Earth's magnetic field is getting significantly weaker, the magnetic north pole is shifting at an accelerating pace, and scientists readily admit that a sudden pole shift could potentially cause "trillions of dollars" in damage. Today, most of us take the protection provided by Earth's magnetic field completely for granted. It is essentially a colossal force field which surrounds our planet and makes life possible. And even with such protection, a giant solar storm could still potentially hit our planet and completely fry our power grid. But as our magnetic field continues to get weaker and weaker, even much smaller solar storms will have the potential to be cataclysmic. And once the magnetic field gets weak enough, we will be facing much bigger problems. As you will see below, if enough solar radiation starts reaching our planet none of us will survive.

Previously, scientists had told us that the magnetic field was weakening by about 5 percent every 100 years.

But now we are being told that data collected from the SWARM satellite indicate that the rate of decay is now 5 percent per decade...

It's well established that in modern times, the axial dipole component of Earth's main magnetic field is decreasing by approximately 5% per century. Recently, scientists using the SWARM satellite announced that their data indicate a decay rate ten times faster, or 5% per decade.

A team of Israeli researchers has "printed" the world's first 3-D vascularized, engineered heart.

On Monday, a team of Tel Aviv University researchers revealed the heart, which was made using a patient's own cells and biological material. Until now, scientists have successfully printed only simple tissues without blood vessels.

"This is the first time anyone anywhere has successfully engineered and printed an entire heart replete with cells, blood vessels, ventricles and chambers," said Prof. Tal Dvir of TAU's School of Molecular Cell Biology and Biotechnology, Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, and the Sagol Center for Regenerative Biotechnology, who was the lead researcher for the study.

He worked with Prof. Assaf Shapira of TAU's Faculty of Life Sciences, and Nadav Moor, a doctoral student. Their research was published in Advanced Science.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death among both men and women in the United States. In Israel, it is the second largest cause of death (after cancer). In 2013, heart disease accounted for about 16% of the total number of deaths in Israel, according to the Health Ministry.

Fluids coursing through the nervous system could help clear the brain of toxic detritus that leads to Alzheimer's and Huntington's disorders

The brain can be a messy place. Thankfully, it has good plumbing: Scientists have just discovered a cleansing river inside the brain, a fluid stream that might be enlisted to flush away the buildup of proteins associated with Alzheimer's, Huntington's and other neurodegenerative disorders.

The researchers, based at the University of Rochester (U.R.), University of Oslo and Stony Brook University, describe this new system in the journal Science Translational Medicine today. The study adds to the evidence that the star-shaped cells called astrocytes play a leading role in keeping the nervous system in good working order.

After years of development, Stratolaunch Systems' gigantic rocket launching plane, weighing 500,000 pounds and with a wingspan of 385-feet, lifted off shortly after 10 AM ET from Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, California on its first test flight.

Founded in 2011 by the late Paul G. Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, the company has from the very start been working to develop the gigantic flying launch pad. The plane has been designed to carry satellites into low-Earth orbit - achieved by launching vehicles to a cruising altitude of 36,000 feet (11,000 meters), reports Geek Wire.


At this point, the aircraft - called Roc - becomes a mobile launch pad, and it will release the satellites and their launchers into orbit. On completing the task, the aircraft is designed to land back on Earth. The plane needs a runway at least 3,700 meters (12,000 ft) long to take off and land.

This is the fourth in a series of posts responding to the extended critique of Darwin Devolves by Richard Lenski at his blog, Telliamed Revisited. Professor Lenski is perhaps the most qualified scientist in the world to analyze the arguments of my book. He is the Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University, a MacArthur ("Genius Award") Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences with hundreds of publications. He also has a strong interest in the history and philosophy of science. His own laboratory evolution work is a central focus of the book. I am very grateful to Professor Lenski for taking time to assess Darwin Devolves. His comments will allow interested readers to quickly gauge the relative strength of arguments against the book's thesis.

"Solid and Interesting"

In his fourth post, "Evolution goes viral! (And how real science works)," Professor Lenski revisits a series of experiments on the bacteriophage lambda begun by his lab around 2012. Briefly, bacteriophages are viruses that invade and eat bacterial cells. Lambda specializes in eating E. coli cells. In order to invade the cell, lambda has to bind to a specific bacterial membrane protein, dubbed LamB, to gain a foothold. The Michigan lab grew a strain of E. coli that had lost much (but not all) of its ability to make LamB, together in a culture with bacteriophage lambda. The lambda had a much more difficult time invading those bacterial cells than normal ones, since its docking site was much rarer.

Over time, however, lambda acquired mutations in the protein (called "J") that is responsible for binding LamB of E. coli. The mutations allowed it to bind to a second E. coli membrane protein, OmpF. Mutant phages could then invade cells that were unavailable to unmutated phages, so they prospered. When Lenski's then-student Justin Meyer investigated, he saw that at least four specific amino acid changes had occurred, and all of them were necessary for the new ability to bind OmpF. Lenski's current post emphasizes that requirement for multiple mutations, so the new interaction seems to him to be irreducibly complex and beyond the "edge of evolution." What's more, nothing was broken, so that contradicts the main argument of Darwin Devolves, he thinks.

There are ghostly shapes hidden in magnetic fields.

They're not made of stuff in the way a lightning bolt or a beam of light is. A lighting bolt carries a fairly defined group of electrons from the sky all the way to the ground. Sunshine that hits your face consists mostly of the same photons that traveled millions of miles from the sun.

But magnetic fields contain things called skyrmions that are different from electrons and photons; a skyrmion is a knot of magnetic field lines looping around each other. As it drifts from one spot to the next, a skyrmion makes itself anew out of the magnetic field lines that are already there. The knot holds together because magnetic field lines resist passing through one another. So, while skyrmions are insubstantial and different from objects we're used to thinking about, they act like more tangible things.
Physicists call these skyrmions "quasiparticles," and suspect they could explain phenomena as disparate as ball lightning and the nuclear structure of an atom. Now, in a new paper, researchers showed that skyrmions can be stuffed inside one another, taking on a completely new shape. These puffed-up "skyrmion bags" are fascinating objects in their own right, but the bizarre things might also be useful for futuristic computing, the researchers said.

If you like solar minimum, good news: It could last for years. That was one of the predictions issued last week by an international panel of experts who gathered at NOAA's annual Space Weather Workshop to forecast the next solar cycle. If the panel is correct, already-low sunspot counts will reach a nadir sometime between July 2019 and Sept 2020, followed by a slow recovery toward a new Solar Maximum in 2023-2026.

"We expect Solar Cycle 25 will be very similar to Cycle 24: another fairly weak maximum, preceded by a long, deep minimum," says panel co-chair Lisa Upton, a solar physicist with Space Systems Research Corp.

Ultra-secure online communications, completely indecipherable if intercepted, are a step closer with the help of a recently published discovery by University of Oregon physicist Ben Alemán.

Alemán, a member of the UO's Center for Optical, Molecular, and Quantum Science, has made artificial atoms that work in ambient conditions. The research, published in the journal Nano Letters, could be a big step in efforts to develop secure quantum communication networks and all-optical quantum computing.

"The big breakthrough is that we've discovered a simple, scalable way to nanofabricate artificial atoms onto a microchip, and that the artificial atoms work in air and at room temperature," said Alemán, also a member of the UO's Materials Science Institute.

"Our artificial atoms will enable lots of new and powerful technologies," he said. "In the future, they could be used for safer, more secure, totally private communications, and much more powerful computers that could design life-saving drugs and help scientists gain a deeper understanding of the universe through quantum computation."

Joshua Ziegler, a doctoral student researcher in Alemán's lab, and colleagues drilled holes - 500 nanometers wide and four nanometers deep - into a thin two-dimensional sheet of hexagonal boron nitride, which is also known as white graphene because of its white color and atomic thickness.

To drill the holes, the team used a process that resembles pressure-washing, but instead of a water jet uses a focused beam of ions to etch circles into the white graphene. They then heated the material in oxygen at high temperatures to remove residues.

US plans to launch a manned mission to the moon isn't just a political goal, but a cover for "secret operations," according to Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin.

"Why do they want to get there again? What is the gain?" Rogozin asked in an interview with Russian media, during which he discussed NASA's lunar program. "Like in previous decades, such actions are cover-ups for some shady operations. Space isn't just for peaceful purposes."

Rogozin believes the US doesn't have military interests on the moon, but US experts could conduct experiments in conditions of increased radiation and low gravity. Such experiments could be of "military interest," he explained.

Earlier in March, US Vice President Mike Pence announced that the Trump administration had directed NASA to speed up the timeline for its already-planned moon landing in 2028 to 2024 in the face of competition from Russia and China.

In 2018, Roscosmos announced its space research program for the next decade, which included a program of lunar exploration. As part of the lunar mission, Moscow is considering placing at least two observatories on the moon. In January, Rogozin announced that the Luna-25 lander would be sent to the moon in 2021 to search for ice at its south pole, and will also test soft-landing technology.

Israel's private spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the Moon on Thursday after being hit with problems during descent, denying the Jewish state a place in the elite club of nations that mastered a lunar landing.

"Small country, big dreams," the engraving on the spacecraft's body read, but those dreams weren't destined to come true.

Beresheet's engine stopped working around 10 kilometers from the surface, with the vehicle crashing into the Moon at a speed of over 130 meters per second.