Science & TechnologyS


Donut

You the taxpayer are funding the Agri-business takeover of our food supply

Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact News
Wed, 23 Oct 2013 20:12 UTC
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Who Controls the World's Food Supply?

When the United States was founded in the 1700s, and when Thomas Jefferson served as President of the United States, about 90% of the U.S. population was employed in agriculture.

By the time of the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln served as President of the United States, about 50% of the population was employed in agriculture.

After the industrial boom, brought about by World War II, the percentage of those employed in agriculture started dropping significantly.

Today, in 2013, less than 1% of our population is employed in agriculture and most of the food sold in the U.S., and even around the world, is controlled by just a handful of companies.

At the bottom of the food chain, of course, are the seeds. No seeds, no food.

This is where the most consolidation has occurred in the past few years:
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Bug

New flu virus found in Peruvian bats

Rachael Rettner
LiveScience
Wed, 23 Oct 2013 10:02 UTC
Flu Virus
© U.S. Centers for Disease Control and PreventionA representation of the structure of a generic flu virus.
A brand new flu virus has been found in Peruvian bats, according to a new study from researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The virus, called A/bat/Peru/10, belongs to a family of flu viruses known as influenza A, which mainly infect birds, but can also infect other animals, including people.

Influenza A viruses are named for two proteins on the virus' surface, hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N), such as H1N1. Previously, there were 17 known types of H proteins and 10 known types of N proteins.

But the proteins on the surface of A/bat/Peru/10 are so distinct, that the researchers designated it a new virus: H18N11.

Last year, the same group of researchers identified a distinct influenza A virus, H17N10, in fruit bats living in Guatemala.
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Galaxy

The Milky Way does the Wave

Sid Perkins
ScienceShot
Tue, 22 Oct 2013 17:45 UTC
Milky Way
© Infospeed/iStockphoto
Stars in our part of the Milky Way seem to be doing "the wave," a new study suggests. The finding comes from an analysis of the motions of more than 70,000 red giant stars that lie within 6500 light-years of Earth - a distance that, in one direction, reaches about one-fourth of the way to the center of the galaxy.

Above the horizontal plane that slices through the center of the galaxy, stars closer to the center of the galaxy than the sun are, in general, moving away from the plane at speeds of 10 kilometers per second or less. Meanwhile, those farther from the galactic center than the sun are moving toward the plane - in some cases, as fast as 17 kilometers per second. All together, the complexity of motions observed by the team is similar to that seen among molecules in a gas with a sound wave passing through it, the researchers report this month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

As of yet, the reasons for these anomalous motions aren't clear, the researchers note. The "wave" may indeed be a ripple caused by a long-ago collision with a small companion galaxy, or it may result from perturbations in pressure triggered as the Milky Way's spiral arms (artist's concept above) push their way through space as the galaxy rotates.
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Bizarro Earth

Antarctic ozone hole hits 2013 peak size

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Tue, 22 Oct 2013 12:07 UTC
Ozone Hole
© NOAAThe ozone hole reached its biggest extent for the year on Sept. 26, 2013.
The Antarctic ozone hole reached its biggest extent for the year on Sept. 26, 2013, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced yesterday.

At its maximum, the ozone hole over the South Pole measured a whopping 7.3 million square miles (18.9 square kilometers), making it almost twice the area of Europe. [See the ozone hole form over Antarctica]

The ozone hole is a region of the stratosphere, the second layer up in Earth's atmosphere, where the concentration of ozone, a molecule made of three oxygen atoms, is less than 220 Dobson units (a measure of the density of a gas in an entire column of the atmosphere). The ozone layer, which stretches between 12 miles to 19 miles (20 to 30 km) above the Earth's surface, provides the planet with an invaluable service: Ozone absorbs ultraviolet light, which can help cause skin cancer and sunburn. It is also the culprit behind damage to plants and plankton.

In the 1980s, scientists first detected a depletion of ozone concentrations over Antarctica. The hole forms every year above Antarctica between September and November. The hole developed because of the proliferation of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), chemicals that were once widely used in refrigerants. In several chemical reactions, CFCs bind to oxygen atoms, breaking ozone down into ordinary oxygen molecules.
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Info

No known hominin is ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans


University of Indiana
Tue, 22 Oct 2013 13:35 UTC
Neanderthals Teeth
© Aida Gómez-RoblesThis image shows diversity in premolar and molar morphology in Neanderthals, modern humans and potential ancestral species.
Bloomington, Indiana -- The search for a common ancestor linking modern humans with the Neanderthals who lived in Europe thousands of years ago has been a compelling subject for research. But a new study suggests the quest isn't nearly complete.

The researchers, using quantitative methods focused on the shape of dental fossils, find that none of the usual suspects fits the expected profile of an ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.

They also present evidence that the lines that led to Neanderthals and modern humans diverged nearly 1 million years ago, much earlier than studies based on molecular evidence have suggested.

The study, which will be published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was carried out by an international team of scholars from The George Washington University, Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Austria, Indiana University and Atapuerca Research Team in Spain.

"Our results call attention to the strong discrepancies between molecular and paleontological estimates of the divergence time between Neanderthals and modern humans," said Aida Gómez-Robles, lead author of the paper and a postdoctoral scientist at the Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology of The George Washington University.

"These discrepancies cannot be simply ignored, but they have to be somehow reconciled."
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Comet 2

Comet C/2012 X1 (LINEAR), trailing ISON by 3 months, 'explodes' - 100x increase in brightness

Anura Guruge
nhlife.wordpress.com
Tue, 22 Oct 2013 12:43 UTC
This 'LINEAR' C/2012 X1 was discovered after C/2012 S1 - i.e., ISON. 'S' vs. 'X'. This 'LINEAR' (and there are a lot of comets discovered by LINEAR) is still in the asteroid belt. It will not make perihelion till February 21, 2014. So it is trailing ISON by 3 months.

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Comet 2

New Comet: P/2013 T2 (SCHWARTZ)

Ernesto Guido, Nick Howes & Martino Nicolini
Remanzacco Observatory
Tue, 22 Oct 2013 12:34 UTC
Cbet nr. 3676, issued on 2013, October 22, announces the discovery of a new comet (discovery magnitude ~18.8) by M. Schwartz on CCD images obtained with the 0.41-m f/3.75 Tenagra III astrograph. The new comet has been designated P/2013 T2 (SCHWARTZ).

We performed follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 16 R-filtered exposures, 50-sec each, obtained remotely from MPC code F65 (Faulkes Telescope North) on 2013, October 16.4 through a 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD (operated by Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network), shows that this object is a comet: sharp central condensation surrounded by a coma about 6" in diameter.

Below our confirmation image. Click on it for a bigger version.
P/2013 T2
© Remanzacco Observatory
M.P.E.C. 2013-U18 (including prediscovery Catalina Sky Survey data from Sept. 14.4 UT, when the magnitude was given as 17.8-18.6) assigns the following elliptical orbital elements to comet P/2013 T2: T 2013 June 20.65; e= 0.53; Peri. = 342.52; q = 1.60; Incl.= 9.36
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Meteor

Huge half-ton chunk of Chelyabinsk meteorite lifted from lakebed


Russia Today
Mon, 21 Oct 2013 14:52 UTC
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© RIA Novosti / Aleksandr Kondratuk
The largest-discovered fragment of a Russian meteorite, weighing around 570 kilograms, has been lifted from the bed of Lake Chebarkul in the Urals.

The huge meteorite chunk split into three pieces when scientists tried to weigh it. The precise weight could not be established because the heavy object broke the scales.

"The preliminary examination... shows that this is really a fraction of the Chelyabinsk meteorite. It's got thick burn-off, the rust is clearly seen and it's got a big number of indents. This chunk is most probably one of the top ten biggest meteorite fragments ever found," said Sergey Zamozdra, associate professor of Chelyabinsk State University, as cited by Interfax news agency.

He explained that it was important to establish the weight of the fragment in order to learn more about the qualities of the whole of the meteorite.

The lifted chunk was taken to the regional natural history museum. The plan is to have a small sample of it X-rayed to determine what minerals it consists of.
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Telescope

Asteroid fear: Gaia satellite sent into space to monitor blind zone between sun and Earth

Emily Fox
The Express, UK
Sun, 20 Oct 2013 13:44 UTC
A state of the art satellite is being sent into space to monitor the blind zone between the Earth and the sun to warn of incoming asteroids.

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© PHThe new satellite will warn of impending asteroids
Astronomers have previously not been able to spot asteroids in the 'blind zone' due to radiation from the sun blocking information.

But now The European Space Agency intends to launch the Gaia Space Telescope with its key task being to monitor the area between the Earth and the sun and warn of any impending collisions.

One recent asteroid which could have been spotted as it travelled through the 'blind zone' months before it collided with the Earth, was that of the Russian asteroid of February this year which caused a spectacular fireball before smashing into Chelyabinsk, 900 miles east of Russia.

Gerry Gilmore, professor of experimental philosophy at Cambridge University's Institute of Astronomy told the Sunday Times: "Gaia will measure all the asteroids including those between us and the sun which are the really nasty ones because we can't see them."
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Comet 2

Outburst of comet C/2012 X1 (LINEAR)

Ernesto Guido, Nick Howes and Martino Nicolini
Remanzacco Observatory
Mon, 21 Oct 2013 13:11 UTC
Cbet No. 3674, issued on 2013 October 21, reports an outburst in brightness of comet C/2012 X1 (LINEAR). The magnitude of the comet was measured by H. Sato on on Oct. 20.5 to be total mag 8.5 (as measured within a circular aperture of diameter 85".2) with a brighter center about 10" across. The predicted H_10 magnitude for C/2012 X1 (LINEAR) would be around 14 now.

We performed follow-up measurements of this object on 2013 October 21.51. Below you can see our image of this comet, stacking of 3x20-seconds unfiltered exposures, obtained remotely from MPC code H06 (iTelescope Observatory, New Mexico) through a 0.50-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD + f/4.5 focal reducer. At the moment of the imaging session, the comet was just +16 degree above the horizon and the Sun was -11 degree. Click on it for a bigger version.
Comet C/2012 X1
© Remanzacco Observatory
Below you can see an elaboration of the original image with the MCM filter. This filter creates an artificial coma, based on the photometry of the original image, and subtract the original image itself in order to highlight the internal zones of different brightness that are very close to the inner core and that would normally be hidden from the diffuse glow of the comet.
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