The largest gravity changes ever recorded: Continuous gravity monitoring of the onset of Kīlauea's 2018 eruption Talk by Mike Poland-USGS Yellowstone Volcano Observatory Scientist-in-Charge and former USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory geophysicist.

Talk originally presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2020. Eruptive activity at Kīlauea Volcano, Hawaiʻi, in April-May 2018 occurred at sites that were well monitored by continuous gravity. Draining of the lava lake from the summit eruptive vent starting May 1, recorded by a gravimeter on the vent rim, was accompanied by a drop of ~1300 microgals over 9 days. At the rim of the Puʻu ʻŌʻō eruptive vent, 20 km [12 miles] down the East Rift Zone from the summit, a gravity decrease of ~200 microgals over 8 minutes, followed by an increase of ~350 microgals over the subsequent 9 minutes, accompanied the formation of an eruptive fissure on the flank of the cone on April 30. About 45 minutes later, a decrease of ~1500 microgals occurred over 2 hours as lava drained from the vent. These gravity changes are the largest ever recorded anywhere in the world.

Global music-streaming giant Spotify has recently been granted a patent for a new technology which will allow it to analyze its users' voice data - including speech recognition and background noise - with an eye to suggesting music based on what it finds.

As reported by Music Business Worldwide, this patent was first applied for in February 2018 and was granted January 2021. The filing states that Spotify's intention is to use audio recognition to identify traits such as "an emotional state, a gender, an age, or an accent of the speaker" and then recommend content based on this model.

This isn't the first time the Swedish company has toyed with what some might view as 'overly personal' personalization techniques - a previous patent that Spotify had granted involved customizing a user's experience based on their 'personality traits'.

In both cases, the aim for Spotify is to target users with more relevant and appropriate content, whether it be music or podcast recommendations, or potentially advertising.

New research suggests that doctors are, thankfully, skilled at correctly identifying a person's time of death — a crucial aspect of ensuring healthy organs for donation. At the same time, the body can sometimes show flitters of cardiac activity even after death has become truly irreversible, according to the study published in the New England of Medicine.

There's no shortage of morbid curiosity surrounding death. But according to the researchers behind this project, known as the Death Prediction and Physiology after Removal of Therapy Study, or DePPaRT, there's a lot we don't know for sure about a person's last minutes of life.

Since 2014, they've been collecting vital sign data from dying patients in Canada, the UK, and the Czech Republic as part of their work. Their main goal has been to document as much as possible about the process of dying, particularly in critically ill people who are taken off life support. They've also been studying how and why families decide to donate the organs of their loved ones soon before death and how the donation affects them. People in the study — around 600 in total — were only included after express consent from their families. The project received funding from the Canadian government as well as the Canadian Donation and Transplantation Research Program.

Though some organs, like the kidneys, can be kept viable for over a day before being transplanted, others, like the heart, have to be transplanted within hours. Any delay can be literally the difference between life and death for the organ recipients. But people are understandably sensitive about death, and many families and some doctors may hold out hope of a miraculous recovery even after a person is taken off life support.

Lemme make this simple for tweeters.

In 2018, on January 23, Russia was first to announce the discovery of space based life obtained by appropriate technical means in a collaborative international scientific effort. Based on genes swiped with a tampon from the OUTSIDE window of the International Space Station, three respected Russian national laboratories, and twelve credentialed scientists, published a peer-reviewed journal article demonstrating that seven kinds of dessicated, hibernated and freeze dried microbial life forms were plastered to the exterior of the spacecraft.

But even Russia was coy. The authors appropriately hedged their conclusions in the announcement. They proposed that the biological material collected 400 kilometers above the earth's surface could have come from below — or above — the space station.

You've heard of a "perfect storm." But what about a perfect solar storm? A new study just published in the research journal Space Weather considers what might happen if a worst-case coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth. Spoiler alert: You might need a backup generator.

For years, researchers have been wondering, what's the worst the sun could do? In 2014, Bruce Tsurutani (JPL) and Gurbax Lakhina (Indian Institute of Geomagnetism) introduced the "Perfect CME." It would be fast, leaving the sun around 3,000 km/s, and aimed directly at Earth. Moreover, it would follow another CME, which would clear the path in front of it, allowing the storm cloud to hit Earth with maximum force.

None of this is fantasy. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has observed CMEs leaving the sun at speeds up to 3,000 km/s. And there are many documented cases of one CME clearing the way for another. Perfect CMEs are real.

Using simple calculations, Tsurutani and Lakhina showed that a Perfect CME would reach Earth in only 12 hours, allowing emergency managers little time to prepare, and slam into our magnetosphere at 45 times the local speed of sound. In response to such a shock, there would be a geomagnetic storm perhaps twice as strong as the Carrington Event of 1859. Power grids, GPS and other high-tech services could experience significant outages.

A Sharjah observatory has detected "rare sequential impacts" on the Moon.

Detected by the Sharjah Astronomical Observatory, the team has analysed the time of impacts and their relative positions. Based on this, it has been determined that they are a series of meteorite impacts. They resulted from the disintegration of the meteoroid due to the gravitational pull of the Moon as it approaches its surface.
It appears from preliminary analyses that these impacts have created new craters on the surface of the Moon ranging in diameter from 5 to 10 metres.

Using a combination of telescopes, including the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO's VLT), astronomers have revealed a system consisting of six exoplanets, five of which are locked in a rare rhythm around their central star. The researchers believe the system could provide important clues about how planets, including those in the Solar System, form and evolve.

The first time the team observed TOI-178, a star some 200 light-years away in the constellation of Sculptor, they thought they had spotted two planets going around it in the same orbit. However, a closer look revealed something entirely different. "Through further observations we realised that there were not two planets orbiting the star at roughly the same distance from it, but rather multiple planets in a very special configuration," says Adrien Leleu from the Université de Genève and the University of Bern, Switzerland, who led a new study of the system published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

... it must be 2021 if robots are being quoted in the news.

A Hong Kong-based robotics company plans to mass produce humanoid robots to replace workers across industries such as healthcare and education.

Hanson Robotics is set to launch a mass rollout of human-like robots that can compete with human workers, something the company's founder says is needed to keep people safe in the age of the coronavirus.

"The world of Covid-19 is going to need more and more automation to keep people safe," founder and chief executive David Hanson claims.

The formation of crystals is one of the most commonplace processes you can probably think of. Every time you freeze water into ice cubes, for instance, you're creating crystalline structures. There's even a fun experiment you can do to grow salt crystals - with nothing more than table salt and water.

But on the atomic level, we have a poor understanding of how crystals form, particularly nucleation - the very first step in the crystallisation process. That's partially because it's a dynamic process that happens on such small scales, and partially because it's somewhat random, both of which make it difficult to study.

That's what makes the work of a team of researchers led by chemist Takayuki Nakamuro of the University of Tokyo in Japan so exciting. Using a special technique in development since 2005, they have filmed the crystallisation of salt on the atomic scale for the first time.

For an environmentally conscious billionaire, what better way to combine luxury with your green credentials?

Bill Gates has commissioned the world's first hydrogen-powered superyacht - believed to cost $860 million, giving him bragging rights over other ultra-rich seafarers.

The Sunday Telegraph can reveal the retired 64-year-old is behind the construction of the cutting-edge cruiser by Dutch superyacht specialist Feadship.