Science & TechnologyS


Attention

Scientists warn Russian volcano could cause destruction on scale of Pompeii


RT
Thu, 06 Jun 2019 05:02 UTC
Bolshaya Udina volcano
© kuhnmi / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
A slumbering titan in Russia's Far East could soon awaken. Scientists warn that a long-dormant volcano is showing new signs of activity, and an eruption could spell disaster in Russia and beyond.

Deemed inactive for decades, the Bolshaya Udina volcano has come back to life, according to recent research, prompting concern about a potentially cataclysmic natural disaster.

"When a volcano is silent for a long time, its first explosion can be catastrophic," said Ivan Kulakov, the head of the seismic tomography lab at the Russian Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics, in an article for the Russian Academy of Sciences' Siberian branch. "A large amount of ash is thrown into the air, it is carried far away, and not only the surrounding settlements, but also large territories all over the planet, can suffer."

"Recall Pompeii," the researcher added ominously: the ancient Roman settlement was wiped off the map by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which laid dormant for thousands of years prior. The city was buried in over 10 feet of ash and most of its inhabitants are thought to have been killed in the disaster.
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Microscope 2

Ancient Siberia was home to previously unknown humans - Theory of Native American ancestors rewritten

Nicola Davis
The Guardian
Wed, 05 Jun 2019 18:00 UTC
Siberia unknown humans
© Elena Pavlova/NatureThe archaeological site near the Yana River in Siberia where two 31,000-year-old milk teeth were found.
It was cold, remote and involved picking fights with woolly mammoths - but it seems ancient Siberia 30,000 years ago was home to a hardy and previously unknown group of humans. Scientists say the discovery could help solve longstanding mysteries about the ancestors of native North Americans.

While it is commonly believed the ancestors of native North Americans arrived from Eurasia via a now submerged land bridge called Beringia, exactly which groups crossed and gave rise to native North American populations has been difficult to unpick.

Now scientists say they might have found some answers to the conundrums.

Comment: Recent revelations suggest Siberia appears to have played a rather prominent role in the story of man:

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Airplane

KLM funding development of new 'Flying-V' plane: Potential to revolutionise air travel


Physics and Astronomy Zone
Wed, 05 Jun 2019 19:53 UTC
flyingV new passenger air jet design
© Studio OSOResearchers hope to fly a scale model of the airplane in September and say it could be ready to enter service between 2040 and 2050.
A new aeroplane design known as the Flying-V is being developed, potentially changing air travel as we know it forever. The development of the V-shaped, fuel-efficient aeroplane is being funded by Dutch airline KLM and is named after the iconic Gibson Flying-V electric guitar used by a number of legendary musicians such as Jimi Hendrix.

The design has the same wingspan as existing planes and is able to carry up to 314 passengers, while the aircraft itself widens diagonally backwards from its nose to create the V-shape.

As reported by CNN, the Flying-V design was conceived by Justus Benad, a student at the Technical University of Berlin at the time, and was developed by researchers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, aka TU Delft. Its futuristic design ensures that passengers will be seated within the wings, along with the fuel tanks and cargo. Not only that, but the airline claims the plane will use 20 per cent less fuel than the Airbus A350-900, despite carrying a similar number of passengers. Pieter Elbers, CEO and president of KLM, said in a statement:
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Info

The surprising promise of inducing torpor

Paul Biegler
Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 05 Jun 2019 16:53 UTC
Therapeutic hypothermia”
© TIER UND NATURFOTOGRAFIE J UND C SOHNS“Therapeutic hypothermia” was sometimes tried in novel ways, such as this case, when a man went into cardiac arrest in supermarket and was subsequently covered in packets of frozen chips.
Inducing torpor and hibernation in humans could improve survival rates for heart attack and violence victims. It might also be the key to long distance space travel.

Take fluffy the cat. Found inert and apparently lifeless in a snow drift during the deep freeze in Montana last US winter, she resembled a trashed shag pile carpet on arrival at the Kalispell Animal Clinic.Her temperature didn't register.

Only hours later, however, gentle rewarming elicited a growl and Fluffy was discharged in full feline health. She was likely in a state loosely called "suspended animation". Body temperature plunges and metabolism slows to a point where the need for oxygen is so low that, even without breathing, vital organs such as the brain come out unscathed. It happens in humans, too.

In 2006, Australian mountaineer Lincoln Hall was pronounced dead by sherpas on Mount Everest after showing no signs of life for two hours. Despite a full night at 8800 metres with no oxygen, he was found next morning alive, if disoriented, by a fellow climber. These feats have not gone unnoticed by scientists.

Researchers are trialling extreme cooling to "buy time" for surgeons to fix patients whose hearts have stopped after a shooting or stabbing. Others are hunting the switch that hibernating animals use to put cell systems on hold, sometimes for years, when resources are scarce. There is intense interest, too, from space agencies hoping "human hibernation" could solve the problems of prolonged space flight. It is on Earth, however, that the need is most pressing.
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Nebula

It's a planet! Two newborn exoplanets caught sucking in matter from distant star


RT
Wed, 05 Jun 2019 02:10 UTC
Exoplanets PDS 70 b and c
© Space Telescope Science InstituteExoplanets PDS 70 b and c. Astronomers were able to cancel out the light from the central star (marked by a white star) to reveal two orbiting exoplanets.
Astronomers have released images of a nascent two-planet system being formed around a young star, a bit smaller than the Sun. It's the first time a duo of planets orbiting the same star have been spotted while still in the making.

The photos offer a rare glimpse into the process of planet birth, showing the gas planets, named PDS 70b and PDS 70c, accumulating matter from within a disk of dust and gas encircling their host star, PDS 70.

It is only the second time a multi-planet system has been photographed in its toddler state, and the first time for a two-planet system.

"This is the first unambiguous detection of a two-planet system carving a disk gap," Julien Girard of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, a co-author of the study, said in a statement.

While PDS 70b, the bigger of the pair, was discovered last year, its companion, PDS 70c, was not known to scientists before. Being twice as far from its star as PDS 70b, PDS 70c might be less massive than PDS 70b, but is far from lightweight in planetary terms. PDS 70c weighs in at up to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet in our Solar System, itself two-and-a-half times as heavy as all other Solar System planets combined.
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Rocket

Russian MoD publishes test launch video of impossibly fast missile


RT
Tue, 04 Jun 2019 20:26 UTC
russian missile hypersonic
A rocket flying at vertiginous speed appears on a fresh MoD video as the Russian military successfully tests a new addition to the missile defense shield.

Launches of the new air defense missile were held at the Sary Shagan testing range in Kazakhstan. A brief statement from the Ministry of Defense did not disclose the name and specifications of the weapon, only indicating that the missile confirmed its characteristics by hitting its test target.

The 34-second video shows different angles of the moment the rocket cruises up to the sky, leaving behind a burst of flame and thick plumes of smoke on the ground. The spectacular footage was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of the Russian Defense Ministry on Tuesday morning.


Comment: Yes, it appears to be supersonic at launch.

US generals must be soiling their pants.

In fact, CNN is reporting that an emergency shipment of underwear and new desk chairs arrived at the Pentagon today.

And John Bolton's mustache had a seizure...

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Microscope 1

Physicists say they can predict quantum jumps, 'save Schrödinger's cat'

Jim Shelton
YaleNews
Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:08 UTC
schrodinger's cat
© Kat Stockton
Yale researchers have figured out how to catch and save Schrödinger's famous cat, the symbol of quantum superposition and unpredictability, by anticipating its jumps and acting in real time to save it from proverbial doom. In the process, they overturn years of cornerstone dogma in quantum physics.

The discovery enables researchers to set up an early warning system for imminent jumps of artificial atoms containing quantum information. A study announcing the discovery appears in the June 3 online edition of the journal Nature.

Schrödinger's cat is a well-known paradox used to illustrate the concept of superposition - the ability for two opposite states to exist simultaneously - and unpredictability in quantum physics. The idea is that a cat is placed in a sealed box with a radioactive source and a poison that will be triggered if an atom of the radioactive substance decays. The superposition theory of quantum physics suggests that until someone opens the box, the cat is both alive and dead, a superposition of states. Opening the box to observe the cat causes it to abruptly change its quantum state randomly, forcing it to be either dead or alive.

The quantum jump is the discrete (non-continuous) and random change in the state when it is observed.

The experiment, performed in the lab of Yale professor Michel Devoret and proposed by lead author Zlatko Minev, peers into the actual workings of a quantum jump for the first time. The results reveal a surprising finding that contradicts Danish physicist Niels Bohr's established view - the jumps are neither abrupt nor as random as previously thought.
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Nebula

Human evolution is still happening - possibly faster than ever

Laurence D. Hurst
The Conversation
Wed, 14 Nov 2018 12:59 UTC
evolution
© watchara/ShutterstockYes, we're still evolving.
Modern medicine's ability to keep us alive makes it tempting to think human evolution may have stopped. Better healthcare disrupts a key driving force of evolution by keeping some people alive longer, making them more likely to pass on their genes. But if we look at the rate of our DNA's evolution, we can see that human evolution hasn't stopped - it may even be happening faster than before.

Evolution is a gradual change to the DNA of a species over many generations. It can occur by natural selection, when certain traits created by genetic mutations help an organism survive or reproduce. Such mutations are thus more likely to be passed on to the next generation, so they increase in frequency in a population. Gradually, these mutations and their associated traits become more common among the whole group.

By looking at global studies of our DNA, we can see evidence that natural selection has recently made changes and continues to do so. Though modern healthcare frees us from many causes of death, in countries without access to good healthcare, populations are continuing to evolve. Survivors of infectious disease outbreaks drive natural selection by giving their genetic resistance to offspring. Our DNA shows evidence for recent selection for resistance of killer diseases like Lassa fever and malaria. Selection in response to malaria is still ongoing in regions where the disease remains common.

Comment: In Paleo diet? Science has moved on since the stone age Tim Spector writes:
Other genetic evidence of recent changes to our digestive genes comes from a worldwide study of the amylase gene which is key to breaking down starch in carbohydrates. People in areas with starch as a major part of the diet evolved to have multiple copies of the gene to help them digest it better. We found in a collaborative study using our twins that this mutation also strangely protected against obesity, and importantly we think this change only happened in the last few hundred generations.

Other genes key to how we digest food can change even more rapidly. These are the 2m or so genes in the DNA of the trillions of microbes in our gut. Although they are not human genes they are crucial to our health as they control our microbiome which digests our food and produces many of our vitamins and blood metabolites. These bacterial genes in our guts can respond rapidly to changes in our diet, and as they can produce a new generation every 30 minutes, they can evolve very fast indeed.

They also have a secret weapon called horizontal gene transfer which means they can rapidly swap genes between them to mutual advantage, without waiting for natural selection. They use this very effectively to become resistant to new antibiotics and the same process is likely for new foods.
And so, while it does appear that a large majority of people do benefit from returning to a diet that would be more akin to what their ancestors ate, it's notable that there are a number of other aspects to consider.

Either way, it's apparent that 'natural selection' and 'chance' are unlikely to be the drivers in the changes discussed above: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Eye 1

Why the world looks different from one person to the next

Charles Q. Choi
Inside Science
Thu, 30 May 2019 19:30 UTC
Eye Movement
People constantly move their eyes to fix their gazes on items of interest, making about two to four eye movements every second for some 150,000 motions daily, but it remains uncertain how we choose what to focus on.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, scientists now find that not everybody looks at the same words first. When shown a series of pictures some people might focus more on, say, faces, while others might fixate on food. The new findings emphasize how the world might look different from one person to the next.

Much remains a mystery about how we look at the world. People constantly move their eyes to fix their gazes on items of interest, making about two to four eye movements every second for some 150,000 motions daily, but it remains uncertain how we choose what to focus on.

Scientists attempting to predict which parts of a scene will attract the eye have often tried modeling a "typical observer" based on aggregated data from many people. A common assumption was that any differences between the gazes of people could "safely be ignored," said study lead author Benjamin de Haas, a neuroscientist at Justus-Liebig University Giessen in Germany.
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Jupiter

What's happening to Jupiter's Great Red Spot? Astronomers see unravelling of 400-year-old storm

Nicole Mortillaro
CBC
Fri, 31 May 2019 04:00 UTC
Jupiter great red spot
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Björn JónssonNASA's Juno spacecraft, currently in orbit around Jupiter, captured the Great Red Spot on Feb. 28, 2019. To the storm's left edge, a region of the 400-year-old storm is seen mixing with the surrounding cloud of gases.
Jupiter's iconic storm is dying.

Over the past week, amateur astronomers around the world have seen some unusual activity around the solar system's largest and longest-lasting storm, known as the Great Red Spot (GRS).

The swirling red clouds that have been raging over the giant planet for centuries have been spotted forming "propellers" along the storm's edges, with these blade-like shapes spinning off and ultimately dissipating.

"This is very uncharted territory," said Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who studies Jupiter. "We've never seen it like this before."

Comment: See also:

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