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Lightning does strikes twice in the same place surprisingly often

Nick Carne
Cosmos Magazine
Mon, 22 Apr 2019 17:33 UTC
Lightning
© Vasin Lee/Shutterstock

Lightning strikes twice in the same place surprisingly often and now, thanks to a Dutch radio telescope network called the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), scientists have a better idea why.

An international team used the array to study the development of lightning flashes in unprecedented detail, and discovered that the negative charges inside a thundercloud are not discharged in a single flash.

Some are stored inside structures the researchers have called needles, making a repeated discharge to the ground quite possible.

"This finding is in sharp contrast to the present picture, in which the charge flows along plasma channels directly from one part of the cloud to another, or to the ground", says Olaf Scholten, from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands.

And it hasn't been noticed before because there wasn't equipment powerful enough to do so.

"These needles can have a length of 100 metres and a diameter of less than five metres, and are too small and too short-lived for other lightning detections systems," says Brian Hare, also from the University of Groningen.
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Cloud Grey

Recent SpaceX Crew Dragon accident clouds outlook for US domestic astronaut launches

James Dean
Florida Today
Mon, 22 Apr 2019 13:37 UTC
SpaceX launch anomaly, Crew Dragon SpaceX
© Craig Bailey / Florida TodayOrange smoke rises above SpaceX's facilities at Cape Canaveral. The Air Force confirmed an anomaly occurred with the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
SpaceX had appeared to be cruising to victory over Boeing in the race to be the first to launch astronauts to orbit from U.S. soil since NASA's final shuttle mission in 2011.

Officials including Vice President Mike Pence hailed last month's successful first test flight of the company's Crew Dragon capsule as the dawn of a new era of commercial spaceflight.

A pair of astronaut test pilots were on track to fly a Crew Dragon to the International Space Station as soon as July.

Not so fast.

The same capsule retrieved from a March 8 splashdown off the Florida coast was believed to have been destroyed Saturday during preparations for another test flight in June.

Acrid smoke that billowed from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, visible for miles along the Space Coast, clouded the outlook for SpaceX's crew program and NASA's optimism that reliance on Russia for rides to the station would end soon.

The space agency already was scrambling to come up with options for maintaining U.S. access to the station as it runs out of seats on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft early next year.

Comment: Neither Boeing or SpaceX are inspiring confidence in the US' ability to command the skies:

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Microscope 1

Discoveries about organelle communication are transforming biology

Elie Dolgin
Nature
Mon, 22 Apr 2019 13:39 UTC
organelle communication
© Serge Bloch/Nature
Organelles - the cell's workhorses - mingle far more than scientists ever appreciated.

Nobody paid much attention to Jean Vance 30 years ago, when she discovered something fundamental about the building blocks inside cells. She even doubted herself, at first.

The revelation came after a series of roadblocks. The cell biologist had just set up her laboratory at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and was working alone. She thought she had isolated a pure batch of structures called mitochondria - the power plants of cells - from rat livers. But tests revealed that her sample contained something that wasn't supposed to be there. "I thought I'd made a big mistake," Vance recalls.

After additional purification steps, she found extra bits of the cells' innards clinging to mitochondria like wads of chewing gum stuck to a shoe. The interlopers were part of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) - an assembly line for proteins and fatty molecules. Other biologists had seen this, too, and dismissed it as an artefact of the preparation. But Vance realized that the pieces were glued together for a reason, and that this could solve one of cell biology's big mysteries.
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Galaxy

How far into space has humanity's voice actually reached?

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Sun, 21 Apr 2019 22:05 UTC
Milky Way
© ESO/S.Brunier
It's the big mystery: Intelligent life should be out there in the Universe, so why haven't we found any evidence for it? This question is called the Fermi paradox, and there are a few potential answers.

But this one image (below) just really brings it home. Space is super, duper big, and humanity's reach into it? It's super, duper small.

The galaxy in the image is a reconstruction of the Milky Way, if it were about 110,000 light-years in diameter (more recent research suggests it's even bigger than that).

The itsy bitsy blue dot is how far our radio signals have travelled from Earth - a diameter of about 200 light-years.
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Giant prehistoric lion fossil discovered hiding in Kenya's museum

Jackson Ryan
CNET
Wed, 17 Apr 2019 21:50 UTC
Ancient Lion
© Mauricio AntonAn artist's rendering of Simbakubwa kutoaafrika, which lived 22 million years ago and had a huge skull, as large as a rhinoceros.
Matthew Borths discovered a giant prehistoric lion on his lunch break.

While examining drawers at the Nairobi National Museum in Kenya, Borths, a carnivore paleontologist, opened a drawer of Ice Age specimens and noticed a row of huge teeth staring back at him. He immediately realized the gigantic jaw was not an Ice Age specimen at all. A few years earlier, Nancy Stevens, a paleontologist at Ohio University, had opened the same drawer and noticed the same set of teeth.

The fossils, which date back 22 million years, were originally unearthed when Kenyan researchers were scouring the African plains looking for ancient ape bones decades ago. They'd been hidden away in the wrong museum drawer for years. When Borth and Stevens came along, the duo quickly realized they had found a new species of prehistoric lion. The team were able to examine portions of the creature's skull, its jaw and parts of its skeleton and discovered it is the oldest specimen of a group of mammals known as hyaenodonts.

The new carnivore has been dubbed Simbakubwa kutoaafrika, which is Swahili for "big lion from Africa". It is described in a study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology on April 18, which suggests the beast was bigger than a polar bear and had canine teeth as big as an adult foot.
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Sherlock

Previously unknown "proto-hominin" species suggests ancestor of humans evolved in Europe not Africa

Colin Barras
New Scientist
Tue, 16 Apr 2019 21:18 UTC
Nikiti hominin
© David R. BegunThe hominin-like piece of upper jaw was found in Nikiti, Greece
The jaws of an ancient European ape might speak volumes about the origins of our ancestors. A new analysis of these fossils supports a controversial idea: that the apes which gave rise to humans evolved in south-east Europe instead of Africa.

Hominins are a group of primates that includes modern humans, extinct humans like Neanderthals and Denisovans, and our immediate ancestors, including australopiths like the famous Lucy.

In his 1871 book The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that the hominin group originated in Africa - an idea most anthropologists believe today. But he also wrote that the group may have arisen in Europe because, at that time, fossils of large apes had already been uncovered there. "Darwin was open-minded," says David Begun at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Comment: In the article Ancient teeth point to mysterious human relative they report on some interesting specualtion that may add more detail to the puzzle:
"It's strange. We don't know where to put it," says study author Song Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. The four teeth join a growing number of finds in China that don't tidily fit onto the known branches of the human evolutionary tree, hinting that there's more to the story of human history in this region.

"We always think of Africa as the 'cradle of humankind,'" says study author María Martinón-Torres, director of Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana in Spain.
"I would say it's a cradle of probably one of the human kinds, which is Homo sapiens." But many human species once walked the Earth, and what is going on in Asia, she says, is likely "crucial to understanding the whole picture."
See also: Also check out SOTT radio's: The Truth Perspective: Mind the Gaps: Locating the Intelligence in Evolution and Design

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Biohazard

Biologist study finds mercury in predator peregrine falcons


ABC News
Sun, 21 Apr 2019 11:32 UTC
Peregrine falcon
A Nevada wildlife researcher has found that not even the fastest bird on Earth can escape mercury contamination.

The toxic element is turning up in feathers of peregrine falcons from coast to coast, including those at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, state Department of Wildlife biologist Joe Barnes .

Over the past decade, Barnes has tested for mercury in 700 individual peregrines in southern Nevada, Washington, Maryland and the Gulf Coast of Texas.

Every single one of them was impacted, regardless of whether they live in wide-open desert or Lake Mead or Greenland or coastal British Columbia, he said.

Comment: See also: Famous falcon family returns to FM building spire in Moscow

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The fabella, tiny knee bone once lost in humans, is making a comeback


The Scientist
Fri, 19 Apr 2019 20:35 UTC
The Fabella
© MICHAEL BERTHAUME, IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDONThe fabella (small dot on the right of each scan) is a little bone embedded in a tendon of the knee in some people.
Textbooks will tell you that the human body contains 206 bones. But sometimes, there are 207. The fabella, a small bone in a tendon behind the knee, was lost over the course of early human evolution, but these days it's becoming more common, according to a study published this week (April 17) in the Journal of Anatomy.

The bone has been linked to knee problems, and the authors argue that the fabella should be taken into account when treating people with knee pain.

Michael Berthaume of Imperial College London and his colleagues gathered data from more than 21,000 studies of the knee spanning the past 150 years, and found that between 1918 and 2018, the fabella has become more than three times more common. In 1918, the bone was found in just 11 percent of the world population, according to their data. Last year, it was present in 39 percent of people. The researchers' analyses controlled for the method of data collection, which included X-rays, dissection, and MRI scans, as well as country of origin.

"The average human, today, is better nourished, meaning we are taller and heavier," Berthaume says in a press release. "This came with longer shinbones and larger calf muscles-changes which both put the knee under increasing pressure. This could explain why fabellae are more common now than they once were." The researchers suggest that genetics may influence whether people have the ability to develop fabellae, but if they do, environmental factors such as the mechanical forces that the knee experiences likely drive the bones' formation.
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Fireball 4

Comet or Asteroid? Research team finds tiny fragment of a comet inside a meteorite


Arizona State University
Mon, 15 Apr 2019 23:25 UTC
LaPaz meteorite
© Carles Moyano-Cambero/Institute of Space Sciences, BarcelonaThe arrow in this view of the LaPaz meteorite points to where the scientists found the carbon-rich cometary fragment. The colors are produced by polarized light shining through a thin slice of the meteorite; the grid lines are spaced one millimeter apart.
ASU researcher part of Carnegie Institution for Science-led team; discovery could shed light on early solar system's chemistry

A tiny piece of the building blocks from which comets formed has been discovered inside a primitive meteorite. The discovery by a Carnegie Institution for Science-led team, including a researcher now at Arizona State University, was published April 15 in Nature Astronomy.

The finding could offer clues to the formation, structure and evolution of the solar system.
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Researchers identify genetic causes of poor sleep


University of Exeter
Thu, 04 Apr 2019 22:08 UTC
Sleep Study
© University of ExeterThe study has uncovered parts of our genetic code that could be responsible for causing poor sleep quality
The largest genetic study of its kind ever to use accelerometer data to examine how we slumber has uncovered a number of parts of our genetic code that could be responsible for causing poor sleep quality and duration.

The international collaboration, led by the University of Exeter and published in Nature Communications, has found 47 links between our genetic code and the quality, quantity and timing of how we sleep. They include ten new genetic links with sleep duration and 26 with sleep quality.

The Medical Research Council-funded study looked at data from 85,670 participants of UK Biobank and 5,819 individuals from three other studies, who wore accelerometers - wrist-worn devices (similar to a Fitbit) which record activity levels continuously. They wore the accelerometers continuously for seven days, giving more detailed sleep data than previous studies, which have relied on people accurately reporting their own sleep habits.

Among the genomic regions uncovered is a gene called PDE11A. The research team discovered than an uncommon variant of this gene affects not only how long you sleep but your quality of sleep too. The gene has previously been identified as a possible drug target for treatment of people with neuropsychiatric disorders associated with mood stability and social behaviours.

The study also found that among people with the same hip circumference, a higher waist circumference resulted in less time sleeping, although the effect was very small - around 4 seconds less sleep per 1cm waist increase in someone with the average hip circumference of around 100cm.
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