Science & TechnologyS


Blue Planet

Welcome to the Anthropocene epoch: Scientists declare Earth has entered the 'Age of Man'

Joe Pinkstone
Daily Mail
Mon, 27 May 2019 05:25 UTC
earth
The human impact on Earth's chemistry and climate has cut short the 11,700-year-old geological epoch known as the Holocene and ushered in a new one. The Anthropocene, or 'new age of man,' would start from the mid-20th century
Humans have ushered in a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, according to a panel of scientists.

Experts have voted to recognise the term and the dawn of the epoch, a vast period of geological time spanning millennia, but it will be several years before the term is fully accepted.

The term means 'Age of man' and its origin will be back-dated to the middle of the 20th-century to mark when humans started irrevocably damaging the planet.

Scientists are now working on defining when it started and what geological feature best describes its initiation.

This quest for a so-called 'golden spike' may include the Hydrogen bomb tests of the 50s which produced vast amounts of radioactive matter immortalised in the world's geological records.

The explosion of chicken farming and increased fossil fuel incineration are also potential signs of the Anthropocene, leaving an indelible mark on the world.

Professor Jan Zalasiewicz, from the University of Leicester, chaired the panel of experts on the issue who took their first formal vote this week.
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Cell Phone

Your iPhone's secret life: While you snooze, apps are beaming out personal information to data guzzlers

Geoffrey A. Fowler
The Washington Post
Tue, 28 May 2019 13:00 UTC
iPhone tracking, smartphone data privacy
© iStock/The Washington Post
It's 3 a.m. Do you know what your iPhone is doing?

Mine has been alarmingly busy. Even though the screen is off and I'm snoring, apps are beaming out lots of information about me to companies I've never heard of. Your iPhone probably is doing the same - and Apple could be doing more to stop it.

On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with.

And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address -- once every five minutes.

Our data has a secret life in many of the devices we use every day, from talking Alexa speakers to smart TVs. But we've got a giant blind spot when it comes to the data companies probing our phones.

You might assume you can count on Apple to sweat all the privacy details. After all, it touted in a recent ad, "What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone." My investigation suggests otherwise.

Comment: You can be sure your phone is recording everything you do (or say):

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X

Scientists caught 'adjusting' sea level data to create false impression of rising oceans

Vick Batts
News Target
Tue, 28 May 2019 09:44 UTC
ocean water sea waves
A scientific paper published by a team of Australian researchers has revealed a startling find: Scientists at the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) have been "adjusting" historical data regarding tide levels in the Indian Ocean. Their "highly questionable" activities have depicted rapidly rising seas - but the truth is that there is no reason to be alarmed at all. Scientists have found that sea levels are stable - and have been for the entirety of the 20th century.

To put it simply, these PSMSL "scientists" have been arbitrarily changing their data in order to create the illusion of a problem that doesn't actually exist.

According to the Australian research team, sea levels in the Indian ocean have remained stable for decades. Dr. Albert Parker and Dr. Clifford Ollier recently published their astounding research in the journal Earth Systems and Environment; their extensive research gives an in-depth look at how this massive deception was undertaken.

Comment: Also see:

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Snowflake Cold

Gender performance varies with temperature says new study

John Timmer
Ars Technica
Sun, 26 May 2019 13:00 UTC
Temperature Control
© Nest
As we move from a season marked by unstoppable heating units and into one dominated by aggressive air conditioning. Figuring out how to optimize the thermostat involves a balancing of individual comfort and energy efficiency. But a new study suggests that there's an additional factor that should feed into decisions: the performance of any employees or students who happen to be subjected to the whims of whoever has access to the thermostat.

Unexpectedly, the new results show that men and women don't respond to different temperatures in the same way. And, in doing so, they raise questions about just what we've been measuring when other studies have looked at gender-specific differences in performance.
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Comet

Trace amounts of extraterrestrial organic matter detected in South African mountain range


Science Global News
Mon, 27 May 2019 22:02 UTC
South Africa Makhonjwa Mountains barberton josefsdal chert
South Africa Makhonjwa Mountains
South Africa's Makhonjwa Mountains are home to some of the oldest rocks on the planet - but not everything in this magnificent landscape originated on Earth. Scientists say they've discovered trace evidence of extraterrestrial organic matter buried within volcanic sediment from over 3.3 billion years ago.

"This is the very first time that we have found actual evidence for extraterrestrial carbon in terrestrial rocks," astrobiologist Frances Westall from the CNRS Centre for Molecular Biophysics in France explained to New Scientist.

For billions of years, Earth has been rained upon by meteorites violently impacting and rearranging the planet's surface. What do these space rocks leave behind when they get here?

It could be a lot.
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Microscope 2

Scientists uncover a trove of genes that behave differently in humans

University of Toronto
Phys.orh
Mon, 27 May 2019 12:00 UTC
dna evolution
© Sam LambertImage depicts motif divergence between human transcription factors and their counterparts in other species. The blue section in the pie charts represents a proportion of transcription factors, across different classes, which are dissimilar in human.
Researchers at the Donnelly Centre in Toronto have found that dozens of genes, previously thought to have similar roles across different organisms, are in fact unique to humans and could help explain how our species came to exist.

These genes code for a class of proteins known as transcription factors, or TFs, which control gene activity. TFs recognize specific snippets of the DNA code called motifs, and use them as landing sites to bind the DNA and turn genes on or off.

Previous research had suggested that TFs which look similar across different organisms also bind similar motifs, even in species as diverse as fruit flies and humans. But a new study from Professor Timothy Hughes' lab, at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, shows that this is not always the case.

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

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Rocket

Caught on video: Russia's Soyuz rocket HIT BY LIGHTNING during launch - still completed mission


RT
Mon, 27 May 2019 16:14 UTC
russian rocket hit lightning
© https://cdni.rt.com/files/2019.05/article/5cebdbdcdda4c8194c8b4604.pngThe Soyuz-2 rocket was struck just after takeoff.
Russia's Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket was struck by lightning just 10 seconds after take-off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome... but it still weathered the tough hit.

The thunderstorm began shortly before launch of the device which is carrying the Glonass-M navigation satellite. Yet, the strike was no obstacle for the cosmodrome team, and the space journey continued as planned.
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Jupiter

Jupiter's magnetic field is changing

Yuen Yiu
Inside Science
Sat, 25 May 2019 11:45 UTC
Close-Up Jupiter
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Seán DoranA close-up image of the stormy surface on Jupiter, taken by the Juno spacecraft last October.
For the first time in history, humans have detected a changing magnetic field on a planet other than our own -- Jupiter. The latest revelation could help scientists better understand how a planet's magnetic field changes over time.

The discovery was made by NASA's Juno spacecraft, named after the Roman goddess -- mother of Mars and wife of Jupiter. According to NASA, scientists chose the name because the goddess "was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter's true nature" when he "drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief." Since its launch in 2011 and arrival at Jupiter in 2016, Juno has been flying by and checking on her namesake husband every 53 days.

The scientists discovered changes in Jupiter's magnetic field when they compared the latest Juno data with measurements done by older missions such as Pioneer 10 and Voyager 1 from the 1970s. A paper in Nature Astronomy published this Monday detailed the findings and suggested some explanations.
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Galaxy

Spiral galaxy, Messier 90, is heading our way


RT
Sun, 26 May 2019 13:57 UTC
Messier 90 spiral galaxy
© NASA, ESA, STScI, V. Rubin, D. Maoz and D. FisherThe Messier 90 spiral galaxy,
The universe is constantly expanding and stretching further afield, but the Hubble space telescope managed to catch one of the rare galaxies that's defying the odds and actually moving closer to us.

A stunning spiral galaxy called Messier 90, sitting about 60 million light-years away, is part of a huge cluster of around 1,200 star systems in the Virgo constellation. While the cluster in general is moving farther away from us, Messier 90 is heading in our direction, according to NASA.
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Chalkboard

The Present Phase of Stagnation in the Foundations of Physics Is Not Normal

Sabine Hossenfelder
Nautilus
Fri, 23 Nov 2018 05:07 UTC
physics
© Inga Nielsen / Shutterstock
Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after the other is returning null results: No new particles, no new dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real news. But experimentalists are just poking in the dark. They have no clue where new physics may be to find. And their colleagues in theory development are of no help.

Some have called it a crisis. But I don't think "crisis" describes the current situation well: Crisis is so optimistic. It raises the impression that theorists realized the error of their ways, that change is on the way, that they are waking up now and will abandon their flawed methodology. But I see no awakening. The self-reflection in the community is zero, zilch, nada, nichts, null. They just keep doing what they've been doing for 40 years, blathering about naturalness and multiverses and shifting their "predictions," once again, to the next larger particle collider.

I think stagnation describes it better. And let me be clear that the problem with this stagnation is not with the experiments. The problem is loads of wrong predictions from theoretical physicists.

The problem is also not that we lack data. We have data in abundance. But all the data are well explained by the existing theories - the standard model of particle physics and the cosmological concordance model. Still, we know that's not it. The current theories are incomplete.
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