Science & TechnologyS


Butterfly

New species of bat-wing dinosaur discovered - 'Shatters' evolutionary ideas of flight in birds

Michael Greshko
National Geographic
Thu, 09 May 2019 09:29 UTC
Ambopteryx
© Illustration by Mr. Chung-Tat CheungThis illustration depicts Ambopteryx longibrachium, a newfound species of nonavian theropod dinosaur that had bat-like membrane wings. It lived in what's now China about 163 million years ago. The rare fossil find from China is the best preserved example yet of this very odd dinosaur group.
More than 160 million years ago, the forests of ancient China were home to a bizarre predator: a tiny dinosaur that glided from tree to tree with leathery, bat-like wings. The newfound fossil, unveiled today in the journal Nature, is just the second feathered dinosaur found with signs of large membranes on its wings. Fitting, then, that the animal's newly assigned genus name is Ambopteryx: Latin for "both wings."

"The most exciting thing, for me, is that it shows that some dinosaurs evolved very different structures to become volant," or capable of some form of flight, says lead study author Min Wang, a paleontologist at China's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

Ambopteryx is now the best known fossil of a scansoriopterygid (scan-soary-OP-teh-rigid), an oddball group of nonavian dinosaurs that includes Yi qi, the first dinosaur ever found with bat-like wings. That fossil find-announced in 2015 by study coauthor Xing Xu, the IVPP's deputy director-reshaped how scientists understood the evolution of flight.

Comment: This is just one of a number of recent discoveries that the Darwinian theory of evolution cannot explain: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Magnify

Irreducible complexity: What scallops' 200 eyes might teach us about the 'evolution' of vision - or more accurately, Intelligent Design

Viviane Callier
Smithsonian.com
Mon, 06 May 2019 00:00 UTC
Scallops can have up to 200 eyes
© ShaneKato / iStockScallops can have up to 200 eyes, although scientists still don't know exactly how they all work together to help the mollusks see.
The word "scallop" usually evokes a juicy, round adductor muscle - a seafood delicacy. So it isn't widely known that scallops have up to 200 tiny eyes along the edge of the mantle lining their shells. The complexities of these mollusk eyes are still being unveiled. A new study published in Current Biology reveals that scallop eyes have pupils that dilate and contract in response to light, making them far more dynamic than previously believed.

"It's just surprising how much we're finding out about how complex and how functional these scallop eyes are," says Todd Oakley, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The optics of scallop eyes are set up very differently than our own ocular organs. As light enters into the scallop eye, it passes through the pupil, a lens, two retinas (distal and proximal), and then reaches a mirror made of crystals of guanine at the back of the eye. The curved mirror reflects the light onto the interior surface of the retinas, where neural signals are generated and sent to a small visceral ganglion, or a cluster of nerve cells, whose main job is to control the scallop's gut and adductor muscle. The structure of a scallop's eye is similar to the optics systems found in advanced telescopes.


Comment: It is the comparisons to machines and technology - that can only be assembled with purposeful intent and an actual blueprint - that the above mention of advanced telescopes reminds us of. Molecular biologist Michael Behe has been successfully countering conventional beliefs about evolution with his concept of irreducible complexity. Behe would further say that:
Irreducible complexity is just a fancy phrase I use to mean a single system which is composed of several interacting parts, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to cease functioning.
How then can we reconcile the incredible complexity of the scallop's eye with natural selection - or mere adaptation to the organism's environment - when it clearly compares to the human's most advanced technologies?? You can't. An incredible amount of science had to be understood and engineered and built together to make an advanced telescope. And we are supposed to believe that the scallop's eye just happened to correctly "assemble" its visual apparatus out of an imperative to adapt??

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Info

New form of virtual money proposed

Sarah Collins
University of Cambridge
Wed, 08 May 2019 17:52 UTC
Fiber Optic Cables
© chaitawat
A new type of money that allows users to make decisions based on information arriving at different locations and times, and that could also protect against attacks from quantum computers, has been proposed by a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

The theoretical framework, dubbed 'S-money', could ensure completely unforgeable and secure authentication, and allow faster and more flexible responses than any existing financial technology, harnessing the combined power of quantum theory and relativity. In fact, it could conceivably make it possible to conduct commerce across the Solar System and beyond, without long time lags, although commerce on a galactic scale is a fanciful notion at this point.

Researchers aim to begin testing its practicality on a smaller, Earth-bound scale later this year. S-money requires very fast computations, but may be feasible with current computing technology. Details are published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

"It's a slightly different way of thinking about money: instead of something that we hold in our hands or in our bank accounts, money could be thought of as something that you need to get to a certain point in space and time, in response to data that's coming from lots of other points in space and time," said Professor Adrian Kent, from Cambridge's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, who authored the paper.
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Laptop

Stolen NSA hacking tools were used by other hacker groups 14 months before Shadow Brokers leak

Dan Goodin
Ars Technica
Tue, 07 May 2019 06:48 UTC
National Security Agency
The National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.
One of the most significant events in computer security happened in April 2017, when a still-unidentified group calling itself the Shadow Brokers published a trove of the National Security Agency's most coveted hacking tools. The leak and the subsequent repurposing of the exploits in the WannaCry and NotPetya worms that shut down computers worldwide made the theft arguably one of the NSA's biggest operational mistakes ever.

On Monday, security firm Symantec reported that two of those advanced hacking tools were used against a host of targets starting in March 2016, fourteen months prior to the Shadow Brokers leak. An advanced persistent threat hacking group that Symantec has been tracking since 2010 somehow got access to a variant of the NSA-developed "DoublePulsar" backdoor and one of the Windows exploits the NSA used to remotely install it on targeted computers.

Killing NOBUS

The revelation that the powerful NSA tools were being repurposed much earlier than previously thought is sure to touch off a new round of criticism about the agency's inability to secure its arsenal.

"This definitely should bring additional criticism of the ability to protect their tools," Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker who is now a cofounder of Rendition Infosec, told Ars. "If they didn't lose the tools from a direct compromise, then the exploits were intercepted in transit or they were independently discovered. All of this completely kills the NOBUS argument."

"NOBUS" is shorthand for nobody but us, a mantra NSA officials use to justify their practice of privately stockpiling certain exploits rather than reporting the underlying vulnerabilities so they can be fixed.

Comment: See also:

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Binoculars

A tectonic plate near Portugal may be peeling apart—and that could shrink the Atlantic Ocean

Maya Wei-Haas
National Geographic
Mon, 06 May 2019 00:00 UTC
Illustration of a subduction zone
© Illustration by National Geographic, Art: Tomáš Müller, Graphic Editors: Manuel Canales, Matthew Chwastyk, Research: Ryan WilliamsAn oceanic plate dives beneath another in an Illustration of a subduction zone. Studies of tectonic activity off the coast of Portugal may reveal a new subduction zone being born.
Something strange is happening off the coast of Portugal, and scientists have now proposed a groundbreaking explanation.

For years, João Duarte has puzzled over a seemingly boring underwater expanse off the coast of Portugal. In 1969, this site spawned a massive earthquake that rattled the shore and sparked a tsunami. But you would never know why just from looking at the broad, featureless surface of the seabed. Duarte, a marine geologist from the Instituto Dom Luiz at the University of Lisbon, wanted to find out what was going on.

Now, 50 years after the event, he may finally have an answer: The bottom of the tectonic plate off Portugal's coast seems to be peeling away from its top. This action may be providing the necessary spark for one plate to start grinding beneath another in what's known as a subduction zone, according to computer simulations Duarte presented in April at the European Geosciences Union meeting.

If confirmed, the new work would be the first time an oceanic plate has been caught in the act of peeling - and it may mark one of the earliest stages of the Atlantic Ocean shrinking, sending Europe inching toward Canada as predicted by some models of tectonic activity. (Find out what scientists think will happen when Earth's tectonic plates grind to a halt.)

"It's certainly an interesting story," says the University of Oslo's Fabio Crameri, who was not part of the research team but who attended the EGU lecture. Duarte presented some strong arguments, he says, but he cautions that the model needs further testing-not an easy feat when your data comes from a natural process that works at the speed at which fingernails grow.
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Fire

Gas that makes mountains breathe fire is appearing around the world

Joanna Klein
The Independent
Thu, 02 May 2019 17:48 UTC
The Flames of Chimaera in Turkey
© Getty iStockThe Flames of Chimaera in Turkey are produced by a gas escaping from deep within the earth produced by chemosynthesis, a chemical reaction inside rocks

Ancient recipe for deep-earth version of photosynthesis is more common than previously known, scientists find

At the top of a mountain in southwest Turkey, the ground spits fire. Known as the Flames of Chimaera, they have burned for millenniums. Local myth long held that these fires were the breath of a monster - part goat, part snake, part lion.

Today we know the fuel for this flaming mountaintop is gas escaping from deep within the earth. But it does not come from the decay of ancient plant, algae or animal life, like fossil fuels.

Instead, this gas comes from a chemical reaction inside rocks. And a series of studies published by a group of international scientists known as the Deep Carbon Observatory is showing that this source of gas is more common on our planet than previously known.

"We have discovered these unusual types of methane in many, many sites. It's not a rare phenomenon," said Giuseppe Etiope, a member of the group who helped discover the cause of the Flames of Chimaera in 2014.

Over the past decade, the observatory's community of scientists has found hundreds of gas deposits in more than 20 countries and several spots at the bottom of the sea that are similar to the Flames of Chimaera.
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Microscope 1

Montana man's DNA oldest found on the continent, testing company says

Kristen Inbody
USA Today
Tue, 07 May 2019 16:44 UTC
Darrell
© KRISTEN INBODY/GREAT FALLS TRIBUNEDarrell "Dusty" Crawford
On a blizzarding March day on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Alvin "Willy" Crawford's heart gave out.

Among the many things his brother Darrell "Dusty" Crawford wanted to tell him before he died, one thing, in particular, is needling him.

At Willy's urging, Crawford had his DNA tested.

"He's the one who encouraged me to do this, and he wanted to compare our results," Crawford said. "I just wish I could have shown it to him. It would have blown him away."

Crawford had his DNA tested through CRI Genetics, which aims to provide customers with a "biogeographical ancestry," a description of where their genes fit into the overall story of the species.
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Info

Scientists confirm ancient Chinese astronomical observations of a supernova

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Tue, 07 May 2019 16:09 UTC
Chinese Astro Calender
© ÖTTGENS, ET ALThe text, dating from 48BCE, recording the glow in a particular spot in the night sky.
Scientists have repeated observations made almost 2070 years ago by Chinese astronomers, confirming one of the earliest ever discoveries of an event occurring beyond the solar system.

In 48BCE, the Chinese sky-watchers recorded a bright glow in a particular part of the night sky.

Now a team of researchers led by astrophysicist Fabian Göttgens from the University of Göttingen in Germany have shown that the observations related to a nova - an explosion of hydrogen on the surface of a star, located in a global cluster known as Messier 22.

The cluster, one of at least 150 thus far identified in the Milky Way, is a tightly packed group of stars located close to the galaxy's centre, some 10,600 light-years from Earth. It is sometimes called the Sagittarius Cluster.
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Meteor

NASA concerned about 2029 arrival of 'God of Chaos' asteroid Apophis

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com
Thu, 02 May 2019 00:00 UTC
asteroids earth
NASA is already beginning preparations for the arrival of the asteroid called "The God of Chaos." The asteroid is said to be approaching Earth and will come close to our planet in 2029.

The asteroid's official name is 99942 Apophis. It is a 1,110-foot-wide asteroid named after the Egyptian god of chaos. It will fly as close to the Earth as some of the orbiting spacecraft, panicking scientists.

99942 Apophis will come within 19,000 miles of Earth on April 13, a decade from now, but scientists at the Planetary Defense Conference are already preparing for the encounter, Newsweek reported. They plan to discuss the asteroid's effects on Earth's gravity, potential research opportunities and even how to deflect an incoming asteroid in a theoretical scenario.

The asteroid will be visible to the naked eye and will look like a moving star point of light, according to NASA. It will pass over the United States in the early evening, according to WUSA 9. 99942 Apophis was discovered in 2004 and, after tracking it for 15 years, scientists say the asteroid has a 1 in 100,000 chance of striking Earth decades in the future. But in the fairly distant future: after 2060, Newsweek reported.

Comment: When NASA says "an emergency on this scale has never happened" they mean strictly within modern history. Earth is certainly no stranger to cataclysmic asteroid-related events - and neither were human civilizations of old...

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Info

Star in Ursa Major hints at Milky Way's cataclysmic past

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Sun, 05 May 2019 20:24 UTC
Ursa Major
© Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty ImagesAn eighteenth century engraving of Ursa Major. Somewhere within the bear lurks a star from outside the galaxy.
Researchers have identified a star in the Milky Way they believe originated from outside the galaxy.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, a team led by Qian-Fan Xing from the National Astronomical Observatories at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, describes a star dubbed J1124+4535, located in the Milky Way constellation known as Ursa Major, or the Big Dipper.

Interest in the star began following observations made through China's Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), which indicated that the star had an unusually low abundance of magnesium.

Seeking more detail, the researchers switched to the High Dispersion Spectrograph (HDS) on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii.
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