Science & Technology

A horse's snort lets you know they're happy

Jordan Hindson
The New Scientist
Wed, 11 Jul 2018 20:12 UTC

Horses appear to snort more when they're happy. The finding could be used to assess the conditions in which horses are kept.

The distinctive noise has long been thought to serve hygienic functions, removing phlegm, flies and more from the nostril - although some studies had suggested that horses that are well looked-after seem to do it more.

Martine Hausberger at the University of Rennes, France, decided to investigate by recording the snorting patterns of 48 horses in Brittany, France, living under different conditions. Some of the horses led restricted lives, housed in individual stalls and feeding on low-fibre meals. Others lived more freely, housed in groups and able to feed on grass and hay at their leisure.

Comment: Read more about the emotionally extraordinarily expressive animals:

NASA releases crazy new photo of the 'spiders' on Mars

Brittany A. Roston
Slash Gear
Fri, 13 Jul 2018 12:00 UTC

NASA has released an image showing "spiders" on Mars, small darks spots on the reddish landscape with tendrils one could easily perceive as tiny legs. The marks were captured by the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in mid-May at Mars' south pole during the planet's winter season. The "spiders" make their appearance as the season turns to spring, dotting the terrain.

Of course, the dark marks shown in the image above aren't spiders - they're not even living creatures. Rather, these are marks on the land called "araneiform terrain," a type of mound that appears to radiate outward with tendrils. These spots form in areas where carbon dioxide ice under the surface gets warm and then releases gas.

Comment: It seems Mars doesn't just experience seasons, but it's also undergoing other more extreme shifts, like we're seeing on earth, and elsewhere throughout space:

And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: The Electric Universe - An interview with Wallace Thornhill

Epic new image of Galactic center created with help of 64 South African telescopes

Ryan F. Mandelbaum
Gizmodo
Sun, 15 Jul 2018 13:20 UTC

The black hole at the center of the Milky Way and filaments.

You're looking at the center of our galactic home, the Milky Way, as imaged by 64 radio telescopes in the South African wilderness.

Scientists released this image today to inaugurate the completed MeerKAT radio telescope. But these scopes form part of an even more ambitious project: the Square Kilometer Array, a joint effort to build the world's largest telescope, spanning the continents of Africa and Australia.

This image shows filaments of particles, structures that seem to exist in alignment with the galaxy's central black hole. It's unclear what causes these filaments. Maybe they are particles ejected by the spinning black hole; maybe they are hypothesized "cosmic strings;" and maybe they're not unique, and there are other, similar structures waiting to be found, according to a 2017 release from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Comment: We're still very much in the dark regarding the properties and rhythms of our universe:

New control of cell division discovered

University of Zurich
Thu, 12 Jul 2018 22:35 UTC

When a cell divides, its constituents are usually evenly distributed among the daughter cells. UZH researchers have now identified an enzyme that guarantees that cell constituents that are concentrated in organelles without a membrane are properly distributed. Their discovery opens up new opportunities for the treatment of cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, aging processes and viral infections.

As every cook has experienced: When balsamic vinegar and olive oil are mixed, both liquids separate. Round vinegar drops form, which then float on the surface of the oil. In physical terms, this constitutes the formation of two phases in the liquid. Phase separation of molecules also takes place inside cells. Here, liquid drops form in the cell plasma.

Phase separation guarantees distribution of cell components

Researchers at the laboratory of Lucas Pelkmans, professor at the Institute of Molecular Life Sciences at the University of Zurich (UZH), have now discovered that a class of enzymes - which are dual specificity kinases - actively control this process in cells. When a cell divides, the enzyme DYRK3 promotes the mixing of the phases. This guarantees that the cells can correctly build the machinery for separating the chromosomes and dividing the cell content. After division, the enzyme is broken down and the individual phases start to form again. If everything goes according to plan, the genetic material, organelles and cell contents are correctly distributed among the daughter cells. "These fundamental findings give us completely new insights into cell division: as a process in which the cell contents mix together and then separate again," says Lucas Pelkmans.

New microcrystalline form of gold is much golder than normal gold

Michael Marshall
New Scientist
Sat, 14 Jul 2018 16:44 UTC

New form of gold is much golder than normal gold

All that glitters is not gold - but sometimes it really, really is. Researchers have made a new kind of gold crystal that is even more gold-like than regular gold.

Gold is a precious metal, which means that as well as being attractively shiny it is almost entirely chemically inert. Unlike other metals, it does not rust when exposed to air, and retains its lustre indefinitely.

It's said this property is why wedding rings are traditionally made of gold: it represents an eternity of love. Silver is another such "noble metal", but even silver reacts slowly with oxygen in the air, so requires occasional polishing.

In 2015 Giridhar Kulkarni of the Centre for Nano and Soft Matter Sciences in Bangalore, India and his colleagues described a new form of gold: microcrystals measuring between 2 and 17 micrometres. They made them by heating gold chloride to 220 °C for 30 minutes in the presence of a second chemical called tetraoctylammonium bromide. They look like angular, knobbly sausages.

Crust-formation on Mars means red planet could have been habitable 100 million years before Earth was

Leah Crane
New Scientist
Sat, 14 Jul 2018 15:45 UTC

The solid surface of Mars formed 100 million years before Earth's - meaning life would have had a head start to evolve on the Red Planet.

Early Mars, like the other rocky planets, was covered in a global magma ocean. The top of that sea of molten rock eventually hardened to a crust, but we weren't sure exactly when - researchers thought it could have happened between 30 million and 100 million years after the start of the solar system. Now, we have evidence that it was much faster.

Laura Bouvier at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and her colleagues figured this out by studying ancient crystals in a Martian meteorite found in Morocco in 2011, dating them to about 4.4 billion years old.

Based on the compositions of the crystals, the researchers suggest that Mars first formed a crust about 4.5 billion years ago. This initial surface survived for about 100 million years before parts of it were melted again, possibly by impacts, to create the magma that the zircons came from.

Genetic research suggests the Roman Empire helped to spread tuberculosis across three continents

Clare Wilson
New Scientist
Tue, 03 Jul 2018 00:00 UTC

The Romans gave us roads, public toilets and the modern calendar, but we may also have them to thank for spreading a deadly disease: tuberculosis.

A genetic analysis suggests that while TB first arose about 5000 years ago in Africa, the Roman Empire was behind its more recent, rapid spread around Europe and beyond.

TB is a lung infection that, if left untreated, can cause a chronic cough, weight loss and a lingering death. By some estimates the bacterium that causes it, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, has killed more people than any other infectious disease in history.

The strain of TB that affects humans can't be carried by other animals, says Caitlin Pepperell at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "So the evolution of the bacterium is inextricably tied to humans."

To find out its origins, Pepperell's team looked at the genetic sequences of 552 samples of TB bacteria obtained from people across most of the world. They left out North and South America as people in these continents are mainly affected by TB bacteria that arrived with the first Europeans.

Comment: Other research suggests that the spread of farming enabled the disease to initially take hold in human populations: Tuberculosis genomes and human history

Solar System-wide Climate Change: Green flashes seen on Mars amidst 'global' dust storm

Space Weather
Thu, 12 Jul 2018 20:33 UTC

Mars is approaching Earth for a 15-year close encounter on July 27th. The Red Planet now outshines every object in the sky except the sun, Moon, and Venus. Mars is doing things only very luminous objects can do--like produce a green flash. Watch this video taken by Peter Rosén of Stockholm, Sweden, on July 12th:

"Mars was shining brightly in the early morning sky," he says. "At an altitude of only 6.5° above the horizon, the turbulence was extreme, sometimes splitting the planet's disc in 2 or 3 slices and displaying a green and blue flash resembling those usually seen on the sun."

That's not all. Mars is also making its own glitter paths. Last night, Alan Dyer photographed this specimen from Driftwood Beach at Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta:

PAK DA, Russia's strategic subsonic, will use stealth tech

RT
Fri, 13 Jul 2018 17:54 UTC

PAK DA, Russia's future subsonic nuclear-capable bomber, will have stealth technology incorporated in its planer, a defense official confirmed after touring a plant, where the advanced project is being implemented.

The Russian long-range aircraft is expected to undergo a major overhaul over the next two decades. The time-tested Tu-95 bombers would be phased out in favor or a yet-to-be named subsonic comber dubbed PAK FA. Russia will also resume the production of supersonic Tu-160Ms while working on the advanced "M2" version of the aircraft. In the meantime its existing fleet of Tu-22M3s and Tu-160 would be upgraded to the latest variants of the aircraft.

Neutrino that struck Antarctica traced to galaxy 3.7 billion light years away

Ian Sample
Guardian
Thu, 12 Jul 2018 16:40 UTC

Neutrino that struck Antarctica traced to galaxy 3.7bn light years away

Discovery may solve 100-year-old puzzle of high-energy cosmic rays that occasionally hit Earth

A mysterious, ghostly particle that slammed into Earth and lit up sensors buried deep beneath the south pole has been traced back to a distant galaxy that harbours an enormous spinning black hole.

Astronomers detected the high-energy neutrino, a kind of subatomic particle, when it tore into the southern Indian Ocean near the coast of Antarctica and carried on until it struck an atomic nucleus in the Antarctic ice, sending more particles flying.

The event, which took place on 22 September 2017, was captured by the IceCube experiment, a cubic kilometre of clear ice kitted out with sensors to detect such intergalactic incidents. Within a second of the particle being spotted, IceCube issued an automatic alert, prompting an international race to find the neutrino's origin.

Comment: Earth's weakening magnetic field is allowing more cosmic rays to enter and this has been demonstrated to contribute to increased cloud cover, and one wonders how else these high energy particles may affect life on our planet:

The Federal requirement states you must be 21 years old to hold an Interstate Commercial Divers License. It used to be 25 and for good reason, the...

bj0311

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Winternights3

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Science & Technology

A horse's snort lets you know they're happy

NASA releases crazy new photo of the 'spiders' on Mars

Epic new image of Galactic center created with help of 64 South African telescopes

New control of cell division discovered

New microcrystalline form of gold is much golder than normal gold

Crust-formation on Mars means red planet could have been habitable 100 million years before Earth was

Genetic research suggests the Roman Empire helped to spread tuberculosis across three continents

Solar System-wide Climate Change: Green flashes seen on Mars amidst 'global' dust storm

PAK DA, Russia's strategic subsonic, will use stealth tech

Neutrino that struck Antarctica traced to galaxy 3.7 billion light years away

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