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Blue Planet

The trees that ooze metallic sap

Mary Halton
BBC News
Wed, 05 Sep 2018 21:40 UTC
Pycnandra acuminata rubber tree nickel
© Antony Van der Ent
Nickel gives the latex of Pycnandra acuminata a peculiar blue-green colour
Heavy metals like nickel and zinc are usually the last thing that plants want to grow next to in high concentrations.But a specialised group, known as hyperaccumulators, have evolved to take up the normally toxic metals into their stems, leaves and even seeds.

Researchers have been studying Pycnandra acuminata in particular - a tree that grows on the island of New Caledonia in the south Pacific. They think it may use the nickel to defend against insects.

Its latex has an unusual blue-green colour as it contains up to 25% nickel.

"Pycnandra acuminata is a large (up to 20m tall) rare rainforest tree, restricted to remaining patches of rainforest in New Caledonia," says Dr Antony van der Ent, a researcher at the University of Queensland who has been studying the tree.

Comment: Industrial hemp extremely useful in removing radiation and other toxins from soils

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Rocket

Project Glide Breaker: DARPA aims to design a interceptor to hit enemy hypersonic missiles


RT
Sat, 08 Sep 2018 17:37 UTC
THAAD interceptor
© Missile Defense Agency / Reuters
A THAAD interceptor is seen after its test launch in Kodiak, Alaska, July 30, 2017.
The Pentagon's DARPA agency has started to develop a hard-kill interceptor capable of hitting incoming hypersonic projectiles. The move follows news of Russia's success in building top-class high-speed weapons.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a high-tech project to develop an interceptor to shoot down enemy hypersonic missiles, the Drive reported.

In September, DARPA displayed concept art of the project, named 'Glide Breaker', which depicted features of a hard-kill, kinetic interceptor that is capable of engaging unpowered, high-speed vehicles, the Drive said. The agency's Tactical Technology Office had previously hosted a gathering to explain the project and its requirements in July 2018, according to the media outlet.

Little information on the project has been made available to the public so far. Back in July, DARPA said that the objective of Glide Breaker will be "to further the capability of the United States to defend against supersonic and the entire class of hypersonic threats."
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Attention

Scientists warn: Bees become 'addicted' to harmful pesticides

Henry Bodkin
Telegraph
Fri, 31 Aug 2018 17:06 UTC
bees
© AFP
Crucial bee colonies are under severe threat in the UK
Bees become addicted to pesticides in the same way that humans grow dependent on cigarettes, new research has found.

The more of the nicotine-like chemicals they consume, the more they appear to want, a study has shown.

The findings suggest that the risk of potentially harmful pesticide-contaminated nectar entering bee colonies is higher than was previously thought.

Controversial neonicotinoid pesticides are chemically similar to nicotine, the addictive compound in tobacco.

Comment: Nature bites back: More unforeseen consequences of neonicotinoid pesticides

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Question

Stargate? Saturn sprouts another weird hexagon

Kimberly Hickok
Live Science
Wed, 05 Sep 2018 18:34 UTC
Saturn's north pole hexagon
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton University
Saturn's north pole hexagon in motion as seen by the now-defunct Cassini spacecraft.
A bizarre, hexagon-shaped vortex has formed above Saturn's north pole as the planet's northern hemisphere enters summer, data from the international Cassini-Huygens mission revealed. The unusual vortex is circulating hundreds of kilometers above the clouds in the stratosphere layer of the ringed planet's atmosphere, a new study reported.

This warm polar vortex resembles another, previously discovered hexagon formation, also located at Saturn's north pole, but lower in the atmosphere. But how and whether these bizarre low- and high-altitude hexagons are related remains a mystery to scientists.

"Either a hexagon has spawned spontaneously and identically at two different altitudes, one lower in the clouds and one high in the stratosphere, or the hexagon is in fact a towering structure spanning a vertical range of several hundred kilometers," Leigh Fletcher, lead author of the study and planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in England, said in a statement.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft arrived at the Saturn system in 2004, when it was summer in the planet's southern hemisphere and winter in the northern hemisphere. At the time, the spacecraft documented a circular, warm, high-altitude vortex at Saturn's south pole but nothing at the north pole.
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Network

Study reveals highly coordinated network among organs and tissues regulate body's energy


Medical Xpress
Fri, 07 Sep 2018 07:09 UTC
body
© CC0 Public Domain
An international research team led by the University of California, Irvine has identified a system of communication networks that exists among organs and tissues that regulate metabolism. Findings from their study provide, for the first time, a detailed "atlas" illustrating how the body creates and uses energy, and how imbalances in the networks may impact overall health.

Published Sept. 6 in the journal Cell, the research reveals the highly coordinated, multi-tissue metabolism underlying the body's circadian rhythms and examines how disruptions in these rhythms-such as those caused by high-fat diets-induce misalignment among the network clocks and can trigger inflammation, which has been linked to major diseases and can affect lifespan.


Comment: What 'high fat' diets are they referring to? As scientists you would hope they would be more specific, because consumption of animal fat enabled our evolution, but it's evident the majority of vegetable fats that predominate the standard western diet, and which we've been consuming for little more than a century, are lethal.

See: Everything About Fat


Lead author Paolo Sassone-Corsi, Donald Bren Professor of Biological Chemistry at UCI's School of Medicine, first showed the circadian rhythm-metabolism link some 10 years ago, identifying the metabolic pathways through which circadian proteins sense energy levels in cells.

Comment: Also check out SOTT radio's: The Truth Perspective: Are Cells the Intelligent Designers? Why Creationists and Darwinists Are Both Wrong

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Fireball

Mad scientists want to use Earth to 'catch' asteroids for mining

Saqib Shah
The Sun
Wed, 05 Sep 2018 12:22 UTC
asteroid earth impact
© Shutterstock
An asteroid hurtling toward Earth sounds like a nightmare scenario - but a bunch of space scientists have hatched a plan to make it happen.

Why? Because capturing the space rocks could allow us to probe them for alien life and even mine them for valuable resources like precious metals.

In a new study, researchers from the University of Glasgow reveal that aerobraking could help them pull off the insane stunt.

Aerobraking is a drag maneuver used by spacecraft like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to change their orbit or speed by using the atmosphere of a planet as a resistance that can pull them down for landing - with the rest left to gravity.

The authors claim that this process could be used to slow down small asteroids enough so that they don't just skim past Earth, but remain in orbit, where they could be mined for platinum or water, according to the journal Science.

Comment: They can't even figure out how to prevent asteroids from hitting the Earth yet they think they can pull off a controlled impact? Wishful thinking at its finest. See also: You know it's 'the end of the world' when... Billionaires launch project to mine asteroids for minerals

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Jupiter

Astonishing discovery: Jupiter has apparently developed a THIRD magnetic pole

Camille M. Carlisle
Sky & Telescope
Wed, 05 Sep 2018 19:22 UTC
jupiter blue spot magnetic pole

Above: Jupiter's magnetic field lines. (a) north polar view; (b) south polar view; (c) equatorial view

Juno observations reveal that Jupiter's magnetic field has a wacky plume.

Jupiter has the strongest magnetic field of any of the planets in the solar system. Like the field that shelters Earth, it's essentially dipolar, which means it has a north pole and a south pole, like the field created by a bar magnetic. A really, really big bar magnetic.

Earth's magnetic field is produced by churning liquid iron in the planet's outer core. Iron conducts electricity, and a changing electrical current creates a magnetic field. So as the liquid iron cycles up and down, carrying heat from the planet's center up to the mantle and then sinking again, it creates powerful electrical currents that in turn produce the planet's global field.

But Jupiter doesn't have an iron core. In fact, it's unclear if it has a core at all - Juno's observations suggest the core might be "fuzzy," a concentration of rock and ice that has dissolved (or is still dissolving) into the surrounding hydrogen. Instead, the source of the global field is the overlying mantle of metallic hydrogen, where hydrogen molecules trade electrons, creating currents. The planet's rotation organizes the resulting magnetic field into a dipole.

Or, at least it kind of does. Reporting in the September 6th Nature, Kimberly Moore (Harvard) and colleagues have discovered a strange plume of magnetic field shooting up from a region in Jupiter's northern hemisphere and reentering the planet at its equator. And it's three times stronger than the main dipole field.

Comment: In their Nature article, the scientists consider the possibility that we are catching Jupiter in the middle of a magnetic reversal - an unsettled situation with temporary poles popping up in strange places...

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Horse

Scientists procure samples in bid to clone extinct ancient foal, 'first step' to restoring woolly mammoth


The Siberian Times
Tue, 04 Sep 2018 00:00 UTC
Ancient snow horses
© mogaz news en
Lenskaya or Lena Horse
Plan for surrogate mare to give birth and bring back to life long-gone species in Russia's coldest region.

A search is now underway in Yakutsk for live cells from a foal found in the permafrost as our pictures show. The joint bid is being made by Russian and South Korean scientists who are also collaborating on recreating the woolly mammoth.

The frozen carcass of the dark-brown baby horse is from an extinct species is up to 40,000 years old, and the animal was perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost in the Batagai crater in Yakutia, the coldest region in Russia.

Scientists/frozen ancient horse
© Michil Yakovlev/SVFU
The frozen carcass of the dark-brown baby horse is from an extinct species is up to 40,000 years old.
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Blue Planet

We don't need another Earth - water worlds can support life, says new study


RT
Tue, 04 Sep 2018 21:17 UTC
Cassini craft
© NASA
Illustration of Cassini Spacecraft Diving Through Plume of 'Ocean World' Enceladus.
A world entirely covered in water could support life, according to a new study which challenges the prevailing scientific thought that living entities need a planet like Earth in order to survive.

After running more than 1,000 simulations, researchers at the University of Chicago and Pennsylvania State University found that ocean planets can stay in the "sweet spot" needed to support the cycling of minerals and gases that keep the climate stable on Earth, for much longer than previously assumed.

"This really pushes back against the idea you need an Earth clone - that is, a planet with some land and a shallow ocean," said Edwin Kite, assistant professor of geophysical sciences at UChicago and lead author of the study. The team's findings are published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Astronomers have been scoping the solar system for Earth-like planets that could one day support life for decades - resulting in the relatively recent discovery of several exoplanets that appear to be humankind's best shot at an alternative to their home planet.
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Book

New open-access plan could spell end to journal subscriptions

Holly Else
Nature
Tue, 04 Sep 2018 06:17 UTC
Eleven research funders in Europe announce 'Plan S' to make all scientific works free to read as soon as they are published.

Robert Jan Smits
© Nikolay Doychinov/EU2018BG
Robert-Jan Smits, the European Commission's special envoy on open access, spearheaded the Plan S initiative.
Research funders from France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and eight other European nations have unveiled a radical open-access initiative that could change the face of science publishing in two years - and which has instantly provoked protest from publishers.

The 11 agencies, who together spend €7.6 billion (US$8.8 billion) in research grants annually, say they will mandate that, from 2020, the scientists they fund must make resulting papers free to read immediately on publication (see 'Plan S players'). The papers would have a liberal publishing licence that would allow anyone else to download, translate or otherwise reuse the work. "No science should be locked behind paywalls!" says a preamble document that accompanies the pledge, called Plan S, released on 4 September.

"It is a very powerful declaration. It will be contentious and stir up strong feelings," says Stephen Curry, a structural biologist and open-access advocate at Imperial College London. The policy, he says, appears to mark a "significant shift" in the open-access publishing movement, which has seen slow progress in its bid to make scientific literature freely available online.

As written, Plan S would bar researchers from publishing in 85% of journals, including influential titles such as Nature and Science. According to a December 2017 analysis, only around 15% of journals publish work immediately as open access (see 'Publishing models') - financed by charging per-article fees to authors or their funders, negotiating general open-publishing contracts with funders, or through other means. More than one-third of journals still publish papers behind a paywall, and typically permit online release of free-to-read versions only after a delay of at least six months - in compliance with the policies of influential funders such as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Comment: See also:

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