Science & Technology

Scientists confirm ancient Chinese astronomical observations of a supernova

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Tue, 07 May 2019 16:09 UTC

Scientists have repeated observations made almost 2070 years ago by Chinese astronomers, confirming one of the earliest ever discoveries of an event occurring beyond the solar system.

In 48BCE, the Chinese sky-watchers recorded a bright glow in a particular part of the night sky.

Now a team of researchers led by astrophysicist Fabian Göttgens from the University of Göttingen in Germany have shown that the observations related to a nova - an explosion of hydrogen on the surface of a star, located in a global cluster known as Messier 22.

The cluster, one of at least 150 thus far identified in the Milky Way, is a tightly packed group of stars located close to the galaxy's centre, some 10,600 light-years from Earth. It is sometimes called the Sagittarius Cluster.

NASA concerned about 2029 arrival of 'God of Chaos' asteroid Apophis

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com
Thu, 02 May 2019 00:00 UTC

NASA is already beginning preparations for the arrival of the asteroid called "The God of Chaos." The asteroid is said to be approaching Earth and will come close to our planet in 2029.

The asteroid's official name is 99942 Apophis. It is a 1,110-foot-wide asteroid named after the Egyptian god of chaos. It will fly as close to the Earth as some of the orbiting spacecraft, panicking scientists.

99942 Apophis will come within 19,000 miles of Earth on April 13, a decade from now, but scientists at the Planetary Defense Conference are already preparing for the encounter, Newsweek reported. They plan to discuss the asteroid's effects on Earth's gravity, potential research opportunities and even how to deflect an incoming asteroid in a theoretical scenario.

The asteroid will be visible to the naked eye and will look like a moving star point of light, according to NASA. It will pass over the United States in the early evening, according to WUSA 9. 99942 Apophis was discovered in 2004 and, after tracking it for 15 years, scientists say the asteroid has a 1 in 100,000 chance of striking Earth decades in the future. But in the fairly distant future: after 2060, Newsweek reported.

Comment: When NASA says "an emergency on this scale has never happened" they mean strictly within modern history. Earth is certainly no stranger to cataclysmic asteroid-related events - and neither were human civilizations of old...

Star in Ursa Major hints at Milky Way's cataclysmic past

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Sun, 05 May 2019 20:24 UTC

© Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images
An eighteenth century engraving of Ursa Major. Somewhere within the bear lurks a star from outside the galaxy.

Researchers have identified a star in the Milky Way they believe originated from outside the galaxy.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, a team led by Qian-Fan Xing from the National Astronomical Observatories at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, describes a star dubbed J1124+4535, located in the Milky Way constellation known as Ursa Major, or the Big Dipper.

Interest in the star began following observations made through China's Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), which indicated that the star had an unusually low abundance of magnesium.

Seeking more detail, the researchers switched to the High Dispersion Spectrograph (HDS) on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii.

Hubble snaps stunning photo of spiral galaxy sparkling with new-born stars

RT
Sun, 05 May 2019 15:06 UTC

The Hubble telescope has captured a spectacular photograph of one of the universe's most majestic sights, a spiral galaxy in all its swirling glory.

The powerful orbital telescope explored the NGC 2903 galaxy and the European Space Agency (ESA) released the dazzling image this week. The stunning spiral is located a staggering 30 million light-years away in the Leo constellation.

The photo captures several star-forming regions which shine with a pinkish glow.

Hospital viruses: Fake cancerous nodes in CT scans, created by malware, trick radiologists

Kim Zetter
The Washington Post
Wed, 03 Apr 2019 00:01 UTC

Researchers in Israel created malware to draw attention to serious security weaknesses in medical imaging equipment and networks.

When Hillary Clinton stumbled and coughed through public appearances during her 2016 presidential run, she faced critics who said that she might not be well enough to perform the top job in the country. To quell rumors about her medical condition, her doctor revealed that a CT scan of her lungs showed that she just had pneumonia.

But what if the scan had shown faked cancerous nodules, placed there by malware exploiting vulnerabilities in widely used CT and MRI scanning equipment? Researchers in Israel say they have developed such malware to draw attention to serious security weaknesses in critical medical imaging equipment used for diagnosing conditions and the networks that transmit those images - vulnerabilities that could have potentially life-altering consequences if unaddressed.

The malware they created would let attackers automatically add realistic, malignant-seeming growths to CT or MRI scans before radiologists and doctors examine them. Or it could remove real cancerous nodules and lesions without detection, leading to misdiagnosis and possibly a failure to treat patients who need critical and timely care.

Comment: So it's not enough that hackers can steal your identity, put charges on your credit cards, access your emails or force your car into oncoming traffic, now they can also hack your medical scans to make you think you have cancer when you don't (or make you think you don't have cancer when you do). It's a dangerous time to have enemies with technological know-how.

See also:

The Muller Two-Step Model: A Refutation of Behe on Irreducible Complexity? Not Quite!

Evolution News
Fri, 03 May 2019 10:18 UTC

In his article in Skeptic Magazine reviewing Michael Behe's new book, Darwin Devolves, biologist Nathan Lents raises a number of objections to Behe's arguments. Many of those have already been addressed here and here. One of his objections was also brought up by Joshua Swamidass in a recent online discussion. This is the argument concerning the Muller two-step model, named after geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller, for explaining irreducibly complex features (Muller, 1918; Muller, 1939). This argument has been advanced several times in the past, including by Douglas Theobald and Alan Orr.

As Lents writes: "In 1918, H. J. Muller first proposed his two-step model of evolutionary innovation: 'Add a part; make it necessary,' which pre-empted Behe's theory of irreducible complexity by 80 years and remains unchallenged." Some ID critics (and perhaps even some ID proponents) who are relatively new to this debate may think that this is a promising objection to ID. However, it is actually been answered by ID proponents numerous times, in numerous different ways. For starters, we've addressed the Muller two-step model multiple times at Evolution News, including here, here, and here.

Arsenic-breathing life discovered in the Pacific Ocean

Hannah Hickey
University of Washington
Wed, 01 May 2019 00:36 UTC

© Noelle Held/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Jaclyn Saunders (far right) fixes the line on a McLane instrument that pumps large volumes of seawater in order to extract the DNA. The instrument on the left measures properties such as temperature, salinity and depth and collects smaller samples of seawater.

Arsenic is a deadly poison for most living things, but new research shows that microorganisms are breathing arsenic in a large area of the Pacific Ocean. A University of Washington team has discovered that an ancient survival strategy is still being used in low-oxygen parts of the marine environment.

"Thinking of arsenic as not just a bad guy, but also as beneficial, has reshaped the way that I view the element," said first author Jaclyn Saunders, who did the research for her doctoral thesis at the UW and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The study was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Did the Romans build earthquake "invisibility cloaks" into structures?

Jennifer Ouellette
Ars Technica
Fri, 03 May 2019 20:43 UTC

© Alex Livesey/Danehouse/Getty Images
The Roman Colosseum is an oval amphitheatre in the center of the city of Rome. French scientists suggest its structure might have helped protect it from earthquake damage.

Scientists are hard at work developing real-world "invisibility cloaks" thanks to a special class of exotic manmade "metamaterials." Now a team of French scientists has suggested in a recent preprint on the physics arXiv that certain ancient Roman structures, like the famous Roman Colosseum, have very similar structural patterns, which may have protected them from damage from earthquakes over the millennia.

Falling within the broader class of photonic band gap materials, a "metamaterial" is technically defined as any material whose microscopic structure can bend light in ways it doesn't normally bend. That property is called an index of refraction, i.e., the ratio between the speed of light in a vacuum and how fast the top of the light wave travels. Natural materials have a positive index of refraction; certain manmade metamaterials-first synthesized in the lab in 2000-have a negative index of refraction, meaning they interact with light in such a way as to bend light around even very sharp angles.

Comment: There is strong evidence that some past civilizations had knowledge of how to construct buildings that could withstand earthquakes:

India wants to be the 1st to land on uncharted Moon territory

RT
Sat, 04 May 2019 15:28 UTC

India's space agency wants to touch down its rover on the Moon's south pole, an area on the Earth's natural satellite where no one has gone before. The launch is scheduled for July.

"All the [ISRO] missions, whatever we have had till now [to the moon], have all landed near the moon's equator. This is a place where nobody has gone," the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief, Kailasavadivoo Sivan, told the Hindu.

India's second lunar exploration mission, Chandrayaan-2, seeks to gain access to some "new science" and information, the chairman said. For example, one of the goals of the probe is to find water on the Moon.

Despite lack of genetic diversity narwhals still thrive

Olivia Harvey
Earth.com
Thu, 02 May 2019 12:00 UTC

Compared to other Arctic marine mammals, narwhals exhibit shockingly low levels of genetic diversity, as realized by Danish researchers who sequenced the narwhal's genome. Although this usually means a species is struggling, the researchers report that the narwhal is actually thriving with a population of about 170,000 individuals strong. Their findings are published in iScience.

"There's this notion that in order to survive and be resilient to changes, you need to have high genetic diversity, but then you have this species that for the past million years has had low genetic diversity and it's still around - and is actually relatively abundant," said Eline Lorenzen, an associate professor and curator at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.

She continued, "This shows us that just looking at the number of individuals isn't indicative of the genomic diversity levels of a species, but also looking at the genomic diversity levels isn't indicative of the number of individuals. Equating those two doesn't seem to be quite as simple as previously thought."

Comment: See also:

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Jean Michel

Science & Technology

Scientists confirm ancient Chinese astronomical observations of a supernova

NASA concerned about 2029 arrival of 'God of Chaos' asteroid Apophis

Star in Ursa Major hints at Milky Way's cataclysmic past

Hubble snaps stunning photo of spiral galaxy sparkling with new-born stars

Hospital viruses: Fake cancerous nodes in CT scans, created by malware, trick radiologists

The Muller Two-Step Model: A Refutation of Behe on Irreducible Complexity? Not Quite!

Arsenic-breathing life discovered in the Pacific Ocean

Did the Romans build earthquake "invisibility cloaks" into structures?

India wants to be the 1st to land on uncharted Moon territory

Despite lack of genetic diversity narwhals still thrive

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