The Elegant Nature of Science 2.0

[Deesse23]

Ill take a wild guess now: small ones will be called "rat"   ......oops that name is already taken. 

[Alan V]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/14/us/deepes...index.html

A new study shows that the deepest point on land is under the Denman Glacier in East Antarctica. Glaciologists at the University of California, Irvine, were mapping the area only to find that the trough under the glacier went far deeper than they had imagined.

The trough is about 3.5 km (about 2 miles) below sea level but there is no ocean water there. Instead, it is filled with ice flowing from the interior of the ice sheet towards the coast. The trough measures about 100 km in length and is 20 km wide, according to the study.

[Bucky Ball]

My cousins from Minnesota are here for the holidays and we are up in Big Bear skiing.
We were arguing about whether California has shorter days than Minnesota.
Still don't have the answer to that, but it was interesting to find that their sunsets start getting later before the equinox.
That is weird.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/12/02...ecember-15

[SYZ]

We were arguing about whether California has shorter days than Minnesota.

Los Angeles (CA) ↑ 6:54 am ↓ 4:47 pm  

Minneapolis (MN) ↑ 7:48 am ↓ 4:34 pm  

From:    https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/usa

Melbourne (Australia)  ↑ 5:54 am ↓ 8:42 pm

All times local.

[Alan V]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/03/world/lif...index.html

Around 700 million years ago, the world is thought to have experienced its most severe ice age -- a period evocatively described by scientists as Snowball Earth.

It threatened the survival of much of the planet's primitive living things, like oxygen-dependent marine life -- including the earliest animals, such as simple sponges.

But new geological evidence uncovered by scientists at McGill University in Montreal has found that glacial meltwater provided a crucial lifeline at the time to microscopic organisms known as eukaryotes.

"The evidence suggests that although much of the oceans during the deep freeze would have been uninhabitable due to a lack of oxygen, in areas where the grounded ice sheet begins to float there was a critical supply of oxygenated meltwater," said McGill University sedimentologist Maxwell Lechte in a press statement.

Previously, scientists thought that oxygen-dependent life may have been restricted to meltwater puddles on the surface of the ice, but the new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides evidence of "oxygen oases" below the ice where the glacier meets the sea. These would have allowed primitive life forms to wait out the ice age.

[Deesse23]

Dust from an australian meteorite was analysed. Age: 5-7bio years.  7bio years would put it at almost TWICE the age of the solar system, and half the age of the unverse.  

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/...1904573117

[Bucky Ball]

So the present news obsessions have prevented attention to this.
The largest explosion in the universe known, (I suppose not counting the big bang).

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supermassiv...y-cluster/

Science News : (I don't think it's behind a pay wall, but in case)
"Say hello to the Krakatoa of black hole eruptions.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, a supermassive black hole in a far-off galaxy blew out gas into intergalactic space. The flare-up was about five times as powerful as the previous record holder, researchers report in the March 1 Astrophysical Journal. The energy from this one explosion was roughly 100 billion times as much as the sun is expected to emit in its entire lifetime. This makes it not only the most energetic known eruption from a supermassive black hole — it’s also the most powerful eruption of any kind in the universe.

Eruptions from enormous black holes aren’t uncommon. The explosions are powered by the release of pent-up energy in encircling disks of hot gas. But the team notes that this newfound eruption is thousands of times more powerful than most.

The source of the eruption was a beast of a galaxy at the center of the Ophiuchus cluster, a gathering of galaxies nearly 400 million light-years from Earth. In 2016, researchers noticed the edge of a cavity in the cluster’s hot, X-ray emitting gas, about 400,000 light-years from the central galaxy. The excavated region appears to be over a million light-years across.

To suss out the origin of the cavity, astrophysicist Simona Giacintucci at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and colleagues pored through data from several radio telescopes. The scientists found that the cavity glowed with radio waves, likely from electrons accelerated to near the speed of light. The team suggests that the electrons got revved up by a powerful outburst at least 240 million years prior from a supermassive black hole at the heart of the cluster’s central galaxy.

CITATIONS
S. Giacintucci et al. Discovery of a giant radio fossil in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Astrophysical Journal. Vol. 891, March 1, 2020. doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab6a9d.

N. Werner et al. Deep Chandra study of the truncated cool core of the Ophiuchus cluster. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Vol. 460, August 11, 2016. doi: 10.1093/mnras/stw1171.

Christopher Crockett is the interim astronomy writer and was the astronomy writer at Science News from 2014 to 2017. He has a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles."

[Alan V]

This article includes some beautiful pictures of Mars.

[skyking]

Friendly black holes.
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/10/rotatin...ce-travel/

the hole thing presumes there is a "through" to be had, but hey we are dreaming 

[skyking]

Old article but an idea I have been revisiting.
https://www.universetoday.com/15570/colo...ng-cities/

The advantages of Venus cloud cities are many.
Pressure
Temperature
Radiation protection
Proximity
Those are huge considering the harshness of everywhere else we could travel to.

The biggest shortfall is water. There is little to be made from components.

More dreaming

[Bucky Ball]

Cryo-electron microscopy .. wanna see some atoms ?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-0...DE221946F6

[Alan V]

Futurism

For the first time, astronomers were able to watch the entire process of a neutron star absorbing material and eventually unleashing a powerful blast of x-rays.

Scientists have long wondered why neutron stars create these violent outbursts. This time around, it took 15 scientists from five institutes using seven observatories in order to gather the complete data set, according to a Monash University press release. And with that data in hand, the scientists hope to finally make sense of these massive x-ray blasts.

After 12 days of absorbing matter from its accretion disk — matter swirling around in a ring or spiral — the neutron star blasted out a jet of x-rays several thousand times brighter than our Sun. Before this study, scientists thought the pre-outburst accretion phase only lasted two or three days at most.

The explosion lasted weeks, according to the research, which was accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. During that brief window, it gave off as much energy as our Sun does in a decade.

[Alan V]

From a Scientific American t-shirt: "Question & Research & Hypothesize & Experiment & Observe & Conclude & Communicate.

[Vera]

[Cavebear]

Looking at your sig... Just a thought. Standing on it might give him that 2 inches of nose above water level...

[Bucky Ball]

The Straights of Juan del Fuego ... the Atlantic and Pacific meet, but do not merge, at the tip of South America.
Video from a Cruise Ship. The Straights of Juan del Fuego, at the tip of South America, (South of Argentina and Chile). T
here is a huge difference in salinity between the clear water that comes from melting glaciers, which is cool and low in salt, while the water from the second ocean has a high salt concentration. Therefore, the two oceans have different densities.

[SYZ]

The Straights of Juan del Fuego...

I'd never seen or heard of this.  Thanks for the link...        

[Bucky Ball]

The Straights of Juan del Fuego...

I'd never seen or heard of this.  Thanks for the link...        

I haven't either. Why is that ? 
I have friends who've been there, and they never said anything about this.

[Dānu]

Scientists discover why the human brain is so big

It is one of the defining attributes of being human: when compared with our closest primate relatives, we have incredibly large brains.

Now scientists have shed light on the reasons for the difference, by collecting cells from humans, chimps and gorillas and turning them into lumps of brain in the laboratory.

Tests on the tiny “brain organoids” reveal a hitherto unknown molecular switch that controls brain growth and makes the human organ three times larger than brains in the great apes.

Tinker with the switch and the human brain loses its growth advantage, while the great ape brain can be made to grow more like a human’s.

“What we see is a difference in cellular behaviour very, very early on that allows the human brain to grow larger,” said Dr Madeleine Lancaster, a developmental biologist at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. “We are able to account for almost all of the size difference.”

The healthy human brain typically reaches about 1,500cm3 in adulthood, roughly three times the size of the 500cm3 gorilla brain or the 400cm3 chimp brain. But working out why has been fraught with difficulty, not least because developing human and great ape brains cannot easily be studied.

[Bucky Ball]

They were talking about these on the BBC last night.
Tunnels in South America from giant sloths. Them is honkin' big sloths.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-...-megafauna

[Cavebear]

Scientists discover why the human brain is so big

It is one of the defining attributes of being human: when compared with our closest primate relatives, we have incredibly large brains.

Now scientists have shed light on the reasons for the difference, by collecting cells from humans, chimps and gorillas and turning them into lumps of brain in the laboratory.

Tests on the tiny “brain organoids” reveal a hitherto unknown molecular switch that controls brain growth and makes the human organ three times larger than brains in the great apes.

Tinker with the switch and the human brain loses its growth advantage, while the great ape brain can be made to grow more like a human’s.

“What we see is a difference in cellular behaviour very, very early on that allows the human brain to grow larger,” said Dr Madeleine Lancaster, a developmental biologist at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. “We are able to account for almost all of the size difference.”

The healthy human brain typically reaches about 1,500cm3 in adulthood, roughly three times the size of the 500cm3 gorilla brain or the 400cm3 chimp brain. But working out why has been fraught with difficulty, not least because developing human and great ape brains cannot easily be studied.

Many DNA and RNA remnants affect growth or supression of organs and other body parts. You activate the right DNA and chickens will grow teeth.

[Cavebear]

They were talking about these on the BBC last night.
Tunnels in South America from giant sloths. Them is honkin' big sloths.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-...-megafauna

We always fail to understand what ancient animals could do because they aren't around now for us to observe. Sloths digging tunnels is pretty impressive. But I do sort of expect that, at one time, sloths were not so "slothful". LOL!

If at some time in the future, octupuses became extinct, could we even IMAGINE such odd creatures?

[Dānu]

The theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has built a parallel career as a best-selling writer on the future — of science, of the mind, of the human condition. Now, with “The God Equation,” No. 12 on the nonfiction list last week, Kaku turns his lens on the past.

Not just, say, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the earliest we’ve yet probed the universe. Before that. As the title suggests, Kaku’s latest concern is with what he calls the “holy grail” of all science, the metaphorical “umbilical cord” of our infant universe, whenever it was (or wasn’t) born out of the alleged multiverse. He wanted to write a balanced account of the physics community’s quest to prove string theory — and thus to resolve the messy, imperfect Standard Model of subatomic particles into one elegant theory of everything. This book is like a State of the Union where the union is all of existence.

The quest is a controversial one. “Nobel Prize winners have taken opposite points of view,” he said in a phone interview. To Kaku, the “vigorous debate” is a good thing.

In conversation, Kaku articulates the thorny situation with ease, and a sense of wonder: Right now the known laws of the universe — “the theory of almost everything,” he calls it — can be written on a single sheet of paper. There’s Einstein’s general relativity on one line, and then a couple more for the Standard Model. “The problem is that the two theories hate each other,” he said. “They’re based on different math, different principles. Every time you put them together it blows up in your face. Why should nature be so clumsy?”

Michio Kaku Says the Universe Is Simpler Than We Think

[Bucky Ball]

Too bad he had to invoke "god".
It's really nothing to do with the gods.

[SYZ]

We always fail to understand what ancient animals could do because they aren't around now for us to observe.  Sloths digging tunnels is pretty impressive.  But I do sort of expect that, at one time, sloths were not so "slothful"...