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Lunar impact event sighted


ITV
Tue, 21 Mar 2017 06:45 UTC
Lunar Impact event
© Aberystwyth University
X marks the spot where the meteorite hit the moon.
Space scientists at Aberystwyth University have reported what they believe to be the first confirmed sighting in the British Isles of a meteorite hitting the Moon.

A Lunar Impact Flash - a flash of light when something hits the Moon's surface - was recorded on the southern hemisphere of the Moon and probably caused by a small meteorite the size of a golf ball.

Lasting less that one tenth of a second, the image was caught on New Year's Day 2017 on a remotely operated telescope at Aberystwyth University.
Lunar Impact Flashes are notoriously difficult to record. The meteorite would be travelling at anywhere between 10 to 70 km per second as it hit the surface of the Moon. That is the equivalent of travelling from Aberystwyth to Cardiff in just a few seconds, and the resulting impact would be over in a fraction of a second.

A similar meteorite hitting the Earth's atmosphere would produce a beautiful shooting star, but as the Moon has no atmosphere it slams into the surface, causing a crater the size of very large pot hole. Just under 1% of the meteorite's energy is converted into a flash of light, which we were able to record here in Aberystwyth.

- Dr Tony Cook, Aberystwyth University
Scientists estimate the Moon is hit by similar sized meteorites as often as once every 10 to 20 hours.
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Airplane Paper

Interceptors: Counter-drone systems emerge in new aerial frontier

Stephen Nellis
Yahoo! News
Tue, 21 Mar 2017 16:30 UTC
Interceptor drone
© Reuters/Stephen Lam
Jaz Banga, co-founder and chief executive of Airspace Systems, stands next to an Interceptor autonomous aerial drone his company developed to capture enemy drones during a product demonstration in Castro Valley, California March 6, 2017.
The enemy drone whined in the distance. The Interceptor, a drone-hunting machine from Silicon Valley startup Airspace Systems, slinked off its launch pad and dashed away in hot pursuit.

The hunter twisted through the air to avoid trees, homed in on its target, fired a Kevlar net to capture it, and then carried the rogue drone back to its base like a bald eagle with a kill.

Airspace is among some 70 companies working on counter-drone systems as small consumer and commercial drones proliferate. But unlike others, it aims to catch drones instead of disabling them or shooting them down.

A demonstration at Airspace headquarters in San Leandro, California, showed a compact aircraft just a few feet wide, yet capable of sophisticated, autonomous navigation and accurate targeting of a drone in motion.

It is still early days in the drone-defense business. Security professionals both public and private worry about dangerous drones at military sites, airports, data centers, and public venues like baseball stadiums. But counter-measures carry risk, too.
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Blue Planet

Study offers new theories about nature of Earth's iron


The Watchers
Mon, 20 Mar 2017 07:49 UTC
Earth's iron formation theory
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
This artist's concept shows a high-speed collision in the early stages of planetary formation.
In a study published March 20, 2017 in Nature Communications, an international team of scientists challenges the prevailing theory that the unique nature of Earth's iron was the result of how its core was formed billions of years ago. The study opens the door to competing theories about why levels of certain heavy forms of iron, known as isotopes, are higher on Earth than in other bodies in the Solar System.

The prevailing view attributes the Earth's anomalous iron composition to the formation of the planet's core, but this new study suggests that the peculiar iron's isotopic signature developed later in Earth's history, possibly created by a collision between Earth and another planetary body that vaporized the lighter iron isotopes, or the churning of Earth's mantle, drawing a disproportionate amount of heavy iron isotopes to Earth's crust from its mantle.

Iron is one of the most abundant elements in the solar system, and understanding it is key to figuring out how Earth and other celestial bodies formed. The researchers compared the ratio of the heavier iron isotope Fe-56 to the lighter Fe-54 for Earth and extraterrestrial rocks, including those from the moon, Mars and ancient meteorites. They found that the ratio is significantly higher for Earth rocks than for extraterrestrial rocks, all of which have an identical ratio. Their research attempts to explain how that happened.

"The Earth's core formation was probably the biggest event affecting the Earth's history," said Jung-Fu Lin, professor of geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the paper. "In this study, we say that there must be other origins than the Earth's formation for this iron isotopic anomaly."

Co-author Nicolas Dauphas, the Louis Block Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, called the research groundbreaking "because of the synthesis of the materials analyzed, the technique to take the measurements and the data treatment."
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Beaker

U.K. moves forward with three-parent IVF

Bob Grant
The Scientist
Mon, 20 Mar 2017 20:50 UTC
The country's fertility regulator has approved the first application to carry out mitochondrial replacement therapy, which uses biological material from two women and one man to create an embryo.

in vitro fertilization
Mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), also known as three-parent in vitro fertilization, is set to make its way to the clinic in the U.K. Last week (March 16), the country's Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority (HFEA) approved the first application for license to perform the procedure. The HFEA granted a license to Newcastle University, where researchers have been studying the technique for several years.

"I can confirm today that the HFEA has approved the first application by Newcastle Fertility at Life for the use of mitochondrial donation to treat patients," HFEA Chair Sally Cheshire told CNN. "Patients will now be able to apply individually to the HFEA to undergo mitochondrial donation treatment at Newcastle, which will be life-changing for them, as they seek to avoid passing on serious genetic diseases to future generations."

Comment:


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Sun

The Sun has been blank for two weeks straight

Anthony Watts
WUWT
Mon, 20 Mar 2017 19:24 UTC
The Sun
© NASA/GSFC
A blank look to the sun on Monday, March 20, and it has now been blank for two weeks straight;
Over the weekend, we reviewed the state of the solar data for March 2017. Now, there's a two week straight lack of sunspots, the longest stretch since 2010.

Overview

The sun is currently blank with no visible sunspots and this is the 14th straight day with a blank look which is the longest such stretch since April 2010 according to spaceweather.com. Historically weak solar cycle 24 continues to transition away from its solar maximum phase and towards the next solar minimum.

In April 2010 - the last time there was a two week stretch with no visible sunspots - the sun was emerging from the last solar minimum which was historically long and deep. There have already been 26 spotless days in 2017 (34% of the entire year) and this follows 32 spotless days last year which occurred primarily during the latter part of the year. The blank look to the sun will increase in frequency over the next couple of years leading up to the next solar minimum - probably to be reached in late 2019 or 2020.

By one measure, the current solar cycle is the third weakest since record keeping began in 1755 and it continues a weakening trend since solar cycle 21 peaked in 1980. One of the impacts of low solar activity is the increase of cosmic rays that can penetrate into the Earth's upper atmosphere and this has some important consequences.
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Music

Researchers study rodent songs they can't hear

Joshua A. Krisch
The Scientist
Wed, 01 Mar 2017 18:12 UTC
Mice and rats produce ultrasonic signals to attract mates.

two mice
© JNE Valkuvaus/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

In 1877, Joseph Sidebotham, a Manchester cotton baron fascinated by natural history, published an informal correspondence in Nature describing how a mouse had serenaded him from the top of a woodpile. In the letter, Sidebotham notes that his son suggested that perhaps all mice can sing, but at frequencies that the human ear cannot hear, and that the audible mouse vocalist was an oddity (what today we would call a mutant).

Sidebotham dismissed his son's idea, but it turned out to be right: mice do sing. In addition to the audible squeaks for which they are known, the rodents produce more-elaborate vocalizations reminiscent of birdsong, but at a frequency far beyond the limits of human hearing. In 2005, Timothy Holy, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, and colleagues defined these ultrasonic vocalizations as songs using measures similar to those that researchers employ to distinguish songs from isolated calls in birds (PLOS Biol, 3:e386). "It was really when I wrote an algorithm that allowed me to shift the pitch of these calls that the analogy to bird songs became apparent," Holy says. He described the mouse high-frequency vocalizations as "distinct syllable types uttered in sequences, and some sort of temporal patterning," just like bird songs. Building on Holy's work, neurobiologist Erich Jarvis and colleagues found that male mice sing complex ultrasonic songs to attract mates. (See "Singing in the Brain.")
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Info

Monkey business forces a rethink on human evolution

Darren Curnoe
Cosmos Magazine
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 18:06 UTC
Monky Business
© Jeffrey Phillips
When did a human-like mind first emerge, setting its owner on a path distinct to that of other apes?

We paleoanthropologists have long looked to tool use as the marker - particularly the appearance of a cutting tool known as a flake.

It now seems we were wrong.

Recent research published in Nature by a team led by Tomos Proffitt at the University of Oxford shows that capuchin monkeys regularly produce sharp-edged flakes indistinguishable from those made by early hominins.

Could these South American simians be taking the same first steps that eventually delivered the spanner, wheel and smartphone? As it turns out, no. The flakes are produced by accident when the monkeys smash rocks together. Nonetheless, the capuchins have thrown a spanner in the works for archaeologists.

Since the flakes they make are not tools at all, we can no longer assume the flakes found in the archaeological record are tools either.

We know that monkeys can make tools of other kinds, of course. Ever since British primatologist Jane Goodall's pioneering work in the 1960s, we have known our chimpanzee cousins use tools to shell nuts and to fish for termites.

Nor is tool use confined to primates. Other mammals, birds, snails, octopuses and even insects all turn out to be tool wielders. In fact, back in the 19th century an American husband and wife team, Elizabeth and George Peckham, first documented tool use outside human beings. They observed wasps hammering dirt with pebbles to build their burrows.
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Rocket

Pacific Hyperloop wants to take you from Seattle to Portland in 15 minutes

Alan Boyle
GeekWire
Fri, 17 Mar 2017 18:00 UTC
hyperloop
© Hyperloop One Illustration
An artist’s concept shows a Hyperloop pod parked at a transit station.
A fledgling venture called Pacific Hyperloop is kicking off its effort to win support for a high-speed transit link between Seattle and Portland, using the Hyperloop system envisioned by SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk.

The plan calls for creating a network of tubes capable of zipping passengers from the Jet City to the Rose City in 15 minutes, thanks to pods that travel at the near-supersonic speed of 760 mph.

Pacific Hyperloop is among 35 semifinalists in the Hyperloop One Global Challenge, a contest set up by California-based Hyperloop One for proposals to set up transit networks in various regions of the world.

The semifinalists include 10 other teams from the United States, plus international groups proposing high-speed links in locales ranging from Vancouver, B.C., to China and India.

"We will be giving our finalist presentation on April 5th and 6th in Washington, D.C., in front of Hyperloop One and government officials," Richard Kim, Pacific Hyperloop's director of marketing and public relations, said in an email to Geekwire, "If/when we become a finalist, Seattle and Portland will be the starting grounds for Hyperloop's innovation and prominence."
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2 + 2 = 4

The scientific evidence for microaggressions is weak and we should drop the term, argues review author

Alex Fradera
British Psychological Society
Mon, 20 Mar 2017 15:27 UTC
Hasidm walking past swastikas

Items filed as microassaults – supposedly one form of microaggression – include racial slurs and swastika graffiti.
Racism and prejudice are sometimes blatant, but often manifest in subtle ways. The current emblem of these subtle slights is the "microaggression", a concept that has generated a large programme of research and launched itself into the popular consciousness - prompting last month's decision by Merriam-Webster to add it to their dictionary. However, a new review in Perspectives on Psychological Science by Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University argues that core empirical and conceptual questions about microaggressions remain unaddressed, meaning the struggle against them takes place on a confusing battlefield, one where it's hard to tell between friend and foe.

So what exactly is a microaggression? First coined in the 1970s but rejuvenated in 2007 in a paper in the American Psychologist by Derald Wing Sue and colleagues, it originally referred only to racism but has expanded to a range of commonplace slights or hostility towards an oppressed group. The definition includes microinvalidations, such as being told that a negative interaction couldn't have been due to racist motives, and microinsults, such as a teacher avoiding calling on you in class due to your gender, as well as a third class of microassaults. The prototypical microaggression hides the offence within apparently innocent words or actions, which places those on the receiving end into a catch-22: swallow the indignity, or respond and risk being accused of overreaction?

Comment:
Questioning the consensus: Maybe we can't really measure "implicit bias"

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Blue Planet

Researchers have found 4.2bn-year-old remnants of Earth's original crust in Canada


RT
Mon, 20 Mar 2017 14:20 UTC
ancient crust found along the eastern shores of the Hudson Bay
© Rick Carlson, DTM.
The ancient crust found along the eastern shores of the Hudson Bay.
A team of US and Canadian researchers has found traces of Earth's original crust dating back at least 4.2 billion years which could help explain a huge gap in our planet's geological evolution.

The Earth's crust is a 10-40km (6-25 miles) deep solid layer which sits on top of the viscous mantle and molten core. The current crust - on which all of our cities, countries, continents and oceans rest - isn't the planet's first.

Billions of years ago, when Earth was in its infancy, a more ancient crust covered the planet. That crust melted back into the planet's interior long ago due to plate tectonics, or was transformed into new rocks.

The oldest portions of the current crust have been dated as 2.7 billion years old. Given that scientists believe the Earth is more than 4.5 billion years old, this leaves a huge gap between the birth of the planet and the formation of its cover.
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