look like as a whole, what astrophysics might be driving these events, and how they can be used to study the universe going forward.”
The researchers hope that the results can be used not only to study FRBs themselves, but to use them to measure other important characteristics of the universe. They may serve as a way to map how gas is distributed throughout the cosmos, for instance.
“Each FRB gives us some information of how far they’ve propagated and how much gas they’ve propagated through,” said Shin.
“With large numbers of FRBs, we can hopefully figure out how gas and matter are distributed on very large scales in the universe. So, alongside the mystery of what FRBs are themselves, there’s also the exciting potential for FRBs as powerful cosmological probes in the future.”
Researchers are still searching for whatever extreme and exotic conditions are able to throw out such energy for such a short period. While speculation has covered everything from black holes to extraterrestrial technology, the leading theory is that they are the result of outbursts from young magnetars, or neutron stars with very powerful magnetic fields.
That theory was boosted further last month by researchers who tracked the bursts down to their exact locations, finding that many of them were placed on the outstretched curvy tentacles of spiral galaxies.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 00892.html
Andrew Griffin
Wed, June 9, 2021, 11:23 AM
Scientists say they have found hundreds more examples of mysterious blasts of radio energy coming from deep in the universe.
The number of the fast radio bursts catalogued has dramatically increased, after a Canadian telescope detected 535 new examples.
Fast radio bursts are intensely powerful, but extremely short, blasts of energy that reach us from unknown sources in the distant universe. Researchers have been looking for their source for years, since they were first discovered in 2007, with only 140 examples of them to go by.
Now, however, that number has quadrupled. Researchers using a Canadian telescope known as CHIME say they have found 535 examples in its first year of operation, between 2018 and 2019.
As well as vastly expanding the current catalogue of FRBs, it has led to the discovery of what appear to be specific kinds of them: some repeat, while others don’t. Of the sources, 18 seem to repeat and the rest do not – and those that repeat have different characteristics, lasting a little longer and emitting in more focused frequencies.
Researchers have assembled the findings into a new FRB catalogue, which they hope can be used to further understand where the blasts are coming from.
“Before CHIME, there were less than 100 total discovered FRBs; now, after one year of observation, we’ve discovered hundreds more,” said CHIME member Kaitlyn Shin, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Physics, in a statement.
“With all these sources, we can really start getting a picture of what FRBs look like as a whole, what astrophysics might be driving these events, and how they can be used to study the universe going forward.”
The researchers hope that the results can be used not only to study FRBs themselves, but to use them to measure other important characteristics of the universe. They may serve as a way to map how gas is distributed throughout the cosmos, for instance.
“Each FRB gives us some information of how far they’ve propagated and how much gas they’ve propagated through,” said Shin.
“With large numbers of FRBs, we can hopefully figure out how gas and matter are distributed on very large scales in the universe. So, alongside the mystery of what FRBs are themselves, there’s also the exciting potential for FRBs as powerful cosmological probes in the future.”
Researchers are still searching for whatever extreme and exotic conditions are able to throw out such energy for such a short period. While speculation has covered everything from black holes to extraterrestrial technology, the leading theory is that they are the result of outbursts from young magnetars, or neutron stars with very powerful magnetic fields.
That theory was boosted further last month by researchers who tracked the bursts down to their exact locations, finding that many of them were placed on the outstretched curvy tentacles of spiral galaxies.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 00892.html
Scientists have solved the mystery behind India's devastating flood that killed 200 people in February
Aylin Woodward
Thu, June 10, 2021, 3:59 PM
chamoli disaster
The destroyed Tapovan Vishnugad hydroelectric plant after a devastating flood on February 7, 2021. Irfan Rashid/Department of Geoinformatics, University of Kashmir
A massive slab of ice and rock broke off a glacier in the mountains of northern India in February.
New research suggests the slab fell a mile down, resulting in a rare flood that killed 200 people.
A warming climate is linked to more glacier-related landslides, so experts expect to see more of such floods.
Imagine a wall of rock and ice 1,800 feet wide falling the length of four Empire State Buildings stacked end-to-end.
A slab that size is responsible for the disaster in northern India that killed more than 200 people and destroyed two power plants four months ago, according to a new study published Thursday.
Just before dawn on February 7, a massive chunk broke off a glacier on Ronti Peak in the Indian Himalayas. The slab dropped more than a mile into the valley below, from its position roughly 18,000 feet above ground, at almost 134 miles per hour.
As the chunk landed, the rock disintegrated and the ice melted, creating a wall of water and debris that swiftly funneled into the river valley below. From there, the mixture cascaded toward the Rishiganaga and Tapovan hydropower plants in India's Chamoli district. After a curve in the valley slowed the sludge down, it swept into tunnels underneath the plants at speeds of up to 56 miles per hour, trapping and killing many workers inside.
The severity of the event, known as the Chamoli disaster, initially stumped scientists. Typically, landslides in the region don't kickstart floods as rapid or lengthy as the one that occurred in February.
"A 'normal' dry rock avalanche would not have traveled as far as this one did - in other words, would not have reached either the Rishiganga or Tapovan hydroplants," Dan Shugar, a geoscientist at the University of Calgary and co-author of the new study, told Insider.
Shugar's team discovered key elements that could explain the disaster's severity: The initial avalanche's composition (about 20% ice and 80% rock), coupled with its mile-long fall, resulted in a hyper-mobile torrent of debris that doomed workers in the valley below.
The researchers calculated that the flood was 27 million cubic meters in volume - enough to cover more than 1,600 football fields in 10 feet of debris and still have some left over.
The flood climbed 722 feet up the valley walls
chamoli disaster
A computer model shows the path of the Chamoli rock and ice avalanche down Ronti Peak in February 2021. Ashim Sattar/University of Zurich
Flooding and landslides are not uncommon in Uttarakhand, the area of northern India where Chamoli is located. In 2013, heavy rainfall set off devastating floods in the area than killed up to 5,700 people.
After the February disaster, experts initially thought a lake near the top of Ronti Peak had burst after the chunks of glacier holding it together cracked or broke off. Some glacial lakes can hold hundreds of millions of cubic meters of water.
But satellite imagery showed there were no such lakes along the debris flow's path.
By analyzing maps of the valleys' terrain, video footage of the event, and earthquake data in the area, Shugar's team was able to reconstruct what happened.
The chunk of glacier that broke off Ronti Peak in the early morning was, on average, 262 feet thick. When it touched down at the mountain's base, the slab flattened a section of nearby forest, and threw a thick dust cloud into air. The impact with the valley floor was so violent that the rock and ice therein blended together to form a flood that climbed 722 feet up the valley walls.
It was "almost the 'optimal' combination" for melting glacier ice, Holger Frey, a glaciologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, told Insider. The massive flood, he added, "facilitated the large reach and destructive nature of this disastrous event."
chamoli
The damaged Dhauliganga hydropower project at Reni village in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand, India after part of a glacier broke off on February 7, 2021. Associated Press
'It's only a matter of time' until a disaster like this happens again
The flood caught workers at the hydroplants in Chamoli by surprise.
But according to the study, an early warning system could have given workers six to 10 minutes of notice before the flood reached them. Seismic sensors - which monitor rumblings in the Earth for signs of earthquakes or shifting rock - can detect when an avalanche happens and let workers know if a flood is on its way.
Even if the Chamoli disaster couldn't have been prevented, Frey said, "a well-designed warning system should be able to warn workers at these plants and allow them to seek safe grounds."
After all, the conditions that led to the Chamoli disaster aren't going to disappear any time soon.
"I expect this would be similar in high mountain Asia," he said.
Rising air and surface temperatures are linked to more instability in glaciers and an increasing likelihood of landslides high in the mountains. The warmer the Earth becomes, the more glaciers shrink.
"It's only a matter of time before the next such massive event will happen somewhere in the Himalayas," Frey said in a press release.
Read the original article on Business Insider
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sc ... 58151.html
Aylin Woodward
Thu, June 10, 2021, 3:59 PM
chamoli disaster
The destroyed Tapovan Vishnugad hydroelectric plant after a devastating flood on February 7, 2021. Irfan Rashid/Department of Geoinformatics, University of Kashmir
A massive slab of ice and rock broke off a glacier in the mountains of northern India in February.
New research suggests the slab fell a mile down, resulting in a rare flood that killed 200 people.
A warming climate is linked to more glacier-related landslides, so experts expect to see more of such floods.
Imagine a wall of rock and ice 1,800 feet wide falling the length of four Empire State Buildings stacked end-to-end.
A slab that size is responsible for the disaster in northern India that killed more than 200 people and destroyed two power plants four months ago, according to a new study published Thursday.
Just before dawn on February 7, a massive chunk broke off a glacier on Ronti Peak in the Indian Himalayas. The slab dropped more than a mile into the valley below, from its position roughly 18,000 feet above ground, at almost 134 miles per hour.
As the chunk landed, the rock disintegrated and the ice melted, creating a wall of water and debris that swiftly funneled into the river valley below. From there, the mixture cascaded toward the Rishiganaga and Tapovan hydropower plants in India's Chamoli district. After a curve in the valley slowed the sludge down, it swept into tunnels underneath the plants at speeds of up to 56 miles per hour, trapping and killing many workers inside.
The severity of the event, known as the Chamoli disaster, initially stumped scientists. Typically, landslides in the region don't kickstart floods as rapid or lengthy as the one that occurred in February.
"A 'normal' dry rock avalanche would not have traveled as far as this one did - in other words, would not have reached either the Rishiganga or Tapovan hydroplants," Dan Shugar, a geoscientist at the University of Calgary and co-author of the new study, told Insider.
Shugar's team discovered key elements that could explain the disaster's severity: The initial avalanche's composition (about 20% ice and 80% rock), coupled with its mile-long fall, resulted in a hyper-mobile torrent of debris that doomed workers in the valley below.
The researchers calculated that the flood was 27 million cubic meters in volume - enough to cover more than 1,600 football fields in 10 feet of debris and still have some left over.
The flood climbed 722 feet up the valley walls
chamoli disaster
A computer model shows the path of the Chamoli rock and ice avalanche down Ronti Peak in February 2021. Ashim Sattar/University of Zurich
Flooding and landslides are not uncommon in Uttarakhand, the area of northern India where Chamoli is located. In 2013, heavy rainfall set off devastating floods in the area than killed up to 5,700 people.
After the February disaster, experts initially thought a lake near the top of Ronti Peak had burst after the chunks of glacier holding it together cracked or broke off. Some glacial lakes can hold hundreds of millions of cubic meters of water.
But satellite imagery showed there were no such lakes along the debris flow's path.
By analyzing maps of the valleys' terrain, video footage of the event, and earthquake data in the area, Shugar's team was able to reconstruct what happened.
The chunk of glacier that broke off Ronti Peak in the early morning was, on average, 262 feet thick. When it touched down at the mountain's base, the slab flattened a section of nearby forest, and threw a thick dust cloud into air. The impact with the valley floor was so violent that the rock and ice therein blended together to form a flood that climbed 722 feet up the valley walls.
It was "almost the 'optimal' combination" for melting glacier ice, Holger Frey, a glaciologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, told Insider. The massive flood, he added, "facilitated the large reach and destructive nature of this disastrous event."
chamoli
The damaged Dhauliganga hydropower project at Reni village in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand, India after part of a glacier broke off on February 7, 2021. Associated Press
'It's only a matter of time' until a disaster like this happens again
The flood caught workers at the hydroplants in Chamoli by surprise.
But according to the study, an early warning system could have given workers six to 10 minutes of notice before the flood reached them. Seismic sensors - which monitor rumblings in the Earth for signs of earthquakes or shifting rock - can detect when an avalanche happens and let workers know if a flood is on its way.
Even if the Chamoli disaster couldn't have been prevented, Frey said, "a well-designed warning system should be able to warn workers at these plants and allow them to seek safe grounds."
After all, the conditions that led to the Chamoli disaster aren't going to disappear any time soon.
"I expect this would be similar in high mountain Asia," he said.
Rising air and surface temperatures are linked to more instability in glaciers and an increasing likelihood of landslides high in the mountains. The warmer the Earth becomes, the more glaciers shrink.
"It's only a matter of time before the next such massive event will happen somewhere in the Himalayas," Frey said in a press release.
Read the original article on Business Insider
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sc ... 58151.html
How to Make Sense of Contradictory Science Papers
Published research is less about conclusions than science at play.
The science you can come across today can often appear to be full of contradictory claims. One study tells you red wine is good for your heart; another tells you it is not. Over the past year, COVID-19 research has offered conflicting reports about the overall effectiveness of wearing a mask. As scientists debate what policy best suits the current moment, they will be drawing on hundreds of studies; some that say masks are effective1 and some that say masks alone are not enough.2
Naturally, given its outsized influence on society—especially during a pandemic—people tend to regard published science highly. This means that many of us expect scientists to be prudent in reporting their results. These ought to be true and justified by evidence, right? And surely, at a bare minimum, the researchers themselves ought to believe in what they are publishing, yes? Maybe not. The bar for publishing might, counter-intuitively, be lower than one might expect. “Scientific conclusions,” as we titled our recent paper,3 “need not be accurate, justified, or believed by their authors.”
We’re not saying scientists generally lie about their published results (this has nothing to do with misconduct). Rather, we argue that scientific papers fulfill a useful social role by doing more than merely reporting on true discoveries. It’s enough for them to draw attention to an idea that is worth pursuing further—and an idea need not be true, well-justified given all our evidence, nor even believed by the scientist in order to pass that test. The peer-review process is, in fact, designed, not to detect fraud or data manipulation, but to select for what is noteworthy.4 What is considered unexpected and thought-provoking will not always track our all-things-considered judgments of what is true, but local community standards of best scientific practice having to do with how to go about data gathering and statistical testing.
For scientists to collectively inquire effectively, they need to communicate interesting ideas to each other that are worth pursuing. Consider Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist who proposed the provocative hypothesis, not without some supporting data, that ‘Oumuamua wasn’t a comet but an alien light-sail. He, presumably, knew that more data would need to be gathered, and a more thorough study would need to be conducted, before the hypothesis could be justifiably believed.
Nonetheless, perhaps it was appropriate for Loeb to publish his data and his hypothesis. He himself might even be agnostic toward the truth of the hypothesis. He likely knew that most of his colleagues would dispute his interpretation of the data, and with good cause. In spite of all this, it was still valuable for him to publicly communicate the possibility of a new hypothesis, because it can—and maybe actually did—spur more research into, and garner attention for, astronomy. Publishing those findings was not about communicating the truth but about saying that there is something exciting and interesting that requires further inquiry.
More...
https://nautil.us/issue/100/outsiders/h ... nce-papers
Published research is less about conclusions than science at play.
The science you can come across today can often appear to be full of contradictory claims. One study tells you red wine is good for your heart; another tells you it is not. Over the past year, COVID-19 research has offered conflicting reports about the overall effectiveness of wearing a mask. As scientists debate what policy best suits the current moment, they will be drawing on hundreds of studies; some that say masks are effective1 and some that say masks alone are not enough.2
Naturally, given its outsized influence on society—especially during a pandemic—people tend to regard published science highly. This means that many of us expect scientists to be prudent in reporting their results. These ought to be true and justified by evidence, right? And surely, at a bare minimum, the researchers themselves ought to believe in what they are publishing, yes? Maybe not. The bar for publishing might, counter-intuitively, be lower than one might expect. “Scientific conclusions,” as we titled our recent paper,3 “need not be accurate, justified, or believed by their authors.”
We’re not saying scientists generally lie about their published results (this has nothing to do with misconduct). Rather, we argue that scientific papers fulfill a useful social role by doing more than merely reporting on true discoveries. It’s enough for them to draw attention to an idea that is worth pursuing further—and an idea need not be true, well-justified given all our evidence, nor even believed by the scientist in order to pass that test. The peer-review process is, in fact, designed, not to detect fraud or data manipulation, but to select for what is noteworthy.4 What is considered unexpected and thought-provoking will not always track our all-things-considered judgments of what is true, but local community standards of best scientific practice having to do with how to go about data gathering and statistical testing.
For scientists to collectively inquire effectively, they need to communicate interesting ideas to each other that are worth pursuing. Consider Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist who proposed the provocative hypothesis, not without some supporting data, that ‘Oumuamua wasn’t a comet but an alien light-sail. He, presumably, knew that more data would need to be gathered, and a more thorough study would need to be conducted, before the hypothesis could be justifiably believed.
Nonetheless, perhaps it was appropriate for Loeb to publish his data and his hypothesis. He himself might even be agnostic toward the truth of the hypothesis. He likely knew that most of his colleagues would dispute his interpretation of the data, and with good cause. In spite of all this, it was still valuable for him to publicly communicate the possibility of a new hypothesis, because it can—and maybe actually did—spur more research into, and garner attention for, astronomy. Publishing those findings was not about communicating the truth but about saying that there is something exciting and interesting that requires further inquiry.
More...
https://nautil.us/issue/100/outsiders/h ... nce-papers
Nasa's giant SLS rocket: a guide
Paul Rincon - Science editor, BBC News website
Sun, June 20, 2021, 7:31 AM
Nasa has been developing a huge rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS) to launch astronauts to the Moon - and eventually Mars. Set to make its debut in late 2021, the SLS is the most powerful launch vehicle built since the 1960s.
Nasa has plans to send a man and woman to the lunar surface this decade, in what will be the first landing with humans since Apollo 17 in 1972.
In the last 20 years, astronauts have been making routine trips to and from the International Space Station (ISS).
But the Moon is nearly 1,000 times further than the ISS; getting astronauts there requires a monster rocket.
The SLS is the modern equivalent of the Saturn V, the huge launcher built during the Apollo era. Like the Saturn, it is split into segments, or stages, stacked on top of each other. But the rocket also incorporates technology from the space shuttle.
The first version of the SLS will be called Block 1. It will undergo a series of upgrades in coming years so that it can launch heavier payloads to destinations beyond low-Earth orbit.
The Block 1 SLS will tower 23 storeys above the launch pad - making it taller than the Statue of Liberty.
"It is truly an immense rocket. It is just jaw-droppingly big," said John Shannon, vice president and program manager for the SLS at Boeing, the rocket's prime contractor. He told BBC News in 2019: "When you see the SLS put together, you just haven't seen anything like it since the Saturn V."
The rocket will launch astronauts in Nasa's next-generation crew vehicle - Orion, boosting it to the speeds necessary to break out of low-Earth orbit and travel onwards to the Moon.
How the rocket works
The SLS consists of a giant core stage flanked by two solid rocket boosters (SRBs). The core houses two large storage tanks: one for liquid hydrogen, the fuel, and another for liquid oxygen, an "oxidiser", which makes the fuel burn.
At the base of the core stage are four RS-25 engines, the same ones that powered the spaceplane-like shuttle orbiter, retired in 2011.
Workers inside the SLS hydrogen tank use a technique called friction stir welding to plug holes
Workers inside the huge SLS hydrogen tank use a technique called friction stir welding to plug holes
When liquid hydrogen and oxygen are fed into the engine chambers and ignited with a spark, the chemical reaction produces vast amounts of energy and steam.
The steam exits engine nozzles at speeds of 16,000 km/h (10,000 mph) to generate thrust - the force that propels a rocket through the air.
The SRBs give the rocket extra power to escape gravity's clutches. These twin boosters stand more than 17 storeys tall and burn six tonnes of solid propellant each second. They provide 75% of total thrust during the first two minutes of flight.
The most powerful rocket ever?
If we use thrust as a measure, the SLS will be the most powerful rocket ever when it flies to space in 2021. The Block 1 SLS will generate 8.8 million pounds (39.1 Meganewtons) of thrust at launch, 15% more than the Saturn V.
In the 1960s, the Soviet Union built a rocket called the N1, in a bid to reach the Moon. Its first stage could produce 10.2 million pounds (45.4 Meganewtons) of thrust. But all four test flights ended in failure.
A future version of the SLS - called Block 2 cargo - should approach the N1's thrust levels. But a vehicle called Starship, being developed by Elon Musk's company SpaceX, should exceed both - producing as much as 15 million pounds (66.7 Meganewtons) of thrust. Starship is currently under development, although there is no firm date for its first flight.
The SLS in numbers
The rocket will stand 98m (322ft) tall in its initial, or Block 1, configuration
The Block 1 SLS can send more than 27 tonnes (59,500 pounds) to lunar orbits - the equivalent of 11 large sports utility vehicles (SUVs)
A future version of the SLS, called Block 2 Cargo, will launch 46 tonnes (101,400 pounds) to the Moon. That's 18 large SUVs.
The SLS will produce 8.8 million pounds (39.1 Meganewtons) of thrust in its Block 1 configuration
Four RS-25 engines sit at the base of the core stage; they're the same ones used in the space shuttle
How shuttle technology was re-used
The SLS core stage is based on the space shuttle's foam-covered external tank. This tank fed propellant to three RS-25 engines at the rear of the shuttle orbiter. The solid rocket boosters play much the same role in both vehicles.
But the SLS is a very different beast. A number of components and structures derived from the shuttle underwent significant design changes because of the different levels of stress placed on them by the SLS.
As an example of these different stresses, in the space shuttle, the RS-25 engines were canted up and away from the solid rocket boosters. Moving them next to the SRBs exposes them to more shaking. As a result, every system in the complex SLS engine section had to be rigorously tested to ensure it could withstand the vibrations.
Why the SLS was built
In February 2010, the Obama administration cancelled Constellation - George W Bush's troubled plan to return to the Moon by 2020. The news came as a devastating blow to workers in five southern states - Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas - where Nasa's human spaceflight programme funded tens of thousands of jobs.
Some Capitol Hill legislators were furious. At the time, Richard Shelby, a republican senator from Alabama, said Congress would not "sit back and watch the reckless abandonment of sound principles, a proven track record, a steady path to success, and the destruction of our human spaceflight programme".
As a compromise, lawmakers from affected states insisted on a single super heavy-lift rocket to replace the Constellation launchers cancelled by the White House.
The SLS design was unveiled in 2011. After work started, delays and cost overruns gave ammunition to critics, who thought Nasa should rely on rockets operated by commercial providers.
But without significant modifications, no existing boosters have sufficient power to send Orion, astronauts and large cargo to the Moon in one flight - as the SLS would have.
An estimated $18bn has been spent on the SLS since the beginning of the last decade.
But with the rocket's development phase over and its flight certification tests complete, the first SLS is now at Florida's Kennedy Space Center, being prepared for its maiden launch.
John Shannon, who has been in charge of the SLS at Boeing since 2015, explained: "I suspect that once SLS is in the national capability there won't be a need for another heavy-lift vehicle like it for many years. So this is really a once-in-a-generation opportunity."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/na ... 25865.html
Paul Rincon - Science editor, BBC News website
Sun, June 20, 2021, 7:31 AM
Nasa has been developing a huge rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS) to launch astronauts to the Moon - and eventually Mars. Set to make its debut in late 2021, the SLS is the most powerful launch vehicle built since the 1960s.
Nasa has plans to send a man and woman to the lunar surface this decade, in what will be the first landing with humans since Apollo 17 in 1972.
In the last 20 years, astronauts have been making routine trips to and from the International Space Station (ISS).
But the Moon is nearly 1,000 times further than the ISS; getting astronauts there requires a monster rocket.
The SLS is the modern equivalent of the Saturn V, the huge launcher built during the Apollo era. Like the Saturn, it is split into segments, or stages, stacked on top of each other. But the rocket also incorporates technology from the space shuttle.
The first version of the SLS will be called Block 1. It will undergo a series of upgrades in coming years so that it can launch heavier payloads to destinations beyond low-Earth orbit.
The Block 1 SLS will tower 23 storeys above the launch pad - making it taller than the Statue of Liberty.
"It is truly an immense rocket. It is just jaw-droppingly big," said John Shannon, vice president and program manager for the SLS at Boeing, the rocket's prime contractor. He told BBC News in 2019: "When you see the SLS put together, you just haven't seen anything like it since the Saturn V."
The rocket will launch astronauts in Nasa's next-generation crew vehicle - Orion, boosting it to the speeds necessary to break out of low-Earth orbit and travel onwards to the Moon.
How the rocket works
The SLS consists of a giant core stage flanked by two solid rocket boosters (SRBs). The core houses two large storage tanks: one for liquid hydrogen, the fuel, and another for liquid oxygen, an "oxidiser", which makes the fuel burn.
At the base of the core stage are four RS-25 engines, the same ones that powered the spaceplane-like shuttle orbiter, retired in 2011.
Workers inside the SLS hydrogen tank use a technique called friction stir welding to plug holes
Workers inside the huge SLS hydrogen tank use a technique called friction stir welding to plug holes
When liquid hydrogen and oxygen are fed into the engine chambers and ignited with a spark, the chemical reaction produces vast amounts of energy and steam.
The steam exits engine nozzles at speeds of 16,000 km/h (10,000 mph) to generate thrust - the force that propels a rocket through the air.
The SRBs give the rocket extra power to escape gravity's clutches. These twin boosters stand more than 17 storeys tall and burn six tonnes of solid propellant each second. They provide 75% of total thrust during the first two minutes of flight.
The most powerful rocket ever?
If we use thrust as a measure, the SLS will be the most powerful rocket ever when it flies to space in 2021. The Block 1 SLS will generate 8.8 million pounds (39.1 Meganewtons) of thrust at launch, 15% more than the Saturn V.
In the 1960s, the Soviet Union built a rocket called the N1, in a bid to reach the Moon. Its first stage could produce 10.2 million pounds (45.4 Meganewtons) of thrust. But all four test flights ended in failure.
A future version of the SLS - called Block 2 cargo - should approach the N1's thrust levels. But a vehicle called Starship, being developed by Elon Musk's company SpaceX, should exceed both - producing as much as 15 million pounds (66.7 Meganewtons) of thrust. Starship is currently under development, although there is no firm date for its first flight.
The SLS in numbers
The rocket will stand 98m (322ft) tall in its initial, or Block 1, configuration
The Block 1 SLS can send more than 27 tonnes (59,500 pounds) to lunar orbits - the equivalent of 11 large sports utility vehicles (SUVs)
A future version of the SLS, called Block 2 Cargo, will launch 46 tonnes (101,400 pounds) to the Moon. That's 18 large SUVs.
The SLS will produce 8.8 million pounds (39.1 Meganewtons) of thrust in its Block 1 configuration
Four RS-25 engines sit at the base of the core stage; they're the same ones used in the space shuttle
How shuttle technology was re-used
The SLS core stage is based on the space shuttle's foam-covered external tank. This tank fed propellant to three RS-25 engines at the rear of the shuttle orbiter. The solid rocket boosters play much the same role in both vehicles.
But the SLS is a very different beast. A number of components and structures derived from the shuttle underwent significant design changes because of the different levels of stress placed on them by the SLS.
As an example of these different stresses, in the space shuttle, the RS-25 engines were canted up and away from the solid rocket boosters. Moving them next to the SRBs exposes them to more shaking. As a result, every system in the complex SLS engine section had to be rigorously tested to ensure it could withstand the vibrations.
Why the SLS was built
In February 2010, the Obama administration cancelled Constellation - George W Bush's troubled plan to return to the Moon by 2020. The news came as a devastating blow to workers in five southern states - Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas - where Nasa's human spaceflight programme funded tens of thousands of jobs.
Some Capitol Hill legislators were furious. At the time, Richard Shelby, a republican senator from Alabama, said Congress would not "sit back and watch the reckless abandonment of sound principles, a proven track record, a steady path to success, and the destruction of our human spaceflight programme".
As a compromise, lawmakers from affected states insisted on a single super heavy-lift rocket to replace the Constellation launchers cancelled by the White House.
The SLS design was unveiled in 2011. After work started, delays and cost overruns gave ammunition to critics, who thought Nasa should rely on rockets operated by commercial providers.
But without significant modifications, no existing boosters have sufficient power to send Orion, astronauts and large cargo to the Moon in one flight - as the SLS would have.
An estimated $18bn has been spent on the SLS since the beginning of the last decade.
But with the rocket's development phase over and its flight certification tests complete, the first SLS is now at Florida's Kennedy Space Center, being prepared for its maiden launch.
John Shannon, who has been in charge of the SLS at Boeing since 2015, explained: "I suspect that once SLS is in the national capability there won't be a need for another heavy-lift vehicle like it for many years. So this is really a once-in-a-generation opportunity."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/na ... 25865.html
NASA's Perseverance rover shot 62 images for its iconic selfie with Ingenuity
Igor Bonifacic· Contributing Writer
Fri, June 25, 2021, 2:51 PM
Back in April, NASA’s Ingenuity rover captured the imagination of the world when it sent back an epic selfie it took with Ingenuity on the surface of Mars. It turns out, capturing that photo wasn’t so easy as Perseverance posing, taking a single photo and calling it a day. According to a new video NASA released on Friday, what we got to see here on Earth was the result of 62 separate images the agency stitched together.
The way NASA tells it, the process was complicated and time-consuming. It involved about a dozen experts, including a variety of engineers, to pull everything off, and about a week to plot all the commands they had to send to Perseverance to make the final shot happen. The reason it took 62 images to produce the final photo was because NASA used Perseverance’s WATSON camera for the composition. The instrument was primarily designed to take close-up images of rocks, not expansive wide-angle shots. Since WATSON is mounted to Perseverance’s robotic arm, NASA also had to take care the appendage didn’t bump into the rover while positioning the camera.
To that end, NASA engineers developed software that allowed them to simulate each arm movement so that they could get it as close to the rover as possible without damaging it. They also ran simulations to figure out how to position Ingenuity in the composition. “The thing that took the most attention was getting Ingenuity into the right place in the selfie,” said Mike Ravine of Malin Space Science System (MSSS), which built the camera NASA used to capture the selfie. “Given how small it is, I thought we did a pretty good job.”
Once NASA had all the images it needed for the selfie, MSSS engineers went about cleaning up each individual one to remove any blemishes left by dust that had settled on WATSON’s light detector. They then stitched them together into a mosaic before cropping and warping that image into the one we all know and love today.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 52269.html
Igor Bonifacic· Contributing Writer
Fri, June 25, 2021, 2:51 PM
Back in April, NASA’s Ingenuity rover captured the imagination of the world when it sent back an epic selfie it took with Ingenuity on the surface of Mars. It turns out, capturing that photo wasn’t so easy as Perseverance posing, taking a single photo and calling it a day. According to a new video NASA released on Friday, what we got to see here on Earth was the result of 62 separate images the agency stitched together.
The way NASA tells it, the process was complicated and time-consuming. It involved about a dozen experts, including a variety of engineers, to pull everything off, and about a week to plot all the commands they had to send to Perseverance to make the final shot happen. The reason it took 62 images to produce the final photo was because NASA used Perseverance’s WATSON camera for the composition. The instrument was primarily designed to take close-up images of rocks, not expansive wide-angle shots. Since WATSON is mounted to Perseverance’s robotic arm, NASA also had to take care the appendage didn’t bump into the rover while positioning the camera.
To that end, NASA engineers developed software that allowed them to simulate each arm movement so that they could get it as close to the rover as possible without damaging it. They also ran simulations to figure out how to position Ingenuity in the composition. “The thing that took the most attention was getting Ingenuity into the right place in the selfie,” said Mike Ravine of Malin Space Science System (MSSS), which built the camera NASA used to capture the selfie. “Given how small it is, I thought we did a pretty good job.”
Once NASA had all the images it needed for the selfie, MSSS engineers went about cleaning up each individual one to remove any blemishes left by dust that had settled on WATSON’s light detector. They then stitched them together into a mosaic before cropping and warping that image into the one we all know and love today.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 52269.html
China wants to up the ante on the space race with a 'sky ladder' to Mars that can beam humans and cargo up in a capsule
Cheryl Teh
Fri, June 25, 2021, 3:37 AM
Mars
China is looking to put a crew on Mars by 2033, and part of the process of getting there might just involve a "sky ladder" made of carbon nanotubes. AP
China is turning up the heat on its space race with the US.
The head of the country's top rocket manufacturing company said China will send a crew to Mars by 2033.
Also in the works is a "sky ladder" that can shoot humans and cargo into space in a capsule.
Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
The space race between the US and China is heating up, and the Chinese are bringing something new to the table - a "sky ladder."
According to Chinese state-owned media Global Times, Wang Xiaojun, the head of the country's top rocket manufacturer, announced this week that China is not only looking to putting a man on Mars by 2033 - it's also working on the "sky ladder," a delivery system made of carbon nanotubes (strong, miniscule carbon atom filaments) that can beam humans and cargo up to space stations for what it claims will be just 4% of the current cost.
Wang, who leads the state-owned China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, did not elaborate on the specifics of how this "sky ladder" all the way to Mars will work, but noted that it would be a starting point for future space voyages and transport missions to the red planet.
Xinhua News posted a video earlier this year that modeled how the system could potentially function for journeys to the moon. In the video, a capsule is seen being propelled from Earth to a Chinese space station, then leapfrogging its way to another space station before reaching a lunar landing pad.
Chinese crewed missions to Mars will involve five expeditions in 2033, 2035, 2037, 2041, and 2043, per a report from Chinese media outlet Sina News. The announcement of these missions follows China's success with deploying a rover on Mars this year, and its launch this month of three taikonauts to its space station.
NASA is currently working on sending a crew to Mars in the 2030s.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ch ... 01342.html
Cheryl Teh
Fri, June 25, 2021, 3:37 AM
Mars
China is looking to put a crew on Mars by 2033, and part of the process of getting there might just involve a "sky ladder" made of carbon nanotubes. AP
China is turning up the heat on its space race with the US.
The head of the country's top rocket manufacturing company said China will send a crew to Mars by 2033.
Also in the works is a "sky ladder" that can shoot humans and cargo into space in a capsule.
Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
The space race between the US and China is heating up, and the Chinese are bringing something new to the table - a "sky ladder."
According to Chinese state-owned media Global Times, Wang Xiaojun, the head of the country's top rocket manufacturer, announced this week that China is not only looking to putting a man on Mars by 2033 - it's also working on the "sky ladder," a delivery system made of carbon nanotubes (strong, miniscule carbon atom filaments) that can beam humans and cargo up to space stations for what it claims will be just 4% of the current cost.
Wang, who leads the state-owned China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, did not elaborate on the specifics of how this "sky ladder" all the way to Mars will work, but noted that it would be a starting point for future space voyages and transport missions to the red planet.
Xinhua News posted a video earlier this year that modeled how the system could potentially function for journeys to the moon. In the video, a capsule is seen being propelled from Earth to a Chinese space station, then leapfrogging its way to another space station before reaching a lunar landing pad.
Chinese crewed missions to Mars will involve five expeditions in 2033, 2035, 2037, 2041, and 2043, per a report from Chinese media outlet Sina News. The announcement of these missions follows China's success with deploying a rover on Mars this year, and its launch this month of three taikonauts to its space station.
NASA is currently working on sending a crew to Mars in the 2030s.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ch ... 01342.html
The One Reason Bottled Water Is More Dangerous Than Tap Water
John Quinn
Mon, June 28, 2021, 9:48 AM
As summer progresses and the temperature rises, it's more important than ever to stay hydrated throughout the day. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine estimate that men need around 3.7 liters of water each day, while women should be aiming for 2.7 liters. However, while experts agree that keeping your water supplies topped up is key, they also warn that the notion that the store-bought stuff is healthier or cleaner than tap water is misguided. To find out how bottled water is more dangerous than tap water, read on.
Tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); bottled water isn't.
In an article for CBS News, Peter H. Gleick, MD, president emeritus and co-founder of the Pacific Institute and author of Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water, points out that while tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act, bottled water is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which allows for less frequent quality testing. He points out that the FDA doesn't monitor certain contaminants that may be in packaged water, and doesn't oblige producers to provide quality reports. "Our standards for protecting both ought to be stricter," says Gleick. "But tap water is better regulated."
On top of that, tap water is routinely treated with fluoride to aid dental health in a way that bottled water isn't, giving the old-fashioned option another edge.
Bottled and tap water may come from the same sources.
While bottled water brands often use extremely creative packaging to conjure up images of natural purity, in many cases, it is essentially the same water as you'd get from your kitchen faucet, just not as strictly regulated. "Sometimes the water you can buy in a bottle is simply public tap water that has been enhanced in some way, such as changing the mineral content," explains the Minnesota Department of Health. The exception is anything claiming to be spring water—if it says this on the label, then the water must actually come from a spring.
There have been several serious public health incidents linked to bottled water.
Despite the perception that bottled water is cleaner and safer for you, there have been multiple recent health threats linked to bottled water. Earlier this year, an outbreak of acute non-viral hepatitis illnesses was traced to Real Water brand alkaline water, leading to its shutdown; Peñafiel spring water was withdrawn due to the presence of arsenic in 2020; and Sweet Springs Valley Water was contaminated with E. coli in 2018.
Drinking water from a plastic bottle itself also comes with its own risks. Especially in the summer, plastic bottles exposed to heat for prolonged periods of time may cause the water inside to become contaminated. A 2014 study found antimony and bisphenol A (BPA), both presumed to be carcinogens, leached into water after being exposed to a temperature of 158 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Minnesota Department of Health notes that there are some specific cases where bottled water may serve you better. Any situation where you can't guarantee a safe drinking supply (for example, on a camping trip, or during a natural disaster) makes bottled water the best choice. Additionally, if tests have shown that your own water well has become contaminated and if authorities have notified you that contamination has occurred in your local public water supply, you should switch to bottled water.
"In these situations above, it is especially important to use bottled water for mixing infant formula or giving water to babies less than one year old," the Minnesota Department of Health advises. "Bottled water may also be the best choice if a person has a health condition requiring lower levels of some substance."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... -144807445
John Quinn
Mon, June 28, 2021, 9:48 AM
As summer progresses and the temperature rises, it's more important than ever to stay hydrated throughout the day. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine estimate that men need around 3.7 liters of water each day, while women should be aiming for 2.7 liters. However, while experts agree that keeping your water supplies topped up is key, they also warn that the notion that the store-bought stuff is healthier or cleaner than tap water is misguided. To find out how bottled water is more dangerous than tap water, read on.
Tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); bottled water isn't.
In an article for CBS News, Peter H. Gleick, MD, president emeritus and co-founder of the Pacific Institute and author of Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water, points out that while tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act, bottled water is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which allows for less frequent quality testing. He points out that the FDA doesn't monitor certain contaminants that may be in packaged water, and doesn't oblige producers to provide quality reports. "Our standards for protecting both ought to be stricter," says Gleick. "But tap water is better regulated."
On top of that, tap water is routinely treated with fluoride to aid dental health in a way that bottled water isn't, giving the old-fashioned option another edge.
Bottled and tap water may come from the same sources.
While bottled water brands often use extremely creative packaging to conjure up images of natural purity, in many cases, it is essentially the same water as you'd get from your kitchen faucet, just not as strictly regulated. "Sometimes the water you can buy in a bottle is simply public tap water that has been enhanced in some way, such as changing the mineral content," explains the Minnesota Department of Health. The exception is anything claiming to be spring water—if it says this on the label, then the water must actually come from a spring.
There have been several serious public health incidents linked to bottled water.
Despite the perception that bottled water is cleaner and safer for you, there have been multiple recent health threats linked to bottled water. Earlier this year, an outbreak of acute non-viral hepatitis illnesses was traced to Real Water brand alkaline water, leading to its shutdown; Peñafiel spring water was withdrawn due to the presence of arsenic in 2020; and Sweet Springs Valley Water was contaminated with E. coli in 2018.
Drinking water from a plastic bottle itself also comes with its own risks. Especially in the summer, plastic bottles exposed to heat for prolonged periods of time may cause the water inside to become contaminated. A 2014 study found antimony and bisphenol A (BPA), both presumed to be carcinogens, leached into water after being exposed to a temperature of 158 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Minnesota Department of Health notes that there are some specific cases where bottled water may serve you better. Any situation where you can't guarantee a safe drinking supply (for example, on a camping trip, or during a natural disaster) makes bottled water the best choice. Additionally, if tests have shown that your own water well has become contaminated and if authorities have notified you that contamination has occurred in your local public water supply, you should switch to bottled water.
"In these situations above, it is especially important to use bottled water for mixing infant formula or giving water to babies less than one year old," the Minnesota Department of Health advises. "Bottled water may also be the best choice if a person has a health condition requiring lower levels of some substance."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... -144807445
Earth Has a Heartbeat, but No One Really Knows Why
Caroline Delbert
Sun, July 4, 2021, 10:15 AM
Earth’s geological history shows pulse-like event clusters every 27.5 million years.
The analysis comes from statistical techniques, plus improved carbon dating.
The clusters show signs of causal links, like tectonic activity causing extinctions.
Just like you, our planet has a ticker that keeps time: Earth’s geological “heartbeat” goes off on a regular schedule, albeit with millions of years in between, says a new study in Geoscience Frontiers.
When scientists from New York University and the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington D.C. analyzed 260 million years of geological feedback, they found “global geologic events are generally correlated,” and seemingly come in pulses every 27.5 million years.
Those events include everything from “times of marine and non-marine extinctions, major ocean-anoxic events, continental flood-basalt eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, global pulses of intraplate magmatism, and times of changes in seafloor-spreading rates and plate reorganizations,” the authors write. They considered a total of 89 such major events from the last 260 million years, from which the 27.5 million-year cycle emerged.
Scientists have long suspected a somewhat cyclical nature to events like these, dating back to at least the 1920s. But to really understand what’s happening, we must “extract potential signals from the noise” using statistical techniques, the study authors say. The right statistical analysis looks at a cloud of questionably related events and pulls likelihoods of certain outcomes based on the data points.
Something else had to fall into place, too. That’s the specificity and accuracy of carbon-dating techniques that are used to pair our knowledge of events with the true timeframe of when those events occurred.
Lead study author Michael Rampino, a geologist who teaches in the biology department at NYU, has been studying these periodic events since at least 1984. Back then, scientists believed the interval was more like 33 million years, and estimates for different kinds of events in research range from 26 to 36 million years apart.
How do these events end up clustering together around this newly emerged 27.5 million-year cycle? There’s probably some causal relationships between, say, volcanism that causes both seafloor spread changes and ocean anoxia, which is when the oxygen level falls precipitously and lead to extinctions. Everything ends up tied together when it comes to ecosystems and the planetary balance.
“We note that 7 out of the 12 marine-extinction events and 6 out of the 9 non-marine tetrapod extinction episodes in the last 260 [million years] are significantly correlated with the pulses of continental flood-basalt volcanism,” the scientists explain. So, the extinctions appear to be at least partly caused by the volcanism. “The potential cause-and-effect relationships between the geologic activity and biotic changes may be complex, but there are several apparent causal chains.”
Statistical analysis helped the scientists group 89 total “well-dated” global geological events into clusters that pop up with regularity roughly every 27.5 million years. “Whatever the origins of these cyclical episodes, our findings support the case for a largely periodic, coordinated, and intermittently catastrophic geologic record, which is a departure from the views held by many geologists,” Rampino said in a statement.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00362.html
Caroline Delbert
Sun, July 4, 2021, 10:15 AM
Earth’s geological history shows pulse-like event clusters every 27.5 million years.
The analysis comes from statistical techniques, plus improved carbon dating.
The clusters show signs of causal links, like tectonic activity causing extinctions.
Just like you, our planet has a ticker that keeps time: Earth’s geological “heartbeat” goes off on a regular schedule, albeit with millions of years in between, says a new study in Geoscience Frontiers.
When scientists from New York University and the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington D.C. analyzed 260 million years of geological feedback, they found “global geologic events are generally correlated,” and seemingly come in pulses every 27.5 million years.
Those events include everything from “times of marine and non-marine extinctions, major ocean-anoxic events, continental flood-basalt eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, global pulses of intraplate magmatism, and times of changes in seafloor-spreading rates and plate reorganizations,” the authors write. They considered a total of 89 such major events from the last 260 million years, from which the 27.5 million-year cycle emerged.
Scientists have long suspected a somewhat cyclical nature to events like these, dating back to at least the 1920s. But to really understand what’s happening, we must “extract potential signals from the noise” using statistical techniques, the study authors say. The right statistical analysis looks at a cloud of questionably related events and pulls likelihoods of certain outcomes based on the data points.
Something else had to fall into place, too. That’s the specificity and accuracy of carbon-dating techniques that are used to pair our knowledge of events with the true timeframe of when those events occurred.
Lead study author Michael Rampino, a geologist who teaches in the biology department at NYU, has been studying these periodic events since at least 1984. Back then, scientists believed the interval was more like 33 million years, and estimates for different kinds of events in research range from 26 to 36 million years apart.
How do these events end up clustering together around this newly emerged 27.5 million-year cycle? There’s probably some causal relationships between, say, volcanism that causes both seafloor spread changes and ocean anoxia, which is when the oxygen level falls precipitously and lead to extinctions. Everything ends up tied together when it comes to ecosystems and the planetary balance.
“We note that 7 out of the 12 marine-extinction events and 6 out of the 9 non-marine tetrapod extinction episodes in the last 260 [million years] are significantly correlated with the pulses of continental flood-basalt volcanism,” the scientists explain. So, the extinctions appear to be at least partly caused by the volcanism. “The potential cause-and-effect relationships between the geologic activity and biotic changes may be complex, but there are several apparent causal chains.”
Statistical analysis helped the scientists group 89 total “well-dated” global geological events into clusters that pop up with regularity roughly every 27.5 million years. “Whatever the origins of these cyclical episodes, our findings support the case for a largely periodic, coordinated, and intermittently catastrophic geologic record, which is a departure from the views held by many geologists,” Rampino said in a statement.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00362.html
NASA's Perseverance rover is driving itself around Mars using an enhanced auto-navigation system
Zahra Tayeb
Sun, July 4, 2021, 4:44 AM
perseverance
Perseverance is continuing to roam the red planet. AP
NASA's Perseverance rover has taken its first autonomous drive on the red planet.
The rover's enhanced AutoNav technology lets it take charge of its adventures.
Perseverance is "thinking while driving" as its wheels are turning, the agency said.
See more stories on Insider's business page.
NASA's Perseverance rover has taken its first autonomous drive using a newly enhanced auto-navigation system, AutoNav, according to the agency.
The technology lets Perseverance take control of its wheels and drive by itself across the red planet, without the need to heavily rely on human drivers from Earth.
According to NASA, AutoNav is equipped with more powerful features than its predecessor, Curiosity. These include the ability to make 3D maps of the terrain ahead, identify hazards, and plan routes around obstacles. This means Perseverance will be able to drive more direct routes and travel at much faster speeds.
"We have a capability called 'thinking while driving,'" said Vandi Verma, a senior engineer, rover planner, and driver at NASA's Jet Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. "The rover is thinking about the autonomous drive while its wheels are turning."
The agency reported that Perseverance might be able to hit top speeds of 393 feet (120 meters) per hour. This is approximately six times faster than Curiosity, which was able to reach 66 feet per hour.
"We sped up AutoNav by four or five times," said Michael McHenry, the mobility domain lead and part of JPL's team of rover planners. "We're driving a lot farther in a lot less time than Curiosity demonstrated."
AutoNav will be a key feature in allowing the six-wheeled robot to complete its science campaign on the floor of Jezero Crater. This involves scanning and drilling Martian soil for signs of ancient microscopic life.
"Now we are able to drive through these more complex terrains instead of going around them: It's not something we've been able to do before," said Jennifer Trosper, Mars 2020 Perseverance rover's project manager.
The AutoNav system doesn't eliminate the need for human drivers entirely, it just increases the rover's autonomy where it can.
Team members said they look forward to letting AutoNav "take the wheel." But they'll also be prepared to intervene when the situation calls for it.
Using technologies like this, NASA eventually aims to fly humans to Mars and establish a settlement there.
Read the original article on Business Insider
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/na ... 36069.html
Zahra Tayeb
Sun, July 4, 2021, 4:44 AM
perseverance
Perseverance is continuing to roam the red planet. AP
NASA's Perseverance rover has taken its first autonomous drive on the red planet.
The rover's enhanced AutoNav technology lets it take charge of its adventures.
Perseverance is "thinking while driving" as its wheels are turning, the agency said.
See more stories on Insider's business page.
NASA's Perseverance rover has taken its first autonomous drive using a newly enhanced auto-navigation system, AutoNav, according to the agency.
The technology lets Perseverance take control of its wheels and drive by itself across the red planet, without the need to heavily rely on human drivers from Earth.
According to NASA, AutoNav is equipped with more powerful features than its predecessor, Curiosity. These include the ability to make 3D maps of the terrain ahead, identify hazards, and plan routes around obstacles. This means Perseverance will be able to drive more direct routes and travel at much faster speeds.
"We have a capability called 'thinking while driving,'" said Vandi Verma, a senior engineer, rover planner, and driver at NASA's Jet Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. "The rover is thinking about the autonomous drive while its wheels are turning."
The agency reported that Perseverance might be able to hit top speeds of 393 feet (120 meters) per hour. This is approximately six times faster than Curiosity, which was able to reach 66 feet per hour.
"We sped up AutoNav by four or five times," said Michael McHenry, the mobility domain lead and part of JPL's team of rover planners. "We're driving a lot farther in a lot less time than Curiosity demonstrated."
AutoNav will be a key feature in allowing the six-wheeled robot to complete its science campaign on the floor of Jezero Crater. This involves scanning and drilling Martian soil for signs of ancient microscopic life.
"Now we are able to drive through these more complex terrains instead of going around them: It's not something we've been able to do before," said Jennifer Trosper, Mars 2020 Perseverance rover's project manager.
The AutoNav system doesn't eliminate the need for human drivers entirely, it just increases the rover's autonomy where it can.
Team members said they look forward to letting AutoNav "take the wheel." But they'll also be prepared to intervene when the situation calls for it.
Using technologies like this, NASA eventually aims to fly humans to Mars and establish a settlement there.
Read the original article on Business Insider
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/na ... 36069.html
Virgin founder Richard Branson successfully lands after beating Jeff Bezos in billionaire space race
11 Jul, 2021 15:45 / Updated 8 hours ago
Virgin Galactic's passenger rocket plane VSS Unity, carrying billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson and his crew, descends after reaching the edge of space above Spaceport America near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, U.S., July 11, 2021. © Reuters / Joe Skipper
Billionaire Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson has made a successful landing following his trip to space on Sunday, narrowly beating Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos to travel away from Earth.
Branson made a trip to suborbital space on the Virgin Galactic Unity 22 spaceplane on Sunday, along with fellow passengers Sirisha Bandla, Colin Bennett, and Beth Moses, and pilots David Mackay and Michael Masucci – launching from Spaceport America, New Mexico.
The passengers experienced weightlessness as they reached space for several minutes before the craft returned to Earth.
Fellow billionaire space enthusiast Elon Musk wished Branson good luck on the morning of the flight and was pictured smiling with the Virgin Galactic founder.
Branson is notable for being the first of a group of space enthusiast billionaires to successfully fly to space on one of his company’s spacecraft, narrowly edging out Bezos, who is set to fly aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard on July 20 – where he will be joined by his brother Mark, aviator Wally Funk, and an unnamed wealthy passenger who paid $28 million for the privilege.
Bezos’ Blue Origin, however, has argued that Branson’s flight does not count as it failed to pass the Karman line, which at 100km above sea level is considered by many to be the true boundary of space.
Billionaires’ space race: Bezos’ Blue Origin dunks on Branson’s Virgin Galactic ahead of crewed flight, saying it doesn’t count
The Virgin Galactic founder’s test flight on Sunday is expected to be the first of many commercial flights by the company into space. Future tickets are expected to cost $250,000 per passenger, before eventually falling to around $40,000.
https://www.rt.com/news/528938-virgin-f ... cessfully/
11 Jul, 2021 15:45 / Updated 8 hours ago
Virgin Galactic's passenger rocket plane VSS Unity, carrying billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson and his crew, descends after reaching the edge of space above Spaceport America near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, U.S., July 11, 2021. © Reuters / Joe Skipper
Billionaire Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson has made a successful landing following his trip to space on Sunday, narrowly beating Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos to travel away from Earth.
Branson made a trip to suborbital space on the Virgin Galactic Unity 22 spaceplane on Sunday, along with fellow passengers Sirisha Bandla, Colin Bennett, and Beth Moses, and pilots David Mackay and Michael Masucci – launching from Spaceport America, New Mexico.
The passengers experienced weightlessness as they reached space for several minutes before the craft returned to Earth.
Fellow billionaire space enthusiast Elon Musk wished Branson good luck on the morning of the flight and was pictured smiling with the Virgin Galactic founder.
Branson is notable for being the first of a group of space enthusiast billionaires to successfully fly to space on one of his company’s spacecraft, narrowly edging out Bezos, who is set to fly aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard on July 20 – where he will be joined by his brother Mark, aviator Wally Funk, and an unnamed wealthy passenger who paid $28 million for the privilege.
Bezos’ Blue Origin, however, has argued that Branson’s flight does not count as it failed to pass the Karman line, which at 100km above sea level is considered by many to be the true boundary of space.
Billionaires’ space race: Bezos’ Blue Origin dunks on Branson’s Virgin Galactic ahead of crewed flight, saying it doesn’t count
The Virgin Galactic founder’s test flight on Sunday is expected to be the first of many commercial flights by the company into space. Future tickets are expected to cost $250,000 per passenger, before eventually falling to around $40,000.
https://www.rt.com/news/528938-virgin-f ... cessfully/
Popular Mechanics
Stephen Hawking Was Right: Black Holes Simply Can't Shrink
Caroline Delbert
Wed, July 21, 2021, 1:27 PM
Photo credit: Universal History Archive - Getty Images
Scientists have confirmed one of Stephen Hawking's famous theorems about black holes.
"Hawking's Area Theorem" states that a black hole's event horizon area can never shrink.
To prove the theorem true, the researchers measured gravitational waves both before and after two black holes merged.
Scientists have just confirmed a 50-year-old theorem about black holes, dreamt up by none other than Stephen Hawking. The astrophysics concept, codified as "Hawking's Area Theorem" in 1971, says a black hole's event horizon (the boundary beyond which nothing, probably not even you, could escape) can never shrink.
An object would need to travel faster than the speed of light in order to escape a black hole, according to the theorem, meaning the event horizon is essentially the point of no return for virtually every object you can imagine. Per Hawking's calculations, if a black hole changes in size, for example, it will "stretch" or constrict the event horizon along with its new size.
Up until now, scientists had only ever proven Hawking's Area Theorem through mathematics. For the first time, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, and Stony Brook University have confirmed it observationally by studying two "inspiraling" black holes (meaning they're spiraling inward into one another) that created an altogether new black hole. They published their findings earlier this month in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Photo credit: Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Project/Courtesy of LIGO
In the study, the researchers take a closer look at GW150914, the first gravitational wave signal detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015. LIGO is a national facility with two locations (one in Hanford, Washington and the other in Livingston, Louisiana), constructed to detect cosmic gravitational waves.
The signal, they discovered, was the product of two merging black holes, along with a vast amount of energy that rippled across the space-time continuum. The idea in their paper is simple: If Hawking's theorem were to hold, they posited, then the event horizon area of the new black hole—created from the merger—should not be smaller than the total event horizon area of its parent black holes.
To prove it, they split up the gravitational wave data into "before" and "after" sections, then statistically analyzed both sections to see how their event horizon areas compare. They found that the two areas are statistically the same within a 95 percent confidence margin.
"The data show with overwhelming confidence that the horizon area increased after the merger, and that the area law is satisfied with very high probability," Maximiliano Isi—lead author of the paper, and a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research—said in a prepared statement. "It was a relief that our result does agree with the paradigm that we expect, and does confirm our understanding of these complicated black hole mergers."
This cool analysis doesn't just show an example of Hawking's theorem that underpins one of the central laws affecting black holes; it shows how analyzing gravitational wave patterns can bear out statistical findings. It also stands to reason the technology to measure gravitational waves will continue to improve, meaning even better datasets for scientists in the future.
Why does this theorem hold so much importance within the study of black holes? Well, it's a parallel, in some ways, to the laws of "regular" physics, like the law of conservation of mass. The ability to observe real life data that can back up the central laws governing black hole behavior can only advance the entire field, giving cosmologists concrete examples to point to as they continue to study these elusive and powerful phenomena.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 00223.html
Stephen Hawking Was Right: Black Holes Simply Can't Shrink
Caroline Delbert
Wed, July 21, 2021, 1:27 PM
Photo credit: Universal History Archive - Getty Images
Scientists have confirmed one of Stephen Hawking's famous theorems about black holes.
"Hawking's Area Theorem" states that a black hole's event horizon area can never shrink.
To prove the theorem true, the researchers measured gravitational waves both before and after two black holes merged.
Scientists have just confirmed a 50-year-old theorem about black holes, dreamt up by none other than Stephen Hawking. The astrophysics concept, codified as "Hawking's Area Theorem" in 1971, says a black hole's event horizon (the boundary beyond which nothing, probably not even you, could escape) can never shrink.
An object would need to travel faster than the speed of light in order to escape a black hole, according to the theorem, meaning the event horizon is essentially the point of no return for virtually every object you can imagine. Per Hawking's calculations, if a black hole changes in size, for example, it will "stretch" or constrict the event horizon along with its new size.
Up until now, scientists had only ever proven Hawking's Area Theorem through mathematics. For the first time, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, and Stony Brook University have confirmed it observationally by studying two "inspiraling" black holes (meaning they're spiraling inward into one another) that created an altogether new black hole. They published their findings earlier this month in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Photo credit: Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Project/Courtesy of LIGO
In the study, the researchers take a closer look at GW150914, the first gravitational wave signal detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015. LIGO is a national facility with two locations (one in Hanford, Washington and the other in Livingston, Louisiana), constructed to detect cosmic gravitational waves.
The signal, they discovered, was the product of two merging black holes, along with a vast amount of energy that rippled across the space-time continuum. The idea in their paper is simple: If Hawking's theorem were to hold, they posited, then the event horizon area of the new black hole—created from the merger—should not be smaller than the total event horizon area of its parent black holes.
To prove it, they split up the gravitational wave data into "before" and "after" sections, then statistically analyzed both sections to see how their event horizon areas compare. They found that the two areas are statistically the same within a 95 percent confidence margin.
"The data show with overwhelming confidence that the horizon area increased after the merger, and that the area law is satisfied with very high probability," Maximiliano Isi—lead author of the paper, and a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research—said in a prepared statement. "It was a relief that our result does agree with the paradigm that we expect, and does confirm our understanding of these complicated black hole mergers."
This cool analysis doesn't just show an example of Hawking's theorem that underpins one of the central laws affecting black holes; it shows how analyzing gravitational wave patterns can bear out statistical findings. It also stands to reason the technology to measure gravitational waves will continue to improve, meaning even better datasets for scientists in the future.
Why does this theorem hold so much importance within the study of black holes? Well, it's a parallel, in some ways, to the laws of "regular" physics, like the law of conservation of mass. The ability to observe real life data that can back up the central laws governing black hole behavior can only advance the entire field, giving cosmologists concrete examples to point to as they continue to study these elusive and powerful phenomena.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 00223.html
Scientists Finish the Human Genome at Last
The complete genome uncovered more than 100 new genes that are probably functional, and many new variants that may be linked to diseases.
Two decades after the draft sequence of the human genome was unveiled to great fanfare, a team of 99 scientists has finally deciphered the entire thing. They have filled in vast gaps and corrected a long list of errors in previous versions, giving us a new view of our DNA.
The consortium has posted six papers online in recent weeks in which they describe the full genome. These hard-sought data, now under review by scientific journals, will give scientists a deeper understanding of how DNA influences risks of disease, the scientists say, and how cells keep it in neatly organized chromosomes instead of molecular tangles.
For example, the researchers have uncovered more than 100 new genes that may be functional, and have identified millions of genetic variations between people. Some of those differences probably play a role in diseases.
For Nicolas Altemose, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked on the team, the view of the complete human genome feels something like the close-up pictures of Pluto from the New Horizons space probe.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/scie ... iversified
The complete genome uncovered more than 100 new genes that are probably functional, and many new variants that may be linked to diseases.
Two decades after the draft sequence of the human genome was unveiled to great fanfare, a team of 99 scientists has finally deciphered the entire thing. They have filled in vast gaps and corrected a long list of errors in previous versions, giving us a new view of our DNA.
The consortium has posted six papers online in recent weeks in which they describe the full genome. These hard-sought data, now under review by scientific journals, will give scientists a deeper understanding of how DNA influences risks of disease, the scientists say, and how cells keep it in neatly organized chromosomes instead of molecular tangles.
For example, the researchers have uncovered more than 100 new genes that may be functional, and have identified millions of genetic variations between people. Some of those differences probably play a role in diseases.
For Nicolas Altemose, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked on the team, the view of the complete human genome feels something like the close-up pictures of Pluto from the New Horizons space probe.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/scie ... iversified
BBC
Mars rover: Nasa's Perseverance prepares to drill first rock sample
Jonathan Amos - BBC Science Correspondent
Thu, July 22, 2021, 2:47 AM
Perseverance looks back at its wheel tracks. The robot is a self-driving vehicle
The US space agency's Perseverance rover is getting ready to take its first sample of Mars rock.
The core, about the size of a finger, will be packaged in a sealed tube for eventual return to Earth.
Scientists say their best chance of determining whether Mars ever hosted life is to study its surface materials in sophisticated home laboratories.
Perseverance landed on the Red Planet in February, in a 45km-wide (30 miles) crater called Jezero.
China releases videos of its Zhurong Mars rover
Mars helicopter mission extended by Nasa
Remarkable photo of Mars rover during landing
Close-up of a rock target nicknamed “Foux”
A dust covering complicates the identification of rocks (image is about 3.5cm across)
Satellite images indicate this deep depression once held a lake, fed by a deltaic river.
As such, it is considered a great candidate for the preservation of ancient microbial organisms - if they ever existed.
The Nasa robot has driven about 1km (3,000ft) south from where it touched down in dramatic fashion five months ago.
It's now stopped at a location that's been dubbed the "Paver Stones", or "Fractured Rough".
An area on Mars nicknamed the “Cratered Floor Fractured Rough”
The first drill sample will be taken from these pale-coloured rocks
This is a collection of pale-coloured rocks that the mission team believes represents the base, or floor, of Jezero.
The scientists want to determine whether these Paver Stones are sedimentary or volcanic in origin. Either is interesting, but the special quality of volcanic rocks is that they can be dated with very high precision and accuracy in a lab, says chief scientist Ken Farley.
"That would really pin down the timing of many of the things we are looking at on Mars," he told reporters.
Perseverance will first abrade the surface of a chosen section of Paver Stone, to remove Mars' obscuring dust, and then examine the site with its powerful instruments.
A layered outcrop (just below centre of image) nicknamed “Artuby”
Telescopic view: The Artuby outcrop is about 600m from the rover's current position
Nasa rover in 'great shape' after Mars landing
Key questions about Nasa's Mars rover
How Perseverance will search for signs of life
These are held on the end of its robotic arm. They are capable of determining the chemical composition, the mineralogy and texture within a rock - to identify it definitively.
Finally, in early August, the robot will secure a drilled core.
The rover will be caching something like 40 of these small sample tubes over the course of its mission. Later projects from Nasa and the European Space Agency (ESA) will arrive on Mars to take ownership and bring them home.
Prof Farley said he expected four unique samples to be cached in the area of the crater now being investigated. This includes an enticing outcrop of rock, called Artuby. This is some 600m away and looks to contain some very finely layered sediments, potentially deposited by the lake and river delta system that once occupied Jezero.
"This is exactly the kind of rock that we are most interested in investigating for looking for potential bio-signatures in this ancient rock record," the California Institute of Technology researcher said.
Nasa is delighted with the way Perseverance is performing.
A particular success has been its mode of driving, which now achieves a high level of autonomy.
Whereas past vehicles needed a lot of direction from controllers back on Earth, or could self-navigate only slowly, Perseverance can image the terrain ahead at speed and plot a route with great efficiency. The robot can do this for drives of 100m or more, dodging tricky obstacles, such as large boulders or fissures in the ground, along the way.
The rover is being helped by the reconnaissance conducted through the mini-helicopter it brought to Mars.
Called Ingenuity, this little chopper has been flying ahead of Perseverance to survey the terrain.
"We just completed flight nine (of Ingenuity)," said Nasa project manager Jennifer Trosper.
"It broke all of our records. The duration was two minutes and 46 seconds, the velocity was 5m/s, and we quadrupled the distance that we had ever flown, and we flew about 625m."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ma ... 22741.html
Mars rover: Nasa's Perseverance prepares to drill first rock sample
Jonathan Amos - BBC Science Correspondent
Thu, July 22, 2021, 2:47 AM
Perseverance looks back at its wheel tracks. The robot is a self-driving vehicle
The US space agency's Perseverance rover is getting ready to take its first sample of Mars rock.
The core, about the size of a finger, will be packaged in a sealed tube for eventual return to Earth.
Scientists say their best chance of determining whether Mars ever hosted life is to study its surface materials in sophisticated home laboratories.
Perseverance landed on the Red Planet in February, in a 45km-wide (30 miles) crater called Jezero.
China releases videos of its Zhurong Mars rover
Mars helicopter mission extended by Nasa
Remarkable photo of Mars rover during landing
Close-up of a rock target nicknamed “Foux”
A dust covering complicates the identification of rocks (image is about 3.5cm across)
Satellite images indicate this deep depression once held a lake, fed by a deltaic river.
As such, it is considered a great candidate for the preservation of ancient microbial organisms - if they ever existed.
The Nasa robot has driven about 1km (3,000ft) south from where it touched down in dramatic fashion five months ago.
It's now stopped at a location that's been dubbed the "Paver Stones", or "Fractured Rough".
An area on Mars nicknamed the “Cratered Floor Fractured Rough”
The first drill sample will be taken from these pale-coloured rocks
This is a collection of pale-coloured rocks that the mission team believes represents the base, or floor, of Jezero.
The scientists want to determine whether these Paver Stones are sedimentary or volcanic in origin. Either is interesting, but the special quality of volcanic rocks is that they can be dated with very high precision and accuracy in a lab, says chief scientist Ken Farley.
"That would really pin down the timing of many of the things we are looking at on Mars," he told reporters.
Perseverance will first abrade the surface of a chosen section of Paver Stone, to remove Mars' obscuring dust, and then examine the site with its powerful instruments.
A layered outcrop (just below centre of image) nicknamed “Artuby”
Telescopic view: The Artuby outcrop is about 600m from the rover's current position
Nasa rover in 'great shape' after Mars landing
Key questions about Nasa's Mars rover
How Perseverance will search for signs of life
These are held on the end of its robotic arm. They are capable of determining the chemical composition, the mineralogy and texture within a rock - to identify it definitively.
Finally, in early August, the robot will secure a drilled core.
The rover will be caching something like 40 of these small sample tubes over the course of its mission. Later projects from Nasa and the European Space Agency (ESA) will arrive on Mars to take ownership and bring them home.
Prof Farley said he expected four unique samples to be cached in the area of the crater now being investigated. This includes an enticing outcrop of rock, called Artuby. This is some 600m away and looks to contain some very finely layered sediments, potentially deposited by the lake and river delta system that once occupied Jezero.
"This is exactly the kind of rock that we are most interested in investigating for looking for potential bio-signatures in this ancient rock record," the California Institute of Technology researcher said.
Nasa is delighted with the way Perseverance is performing.
A particular success has been its mode of driving, which now achieves a high level of autonomy.
Whereas past vehicles needed a lot of direction from controllers back on Earth, or could self-navigate only slowly, Perseverance can image the terrain ahead at speed and plot a route with great efficiency. The robot can do this for drives of 100m or more, dodging tricky obstacles, such as large boulders or fissures in the ground, along the way.
The rover is being helped by the reconnaissance conducted through the mini-helicopter it brought to Mars.
Called Ingenuity, this little chopper has been flying ahead of Perseverance to survey the terrain.
"We just completed flight nine (of Ingenuity)," said Nasa project manager Jennifer Trosper.
"It broke all of our records. The duration was two minutes and 46 seconds, the velocity was 5m/s, and we quadrupled the distance that we had ever flown, and we flew about 625m."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ma ... 22741.html
A YouTuber bet a physicist $10,000 that a wind-powered vehicle could travel twice as fast as the wind itself - and won
A YouTuber bet a physicist $10,000 that a wind-powered vehicle could travel twice as fast as the wind itself - and won
Aylin Woodward
Wed, July 28, 2021, 7:01 AM
A vehicle with large propeller blades riding on the sand.
The wind-powered Blackbird vehicle. Courtesy of Rick Cavallero
A popular YouTuber filmed himself driving a wind-powered vehicle downwind faster than the wind itself.
A UCLA professor bet $10,000 that the video was wrong, saying it broke the laws of physics.
Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson oversaw the bet. In the end, the professor conceded and paid up.
See more stories on Insider's business page.
When Derek Muller took an experimental land yacht for a spin this spring, he wasn't aiming to stir up scientific controversy. He certainly wasn't trying to win $10,000 in a bet.
Muller, the creator of the Veritasium YouTube channel, likes to break down funky science concepts for his 9.5 million subscribers. So in May, he published a video about a vehicle called Blackbird that runs on wind power.
Created by Rick Cavallaro, a former aerospace engineer, Blackbird is unique because it can move directly downwind faster than the wind itself for a sustained period. Any sailor worth their salt can tell you that a boat can travel faster than the wind by cutting zigzag patterns; that's called tacking. But the idea that a vehicle can beat the breeze traveling straight downwind, no tacking involved, is controversial.
"I knew this was a counterintuitive problem. To be perfectly honest with you, when I went out to pilot the craft, I didn't understand how it worked," Muller told Insider.
Blackbird is so counterintuitive, in fact, that less than a week after Muller released his video (below), Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics at UCLA, emailed to inform him that it had to be wrong. A vehicle like that would break the laws of physics, Kusenko said.
"I said, 'Look, if you don't believe this, let's put some money on this,'" Muller said. He suggested a wager of $10,000, never imagining Kusenko would take it.
But Kusenko agreed, and in the weeks that followed, they exchanged data and argued about Blackbird. They even brought in several of science's biggest names, including Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, to help decide who was right.
In the end, Muller emerged victorious.
'I never saw a way I could lose'
A rider in a white helmet in a vehicle with a tall pillar with propeller blades at the back. The pillar has Google and Joby decals.
A side view of Blackbird. Courtesy of Rick Cavallero
Days after Muller suggested the wager, Kusenko sent him a document with the bet's terms, Muller said.
"Everything was always super airtight, I never saw a way I could lose," Muller said.
But Kusenko was equally confident. "Thanks to the laws of physics, I am not risking anything," Kusenko told Vice last month. He did not respond to Insider's request for comment.
Kusenko gave Muller an hourlong presentation explaining why he was certain the YouTuber had been taken in by bad science. The professor said Blackbird was most likely taking advantage of intermittent wind gusts that helped the vehicle speed up. He outlined his objections on a page of his UCLA website, though it has since been taken down.
For his part, Muller sent Kusenko data from the driving test in his video, which was filmed in the El Mirage lake bed. During that drive, Blackbird accelerated over two minutes - a feat that would have been impossible if it had relied on sporadic gusts.
The vehicle reached a speed of 27.7 mph in a 10-mph tailwind.
Muller even contracted Xyla Foxlin, a fellow YouTuber, to build a model cart similar to Blackbird that could be tested on a treadmill. Indeed, Foxlin showed that her wind-powered model could go faster than the wind.
Muller documented this back-and-forth in a follow-up video (below) that he released in June.
"Kusenko was so sure he was right. He wanted to make it public," Muller said.
How Blackbird works
In 2010, Google and Joby Energy sponsored Cavallaro and a team of collaborators from San Jose State University to build Blackbird. The team demonstrated that the vehicle could travel downwind 2.8 times as fast as the wind, a record confirmed by the North American Land Sailing Association.
The secret to Blackbird, Cavallaro explained, is that once the wind gets the vehicle going, its wheels start to turn the propeller blades - they're connected to the blades by a chain. As the vehicle speeds up, its wheels turn the propeller faster and faster. The propeller blades, in turn, act as a fan, pushing more air behind the land yacht and thrusting it forward.
Rick Cavallero wearing a helmet with goggles pulled up and a glove on his left hand.
Rick Cavallaro, an engineer and builder, in the driver's seat of his wind-powered vehicle. Courtesy of Rick Cavallero
"I never even imagined a decade later that a physics professor would still be arguing how it's impossible," Cavallaro, a chief scientist at Sportvision, told Insider.
After three weeks of debate, Kusenko acknowledged that Blackbird could go slightly faster than the wind, but he maintained that it was for only short periods. If a gust of wind sped up the land yacht and then quickly died down, he said, it would appear that Blackbird was traveling faster than wind.
"The resolution of our bet was not as clean as I'd hoped," Muller said. "Kusenko coughed up the 10 grand, let's leave it at that."
A front view of the Blackbird vehicle and its tall column with propeller blades.
A front view of the Blackbird vehicle. Courtesy of Rick Cavallero
Cavallaro, too, wanted more acknowledgment of his vehicle's capabilities.
Kusenko "conceded on a technicality - that the vehicle moves marginally faster than the wind temporarily," Cavallaro said. "I offered him another $10,000 bet, because his technicality is entirely wrong, but I know I won't be hearing from him."
Muller's two videos have each garnered at least 6.8 million views and 41,000 comments, with many agreeing with Kusenko that it's impossible for Blackbird to go faster than the wind. Some viewers have even asked the YouTuber if he'd make follow-up wagers.
"It breaks a lot of people's brains," Muller said. "Clearly it got Kusenko too."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/yo ... 00405.html
A YouTuber bet a physicist $10,000 that a wind-powered vehicle could travel twice as fast as the wind itself - and won
Aylin Woodward
Wed, July 28, 2021, 7:01 AM
A vehicle with large propeller blades riding on the sand.
The wind-powered Blackbird vehicle. Courtesy of Rick Cavallero
A popular YouTuber filmed himself driving a wind-powered vehicle downwind faster than the wind itself.
A UCLA professor bet $10,000 that the video was wrong, saying it broke the laws of physics.
Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson oversaw the bet. In the end, the professor conceded and paid up.
See more stories on Insider's business page.
When Derek Muller took an experimental land yacht for a spin this spring, he wasn't aiming to stir up scientific controversy. He certainly wasn't trying to win $10,000 in a bet.
Muller, the creator of the Veritasium YouTube channel, likes to break down funky science concepts for his 9.5 million subscribers. So in May, he published a video about a vehicle called Blackbird that runs on wind power.
Created by Rick Cavallaro, a former aerospace engineer, Blackbird is unique because it can move directly downwind faster than the wind itself for a sustained period. Any sailor worth their salt can tell you that a boat can travel faster than the wind by cutting zigzag patterns; that's called tacking. But the idea that a vehicle can beat the breeze traveling straight downwind, no tacking involved, is controversial.
"I knew this was a counterintuitive problem. To be perfectly honest with you, when I went out to pilot the craft, I didn't understand how it worked," Muller told Insider.
Blackbird is so counterintuitive, in fact, that less than a week after Muller released his video (below), Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics at UCLA, emailed to inform him that it had to be wrong. A vehicle like that would break the laws of physics, Kusenko said.
"I said, 'Look, if you don't believe this, let's put some money on this,'" Muller said. He suggested a wager of $10,000, never imagining Kusenko would take it.
But Kusenko agreed, and in the weeks that followed, they exchanged data and argued about Blackbird. They even brought in several of science's biggest names, including Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, to help decide who was right.
In the end, Muller emerged victorious.
'I never saw a way I could lose'
A rider in a white helmet in a vehicle with a tall pillar with propeller blades at the back. The pillar has Google and Joby decals.
A side view of Blackbird. Courtesy of Rick Cavallero
Days after Muller suggested the wager, Kusenko sent him a document with the bet's terms, Muller said.
"Everything was always super airtight, I never saw a way I could lose," Muller said.
But Kusenko was equally confident. "Thanks to the laws of physics, I am not risking anything," Kusenko told Vice last month. He did not respond to Insider's request for comment.
Kusenko gave Muller an hourlong presentation explaining why he was certain the YouTuber had been taken in by bad science. The professor said Blackbird was most likely taking advantage of intermittent wind gusts that helped the vehicle speed up. He outlined his objections on a page of his UCLA website, though it has since been taken down.
For his part, Muller sent Kusenko data from the driving test in his video, which was filmed in the El Mirage lake bed. During that drive, Blackbird accelerated over two minutes - a feat that would have been impossible if it had relied on sporadic gusts.
The vehicle reached a speed of 27.7 mph in a 10-mph tailwind.
Muller even contracted Xyla Foxlin, a fellow YouTuber, to build a model cart similar to Blackbird that could be tested on a treadmill. Indeed, Foxlin showed that her wind-powered model could go faster than the wind.
Muller documented this back-and-forth in a follow-up video (below) that he released in June.
"Kusenko was so sure he was right. He wanted to make it public," Muller said.
How Blackbird works
In 2010, Google and Joby Energy sponsored Cavallaro and a team of collaborators from San Jose State University to build Blackbird. The team demonstrated that the vehicle could travel downwind 2.8 times as fast as the wind, a record confirmed by the North American Land Sailing Association.
The secret to Blackbird, Cavallaro explained, is that once the wind gets the vehicle going, its wheels start to turn the propeller blades - they're connected to the blades by a chain. As the vehicle speeds up, its wheels turn the propeller faster and faster. The propeller blades, in turn, act as a fan, pushing more air behind the land yacht and thrusting it forward.
Rick Cavallero wearing a helmet with goggles pulled up and a glove on his left hand.
Rick Cavallaro, an engineer and builder, in the driver's seat of his wind-powered vehicle. Courtesy of Rick Cavallero
"I never even imagined a decade later that a physics professor would still be arguing how it's impossible," Cavallaro, a chief scientist at Sportvision, told Insider.
After three weeks of debate, Kusenko acknowledged that Blackbird could go slightly faster than the wind, but he maintained that it was for only short periods. If a gust of wind sped up the land yacht and then quickly died down, he said, it would appear that Blackbird was traveling faster than wind.
"The resolution of our bet was not as clean as I'd hoped," Muller said. "Kusenko coughed up the 10 grand, let's leave it at that."
A front view of the Blackbird vehicle and its tall column with propeller blades.
A front view of the Blackbird vehicle. Courtesy of Rick Cavallero
Cavallaro, too, wanted more acknowledgment of his vehicle's capabilities.
Kusenko "conceded on a technicality - that the vehicle moves marginally faster than the wind temporarily," Cavallaro said. "I offered him another $10,000 bet, because his technicality is entirely wrong, but I know I won't be hearing from him."
Muller's two videos have each garnered at least 6.8 million views and 41,000 comments, with many agreeing with Kusenko that it's impossible for Blackbird to go faster than the wind. Some viewers have even asked the YouTuber if he'd make follow-up wagers.
"It breaks a lot of people's brains," Muller said. "Clearly it got Kusenko too."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/yo ... 00405.html
Rob Waugh· Contributor
Tue, August 10, 2021
EVIA, GREECE - AUGUST 10: Firefighters try to extinguish fire in the island of Evia, Greece on August 10, 2021. Wildfire has destroyed hundreds of homes, thousands of hectares of forests and forced hundreds of people to flee in eight days on the Greek island of Evia.
Firefighters try to extinguish fire on the island of Evia, Greece, on 10 August, 2021.
"Heat domes" have been in the news after Greece experienced heat of up to 47C this month and record temperatures swept North America earlier this year.
Both the American and European heatwaves have been attributed to the phenomenon, which sees heat getting trapped in an area for days or even weeks without being moved by wind.
In a heat dome, the heat is trapped by a "lid" of high-pressure air.
With the heat unable to escape an area, more warm air heats up and rises, becoming compressed and trapping even more heat.
The dome stretches high into the atmosphere and becomes "locked" over an area.
It also dries the ground and can create the perfect conditions for fires.
According to the US NOAA weather service, “vast areas of sweltering heat get trapped under the high-pressure ‘dome’.
‘High-pressure circulation in the atmosphere acts like a dome or cap, trapping heat at the surface and favouring the formation of a heat wave.”
When a record-breaking heatwave roasted Canada earlier this summer, Armel Castellan, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, said: “We have experienced a ridge with low pressure sandwiched on either side.
"It’s really hard to move it. The jet stream isn’t moving it along. In that pattern we have essentially a heat dome.
"A pattern that is sticking to its guns where pollutants and heat keep adding to each other. It is compounding."
This month’s heatwave in Greece saw fires blocking out the sun and the hottest weather in 30 years.
The World Meteorological Association said climate change meant heatwaves were becoming both more frequent and more intense.
Extreme weather events that previously would have happened every 50 years could soon happen every four if temperatures rise 2C above pre-industrial levels, a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned this week.
The report is the first to quantify the likelihood of extreme events across a wide variety of scenarios.
Dr. Robert Rohde, lead scientist of Berkeley Earth, said: “What were once-in-50-year heat extremes are now occurring every 10 years.
“By a rise of 2C, those same extremes will occur every 3.5 years.”
The report found that (for example) once-in-a-decade heavy rain events are already 1.3 times more likely and 6.7% wetter, compared with the 50 years leading up to 1900 when human-driven warning began to occur.
Droughts that previously happened once a decade now happen every five or six years.
Xuebin Zhang, a climatologist with Environment Canada in Toronto, warned that as the world warms, such extreme weather events will not just become more frequent, they will become more severe.
Zhang said that the world should also expect more compound events, such as heatwaves and long-term droughts occurring simultaneously.
“We are not going to be hit just by one thing," Zhang said, "we are going to be hit by multiple things at the same time.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/what-is-heat ... 41697.html
Tue, August 10, 2021
EVIA, GREECE - AUGUST 10: Firefighters try to extinguish fire in the island of Evia, Greece on August 10, 2021. Wildfire has destroyed hundreds of homes, thousands of hectares of forests and forced hundreds of people to flee in eight days on the Greek island of Evia.
Firefighters try to extinguish fire on the island of Evia, Greece, on 10 August, 2021.
"Heat domes" have been in the news after Greece experienced heat of up to 47C this month and record temperatures swept North America earlier this year.
Both the American and European heatwaves have been attributed to the phenomenon, which sees heat getting trapped in an area for days or even weeks without being moved by wind.
In a heat dome, the heat is trapped by a "lid" of high-pressure air.
With the heat unable to escape an area, more warm air heats up and rises, becoming compressed and trapping even more heat.
The dome stretches high into the atmosphere and becomes "locked" over an area.
It also dries the ground and can create the perfect conditions for fires.
According to the US NOAA weather service, “vast areas of sweltering heat get trapped under the high-pressure ‘dome’.
‘High-pressure circulation in the atmosphere acts like a dome or cap, trapping heat at the surface and favouring the formation of a heat wave.”
When a record-breaking heatwave roasted Canada earlier this summer, Armel Castellan, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, said: “We have experienced a ridge with low pressure sandwiched on either side.
"It’s really hard to move it. The jet stream isn’t moving it along. In that pattern we have essentially a heat dome.
"A pattern that is sticking to its guns where pollutants and heat keep adding to each other. It is compounding."
This month’s heatwave in Greece saw fires blocking out the sun and the hottest weather in 30 years.
The World Meteorological Association said climate change meant heatwaves were becoming both more frequent and more intense.
Extreme weather events that previously would have happened every 50 years could soon happen every four if temperatures rise 2C above pre-industrial levels, a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned this week.
The report is the first to quantify the likelihood of extreme events across a wide variety of scenarios.
Dr. Robert Rohde, lead scientist of Berkeley Earth, said: “What were once-in-50-year heat extremes are now occurring every 10 years.
“By a rise of 2C, those same extremes will occur every 3.5 years.”
The report found that (for example) once-in-a-decade heavy rain events are already 1.3 times more likely and 6.7% wetter, compared with the 50 years leading up to 1900 when human-driven warning began to occur.
Droughts that previously happened once a decade now happen every five or six years.
Xuebin Zhang, a climatologist with Environment Canada in Toronto, warned that as the world warms, such extreme weather events will not just become more frequent, they will become more severe.
Zhang said that the world should also expect more compound events, such as heatwaves and long-term droughts occurring simultaneously.
“We are not going to be hit just by one thing," Zhang said, "we are going to be hit by multiple things at the same time.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/what-is-heat ... 41697.html
NASA to Study a $700 Quintillion ‘Goldmine’ Asteroid
Matthew Hart
Wed, August 11, 2021, 1:30 PM
If The Beatles taught us one thing it’s that all we need is love. A pretty close second thing we need, however, is enough money to make everyone in the world a billionaire many times over. Incredibly, something exists that could actually make that a reality: Psyche 16, a totally metal asteroid that Bloomberg says is worth $700 quintillion. Or at least $140 quintillion, as scientists have now confirmed the asteroid’s at least 20% metal.
Design TAXI picked up on the new look at Psyche 16, which comes as one of the latest steps toward actually visiting the precious space rock. NASA plans to send a probe to the asteroid in 2022, which would arrive in 2026. That’s a surprisingly short period of time considering Psyche 16 is hundreds of millions of miles from Earth. Although it will get a “gravity assist” from Mars.
A crisp animation of the $700 quintillion grayish blue asteroid, Psyche 16.
NASA
To better understand Psyche 16’s size, spin, shape, reflectivity, and roughness, researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array telescope (or ALMA) in Chile to image the asteroid thermally. They also used ALMA to study any polarized light bouncing off its surface. (Polarized light waves have vibrating electric charges that occur on a single plane versus a variety of planes. More on that here.)
A series of thermal images of Psyche 16, an asteroid worth $700 quintillion.
Katherine de Kleer, et al.
In a study published in The Planetary Science Journal, the researchers say the data shows Psyche 16 is at least 20% metal. And it may even have a much higher metal content. However, paradoxically, the researchers found Psyche 16 doesn’t emit the kind of polarized light a highly metallic body should. The researchers now think this must mean that metal-rich asteroids produce less polarized emissions than metal-poor ones do. It’s a direct contradiction of what they would’ve expected.
That scientific conundrum aside, this discovery obviously helps bolster excitement for the mission. (An overview of which is in the above video.) Although we shouldn’t all start counting our billies quite yet. The NASA probe only aims to collect more data from the asteroid. That includes measurements of its gravity and potential electromagnetic fields, as well as if it is indeed the core of a planet-sized object.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 07872.html
Matthew Hart
Wed, August 11, 2021, 1:30 PM
If The Beatles taught us one thing it’s that all we need is love. A pretty close second thing we need, however, is enough money to make everyone in the world a billionaire many times over. Incredibly, something exists that could actually make that a reality: Psyche 16, a totally metal asteroid that Bloomberg says is worth $700 quintillion. Or at least $140 quintillion, as scientists have now confirmed the asteroid’s at least 20% metal.
Design TAXI picked up on the new look at Psyche 16, which comes as one of the latest steps toward actually visiting the precious space rock. NASA plans to send a probe to the asteroid in 2022, which would arrive in 2026. That’s a surprisingly short period of time considering Psyche 16 is hundreds of millions of miles from Earth. Although it will get a “gravity assist” from Mars.
A crisp animation of the $700 quintillion grayish blue asteroid, Psyche 16.
NASA
To better understand Psyche 16’s size, spin, shape, reflectivity, and roughness, researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array telescope (or ALMA) in Chile to image the asteroid thermally. They also used ALMA to study any polarized light bouncing off its surface. (Polarized light waves have vibrating electric charges that occur on a single plane versus a variety of planes. More on that here.)
A series of thermal images of Psyche 16, an asteroid worth $700 quintillion.
Katherine de Kleer, et al.
In a study published in The Planetary Science Journal, the researchers say the data shows Psyche 16 is at least 20% metal. And it may even have a much higher metal content. However, paradoxically, the researchers found Psyche 16 doesn’t emit the kind of polarized light a highly metallic body should. The researchers now think this must mean that metal-rich asteroids produce less polarized emissions than metal-poor ones do. It’s a direct contradiction of what they would’ve expected.
That scientific conundrum aside, this discovery obviously helps bolster excitement for the mission. (An overview of which is in the above video.) Although we shouldn’t all start counting our billies quite yet. The NASA probe only aims to collect more data from the asteroid. That includes measurements of its gravity and potential electromagnetic fields, as well as if it is indeed the core of a planet-sized object.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 07872.html
Melting snow in Himalayas drives growth of green sea slime visible from space
Rob Waugh
Rob Waugh·Contributor
May 5, 2020
Melting snow in the Himalayas has led to enormous growth of a ‘green slime’ in the Arabian sea, swirls of which are now visible from space.
Research published in Nature’s Scientific Reports used NASA satellite imagery to track the growth of the planktonic organism Noctiluca scintillans in the Arabian sea.
It was unheard of 20 years ago, but the huge blooms have grown to such an extent that it has disrupted the food chain and could threaten fisheries which sustain 150 million people.
The millimeter-size planktonic organism has forced out the photosynthesising plankton that used to support life in the area.
Read more: A 1988 warning about climate change was mostly right
Joaquim Goes, from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said: “This is probably one of the most dramatic changes that we have seen that’s related to climate change.”
“We are seeing Noctiluca in Southeast Asia, off the coasts of Thailand and Vietnam, and as far south as the Seychelles, and everywhere it blooms it is becoming a problem. It also harms water quality and causes a lot of fish mortality.”
Normally, cold winter monsoon winds blowing from the Himalayas cool the surface of the oceans.
But with the shrinking of glaciers and snow cover in the Himalayas, the monsoon winds blowing offshore from land are warmer and more moist, meaning that Noctiluca blooms have flourished.
Noctiluca (also known as sea sparkle) doesn’t rely only on sunlight and nutrients; it can also survive by eating other microorganisms.
This dual mode of energy acquisition gives it a tremendous advantage to flourish and disrupt the classic food chain of the Arabian Sea.
Noctiluca blooms first appeared in the late 1990s.
In Oman, desalination plants, oil refineries and natural gas plants are now forced to scale down operations because they are choked by Noctiluca blooms and the jellyfish that swarm to feed on them.
The resulting pressure on the marine food supply and economic security may also have fuelled the rise in piracy in countries like Yemen and Somalia.
The study provides compelling new evidence of the cascading impacts of global warming on the Indian monsoons, with socio-economic implications for large populations of the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East.
“Most studies related to climate change and ocean biology are focused on the polar and temperate waters, and changes in the tropics are going largely unnoticed,” said Goes
https://www.yahoo.com/news/climate-chan ... 58393.html
Rob Waugh
Rob Waugh·Contributor
May 5, 2020
Melting snow in the Himalayas has led to enormous growth of a ‘green slime’ in the Arabian sea, swirls of which are now visible from space.
Research published in Nature’s Scientific Reports used NASA satellite imagery to track the growth of the planktonic organism Noctiluca scintillans in the Arabian sea.
It was unheard of 20 years ago, but the huge blooms have grown to such an extent that it has disrupted the food chain and could threaten fisheries which sustain 150 million people.
The millimeter-size planktonic organism has forced out the photosynthesising plankton that used to support life in the area.
Read more: A 1988 warning about climate change was mostly right
Joaquim Goes, from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said: “This is probably one of the most dramatic changes that we have seen that’s related to climate change.”
“We are seeing Noctiluca in Southeast Asia, off the coasts of Thailand and Vietnam, and as far south as the Seychelles, and everywhere it blooms it is becoming a problem. It also harms water quality and causes a lot of fish mortality.”
Normally, cold winter monsoon winds blowing from the Himalayas cool the surface of the oceans.
But with the shrinking of glaciers and snow cover in the Himalayas, the monsoon winds blowing offshore from land are warmer and more moist, meaning that Noctiluca blooms have flourished.
Noctiluca (also known as sea sparkle) doesn’t rely only on sunlight and nutrients; it can also survive by eating other microorganisms.
This dual mode of energy acquisition gives it a tremendous advantage to flourish and disrupt the classic food chain of the Arabian Sea.
Noctiluca blooms first appeared in the late 1990s.
In Oman, desalination plants, oil refineries and natural gas plants are now forced to scale down operations because they are choked by Noctiluca blooms and the jellyfish that swarm to feed on them.
The resulting pressure on the marine food supply and economic security may also have fuelled the rise in piracy in countries like Yemen and Somalia.
The study provides compelling new evidence of the cascading impacts of global warming on the Indian monsoons, with socio-economic implications for large populations of the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East.
“Most studies related to climate change and ocean biology are focused on the polar and temperate waters, and changes in the tropics are going largely unnoticed,” said Goes
https://www.yahoo.com/news/climate-chan ... 58393.html
CNN
More than 230 journals warn 1.5°C of global warming could be 'catastrophic' for health
Angela Dewan
Sun, September 5, 2021, 7:10 PM
Human health is already being harmed by the climate crisis, and the impacts could become catastrophic and irreversible unless governments do much more to address global warming, the editors of more than 230 medical journals said in a joint editorial Monday.
The editorial points to established links between the climate crisis and a slew of adverse health impacts over the past 20 years: Among them are an increase in heat deaths, dehydration and kidney function loss, skin cancer, tropical infections, mental health issues, pregnancy complications, allergies, and heart and lung disease, and deaths associated with them.
“Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world, a state of affairs health professionals have been bringing attention to for decades,” the editorial reads.
It warned that an increase of global average temperatures of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and the loss of biodiversity risked “catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.” Governments around the world are laying out plans to try to contain global warming to 1.5°C to stave off worsening impacts of climate change, a target that the editorial said did not go far enough to protect public health. Warming is already at around 1.2°C.
“Despite the world’s necessary preoccupation with Covid-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions,” the authors wrote, calling on governments to respond to the climate crisis with the same spirit of “unprecedented funding” dedicated to the pandemic.
The UK-based BMJ, one of the journals that published the report, said that “never before” had so many health publications come together to make the same statement, “reflecting the severity of the climate change emergency now facing the world.”
The authors also warned that the aim to reach net zero – where the world emits no more greenhouse gases than it removes from the atmosphere – was relying on unproven technology to take gases like carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. They added it was more likely that global warming would surpass 2°C, a threshold that climate scientists say would bring catastrophic extreme weather events, among other impacts to human, animal and plant life.
Simply urging the world and energy industry to transition from fossil fuels to renewables falls short of the action needed to meet the challenge of the climate crisis, they said.
The editorial was published as a call to action ahead of a several meetings between global leaders to discuss and negotiate action on the climate crisis, including the UN General Assembly next week, a biodiversity conference in Kunming, China, in October and crucial climate talks in the Scottish city of Glasgow in November.
Among key climate issues expected to be addressed at these events are the 1.5°C target, putting an end date on the use of coal and protecting biodiversity, both on land and sea.
“The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5°C and to restore nature. Urgent, society-wide changes must be made and will lead to a fairer and healthier world,” the authors wrote.
“We, as editors of health journals, call for governments and other leaders to act, marking 2021 as the year that the world finally changes course.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/mor ... 24992.html
More than 230 journals warn 1.5°C of global warming could be 'catastrophic' for health
Angela Dewan
Sun, September 5, 2021, 7:10 PM
Human health is already being harmed by the climate crisis, and the impacts could become catastrophic and irreversible unless governments do much more to address global warming, the editors of more than 230 medical journals said in a joint editorial Monday.
The editorial points to established links between the climate crisis and a slew of adverse health impacts over the past 20 years: Among them are an increase in heat deaths, dehydration and kidney function loss, skin cancer, tropical infections, mental health issues, pregnancy complications, allergies, and heart and lung disease, and deaths associated with them.
“Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world, a state of affairs health professionals have been bringing attention to for decades,” the editorial reads.
It warned that an increase of global average temperatures of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and the loss of biodiversity risked “catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.” Governments around the world are laying out plans to try to contain global warming to 1.5°C to stave off worsening impacts of climate change, a target that the editorial said did not go far enough to protect public health. Warming is already at around 1.2°C.
“Despite the world’s necessary preoccupation with Covid-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions,” the authors wrote, calling on governments to respond to the climate crisis with the same spirit of “unprecedented funding” dedicated to the pandemic.
The UK-based BMJ, one of the journals that published the report, said that “never before” had so many health publications come together to make the same statement, “reflecting the severity of the climate change emergency now facing the world.”
The authors also warned that the aim to reach net zero – where the world emits no more greenhouse gases than it removes from the atmosphere – was relying on unproven technology to take gases like carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. They added it was more likely that global warming would surpass 2°C, a threshold that climate scientists say would bring catastrophic extreme weather events, among other impacts to human, animal and plant life.
Simply urging the world and energy industry to transition from fossil fuels to renewables falls short of the action needed to meet the challenge of the climate crisis, they said.
The editorial was published as a call to action ahead of a several meetings between global leaders to discuss and negotiate action on the climate crisis, including the UN General Assembly next week, a biodiversity conference in Kunming, China, in October and crucial climate talks in the Scottish city of Glasgow in November.
Among key climate issues expected to be addressed at these events are the 1.5°C target, putting an end date on the use of coal and protecting biodiversity, both on land and sea.
“The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5°C and to restore nature. Urgent, society-wide changes must be made and will lead to a fairer and healthier world,” the authors wrote.
“We, as editors of health journals, call for governments and other leaders to act, marking 2021 as the year that the world finally changes course.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/mor ... 24992.html
First Mars Rocks Reveal Planet Was Once Potentially Habitable
Matthew Hart
Mon, September 13, 2021, 2:09 PM
As the possibility of humans setting foot on Mars draws closer, NASA’s rovers continue to send new, tantalizing details of the Red Planet. For the rover’s latest discovery, the space agency presents the first rocks from Mars the Perseverance rover has ever collected. Scientists say the extraterrestrial stones hint at a history of a potentially habitable world.
A rich, colorful look at the rust-colored Martian surface and the rocks of Mars.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Engadget reported on the announcement, which stands as the latest breakthrough Perseverance has made. The rover has already beamed back the first-ever audio recordings of the planet. The rover’s also dropped off a miniature helicopter that can fly in Mars’ ultra-thin atmosphere.
Project scientists say Perseverance’s first-ever rock sample from Mars is basaltic in composition. It may be the product of lava flows. This means the rocks may have formed from the rapid cooling of low-viscosity lava. A long-dead volcano could be the culprit. More pertinent to the possibility of a formerly habitable world, however, is the presence of salt minerals in the rocks; signs that groundwater may have once flowed through them. Or perhaps collected on top of them and then evaporated away, leaving the salt behind.
It’s hard for scientists to say, but it seems their best guess for the origin of the water is a long-lost lake. NASA’s suspected for some time that Jezero Crater—the 750-mile-wide crater Perseverance landed inside of—was once home to a lake. Although scientists weren’t sure if the lake survived for 50 years or a million. This new evidence, however, points to a long-standing body of water.
“It looks like [Perseverance’s] first rocks reveal a potentially habitable sustained environment,” project scientist Ken Farley said in a NASA blog post. “It’s a big deal that the water was there a long time.”
Indeed, NASA says that scientists now “feel more certain” that Jezero Crater was potentially home to a lake—or flowing groundwater—for long enough to allow microscopic life to bloom. Again, a tantalizing tidbit that makes Mars seem all the riper for exploration. Because seeing a bit of Martian rock in one of Perseverance’s sample tubes (above) is cool and all, but touching regolith for real would really “wet” humanity’s appetite for space exploration.
The post First Mars Rocks Reveal Planet Was Once Potentially Habitable appeared first on Nerdist.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 55347.html
Matthew Hart
Mon, September 13, 2021, 2:09 PM
As the possibility of humans setting foot on Mars draws closer, NASA’s rovers continue to send new, tantalizing details of the Red Planet. For the rover’s latest discovery, the space agency presents the first rocks from Mars the Perseverance rover has ever collected. Scientists say the extraterrestrial stones hint at a history of a potentially habitable world.
A rich, colorful look at the rust-colored Martian surface and the rocks of Mars.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Engadget reported on the announcement, which stands as the latest breakthrough Perseverance has made. The rover has already beamed back the first-ever audio recordings of the planet. The rover’s also dropped off a miniature helicopter that can fly in Mars’ ultra-thin atmosphere.
Project scientists say Perseverance’s first-ever rock sample from Mars is basaltic in composition. It may be the product of lava flows. This means the rocks may have formed from the rapid cooling of low-viscosity lava. A long-dead volcano could be the culprit. More pertinent to the possibility of a formerly habitable world, however, is the presence of salt minerals in the rocks; signs that groundwater may have once flowed through them. Or perhaps collected on top of them and then evaporated away, leaving the salt behind.
It’s hard for scientists to say, but it seems their best guess for the origin of the water is a long-lost lake. NASA’s suspected for some time that Jezero Crater—the 750-mile-wide crater Perseverance landed inside of—was once home to a lake. Although scientists weren’t sure if the lake survived for 50 years or a million. This new evidence, however, points to a long-standing body of water.
“It looks like [Perseverance’s] first rocks reveal a potentially habitable sustained environment,” project scientist Ken Farley said in a NASA blog post. “It’s a big deal that the water was there a long time.”
Indeed, NASA says that scientists now “feel more certain” that Jezero Crater was potentially home to a lake—or flowing groundwater—for long enough to allow microscopic life to bloom. Again, a tantalizing tidbit that makes Mars seem all the riper for exploration. Because seeing a bit of Martian rock in one of Perseverance’s sample tubes (above) is cool and all, but touching regolith for real would really “wet” humanity’s appetite for space exploration.
The post First Mars Rocks Reveal Planet Was Once Potentially Habitable appeared first on Nerdist.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 55347.html
Weird Dreams Train Our Brains to Be Better Learners
For many of us over the last year and more, our waking experience has, you might say, lost a bit of its variety. We spend more time with the same people, in our homes, and go to fewer places. Our stimuli these days, in other words, aren’t very stimulating. Too much day-to-day routine, too much familiarity, too much predictability. At the same time, our dreams have gotten more bizarre. More transformations, more unrealistic narratives. As a cognitive scientist who studies dreaming and the imagination, this intrigued me. Why might this be? Could the strangeness serve some purpose?
Maybe our brains are serving up weird dreams to, in a way, fight the tide of monotony. To break up bland regimented experiences with novelty. This has an adaptive logic: Animals that model patterns in their environment in too stringent a manner sacrifice the ability to generalize, to make sense of new experiences, to learn. AI researchers call this “overfitting,” fitting too well to a given dataset. A face-recognition algorithm, for example, trained too long on a dataset of pictures might start identifying individuals based on trees and other objects in the background. This is overfitting the data. One way to look at it is that, rather than learning the general rules that it should be learning—the various contours of the face regardless of expression or background information—it simply memorizes its experiences in the training set. Could it be that our minds are working harder, churning out stranger dreams, to stave off overfitting that might otherwise result from the learning we do about the world every day?
Yet how often do you dream of being at a computer?
Erik Hoel, a Tufts University neuroscientist and author of The Revelations, a cerebral novel about consciousness (excerpted in Nautilus), thinks it’s plausible. He recently published a paper, “The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization,” laying out his reasoning. “Mammals are learning all the time. There’s no shut-off switch,” Hoel told me. “So it becomes very natural to assume that mammals would face the problem of overlearning, or learning too well, and would need to combat that with some sort of cognitive homeostasis. And that’s the overfitted brain hypothesis: that there is homeostasis going on wherein the effects of the learning of the organism is constantly trending in one direction, and biology needs to fight it to bring it back to a more optimal setpoint.”
What’s distinctive about Hoel’s idea in the field of dream research is that it provides not only a cause of the weirdness of dreams, but a purpose, too. Other accounts of dreaming don’t really address why dreams get weird, or just write them off as a kind of by-product of other processes. They get away with this by noting that truly weird dreams are rare: It is easy to overestimate how weird our dreams really are. Although we tend to remember better the weird dreams, careful studies show that around 80 percent of our dreams reflect normal activity, and can be downright boring.
The “continuity hypothesis,” emphasizing this, suggests that dreams are just replays of plausible versions of waking life. To its credit, most of our dreams, though not most of the dreams we remember, fall into this category. But the continuity hypothesis doesn’t explain why we dream more about some things than others. For example, many if not most of us spend an enormous amount of time in front of screens—working, playing, watching movies, reading. Yet how often do you dream of being at a computer? The continuity hypothesis would suggest that the proportion of activities in dreams would reflect their proportions in waking life, and this clearly doesn’t happen.
Another set of theories holds that dreams are there to help you practice for real-world events. These theories are generally supported by the findings that sleep, and dreams in particular, seem to be important for learning and memory. Antti Revonsuo, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Skövde, in Sweden, came up with two theories of this nature. The threat simulation theory accounts for why 70 percent of our dreams are distressing. It holds that the function of dreams is to practice for dangerous situations. Later he broadened this to suggest that dreams are for practicing social situations in general. These learning theories also provide an explanation for why we believe that what we see in dreams is really happening: If we didn’t, we might not take them seriously, and our ability to learn from them would be diminished.1
Another theory accounts for the weirdness as being a side-effect of the brain activity. The “random activation theory” suggests that dreams are our forebrains trying to make sense of the random activity sent to it by the chaotic and meaningless information coming from the back of the brain during sleep. On this view, the weirdness has no function. On the other hand, the brain stem’s random activity might not be meaningless. McGill University neuroscientist Barbara Jones has noted that this part of the brain is used for programmed movements, like having sex and running, and these activities are frequently represented in dreams.
Hoel faces the weirdness of dreams head on. His hypothesis doesn’t deal with it indirectly but gives the weirdness significance. It helps keep the brain from doing something that plagues machine-learning researchers: overfitting. Stopping learning is one way to deal with overfitting—paying too much attention to insignificant details of a training set. But there are others, and many of the main ways to combat it introduce noise, often with distorted versions of the input. This, in effect, makes the “deep learning” neural network not so sure about the importance of the idiosyncrasies of the training set, and more likely to focus on generalities that will end up working better in the real world. So, for Hoel, dreams are weird because they’re serving the same function: They provide distorted input to keep the brain from overfitting to the “training set” of its waking experiences.
Interestingly, overfitting has been shown to happen in people in laboratory experiments—and sleep removes the overfitting. In short, dreams are weird because they need to be. If they were too similar to waking life they would exacerbate overfitting, not eliminate it. Even the dreams that are realistic usually don’t exactly match the episodes that happened to us—they’re different takes on the activities we do in life.
Like other learning accounts of dreaming, Hoel’s hypothesis holds that sleep is the perfect time to do “offline” learning. Experiencing warped or distorted inputs would be distracting and dangerous if they happened while we were awake. And perhaps the function of forgetting so many of our dreams is so that we don’t mistake them for things that actually happened. The mind wants to train its neural net parameters, not create new episodic memories for us to confuse with reality.
I asked Hoel whether we might look to machine learning to get hypotheses about how weird dreams would optimally be in a human being. “Possibly, but I would very much like to go the other way,” he said. “Maybe there’s something from neuroscience that deep learning should pay attention to. You want incoming data that is different enough that it is out of distribution in the classic sense, but it is not so different or wild that you don’t know what to do with it.”
This all suggests that there’s some optimal level of weirdness that dreams should have. Unfortunately, weirdness is not an easy thing to measure. “It’s almost like art or literature,” Hoel said. “A good poem is not completely nonsense, but also not just I saw the flower / the flower was blue. It’s occupying some critical space where things morph and change with the use of metaphor, but not so much so that it’s totally unrecognizable or alien.” He went on, “Maybe that Lynchian distance is precisely what helps big, complex minds the most when it comes to these serial problems of overlearning and over-memorization and overfitting.”
Neural networks were inspired by brain architecture, but since the deep-learning movement, these AIs have mostly been used to simply create smarter machines, not to model and understand human thought. But more and more, findings in deep learning are inspiring new theories of how our brains work. Neural networks need to “dream” of weird, senseless examples to learn well.
Maybe we do, too.
Jim Davies is a professor at the Department of Cognitive Science at Carleton University. He is co-host of the award-winning podcast Minding the Brain. His new book is Being the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are: The Science of a Better You.
Footnote
1. A brain explanation for why we accept the reality of our dreams is that our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is (relatively) deactivated during dreaming. This part of the brain is used, in part, to detect anomalies in the world. This theory is strengthened by the fact that the DLPFC is more active during lucid dreaming, which is characterized by an awareness of being in a dream.
https://nautil.us/blog/weird-dreams-tra ... r-learners
For many of us over the last year and more, our waking experience has, you might say, lost a bit of its variety. We spend more time with the same people, in our homes, and go to fewer places. Our stimuli these days, in other words, aren’t very stimulating. Too much day-to-day routine, too much familiarity, too much predictability. At the same time, our dreams have gotten more bizarre. More transformations, more unrealistic narratives. As a cognitive scientist who studies dreaming and the imagination, this intrigued me. Why might this be? Could the strangeness serve some purpose?
Maybe our brains are serving up weird dreams to, in a way, fight the tide of monotony. To break up bland regimented experiences with novelty. This has an adaptive logic: Animals that model patterns in their environment in too stringent a manner sacrifice the ability to generalize, to make sense of new experiences, to learn. AI researchers call this “overfitting,” fitting too well to a given dataset. A face-recognition algorithm, for example, trained too long on a dataset of pictures might start identifying individuals based on trees and other objects in the background. This is overfitting the data. One way to look at it is that, rather than learning the general rules that it should be learning—the various contours of the face regardless of expression or background information—it simply memorizes its experiences in the training set. Could it be that our minds are working harder, churning out stranger dreams, to stave off overfitting that might otherwise result from the learning we do about the world every day?
Yet how often do you dream of being at a computer?
Erik Hoel, a Tufts University neuroscientist and author of The Revelations, a cerebral novel about consciousness (excerpted in Nautilus), thinks it’s plausible. He recently published a paper, “The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization,” laying out his reasoning. “Mammals are learning all the time. There’s no shut-off switch,” Hoel told me. “So it becomes very natural to assume that mammals would face the problem of overlearning, or learning too well, and would need to combat that with some sort of cognitive homeostasis. And that’s the overfitted brain hypothesis: that there is homeostasis going on wherein the effects of the learning of the organism is constantly trending in one direction, and biology needs to fight it to bring it back to a more optimal setpoint.”
What’s distinctive about Hoel’s idea in the field of dream research is that it provides not only a cause of the weirdness of dreams, but a purpose, too. Other accounts of dreaming don’t really address why dreams get weird, or just write them off as a kind of by-product of other processes. They get away with this by noting that truly weird dreams are rare: It is easy to overestimate how weird our dreams really are. Although we tend to remember better the weird dreams, careful studies show that around 80 percent of our dreams reflect normal activity, and can be downright boring.
The “continuity hypothesis,” emphasizing this, suggests that dreams are just replays of plausible versions of waking life. To its credit, most of our dreams, though not most of the dreams we remember, fall into this category. But the continuity hypothesis doesn’t explain why we dream more about some things than others. For example, many if not most of us spend an enormous amount of time in front of screens—working, playing, watching movies, reading. Yet how often do you dream of being at a computer? The continuity hypothesis would suggest that the proportion of activities in dreams would reflect their proportions in waking life, and this clearly doesn’t happen.
Another set of theories holds that dreams are there to help you practice for real-world events. These theories are generally supported by the findings that sleep, and dreams in particular, seem to be important for learning and memory. Antti Revonsuo, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Skövde, in Sweden, came up with two theories of this nature. The threat simulation theory accounts for why 70 percent of our dreams are distressing. It holds that the function of dreams is to practice for dangerous situations. Later he broadened this to suggest that dreams are for practicing social situations in general. These learning theories also provide an explanation for why we believe that what we see in dreams is really happening: If we didn’t, we might not take them seriously, and our ability to learn from them would be diminished.1
Another theory accounts for the weirdness as being a side-effect of the brain activity. The “random activation theory” suggests that dreams are our forebrains trying to make sense of the random activity sent to it by the chaotic and meaningless information coming from the back of the brain during sleep. On this view, the weirdness has no function. On the other hand, the brain stem’s random activity might not be meaningless. McGill University neuroscientist Barbara Jones has noted that this part of the brain is used for programmed movements, like having sex and running, and these activities are frequently represented in dreams.
Hoel faces the weirdness of dreams head on. His hypothesis doesn’t deal with it indirectly but gives the weirdness significance. It helps keep the brain from doing something that plagues machine-learning researchers: overfitting. Stopping learning is one way to deal with overfitting—paying too much attention to insignificant details of a training set. But there are others, and many of the main ways to combat it introduce noise, often with distorted versions of the input. This, in effect, makes the “deep learning” neural network not so sure about the importance of the idiosyncrasies of the training set, and more likely to focus on generalities that will end up working better in the real world. So, for Hoel, dreams are weird because they’re serving the same function: They provide distorted input to keep the brain from overfitting to the “training set” of its waking experiences.
Interestingly, overfitting has been shown to happen in people in laboratory experiments—and sleep removes the overfitting. In short, dreams are weird because they need to be. If they were too similar to waking life they would exacerbate overfitting, not eliminate it. Even the dreams that are realistic usually don’t exactly match the episodes that happened to us—they’re different takes on the activities we do in life.
Like other learning accounts of dreaming, Hoel’s hypothesis holds that sleep is the perfect time to do “offline” learning. Experiencing warped or distorted inputs would be distracting and dangerous if they happened while we were awake. And perhaps the function of forgetting so many of our dreams is so that we don’t mistake them for things that actually happened. The mind wants to train its neural net parameters, not create new episodic memories for us to confuse with reality.
I asked Hoel whether we might look to machine learning to get hypotheses about how weird dreams would optimally be in a human being. “Possibly, but I would very much like to go the other way,” he said. “Maybe there’s something from neuroscience that deep learning should pay attention to. You want incoming data that is different enough that it is out of distribution in the classic sense, but it is not so different or wild that you don’t know what to do with it.”
This all suggests that there’s some optimal level of weirdness that dreams should have. Unfortunately, weirdness is not an easy thing to measure. “It’s almost like art or literature,” Hoel said. “A good poem is not completely nonsense, but also not just I saw the flower / the flower was blue. It’s occupying some critical space where things morph and change with the use of metaphor, but not so much so that it’s totally unrecognizable or alien.” He went on, “Maybe that Lynchian distance is precisely what helps big, complex minds the most when it comes to these serial problems of overlearning and over-memorization and overfitting.”
Neural networks were inspired by brain architecture, but since the deep-learning movement, these AIs have mostly been used to simply create smarter machines, not to model and understand human thought. But more and more, findings in deep learning are inspiring new theories of how our brains work. Neural networks need to “dream” of weird, senseless examples to learn well.
Maybe we do, too.
Jim Davies is a professor at the Department of Cognitive Science at Carleton University. He is co-host of the award-winning podcast Minding the Brain. His new book is Being the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are: The Science of a Better You.
Footnote
1. A brain explanation for why we accept the reality of our dreams is that our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is (relatively) deactivated during dreaming. This part of the brain is used, in part, to detect anomalies in the world. This theory is strengthened by the fact that the DLPFC is more active during lucid dreaming, which is characterized by an awareness of being in a dream.
https://nautil.us/blog/weird-dreams-tra ... r-learners
The Hubble Telescope Checks In With the Most Distant Planets
The spacecraft’s farseeing eye once again sets its gaze on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows on Jupiter. All you need is the keen eyesight of the Hubble Space Telescope for a close-up look at the candy-colored ribbons of clouds and storms on the face of the solar system’s largest planet.
Every year the Hubble is deployed to make a visual “grand tour” of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. NASA calls this the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy program, and it lets planetary scientists and astronomers on Earth see what’s changed and what hasn’t in something like a cosmic weather report.
On Thursday, NASA released photos from this year’s grand tour. The gallery of portraits of the planets with all their brisk stripes, ethereal rings, giant storms and raging winds bears witness to the endless ability of nature to surprise and charm us. The results, NASA says, will help scientists understand the dynamics of huge gas giant planets both in our own solar system and around other stars, as well as provide insights into how Earth’s atmosphere works.
And the planets are pretty to look at, too.
The most prominent feature among Jupiter’s cloud tops is the Great Red Spot, an anticyclone bigger than Earth that has been swirling for more than 150 years at speeds of some 400 miles per hour. The new observations show that the winds at the center of the storm are continuing to slow, while the winds on the outer edges are speeding up. The spot is slowly changing its shape into a circle from an oval, and a series of new storms have formed to its south.
In the northern hemisphere of Saturn, it was early autumn when Hubble took this year’s look at the ringed planet. A mysterious six-sided hurricane has reappeared around the planet’s north pole. The storm, big enough to swallow four Earths, was first spotted by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. Last year it was hard to see but this year it has reappeared.
Farther out, it’s springtime on Uranus, which goes around the sun tilted on its side relative to the other planets. This means that its north polar region is aimed right at the sun. As a result, the planet’s northern latitudes are being bathed in ultraviolet light from the sun and are glowing like a light bulb. The researchers suspect that the brightening results from changes in the concentration of methane gas, a major component of Uranus’s atmosphere, and smog, as well as wind patterns around the pole.
Neptune beckons with the seductive deep blue of the ocean. But its color comes from methane, not water. The solar system’s eighth planet is also prone to storms, high-pressure regions that resemble dark blurs or bruises on its surface. They were discovered in 1989 when Voyager 2 went past Neptune, but they weren’t seen again until a few years later when Hubble took up its job as cosmic sentry in the 1990s.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/scie ... iversified
The spacecraft’s farseeing eye once again sets its gaze on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows on Jupiter. All you need is the keen eyesight of the Hubble Space Telescope for a close-up look at the candy-colored ribbons of clouds and storms on the face of the solar system’s largest planet.
Every year the Hubble is deployed to make a visual “grand tour” of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. NASA calls this the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy program, and it lets planetary scientists and astronomers on Earth see what’s changed and what hasn’t in something like a cosmic weather report.
On Thursday, NASA released photos from this year’s grand tour. The gallery of portraits of the planets with all their brisk stripes, ethereal rings, giant storms and raging winds bears witness to the endless ability of nature to surprise and charm us. The results, NASA says, will help scientists understand the dynamics of huge gas giant planets both in our own solar system and around other stars, as well as provide insights into how Earth’s atmosphere works.
And the planets are pretty to look at, too.
The most prominent feature among Jupiter’s cloud tops is the Great Red Spot, an anticyclone bigger than Earth that has been swirling for more than 150 years at speeds of some 400 miles per hour. The new observations show that the winds at the center of the storm are continuing to slow, while the winds on the outer edges are speeding up. The spot is slowly changing its shape into a circle from an oval, and a series of new storms have formed to its south.
In the northern hemisphere of Saturn, it was early autumn when Hubble took this year’s look at the ringed planet. A mysterious six-sided hurricane has reappeared around the planet’s north pole. The storm, big enough to swallow four Earths, was first spotted by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. Last year it was hard to see but this year it has reappeared.
Farther out, it’s springtime on Uranus, which goes around the sun tilted on its side relative to the other planets. This means that its north polar region is aimed right at the sun. As a result, the planet’s northern latitudes are being bathed in ultraviolet light from the sun and are glowing like a light bulb. The researchers suspect that the brightening results from changes in the concentration of methane gas, a major component of Uranus’s atmosphere, and smog, as well as wind patterns around the pole.
Neptune beckons with the seductive deep blue of the ocean. But its color comes from methane, not water. The solar system’s eighth planet is also prone to storms, high-pressure regions that resemble dark blurs or bruises on its surface. They were discovered in 1989 when Voyager 2 went past Neptune, but they weren’t seen again until a few years later when Hubble took up its job as cosmic sentry in the 1990s.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/scie ... iversified
How Do You Tell the World That Doomsday Has Arrived?
A new film about a killer comet revives memories of a nail-biting night in The Times newsroom two decades ago.
One of the thus-far theoretical duties of the astronomer is to inform the public that something very big and horrible is about to happen: The sun will soon explode, a black hole has just wandered into Earth’s path, hostile aliens have amassed an armada right behind the moon.
In the new Netflix film “Don’t Look Up,” a pair of astronomers, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, assume this responsibility when they discover that a “planet-killing” comet is headed straight for Earth and must spread the news.
It doesn’t go well. The president of the United States, played by Meryl Streep, is more concerned with her poll numbers. Television talk show hosts ridicule the scientists. Rich oligarchs want to exploit the comet’s minerals. “Don’t Look Up” may be the most cinematic fun anyone has had with the End of the World since Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic black comedy, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”
Watching it brought back my own experience reporting Really Bad news. In March of 1998, I was the new deputy science editor of The Times, and my doomsday audience was small but elite: The Times’s top editors. I had been on the job for only a month. Nobody really knew me. My direct boss, the science editor, had taken the week off, leaving me in charge.
And so, late in the afternoon on March 11, I walked into the 4:30 news meeting where editors pitch stories for the next day’s front page and announced that we had a late-breaking story by the distinguished reporter Malcolm Browne. “It’s a pretty good story,” I said. “It’s about the end of the world.”
The source was Brian Marsden, director of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, which is the International Astronomical Union’s clearinghouse for cosmic discoveries, as well as its Minor Planet Center, which is responsible for keeping track of comets and asteroids. He had just calculated that a recently discovered asteroid, a mile-wide rock named 1997 XF11 (now asteroid 35396), would pass within 30,000 miles of Earth on Oct. 26, 2028 — and had a small but real chance of hitting our planet.
“In more than 40 years of computing orbits, I had never seen anything like that before,” Dr. Marsden later said. He felt he had a duty to share this with the world in an I.A.U. Circular.
The front-page meeting dissolved into a purposeful pandemonium. I spent the rest of the night answering questions from newsroom colleagues who wanted to know whether they should continue to pay their mortgages, and responding to queries and suggestions from the top editors. Astronomers sent pictures of the asteroid, a fuzzy dot in the darkness. I was having an adrenaline-fueled crash course in the scrutiny a front-page story receives in the newsroom before it can be published.
I didn’t want to go home that night but eventually did, in a nervous fritter. The next morning it was already all over. Pictures of the asteroid from several years earlier had turned up overnight, and Dr. Marsden had recalculated the orbit and found that 1997 XF11 would miss the Earth by 600,000 miles. That was still close by cosmic standards, but safe for civilization.
In the following days, Dr. Marsden was publicly scolded by his colleagues and the media as a “Chicken Little” who had made “cockamamie calculations” without consulting other astronomers who already knew that the asteroid posed no risk. NASA told the astronomers to get their act together before blindsiding the agency and the public with news of an apocalypse.
Dr. Marsden apologized for generating such a scare, but noted that he had helped raise awareness on the danger of asteroid strikes and extinction.
“Much as the incident was bad for my reputation, we needed a scare like that to bring attention to this problem,” he later wrote in The Boston Globe. “I also believe that for us not to make the announcement as we did would have led to condemnation that science was being stripped of its essential openness,” he said.
I felt bad for Dr. Marsden, a wry, cherubic presence I had known for 20 years of reporting on astronomy. (He died in 2010.) And I felt bad for myself. How often do you get to cover the possible end of the world after only a month on the job? The next day, when The New York Post ran the headline “Kiss Your Asteroid Goodbye!,” I took it personally.
But the incident was indeed a kind of turning point, according to Amy Mainzer, an asteroid expert at the University of Arizona who served as a scientific consultant on “Don’t Look Up.”
In 2005, Congress ordered NASA to find and begin tracking at least 90 percent of all asteroids larger than 500 feet wide or so that come near Earth. (They neglected to provide much money to pay for the search until years later.) The word was out that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery.
NASA now spends some $150 million a year on the endeavor. “We’ve come a long way since 1997 XF11,” said Donald Yeomans, a comet expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena who criticized Dr. Marsden back in 1998.
These days, computers do the work of sorting asteroids and comets, automatically calculating orbits from new observations, comparing them with known objects, scoring them for how dangerous they are and sending out the results to astronomers. Anything that comes within five million miles of Earth is considered a Potentially Hazardous Object, or PHO.
“We didn’t have all that back then,” Dr. Mainzer said. “We’ve learned a lot as a community.”
“Don’t Look Up,” directed and co-written by Adam McKay, arrives on Friday — incidentally, less than three weeks after NASA launched a mission to see whether asteroids could be diverted from their trajectories. But the film is less about asteroids than about the tendency of humans to dismiss bad news from science and to embrace misinformation. It was conceived as an allegory about the failure to act on climate change. “A lot of people don’t want to hear it,” Dr. Mainzer said. “As a scientist, this is terrifying.”
However, the film was shot, very carefully, during the pandemic, and the parallels to the ongoing health crisis are hard to miss.
“Scientists don’t possess the power to effect change,” Dr. Mainzer said. “How do we get people to act on scientific information?” Should they “work within the system,” she asked, even if it means they have to cope with purveyors of misinformation?
Humor helps, Dr. Mainzer added: “We’re saying it doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t have to go down this path.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/scie ... 778d3e6de3
A new film about a killer comet revives memories of a nail-biting night in The Times newsroom two decades ago.
One of the thus-far theoretical duties of the astronomer is to inform the public that something very big and horrible is about to happen: The sun will soon explode, a black hole has just wandered into Earth’s path, hostile aliens have amassed an armada right behind the moon.
In the new Netflix film “Don’t Look Up,” a pair of astronomers, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, assume this responsibility when they discover that a “planet-killing” comet is headed straight for Earth and must spread the news.
It doesn’t go well. The president of the United States, played by Meryl Streep, is more concerned with her poll numbers. Television talk show hosts ridicule the scientists. Rich oligarchs want to exploit the comet’s minerals. “Don’t Look Up” may be the most cinematic fun anyone has had with the End of the World since Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic black comedy, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”
Watching it brought back my own experience reporting Really Bad news. In March of 1998, I was the new deputy science editor of The Times, and my doomsday audience was small but elite: The Times’s top editors. I had been on the job for only a month. Nobody really knew me. My direct boss, the science editor, had taken the week off, leaving me in charge.
And so, late in the afternoon on March 11, I walked into the 4:30 news meeting where editors pitch stories for the next day’s front page and announced that we had a late-breaking story by the distinguished reporter Malcolm Browne. “It’s a pretty good story,” I said. “It’s about the end of the world.”
The source was Brian Marsden, director of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, which is the International Astronomical Union’s clearinghouse for cosmic discoveries, as well as its Minor Planet Center, which is responsible for keeping track of comets and asteroids. He had just calculated that a recently discovered asteroid, a mile-wide rock named 1997 XF11 (now asteroid 35396), would pass within 30,000 miles of Earth on Oct. 26, 2028 — and had a small but real chance of hitting our planet.
“In more than 40 years of computing orbits, I had never seen anything like that before,” Dr. Marsden later said. He felt he had a duty to share this with the world in an I.A.U. Circular.
The front-page meeting dissolved into a purposeful pandemonium. I spent the rest of the night answering questions from newsroom colleagues who wanted to know whether they should continue to pay their mortgages, and responding to queries and suggestions from the top editors. Astronomers sent pictures of the asteroid, a fuzzy dot in the darkness. I was having an adrenaline-fueled crash course in the scrutiny a front-page story receives in the newsroom before it can be published.
I didn’t want to go home that night but eventually did, in a nervous fritter. The next morning it was already all over. Pictures of the asteroid from several years earlier had turned up overnight, and Dr. Marsden had recalculated the orbit and found that 1997 XF11 would miss the Earth by 600,000 miles. That was still close by cosmic standards, but safe for civilization.
In the following days, Dr. Marsden was publicly scolded by his colleagues and the media as a “Chicken Little” who had made “cockamamie calculations” without consulting other astronomers who already knew that the asteroid posed no risk. NASA told the astronomers to get their act together before blindsiding the agency and the public with news of an apocalypse.
Dr. Marsden apologized for generating such a scare, but noted that he had helped raise awareness on the danger of asteroid strikes and extinction.
“Much as the incident was bad for my reputation, we needed a scare like that to bring attention to this problem,” he later wrote in The Boston Globe. “I also believe that for us not to make the announcement as we did would have led to condemnation that science was being stripped of its essential openness,” he said.
I felt bad for Dr. Marsden, a wry, cherubic presence I had known for 20 years of reporting on astronomy. (He died in 2010.) And I felt bad for myself. How often do you get to cover the possible end of the world after only a month on the job? The next day, when The New York Post ran the headline “Kiss Your Asteroid Goodbye!,” I took it personally.
But the incident was indeed a kind of turning point, according to Amy Mainzer, an asteroid expert at the University of Arizona who served as a scientific consultant on “Don’t Look Up.”
In 2005, Congress ordered NASA to find and begin tracking at least 90 percent of all asteroids larger than 500 feet wide or so that come near Earth. (They neglected to provide much money to pay for the search until years later.) The word was out that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery.
NASA now spends some $150 million a year on the endeavor. “We’ve come a long way since 1997 XF11,” said Donald Yeomans, a comet expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena who criticized Dr. Marsden back in 1998.
These days, computers do the work of sorting asteroids and comets, automatically calculating orbits from new observations, comparing them with known objects, scoring them for how dangerous they are and sending out the results to astronomers. Anything that comes within five million miles of Earth is considered a Potentially Hazardous Object, or PHO.
“We didn’t have all that back then,” Dr. Mainzer said. “We’ve learned a lot as a community.”
“Don’t Look Up,” directed and co-written by Adam McKay, arrives on Friday — incidentally, less than three weeks after NASA launched a mission to see whether asteroids could be diverted from their trajectories. But the film is less about asteroids than about the tendency of humans to dismiss bad news from science and to embrace misinformation. It was conceived as an allegory about the failure to act on climate change. “A lot of people don’t want to hear it,” Dr. Mainzer said. “As a scientist, this is terrifying.”
However, the film was shot, very carefully, during the pandemic, and the parallels to the ongoing health crisis are hard to miss.
“Scientists don’t possess the power to effect change,” Dr. Mainzer said. “How do we get people to act on scientific information?” Should they “work within the system,” she asked, even if it means they have to cope with purveyors of misinformation?
Humor helps, Dr. Mainzer added: “We’re saying it doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t have to go down this path.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Associated Press
NASA craft 'touches' sun for 1st time, dives into atmosphere
FILE - This image made available by NASA shows an artist's rendering of the Parker Solar Probe approaching the Sun. On Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2021, NASA announced that the spacecraft has plunged through the unexplored solar atmosphere known as the corona in April, and will keep drawing ever closer to the sun and diving deeper into the corona. (Steve Gribben/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA via AP)
MARCIA DUNN
Tue, December 14, 2021, 2:23 PM
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A NASA spacecraft has officially “touched” the sun, plunging through the unexplored solar atmosphere known as the corona.
Scientists announced the news Tuesday during a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
The Parker Solar Probe actually flew through the corona in April during the spacecraft’s eighth close approach to the sun. Scientists said it took a few months to get the data back and then several more months to confirm.
"Fascinatingly exciting,” said project scientist Nour Raouafi of Johns Hopkins University.
Launched in 2018, Parker was 8 million miles (13 million kilometers) from the center of the sun when it first crossed the jagged, uneven boundary between the solar atmosphere and outgoing solar wind. The spacecraft dipped in and out of the corona at least three times, each a smooth transition, according to scientists.
“The first and most dramatic time we were below for about five hours ... Now you might think five hours, that doesn't sound big," the University of Michigan's Justin Kasper told reporters. But he noted that Parker was moving so fast it covered a vast distance during that time, tearing along at more than 62 miles (100 kilometers) per second.
The corona appeared dustier than expected, according to Raouafi. Future coronal excursions will help scientist better understand the origin of the solar wind, he said, and how it is heated and accelerated out into space. Because the sun lacks a solid surface, the corona is where the action is; exploring this magnetically intense region up close can help scientists better understand solar outbursts that can interfere with life here on Earth.
Preliminary data suggest Parker also dipped into the corona during its ninth close approach in August, but scientists said more analyses are needed. It made its 10th close approach last month.
Parker will keep drawing ever closer to the sun and diving deeper into the corona until its grand finale orbit in 2025.
The latest findings were also published by the American Physical Society.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/na ... 06871.html
NASA craft 'touches' sun for 1st time, dives into atmosphere
FILE - This image made available by NASA shows an artist's rendering of the Parker Solar Probe approaching the Sun. On Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2021, NASA announced that the spacecraft has plunged through the unexplored solar atmosphere known as the corona in April, and will keep drawing ever closer to the sun and diving deeper into the corona. (Steve Gribben/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA via AP)
MARCIA DUNN
Tue, December 14, 2021, 2:23 PM
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A NASA spacecraft has officially “touched” the sun, plunging through the unexplored solar atmosphere known as the corona.
Scientists announced the news Tuesday during a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
The Parker Solar Probe actually flew through the corona in April during the spacecraft’s eighth close approach to the sun. Scientists said it took a few months to get the data back and then several more months to confirm.
"Fascinatingly exciting,” said project scientist Nour Raouafi of Johns Hopkins University.
Launched in 2018, Parker was 8 million miles (13 million kilometers) from the center of the sun when it first crossed the jagged, uneven boundary between the solar atmosphere and outgoing solar wind. The spacecraft dipped in and out of the corona at least three times, each a smooth transition, according to scientists.
“The first and most dramatic time we were below for about five hours ... Now you might think five hours, that doesn't sound big," the University of Michigan's Justin Kasper told reporters. But he noted that Parker was moving so fast it covered a vast distance during that time, tearing along at more than 62 miles (100 kilometers) per second.
The corona appeared dustier than expected, according to Raouafi. Future coronal excursions will help scientist better understand the origin of the solar wind, he said, and how it is heated and accelerated out into space. Because the sun lacks a solid surface, the corona is where the action is; exploring this magnetically intense region up close can help scientists better understand solar outbursts that can interfere with life here on Earth.
Preliminary data suggest Parker also dipped into the corona during its ninth close approach in August, but scientists said more analyses are needed. It made its 10th close approach last month.
Parker will keep drawing ever closer to the sun and diving deeper into the corona until its grand finale orbit in 2025.
The latest findings were also published by the American Physical Society.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/na ... 06871.html
James Webb Space Telescope Launches on Journey to See the Dawn of Starlight
Astronomers were jubilant as the spacecraft made it off the launchpad following decades of delays and cost overruns. The Webb is set to offer a new keyhole into the earliest moments of our universe.
Watch video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/scie ... 778d3e6de3
The dreams and work of a generation of astronomers headed for an orbit around the sun on Saturday in the form of the biggest and most expensive space-based observatory ever built. The James Webb Space Telescope, a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, lifted off from a spaceport near the Equator in Kourou, French Guiana, a teetering pillar of fire and smoke embarking on a million-mile trip to the morning of time.
“The world gave us this telescope and we’re handing it back to the world today,” said Gregory Robinson, the Webb telescope’s program director, during a post-launch news conference in French Guiana.
The telescope, named for the NASA administrator who led the space agency through the early years of the Apollo program, is designed to see farther in space and further back in time than the vaunted Hubble Space Telescope. Its primary light gathering mirror is 21 feet across, about three times bigger than Hubble, and seven times more sensitive.
The Webb’s mission is to seek out the earliest, most distant stars and galaxies, which appeared 13.7 billion years ago, burning their way out of a fog leftover from the Big Bang (which occurred 13.8 billion years ago).
Astronomers watching the launch remotely from all over the world, many Zooming together in their pajamas, were jubilant.
“What an incredible Christmas present,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Tod Lauer of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, in an email exchange with other astronomers reported his feeling about the launch: “Just enjoying the most sacred of all space words, “Nominal!” he said, referring to the lingo used by launch teams to describe rockets operating as expected.
To which Alan Dressler, a Carnegie Observatory astronomer and one of the founders of the Webb telescope project, replied, “Hallelujah! — another sacred word for the moment, Tod.”
Priyamvada Natarajan, a cosmologist at Yale, emailed from India to describe herself as “Just utterly utterly elated! — wow! wow!”
In Baltimore at the Space Telescope Science Institute, the headquarters for Webb’s mission operations, a small group of scientists and NASA officials erupted in screams of joy and applauded during the launch.
The flight operations team in another part of the institute then watched as Webb deployed its solar array, then its communications antenna minutes later. Roughly 100 mission personnel will command the spacecraft’s deployments, alternating between 12 hour shifts 24 hours a day as it begins its journey to a point beyond the moon.
“They’ve got real work to do,” said Kenneth Sembach, the institute’s director. “Our teams have spent the last two years doing numerous rehearsals.”
Equipped with detectors sensitive to infrared or “heat radiation,” the telescope will paint the universe in colors no human eye has ever seen. The expansion of the universe shifts the visible light from the earliest, most distant galaxies into the longer infrared wavelengths.
Studying the heat from these infant galaxies, astronomers say, could provide important clues to when and how the supermassive black holes that squat in the centers of galaxies form. Closer to home in the present, the telescope will sniff at the atmospheres of planets orbiting nearby stars, looking for the infrared signatures of elements and molecules associated with life, like oxygen and water.
The Webb will examine all of cosmic history, billions of years of it, astronomers say — from the first stars to life in the solar system. This week, the NASA administrator Bill Nelson called the telescope a “keyhole into the past.”
“It is a shining example of what we can accomplish when we dream big,” he said. After the launch he said, “It’s a great day for planet Earth.”
The beginning of the telescope’s journey did not go unnoticed by the space agency’s paymasters in Congress, who have stuck with the project for decades now.
“Today’s successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope marks a historic milestone in our advancement of astrophysics and space science,” said Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Democrat of Texas and chairwoman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, in a news release.
Saturday’s successful launch caps an expensive effort that stretched over 25 years of uncertainty, mistakes and ingenuity. Webb’s 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirrors, advanced temperature controllers and ultrasensitive infrared sensors were pieced together in a development timeline filled with cost overruns and technical hurdles. Engineers had to invent 10 new technologies along the way to make the telescope far more sensitive than Hubble.
When NASA picked the Northrop Grumman company to lead Webb’s construction in 2002, mission managers estimated that it would cost $1 billion to $3.5 billion and launch to space in 2010. Over-optimistic schedule projections, occasional development accidents and disorganized cost reporting dragged out the timeline to 2021 and ballooned the overall cost to $10 billion.
Even its final lap to the launchpad seemed perilous as a mishap in the Kourou rocket bay, disconnected cables and worrisome weather reports moved the Webb’s departure date deeper into December, until a Christmas morning launch could not be avoided.
“I’m so happy today,” said Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency. But he added, “It’s very nerve racking, I couldn’t do launches every single day, this would not be good for my life expectancy.”
For astronomers and engineers, the launch was also a suspenseful sight to take in.
“It was hard to sleep last night,” said Adam Riess, an astrophysicist and Nobel laureate who will use the Webb telescope to measure the expansion rate of the universe.
“It’s 7 a.m. on Christmas and I’m awake and everyone is excited— is this what having kids is like?” Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, wrote on Twitter. They added, “Terrible, I’m going back to sleep,” which they confirmed in an email they did, but not before the solar array deployed.
Image
The Webb space telescope flying into space away from the rocket that launched it on Saturday.
The Webb space telescope flying into space away from the rocket that launched it on Saturday.Credit...NASA TV via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But the launch itself is only the first step in an even more treacherous journey that astronomers and rocket engineers have called “six months of anxiety.”
The solar panel deployment half an hour into the flight was the first in a monthlong series of maneuvers and deployments with what NASA calls “344 single points of failure.”
“I could finally start breathing again when the solar arrays came out,” said Pam Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator. “We have so many hard days ahead of us, but you can’t even get started on any of that until this part goes perfectly.”
Among the most tense moments, astronomers say, will be the unfolding of a giant sunscreen, the size of a tennis court, designed to keep the telescope in the dark and cold enough so that its own heat doesn’t swamp the heat from distant stars. The screen is made of five layers of a plastic called Kapton, which is similar to mylar, and as flimsy as mylar. It has occasionally ripped during rehearsals of its deployment.
If all goes well, astronomers will start to see the universe in a new light next summer. They are most looking forward to what they didn’t expect. As Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said recently: “Every time we launch a big bold telescope, we get a surprise. This one is the biggest and boldest yet.”
But if anything goes wrong in the coming weeks and months, the field of astronomy’s view of the origins of existence may be imperiled. When problems snarled the work of the Hubble in the 1990s, NASA sent astronauts in the space shuttles to perform repair work. The Webb telescope is headed to a point beyond the moon where no spacecraft has ever carried humans before (although Ms. Melroy says NASA has contemplated a robotic repair mission if one were needed).
“I tell friends of mine who are not astronomers, after the launch, you mostly want to hear 30 days of nothing,” Dr. Riess said. “And we’ll be really happy if we hear nothing.”
Dennis Overbye reported from New York, and Joey Roulette from Baltimore.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Astronomers were jubilant as the spacecraft made it off the launchpad following decades of delays and cost overruns. The Webb is set to offer a new keyhole into the earliest moments of our universe.
Watch video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/scie ... 778d3e6de3
The dreams and work of a generation of astronomers headed for an orbit around the sun on Saturday in the form of the biggest and most expensive space-based observatory ever built. The James Webb Space Telescope, a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, lifted off from a spaceport near the Equator in Kourou, French Guiana, a teetering pillar of fire and smoke embarking on a million-mile trip to the morning of time.
“The world gave us this telescope and we’re handing it back to the world today,” said Gregory Robinson, the Webb telescope’s program director, during a post-launch news conference in French Guiana.
The telescope, named for the NASA administrator who led the space agency through the early years of the Apollo program, is designed to see farther in space and further back in time than the vaunted Hubble Space Telescope. Its primary light gathering mirror is 21 feet across, about three times bigger than Hubble, and seven times more sensitive.
The Webb’s mission is to seek out the earliest, most distant stars and galaxies, which appeared 13.7 billion years ago, burning their way out of a fog leftover from the Big Bang (which occurred 13.8 billion years ago).
Astronomers watching the launch remotely from all over the world, many Zooming together in their pajamas, were jubilant.
“What an incredible Christmas present,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Tod Lauer of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, in an email exchange with other astronomers reported his feeling about the launch: “Just enjoying the most sacred of all space words, “Nominal!” he said, referring to the lingo used by launch teams to describe rockets operating as expected.
To which Alan Dressler, a Carnegie Observatory astronomer and one of the founders of the Webb telescope project, replied, “Hallelujah! — another sacred word for the moment, Tod.”
Priyamvada Natarajan, a cosmologist at Yale, emailed from India to describe herself as “Just utterly utterly elated! — wow! wow!”
In Baltimore at the Space Telescope Science Institute, the headquarters for Webb’s mission operations, a small group of scientists and NASA officials erupted in screams of joy and applauded during the launch.
The flight operations team in another part of the institute then watched as Webb deployed its solar array, then its communications antenna minutes later. Roughly 100 mission personnel will command the spacecraft’s deployments, alternating between 12 hour shifts 24 hours a day as it begins its journey to a point beyond the moon.
“They’ve got real work to do,” said Kenneth Sembach, the institute’s director. “Our teams have spent the last two years doing numerous rehearsals.”
Equipped with detectors sensitive to infrared or “heat radiation,” the telescope will paint the universe in colors no human eye has ever seen. The expansion of the universe shifts the visible light from the earliest, most distant galaxies into the longer infrared wavelengths.
Studying the heat from these infant galaxies, astronomers say, could provide important clues to when and how the supermassive black holes that squat in the centers of galaxies form. Closer to home in the present, the telescope will sniff at the atmospheres of planets orbiting nearby stars, looking for the infrared signatures of elements and molecules associated with life, like oxygen and water.
The Webb will examine all of cosmic history, billions of years of it, astronomers say — from the first stars to life in the solar system. This week, the NASA administrator Bill Nelson called the telescope a “keyhole into the past.”
“It is a shining example of what we can accomplish when we dream big,” he said. After the launch he said, “It’s a great day for planet Earth.”
The beginning of the telescope’s journey did not go unnoticed by the space agency’s paymasters in Congress, who have stuck with the project for decades now.
“Today’s successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope marks a historic milestone in our advancement of astrophysics and space science,” said Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Democrat of Texas and chairwoman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, in a news release.
Saturday’s successful launch caps an expensive effort that stretched over 25 years of uncertainty, mistakes and ingenuity. Webb’s 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirrors, advanced temperature controllers and ultrasensitive infrared sensors were pieced together in a development timeline filled with cost overruns and technical hurdles. Engineers had to invent 10 new technologies along the way to make the telescope far more sensitive than Hubble.
When NASA picked the Northrop Grumman company to lead Webb’s construction in 2002, mission managers estimated that it would cost $1 billion to $3.5 billion and launch to space in 2010. Over-optimistic schedule projections, occasional development accidents and disorganized cost reporting dragged out the timeline to 2021 and ballooned the overall cost to $10 billion.
Even its final lap to the launchpad seemed perilous as a mishap in the Kourou rocket bay, disconnected cables and worrisome weather reports moved the Webb’s departure date deeper into December, until a Christmas morning launch could not be avoided.
“I’m so happy today,” said Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency. But he added, “It’s very nerve racking, I couldn’t do launches every single day, this would not be good for my life expectancy.”
For astronomers and engineers, the launch was also a suspenseful sight to take in.
“It was hard to sleep last night,” said Adam Riess, an astrophysicist and Nobel laureate who will use the Webb telescope to measure the expansion rate of the universe.
“It’s 7 a.m. on Christmas and I’m awake and everyone is excited— is this what having kids is like?” Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, wrote on Twitter. They added, “Terrible, I’m going back to sleep,” which they confirmed in an email they did, but not before the solar array deployed.
Image
The Webb space telescope flying into space away from the rocket that launched it on Saturday.
The Webb space telescope flying into space away from the rocket that launched it on Saturday.Credit...NASA TV via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But the launch itself is only the first step in an even more treacherous journey that astronomers and rocket engineers have called “six months of anxiety.”
The solar panel deployment half an hour into the flight was the first in a monthlong series of maneuvers and deployments with what NASA calls “344 single points of failure.”
“I could finally start breathing again when the solar arrays came out,” said Pam Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator. “We have so many hard days ahead of us, but you can’t even get started on any of that until this part goes perfectly.”
Among the most tense moments, astronomers say, will be the unfolding of a giant sunscreen, the size of a tennis court, designed to keep the telescope in the dark and cold enough so that its own heat doesn’t swamp the heat from distant stars. The screen is made of five layers of a plastic called Kapton, which is similar to mylar, and as flimsy as mylar. It has occasionally ripped during rehearsals of its deployment.
If all goes well, astronomers will start to see the universe in a new light next summer. They are most looking forward to what they didn’t expect. As Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said recently: “Every time we launch a big bold telescope, we get a surprise. This one is the biggest and boldest yet.”
But if anything goes wrong in the coming weeks and months, the field of astronomy’s view of the origins of existence may be imperiled. When problems snarled the work of the Hubble in the 1990s, NASA sent astronauts in the space shuttles to perform repair work. The Webb telescope is headed to a point beyond the moon where no spacecraft has ever carried humans before (although Ms. Melroy says NASA has contemplated a robotic repair mission if one were needed).
“I tell friends of mine who are not astronomers, after the launch, you mostly want to hear 30 days of nothing,” Dr. Riess said. “And we’ll be really happy if we hear nothing.”
Dennis Overbye reported from New York, and Joey Roulette from Baltimore.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Israel Found a Way to Make Soldiers Invisible
Kyle Mizokami
Fri, December 24, 2021, 3:45 AM
Picture this: A special operations team has set up an observation post on a rocky hillside in enemy territory. The team’s mission: provide surveillance of the terrorists planning an attack from their camp below, and then target the commander once preparations have reached their peak.
Down in the camp, the commander is confident the valley above is free of danger. There’s little cover, and he’s outfitted his sentries with night-vision goggles that would light up with the heat signature of any threats. The special ops troops have covered themselves with camouflage that not only blends in with the rock-strewn hillside, but hides their telltale heat. The team is difficult to see during the daytime, but impossible to spot at night.
Before the attack is set to commence, the commander calls his fighters before him. As he begins to speak, a pair of crosshairs a half-mile away drifts over his silhouette. The sniper exhales and gently squeezes the trigger.
This scenario could become possible thanks to a new camouflage material, Kit 300, developed by Israeli defense contractor Polaris Solutions. Kit 300 is a “thermal visual concealment”—essentially a sheet that uses advanced materials to block a soldier’s body heat. This renders them invisible to night-vision sensors, which in recent decades have become available to terrorist groups.
The first American night-vision device, the M3 Infrared, debuted in the final days of World War II. Early gadgets typically paired an infrared spotlight with an image amplifier. The infrared light was invisible to the naked eye, but would illuminate a target for the image amplifier. Later scopes did away with the infrared light source entirely, instead amplifying ambient light, particularly moonlight.
In the 1980s, thermal imagers heralded a revolution in night-fighting capability. By detecting small differences in heat in their field of view, thermal imagers show a person as defined by their radiated body heat, with the hands, face, and other exposed body parts shining brightly. A tank fighting at night would be seen via its engine panels.
Through the 1990s, thermal imagers used to confer a huge edge on the armies of the countries who had the technology. But as the tech advanced, it became easier to acquire. After the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israel complained that night vision sold by Britain and Italy to Iran to stem the flow of drugs was discovered in the possession of the terrorist group. By 2017, Iran was reportedly manufacturing thermal imagers of its own.
In 2018, when the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson, accused Russia of giving aid to the Taliban, senior Afghan police officers and military figures said night- vision goggles were part of the gear that Russia supplied.
Kit 300 camouflage could give NATO and its allies their nighttime advantage back. Polaris is tight-lipped about exactly what goes into the Kit 300 sheet, stating only that it consists of “microfibres, metals, and polymers.” The foil-like material can be formed into rock-shaped structures for soldiers to hide behind. A large sheet of the material can hide vehicles as large as a Hummer.
Roughly the size of a twin bedsheet, a Kit 300 sheet weighs around one pound and compresses into a small roll. It’s also strong enough to be used as a litter to carry injured soldiers. Plus, the sheet is reportedly waterproof and has been tested in rain and high heat.
While armies with thermal-imaging devices once held a trump card over their enemies, they must continue to develop countermeasures of their own to survive. Devices like the Kit 300 will allow soldiers to once again disappear.
Camouflage Uniforms: For centuries, armies used brightly colored uniforms to control troops, allowing leaders to organize their infantry into tightly packed columns that delivered volleys of firepower.
By World War I, as small arms improved, armies sought more subdued uniforms and began experimenting with darker patterns (brown, khaki) to blend in with the dirt of trench warfare. By WWII, U.S. troops in the Pacific wore camouflage patterns to blend in with jungle vegetation.
Operational Camouflage Pattern (OCP): In 2015, the U.S. Army abandoned the pixelated grays and whites of the Universal Camouflage Pattern in favor of a new scheme. Scorpion W2, developed by the Army’s Natick Soldier Systems Center, was a return to the dashes and flashes of subdued colors of previous army camouflage.
In 2021, Scorpion, or Operational Camouflage Pattern, became the official duty uniform of the Army, Air Force, and Space Force.
Ghillie Suits: In the 19th century, Scottish gamekeepers constructed these loose suits of dyed strips of fabrics to blend in with their surroundings and catch poachers. Lovat Scouts, the first snipers employed by the British Army, adopted and used the suits during the Boer War.
The shaggy, dark suits break up the wearer’s profile to remain undetected. Today’s U.S. Army snipers use specialized suits called the Improved Ghillie System that consist of sleeves, leggings, veil, and a cape.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 00294.html
Kyle Mizokami
Fri, December 24, 2021, 3:45 AM
Picture this: A special operations team has set up an observation post on a rocky hillside in enemy territory. The team’s mission: provide surveillance of the terrorists planning an attack from their camp below, and then target the commander once preparations have reached their peak.
Down in the camp, the commander is confident the valley above is free of danger. There’s little cover, and he’s outfitted his sentries with night-vision goggles that would light up with the heat signature of any threats. The special ops troops have covered themselves with camouflage that not only blends in with the rock-strewn hillside, but hides their telltale heat. The team is difficult to see during the daytime, but impossible to spot at night.
Before the attack is set to commence, the commander calls his fighters before him. As he begins to speak, a pair of crosshairs a half-mile away drifts over his silhouette. The sniper exhales and gently squeezes the trigger.
This scenario could become possible thanks to a new camouflage material, Kit 300, developed by Israeli defense contractor Polaris Solutions. Kit 300 is a “thermal visual concealment”—essentially a sheet that uses advanced materials to block a soldier’s body heat. This renders them invisible to night-vision sensors, which in recent decades have become available to terrorist groups.
The first American night-vision device, the M3 Infrared, debuted in the final days of World War II. Early gadgets typically paired an infrared spotlight with an image amplifier. The infrared light was invisible to the naked eye, but would illuminate a target for the image amplifier. Later scopes did away with the infrared light source entirely, instead amplifying ambient light, particularly moonlight.
In the 1980s, thermal imagers heralded a revolution in night-fighting capability. By detecting small differences in heat in their field of view, thermal imagers show a person as defined by their radiated body heat, with the hands, face, and other exposed body parts shining brightly. A tank fighting at night would be seen via its engine panels.
Through the 1990s, thermal imagers used to confer a huge edge on the armies of the countries who had the technology. But as the tech advanced, it became easier to acquire. After the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israel complained that night vision sold by Britain and Italy to Iran to stem the flow of drugs was discovered in the possession of the terrorist group. By 2017, Iran was reportedly manufacturing thermal imagers of its own.
In 2018, when the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson, accused Russia of giving aid to the Taliban, senior Afghan police officers and military figures said night- vision goggles were part of the gear that Russia supplied.
Kit 300 camouflage could give NATO and its allies their nighttime advantage back. Polaris is tight-lipped about exactly what goes into the Kit 300 sheet, stating only that it consists of “microfibres, metals, and polymers.” The foil-like material can be formed into rock-shaped structures for soldiers to hide behind. A large sheet of the material can hide vehicles as large as a Hummer.
Roughly the size of a twin bedsheet, a Kit 300 sheet weighs around one pound and compresses into a small roll. It’s also strong enough to be used as a litter to carry injured soldiers. Plus, the sheet is reportedly waterproof and has been tested in rain and high heat.
While armies with thermal-imaging devices once held a trump card over their enemies, they must continue to develop countermeasures of their own to survive. Devices like the Kit 300 will allow soldiers to once again disappear.
Camouflage Uniforms: For centuries, armies used brightly colored uniforms to control troops, allowing leaders to organize their infantry into tightly packed columns that delivered volleys of firepower.
By World War I, as small arms improved, armies sought more subdued uniforms and began experimenting with darker patterns (brown, khaki) to blend in with the dirt of trench warfare. By WWII, U.S. troops in the Pacific wore camouflage patterns to blend in with jungle vegetation.
Operational Camouflage Pattern (OCP): In 2015, the U.S. Army abandoned the pixelated grays and whites of the Universal Camouflage Pattern in favor of a new scheme. Scorpion W2, developed by the Army’s Natick Soldier Systems Center, was a return to the dashes and flashes of subdued colors of previous army camouflage.
In 2021, Scorpion, or Operational Camouflage Pattern, became the official duty uniform of the Army, Air Force, and Space Force.
Ghillie Suits: In the 19th century, Scottish gamekeepers constructed these loose suits of dyed strips of fabrics to blend in with their surroundings and catch poachers. Lovat Scouts, the first snipers employed by the British Army, adopted and used the suits during the Boer War.
The shaggy, dark suits break up the wearer’s profile to remain undetected. Today’s U.S. Army snipers use specialized suits called the Improved Ghillie System that consist of sleeves, leggings, veil, and a cape.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 00294.html
China switched on its nuclear fusion device that’s 5 times hotter than the Sun
Joshua Hawkins
Tue, January 4, 2022, 2:41 PM
This week, China switched on a nuclear fusion reactor. The “artificial sun” is known as the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (or EAST for short). After turning it on, China noticed record high levels for sustained temperatures. According to China’s state media, the EAST reactor ran five times hotter than the real Sun for over 17 minutes.
China’s artificial sun is a bid for clean energy
China says its overall goal with the nuclear fusion reactor is to provide near limitless clean energy. The hope is that the reactor can mimic the natural reactions that occur within stars like the Sun. The idea is one that has been proposed for years. However, creating a working artificial sun has proven to be difficult, despite decades of research. This latest run, though, could help China break through the walls that have been holding back researchers for years.
“The recent operation lays a solid scientific and experimental foundation towards the running of a fusion reactor,” Gong Xianzu, one of the experiment’s leaders and a researcher with the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said. (via The Independent)
If China can continue work on its artificial sun, we could see more breakthroughs in the future. 17 minutes might not sound like long, but when you have something running at more than 70,000,000° C for that long, it’s pretty impressive, to say the least. Previously we’ve also seen other artificial suns reach upwards of 100 million degrees, another record level.
How nuclear fusion works
3D Render fusion reactor nuclear fusion
The idea behind nuclear fusion reactors isn’t exactly easy. The entire basis of the idea is built on replicating the physics of the actual Sun. Artificial suns do this by merging atomic nuclei together to generate massive amounts of energy. Researchers are then trying to find ways to transfer all of that energy into electricity. There’s probably a lot more math involved in the actual process, but that’s the basic gist of what scientists are trying to accomplish.
Because artificial suns don’t require any fossil fuels to run, and they also leave behind no hazardous waste, physicists say there is far less risk to the environment. This is especially true when you compare it to other energy sources out there, like nuclear fission reactors.
China isn’t the only country working on creating an artificial sun, either. As mentioned before, the research into the idea has been ongoing for decades at this point. The same team from China’s reactor will also work with a team in Marseille, France. Once completed, the artificial sun in Marseille will be the world’s largest reactor. It’s known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). The United Kingdom also has plans to build its own nuclear fusion power station.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/enterta ... 00017.html
Joshua Hawkins
Tue, January 4, 2022, 2:41 PM
This week, China switched on a nuclear fusion reactor. The “artificial sun” is known as the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (or EAST for short). After turning it on, China noticed record high levels for sustained temperatures. According to China’s state media, the EAST reactor ran five times hotter than the real Sun for over 17 minutes.
China’s artificial sun is a bid for clean energy
China says its overall goal with the nuclear fusion reactor is to provide near limitless clean energy. The hope is that the reactor can mimic the natural reactions that occur within stars like the Sun. The idea is one that has been proposed for years. However, creating a working artificial sun has proven to be difficult, despite decades of research. This latest run, though, could help China break through the walls that have been holding back researchers for years.
“The recent operation lays a solid scientific and experimental foundation towards the running of a fusion reactor,” Gong Xianzu, one of the experiment’s leaders and a researcher with the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said. (via The Independent)
If China can continue work on its artificial sun, we could see more breakthroughs in the future. 17 minutes might not sound like long, but when you have something running at more than 70,000,000° C for that long, it’s pretty impressive, to say the least. Previously we’ve also seen other artificial suns reach upwards of 100 million degrees, another record level.
How nuclear fusion works
3D Render fusion reactor nuclear fusion
The idea behind nuclear fusion reactors isn’t exactly easy. The entire basis of the idea is built on replicating the physics of the actual Sun. Artificial suns do this by merging atomic nuclei together to generate massive amounts of energy. Researchers are then trying to find ways to transfer all of that energy into electricity. There’s probably a lot more math involved in the actual process, but that’s the basic gist of what scientists are trying to accomplish.
Because artificial suns don’t require any fossil fuels to run, and they also leave behind no hazardous waste, physicists say there is far less risk to the environment. This is especially true when you compare it to other energy sources out there, like nuclear fission reactors.
China isn’t the only country working on creating an artificial sun, either. As mentioned before, the research into the idea has been ongoing for decades at this point. The same team from China’s reactor will also work with a team in Marseille, France. Once completed, the artificial sun in Marseille will be the world’s largest reactor. It’s known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). The United Kingdom also has plans to build its own nuclear fusion power station.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/enterta ... 00017.html
'What an amazing milestone': Nasa's James Webb telescope fully deployed in space
AFP Published January 8, 2022 -
In this photo released by Nasa, engineering teams celebrate at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland as the second primary mirror wing of Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope unfolds, before beginning the process of latching the mirror wing into place. — AFP
In this photo released by Nasa, engineering teams at Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope Mission Operations Centre at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland monitor progress as the observatory’s second primary mirror wing rotates into position. — AFP
The James Webb Space Telescope completed its two-week-long deployment phase on Saturday, unfolding the final mirror panel as it readies to study every phase of cosmic history.
“I'm emotional about it — what an amazing milestone,” Thomas Zurbuchen, a senior Nasa engineer, said during the live video feed as stargazers worldwide celebrated.
Because the telescope was too large to fit into a rocket's nose cone in its operational configuration, it was transported folded-up.
Unfurling has been a complex and challenging task — the most daunting such project ever attempted, according to Nasa.
“We've still got work to do,” NASA said as the wing was latched into place. “When the final latch is secure, Nasa Webb will be fully unfolded in space.”
The most powerful space telescope ever built and the successor to Hubble, Webb blasted off in an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana on December 25, and is heading to its orbital point, 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.
Though Webb will reach its space destination, known as the second Lagrange point, in a matter of weeks, it still has around another five and a half months of setup to go.
Next steps include aligning the telescope's optics and calibrating its scientific instruments.
Far reaches of the Universe
Its infrared technology will allow it to see the first stars and galaxies that formed 13.5 billion years ago, giving astronomers new insight into the earliest epoch of the Universe.
Earlier this week, the telescope deployed its five-layered sunshield — a 70-foot-long, kite-shaped apparatus that acts like a parasol, ensuring Webb's instruments are kept in the shade so they can detect faint infrared signals from the far reaches of the Universe.
The sunshield will be permanently positioned between the telescope and the Sun, Earth and Moon, with the Sun-facing side built to withstand 230 degrees Fahrenheit (110 degrees Celsius).
Visible and ultraviolet light emitted by the very first luminous objects has been stretched by the Universe's expansion, and arrives today in the form of infrared, which Webb is equipped to detect with unprecedented clarity.
Its mission also includes the study of distant planets to determine their origin, evolution, and habitability.
The Nasa telescope blog said Saturday's procedure was “the last of the major deployments on the observatory.”
“Its completion will set the stage for the remaining five and a half months of commissioning, which consist of settling into stable operating temperature, aligning the mirrors, and calibrating the science instruments.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1668348/what- ... d-in-space
AFP Published January 8, 2022 -
In this photo released by Nasa, engineering teams celebrate at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland as the second primary mirror wing of Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope unfolds, before beginning the process of latching the mirror wing into place. — AFP
In this photo released by Nasa, engineering teams at Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope Mission Operations Centre at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland monitor progress as the observatory’s second primary mirror wing rotates into position. — AFP
The James Webb Space Telescope completed its two-week-long deployment phase on Saturday, unfolding the final mirror panel as it readies to study every phase of cosmic history.
“I'm emotional about it — what an amazing milestone,” Thomas Zurbuchen, a senior Nasa engineer, said during the live video feed as stargazers worldwide celebrated.
Because the telescope was too large to fit into a rocket's nose cone in its operational configuration, it was transported folded-up.
Unfurling has been a complex and challenging task — the most daunting such project ever attempted, according to Nasa.
“We've still got work to do,” NASA said as the wing was latched into place. “When the final latch is secure, Nasa Webb will be fully unfolded in space.”
The most powerful space telescope ever built and the successor to Hubble, Webb blasted off in an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana on December 25, and is heading to its orbital point, 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.
Though Webb will reach its space destination, known as the second Lagrange point, in a matter of weeks, it still has around another five and a half months of setup to go.
Next steps include aligning the telescope's optics and calibrating its scientific instruments.
Far reaches of the Universe
Its infrared technology will allow it to see the first stars and galaxies that formed 13.5 billion years ago, giving astronomers new insight into the earliest epoch of the Universe.
Earlier this week, the telescope deployed its five-layered sunshield — a 70-foot-long, kite-shaped apparatus that acts like a parasol, ensuring Webb's instruments are kept in the shade so they can detect faint infrared signals from the far reaches of the Universe.
The sunshield will be permanently positioned between the telescope and the Sun, Earth and Moon, with the Sun-facing side built to withstand 230 degrees Fahrenheit (110 degrees Celsius).
Visible and ultraviolet light emitted by the very first luminous objects has been stretched by the Universe's expansion, and arrives today in the form of infrared, which Webb is equipped to detect with unprecedented clarity.
Its mission also includes the study of distant planets to determine their origin, evolution, and habitability.
The Nasa telescope blog said Saturday's procedure was “the last of the major deployments on the observatory.”
“Its completion will set the stage for the remaining five and a half months of commissioning, which consist of settling into stable operating temperature, aligning the mirrors, and calibrating the science instruments.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1668348/what- ... d-in-space
Moon Cube Mystery: Chinese Rover Finds It's Just a Rock
Kenneth Chang
Sat, January 8, 2022, 9:18 AM·2 min read
A closer look at a rock on the moon whose shape, seen from afar by China's Yuta-2 rover, had prompted curiosity and discussion. (CNSA via The New York Times)
A closer look at a rock on the moon whose shape, seen from afar by China's Yuta-2 rover, had prompted curiosity and discussion. (CNSA via The New York Times)
Last November, China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover spotted something curious on the far side of the moon. The image was blurry, but it was unmistakable: The object looked like a cube sitting on the moon’s surface. Its shape looked too precise to be just a moon rock — perhaps something left by visiting aliens like the monolith in Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
China’s space authorities called it the “mystery hut.” Others called it the “moon cube.” Yutu-2 was sent for a closer look, and at the leisurely speed the rover is capable of traveling, it took weeks to get up close.
On Friday, Our Space, a Chinese language science channel affiliated with China National Space Administration, posted an update. There is no monolith, no secret base on the rim of a lunar crater. Close up, it turns out to be just a rock. The seemingly perfect geometric shape was just a trick of angle, light and shadow.
The report was noted earlier on Twitter by Andrew Jones, a journalist who follows the Chinese space program.
Although the mystery hut was not a hut at all, one of the rover’s remote drivers on Earth pointed out that the rock sort of resembled a rabbit and one of the stones in front of it looked a bit like a carrot. That’s fitting as the rover’s name means “Jade Rabbit.”
The rover has now driven just over 1,000 meters since it arrived three years ago on the moon’s far side, in Von Kármán crater, as part of the Chang’e-4 mission. It is the first mission to land on the far side.
Visual illusions are common in the history of space exploration, whether seen by astronomers peering through telescopes on Earth or robotic explorers on other worlds capturing images with cameras. In a parallel with the rabbitlike rock found by China’s rover, a NASA rover on Mars, Opportunity, spotted something that looked like bunny ears in 2004. Further analysis by engineers on Earth suggested it was insulation or other soft material that fell off the rover itself.
© 2022 The New York Times Company
https://news.yahoo.com/moon-cube-myster ... 34072.html
Kenneth Chang
Sat, January 8, 2022, 9:18 AM·2 min read
A closer look at a rock on the moon whose shape, seen from afar by China's Yuta-2 rover, had prompted curiosity and discussion. (CNSA via The New York Times)
A closer look at a rock on the moon whose shape, seen from afar by China's Yuta-2 rover, had prompted curiosity and discussion. (CNSA via The New York Times)
Last November, China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover spotted something curious on the far side of the moon. The image was blurry, but it was unmistakable: The object looked like a cube sitting on the moon’s surface. Its shape looked too precise to be just a moon rock — perhaps something left by visiting aliens like the monolith in Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
China’s space authorities called it the “mystery hut.” Others called it the “moon cube.” Yutu-2 was sent for a closer look, and at the leisurely speed the rover is capable of traveling, it took weeks to get up close.
On Friday, Our Space, a Chinese language science channel affiliated with China National Space Administration, posted an update. There is no monolith, no secret base on the rim of a lunar crater. Close up, it turns out to be just a rock. The seemingly perfect geometric shape was just a trick of angle, light and shadow.
The report was noted earlier on Twitter by Andrew Jones, a journalist who follows the Chinese space program.
Although the mystery hut was not a hut at all, one of the rover’s remote drivers on Earth pointed out that the rock sort of resembled a rabbit and one of the stones in front of it looked a bit like a carrot. That’s fitting as the rover’s name means “Jade Rabbit.”
The rover has now driven just over 1,000 meters since it arrived three years ago on the moon’s far side, in Von Kármán crater, as part of the Chang’e-4 mission. It is the first mission to land on the far side.
Visual illusions are common in the history of space exploration, whether seen by astronomers peering through telescopes on Earth or robotic explorers on other worlds capturing images with cameras. In a parallel with the rabbitlike rock found by China’s rover, a NASA rover on Mars, Opportunity, spotted something that looked like bunny ears in 2004. Further analysis by engineers on Earth suggested it was insulation or other soft material that fell off the rover itself.
© 2022 The New York Times Company
https://news.yahoo.com/moon-cube-myster ... 34072.html