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New Horizons telescope spots Kuiper Belt "twins"

David Dickinson
Sky & Telescope
Fri, 08 Oct 2021 17:37 UTC
new horizons telescope artist rendition
© NASA / JHAPL / SwRI
An artist's conception of New Horizons in the distant solar system.
New Horizons has spotted two asteroid pairs in the outer solar system. Their existence sheds light on how planets formed.

NASA's New Horizons is still showing us how bizarre the outer solar system really is. A recent announcement out of the 53rd American Astronomical Society Meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences demonstrates that two Kuiper Belt objects that the spacecraft's camera homed in on are actually each close binary pairs.
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Comet 2

NASA will attempt to nudge asteroid Didymoon off trajectory that poses threat to Earth

Joseph Curl
The Daily Wire
Wed, 06 Oct 2021 12:00 UTC
asteroid strike
© Tobias Roetsch/Future Publishing via Getty Images
The U.S. space agency plans to conduct a mission next month to deflect a pair of asteroids far out in deep space to keep them from threatening Earth.

Dubbed the DART Mission, or the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will send spacecraft to a pair of asteroids — the Didymos binary — on November 24 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

If all goes as planned, DART will smash into one of the two asteroids, known as Didymoon, at roughly 13,500 mph nearly a full year later, on October 2, 2022.

Comment: Throughout history cosmic catastrophes appear to have coincided with times of societal and environmental upheaval, and one could say that's a rather fitting description of our current era. Unsurprisingly the establishment has suppressed this information, and its scientists have, for the most part, dismissed it. And so, ultimately, this exercise may be futile; because it is capable of so little and it may just be too late. However, considering the current state of the world and the incredible and increasing suffering caused by the tyranny of governments, it may be that intervention of this kind is, at least on some level, welcome:

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Better Earth

The unknown Eocene-Oligocene boundary mass extinction event was accompanied by climate change and super eruptions, followed by an explosion of life

Marie Claire Chelini
Phys.org
Thu, 07 Oct 2021 12:00 UTC
hyaenodont
© Matt Borths, Duke University Lemur Center
Fossils of the key groups used to unveil the Eocene-Oligocene extinction in Africa with primates on the left; the carnivorous hyaenodont, upper right; rodent, lower right. These fossils are from the Fayum Depression in Egypt and are stored at the Duke Lemur Center’s Division of Fossil Primates.
Sixty-three percent. That's the proportion of mammal species that vanished from Africa and the Arabian Peninsula around 30 million years ago, after Earth's climate shifted from swampy to icy. But we are only finding out about it now.

Compiling decades of work, a new study published this week in the journal Communications Biology reports on a previously undocumented extinction event that followed the transition between the geological periods called the Eocene and Oligocene.

That time period was marked by dramatic climate change. In a reverse image of what is happening today, the Earth grew cooler, ice sheets expanded, sea levels dropped, forests started changing to grasslands, and carbon dioxide became scarce. Nearly two-thirds of the species known in Europe and Asia at that time went extinct.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Microscope 2

Identical twins carry distinctive epigenetic marks

Chloe Tenn
The Scientist
Thu, 30 Sep 2021 12:00 UTC
twins
© ISTOCK.COM, _JURE
ABOVE: Two sets of identical twins
Sets of identical twins famously have much in common with one another. In a Dutch study published September 28 in Nature Communications, scientists find that they also have something in common with other identical twins the world over: a set of matching marks on their DNA. The researchers studied around 6,000 pairs of twins of varying ages from around the world, analyzing hundreds of thousands of sites on their genomes. Their finding of 834 sites in the genome with marks distinct to identical, but not fraternal, twins could provide clues to how identical twins come about, researchers say.

Comment: See also:

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Microscope 2

Wuhan and US scientists planned to create new coronaviruses

Sarah Knapton
The Telegraph
Tue, 05 Oct 2021 04:00 UTC
Wuhan InstituteVirology
© Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images
Aerial view of Wuhan Institute of Virology
Scientists from Wuhan and the US were planning to create new coronaviruses that did not exist in nature by combining the genetic codes of other viruses, proposals show.

Documents of a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), leaked last month, reveal that the international team of scientists planned to mix genetic data of closely related strains and grow completely new viruses.

A genetics expert working with the World Health Organisation (WHO), who uncovered the plan after studying the proposals in detail, said that if Sars-CoV-2 had been produced in this way, it would explain why a close match has never been found in nature.

So far the closest naturally occurring virus to Sars-CoV-2 is a strain called Banal-52, which was reported from Laos last month and shares 96.8 per cent of the genome. Yet scientists expect a direct ancestor to be around a 99.98 per cent match - and none has been found so far.

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Info

Novel quantum effect discovered in naturally occurring graphene


Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Wed, 06 Oct 2021 16:35 UTC
International research team led by University of Göttingen finds atomically-thin carbon generates its own magnetic field.
graphene flake
Usually, the electrical resistance of a material depends very much on its physical dimensions and fundamental properties. Under special circumstances, however, this resistance can adopt a fixed value that is independent of the basic material properties and "quantised" (meaning that it changes in discrete steps rather than continuously). This quantisation of electrical resistance normally occurs within strong magnetic fields and at very low temperatures when electrons move in a two-dimensional fashion. Now, a research team led by the University of Göttingen has succeeded in demonstrating this effect at low temperatures in the almost complete absence of a magnetic field in naturally occurring double-layer graphene, which is just two atoms thick. The results of the study have been published in Nature.

The team from the University of Göttingen, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the University of Texas (Dallas) used two-layer graphene in its natural form. The delicate graphene flakes are contacted using standard microfabrication techniques and the flake is positioned so that it is hangs freely like a bridge, held at the edges by two metal contacts. The extremely clean double-layers of graphene show a quantisation of electrical resistance at low temperatures and almost undetectable magnetic fields. In addition, the electrical current flows without any loss of energy. The reason for this is a form of magnetism that is not generated in the usual way as seen in conventional magnets (ie by the alignment of the intrinsic magnetic moments of electrons), but by the motion of the charged particles in the graphene double layer itself. "In other words, the particles generate their own intrinsic magnetic field, which leads to the quantisation of the electrical resistance," says Professor Thomas Weitz from the University of Göttingen.
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Info

Face to face with the prehistoric inhabitants of El Argar


Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Tue, 05 Oct 2021 21:30 UTC
Facial Reconstruction
© Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Display of 12 profiles of reconstructed faces. The individuals present very different profiles, in which the differences in the shape of the nose and chin stand out. The variety in the reconstructed facial features is a reflection of the observable differences in each skull.
What did the Early Bronze Age men and women of the Argaric culture in the southeastern Iberian Peninsula look like? Researchers at the UAB have analysed the facial features of these individuals based on the digital and biological study of the skulls recovered at the sites of La Almoloya and La Bastida (Murcia), and have obtained images of 40 of their inhabitants. The study, the first to apply this method to such a large group of individuals from the same prehistoric site, is part of a more ambitious project being conducted by the research group on the Argaric society ASOME-UAB, which focuses on kinship relationships in prehistoric times.

Our faces contain information about our family history and lifestyle. For example, certain facial traits can be passed down from parents to children for generations. Is it therefore possible that the physical resemblances among a group of individuals can provide clues about common blood ties?

This is one of the main objectives of a research being carried out by the group of Social and Mediterranean Archaeoecology (ASOME) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) on the Argaric society, which expanded throughout the southeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula some 4,000 years ago and was one of the first urban societies in Western Europe. And the first step has been the work of Joana Bruno, researcher at ASOME-UAB, archaeologist and master in science illustration, who was in charge of the facial reconstruction of 38 individuals from El Argar, selected after a detailed osteological study of more than 250 skeletons recovered from well-preserved tombs of La Almoloya and La Bastida.
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Fireball 4

New Arid meteor shower discovered coming from Comet 15P/Finlay, next pass has STORM potential


Space Weather
Wed, 06 Oct 2021 19:27 UTC
15P/Finlay
© P. Jenniskens, T. Cooper, J. Baggaley, S. Heathcote, D. Lauretta
First detection of the Arid (ARD, #1130) meteor shower from comet 15P/Finlay
A NEW METEOR SHOWER

For thousands of years, Comet 15P/Finlay has been dive-bombing Earth's orbit, leaving trails of dust on our planet's doorstep, yet, strangely, there has never been a meteor shower. Until now. On Sept. 27th, Earth hit a stream of debris from Comet Finlay, and a meteor shower was born.

"It is called the Arid meteor shower, because the meteors radiate from the far-southern constellation Ara, the Altar," explains Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute, whose meteor cameras in New Zealand and Chile detected the mini-outburst of 13 Arids.

It's long overdue. Every 6 years, Finlay passes only 0.01 au from Earth's orbit. Somehow, we've dodged the debris. "This is the first time we've ever seen meteors from the comet," says Jenniskens.


Comment: Isn't it possible that, up until recently, there were no meteors of significance coming from Comet Finlay?


Comment: Could it be that, in the near future, more formerly inactive comets will suddenly come to life? And, if so, isn't it likely that the risks associated with comets, throughout history, also increase?

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Info

Surprising stillness ensues when the solar wind hits Earth's magnetosphere

Hayley Dunning
Imperial College London
Wed, 06 Oct 2021 20:00 UTC
Energy from the solar wind interacting with the magnetospheric 'bubble' around Earth creates waves of energy that appear to stand still.
boundary of Earth's magnetic bubble

This new finding, from research led by Imperial scientists, improves our understanding of the conditions around Earth that contribute to 'space weather', which can impact our technology from communications satellites in orbit to power lines on the ground.

The Sun releases a stream of charged particles called the solar wind. On the Earth's surface, we are protected from this barrage by the magnetosphere - a bubble created by the Earth's magnetic field.

When the solar wind hits the magnetosphere, waves of energy are transferred along the boundary between the two. Scientists thought the waves should ripple in the direction of the solar wind, but the new study, published today in Nature Communications, reveals some waves do just the opposite.
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Comet

Asteroid or comet? Strange solar system object 2005 QN173 is actually BOTH

Meghan Bartels
Space.com
Wed, 06 Oct 2021 12:00 UTC
2005 QN173
© Henry H. Hsieh (PSI), Jana Pittichová/NASA/JPL-Caltech
A composite image shows the passage of 2005 QN173, a rare active asteroid. The nucleus is in the upper left corner of the image; the tail streaks diagonally across the frame.
Scientists have identified a rare solar system object with traits of both an asteroid and a comet.

The object, dubbed 2005 QN173, orbits like any other asteroid, but most such objects are rocks that don't change much as they loop through the solar system. Not so for 2005 QN173, which was first spotted in 2005 (hence the name), according to new research. Instead, it looks like a comet, shedding dust as it travels and sporting a long, thin tail, which suggests that it's covered with icy material vaporizing away into space — even though comets usually follow elliptical paths that regularly approach and retreat from the sun.

Comment: It's highly likely that, as we enter a 'grand' solar minimum and activity on the Sun wanes to levels unknown in our era, formerly inactive bodies, as well as new comers, will show unusually high levels of activity 'surprising' scientists even further; and, perhaps, when taking into account the surge in other unusual, and in some cases disastrous, phenomena on planet Earth, it will sufficiently rouse their curiousity that they'll begin to question their long held theories: Volcanoes, Earthquakes And The 3,600 Year Comet Cycle

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