Science & Technology

Chelyabinsk meteor believed to be created in outer space collision

RT
Fri, 23 May 2014 12:58 UTC

Russian scientists and their Japanese colleagues have determined that the Chelyabinsk meteor that entered Earth's atmosphere almost 60 times the speed of sound and exploded above the Russian city back in February 2013 was formed by a space collision.

A joint study of Russian researchers from the Novosibirsk University and members of Japanese academia, in their newly published study in the Scientific Reports periodical, conclude that Chelyabinsk meteor constitutes "the second largest asteroid airburst in our recorded history."

Their study is based on the analysis of the composition of fragments of the celestial body, raised last summer from the bottom of lake Chebarkul, where parts of the meteorite fell.

"Chelyabinsk meteorite is a unique sample: it is fragments of a Near-Earth Object that actually hit the Earth and its trajectory was well-recorded," the study says.

In particular, the researchers found that the meteorite contained a jade - green mineral that is rarely found in such samples.

"We found a clear evidence for an intense impact event: the existence of a high-pressure mineral jadeite in Chelyabinsk meteorite."

Comment: Those in the know understand that the Chelyabinsk meteorite is only the opening show:

Astronauts reveal sobering data on asteroid impacts: Since 2001, 26 atomic-bomb-scale explosions have occurred in remote locations around the world

'Every' meteorite fall on earth mapped

We live in a cosmic shooting gallery

Crowded Skies

Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls

LA Times backpedals on crazy talk about Antarctica, glacier melt, sea level rise, and the Los Angeles Airport

Anthony Watts
Wattsupwiththat.com
Wed, 14 May 2014 05:58 UTC

Below is a screencap of the "walkback" story headline in the LA Times posted late today.

This morning, about 5:30AM, I sent a short but succinct letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times (reproduced below) regarding the statements made yesterday by California Governor Jerry Brown saying that the LAX and SFO airports would "have to be moved" due to effects from posited sea level rise caused by melting of portions of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, some 200-800 years in the future. The claim by Governor Brown, was patently ridiculous and I wrote about it here: Governor 'Moonbeam' beclowns himself over sea level rise at LAX airport.

Pentagon plans project to combat 'space junk chain reaction,' but is it really incoming space rocks they're worried about?

RT
Sat, 17 May 2014 03:55 UTC

Later this month the US Pentagon plans to award a massive contract to one of the two most influential American contractors for a project that, if all goes according to plan, will be able to identify space debris before it becomes a threat to the Earth.

Lockheed Martin Corp. and Raytheon Co. are competing for the $6 billion contract to design and construct Space Fence, a radar system that will eventually be able to track large bodies of space matter. The plan is being put into place so that the government can not only better predict the bodies that may come into contact with Earth (such as the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, for instance) but also to better protect satellites that could be destroyed while in orbit.

"There's a lot of stuff up there, and the impact of the new space fence will be able to track more objects and smaller objects," Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security affairs at the US Naval College, told the Sydney Morning Herald, adding that the technology "is a necessity, but not sufficient...We need to move on to an active plan for removal."

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has estimated that 500,000 chunks of man-made material floats around the Earth. Any one of those could damage or completely knock out the 1,200 operational satellites owned by various nations that are responsible for providing Internet access, banking functions, cell phone connections, Global Position System mapping, and other necessities.

Comment: Space Fence is a successor project to design and deliver globally positioned S-band radars capable of interoperation with the Space Surveillance Network. Not conveyed is what can possibly be done, once alerted, to stop a 22,000 mile-per-hour space junk collision. Since debris begets debris, the field is predicted to reach critical density beginning 2015 and initiate a chain reaction (Kessler Syndrome), enough to render low earth orbits unusable and too hostile for future space use. Is the Pentagon justified to spend multi-billions on a space junk tracker? Or, could it be the uptick of incoming comets and asteroids is the real tracking priority lurking in the background not being talked about?

Violent stellar explosion: Stellar behemoth self-destructs

ScienceDaily
Thu, 22 May 2014 14:38 UTC

© Avishay Gal-Yam, Weizmann Institute of Science
For the first time, astronomers have direct confirmation that a Wolf-Rayet star -- sitting 360 million light years away -- died in a violent explosion known as a Type IIb supernova.

Our sun may seem pretty impressive: 330,000 times as massive as Earth, it accounts for 99.86 percent of the Solar System's total mass; it generates about 400 trillion trillion watts of power per second; and it has a surface temperature of about 10,000 degrees Celsius. Yet for a star, it's a lightweight.

The real cosmic behemoths are Wolf-Rayet stars, which are more than 20 times as massive as the Sun and at least five times as hot. Because these stars are relatively rare and often obscured, scientists don't know much about how they form, live and die. But this is changing, thanks to an innovative sky survey called the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF), which uses resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), both located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), to expose fleeting cosmic events such as supernovae.

For the first time ever, scientists have direct confirmation that a Wolf-Rayet star -- sitting 360 million light years away in the Bootes constellation -- died in a violent explosion known as a Type IIb supernova. Using the iPTF pipeline, researchers at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science led by Avishay Gal-Yam caught supernova SN 2013cu within hours of its explosion. They then triggered ground- and space-based telescopes to observe the event approximately 5.7 hours and 15 hours after it self-destructed. These observations are providing valuable insights into the life and death of the progenitor Wolf-Rayet.

New supernova pops in bright Galaxy M106 in the 'Hunting Dogs'

Bob King
Universe Today
Thu, 22 May 2014 14:13 UTC

© Gianluca Masi, Francesca Nocentini and Patrick Schmeer
The new supernova with the temporary name of PSNJ12185771+4718113 nestles right up to the nucleus of the galaxy in this photo taken May 21 with a 17-inch telescope. It’s just 1″ east and 3″ south of galactic center.

A supergiant star exploded 23.5 million years ago in one of the largest and brightest nearby galaxies. This spring we finally got the news. In April, the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) as part of the Lick Observatory Supernova Search, photographed a faint "new star" very close to the bright core of M106, a 9th magnitude galaxy in Canes Venatici the Hunting Dogs.

Strange rocks found in Earth's crustal graveyard

Becky Oskin
Live Science
Thu, 22 May 2014 13:00 UTC

Models of how the Earth's mantle works may need to change, thanks to two new studies that recreate the extreme conditions just above the planet's core.

The deep mantle, a region that lies 416 to 1,800 miles (670 to 2,900 kilometers) below the Earth's surface, is impossible to reach and hard to "see" clearly with seismic signals. The little scientists do know about the mantle comes from earthquake waves, which speed up and slow down as they travel through different rock layers inside the Earth. The deepest part of the mantle has weird blobs and seismic slow zones that have long puzzled scientists. Both new studies offer possible explanations for the strange seismic behavior.

In the studies, researchers mimicked conditions inside the deep mantle with experiments in the laboratory. Teams working independently on different continents shot lasers at tiny specks of rock squeezed between diamond anvils.

One team concluded that scientists had been wrong about the form that a certain rock takes in the deep mantle, which accounts for about half of Earth's volume. The other team found evidence for small amounts of Earth's most common surface rock, basalt, pooling in liquid form at the core-mantle boundary. The findings are published today (May 22) in the journal Science.

"These results are a new step forward in reproducing in the laboratory what is occurring in the very deep mantle," said Denis Andrault, lead author of one of the studies and a scientist at Blaise Pascal University in France.

Your Facebook mobile app just grew a keen sense of hearing

Reed Albergotti
The Wall Street Journal
Wed, 21 May 2014 23:03 UTC

Facebook's mobile app just grew a keen sense of hearing. Starting Wednesday, the app has the ability to recognize music and television shows playing in the vicinity of users.

The feature is designed to make it easier for users to share. When users begin to write a post, the Facebook app will offer to include information about music or shows playing in the background.

"We want to help people tell better stories," said Aryeh Selekman, the product manager who led the development of the feature. "I hope there are people who love the feature and post more."

If Facebook users share more about themselves, that can boost the value of ads targeted at some of its 1.28 billion users.

The audio-recognition feature works similar to the app Shazam, which also can identify music and television programming using the built-in microphones in mobile phones.

Comment: Yeah, we are sure that Facebook will hold your privacy sacred and this will not be abused or hacked by the NSA... One wonders though, is there any way for non-Facebook users to know that they are being eavesdropped upon?

Prices skyrocket as fungus kills high-end coffee beans

RT
Mon, 19 May 2014 20:19 UTC

If you've noticed the cost of a cup of coffee at your local shop has been inching up lately, it's because a fungus has decimated Central America's Arabica bean crop. Now the US is stepping in to try to eliminate the deadly coffee rust fungus.

Leaf rust, or la roya in Spanish, is a yellow- and orange-colored, plant-choking fungus that has devastated coffee crops from Peru to Mexico over the past three years, costing $1 billion in damages in Central America in the late harvest season of 2012 alone. The fungus is especially ruinous to the Arabica bean, which is used in higher-end coffees, as it is said to produce better-tasting coffee than the other major commercially grown coffee species. It contains less caffeine but a more robust flavor. Arabica accounts for 75 to 80 percent of the world's coffee production, according to the Coffee Research Institute.

The effects of leaf rust have decimated local economies.

"Big farmers hire fewer workers to pick the ripe coffee cherries that enclose the beans. Smaller farmers go into debt and sell livestock or tools to make up for the lost income. Sales fall at local merchants," the New York Times reported. "Teenagers leave school to work on the farm because their parents can no longer hire outside help. At the very end of the chain are the landless migrant workers who earn just a few dollars a day."

Central America has been particularly hard hit. Four million people there and in southern Mexico rely on coffee for their living, according to the Inter-American Development Bank. In Guatemala, twenty percent of the half-million jobs directly tied to growing coffee have already disappeared, estimated Nils Leporowski, the president of Anacafé, the country's coffee board.

Comment: In Colombia, unusual rainy weather in 2008 fueled an outbreak of rust that later grew into an epidemic. If roya is detected on more than half of a tree's leaves, the tree has to be cut off at the stump and will not produce beans for three years. The rust is a microorganism that must take energy and nutrients from a specific live host and thereby produces thousands of tiny spores that can travel in water, rain, or air and remain viable for long distances. Coffee rust must find a coffee host in order to complete its cycle. The rust pathogen impacts photosynthesis which provides energy to the plant for food production. Currently there are over 45 varieties of coffee rust. The shift to a high density monoculture and lagging research has aided this problem and, so far, is attempting to be cured primarily by metallic fungicides, limited in capacity and detrimental to the environment. Are we surprised?

Potential "imminent" threat from New Mexico nuclear waste, officials say

CBS
Tue, 20 May 2014 20:11 UTC

Los Alamos National Laboratory packed 57 barrels of nuclear waste with a type of kitty litter believed to have caused a radiation leak at the federal government's troubled nuclear waste dump, posing a potentially "imminent" and "substantial" threat to public health and the environment, New Mexico officials said Monday.

State Environment Department Secretary Ryan Flynn issued a formal order giving the lab two days to submit a plan for securing the waste containers, many of which are likely stored outdoors on the lab's northern New Mexico campus or at a temporary site in west Texas.

The order says 57 barrels of waste were packed with nitrate salts and organic kitty litter, a combination thought to have caused a heat reaction and radiation release that contaminated 22 workers with low levels of radiation at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad in February.

The kitty litter soaks up any liquid before drums of waste are sealed and shipped. Officials are investigating whether a switch from non-organic to organic litter is to blame for the leak.

According to the order, two of those containers are known to be at WIPP. It doesn't say where the rest of the barrels are, but Los Alamos was in the process of transferring the last of thousands of barrels of waste from decades of nuclear bomb making to the underground dump when the leak shuttered the half-mile-deep mine.

Some containers were then transferred to temporary storage at a commercial nuclear waste dump in Andrews, Texas. But all shipments were stopped when investigators earlier this month zeroed in on the Los Alamos container as the likely source of the leak.

"Based on the evidence presented to NMED, the current handling, storage, treatment and transportation of the hazardous nitrate salt bearing waste containers at LANL may present an imminent and substantial endangerment to health or the environment," the order signed by Flynn states.

Biotech factories to farm fake meat

Eric Niiler
Discovery News
Tue, 20 May 2014 11:45 UTC

The movement to sell locally sourced, artisanal food and drink has picked up steam in recent years as many consumers demand better quality products with a smaller environmental footprint and traceable pedigree.

But some Dutch researchers are taking this idea a step further, proposing the creation of village-level "meat factories" that would produce unique flavors of artificial beef, pork or chicken, all from a biotech reactor.

The study builds upon work done last year, the so-called "test-tube hamburger" that was created by researchers at the University of Maastrict in the Netherlands and unveiled at a tasting in London.

This latest study by a pair of researchers at Wagenigen University proposes a device that can create meat cells in a metal container - enough to feed a small amount of "cultured beef" each month to a village of 2,650 people.

"We thought it was interesting and most promising to do cultured meat on a small scale," said Cor van der Weele, professor of philosophy who wrote the paper with biotechnology professor Johannes Tamper in the journal Trends in Biotechnology. "A small scale is also good from a biotechnology point of view."

Van der Weele said she was inspired to come up with this alternative to meat because of her concerns over animal welfare, as well as the environmental impact of land used to grow beef cattle.

"Raising small numbers of animals in a village is fine," Van der Weele said. "But the way animals are raised now is not in small amounts but in large scale and factory farms."

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Science & Technology

Chelyabinsk meteor believed to be created in outer space collision

LA Times backpedals on crazy talk about Antarctica, glacier melt, sea level rise, and the Los Angeles Airport

Pentagon plans project to combat 'space junk chain reaction,' but is it really incoming space rocks they're worried about?

Violent stellar explosion: Stellar behemoth self-destructs

New supernova pops in bright Galaxy M106 in the 'Hunting Dogs'

Strange rocks found in Earth's crustal graveyard

Your Facebook mobile app just grew a keen sense of hearing

Prices skyrocket as fungus kills high-end coffee beans

Potential "imminent" threat from New Mexico nuclear waste, officials say

Biotech factories to farm fake meat

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