Researchers have for the first time been able to explain the origin of the mysterious honeycomb patterns found in salt deserts across the world.
Salt deserts are among the most extreme and inhospitable places on the planet and their bizarre and other-worldly polygon-shaped structures attract hundreds of thousands of tourists every year.

They occur in areas including the Badwater Basin of Death Valley in California and Salar de Uyuni in Chile, where they served as a backdrop for the desert planet Crait in 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'.

Now a team involving researchers at Nottingham Trent University and TU Graz in Austria has been able to explain the origin of these patterns and their iconic shape and size.

Previously, it was suspected that the salt crust of the desert dries out and cracks form, around which the patterns grow. Another hypothesis suggested that the salt crust grows continuously and bends due to lack of space, forming the patterns.

Neither of these explanations, however, account for the consistent size - always one to two metres - and the honeycomb shape.

A more plausible explanation has now been provided by researchers, who describe how convection of saline water in the subsurface is responsible for the honeycomb-like formation of the salt patterns.

The constant size of the features and the speed with which the patterns grow can also be attributed to this, they say.

In a Brooklyn lab stuffed with 3D printers and a makeshift pickleball court, employees at a brain interface startup called Synchron are working on technology designed to transform daily life for people with paralysis.

The Synchron Switch is implanted through the blood vessels to allow people with no or very limited physical mobility to operate technology such as cursors and smart home devices using their mind. So far, the nascent technology has been used on three patients in the U.S. and four in Australia.

Synchron CEO Tom Oxley told CNBC in an interview.:

"I've seen moments between patient and partner, or patient and spouse, where it's incredibly joyful and empowering to have regained an ability to be a little bit more independent than before. It helps them engage in ways that we take for granted."

Founded in 2012, Synchron is part of the burgeoning brain-computer interface, or BCI, industry. A BCI is a system that deciphers brain signals and translates them into commands for external technologies. Perhaps the best-known name in the space is Neuralink, thanks to the high profile of founder Elon Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter.

Researchers at the University of Jena and the German Electron Synchrotron DESY solve a 60-year-old mystery with a high-pressure study.
For the first time, researchers have recorded live and in atomic detail what happens to the material in an asteroid impact. The team of Falko Langenhorst from the University of Jena and Hanns-Peter Liermann from DESY simulated an asteroid impact with the mineral quartz in the lab and pursued it in slow motion in a diamond anvil cell, while monitoring it with DESY's X-ray source PETRA III. The observation reveals an intermediate state in quartz that solves a decades-old mystery about the formation of characteristic lamellae in material hit by an asteroid. Quartz is ubiquitous on the Earth's surface, and is, for example, the major constituent of sand. The analysis helps to better understand traces of past impacts, and may also have significance for entirely different materials. The researchers present their findings in the journal Nature Communications.

Asteroid impacts are catastrophic events that create huge craters and sometimes melt parts of Earth's berock. "Nevertheless, craters are often difficult to detect on Earth, because erosion, weathering and plate tectonics cause them to disappear over millions of years," Langenhorst explains. Therefore, minerals that undergo characteristic changes due to the force of the impact often serve as evidence of an impact. For example, quartz sand (which chemically is silicon dioxide, SiO₂) is gradually transformed into glass by such an impact, with the quartz grains then being crisscrossed by microscopic lamellae. This structure can only be explored in detail under an electron microscope. It can be seen in material from the relatively recent and prominent Barringer crater in Arizona, USA, for example.

"For more than 60 years, these lamellar structures have served as an indicator of an asteroid impact, but no one knew until now how this structure was formed in the first place," Liermann says. "We have now solved this decades-old mystery."

To do so, the researchers had spent years modifying and advancing techniques that allow materials to be studied under high pressure in the lab. In these experiments, samples are usually compressed between two small diamond anvils in a so-called diamond anvil cell (DAC). It allows extreme pressures - as prevalent in Earth's interior or in an asteroid impact - to be generated in a controlled manner.

There is a mystery in our solar system surrounding the orbits of Kuiper belt objects. More than one trillion icy objects smaller than our moon orbit the sun in a donut-shaped ring beyond Neptune. Oddly, a cluster of outer Kuiper belt objects all ellipse in a similar way, as though being gravitationally pulled in one direction. The leading hypothesis is that an unseen object, five to 10 times the mass of Earth, is causing the pulling effect. The mystery object has been dubbed Planet 9.

Observations have yet to discover the source of this gravity from the usual optical, microwave, infrared or electromagnetic wave spectrums, leading to speculation that it could be a rogue planet core, a small black hole, or even a cluster of dark matter. Any of these would make the object extremely difficult, if not impossible, to detect.

Curled up on the sofa, you watch your dog snoozing nearby. Is he dreaming of the bowl of biscuits he gobbled down? Or could he be picturing the great odyssey of his forbearers, who roamed in packs across the vast steppes during the last Ice Age in search for reindeer?

The story of the ancestral ties between the dog and the wolf is one of the most exciting evolutionary sagas in humanity's history. Not only does it invite us to examine our relationship with nature, but it also brings us back to the question of who we are as humans.

Recent advances in genetics are starting to provide key details that can help us map out the interconnected history of our loyal pets and the proud canine predators that have been gradually repopulating our countries' hinterlands.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Six massive galaxies discovered in the early universe are upending what scientists previously understood about the origins of galaxies in the universe.

"These objects are way more massive​ than anyone expected," said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, who modeled light from these galaxies. "We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we've discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe."

Using the first dataset released from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the international team of scientists discovered objects as mature as the Milky Way when the universe was only 3% of its current age, about 500-700 million years after the Big Bang. The telescope is equipped with infrared-sensing instruments capable of detecting light that was emitted by the most ancient stars and galaxies. Essentially, the telescope allows scientists to see back in time roughly 13.5 billion years, near the beginning of the universe as we know it, Leja explained.

"This is our first glimpse back this far, so it's important that we keep an open mind about what we are seeing," Leja said. "While the data indicates they are likely galaxies, I think there is a real possibility that a few of these objects turn out to be obscured supermassive black holes. Regardless, the amount of mass we discovered means that the known mass in stars at this period of our universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought. Even if we cut the sample in half, this is still an astounding change."

With the aim of creating an appealing brand, the name of the " Domaine du Météore " winery near the town of Béziers in Southern France points to a local peculiar: one of its vineyards lies in a round, 200-metre-wide depression that resembles an impact crater. By means of rock and soil analyzes, scientists led by cosmochemist Professor Frank Brenker from Goethe University Frankfurt have now established that the crater was indeed once formed by the impact of an iron-nickel meteorite. In doing so, they have disproved a scientific opinion almost 60 years old, because of which the crater was never examined more closely from a geological perspective.

Countless meteorites have struck Earth in the past and shaped the history of our planet. It is assumed, for example, that meteorites brought with them a large part of its water. The extinction of the dinosaurs might also have been triggered by the impact of a very large meteorite.

Meteorite craters which are still visible today are rare because most traces of the celestial bodies have long since disappeared again. This is due to erosion and shifting processes in Earth's crust, known as plate tectonics. The "Earth Impact Database" lists just 190 such craters worldwide. In the whole of Western Europe, only three were previously known: Rochechouart in Aquitaine, France, the Nördlinger Ries between the Swabian Alb and the Franconian Jura, and the Steinheim Basin near Heidenheim in Baden-Württemberg (both in Germany ). Thanks to millions of years of erosion, however, for laypersons the three impact craters are hardly recognizable as such.

According to current systematic theory, everyone reading this right now belongs to the taxonomic category Deuterostomia. This refers to the "second opening": the group was originally defined with respect to the embryological appearance of the anus (first opening) versus mouth (second opening), a trait no longer considered diagnostic. Deuterostomia is still around as a systematic grouping, however, and it is showing signs of strain. At present, three phyla belong to Deuterostomia: chordates (that's you), echinoderms (e.g., sea urchins), and hemichordates (acorn worms).

A Long-Standing Mystery

The origins of Deuterostomia represent a long-standing mystery:

Deuterostomes are the major division of animal life which includes sea stars, acorn worms, and humans, among a wide variety of ecologically and morphologically disparate taxa. However, their early evolution is poorly understood, due in part to their disparity, which makes identifying commonalities difficult, as well as their relatively poor early fossil record. [Emphasis added.]

The catastrophisation of natural events and weather is relentless across the mainstream media as populations continue to be nudged towards an elitist command-and-control Net Zero future. The BBC recently copied a headline from the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) claiming Antarctica sea ice had hit a "new record low". Inexplicably missing from the story was the later observation from the NSIDC that since accurate satellite records began in 1979, the trend in the minimum ice extent is "near zero". Any loss was said to be "not statistically significant".

To be fair to the writer, BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos, he did report later in the story that scientists consider the behaviour of Antarctica sea ice to be a "complicated phenomenon which cannot simply be ascribed to climate change". Of course, as regular Daily Sceptic readers are aware, the Antarctic is a difficult hunting ground for climate catastrophists since over the last seven decades there has been little or no warming over large areas of the continent.

The red streaks crisscrossing the surface of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, are striking. Scientists suspect it is a frozen mixture of water and salts, but its chemical signature is mysterious because it matches no known substance on Earth.

An international team led by the University of Washington may have solved the puzzle with the discovery of a new type of solid crystal that forms when water and table salt combine in cold and high-pressure conditions. Researchers believe the new substance created in a lab on Earth could form at the surface and bottom of these worlds' deep oceans.

The study, published the week of Feb. 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, announces a new combination for two of Earth's most common substances: water and sodium chloride, or table salt.

"It's rare nowadays to have fundamental discoveries in science," said lead author Baptiste Journaux, a UW acting assistant professor of Earth and space sciences. "Salt and water are very well known at Earth conditions. But beyond that, we're totally in the dark. And now we have these planetary objects that probably have compounds that are very familiar to us, but at very exotic conditions. We have to redo all the fundamental mineralogical science that people did in the 1800s, but at high pressure and low temperature. It is an exciting time."