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Engine of climate change: Thousands, and possibly millions, of underwater volcanoes remain undiscovered

Joanne Nova
JoNova
Mon, 04 Dec 2017 18:20 UTC
The world is watching one volcano in Bali, but it's sobering to think there may be hundreds of others going off, and almost certainly ones we don't even know about. The article Is the Bali volcano making us warmer or cooler? by William F Jasper, reminded me of Ian Plimers words about there being squillions of undersea volcanoes so I found the 2007 paper, by Hillier, that tried to count them. Trying being the appropriate word. Volcanoes are biggish things, but when they are under one or two kilometers of water they are hard to hear, hard to see, and, by crikey, we know more about the moon than the bottom of the Marinara, and it's only 11km "away".

People are constantly discovering new volcanoes, like a 3,000m one off Indonesia that no one realized was there til 2010. It turns out the second largest volcano in the solar system is apparently not on Io, but 1,000 miles east of Japan. It's the size of the British Isles, but who knew? A few months ago a team found 91 new volcanoes under Antarctica. (This is getting serious, someone should talk to the Minister for Lava!)
Marianna Volcanoes
© JoNova
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Pharoah

Half of all Swiss men share a gene with Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun

Siobhán Dowling
The Local
Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:53 UTC
Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun
Every second Swiss male is related to the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun, according to researchers in Zurich.

Scientists working on mapping the genetic profile of Tutankhamun, who ruled Egypt around 3,000 years ago, were able to reconstruct his Y-DNA profile.

They found that he belonged to the haplogroup R1b1a2 that is today strongly represented in Switzerland and other parts of Western Europe.

Comment: Who would've thought?

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Robot

Must have more better weapons technology! Report says U.S. losing to Russia and China in AI military race

Tom O'Connor
Newsweek
Wed, 29 Nov 2017 21:17 UTC
FEDOR
FEDOR (Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research) is a bipedal robot designed by Russia's Android Technics and Russian military research agency Advanced Research Fund. Its capable of performing a number complex human tasks including firing guns and driving cars.
Russia and China want to revolutionize their forces with weaponized artificial intelligence, a field in which the U.S. risks falling behind, according to a new report released Wednesday from former defense officials and field experts.

The report, from government data analysis group Govini and former Department of Defense Chief Robert Work, says America's two biggest military competitors are rapidly advancing with AI, leaving the U.S. military with the choice of whether it wants to "lead the coming revolution, or fall victim to it."

"This stark choice will be determined by the degree to which the Department of Defense (DoD) recognizes the revolutionary military potential of AI and advanced autonomous systems," the report said, according to CNN, which first obtained it.

Comment: This article smells like military-industrial mouthpiece Newsweek's way of saying: "Listen Americans, we've got to throw another Trillion dollars at this or the Chinese and Russians will destroy us with better Artificial Intelligence weapons!!" Never mind that the Russians and Chinese would probably not even be going this route so strongly if the U.S. Deep State itself wasn't so obsessed with dominating the world.

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Brain

Brain's information processing mechanisms may be responsible for similarities across languages


Science Blog
Sat, 02 Dec 2017 13:59 UTC
Brain
An estimated 7,099 languages are spoken throughout the world today. Almost a third of them are endangered - spoken by dwindling numbers - while just 23 languages represent more than half of the global population.

For years, researchers have been interested in the similarities seen across human languages. A new study led by University of Arizona researcher Masha Fedzechkina suggests that some of those similarities may be based on the human brain's preference for efficient information processing.

"If we look at languages of the world, they are very different on the surface, but they also share a lot of underlying commonalities, often called linguistic universals or cross-linguistic generalizations," said Fedzechkina, an assistant professor in the UA Department of Linguistics and lead author of the study, published in the journal Psychological Science.

"Most theories assume the reasons why languages have these cross-linguistic universals is because they're in some way constrained by the human brain," Fedzechkina said. "If these linguistic universals are indeed real, and if we understand their causes, then it can tell us something about how language is acquired or processed by the human brain, which is one of the central questions in language sciences."
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Galaxy

Supermassive black holes photobomb Andromeda galaxy


Phys.org
Thu, 30 Nov 2017 06:23 UTC
pair of black holes
© X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Washington/T.Dorn-Wallenstein et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/J. Dalcanton, et al. & R. Gendler
It seems like even black holes can't resist the temptation to insert themselves unannounced into photographs. A cosmic photobomb found as a background object in images of the nearby Andromeda galaxy has revealed what could be the most tightly coupled pair of supermassive black holes ever seen.

Astronomers made this remarkable discovery using X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical data from ground-based telescopes, Gemini-North in Hawaii and the Caltech's Palomar Transient Factory in California.

This unusual source, called LGGS J004527.30+413254.3 (J0045+41 for short), was seen in optical and X-ray images of Andromeda, also known as M31. Until recently, scientists thought J0045+41 was an object within M31, a large spiral galaxy located relatively nearby at a distance of about 2.5 million light years from Earth. The new data, however, revealed that J0045+41 was actually at a much greater distance, around 2.6 billion light years from Earth.

"We were looking for a special type of star in M31 and thought we had found one," said Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein of the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, who led the paper describing this discovery. "We were surprised and excited to find something far stranger!"

Even more intriguing than the large distance of J0045+41 is that it likely contains a pair of giant black holes in close orbit around each other. The estimated total mass for these two supermassive black holes is about two hundred million times the mass of our Sun.
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Brain

The smarter person's brain is just wired better

Daniel Steingold
StudyFinds
Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00 UTC
brain halves
© ElisaRiva Pixabay.comA new study finds the brains of people with higher levels of intelligence are simply wired in a way that allows them to better understand and retain information.
Brainiacs happen to have thinking organs that are physically designed to outperform, a new study finds.

Researchers at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany looked at brain scans of more than 300 participants, while simultaneously consulting graph theoretical network analysis methods, to try to determine what helps form human intelligence.

Explaining how the brain's many regions interact with others to varying degrees - think of smaller social groups within broader society - the researchers more specifically sought to understand whether the wiring of certain regions was different among people depending on their level of intelligence.
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2 + 2 = 4

Ancient women had much stronger arms than today's female sports stars


RT
Sun, 03 Dec 2017 18:23 UTC
woman flexing muscle
© Michaela Begsteiger / Global Look Press
Women in Europe's ancient civilizations had stronger arms than elite female sports stars do today thanks to the grind of farming life, scientists say. The research shows women were a driving force behind the socio-cultural development of agrarian communities.

A study of bones belonging to women who lived in central Europe between 5300 BC to around 100 AD reveals manual agricultural work had a profound effect on their bodies. Their strong arms reveal women engaged in hard work like harvesting, tilling the soil and grinding grain using their hands.
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Eye 1

Yellowstone supervolcano threat theory 'demonstrably false' - USGS expert to RT


RT
Sun, 03 Dec 2017 16:36 UTC
Yellowstone National Park
© Jim Urquhart / ReutersYellowstone National Park
If you spend any time on the internet, it seems every few months humanity is faced with a looming existential threat from the depths of space. Planet X/Nibiru, the rapture or a wayward comet are, according to conspiracy theorists, destined to destroy us.

However, there is one particular conspiracy, treasured by theorists, that our impending doom will come from within planet Earth - that lurking beneath America's Yellowstone National Park is a supervolcano that will kill us all.

Yellowstone, in the midwestern US, is - they claim - about to erupt and send unfathomable amounts of matter into the sky, covering anyone in the vicinity in a pyroclastic flow of ash and rock, and blocking out the sun, wiping out almost all life on Earth in the process.

Conspiracy theories tend to draw on some grain of truth. The super volcano really has erupted before, three times in fact, over the last 2 billion years or so, but the theory goes that it's bound to do so again soon, right? RT.com caught up with Michael Poland, Scientist-in-Charge at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, to find out the full extent of this lurking supervolcanic 'threat.'

Comment: See this article for a different perspective: Disastrous super-eruption could happen sooner than first thought
The new study from Bristol scientists, published in the Earth and Planetary Science Letters, suggests large, catastrophic eruptions are most likely to happen every 17,000 years.

It's a significant revision from a 2004 estimate, said Jonathan Rougier, of the University of Bristol.

"The previous estimate, made in 2004, was that super-eruptions occurred every 45-714 thousands years, comfortably longer than our civilization. But in our paper just published, we re-estimate this range as 5.2-48 thousand years, with a best guess value of 17,000," he said.

And the two most recent ones came 30,000 to 20,000 years ago.

"On balance, we have been slightly lucky not to experience any super-eruptions since then. But it is important to appreciate that the absence of super-eruptions in the last 20,000 years does not imply that one is overdue. Nature is not that regular."

He added: "What we can say is that volcanoes are more threatening to our civilization than previously thought."

In 2014, the US Geological Survey warned that if the massive volcano at Yellowstone National Park were to boil over, cities nearly 300 miles away would be covered in up to three feet of ash.


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HAL9000

10-qubit entanglement superconducting circuit sets a new record

Lisa Zyga
PhysOrg
Wed, 29 Nov 2017 17:30 UTC
qubit chip
© American Physical SocietyFalse-color circuit image showing 10 superconducting qubits (star shapes) interconnected by a central bus resonator B (gray).
Physicists have experimentally demonstrated quantum entanglement with 10 qubits on a superconducting circuit, surpassing the previous record of nine entangled superconducting qubits. The 10-qubit state is the largest multiqubit entangled state created in any solid-state system and represents a step toward realizing large-scale quantum computing.

Lead researcher Jian-Wei Pan and co-workers at the University of Science and Technology of China, Zhejiang University, Fuzhou University, and the Institute of Physics, China, have published a paper on their results in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

In general, one of the biggest challenges to scaling up multiqubit entanglement is addressing the catastrophic effects of decoherence. One strategy is to use superconducting circuits, which operate at very cold temperatures and consequently have longer qubit coherence times.

In the new set-up, the researchers used qubits made of tiny pieces of aluminum, which they connected to each other and arranged in a circle around a central bus resonator. The bus is a key component of the system, as it controls the interactions between qubits, and these interactions generate the entanglement.
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Mars

'Rocket test' proves worms can thrive in Red Planet soil


RT
Sun, 03 Dec 2017 17:14 UTC
Artist's impression of a food growing facility on Mars.
© NASAArtist's impression of a food growing facility on Mars.
Rockets will take humans to Mars but rocket (of the leafy variety) could help them stay there. Simulating its growth in deep space, scientists made a key discovery that could yield Red Planet farming - worms can reproduce in Martian-like soil.

The finding, announced by Wageningen University in the Netherlands on Monday, came as researchers attempted to grow arugula, also known as rocket, in Mars soil simulant provided by NASA.
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