Science & TechnologyS


Ice Cube

Images reveal crater at Mars' north pole brimming with ice

Michael Le Page
New Scientist
Thu, 20 Dec 2018 12:00 UTC
crater mars water
© ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGOLooking frosty
Even Mars is getting into the festive spirit. This is the Korolev Crater near the north pole of the Red Planet, which is filled with a mound of water ice 60 kilometres across and nearly 2 kilometres thick.

The water ice is a permanent feature. It is thought that the crater traps a layer of cold air that prevents the ice melting even during the six-month-long northern summer on Mars, making this a year-long winter wonderland.

This image is based on five image strips captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on board the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, which has been in orbit around Mars since 2003. The image strips were taken in April this year.

Comment: See also:

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Cards

Flashback Memory genetically programmed? Women excel at remembering everyday events & faces; men better at remembering symbolic info


Science Daily
Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00 UTC
sex differences episodic memory
Specific results indicated that women excelled in verbal episodic memory tasks, such as remembering words, objects, pictures or everyday events, and men outperformed women in remembering symbolic, non-linguistic information, known as visuospatial processing
There are several human characteristics considered to be genetically predetermined and evolutionarily innate, such as immune system strength, physical adaptations and even sex differences. These qualities drive the nature versus nurture debate and ask of our species, who is more successful and why?

Psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman in Stockholm, Sweden asked an even more complicated question of human predisposition: Does one's sex influence his or her ability to remember every day events? Their surprising findings did in fact determine significant sex differences in episodic memory, a type of long-term memory based on personal experiences, favoring women.

Specific results indicated that women excelled in verbal episodic memory tasks, such as remembering words, objects, pictures or everyday events, and men outperformed women in remembering symbolic, non-linguistic information, known as visuospatial processing. For example, the results indicate a man would be more likely to remember his way out of the woods.

However, there are also sex differences favoring women on tasks such as remembering the location of car keys, which requires both verbal and visuospatial processing.

Comment: More information and evidence that feminists will attempt to ignore, although there's plenty of other evidence for sex differences in the brain. At any rate, ask any husband if his wife has a better memory for everyday events!!

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Info

Sound waves used to levitate small objects

Daniel Oberhaus
Motherboard
Thu, 20 Dec 2018 21:56 UTC
Sound wave Levitation
© Pixabay
Researchers from the UK and Spain have developed a device that can simultaneously levitate individual objects ranging from micrometers to centimeters in size in different directions using only sound waves.

"Acoustic levitation," the ability to move particles using only sound waves, has been explored by researchers for years, but until now it has only been able to move small objects along one axis at a time.

In a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers dubbed their technique "holographic acoustic tweezers" in homage to its likely use cases. They say their device could be used to manipulate tiny biomedical devices inside the human body without invasive surgery or to do advanced manufacturing at incredibly small scales.


When a normal sound wave is produced, it has peaks and valleys. If you imagine a particle riding along that wave, it would ride along the peaks and valleys from point A to point B. A standing wave, by contrast, is produced when a wave is reflected off of something back toward itself, or is offset by a second wave.
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Comet 2

New Comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto)

Ernesto Guido
Remanzacco Blogspot
Thu, 20 Dec 2018 21:48 UTC
CBET 4588 & MPEC 2018-Y52, issued on 2018, Dec. 20, announce the discovery of a comet (magnitude ~12) by M. Iwamoto (MPC code 872) in images taken on 2018 Dec 18.8. The new comet has been designated C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto).

I performed follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the PCCP webpage. Stacking of 5 unfiltered exposures, 20 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2018, December 20.5 from H06 (T20 - iTelescope network) through a 0.1-m f/5.0 astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a diffuse coma about 1.5 arcmin in diameter and sharp central condensation.

My confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version)
Comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto)
© Remanzacco Blogspot
MPEC 2018-Y52 assigns the following preliminary parabolic orbital elements to comet C/2018 Y1: T 2019 Jan. 27.16; e= 1.0; Peri. = 354.05; q = 1.14; Incl.= 160.69
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Saturn

Water in Saturn's rings surprisingly like that on Earth, except for moon Phoebe

Planetary Science Institute
Phys.org
Thu, 20 Dec 2018 20:19 UTC
saturn phoebe
© NASA, JPL, VIMS Team, ISS Team, U. Arizona, D. Machacek, U. LeicesterAbove image lower left: Cassini VIMS infrared view of Saturn. Blue is infrared light where water ice reflects relatively brightly. Red is longer wavelength thermal emission showing heat from deep inside the planet. Green is infrared wavelengths where aurora emit light. Above image upper right: Phoebe in visible light. Phoebe is very dark, like charcoal whereas the rings are very bright in visible light like slightly dirty snow. Phoebe is not to scale relative to Saturn.
By developing a new method for measuring isotopic ratios of water and carbon dioxide remotely, scientists have found that the water in Saturn's rings and satellites is unexpectedly like water on the Earth, except on Saturn's moon Phoebe, where the water is more unusual than on any other object so far studied in the Solar System.

The results, found in the Icarus paper "Isotopic Ratios of Saturn's Rings and Satellites: Implications for the Origin of Water and Phoebe" by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Roger N. Clark, also mean we need to change models of the formation of the Solar System because the new results are in conflict with existing models. Robert H. Brown (U. Arizona), Dale P. Cruikshank (NASA), and Gregg A. Swayze (USGS) are co-authors.

Comment: More evidence that many of science's models need revising: Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: The Electric Universe - An interview with Wallace Thornhill

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Brain

Industry funded study suggests AI could help emergency clinics identify serious head trauma

Emily Mullen
nature medicine
Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00 UTC
Brain scan AI identification head trauma
A brain scan (left) showing an intraparenchymal hemorrhage in left frontal region and a scan (right) of a subarachnoid hemorrhage in the left parietal region. Both conditions were accurately detected by the Qure.ai tool.
The rise in the use of computed tomography (CT) scans in US emergency rooms has been a well-documented trend1 in recent years2. At the same time, the diagnosis of life-threatening conditions using these head scans has risen only slightly in emergency rooms. One problem ER doctors face is trying to separate out serious cases of head trauma from less serious injuries.

A new study suggests that deep-learning algorithms could help automate the triage process for some of these head trauma cases, specifically for patients with brain injury who require immediate attention. The study3, which appeared recently in The Lancet, found that deep-learning algorithms were able to accurately identify as many as nine different critical abnormalities in CT head scans.

The study is the latest in a slew of new research that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze medical images. Eric Topol, a physician at and the executive vice president of Scripps Research who wasn't involved in the research, says that this study represents a step forward because most previous reports of AI in medical imaging gave a yes-or-no answer for one type of abnormality, like a brain lesion. But the algorithms in this study were trained to parse multiple kinds of brain trauma.

"It's one of the best radiology-AI efforts to date, because it widens the deep-learning interpretation task to urgent referral of many different types of head CT findings," Topol says.

Comment: Let's hope these AI algorithms are more robust than facial recognition technology in current use.

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Info

China and Russia jointly conducted ionospheric experiments

Peter Dockrill
ScienceAlert
Thu, 20 Dec 2018 03:10 UTC
Ionosphere
© NASA
China and Russia have jointly conducted a controversial series of experiments to modify Earth's atmosphere with high-frequency radio waves.

From a Russian installation called the Sura Ionospheric Heating Facility near the town of Vasilsursk, east of Moscow, scientists emitted high-frequency radio waves to manipulate the ionosphere, while the China Seismo‐Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES) measured the effects on plasma disturbance from orbit.

It's not the first time research like this has been conducted, but news of the China-Russia developments - conveyed via a published paper on the experiments, and a recent article in the South China Morning Post - has ignited concerns over the potential military applications of this kind of science.

That's because the ionosphere, and the ionised gas (plasma) that inhabits it, is crucial to radio communication. By selectively disturbing the charged particles that make up this part of the upper atmosphere, scientists or even governments could theoretically boost or block long-range radio signals.

Even these preliminary experiments - conducted in June, and ostensibly designed as a test-case for future related ionosphere research - had extreme effects.
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Microscope 1

Ant-Man suit coming soon? Team invents method to shrink objects to the nanoscale

Anne Trafton
MIT News
Thu, 13 Dec 2018 11:15 UTC
nanoscale object
© Daniel OranMIT engineers have devised a way to create 3-D nanoscale objects by patterning a larger structure with a laser and then shrinking it. This image shows a complex structure prior to shrinking.
MIT researchers have invented a way to fabricate nanoscale 3-D objects of nearly any shape. They can also pattern the objects with a variety of useful materials, including metals, quantum dots, and DNA.

"It's a way of putting nearly any kind of material into a 3-D pattern with nanoscale precision," says Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology and an associate professor of biological engineering and of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.

Using the new technique, the researchers can create any shape and structure they want by patterning a polymer scaffold with a laser. After attaching other useful materials to the scaffold, they shrink it, generating structures one thousandth the volume of the original.

These tiny structures could have applications in many fields, from optics to medicine to robotics, the researchers say. The technique uses equipment that many biology and materials science labs already have, making it widely accessible for researchers who want to try it.

Boyden, who is also a member of MIT's Media Lab, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, is one of the senior authors of the paper, which appears in the Dec. 13 issue of Science. The other senior author is Adam Marblestone, a Media Lab research affiliate, and the paper's lead authors are graduate students Daniel Oran and Samuel Rodriques.
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Saturn

Saturn's rings are raining at faster rate than previously thought

Meghan Bartels
Space.com
Tue, 18 Dec 2018 07:36 UTC
saturn rings
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteThe Cassini spacecraft captured this stunning view of Saturn and its rings on April 25, 2016.
The Cassini spacecraft captured this stunning view of Saturn and its rings on April 25, 2016.
Chances are, you wouldn't recognize Saturn without its trademark thick band of rings. But if you could travel 300 million years into the future, you would need to, because by then, chances are those rings would be gone - and they could disappear even faster.

That's the conclusion of a new investigation into a phenomenon called "ring rain," which pulls water out of Saturn's rings and into the planet's midlatitude regions. Combined with earlier research this year using Cassini data to look at a different type of inflow from the rings to the planet, that find means the stunning structures could be gone in as little as 100 million years.

"We are lucky to be around to see Saturn's ring system, which appears to be in the middle of its lifetime," lead author James O'Donoghue, a space physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. "However, if rings are temporary, perhaps we just missed out on seeing giant ring systems of Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, which have only thin ringlets today!"

Comment: Were Saturn's rings always disappearing so fast and it was merely a matter of measurement? Or has the process actually begun to speed up? Could it be related to the other diverse and increasing changes we see throughout our solar system? Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Earth changes in an electric universe: Is climate change really man-made?

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Rose

Fossils suggest flowers originated 50 million years earlier than thought


Phys.org
Tue, 18 Dec 2018 12:00 UTC
Nanjinganthus
© Fu et al., 2018Nanjinganthus fossil, showing its ovary (bottom centre), sepals and petals (on the sides) and a tree-shaped top.
Scientists have described a fossil plant species that suggests flowers bloomed in the Early Jurassic, more than 174 million years ago, according to new research in the open-access journal eLife.

Before now, angiosperms (flowering plants) were thought to have a history of no more than 130 million years. The discovery of the novel flower species, which the study authors named Nanjinganthus dendrostyla, throws widely accepted theories of plant evolution into question, by suggesting that they existed around 50 million years earlier. Nanjinganthus also has a variety of 'unexpected' characteristics according to almost all of these theories.

Angiosperms are an important member of the plant kingdom, and their origin has been the topic of long-standing debate among evolutionary biologists. Many previously thought angiosperms could be no more than 130 million years old. However, molecular clocks have indicated that they must be older than this. Until now, there has been no convincing fossil-based evidence to prove that they existed further back in time.

Comment: From dinosaurs to mammoths to early humans and so much more, recent discoveries are throwing our current theories into dissaray and it seems a new history for life on Earth is being written:

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