Science & TechnologyS


Oil Well

What happens if we ditch Fossil Fuels?

Scottie
ScottiesTech.Info
Tue, 07 Feb 2023 10:34 UTC
Scottie ditch fossil fuels
These days, it's all about the green, reduced carbon footprint.

While that all sounds nice, what would actually happen if we just ditched fossil fuels - coal, oil, and gas - overnight?

It turns out it's WAY more complicated than you might think...

Join me for a deep dive into the world of petrochemicals!
Read More...
Satellite

NASA's Webb Telescope spots new asteroid 'completely unexpectedly'

Amanda Kooser
CNET
Mon, 06 Feb 2023 20:01 UTC
asteroid JWST discover
© NASA, ESA, CSA, Martin Kornmesser (ESA), Serge Brunier (ESO), N. Bartmann (ESA/Webb)The asteroid Webb spotted is small in asteroid terms, but in Earth terms it works out to be about the size of the Colosseum in Rome.
The space rock is small for an asteroid, but it's still the size of the Colosseum in Rome.

The James Webb Space Telescope has been wowing us with observations of galaxies, nebulas and exoplanets, but it's now spotted something much, much smaller: a dainty, previously unknown asteroid. The discovery came as a serendipitous surprise for astronomers.

A team of European astronomers found the asteroid in data collected by Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). "The object is likely the smallest observed to date by Webb and may be an example of an object measuring under 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) in length within the main asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter," NASA and the European Space Agency said in a statement on Monday.

The asteroid is estimated to be between 300 and 650 feet (100 and 200 meters) in length, or roughly the size of the Colosseum in Rome.
Read More...
Sun

The Sun is alive, and why that matters

Charles Eisenstein
charleseisenstein.substack.com
Sun, 05 Feb 2023 18:14 UTC
Solar Dynamics Observatory Sun
© NASA/SDOA NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory image of the sun.
When the modern mind attempts to grapple with animistic concepts like "the sun is alive," the first impulse is to dismiss them as a superstitious fancy. Thankfully, many of us recognize the culturally imperialistic tone of that dismissal. We may also be in touch with our own fundamental indigenous knowledge, however deeply buried it may be under layers of scientific education, that the sun is indeed alive. We want somehow to accept that without denying what science has taught us: that the sun is a burning ball of gas, a nuclear furnace, and couldn't possibly be alive.

One way to accommodate both is to make aliveness into an extra-material property, a spirit that infuses all things. The sun is alive because everything is alive. But to do so is to subtly capitulate to the worldview that holds everything dead, by making aliveness an added property, independent of anything material. It is a version of Cartesian dualism.

Here I will offer another, much more radical alternative. It is an exhilarating alternative. It is a homecoming. It may guide human relations with life generally.
Read More...
Snowflake Cold

Oops. Scientists discover that higher carbon dioxide levels are COOLING many parts of the planet by increasing vegetation growth

Chris Morrison
The Daily Sceptic
Sun, 05 Feb 2023 18:29 UTC
snow on car message global cooling
© Getty
Fascinating evidence has been published that shows the recent increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has caused some cooling over large areas of the planet, and significant and widespread increases in vegetation. This plant boost, which has alleviated famine and hunger and helped send global food production soaring in recent decades, was found to have led to a global cooling trend of -0.018C a decade. There are significant margins of error, up and down, but this is said to have offset ~4.6% of global warming. However, in the case of India and China it has offset ~ 39.4% and ~19% respectively.

In a paper published last month, 11 Chinese climate scientists note that the Earth has experienced "widespread vegetation greening" since the 1980s due to CO2 fertilisation effects. Such greening could mitigate global warming "by triggering negative biochemical feedback to the climate system". The darker green vegetation absorbs more of the sun's heat, claim the scientists, while processes involving water evaporation or heat convection between the surface and the atmosphere also depress local temperatures.
Read More...
Headphones

No one can stay in the 'quietest room in the world' for more than an hour


CF.org
Sat, 04 Feb 2023 18:02 UTC
Microsoft Anechoic Chamber
© MicrosoftInside Microsoft's Anechoic Chamber
Silence is golden — unless you find yourself in the quietest room in the world.

In 2015, Microsoft built what is now in the Guinness Book of World Records as the quietest place on the planet.

Known as the anechoic chamber at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, "ultra-sensitive tests" performed in 2015 gave an average background noise reading of -20.35 dBA (decibels A-weighted — a measurement of the sound pressure level).

Only very few people have been able to withstand being in the room for a long period of time — at most an hour.
Read More...
Mars

Astronomers find rare Earth-mass rocky planet suitable for the search for signs of life

Max Planck Society
Phys.org
Fri, 03 Feb 2023 06:37 UTC
rocky exo-planet
© NASA/Ames Research Center/Daniel RutterArtist’s conception of a rocky Earth-mass exoplanet like Wolf 1069 b orbiting a red dwarf star. If the planet had retained its atmosphere, chances are high that it would feature liquid water and habitable conditions over a wide area of its dayside.
A newly discovered exoplanet could be worth searching for signs of life. Analyses by a team led by astronomer Diana Kossakowski of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy describe a planet that orbits its home star, the red dwarf Wolf 1069, in the habitable zone.

This zone includes distances around the star for which liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet. In addition, the planet named Wolf 1069 b has an Earth-like mass. Very likely, this planet is a rocky planet that may also have an atmosphere. This makes the planet one of the few promising targets to search for signs of life-friendly conditions and biosignatures.

When astronomers search for planets outside our solar system, they are particularly interested in Earth-like planets. Of the more than 5,000 exoplanets they have discovered so far, only about a dozen have an Earth-like mass and populate the habitable zone, the range in a planetary system where water can maintain its liquid form on the planet's surface. With Wolf 1069 b, the number of such exoplanets on which life could have evolved has increased by one candidate.
Read More...
Blue Planet

'Ancient humans had same sense of smell, but different sensitivities' - study

Duke University
Phys.org
Sun, 05 Feb 2023 22:49 UTC
early human
© C0 Public Domain
If you had the grooming habits of a Neanderthal, perhaps it's a good thing your nose wasn't as sensitive to urine and sweat as a modern human's.

And if you lived the hunting and gathering lifestyle of a Denisovan on the Asian steppes, your strong nose for energy-rich honey was almost certainly an advantage.

Though we can't really know what these two extinct human species perceived or preferred to eat, a new study from Duke University scientists has figured out a bit more about what they might have been able to smell.


Comment: That's not quite accurate, because two Neanderthal studies revealed that their bones showed signs of being fresh meat eaters (rather than scavenging) and that they hunted elephant that were bigger than the woolly mammoth.


Using a technique they developed that allows researchers to test smell sensitivity on odor receptors grown in a lab dish, researchers Claire de March of CNRS Paris Saclay University and Hiroaki Matsunami of Duke University were able to compare the scents-abilities of three kinds of humans. Their work appeared Dec. 28 in the open access journal iScience.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Info

The moon has a hidden tidal force that pulls on Earth's magnetosphere, new study reveals

Harry Baker
Live Science
Fri, 03 Feb 2023 21:50 UTC
Researchers have detected fluctuations in Earth's magnetosphere created by the same tidal forces that the moon exerts on the oceans.

moon's impact on ocean tides
© Chinese Academy of SciencesAn illustration comparing the moon's impact on ocean tides (blue) with its impact on plasmasphere tides (orange).

The moon exerts a previously unknown tidal force on the "plasma ocean" surrounding Earth's upper atmosphere, creating fluctuations that are similar to the tides in the oceans, a new study suggests.

In the study, published Jan. 26 in the journal Nature Physics, scientists used more than 40 years of data collected by satellites to track the minute changes in the shape of the plasmasphere, the inner region of Earth's magnetosphere, which shields our planet from solar storms and other types of high-energy particles.

The plasmasphere is a roughly doughnut-shaped blob of cool plasma that sits on top of Earth's magnetic field lines, just above the ionosphere, the electrically charged part of the upper atmosphere. The plasma, or ionized gas, in the plasmasphere is denser than the plasma in the outer regions of the magnetosphere, which causes it to sink to the bottom of the magnetosphere. The boundary between this dense sunken plasma and the rest of the magnetosphere is known as the plasmapause.

"Given its cold, dense plasma properties, the plasmasphere can be regarded as a 'plasma ocean,' and the plasmapause represents the 'surface' of this ocean," the researchers wrote in the paper. The moon's gravitational pull can distort this "ocean," causing its surface to rise and fall like the ocean tides.
Read More...
Microscope 1

319-million-year-old fish preserves the earliest fossilized brain of a vertebrate animal


Science Daily
Wed, 01 Feb 2023 17:51 UTC
Coccocephalus wildi oldest brain vertebrate
© Marcio L. CastroCoccocephalus wildi has been discovered to have the oldest evidence of a brain in a vertebrate species
The CT-scanned skull of a 319-million-year-old fossilized fish, pulled from a coal mine in England more than a century ago, has revealed the oldest example of a well-preserved vertebrate brain.

The brain and its cranial nerves are roughly an inch long and belong to an extinct bluegill-size fish. The discovery opens a window into the neural anatomy and early evolution of the major group of fishes alive today, the ray-finned fishes, according to the authors of a University of Michigan-led study scheduled for publication Feb. 1 in Nature.

The serendipitous find also provides insights into the preservation of soft parts in fossils of backboned animals. Most of the animal fossils in museum collections were formed from hard body parts such as bones, teeth and shells.
Read More...
Galaxy

New map of the universe's matter reveals a possible hole in our understanding of the cosmos

Ben Turner
Live Science
Thu, 02 Feb 2023 16:52 UTC
cosmic web
© Volker Springel (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics) et al.An artist’s impression of the cosmic web. It looks like a vast cobweb-like structure or mostly purple and some orange filaments on a black background.
Scientists have made one of the most precise maps of the universe's matter, and it shows that something may be missing in our best model of the cosmos.

Created by pooling data from two telescopes that observe different types of light, the new map revealed that the universe is less "clumpy" than previous models predicted — a potential sign that the vast cosmic web that connects galaxies is less understood than scientists thought.

According to our current understanding, the cosmic web is a gigantic network of crisscrossing celestial superhighways paved with hydrogen gas and dark matter. Taking shape in the chaotic aftermath of the Big Bang, the web's tendrils formed as clumps from the roiling broth of the young universe; where multiple strands of the web intersected, galaxies eventually formed. But the new map, published Jan. 31 as three separate studies in the journal Physical Review D, shows that in many parts of the universe, matter is less clumped together and more evenly spread out than theory predicts it should be.
Read More...