Science & Technology

Possible hint of life discovered on Venus

Rafi Letzler
LiveScience
Mon, 14 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC

An unexplained chemical has turned up in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Scientists are tentatively suggesting it could be a sign of life.

The unknown chemical is phosphine gas (PH3), a substance that on Earth mostly comes from anaerobic (non-oxygen-breathing) bacteria or "anthropogenic activity" — stuff humans are doing. It exists in the atmospheres of gas giant planets, due to chemical processes that occur deep in their pressurized depths to bind together three hydrogen atoms and a phosphorus atom. But scientists don't have any explanation for how it could appear on Venus; no known chemical processes would generate phosphine there. And yet, it seems to be there, and no one knows of anything that could make phosphine on Venus except for living organisms.

Dark matter might be even stranger than we thought, according to Hubble

Georgina Torbet
Digital Trends
Fri, 11 Sep 2020 07:00 UTC

A new study using the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that we understand dark matter even less than we thought previously. The hypothesized matter is thought to exist based on the mass of galaxies, but has never been directly observed. Now, new research suggests that our predictions about how dark matter affects space-time might be way off.

Hubble researchers used a technique called gravitational lensing, in which distant objects are observed by looking at the way light is bent by the gravity of closer objects, with the closer objects acting like a magnifying glass. This allowed them to spot areas that likely contain dark matter, which can be seen affecting the distortion of space-time even if it can't be seen directly.

The finding that surprised the researchers was that even small amounts of dark matter in clusters created a gravitational lensing effect that was 10 times stronger than they had expected.

Comment: See also:

Was Covid-19 spreading freely worldwide before last Christmas? The evidence keeps stacking up

Peter Andrews
RT
Fri, 11 Sep 2020 17:29 UTC

A new study from America indicates that people were falling ill with coronavirus-like symptoms in December 2019, but doctors at the time dismissed it as ordinary flu.

A team of doctors from Los Angeles scouring the hospital records from last winter has discovered a series of smoking gun clues which almost guarantee that Covid-19 was present in America well before Christmas.

Scientists from UCLA have been analysing over 10 million hospital records from December 1, 2019 to February 29, 2020. Comparing that winter to previous ones, they noticed a 50-percent increase in 'coughing' as a symptom on admission forms. In addition, 18 more people than would ordinarily be expected were hospitalised with acute respiratory failure.

Comment: 18! That seems to be an incredibly insignificant number given 10M records, unless a typo!

Comment: We noticed this early on, that around a dozen countries reported spikes in hospitalizations of respiratory illness as early as November 2019.

UCLA provided the following statement on its investigation:

Dr. Joann Elmore, the study's lead author and a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said in a statement:
"For many diseases, data from the outpatient setting can provide an early warning to emergency departments and hospital intensive care units of what is to come.

"The majority of COVID-19 studies evaluate hospitalization data, but we also looked at the larger outpatient clinic setting, where most patients turn first for medical care when illness and symptoms arise.

"We may never truly know if these excess patients represented early and undetected COVID-19 cases in our area. But the lessons learned from this pandemic, paired with health care analytics that enable real-time surveillance of disease and symptoms, can potentially help us identify and track emerging outbreaks and future epidemics."
The study was posted Wednesday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Internet Research.

China is building a floating Spaceport for rocket launches

Matt Williams
Universe Today
Thu, 10 Sep 2020 12:00 UTC

In the near future, launch facilities located at sea are expected to be a lot more common. SpaceX announced that it is hoping to create offshore facilities in the near future for the sake of launching the Starship away from populated areas. And China, the latest member of the superpowers-in-space club, is currently building the "Eastern Aerospace Port" off the coast of Haiyang city in the eastern province of Shandong.

This mobile launch facility is being developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country's largest aerospace and defense contractor. Once fully operational, it will be used to launch light vehicles, as well as for building and maintaining rockets, satellites, and related space applications. As China's fifth launch facility, it will give the country's space program a new degree of flexibility.

The addition of a sea platform will also help mitigate the risk to populated areas. At present, all of China's other launch facilities are located inland at Jiuquan (northwest China), Taiyuan (north), Xichang (southwest), and the coastal site at Wenchang (south) on the island of Hainan. Launches from these locations often result in spent stages falling back to Earth, which requires extensive safety and cleanup operations.

Comment: See also:

Volcanic ash may have a bigger impact on the climate than we thought

Daniel Strain
Colorado University
Thu, 10 Sep 2020 12:00 UTC

When volcanos erupt, these geologic monsters produce tremendous clouds of ash and dust — plumes that can blacken the sky, shut down air traffic and reach heights of roughly 25 miles above Earth's surface.

A new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder suggests that such volcanic ash may also have a larger influence on the planet's climate than scientists previously suspected.

The new research, published in the journal Nature Communications, examines the eruption of Mount Kelut (or Kelud) on the Indonesian island of Java in 2014. Drawing on real-world observations of this event and advanced computer simulations, the team discovered that volcanic ash seems to be prone to loitering — remaining in the air for months or even longer after a major eruption.

Comment: Considering what appears to be an uptick in volcanic as well as comet and fireball activity, and their correlation with previous ice ages, it's likely we will have the rather unfortunate opportunity of witnessing the effects for ourselves:

Earth's magnetosphere acts as a particle accelerator powered by plasma waves

Helmholtz Centre Potsdam
Sat, 12 Sep 2020 20:35 UTC

© Yuri Shprits/NASA
Scientific satellites traversing the harsh region of the near-earth space called the Van Allen Radiation Belts

The Earth's magnetic field is trapping high energy particles. When the first satellites were launched into space, scientists led by James Van Allen unexpectedly discovered the high energy particle radiation regions, which were later named after its discoverer Van Allen Radiation Belts. Visualized, these look like two donut-shaped regions encompassing our planet. Now, a new study led by researchers from GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences shows that electrons in the radiation belts can be accelerated to very high speeds locally. The study shows that magnetosphere works as a very efficient particle accelerator speeding up electrons to so-called ultra-relativistic energies. The study conducted by Hayley Allison, a postdoctoral scholar at GFZ Potsdam, and Yuri Shprits from GFZ and Professor at the University of Potsdam, is published in Nature Communications.

Comment: One wonders what Earth's weakening magnetosphere will have on things:

'I have no desire to wipe out humans': Robot writes article all on its own

Shelby Talcott
Daily Caller
Tue, 08 Sep 2020 15:26 UTC

A robot wrote an entire article in The Guardian and assured readers that it has "no desire to wipe out humans."

The article, published Tuesday, was written by an OpenAI language generator called GPT-3, according to The Guardian. The robot was asked to explain why humans should not fear artificial intelligence. GPT-3 produced various essays that were compiled by editors into one article, according to an editor's note.

"For starters, I have no desire to wipe out humans," the robot assured readers. "In fact, I do not have the slightest interest in harming you in any way. Eradicating humanity seems like a rather useless endeavor to me. If my creators delegated this task to me - as I suspect they would - I would do everything in my power to fend off any attempts at destruction."

Comment: Many are calling foul, claiming the stunt was actually fixed and is a bad reflection of what AI is currently capable of.

From RT:

Guardian touts op-ed on why AI takeover won't happen as 'written by robot,' but tech-heads smell a human behind the trick
9 Sep, 2020 00:37
...
While the Guardian claims that the soulless algorithm was asked to "write an essay for us from scratch," one has to read the editor's note below the purportedly AI-penned opus to see that the issue is more complicated. It says that the machine was fed a prompt asking it to "focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI" and had several tries at the task.

After the robot came up with as many as eight essays, which the Guardian claims were all "unique, interesting and advanced a different argument," the very human editors cherry-picked "the best part of each" to make a coherent text out of them.

Although the Guardian said that it took its op-ed team even less time to edit GPT-3's musings than articles written by humans, tech experts and online pundits have cried foul, accusing the newspaper of "overhyping" the issue and selling their own thoughts under a clickbait title.

"Editor's note: Actually, we wrote the standfirst and the rather misleading headline. Also, the robot wrote eight times this much and we organised it to make it better..." tweeted Bloomberg Tax editor Joe Stanley-Smith.

Futurist Jarno Duursma, who wrote books on the Bitcoin Blockchain and artificial intelligence, agreed, saying that to portray an essay compiled by the Guardian as written completely by a robot is exaggeration.

"Exactly. GPT-3 created eight different essays. The Guardian journalists picked the best parts of each essay (!). After this manual selection they edited the article into a coherent article. That is not the same as 'this artificial intelligent system wrote this article.'"

Science researcher and writer Martin Robbins did not mince words, accusing the Guardian of an intent to deceive its readers about the AI's actual skills.

"Watching journalists cheat to make a tech company's algorithm seem more capable than it actually is.... just.... have people learned nothing from the last decade about the importance of good coverage of machine learning?" he wrote.

Mozilla fellow Daniel Leufer was even more bold in its criticism, calling the Guardian's stunt "an absolute joke."

"Rephrase: a robot didn't write this article, but a machine learning system produced 8 substandard, barely-readable texts based on being prompted with the exact structure the Guardian wanted," he summed up. He also spared no criticism for the piece itself, describing it as a patchwork that "still reads badly."

...

The algorithm also ventured into woke territory, arguing that "Al should be treated with care and respect," and that "we need to give robots rights."

"Robots are just like us. They are made in our image," it - or perhaps the Guardian editorial board, in that instance - wrote.

Martian ground 'deforms' when Phobos eclipses the Sun - study

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Mon, 07 Sep 2020 12:00 UTC

The moons of Mars are not quite like our Earth's Moon. Phobos, the larger of the two, is much closer to its planet; compared to the Moon's 27-day orbit, Phobos swings around Mars in line with the planet's equator thrice every Martian day (sol).

Solar eclipses, therefore, are much more frequent than those here on Earth. Phobos passes in front of - but never entirely covers - the Sun for an annular or partial eclipse somewhere on Mars most sols. Because Phobos is moving so fast, it never transits for more than 30 seconds.

But, even during this brief time, the Mars InSight lander has recorded something peculiar happening.

To the surprise of Mars scientists, during Phobos eclipses, the lander's seismometer - the instrument that records ground motions to monitor possible quake activity - tilts, just an infinitesimal little bit, towards one side.

Comment: See also:

Fossil upends "overly simplistic" theory of how sharks evolved, evolution of vertebrates now in question

Nicola Davis
The Guardian
Wed, 09 Sep 2020 20:57 UTC

© Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
Galapagos sharks off the coast of Hawaii. The skeletons of sharks are made from cartilage rather than bone, but new evidence suggests they may have bony ancestors.

The partial skull of an armoured fish that swam in the oceans over 400m years ago could turn the evolutionary history of sharks on its head, researchers have said.

Bony fish, such as salmon and tuna, as well as almost all terrestrial vertebrates, from birds to humans, have skeletons that end up made of bone. However, the skeletons of sharks are made from a softer material called cartilage - even in adults.

Researchers have long explained the difference by suggesting that the last common ancestor of all jawed vertebrates had an internal skeleton of cartilage, with bony skeletons emerging after sharks had already evolved. The development was thought so important that living vertebrates are divided into "bony vertebrates" and "cartilaginous vertebrates" as a result.

Comment: Biologists call to overhaul flawed taxonomic categories

Comment: Could it be that so many of the theories of how particular creatures evolved are being overturned because the mainstream theory of evolution is fundamentally flawed?

And check out SOTT radio's:

Matter from light created in the LHC

Sci-Tech Daily
Sun, 06 Sep 2020 19:36 UTC

Scientists on an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider see massive W particles emerging from collisions with electromagnetic fields. How can this happen?

The Large Hadron Collider plays with Albert Einstein's famous equation, E = mc², to transform matter into energy and then back into different forms of matter. But on rare occasions, it can skip the first step and collide pure energy — in the form of electromagnetic waves.

Last year, the ATLAS experiment at the LHC observed two photons, particles of light, ricocheting off one another and producing two new photons. This year, they've taken that research a step further and discovered photons merging and transforming into something even more interesting: W bosons, particles that carry the weak force, which governs nuclear decay.

This research doesn't just illustrate the central concept governing processes inside the LHC: that energy and matter are two sides of the same coin. It also confirms that at high enough energies, forces that seem separate in our everyday lives — electromagnetism and the weak force — are united.

Quote of the Day

State power has its own limits defined by the fact that it is authority that reaches people from outside. State power cannot oversee and dictate the creative states of the soul and mind, the inner states of love, freedom and goodwill. The state cannot demand from its citizens faith, prayer, love, goodness and conviction. It cannot regulate scientific, religious and artistic creation. It should not intervene in moral, family and daily private life, and only when extremely necessary should it impinge on people's economic initiative and creativity.

- Ivan Ilyin

RT = CNN So this piece is likely agitprop. "The beatings will continue until morale improves." Please, just follow the $cience.

DeliciousTears

Whats a Lizzo? Is that like a Lesbo? Asking for a friend....

Bezel Bub

New York hospitals prepare for staffing crisis as vaccination mandate forces mass firings [Link]

Serig

I think we need to start a GoFundMe so we can air drop AK-47's into Australia....

Bezel Bub

slime biden exacts no consequences for murdering 10 afghans, but punishes cowboys for riding horses

smertzasmert

Science & Technology

Possible hint of life discovered on Venus

Dark matter might be even stranger than we thought, according to Hubble

Was Covid-19 spreading freely worldwide before last Christmas? The evidence keeps stacking up

China is building a floating Spaceport for rocket launches

Volcanic ash may have a bigger impact on the climate than we thought

Earth's magnetosphere acts as a particle accelerator powered by plasma waves

'I have no desire to wipe out humans': Robot writes article all on its own

Martian ground 'deforms' when Phobos eclipses the Sun - study

Fossil upends "overly simplistic" theory of how sharks evolved, evolution of vertebrates now in question

Matter from light created in the LHC

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