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UFO

China military uses AI to track rapidly increasing UFOs

Stephen Chen
South China Morning Post
Fri, 04 Jun 2021 11:00 UTC
Saucers/China flag
© Shutterstock
The PLA has a dedicated task force to investigate sightings.
As the Pentagon prepares its report into UFOs, due later this month, Chinese military researchers have turned to artificial intelligence to track and analyse the increasing number of unknown objects in China's airspace.

To the People's Liberation Army, they are "unidentified air conditions" - a phrase which echoes the US military's "unidentified aerial phenomena" - but to the public they are better known as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.

According to Wuhan-based researcher Chen Li from the Air Force Early Warning Academy, human analysts have been overwhelmed in recent years by the rapidly mounting sighting reports from a wide range of military and civilian sources across the country. Chen, in a 2019 report to a conference of senior information technology scientists in Beijing in 2019, said:
"The frequent occurrence of unidentified air conditions in recent years ... brings severe challenges to air defence security of our country."
The PLA's task force dedicated to the unknown objects increasingly relies on AI technology to analyse its data, according to Chen's report, which is in line with several other military studies published in domestic journals, most recently in August last year.
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Better Earth

Is Earth's core growing lopsided? Strange goings-on in our planet's interior

Robert Sanders
UC Berkley
Thu, 03 Jun 2021 12:00 UTC
earth core
© Marine Lasbleis
A new model by UC Berkeley seismologists proposes that Earth’s inner core grows faster on its east side (left) than on its west. Gravity equalizes the asymmetric growth by pushing iron crystals toward the north and south poles (arrows). This tends to align the long axis of iron crystals along the planet’s rotation axis (dashed line), explaining the different travel times for seismic waves through the inner core.
For reasons unknown, Earth's solid-iron inner core is growing faster on one side than the other, and it has been ever since it started to freeze out from molten iron more than half a billion years ago, according to a new study by seismologists at the University of California, Berkeley.

The faster growth under Indonesia's Banda Sea hasn't left the core lopsided. Gravity evenly distributes the new growth — iron crystals that form as the molten iron cools — to maintain a spherical inner core that grows in radius by an average of 1 millimeter per year.

But the enhanced growth on one side suggests that something in Earth's outer core or mantle under Indonesia is removing heat from the inner core at a faster rate than on the opposite side, under Brazil. Quicker cooling on one side would accelerate iron crystallization and inner core growth on that side.

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

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X

Two human flu virus strains may have gone extinct so say reports

Rachael Rettner
Science Alert
Fri, 04 Jun 2021 00:00 UTC
H1N1
© NIAID/CC by 2.0
Electron micrograph of H1N1 flu strain
There's been so little flu transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic that some types of flu viruses may have gone extinct, according to news reports.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, flu cases dropped to historic lows - a phenomenon experts attribute to mask wearing and other precautions to combat the novel coronavirus.

Interestingly, two types of flu viruses haven't shown up on anyone's radar for a year, meaning there have been no reported cases of these viruses anywhere in the world, STAT reported.

Experts don't yet know if these types have gone extinct, but if so, officials could have an easier time picking the strains of flu viruses included in the seasonal flu shot, STAT reported.

To explain which flu viruses may have gone extinct, it helps to understand how flu viruses are classified. Two families of flu viruses cause seasonal flu: influenza A and influenza B. Influenza A viruses are divided into "subtypes" based on two proteins on their surface known as hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
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Info

Nearby gamma-ray burst defies expectations

Meghan Bartels
Live Science
Fri, 04 Jun 2021 13:09 UTC
gamma-ray burst
© DESY, Science Communication Lab
An artist's depiction of a gamma-ray burst's relativistic jet full of very-high-energy photons breaking out of a collapsing star.
A team of scientists has gotten their best look yet at a gamma-ray burst, the most dramatic type of explosion in the universe.

Astronomers think some of these explosions occur when a massive star — five or 10 times the mass of our sun — detonates, abruptly becoming a black hole. Gamma-ray bursts may also occur when two superdense stellar corpses called neutron stars collide, often forming a black hole. And conveniently, a gamma-ray burst that scientists watched during a few nights in 2019 likely occurred only about 1 billion light-years away from Earth, relatively close by for these dramatic events.

"We were really sitting in the front row when this gamma-ray burst happened," Andrew Taylor, a physicist at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (German Electron Synchrotron, or DESY) and co-author on the new paper, said in a statement. "We could observe the afterglow for several days and to unprecedented gamma-ray energies."

Two NASA space-based observatories, Fermi and Swift, first detected the event, which is known as GRB 190829A because it was detected on Aug. 29, 2019. The fireworks came from the direction of the constellation Eridanus, a large swath of sky in the Southern Hemisphere.

When the scientists behind the new research heard about the gamma-ray burst detection, they mobilized a set of five gamma-ray telescopes in Namibia, called the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS). Over three nights, the telescopes observed the explosion for a total of 13 hours, in an attempt to understand what took place.
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Seismograph

Giant diamonds may hold the secret to understanding superdeep earthquakes

Sid Perkins
Science Magazine
Tue, 01 Jun 2021 17:23 UTC
giant diamond deep earthquakes
© Evan Smith/ GIA
Imperfections such as the inclusions (dark flecks) in this diamond reveal that tectonic slabs can carry water deep into Earth's mantle.
Earthquakes shouldn't occur more than 300 kilometers below Earth's surface, according to most geophysical models. Yet they commonly do — a phenomenon that has mystified seismologists for decades. Now, researchers suggest water carried by tectonic plates shoved beneath continents could be triggering these deep temblors. The find may also explain another marvel: why a huge number of fist-size diamonds form at this depth.

Earthquakes typically occur when the two sides of a fault, or the opposite sides of a tectonic plate boundary, scrape past each other. But far beneath our planet's surface, the pressures are too high for such slippage, and rocks are typically so hot they ooze and flow rather than break. That has led geophysicists to come up with alternate explanations for deep seismic activity, which can be very strong but largely too far away for us to feel.

One idea is that some minerals, under the extreme heat and pressure deep within our planet, can suddenly lose volume, with the runaway collapse over large distances causing strong quakes. A second notion is that once a quake gets going — because of the sudden collapse of minerals or another cause — rocks near the tip of the rupture heat up even further and weaken, fueling the quake. A third cause might be water released from rocks deep below Earth's surface, which could weaken other rocks nearby, allowing them to fracture more easily. Researchers have largely dismissed that explanation, however, because it wasn't clear where such water would come from.
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Comet 2

New Comet C/2021 J1 (Maury-Attard)

Ernesto Guido
Remanzacco Blogspot
Thu, 03 Jun 2021 18:31 UTC
CBET 4972 & MPEC 2021-L11, issued on 2021, June 02, announce the discovery of a new comet (magnitude ~19.0) on CCD images taken by A. Maury and G. Attard on May 09.3 UT with the 0.28-m f/2.2 Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt astrograph at San Pedro de Atacama, Chile in the course of the MAP (W94) survey. The new comet has been designated C/2021 J1 (Maury-Attard). This is the first amateur comet discovery of 2021. It is also the first comet ever discovered using the synthetic tracking technique (using TYCHO software).

Stacking of 27 unfiltered exposures, 30 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2021, May 16.3 from X02 (Telescope Live, Chile) through a 0.61-m f/6.5 astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a compact coma about 7" arcsecond in diameter (Observers E. Guido, M. Rocchetto, E. Bryssinck, M. Fulle, G. Milani, C. Nassef, G. Savini, A. Valvasori).

Our confirmation images (click on the images for a bigger version; made with TYCHO software by D. Parrott)

comet C/2021 J1 (Maury-Attard)
© Remanzacco Blogspot
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Mars

NASA rover spots ethereal 'mother of pearl' clouds glistening over Mars

Amanda Kooser
CNET
Tue, 01 Jun 2021 18:00 UTC
Clouds drift over Mount Sharp in the Gale Crater
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Clouds drift over Mount Sharp in the Gale Crater on March 19, 2021, as seen by NASA's Curiosity rover.
Mars has a lot of wind and dust devils, but unlike Earth, it's not really famous for its clouds. That's one reason images of Martian clouds from NASA's Curiosity rover are so stunning.

Scientists had noticed clouds starting to form on Mars earlier than expected, so this year they laid in wait to make sure Curiosity could capture the ethereal formations, some of which took on very colorful characteristics.

"More than just spectacular displays, such images help scientists understand how clouds form on Mars and why these recent ones are different," NASA said in statement on Friday.

Researchers discovered the earliest cloud arrivals appeared at higher altitudes. A typical Mars clouds would be made of water ice, something we see on Earth. But these high-flying clouds might actually be made of dry ice, frozen carbon dioxide. The idea is still under investigation.
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Doberman

Can dogs smell COVID? Here's what the science says

Holly Else
Nature
Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00 UTC
covid smelling dog
© Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency/Getty
Research groups around the world are testing whether dogs can detect COVID-19 by smell.
Asher is an eccentric, Storm likes sunbathing and Maple loves to use her brain. All three could play a part in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, but they are not scientists or politicians. They are dogs.

And they are not alone. Around the world, canines are being trained to detect the whiff of COVID-19 infections. Dog trainers are claiming extraordinary results — in some cases, they say that dogs can detect the virus with almost perfect accuracy. Scientists involved with the efforts suggest that canines could help to control the pandemic because they can screen hundreds of people an hour in busy places such as airports or sports stadiums, and are cheaper to run than conventional testing methods such as the RNA-amplification technique PCR.

But most of these findings have not yet been peer reviewed or published, making it hard for the wider scientific community to evaluate the claims. Researchers working on more conventional viral tests say that initial results from dog groups are intriguing and show promise. But some question whether the process can be scaled up to a level that would allow the animals to make a meaningful impact.
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Beaker

Natural antibody from common cold found to neutralize COVID-19, may lead to vaccine that protects against all coronaviruses

Mary Kekatos
The Daily Mail
Wed, 02 Jun 2021 18:37 UTC
common cold, allergies
An antibody that develops after people have the common cold can neutralize the virus that causes COVID-19, a new study suggests.

Both the common cold and SARS-CoV-2 fall under a family known as coronaviruses, which cause upper-respiratory tract illnesses. However, it was believed that antibodies that react to ordinary coronaviruses didn't work against the virus that leads to COVID.

But in blood samples of COVID survivors, researchers found high levels of immune cells generated during the common cold that 'remember' diseases and are called back into action if the threat returns.

The team, from the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, California, says the findings could help scientists develop a vaccine or antibody treatment that protects against all coronaviruses.

Comment: It appears that researchers have gone through a great deal of time, effort and money to prove the human immune system is capable of handling the majority of infectious viruses. Well done. [/sarcasm] The original standard of care was to isolate and treat the sick, not the healthy. Why has this suddenly changed?

But the real danger comes from directly interfering with the function of that immune system, which is what the mRNA vaccine is DESIGNED to do.

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Bizarro Earth

Ancient Lake Toba volcanic eruption destroyed the ozone layer

Sergey Osipov
KAUST Discovery
Tue, 01 Jun 2021 18:16 UTC
Ozone depletion following the Toba eruption around 74,000 years ago compounded the ensuing volcanic winter and caused a human population bottleneck.

Lake Toba
© Karpov Oleg/Shutterstock
The eruption of the Toba volcano 74,000 years ago affected the planet's climate so drastically that it led to a drop in the human population.
A catastrophic drop in atmospheric ozone levels around the tropics is likely to have contributed to a bottleneck in the human population around 60 to 100,000 years ago, an international research team has suggested. The ozone loss, triggered by the eruption of the Toba supervolcano located in present-day Indonesia, might solve an evolutionary puzzle that scientists have been debating for decades.

"Toba has long been posited as a cause of the bottleneck, but initial investigations into the climate variables of temperature and precipitation provided no concrete evidence of a devastating effect on humankind," says Sergey Osipov at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, who worked on the project with KAUST's Georgiy Stenchikov and colleagues from King Saud University, NASA and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry.

"We point out that, in the tropics, near-surface ultraviolet (UV) radiation is the driving evolutionary factor. Climate becomes more relevant in the more volatile regions away from the tropics," says Stenchikov.

Large volcanic eruptions emit gases and ash that create a sunlight-attenuating aerosol layer in the stratosphere, causing cooling at the Earth's surface. This "volcanic winter" has multiple knock-on effects, such as cooler oceans, prolonged El Niño events, crop failures and disease.
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