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Mon, 27 Sep 2021
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Mars

Network of hidden lakes detected under surface of Mars

Michelle Starr
ScienceAlert
Mon, 28 Sep 2020 18:31 UTC
mars south pole ice
© YouTube / Screenshot / Kami
The icy south pole of Mars.
The surface of Mars is renowned for its aridity. The entire planet is a dusty, barren desert - a wasteland of rock and, in some regions, ice; but of liquid water, not a confirmed drop has been found.

But in 2018, scientists unveiled a bombshell discovery - they'd found evidence of a colossal underground reservoir of liquid water at the Martian south pole.

Now, they've taken that discovery a crucial step forward. There's not one, but an entire network of multiple lakes under the southern polar ice cap. And that means that the first reservoir was not a one-off or a freak of Martian nature.

"The existence of a single subglacial lake could be attributed to ad-hoc conditions such as the presence of a volcano under the ice sheet, or some other situation unique to the specific location where we found the first subglacial lake," explained geophysicist Elena Pettinelli of Roma Tre University in Italy to ScienceAlert. She led the research alongside colleague Sebastian Emanuel Lauro.

Comment: From the European Space Agency:



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Evil Rays

Ireland switches on 5G network, expects 50% coverage by next year

Ciara O'Brien
Irish Times
Mon, 28 Sep 2020 07:00 UTC
Ireland 5g

From left: John Griffin, head of Ericsson Ireland; and David Hennessy, chief technology officer, Three Ireland.
Three Ireland has turned on its 5G network around the country, offering coverage at certain sites in every county.

Claiming to have Ireland's largest 5G network, the mobile operator has enabled 315 sites for the next generation technology, and plans to add further sites early next year. At launch it has about 35 per cent population coverage, but that will increase with the addition of 500 sites next year.

"What we expect is by the end of next year we will be well in excess of 50 per cent population coverage and growing," said David Hennessy, chief technology officer with Three Ireland. "This is about actually having a very substantive proposition out there for our customers and very substantive service."

Comment: It would appear that while some countries halt the roll out of 5G due to health concerns, Ireland's government has decided to put its citizens at the forefront of the experiment: Also check out SOTT radio's: Objective:Health #15 - The Dangers of 5G & WiFi - With Scott Ogrin of Scottie's Tech.Info

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Moon

Moon has hazardous radiation levels, new measurements from China probe show

Marcia Dunn
Phys.org
Fri, 25 Sep 2020 12:00 UTC
Chang'e-4
© CNSA/CLEP
The Chang'e-4 lunar probe, photographed from the Yutu-2 rover. The measuring device from Kiel is located on the left behind the antenna.
Future moon explorers will be bombarded with two to three times more radiation than astronauts aboard the International Space Station, a health hazard that will require thick-walled shelters for protection, scientists reported Friday.

China's lander on the far side of the moon is providing the first full measurements of radiation exposure from the lunar surface, vital information for NASA and others aiming to send astronauts to the moon, the study noted.

A Chinese-German team reported on the radiation data collected by the lander — named Chang'e 4 for the Chinese moon goddess — in the U.S. journal Science Advances.

Comment: Could it be that with the changes occurring in our solar system that this radiation could increase too?

See also:

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Fireball 2

NASA warns Statue of Liberty-sized space rock among FIVE headed towards Earth


RT
Mon, 28 Sep 2020 23:23 UTC
asteroids earth artist conception
© GETTY IMAGES / CHRISTOPH BURGSTEDT / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
In its latest bulletin, NASA has warned of five Near-Earth Objects headed towards our planet this week, one of which is larger than the Statue of Liberty. Meanwhile, the agency is gearing up for its asteroid-sampling mission.

It'll be a ferocious finale to September, as five space rocks measuring between 11 meters and 110 meters in diameter are due in just three days.

Kicking things off on Monday will be the 11-meter, telephone pole-sized 2020 SY4, which will come within 724,000km of Earth at a blistering pace of 16.12km/s (58,032kph, or 21 times as fast as a bullet (2,736kph).

Comment: Though it is downplayed in the media, there has been a serious uptick in the number of asteroids passing Earth at uncomfortable distances detected. Some of this may be attributed to the increase of amateur skywatchers assisting professional astronomers, but not all of it. More on the Bennu mission:

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Robot

Scientists learn how to make liquid crystal shape-shift

Ioana Patringenaru
UC San Diego
Fri, 25 Sep 2020 17:18 UTC
Liquid Crystal
© UC San Diego
A 3D-printed flower-like structure that can twist.
A new 3D-printing method will make it easier to manufacture and control the shape of soft robots, artificial muscles and wearable devices. Researchers at UC San Diego show that by controlling the printing temperature of liquid crystal elastomer, or LCE, they can control the material's degree of stiffness and ability to contract — also known as degree of actuation. What's more, they are able to change the stiffness of different areas in the same material by exposing it to heat.

As a proof of concept, the researchers 3D-printed in a single print, with a single ink, structures whose stiffness and actuation varies by orders of magnitude, from zero to 30 percent. For example, one area of the LCE structure can contract like muscles; and another can be flexible, like tendons. The breakthrough was possible because the team studied LCE closely to better understand its material properties.

The team, led by Shengqiang Cai, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, details their work in the Sept. 25 issue of Science Advances.

Researchers were inspired to create this material with different degrees of actuation by examples in biology and nature. In addition to the combination of muscle and tendon, researchers took cues from the beak of the squid, which is extremely stiff at the tip but much softer and malleable where it is connected to the mouth of the squid.

"3D-printing is a great tool to make so many different things — and it's even better now that we can print structures that can contract and stiffen as desired under a certain stimuli, in this case, heat," said Zijun Wang, the paper's first author and a Ph.D. student in Cai's research group.
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Alarm Clock

Physicist comes up with math that makes 'paradox-free' time travel plausible

David Nield
ScienceAlert
Sat, 26 Sep 2020 18:24 UTC
wormhole time travel
© andrey_l/Shutterstock
No one has yet managed to travel through time - at least to our knowledge - but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.

As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?

It's a monumental head-scratcher known as the 'grandfather paradox', but now a physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, says he has worked out how to "square the numbers" to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.
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Robot

AI is getting smarter

Karen Hao
MIT Review
Fri, 25 Sep 2020 18:43 UTC
People on a Couch
© ALLEN INSTITUTE FOR AI
Of all the AI models in the world, OpenAI's GPT-3 has most captured the public's imagination. It can spew poems, short stories, and songs with little prompting, and has been demonstrated to fool people into thinking its outputs were written by a human. But its eloquence is more of a parlor trick, not to be confused with real intelligence.

Nonetheless, researchers believe that the techniques used to create GPT-3 could contain the secret to more advanced AI. GPT-3 trained on an enormous amount of text data. What if the same methods were trained on both text and images?

Now new research from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, AI2, has taken this idea to the next level. The researchers have developed a new text-and-image model, otherwise known as a visual-language model, that can generate images given a caption. The images look unsettling and freakish — nothing like the hyperrealistic deepfakes generated by GANs — but they might demonstrate a promising new direction for achieving more generalizable intelligence, and perhaps smarter robots as well.
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Sun

British astrophysicists: "mini ice age is accelerating - New 'Maunder Minimum' has begun," look at changes in Beaufort Gyre

Cap Allon
Electroverse
Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC
sunset
"We are plunging now into a deep mini ice age," says British astrophysicist Piers Corbyn, "and there is no way out".

For the next 20 years it's going to get colder and colder, on average, says Corbyn who holds a B.Sc. in Physics and an M.Sc. in Astrophysics. The jet stream will be wilder: there will be more wild temperature changes, more hail events, more earthquakes, more extreme volcano events, more snow in winters, lousy summers, late springs, short autumns, and more and more crop failures.

"The fact is the sun rules the sea temperature, and the sea temperature rules the climate," explains Corbyn.

"What we have happening now is the start of the mini ice age ... it began around 2013. It's a slow start, and now the rate of moving into the mini ice age is accelerating.

Little Ice Age Triggered by Arctic Sea Ice

Arctic sea ice

Comment: It can't be said enough; the world has been had, fooled, tricked and lied to about the mechanisms and probable outcome of what is the true state of climate change. Imagine the responses to governments, the UN, Greta, and all the scientists who have been pushing the Global Warming "crisis" green agenda on people when things become even more obvious - and we are seeing ice and cold instead of heat.

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Jupiter

The strange storms on Jupiter

Emily Velasco, California Institute of Technology
Phys.org
Thu, 24 Sep 2020 06:40 UTC
Storms gathered at the south pole of Jupiter, as imaged by the Juno probe
© NASA-JPL/Caltech
Storms gathered at the south pole of Jupiter, as imaged by the Juno probe.
At the south pole of Jupiter lurks a striking sight — even for a gas giant planet covered in colorful bands that sports a red spot larger than the earth. Down near the south pole of the planet, mostly hidden from the prying eyes of humans, is a collection of swirling storms arranged in an unusually geometric pattern.

Since they were first spotted by NASA's Juno space probe in 2019, the storms have presented something of a mystery to scientists. The storms are analogous to hurricanes on Earth. However, on our planet, hurricanes do not gather themselves at the poles and twirl around each other in the shape of a pentagon or hexagon, as do Jupiter's curious storms.

Now, a research team working in the lab of Andy Ingersoll, Caltech professor of planetary science, has discovered why Jupiter's storms behave so strangely. They did so using math derived from a proof written by Lord Kelvin, a British mathematical physicist and engineer, nearly 150 years ago.

Ingersoll, who was a member of the Juno team, says Jupiter's storms are remarkably similar to the ones that lash the East Coast of the United States every summer and fall, just on a much larger scale.

"If you went below the cloud tops, you would probably find liquid water rain drops, hail, and snow," he says. "The winds would be hurricane-force winds. Hurricanes on Earth are a good analog of the individual vortices within these arrangements we see on Jupiter, but there is nothing so stunningly beautiful here."

Comment: Could another factor be found in Electric Universe theory? See also:

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Info

100 million-year-old meteorite crater discovered Down Under

Laura Geggel
Live Science
Wed, 23 Sep 2020 22:30 UTC
Ora Banda Impact Crater
© Resource Potentials
A color-coded gravity image of the Ora Banda Impact Crater site. The crater (deep blue) is in the middle of the image.
Gold miners in the Australian Outback recently discovered a gigantic meteorite crater dating to about 100 million years ago, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Found near the Western Australian town of Ora Banda, the newly dubbed Ora Banda Impact Crater is about 3 miles (5 kilometers) across. This huge hole was likely created by a meteorite up to 660 feet (200 meters) wide, or longer than the length of two American football fields, according to Resourc.ly, a Western Australia news outlet.

When geologists at Evolution Mining, an Australian gold mining company, came across some unusual rock cores at Ora Banda, they called Jayson Meyers, the principal geophysicist, director and founder of Resource Potentials, a geophysics consulting and contracting company in Perth. Meyers examined the geologists' drill core samples, as well as rock samples from the site, and he immediately noticed the shatter cones — telltale signs of a meteorite crash.

Shatter cones form when high-pressure, high-velocity shock waves from a large impacting object — such as a meteorite or a gigantic explosion (such as would occur at a nuclear testing site) — rattle an area, according to the Planetary Science Institute (PSI), a nonprofit group based in Tucson, Arizona, which was not involved with the new find. These shock waves shatter rock into the unique shatter cone shape, just like a mark that a hard object can leave on a car's windshield.

Because "we know they didn't do any nuclear testing at Ora Banda," the evidence suggests that an ancient impact crater hit the site, Meyers told Resourc.ly.
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