Science & Technology

Puzzling spike in radioactive particles across Europe, baffles scientists

RT
Tue, 10 Oct 2017 14:56 UTC

Radiation monitors have detected radioactive particles in the air across Europe, although the source remains a mystery.

Germany's Office for Radiation Protection reported increased radioactivity in parts of Central and Western Europe over the last week. The heightened levels were detected at several trace measuring stations in Europe, and at six locations in Germany.

The particles are ruthenium-106, an isotope used in cancer radiation therapy for eye tumors and at times in radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) which provide power to satellites. An increase of ruthenium-106 has been detected in the air in Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.

While officials say there's no need to panic, they don't know where the material has come from. The elevated radiation levels don't present a threat to human health.

"New analyzes of the source of the radioactive material are likely to indicate a release in the southern Ural," the Office for Radiation Protection said, "but other regions in Southern Russia can not be excluded."

It said that because it's only ruthenium-106 that has been detected, this rules out a nuclear power plant accident.

Similar spikes in radioactive particles have occurred across Europe in the past, but they are rare. In February, trace amounts of radioactive Iodine-131 were detected across parts of Europe. The iodine faded, and the source of the radioactivity wasn't identified, Motherboard reports. France's IRSN institute announced the trace amounts were detected over Norway, Finland, Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, France and Spain.

Dr. Henry Bauer interview discussing the corruption of science

Skeptiko
Sat, 07 Oct 2017 14:44 UTC

Kyrie Irving, is an amazing basketball player, who made quite a stir earlier this year regarding the flat earth theory.

Ben Nichols, this is a shout out to you. He came to us with this super conspiracy theory, he said, "The earth is flat."

No, the earth is flat.

Oh here we go.

No the earth is flat.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's no way a bright, Duke University educated guy like Kyrie Irving should fall for something anyone can debunk with the United Airlines timetable and some common sense. But take a minute to understand how he formed his opinion.

Hopefully they'll either back my belief or they'll throw it in the water. I think it's interesting for people to find out on their own.

You've seen pictures of the planet thought right? Like it's a circle?

I've seen a lot of things that have been... and my educational system has said that was real and it turned out to be completely fake. I don't mind, I don't mind going against the grain in terms of my thoughts and what I believe.

And with that, you might begin to understand why today's guest, Dr. Henry Bauer, might cut Kyrie some slack.

The popular view of science has not caught up with the present situation where people should be as skeptical about what official science says as they are about what the experts say about any other aspect of society.

Comment:

The TC4 asteroid, slated to make a close call with Earth, will be used to test early warning systems

Mariëtte Le Roux
Yahoo News
Tue, 10 Oct 2017 14:36 UTC

© AFP photo/HO
The 2012 TC4 asteroid, seen at the center of this composite photo from the Euopean Space Agency, will pass closer to Earth than the moon.

A house-size asteroid will give Earth a near-miss Thursday, passing harmlessly inside the Moon's orbit while giving experts a rare chance to rehearse for a real-life strike threat.

Dubbed 2012 TC4, the space rock will shave past at an altitude of less than 44,000 kilometres (27,300 miles) -- just above the 36,000-km plane at which hundreds of geosynchronous satellites orbit the Earth.

That represents about an eighth of the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

NASA's Mike Kelley, who leads the exercise to spot, track and intimately probe the transient visitor, insisted there was "no danger. Not even for satellites".

"We've now been observing TC4 for two months, so we have very accurate position information on it, which in turn allows very precise calculations of its orbit," which will not cross that of Earth nor its satellites, he told AFP.

As its name suggests, the object was first spotted five years ago when it called on Earth at about double Thursday's projected distance, before disappearing from view.

It is 15 to 30 metres (50 to 100 feet) wide -- about the size of the meteoroid that exploded in the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk in central Russia in 2013 with 30 times the kinetic energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Comment: Chelyabinsk meteor: A wake-up call for humanity

Scientists have finally found half of the universe's missing matter

Leah Crane
New Scientist
Mon, 09 Oct 2017 21:43 UTC

© Andrey Kravtsov (The University of Chicago) and Anatoly Klypin (New Mexico State University)
Discoveries seem to back up many of our ideas about how the universe got its large-scale structure.

The missing links between galaxies have finally been found. This is the first detection of the roughly half of the normal matter in our universe - protons, neutrons and electrons - unaccounted for by previous observations of stars, galaxies and other bright objects in space.

You have probably heard about the hunt for dark matter, a mysterious substance thought to permeate the universe, the effects of which we can see through its gravitational pull. But our models of the universe also say there should be about twice as much ordinary matter out there, compared with what we have observed so far.

Two separate teams found the missing matter - made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter - linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas.

Comment: Fermilab Scientists Discover New Particle

"The missing baryon problem is solved," says Hideki Tanimura at the Institute of Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France, leader of one of the groups. The other team was led by Anna de Graaff at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Because the gas is so tenuous and not quite hot enough for X-ray telescopes to pick up, nobody had been able to see it before.

Scientists to explore 120,000yo ecosystem uncovered after trillion-ton iceberg broke from Larsen C Ice Shelf

RT
Tue, 10 Oct 2017 21:09 UTC

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is due to launch a mission in early 2018 to explore the uncharted ecosystem that remained hidden beneath the Antarctic ice shelf for the past 120,000 years.

BAS researchers want to gauge the response of the marine ecosystem to environmental change after the A68 iceberg, which is four times the size of London, broke away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in mid-July, leaving 5,818 sq km of seabed exposed to the elements for the first time.

Did you know the Moon once had an atmosphere?

Richard Lovett
Cosmos
Mon, 09 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC

© olcano.oregonstate.edu/NASA
There are many volcanic features on the lunar surface. In fact, the dark lunar maria that you can see when there is a full Moon are massive, generally level deposits of basalt, a volcanic rock. The Gruithuisen Domes (shown by the black arrows in this Apollo 15 picture) are unusual silica-rich volcanoes.

New study finds that not once, but twice, volcanic eruptions left the Moon blanketed by gases for 70 million years.

Three to four billion years ago, the giant volcanic eruptions that created the Man in the Moon also gave the Moon an atmosphere, scientists say.

That's because volcanic eruptions release gases, and a new study, published online in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, calculates that these gases would have accumulated more quickly than they could escape into space, even under the Moon's low gravity.

The exact composition of that ancient atmosphere isn't completely known, but it would have included carbon dioxide, water, hydrogen, and sulfur, says David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. And there would have been enough of these gases to raise the surface pressure about 50% higher than on present-day Mars, about 1% of Earth's at sea level.

The research was based on prior studies that reanalysed volcanic rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts. These studies had concluded that the magma from which these rocks solidified contained substantially larger quantities of gases than had previously been believed. Kring's brainstorm was to wonder where those gases had gone.

GMO - chicken sperm key to creating cancer-fighting eggs

RT
Tue, 10 Oct 2017 11:36 UTC

A team of Japanese researchers have genetically-modified chicken sperm with a view to creating a generation of hens that lay cancer-fighting eggs.

The team of scientists from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in the Kansai region of Japan used genome-editing on chicken DNA by introducing genes that produce interferon beta into the precursors of chicken sperm.

Interferon beta is a type of protein used in treatments for a multitude of diseases including multiple sclerosis (MS), certain types of cancer and even hepatitis.

"This is a result that we hope leads to the development of cheap drugs," Professor Hironobu Hojo at Osaka University said, as cited by The Yomiuri Shimbun.

Expert hacker shows how easy it is to hack wireless tech

TEDx Talks
YouTube
Thu, 30 Aug 2012 20:55 UTC

Think your wireless and other technology is safe? Think again. From Blue Tooth to automobile remotes, PCs, and "secure" credit cards, this Hacker shows how nearly every secure system is vulnerable.

'Antibiotic apocalypse': Drug-resistant gene has spread around the world within 2 years

RT
Mon, 09 Oct 2017 16:56 UTC

The life-saving antibiotic of "last resort" is in danger of becoming powerless after a drug-resistant gene was found to have spread across the globe in the last two years. Scientists believe it's one of the greatest dangers now facing humanity.

A bacteria containing a gene which carries resistance to the antibiotic colistin has spread around the world at an alarming rate. The gene is mcr-1 and was first discovered in China in 2015, and has since been found in more than 30 other countries.

Colistin is known as the antibiotic of "last resort," because it is used when patients no longer respond to other antibiotics. It has toxic side effects but doctors are increasingly using it as a result of antibiotic resistance.

"The world is facing an antibiotic apocalypse," England's chief medical officer Sally Davies said, the Guardian reports.

Comment: See also: Top unnecessary medical treatments - according to scientists

Thunderbolts Space News: 'Dirty snowballs' falsified - NASA fails to notice

Thunderbolts Project
YouTube
Sun, 08 Oct 2017 17:26 UTC

Today, we explore stunning new developments in comet science that provide remarkable affirmation of the electric comet theory. Scientists using the Hubble telescope recently spotted the most distant active comet ever observed, at the incredible distance of 1.5 billion miles away, or about 16 Astronomical Units. In the same week, the ESA released over 1000 images of the comet 67P nucleus, imaged by the Rosetta probe. On the comet surface, we see undeniably planetary features, including stratified rock. In this episode, we explain why these amazing discoveries are completely expected in the Electric Universe.

Comment: For more information on comets, the Electric Universe model and much more, see Pierre Lescaudron and Laura Knight-Jadczyk's book, Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection. See also:

"The FDA has many decisions to make beyond just approving the drug, or not. It must decide whether pregnant women - and any other at-risk groups -...

prehistoric

Many people who are hesitant to be vaccinated for Covid-19 see the drug as a treatment or prophylactic for the disease, though so far there is no...

Good Optics

With mail in voting likely to become a thing, does it really matter any more? Stick a fork in us...this country is done.

Bezel Bub

Other comets coming sooner, although not quite as big. E.g. "Leonard" this December https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2021_A1_(Leonard)

Tsidkenu

Tornadoes here in Aus too, as I reported here [Link]

Tsidkenu

Science & Technology

Puzzling spike in radioactive particles across Europe, baffles scientists

Dr. Henry Bauer interview discussing the corruption of science

The TC4 asteroid, slated to make a close call with Earth, will be used to test early warning systems

Scientists have finally found half of the universe's missing matter

Scientists to explore 120,000yo ecosystem uncovered after trillion-ton iceberg broke from Larsen C Ice Shelf

Did you know the Moon once had an atmosphere?

GMO - chicken sperm key to creating cancer-fighting eggs

Expert hacker shows how easy it is to hack wireless tech

'Antibiotic apocalypse': Drug-resistant gene has spread around the world within 2 years

Thunderbolts Space News: 'Dirty snowballs' falsified - NASA fails to notice

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