Science & TechnologyS


Better Earth

Remains of huge methane domes found on the floor of the Barents Sea

Karen Graham
Digital Journal
Fri, 02 Jun 2017 14:04 UTC
craters
© Karin AndreassenSeveral hundred craters were documented in the area, of which around one hundred were up to one kilometer wide.

Huge craters on the floor of the Arctic Ocean are the remains of collapsed methane domes that exploded at the end of the last Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago as the glaciers retreated. But even now, methane gas is still seeping out of the seafloor.

It has been about 11,600 years since the last one of the huge mounds exploded, releasing its methane gas, and there are literally hundreds of the craters to be seen on the floor of the Barents Sea, according to a study published in the journal, Science on June 1, 2017.

The cold and shallow body of water just a little north of Norway meets Russia and is home to oil and gas fields. Methane, the primary component of natural gas naturally seeps out of the seafloor in this region. Karin Andreassen, the lead author of the study is a marine geologist and geophysicist at the Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment, and Climate in Tromsø, Norway.

She knew the research team would find some craters on the seafloor when they began the study in the Barents Sea, however, she didn't realize just how many craters the team would find or how massive many of them turned out to be.

Comment: All of this methane leaking into the atmosphere cannot be a good thing:

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Comet 2

New Comet: C/2017 K4 (ATLAS)

Ernesto Guido
Remanzacco Blogspot
Mon, 05 Jun 2017 07:19 UTC
CBET nr. 4397, issued on 2017, June 01, announces the discovery of a comet (magnitude ~17) by the "Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System" (ATLAS) Team on CCD exposures taken on May 26.5 with the ATLAS 0.5-m f/2.0 Schmidt telescope at Haleakala. The new comet has been designated C/2017 K4 (ATLAS).

I performed follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 10 unfiltered exposures, 120 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2017, May 29.4 from Q62 (iTelescope network) through 0.43-m f/6.8 reflector + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a diffuse coma nearly 10 arcsec in diameter

My confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version)
C/2017 K4 (ATLAS)
© Remanzacco Blogspot
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Beaker

Key to saving a river may be understanding its 'thermal landscape'

American Institute of Biological Sciencces
Science Daily
Fri, 02 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
thermal river
© huawei P9A thermal river at dawn.
River temperatures have long been an area of study, but until recently, the field has been hampered by technological constraints. Fine-scale measurements over large distances and long time periods have been difficult to collect, and research efforts have focused instead on average river temperatures, lethal extremes, and small-scale patterns.

However, a suite of new technologies and methods, driven by inexpensive sensor technology, are enabling new insights, with significant implications for the future of river management. Writing in BioScience, E. Ashley Steel of the USDA Forest Service and her colleagues detail the effects of these new data and describe the ways in which the new information will assist future management efforts.

Key among data-enabled innovations is the incorporation of measurements over time and space to create a holistic view of river thermal regimes that the authors dub the "thermal landscape." In natural thermal landscapes, there are complex patterns in which temperatures fluctuate over time, in slightly different ways, at every location on a river network. The authors argue that a greater understanding of thermal landscapes could guide new insight into humans' effects on river networks.
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Microscope 2

Stunting: How the Galapagos cormorant's lost ability to fly relates to human bone-development disorders

University of California - Los Angeles Health Sciences
Science Daily
Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
Cormorant
© Vermeulen-Perdaen / FotoliaFlightless Galapagos cormorant displays its tiny wings.
The flightless cormorant is one of a diverse array of animals that live on the Galapagos Islands, which piqued Charles Darwin's scientific curiosity in the 1830s. He hypothesized that altered evolutionary pressures may have contributed to the loss of the ability to fly in birds like the Galapagos cormorant.

In a new study unraveling the cormorant's DNA, UCLA scientists discovered genetic changes that transpired during the past 2 million years and contributed to the bird's inability to fly. Interestingly, when these same genes go awry in humans, they cause bone-development disorders called skeletal ciliopathies.

Published June 2 in the journal Science, the findings shed light on the genetic mechanisms underlying the evolution of limb size and could eventually lead to new treatments for people with skeletal ciliopathies.

"A number of these iconic, salient evolutionary changes occurred in the Galapagos," said senior author Leonid Kruglyak, chair of human genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Darwin, just by looking at these changes, inferred the process of evolution by natural selection. We now have sophisticated genetic tools to reexamine these classic examples and uncover what happened at the molecular level."
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Nebula

Confirmation: LIGO detects gravitational waves a third time

MIT, Jennifer Chu
Science Daily
Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
2 black holes
© LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)This artist's conception shows two merging black holes similar to those detected by LIGO. The black holes are spinning in a nonaligned fashion, which means they have different orientations relative to the overall orbital motion of the pair. LIGO found hints that at least one black hole in the system called GW170104 was nonaligned with its orbital motion before it merged with its partner.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) has made a third detection of gravitational waves, ripples in space and time, demonstrating that a new window in astronomy has been firmly opened. As was the case with the first two detections, the waves were generated when two black holes collided to form a larger black hole. The newfound black hole, formed by the merger, has a mass about 49 times that of our sun. This fills in a gap between the masses of the two merged black holes detected previously by LIGO, with solar masses of 62 (first detection) and 21 (second detection).

"We have further confirmation of the existence of stellar-mass black holes that are larger than 20 solar masses -- these are objects we didn't know existed before LIGO detected them," says MIT's David Shoemaker, the newly elected spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), a body of more than 1,000 international scientists who perform LIGO research together with the European-based Virgo Collaboration. "It is remarkable that humans can put together a story, and test it, for such strange and extreme events that took place billions of years ago and billions of light-years distant from us. The entire LIGO and Virgo scientific collaborations worked to put all these pieces together."
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Brain

Let's connect: Neuroscientists rewire brain of one species to another

Georgia State University
Science Daily
Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
Giant Nudibranch
© Ralph and Dale Marie GonzalesA Giant Nudibranch, Dendronotus iris.
Scientists at Georgia State University have rewired the neural circuit of one species and given it the connections of another species to test a hypothesis about the evolution of neural circuits and behavior.

Neurons are connected to each other to form networks that underlie behaviors. Drs. Akira Sakurai and Paul Katz of Georgia State's Neuroscience Institute study the brains of sea slugs, more specifically nudibranchs, which have large neurons that form simple circuits and produce simple behaviors. In this study, they examined how the brains of these sea creatures produce swimming behaviors. They found that even though the brains of two species -- the giant nudibranch and the hooded nudibranch -- had the same neurons, and even though the behaviors were the same, the wiring was different.

The researchers blocked some of the connections in the giant nudibranch using curare, a paralyzing poison used on blow darts by indigenous South Americans. This prevented the brain of the giant nudibranch from producing the pattern of impulses that would normally cause the animal to swim. Then, they inserted electrodes into the neurons to create artificial connections between the brain cells that were based on connections from the hooded nudibranch. The brain was able to produce rhythmic, alternating activity that would underlie the swimming behavior, showing these two species produce their swimming behavior using very different brain mechanisms.

Comment: Slugging away at neural connectivity!

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Monkey Wrench

DragonflEye: Genetically engineered dragonfly drone

Andrew Liszewski
Gizmodo
Thu, 01 Jun 2017 23:32 UTC
dragon fly eye
© IEEE SpectrumDraper's Genetically Modified Cyborg DragonflEye Takes Flight
The smaller a drone gets, the more places it can be easily flown. But while many researchers have been trying to tackle the monumental challenge of building drones that look and behave like tiny insects, a new approach has engineers giving Mother Nature's existing creations drone-like upgrades.

The biggest hurdle with building tiny drones that can fly almost anywhere is powering them. A small flying craft is only strong enough to carry a small battery, which dramatically limits its flight time. But somehow that mosquito in your tent while camping can buzz your ear for hours on end before refueling—on you.

We can only make electronics so small, though, so upgrading a mosquito isn't currently feasible. But a dragonfly? Researchers at Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and Howard Hughes Medical Institute have created something they call DragonflEye: a remote control drone built on a living dragonfly.
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Info

How ancestry shapes our immune cells


Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München
Thu, 01 Jun 2017 20:13 UTC
ACKR1
© S. Leah Etheridge/University of YorkErythrocyte progenitors express ACKR1 (yellow) on their surface.
A genetic variant that is particularly prevalent in people of African ancestry confers protection against malaria. LMU researchers have now shown how it modulates the properties of white blood cells that play a major role in immune defenses and inflammation.

Virtually the entire population of sub-Saharan Africa, and some 70% of African Americans, carry a gene variant (allele) which results in a trait referred to as Duffy-negative. It has long been known that carriers of this version of the gene are relatively protected from some strains of malaria. In addition, the allele has recently been linked to benign neutropenia - a mild reduction in the numbers of neutrophilic granulocytes (neutrophils), a type of white blood cells present in the circulation.

Although neutrophils are known to play an important part in the innate immune defenses against pathogens, Duffy-negative individuals do not show any obvious increase in susceptibility to infections. In a new study led by LMU's Dr. Johan Duchêne, Professor Christian Weber and Professor Antal Rot (also at University of York), an international team of biomedical researchers has now shown how the Duffy-negative variant affects the differentiation of white blood cells and why it leads to a relative paucity of circulating neutrophils. The findings appear in the current issue of the journal Nature Immunology.
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Comet

Comet simulation reveals the effect of the Sun's solar wind

Shubashree Desikan
The Hindu
Sat, 27 May 2017 15:26 UTC
Hale-Bopp comet
Icy visitor: A view of comet Hale-Bopp, as seen from California in 1997, shows the matchhead and feathery tail.
Historically, the shape of comets revealed the presence of the solar wind in the 1950s

In our exploration of the space and the Sun, an important aspect is to understand how emanated gases behave when they are close to the sun. To study this, a simulation of a comet interacting with solar wind has been made by researchers. The work, published in Physical Review Letters, reveals how the electrons and ions in the comet's body interact with the electrons and protons in the solar wind. This is interesting as comet observations have a history of revealing even the existence of the solar wind.

Solar wind consists of a plasma of electrons and protons flowing away from the sun at hypersonic speeds. Its existence was first inferred indirectly in the 1950s by observing the shapes of comet tails. Only later was its existence confirmed by the Mariner 2 spacecraft.

Comment: Looks like mainstream science is edging close to an electrical theory for cometary behavior.

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Beaker

Hundreds of giant ocean bed craters produced by explosive methane seeps

George Dvorsky
Gizmodo
Thu, 01 Jun 2017 16:49 UTC
undersea craters methane release
© K. Andreassen/CAGESeveral hundred craters were documented in the area, of which around one hundred were up to one kilometer wide.
Researchers working in the Barents Sea have discovered hundreds of craters on the Arctic Sea floor, some measuring over a kilometer in width. These craters, which date back to the end of the last Ice Age, were formed when large reserves of methane exploded in the wake of retreating ice sheets. Because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, this discovery is a potential warning of things to come in our warming world.

Around 12,000 years ago, the Barents Sea—an area north of Scandinavia—was covered by a thick layer of ice. When the planet warmed and these ice sheets receded, enormous quantities of methane trapped below were abruptly released. The result was a series of explosive methane blowouts that littered the seafloor with craters. The details of this finding now appear in the latest edition of Science.

Today, these craters are still seeping methane, which is a concern to climate researchers. A colorless, odorless gas produced during microbial decomposition, methane is around 30 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Moreover, the same geological processes responsible for the historic methane blowouts are still happening elsewhere in the world today, leading to speculation that methane explosions could amp up due to human-caused climate change.

Comment: Unlike the fake global warming scam, the release of massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere is a real danger.

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