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Telescope

Russian scientists place underwater telescope below Siberia's Lake Baikal, aim to detect neutrinos from billions of years ago

Ryan Morrison
The Daily Mail
Mon, 15 Mar 2021 16:13 UTC
particle detector baikal underwater telescope
© Svetlana Latynina/TASS
A ceremony to launch the Baikal Gigaton Volume Detector (Baikal-GVD) deep underwater neutrino telescope built on Lake Baikal.
A giant underwater telescope has been deployed 4,300ft below the surface of Lake Baikal in a bid to observe neutrinos - the smallest particles known to science.

Baikal-GVD has been under construction since 2015 and consists of strings with spherical glass and stainless steel modules measuring a total of 17,657 cubic feet.

A neutrino is a subatomic particle with no electrical charge and a very small mass - they are one of the most abundant particles in the universe but because of their small size they are very difficult to detect.
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Radar

Lack of 'important' genetic changes to Covid-19 in first 11 months surprises scientists

PLOS
Science Daily
Fri, 12 Mar 2021 12:00 UTC
coronavirus 3d model
© CDC.gov
The spikes that adorn the outer surface of the virus, which impart the look of a corona surrounding the virion, when viewed electron microscopically. These spikes determine which animal it can infect.
How much did SARS-CoV-2 need to change in order to adapt to its new human host? In a research article published in the open access journal PLOS Biology Oscar MacLean, Spyros Lytras at the University of Glasgow, and colleagues, show that since December 2019 and for the first 11 months of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic there has been very little 'important' genetic change observed in the hundreds of thousands of sequenced virus genomes.


Comment: Note that the article is working on the premise that Covid-19 was transmitted from bats whereas there's significant evidence showing that it was actually constructed in a laboratory: Compelling Evidence That SARS-CoV-2 Was Man-Made


The study is a collaboration between researchers in the UK, US and Belgium. The lead authors Prof David L Robertson (at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, Scotland) and Prof Sergei Pond (at the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine, Temple University, Philadelphia) were able to turn their experience of analysing data from HIV and other viruses to SARS-CoV-2. Pond's state-of-the-art analytical framework, HyPhy, was instrumental in teasing out the signatures of evolution embedded in the virus genomes and rests on decades of theoretical knowledge on molecular evolutionary processes.

Comment: For further insight on just why Covid-19 continues to 'surprise' scientists, and how this has lead many respected researchers to declare that it was most likely concocted in a laboratory, see: As noted above, this is a virus that has already infected high numbers of people, and the immune systems of the 'vast majority' can cope and ultimately develop an immunity, leading to herd immunity, so why are governments coercing citizens to suffer these experimental vaccines?

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Blue Planet

Houston Uni geologists discover powerful 'river of rocks' below Caribbean

Sara Tubbs
University of Houston
Thu, 11 Mar 2021 02:28 UTC
river rocks caribbean
© Chen, YW., Colli, L., Bird, D.E. et al.
An image of the Earth's warped surface of the Caribbean shows its tilted due to the east-flowing mantle underneath the Caribbean that pushes up the western Caribbean.
Study finds flows in softer layer under tectonic plates are stronger, faster

In this image, the warped amount of the surface is due to the opening of the Central American gateway that allowed hot material to flow through. (a) Before 8.5 million years ago, hot material was upwelling under the Galapagos from deep inside the Earth, but was blocked out of the Caribbean because of a curtain of subducting plate. (b) A gateway opened at 8.5 million years ago allowing the hot material to flow through. (c) Today, the hot material reaches midway between Central America and the Lesser Antilles, tilting up the bottom of the Caribbean sea by about 300 m (1,000 ft).

Geologists have long thought tectonic plates move because they are pulled by the weight of their sinking portions and that an underlying, hot, softer layer called asthenosphere serves as a passive lubricant. But a team of geologists at the University of Houston has found that layer is actually flowing vigorously, moving fast enough to drive plate motions.
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Nebula

Bacteria may be first organisms found to use quantum effects to survive

Mike Mcrae
Science Alert
Fri, 12 Mar 2021 12:00 UTC
bacteria
© (Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library/Getty Images)
Oxygen is life to animals like us. But for many species of microbe, the smallest whiff of the highly reactive element puts their delicate chemical machinery at risk of rusting up.

The photosynthesizing bacterium Chlorobium tepidum has evolved a clever way to shield its light-harvesting processes from oxygen's poisonous effects, using a quantum effect to shift its energy production line into low gear.

A study conducted by scientists from the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis has shown how the bacterium throws a spanner into its quantum resonance to 'tune' its system so that it loses energy in the presence of oxygen, preventing it from wrecking its photosynthetic apparatus.

Comment: See also:

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Eggs Fried

Twin Peaks: More twinning in humans than ever before

European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology
Medical Xpress
Fri, 12 Mar 2021 12:00 UTC
twins baby
© CC0 Public Domain
More human twins are being born than ever before, according to the first comprehensive, global overview published today in Human Reproduction, one of the world's leading reproductive medicine journals.

Since the 1980s the twinning rate has increased by a third from 9 to 12 per 1000 deliveries, meaning that about 1.6 million twins are born each year worldwide and one in every 42 children born is a twin. The study finds that a major cause of this increase is the growth in medically assisted reproduction (MAR), which includes not only IVF (in vitro fertilisation) techniques, but also simpler methods, such as ovarian stimulation and artificial insemination. Another cause of the increase is the delay in childbearing observed in many countries over the last decades, since the twinning rate increases with the mother's age.

However, the researchers think that we may have reached the peak in twinning rates, particularly in high income countries such as Europe and North America, because of increasing emphasis on the importance of trying to achieve singleton pregnancies. Whether this is also the case in lower income countries, such as Africa, is less certain and has important implications for the health of mothers and babies, and also healthcare resources.

Comment: See also:

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Blue Planet

Neanderthals disappeared from Europe earlier than thought - study

Issam Ahmed
Phys.org
Sat, 13 Mar 2021 10:49 UTC
Neanderthal

The remains of the upper and lower jaw of a Neanderthal from the Spy Cave in Belgium
Neanderthal fossils from a cave in Belgium believed to belong to the last survivors of their species ever discovered in Europe are thousands of years older than once thought, a new study said Monday.

Previous radiocarbon dating of the remains from the Spy Cave yielded ages as recent as approximately 24,000 years ago, but the new testing pushes the clock back to between 44,200 to 40,600 years ago.

The research appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was carried out by a team from Belgium, Britain and Germany.

Comment: See also:

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Cassiopaea

Rare supernova remnant discovered in the core of the Milky Way

Samantha Mathewson
Space.com
Wed, 10 Mar 2021 20:02 UTC
Supernova remnant called Sagittarius A East
© X-ray: NASA/CXC/Nanjing Univ./P. Zhou et al. Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory captured a supernova remnant called Sagittarius A East (Sgr A East) near the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered the remains of a rare kind of stellar explosion near the center of the Milky Way.

Supernovas are stellar explosions that seed the galaxy with elements vital for life. Sagittarius A East (or Sgr A East) is a supernova remnant that lies near Sagittarius A* — the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. This supernova remnant is the first known example in our own Milky Way galaxy of an unusual type of white dwarf stellar explosion called a Type Iax supernova, according to a statement from the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

"While we've found Type Iax supernovae in other galaxies, we haven't identified evidence for one in the Milky Way until now," Ping Zhou, lead author of the study from Nanjing University in China, said in the statement. "This discovery is important for getting a handle of the myriad ways white dwarfs explode."
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Info

'Lunar Ark' proposed at aerospace conference

Tibi Puiu
ZME Science
Thu, 11 Mar 2021 18:52 UTC
Lunar Ark
© University of Arizona.
Artist impression of the proposed underground lunar ark.
Researchers at the University of Arizona have proposed an audacious plan to backup Earth's biodiversity in the event of a planetary obliteration, i.e. nuclear war. The idea is to store the genetic material from millions of species below the moon's surface in lava tubes, which could act as a 'lunar ark' that preserves Earth's most cherished resource: the evolution of billions of years of life.

This project is similar to Norway's "Doomsday" Seed Vault, which hosts more than 850,000 different seed samples in the frigid Arctic. Seeds are kept at -18 °C (-3 °F) and should be protected against a number of potential disasters, ranging from global warming to nuclear war.

Likewise, the lunar ark would deposit cryogenically frozen seeds, spores, sperm, and egg samples from millions of species of animals. In order to protect these precious samples, the ark would be stored inside one of the more than 200 lava tubes identified so far beneath the moon's surface.

A lava tube, or pyroduct, is a natural conduit formed by flowing lava from a volcanic vent that moves beneath the hardened surface of a lava flow.

These yawning, subterranean caverns can have heights that dwarf Dubai's Burj Khalifa. Untouched for the last billions of years, these lava tubes provide the perfect shelter from punishing solar radiation, which is why they've been identified as sites for future human bases.
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Cassiopaea

Highest-energy cosmic rays detected in star clusters

Michigan Technological University
Phys.org
Thu, 11 Mar 2021 12:00 UTC
Cocoon
© Binita Hona
A 24 micrometer infrared map from the Cocoon region with Spitzers MIPS overlaid with a gamma-ray significance map from HAWC (greenish-yellow to red indicate higher gamma-ray significance). The map is centered at Cocoon with about 4.6 degrees in x and y direction
For decades, researchers assumed the cosmic rays that regularly bombard Earth from the far reaches of the galaxy are born when stars go supernova — when they grow too massive to support the fusion occurring at their cores and explode.

Those gigantic explosions do indeed propel atomic particles at the speed of light great distances. However, new research suggests even supernovae — capable of devouring entire solar systems — are not strong enough to imbue particles with the sustained energies needed to reach petaelectronvolts (PeVs), the amount of kinetic energy attained by very high-energy cosmic rays.

And yet cosmic rays have been observed striking Earth's atmosphere at exactly those velocities, their passage marked, for example, by the detection tanks at the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory near Puebla, Mexico. Instead of supernovae, the researchers posit that star clusters like the Cygnus Cocoon serve as PeVatrons — PeV accelerators — capable of moving particles across the galaxy at such high energy rates.

Comment: See also:

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Better Earth

Gondwana: Antarctica's magnetic link to ancient neighbors

European Space Agency
Phys.org
Wed, 10 Mar 2021 12:00 UTC
Gondwana
© University of Kiel
For the first time, an international team of scientists has used magnetic data from ESA’s Swarm mission together with aeromagnetic datasets to help unveil the mysteries of the geology that underlies Antarctica’s kilometres-thick ice sheets. Their findings compare well with the geology of formerly adjacent continents, namely Australia, India and South Africa, which were once part of the ancient Gondwana supercontinent.
For the first time, an international team of scientists has used magnetic data from ESA's Swarm satellite mission together with aeromagnetic data to help reveal the mysteries of the geology hidden beneath Antarctica's kilometers-thick ice sheets, and link Antarctica better to its former neighbors.

Not only is Antarctic sub-ice geology important to understand global supercontinent cycles over billions of years that have shaped Earth's evolution, it is also pivotal to comprehend how the solid Earth itself influences the Antarctic ice sheet above it.

The research team from Germany's Kiel University, the British Antarctic Survey and National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics, and Witwatersrand University in South Africa has today published their findings in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's: MindMatters: The Meaning of the World's Mythologies

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