Science & TechnologyS


Bug

Meet the largest land-dwelling "bug" of all time


GeologyIn
Fri, 05 Jun 2020 14:57 UTC
giant millipede extinct
© Wrexham MuseumsA life size model of a giant millipede, Arthropleura
The giant extinct invertebrate Arthropleura resembled some modern millipedes, but could grow to be more than one-and-a-half feet wide, and may sometimes have been more than six feet long.

The giant extinct invertebrate Arthropleura resembled some modern millipedes, but could grow to be more than one-and-a-half feet wide, and may sometimes have been more than six feet long. Reconstruction of the giant millipede Arthropleura from the Pennsylvanian and earliest Permian of North America and Europe.

During the Pennsylvanian and earliest Permian periods (about 320 to 290 million years before present), much of present-day North America and Europe was located close to the equator and was covered by vast, richly vegetated swamps.
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Comet 2

Rocks on asteroid Bennu are cracking, surprising scientists

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Tue, 09 Jun 2020 12:00 UTC
Bennu
Photographs of asteroid Bennu's surface
Asteroid Bennu is blanketed by rocks and huge boulders. And now that the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is taking a close look at those rocks, researchers are able to see something surprising for an airless body: the rocks have tiny cracks and fissures.

The cause?

Most likely the cracks are from wide variations in temperatures, with sunlight heating up the rocks during the day, and then cooling off quickly at night. This process happens quickly and frequently, as Bennu makes one full rotation on its axis every 4.3 hours.

"This is the first time evidence for this process, called thermal fracturing, has been definitively observed on an object without an atmosphere," said Jamie Molaro of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. Molaro is the lead author of a paper published today in Nature Communications. "It is one piece of a puzzle that tells us what the surface used to be like, and what it will be like millions of years from now."

Comment: The cause of the cracking is stated to 'likely' be due to thermal fracturing, and it may be, but one should also bear in mind the other forces at work on space bodies: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Beaker

Exotic fifth state of matter made on the International Space Station

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Thu, 11 Jun 2020 18:31 UTC
Bose-Einstein condensate
© NASA/NISTComputer model of a Bose-Einstein condensate
In July of 2018, NASA announced an incredible achievement. They had created the coldest spot in space - right there on the International Space Station, in orbit around Earth.

They took atoms of a soft metal called rubidium, and cooled them to temperatures around 100 nanoKelvin - one ten-millionth of a Kelvin above absolute zero.

This resulted in a super cold cloud called a Bose-Einstein condensate, the exotic 'fifth' state of matter, and one that could help us understand the weird quantum properties of ultra-cold atoms. But the research did not stop there.

Using the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Cold Atom Laboratory, scientists went on to produce Bose-Einstein condensates less than a nanoKelvin above absolute zero - exploiting the microgravity conditions aboard the space station to learn more about this state than we could on Earth.
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Info

Scientists find new liquid phase of crystals


University of Colorado Boulder
Wed, 10 Jun 2020 18:13 UTC
Liquid Crystal
© SMRCThe colors in this newly discovered phase of liquid crystal shift as researchers apply a small electric field.
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder's Soft Materials Research Center (SMRC) have discovered an elusive phase of matter, first proposed more than 100 years ago and sought after ever since.

The team describes the discovery of what scientists call a "ferroelectric nematic" phase of liquid crystal in a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The discovery "opens a door to a new universe of materials," said co-author Matt Glaser, a professor in the Department of Physics.

Nematic liquid crystals have been a hot topic in materials research since the 1970s. These materials exhibit a curious mix of fluid- and solid-like behaviors, which allow them to control light. Engineers have used them extensively to make the liquid crystal displays (LCDs) in many laptops, TVs and cellphones.

Think of nematic liquid crystals like dropping a handful of pins on a table. The pins in this case are rod-shaped molecules that are "polar" — with heads (the blunt ends) that carry a positive charge and tails (the pointy ends) that are negatively charged. In a traditional nematic liquid crystal, half of the pins point left and the other half point right, with the direction chosen at random.

A ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal phase, however, is much more disciplined. In such a liquid crystal, patches or "domains" form in the sample in which the molecules all point in the same direction, either right or left. In physics parlance, these materials have polar ordering.

Noel Clark, a professor of physics and director of the SMRC, said that his team's discovery of one such liquid crystal could open up a wealth of technological innovations — from new types of display screens to reimagined computer memory.

"There are 40,000 research papers on nematics, and in almost any one of them you see interesting new possibilities if the nematic had been ferroelectric," Clark said.
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Cassiopaea

Shock waves created in the lab mimic exploding stars


Stanford
Fri, 05 Jun 2020 12:00 UTC
shockwave
In experiments at the National Ignition Facility, a SLAC-led team found new details about how supernovas boost charged particles to nearly the speed of light.
When stars explode as supernovas, they produce shock waves in the plasma surrounding them. So powerful are these shock waves, they can act as particle accelerators that blast streams of particles, called cosmic rays, out into the universe at nearly the speed of light. Yet how exactly they do that has remained something of a mystery.

Now, scientists have devised a new way to study the inner workings of astrophysical shock waves by creating a scaled-down version of the shock in the lab. They found that astrophysical shocks develop turbulence at very small scales - scales that can't be seen by astronomical observations - that helps kick electrons toward the shock wave before they're boosted up to their final, incredible speeds.
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Info

New hints of volcanism under the heart of northern Europe


Royal Astronomical Society
Wed, 10 Jun 2020 19:19 UTC
Water Filled Maars Eifel
© Martin Schildgen / Wikimedia CommonsThree water-filled maars in the Eifel, Germany (Gemündener Maar, Weinfelder Maar, Schalkenmehrener Maar). Created by volcanic activity, maars are also found in other parts of Europe and on other continents, but Eifel-Maars are the classic example worldwide.
Scientists have discovered new evidence for active volcanism next door to some of the most densely populated areas of Europe. The study 'crowd-sourced' GPS monitoring data from antennae across western Europe to track subtle movements in the Earth's surface, thought to be caused by a rising subsurface mantle plume. The work is published in Geophysical Journal International.

The Eifel region lies roughly between the cities of Aachen, Trier, and Koblenz, in west-central Germany. It is home to many ancient volcanic features, including the circular lakes known as 'maars'.

These are the remnants of violent volcanic eruptions, such as the one which created Laacher See, the largest lake in the area. The explosion that created this is thought to have occurred around 13,000 years ago, with a similar explosive power to the cataclysmic Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991.

The mantle plume that likely fed this ancient activity is thought to still be present, extending up to 400km down into the Earth. However, whether or not it is still active is unknown: "Most scientists had assumed that volcanic activity in the Eifel was a thing of the past," said Prof. Corné Kreemer, lead author of the new study. "But connecting the dots, it seems clear that something is brewing underneath the heart of northwest Europe."
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Info

Titan drifting away from Saturn faster than predicted


California Institute of Technology
Mon, 08 Jun 2020 19:11 UTC
Titan and Cassini
© Francesco Fiori, Radio Science and Planetary Exploration LabArtwork of Saturn, Titan, and the Cassini spacecraft.
By Earthly standards, Saturn's moon Titan is a strange place. Larger than the planet Mercury, Titan is swaddled in a thick atmosphere (it is the only moon in the solar system to have one) and covered in rivers and seas of liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane. Beneath these is a thick crust of water ice, and beneath that may be a liquid water ocean that could potentially harbor life.

Now, decades of measurements and calculations have revealed that Titan's orbit around Saturn is expanding — meaning, the moon is getting farther and farther away from the planet — at a rate about 100 times faster than expected. The research suggests that Titan was born much closer to Saturn and migrated out to its current distance of 1.2 million kilometers (about 746,000 miles) over 4.5 billion years.

The findings are described in a paper that appears in the journal Nature Astronomy on June 8.

"Most prior work had predicted that moons like Titan or Jupiter's moon Callisto were formed at an orbital distance similar to where we see them now," says Caltech's Jim Fuller, assistant professor of theoretical astrophysics and co-author on the new paper. "This implies that the Saturnian moon system, and potentially its rings, have formed and evolved more dynamically than previously believed."
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Rocket

USAF investigates hypersonic test mishap

Guy Norris, Steve Trimble
Aviation Week
Tue, 09 Jun 2020 00:00 UTC
hypersonic missile
© Lockheed MartinArtist conception of hypersonic missile.
A scramjet-powered missile developed under the joint DARPA/U.S. Air Force Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) program was destroyed in a recent test accident, Aerospace DAILY has learned.

The missile is believed to have inadvertently separated from a B-52 carrier aircraft during a captive-carry flight test, according to sources familiar with the evaluation. The cause of the mishap, which is thought to have involved an aircraft from the 419th Flight Test Squadron at Edwards AFB, California, is under investigation.

The Air Force referred questions about the incident to DARPA, but the agency declined to provide any details. "Details of those flight demonstrations are classified," a DARPA spokesman said.

Aerospace DAILY understands pieces of the instrumented test article were recovered after the accident. The description could suggest the payload inadvertently detached from the B-52 in flight, rather than during ground tests or on the runway. It also suggests the mishap potentially occurred over land — possibly over a designated test range such as the Edwards Precision Impact Range Area or the nearby Naval Air Weapons Station test range at China Lake — rather than during transit for a wet dress rehearsal or live fire test over the Pacific range.
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Doberman

The new dogs? Foxes appear to be domesticating themselves

Matthew Rozsa
Salon
Wed, 10 Jun 2020 14:07 UTC
red fox sleeping
© Giandomenico Manna / Getty ImagesA sleeping red fox.
A new study on urban foxes could shed light on how widely-domesticated animals began their relationship with humans

Just as dogs descended from a wolf-like ancestor to become man's best friend, so it would seem wild foxes are doing the same.

Indeed, a new study reveals that foxes in London appear to be inadvertently developing signs of domestication. The reason is that living in such close proximity to human beings has altered their evolutionary path.

The new journal article is another entry in a long, and sometimes thorny, body of scientific literature regarding the evolution of foxes in the anthropocene. Notably, at least one past study on fox domestication later proved controversial among the scientific community.
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Microscope 1

Engineered protein blocks cancer growth and regenerates neurons


Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News
Tue, 09 Jun 2020 23:52 UTC
Genetically engineered protein
© Nicolle Rager, National Science FoundationExternal signals (yellow) interact with the cell’s membrane-bound sensing molecules (aqua). This information is transmitted sequentially throughout the cell via signaling networks. In this illustration, arrows indicate the direction of information flow. The internal flow is maintained by the signaling molecules shown in green, blue, pink, and purple. Communication from outside the cell often follows signaling pathways to the nucleus, where the information activates genes that control the cell’s response.
Ligands are protein molecules that transmit signals in between or within the cells. They exert their effects by binding to cellular proteins called receptors. After binding to the ligand, the receptor can then send additional signals to other parts of the cell to regulate our biological processes. However, if those messages get garbled, it can make us ill with a set of different diseases.

Now a team led by Jennifer Cochran, PhD, professor of bioengineering and Shriram chair of the department of bioengineering at Stanford University, has altered one ligand that produced two dramatically different results. One set of alterations regenerated neuron cells, while the other alteration to the same protein inhibited lung tumor growth.

Their results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and performed in mice that model actual diseases. These results give hope to eventually treating neurodegenerative diseases as well as cancers.
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