Science & TechnologyS


Gold Bar

Scientists uncover more about the mystery of the origin of gold


Geology In
Fri, 16 Feb 2018 02:42 UTC
gold veins quartz
Veins of gold in quartz
An international group of scientists, with the participation of the University of Granada (UGR), has shed new light on the origin of gold, one of the most intriguing mysteries for Mankind since ancient times and which even today doesn't have an answer that convinces the scientific community.

Their work, which has been recently published in the renowned Nature Communications journal, has established that the gold came to the Earth's surface from the deepest regions of our planet. Thus, the Earth's set of internal movements would have favored the ascent and concentration of the precious metal.

The researchers have found evidence of said process in the Argentinean Patagonia, which in addition represents the first register of gold found under the South American continent, specifically at a depth of 70 kilometers.
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Info

Storm on Neptune is mysteriously fading away

Matthew Loffhagen
Outer Places
Thu, 15 Feb 2018 18:45 UTC
Neptune
© NASA/JPL
Far away on the distant planet of Neptune, an enormous storm is fading away into nothingness.

When the storm was first discovered in 2015, it stretched over 3,100 miles in length, but now, it's shrunk significantly, measuring a mere 2,300 miles long. This goes against computer models of its development, meaning that our current understanding of how storms move on Neptune is woefully flawed.

Storms of this nature have been observed on Neptune regularly since the 1980s, when the Voyager 2 probe gave us a close look at the planet for the first time. Back then, a large storm on Neptune's surface was spotted, and scientists drew similarities to the large circular storm that rages on the much larger planet Jupiter.

Over time, as further photographs of Neptune were taken, it was proven that the planet's storms hardly last as long as those on Jupiter - while the so-called Giant Red Spot has been swirling on the gas giant for two centuries, it seems that only a few years are necessary for storms on Neptune to dissipate.
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Sun

Sunspot explodes for more than 6 hours, hurls giant solar flare at earth

Anthony Watts
WUWT
Thu, 15 Feb 2018 21:28 UTC
CME leaving the sun
CME leaving the sun
We first reported on this possibility a few days ago.

On Feb. 12th, the magnetic canopy of sunspot AR2699 exploded-for more than 6 hours. The slow-motion blast produced a C1-class solar flare and hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) almost directly toward Earth. This movie from the Solar and Heliospheric Observtory (SOHO) shows the CME leaving the sun.

The CME could arrive as early as today, although Feb 15th is more likely. NOAA forecasters say there is a 60% chance of G1-class geomagnetic storms with isolated periods of stronger G2 storming.
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Satellite

Farewell to a pioneering pollution sensor - NASA retires failing Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer


Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Thu, 15 Feb 2018 13:51 UTC
tes satellite
© NASATES collected spectral "signatures," illustrated here, of ozone and other gases in the lower atmosphere. Credit: NASA
On Jan. 31, NASA ended the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer's (TES) almost 14-year career of discovery. Launched in 2004 on NASA's Aura spacecraft, TES was the first instrument designed to monitor ozone in the lowest layers of the atmosphere directly from space. Its high-resolution observations led to new measurements of atmospheric gases that have altered our understanding of the Earth system.

TES was planned for a five-year mission but far outlasted that term. A mechanical arm on the instrument began stalling intermittently in 2010, affecting TES's ability to collect data continuously. The TES operations team adapted by operating the instrument to maximize science operations over time, attempting to extend the data set as long as possible. However, the stalling increased to the point that TES lost operations about half of last year. The data gaps hampered the use of TES data for research, leading to NASA's decision to decommission the instrument. It will remain on the Aura satellite, receiving enough power to keep it from getting so cold it might break and affect the two remaining functioning instruments.

"The fact that the instrument lasted as long as it did is a testament to the tenacity of the instrument teams responsible for designing, building and operating the instrument," said Kevin Bowman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the TES principal investigator.
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Blue Planet

The paradox of Earth's core - it shouldn't exist

Brandon Specktor
Live Science
Fri, 09 Feb 2018 12:00 UTC
earth core centro tierra
© Sputnik/ Alexandr LyskinEarth's solid inner core formed about one billion years ago. Researchers are getting closer to figuring out how it happened.
One day, about a billion years ago, Earth's inner core had a growth spurt. The molten ball of liquid metal at the center of our planet rapidly crystallized due to lowering temperatures, growing steadily outward until it reached the roughly 760-mile (1,220 kilometers) diameter to which it's thought to extend today.

That's the conventional story of the inner core's creation, anyway. But according to a new paper published online this week in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, that story is impossible.

In the paper, the researchers argued that the standard model of how the Earth's core formed is missing a crucial detail about how metals crystallize: a mandatory, massive drop in temperature that would be extremely difficult to achieve at core pressures. [6 Visions of Earth's Core]

Comment: In other words, while they've identified their errors, they have no idea how it could have happened. There may be some clues in Electric Universe theory, as well as other 'fringe' areas of scientific research:

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Bug

Ants nurse wounded warriors back to health

Mariette le Roux and Laurence Coustal
Digital Journal
Wed, 14 Feb 2018 15:37 UTC
African Matabele ant
© Erik Frank, AFPAfrican Matabele ants dress the wounds of injured comrades and nurse them back to health.
African Matabele ants dress the wounds of comrades injured during hunting raids and nurse them back to health, according to an "astonishing" discovery reported Wednesday.

After collecting their wounded from the battlefield and carrying them back home, nestmates become medics, massing around patients for "intense licking" of open wounds, according to a study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

This behaviour reduces the fatality rate from about 80 percent of injured soldiers to a mere 10 percent, researchers observed.

The study claimed to be the first to show such nursing behaviour in any non-human animal.

"This is not conducted through self-medication, as is known in many animals, but rather through treatment by nestmates which, through intense licking of the wound, are likely able to prevent an infection," said study co-author Erik Frank.

He contributed to the research when he was at the Julius Maximilian University of Wuerzburg in Germany, and continues his work at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Frank had also taken part in a previous study, published last year, describing the ants' battleground rescue behaviour.

The new research focused on what happens to the injured back in the nest.
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Magnify

Photographing a single atom and other entries for UK science competition (PHOTOS)

Fiona Macdonald
Science Alert
Wed, 14 Feb 2018 11:36 UTC
This Photo of a Single Trapped Atom Is Absolutely Breathtaking
At the very centre of the image above is something incredible - a single, positively-charged strontium atom, suspended in motion by electric fields.

Not only is this an incredibly rare sight, it's also difficult to wrap your head around the fact that this tiny point of blue light is a building block of matter.

Tiny specks of energy just like this one are at the centre of so much of the stuff around us, and the thought that we can see this one makes our hearts hurt.

In case you're struggling to get a close-enough view to see what we're talking about, the team over at Gizmodo has done the zoom work for you.

Comment: See Also:

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Fire

Yellowstone super volcano under strain from pressure in magma chamber

Sean Martin
Express
Tue, 13 Feb 2018 13:14 UTC
Yellowstone National Park
© Jim Urquhart / ReutersYellowstone National Park
A process known as deformation, where subsurface rocks subtly change shapes, is occurring beneath the surface of Yellowstone which alerts experts.

Researchers state deformation occurs when there is a change in the amount of pressure in the magma chamber and experts are keeping an eye on the development.

Seismologists from UNAVCO, a nonprofit university-governed consortium, are using "Global Positioning System, borehole tiltmeters, and borehole strainmeters" to measure minute changes in deformation at Yellowstone.

Comment: All signs point to great changes occurring on our planet, to think that Yellowstone's behaviour is shifting along with it wouldn't be too much of a stretch of the imagination, and the data shows that it is: Also check out SOTT's monthly documentary: SOTT Earth Changes Summary - January 2018: Extreme Weather, Planetary Upheaval, Meteor Fireballs

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Wolf

Scientists artificially inseminate Mexican wolf at US zoo to help species back from the brink of extinction

Ese Olumhense
Chicago Tribune
Mon, 12 Feb 2018 11:04 UTC
Mexican wolf Broookfield zoo
© Antonio Perez / Chicago TribuneA Mexican wolf at Brookfield Zoo in Brookfield on Feb. 7, 2018. Brookfield Zoo is working to further advance the science of artificial reproduction to help save an endangered species.
The scene mirrors one popular in most medical television dramas: A sedated patient lies on a table as practitioners, their hands gloved, bustle about handling tubes and tongs, vials and syringes. Computer monitors, flickering with real-time vital information, hum in the background of beeping machines, walkie-talkie static and urgent voices.

And though the procedure being done this day, artificial insemination, is fairly typical, the patient, Zana, a Mexican wolf living at the Brookfield Zoo, is anything but.

For the first time in the state, scientists from the Chicago Zoological Society and a team assembled by the Reproductive and Behavioral Sciences Department at the St. Louis Zoo used artificial insemination in an effort to improve the genetic diversity of the Mexican wolf population, which has been endangered since 1976. At that time, only seven of these wolves were left in the wild, experts said.

Decades later, and more than 1,000 miles away from the species' original habitat in the Southwestern U.S. and Mexico, scientists at Brookfield are deploying new reproductive tools and technologies to advance the recovery of the Mexican wolf. Artificial insemination is among the latest of these. Scientists say it holds promise for the Mexican wolf - which now has a population of over 280 in 55 zoos and other institutions and an estimated 150 living in the wild - as well as other species at the fringes of extinction.
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Question

Enriched uranium found floating above Alaska

Ryan F. Mandelbaum
Gizmodo Australia
Wed, 14 Feb 2018 06:29 UTC
WB-57
© NASAA NASA WB-57 plane, like the one that located the mystery particle.
On 3 August 2016, 7km above Alaska's Aleutian Islands, a research plane captured something mysterious: An atmospheric aerosol particle enriched with the kind of uranium used in nuclear fuel and bombs.

It's the first time scientists have detected such a particle just floating along in the atmosphere in 20 years of plane-based observations.

Uranium is the heaviest element to occur naturally on Earth's surface in an appreciable amount. Normally it occurs as the slightly radioactive isotope uranium-238, but some amount of uranium-235, the kind humans make bombs and fuel out of, occurs in nature. Uranium-238 is already rare to find floating above the Earth in the atmosphere. But scientists have never before spotted enriched uranium, a sample uranium containing uranium-235, in millions of research plane-captured atmospheric particles.

"One of the main motivations of this paper is to see if somebody who knows more about uranium than any of us would understand the source of the particle," scientist Dan Murphy from NOAA told me. After all, "aerosol particles containing uranium enriched in uranium-235 are definitely not from a natural source," he writes in the paper, published recently in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity.

Murphy has led flights around the world sampling the atmosphere for aerosols. These tiny particles can come from polution, dust, fires and other sources, and can influence things such as cloud formation and the weather. The researchers spotted the mystery particle on a flight over Alaska using their "Particle Analysis by Laser Mass Spectrometry" instrument. They considered that perhaps the signature came from something weird, but evidence seems to point directly at enriched uranium.
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