Science & TechnologyS


Comet 2

49-foot asteroid will scrape past earth on Tuesday - 2nd such close approach by space rock in 3 days

Alexandra Lozovschi
Inquisitr
Sun, 26 Jan 2020 10:35 UTC
Close approach
© MASTERTUX / PIXABAYClose approach
Next week, Earth is in for a brush with a swift asteroid that will come extremely close to the planet's surface, NASA has announced. The space rock is known as asteroid 2020 BJ7 and is an Apollo-type asteroid that orbits the sun once every 1.9 years. The object is not particularly large but is incredibly fast, and is hurtling through space at formidable speeds of more than 45,000 mph. The rock will skim Earth from a very short distance, flying nearly as close as the moon.

Size-wise, the near-Earth asteroid fares somewhat on the smaller side. The rock — which was discovered a mere two days ago — is estimated to measure no more than 49 feet in diameter. As such, the object is only a little smaller than the famous Chelyabinsk meteor that penetrated the Earth's atmosphere nearly seven years ago. Though only slightly larger than asteroid 2020 BJ7, the meteor caused a substantial amount of damage when it exploded in the sky over Russia on February 15, 2013, destroying more than 7,200 buildings and injuring nearly 1,500 people.

Thankfully, the tiny asteroid won't give us any cause for concern when it comes swooping by in two days' time. NASA assures that the rock will safely pass by our planet and uneventfully exit the inner solar system as it circles the sun.

Comment: Related: 32-foot asteroid just skimmed Earth from VERY CLOSE by shortly after discovery

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Fireball 2

32-foot asteroid just skimmed Earth from VERY CLOSE by shortly after discovery

Alexandra Lozovschi
Inquisitr
Sat, 25 Jan 2020 10:47 UTC
close call
Close call
A tiny space rock has just scraped past Earth in what was the closest asteroid encounter not only of 2020 so far, but also in quite a long time. The teeny rock was one of the smallest to traipse through our cosmic neighborhood in recent months — and managed to creep in closer than any other asteroid has done in the past year.

Today's celestial visitor is known as asteroid 2020 BH6. The object flew extremely close to our planet's surface, skimming Earth closer than the moon. According to a report released by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the space rock approached Earth shortly after midnight, swooping past us at 12:11 a.m. ET. At the time, the asteroid was traveling at an incredible speed of 22,800 mph and buzzed Earth from only 37,200 miles away.

To put that into perspective, the moon sits at an average distance of 238,900 miles from Earth. This means that the asteroid passed at 0.18 times the distance to the moon during today's near-miss. The last time an asteroid came comparably close to Earth was in late November, when a 42-foot space rock zoomed past our planet from 65,100 miles away, or 0.28 times the lunar distance.

Comment: 49-foot asteroid will scrape past earth on Tuesday - 2nd such close approach by space rock in 3 days

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Bulb

Forward thinking company is using plastic waste to make roads that are 60% stronger than traditional ones

Jade Small
The Mind Unleashed
Fri, 24 Jan 2020 03:27 UTC
Roads made with plastic
The first plastic created by Leo Hendrik Baekeland in 1907 was based on synthetic polymer made from phenol and formaldehyde. Since then plastic has been used to create just about anything you could think of. It is cheap to manufacture and affordable to buy and replace. It is also used for almost all products we use and throw away without a second thought.

As populations grew, the use of plastics grew as did plastic waste — one of the biggest threats to humanity, animals, and the environment.

While scientist and experts try to find solutions to non-recyclable plastic waste, we're running out of landfill sites and continue to poison our air by incinerating plastic waste and choking our oceans. Thankfully forward thinking companies are finding ways of reusing plastic waste while many others are focusing on finding biodegradable alternatives to replace plastics altogether.

As an example of recycling waste plastic, UK company MacRebur has developed a product by recycling plastic bottles to improve the quality, durability, and cost of asphalt roads.
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Info

Behavior of slow earthquakes explained by new evidence


University of Ottawa
Wed, 22 Jan 2020 21:03 UTC
Earth from Space
© University of Ottawa
A team of researchers at the University of Ottawa has made an important breakthrough that will help better understand the origin and behavior of slow earthquakes, a new type of earthquake discovered by scientists nearly 20 years ago.

These earthquakes produce movement so slow - a single event can last for days, even months - that they are virtually imperceptible. Less fearsome and devastating than regular earthquakes, they do not trigger seismic waves or tsunamis. They occur in regions where a tectonic plate slides underneath another one, called ''subduction zone faults'', adjacent but deeper to where regular earthquakes occur. They also behave very differently than their regular counterparts. But how? And more importantly: why?

Pascal Audet, Associate Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at uOttawa, along with his seismology research group (Jeremy Gosselin, Clément Estève, Morgan McLellan, Stephen G. Mosher and former uOttawa postdoctoral student Andrew J. Schaeffer), were able to find answers to these questions.
"Our work presents unprecedented evidence that these slow earthquakes are related to dynamic fluid processes at the boundary between tectonic plates," said first author and uOttawa PhD student, Jeremy Gosselin. "These slow earthquakes are quite complex, and many theoretical models of slow earthquakes require the pressure of these fluids to fluctuate during an earthquake cycle."
Using a technique similar to ultrasound imagery and recordings of earthquakes, Audet and his team were able to map the structure of the Earth where these slow earthquakes occur. By analyzing the properties of the rocks where these earthquakes happened, they were able to reach their conclusions.
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Pills

Researchers identify 102 genes linked to autism, but still won't look into vaccines or diet


Healthline
Sun, 26 Jan 2020 19:10 UTC
autism
In the largest genetics study of its kind to date, scientists have identified 102 genes associated with the risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Researchers also gained further insight into which of these genes are associated with both ASD and other disorders that cause intellectual disability and developmental delay.

For the study, an international team of researchers analyzed more than 35,000 participant samples, including almost 12,000 from people with ASD.

Researchers used a genetic technique called "exome sequencing," which looks at all the regions of a person's genetic information — or genome — that are translated into proteins. This testing can pick up rare genetic mutations that might not show up with other methods.

Comment: Parents need to educate themselves in order to advocate for their children. Besides pushing back on mandatory shots, there is much that can be done without getting on the medical treadmill:

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Telescope

Scientists solve a mystery about aurorae

Nathaniel Scharping
Astronomy
Fri, 01 Feb 2019 18:55 UTC
Rainbow auroras NW of Calgary
© Harlan Thomas
Aurorae: They're colorful, mesmerizing and, most of all, mysterious. Scientists understand the basic physics behind how charged particles interact with our atmosphere to produce these dancing lights. But the larger mechanics of when, why and how auroras appear still isn't very well understood.

One particular mystery is that the northern and southern lights don't always match up like researchers would expect. For years, scientists assumed that aurora borealis and aurora australis would mirror each other. That is, people in the Arctic and Antarctic Circles would see a similar show if their positions were just right. But recent research has shown that's not the case. And now a team led by scientists from the University of Bergen in Norway thinks they have an answer.

Comment: More on the Carrington Event:

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Mars

NASA image reveals probable sandstone layers on Mars

Evan Gough
Universe Today
Thu, 23 Jan 2020 00:00 UTC
sandstone
© NASA/JPL/University of ArizonaLight-toned layered deposits thought to be sandstones in West Candor Chasma, Mars. They may have formed in an ancient wet and potentially habitable environment.
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been in orbit around Mars for almost 14 years. It carries a variety of instruments with it, including the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) instrument. That instrument has collected thousands of images of Mars.

CRISM's main purpose is to created detailed maps of the surface mineralogy of Mars. It can detect iron, oxides, phyllosilicates (clays,) and carbonates. All of these materials are indications that Mars was wet in the past, or is still wet now

Usually, CRISM images are paired with High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) images of the same area. HiRISE is one of three cameras on the MRO, and the most powerful. In fact, HiRISE is a reflecting telescope, the largest ever carried on a deep space mission. It can image the surface of Mars in great detail, and NASA makes HiRISE images available on the website.
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Cloud Precipitation

Climate (not humans) shaped early forests of New England

Harvard University
Phys.org
Wed, 22 Jan 2020 11:29 UTC
sandplain
© David Foster, Harvard UniversityConservationists have employed prescribed fire in an attempt to maintain openland habitats such as the Katama sandplain grassland on the island of Martha's Vineyard. Research by Oswald and colleagues indicates that, despite a large human population for thousands of years, fire was uncommon and landscapes across southern New England were heavily forested until European contact and deforestation for agriculture. Grazing and other agricultural practices can be used to maintain these uncommon habitats today.
A new study in the journal Nature Sustainability overturns long-held interpretations of the role humans played in shaping the American landscape before European colonization. The findings give new insight into the rationale and approaches for managing some of the most biodiverse landscapes in the eastern U.S.

The study, led by archaeologists, ecologists, and paleoclimatologists at Harvard, Emerson College and elsewhere, focuses on the coast from Long Island to Cape Cod and the nearby islands of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Block Island, and Naushon — areas that historically supported the greatest densities of Native people in New England and today are home to the highest concentrations of rare habitats in the region, including sandplain grasslands, heathlands, and pitch pine and scrub oak forests.

"For decades, there's been a growing popularization of the interpretation that, for millennia, Native people actively managed landscapes — clearing and burning forests, for example — to support horticulture, improve habitat for important plant and animal resources, and procure wood resources," says study co-author David Foster, Director of the Harvard Forest at Harvard University. This active management is said to have created an array of open-land habitats and enhanced regional biodiversity.

Comment: As noted above, the conservationists - opening up the land with controlled burning - have actually been doing the exact opposite to what the native peoples were doing. And this wouldn't be the first time ill-informed and biased conservation efforts, despite their best intentions, have run counter to what nature intends. It also reflects that, in the long term, man's impact is relatively insignificant:

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Microscope 2

15,000-year-old unknown viruses found in Tibetan glacier

Bob Yirka
Phys.org
Fri, 24 Jan 2020 12:00 UTC
glacier
© CC0 Public Domain
A team of researchers from The Ohio State University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found a host of ancient virus groups in ice cores taken from a Tibetan glacier. They have written a paper about their discovery and uploaded it to the bioRxiv preprint server.

Back in 1992, a team of researchers collected ice core samples from a glacier in the Tibetan Plateau — they calculated the ice to be approximately 15,000 years old. Some of the samples were put into cold storage for study at a later date. Then, in 2015, another team collected ice core samples from the same glacier — they were also put into cold storage for later study. In this new effort, the researchers carried out one part of the testing planned for the cores — looking at what sort of organisms might be trapped in them.

When the two teams originally collected their ice core samples, they did not ensure the equipment they were using would not contaminate the cores they were collecting. That meant the researchers with this new effort had to take special care to remove any contamination that had occurred during initial extraction and to make sure they did not introduce any contaminants of their own.

Comment: It's interesting the viruses were noted as different possibly due to "differences in climate", one wonders what these differences were and how different?

The location is also notable, because, as detailed in New Light on the Black Death: The Viral and Cosmic Connection:
In a letter to Lancet [1],Wickramasinghe explains that a small amount of a virus introduced into the stratosphere could make a first tentative fallout east of the great mountain range of the Himalayas, where the stratosphere is thinnest, followed by sporadic deposits in neighboring areas. Could this explain why new strains of the influenza virus that are capable of engendering epidemics, and which are caused by radical genetic mutations, usually originate in Asia? Wickramasinghe argues that if the virus is only minimally infective, the subsequent course of its global progress will depend on stratospheric transport and mixing, leading to a fallout continuing seasonally over a few years; even if all reasonable attempts are made to contain an infective spread, the appearance of new foci almost anywhere is a possibility.
And, for reference, a map showing the Himalayas (red dot) and the Tibetan Plateau:

himalayas
© Google Maps
See also:

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Microscope 1

DNA sleuths read the coronavirus genome, tracing its origins and looking for dangerous mutations

Sharon Begley
STAT
Fri, 24 Jan 2020 00:00 UTC
coronavirus microscope
© The New England Journal of MedicineElectron micrographs of isolated 2019-nCoV particles (left), and in cells from human airways (right), marked with arrows.
As infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists race to contain the outbreak of the novel coronavirus centered on Wuhan, China, they're getting backup that's been possible only since the explosion in genetic technologies: a deep-dive into the DNA of the virus known as 2019-nCoV.

Analyses of the viral genome are already providing clues to the origins of the outbreak and even possible ways to treat the infection, a need that is becoming more urgent by the day: Early on Saturday in China, health officials reported 15 new fatalities in a single day, bringing the death toll to 41. There are now nearly 1,100 confirmed cases there.

Reading the DNA also allows researchers to monitor how 2019-nCoV is changing and provides a roadmap for developing a diagnostic test and a vaccine.

Comment: See also:

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