Science & TechnologyS


Cloud Lightning

Meet 'Hector the Convector': The worlds most consistent thunderstorm


AccuWeather
Tue, 25 Feb 2020 21:23 UTC
hector thunderstorm australia tiwi islands named
© Murray Fredricks/Australian Bureau of MeteorologyHector ('the Convector') forming over the Tiwi Islands near Australia
During the wet season, the Tiwi Islands, located in Australia's Northern Territory get hit by a storm every day at 3:00 p.m.

Meteorologists and scientists tend to assign names to natural phenomena that have a significant impact. Hurricanes are one specific example of this naming process. This organization makes it easier to document and communicate about these events. Instead of mentioning the type of storm, time of year, and location, scientists can simply refer to the assigned name and everyone is on the same page. While prominence is a major factor determining whether a storm is given enough attention to receive a name, there are some smaller examples that earn their own title. The Tiwi Islands, that lie just off the coast of the Northern Territory of Australia, are home to such a storm known as Hector. Hector Storm or Hector the Convector are two other widely-used names as well.
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Galaxy

Biggest explosion since the Big Bang discovered


Cosmos Magazine
Thu, 27 Feb 2020 17:33 UTC
Galaxy Clusters
© X-RAY: NASA/CXC/NAVAL RESEARCH LAB/GIACINTUCCI, S.; XMM:ESA/XMM; RADIO: NCRA/TIFR/GMRTN; INFRARED: 2MASS/UMASS/IPAC-CALTECH/NASA/NSFGalaxy clusters, the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity, contain thousands of individual galaxies, dark matter and hot gas.
Scientists studying a distant galaxy cluster say they have discovered the biggest explosion seen in the Universe since the Big Bang.

It came from a supermassive black hole at the centre the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, about 390 million light-years from Earth, and released five times more energy than the previous record holder, according to a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal and currently available on the pre-print server arXiv.

It was so powerful, the authors say, that it punched a cavity in the cluster plasma - the super-hot gas surrounding the black hole.

"We've seen outbursts in the centres of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive - and we don't know why it's so big," says Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, from the Curtin University, Australia, node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

"But it happened very slowly - like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years."

The study brought together a team from Australia, the US and New Zealand.
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Butterfly

In episode 3 of Secrets of the Cell, Michael Behe tests "the power of evolution"

David Klinghoffer
Evolution News
Thu, 27 Feb 2020 12:08 UTC
Michael Behe secrets of the cell
When people invented gears is not certain, but examples survive in artifacts from ancient China and Greece. These indicate that the mechanism was known well over 2,000 years ago. Impressive! And yet as Michael Behe points out in a new episode of Secrets of the Cell, from Discovery Institute, bugs had been there and done that long before humans came on the scene:


Comment: See also:

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People

Behe and Swamidass debate evolution and intelligent design at Texas A&M

Jonathan Witt
Evolution News
Thu, 27 Feb 2020 11:02 UTC
Behe-Swamidass debate 1
Biochemist and CSC Senior Fellow Michael Behe shared the stage with physician and computational biologist Joshua Swamidass this past Thursday evening at an overflow event at Texas A&M's Rudder Theatre in College Station, TX.

The meeting, titled "God and/or Evolution?" was part conversation, part debate. Behe made the case for intelligent design in biology. Swamidass argued for methodological naturalism and modern evolutionary theory while also allowing for the separate de novo creation of Adam and Eve, an idea outlined in his new book.

Behe-Swamidass debate 2
The format had Behe going first and then Swamidass responding. Then each speaker got a shorter chunk of time for follow-up comments, followed by a Q&A sent via tweets that were selected and read by the moderator.

Behe began by noting that his three books, including his newest one, Darwin Devolves, make two main arguments. The first is that "Darwin's mechanism is grossly inadequate to explain the molecular structure of life." But then he said that due to time constraints he wouldn't focus on that tonight, and that this thesis was the less controversial of the two, since there are today many prominent scientists who question the creative power of neo-Darwinism's joint mechanism of random mutations and natural selection.
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Question

Sunspots may cause mass whale strandings, new study suggests

Rob Waugh
Yahoo! News
Wed, 26 Feb 2020 18:57 UTC
Does the sun cause grey whale strandings?
Does the sun cause grey whale strandings?
Solar storms and sunspots may be behind mass whale strandings, new research has suggested.

Grey whales are far more likely to strand on days when there are more sunspots, researchers from Duke University found.

The finding suggests that the migrating animals may use a magnetic sense to navigate, which is disrupted by solar activity.

Sunspots are linked to solar storms, a sudden release of high-energy particles from the sun that can disrupt magnetic orientation.

The Duke University researchers analysed 186 live strandings of grey whales and the results showed they occurred significantly more on days with high sunspot counts.
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Beaker

New experiment with human stem cells ends up rapidly curing diabetes in mice

Peter Dockrill
Science Alert
Wed, 26 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
Human cells
© Millman LaboratoryHuman insulin-secreting beta cells under the microscope.
A new technique to convert human stem cells into insulin-producing cells could hold huge promise for future diabetic treatments, if results seen in an experiment with mice can be successfully replicated in humans.

In a study, researchers figured out a new way to coax human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) into pancreatic beta cells that make insulin. When these insulin-producing cells were transplanted into mice induced to have an acute form of diabetes, their condition was rapidly cured.

"These mice had very severe diabetes with blood sugar readings of more than 500 milligrams per decilitre of blood - levels that could be fatal for a person," explains biomedical engineer Jeffrey R. Millman from Washington University.

"When we gave the mice the insulin-secreting cells, within two weeks their blood glucose levels had returned to normal and stayed that way for many months."
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Magnify

Flashback Black Death casts a genetic shadow over England

Colin Barras
New Scientist
Thu, 02 Aug 2007 01:40 UTC
black death england
The Black Death continues to cast a shadow across England. Although the modern English population is more cosmopolitan than ever, the plagues known as the Black Death killed so many people in the Middle Ages that, to this day, genetic diversity is lower in England than it was in the 11th century, according to a new analysis.

Rus Hoelzel at the University of Durham, UK and his colleagues looked at the mitochondrial DNA from human remains at 4th and 11th century archaeological sites in England, and compared them to samples from the modern population stored on DNA databases such as GenBank. They found there was more variation in the ancient mitochondrial DNA sequences than in modern sequences.

Hoelzel thinks random genetic drift may have lowered genetic diversity naturally. But the large unexpected drop in diversity was more likely to have been caused by population crashes following major outbreaks of the Black Death in England during the 1340s and the 1660s.

"The main factors in support of a role for plague are the timing and the fact that it affected different families [to a differing degree]," says Hoelzel.

Comment: Note that, 600 years ago, they CLOSED BORDERS!

This is something only a handful of countries seem prepared to do with the current Coronavirus epidemic. Russia did so wrt China early on, and it has still only recorded two cases, both of them Chinese nationals, and both now recovered.

But the 'Black Death' of the mid-14th century, and its similar recurrences over the next two centuries, were in a whole other league. The astrobiologists are likely correct: truly civilization-decimating viruses come from outer space...

New Light on the Black Death: The Viral and Cosmic Connection

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Microscope 1

First animal without mitochondria and that doesn't breathe discovered

Brandon Specktor
Live Science
Tue, 25 Feb 2020 20:39 UTC
salminicola
© Stephen Douglas AtkinsonSpores of the parasite H. salminicola swim under a microscope. Those alien "eyes" are actually stinger cells, one of the few features this organism hasn't evolved away.
When the parasitic blob known as Henneguya salminicola sinks its spores into the flesh of a tasty fish, it does not hold its breath. That's because H. salminicola is the only known animal on Earth that does not breathe.

If you spent your entire life infecting the dense muscle tissues of fish and underwater worms, like H. salminicola does, you probably wouldn't have much opportunity to turn oxygen into energy, either. However, all other multicellular animals on Earth whose DNA scientists have had a chance to sequence have some respiratory genes. According to a new study published today (Feb. 24) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, H. salminicola's genome does not.

A microscopic and genomic analysis of the creature revealed that, unlike all other known animals, H. salminicola has no mitochondrial genome — the small but crucial portion of DNA stored in an animal's mitochondria that includes genes responsible for respiration.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's: The Truth Perspective: Are Cells the Intelligent Designers? Why Creationists and Darwinists Are Both Wrong

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Easter Egg 2

Choosy eggs may pick sperm for their genes, defying Mendel's law

Carrie Arnold
Quanta Magazine
Wed, 15 Nov 2017 07:43 UTC
sperm selection
© Allison Filice for Quanta Magazine
In the winner-takes-all game of fertilization, millions of sperm race toward the egg that's waiting at the finish line. Plenty of sperm don't even make it off the starting line, thanks to missing or deformed tails and other defects. Still others lack the energy to finish the long journey through the female reproductive tract, or they get snared in sticky fluid meant to impede all but the strongest swimmers. For the subset of a subset of spermatozoa that reach their trophy, the final winner would be determined by one last sprint to the end. The exact identity of the sperm was random, and the egg waited passively until the Michael Phelps of gametes finally arrived. Or so scientists have thought.

Joe Nadeau, principal scientist at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute, is challenging this dogma. Random fertilization should lead to specific ratios of gene combinations in offspring, but Nadeau has found two examples just from his own lab that indicate fertilization can be far from random: Certain pairings of gamete genes are much more likely than others. After ruling out obvious alternative explanations, he could only conclude that fertilization wasn't random at all.

"It's the gamete equivalent of choosing a partner," Nadeau said.

His hypothesis - that the egg could woo sperm with specific genes and vice versa - is part of a growing realization in biology that the egg is not the submissive, docile cell that scientists long thought it was. Instead, researchers now see the egg as an equal and active player in reproduction, adding layers of evolutionary control and selection to one of the most important processes in life.

Comment: If true that the egg 'chooses' or selects for the best genetic package, then the idea that random mutations lead to evolution (which already has a probability so low that it can be said to be impossible) is even less likely to happen.

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Galaxy

Mysterious dimming star Betelgeuse brightens again, dashes hopes of imminent premature death

Svetlana Ekimenko
Sputnik International
Mon, 24 Feb 2020 11:13 UTC
This artists impression shows the supergiant star Betelgeuse
© ESOThis artists impression shows the supergiant star Betelgeuse as it would be if it were in the solar system - its outer edge would go as far out as Jupiter, swallowing the inner planets
At the end of 2019, Betelgeuse generated a great deal of excitement among astronomers, who had noticed the red giant, known to get dimmer and brighter, had begun to do so on an unprecedented scale, with many starting to hope for a looming supernova.

According to the latest round of observations, the notorious star Betelgeuse has ceased to manifest the dimming effect that many had hoped was a sure sign of a looming supernova effect, and is reported to actually be brightening.

"Photometry secured over the last ~2 weeks shows that Betelgeuse has stopped its large decline of delta-V of ~1.0 mag relative to September 2019," astronomers wrote in an Astronomers Telegram.
"Based on these and additional observations, Betelgeuse has definitely stopped dimming and has started to slowly brighten. Thus this 'fainting' episode is over but additional photometry is needed to define the brightening phase," added the scientists in their report entitled "The Fall and Rise in Brightness of Betelgeuse".
While the newest data signifies the celestial body is not about to explode in a premature death, this still leaves open the question as to why it had started dimming in the first place.

"Observations of all kinds continue to be needed to understand the nature of this unprecedented dimming episode and what this surprising star will do next," the astronomers wrote.

Comment: Light from Betelgeuse faintest ever recorded, temperature way down in just 4 months, yet star has 'swollen' by 9%

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