Science & TechnologyS


Gear

Misleading? Longevity has improved so rapidly that scientists claim 72 is the new 30

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© GM Visuals | Blend Images | Getty Images
Human longevity has improved so rapidly over the past century that 72 is the new 30, scientists say.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, said progress in lowering the odds of death at all ages has been so rapid since 1900 that life expectancy has risen faster than it did in the previous 200 millennia since modern man began to evolve from hominid species.

The pace of increase in life expectancy has left industrialized economies unprepared for the cost of providing retirement income to so many for so long.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, looked at Swedish and Japanese men - two countries with the longest life expectancy today. It concluded that their counterparts in 1800 would have had lifespans that were closer to those of the earliest hunter-gatherer humans than they would to adult men in both countries today.

Comment: It appears the authors are trying to argue that the advent of modern diets and medicine has improved life expectancy and health, but this may be far from the truth.

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Fireball 5

Astronomers calculate Russian meteorite's orbit, find it has 80 million cousins

Asteroid Orbits
© NASAAsteroid Orbits - Both the asteroid 2012DA14 and the Chelyabinsk meteorite came from the asteroid belt, but from different orbits. Earth's orbit is shown in green.
Thanks to dozens of video reports, scientists are getting a pretty good handle on the life history of the massive meteorite that exploded above Russia earlier this month. They know it is rocky and a common type, and now they know where it probably came from. Scientists are scrambling to publish papers describing its origins in the middle of the solar system.

The asteroid chip that became the recent meteorite came from a spot in the asteroid belt near Jupiter, about 2.5 times further from the sun than Earth is, according to NASA.

At the University of Antioquia in Colombia, astronomers Jorge I. Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin produced a preliminary reconstruction of its orbit around the sun. It came from a well-known group of asteroids that frequently cross paths with Earth, known as the Apollo asteroids. Astronomers have seen about 240 that are larger than a kilometer in diameter, but speculate that about 2,000 similarly sized space rocks exist. As for rocks of Chelyabinsk size? There could be 80 million.

Info

Scientists spot possible remains of "Rodinia," ancient lost microcontinent

Supercontinent Rodinia
© United States Antarctic Program/Wikipedia Supercontinent Rodinia This map of supercontinent Rodinia shows the ancient locations of the continents. "Mauritia" is sandwiched between what is now India and Madagascar.
Tourists vacationing on the sunny isles of Reunion and Mauritius have no idea what secrets those sandy beaches hold. The islands could be hiding the remains of an ancient micro-continent, quietly torn apart between 50 and 100 million years ago, according to a new study. Scientists think they have spotted a fragment of a continent known as Mauritia.

The small strip of continent was once tucked tightly between the lands now known as India and Madagascar, back when those areas were packed into a supercontinent known as Rodinia. (It's the older and less-famous relative of supercontinent Pangaea.) Evidence of this sandwiched continent came from sand grains on Mauritius beaches, according to Trond Torsvik of the University of Oslo in Norway and colleagues.

Rodinia would have existed from the Precambrian era, about 2 billion years ago, to around 85 million years ago when plate tectonics broke it apart. Continental breakup is usually a mantle plume's doing--hot rock from within the Earth softens up tectonic plates, which eventually split. This is how the land masses now known as Madagascar, India, Australia and Antarctica broke up and migrated to their current locations on the planet. As this took place and the Indian Ocean formed, small fragments located on the edges of the rupture zone broke off--this is how the Seychelles came to be. Mini-continent Mauritius just wasn't so lucky, and it slipped beneath the waves, disappearing with time.

Arrow Down

NRL scientists produce densest artificial ionospheric plasma clouds using HAARP

Plasma Cloud
© SRI International/Elizabeth KendallSequence of images of the glow plasma discharge produced with transmissions at the third electron gyro harmonic using the HAARP HF transmitter, Gakona, Alaska. The third harmonic artificial glow plasma clouds were obtained with HAARP using transmissions at 4.34 megahertz (MHz). The resonant frequency yielded green line (557.7 nanometer emission) with HF on November 12, 2012, between the times of 02:26:15 to 02:26:45 GMT.
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory research physicists and engineers from the Plasma Physics Division, working at the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) transmitter facility, Gakona, Alaska, successfully produced a sustained high density plasma cloud in Earth's upper atmosphere. "Previous artificial plasma density clouds have lifetimes of only ten minutes or less," said Paul Bernhardt, Ph.D., NRL Space Use and Plasma Section. "This higher density plasma 'ball' was sustained over one hour by the HAARP transmissions and was extinguished only after termination of the HAARP radio beam."

These glow discharges in the upper atmosphere were generated as a part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored Basic Research on Ionospheric Characteristics and Effects (BRIOCHE) campaign to explore ionospheric phenomena and its impact on communications and space weather.

Using the 3.6-megawatt high-frequency (HF) HAARP transmitter, the plasma clouds, or balls of plasma, are being studied for use as artificial mirrors at altitudes 50 kilometers below the natural ionosphere and are to be used for reflection of HF radar and communications signals.

Info

"Fake genes" affect cancer development and may lead to treatments

Junk DNA
© Medical Daily
Pseudogenes, or stretches of DNA that have similar sequences to functional genes that make proteins but are not functional themselves, have been shown to have an effect in certain cancers and may be used to treat certain cancers.

Originally designated as "junk DNA" and not focused on during the Human Genome Project to decode all human genes, these evolutionarily inactive duplicate genes are showing their importance in the control and development of cancer.

A recent publication in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology looked at a pseudogene of PTEN, a gene that makes a protein that suppresses cancer development.

The pseudogene of this real gene has a similar stretch of DNA sequences but does not make a protein, and is therefore considered "non-functional." The vast majority of the DNA sequences in our genome are not genes and do not produce proteins.

But this new report indicates that pseudogenes may control functional genes in many ways.

Battery

In Japan, The Matrix is now reality as humans are used as living batteries

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Who says necessity is not the mother of invention in the New Normal. While a tiny fraction of the Japanese population is enjoying the transitory effects of Abe's latest reflating "wealth effect" policy (even as China has made it clear said policy will end quite soon), the bigger problem for Japan is that even sooner, more and more of it will be reliant on hamster wheels to generate electricity, as LNG prices have just hit a record high and are rising at a breakneck pace, and as local nuclear power generation has collapsed to virtually zero. Which means one thing: electricity will soon become so unaffordable only those who are invested in the daily 2% Nikkei surges will be able to electrify their immediate surroundings.

So what is Japan's solution? A quite ingenious one: as Geek.com and ASR both report, Japan's Fujifilm has created organic printed sheet that harvests energy from body heat, or in other words, converts body heat to electricity. Finally, at least one key part of the Matrix "reality" is now fully operational - the use of human beings as batteries.

Specifically, Fujifilm Corp. and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have developed a resin sheet that generates electricity, utilizing the temperature difference between human body and the air.

The power-generating sheet developed by Fujifilm and AIST could be used to provide additional power for portable devices.

The sheet uses the thermoelectric effect, which generates a voltages due to the temperature difference between the surface of an object and its reverse side. The sheet is 0.4mm thick and soft. In a normal environment, the temperature of the air is lower than that of the human body or the surface of clothes. That temperature difference can be used to generate a steady flow of electricity.

Sherlock

Fact check for Andrew Glickson - ocean heat has paused too

Over at The Conversation Andrew Glickson asks Fact check: has global warming paused? citing an old Skeptical Science favorite graph, and that's the problem; it's old data. He writes:
As some 90% of the global heat rise is trapped in the oceans (since 1950, more than 20×1022 joules), the ocean heat level reflects global warming more accurately than land and atmosphere warming. The heat content of the ocean has risen since about 2000 by about 4×1022 joules.

To summarise, claims that warming has paused over the last 16 years (1997-2012) take no account of ocean heating.
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Figure 3: Build-up in Earth’s total heat content. http://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/Comment_on_DK12.pdf

Comet 2

Could a comet hit Mars in 2014?

Cometary Nucleus
© NASAArtist’s impression of a cometary nucleus.
A recently discovered comet will make an uncomfortably-close planetary flyby next year - but this time it's not Earth that's in the cosmic crosshairs.

According to preliminary orbital prediction models, comet C/2013 A1 will buzz Mars on Oct. 19, 2014. The icy interloper is thought to originate from the Oort Cloud - a hypothetical region surrounding the solar system containing countless billions of cometary nuclei that were outcast from the primordial solar system billions of years ago.

We know that the planets have been hit by comets before (re: the massive Comet Shoemaker - Levy 9 that crashed into Jupiter in 1994) and Mars, in particular, will have been hit by comets in the past. It's believed Earth's oceans were created by water delivered by comets - cometary impacts are an inevitable part of living in this cosmic ecosystem.

C/2013 A1 was discovered by ace comet-hunter Robert McNaught at the Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia, on Jan. 3. When the discovery was made, astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona looked back over their observations to find "prerecovery" images of the comet dating back to Dec. 8, 2012. These observations placed the orbital trajectory of comet C/2013 A1 through Mars orbit on Oct. 19, 2014.

Could the Red Planet be in for a potentially huge impact next year? Will Mars rovers Curiosity and Opportunity be in danger of becoming scrap metal?

Comment: Perhaps we should be looking a bit closer to home? There's been a dramatic increase of fireballs around the planet in the last few days. For more information about what might be coming down the pike in the near future read: Comets and the Horns of Moses by Laura Knight-Jadczyk.


Radar

Earthquakes' booms big enough to be detected from orbit

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© ESAArtist's impression of GOCE satellite.
Last year, we reported on some mysterious booms in a small Wisconsin town that turned out to be small earthquakes. While it was an unusual story, it's actually not that uncommon of an occurrence. Early in the summer of 2001, folks in Spokane, Washington started reporting similar booms. The sounds continued, off and on, for about five months. The mystery didn't last long, as the earthquakes responsible were picked up by seismometers in the area. (A particularly loud one that took place exactly one month after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York did rattle some nerves, however.)


Comment: These 'booms' may very well be generated by something besides earthquakes. There's been a dramatic increase of fireballs around the planet in the last few days. For more information about what might be coming down the pike in the near future read: Comets and the Horns of Moses by Laura Knight-Jadczyk.


In total, 105 earthquakes were detected, with a couple as large as magnitude 4.0. For most of them, there wasn't good enough seismometer coverage to really pinpoint locations, but some temporary units deployed around the city in July located a number of events pretty precisely: the earthquakes were centered directly beneath the city itself.

While a dangerously large earthquake is pretty unlikely in Wisconsin, the possibility can't be ignored in Washington. The 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand was only a magnitude 6.3, but the damage was extensive because the epicenter was so close to the city. In L'Aquila, Italy, a swarm of small earthquakes in 2009 was followed by a deadly magnitude 6.3. (The poor public communication of risk during that swarm netted six seismologists manslaughter convictions.)

For obvious reasons, it's important to learn more about what's going on beneath Spokane. A group of researchers from the US Geological Survey and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network have turned to satellites to start piecing the story together.

Camera

Noctilucent clouds appear out of season and far to the south - cometary dust from the Russian meteor blast?

From 19-21 February 2013, noctilucent clouds were observed in the UK, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Since these clouds are usually only seen in summer, it is suspected that they may be the result of comet dust deposited in the upper atmosphere by the Chelyabinsk/Chebarkul meteor or comet fragment explosion over Southern Russia on 15 February.

The following images were submitted to spaceweather.com
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© Terry ParkerImage taken by Terry Parker on Feb. 20, 2013 from above Birmingham, UK. 'I am an airline pilot in the UK and I occasionally see noctilucent clouds. Usually during the summer at about midnight looking North. But yesterday (20 Feb 13) I was very surprised to see them looking south towards France and so close to sunrise.'

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© Tom AxelsenPhoto by Tom Axelsen, Copenhagen area, Denmark