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Fireball 5

Geologists identify rare meteorite impact site in Dakota County

Cathy Wurzer
Minnesota Public Radio News
Thu, 13 May 2021 23:54 UTC
Shocked Quartz
© Courtesy of Julia Steenberg
Small grains of shocked quartz buried deep under ground in Inver Grove Heights, Minn., are evidence of an ancient meteorite impact in the area
An area around Inver Grove Heights, Minn., is the site of an ancient meteorite crash, according to recent analysis by the Minnesota Geological Survey.

The discovery came as scientists were updating geologic maps of Dakota County. They identified anomalies in the rock record — certain layers appeared out of order or irregularly sized. This led to further examination and the identification of small grains of shocked quartz, which is known to be produced only by the extreme shock and compression of a meteorite impact or nuclear explosion.

"It's really exciting and new," geologist Julia Steenberg told MPR News host Cathy Wurzer. Steenberg and her colleagues are hoping to do more research to better understand the age of the impact and the size of the meteorite involved.

Globally, known meteorite impact sites are exceptionally rare. This is the first identified in Minnesota and one of fewer than 200 in the world.
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Info

Scientists decode the 'language' of immune cells

Stuart Wolpert
University of California
Wed, 12 May 2021 19:03 UTC
Immune Cells
© Brooks Taylor/UCLA
In this image from a microscopy video, scientists “listen” to macrophages as they responded to an immune threat.
UCLA life scientists have identified six "words" that specific immune cells use to call up immune defense genes — an important step toward understanding the language the body uses to marshal responses to threats.

In addition, they discovered that the incorrect use of two of these words can activate the wrong genes, resulting in the autoimmune disease known as Sjögren's syndrome. The research, conducted in mice, is published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Immunity (Cell Press).

"Cells have evolved an immune response code, or language," said senior author Alexander Hoffmann, the Thomas M. Asher Professor of Microbiology and director of the Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences at UCLA. "We have identified some words in that language, and we know these words are important because of what happens when they are misused. Now we need to understand the meaning of the words, and we are making rapid progress. It's as exciting as when archaeologists discovered the Rosetta stone and could begin to read Egyptian hieroglyphs."

Immune cells in the body constantly assess their environment and coordinate their defense functions by using words — or signaling codons, in scientific parlance — to tell the cell's nucleus which genes to turn on in response to invaders like pathogenic bacteria and viruses. Each signaling codon consists of several successive actions of a DNA binding protein that, when combined, elicit the proper gene activation, in much the same way that successive electrical signals through a telephone wire combine to produce the words of a conversation.
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Nuke

Chernobyl's molten guts are warming up, and scientists don't know why

Mike Mcrae
Science Alert
Wed, 12 May 2021 09:39 UTC
Chernobyl
© Zheka-Boss/iStock/Getty Images
Over the past five years, a sensor keeping count of neutron emissions deep within the rubble of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant has kept track of a gradual spike in activity.

The rising count might be nothing. It might even drop back down again, given time. Scientists aren't exactly keen on taking any chances, as the potential for a runaway nuclear fission reaction in the future can't be ruled out until we know what's going on.

Unfortunately, the precise location of the decaying material beneath debris and heavy slabs of concrete makes detailed investigations and potential fixes all that more challenging.

As reported by Science Magazine's Richard Stone, researchers at the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP) in Kyiv, Ukraine, are yet to determine whether the noted rise in neutrons heralds pending disaster, or is more of a storm in a nuclear tea-cup.

"There are many uncertainties," ISPNPP's Maxim Saveliev told Stone. "But we can't rule out the possibility of [an] accident."

Comment: See also:

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Magnify

MIT researchers find that 'skeptics' value data literacy and scientific rigour

Noah Carl
Lockdown Sceptics
Wed, 12 May 2021 11:15 UTC
Massachusetts institute of Technology
© Unknown
Massachusetts institute of Technology
Throughout the pandemic, governments have claimed to be following "the science". But of course, many aspects of "the science" were never settled.

The WHO, as well as the UK Government, initially told us not to wear face masks. They then decided that face masks were essential. Countries like Australia and New Zealand introduced border controls in early February. Meanwhile, UK scientists were advising against port-of-entry screening. Researchers predicted there would be 96,000 deaths in Sweden by July. But as it turned out, there were less than 6,000.

Of course, many people have been sceptical of "the science" (by which I mean the officially endorsed science) from the very beginning. And of course, they've formed communities online with other like-minded persons. (Lockdown Sceptics would be one example of such a community.)

In an unpublished paper, researchers from MIT sought to understand how the users of these communities obtain, analyse, share and curate information. Surprisingly (to them), they found that users place a premium on data literacy and scientific rigour.

Comment: Some seek and face the truth. Others refute and mask it.

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Microscope 1

Researchers unravel mystery of why and for how long animals, including humans, yawn


RT
Tue, 11 May 2021 19:30 UTC
lion
© Rachel Claire from Pexels
Following a painstaking, large-scale animal study, researchers in the Netherlands now claim that, when it comes to yawning vertebrates, the larger and denser the brain, the longer the yawn.

In what could be considered the biological research equivalent of watching paint dry, the scientists collected data on 1,291 separate yawns by visiting zoos and poring over videos online, observing some 55 mammals and 46 species of bird.

"We went to several zoos with a camera and waited by the animal enclosures for the animals to yawn," says ethologist Jorg Massen, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "That was a pretty long haul."
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Cassiopaea

Hum of plasma waves in the 'void' of interstellar space detected by Voyager 1

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Mon, 10 May 2021 12:00 UTC
solar system space
© Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty Images
Illustration of Voyager leaving the Solar System.
Voyager 1, having spent over 43 years zooming away from Earth since its 1977 launch, is now a very long way away indeed.

Its distance from the Sun is over 150 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. It takes over 21 hours for transmissions traveling at light speed to arrive at Earth. It officially passed the heliopause - the boundary at which pressure from the solar wind is no longer sufficient to push into the wind from interstellar space - in 2012.

Voyager 1 has left the Solar System - and it's finding that the void of space is not quite so void-like, after all.

In the latest analysis of data from the intrepid probe, from a distance of nearly 23 billion kilometers (over 14 billion miles), astronomers have discovered, from 2017 onwards, a constant hum from plasma waves in the interstellar medium, the diffuse gas that lurks between the stars.

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

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Chalkboard

Mathematicians find core mechanism to calculate tipping points


Technical University of Munich
Mon, 10 May 2021 18:26 UTC
Tipping Point
© MonicaVolpin / pixaby
At a tipping point, the system state can change slowly or abruptly - for example, when the complete melting of a glacier can no longer be stopped.
Climate change, a pandemic or the coordinated activity of neurons in the brain: In all of these examples, a transition takes place at a certain point from the base state to a new state. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have discovered a universal mathematical structure at these so-called tipping points. It creates the basis for a better understanding of the behavior of networked systems.

It is an essential question for scientists in every field: How can we predict and influence changes in a networked system? "In biology, one example is the modelling of coordinated neuron activity," says Christian Kühn, professor of multiscale and stochastic dynamics at TUM. Models of this kind are also used in other disciplines, for example when studying the spread of diseases or climate change.

All critical changes in networked systems have one thing in common: a tipping point where the system makes a transition from a base state to a new state. This may be a smooth shift, where the system can easily return to the base state. Or it can be a sharp, difficult-to-reverse transition where the system state can change abruptly or "explosively." Transitions of this kind also occur in climate change, for example with the melting of the polar ice caps. In many cases, the transitions result from the variation of a single parameter, such as the rise in concentrations of greenhouse gases behind climate change.
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2 + 2 = 4

Scientists conclude: Human origins research is a big mess

Günter Bechly
Evolution News
Mon, 10 May 2021 16:31 UTC
fossil photo
In several articles at Evolution News (Bechly 2017a-d, 2018a-b, 2019a-d) and podcasts at ID the Future (Bechly 2019a+c) I have described in recent years how human origins research is in a ridiculous state of constant major "rewritings" and refutations of allegedly indisputable textbook wisdom. This is mainly due to surprising new discoveries of hominin fossils. The situation goes far beyond the healthy normal progress of science. Instead, it suggests that something is wrong with the general narrative, which needs not just some rewriting here and there, but a major rethinking and paradigm change (Bechly 2017c).

A New Review Study

This critical view has again been confirmed with a new review study by Almécija et al. (2021) in the prestigious journal Science, which especially evaluates the role of Miocene apes for evolutionary scenarios of human origins and the reconstruction of the last common ancestor (LCA) of chimps and humans. The authors discuss the numerous conflicting hypotheses and elaborate on two very different approaches with incompatible conclusions: A bottom-up approach considers the chimp-human LCA as a quadrupedal knuckle-walking chimp-like creature, while an alternative top-down approach considers some strange bipedal and tree-climbing Miocene apes as model for this LCA.
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Mars

Mushrooms on Mars? Scientists believe they've found proof of life on the red planet

Caroline Delbert
Yahoo
Fri, 07 May 2021 17:55 UTC
mars mushroom
© NASA/Advances in Microbiology/Screenshot
Could there be mushrooms on Mars? In a new paper, an international team of scientists from countries including the U.S., France, and China have gathered and compared photographic evidence they claim shows fungus-like objects growing on the Red Planet.

In their paper, which appears in Scientific Research Publishing's Advances in Microbiology, the scientists analyze images taken by NASA's Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, plus the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera. The objects in question show "chalky-white colored spherical shaped specimens," which the Mars Opportunity team initially said was a mineral called hematite.

Comment: Website The Cosmic Tusk comments that the discovery claim is still up for debate, but that much of the response from the scientific community has been far from scientific:
The sciency internet is alive with consensus condemnation and damnation for a new paper from Rhawn Joseph, dubbed the "Tiger King of Mars." In the article below, Joseph et al. continues his radical break from conventional interpretations of Martian photography, believing a number of odd features photographed by the Martian rovers are...wait for it...mushrooms and fungi.

The Tusk has seen so much mistreatment and knee jerk criticism of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, I feel some empathy for the poor guy — right or wrong. It's sad so much of the press can't find time to give him a call before tearing his ass off on-line as a fraud. I don't think he is fraud, or a hoaxter. Maybe wrong, maybe iconoclastic, but Rhawn Joseph in my estimation sincerely believes every word he writes. And, personally, I find his paper well-written and worthy of thoughtful criticism and refutation, not ad hominem attacks.

While it very hard to believe NASA would miss mushrooms on Mars, it sure would be nice if they would just take one of those robotic tools and give one the hematite spheres a "poke" — to see if it's squishy.

A responsible take: Scientists Believe These Photos Show Mushrooms on Mars — and Proof of Life

Some links from a "PolitiFact" drive-by debunking (begging the question, have we run out lying politicians?):

Futurism, "Scientists Claim to Spot Fungus Growing on Mars in NASA Rover Photos," May 6, 2021

Futurism, "Experts Shred Paper Claiming to Identify Mushrooms on Mars," May 7, 2021

CNET, "No, NASA photos are not evidence of fungus growing on Mars, sorry," May 6, 2021

TNW News, "Mushrooms on Mars is a hoax — stop believing hack 'scientists,'" May 7, 2021

South China Morning Post, "Fungi on Mars? Researchers claim signs of life on red planet," May 7, 2021

ResearchGate, "Fungi on Mars? Evidence of Growth and Behavior From Sequential Images," accessed May 7, 2021

Email interview with Dr. Kenneth Nealson, professor emeritus of earth sciences and expert in microbial life in extreme environments at the University of Southern California, May 7, 2021

Email interview with Dr. Edwin Kite, assistant professor in the department of the geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, May 7, 2021

University of Chicago, "Mars expert available to discuss Perseverance rover landing scheduled for Thursday," Feb. 16, 2021

Vice, "This Man Is Suing NASA For Ignoring a Jelly Donut-Shaped Rock He Thinks Is Life on Mars," Jan. 30, 2014

ResearchGate, "Rhawn Gabriel Joseph," accessed May 9, 2021

SpringerLink, "Retraction Note to: Life on Venus and the interplanetary transfer of biota from Earth," accessed May 9, 2021

CNET, "The fungus on Mars and the man who thinks he found life on other planets," May 6, 2021

Retraction Watch, "'Prince of panspermia' has a paper retracted, and sues Springer Nature," Oct. 6, 2020

ResearchGate, "About," accessed May 9, 2021
See also:

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Blue Planet

Oral microbiomes of Neanderthals, primates, and humans reconstructed, revealing insights into early human behaviour

Max Planck Society
Phys.org
Mon, 10 May 2021 20:27 UTC
gorilla
© Katerina Guschanski
Grauer's gorilla specimens at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium), showing typical dental calculus deposits on the teeth that are stained dark likely as a result of their herbivorous diet.
Living in and on our bodies are trillions of microbial cells belonging to thousands of bacterial species, known as the microbiome. These microbes play key roles in human health, but little is known about their evolution. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a multidisciplinary international research team led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) investigated the evolutionary history of the hominid oral microbiome by analyzing the fossilized dental plaque of humans and Neanderthals spanning the past 100,000 years and comparing it to those of wild chimpanzees, gorillas, and howler monkeys.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Dissecting the Vegetarian Myth - Interview with Lierre Keith

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