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Comet 2

Did comet impacts kill lots of animals in Alaska?

Ross Pomeroy
RealClear Science
Tue, 02 Jan 2018 17:46 UTC
impact-related microspherules
© Hagstrum et. al/Scientific Reports
To laypeople, the "muck" found in certain areas of Alaska and Yukon is just dirt - dark, silty, often frozen, and full of plant material. To miners, it is somewhat of a nuisance. When dug out and left to thaw, the muck lets loose a fetid stench due to its high organic content. To scientists, however, the muck is a graveyard, and a fascinating one at that. Over the years, thousands of remains of bison, mammoth, horse, musk ox, moose, lynx, lion, mastodon, bear, caribou, and even camel have been uncovered.

More interesting than the mere presence of this zoological gold mine is the actual condition of the remains. Cached inside the frozen mucks for as long as 48,000 years, the remains are remarkably well preserved, with some carcasses mostly intact and effectively mummified. Even more curious, many animals show no signs of predation, scavenging, or decomposition, and despite disarticulated bones, seemed to be in relatively good health at the time of their demise.

This made Jonathan Hagstrum, a research geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey, wonder... What killed all of these animals? He and colleagues Richard Firestone, Allen West, James Weaver, and Ted Bunch share an intriguing hypothesis.

They think the seemingly sudden deaths of many of these animals in the Alaskan and Yukon mucks could be explained by airbursts and impacts from comet debris that struck Earth during the Late Pleistocene, between 11,000 and 46,000 years ago. Hagstrum and his colleagues recently presented new evidence for this idea in the journal Scientific Reports.
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Network

7 surprising statistics about Twitter in America

Jay Baer
Convince and Convert
Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:00 UTC
twitter big screenshot
© AP Photo/Richard Drew, File
Ah Twitter, we thought we knew you.

A comprehensive survey (1,753 respondents) released today by Edison Research, paints a fascinating picture of Twitter and its role in America's social media ecosystem.

The full 49-page study is full of interesting graphs and data morsels, but these are the 7 findings that I didn't anticipate:

1. Twitter is Ubiquitous

Like Terrell Owens, Carrie Underwood, and Coke Zero, Twitter is almost universally on the radar of Americans. 87% of respondents had heard of Twitter, compared to 88% who had heard of Facebook. (Note that the survey population was 12 and up, including a representative portion of seniors). Thus, we can safely assume that with the exception of Amish, prisoners, and sea creatures, the entirety of the country knows about Twitter.
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Robot

Fembot fatale? Sex bots could potentially be hacked to murder people in future

Greg Evans
Independent
Fri, 29 Dec 2017 21:08 UTC
robot android virtual reality
© ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES
If you've been keeping up with technology news this year you'll be aware that people are a bit concerned about artificial intelligence.

Elon Musk is convinced that it is going to kill everyone and a Google AI managed to create its own AI which was more powerful than any version a human has ever built.

Yeah, it isn't looking good and we wouldn't bet against Judgment Day from the Terminator movies happening anytime soon.

Just when you thought it was advanced computer systems and the military that were out to get us, it turns out that sex robots - the very machines designed to give us pleasure - could be about to kill us too.

Sex robots have been with us for quite a few years now and they have already attracted their fair share of warnings and controversy.

However, a warning from Dr Nick Patterson, a cybersecurity lecturer at Deakin University, Australia has to be the starkest yet.

He believes that in the future sex robots could be easier for hackers to access and control than a laptop or a mobile phone.

From there these remotely controlled cyborgs could be used for all sorts of nefarious means such as violence and murder.

Comment: A vision of the future?


Every innovation in technology opens the doors to many possibilities. A subset of those possibilities will always be worse than the others. And since a subset of humans always go for the worse options, it's pretty much a sure thing that if sex bots can be hacked, they will be.

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Brain

The reason some people don't learn from mistakes, their brains are not really processing the information


Psy Blog
Mon, 31 Dec 2018 00:00 UTC
Child
Adults who have had stressful childhoods find it harder to sense risky situations approaching, new research finds.

As a result, looming health, financial or legal problems could be more difficult to spot for people who were maltreated early in life.

But when the bad luck hits, people who have had stressful childhoods get hit harder - perhaps because it is more of a surprise.

Professor Seth Pollak, who led the study, said:

"It's not that people are overtly deciding to take these negative risks, or do things that might get them in trouble.

It may very well be that their brains are not really processing the information that should tell them they are headed to a bad place, that this is not the right step to take."

Comment: See also:

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Snowflake Cold

Reality check: The Sun is cooling faster than anyone suspected - and lowering Earth's temperature along with it

Martin Armstrong
Armstrong Economics
Wed, 20 Dec 2017 00:00 UTC
sun cooling
The danger from the Global Warming crowd is that they are misleading the entire world and preventing us from seeing what is dangerously unfolding that sparks the rapid decline in civilization - GLOBAL COOLING. I previously warned that this is not my opinion, but simply our computer. If it were really conscious it would be running to the store to buy heating pads. This year will be much colder for Europe than the last three. It will also be cold in the USA. We are in a global cooling period and all the data we have in our computer system warns that the earth is turning cold not warm.

This cooling is very serious. This decline in the energy output of the sun will manifest in a commodity boom in agriculture as shortages send food prices higher. We will see famine begin to rise as crops fail and that will inspire disease and plagues. We will see the first peak in agricultural prices come probably around 2024 after the lows are established on this cycle. We have been warning that this rise would begin AFTER 2017.


Comment: Consider reading: The Four Gender Non-Conforming Horsepersons of the Apocalypse

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Jupiter

Jupiter's UV Aurora

John Ackerman
Acksblog
Sat, 30 Dec 2017 18:39 UTC
Jupiter's Aurora
© Acksblog
Fig. 1. A portion of the 3He++ particles deflected to the poles to form auroral ovals.
As discussed in a recent post, Jupiter is a solid, highly deuterated, Methane Gas Hydrate (clathrate) body, density of 1.33 g/cm3 incorporating the full complement of known solar system elements. The terrestrial planets were each formed by unique impacts on Jupiter, The most recent of which was Venus. This impact left behind a continuous fusion reaction which has slowly declined over the past 6,000 years to a single reaction, usually written.

p + d -> 3He+ + γ (1)

As reasoned in a previous post and below, the author maintains this is not the correct form of the reaction, which should be written:

p + d -> 3He++ (2)

The energy produced by this aneutronic reaction is solely in the kinetic energy of 1030 light helium nucleons per second, 4.98 MeV, with velocities of 17,800 km/s on the MGH surface 50,000 km east of the Great Red Spot. These nucleons swirl in a vortex, due to the Coriolis effect (proportional to their velocity and the rapid rotation of Jupiter), exit the atmosphere via the Great Red Spot and circulate prograde (yellow in Figure 1) around the planet. This circulation of positively charged particles generates the unusual magnetodisk magnetic field of Jupiter. The field is powerful because it is produced in space, not shielded within the planet.
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Rose

The minds of plants: From the memories of flowers to the sociability of trees, the cognitive capacities of our vegetal cousins are all around us

Laura Ruggles
Aeon
Tue, 12 Dec 2017 17:39 UTC
Cornish mallow (Lavatera cretica)

Cornish mallow (Lavatera cretica)
At first glance, the Cornish mallow (Lavatera cretica) is little more than an unprepossessing weed. It has pinkish flowers and broad, flat leaves that track sunlight throughout the day. However, it's what the mallow does at night that has propelled this humble plant into the scientific spotlight. Hours before the dawn, it springs into action, turning its leaves to face the anticipated direction of the sunrise. The mallow seems to remember where and when the Sun has come up on previous days, and acts to make sure it can gather as much light energy as possible each morning. When scientists try to confuse mallows in their laboratories by swapping the location of the light source, the plants simply learn the new orientation.

What does it even mean to say that a mallow can learn and remember the location of the sunrise? The idea that plants can behave intelligently, let alone learn or form memories, was a fringe notion until quite recently. Memories are thought to be so fundamentally cognitive that some theorists argue that they're a necessary and sufficient marker of whether an organism can do the most basic kinds of thinking. Surely memory requires a brain, and plants lack even the rudimentary nervous systems of bugs and worms.

Comment: Read more about The secret intelligence of plants

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Monkey Wrench

Rewriting life: These are not your father's GMOs

Antonio Regalado
technologyreview.com
Tue, 19 Dec 2017 22:16 UTC
soybeans
A new wave of gene-edited crops are dodging regulators, and they're about to reach stores.

When I visited Jason McHenry's farm in South Dakota, the young farmer, dressed in worn jeans and sunglasses, led me up a slippery steel ladder on the side of a grain bin. We tumbled through the manhole into a shifting mountain of soybeans. You could sift them through your fingers and taste their sweet, cloudy flavor.

The U.S. soybean crop is four billion bushels a year, about 240 billion pounds. It generates the most cash receipts for American farms after cattle and corn. Of those beans, more than 90 percent are genetically modified organisms, or GMOs-that is, they've been genetically enhanced, most often through the addition of a gene from a soil bacterium that renders them immune to the weed killer glyphosate, commonly known as Roundup.
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Attention

New culprit is killing the world's bees


RT
Sat, 30 Dec 2017 12:41 UTC
flower bee
© Stephane Mahe / Reuters
Scientists have found what they believe to be the strongest factor leading to the worryingly steep decline of bumblebees... fungicides.

The discovery has now been added to the growing list of threats that could potentially lead to the extinction of the essential pollinators. The revelation that common fungicides are having the strongest impact on the insects came as a surprise, as they typically affect mold and mildew, but appear to be killing bees by making them more susceptible to the nosema parasite or by exacerbating the toxicity of other pesticides.

The discovery was made during a landscape-scale study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, which used machine learning technology to analyze 24 different factors and how they impacted four bumblebee species.

The study collected 'subjects' from 284 sites across 40 US states and tested them against various factors like latitude, elevation, habitat type and damage, human population and pesticide use.
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Network

The man the internet can't identify

Jane Wakefield
BBC News
Sat, 30 Dec 2017 15:50 UTC
ohnathan hirshon privacy internet
© Jonathan Hirshon
For someone who likes anonymity, it is no surprise that Jonathan Hirshon enjoys remote places such as northern Lapland
Earlier this month, Facebook announced it would be using facial recognition to let users know every time a photo of them had been uploaded to the site.

Such a feature would be extremely useful to one man - public-relations professional Jonathan Hirshon, who has managed to stay anonymous on the social network for the past 20 years.

He has more than 3,000 friends on Facebook and regularly updates his profile with personal information - where he is going on holiday, what he has cooked for dinner and the state of his health.

But what he has never shared on the social network, or anywhere else online, is a picture of himself.

It is, he said, his way of "screaming my privacy to the world".

"I choose to share virtually everything about myself on social media, but my face is the essence of me individually and this is about refusing to give up the last piece of identifiable information that I can control."

One of the big debates of 2018 is going to be around our personal information - how we share it, what Facebook, Amazon and Google do with it and what should happen when it is stolen or hacked.
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