Science & TechnologyS


Fish

Mysterious sound coming from the Mariana Trench has finally been explained

Harry Baker
Live Science
Thu, 19 Sep 2024 17:40 UTC
A new study has revealed the exact origin of the Pacific Ocean's mysterious "biotwang" noises, which were first detected by underwater surveys near the Mariana Trench in 2014.
Bryde's whales
© Getty ImagesResearchers have identified Bryde's whales as the origin of the mysterious "biotwang" noises. In this photo, a Bryde's whale lunges through a school of fish.
Researchers have finally identified the source of mysterious noises coming from the deepest ocean trench. The odd sounds, described as "biotwang" noises, sound a bit like sci-fi starships, and are actually whale calls from Bryde's whales (Balaenoptera edeni). The whales may use the calls to locate one another like a giant game of Marco Polo, researchers say.

Scientists first detected the unusual noises in 2014 while using underwater gliders to carry out an acoustic survey of the Mariana Trench — the world's deepest ocean trench, which spans more than 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) south of Japan and has a maximum depth of 35,876 feet (10,935 meters).

The biotwang sound can be broken down into two distinct parts: first, a low, grumbly sound that reverberates through the deep; and second, a high-pitched, metallic ringing that researchers have likened to the sounds made by spaceships in Star Trek and Star Wars.

The sounds initially stumped scientists. But in 2016, researchers revealed that biotwang was most likely a call from large baleen whales, such as blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) or humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). However, the sounds did not match any known whale calls.

In the new study, published Wednesday (Sept. 18) in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, researchers were finally able to prove that Bryde's whales were making the noises, thanks in part to new artificial intelligence (AI) tools that sifted through over 200,000 hours of audio recordings containing various ocean sounds.
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Brain

Breathing could bring microplastics into the human brain, study shows

Ernie Mundell
Medical Xpress
Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00 UTC
plastic
© unknown"What's in YOUR breath?"
For the first time, scientists have detected microscopic microplastics lodged in the human brain. Researchers in Germany and Brazil say that 8 out of 15 autopsied adults had microplastics detected within their brain's smell centers, the olfactory bulb.

The particles were likely breathed in over a lifetime, since tiny floating microplastics are ubiquitous in the air.

Although microplastics have already been found in human lungs, intestines, liver, blood, testicles and even semen, it had long been thought that the body's protective blood-brain barrier might keep the particles out of the brain.

However, the new study suggests that there's "a potential pathway for the translocation of microplastics to the brain" via the olfactory bulb, according to a team led by Luis Fernando Amato-Lourenco, of the Free University Berlin and Thais Mauad, an associate professor of pathology at the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil.

The team published its findings Sept. 16 in the journal JAMA Network Open.

Comment: See also:

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Info

Astronomers detect hundreds of supernova remnants using novel method

Thomas Nowakowski
Phys Org
Wed, 18 Sep 2024 19:07 UTC
Detected SNRs
© Kravtsov et al., 2024.Image showing some of the detected SNRs presented by a circle, while the oxygen-rich ones are represented by a gold star.
Using a new method exploiting the capabilities of the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), astronomers have detected 307 new supernova remnants, including seven rare oxygen-rich ones. The finding was presented in a research paper published September 10 on the preprint server arXiv.

Supernova remnants (SNRs) are diffuse, expanding structures resulting from a supernova explosion. They contain ejected material expanding from the explosion and other interstellar material that has been swept up by the passage of the shockwave from the exploded star.

Some supernova remnants showcase strong visible light oxygen emission, and due to that, are known as oxygen-rich SNRs. However, oxygen-rich SNRs are rarely found, as to date, only eight such objects have been identified in our galaxy and in the Magellanic Clouds. Moreover, the nature of these SNRs and their connection to specific supernovae (SNe) is still not well understood.

Now, a team of astronomers led by Timo Kravtsov of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile reports new findings that could advance our knowledge about oxygen-rich supernova remnants. By employing a new method of SNR detection, they managed to discover hundreds of new remnants with MUSE mounted on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), including those exhibiting oxygen-emission.

"We present a new method to detect SNRs exploiting the capabilities of modern visible-light integral-field units based on the shapes of the SNR emission lines," the researchers explained.
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Attention

Facebook scrapes photos of kids from Australian user profiles to train its AI

Pieter Arntz
Malware Bytes
Thu, 12 Sep 2024 00:00 UTC
facebook
Facebook has admitted that it scrapes the public photos, posts and other data from the accounts of Australian adult users to train its AI models. Unlike citizens of the European Union (EU), Australians are not offered an opt-out option to refuse consent.

At an inquiry as to whether the social media giant was hoovering up the data of all Australians in order to build its generative artificial intelligence tools, senator Tony Sheldon asked whether Meta (Facebook's owner) had used Australian posts from as far back as 2007 to feed its AI products.

At first Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh denied this but senator David Shoebridge challenged her claim.
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Archaeology

Rare skeletons up to 30,000 years old reveal when ancient humans went through puberty

Kristina Killgrove
Live Science
Mon, 16 Sep 2024 20:22 UTC
puberty ancient adolescents
© Mila Tomsich via Getty ImagesResearchers looked at about a dozen skeletons from the last ice age, including those from Arene Candide in Italy (pictured here) to determine when teenagers hit major puberty milestones
An analysis of around a dozen teenagers who lived during the Paleolithic reveals that they hit puberty around the same time modern teens do.

Most ice age teens started puberty around the same time as humans in modern times do, according to archaeologists who studied the skeletons of adolescents who died in Europe between 10,000 and 30,000 years ago. But physical maturity was delayed in some individuals, likely because of their challenging and hazardous lifestyles.

An international team of researchers studied the skeletons of 13 adolescents recovered from seven archaeological sites in Italy, Russia and Czechia (the Czech Republic). In a study published Sept. 12 in the Journal of Human Evolution, the researchers detailed their use of "maturation markers" on the skeletons to estimate different puberty stages in teens who died in the Upper Paleolithic period.
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Sun

The sun is doing something that it is not supposed to do, and that could mean big trouble in the months ahead

Michael
The Economic Collapse
Mon, 09 Sep 2024 00:00 UTC
thesun
© UnknownThe Sun
The giant ball of fire that our planet revolves around has been far more active than scientists originally anticipated this year, and that could have very serious implications for all of us in the months ahead. Fluctuations in solar activity affect our climate more than anything else does, and we also tend to see more earthquakes when solar activity is at elevated levels. The current solar cycle is supposed to reach a peak at some point during the next 12 months, but so far there are no signs that solar activity is slowing down. In fact, the average number of sunspots that we witnessed last month was the highest that we have seen since 2001...
The average number of sunspots reached 215.5 in August, according to the Solar Influences Data Analysis Center at the Royal Observatory in Belgium. It's the highest number since Sept.-Dec. 2001, according to SpaceWeather.com. July's total was 196.5. Last month, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center issued a preliminary statement that solar activity is at its highest since March 2001.
This wasn't supposed to happen.
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Better Earth

45-million-year-old extinct species of walnut discovered on remote Arctic island

Makena Lang, Florida Museum of Natural History
Sci Tech Daily
Wed, 11 Sep 2024 17:10 UTC
walnut ancient
© Florida Museum photo by Jeff GageThree new species of walnuts have been found above the Arctic Circle, remnants of a time when the North and South Poles were covered in forests.
The discovery of extinct walnuts in the Arctic suggests a warmer historical climate with dense forests, extending our knowledge of walnut evolution and geographic spread.

Scientists have discovered three new speciesA species is a group of living organisms that share a set of common characteristics and are able to breed and produce fertile offspring. The concept of a species is important in biology as it is used to classify and organize the diversity of life. There are different ways to define a species, but the most widely accepted one is the biological species concept, which defines a species as a group of organisms that can interbreed and produce viable offspring in nature. This definition is widely used in evolutionary biology and ecology to identify and classify living organisms." data-gt-translate-attributes="[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]" tabindex="0" role="link">species of extinct walnuts on an island above the Arctic Circle. The fossils were discovered further north than any known walnut species, living or extinct, and represent some of the oldest-known records of this group.

Comment: A wealth of evidence suggests that these regions were warmer in the much more recent past, and so could it be that those walnuts are actually much, much younger?

In Pierre Lescaudron's article Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes, he details some of the evidence:
[...]
Charles Hapgood compiled the locations of the geographic poles over the ages and his results were unexpected. For example, during the Pleistocene - the epoch that lasted from about 2,588,000 years ago and ended with the Younger Dryas - the geographic pole occupied 15 different locations.

The Laurentide ice sheet represented most of the Northern ice cap which covered almost all of Canada, Greenland (except its coast) and a small fraction of Northern Europe. All the rest of the Northern hemisphere including the Arctic Ocean, Alaska, Siberia and part of the Yukon were ice free.
Location of the Ross sea. The green dot indicates the antipode of Hudson Bay.
Location of the Ross sea. The green dot indicates the antipodes of Hudson Bay.
The above strongly suggests that before the Younger Dryas, the North geographic pole was located around Hudson Bay, which is about 60° North - that is; 30 degrees in latitude away from the current North pole.

Second, the ancient maps which represent an ice-free Antartica.

A group of ancient maps, called "maps of the ancient sea kings" was published in 1531 by the French geographer Oronce Fine, but the maps were far more ancient than 1531. Apparently they were drawn by some very ancient people then preserved by some past civilizations (Greeks, Phoenicians, etc), and finally discovered by Fine.
[...]
The above evidence strongly suggests that, about 13,000 years ago, the geographic North pole was located around Hudson Bay, which is about 60° N, or 30° away from the current North pole.

This would have placed Northern Siberia at 40° degrees of latitude North (the current longitude of Northern Siberia is 70°, to which we subtract 30°, giving us 40° N).

40°N is the current latitude of Spain, Greece, Italy, California and Nevada. It is a latitude typical of temperate climate. It is under this temperate latitude that the woolly mammoths lived, but it's not under this latitude that their corpses were preserved frozen.

The cometary bombardment had dramatic effects for our planet, including the location of its geographic poles. Now let's look at how it happened.
And in his article Did Earth 'Steal' Martian Water? we can see further evidence for why dating in the region may not be particularly reliable.

See also:

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Cassiopaea

'Abundant' live fungi, bacteria, viruses, found high in Earth's atmosphere, new study reveals

Bob Yirka
Phys.org
Thu, 12 Sep 2024 14:46 UTC
fungi virus atmosphere
© Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2404191121FLEXPART space-time simulations 4 days back in time for each individual day of flights for all 10 flights in February and April of 2014.
A team of climate, health and atmospheric specialists in Spain and Japan has found abundant live fungi, bacteria and viruses high in the Earth's atmosphere. In their study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group collected air samples from altitudes of 1,000-3,000 meters.

Prior research has shown that dust can travel thousands of miles in the atmosphere — large amounts of dust from Africa are carried to both North and South America, for example. Prior research has also shown that microbes that attach to dust can be carried equally far.

Comment: These findings support Dr Wickramasinghe's research on viruses from space, and their possible role in evolution - as well as their possible role in (near) extinction; because a number of plagues throughout history, like the Black Death, could not have traveled at the speeds, across the terrain, and at the time of year, that they did, unless they were spread via the air. Which, notably, was partly what people believed at the time.

See also:

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Airplane

Major TSA security flaw exposed, simple SQL vulnerability could have allowed access to airplane cockpits

Zo Ahmed
Techspot
Mon, 09 Sep 2024 12:51 UTC
ckpoint
© Unknown
An attacker could have added fake pilots to the roster using SQL injection.

Why it matters: Security researchers have uncovered a major vulnerability that could have allowed anyone to bypass airport security and even access airplane cockpits. The flaw was found in the login system used by the Transportation Security Administration to verify airline crew members at checkpoints.

The story began in April when researchers Ian Carroll and Sam Curry were exploring a third-party website called FlyCASS. This vendor provides smaller airlines with access to the TSA's Known Crewmember (KCM) and Cockpit Access Security System (CASS) databases. While testing the site's login page, they noticed a telltale MySQL error appear after inserting an apostrophe - a classic sign of an SQL injection flaw.
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Gold mine

Study finds earthquakes can trigger quartz into forming giant gold nuggets

Sascha Pare
Live Science
Wed, 11 Sep 2024 18:00 UTC
gold vein in quartz earthquake
© Henri Koskinen via AlamyGold nuggets form inside quartz veins, which are cracks in the rock infilled with mineral-rich hydrothermal fluids.
Geologists have known for decades that gold forms in quartz with the help of earthquakes, but now they have worked out exactly how the setting and seismic waves combine to form large nuggets.

Scientists have discovered exactly how earthquakes trigger quartz into forming large gold nuggets — finally solving a mystery that's puzzled researchers for decades.

Gold naturally forms in quartz — the second-most abundant mineral in Earth's crust after feldspar. But unlike other types of gold deposits, those found in quartz often cluster into giant nuggets. These nuggets float in the middle of what geologists call quartz veins, which are cracks in quartz-rich rocks that periodically get pumped full of hydrothermal fluids from deep within the crust.

"Gold forms in quartz all the time," said Chris Voisey, a geologist at Monash University in Australia and the lead author of a new study published Monday (Sept. 2) in the journal Nature Geoscience. "The thing that's weird is really, really large gold nugget formation. We didn't know how that worked — how you get a large volume of gold to mineralize in one discreet little place," Voisey told Live Science.
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