Evidence of a Cycle 25 sunspot found

In our previous post: Solar activity crashes - the Sun looks like a cueball,

Our resident solar physicist, Dr. Leif Svalgaard commented and provided a link to something reported by his colleagues, something that likely would not have been possible without the fantastic solar observations of NASA's Solar Dynamic Observeratory (SDO). He said:

Cycle 25 has already begun
http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~tohban/wiki/index.php/A_Sunspot_from_Cycle_25_for_sure

It looks to me that SC25 will be a bit stronger than SC24, so probably no Grand Minimum this time
http://www.leif.org/research/Prediction-of-SC25.pdf
http://www.leif.org/research/comparative-study-solar-prediction.pdf
(ignore the 2014 in the top line - it is just a place holder).

The mesmeric swirling mass atop our solar system's largest planet is laid bare in all its turbulent glory in an incredible 3D flyover 'tour' video from NASA. The imagery offers an intriguing peak beneath Jupiter's clouds.

The animation shows Jupiter's north pole and the "engine" powering its magnetic field in never-before-seen and highly-textured detail. The churning surface looks almost menacing in the video which illustrates the polar region's central storm and the eight cyclones - ranging in diameter from 2,500 to 2,900 miles (4,000 to 4,600 kilometers) - that encircle it.

The 3D tour was built using data collected by the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft during its fourth flyover of the enormous planet. The infrared cameras measure the atmospheric temperature some 30 to 34 miles from Jupiter's cloud tops, and offer some insight into the gas giant's powerful cyclones.

Our memories leave a clear and unique genetic mark on our brains.

That's the remarkable discovery of scientists in Israel who say these genetic markers could be used to unlock memories after people die.

The technology opens the door to strange scenarios, similar to those portrayed in the series 'Black Mirror', where investigators can record and playback the memories of suspected criminals.

It could even lead to a future in which police are able to read and replay memories of murder victims to help them piece together the events leading up to their death.

Researchers at the University of Michigan Life Sciences Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have determined how satellite DNA, considered to be "junk DNA," plays a crucial role in holding the genome together.

Their findings, published recently in the journal eLife, indicate that this genetic "junk" performs the vital function of ensuring that chromosomes bundle correctly inside the cell's nucleus, which is necessary for cell survival. And this function appears to be conserved across many species.

This pericentromeric satellite DNA consists of a very simple, highly repetitive sequence of genetic code. Although it accounts for a substantial portion of our genome, satellite DNA does not contain instructions for making any specific proteins. What's more, its repetitive nature is thought to make the genome less stable and more susceptible to damage or disease. Until fairly recently, scientists believed this so-called "junk" or "selfish" DNA did not serve any real purpose.

"But we were not quite convinced by the idea that this is just genomic junk," said Yukiko Yamashita, research professor at the LSI and lead author on the study. "If we don't actively need it, and if not having it would give us an advantage, then evolution probably would have gotten rid of it. But that hasn't happened."

Yamashita and her colleagues decided to see what would happen if cells could not use this pericentromeric satellite DNA. Because it exists in long, repetitive sequences, the researchers could not simply mutate or cut the entire satellite DNA out of the genome. Instead, they approached the question through D1, a protein known to bind to satellite DNA.

'I didn't expect them to be there,' says University of Alberta scientist

Scientists from the University of Alberta have accidentally discovered the first two subglacial lakes found in the Canadian Arctic - and their unique conditions could help scientists in their search for life beyond Earth.

The two lakes were found underneath the ice cap, below between 550 and 750 metres of ice.

The discovery was made by Anja Rutishauser, a PhD student in radio glaciology, who was studying the bedrock conditions underneath the Devon Ice Cap, one of the largest ice caps in the Canadian Arctic.

The revival of space launches from a sea platform serves as a pilot project for Russia's space agency's ability to benefit from private capital. Neglecting the commercial aspects of spaceflight is no longer an option.

Russian space agency Roscosmos has long ignored the arrival of private firms in the space industry, and the result has been the loss of international customers and sluggish development in new technology. But now Roscosmos is apparently willing to cooperate with for-profit organizations. As the world celebrates International Space Day on Thursday, RT looks at how the revival of the Sea Launch project attempts to become a proof-of-concept for a shift in how the Russian space industry works.

In late December 2017, a rocket was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and delivered a telecommunications satellite into orbit. The Russia-made spacecraft was supposed to reach geosynchronous orbit and become the first operated by the African nation of Angola. Instead, it experienced communication glitches and was finally ordered by mission control to go into hibernation. AngoSat 1 may yet to be revived later this month, but there is not much hope for it.

Yet one party involved in the launch considered it a big success. The carrier rocket that delivered AngoSat 1 to its orbital grave was a Russian-Ukrainian Zenit-3F, a version of a rocket family developed by the Soviet Union and remarkable for its other version - the Zenit-3SL. The letters stand for 'Sea Launch' - an ambitious collaboration for launching commercial payloads from a sea platform floating near the equator. The December 2017 launch was the first for Sea Launch's new private owner, the S7 Space.

A trio of satellites studying our planet's magnetic field have shown details of the steady swell of a magnetic field produced by the ocean's tides.

Four years of data collected by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm mission have contributed to the mapping of this 'other' magnetic field, one that could help us build better models around global warming.

Physicist Nils Olsen from the Technical University of Denmark presented the surprising results at this year's European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, explaining how his team of researchers managed to detail such a faint signature.

"It's a really tiny magnetic field," Olsen told BBC correspondent Jonathan Amos.

The world's first 3D-printed house has been unveiled in the French city of Nantes. The first tenants of the groundbreaking public housing property are scheduled to move in by June.

Researchers at the University of Nantes are responsible for the project, which was built using a robot 3D printer, known as 'BatiPrint3D,' in just 18 days before its hollow walls were filled with cement.

The robot uses a special polymer material that should insulate the 95-square-meter (1000-square-foot), five-room house for a century.

"Is this the future? It's a solution and a constructive principle that is interesting because we create the house directly on site and in addition thanks to the robot, we are able to create walls with complex shapes," Benoit Furet, a professor who worked on the project, told Reuters.

Located in one of the closest star systems to our own at just 4.2 lightyears away, the exoplanet Proxima b seemed like a great candidate for a space colony once we're capable of that sort of thing. Not so much anymore.

Because even though Proxima b is in that solar system's habitable zone (often called its "goldilocks zone"), its star Proxima Centauri seems to be more volatile than our sun. Proxima Centuari has been detected unleashing a giant solar flare of approximately 316,227,766,000 petajoules (316,227 petawatts). It was powerful enough that the normally dim red dwarf star could be seen from Earth.

It was also powerful enough that it may have fried any life living on the surface of Proxima b, and this may be common enough that future settlements there wouldn't last very long.

Now, it's unlikely that any life was sitting on the surface while this event occurred. One reason is that the chances of life forming so close are slim, and we have no evidence of any life there beyond that the planet is usually the right temperature for liquid water to form.

Most people know that the X chromosome is one of the two sex chromosomes; inherit an X from each of your parents and you will likely be deemed "biologically female." Get an X from your mother and a Y from your father and you will likely be deemed "biologically male." Unlike the other twenty-two pairs of chromosomes, the sex chromosomes are not identical in structure.

As historian Stephen G. Brush writes, the term "X chromosome" was coined by C.E. McClung, for "accessory chromosome." McClung noticed that in some organisms only one sex had the "X." Sex determination by chromosome, though, was discovered in 1905 by Nettie Stevens and Edmund Wilson, working independently. The nature of the XY relationship was determined first by Dr. Stevens.

Examining mealworms, she noticed that the chromosomes were different in males and females. Females contained twenty large chromosomes, while males contained nineteen large chromosomes and one small chromosome. Stevens deduced that biological sex was determined by this last pair of chromosomes, and that the female-determining feature was larger.