Science & TechnologyS


Moon

Intact in One Piece: India loses contact with Vikram lander during historic Moon landing attempt

Meghan Bartels , Hanneke Weitering
Space
Fri, 06 Sep 2019 00:00 UTC
ISRO chandrayaan2 failure
© Mirror Now
India lost contact with its Vikram lunar lander Friday (Sept. 6) during a daring attempt to make history as the first country to land near the south pole. The landing anomaly may have dashed Indian dreams of becoming just the fourth country to successfully soft-land a spacecraft on the moon.

Long, tense minutes stretched out inside the mission control center for the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), which designed the Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had arrived onsite at the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bengaluru, India, about half an hour before touchdown of the landed component, dubbed Vikram, was scheduled to take place.

That announcement came at 4:48 p.m. EDT (2048 GMT) from K. Sivan, the director of ISRO. "Vikram lander descent was as planned and normal performance was observed up to an altitude of 2.1 kilometers [1.3 miles]," Sivan said in an announcement at mission control. "Subsequently the communications from the lander to the ground station was lost. The data is being analyzed."

Comment:
Chandrayaan-2 landing: 40% lunar missions in last 60 years failed, finds Nasa report

While many countries like India, China, US, Russia, Japan and Israel have sent missions to the moon, the success rate of lunar missions is about 60 per cent, with each country getting it right only after years and years of practice.


Read More...
Info

Body's 'biological age' can be reversed suggest new study

Alison Abbott
Nature
Thu, 05 Sep 2019 20:02 UTC
Biological Age Reversal
© Patrick McDermott/GettyA person’s biological age, measured by the epigenetic clock, can lag behind or exceed their chronological age.
A small clinical study in California has suggested for the first time that it might be possible to reverse the body's epigenetic clock, which measures a person's biological age.

For one year, nine healthy volunteers took a cocktail of three common drugs — growth hormone and two diabetes medications — and on average shed 2.5 years of their biological ages, measured by analysing marks on a person's genomes. The participants' immune systems also showed signs of rejuvenation.

The results were a surprise even to the trial organizers — but researchers caution that the findings are preliminary because the trial was small and did not include a control arm.

"I'd expected to see slowing down of the clock, but not a reversal," says geneticist Steve Horvath at the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted the epigenetic analysis. "That felt kind of futuristic." The findings were published on 5 September in Aging Cell.

"It may be that there is an effect," says cell biologist Wolfgang Wagner at the University of Aachen in Germany. "But the results are not rock solid because the study is very small and not well controlled."
Read More...
Cow

FDA finds a surprise in gene-edited cattle: Antibiotic-resistant, non-bovine DNA

Sam Bloch
The New Food Economy
Thu, 15 Aug 2019 14:43 UTC
gene edited cattle
© Genetic Literacy Project
How do you get a better cow? You breed it. For decades, cattle ranchers, dairy farmers, and others have relied on a billion-dollar animal genetics industry to get fitter, happier, and more productive livestock, working with specialists to find the best parents in the barn, and paying top dollar for elite semen. It's a costly process, and some farmers mate selectively for generations before the whole herd comes out right.

Imagine if that could happen faster — say, in a year or two, instead of decades. That's the promise of gene-editing, a still-emerging technology in agriculture. Biologists use precision technology, such as CRISPR, to break the double helix, delete sections of those DNA strands, and then insert new genes that can occur naturally in other breeds. Boosters say these "molecular scissors" are a high-tech, rapid update on traditional cross-breeding, which has been practiced since time immemorial.

Comment: Objective:Health #30 - Gene Tech - What the Heck!?

Read More...
Fish

New whale species discovered along the coast of Hokkaido

Hokkaido University
Phys.org
Sun, 08 Sep 2019 14:04 UTC
beaked whales
© Tadasu K. Yamada et al., Scientific Reports. August 30, 2019Unidentified beaked whales sighted in the Nemuro Strait.

In a collaboration between the National Museum of Nature and Science, Hokkaido University, Iwate University, and the United States National Museum of Natural History, a beaked whale species which has long been called Kurotsuchikujira (black Baird's beaked whale) by local Hokkaido whalers has been confirmed as the new cetacean species Berardius minimus (B. minimus).

Beaked whales prefer deep ocean waters and have a long diving capacity, making them hard to see and inadequately understood. The Stranding Network Hokkaido, a research group founded and managed by Professor Takashi F. Matsuishi of Hokkaido University, collected six stranded unidentified beaked whales along the coasts of the Okhotsk Sea.


Comment: There does appear to be an uptick in beachings: More and more whales, dolphins washing up dead on UK's shores - nearly 5,000 in last decade


The whales shared characteristics of B. bairdii (Baird's beaked whale) and were classified as belonging to the same genus Berardius. However, a number of distinguishable external characteristics, such as body proportions and color, led the researchers to investigate whether these beaked whales belong to a currently unclassified species.

Comment: It would appear new species and the rediscovery of presumed extinct species is occurring fairly often, meanwhile there's a collapse in other realms of the animal kingdon:

Read More...
2 + 2 = 4

SOTT Focus: The Theory of Evolution is Anti-Science

Mandatory Intellectomy
Sott.net
Sat, 07 Sep 2019 17:33 UTC
Darwin
If at least this part of Darwin's theory is correct, then neo-Darwinian scientists today are an endangered species.
In their desperate attempts to discredit anything that even remotely makes sense, Darwinists like to ask the question, "Is ID (Intelligent Design) science?", to which, of course, they answer "no" based on a random ridiculous claim of the day. But that's not the correct answer. The correct answer is, "Who the f**k cares?!?" If you had one theory that happens to be correct but isn't "scientific" (whatever that means) and another one that's perfectly "scientific" but happens to be wrong, you'd have to be an idiot to pick the one that's wrong. And by even just asking the question "Is ID science?", Darwinists are designating themselves as being exactly this kind of idiot. They'd rather be wrong than acknowledge the existence of any kind of intelligence.

So if you let somebody convince you that the question of whether ID is "science" is important, you've already been duped and have little chance of figuring out the truth about anything. You're not concerned with what's true or correct. You're concerned with something completely irrelevant, and while engaged in a dumb argument about nothing, you're completely missing the point.

But since this question is often being raised, let's look at just how scientific evolution itself really is.

Comment: This article is the fifth in a series. For part 6, go here:

Richard Dawkins and Half a Wing

Read More...
Magnify

Apeman waves goodby to Darwinian gradualism

Günter Bechly
Evolution News
Fri, 06 Sep 2019 18:02 UTC
Australopithecus africanus skull
© José Braga; Didier Descouens [CC BY-SA 4.0] / Wikimedia CommonsAustralopithecus africanus skull
A few days ago a sensational new paleontological discovery made headlines around the globe. After 15 years of searching, and the recovery of 12,600 fossils including 230 hominin remains (Leakey Foundation 2019), finally a rather complete skull has been found and described for Australopithecus anamensis, which is the oldest and most primitive representative of the australopithecines, living 4.2-3.9 million years ago. It was generally considered to be the direct ancestor of Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, that lived in the same region 3.8-2.9 million years ago. The former species was previously known only by some fragments. Now we can finally give it a face. Actually, this face turns out to be very much ape-like, with a small chimp-sized braincase and a protruding jaw, but that is not the really interesting thing about this discovery. I will come back to that in a moment.

The Background to the Story

The fossil skull was discovered in 2016 by a native goat herder in Ethiopia's Afar region in sediments beneath a pile of goat dung. It was excavated and described by the famous paleoanthropologist Haile-Selassie, from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and his colleagues (Haile-Selassie et al. 2019). The vivid story of the discovery is available in more detail at the National Geographic website (Greshko 2019). Because of the lucky circumstance that volcanic ash layers were deposited directly below and above the layers from which the skull came, this fossil could be very precisely dated to an age of 3.8 million years by radiometric methods (Saylor et al. 2019). Thus it is 100,000 years younger than the previous oldest remains from this species. Nevertheless, this skull, nicknamed MRD after its collection number, is the oldest australopithecine skull ever found. It also ranks among the very few relatively complete ones. It represents a truly remarkable discovery of tremendous scientific importance, which is already "set to become another celebrated icon of human evolution" (Spoor 2019).
Read More...
Meteor

NASA researcher warns there is '100 percent chance an asteroid will hit us'


Sputnik
Sat, 07 Sep 2019 14:19 UTC
Asteroid hitting earth
© Creative Commons
NASA and its European counterparts are on constant lookout for so-called near-Earth objects that might crash into the planet and cause damage. The smallest of these space objects usually burn up in the earth's atmosphere - but the largest ones can cause massive devastation.

Greg Leonard, a professor at the University of Otago's School of Surveying (New Zealand) and senior research specialist at the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey project, has said there is 100-percent possibility of an asteroid hitting Earth.

Speaking to science writer Bryan Walsh for his new book on the history of extinction, called 'End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World', Leonard conceded that the chances of being killed by an asteroid are less than dying from a lightning strike.

"But I also know that if we do nothing, sooner or later, there's a one hundred percent chance that one will get us," he added. "So I feel privileged to be doing something."

Leonard said that when a large near-Earth object ends up on a collision course with the planet, humanity will need a little more than intelligence-gathering to avoid a disaster.
Read More...
Galaxy

2 Giant blobs at the core of our galaxy are emitting very large amounts of radiation and scientists don't know how they got there

Paul Sutter
Livescience
Thu, 05 Sep 2019 00:00 UTC
giant blobs
© NASA Goddard)
In 2010, astronomers working with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope announced the discovery of two giant blobs. These blobs were centered on the core of the Milky Way galaxy, but they extended above and below the plane of our galactic home for over 25,000 light-years. Their origins are still a mystery, but however they got there, they are emitting copious amounts of high-energy radiation.

More recently, the IceCube array in Antarctica has reported 10 super-duper-high-energy neutrinos sourced from the bubbles, leading some astrophysicists to speculate that some crazy subatomic interactions are afoot. The end result: The Fermi Bubbles are even more mysterious than we thought.

Two giant blobs of hot gas

It's not easy to make big balls of hot gas. For starters, you need energy, and a lot of it. The kind of energy that can spread hot gas to a distance of over 25,000 light-years doesn't come easily to a typical galaxy. However, the peculiar orientation of the Fermi Bubbles — extending evenly above and below our galactic center — is a strong clue that they might be tied our central supermassive black hole, known as Sagittarius A*.
Read More...
HAL9000

US military experts say that 'America needs' AI to control its nuclear missiles

Elias Marat
The Mind Unleashed
Wed, 04 Sep 2019 18:06 UTC
AI controlled nukes
Experts want to give control of America's nuclear missiles to artificial intelligence.

According to two U.S. military researchers, the United States needs a "Dead Hand" that would ensure an automated, rapid response to any nuclear threat.

Their solution? To fit the U.S. nuclear arsenal with artificial intelligence (AI) controls.

In a column for military blog War on the Rocks, U.S. nuclear warfare experts Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin suggest that AI is precisely the solution for what they see as a lagging U.S. response system to threats.

The two men make the claim that the current NC3 system is dependent on outdated Cold War technology, posing the danger that it "may be too slow for the president to make a considered decision and transmit orders" in case of a nuclear attack on the United States.
Read More...
Fireball 2

1,247 ft asteroid 2019 GT3 skims Earth tonight

Inigo Monzon
International Business Times
Thu, 05 Sep 2019 17:26 UTC
artist picture asteroid earth
© NASAAn artistic illustration of an asteroid flying by Earth.
NASA has detected an asteroid almost as big as the Empire State Building that's on a near-collision course with Earth. The agency's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) has classified the massive space rock as a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA).

The approaching asteroid has been identified by CNEOS as 2019 GT3. According to the agency's database, this asteroid is currently traveling at a speed of 30,500 miles per hour. It is estimated to have a diameter of 1,247 feet.

Due to its massive size, the asteroid will not break up or explode in mid-air if it enters Earth's atmosphere. Instead, it will hit the ground and create a massive crater about 3 miles wide.
Read More...