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Astronomers discover new stellar stream in Milky Way galaxy

Tomasz Nowakowsk
PhysOrg
Tue, 05 Dec 2017 13:36 UTC
An international team of astronomers has detected a new thin stellar stream in the halo of the Milky Way galaxy. The newly discovered feature, named "jet stream," could help researchers answer fundamental questions about the mass distribution of the Milky Way's dark matter halo. The finding was presented November 24 in a paper published on the arXiv pre-print server.
new stellar stream
© Jethwa et al., 2017.
False-colour map of the density of stars with 0.1 < g−r < 0.45 from the SLAMS survey. Density in different magnitude ranges is shown using different colour channels: red 20.5 < r < 23.0, green 17.5 < r < 20.5 and blue 15.0 < r < 17.5. The newly discovered stream is labelled. The dotted line shows the future orbit of the LMC, calculated using Kallivayalil et al. (2013) proper motions, which is roughly aligned with the orientation of the Jet stream. The green/blue colour gradient along the southern edge is due to the varying distance distribution of MW disk stars.
Stellar streams are remnants of dwarf galaxies or globular clusters that once orbited a galaxy but have been disrupted and stretched out along their orbits by tidal forces of their hosts. So far, nearly 20 stellar streams have been identified in the Milky Way, just a few in the Andromeda galaxy, and about 10 outside the Local Group.

Astronomers are interested in finding new stellar streams in the Milky Way, as they hope that such features could answer some crucial questions about the the galaxy. For instance, stellar streams could help us understand the large-scale mass distribution of the galactic dark matter halo. Moreover, they could confirm whether or not our galaxy contains low-mass dark matter subhalos.
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Bulb

Not so bird-brained: Pigeons can discriminate both space, time


Science Daily
Wed, 06 Dec 2017 13:33 UTC
Finding underscores that animals beyond humans and primates show abstract intelligence

Pigeon
© Natasa / Fotolia
New research at the University of Iowa shows that pigeons can discriminate the abstract concepts of space and time -- and seem to use a region of the brain different from humans and primates to do so. The finding adds to growing recognition in the scientific community that lower-order animal species -- such as birds, reptiles, and fish -- are capable of high-level, abstract decision-making.

New research at the University of Iowa shows that pigeons can discriminate the abstract concepts of space and time -- and seem to use a different region of the brain than humans and primates to do so. In experiments, pigeons were shown on a computer screen a static horizontal line and had to judge its length or the amount of time it was visible to them. Pigeons judged longer lines to also have longer duration and judged lines longer in duration to also be longer in length.

What that means, says Edward Wasserman, Stuit Professor of Experimental Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the UI, is pigeons use a common area of the brain to judge space and time, suggesting that these abstract concepts are not processed separately. Similar results have been found with humans and other primates.

Comment:

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Cloud Lightning

Lightning sparks mid-air nuclear reaction, first time recorded phenomenon

Kastalia Medrano
Newsweek
Fri, 24 Nov 2017 12:42 UTC
Pinklightning
© NASA
Lightning can bring in mid-air nuclear reactions.
After nearly 100 years of speculating that thunderstorms could trigger a nuclear reaction in the atmosphere, scientists have finally recorded the phenomenon for the first time.

Lightning produces flashes of electromagnetic radiation called gamma rays. Researchers have long theorized that gamma rays, upon interacting with molecules in the air, can generate radioactive isotopes - elements with nuclei that aren't stable. That instability means they can randomly let off bursts of excess radiation including gamma rays, and result in a nuclear reaction.

There have been reports of lightning-induced nuclear reactions before, going back to 1985, but none of them sufficiently reliable. Scientists had been able to create computer simulations of the phenomenon, but that was about it. On February 6, 2017, a team in Japan observed a "clear signature of positron annihilation associated with γ-ray flashes." A paper describing the observations was published Thursday in the journal Nature.
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Water

Light reveals secrets of supercooled water

Stephen Skolnick
Physics Central
Mon, 04 Dec 2017 17:25 UTC
Supercooled Water Droplet
© New Scientist
Patterns of light scattered from a supercooled water droplet reveal its structure and density.
How low can you go? That's the question a collaboration of sixteen European scientists have set out to answer, in regards to one of the most ubiquitous-yet-mysterious substances on Earth: water.

Ordinarily, water freezes at 0°C, when its molecules stop moving fast enough to overcome the forces between them, clicking together to form a crystalline lattice. This isn't a hard and fast line, though: that lattice generally needs a "seed" disturbance to act as a starting point. Under the right circumstances, like if it's free of large impurities and chilled in a very smooth-walled container, water can get well below its freezing point before crystallizing. So-called supercooled liquids can do some super-cool stuff, like freezing all at once when disturbed.

Since a solid is in a lower-energy state than a liquid, liquids can actually release a good deal of heat when they crystallize, too. Though it might sound paradoxical, farmers will sometimes spray water on their crops before a chilly night to prevent frost damage. Chemical hand warmers work the same way, with sodium acetate-a chemical that's got a high freezing/melting point. Since any temperature below 137°F is "supercooled", the sodium acetate in the bag gets nice and toasty as it crystallizes, and can be recharged by boiling. (Watch video below)

Everyday uses aside, supercooling has some important scientific applications. As abundant as it is, water has some really weird quirks, and they only get weirder when it drops below its freezing point, with properties like the water's specific heat (the amount of thermal energy it takes to change a substance's temperature) growing exponentially. Getting water down to 228 Kelvin-or about -45°C-is a big target for scientists, because projections based on current data imply a "singularity" here-with the specific heat rising to infinity. Nobody knows what that really represents physically, but the debate rages on among theoretical physicists, and experimentalists are hard at work trying to find out.
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2 + 2 = 4

DARPA-funded genetic tools that can doom a species under UN review


phys.org
Tue, 05 Dec 2017 16:20 UTC
gene drive

Diagram of how gene drives would work in the mosquito
For some, a new cutting-edge technology called gene drive is the silver bullet able to wipe out invasive species decimating island wildlife, and eradicate the malaria-bearing mosquitos that killed nearly half a million people last year, mostly in Africa.

Others fear that the genetic engineering process is a one-way ticket to ecological mayhem, or suspect health and conservation aims are masking industrial and military objectives.

Advocates and critics square off in Montreal this week in an obscure working group under the Convention on Biological Diversity, a 1992 UN treaty forged as a bulkhead against the gathering pace of extinction on our planet.

The Ad-Hoc Technical Experts Committee on synthetic biology, known as AHTEG, is tasked with understanding science's increasingly powerful ability to manipulate genomes, and reporting back to the Convention's 195 member states.

Comment: Something sinister afoot? See also:

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Comet

Impact-related microspherules in Late Pleistocene Yukon and Alaskan 'muck' deposits indicate recurrent episodes of catastrophic emplacement

Jonathan T. Hagstrum, Richard B. Firestone, et al.
Scientific Reports
Mon, 04 Dec 2017 03:12 UTC
Beringia map
© Natural Earth
Map showing eastern Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM; ~23–19 ka B.P.) when eustatic sea level was ~120 m below its present level1. Megafauna fossils of this study were initially collected between 1940 and 1954 from mining operations near Fairbanks, Alaska, and more recently from the Klondike mining district near Dawson City in the Yukon Territory. Permafrost zones, discriminated by dashed purple curves, are continuous (CPZ, >90% frozen ground), discontinuous (DPZ, >50%), and sporadic (SPZ, <50%)35. White curves outline areas of both continental and mountain glaciation with the latter having occurred in the Brooks Range of northern, and the Alaskan Range of southern, Alaska70. Dashed red curve indicates the Arctic Circle. Chukotka is an autonomous district (Okrug) in easternmost Russia.
During the time period leading up to the Last Glacial Maximum (~23-19 ka B.P.), when eustatic sea level was substantially lower, Alaska and the Yukon Territory were part of the largest circumarctic area to remain unglaciated, called Beringia (Fig.1), which extended from eastern Siberia (Chukotka) across the exposed Bering Strait region into Alaska and western Canada1,2. The glacial steppe environment of Beringia3 was a refugium for Plio-Pleistocene tundra-grassland plant communities4 as well as for the now-extinct mammalian megafauna 5. Relict permafrost within the region 6,7,8,9 has preserved an extraordinary frozen record of plant, pollen, insect, and vertebrate fossil remains, as well as their ancient DNA 1,10,11.

Early expeditions to Alaska12,13,14 and the Yukon Territory14,15 found large quantities of megafaunal bones along beaches, riverbanks, and in minor-stream valleys8. Even greater collections of these fossils were made after industrial-scale placer-gold mining operations began in the Fairbanks and Klondike districts in the early 20th century16. Otto W. Geist undertook extensive fossil collecting in Alaska on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), and in a typical year (1938) shipped more than eight thousand select specimens, weighing nearly eight tons (~7257 kg), to New York City8.

The fossil bones collected included those of bison, mammoth, horse, musk ox, moose, lynx, lion, camel, mastodon, bear, and caribou, with many of these animals also appearing as frozen partial carcasses or mummies1,8,17. The three most common genera found were bison, mammoth, and horse, which represent more than 90% of Beringia's large mammalian biomass18. Many tens of thousands of specimens were collected in the 20th century from Alaska and the Yukon Territory5,8,19, and hundreds to thousands more are still being recovered every year from mines in the Klondike district alone1.
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Grey Alien

Just how will humanity react to evidence of alien life? Psychologists predict answers

Ben Guarino
The Washington Post
Mon, 04 Dec 2017 07:00 UTC
ISS and Microbes
© NPR/ExtremeTech
International Space Station • ISS Microbes
Germs stuck to the outside of the International Space Station are not from around here, cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov said in an interview last week with Russian state-owned news service Tass. Microbes "have come from outer space and settled along the external surface," Shkaplerov said. "They are being studied so far, and it seems that they pose no danger." Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, has not weighed in on this extraordinary claim.

The odds are not on the side of aliens. If microorganisms are tucked away within the space station hull's crannies, as Shkaplerov says, they probably hitchhiked the 250 miles from our planet's surface.

But imagine if scientists found alien microbes. How would humanity react to the news?


Comment: This is as much a study in how to present subtle positive triggers to otherwise questionably fearful news to modify reaction on a mass scale as it is to the question of alien life. Which is more disturbing...the possibility of alien life or the manipulation of minds and perception to a predetermined outcome? (Such as this piece.)

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Info

Engine of climate change: Thousands, and possibly millions, of underwater volcanoes remain undiscovered

Joanne Nova
JoNova
Mon, 04 Dec 2017 18:20 UTC
The world is watching one volcano in Bali, but it's sobering to think there may be hundreds of others going off, and almost certainly ones we don't even know about. The article Is the Bali volcano making us warmer or cooler? by William F Jasper, reminded me of Ian Plimers words about there being squillions of undersea volcanoes so I found the 2007 paper, by Hillier, that tried to count them. Trying being the appropriate word. Volcanoes are biggish things, but when they are under one or two kilometers of water they are hard to hear, hard to see, and, by crikey, we know more about the moon than the bottom of the Marinara, and it's only 11km "away".

People are constantly discovering new volcanoes, like a 3,000m one off Indonesia that no one realized was there til 2010. It turns out the second largest volcano in the solar system is apparently not on Io, but 1,000 miles east of Japan. It's the size of the British Isles, but who knew? A few months ago a team found 91 new volcanoes under Antarctica. (This is getting serious, someone should talk to the Minister for Lava!)
Marianna Volcanoes
© JoNova
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Pharoah

Half of all Swiss men share a gene with Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun

Siobhán Dowling
The Local
Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:53 UTC
Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun
Every second Swiss male is related to the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun, according to researchers in Zurich.

Scientists working on mapping the genetic profile of Tutankhamun, who ruled Egypt around 3,000 years ago, were able to reconstruct his Y-DNA profile.

They found that he belonged to the haplogroup R1b1a2 that is today strongly represented in Switzerland and other parts of Western Europe.

Comment: Who would've thought?

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Robot

Must have more better weapons technology! Report says U.S. losing to Russia and China in AI military race

Tom O'Connor
Newsweek
Wed, 29 Nov 2017 21:17 UTC
FEDOR

FEDOR (Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research) is a bipedal robot designed by Russia's Android Technics and Russian military research agency Advanced Research Fund. Its capable of performing a number complex human tasks including firing guns and driving cars.
Russia and China want to revolutionize their forces with weaponized artificial intelligence, a field in which the U.S. risks falling behind, according to a new report released Wednesday from former defense officials and field experts.

The report, from government data analysis group Govini and former Department of Defense Chief Robert Work, says America's two biggest military competitors are rapidly advancing with AI, leaving the U.S. military with the choice of whether it wants to "lead the coming revolution, or fall victim to it."

"This stark choice will be determined by the degree to which the Department of Defense (DoD) recognizes the revolutionary military potential of AI and advanced autonomous systems," the report said, according to CNN, which first obtained it.

Comment: This article smells like military-industrial mouthpiece Newsweek's way of saying: "Listen Americans, we've got to throw another Trillion dollars at this or the Chinese and Russians will destroy us with better Artificial Intelligence weapons!!" Never mind that the Russians and Chinese would probably not even be going this route so strongly if the U.S. Deep State itself wasn't so obsessed with dominating the world.

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