Science & TechnologyS


Meteor

2 asteroids to scream past Earth Wednesday, including one discovered only last week


RT
Tue, 27 Aug 2019 12:59 UTC
asteroid approaching earth
© Illustration urikyo33/Pixabay
To conclude what has been a busy summer for NASA's Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), not one but two asteroids are set to scream by the Earth Wednesday, one of which was only spotted less than a week ago.

In news which may exacerbate concerns over our lack of planetary defenses, asteroid 2019 QS was first spotted on August 21. Measuring between 108 and 240ft (33 - 73 meters) in diameter and travelling at a speed of 49,709 mph, the space rock could do some serious damage if it smashed into our planet.

Thankfully, however, NASA boffins spotted the inbound asteroid in the nick of time and were able to calculate that it will pass us by harmlessly in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

2019 QS will be making its debut close Earth approach at a distance of roughly 5.48 times the distance to the moon.


Comment: In cosmic terms this isn't very far from Earth at all. How soon before something of this size (or larger) makes a direct hit given what we now know about the relationship between in-coming comets and the sun's dark companion Nemesis.


The second of Wednesday's close fly-by visitors, asteroid 2019 OU1 will pass by shortly afterwards. Measuring an estimated 560ft in diameter (roughly the size of the Washington Monument) it will shoot past at a distance of less than a million miles away and a speed of 29,000mph.
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Comet 2

Dr. Napier fingers fragmented comet in Younger Dryas and Bronze Age impacts


Cosmic Tusk
Wed, 21 Aug 2019 22:26 UTC
Comet 332P Fragmenting
© NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA)This image, captured on January 27 2016 by the Hubble Space Telescope, is one of three showing Comet 332P fragmenting as it nears the sun.
Folks, I am sorry to have been so scarce in recent months. Among other excuses for the inexcusable, the auto-mailer for subscribers to the site went down, and I felt I needed to repair it before posting. Fixing it turned into a mess which led to my continued procrastination. Much has happened in recent months in our subject though, and I look forward to catching up and posting more, as the year closes out.

First up is a fabulous new paper from Tusk friend and Scottish astronomer William Napier. Bill is a member of the Comet Research Group and contributes his world class knowledge on the behavior of comets in support of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. In this contribution he further refines the culprit in our favorite cataclysm, a fragmenting comet. But keep in mind, as sometimes others have not, that the subject comet is fragmenting IN SPACE over thousands of years, not in the earth's atmosphere. See The Bos misdirecting the nature and context of the fragmentation events here and here, and the CRG response here.
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Laptop

Digital Immortality

David Evans Bailey
Cosmos Magazine
Mon, 26 Aug 2019 18:50 UTC
Digital Immortality
© Shutterstock/CC BY-NDIf it were possible to download the neural networks of a human brain, could we preserve a computer simulation of that person?
Immortality has been a topic of discussion since the legend of the Holy Grail.

Some people have gone as far as cryogenic freezing after death in the hope that one day science will have advanced enough to resurrect them. Others believe the route to immortality lies in the digital realm.

The theory that humans can be digitised and live on within the digital confines of a computer-based existence has been the subject of debate. But until recently, no one had taken the idea much beyond research and discussion.

Last year, a consortium of unidentified individuals launched Virternity with the stated goal of a digital life for all. A world that would be owned not by any government but by the people.

This digital world, Virternity said, would remove the physical constraints upon us and the planet and usher in a completely new plane of existence. Then, without any warning, Virternity disappeared.
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Microscope 2

Wheels in nature: Making predictions against design

Ann Gauger
Evolution News
Mon, 26 Aug 2019 18:20 UTC
cells
© Discovery Institute
From back when I was a sophomore taking biochemistry, one particular event stands out in my memory, perhaps because it was such an odd thing. Our professor, I'll call him Dr. X, knew his material very well. Our classroom had nine blackboards stacked in groups of three. As he wrote on one, Professor X would flip a switch and blackboard A would advance upward, then B, then C, following some pattern that only he knew, until at the end of class, having dragged us all through metabolism, he would neatly draw an arrow connecting blackboard I's reaction with the one on the starting blackboard. He always left me staring at my notes in despair of connecting them.

But that's not what I remember about him the best. One day we were having a discussion about the marvelous things that were being found in biology. It was only a decade since the genetic code had been cracked, and the first DNA and the first protein had been sequenced. These were remarkable achievements. The development of the tools that made genetic engineering possible was happening there and then, at MIT at the time. I didn't really realize how momentous it all was.
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Microscope 2

New species of "medicinal" leech identified in swamps near Washington DC

Lila Thulin
Smithsonian
Mon, 26 Aug 2019 10:33 UTC
leech
© Ian Cook.Macrobdella mimicus.
In the summer of 2015, when Smithsonian research zoologist Anna Phillips and other scientists were standing in slow-moving swamp water, letting leeches latch onto their bare legs or gathering them up in nets from muddy pond bottoms, they didn't realize that some of the bloodsuckers they'd collected belonged to an entirely new species. But in a just-published paper in the Journal of Parasitology, Phillips and her colleagues from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Royal Ontario Museum report that a previously unknown leech species, Macrobdella mimicus, is the first to be discovered on the continent in more than 40 years.

An international collaboration investigating biodiversity in leech populations led Phillips, a curator of parasitic worms and invertebrate zoology at the National Museum of Natural History, to streams and ponds across the eastern United States. Wading into the water, she checked rocks and submerged wood scraps for leeches to collect and analyze.

Comment: See also: Man dies from flesh-eating bacteria he contracted on fishing boat

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Satellite

Russia's Roscosmos invents shield system to protect satellites from space junk


RT
Sun, 25 Aug 2019 13:06 UTC
Roscosmos satellite shield
Russia's Roscosmos space agency has invented a shield system for protecting satellites from being damaged by flying objects that could smash into them as they hurtle through space.

A patent filed with the Federal Service for Intellectual Property (Rospatent) shows that the two-layer shield, made from aluminum plates, is covered in numerous staggered conical 'spikes,' which are coated with a hard alloy. The spaces between the cones are filled in with carbon-fiber-reinforced carbon, a composite material used to build spacecraft and missile noses.

The armor is designed to break objects into smaller fragments which would then be pushed in different directions, hitting the cone-shaped base of the protective shield as the force of the object diminishes. The patent specification notes that the system should be 10 percent lighter than a flat shield.

Comment: Se also: Russia's Roscosmos invents self-destroying satellite to solve 'space junk' problem

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Cow Skull

Recombinetics: Flaws overlooked in Gene-edited hornless cattle


GM Watch
Thu, 08 Aug 2019 12:03 UTC
cattle
© Alison Van Eenennaam/TwitterHornless heifer calf #1 of gene-edited bull alongside horned Hereford control calf on right
New techniques for genetic engineering are not as precise as claimed

Cattle are being genetically engineered using gene-editing tools to not grow horns. But according to newly published research by experts at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), gene-editing errors in the genome of these cattle are often being overlooked (see abstract below).

The animals were genetically engineered by the biotech company Recombinetics. The company also filed a patent on the genetically engineered cattle. The cattle have for some years been hyped as a positive application of new genetic engineering techniques and a boon for animal welfare, since these GM cattle will not need to be de-horned. However, it appears to have so far gone unnoticed that the gene-editing has resulted in major unintended outcomes.
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Jupiter

Jupiter: Storms are disturbing the planet's colorful belts

Robert Sanders
Berkley News
Thu, 22 Aug 2019 00:00 UTC
closeup plumes jupiter
© Imke de Pater, UC Berkeley; Robert Sault, University of Melbourne; Chris Moeckel, UC Berkeley; Michael Wong, UC Berkeley; Leigh Fletcher, University of LeicesterA closeup of the two bright white plumes (center) in the South Equatorial Belt of Jupiter and a large downstream disturbance to their right.
Storm clouds rooted deep in Jupiter's atmosphere are affecting the planet's white zones and colorful belts, creating disturbances in their flow and even changing their color.

Thanks to coordinated observations of the planet in January 2017 by six ground-based optical and radio telescopes and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a University of California, Berkeley, astronomer and her colleagues have been able to track the effects of these storms — visible as bright plumes above the planet's ammonia ice clouds — on the belts in which they appear.

The observations will ultimately help planetary scientists understand the complex atmospheric dynamics on Jupiter, which, with its Great Red Spot and colorful, layer cake-like bands, make it one of the most beautiful and changeable of the giant gas planets in the solar system.
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Robot

Next-gen robots that can swim, fly and perform brain surgery unveiled in China at World Robot Conference


RT
Sat, 24 Aug 2019 16:41 UTC
ultralight flying drone
© AFP / Wang ZhaoGerman firm Festo's Ultralight flying drone
The largest robot convention in the world has got underway in China and this year the bots are more impressive and advanced than ever before.

The fifth annual World Robot Conference is being held in Beijing from August 20 to 25, attracting over 800,000 visitors. The event showcases more than 700 models of the latest robotic technologies and upgrades, and, this year, they can swim, fly and even perform brain surgery.

Smartbird

Created by German firm Festo, the ultralight flying drone was inspired by the herring gull. With a wingspan of two meters, the flight model can take off, fly and land using its own wings and just 23 watts of power - half the power used by some laptops.

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Calculator

Polish village that hasn't seen a boy born in nearly 10 years is making headlines

Craig Anderson
The Conversation
Sat, 24 Aug 2019 10:49 UTC
baby feet
© Irina Murza/Unsplash
The tiny Polish village of Miejsce Odrzanskie has become the unlikely source of international media attention over the past fortnight as a result of what the New York Times called "a strange population anomaly". It has now been almost a decade since the last boy was born in this place, with the most recent 12 babies all having been girls.

The mayor of the region is quoted in the article as saying there has been "scientific interest" - presumably from geneticists - in exploring what has led to this unusual sequence. He also discusses some glaringly unscientific advice the town has been given on how to conceive boys, ranging from changing mothers' diets to "keeping an ax(e) under your marital bed".

But the most prosaic suggestion mentioned in the article is also by far the most likely - that it's just a statistical coincidence.

So how could this be possible? Just like a coin toss, a birth has two equally likely outcomes - and therefore the probability of any given baby being a girl is ½. We can also assume that each individual birth can be considered to be independent of the previous one - the first mother having a girl doesn't make it any more or less likely that the second mother will have a girl.
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