Science & TechnologyS


Robot

Scientists learn how to make liquid crystal shape-shift

Ioana Patringenaru
UC San Diego
Fri, 25 Sep 2020 17:18 UTC
Liquid Crystal
© UC San DiegoA 3D-printed flower-like structure that can twist.
A new 3D-printing method will make it easier to manufacture and control the shape of soft robots, artificial muscles and wearable devices. Researchers at UC San Diego show that by controlling the printing temperature of liquid crystal elastomer, or LCE, they can control the material's degree of stiffness and ability to contract — also known as degree of actuation. What's more, they are able to change the stiffness of different areas in the same material by exposing it to heat.

As a proof of concept, the researchers 3D-printed in a single print, with a single ink, structures whose stiffness and actuation varies by orders of magnitude, from zero to 30 percent. For example, one area of the LCE structure can contract like muscles; and another can be flexible, like tendons. The breakthrough was possible because the team studied LCE closely to better understand its material properties.

The team, led by Shengqiang Cai, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, details their work in the Sept. 25 issue of Science Advances.

Researchers were inspired to create this material with different degrees of actuation by examples in biology and nature. In addition to the combination of muscle and tendon, researchers took cues from the beak of the squid, which is extremely stiff at the tip but much softer and malleable where it is connected to the mouth of the squid.

"3D-printing is a great tool to make so many different things — and it's even better now that we can print structures that can contract and stiffen as desired under a certain stimuli, in this case, heat," said Zijun Wang, the paper's first author and a Ph.D. student in Cai's research group.
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Alarm Clock

Physicist comes up with math that makes 'paradox-free' time travel plausible

David Nield
ScienceAlert
Sat, 26 Sep 2020 18:24 UTC
wormhole time travel
© andrey_l/Shutterstock
No one has yet managed to travel through time - at least to our knowledge - but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.

As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?

It's a monumental head-scratcher known as the 'grandfather paradox', but now a physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, says he has worked out how to "square the numbers" to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.
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Robot

AI is getting smarter

Karen Hao
MIT Review
Fri, 25 Sep 2020 18:43 UTC
People on a Couch
© ALLEN INSTITUTE FOR AI
Of all the AI models in the world, OpenAI's GPT-3 has most captured the public's imagination. It can spew poems, short stories, and songs with little prompting, and has been demonstrated to fool people into thinking its outputs were written by a human. But its eloquence is more of a parlor trick, not to be confused with real intelligence.

Nonetheless, researchers believe that the techniques used to create GPT-3 could contain the secret to more advanced AI. GPT-3 trained on an enormous amount of text data. What if the same methods were trained on both text and images?

Now new research from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, AI2, has taken this idea to the next level. The researchers have developed a new text-and-image model, otherwise known as a visual-language model, that can generate images given a caption. The images look unsettling and freakish — nothing like the hyperrealistic deepfakes generated by GANs — but they might demonstrate a promising new direction for achieving more generalizable intelligence, and perhaps smarter robots as well.
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Sun

British astrophysicists: "mini ice age is accelerating - New 'Maunder Minimum' has begun," look at changes in Beaufort Gyre

Cap Allon
Electroverse
Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC
sunset
"We are plunging now into a deep mini ice age," says British astrophysicist Piers Corbyn, "and there is no way out".

For the next 20 years it's going to get colder and colder, on average, says Corbyn who holds a B.Sc. in Physics and an M.Sc. in Astrophysics. The jet stream will be wilder: there will be more wild temperature changes, more hail events, more earthquakes, more extreme volcano events, more snow in winters, lousy summers, late springs, short autumns, and more and more crop failures.

"The fact is the sun rules the sea temperature, and the sea temperature rules the climate," explains Corbyn.

"What we have happening now is the start of the mini ice age ... it began around 2013. It's a slow start, and now the rate of moving into the mini ice age is accelerating.

Little Ice Age Triggered by Arctic Sea Ice

Arctic sea ice

Comment: It can't be said enough; the world has been had, fooled, tricked and lied to about the mechanisms and probable outcome of what is the true state of climate change. Imagine the responses to governments, the UN, Greta, and all the scientists who have been pushing the Global Warming "crisis" green agenda on people when things become even more obvious - and we are seeing ice and cold instead of heat.

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Jupiter

The strange storms on Jupiter

Emily Velasco, California Institute of Technology
Phys.org
Thu, 24 Sep 2020 06:40 UTC
Storms gathered at the south pole of Jupiter, as imaged by the Juno probe
© NASA-JPL/CaltechStorms gathered at the south pole of Jupiter, as imaged by the Juno probe.
At the south pole of Jupiter lurks a striking sight — even for a gas giant planet covered in colorful bands that sports a red spot larger than the earth. Down near the south pole of the planet, mostly hidden from the prying eyes of humans, is a collection of swirling storms arranged in an unusually geometric pattern.

Since they were first spotted by NASA's Juno space probe in 2019, the storms have presented something of a mystery to scientists. The storms are analogous to hurricanes on Earth. However, on our planet, hurricanes do not gather themselves at the poles and twirl around each other in the shape of a pentagon or hexagon, as do Jupiter's curious storms.

Now, a research team working in the lab of Andy Ingersoll, Caltech professor of planetary science, has discovered why Jupiter's storms behave so strangely. They did so using math derived from a proof written by Lord Kelvin, a British mathematical physicist and engineer, nearly 150 years ago.

Ingersoll, who was a member of the Juno team, says Jupiter's storms are remarkably similar to the ones that lash the East Coast of the United States every summer and fall, just on a much larger scale.

"If you went below the cloud tops, you would probably find liquid water rain drops, hail, and snow," he says. "The winds would be hurricane-force winds. Hurricanes on Earth are a good analog of the individual vortices within these arrangements we see on Jupiter, but there is nothing so stunningly beautiful here."

Comment: Could another factor be found in Electric Universe theory? See also:

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Info

100 million-year-old meteorite crater discovered Down Under

Laura Geggel
Live Science
Wed, 23 Sep 2020 22:30 UTC
Ora Banda Impact Crater
© Resource PotentialsA color-coded gravity image of the Ora Banda Impact Crater site. The crater (deep blue) is in the middle of the image.
Gold miners in the Australian Outback recently discovered a gigantic meteorite crater dating to about 100 million years ago, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Found near the Western Australian town of Ora Banda, the newly dubbed Ora Banda Impact Crater is about 3 miles (5 kilometers) across. This huge hole was likely created by a meteorite up to 660 feet (200 meters) wide, or longer than the length of two American football fields, according to Resourc.ly, a Western Australia news outlet.

When geologists at Evolution Mining, an Australian gold mining company, came across some unusual rock cores at Ora Banda, they called Jayson Meyers, the principal geophysicist, director and founder of Resource Potentials, a geophysics consulting and contracting company in Perth. Meyers examined the geologists' drill core samples, as well as rock samples from the site, and he immediately noticed the shatter cones — telltale signs of a meteorite crash.

Shatter cones form when high-pressure, high-velocity shock waves from a large impacting object — such as a meteorite or a gigantic explosion (such as would occur at a nuclear testing site) — rattle an area, according to the Planetary Science Institute (PSI), a nonprofit group based in Tucson, Arizona, which was not involved with the new find. These shock waves shatter rock into the unique shatter cone shape, just like a mark that a hard object can leave on a car's windshield.

Because "we know they didn't do any nuclear testing at Ora Banda," the evidence suggests that an ancient impact crater hit the site, Meyers told Resourc.ly.
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Blue Planet

Neanderthal's Y chromosome replaced during mating event with human

Ann Gibbons
Science Magazine
Thu, 24 Sep 2020 14:00 UTC
neanderthal
© Flavio Massari/agefotostock/Newscom
Neanderthals have long been seen as uber-masculine hunks, at least compared with their lightweight human cousins, with whom they competed for food, territory, and mates. But a new study finds Homo sapiens men essentially emasculated their brawny brethren when they mated with Neanderthal women more than 100,000 years ago. Those unions caused the modern Y chromosomes to sweep through future generations of Neanderthal boys, eventually replacing the Neanderthal Y.

The new finding may solve the decade-old mystery of why researchers have been unable to find a Neanderthal Y chromosome. Part of the problem was the dearth of DNA from men: Of the dozen Neanderthals whose DNA has been sequenced so far, most is from women, as the DNA in male Neanderthal fossils happened to be poorly preserved or contaminated with bacteria. "We began to wonder if there were any male Neanderthals," jokes Janet Kelso, a computational biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and senior author of the new study.

Comment: See also:

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Cloud Grey

Newly identified 'landfalling droughts' originate over ocean, grow faster, have more severe impact

Danielle Torrent Tucker, Stanford University
Phys.org
Thu, 24 Sep 2020 19:18 UTC
Landfalling
© Josh Aarons/UnsplashLandfalling droughts, which form over the ocean and then migrate onto land, can cause larger, drier conditions than droughts that occur solely over the land.
Meteorologists track hurricanes over the oceans, forecasting where and when landfall might occur so residents can prepare for disaster before it strikes. What if they could do the same thing for droughts?

Stanford scientists have now shown that may be possible in some instances — the researchers have identified a new kind of "landfalling drought" that can potentially be predicted before it impacts people and ecosystems on land. They found that these droughts, which form over the ocean and then migrate landward, can cause larger and drier conditions than droughts that occur solely over the land. Of all the droughts affecting land areas worldwide from 1981 to 2018, roughly one in six were landfalling droughts, according to the study published Sept. 21 in Water Resources Research.

"We normally don't think about droughts over the ocean — it may even sound counterintuitive. But just as over land, there can be times where large regions in the ocean experience less rainfall than normal," said lead author Julio Herrera-Estrada, a research collaborator with Water in the West who conducted research for the study while he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). "Finding that some droughts start offshore will hopefully motivate conversations about the benefits of monitoring and forecasting droughts beyond the continents."

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Fireball 5

NASA: Asteroid will fly by Earth closer than our satellites - today

Andrew Griffin
Independent
Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC
AsteroidMoonEarth
© news.sky.com
An asteroid the size of a bus is set to fly past Earth in the coming hours.

The object, known as 2020 SW, will fly just 13,000 miles above the Earth's surface on 24 September, Nasa has said. That is closer than the artificial objects that are in orbit around our planet.

The object was only discovered on 18 September by a Nasa-funded project in Arizona, and further observations were able to track its trajectory and rule out any chance that it might collide with Earth. Those estimates showed that it would make its closest pass around noon UK time on Thursday.

It will then fly off to continue its trip around the solar system. It will not come back anywhere near Earth until 2041, when it will be at an even further distance.

The asteroid is thought to be about five to ten meters wide, roughly the size of a "small school bus", the space agency said. The size is estimated from the brightness of the object.
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Sherlock

Mass death of elephants in Botswana claimed to be due to cyanobacteria, death of 25 more in Zimbabwe remains unexplained - UPDATE

Brian Benza
Reuters
Mon, 21 Sep 2020 10:32 UTC
elephant deaths
Aerial images of some of the elephant carcasses seen in the Okavango Delta
Toxins in water produced by cyanobacteria killed more than 300 elephants in Botswana this year, officials said on Monday, announcing the result of an investigation into the deaths which had baffled and alarmed conservationists.

Cyanobacteria are microscopic organisms common in water and sometimes found in soil. Not all produce toxins but scientists say toxic ones are occurring more frequently as climate change drives up global temperatures.

Cyril Taolo, deputy director of the Department of Wildlife and National Parks, told a news conference the number of elephant carcasses found since deaths were first reported around early May had risen to 330, from 281 in July.

Comment: Not only do the researchers have no hard evidence, but they don't sound very sure of their conclusions. This makes sense because elephants are likely to have encountered cyanobacteria before - the water would likely stink and the bacteria would form a bloom, alerting the elephants to it's presence - and so it's unlikely all of them would make the same mistake of drinking copious amounts of contaminated water; moreover, this doesn't explain those that died, also en masse, in neighbouring Zimbabwe. So the question still remains, what led to the mass death of these elephants?

See also: Burundi president Pierre Nkurunziza, who refused to follow Corona World Order diktats, 'dies unexpectedly of heart attack'

UPDATE: 23rd September 2020 @ 21:47 CET

RT reports that the investigation hasn't convinced everyone and that more research is needed to identify the cause of death:
The elephant deaths dropped off near the end of June, as the pans and watering holes dried up and the species of cyanobacteria that produces neurotoxins died.

Tests were conducted in laboratories in South Africa, Canada, Zimbabwe, and the United States, though local officials in Botswana declined to name specific labs or agencies. The same officials vowed to conduct more testing of waterholes for algal blooms ahead of future rainy seasons to prevent similar die-offs from reoccurring.

These kinds of toxins were initially ruled out as the cause of the die-off, as only one other animal, a horse, died in close proximity to watering holes and in similar circumstances to the elephants. Scientists now suspect that prolonged exposure to the cyanobacteria due to bathing and additional drinking time among elephants may explain the discrepancy.

However, conservationists such as Dr Niall McCann, director of conservation at UK-based charity National Park Rescue, have called for increased research into the algal blooms believed to be responsible so the wildlife community can better protect the pachyderms.

McCann also decried a lack of more thorough testing of the elephant carcasses, which must be done in a highly specific and timely manner, to better narrow down and explain the die-off events.

"Just because cyanobacteria were found in the water that does not prove that the elephants died from exposure to those toxins. Without good samples from dead elephants, all hypotheses are just that: hypotheses," said McCann, highlighting that correlation doesn't equal causation, especially if there is to be any real hope of protecting the animals in future.

One leading theory is that they were felled by a strain of a bacteria called pasteurella, which killed hundreds of thousands of Saiga antelope in Kazakhstan in 2015.


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