Science & Technology

Study finds increase in Antarctic sea ice could have triggered an ice age

Louise Lerner
UChicago News
Mon, 28 Oct 2019 18:44 UTC

© University of Chicago / Yvonne Firing
A new study shows how an increase in Antarctic sea ice could have triggered a chain of events leading to an ice age.

UChicago scientists model how cooling atmosphere can tip climate into glacial periods

We've known for years that Earth's climate is like a giant Rube Goldberg machine: Pull one lever, and a massive chain of events starts into motion. Yet many of the steps that drive these changes have remained shrouded in uncertainty.

"One key question in the field is still what caused the Earth to periodically cycle in and out of ice ages," said Asst. Prof. Malte Jansen, whose research at the University of Chicago seeks to discover and understand the processes that make up global climate. "We are pretty confident that the carbon balance between the atmosphere and ocean must have changed, but we don't quite know how or why."

Comment: Interesting and plausible, but not the whole story. Mainstream science continues to ignore the evidence of catastrophic events in Earth's history.

Possible nova in constellation Scutum

Ernesto Guido
Remanzacco Blogspot
Thu, 31 Oct 2019 17:40 UTC

Following the posting on the Central Bureau's Transient Object Confirmation Page about a possible Nova in Scutum (TOCP Designation: PNV J18395972-1025415) I performed some follow-up of this object through a TEL 0.6-m f/6.5 astrograph + CCD located in the El Sauce Observatory in Chile and operated by Telescope Live network.

On images taken on October 31.01, 2019 I can confirm the presence of an optical counterpart with R-filtered CCD magnitude about +8.4 (saturated in a 10-second exposure) at coordinates:

R.A. = 18 39 59.71, Decl.= -10 25 41.9

(equinox 2000.0; Gaia DR2 catalogue reference stars for the astrometry).

This transient was discovered (discovered magnitude 11.5 g-Sloan Filter) by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) on 2019 Oct. 29 at 01:12UT and reported to Transient Name Server (TNS) on Oct. 29 at 02:07:49 UTC as ASASSN-19aad = AT 2019tpb. According to CBET 4690, several independents discoveries have been reported to the Central Bureau of a nova in Scutum: Koichi Nishiyama (unfiltered magnitude 9.4 on Oct. 29.397), Hideo Nishimura (unfiltered magnitude 9.8 on Oct. 29.421), Shizuo Kaneko (unfiltered magnitude 9.8 on Oct. 29.462) (on AAVSO VSX is reported also Fujio Kabashima as independent discoverer).

Spectroscopy by S. C. Williams et al. (see ATel #13241) & by M. Pavana et al. (see ATel #13245) show that AT 2019tpb/ASASSN-19aad is a Galactic nova in the early stages of eruption.

Witches, Comets and Planetary Cataclysms

Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Sott.net
Sat, 30 Oct 2010 16:59 UTC

When you think of Halloween, what is the first image that comes to mind? I took a little informal poll among my friends, family and associates. Guess what image came in first? Jack-o-lanterns! Bet you thought I was going to say "witches". Well, I sure thought it would be witches, but they only came in a close second!..

When I think of Halloween, I think of grade-school art projects where we cut out silhouettes of witches to paste onto large yellow moons made of construction paper. The witch was always on a broom with her black dress flying in the wind, accompanied by a black cat sitting on the back of the broom. I wondered even then how the cat managed to stay on and why anybody would think that straddling a broomstick as a seat would be even remotely comfortable.

What makes the Earth's surface move?

Nicolas Coltice
CNRS, France
Wed, 30 Oct 2019 05:26 UTC

© Nicolas Coltice
Images of the numerical solution at the moment when a supercontinent (left, in purplish grey) begins to break up.
In the image on the left, the modelled fictional planet looks much like the Earth: its surface and mantle move spontaneously, at speeds close to those observed on Earth. The distribution of the plates (some of which are large, while many are small) is also similar, as is the topography: red hues represent shallow regions of the ocean (ridges), while blue indicates the deep seafloor. The deepest blue areas correspond to subduction trenches (where a plate is sinking into the mantle). The continents are shown in translucent white (and therefore appear purplish grey). The image on the right shows warm currents (plumes) rising from the bottom of the mantle.

Do tectonic plates move because of motion in the Earth's mantle, or is the mantle driven by the movement of the plates? Or could it be that this question is ill-posed? This is the point of view adopted by scientists at the École Normale Supérieure - PSL, the CNRS and the University of Rome 3, who regard the plates and the mantle as belonging to a single system. According to their simulations, published in Science Advances on October 30, 2019, it is mainly the surface that drives the mantle, although the dynamic balance between the two changes over supercontinent cycles.

Which forces drive tectonic plates? This has remained an open question ever since the advent of plate tectonic theory 50 years ago. Do the cold edges of plates slowly sinking into the Earth's mantle at subduction zones cause the motion observed at the Earth's surface? Or alternatively, does the mantle, with its convection currents, drive the plates? For geologists, this is rather like the problem of the chicken and the egg: the mantle apparently causes the plates to move, while they in turn drive the mantle...

Comment: It's neither. The surface - properly called, as a collective, the lithosphere - speeds up/slows down according to 'drag' on the whole planet caused by interaction between the Sun and... well, we're not sure yet, but most likely a distant 'twin Sun', tentatively named 'Nemesis'.

That's why they're stuck, separately examining the 'chicken' and the 'egg'; they're missing the farm in which both interact, and which acts on both of them.

Water from beyond our solar system found on interstellar comet 2l/Borisov

RT
Wed, 30 Oct 2019 18:10 UTC

Water from a completely alien star system has been detected on the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov, which is currently passing through our space neighborhood.

In an extraordinary breakthrough, astronomers studying Borisov believe they have detected the tell-tale signs of water on the visiting comet. Water from another planetary system has never before been spotted inside our solar system.

Borisov was spotted by an amateur astronomer on 30 August, and the professionals have been scrambling to analyse before it flies away. Researchers had already detected gas being spewed from the comet's surface, but finding water would signal a hugely significant discovery.

Comment: Incoming! Five asteroids flew past Earth Friday - one twice as big as Empire State Building

Comment: See also:

And check out SOTT radio's:

'Artificial leaf' successfully produces clean gas

University of Cambride
Techxplore
Mon, 21 Oct 2019 17:54 UTC

© Virgil Andrei
This 'artificial leaf' uses water, sunlight and carbon dioxide to produce a widely-used gas, inspired by the natural process by which plants use the energy from sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into food.

A widely-used gas that is currently produced from fossil fuels can instead be made by an 'artificial leaf' that uses only sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, and which could eventually be used to develop a sustainable liquid fuel alternative to petrol.

The carbon-neutral device sets a new benchmark in the field of solar fuels, after researchers at the University of Cambridge demonstrated that it can directly produce the gas — called syngas — in a sustainable and simple way.

Rather than running on fossil fuels, the artificial leaf is powered by sunlight, although it still works efficiently on cloudy and overcast days. And unlike the current industrial processes for producing syngas, the leaf does not release any additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The results are reported in the journal Nature Materials.

Comment: At least one benefit of the 'green movement' is that there is a push to understand energy through a myriad of lenses. Such approaches are leading to some interesting findings such as the above. That said, oil and gas will remain dominant for quite some time ... and Epstein didn't kill himself.

We may be getting close to building chromosomes

Kostas Vavitsas, PhD
Genetic Literacy Project
Tue, 29 Oct 2019 17:57 UTC

Understand biology and engineer biology. These are the goals of synthetic biology in brief. Due to the developments in sequencing and DNA synthesis, scientists can construct genetic constructs and edit genomes. These tools answer basic research questions and provide biological applications. But synthetic biology can never reach its full potential until artificial genome writing becomes commonplace.

Chromosomes are the "hard drives" of cells. They contain most of the cell's DNA and genes. Bacteria and archaea typically have a single circular chromosome, while eukaryotes contain several linear ones. Besides genetic information, a chromosome contains structural elements. Centromers (that participate in mitosis), telomers (that have a role in maintaining linear chromosome integrity), and origins of replication (that are where DNA replication starts in circular DNA pieces) are some well-known examples.

Artificial chromosomes are chromosomes that have been fully constructed in the lab and assembled within a cell. An important note: artificial chromosomes do not mean artificial life. They function normally within cells and the DNA used is the same as the one found in nature. What is different is their origin - they don't come from a DNA template duplication - and the genetic information they carry.

NASA telescope catches spooky face staring at us from the void

RT
Tue, 29 Oct 2019 11:19 UTC

The team behind NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has released a cosmically terrifying image of what appears to be a celestial spook looking right at us from deep in the universe.

Thankfully, it is not Cthulhu's cousin or anything quite so sinister but is instead two galaxies merging in a system called called Arp-Madore 2026-424, 704 million light-years away.

The 'head' is a result of the gravitational shock wave that pushes material outwards from the two merging galaxies while the bright 'eyes' are the centers of the galaxies themselves.

"The crash has pulled and stretched the galaxies' discs of gas, dust, and stars outward, forming the ring of intense star formation that shapes the 'nose' and 'face' features of the system," a NASA spokesperson explained on Hubble's official website.

Pareidolia is the tendency for humans to see faces in inanimate objects and in our environment and is often at the heart of reports about the wider universe and sightings of 'faces' and possible 'aliens.'

Putting a chip in your brain will not make you a superhero or a God

Peter Breggin
Activist Post
Fri, 25 Oct 2019 00:00 UTC

Aaron and Melissa Dykes have made the single most important video that we have ever watched. It is called Putting a Chip in Your Brain Will Not Make You a Superhero or a God.

It follows their astonishing documentary about the history of mind control, The Minds of Men.

Elon Musk, the super-wealthy founder of Tesla, has now officially with great fanfare rolled out his ongoing and rapidly progressing technology for the physical control of the brain and mind by irreversibly hooking up our living brains with thread-like wires to the hard metal of supercomputers. But what will happen to the humans enmeshed in this catastrophe and who will be controlling them?

In the video by Aaron and Melissa, we see and hear Musk and his team at their official roll out describing how they are building a foundation for mass application by first getting approval from the FDA for more limited "medical" uses.

Electroactive bacteria: A "mind-blowing" case of Intelligent Design

Otangelo Grasso
Evolution News
Mon, 28 Oct 2019 16:43 UTC

Editor's note: We are delighted to welcome Otangelo Grasso, a graduate of the Summer Seminar on Intelligent Design, as a contributor.

As journalist Carl Zimmer reported not long ago in the New York Times, "Wired Bacteria Form Nature's Power Grid: 'We Have an Electric Planet.'" Electroactive bacteria were running current through "wires" long before humans discovered electricity. Now that is worthy of note and analysis. How did they learn this very sophisticated trick?

In a tweet, Zimmer did not hide his amazement, admitting that that the "discovery that microbes build electric wires all over the world is mind-blowing." Though an outspoken advocate of unguided Darwinian evolution, Zimmer in his article did not explain how bacteria might have gotten that ability by evolutionary means.

Comment: Another nail in the Darwinist coffin. See also:

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Science & Technology

Study finds increase in Antarctic sea ice could have triggered an ice age

Possible nova in constellation Scutum

Witches, Comets and Planetary Cataclysms

What makes the Earth's surface move?

Water from beyond our solar system found on interstellar comet 2l/Borisov

'Artificial leaf' successfully produces clean gas

We may be getting close to building chromosomes

NASA telescope catches spooky face staring at us from the void

Putting a chip in your brain will not make you a superhero or a God

Electroactive bacteria: A "mind-blowing" case of Intelligent Design

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