Science & TechnologyS


Bug

Theory of anthropod evolution questioned following discovery of 99-million-year-old millipede in Myanmar

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Thu, 02 May 2019 20:58 UTC
millipede amber
© Leif MoritzHeld still for 99 million years: a millipede preserved in amber.
The earliest known millipede fossil has been discovered preserved in amber in Myanmar.

The arthropod, just 8.2 millimetres long, was found trapped in a piece of amber dated to 99 million years ago, putting it well into the Cretaceous period.

Writing in the journal ZooKeys, researchers led by Pavel Stoev from Bulgaria's National Museum of Natural History suggest that the newly identified species - dubbed Burmanopetalum inexpectatum - will prompt a substantial rethink of the evolutionary history of the millipede order, Callipodida.

Comment: Discoveries like this are coming thick and fast these days: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Archaeology

Animal & human bones over 12,000 years old found in underwater graveyard


RT
Fri, 03 May 2019 17:19 UTC
scuba diving
© Donald Miralle / Getty Images North America / AFP
An array of ancient animal and human bones including a wolf-like dog, elephant-like animals, sabertooth cats and other strange creatures have been found buried in an ancient graveyard at the bottom of an underwater cave in Mexico.

hoyo negro cave
© Roberto Chavez / Mexican National Anthropology and History Institute / AFPScientist looks at 12,000 year old bone of a teenage girl in the Hoyo Negro (Black Hole) cave in Tulum, Mexico
Experts say the "underworld of exquisitely preserved fossils" includes human remains that are over 12,000 years old and the skull of a large, short-faced bear. The Hoyo Negro pit is a natural time capsule from the Late Pleistocene era. Before it was underwater, animals would fall 60 meters into the cave to their deaths.

hoyo negro cave
© Roberto CHAVEZ / INAH / AFPDivers collect bones in the Hoyo Negro cave in Tulum, Mexico, 2012
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Chalkboard

Scientists study "machine behavior" in order to prevent a robot apocalypse

Dagny Taggart
The Organic Prepper
Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00 UTC
robot behavior
Experts have been warning us about potential dangers associated with artificial intelligence for quite some time. But is it too late to do anything about the impending rise of the machines?

Once the stuff of far-fetched dystopian science fiction, the idea of robot overlords taking over the world at some point now seems inevitable.

The late Dr. Stephen Hawking issued some harsh and terrifying words of caution back in 2014:
The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded. (source)
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, warned that we could see some terrifying issues within the next few years:
The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most. Please note that I am normally super pro technology and have never raised this issue until recent months. This is not a case of crying wolf about something I don't understand.

The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I'm not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast - it is growing at a pace close to exponential.

I am not alone in thinking we should be worried.

The leading AI companies have taken great steps to ensure safety. They recognize the danger, but believe that they can shape and control the digital superintelligences and prevent bad ones from escaping into the Internet. That remains to be seen... (source)
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Fireball 2

17 meteorites hit Earth everyday

Richard A Lovett
Cosmos Magazine
Thu, 02 May 2019 23:03 UTC
Meteor Over Minsk
© SERGEI GAPON/AFP/Getty ImagesA meteor crosses the night sky over a statue of Jesus Christ in the village of Ivye some 125 kilometres west of Minsk, in 2016.
Every year, the Earth is hit by about 6100 meteors large enough to reach the ground, or about 17 every day, research has revealed.

The vast majority fall unnoticed, in uninhabited areas. But several times a year, a few land in places that catch more attention.

Three months ago, for example, a small asteroid probably about the size of a minivan, flashed across the midday sky and exploded over western Cuba, showering the town of Viñales with falling rocks, some of which reportedly landed on rooftops.

Nobody was hurt, but it was a reminder that just as it's not safe to turn your back on the ocean for fear of being washed out to sea by an unusually large wave, space hazards are also capable of catching us by surprise.

To calculate how often such meteor falls occur, Gonzalo Tancredi, an astronomer at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay, examined a database of incident reports, discovering that in the last 95 years people have directly observed 95 such events - an average of about eight per year.

To figure out how many others occur unobserved, Tancredi noted that people only occupy a tiny fraction of the Earth's surface - about 0.44% of its land area, or 0.13% of its total surface area.

That means that for every impact that is actually seen by someone, another 770 splash into the sea or fall in a desert, forest, or other locations so remote that nobody sees it happen.

"Some places on the Earth are heavily populated," Tancredi says, "but most places are very lowly populated."
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Sun

The Sun is stranger than astrophysicists imagined

Natalie Wolchover
Quanta Magazine
Wed, 01 May 2019 12:00 UTC
sun gamma ray
© 5W Infographics for Quanta MagazineGamma radiation from the sun was thought to come from cosmic rays interacting with the sun’s magnetic field and then colliding with gas molecules near its surface. But this long-standing theory doesn’t account for the observed strength and other features of the solar gamma-ray signal.
Gamma radiation from the sun was thought to come from cosmic rays interacting with the sun's magnetic field and then colliding with gas molecules near its surface. But this long-standing theory doesn't account for the observed strength and other features of the solar gamma-ray signal.

A decade's worth of telescope observations of the sun have revealed a startling mystery: Gamma rays, the highest frequency waves of light, radiate from our nearest star seven times more abundantly than expected. Stranger still, despite this extreme excess of gamma rays overall, a narrow bandwidth of frequencies is curiously absent.

The surplus light, the gap in the spectrum, and other surprises about the solar gamma-ray signal potentially point to unknown features of the sun's magnetic field, or more exotic physics.

Comment: There are some fascinating and fruitful discoveries here, although they also show how science can be so easily blinded by its own suppositions these days.

See also: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Fireball 2

Water found in samples from asteroid Itokawa


Arizona State University
Thu, 02 May 2019 18:28 UTC
Itokawa
© Image by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)Asteroid Itokawa is the much-battered remnant of a larger parent body. Working with samples provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, ASU scientists have discovered that despite Itokawa's tumultuous history, this rubble-pile asteroid still contains significant amounts of water in its minerals. .
Two cosmochemists at Arizona State University have made the first-ever measurements of water contained in samples from the surface of an asteroid. The samples came from asteroid Itokawa and were collected by the Japanese space probe Hayabusa.

The team's findings suggest that impacts early in Earth's history by similar asteroids could have delivered as much as half of our planet's ocean water.


Comment: Study: Earth's water may have originally been formed deep within its mantle


"We found the samples we examined were enriched in water compared to the average for inner solar system objects," Ziliang Jin said. A postdoctoral scholar in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration, Jin is the lead author on the paper published May 1 in Science Advances reporting the results. His co-author is Maitrayee Bose, assistant professor in the school.

Comment: As far as science can reach the presence of water is never far away:

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Attention

Humans will eat maggot sausages as meat substitute - scientists

Hannah Sparks
New York Post
Wed, 01 May 2019 18:03 UTC
maggot sausages
"One hot dog, please - heavy on the maggots."

Food scientists at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia are incorporating insects such as maggots and locusts into a range of specialty foods, including sausage, as well as formulating sustainable insect-based feeds for the livestock themselves.

Hoffman says conventional livestock production will soon be unable to meet global demand for meat, so other fillers and alternatives will be needed to supplement the food supply with sufficient protein sources.

"An overpopulated world is going to struggle to find enough protein unless people are willing to open their minds, and stomachs, to a much broader notion of food," says meat science professor Dr. Louwrens Hoffman. "Would you eat a commercial sausage made from maggots? What about other insect larvae and even whole insects like locusts? The biggest potential for sustainable protein production lies with insects and new plant sources."
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Cloud Lightning

Meteorologists warn 5G frequencies could interfere with water vapor signals, disrupting forecasting


Strange Sounds
Wed, 01 May 2019 12:00 UTC
NOAA sateillite image
© Satellite image from NOAAGlobal 5G wireless networks threaten weather forecasts: Next-generation mobile technology could interfere with crucial satellite-based Earth observations.
Wireless radio frequencies being auctioned by the U.S. government for mobile 5G networks could interfere with weather forecasts and make them much less accurate, as the mobile network could cause interference that prevents satellites from detecting concentrations of water vapor in the atmosphere accurately, warn meteorologists. A new global problem.

For months, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, and two committees in the U.S. House, asked the Federal Communications Commission to delay 5G spectrum auctions.

But the FCC has gone ahead with the sales. An auction on April 17 involved two groups of frequencies: one between 24.25 and 24.45 gigahertz and the other between 24.75 and 25.25 gigahertz.

Water vapor problem

Comment: This is just one of many grave concerns over 5G - but with the rise in extreme weather and the increasingly erratic seasons accurate forecasting has never been more critical:

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Info

The phenomenon STEVE is not an Aurora after all

Monica Young
Sky&Telescope
Wed, 01 May 2019 02:51 UTC
STEVE
© Rocky RaybellSTEVE's mauve ribbon and green "picket fence."
A few years ago aurora chasers kept finding a mauve arc crossing the sky, sometimes accompanied by green stripes. The phenomenon lacked both an explanation and a name, so they dubbed it Steve. But even as their discovery went viral, its origin continued to stump amateurs and professionals alike.

As scientists began to investigate the pinkish celestial ribbon from within, using satellite data, they managed to turn the name into a scientific description: Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (STEVE). They soon found that the ribbon itself isn't an aurora after all but rather the warm glow from fast-flowing plasma above Earth's atmosphere. These regions appear following frequent space weather squalls called substorms, but still STEVE's origin remained unclear.

Now, Toshi Nishimura (Boston University) and colleagues report on the energy source that fuels STEVE in the Geophysical Research Letters, following an in-depth probe of the regions just outside of Earth's atmosphere.
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Better Earth

First hominins on the Tibetan Plateau were Denisovans - 160,000 years ago

Max Planck Society
Phys.org
Wed, 01 May 2019 20:05 UTC
Tibetan plateau
Tibetan Plateau
So far, Denisovans were only known from a small collection of fossil fragments from Denisova Cave in Siberia. A research team now describes a 160,000-year-old hominin mandible from Xiahe in China. Using ancient protein analysis, the researchers found that the mandible's owner belonged to a population that was closely related to the Denisovans from Siberia. This population occupied the Tibetan Plateau in the Middle Pleistocene and was adapted to this low-oxygen environment long before Homo sapiens arrived in the region.

Denisovans-an extinct sister group of Neandertals-were discovered in 2010, when a research team led by Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) sequenced the genome of a fossil finger bone found at Denisova Cave in Russia and showed that it belonged to a hominin group that was genetically distinct from Neandertals. "Traces of Denisovan DNA are found in present-day Asian, Australian and Melanesian populations, suggesting that these ancient hominins may have once been widespread," says Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the Department of Human Evolution at the MPI-EVA. "Yet so far the only fossils representing this ancient hominin group were identified at Denisova Cave."

Comment: It was only 6 months ago that scientists were claiming Denisovans had arrived at the Tibetan plateau a mere 30,000 years ago - stuff just keeps getting older and humanity's story is proving to be so much more complex:


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