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Moon

Not your imagination: New research shows the full moon does affect sleep


Strange Sounds
Tue, 01 May 2018 00:00 UTC
full moon
© Voraorn Ratanakorn/Shutterstock.com

Over the years, the full Moon has been blamed for everything from spikes in crime, to causing madness, to baby booms. But could it also be the reason some of you have found it hard to nod off this week? Full Moons are mentioned in people's diaries. Everyone is writing about super Moons and blue Moons these days. It may be just a self-fulfilling prophecy. For once, it may not be those caffeinated drinks or hours of screen time that have kept you awake.

Scientists from Basel University in Switzerland found evidence of a "lunar influence" when they carried out a study on volunteers sleeping in laboratory conditions.

Their results showed that during a full Moon their 33 volunteers (who were unaware of the purpose of the study and unable to see the Moon from their beds):
  • Took five minutes longer to drop off
  • Slept for 20 minutes less
  • Spent 30% less time in deep sleep
But, intriguingly, the researchers suggested it was not down to the extra light from the Moon, as they were shut in a darkened room.

Comment: More on the affects of the moon:

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Blue Planet

Subterranean networks: Plants use underground communication to exchange warnings of attack

Josh Gabbatiss
The Independent
Wed, 02 May 2018 00:00 UTC
Chemical signals exchanged via soil can help prepare corn seedlings for attack by animals or rivals entering their territory

plant communication networks
© AFP / Getty
A new experiment has shown that corn plants have far more going on beneath the surface of the soil than initially meets the eye.
Plants use an underground communication network to exchange chemical warnings, according to a new study.

Work by a team of biologists at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences has provided new insights into the complex subterranean life of seemingly immobile corn plants.

The work adds to a body of research exploring the chemical pathways that plants use to "talk" to each other.

"Our study demonstrated that changes induced by above ground mechanical contact between plants can affect below ground interactions, acting as cues in prediction of the future competitors," said Dr Velemir Ninkovic, lead author of the study.

Plants are known to communicate via touch. Trees, for example, tend to stop growing outwards when they make contact with their neighbours' branches.

Comment: See also:

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Brain

Researchers find white-matter abnormalities in impulsive male offenders - link to psychopathy


Medical Express
Mon, 30 Apr 2018 15:33 UTC
brain white matter psychopathy
© Radboud University
Impulsive offenders with psychopathic traits have abnormal brain connections. The integrity of their so called 'white-matter' tracts between brain areas is decreased. Researchers from Radboud University and the Dutch Institute for Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology publish these findings in Neuropsychology.

Psychopathy is characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow affect, and manipulative, impulsive and antisocial behaviour. Many criminals show psychopathic traits, but the severity and expression vary strongly from person to person.

Comment: Further reading

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Ice Cube

Marine experts hatching scheme to tow icebergs from Antarctica to Cape Town in efforts to aid South Africa's drought crisis

Anna Verdon
Mirror.co.uk
Tue, 01 May 2018 14:11 UTC
icebergs towed Antarctica to South Africa
© Reuters
Huge icebergs could be towed from Antarctica to Cape Town to solve South Africa's worst drought in a century.
Huge icebergs could be towed from Antarctica to Cape Town in a bid to solve South Africa's worst drought in a century.

Marine salvage experts are floating the plan to tug the icebergs to the region after its seen the worst water shortage in decades.

Salvage master Nick Sloane told Reuters news agency he was looking for government and private investors for a scheme to guide huge chunks of ice across the ocean, chop them into a slurry and melt them down into millions of litres of drinking water.

"We want to show that if there is no other source to solve the water crisis, we have another idea no one else has thought of yet," said Sloane, who led the refloating of the capsized Italian passenger liner Costa Concordia in 2014.

Comment: Well, perhaps the icebergs won't be needed after all: Flooding hits Cape Town, South Africa after long drought

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Monkey Wrench

U.S. agencies clash over who should regulate genetically engineered livestock

Marc Heller
sciencemag.org
Thu, 19 Apr 2018 20:37 UTC
piglet
© USDA/SCOTT BAUER
A virus that causes illness in pigs could be a target of genetic modification.
A disease that kills millions of pigs a year may soon meet its match - if two federal agencies can agree on the idea.

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus is one of the latest examples of a condition that scientists believe they can beat with genetic engineering, and one that's caught up in a disagreement between the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over how quickly such methods should be approved, and by whom.
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Info

Dwarf V392 Persei undergoes a rare nova outburst

Bob King
Sky & Telescope
Tue, 01 May 2018 19:19 UTC
In a rare move, a sleepy cataclysmic variable blows its top and suddenly becomes a nova.

V392 Nova
© Stellarium
Although low in the sky at nightfall, there's still time to observe the nova outburst. V392 Per is located near the junction of Auriga, Perseus, and Camelopardalis about 5° west of bright Capella. A more detailed AAVSO chart is below.
The dwarf nova V392 Persei, which only gets as bright as magnitude 14 during outburst, appears to have undergone a rare nova outburst. The sudden and steep brightening was discovered photographically on April 29th by Yuji Nakamura of Japan, who recorded the star at magnitude 6.2. Spectra obtained shortly thereafter with the 2.4-meter Hiltner telescope on Kitt Peak confirm the explosion as a nova.

Had the Moon not brightened the sky, the outburst would have been visible with the naked eye from a dark site.
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Stock Down

No April fool's day joke: Tesla is losing $6,500 every minute


RT
Mon, 30 Apr 2018 20:51 UTC
Telsa
© Denis Balibouse / Reuters
Tesla is losing $6,500 every minute and needs another $2 billion to get through the year. With losses continuing to mount, the spotlight of scrutiny has ramped up on the former media darling.

There is now a "genuine risk" that Elon Musk's electric car company will not survive until the end of the year, Bloomberg reports.

Tesla is failing to meet its own production targets for its Model 3 sedan, a Tesla driver was killed while using his cars autopilot feature and a shareholder in the company urged the board to boot Musk as chairman.

On April Fool's day, Musk joked on Twitter that his company had gone bankrupt and now Bloomberg is reporting that that is a distinct possibility. "Tesla is going through money so fast that, without additional financing, there is now a genuine risk that the 15-year-old company could run out of cash in 2018," the financial news agency said on Monday.
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No Entry

Solar activity flat lines to weakest cycle in 200 years - link to recent northern hemisphere ice rebound?

P Gosselin
NoTricksZone
Sat, 28 Apr 2018 00:00 UTC
weak solar cycle
As the current solar cycle nears an end, it will go down as the weakest in close to 200 years. And as inhabitants of the northern hemisphere dig themselves out of an especially icy and snowy winter and Arctic sea ice rebounds, it may all be in part linked to low solar activity as many scientific studies have long suggested.

=================================================

The Sun in March 2018

By Frank Bosse and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt
(Translated /edited by P Gosselin)

In March our supplier of energy was more inactive than in the previous months. The sunspot number was only 2,5, which is only 8% of what is normal for this month into the average cycle (month 112).

A sunspot was detected only on 6 of 31 days.

solar cycle

Figure 1: The current solar cycle no. 24 (red) compared to the mean of the previous 23 recorded solar cycles (blue) and the similar solar cycle no. 5 (black).
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Jet4

Russia upgrades Su-25SM3 attack aircraft with modern electronic warfare system in Syria


South Front
Mon, 30 Apr 2018 20:12 UTC
A Su-25SM3 attack aircraft
© Source: https://bmpd.livejournal.com/3179127.html
A Su-25SM3 attack aircraft is at the Khmeimim airbase, Syria, April 2018
A first clear photo of Russia's Su-25SM3 attack aircraft in Syria has appeared online. The photo was made at the Khmeimim airbase in April, 2018. The Su-25SM3 is a deeply modernized modernized version of the Su-25, which entered service with the Russian Aerospace Forces (previously known as the Russian Air Force) in the early 1980s.

Su-25SM3 version differs significantly even from upgraded Su-25SM strike-fighters. The Su-25SM3 incorporates a host of sensor and defensive systems upgrades. The core of the modernization package is the Vitebsk-25 EW system, avionics, and weapon control systems.

The Vitebsk-25 includes an L-370-3S digital active jamming station. It can locate the likely enemy's azimuth and the radar emission type as well as suppress the signal in different frequency ranges. It also poses protective measures against various missiles. External elements of the L-370-3S digital active jamming station are marked by red squares.
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Info

Pole reversal apocalypse downgraded for now

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Mon, 30 Apr 2018 18:08 UTC
Earth's magnetic field
© Science Photo Library/Andrzej Wojcicki/Getty Images
The Earth's magnetic field. It seems that north will stay north, at least for the foreseeable future.
In 2018, UK tabloid newspaper The Sun ran a very disturbing story.

"The Earth's magnetic poles could be about to flip, sparking chaos and making large parts of the planet uninhabitable, it has emerged," the paper reported.

And while it is true that Earth's magnetic field has reversed in the past - multiple times, in fact - and that doing so today would very likely cause some serious problems, not least to navigation equipment, new modelling suggests it's not going to happen any time soon.

And that's genuinely reassuring. Research shows that the magnetic north and south poles historically flip about every 300,000 years, but that the last time it happened was 780,000 years ago. Technically, therefore, the next one is long overdue.

According to the British Geological Survey, however, the periodicity of the changes is much more apparent than real. At some stages in the Earth's history millions of years have passed between reversals.
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