Science & TechnologyS


Pi

Back to the drawing board: Higgs boson teaches that Universe should have ceased to exist


RT
Tue, 24 Jun 2014 17:48 UTC
CERN
© Reuters / Denis Balibouse
A technician stands near equipment of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experience at the Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the French village of Cessy near Geneva in Switzerland.
A refitted Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being readied to delve deeper into the secrets of the Universe's structure, a new British scientists' model considering Higgs boson data claims the Universe should have collapsed immediately after the Big Bang.

Confirmation of the Higgs boson's existence in July 2012 did not actually add clarity to the general picture of our Universe after all. The information acquired raised new, even more complex, questions.

Physicists at King's College in London claim they have recreated the conditions following the Big Bang, but this time using the new information acquired with the help of the LHC. British scientists maintain now that the new data related to the so-called 'God particle' suggests the universe should have expanded excessively fast after the Big Bang and collapsed billions of years ago.

"During the early universe, we expected cosmic inflation - this is a rapid expansion of the universe right after the Big Bang," co-author of the King's College study Robert Hogan, a Ph.D. student in physics, told Live Science. "This expansion causes lots of stuff to shake around, and if we shake it too much, we could go into this new energy space, which could cause the universe to collapse."

Comment: Scientists are a stubborn bunch, no? No matter how much evidence directly contradicts their theories, they stick to 'em.

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Moon

Titan may be older than Saturn, a new study suggests

Shannon Hall
Universe Today
Tue, 24 Jun 2014 14:26 UTC
Titan
© NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science InstituteTitan’s atmosphere makes Saturn’s largest moon look like a fuzzy orange ball.
It's well accepted that moons form after planets. In fact, only a few months ago, astronomers spotted a new moon forming deep within Saturn's rings, 4.5 billion years after the planet initially formed.

But new research suggests Saturn's icy moon Titan - famous for its rivers and lakes of liquid methane - may have formed before its parent planet, contradicting the theory that Titan formed within the warm disk surrounding an infant Saturn.

A combined NASA and ESA-funded study has found firm evidence that the nitrogen in Titan's atmosphere originated in conditions similar to the cold birthplace of the most ancient comets from the Oort cloud - a spherical shell of icy particles that enshrouds the Solar System.

The hint comes in the form of a ratio. All elements have a certain number of known isotopes - variants of that element with the same number of protons that differ in their number of neutrons. The ratio of one isotope to another isotope is a crucial diagnostic tool.

In planetary atmospheres and surface materials, the amount of one isotope relative to another isotope is closely tied to the conditions under which materials form. Any change in the ratio will allow scientists to deduce an age for that material.

Kathleen Mandt from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and colleagues analyzed the ratio of nitrogen-14 (seven protons and seven neutrons) to nitrogen-15 (seven protons and eight neutrons) in Titan's atmosphere.
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Robot

Japan unveils 'world's first' android newscaster


Breitbart
Tue, 24 Jun 2014 05:53 UTC
Kodomoroid
© Breitbart
Japanese scientists on Tuesday unveiled what they said was the world's first news-reading android, eerily lifelike and possessing a sense of humour to match her perfect language skills.

The adolescent-looking "Kodomoroid" -- an amalgamation of the Japanese word kodomo (child) and "android" -- delivered news of an earthquake and an FBI raid to amazed reporters in Tokyo.

She even poked fun at her creator, telling leading robotics professor Hiroshi Ishiguro: "You're starting to look like a robot!"

The pitch-perfect Kodomoroid was flanked by a grown-up fellow robot, who caught stage fright and fluffed her lines when asked to introduce herself.

"Otonaroid" -- otona meaning adult -- excused herself after a quick reboot, saying: "I'm a little bit nervous."
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Info

Wolves and dogs speak with their eyes

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Tue, 24 Jun 2014 05:00 UTC
Wolf
© Doug Smith, National Park ServiceA wolf rests in the snow at Yellowstone National Park.
Wolves and dogs can communicate using their eyes alone, suggests a new study in the journal PLoS ONE.

The color of the face around the eye, the eye's shape and the color and shape of both the iris and the pupil are all part of the elaborate eye-based communication system, according to the research, which could apply to humans as well.

Sayoko Ueda of the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Kyoto University led the study, which compared these characteristics of the face and eyes among 25 different types of canines.

The researchers identified three basic patterns:

A-type: Both pupil position in the eye outline and eye position in the face are clear.

B-type: Only the eye position is clear.

C-type: Both the pupil and eye position are unclear.

"A-type faces tended to be observed in species living in family groups all year-round, whereas B-type faces tended to be seen in solo/pair-living species," Ueda and colleagues wrote.

Wolves and dogs exemplify the A-type. Humans fit into this category too! Such individuals invite you to look into their eyes. The researchers even suspect that the white of the eye (sclera) evolved, in part, to set off the darker hues of the iris and pupil.
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Cassiopaea

Distant blazar outburst, visible in amateur telescopes

Bob King
Universe Today
Tue, 24 Jun 2014 12:57 UTC
Blazar 3C 454.3
© SDSSThe blazar 3C 454.3 photographed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It’s currently in outburst and nearly as bright as the star just above it. Both are about magnitude +13.6. Click for more information and visuals.
Have an 8-inch or larger telescope? Don't mind staying up late? Excellent. Here's a chance to stare deeper into the known fabric of the universe than perhaps you've ever done before. The violent blazer 3C 454.3 is throwing a fit again, undergoing its most intense outburst seen since 2010. Normally it sleeps away the months around 17th magnitude but every few years, it can brighten up to 5 magnitudes and show in amateur telescopes. While magnitude +13 doesn't sound impressive at first blush, consider that 3C 454.3 lies 7 billion light years from Earth. When light left the quasar, the sun and planets wouldn't have skin in the game for another two billion years.

Blazars form in the the cores of active galaxies where supermassive black holes reside. Matter falling into the black hole spreads into a spinning accretion disk before spiraling down the hole like water down a bathtub drain.

Superheated to millions of degrees by gravitational compression the disk glows brilliantly across the electromagnetic spectrum. Powerful spun-up magnetic fields focus twin beams of light and energetic particles called jets that blast into space perpendicular to the disk.

Blazars and quasars are thought to be one and the same, differing only by the angle at which we see them. Quasars - far more common - are actively- munching supermassive black holes seen from the side, while in blazars - far more rare - we stare directly or nearly so into the jet like looking into the beam of a flashlight
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Bulb

Time-traveling photon simulation connect general relativity to quantum mechanics


RT
Mon, 23 Jun 2014 17:15 UTC
wormhole
© Martin RingbauerSpace-time structure exhibiting closed paths in space (horizontal) and time (vertical). A quantum particle travels through a wormhole back in time and returns to the same location in space and time.
Scientists have simulated time travel by using particles of light acting as quantum particles sent away and then brought back to their original space-time location. This is a huge step toward marrying two of the most irreconcilable theories in physics.

Since traveling all the way to a black hole to see if an object you're holding would bend, break or put itself back together in inexplicable ways is a bit of a trek, scientists have decided to find a point of convergence between general relativity and quantum mechanics in lab conditions, and they achieved success.

Australian researchers from the UQ's School of Mathematics and Physics wanted to plug the holes in the discrepancies that exist between two of our most commonly accepted physics theories, which is no easy task: on the one hand, you have Einstein's theory of general relativity, which predicts the behavior of massive objects like planets and galaxies; but on the other, you have something whose laws completely clash with Einstein's - and that is the theory of quantum mechanics, which describes our world at the molecular level. And this is where things get interesting: we still have no concrete idea of all the principles of movement and interaction that underpin this theory.

Natural laws of space and time simply break down there.

The light particles used in the study are known as photons, and in this University of Queensland study, they stood in for actual quantum particles for the purpose of finding out how they behaved while moving through space and time.
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Info

The coolest known white dwarf detected

Shannon Hall
Universe Today
Mon, 23 Jun 2014 16:58 UTC
White Dwarf
© B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)An artist’s conception of a white dwarf star in orbit with pulsar PSR J2222-0137.
We live in a vast, dark Universe, which makes the smallest and coolest objects extremely difficult to detect, save for a stroke of luck. Often times this luck comes in the form of a companion. Take, for example, the first exoplanet detected due to its orbit around a pulsar - a rapidly spinning neutron star.

A team of researchers using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Green Bank Telescope and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), as well as other observatories have repeated the story, detecting an object in orbit around a distant pulsar. Except this time it's the coldest, faintest white dwarf ever detected. So cool, in fact, its carbon has crystallized.

The punch line is this: with the help of a pulsar, astronomers have detected an Earth-size diamond in the sky.

"It's a really remarkable object," said lead author David Kaplan from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in a press release. "These things should be out there, but because they are so dim they are very hard to find."
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Beaker

'Molecular time travel' experiments show evolution depends on non-adaptive chance mutations


Science Daily
Wed, 18 Jun 2014 15:50 UTC
DNA, DNS Strang
© iStock
Chance events may profoundly shape history. What if Franz Ferdinand's driver had not taken a wrong turn, bringing the Duke face to face with his assassin? Would World War I still have been fought? Would Hitler have risen to power decades later?

Historians can only speculate on what might have been, but a team of evolutionary biologists studying ancient proteins has turned speculation into experiment. They resurrected an ancient ancestor of an important human protein as it existed hundreds of millions of years ago and then used biochemical methods to generate and characterize a huge number of alternative histories that could have ensued from that ancient starting point.

Tracing these alternative evolutionary paths, the researchers discovered that the protein - the cellular receptor for the stress hormone cortisol - could not have evolved its modern-day function unless two extremely unlikely mutations happened to evolve first. These "permissive" mutations had no effect on the protein's function, but without them the protein could not tolerate the later mutations that caused it to evolve its sensitivity to cortisol. In screening thousands of alternative histories, the researchers found no alternative permissive mutations that could have allowed the protein's modern-day form to evolve. The researchers describe their findings June 16, online in Nature.

"This very important protein exists only because of a twist of fate," said study senior author Joe Thornton, PhD, professor of ecology & evolution and human genetics at the University of Chicago. "If our results are general - and we think they probably are - then many of our body's systems work as they do because of very unlikely chance events that happened in our deep evolutionary past," he added.

Comment: In other words, evolution depends on events that are extremely unlikely to occur: so unlikely that the laws of chance are weighted strongly against them occuring. Not only that, the steps in between the functional versions of the genes are non-adaptive. This means they serve no survival function. It seems the researchers involved are falling victim to the detective's curse: the clue to the solution is right under their noses, but they're focusing on other details. Intelligence is the only property of the universe that can reliably hit an extremely rare target. For a better understanding of just how unlikely these types of mutations are, and why we need to add intelligence into the evolutionary equation, see Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell.

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Mars

Researchers discover new type of dust in Mars' atmosphere

Brett Smith
RedOrbit
Mon, 23 Jun 2014 14:53 UTC
Mars Atmosphere
© Cristiano Ribeiro/Thinkstock
Using ultraviolet and infrared imaging techniques, scientists have discovered that the Martian atmosphere contains particulate matter in two distinct sizes, according to a new report published in the journal Icarus.

In the study, a team of Russian and French scientists observed the transition of Mars' northern hemisphere into summer. During this transitional phase, the Sun's rays poke through the Martian atmosphere and the spectrometer on board the European Space Agency's orbital station Mars Express was able to capture just how solar radiation interacts with particulates high above Mars.

The European researchers discovered that the dust in the Martian atmosphere isn't homogenous. Rather, there are two distinct types. The first type is rougher and includes both water-ice grains and slightly smaller airborne dust. The second type of particulate is finer, and is an aerosol consisting of much smaller particles.

The researchers noted that the density quantity of both types is not that high. Even in the densest layers of the planet's atmosphere at altitudes of 12 to 18 miles there are approximately three particles of the finer mode per cubic meter, and less than two particles of the coarser mode per one cubic meter.

The study team noted that when looking at what is considered normal on Earth, Martian air is fairly clean, adding that most rooms are dustier. However, aerosols are critical because they have an essential role in developing the planet's climate.
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Cloud Lightning

A new map shows lightning strikes around the world in real time

George Dvorsky
io9.com
Mon, 23 Jun 2014 13:43 UTC
Image
A small German group called Blitzortung has developed a crowd-sourced map that shows real-time lightning strikes around the world.

The maps are driven by a network of volunteers who have set up a $275 detection kit consisting of an antenna system, amplifier, and controller. Each station can detect radio signals from a lightning strike and transmit the exact time and location to the Blitzortung servers. Remarkably, the detection stations don't have to be close to the lightning strike; a receiving station, say in New York, can still pick up lightning strikes in the Caribbean (low frequency RF waves can travel thousands of miles).

The realtime maps display five main global regions (Europe, Oceania, North America, Asia, and South America), and six local regions (Texas, Florida, New York, Minnesota, California, and the Dominican Republic).

The aim of the project is to establish a low budget lightning location network with a high number of stations. Go here if you're interested in covering your area.

Check it out here.
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