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The Darkest Black: Scientists create 'Vantablack', a black so dark it's difficult to see

Ian Johnston
The Independent
Sun, 13 Jul 2014 19:53 UTC


vantablack
Puritans, Goths, avant-garde artists, hell-raising poets and fashion icon Coco Chanel all saw something special in it. Now black, that most enigmatic of colours, has become even darker and more mysterious.

A British company has produced a "strange, alien" material so black that it absorbs all but 0.035 per cent of visual light, setting a new world record. To stare at the "super black" coating made of carbon nanotubes - each 10,000 times thinner than a human hair - is an odd experience. It is so dark that the human eye cannot understand what it is seeing. Shapes and contours are lost, leaving nothing but an apparent abyss.

If it was used to make one of Chanel's little black dresses, the wearer's head and limbs might appear to float incorporeally around a dress-shaped hole.

Actual applications are more serious, enabling astronomical cameras, telescopes and infrared scanning systems to function more effectively. Then there are the military uses that the material's maker, Surrey NanoSystems, is not allowed to discuss.

Comment: A sign of the times, perhaps.

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Apple Green

New study suggests plants can listen

Emma Weissmann
Healthy Debates
Sun, 13 Jul 2014 00:00 UTC
Image
The aptly named mousear cress may respond to caterpillar munching sounds. Plants have long been known to react to changes in their environment, and may respond to light, temperature, and touch.

But are they listening too?

For the Arabidopsis plant, the answer is a loud and clear "yes."

The distinct, high-amplitude vibrations produced by a cabbage butterfly caterpillar munching on a leaf of this flowering mustard plant, commonly called mousear cress, throws its defenses into high gear, according to a study published in Oecologia this month by two researchers at the University of Missouri.

The study, which combined audio and chemical analysis, is the first to find evidence that plants respond to an ecologically relevant sound in the environment, said Heidi Appel, a senior research scientist in the Division of Plant Sciences at Missouri.

Comment: More bad news for vegetarians in that science of their beloved faceless plantbased food source, no longer can be considered without functions of consciousness, but aware beings with ability to feel some kind of pain and reciprocate in more complex ways than formerly thought (purely electric and chemical communications).

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Evil Rays

Pentagon delays demolition of HAARP facility in Alaska

Bob Brewin
Defense One
Tue, 08 Jul 2014 00:00 UTC
Image
© Defense One
HAARP antenna array outside Gakona Alaska
The Pentagon has delayed its plans to knock down a controversial Alaskan radio research facility until next year, for a possible transfer to a university or scientific institution, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, announced.

Murkowski said July 2 the Air Force had agreed to halt demolition of the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program facility until May 2015 while research institutions, including the University of Alaska, develop funding proposals for it.

HAARP, located on 30 acres adjacent to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in southeastern Alaska, features 180 antennas that beam electrons into the ionosphere for research into radio communications and surveillance. Conspiracy theorists contend the Defense Department uses HAARP, which went into operation in 1997, to conduct mind-control experiments and to modify global weather patterns.

At a May 14 Senate hearing, Murkowski questioned why the Pentagon planned to demolish HAARP this summer to cut costs, and asked whether it was fiscally sound to destroy a $290 million facility when it costs less than 1 percent of that to run it each year.

Comment: It's highly unlikely the defense community has no more interest in this technology. The fact that they are talking about dismantling it just means they already have a newer, better facility elsewhere.

Related...

HAARP and The Canary in the Mine

Mind Control and HAARP

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Comet 2

New Comet: C/2014 N3 (NEOWISE)

Ernesto Guido, Nick Howes & Martino Nicolini
Remanzacco Observatory
Sun, 13 Jul 2014 16:51 UTC
Cbet nr. 3921, issued on 2014, July 13, announces the discovery of a comet (~ magnitude 17) by the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (or NEOWISE; formerly the WISE satellite) team on images taken with the NEOWISE satellite on 2014, July 04.5. The new comet has been designated C/2014 N3 (NEOWISE).

We performed follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 10 unfiltered exposures, 60-sec each, obtained remotely on 2014, July 09.6 from Q62 (iTelescope network - Siding Spring) through a 0.50-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD + focal reducer, shows that this object is a comet: coma about 15" in diameter elongated toward PA 200 (the comet was about +21 degree above the horizon at the moment of the imaging session).

Our confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version)
C/2014 N3 Neowise
© Remanzacco Observatory
M.P.E.C. 2014-N72 assigns the following parabolic orbital elements to comet C/2014 N3: T 2015 Mar. 15.67; e= 1.0; Peri. = 354.49; q = 3.84; Incl.= 61.73.
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Bulb

Five obsolete theories previously widely accepted

C. J. Miozzi
The Escapist
Wed, 02 Jul 2014 03:00 UTC
Once upon a time, scientists actually believed the world was flat, the center of the universe, and composed of four elements. These were not views held by crackpot theorists living on the fringes of society - reputable scholars representing the scientific community held these beliefs. That is, until radical thinkers brought to light new evidence to cause paradigm shifts that would evolve our understanding of the world we inhabit.

Here are five other obsolete theories once commonly accepted by mainstream science.

eyes with beams
© en.wikipedia.org
Eye beam emissions.
1. Emission Theory
How do we see? Our brains process the information held within visible light, which either issues directly from a source or is reflected off objects and "bounced" into our eyes. According to emission theory, our eyes aren't receiving these rays of light - they are emitting them. In short, we see by shooting "sight" beams from our eyes.

Emission theory was first proposed in the fifth century BCE and supported by the likes of renowned scholars Plato, Euclid and Ptolemy. However, there was always a school of thought that opposed this notion and supported ideas more in line with our modern understanding of vision - though that understanding may not be as widespread as the education system would hope. A study conducted in 2002 found that as many as 50% of American college students believe human vision operates on principles in line with emission theory.

Curiously, ray tracing technology in computer graphics is a technique that generates images in a manner very similar to emission theory, by tracing a straight-line path from the camera (or eye) to the objects in front of it and gathering the information needed to construct a picture.
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Info

Why cooperation among sociable weaver birds leads to their astounding nests


wildlifeextra.com
Sat, 12 Jul 2014 09:24 UTC
Image

Social weavers are small birds that live in communes, building joint nests for up to 300 pairs. The nests up can be as large as 25 feet wide, 5 feet high, weighing over one ton, and with an individual room for every couple. One known colony is over 100 years old.
A new insight into one of the biggest questions in science - why some animals, including humans, work together to maintain a common good - has been achieved by scientists at the University of Sheffield.

Sociable weavers, a highly gregarious and co-operative breeding bird from the savannahs of southern Africa, build the largest nests of any bird, often weighing tonnes and lasting for decades, and housing colonies of up to several hundred birds.

The massive nests consist of individual nest chambers which are used throughout the year for breeding and roosting and are embedded within a communal thatch.

The thatch covering the nest doesn't originate from individual chamber building but requires separate investment from colony members to build and maintain it.
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Moon

Supermoon makes its way over Earth this weekend


RT
Fri, 11 Jul 2014 20:29 UTC
Image
© Reuters/Mike Blake
Americans with their eyes to the sky this weekend could get a chance to see Earth's moon as it rarely appears. Starting Friday evening, a so-called "supermoon" will be viewable across the United States.

There will be a full moon in the sky starting Friday night and into early Saturday, and this time around the super-sized satellite will look larger than usual. When a full moon occurs at the same time that its orbit brings it closest to the Earth, as expected this weekend, onlookers are greeted with what scientists at NASA call a "supermoon."

Five supermoons are expected in all during the course of 2014, and two of them already happened in the month of January. Beginning Friday evening, however, Americans will have their third chance this year to see a full moon coincide as the satellite's orbit reaches "perigee" (or "near earth").

Scientists expect that this weekend's full moon will reach perigee at around 222,611 miles away from Earth - around 30,000 miles closer than the moon will be when it's at its furthest this year.
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Bacon n Eggs

Food influences body clock and may ease jet lag

Azeen Ghorayshi
New Scientist
Fri, 11 Jul 2014 12:04 UTC
healthy food bacon fat
Food could be a new weapon in shaking off the effects of jet lag after research in mice showed that the insulin released as a result of eating can be a key factor in restoring a disrupted body clock.

Miho Sato and her colleagues at The Research Institute for Time Studies at Yamaguchi University in Japan did experiments in mice and tissue cultures to show, for the first time, that increases in insulin affect circadian rhythms. These daily rhythms affect alertness, sleep patterns, and mediate many other physiological processes.

Your biological clock is regulated by two broad factors: first, the central rhythm is reset daily by light, as sensory input from the eyes is processed by a small part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

The rise and fall of hormones linked to sleep, for example, match this rhythm. But circadian rhythms are also present in peripheral "clocks" in a wide range of cell types in the body. Some of these can be influenced by food.

Sato demonstrated the role of insulin by shifting the peripheral body clock in the livers of mice by feeding them only at night. They then split the mice into two groups, supressed insulin levels in one group, and returned all the mice to daytime feeding. Four days later, the livers of the non-supressed mice had readjusted to a normal daily rhythm, as revealed by the daily rise and fall of liver-gene expression. The livers of the insulin-suppressed mice had still not returned to normal.
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Galaxy

Scientists say 80 percent of light in space is missing


RT
Thu, 10 Jul 2014 20:26 UTC
Image
© AFP/NASA
Scientists now believe that a tremendous amount of light that would otherwise be illuminating our universe is mysteriously absent.

How much light exactly? According to new research conducted by a team of international scientists and funded in part by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Ahmanson Foundation, around 80 percent of the universe's light is nowhere to be found.

"It's as if you're in a big, brightly lit room, but you look around and see only a few 40-watt lightbulbs," astronomer Juna Kollmeier - a Carnegie Institution for Science professor and the lead author of the new study on missing light said in a statement this week. "Where is all that light coming from? It's missing from our census."

Kollmeier and company have published their research in the latest edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and there they explain further why they have reason to believe that the universe is missing around 400 percent of its light.
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Question

Stem cell patient grows nose on her back eight years after surgeons inject cells

Emily Payne
The Daily Mail, UK
Wed, 09 Jul 2014 12:55 UTC
Image
  • Unnamed woman had tissue from her nose implanted in her spine in the hope the cells would help repair nerve damage causing paralysis
  • Treatment failed and woman complained of increasing pain in the area
  • Eight years later, a 3cm growth made of nasal tissue and bones appeared
A woman has developed a nose-like growth eight years after a stem cell treatment to cure her paralysis failed.

At the Hospital de Egas Moniz in Lisbon, Portugal, the unnamed woman, a U.S. citizen, had tissue from her nose implanted in her spine. Doctors hoped the cells would develop into neural cells and help repair the nerve damage to the woman's spine. But the treatment failed.

However, last year, eight years after the stem cell operation, the woman, then 28, complained of increasing pain in the area. Doctors discovered a three-centimetre-long growth, which was found to be mainly nasal tissue, as well as bits of bone and nerve branches that had not connected with the spinal nerves.
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