© Hans Hillewaert.
Science & Technology
© Archives of the Gemmellaro Geological Museum
Despite their small size, the miniature elephants looked incredibly similar to the giants they evolved from, including retaining impressive tusks
Despite their small size, the miniature elephants looked incredibly similar to the giants they evolved from, including retaining impressive tusks
Now for the first-time researchers have been able to extract and delve into the DNA of one of these extinct elephants, helping to show how the largest land mammal ever to exist shrank by at least 8,000kg to become one of the smallest elephants known.
The tiny elephants that were once found on Sicily were some of the smallest elephants ever to have existed, but quite extraordinarily they are descended from one of the biggest land mammals ever to have lived: the straight-tusked elephant.
These animals were genuine giants, with some individuals reaching up to 4.5 metres tall and tipping the scales at 14 tons. An adult straight-tusked elephant could very easily have rested its chin on the back of a bull African savannah elephant.
Comment: It's unlikely that the standard theory of 'evolution' can explain what happened to Sicily's elephants:
- Last mammoths plagued by genetic defects
- Evolution - A Modern Fairy Tale
- Why Darwinism Is Wrong, Dead Wrong - Part 1: Intelligent Design and Information
- Despite lack of genetic diversity narwhals still thrive
- Bird that went extinct 136,000 years ago comes 'back from the dead' after evolving again
- MindMatters: Interview with Ken Pedersen: Quarks, DNA, Consciousness - It's All Information, Always Has Been
- The Truth Perspective: Mind the Gaps: Locating the Intelligence in Evolution and Design
- The Truth Perspective: Are Cells the Intelligent Designers? Why Creationists and Darwinists Are Both Wrong
© Giniger lab NIH/NINDS
A picture of a Drosophila (fruit fly) gut, a key source of bacteria.
A picture of a Drosophila (fruit fly) gut, a key source of bacteria.
To better understand the role of bacteria in health and disease, National Institutes of Health researchers fed fruit flies antibiotics and monitored the lifetime activity of hundreds of genes that scientists have traditionally thought control aging. To their surprise, the antibiotics not only extended the lives of the flies but also dramatically changed the activity of many of these genes. Their results suggested that only about 30% of the genes traditionally associated with aging set an animal's internal clock while the rest reflect the body's response to bacteria.
"For decades scientists have been developing a hit list of common aging genes. These genes are thought to control the aging process throughout the animal kingdom, from worms to mice to humans," said Edward Giniger, Ph.D., senior investigator, at the NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the senior author of the study published in iScience. "We were shocked to find that only about 30% of these genes may be directly involved in the aging process. We hope that these results will help medical researchers better understand the forces that underlie several age-related disorders."
© A. Lopez/UCLan
“According to cosmologists, the current theoretical limit is calculated to be 1.2 billion light years, which makes the Giant Arc almost three times larger"
“According to cosmologists, the current theoretical limit is calculated to be 1.2 billion light years, which makes the Giant Arc almost three times larger"
"It would overturn cosmology as we know it," said cosmologist Alexia Lopez at a June 7 news conference at the virtual American Astronomical Society meeting. "Our standard model, not to put it too heavily, kind of falls through."
Lopez, of the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, England, and colleagues discovered the purported structure, which they call simply the Giant Arc, by studying the light of about 40,000 quasars captured by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Quasars are the luminous cores of giant galaxies so distant that they appear as points of light. While en route to Earth, some of that light gets absorbed by atoms in and around foreground galaxies, leaving specific signatures in the light that eventually reaches astronomers' telescopes (SN: 7/12/18).
Comment: Some more information on the Giant Arc of Galaxies:
© Chris Maupin/Texas A&M University
Southern Great Plains CG strike.
Southern Great Plains CG strike.
Co-authored by Christopher Maupin, Courtney Schumacher and Brendan Roark, all scientists in Texas A&M University's College of Geosciences, along with other researchers, the findings were recently published in Nature Geoscience.
In the study, researchers analyzed oxygen isotopes from 30,000-50,000 year old stalactites from Texas caves to understand trends in past thunderstorms and their durations, using radar-based calibration for the region's rainfall isotopes. They discovered that when storm regimes shift from weakly to strongly organized on millennial timescales, they coincide with well-known, global abrupt climate shifts during the last glacial period, which occurred between about 120,000 and 11,500 years ago.
Comment: In Pierre Lescaudron and Laura Knight-Jadczyk's book Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection they provide insight into just why we may be seeing an uptick now:
Hurricanes, lightning, and tornadoesSee also:
Introduction
The accumulation of cometary dust in the Earth's atmosphere plays an important role in the increase of tornadoes, cyclones, hurricanes and their associated rainfalls, snowfalls and lightning. To understand this mechanism we must first take into account the electric nature of hurricanes, tornadoes and cyclones, which are actually manifestations of the same electric phenomenon at different scales or levels of power. Because of this similarity, we will refer to these three phenomena collectively as 'air spirals' in the following discussion.
Discharge frequency
If air spirals are electrically driven, how then can we explain an increase in their frequency when the Sun's activity has dropped and the atmospheric E-field has therefore weakened1? While the overall atmospheric E-field has indeed weakened, another factor must be taken into account. The increase in atmospheric dust concentration2 reduces the electric conductivity of the atmosphere.3 Conductivity in the atmosphere is due to the mobility of small ions. When dust is present, these ions, instead of moving freely, attach to the relatively large dust particles and lose mobility, hence the decrease in atmospheric conductivity.4
[....]
This additional feature of dust particles - their ability to carry an electric charge - means that dust accumulation enables any given area of the atmosphere to carry potentially massive electric charges, which can differ from the charge of adjacent regions, from the charge of the ionosphere and from the charge of the Earth's surface.
[...]
Lightning and hurricanes seem to be a similar charge rebalancing processes. Lightning mostly occurs above continents and is far less frequent above oceans.1 This may be due to the difference between ground conductivity and sea conductivity. When electrons start flowing upwards from the ocean, the high conductivity of salt water2 usually prevents the formation of electron-deficient regions, which is one of the causes of lightning. However, when the upward electron flow occurs above a continent, the poor conductivity of the ground3 enables the formation of electron-deficient pockets that will trigger and receive lightning discharges.
- Volcanoes, Earthquakes And The 3,600 Year Comet Cycle
- 'Superbolts' detected above atmosphere are over 1,000 times brighter than normal lightning
- Behind the Headlines: Earth changes in an electric universe: Is climate change really man-made?
- MindMatters: The Holy Grail, Comets, Earth Changes and Randall Carlson
© Helen Ward, Graham Cooke, et al.
Reconstructed epidemic curve from number of symptomatic infections per week, by date of onset in antibody positive participants reporting symptoms
Reconstructed epidemic curve from number of symptomatic infections per week, by date of onset in antibody positive participants reporting symptoms
It's a very useful graph because it does not involve any PCR tests at all, only lateral flow immunoassay tests, self-administered at home. This means it does not suffer from the problem of detecting non-infectious virus as it is not detecting virus at all but antibodies. (Its specificity is reported as 98.6%, giving it a 1.4% background false positive rate, which the researchers adjust for.) This means, for example, that the epidemic decline is much faster than in the familiar "case" curves, and the curves are more symmetrical.
What does it show? Here's what I take from it. You might see more.
© AFP/Getty Images
The toroidal magnetic chamber (Tokamak) of the Joint European Torus (JET) at the Culham Science Centre.
The toroidal magnetic chamber (Tokamak) of the Joint European Torus (JET) at the Culham Science Centre.
Researchers in the United States have developed a new method for controlling the brain circuits associated with complex animal behaviours, using genetic engineering to create a magnetised protein that activates specific groups of nerve cells from a distance.
Understanding how the brain generates behaviour is one of the ultimate goals of neuroscience - and one of its most difficult questions. In recent years, researchers have developed a number of methods that enable them to remotely control specified groups of neurons and to probe the workings of neuronal circuits.
© Twitter / @mhn6712
On Wednesday, in the presence of Sorena Sattari, vice-president for science and technology, the first surgery using a domestically developed device was carried out on a dog.
A vasectomy operation took place at Sina Hospital in Tehran by a remotely controlled device which was being operated by doctors at the Iran Advanced Clinical Skills Training Center, approximately seven kilometers away.
© Philipp Salzgeber
Comet Hale-Bopp as observed from Earth in 1997. The newly detected object could be even larger than Hale-Bopp, but it likely won’t be visible to the unaided eye.
Comet Hale-Bopp as observed from Earth in 1997. The newly detected object could be even larger than Hale-Bopp, but it likely won’t be visible to the unaided eye.
The mystery object is called 2014 UN271, and it's currently 22 AU from the Sun (in which 1 AU is the average distance of Earth to the Sun), which means it has already passed the orbit of Neptune. The International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center announced the detection on June 19. This object will travel another 11.1 AU before reaching its perihelion point (closest approach to the Sun) in 2031, after which 2014 UN271 will begin its long journey back to the Oort cloud.
Algorithms spotted the object in data collected by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) from 2014 to 2018, as Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, explained in an email. Nearly 40 distinct observations of 2014 UN271 were made during this timespan, allowing astronomers to estimate its size, speed, and trajectory.
© Bart Delsaert (www.delsaert.com)
In the centre of the image the elliptical galaxy NGC5982, and to the right the spiral galaxy NGC5985. These two types of galaxies turn out to behave very differently when it comes to the extra gravity - and therefore possibly the dark matter - in their outer regions.
In the centre of the image the elliptical galaxy NGC5982, and to the right the spiral galaxy NGC5985. These two types of galaxies turn out to behave very differently when it comes to the extra gravity - and therefore possibly the dark matter - in their outer regions.
Comment: And they've yet to factor in plasma's role in space: Why the sun's atmosphere is hundreds of times hotter than its surface
See also:
- The Sun is stranger than astrophysicists imagined
- Cosmic voids revealed in most detailed map of the universe defy our understanding of physics
- Mysterious 'wave' of star-forming gas may be the largest structure in the galaxy
- Behind the Headlines: Earth changes in an electric universe: Is climate change really man-made?
- MindMatters: The Holy Grail, Comets, Earth Changes and Randall Carlson
- Behind the Headlines: The Electric Universe - An interview with Wallace Thornhill
Comment: See also: