Science & TechnologyS


Microscope 1

For the first time in one billion years, two lifeforms have truly merged into one organism

Laura Baisas
Popular Science
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 20:54 UTC
cell new organelle nitrogen fixer
© Tyler CoaleA light microscopy image shows the marine algae Braarudosphaera bigelowii, which is a potentially large evolutionary step. This algae absorbed a bacterium called UCYN-A and formed a new organelle called a nitroplast. The black arrow is pointing to the nitroplast.
Evolution is quite a wondrous and lengthy process, with some random bursts of activity that are responsible for the diversity of life on our planet today. These can happen on large scales like with the evolution of more efficient limbs. They also occur at microscopic cellular level, such as when different parts of the cell were first formed.

Now, a team of scientists have detected a sign of a major life event that has likely not occurred for at least one billion years. They've observed primary endosymbiosis — two lifeforms merging into one organism. This incredibly rare event occurred between a type of abundant marine algae and a bacterium was observed in a lab setting. For perspective, plants first began to dot our planet the last time this happened. The results are described in two papers recently published in the journals Cell and Science.
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Better Earth

Best of the Web: Weak geomagnetic field coincided with significant diversification of life on Earth, new study reveals

Nature Publishing Group
Phys.org
Thu, 02 May 2024 14:32 UTC
orange aurora scotland november 2023 solar wind
© Graeme WhippsFILE: Extremely rare orange auroras danced in between reds and greens in the evening sky above Scotland during a geomagnetic storm on Nov. 25, 2023.
An unusual reduction in the strength of Earth's magnetic field between 591 and 565 million years ago coincided with a significant increase in the oxygen levels in the atmosphere and oceans, according to a paper published in Communications Earth & Environment. The authors propose that the weakening of the magnetic field may have led to the increase in oxygen, which is believed to have supported the evolution of some of the earliest complex organisms.

Between 600 and 540 million years ago, life on Earth consisted of soft-bodied organisms known as the Ediacaran fauna, the earliest known complex multicellular animals. The fossil record shows that these organisms significantly diversified in complexity and type between 575 and 565 million years ago. Previous research has suggested that this diversification is linked to a significant increase in atmospheric and oceanic oxygen levels that occurred over the same period. However, it is not yet clear why this increase in oxygen occurred.

Comment: Interestingly, theories connecting 'evolutionary leaps' and geomagnetic activity have been proposed by other researchers - such as Robert Felix with his book Magnetic Reversals & Evolutionary leaps -and, notably, our own time appears to be on the cusp of a similar shift: And check out SOTT radio's: The following discussion may also help provide further insight into the connection:



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Mr. Potato

The Policy Makers: Offshore wind is gearing up to bulldoze the ocean

David Wojick
Wattsupwiththat.com
Fri, 03 May 2024 01:13 UTC
Ocean Windmills
From CFACT

The Biden Administration has recently produced a wave of plans and regulatory actions aimed at building a monstrous amount of destructive offshore wind. No environmental impact assessment is included.


Comment: Simply put, the administration has windmills in their minds.


Time scales range from tomorrow to 2050. Here is a quick look at some of it, starting with the Grand Plan.

"Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Offshore Wind" is the grandiose title of the Energy Department's version of Biden's vision. Their basic idea is that having successfully traversed the unexpected cost crisis, offshore wind is ready to take off.

They point out that even though costs quickly jumped an average of 65%, the boom market is unchanged. The coastal States are raring to go with huge offshore wind targets and laws. In short, it is a seller's market. Cost is no object.

They note that State mandates and targets already exceed the Biden goal of 100,000 MW by 2050. But why stop there? They say that Net Zero requires an incredible 250,000 MW of offshore wind. At 15 MW a turbine, this is just under 17,000 monster towers.

The word "environmental" occurs frequently in this 62-page grand vision but it is always about environmental justice. The cumulatively destructive environmental impacts of lining our coast with towers and cables are ignored apparently not worth mentioning. Neither is cost.

Next comes transmission, where we have "AN ACTION PLAN FOR OFFSHORE WIND TRANSMISSION DEVELOPMENT IN THE U.S. ATLANTIC REGION". While the Pathways plan covers the US, this one is just about the Atlantic because that is where the big action is now.

This 110-pager is from the Energy Department and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is actually building the offshore wind monster.
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Blue Planet

Why climate change ISN'T going to end the world

Peter Hess
The Daily Mail
Thu, 02 May 2024 21:07 UTC
Professor Mike Hulme cambridge climate change climatism
© Cambridge 105 Radio/YouTubeProfessor Mike Hulme
Cambridge University professor says we need to stop obsessing about net-zero

Young people are terrified that climate change will destroy Earth by the time they grow up, but the world is not actually ending, argues Cambridge professor Mike Hulme.

Humanity is not teetering on a cliff's edge, he says, at risk of imminent catastrophe if we don't reach net-zero carbon emissions by a certain date. And he has made it his mission to call out the people who claim we are.

In his most recent book, Climate Change Isn't Everything, Hulme argued that belief in the urgent fight against climate change has shot far past the territory of science and become an ideology.

Hulme, a professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge, dubs this ideology 'climatism,' and he argues that it can distort the way society approaches the world's ills, placing too much focus on slowing Earth from warming.
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Telephone

Scientists claim they've had a 20 minute conversation with a WHALE - and say it could pave the way for conversations with aliens someday

William Hunter
Daily Mail
Wed, 18 Dec 2024 09:42 UTC
avatar whale
It might sound like something from Avatar 2 (pictured), but scientists say that this research could pave the way for future communications with aliens
It might sound like a scene out of Avatar 2.

But scientists claim it's now possible to have a conversation with a whale, following a 20-minute chat with a humpback whale in Southeast Alaska.

A 38-year-old whale named Twain 'spoke' with the researchers from the SETI Institute and UC Davis by responding to a pre-recorded 'contact call'.

This marks the first communication between humans and whales in their own language, according to the team.

Looking ahead, the researchers say the conversation could pave the way for interactions with aliens in the future.

Comment: Probably the most interesting thing about this story (aside from just how intelligent whales are) is that there are some scientists (like those at SETI) who still continue this kind of work on the pretense that humans have not yet been communicating with 'aliens,' however secretly, for a good many decades already. But a paycheck is a paycheck, and studying whale behavior sounds like a lot of fun!

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Butterfly

Orangutan observed treating its own wound with medicinal plant for the first time

Peter Hess
Daily Mail
Thu, 02 May 2024 18:46 UTC
orangutan
Researchers saw a male orangutan named Rakus with a face wound on June 22, 2022. Two days later, he chewed up leaves and spread the paste onto the wound
Scientists have observed a wild orangutan applying medicine to his own wound in a world's first.

A Sumatran orangutan, named Rakus, was seen chewing up leaves of a medicinal plant, create a pulp and administering the substance on an injury near his eye.

Not only were scientists amazed that the orangutan knew the plant had medicinal powers, but the sight of an ape treating its wounds have never before seen.

After two months, the wound had healed and orangutan's face showed little sign that he had ever been injured.

The surprising observation was made in Gunung Leuser National Park in South Aceh, Indonesia the summer before last.

Comment: Whilst discoveries like this are wonderful, perhaps part of our surprise stems from the fact that some of the foundations of mainstream science are still rather restrictive, despite the myriad of other awesome discoveries in recent years: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Mars

New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars


Phys.org
Wed, 01 May 2024 18:31 UTC
mars
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSSNASA's Curiosity rover continues to search for signs that Mars' Gale Crater conditions could support microbial life.
A research team using the ChemCam instrument onboard NASA's Curiosity rover discovered higher-than-usual amounts of manganese in lakebed rocks within Gale Crater on Mars, which indicates that the sediments were formed in a river, delta, or near the shoreline of an ancient lake. The results were published today in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

"It is difficult for manganese oxide to form on the surface of Mars, so we didn't expect to find it in such high concentrations in a shoreline deposit," said Patrick Gasda, of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Space Science and Applications group and lead author on the study.

"On Earth, these types of deposits happen all the time because of the high oxygen in our atmosphere produced by photosynthetic life, and from microbes that help catalyze those manganese oxidation reactions.

"On Mars, we don't have evidence for life, and the mechanism to produce oxygen in Mars's ancient atmosphere is unclear, so how the manganese oxide was formed and concentrated here is really puzzling. These findings point to larger processes occurring in the Martian atmosphere or surface water and shows that more work needs to be done to understand oxidation on Mars," Gasda added.
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Satellite

Earth receives NASA space laser transmission from 140 million miles away

Ben Cost
New York Post
Tue, 30 Apr 2024 13:50 UTC
Psyche spacecraft laser transmission record distance
© NASA/Ben SmegelskyNASA’s Psyche spacecraft “could use optical communications in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.”
This redefined a long-distance call.

Earth just received a laser transmission from a world- (and perhaps universe) record-breaking 140 million miles away — which could have major implications for the future of space travel.

However, this correspondence wasn't extraterrestrial in origin: It was actually sent by NASA's Psyche spacecraft, which is currently located approximately 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

"This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft's radio frequency comms system," Meera Srinivasan, the project's operations lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.
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Telescope

New evidence found for Planet 9

Bob Yirka
Phys.Org
Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00 UTC
2 blues
© arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2404.11594A comparison of the orbital distributions from P9-inclusive (left) and P9-free (right) N−body simulations. Both panels depict the perihelion distance against the semi-major axis of orbital footprints of simulated TNOs with i < 40 deg. The overlaying contour lines represent density distributions, with brighter colors indicating higher concentrations of objects. While the panels themselves show raw simulation data, the histograms along the axes show a biased frequency distribution for the perihelion distances (vertical) and semi-major axes (horizontal), assuming a limiting magnitude of Vlim = 24.
A small team of planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology, Université Côte d'Azur and Southwest Research Institute reports possible new evidence of Planet 9. They have published their paper on the arXiv preprint server, and it has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

In 2015, a pair of astronomers at Caltech found several objects bunched together beyond Neptune's orbit, near the edge of the solar system. The bunching, they theorized, was due to the pull of gravity from an unknown planet — one that later came to be called Planet 9.

Since that time, researchers have found more evidence of the planet, all of it circumstantial. In this new paper, the research team reports what they describe as additional evidence supporting the existence of the planet.

The work involved tracking the movements of long-period objects that cross Neptune's orbit and exhibit irregular movements during their journey. They used these observations to create multiple computer simulations, each depicting different scenarios.
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Cassiopaea

Rare quadruple 'super-sympathetic' solar flare event captured by NASA

Andrew Paul
Popular Science
Tue, 23 Apr 2024 14:46 UTC
quarduple solar flare
© NASA/SDO/AIA SHARESimilar activity will likely increase as the sun nears its 'solar maximum.'.
Earlier this week, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded a rarely seen event — four nearly-simultaneous flare eruptions involving three separate sunspots, as well as the magnetic filament between them. But as impressive as it is, the event could soon pose problems for some satellites and spacecraft orbiting Earth, as well as electronic systems here on the ground.


Comment: More so considering how, with Earth's weakening magnetic field, even relatively moderate solar flares have been shown to disrupt groundbased instruments: (2023) Powerful Solar storm has unusually strong impact on Earth, delays SpaceX rocket launch, stalls oil rigs in Canada


It may seem like a massive ball of fiery, thermonuclear chaos, but there's actually a fairly predictable rhythm to the sun.
Similar to Earth's seasonal changes, the yellow dwarf star's powerful electromagnetic fluctuations follow a roughly 11-year cycle of ebbs and flows.


Comment: Except this 'fairly predictable rhythm' has not yet been fully figured out: NOAA scientists finally admit their solar cycle 25 predictions are WRONG, peak is approaching faster than expected


Although astronomers still aren't quite sure why this happens, it's certainly observable — and recent activity definitely indicates the sun is heading towards its next "solar maximum" later this year.

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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