Science & TechnologyS


Bizarro Earth

New research suggests Mt Etna at risk of 'catastrophic collapse'

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 10 Oct 2018 19:23 UTC
Mt Etna
© Alberto Masnovo/Getty ImagesMt Etna, brooding and slipping, with the city of Catania in the foreground.
Mt Etna, one of the world's most active and iconic volcanoes, is at high risk of suddenly collapsing into the sea, potentially triggering a devastating tsunami, new research suggests.

In a paper published in the journal Science Advances, a team led by Morelia Urlaub from the EOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, in Germany, presents findings that explain why the south-eastern flank of the volcano is sliding into the sea at a rate of three to five centimetres every year - a phenomenon first documented in the 1980s.

The cause, it turns out, is not increasing pressure from magma swelling up through Etna's plumbing, but gravity.

The conclusion is vitally important in terms of assessing the risk posed by the volcano, which is sited between two densely populated cities, Messina and Catania. Movement caused by magma and movement caused by gravity, Urlaub and colleagues report, "have fundamentally different hazard implications".

"While magma dynamics can trigger slope failures near the magma pathways, gradual deep-seated gravitational deformation can induce catastrophic collapse."
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Fireball

Draconids 'dragon meteor shower' blaze across Russia & US skies


RT
Wed, 10 Oct 2018 18:08 UTC
draconids
© Twitter/@tass_agency
Lucky stargazers in Russia and North America have been treated to a spectacular cosmic display, courtesy of an age-old star constellation shaped like a space dragon.

The annual Draconids meteor shower occurs every year in October, providing astronomers and amateur stargazers with an opportunity to see fiery space rock shoot across Earth's sky. The celestial light show is best viewed on a clear night from the northern hemisphere as the meteors appear to come from the Draco the Dragon constellation in the north.

Discovered by the ancient Roman astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, the intriguing star formation, which is home to more than 14 main stars, resembles a serpent or dragon parading across the sky. It's from this constellation that the Draconids appear to come from, sometimes raining down in their many hundreds.

So far, enthusiasts from Russia, Canada and the US have posted their incredible snapshots on social media, revealing meteors surging sideways over places like Siberia, Texas and the Blue Ridge Mountains, Georgia.

With the Draconids expected to last until October 16, there is still time to sneak a peek of the celestial experience.
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Fish

'Lost volcano world' teeming with life discovered thousands of meters below remote seas


RT
Wed, 10 Oct 2018 14:59 UTC
whales
© CSIRO
An expedition to map remote parts of the ocean off Australia has yielded a startling discovery - a "lost world" of volcanoes where towering underwater peaks reach higher than sierras in the Andes mountain range.

Uncovered by a Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) vessel during a trip 400km east of Tasmania, the subaquatic world appears to be teeming with marine animals such as migrating whales.

According to CSIRO researchers, some of the underwater peaks are up to 3,000 meters in height, taller than the Andes' Copahue stratovolcano. Despite the seamounts' significant size, they are still remarkably well hidden approximately 2,000 meters below the ocean surface.
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Apple Red

Plant intelligence: Fruiting plants may have adapted to entice animals to spread their seeds

JoAnna Klein
The New York Times
Tue, 09 Oct 2018 00:00 UTC
Two national parks in Uganda and Madagascar presented researchers with a natural experiment to understand how plants have adapted to appeal to animals that spread their seeds.

Lemur madagascar
© Andy DaviesSome plants in Madagascar may have evolved fruit colors so that they can be seen by lemurs that are red-green colorblind.
As the sun rises over Kibale National Park in Uganda, red berries and orange figs hang in the rain forest's canopy. They're waiting for monkeys, apes or birds to scan the foliage, eat the ripe fruit and either spit or defecate seeds far from their sources, spreading their next generation to a new location.

Nearly 2,000 miles away, in the similarly mountainous rain forests of Madagascar's Ranomafana National Park, yellow berries or fragrant, green figs await lemurs, the frugivores of this jungle. They'll search the forest all night for their feast, later scattering the seeds.

Over millions of years of natural selection, these plants have developed ways to communicate with animals through their fruits, new research suggests, saying something like "choose me." With traits evolved to match each animal's sensory capacities or physical abilities, fruits can signal dinner time in the jungle, and further their plant's survival as a species.

"When I first learned that plants, in a way, behaved - that they were actually communicating information to animals - my mind exploded," said Kim Valenta, an evolutionary ecologist at Duke University and co-author of a study published recently in Biology Letters investigating the relationship between fruit color and animal vision.

Comment: More on the surprising abilities of plants:

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Cassiopaea

Powerful cosmic explosion detected 300 million light years from Earth by astronomers

Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics
Science Daily
Thu, 04 Oct 2018 12:12 UTC
gamma ray burst
© NASA/GSFCThis illustration shows the most common type of gamma-ray burst, thought to occur when a massive star collapses, forms a black hole, and blasts particle jets outward at nearly the speed of light.
A team of astronomers has detected the sonic boom from an immensely powerful cosmic explosion, even though the explosion itself was totally unseen.

For years, astronomers have been hunting all over the sky for an example of this strange phenomenon, known as an "orphan afterglow." At last, now they've finally found one.

The titanic eruption, known as a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB), was generated by the collapse of a massive star in a galaxy nearly 300 million light-years from Earth. In the process, the star collapsed into either a dense star called a magnetar, or more likely, a black hole.

Typically, GRBs release a prodigious amount of energy, as much as the Sun would release over ten billion years.

Comment: See also:

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Evil Rays

5G network uses same EMF waves as crowd control system developed by Pentagon

Terence Newton
Waking Times
Fri, 05 Oct 2018 00:00 UTC
5G crowd control
The global rollout of 5G is well underway, and we soon may see new small cell towers near all schools, on every residential street, dispersed throughout the natural environment, and pretty much everywhere. But the safety of this technology is in serious question, and there is a raging battle to stop the taxpayer funded implementation of 5G.

The new cell network uses high band radio frequency millimeter waves to deliver high bandwidth data to any device within line of sight.
"Today's cellular and Wi-Fi networks rely on microwaves - a type of electromagnetic radiation utilizing frequencies up to 6 gigahertz (GHz) in order to wirelessly transmit voice or data. However, 5G applications will require unlocking of new spectrum bands in higher frequency ranges above 6 GHz to 100 GHz and beyond, utilizing submillimeter and millimeter waves - to allow ultra-high rates of data to be transmitted in the same amount of time as compared with previous deployments of microwave radiation." [Source]
"One of the ways 5G will enable this is by tapping into new, unused bands at the top of the radio spectrum. These high bands are known as millimeter waves (mmwaves), and have been recently been opened up by regulators for licensing. They've largely been untouched by the public, since the equipment required to use them effectively has typically been expensive and inaccessible." [Source]
Among the many potential problems with exposure to 5G radio waves are issues with the skin, which is interesting when you consider that this technology is already being used in the military for crowd control purposes.

Comment: See also:

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Coffee

Developers tout new font 'Sans Forgetica' as aiding enhanced memory retention

Amelia Harris
RT
Tue, 09 Oct 2018 17:37 UTC
manual typewriter
© Reuters
A new font released by RMIT could help people remember more of what they read as thousands of students begin to study for exams.

Sans Forgetica could help people remember more of what they read.

Researchers and academics from different disciplines came together to develop, design and test the font called Sans Forgetica.

The font is believed to be the world's first typeface specifically designed to help people retain more information and remember more of typed study notes and it's available for free.
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Nuke

Russian scientists isolate bacteria which neutralizes nuclear waste


Sputnik
Mon, 08 Oct 2018 16:54 UTC
Nuclear Waste
© Gualtiero Boffi
The unique bacteria, discovered in a nuclear waste storage site in Siberia, shows promise as a tool for the creation of a natural barrier to the spread of radionuclides.

Researchers from the Moscow-based Frumkin Institute of Physical Chemistry and the Russian Academy of Sciences' Federal Research Center for Biotechnology have been able to isolate microorganisms which can be used to safeguard the surrounding environment from liquid radioactive waste.

Comment: The discovery extends research done in the UK.
Certain microbes can use radionuclides such as uranium and neptunium in place of oxygen, studies have found. In doing so, they convert them from soluble to insoluble forms, making them less mobile.

This should give us more confidence in waste disposal plans, says Jonathan Lloyd, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Manchester, UK, who presented the research at the annual meeting of the Microbiology Society in Edinburgh last week.

It had been thought that the presence of cement would result in conditions too alkaline for microbes to grow - it has a pH of around 11, similar to bleach. To see if this was so, Lloyd's team studied a lime kiln site in the UK's Peak District to see if microbes could be found growing in conditions similar to those that would be expected in a nuclear disposal site. "We went to see if there was biology there and there was," says Lloyd. "We found they could grow at pH values you would probably find developing around these cementitious waste forms."

The radiation levels typically found at nuclear waste dumps don't seem to pose a problem for bacteria either.

"It doesn't kill them," says Lloyd. "If anything, it actually stimulates the microbes."

The study found that the way bacteria process waste products means hazardous material is less likely to seep into the environment. Some nuclear waste contains cellulose, which can break down to form isosaccharinic acid (ISA) under alkaline conditions. ISA can form a soluble complex with uranium, helping it to leak out of the waste repository. But bacteria seem to use ISA as a carbon source and degrade it, keeping radionuclides in solid form - which means they stay in place.

Microbes may also help prevent radioactive gases escaping. Hydrogen produced by reactions in the repositories could build up pressure and cause them to crack open or explode. But microbes can use hydrogen and keep the levels down. They can also grow in fractures in the rock, form biofilms and clog up pores.

"At the moment, they have safety case models that are built on chemistry and physical containment. If you start including the biology, it means that those models are actually overly conservative, which is a good thing," says Lloyd.


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Sherlock

Scientists puzzled as to why Earth's mantle convection has stalled


RT
Mon, 08 Oct 2018 11:13 UTC
Earth core mantle
© REUTERS/Terray Sylvester
Scientists have diagnosed the Earth as having a bizarre geological condition known as 'stagnant slabs', meaning tectonic rocks subducted into the fiery hot mantle mysteriously become wedged hundreds of miles below the surface.

But researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder believe they have discovered the reason for what appears to be a glitch in the Earth's internal mechanism.

Using computer simulations of seismic activities under the Pacific Ocean, scientists found that slabs of rocky tectonic plates may be temporarily obstructed from falling seamlessly into the subduction, by an obstacle at a certain point in the Earth's mantle that is like a "thin, weak" layer of material.
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Cassiopaea

New imaging technique lets scientists see one molecule through the 'eyes' of another

Chris
Evolving Science
Sat, 06 Oct 2018 18:35 UTC
molecule representation
CO is a molecule with a rather unique form of triple bond, which can stretch and vibrate to a relatively impressive extent.
Molecules, or singular units of substances such as proteins or gases, react to each other through a complex, and finite, set of properties. These include the electrical attributes that may repel or draw one atom away from (or toward) another; electrical charges acting on different chemical bonds, as well as a number of other smaller forces often named after the scientists who discover them (e.g., Pauli or Stark forces). These factors determine how different molecules interact, and, ultimately, build up what we think of as the matter around us.

Imaging Molecular Interactions

Molecular interactions are a fundamental component of chemistry. Advanced technologies allow modern-day scientists to visualize or project increasingly clear and accurate images of how different chemicals really 'look' based on them. In fact, they are even integrated into these techniques themselves. These improved imaging techniques may one day help scientists to visualize how different molecules really look like in their natural state. More traditional techniques, such as X-ray crystallography, have done a good enough job.
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