Science & Technology

Mysterious 'ghost shark' filmed for first time ever

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper
cnet.com
Sat, 17 Dec 2016 12:47 UTC

Remote cameras accidentally catch images of the phantasmal creature with a sex organ on its forehead, far from the waters previously believed to be its home.

It's like the plot of a Michael Crichton book. The disturbing-looking pointy-nosed blue chimaera, also known as a "ghost shark," has been caught alive on video for the first time, purely by accident.

Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute repeatedly captured footage of numerous species while on dives up to 6,700 feet (2,042 meters) below the sea off the coast of southern California, central California and the Hawaiian islands, in 2009. The footage and an accompanying paper in "Marine Biodiversity Records" came out in October, but the video just started to pick up steam this past week.

The institute wasn't looking specifically for the creatures -- the bluish, pointy-nosed sharks simply happened to be caught on camera on six separate occasions during remotely operated vehicle deep-sea surveys.

New Russian hypersonic aircraft able to break through missile defense systems

Sputnik
Sat, 17 Dec 2016 18:26 UTC

Russian scientists are working on hypersonic aircraft that will be able to penetrate enemy missile defense, RIA Novosti wrote, citing Boris Satovsky, a project director at the military research agency Future Research Fund in Moscow.

Boris Satovsky said that the ongoing technological progress was producing ever new types of weapons, including those based on highly maneuverable hypersonic elements

"Thanks to their outstanding technical characteristics, such systems will be able to break through virtually every existing missile defense system, thus ensuring global military-strategic parity in the next 30-40 years," Boris Satovsky told RIA.

According to media reports, this year Russia has twice tested a hypersonic glider meant to replace traditional warheads for new generations of intercontinental ballistic missiles, including the heavy Sarmat ICBM.

Researchers use neurofeedback to tap into brain activity associated with confidence

Rachael Rettner,
Live Science
Thu, 15 Dec 2016 18:55 UTC

There may be a way to tap into people's brain activity to boost their confidence, a new study suggests.

In the study, the researchers used a technique called decoded neurofeedback, which involves scanning people's brains to monitor their brain activity, and using artificial intelligence to detect activity patterns that are linked with feelings of confidence.

Then, whenever these patterns are detected, people are given a reward — in this case, participants were given a small amount of money.

The researchers found that by doing this, they could boost participants' confidence when they were doing a task in a laboratory, regardless of how well they actually performed the task. What's more, the same technique could be used to decrease confidence, if people were rewarded when their brain activity showed a pattern that was linked to low confidence, according to the researchers.

Planet-eating death star discovered by astronomers

RT
Fri, 16 Dec 2016 17:56 UTC

A sun in a far off galaxy has been digesting its orbiting planets, according to new research. The contents of HIP68468's 'belly' led scientists to believe the star had quite the appetite.

Taking a cue from the famous "Death Star" in the Star Wars film saga, HIP68468 is theorized to have destroyed planets that veered into its path due to an orbit much closer than Earth is to the our own sun. Unlike the "Death Star" though, the planets were engulfed by it and became part of its composition.

HIP68468's composition "points to a history of ingesting planets," according to the research, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

"It doesn't mean that the sun will 'eat' the Earth any time soon," said the report's co-author, Jacob Bean, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of Chicago, explaining how the planet contains "four times more lithium than would be expected for a star that is 6-billion-years old."

"Our discovery provides an indication that violent histories may be common for planetary systems, including our own," Bean says.

Hawaii: US Navy conducts missile tests off Kauai

William Cole
Stars and Stripes
Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00 UTC

© Leah Garton/Missile Defense Agency
The Missile Defense Agency and sailors aboard USS John Paul Jones (DDG 53) successfully fired a salvo of two SM-6 Dual I missiles against a complex medium-range ballistic missile target on Dec. 14, 2016 off Hawaii.

The Missile Defense Agency and Navy continued testing the versatility of the SM-6 missile with a salvo of two missiles fired at a ballistic missile target in the "terminal" or final phase of flight early this morning off Hawaii. The Pearl Harbor destroyer USS John Paul Jones fired the defensive missiles after a target missile was launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai just after midnight. The target missile represented a medium-range ballistic missile — something the U.S. military is increasingly concerned about.

The SM-6 Dual 1 missiles fired by the John Paul Jones can be used for either increasingly sophisticated and lethal cruise missiles that come in low and ballistic missiles in the terminal phase of their arc. The Aegis sea-based missile defense element utilizes Aegis cruisers and destroyers to defend against short- to medium-range ballistic missiles in the midcourse of flight as well as in the terminal phase, which is short and begins once the missile reenters the atmosphere, MDA said.

Study warns tornadoes in Europe are an underestimated threat

The Watchers
Tue, 13 Dec 2016 17:30 UTC

F3 tornado near Rostock, Germany.

A new research paper warns that although tornadoes in Europe cause injuries, fatalities, and damages, their threat is not widely recognized and is underestimated. To increase awareness of tornadoes and their threat to the continent, authors of the paper propose a strategy that includes a collaboration between meteorological services and development of national forecasting and warning systems.

A team of researchers led by Bogdan Antonescu and David M. Schult analyzed the social and economical impact of tornadoes in Europe using reports from the European Severe Weather Database (ESWD) between 1950 and 2015.

Although the reported frequencies and intensities of tornadoes in Europe are lower compared with the United States, tornadoes do occur in Europe and they are associated with injuries, fatalities and damages.

US shale boom has already 'peaked' says former govt geoscientist - industry 'now in decline'

Nafeez Ahmed
InsurgeIntelligence
Fri, 16 Dec 2016 16:13 UTC

$fracking gas well$

Fracking revolution now in decline

A former Canadian government geoscientist has just published new research showing that US shale oil and gas production has peaked, and is unlikely to increase substantially for the foreseeable future.

The two new reports find that US forecasts of oil and gas abundance are over-hyped, unrealistic, and ignore mounting evidence of an industry in decline.

On Monday, the Post Carbon Institute published two new studies by Dr J. David Hughes, a former research manager for 32 years at the Geological Survey of Canada, where he headed up research on unconventional gas and coal.

Hughes found that the US Energy Information Administration's (EIA) optimistic forecasts of US shale oil and gas production are "highly unlikely to be realized."

US shale oil production peaked in March 2015, and has since declined a million barrels a day. US shale gas production peaked in February 2016, and since declined 2.1 billion cubic feet per day.

Comment: The oil shortage is like a manufactured crisis.

Giant 'rivers in the sky' could cause extinction-level floods

BEC CREW
Science Alert
Thu, 15 Dec 2016 08:17 UTC

Atmospheric rivers have claimed their first victims.

Atmospheric rivers - narrow corridors of concentrated moisture suspended in the atmosphere - were responsible for the mysterious mass die-off of wild Olympia oysters in San Francisco Bay in 2011, scientists have found.

This is the first documented case of these 'rivers in the sky' - which can hold 15 times more water than the Mississippi River - directly harming an entire population, and they're expected to increase in frequency, intensity, and unpredictability as the global climate warms.

"Extreme events are predicted to be more prevalent under climate change," the University of California, Davis team reports.

"We highlight a new mechanism by which precipitation extremes appear to affect a sensitive species, contributing to the near 100 percent mass mortality of wild oysters in northern San Francisco Bay."

If you're not familiar with the natural phenomenon of atmospheric rivers, they're relatively narrow regions in the atmosphere that are responsible for most of the horizontal transport of water vapour outside of the tropics.

These suspended moisture plumes are, on average, 400 to 600 km wide, and in California, they can deliver up to half of the state's annual precipitation in just 10 to 15 days.

While most atmospheric rivers are mild, the ones containing the largest amounts of water vapour and the strongest winds can create extreme rainfall and floods, inducing catastrophic mud slides and drops in salinity.

They have been linked to all seven declared floods on California's Russian River between 1996 and 2007, and all 10 of Britain's largest floods since the 1970s.

Comment: See also:

The ice is cracking in Antarctica: 'Pyramids' have been spotted, secret past emerging?

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan
Wed, 14 Dec 2016 23:30 UTC

There are secrets in Antarctica. You can sense them from thousands of miles away.

And they are starting to come out.

A giant crack in the ice has freed an iceberg the size of a small U.S. state, and it will ignite the climate change/global warming debate; but this change will also offer unique perspective on the geological history that has never before been known. Ice is accumulating rapidly in one part of the continent, but melting in the other. According to Live Science:

Mysterious 'Crater' in Antarctica Has Ominous Cause:

A "crater" in Antarctica once thought to be the work of a meteorite impact is actually the result of ice melt, new research finds.

The hole, which is in the Roi Baudouin ice shelf in East Antarctica, is a collapsed lake — a cavity formed when a lake of meltwater drained — with a "moulin," a nearly vertical drainage passage through the ice, beneath it, researchers found on a field trip to the area in January 2016.

"That was a huge surprise," Stef Lhermitte, an earth science researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and at the University of Leuven in Belgium, said in a statement. "Moulins typically are observed on Greenland. And we definitely never see them on an ice shelf."

World first: London woman gives birth with help from ovarian tissue frozen before she reached puberty

RT
Thu, 15 Dec 2016 17:28 UTC

A London woman is believed to be the first in the world to give birth with the help of ovarian tissue that was frozen before she reached puberty. The tissue was removed from her body ahead of chemotherapy treatment needed to treat a blood disorder.

Moaza Al Matrooshi gave birth to a healthy baby boy on Tuesday, but her path to motherhood wasn't easy.

The 24-year-old was born with beta thalassaemia, an inherited blood disorder that is fatal if left untreated. She needed chemotherapy as a child, which damages the ovaries, before receiving a bone marrow transplant from her brother.

At the age of nine, long before most girls are faced with reproductive decisions, Al Matrooshi had her right ovary removed in an operation in Leeds, where the tissue was frozen.

How to beat a dead horse. Next up, Gay Bond? Gay Star Trek? Gay President? Oh right, we already had that sequel.

bbrebozo

Wonder what the implications are from this for both Southwest and the other airlines doing business in Texas: [Link] BK

Buffalo_Ken

Uummm, dude, maybe you need a better news feed: There is still no “hundred-employee” vaccine mandate Jon Rappoport Oct 13, 2018 [Link]

Good Optics

Fewtile of many. Time cannot be killed. It is fixed. It moves on on its own. It just is. It is time. tick-tock....time. So I reckon in the...

Buffalo_Ken

For one, there is no.... time .....like the present.....so stop killing it ;)

Fewtile

Science & Technology

Mysterious 'ghost shark' filmed for first time ever

New Russian hypersonic aircraft able to break through missile defense systems

Researchers use neurofeedback to tap into brain activity associated with confidence

Planet-eating death star discovered by astronomers

Hawaii: US Navy conducts missile tests off Kauai

Study warns tornadoes in Europe are an underestimated threat

US shale boom has already 'peaked' says former govt geoscientist - industry 'now in decline'

Giant 'rivers in the sky' could cause extinction-level floods

The ice is cracking in Antarctica: 'Pyramids' have been spotted, secret past emerging?

World first: London woman gives birth with help from ovarian tissue frozen before she reached puberty

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