Science & TechnologyS


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:

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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

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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).
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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.
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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*.
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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.
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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.
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Flashlight

Our individuality is encrypted in our DNA, but it is deeper than expected

Sonia Fernandez
Archeology News Netwrrok
Thu, 05 Sep 2019 21:21 UTC
elegans worm
© Pradeep JoshiC. elegans worms showing pharynx (red) and intestine ("endoderm" in green and cyan) portions
of the digestive tract. Providing a glimpse the hidden workings of evolution, a group of researchers at UC Santa Barbara have discovered that embryos that appear the same can start out with surprisingly different instructions.
"We found that a lot of undercover evolution occurs in early embryos," said Joel Rothman, a professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, who led the team.

Indeed, although members of the same species are identical across the vast majority of their genomes, including all the genetic instructions used in development, Rothman and his colleagues found that key parts of the assembly instructions used when embryos first start developing can differ dramatically between individuals of the same species.

This finding may shed light on two important areas: how animals can evolve quickly, and why patients can show very different responses to particular drugs.

"Many of the distinctive features that make us unique, including our color, height and susceptibility to diseases, are determined by our genomes," Rothman said. "But since everyone looks pretty similar as embryos, the genetic assembly instructions that get us started at conception were thought to be nearly identical between us."

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Frog

Ancient worm fossil rolls back origins of animal life, challenges theory of evolution

Colin Barras
Nature
Thu, 05 Sep 2019 20:30 UTC
Yilingia spiciformis
© Z. Chen et al./NatureA fossil of Yilingia spiciformis and the track it left as it moved.
More than half a billion years ago, a strange, worm-like creature died as it crawled across the muddy sea floor. Both the organism and the trail it left lay undisturbed for so long that they fossilized. Now, they are helping to revise our understanding of when and how animals evolved.

The fossil, which formed some time between 551 million and 539 million years ago, in the Ediacaran period, joins a growing body of evidence that challenges the idea that animal life on Earth burst onto the scene in an event known as the Cambrian explosion, which began about 539 million years ago.

"It is just pushing things further and further back into the Ediacaran," says Rachel Wood, a geoscientist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. The Cambrian explosion no longer appears to be such an abrupt event in the history of life on Earth, she says. An analysis of the fossil, along with a few dozen similar specimens found in the same rock sequence in southern China, is published in Nature1.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Question

Mysterious radio burst detected by China's radio telescope

DM Chan
Asia Times
Thu, 05 Sep 2019 20:08 UTC
FAST in China
© Asia TimesFAST, the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, has a certain edge in detecting repeated FRBs.
Is someone or something trying to contact earth?

China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) has detected a repeating fast radio burst (FRB) — mysterious radio signals from outer space — for the first time, Science and Technology Daily reported.

Scientists on the FAST project with the National Astronomical Observatories of China, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, revealed the news to China Daily on Wednesday.

The FRB originated some three billion light years away from Earth. Interference factors including aircraft and satellites have been eliminated and cross validation is being carried out, the scientists said.

FRB is one of the hottest topics in astronomy. It was not until 2007 when the first FRB was discovered by humans. Fewer than 100 FRBs have been detected internationally to date.

There is still no cohesive explanation for the origin of FRB in the international scientific community at present. FRBs mostly only appear once, which makes them very hard to track.
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