Science & Technology
The Climate is fine, but climate science is a catastrophe - and Congressional Democrats demand a censorship plan from Google by tomorrow.
One year ago in January, a Chinese robot landed on the dark side of the moon. Since then, the Chang'e 4 probe and the Yutu-2 rover it carried onboard have been busy photographing and scanning minerals, growing yeast, hatching fruit-fly eggs, and cultivating cotton, potato, and rapeseeds in the moon's low gravity, according to the Daily Beast.
Now, China's National Space Administration is quietly planning to launch yet another probe into space. Chang'e 5 could blast off as early as this year.
Last year, TMU reported that the Yutu-2 rover came across a strange "gel-like" substance which the Chinese began to study extensively.
The Chinese space agency has continued to work on its Tiangong 3 space station and is planning on testing a new manned spacecraft for deep-space missions. That permanent station will reach orbit aboard the country's new Long March 5B rocket in the first half of 2020, AFP reported. The mission will not be associated with the International Space Station.
It is worth noting that China and Europe both planned on building a moonbase together in a move of "international collaboration" back in 2017. Europe and Russia are also eyeing plans to send a probe to the dark side of the moon to determine if they should build a moon base on the far side of the lunar surface.
MPEC 2020-C111, issued on 2020, February 06, announces the discovery of a comet (magnitude ~20) by D. Rankin in the course of the Mt. Lemmon Survey (G96), in images taken on 2020, Jan 29 with a 1.5-m reflector + 10K CCD. The new comet has been designated C/2020 B3 (Rankin).
I performed follow-up measurements of this object while it was still on the PCCP webpage. Stacking of 16 unfiltered exposures, 120 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2020, February 03.2 from X02 Telescope Live (El Sauce, Chile) through a 0.6-m f/6.5 astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a compact coma about 5" in diameter slightly elongated toward PA 250.
My confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version)
I performed follow-up measurements of this object while it was still on the PCCP webpage. Stacking of 16 unfiltered exposures, 120 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2020, February 03.2 from X02 Telescope Live (El Sauce, Chile) through a 0.6-m f/6.5 astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a compact coma about 5" in diameter slightly elongated toward PA 250.
My confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version)
© Remanzacco Blogspot
Comet C/2020 B3 (Rankin)
Comet C/2020 B3 (Rankin)
© VICTOR CAETANO-ANDRADE
A towering Brazil nut tree in Jaú National Park in Brazil’s Amazonas state.
A towering Brazil nut tree in Jaú National Park in Brazil’s Amazonas state.
"As trees grow, they absorb details about their surroundings into their wood, creating snapshots of the environment through time," says Victor Caetano-Andrade, from the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
The insights that can be gleaned from these "time capsules of cultural heritage" could help inform conservation efforts, according to a review published by Caetano-Andrade and colleagues in the journal Trends in Plant Science.
This is a mounting imperative, they write, as tropical forests are refuges for half of the Earth's biodiversity and major mitigators of greenhouse gases.
However, the trees face numerous threats from climate change and logging; an area equivalent to 40 football fields is being deforested every minute.
The review discusses bringing together dendrochronology (the study of tree rings), radiocarbon dating, stable isotope in the wood and tree DNA to shine more light on questions about past human societies.
"We emphasise the importance of using these methods in dialogue with history and archaeology to understand the dimensions of human influence in tropical forests," says Caetano-Andrade.
Rather than forests being "pristine" prior to industrialisation, evidence from trees, archaeological and historical records suggest prehistoric humans had far greater impacts on their ecology than previously thought.
© Tsunehiko Kato, ARC and SDSS, NAOJ Four-Dimensional Digital Universe Project
The way in which galaxies cluster together in the Universe is made clear in this image of the Universe as observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The yellow dots represent the position of individual galaxies, while the orange loop shows the area of the Universe spanning 1 billion light-years. At the center is Earth, and around it is a three-dimensional map of where different galaxies are. The image reveals how galaxies are not uniformly spread out throughout the Universe, and how they cluster together to create areas called filaments, or are completely absent in areas called voids.
The way in which galaxies cluster together in the Universe is made clear in this image of the Universe as observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The yellow dots represent the position of individual galaxies, while the orange loop shows the area of the Universe spanning 1 billion light-years. At the center is Earth, and around it is a three-dimensional map of where different galaxies are. The image reveals how galaxies are not uniformly spread out throughout the Universe, and how they cluster together to create areas called filaments, or are completely absent in areas called voids.
Advancements in telescopes have enabled researchers to study the Universe with greater detail, and to establish a standard cosmological model that explains various observational facts simultaneously. But there are many things researchers still do not understand. Remarkably, the majority of the Universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, of which no one has been able to identify their nature. A promising avenue to solve these mysteries is the structure of the Universe. Today's Universe is made up of filaments where galaxies cluster together and look like threads from far away, and voids where there appears to be nothing (image 1). The discovery of the cosmic microwave background has given researchers a snapshot of what the Universe looked like close to its beginning, and understanding how its structure evolved to what it is today would reveal valuable characteristics about what dark matter and dark energy is.
© ALMA/ ESO/ NAOJ/ NRAO)/ Olofsson et al./ Robert Cumming
This new image from the ALMA telescope in Chile shows the aftermath of a near-collision between stars in the binary star system HD101584. The red and blue rings and blobs of gas are the result of a red giant star engulfing its smaller companion.
This new image from the ALMA telescope in Chile shows the aftermath of a near-collision between stars in the binary star system HD101584. The red and blue rings and blobs of gas are the result of a red giant star engulfing its smaller companion.
Like humans, stars change with age and ultimately die. For the Sun and stars like it, this change will take it through a phase where, having burned all the hydrogen in its core, it swells up into a large and bright red-giant star. Eventually, the dying Sun will lose its outer layers, leaving behind its core: a hot and dense star called a white dwarf.
"The star system HD101584 is special in the sense that this 'death process' was terminated prematurely and dramatically as a nearby low-mass companion star was engulfed by the giant," said Hans Olofsson of the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, who led a recent study, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, of this intriguing object.
In 2016, there were only 21,000 donor kidneys available for transplant in the US, but a waiting list of nearly 100,000, resulting in a wait time of five to ten years.
The Kidney Project is a national network that has been cooperating to develop an implantable bio-artificial kidney that could eliminate the need for dialysis.
During a presentation at the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week in November of 2019, the team announced that UC San Francisco scientists were able to implant a prototype kidney bioreactor containing functional human kidney cells into pigs without causing any harm to the test subjects.
The web of stars, known as XMM-2599, existed about 12 billion years ago, in the early days of the universe, when it was only about 1.8 billion years old.
It spewed out a vast number of stars in its short life. And then it suddenly stopped.
That rapid and unexplained death has puzzled astronomers, who say the vast galaxy does not fit with our existing models of the early universe.
© Zhurakivska etal., OOOOJournal, 2020
Just over 10 years ago, a 19-year-old woman met with doctors at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli in Italy, providing them with a rare case of what's known in the medical field as gingival hirsutism.
"In 2009, we reported a case of a young woman who presented with hairs on the sulcular epithelium of the retroincisor palatal papilla," the specialists reported in their recent case study.
To translate, they found a scattering of eyelash-like hairs protruding from the soft tissues directly behind her upper front teeth.
© NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
This high-resolution image captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC).
This high-resolution image captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC).
Uncovering how Pluto's atmosphere behaves has provided scientists with another place to compare our own planet with. Such findings can pinpoint both similar and distinctive features between Earth and a dwarf planet billions of kilometres away.
Pluto's heart-shaped structure, named Tombaugh Regio, quickly became famous after NASA's New Horizons mission captured footage of the dwarf planet in 2015 and revealed it is not the barren world scientists thought it was.
Nitrogen gas — an element also found in air on Earth — comprises most of Pluto's thin atmosphere, along with small amounts of carbon monoxide and the greenhouse gas methane.
