Science & TechnologyS


Mars

Mysterious magnetic pulses and evidence of groundwater discovered on Mars


RT
Sat, 21 Sep 2019 13:30 UTC
Closeup of Mars' surface
© Global Look / NASACloseup of Mars' surface.
Mars may be hiding water deep beneath its surface, NASA's InSight lander has discovered - and the planet's magnetic field has a life of its own, pulsing at the stroke of midnight in a manner utterly unlike anything found on Earth.

There may be liquid water on Mars after all - dozens of miles inside the planet, according to magnetic measurements from the InSight lander, which has been exploring Mars since landing in November. The probe's magnetometer seems to register an electrically conductive layer up to 62 miles beneath the surface, appearing similar to how water deep within the Earth appears using terrestrial magnetometers.

Unfortunately for would-be Martian colonists eager to find out whether there really is water down there, InSight can only drill 16 feet beneath the surface, leaving a potential oasis woefully out of reach.
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Broom

Huawei Mate 30 Pro ditches Google Apps, keeps Android - Why it matters

Daniel Van Boom
CNET
Thu, 19 Sep 2019 02:26 UTC
huawei
© Daniel Van Boom/CNETThe Mate 30 Pro.
Can Huawei make great phones without the full power of Google's Android operating system behind it? We're about to find out. The Chinese giant on Thursday unveiled the Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro, its latest flagship phones, at an event in Munich. The phones will ship with state-of-the-art hardware, including four rear cameras, but without full Android support. The Mate 30 phones are based on Android open source, meaning they will still function like Androids. What they won't have, though, is Google services or apps. No Google Maps, no Google Chrome and, most importantly, no Google Play Store.

Instead, you'll surf the web through the Huawei Browser and download apps through the Huawei AppGallery. The AppGallery has around 45,000 apps, according to Huawei, compared to the Google Play Store's estimated 2.7 million. Google typically licenses the latest version of Android, currently Android 10, for phone manufacturers to use. The Mate 30 phones will instead be powered by open-source Android and run EMUI 10, Huawei's user interface that approximates Google's Android 10.

This means Huawei will only be able to bring security updates to the Mate 30 phones when those updates hit open-source Android.

Comment: See also:

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Dig

Denise the Denisovan - scientists attempt to reconstruct extinct human's skeletal structure based only on DNA


Science Daily
Thu, 19 Sep 2019 18:24 UTC
denise denisovan
© Facebook / The Hebrew University of Jerusalem / Maayan Harel
If you could travel back in time to 100,000 years ago, you'd find yourself living among several different groups of humans, including Modern Humans (those anatomically similar to us), Neanderthals, and Denisovans. We know quite a bit about Neanderthals, thanks to numerous remains found across Europe and Asia. But exactly what our Denisovan relatives might have looked like had been anyone's guess for a simple reason: the entire collection of Denisovan remains includes three teeth, a pinky bone and a lower jaw. Now, as reported in the scientific journal Cell, a team led by Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) researchers Professor Liran Carmel and Dr. David Gokhman (currently a postdoc at Stanford) has produced reconstructions of these long-lost relatives based on patterns of methylation (chemical changes) in their ancient DNA.

"We provide the first reconstruction of the skeletal anatomy of Denisovans," says lead author Carmel of HUJI's Institute of Life Sciences. "In many ways, Denisovans resembled Neanderthals but in some traits they resembled us and in others they were unique."

Denisovan remains were first discovered in 2008 and have fascinated human evolution researchers ever since. They lived in Siberia and Eastern Asia, and went extinct approximately 50,000 years ago. We don't yet know why. That said, up to 6% of present-day Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians contain Denisovan DNA. Further, Denisovan DNA likely contributed to modern Tibetans' ability to live in high altitudes and to Inuits' ability to withstand freezing temperatures.

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Newspaper

From The Atlantic on teaching human evolution, a bit of rare honesty in reporting

David Klinghoffer
Evolution News
Thu, 19 Sep 2019 16:48 UTC
evolution graphic
© Gerd Altmann via Pixabay.
If you've read enough articles from mainstream journalists about how evolution is taught in public schools, and about Discovery Institute's position on that, you're bound to have low expectations of a new article that just came out from The Atlantic. "I Was Never Taught Where Humans Came From," laments staff writer Olga Khazan about her Texas upbringing. She feels that as a ninth grade biology student, she was shortchanged in not learning "the monkey part. That is, our shared ancestry with other primates."

Usually these articles obediently quote Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education, swallowing everything he says, and fail to interview anyone from Discovery Institute. I have seen this so many times. But you know what? This piece by Ms. Khazan is a cut above. She quotes Discovery Institute's John West and Sarah Chaffee, accurately. This could be because they conducted the interview by email. (See below for the full text.)

And while she naturally also talked with Glenn Branch, she notes that she is a "little skeptical" of something he says (about how not learning about human evolution "might make it harder for, say, doctors to understand superbugs, or for farmers to understand the nuances of agriculture," as she paraphrases him).

Whoa, that caught that my attention. She's "skeptical" of some lame talking point from the NCSE? How about that? Good job, Olga Khazan!
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Microscope 1

China's lunar rover scopes out weird substance on far side of the moon (PHOTOS)

Andrew Jones
space.com
Thu, 19 Sep 2019 17:03 UTC
china moon images
© CNSA/CLEPChina's Yutu-2 moon rover captured this image from the edge of the small crater where it found a mysterious, gel-like material.
China's lunar exploration program has released images that give us a glimpse of the mysterious material discovered on the far side of the moon.

Yutu-2, the lunar rover for China's Chang'e-4 mission, grabbed attention last month after its drive team spotted something unusual while roving close to a small crater. The Chinese-language science outreach publication Our Space, which announced the findings on Aug. 17, used the term "胶状物" (jiao zhuang wu), which can be translated as "gel-like." This notion sparked wide interest and speculation among lunar scientists.

Scientists have now gotten a look at that curious material, thanks to a post (Chinese) released over the weekend by Our Space via its WeChat social media account. Along with new images of the stuff on the moon, the post details how the Yutu-2 team carefully approached the crater in order to analyze the specimen, despite risks.
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Snowflake

New mineral discovered inside diamond mined in South Africa

Katie Willis
Phys.org
Thu, 19 Sep 2019 12:00 UTC
goldschmidtite
© Nicole MeyerA tiny sample of goldschmidtite found inside a diamond by U of A PhD student Nicole Meyer. The newly discovered mineral has high concentrations of elements seldom found in Earth's mantle, suggesting it formed under extreme conditions.
A Ph.D. student at the University of Alberta has discovered a new and curious mineral inside a diamond unearthed from a mine in South Africa.

The mineral — named goldschmidtite in honor of Victor Moritz Goldschmidt, the founder of modern geochemistry — has an unusual chemical signature for a mineral from Earth's mantle, explained Nicole Meyer, a graduate student in the Diamond Exploration Research and Training School.

"Goldschmidtite has high concentrations of niobium, potassium and the rare earth elements lanthanum and cerium, whereas the rest of the mantle is dominated by other elements, such as magnesium and iron," said Meyer.

"For potassium and niobium to constitute a major proportion of this mineral, it must have formed under exceptional processes that concentrated these unusual elements."

Comment: See also:

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Satellite

'Insurance policy for planet Earth': Space agencies to smash spacecraft into asteroid at over 14,000 mph


RT
Thu, 19 Sep 2019 17:48 UTC
asteroid impact
© ESAArtist's impression of the impact.
NASA and the ESA are finally set to test the Earth's planetary defenses to see whether we can successfully defend ourselves from the apparent scourge of space rocks. But the scientists are not sure what's going to happen.

The target they have chosen is the asteroid Didymos B, roughly 160 meters in diameter, one half of a binary asteroid system. Didymos B orbits the larger asteroid Didymos A every 11.92 hours and this will help determine the ultimate success (or failure) of the mission.

The Didymos system is classified as a Near-Earth Object (NEO), meaning it's close but not too close that it might hit us, making it the perfect test subject to flex our anti-meteor might.

The joint asteroid impact and deflection assessment (AIDA) project launched by the ESA and NASA in 2015, and Earth's champion selected for the mission will be NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft.

"Today, we're the first humans in history to have the technology to potentially deflect an asteroid from impacting the Earth," astronomer Ian Carnelli of the ESA told Technology Review.
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Jupiter

NASA's Juno probe reveals stunning eclipse on Jupiter


RT
Wed, 18 Sep 2019 13:08 UTC
Eclipse on Jupiter
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. GillSolar eclipse on Jupiter
NASA's Juno spacecraft captured a truly awe-inspiring shot of a partial solar eclipse on Jupiter, capping off its 22nd close flyby of the enormous planet in sensational style.

Io, the closest of Jupiter's four moons, casts a surprisingly sharp shadow across the surface of the gas giant in the amazing photos. The images come to us courtesy of NASA software engineer and citizen scientist, Kevin Gill, who shared his rendering of the craft's image on his Twitter feed.


Note: Click on directional circle to bring up the image.
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Display

Smart TVs Caught Sending Sensitive User Data To Facebook And Netflix

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Wed, 18 Sep 2019 19:20 UTC
smart TV spying, samsung
A study by researchers from Northeastern University and Imperial College London found that many popular smart TV models, including models by Samsung and LG, as well as streaming dongles Roku and Amazon FireTV, are leaking sensitive user data to advertisers.

The models listed above would share data like location and IP address with Netflix, Facebook and third-party advertisers, according to the FT.

Just when social media companies were starting to modify their data collection practices to better respect user privacy, the next threat is coming from the Internet of Things (IoT). Smart TVs are becoming increasingly popular in the US.
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Galaxy

Astronomers discover most massive neutron star ever recorded


RT
Tue, 17 Sep 2019 11:07 UTC
Neutron star
© AFP / National Science Foundation / A. Simonnet
Astronomers have detected a neutron star which beggars belief, being so big it challenges our understanding of extreme objects in the universe.

The pulsar, with the catchy name J0740+6620, is the first neutron star humans have detected measuring over two solar masses.

Using the timing of its pulses, astronomers have calculated its mass to be roughly 2.14 times that of our sun, packed into an area just 30km across (the Sun is 1.391 million km across, so it's a tight squeeze).

The object is close to the theoretical upper limit of 2.3 solar masses for a rotating neutron star, based on cutting-edge gravitational wave astronomy calculations from just last year.

Neutron stars form after the immensely explosive and violent deaths of stars in a series of thermonuclear explosions that fuse every last bit of material remaining in their cores.

After this truly awe-inspiring death rattle, the remaining iron core collapses, packing whatever neutrons are left into an almost inconceivably small space, producing an object roughly as dense as an atomic nucleus.
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