Science & TechnologyS


Blue Planet

Unidentified "Type D" killer whale finally discovered in Southern Ocean

Christopher Joyce
NPR
Thu, 07 Mar 2019 16:08 UTC
killer whales
© J.P. SylvestreA rare photo of "type D" killer whales off South Georgia island, located between South America and Antarctica, shows the whales' blunt heads and tiny white eye patches.
Scientists say they've found a mysterious type of killer whale that they've been searching for for years. It lives in parts of the ocean near Antarctica - and it could be the largest animal to have remained unidentified by biologists.

The notion that there might be some unusual kind of killer whale emerged in 1955. Photos from New Zealand showed a bunch of whales stranded on a beach. "This was a very different-looking group of killer whales," says Robert Pitman, a marine ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The whales were smaller than other killer whales, and they had rounded heads and pointier fins. "And most importantly," Pitman adds, "they had a little tiny eye patch," a white spot under each eye characteristic of killer whales. These patches were unusually small, in some cases almost nonexistent.

Comment: It seems there's been a number of discoveries or rediscoveries recently: Scientists found the world's largest bee which they believed had become extinct, and in Taiwan a leopard, having not been seen for 30 years, was spotted:
Leopard Thought to Be Extinct Is Spotted in Taiwan for First Time in Over 30 Years

Formosan clouded leopard
© Stock Photos from Khaled Azam Noor/ShutterstockThe Formosan clouded leopard is a subspecies of the rare clouded leopard (pictured).
Hopeful news for animal lovers is coming out of Taiwan, where rangers say they've spotted a leopard thought to be extinct. The Formosan clouded leopard was declared extinct in 2013, though the last official sighting occurred in 1983. Locally known as Li'uljaw, these elusive creatures are not easy to trap, but a group of rangers in Taitung County's Daren Township have been patrolling since last summer hoping to spot the cat that locals claim to have seen.

Village chief of the Paiwan Tribe, Kao Cheng-chi, confirmed that rangers have been on alert since last June and that they'd held tribal meetings to discuss the sightings and ensure that hunters were kept at bay. Now, rangers have reported seeing Formosan clouded leopards hunting goats on a cliff, while a separate group spotted one run up a tree after roaming near some scooters.

The Formosan clouded leopard is a subspecies of the clouded leopard, a Himalayan cat that has been on the IUCN's vulnerable list since 2008. Known for its beautiful dusky-grey markings, the Formosan clouded leopard was endemic to Taiwan and, at one time, it was the island's second largest carnivore. Extensive logging ate away at its habitat, forcing it to retreat into the mountains.

This rare animal is considered sacred by the Paiwan tribe and is still listed as protected wildlife by Taiwan's Forestry Bureau. The Paiwan have implored the government to stop logging in order to allow the Formosan clouded leopards to come out of hiding and there have been reports of encounters past 1983, even if they weren't official sightings. Liu Chiung-hsi, a professor at the National Taitung University of Department of Life Sciences, said that a group of indigenous hunters told him that they had killed several cats in the 1990s, but burned their pelts for fear of repercussion from the government.

Now that these new sightings have been reported, the Taitung Forest District Office is hoping to confirm the sightings and start scientific research regarding them. For his part, Professor Chiung-hsi believes the reports. He told local reporters, "I believe this animal still does exist," stating that it's not surprising that they haven't been seen regularly due to their vigilance and natural elusive behavior.

It wouldn't be the first time a seemingly extinct species popped back up. Just recently the Fernandina giant tortoise, thought to be extinct after a last official sighting in 1906, was spotted by rangers at the Galápagos National Park. Fingers crossed that the same is true for the Formosan clouded leopard.
See also:

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Rocket

'Excellent engineering & best engine': Musk praises Russian rockets after Crew Dragon test flight


RT
Thu, 07 Mar 2019 23:06 UTC
musk
© Reuters / Mike Blake
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has reiterated his admiration for Russian rocket engineering, giving credit where it was due and responding to allegations of Moscow's 'passive aggressive' reaction to the flight of his Crew Dragon to the ISS.

"Russia has excellent rocket engineering & best engine currently flying," Musk declared, noting that a "reusable version" of the Angara rocket in particular "would be great."

The Tesla billionaire was responding to a somewhat shade-throwing piece by Ars Technica, which framed Roscosmos as 'threatened' by the newly-invigorated American space program.

Comment: NASA agrees: America will continue to use Russian rocket engines to fly into space

And it's not just rocket engines: Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Putin The World To Rights: Russia's New Nuclear Weapons And The End of 'Unipolarity'

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Microscope 2

Animal with an anus that comes and goes could reveal how ours evolved

Michael Le Page
New Scientists
Tue, 05 Mar 2019 12:00 UTC
warty comb jelly
© imageBROKER / Alamy Stock PhotoThe warty comb jelly has an anus like no other
A jellyfish-like creature has a neat trick that makes it unique among animals: its anus forms only when it needs to defecate, then disappears without a trace.

"That is the really spectacular finding here," says Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, who made the discovery. "There is no documentation of a transient anus in any other animals that I know of."

Tamm thinks the discovery might represent an intermediate stage in evolution.

In some simple animals, such as jellyfish, the gut has only one opening, which functions as the mouth and anus.

It has been known since 1850 that comb jellies - which superficially resemble jellyfish, but belong to a separate group called ctenophores - have a through-gut, with a separate mouth and anus. Some even have more than one anus.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Camcorder

AI detects shoplifters before they steal

Lisa Du and Ayaka Maki
Bloomberg Quint
Tue, 05 Mar 2019 02:09 UTC
Pre-crime AI
© Screenshot VAAK/YouTube
It's watching, and knows a crime is about to take place before it happens.

Vaak, a Japanese startup, has developed artificial intelligence software that hunts for potential shoplifters, using footage from security cameras for fidgeting, restlessness and other potentially suspicious body language.

While AI is usually envisioned as a smart personal assistant or self-driving car, it turns out the technology is pretty good at spotting nefarious behavior. Like a scene out of the movie "Minority Report," algorithms analyze security-camera footage and alert staff about potential thieves via a smartphone app. The goal is prevention; if the target is approached and asked if they need help, there's a good chance the theft never happens.

Vaak made headlines last year when it helped to nab a shoplifter at a convenience store in Yokohama. Vaak had set up its software in the shop as a test case, which picked up on previously undetected shoplifting activity. The perpetrator was arrested a few days later.

"I thought then, 'Ah, at last!'" said Vaak founder Ryo Tanaka, 30. "We took an important step closer to a society where crime can be prevented with AI."

Shoplifting cost the global retail industry about $34 billion in lost sales in 2017 - the biggest source of shrinkage, according to a report from Tyco Retail Solutions. While that amounts to approximately 2 percent of revenue, it can make a huge difference in an industry known for razor-thin margins.
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Info

Bacteria that 'eat and breathe' electricity in Yellowstone


Science Daily
Tue, 05 Mar 2019 02:02 UTC
Hot Pools Yellowstone
© WSUPools of hot water like this are the home to bacteria that can eat and breathe electricity.
Last August, Abdelrhman Mohamed found himself hiking deep into the wilderness of Yellowstone National Park.

Unlike thousands of tourists who trek to admire the park's iconic geysers and hot springs every year, the WSU graduate student was traveling with a team of scientists to hunt for life within them.

After a strenuous seven mile walk through scenic, isolated paths in the Heart Lake Geyser Basin area, the team found four pristine pools of hot water. They carefully left a few electrodes inserted into the edge of the water, hoping to coax little-known creatures out of hiding -- bacteria that can eat and breathe electricity.

After 32 days, the team returned to the hot springs to collect the submerged electrodes. Working under the supervision of Haluk Beyenal, Paul Hohenschuh Distinguished Professor in the Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, Mohamed and postdoctoral researcher Phuc Ha analyzed the electrodes.

Voila! They had succeeded in capturing their prey -- heat-loving bacteria that "breathe" electricity through the solid carbon surface of the electrodes.

The WSU team, in collaboration with colleagues from Montana State University, published their research detailing the multiple bacterial communities they found in the Journal of Power Sources.
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Map

Maps for Earth's Crust: Billionaires are on the hunt for new underground Cobalt

Jack Farchy
Bloomberg
Mon, 04 Mar 2019 00:00 UTC
Kobold Metals
A coalition of billionaires led by Bill Gates has thrown its financial weight behind a startup hoping to build a "Google Maps for the earth's crust" to hunt for new sources of cobalt.

The startup, Kobold Metals, is using data-crunching algorithms to scour the globe for cobalt, in a bet that there may still be significant undiscovered sources of the metal that has become one of the world's hot commodities thanks to its use in electric vehicle batteries.

The company has raised money from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund backed by Gates and a dozen other tycoons including Jeff Bezos, Ray Dalio and Michael Bloomberg, owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.
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Magic Hat

Octopus evolution 'weirder than we could have imagined' - edit their own RNA to adapt to environment

Signe Dean
Science Alert
Wed, 06 Mar 2019 17:50 UTC
octopus
© Olga Visavi/Shutterstock
Just when we thought octopuses couldn't be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet.

In a surprising twist, in April 2017 scientists discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment.

This is weird because that's really not how adaptations usually happen in multicellular animals. When an organism changes in some fundamental way, it typically starts with a genetic mutation - a change to the DNA.


Comment: That's a major assumption. Genetic mutations may occur, but they do not 'evolve' species: they damage existing genetic information, the results of which are sometimes adaptive. Random mutations do not result in new proteins or new traits. See:

Those genetic changes are then translated into action by DNA's molecular sidekick, RNA. You can think of DNA instructions as a recipe, while RNA is the chef that orchestrates the cooking in the kitchen of each cell, producing necessary proteins that keep the whole organism going.

But RNA doesn't just blindly execute instructions - occasionally it improvises with some of the ingredients, changing which proteins are produced in the cell in a rare process called RNA editing.

Comment: Self-editing code? Must be an accident of nature, right?

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Galaxy

Juno and Cassini missions bring new surprises from Jupiter and Saturn

American Physical Society
Eureaka Alert
Wed, 06 Mar 2019 12:00 UTC
jupiter
© CC0 Public Domain
The latest data sent back by the Juno and Cassini spacecraft from giant gas planets Jupiter and Saturn have challenged a lot of current theories about how planets in our solar system form and behave.

The detailed magnetic and gravity data have been "invaluable but also confounding," said David Stevenson from Caltech, who will present an update of both missions this week at the 2019 American Physical Society March Meeting in Boston. He will also participate in a press conference describing the work. Information for logging on to watch and ask questions remotely is included at the end of this news release.

"Although there are puzzles yet to be explained, this is already clarifying some of our ideas about how planets form, how they make magnetic fields and how the winds blow," Stevenson said.

Comment: Evidently scientific theories are, as of yet, missing some significant pieces of the puzzle: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Arrow Down

Tesla's autopilot system not safe & may even increase risk of crashes


RT
Thu, 07 Mar 2019 10:32 UTC
tesla car
© Reuters / South Jordan Police Department
New research by Quality Control Systems Corporation (QCSC) has found that Tesla's Autosteer may have made accidents more common instead of reducing crashes.

According to the report, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which launched an investigation in 2016 following a fatal Tesla crash, has misinterpreted the data it was provided. Back then, the NHTSA determined that the system wasn't just safe, but actually slashed crash rates by nearly 40 percent.

"After obtaining the formerly secret, underlying data through a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act against the US Department of Transportation, we discovered that the actual mileage at the time the Autosteer system was installed appears to have been reported for fewer than half the vehicles NHTSA studied," the QCSC report said.

Comment: Evidently the technology for driverless cars has yet to mature and it's no wonder the majority of the public don't trust them:

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Jupiter

Kepler's first exoplanet has been confirmed, ten years after discovery

Ashley Strickland
CNN
Wed, 06 Mar 2019 17:27 UTC
kepler 1658 system
This is an artist's illustration of the Kepler-1658 system, where Kepler-1658 b orbits an evolved subgiant star every 3.8 days.
Ten years after the Kepler Space Telescope launched and revolutionized exoplanet discovery, Kepler-1658 b has finally been confirmed as the first exoplanet that the mission ever detected.

It's taken so long because the initial estimate of Kepler-1658, the planet's host star, was wrong. This also made the size estimate for the planet incorrect as well, and both of them were underestimated.

The incorrect numbers contributed to confusion that made the planet candidate seem like a false positive, and it was set aside. Then, University of Hawai'i graduate student Ashley Chontos focused her first year graduate research project on re-analyzing host stars of Kepler planet candidates.

Together, Chontos and an international team of astronomers have a paper on the planet that has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal.

"Our new analysis, which uses stellar sound waves observed in the Kepler data to characterize the star, demonstrated that the star is in fact three times larger than previously thought. This in turn means that the planet is three times larger, revealing that Kepler-1658 b is actually a hot Jupiter," Chontos said in a statement.

Comment: See also:

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