Science & TechnologyS


Comet 2

New Comet C/2020 B3 (Rankin)

Ernesto Guido
Remanzacco Blogspot
Thu, 06 Feb 2020 21:11 UTC
MPEC 2020-C111, issued on 2020, February 06, announces the discovery of a comet (magnitude ~20) by D. Rankin in the course of the Mt. Lemmon Survey (G96), in images taken on 2020, Jan 29 with a 1.5-m reflector + 10K CCD. The new comet has been designated C/2020 B3 (Rankin).

I performed follow-up measurements of this object while it was still on the PCCP webpage. Stacking of 16 unfiltered exposures, 120 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2020, February 03.2 from X02 Telescope Live (El Sauce, Chile) through a 0.6-m f/6.5 astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a compact coma about 5" in diameter slightly elongated toward PA 250.

My confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version)
Comet C/2020 B3 (Rankin)
© Remanzacco BlogspotComet C/2020 B3 (Rankin)
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Info

Living giant trees store millennia of clues to historic climates and societies

Natalie Parletta
Cosmos Magazine
Thu, 06 Feb 2020 17:36 UTC
Brazil Nut Tree
© VICTOR CAETANO-ANDRADEA towering Brazil nut tree in Jaú National Park in Brazil’s Amazonas state.
Evolving technologies hold the key to unlocking information stored by ancient tropical trees, which have borne witness to human activities and environmental forces from pre-historic to industrial epochs.

"As trees grow, they absorb details about their surroundings into their wood, creating snapshots of the environment through time," says Victor Caetano-Andrade, from the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

The insights that can be gleaned from these "time capsules of cultural heritage" could help inform conservation efforts, according to a review published by Caetano-Andrade and colleagues in the journal Trends in Plant Science.

This is a mounting imperative, they write, as tropical forests are refuges for half of the Earth's biodiversity and major mitigators of greenhouse gases.

However, the trees face numerous threats from climate change and logging; an area equivalent to 40 football fields is being deforested every minute.

The review discusses bringing together dendrochronology (the study of tree rings), radiocarbon dating, stable isotope in the wood and tree DNA to shine more light on questions about past human societies.

"We emphasise the importance of using these methods in dialogue with history and archaeology to understand the dimensions of human influence in tropical forests," says Caetano-Andrade.

Rather than forests being "pristine" prior to industrialisation, evidence from trees, archaeological and historical records suggest prehistoric humans had far greater impacts on their ecology than previously thought.
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Galaxy

Dark Emulator: AI program created to predict Universe's structure, solve mysteries of dark matter and dark energy


SciTech Daily
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 13:40 UTC
AI dark matter universe structure emulator
© Tsunehiko Kato, ARC and SDSS, NAOJ Four-Dimensional Digital Universe ProjectThe way in which galaxies cluster together in the Universe is made clear in this image of the Universe as observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The yellow dots represent the position of individual galaxies, while the orange loop shows the area of the Universe spanning 1 billion light-years. At the center is Earth, and around it is a three-dimensional map of where different galaxies are. The image reveals how galaxies are not uniformly spread out throughout the Universe, and how they cluster together to create areas called filaments, or are completely absent in areas called voids.
The origin of how the Universe created its voids and filaments can now be studied within seconds after researchers developed an artificial intelligence tool called Dark Emulator.

Advancements in telescopes have enabled researchers to study the Universe with greater detail, and to establish a standard cosmological model that explains various observational facts simultaneously. But there are many things researchers still do not understand. Remarkably, the majority of the Universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, of which no one has been able to identify their nature. A promising avenue to solve these mysteries is the structure of the Universe. Today's Universe is made up of filaments where galaxies cluster together and look like threads from far away, and voids where there appears to be nothing (image 1). The discovery of the cosmic microwave background has given researchers a snapshot of what the Universe looked like close to its beginning, and understanding how its structure evolved to what it is today would reveal valuable characteristics about what dark matter and dark energy is.
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Galaxy

ALMA telescope catches beautiful outcome of stellar fight


European Southern Observatory
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 20:19 UTC
HD101584 stars collide
© ALMA/ ESO/ NAOJ/ NRAO)/ Olofsson et al./ Robert CummingThis new image from the ALMA telescope in Chile shows the aftermath of a near-collision between stars in the binary star system HD101584. The red and blue rings and blobs of gas are the result of a red giant star engulfing its smaller companion.
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner, have spotted a peculiar gas cloud that resulted from a confrontation between two stars. One star grew so large it engulfed the other which, in turn, spiralled towards its partner provoking it into shedding its outer layers.

Like humans, stars change with age and ultimately die. For the Sun and stars like it, this change will take it through a phase where, having burned all the hydrogen in its core, it swells up into a large and bright red-giant star. Eventually, the dying Sun will lose its outer layers, leaving behind its core: a hot and dense star called a white dwarf.

"The star system HD101584 is special in the sense that this 'death process' was terminated prematurely and dramatically as a nearby low-mass companion star was engulfed by the giant," said Hans Olofsson of the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, who led a recent study, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, of this intriguing object.
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Arrow Up

A bio-artificial kidney is being developed to end the need for dialysis

John Vibes
The Mind Unleashed
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 11:14 UTC
Artificial kidney
Roughly two million people around the world are being treated for end-stage renal disease (ESRD), which has led to an urgent shortage of kidneys for transplant.

In 2016, there were only 21,000 donor kidneys available for transplant in the US, but a waiting list of nearly 100,000, resulting in a wait time of five to ten years.

The Kidney Project is a national network that has been cooperating to develop an implantable bio-artificial kidney that could eliminate the need for dialysis.

During a presentation at the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week in November of 2019, the team announced that UC San Francisco scientists were able to implant a prototype kidney bioreactor containing functional human kidney cells into pigs without causing any harm to the test subjects.
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Galaxy

Scientists perplexed by massive galaxy that mysteriously and suddenly went dark

Andrew Griffin
Independent
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 17:26 UTC
galaxy
Scientists have been left puzzled by a vast "monster" galaxy that mysteriously went dark.

The web of stars, known as XMM-2599, existed about 12 billion years ago, in the early days of the universe, when it was only about 1.8 billion years old.

It spewed out a vast number of stars in its short life. And then it suddenly stopped.

That rapid and unexplained death has puzzled astronomers, who say the vast galaxy does not fit with our existing models of the early universe.
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Info

Woman grows hairs out of her gums in extremely rare medical case

Mike Mcrae
Science Alert
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
Gums growing hair
© Zhurakivska etal., OOOOJournal, 2020
From time to time, we all need to pull out the odd hair that's grown out of place. But we're willing to bet that one spot you've never needed to pluck is your gums.

Just over 10 years ago, a 19-year-old woman met with doctors at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli in Italy, providing them with a rare case of what's known in the medical field as gingival hirsutism.

"In 2009, we reported a case of a young woman who presented with hairs on the sulcular epithelium of the retroincisor palatal papilla," the specialists reported in their recent case study.

To translate, they found a scattering of eyelash-like hairs protruding from the soft tissues directly behind her upper front teeth.
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Snowflake Cold

Study find Pluto's icy 'Heart' formation rules its atmospheric circulation, shapes its surface

IANS
The Weather Channel
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 16:11 UTC
pluto close up
© NASA/JHUAPL/SwRIThis high-resolution image captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC).
Pluto's famous "beating heart" of frozen nitrogen control its winds and may give rise to features on its surface, new research has found.

Uncovering how Pluto's atmosphere behaves has provided scientists with another place to compare our own planet with. Such findings can pinpoint both similar and distinctive features between Earth and a dwarf planet billions of kilometres away.

Pluto's heart-shaped structure, named Tombaugh Regio, quickly became famous after NASA's New Horizons mission captured footage of the dwarf planet in 2015 and revealed it is not the barren world scientists thought it was.

Nitrogen gas — an element also found in air on Earth — comprises most of Pluto's thin atmosphere, along with small amounts of carbon monoxide and the greenhouse gas methane.
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Wolf

Limitation of Darwanian processes: Important medical effects but modest mutations

Michael Behe
Evolution News
Tue, 04 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
A rhesus macaque
© pradeep
I was asked to address a comment left by a viewer of one of Discovery's YouTube videos. The comment is:1
Some monkeys have a mutation in a protein called TRIM5 that results in a piece of another, defunct protein being tacked onto TRIM5. The result is a hybrid protein called TRIM5-CypA, which can protect cells from infection with retroviruses such as HIV. Here, a single mutation has resulted in a new protein with a new and potentially vital function. New protein, new function, new information.
A bit of Googling shows that the text was taken word-for-word from an old article (2008) on the New Scientist website2 (perhaps by way of intermediate copying). That was during a period when the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species was fast approaching, and many science-y websites were doing all they could to spin whatever information they had to defend Darwin from those crazy ID people. It turns out the results they cite are interesting but quite modest.

Comment: See also:

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Pineapple

Scientists discover hidden symmetries using soundwaves

Louise Lerner, University of Chicago
Phys.org
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 10:01 UTC
structures
© V. Vitelli and M. Fruchart, University of ChicagoScientists used a LEGO array to demonstrate how sound waves can propagate identically in different structures.
When you knock on a melon to see if it's ripe, you are using sound waves to probe the structure of the material inside. Physicists at the University of Chicago were using the same concept to explore how sound waves travel through patterned structures when they noticed an oddity: completely different structures sounded the same.

This was a surprising thing — sort of like knocking on a melon and a pineapple, and discovering they both made the same sound.

"What got us excited was that we could not explain our findings using existing concepts, such as spatial symmetries," said Vincenzo Vitelli, a professor of physics in the James Franck Institute.

Comment: See also:

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