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Sun, 19 Sep 2021
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Cassiopaea

Is dark matter real, or have we misunderstood gravity?

University of Amsterdam
Phys.org
Tue, 22 Jun 2021 20:55 UTC
galaxy
© Bart Delsaert (www.delsaert.com)
In the centre of the image the elliptical galaxy NGC5982, and to the right the spiral galaxy NGC5985. These two types of galaxies turn out to behave very differently when it comes to the extra gravity - and therefore possibly the dark matter - in their outer regions.
For many years now, astronomers and physicists have been in conflict. Is the mysterious dark matter that we observe deep in the Universe real, or is what we see the result of subtle deviations from the laws of gravity as we know them? In 2016, Dutch physicist Erik Verlinde proposed a theory of the second kind: emergent gravity. New research, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics this week, pushes the limits of dark matter observations to the unknown outer regions of galaxies, and in doing so re-evaluates several dark matter models and alternative theories of gravity. Measurements of the gravity of 259,000 isolated galaxies show a very close relation between the contributions of dark matter and those of ordinary matter, as predicted in Verlinde's theory of emergent gravity and an alternative model called Modified Newtonian Dynamics. However, the results also appear to agree with a computer simulation of the Universe that assumes that dark matter is 'real stuff'.

Comment: And they've yet to factor in plasma's role in space: Why the sun's atmosphere is hundreds of times hotter than its surface

See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Life Preserver

'Conservation' project of Tasmanian devils wipes out island's penguin population

Donna Lu
The Guardian
Mon, 21 Jun 2021 07:57 UTC
penguin
© Eric Woehler
Little penguins - the species has been eliminated from Australia's Maria Island by introduced Tasmanian devils.
An attempt to save the Tasmanian devil by shipping an "insurance population" to a tiny Australian island has come at a "catastrophic" cost to the birdlife there, including the complete elimination of little penguins, according to BirdLife Tasmania.

Maria Island, a 116-square-kilometre island east of Tasmania, was home to 3,000 breeding pairs of little penguins around a decade ago.

Their populations have dwindled since Tasmanian devils were introduced in 2012, but according to BirdLife Tasmania, the most recent survey conducted by the parks department showed penguins had completely disappeared from the island.

Comment: As with numerous other areas of science, something is seriously wrong when conservationists repeatedly cause more problems than they set out to solve; another alarming sign is that zoologists have been claiming species to be 'extinct', only for the animal to turn up later, and some times for the most comical of reasons:

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Snowflake

Glacier blood? Watermelon Snow? Whatever it's called, snow shouldn't be so red

Cara Giaimo
The New York Times
Fri, 11 Jun 2021 00:00 UTC
Red snow
© Jean-Gabriel/Valaey/Jardin du Lautaret/UGA/CNRS/ALPALGA
Sampling red-colored snow in the Alps.
Researchers are starting to investigate the species that drive alpine algal blooms to better understand their causes and effects.

Winter through spring, the French Alps are wrapped in austere white snow. But as spring turns to summer, the stoic slopes start to blush. Parts of the snow take on bright colors: deep red, rusty orange, lemonade pink. Locals call this "sang de glacier," or "glacier blood." Visitors sometimes go with "watermelon snow."

In reality, these blushes come from an embarrassment of algae. In recent years, alpine habitats all over the world have experienced an uptick in snow algae blooms — dramatic, strangely hued aggregations of these normally invisible creatures.

While snow algae blooms are poorly understood, that they are happening is probably not a good sign. Researchers have begun surveying the algae of the Alps to better grasp what species live there, how they survive and what might be pushing them over the bleeding edge. Some of their initial findings were published this week in Frontiers in Plant Science.

Tiny yet powerful, the plantlike organisms we call algae are "the basis of all ecosystems," said Adeline Stewart, an author of the study who worked on it as a doctoral student at Grenoble Alpes University in France. Thanks to their photosynthetic prowess, algae produce a large amount of the world's oxygen, and form the foundation of most food webs.
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Fish

Deep-sea creature with EIGHT jaws is a "totally unique" animal

Tim O'Hara
Teh Conversation
Fri, 18 Jun 2021 17:49 UTC
jurassic eight jaws sea creature relic
© J. Black/University of Melbourne
A close-up micro-CT scan of Ophiojura's eight sets of toothy jaws
Let me introduce you to Ophiojura, a bizarre deep-sea animal found in 2011 by scientists from the French Natural History Museum, while trawling the summit of a secluded seamount called Banc Durand, 500 metres below the waves and 200 kilometres east of New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific Ocean.

Ophiojura is a type of brittle star, which are distant cousins of starfish, with snake-like arms radiating from their bodies, that live on sea floors around the globe.

Being an expert in deep-sea animals, I knew at a glance that this one was special when I first saw it in 2015. The eight arms, each 10 centimetres long and armed with rows of hooks and spines. And the teeth! A microscopic scan revealed bristling rows of sharp teeth lining every jaw, which I reckon are used to snare and shred its prey.
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Attention

Science and Consensus

Willis Eschenbach
Watts Up with That
Tue, 22 Jun 2021 17:14 UTC
Pastafarian God
© Watts Up with That
I got to thinking about how science progresses. Science is a funny beast. It's not a "thing", it's a process. The process works like this:
  • One or more people make a falsifiable claim about how the physical world works. They support it with logic, math, computer code, examples, experience, experimental results, thought experiments, or other substantiating backup information.
  • They make all of that information public, so others can replicate their work.
  • Other people try to find things that are wrong with the original claim, including errors in the logic, math, computer code, examples, and the rest.
  • If someone can show the original claim is wrong, that claim is falsified and rejected.
  • If nobody can show the claim is wrong, then it is provisionally accepted as scientifically valid ... but only provisionally, because at any time new information of any kind may show that the claim actually is wrong.
Note that there is two things that must be present for this process we call "science" to work. The first is total transparency. If the author of the claim refuses to provide the data, computer code, or any part of the supporting evidence, the claim cannot be either replicated or falsified and thus it is not a part of science.

The second necessary component is that the claim must be falsifiable. If I say "There is a Pastafarian God who controls the universe through his noodly appendages", (image above) no one can falsify that statement ... so it's not a scientific claim.
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Info

There's more to genes than DNA


University of Bath
Mon, 21 Jun 2021 16:31 UTC
Biologists at the University of Bath and the University of Vienna in Austria have discovered 71 new imprinted genes in the mouse genome.

Genetic imprinting
© University of Bath
Genetic imprinting - genes that are more active when they come from one parent than the other - impacts health at all stages of life.
Biologists at the Universities of Bath and Vienna have discovered 71 new 'imprinted' genes in the mouse genome, a finding that takes them a step closer to unravelling some of the mysteries of epigenetics - an area of science that describes how genes are switched on (and off) in different cells at different stages in development and adulthood.

To understand the importance of imprinted genes to inheritance, we need to step back and ask how inheritance works in general. Most of the thirty trillion cells in a person's body contain genes that come from both their mother and father, with each parent contributing one version of each gene. The unique combination of genes goes part of the way to making an individual unique. Usually, each gene in a pair is equally active or inactive in a given cell. This is not the case for imprinted genes. These genes - which make up less than one percent of the total of 20,000+ genes - tend to be more active (sometimes much more active) in one parental version than the other.

Until now, researchers were aware of around 130 well-documented imprinted genes in the mouse genome - the new additions take this number to over 200. Professor Tony Perry, who led the research from the Department of Biology & Biochemistry at Bath, said: "Imprinting affects an important family of genes, with different implications for health and disease, so the seventy-plus new ones add an important piece of the jigsaw."
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Butterfly

Butterflies cross the Sahara in longest-known insect migration

University of Reading
Phys.org
Mon, 21 Jun 2021 12:00 UTC
butterfly
© cc by 3point0 Jean-Pol Grandmont
A Painted Lady butterfly.
A species of butterfly found in Sub-Saharan Africa is able to migrate thousands of miles to Europe, crossing the Saharan Desert, in years when weather conditions are favorable, scientists have found.

The striking Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui) butterfly has been shown for the first time to be capable of making the 12,000-14,000 km round trip — the longest insect migration known so far — in greater numbers, when wetter conditions in the desert help the plants on which it lays eggs.

The international research team's findings increase understanding of how insects, including pollinators, pests and the diseases they carry could spread between continents in future as climate change alters seasonal conditions.


Comment: Indeed. We are not seeing 'global warming' as mainstream science continues to claim, although this slogan is slowly being phased out because it's undeniable that, amongst other Earth Changes, our planet cooling, and that includes increasingly erratic seasons that are wreaking havoc with life on our planet: Recap: The changing jet stream and global cooling


Comment: It would appear that it's a similar story for the Monarch butterflies over in the Americas. As noted in Millions of butterflies flying to Scotland in 'once-in-a-decade' phenomenon:
Every September an incredible migration phenomenon begins. Clouds of stripy orange monarch butterflies set off on a 2,500km journey, travelling from southern Canada to warmer climes in southern California and Mexico. Come spring they follow the milkweed blossom and travel back up north. No butterfly completes the entire trip: after flying many hundreds of kilometres the female butterflies lay eggs and pass the baton to the next generation. Now a new study, published in Biology Letters, reveals how these amazing insects make use of the weather to aid their journey.

Miniaturised radio transmitters were attached to the butterflies and their journey tracked using a series of automated telemetry towers. The results show how monarchs soar high to take advantage of strong tailwinds, powering along at up to 31kph. Those that have to travel furthest seem to travel fastest, but all butterflies took rest days every now and then. Warmer temperatures also help (though only up to a certain point) and on a good day they managed to travel over 100km. Light rain didn't seem to have any adverse effect, but the researchers note they didn't track any individuals during heavy rain events. Perhaps they shelter and make up lost time later?
See also:

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X

Scientists find most PCR test results do not indicate infectious virus, question test's status as "Gold Standard"

Will Jones
Lockdown Skeptics
Sun, 20 Jun 2021 19:02 UTC
PCR machine
© unknown
PCR Machine
How often do we hear that the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test is the "gold standard" for detecting COVID-19 infection and thus for controlling and containing a COVID-19 epidemic? To question the accuracy of this test is supposedly part of the "misinformation" sceptics spread, which Ofcom, being guided by biased, Big Tech-funded, activist organisation Full Fact, aims to suppress.

In reality, serious questions about the proper use of PCR tests, particularly in mass screening programmes, have been asked since the technique was invented in 1985 and predate the Covid pandemic.

Since early 2020, there have been concerns that defining a "case" of COVID-19 merely in terms of a positive PCR test - with no consideration of clinical symptoms or the cycle threshold (Ct) of the test, which indicates the viral load of the patient - debases the concept of a clinical case and exaggerates the prevalence of the disease, fuelling alarm.

The issue was raised by Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina and colleagues in the Lancet in February 2021, where they concluded that the cycle thresholds in reported test data were such that only a quarter to a half of positive PCR tests were likely to indicate the presence of infectious COVID-19. The rest, they argued, were detecting post-infectious viral particles, meaning relying on PCR testing was overstating the number of infectious cases of COVID-19 by a factor of between two and four.

Comment: See also:

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Info

Supernova seen three times due gravitational lensing

Andy Tomaswick
Universe Today
Mon, 21 Jun 2021 18:34 UTC
MAC J0138.02155
© Rodney, Brammer et al.
Image of the MAC J0138.02155 cluster and gravitationally lensed MRG-M0138 galaxy showing the locations of the three observed instances of the supernova (SN1-3) and the expected location of the fourth instance (SN4), estimated to appear around 2037.
It is hard for humans to wrap their heads around the fact that there are galaxies so far away that the light coming from them can be warped in a way that they actually experience a type of time delay. But that is exactly what is happening with extreme forms of gravitational lensing, such as those that give us the beautiful images of Einstein rings. In fact, the time dilation around some of these galaxies can be so extreme that the light from a single event, such as a supernova, can actually show up on Earth at dramatically different times. That is exactly what a team led by Dr. Steven Rodney at the University of South Carolina and Dr. Gabriel Brammer of the University of Copenhagen has found. Except three copies of this supernova have already appeared - and the team thinks it will show up again one more time, 20 years from now.

Finding such a supernova is important not just for its mind bending qualities - it also helps to settle an important debate in the cosmological community. The rate of expansion of the universe has outpaced the rate expected when calculated from the cosmic microwave background radiation. Most commonly, this cosmological conundrum is solved by invoking "dark energy" - a shadowy force that is supposedly responsible for increasing the acceleration rate. But scientists don't actually know what dark energy is, and to figure it out they need a better model of the physics of the early universe.

One way to get that better model is to find an event that is actively being distorted through a gravitational lens. Importantly - the same event must show up at two separate, distinct times in order to provide input to a calculation about the ratio of the distance between the galaxy doing the lensing and the background galaxy that was the source of the event.
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Microscope 1

Another language found in life: Immune signaling


Evolution News
Mon, 21 Jun 2021 16:51 UTC
immune system

Your immune system detects invaders, and works to eliminate them.
Begin with a remarkable fact: the body's immune system finds specific targets and mounts a coordinated response to eliminate them. That much is common knowledge. Everyone knows why this happens, too: without it, the organism would die. Inquiring minds, though, want to know how the immune system does it. Scientists at UCLA believe they have discovered the Rosetta Stone of the immune system: a molecular "language" that activates the body's defenses to mount a coordinated and accurate response to pathogens.

Imagine being a lonely macrophage wandering about blindly in the body. It is able to "eat" bad cells, but would be unaware of nearby enemies needing to be eaten. It would be like a soldier without orders. A soldier needs to read or hear what to do, when to do it, and where to do it. Essentially, the soldier relies on communication from the chain of command. In the army, that communication is done using human language or codes. What language or code informs a macrophage that it is time to eat the enemy? And what form does this language take?
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