Science & Technology

Scientists find water on Mars where they thought none could exist

Dom Galeon
Futurism
Fri, 06 Oct 2017 20:35 UTC

A SURPRISE FIND

It's long been known that Mars had large bodies of water some millions of years ago. Traces of these ancient Martian lakes and oceans have been found in recent years, thanks to information provided by probes and landers, like NASA's Curiosity rover and the Odyssey spacecraft that currently orbits the red planet. Now, a team of astronomers from the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of Johns Hopkins University found large deposits of what could be permafrost ice in the most unlikeliest of places on the Martian surface.

The ice was discovered in an area on the Martian equator called the Medusae Fossae, which spans several hundred kilometers across. Scientists had assumed the equator would be too warm for ice to stay intact near the surface for so long.

Permafrost ice has been spotted on Mars using data provided by the Odyssey spacecraft's neutron spectrometer, particularly at the red planet's polar regions, which was confirmed in 2008 by NASA's Phoenix lander when it uncovered chunks of pure ice just a few centimeters below the surface. The specialized spectrometer picks up neutron radiation coming from the Martian surface when high-energy cosmic rays pour down from space.

"These interact with the top meter of the soil and kick out particles, neutrons included," Johns Hopkins' APL planetary astronomer Jack Wilson told Cosmos. Analyzing those particles can identify what substances the cosmic rays are interacting with. Recently, Wilson and his colleagues gave the Odyssey data a second look, because the earlier studies had a very low resolution at just around 520 kilometers. They managed to reconstruct the image to a resolution of 290 kilometers.

German officials detect spike in airborne radioactivity in Europe, calculations indicate source in Eastern Europe

Phys.org
Thu, 05 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC

German officials say that a spike in radioactivity has been detected in the air in Western and Central Europe but there's no threat to human health.

The Federal Office for Radiation Protection said Thursday that elevated levels of the isotope Ruthenium-106 have been reported in Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland and France since Sept. 29.

Spokesman Jan Henrik Lauer told The Associated Press the source of the Ruthenium-106 isn't known but calculations indicate it may have been released in eastern Europe.

Ruthenium-106 is used for radiation therapy to treat eye tumors, and sometimes as a source of energy to power satellites.

Physicists send particles of light into the past, prove time travel is possible

Cosmos
Thu, 05 Oct 2017 10:15 UTC

Scientists from the University of Queensland, Australia, have used single particles of light (photons) to simulate quantum particles travelling through time. They showed that one photon can pass through a wormhole and then interact with its older self. Their findings were published in Nature Communications.

The source of this time travel conundrum comes from what are called "closed time-like curves" (CTC). CTCs are used to simulate extremely powerful gravitational fields, like the ones produced by a spinning black hole, and could, theoretically (based on Einstein's theory of general relativity), warp the fabric of existence so that space-time bends back on itself - thus creating a CTC, almost like a path that could be used to travel back in time.

According to Scientific American, many physicists find CTCs "abhorrent, because any macroscopic object traveling through one would inevitably create paradoxes where cause and effect break down." Others disagree with this assessment, however; in 1991, physicist David Deutsch showed that these paradoxes (created by CTCs) could be avoided at the quantum scale because of the weird behavior of these fundamental particles that make up what we call matter.

Scientists suggest a synthetic crystal can mimic learning and forgetting

Dan Garisto
Nautilus
Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00 UTC

You don't need a brain to learn. Slime molds, for example, solve mazes and navigate obstacles-all without a single neuron. Information about their environment is somehow stored across their bodies. (Scientists are still a bit hazy on how this works.)

But what about something that isn't even alive? A new paper suggests that samarium nickelate oxide (SNO, for short), a synthetic crystal, can mimic learning.

SNO's ability comes from its environmental sensitivity. When it makes contact with hydrogen gas, it steals electrons from the hydrogen and its electric resistivity increases. "It basically changes the electrical resistance of the material by many orders of magnitude-and this happens even at room temperature," said Shriram Ramanathan, a professor of material science at Purdue University and co-author on the study. "It's a really remarkable effect."

Successive exposure, however, produces diminishing returns-SNO becomes "habituated" to the hydrogen and its resistivity increases more slowly. "You might take that behavior for granted," Ramanathan said. "[But] habituation is considered to be a very fundamental survival skill for organisms." For example, dogs can become habituated to loud car engines. At first, they might be threatening, so the dogs expend energy barking. But after long enough, they generally stop. (This way, the dogs conserve energy and attention for real threats, like mailmen.)

Study reveals world's tropical forests are now carbon emission source

Jonathan Watts
The Guardian
Thu, 28 Sep 2017 21:36 UTC

© AFP/Getty Images
The study measured the impact of disturbance and degradation – the thinning of tree density and the culling of biodiversity below an apparently protected canopy.

The world's tropical forests are so degraded they have become a source rather than a sink of carbon emissions, according to a new study that highlights the urgent need to protect and restore the Amazon and similar regions.

Researchers found that forest areas in South America, Africa and Asia - which have until recently played a key role in absorbing greenhouse gases - are now releasing 425 teragrams of carbon annually, which is more than all the traffic in the United States.

This is a far greater loss than previously thought and carries extra force because the data emerges from the most detailed examination of the topic ever undertaken. The authors say their findings - published in the journal Science on Thursday - should galvanise policymakers to take remedial action.

"This shows that we can't just sit back. The forest is not doing what we thought it was doing," said Alessandro Baccini, who is one of the leader authors of the research team from Woods Hole Research Center and Boston University. "As always, trees are removing carbon from the atmosphere, but the volume of the forest is no longer enough to compensate for the losses. The region is not a sink any more."

Comment: Ocean cycles, not humans, are responsible for climate change

Nobel prize in physics: Discovery of gravitational waves

Hannah Devlin, Ian Sample
The Guardian
Tue, 03 Oct 2017 11:31 UTC

£825,000 prize awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne for their work on Ligo experiment which was able to detect ripples in the fabric of spacetime

Three American physicists have won the Nobel prize in physics for the first observations of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago.

Rainer Weiss has been awarded one half of the 9m Swedish kronor (£825,000) prize, announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Tuesday. Kip Thorne and Barry Barish will share the other half of the prize.

All three scientists have played leading roles in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or Ligo, experiment, which in 2015 made the first historic observation of gravitational waves triggered by the violent merger of two black holes a billion light years away. Prof Olga Botner, a member of the Nobel committee for physics, described this as "a discovery that shook the world".

The Ligo detections finally confirmed Einstein's century-old prediction that during cataclysmic events the fabric of spacetime itself can be stretched and squeezed, sending gravitational tremors out across the universe like ripples on a pond.

The direct detection of gravitational waves also opens a new vista on the "dark" side of the cosmos, to times and places from which no optical light escapes. This includes just fractions of a second after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, when scientists believe gravitational waves left a permanent imprint on the cosmos that may still be perceptible today.

When galaxies collide: Hard to spot supermassive black hole 'couples' found by NASA

RT
Wed, 04 Oct 2017 12:21 UTC

Several pairs of supermassive black holes have been detected by NASA observatories in a rare find that scientists say could shed light on how the phenomena produce the strongest gravitational wave signals in the universe.

The 'couples' form when two galaxies collide and merge with each other, forcing their supermassive black holes close together.

Five black hole 'couples' were identified by astronomers using a combination of data from a number of telescopes, including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Wide-Field Infrared Sky Explorer Survey (WISE) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

Spacewalk 360: RT releases first-ever panoramic video of two Russian cosmonauts in outer space (VIDEO)

RT
Wed, 04 Oct 2017 04:01 UTC

RT has released the first-ever 360-degree footage shot by man in outer space, putting viewers in the shoes of two Russian cosmonauts launching nanosatellites from outside the International Space Station (ISS).

The video, which shows out-of-this-world views of Planet Earth, is the first time that the so-called extravehicular activity (EVA) has been filmed in 360. The immersive new format previously helped viewers explore the ISS modules as part of the Space 360 project.

Cosmonauts Sergey Ryazansky and Fedor Yurchikhin captured the breathtaking scenery while doing their 7.5-hour spacewalk in August, which included maintenance tasks and the launch of five miniature satellites.

Security researchers discover hackers can easily take control of "smart" sex toys

RT
Wed, 04 Oct 2017 09:55 UTC

Security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in smart sex toys, including those made in the US, that allows hackers to easily take control of the devices from the street.

Walking through the streets of Berlin, Alex Lomas, a researcher from security group Pen Test Partners, said he was "genuinely surprised" to see an adult sex toy pop up on his phone.

Using a technique Lomas dubbed "screwdriving" - a play on "wardriving," a term hackers use for locating Wi-Fi networks while driving - Lomas showed how hackers could "fairly accurately" locate a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-enabled sex toy using triangulation.

"We went hunting...and found some devices in an exploitable state...in people," Lomas wrote in a blog.

Study suggests methane belches kept water flowing on ancient Mars

Brooks Hays
UPI
Tue, 03 Oct 2017 11:12 UTC

© NASA/UPI
New research suggests outflows of methane could have warned Mars' atmosphere and melted water ice a few billion years ago, allowing lakes and rivers to flow through Martian craters.

By the end of the Hesperian period, all of the Red Planet's water should have been locked up in ice form. But 3.5-million-year-old lake beds, like those found within Gale Crater, suggest otherwise.

Frequent belches of methane could explain how a younger Mars maintained liquid water on its surface despite a cold, arid climate.

The evidence that water once flowed freely on Mars is overwhelming. Over the last decade, scientists have found signs that water moved across the surface of the Red Planet as recently as 3 billion years ago.

The problem is, scientists have also uncovered a large body of evidence suggesting Mars' climate was especially cold and dry some 3 billion years ago.

Planetary scientists have been fishing for a solution to the contradiction.

"It's a paradox, an unresolved paradox of Mars," Kevin Zahnle, a NASA scientist who was not involved in the research, told The Verge. "On the one hand, some people say that it looked warmish and wettish, at least occasionally. On another hand, nobody can figure out how it could have been warmish and wettish."

Comment: See also: Discovery that Mars' Gale Crater was once lake evidence of wet and warm climate

Everyone. A long time ago, I dropped reading Veterans Today Gordon Duff because I concluded he was a limited hangout guy. He might still be so...

Rowan Cocoan

Rajiv Shah is also a member of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission. These interlocking organizations,...

JohnSmith

I could give a shit about Facejob or their theatrics, it's nothing more than a propaganda platform. What does bother me is Zuckerburg, that...

Psstoffgoy

You never hear of instances, trying to identify a John Doe, where they say that they have examined his teeth and can confirm he was a vegan,...

HashAttack2

Its hardline approach, which involved strict lockdowns, rigorous contact tracing and tight border restrictions, paid off, with domestic life near...

HashAttack2

Science & Technology

Scientists find water on Mars where they thought none could exist

German officials detect spike in airborne radioactivity in Europe, calculations indicate source in Eastern Europe

Physicists send particles of light into the past, prove time travel is possible

Scientists suggest a synthetic crystal can mimic learning and forgetting

Study reveals world's tropical forests are now carbon emission source

Nobel prize in physics: Discovery of gravitational waves

When galaxies collide: Hard to spot supermassive black hole 'couples' found by NASA

Spacewalk 360: RT releases first-ever panoramic video of two Russian cosmonauts in outer space (VIDEO)

Security researchers discover hackers can easily take control of "smart" sex toys

Study suggests methane belches kept water flowing on ancient Mars

Latest News

Picture of the Day

Quote of the Day

Recent Comments

Quantum Quirk

Contact Us