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R2-D2

NASA awards contracts to Blue Origin, SpaceX & Dynetics to begin work on lunar landers; Boeing left out

Michael Sheetz
CNBC
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 19:02 UTC
Full moon
NASA awarded contracts worth a combined $967 million to three teams of companies on Thursday to begin work on lunar landers toward the agency's goal of putting astronauts on the Moon by 2024.

Teams led by Blue Origin, SpaceX and Dynetics won awards under NASA's Human Landing Systems program. These awards are study contracts for the next 10 months, at the end of which NASA will pick one or more winners to begin building the spacecraft.

NASA awarded the Blue Origin team with $579 million, the Dynetics team with $253 million and SpaceX with $135 million. The wide range in award totals comes due to the differences in each team's bid and approach to achieving NASA's goal.

Boeing also bid on HLS but was not awarded with a study contract. The Boeing proposal included using an upgraded Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which Boeing is currently building for NASA.

Comment: NASA's video announcement:



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Telescope

Astronomers take unique photos of remote planet-forming disks


RT
Fri, 01 May 2020 06:31 UTC
The protoplanetary disks around the R CrA (left) and HD45677 (right) stars.
© kuleuven.be / Jacques Kluska
The protoplanetary disks around the R CrA (left) and HD45677 (right) stars. The orbits of earth and Jupiter and star are added for reference.
An international team of scientists was able to capture images of planet-forming disks hundreds of light years away from Earth. The photos, which are an achievement in itself, shed new light on how planetary systems come to be.

Those protoplanetary clouds of dust and gas, shaped like vinyl music records, appear around young stars and astronomers believe the matter found in them eventually turns into planets.

Scientists previously struggled to properly capture planet-forming disks, as even the images from the largest telescopes weren't detailed enough. A new study, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics on Thursday, solved this problem by coming up with completely different observation techniques.

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Microscope 1

A Disappointing Decade for the Study of Human Evolution


Evolutions News
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 18:21 UTC
Foot of Homo naledi
© Lee Roger Berger research team [CC BY 4.0], Wikimedia Commons
Foot of Homo naledi
The 2010s was a bad decade for the study of human evolution. Smithsonian Magazine recently published an article titled "These are the Decade's Biggest Discoveries in Human Evolution." It opens by saying:
Human evolution is one of the most vibrant areas of scientific investigation. In the past decade we've seen many discoveries that add to our understanding of our origins. To mark the 10th anniversary of the Smithsonian's "David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins," here are some of the biggest discoveries in human evolution from the last 10 years.
What are the big discoveries of the decade? Did they reveal new and compelling evidence that humans evolved from lower primates? Some of these big discoveries actually turn out to be instances where the evidence for human evolution weakened, and the rest amount to slight revisions of previously held theories that don't say much about the core tenets of paleoanthropology.

Ancient DNA

Smithsonian's first big science breakthrough is the discovery of ancient DNA. Indeed, this is an exciting development for the burgeoning field of paleogenetics — and it has shown that there were various sublineages of very modern human-like groups such as the Denisovans that have existed in the past million years. Though a novel and intriguing form of evidence, at present ancient DNA is essentially silent on two crucial tenets of evolutionary paleoanthropology: (1) the hypothesis that modern humans are descended from decidedly non-human, subhuman, or otherwise primitive species, and (2) the claim that these newly revealed "species of early humans" were substantially different from us. Yes we have Denisovan DNA, but at present for all we know the Denisovans were as human as we are.
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Fish

Fish evolve in a single generation? Not so fast...


Uncommon Descent
Wed, 29 Apr 2020 17:47 UTC
goldfish
© Goldfish, by ぱたごん [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
First, the claim:
Evolution is usually viewed as a slow process, with changes in traits emerging over thousands of generations only. Over the recent years, however, research has indicated that adaptation in specific traits can occur more quickly. However, very few studies outside microorganisms were able to demonstrate empirically how quickly natural selection shapes the whole genome.

A research team led by Dr. Daniel Berner at the University of Basel's Department of Environmental Sciences has now provided evidence for rapid evolution within a single generation, using threespine stickleback fish as model organism. The five-year study combined lab work, field experiments, mathematical modeling and genomic analysis.

University of Basel, "Rapid evolution in fish: Genomic changes within a generation" at ScienceDaily
Paper. (open access)
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Fireball 4

Rethinking the world's largest 'explosion': Tunguska event could have been caused by iron asteroid entering and leaving atmosphere

Olga Gertcyk
Siberian Times
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 15:22 UTC
Tunguska trees
© Russian Geographical Society
'At present, there are over 100 hypotheses about the nature of the Tunguska phenomenon', says Sergei Karpov. 'They include the fall of a small asteroid measuring several dozen metres consisting of typical asteroid materials, either metal or stone, as well as ice.'
For decades experts have been baffled by the shattering detonation which wiped out more than 80 million trees over a remote area of the then tsarist empire.

Explanations have focused on a meteor exploding in the atmosphere, a meteorite striking the surface, or a comet composed mainly of ice, yet apart from the wholesale destruction at ground level in an unpopulated area, there is only minuscule evidence of a space object.

In a major new contribution to the scientific debate, Dr. Sergei Karpov, leading researcher at Kirensky Physics Institute in Krasnoyarsk and his peers, argue 'that the Tunguska event was caused by an iron asteroid body, which passed through the Earth's atmosphere and continued to the near-solar orbit'.

It was 100 to 200 metres (328 to 656 feet) in diameter.

Comment: Scientists are still hanging on to the 'icy snowball' theory of comets. If one looks at comets as charged solid bodies, the effects become much more understandable

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Comet 2

Rapidly brightening Comet SWAN (C/2020 F8) now visible with naked eye


Space Weather
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 06:24 UTC
Comet C/2020 F8 SWAN
© Gerald Rhemann
Comet C/2020 F8 SWAN taken on April 27, 2020 @ Farm Tivoli, Namibia
Comet SWAN (C/2020 F8) is brightening rapidly. "I just came in from observing it with the naked eye," reports John Drummond of Gisborne, New Zealand. "It seems to have increased in brightness dramatically since I last saw it a few nights ago." Indeed, multiple observers have now pegged the comet at magnitude +5.5, just within the range of naked-eye visibility.

At the moment, the comet is little more than a dim fuzzball to the human eye. The view through a telescope, however, is stunning. Gerald Rhemann sends this picture from Farm Tivoli, Namibia.

"This is a 30 minute exposure through my 12-inch Astrograph," says Rhemann, who also made a magnificent animation of the comet. In only 40 minutes of tracking, it is possible to see complicated waves and tendrils of gas rippling down the comet's tail. Play the movie.

Comment: Trio of comets grace our skies

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Info

Prof. Wickramasinghe and team share potential origin and predict progression of COVID-19


EIN Press Wire
Tue, 28 Apr 2020 00:38 UTC
Map of Coronavirus spread
© EIN PressWire
Map of Coronavirus spread.
Scientific researchers released their findings about the source and predicted direction of the coronavirus and proposed critical measures for the pandemic.

London, UK, — Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and his team of researchers believe that the novel coronavirus arrived on meteorites in Oct 2019 and instantaneously infected hundreds of thousands of people through the atmosphere, as meteorites were reported in China, Northern Italy, Michigan in October 2019. This is somewhat at odds with the mainstream assertion that it originated in bats in WUHAN, China. Given this disparity, they went to great lengths to produce a timely research paper to back up their argument.

In the research paper released on COVID-19, Professor Wickramasinghe puts forward several thought-provoking arguments. Notably that: "our informed view is that many people were almost simultaneously infected and naturally inoculated with the same COVID-19 virus strain."
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Jet2

Expensive junk: F-35 can't go supersonic without compromising critical stealth tech - Pentagon is fine with that

Jared Keller
Task and Purpose
Tue, 28 Apr 2020 20:05 UTC
F-35B jet
© AFP 2019 / MARK WILSON
A new F-35B Lightning fighter jet
The Navy and Marine Corps variants of the vaunted F-35 Joint Strike Fighter cannot maintain supersonic speeds without sustaining significant structural damage that compromises its stealth capabilities — and the Pentagon is reportedly just fine with that.

Defense News reports that the major deficiency — in which F-35B and F-35C variants experienced damage to their stealth coating after firing their afterburners — will go unaddressed by the F-35 Joint Program Office despite its risk of undermining the aircraft's critical stealth systems.

"This issue was closed on December 17, 2019 with no further actions and concurrence from the U.S. services," the F-35 Joint Program Office told Defense News in a statement. "The [deficiency report] was closed under the category of 'no plan to correct,' which is used by the F-35 team when the operator value provided by a complete fix does not justify the estimated cost of that fix."

As previously reported by Defense News, this deficiency was first discovered in November 2011 after a pair of F-35s sustained "bubbling [and] blistering" of its stealth coating after flying at speeds of Mach 1.3 and Mach 1.4 near their maximum service ceiling of 50,000 feet.

Subsequent tests the following December revealed "thermal damage" that reportedly compromised the overall integrity of both the inboard horizontal tail and tail boom, per Defense News.

Comment: You don't get what you pay for. No-bid contracts, revolving-door positions, overinflated prices, shoddy design - each one is bad enough, but together you get the massive failure that is the F-35. But while you don't always get what you pay for, you often get what you deserve, and the U.S. military greatly deserves a fighter jet of the F-35's quality.

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Comet 2

New Comet C/2020 H2 (Pruyne)

Ernesto Guido, Marco Rocchetto & Adriano Valvasori
Remanzacco Blogspot
Wed, 29 Apr 2020 19:31 UTC
CBET 4761 & MPEC 2020-H220, issued on 2020, April 28, announce the discovery of a comet (magnitude ~16.5) by Theodore A. Pruyne on four 30-s CCD exposures taken with the Catalina Sky Survey's 0.68-m Schmidt telescope. The new comet has been designated C/2020 H2 (PRUYNE).

We performed follow-up measurements of this object while it was still on the PCCP webpage.

Stacking of 55 unfiltered exposures, 10 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2020, April 27.4 from X02 (Telescope Live, Chile) through a 0.6-m f/6.5 astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a diffuse coma about 1' arcmin in diameter.

Our confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version)
C/2020 H2 PRUYNE
© Remanzacco Blogspot
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Seismograph

"Wobble" may precede some great earthquakes - study

Laura Arenschield, The Ohio State University
Phys.org
Wed, 29 Apr 2020 17:47 UTC
earthquake
© CC0 Public Domain
The land masses of Japan shifted from east to west to east again in the months before the strongest earthquake in the country's recorded history, a 2011 magnitude-9 earthquake that killed more than 15,500 people, new research shows.

Those movements, what researchers are calling a "wobble," may have the potential to alert seismologists to greater risk of future large subduction-zone earthquakes. These destructive events occur where one of Earth's tectonic plates slides under another one. That underthrusting jams up or binds the earth, until the jam is finally torn or broken and an earthquake results.

The findings were published today (April 30) in the journal Nature.
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