Science & TechnologyS


Compass

When tectonic plates move, what happens to Google Maps?

George Musser
Nautilus
Thu, 23 Jan 2020 15:15 UTC
google maps smartphone
© AngieYeoh / Shutterstock
Earth's tremors can tweak your GPS coordinates.

As a writer on physics, I'm always seeking new metaphors for understanding Einstein's general theory of relativity, and while working on my last book, Spooky Action at a Distance, I thought I'd compare the warping of space and time to the motion of Earth's tectonic plates. Einstein explained gravity as the bending of spacetime. A well-hit baseball arcs through the air to an outfielder's glove because it is following the contours of spacetime, which the planet's mass has resculpted. The mutability of spacetime also means that nothing in the universe has a fixed position, since the framework by which position is defined is fluid. And something like that is also true of Earth's surface. Nothing on the ground has fixed coordinates because the landscape is ever-shifting.

But then it struck me: If nothing has fixed coordinates, then how do Google Maps, car nav systems, and all the other mapping services get you where you're going? Presumably they must keep updating the coordinates of places, but how? I figured I'd Google the answer quickly and get back to Einstein, yet a search turned up remarkably little on the subject. So, as happens distressingly often in my life, what I thought would take 30 seconds ended up consuming several days. I discovered a sizable infrastructure of geographers, geologists, and geodesists dedicated to ensuring that maps are accurate. But they are always a step behind the restless landscape. Geologic activity can create significant errors in the maps on your screens.
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Binoculars

Russia's Rezonans-NE Radar, capable of tracking hypersonic and stealth targets

Drago Bosnic
FRN
Fri, 18 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC
Rezonans system
© Communal News
Another significant piece of military equipment showcased during the Army-2020 forum in Moscow is the Rezonans-NE radar. The radar system is capable of detecting and tracking the most complex types of air targets. It is also able to detect stealth aircraft, mini-UAVs and hypersonic targets.

The station's capabilities are greatly enhanced by the phased array antenna. In addition, the locator can automatically exchange information with other radars in automatic mode. The range of Rezonans-NE is also impressive - 1100 km, and it is able to provide target designation for air defense systems, at a distance of over 600 km.

The radar can operate in adverse climate conditions, in temperatures ranging from -50 to +60 degrees Celsius. Currently, the radar system is deployed in the Arctic, and it contains elements of artificial intelligence. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the station entered service with Russia's Northern Fleet at the end of 2018.
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Fireball 2

Two asteroids set to cross Earth's orbit just hours apart as another Great Pyramid-sized space rock barrels our way


RT
Sat, 19 Sep 2020 17:16 UTC
AsteroidEarth
© Pixabay/urikyo33
Two 100-meter-wide asteroids are set to cross Earth's orbit within hours of each other in the coming days as another space rock, the size of ancient Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza, careens towards our planet.

NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which tracks asteroids and comets that will come close to Earth, has confirmed that it is monitoring two asteroids that are due to hurtle past on Friday, September 25. Both bodies are classed as Apollo asteroids, meaning they will cross Earth's orbit as they fly through space.

The first asteroid, which is named 2020 RO, is estimated to be up to 130 meters wide. It will fly past on September 25 at 00:10 EST at a speed of 11.84km per second. The second asteroid, named 2020 SM, is expected to sail past Earth later that day, at a speed of 18.43 km per second. The slightly smaller space rock is estimated to measure up to 100 meters in diameter.

Although both asteroids are classed as near-Earth objects (NEOs) they are forecast to sail safely past our planet, despite coming into contact with its orbit. They were both discovered this year.

On September 29, a giant 200-meter-wide asteroid will silently pass Earth at a distance of around 1.78 million miles. The enormous visitor is comparable in size to Ancient Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza.

Comment: See also: Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls

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Cassiopaea

Unique supernova explosion discovered by researchers


Carnegie Science
Thu, 10 Sep 2020 22:49 UTC
Blue Snowball
© Image is courtesy of Eric HsiaoAn image of the "Blue Snowball" planetary nebula taken with the Florida State University Observatory. The supernova LSQ14fmg exploded in a system similar to this, with a central star losing a copious amount of mass through a stellar wind. When the mass loss abruptly stopped, it created a shell of material surrounding the star.
Pasadena, CA — An unusual stellar explosion is shining new light on the origins of a specific subgroup of Type Ia supernovae.

Called LSQ14fmg, the exploding star exhibits certain characteristics that are unlike any other supernova. For example, its brightness increases at an extremely slow rate compared to other Type Ia supernovae. Despite this, it is also one of the brightest explosions in its class.

"Type Ia supernovae are violent, fantastically bright explosions of a white dwarf — the remnant of a star that has exhausted its nuclear fuel — which is part of a binary system with another star," said Carnegie astronomer Mark Phillips, an expert in these phenomena.

While the precise details of the explosion are still unknown, it is believed to be triggered when the white dwarf approaches a critical mass. However, some Type Ia supernovae, such as LSQ14fmg, are mysteriously able to exceed this mass before exploding. Astronomers call them "super-Chandrasekhar" supernovae after the scientist who first discovered this association between a white dwarf's mass and its stability.

Led by Florida State University's Eric Hsiao (a former Carnegie Observatories postdoc), the research team made a surprising discovery about the other half of the two-star system of which LSQ14fmg's progenitor was a part. Their findings, which could explain the existence of "super-Chandrasekhar" supernovae, are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

"This was a truly unique and strange event, and our explanation for it is equally interesting," said Hsiao.
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Stock Up

Rising in the north, setting in the south: Covid-19 in the USA


InProportion2
Fri, 11 Sep 2020 21:18 UTC
covid usa graph
US covid-19 deaths have risen, peaked and fallen very differently from those of large Western European countries.

What is causing this difference and what can we learn from it?

Why is the US different?

In the larger countries of Western Europe the scale of death tolls has varied significantly, but the shape of the mortality curve has not. In most of Western Europe, covid-19 deaths have risen and fallen around a single peak in a familiar bell-shaped curve.

As shown in the above image, covid-19 mortality curves for Europe are very similar to the curve predicted by the so-called 'SIR Model'. SIR, developed by Scottish scientists Kermack and McKendrick in the 1920s and 1930s, is a mathematical model used to predict the path of a number of different infectious diseases.[1] Notice how the curve rises slightly more steeply than it declines in both the SIR model and the covid data. The similarity between this decades-old mathematical model and 2020 covid mortality curves is striking. This observation suggests a natural process and not one resulting mainly from human interventions.

Notice however that the US covid-19 mortality curve does not follow the pattern of these European countries and by extension the SIR model. Why is the US different?

The US covid mortality curve is a composite of regional variations

Many have observed that the southern US is having a very different covid experience from the north. A reasonable hypothesis is that the US mortality curve is a composite of other curves, one overlaying the other to give the overall curve. A possible explanation for the varying forms of the underlying curves could be related to regional and climactic differences.
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Attention

Unmasked

Gregory Morin
Porcupine Musings
Sat, 19 Sep 2020 20:29 UTC
We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.

New England Journal of Medicine, 2020; 382:363
Throw the mask!
© Twitter
These days everyone imagines himself or herself to be a scientist. Scolds, who labor under the delusion that reading the New York Times is equivalent to holding a doctorate, unceasingly inflict on us finger-wagging lectures about how we need to "listen to the science" when it comes to masks. Apparently "masks work" because "The Science™" says so.

Newsflash: these media figures and self-styled authorities aren't (largely) scientists and know not of what they speak. As a scientist myself I feel compelled to set the record straight on what is, and is not, science. For those degreed scientists out there parroting the mask propaganda: for shame, you should know better. Cherry picking, selection bias, anecdotal data, and dubious models have no place in the arsenal of scientific inquiry.
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Info

Study raises questions about sleep's role

Natalie Parletta
Cosmos Magazine
Sat, 19 Sep 2020 18:43 UTC
Role of Sleep
© Donald Iain Smith / Getty Images
Humans (and other animals) need sleep as much as they need water and oxygen, and considering we spend about a third of our lives doing it, it clearly serves an important function. But, despite many theories, much of sleep's purpose remains elusive.

Leading theories - and debates - focus on its role in brain repair and reorganisation. Taking a unique, multi-disciplinary approach, a new study, published in the journal Science Advances, suggests it does both - it just depends on age.

In children around two and a half years old, the study found, synaptic growth and reorganisation, which underpins learning and memory formation, seems to be sleep's main purpose.

After that age, sleep becomes dominated by repair and cleaning, or maintenance - and the transition is not a gradual process, according to senior author Van Savage from Santa Fe Institute, US.

"One most surprising part of this finding is that this switch is very sharp and abrupt," he says, likening it to the transition that happens when water freezes to ice.

Their analysis also reveals that deep rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, associated with vivid dreams, could be the primary driver of brain reorganisation in those early years.
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Blue Planet

Geologists and seismologists are fascinated by 'precariously balanced rocks'

Sabrina Imbler
Atlas Obscura
Thu, 09 Jan 2020 17:32 UTC
balanced rock colorado springs
© Ahodges7/CC by 3.0Despite appearances, it is safe to drive by Balanced Rock in Colorado Springs.
"They're nature's hilarious accidents."

On April 1, 1994, Paul Butcher, then the director of Colorado Springs parks department, received a chilling phone call from a frantic staff member. She told him that Balanced Rock — a 290-million-year-old red sandstone boulder naturally perched on a sloped ledge in Garden of the Gods Park — had fallen. Butcher panicked, his thoughts roiling with how disappointed and outraged both locals and visitors would be with the loss of the beloved, iconic landmark. He imagined the 700-ton boulder rolling downhill, with nothing to stop its tumble onto the nearby U.S. Highway 24, like a monstrously dense tumbleweed. Then he remembered the calendar, and realized it was a prank. "I never laughed," Butcher, who is now retired, told Out There Colorado. "It's not a great joke."

In a way, the mere existence of Balanced Rock also seems like a prank, either geological or cosmic. The enormous boulder looks like it had been photoshopped onto the landscape, or photographed mid-roll, or carefully placed by aliens. But it's no hoax and there's no sorcery to it. Rather it is a prime example of a whole category of geologic formations called "precariously balanced rocks" — PBRs, for short. They're exactly what you might expect. "It's a rock balanced on top of another rock," says Mark Stirling, who studies PBRs at the University of Otago in New Zealand. And if you think Colorado Springs' landmark ought to have a more imaginative name, see also: Balanced Rock in Grand Junction, Balanced Rock in Rocky Mountain National Park, and Balanced Rock at the Rampart Range. And that's just Colorado.
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Info

Men and women have different circadian rhythms says new study

Ida Kvittingen
Science Norway
Fri, 18 Sep 2020 12:58 UTC
Late Night Worker
© Tore Meek / NTB scanpixNurses are among the workers who have to work at night. Are women affected differently than men by night shifts?
Staying awake at night and being able to sleep during the day goes against our natural circadian rhythm, but some people cope better than others.

Recently, researchers have found evidence that biological differences between the sexes can affect the circadian rhythm of both humans and mice.

There are many indications that women and men have internal clocks that are set a little differently, according to a background article in the journal Science about some of the more recent research in the field.

"It's exciting and quite new that we can say something more about the mechanisms behind the differences in circadian rhythms," says Andrea Rørvik Marti, a PhD candidate in psychology at the University of Bergen (UiB).

But she's quick to add that while gender can affect circadian rhythms, a lot of other things may do so too. There are many more similarities than differences between the sexes.
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SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: MindMatters: Opening One's Mind to the Implications of Intelligent Design

Corey Schink, Harrison Koehli, Elan Martin
Sott.net
Thu, 17 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC
worldview
One of the most profoundly enlightening and potentially life-changing areas of study one can pursue today is that of intelligent design: the idea that life, in so many of its forms, is so complex - and on so many levels - that it couldn't possibly have come into being without the information injected into it by some form of 'higher intelligence'. While one cannot say with absolute certainty what that 'higher intelligence' may actually be, or whence it comes (or how it 'designs'), the conclusion that human beings - and much of physical reality itself - is no mere series of accidents is now quite clear. Anyone paying attention to the data, science and logic of ID research can plainly see it.

All of this understanding, however, begs for more questions. For instance: If the 'information system' hypothesis of reality is correct, then what does that say about the nature of the mind and its relationship to information? If information is 'non-material' in the sense that we understand physical reality, what does that suggest about the state of reality itself? And does the dogmatic, materialistic, neo-Darwinist worldview effectively block one's mind from assimilating real knowledge of the world and expanding on our understanding of consciousness itself, and of ourselves, as carriers of information? The implications for these lines of inquiry are as staggering as they are endless. And considering how limiting and damaging the 'accidental worldview' - and all of its offshoots are - perhaps it's time that humanity at large now comes to know what's truly at stake.


Running Time: 01:13:05

Download: MP3 — 66.9 MB

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