Science & TechnologyS


Galaxy

Wakey wakey, rise and shine! Black hole begins brightly flashing - leaving scientists puzzled


RT
Wed, 14 Aug 2019 11:14 UTC
blackhole
© Pixabay / David Mark
A supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way just woke up and is flashing 75 times brighter than ever observed, after being quiet for more than 20 years, baffling astronomers.

Sagittarius A*, a supermassive blackhole, is normally low key with minimal fluctuation in brightness. Recently, however, it bloomed 75 times brighter than ever before for no apparent reason.

Earlier this year, Tuan Do, an astronomer at UCLA, and his team took observations of the galactic centre using the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii over four nights. The team observed the bizarre flash on May 13, capturing it in a two-hour timelapse that condensed the phenomenon down to just a few seconds. The "unprecedented" findings have now been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Fish

How Does a Religious Studies Professor Become a Darwinian Skeptic?

Robert F. Shedinger
Evolution News
Tue, 13 Aug 2019 18:02 UTC
Campus of Luther College
© Jonathunder [CC BY-SA 3.0] / Wikimedia CommonsCampus of Luther College
Evolution News Editor's note: We are delighted to welcome Dr. Shedinger as a new contributor. A Professor of Religion at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, he is the author of a new book critiquing Darwinian triumphalism, The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms: Darwinian Biology's Grand Narrative of Triumph and the Subversion of Religion, from which this post is adapted.
For most of my fifty-nine years, I fully accepted the truth of Darwinian evolution. I knew that Daniel Dennett had called Darwin's theory the best idea anyone has ever had and was quite familiar with Richard Dawkins's aggressive defense of modern evolutionary theory. Moreover, I had a passing familiarity with the biological establishment's disparaging treatment of intelligent design theory and accepted the view that ID is just a religious idea dressed up as science — that it has no scientific validity. And as a scholar committed to the academic study of religion, I found that these ideas about evolution and ID fit well with my position in the liberal academy.

A Colleague Retires

But then a senior colleague at Luther College who taught a course on science and religion retired. Wanting the course to continue, he looked to me as the person best suited to take it over. (My undergraduate degree is in civil engineering, so unlike many religion scholars, I have some scientific and mathematical background.) I was happy to do so, but I knew I had much work to do to get up to speed on the issues.

After some reflection, I decided to put the debate about evolution and ID at the center of the course. But since I had little direct experience with ID literature, I knew I needed to engage with it. That was something I did with great trepidation, feeling as though I was betraying my academic standards. I fully expected to find easily dispatched arguments full of faulty understandings of religion — my specialty. I began with Philip Johnson's seminal Darwin on Trial, followed by Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution, Stephen Meyer's Darwin's Doubt, and Jonathan Wells's Icons of Evolution.


Comment: Shedinger committed the mortal sin of honest Darwinists: to actually read the material produced by the other side. Warning to others: doing so is dangerous. You might just end up being convinced. And that means you're in for a world of hurt from your 'professional' colleagues. Better just to not read anything by the ID camp. It's much safer that way.


Comment: Kudos to Shedinger for breaking out of the Darwinist mind prison.

For SOTT's own series on evolution and ID, don't miss these: And if you prefer podcasts:

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Blue Planet

Read's Rule: Researchers map symbiotic relationships between trees and microbes worldwide

Taylor Kubota
phys.org
Wed, 15 May 2019 11:59 UTC
mapping
© Sora HaslerWatercolor depicting the relationship between trees, fungi and bacteria globally.
In and around the tangled roots of the forest floor, fungi and bacteria grow with trees, exchanging nutrients for carbon in a vast, global marketplace. A new effort to map the most abundant of these symbiotic relationships — involving more than 1.1 million forest sites and 28,000 tree species — has revealed factors that determine where different types of symbiots will flourish. The work could help scientists understand how symbiotic partnerships structure the world's forests and how they could be affected by a warming climate.

Stanford University researchers worked alongside a team of over 200 scientists to generate these maps, published May 16 in Nature. From the work, they revealed a new biological rule, which the team named Read's Rule after pioneer in symbiosis research Sir David Read.
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Magnet

Fluctuating fields: Russian scientists develop new composites for microelectronics


Sputnik
Tue, 06 Aug 2019 12:15 UTC
Piezoelectric element in a sensor
© MISISPiezoelectric element in a sensor
The ceramic composites - a breakthrough of a Russian research team - are deemed as exceptionally promising in terms of the development of data storage devices of greater capacity, as well as top sensitive detectors and sensors.

Scientists at the Russian National University of Science and Technology MISIS together with their colleagues from the South Ural State University and the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus have devised new, exceptionally promising materials that may be used to create the cutting-edge data storage devices and sensors. The research has been published in the prestigious scientific journal Composites Part B: Engineering.

The experiment conducted by Russian physicists has resulted in the development of ceramic composites, in other words, materials consisting of several components that boast curious properties. They may simultaneously exert control of the magnetic and electric fields, which will enable to process information in a quicker mode, create new data storage devices for larger bulks of information that will be more efficiently protected from hackers, new detectors and sensors, all the way to other more reliable and accurate microelectronic devices that do not have to be plugged into a power supply.
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Telescope

The Perseid meteor shower is here!


NASA
Thu, 01 Aug 2019 17:36 UTC
Shower of perseids
© Wikipedia
Perseid meteors, caused by debris left behind by the Comet Swift-Tuttle, began streaking across the skies in late July and will peak on the night of August 12.

The Perseid meteor shower is often considered to be one of the best meteor showers of the year due to its high rates and pleasant late-summer temperatures. This year's shower, however, has unfortunate circumstance of having a full Moon right at the shower peak, reducing the meteor rates from over 60 per hour down to 15-20 per hour. But the Perseids are rich in bright meteors and fireballs, so it will still be worth going out in the early morning to catch some of nature's fireworks.
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Microscope 1

The genius involved in creating alternative reading frames in DNA sequences

Ann Gauger
Evolution News
Mon, 12 Aug 2019 16:46 UTC
genes evolution alternate reading frames
© Emmanuel Douzery, [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
A reader, Charles, asks a good question:
I've been wondering about this for some time and haven't been able to find an answer. In protein production in an organism having a diploidal genome, do both strands contribute to protein production? In particular, does the complementary segment of a translated gene also get translated? It seems to me that it would be a real miracle if that were to be the case, since the chances of a sequence being useful and its complement being useful in the reversed direction would be quite small.

Best regards,
Charles

Comment:

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Black Cat 2

Why cats eat grass solved

David Shultz
Science Magazine
Thu, 08 Aug 2019 18:55 UTC
Cat Eating Grass
© KDDESIGNPHOTO/SHUTTERSTOCK
Cats do a lot of weird things. One of the biggies is eating grass, often to throw it up just a few minutes later. Now, after perhaps centuries of mystery, scientists think they know why.

Researchers surveyed more than 1000 cat owners on the internet who spent at least 3 hours a day watching and hanging out with their pet. As many cat parents suspected, eating plants is an extremely common behavior: Seventy-one percent of the animals were caught in the act at least six times in their lifetime, whereas only 11% were never observed gobbling greenery.

Many online explanations for grass eating posit that the behavior helps cats throw up when they're feeling ill. But only about a quarter of grass eaters were observed vomiting afterward, and 91% of respondents said their cat did not appear sick before imbibing plant matter.
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Nuke

Sabotage? Deadly explosion at Russian rocket test site near home of Northern Fleet - 5 nuclear specialists killed


RT
Fri, 09 Aug 2019 21:35 UTC
Rosatom scientists
© Facebook/Rosatom GlobalScientists at Rosatom facility
Five staff of Russia's nuclear corporation Rosatom were killed and three suffered serious burns in the blast during a test of a liquid-propellant engine that resulted in a brief spike of radiation around the military testing site.

The Rosatom engineering and technical team was working on the "isotope power source" for a propulsion system on Thursday, when the accident happened. The blast resulted in a background radiation spike, which quickly returned back to normal.

"As a result of the accident at the military firing range in Arkhangelsk region during liquid reactive propulsion system tests, five employees of the state corporation Rosatom were killed," the company said. Three military and civilian specialists remain in serious condition, but their injuries are "not life-threatening."

Comment: Between this hit on its nuclear and rocket specialists, the deaths of its military-intelligence submarine experts last month, and the ongoing massive explosions at multiple military ordinance sites, some hefty sabotage (and possibly deliberate assassination) efforts appear to be underway against key military-scientific targets across Russia.

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Broom

Russia's Roscosmos invents self-destroying satellite to solve 'space junk' problem


RT
Sat, 10 Aug 2019 15:47 UTC
Space junk
© NASA’s Johnson Space CenterThere is currently more than 8,400 tons of space trash orbiting the Earth.
Russia's Roscosmos space agency has invented a satellite with the ability to destroy itself at the end of its life, offering a solution to the significant problem of space debris.

The materials used in the satellite means it would "evaporate" when it is no longer useful, preventing it from adding to the increasing volume of defunct man-made objects that are floating around in space.

A patent filed with the Federal Service for Intellectual Property (Rospatent) shows that this would involve constructing the satellite out of materials that sublimate, meaning they transition directly from solid to gas without becoming liquid.

This clever construction would allow the satellites to self-decompose when they get a signal from Earth.

Comment: Scientists have been working on a variety of solutions to the excess space debris: What they aren't mentioning is the exponentially increasing amount of 'space junk' that isn't man-made, and can't be eliminated: Debris from increased asteroids and comets? Dust ring discovered 'where it should not be' - in Mercury's orbit

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Cell Phone

Huawei launches operating system HarmonyOS to replace Google's Android


RT
Sat, 10 Aug 2019 01:47 UTC
Huawei logo
© Reuters/Rodrigo Garrido
Huawei has rolled out its long-rumored Hongmeng operating system (OS), known as the HarmonyOS. The company says it can switch to the new system at any time, including on phones, if it is unable to use Android.

The Chinese tech giant officially unveiled the new platform on Friday. The operating system can be used on various smart devices and will be launched on "smart screen products," such as televisions, later this year. After the launch in China, the OS can become available on global markets, Huawei announced.

While the company said that it currently prefers to power its smartphones with Google's Android, it did not rule out the future use of its own system on smartphones.

"If we cannot use [Android] in the future we can immediately switch to HarmonyOS," CEO of the Chinese tech giant's consumer division, Richard Yu, told the Huawei Developer Conference in Dongguan. He added that the switch would take just one or two days.

Comment: See also:

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