Science & TechnologyS


Galaxy

Forget the Big Bang theory - the universe 'thawed' sez physicist

Ellie Zolfagharifard
The Daily Mail
Tue, 04 Feb 2014 07:37 UTC
Image
The latest theory contradicts the most popular concept of the universe which suggests the world started with a Big Bang, and has been expanding ever since. Pictured here is the cosmic microwave background that is thought to have been left over from the Bang.
Our existence didn't come as a result of a glorious bang, but instead of a long, cold transformation, according to a new theory.

The theory contradicts the most popular concept of our universe's beginning, which suggestsit started with the Big Bang, and has been expanding ever since.

The Big Bang model suggests the universe began from what is known as a 'singularity', or a point of infinite density at which physical laws break down.

But Christof Wetterich, a theoretical physicist at Heidelberg University in Germany, claims this Big Bang never happened. Instead, the universe started as an empty and cold void, slowly emerging from a deep freeze.

He claims his theory will help resolve some of the more challenging aspects of the Big Bang theory, such as the singularity present during the beginning of the universe.

The concept that the universe is expanding was developed in the 1920s when astronomers look at the light emitted or absorbed by atoms, which appeared at different frequencies.

Professor Wetterich's latest suggestion builds on his earlier theory that the universe is not expanding, but instead getting fatter.
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Gear

The real-life Death Star: U.S. researchers developing super laser

Mark Prigg
Daily Mail
Wed, 05 Feb 2014 17:00 UTC
Image
The project has been nicknamed the 'death Star' after the Star Wars craft that could blow up planets.
  • Will emit a short laser burst with an intensity of 1023 watts per square centimetre
  • 100,000 times more power than all the power stations in the world combined
  • Laser bursts will last only 1/100,000th of a billionth of a second
  • Laser being built by Lawrence Livermore lab in the US
It will be the most powerful laser ever created, and could give researchers incredible new insights into how the cosmos was created.

Called the High-Repetition-Rate Advanced Petawatt Laser System (HAPLS), it will emit 100,000 times more power than all the power stations in the world - for a tiny fraction of a second.

It has even been nicknamed the Death Star laser for its similarity to Darth Vader's laser wielding base in Star Wars.

The project has been nicknamed the 'death Star' after the Star Wars craft that could blow up planets
How Powerful is it?

HAPLS is designed to ultimately generate a peak power greater than 1 petawatt (1015 or 1 quadrillion watts).

Each pulse will deliver 30 joules of energy in less than 30 femtoseconds (trillionths of a second or 0.00000000000003 seconds) - the time it takes light to travel a fraction of the width of a human hair.

The laser system will deliver these pulses of light at 10 hertz (10 repetitions per second).
The Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) Beamlines project is an EU-funded lab being developed with experts from around the world, including Lawrence Livermore lab in the US, and being built in the Czech Republic.
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Grey Alien

Bold Prediction: Intelligent alien life could be found by 2040

Mike Wall
LiveScience
Mon, 10 Feb 2014 11:13 UTC
Gliese 667 C
© ESOThis exoplanet orbits the star Gliese 667 C, which belongs to a triple system. The six Earth-mass exoplanet circulates around its low-mass host star at a distance equal to only 1/20th of the Earth-Sun distance. The host star is a companion to two other low-mass stars, which are seen here in the distance.
Palo Alto, California - The first detection of intelligent extraterrestrial life will likely come within the next quarter-century, a prominent alien hunter predicts.

By 2040 or so, astronomers will have scanned enough star systems give themselves a great shot of discovering alien-produced electromagnetic signals, said Seth Shostak of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

"I think we'll find E.T. within two dozen years using these sorts of experiments," Shostak said here Thursday (Feb. 6) during a talk at the 2014 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) symposium here at Stanford University.

"Instead of looking at a few thousand star systems, which is the tally so far, we will have looked at maybe a million star systems" 24 years from now, Shostak said. "A million might be the right number to find something."
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Info

It took 60,000 years to kill nearly everything on Earth

Becky Oskin
LiveScience
Mon, 10 Feb 2014 14:00 UTC
Trilobite
© Javier Ortega-Hernández, University of CambridgeTrilobites disappeared from Earth following the Permian mass extinction.
It took only 60,000 years to kill more than 90 percent of all life on Earth, according to the most precise study yet of the Permian mass extinction, the greatest die-off in the past 540 million years.

The new timeline doesn't reveal the culprit behind the die-off, though scientists have several suspects, such as volcanic eruptions in Siberia that belched massive quantities of climate-changing gases. But pinning down the duration of the Permian mass extinction will help researchers refine its potential trigger mechanisms, said Seth Burgess, lead study author and a geochemist at MIT.

"Whatever caused the extinction was really rapid, or the biosphere reached some critical threshold," Burgess told Live Science. "Having an accurate timeline for the events surrounding the mass extinction and the interval itself is extremely important, because it gives us an idea of how the biosphere responds."

The findings were published today (Feb. 10) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Bullseye

Researchers want your body odor to be your new ID

Kwame Opam
The Verge
Sat, 08 Feb 2014 02:43 UTC
smelling the flowers
Researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid are currently developing a new form of biometric authentication based on personal body odor. The Group of Biometrics, Biosignals and Security (GB2S), with help from the Spanish engineering consulting firm Ilía Systems Ltd, hopes that its work can used as a novel form of citizen security while also being used in the realm of disease detection.

As the group reports, every person has their own distinct odor that stays steady most of the time. As such, a person's bouquet can be traced back to them with an accuracy rate of 85 percent or higher. With that in mind, Ilía Systems created a sensor for smell detection. While it's not as accurate an indicator of identity as, say, a bloodhound trained to track by scent, it is sensitive enough to detect volatile elements in body odor. Armed with this sensor, GB2S hopes that body odor can be used in such scenarios as airport security checkpoints and national borders.
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Take 2

95% of climate models agree - So, what is actually happening must be an illusion

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D
WattsUpWithThat.com
Mon, 10 Feb 2014 14:36 UTC
I'm seeing a lot of wrangling over the recent (15+ year) pause in global average warming...when did it start, is it a full pause, shouldn't we be taking the longer view, etc.

These are all interesting exercises, but they miss the most important point: the climate models that governments base policy decisions on have failed miserably.

I've updated our comparison of 90 climate models versus observations for global average surface temperatures through 2013, and we still see that >95% of the models have over-forecast the warming trend since 1979, whether we use their own surface temperature dataset (HadCRUT4), or our satellite dataset of lower tropospheric temperatures (UAH):
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© Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
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Chalkboard

Climate scientist who got it right predicts 20 more years of global cooling

Barbara Hollingsworth
CNS News
Tue, 28 Jan 2014 12:02 UTC
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Dr. Don Easterbrook - a climate scientist and glacier expert from Washington State who correctly predicted back in 2000 that the Earth was entering a cooling phase - says to expect colder temperatures for at least the next two decades.

Easterbrook's predictions were "right on the money" seven years before Al Gore and the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for warning that the Earth was facing catastrophic warming caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide, which Gore called a "planetary emergency."

"When we check their projections against what actually happened in that time interval, they're not even close. They're off by a full degree in one decade, which is huge. That's more than the entire amount of warming we've had in the past century. So their models have failed just miserably, nowhere near close. And maybe it's luck, who knows, but mine have been right on the button," Easterbrook told CNSNews.com.

"For the next 20 years, I predict global cooling of about 3/10ths of a degree Fahrenheit, as opposed to the one-degree warming predicted by the IPCC," said Easterbrook, professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University and author of 150 scientific journal articles and 10 books, including "Evidence Based Climate Science," which was published in 2011. (See EasterbrookL coming-century-predictions.pdf)

In contrast, Gore and the IPCC's computer models predicted "a big increase" in global warming by as much as one degree per decade. But the climate models used by the IPCC have proved to be wrong, with many places in Europe and North America now experiencing record-breaking cold.

Comment: To read more about the Dr. Don Easterbrook and REAL science, see:

'Geologist Declares 'global warming is over' - Warns U.S. Climate Conference of 'Looming Threat of Global Cooling'
Global Warming's Kaput; 2008 Coolest in 5 Years
Global Warming? Global Cooling Forecast Backed By Real Science

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Magic Wand

Warmists trying to save face: Nature can, selectively, buffer human-caused global warming, say Israeli, U.S. scientists

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That
Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00 UTC
Image
© NASA
Can naturally occurring processes selectively buffer the full brunt of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities?

Yes, find researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Johns Hopkins University in the US and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

As the globe warms, ocean temperatures rise, leading to increased water vapor escaping into the atmosphere. Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, and its impact on climate is amplified in the stratosphere.

In a detailed study, the researchers from the three institutions examined the causes of changes in the temperatures and water vapor in the tropical tropopause layer (TTL). The TTL is a critical region of our atmosphere with characteristics of both the troposphere below and the stratosphere above.

The TTL can have significant influences on both atmospheric chemistry and climate, as its temperature determines how much water vapor can enter the stratosphere. Therefore, understanding any changes in the temperature of the TTL and what might be causing them is an important scientific question of significant societal relevance, say the researchers.

The Israeli and US scientists used measurements from satellite observations and output from chemistry-climate models to understand recent temperature trends in the TTL. Temperature measurements show where significant changes have taken place since 1979.
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Comet

New comet discovered: C/2014 C2 (STEREO)

Seiichi Yoshida
Aerith Net
Sat, 08 Feb 2014 19:34 UTC
Discovery Date: February 1, 2014

Magnitude: 7.0 mag

Discoverer: Alan Watson (STEREO-A satellite)

C/2014 C2
© Aerith Net

The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2014-C25.
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Comet 2

New Comet: P/2014 C1 (TOTAS)

Seiichi Yoshida
Aerith Net
Sat, 08 Feb 2014 19:30 UTC
Discovery Date: February 1, 2014

Magnitude: 19.3 mag

Discoverer: Teide Observatory Tenerife Asteroid Survey (TOTAS)

P/2014 C1
© Aerith NetMagnitudes Graph
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2014-C11.
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