Science & Technology

New celestial phenomenon, STEVE, closely correlated with violent disturbances in Earth's magnetosphere says study

Terri Cook
Earth & Space Science News
Fri, 15 Mar 2019 19:59 UTC

© Alan Dyer
Researchers find a violent potential origin for the aurora-like phenomenon dubbed STEVE events, pictured here in southern Alberta.

Earlier this year, researchers announced that long, narrow streaks of purple light occasionally observed in the nighttime sky are not a new type of aurora, as first suspected, but a novel upper atmospheric phenomenon. Dubbed Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (STEVE) because of their association with fast-moving ions and hot electrons in Earth's ionosphere, these celestial lights are often visible at lower latitudes than most auroras and appear to be caused by a different, and still undetermined, mechanism.

To better characterize STEVE, Gallardo-Lacourt et al. conducted the first statistical analysis of this optical phenomenon. Using NASA's Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) ground-based All-Sky Imager array and the Canadian Space Agency's Redline Geospace Observatory (REGO) databases, the team identified and analyzed optical data from 28 STEVE events that occurred between December 2007 and December 2017.

Time reversal achieved by physicists using quantum computer

Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
Wed, 13 Mar 2019 13:00 UTC

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past. They also calculated the probability that an electron in empty interstellar space will spontaneously travel back into its recent past. The study comes out March 13 in Scientific Reports.

"This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics. That law is closely related to the notion of the arrow of time that posits the one-way direction of time: from the past to the future," commented the study's lead author Gordey Lesovik, who heads the Laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information Technology at MIPT.

"We began by describing a so-called local perpetual motion machine of the second kind. Then, in December, we published a paper that discusses the violation of the second law via a device called a Maxwell's demon," Lesovik said. "The most recent paper approaches the same problem from a third angle: We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time."

What the world's oldest eggs are revealing about dinosaur evolution

PhysOrg
Thu, 14 Mar 2019 18:18 UTC

A study of the world's earliest known dinosaur eggs reveals new information about the evolution of dinosaur reproduction.

An international team of researchers led by Robert Reisz of the Department of Biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga studied the fossilized remains of eggs and eggshells discovered at sites in Argentina, China and South Africa-widely separated regions of the supercontinent Pangea. At 195 million years old, they are the earliest known eggs in the fossil record, and they were all laid by a group of stem sauropods-long-necked herbivores that ranged in size from four to eight metres in length and were the most common and widely spread dinosaurs of their time.

Reisz is puzzled by the fact that "reptile and mammal precursors appear as skeletons in the fossil record starting 316 million years ago, yet we know nothing of their eggs and eggshells until 120 million years later. It's a great mystery that eggs suddenly show up at this point, but not earlier."

Horseshoe crab throws theory of arachnid evolution into disarray

Kelly April Tyrrell
Phys.org
Sat, 09 Mar 2019 12:00 UTC

© Jesús Ballesteros
University of Wisconsin-Madison postdoctoral researcher Jesús Ballesteros holds a small horseshoe crab. A study he led with Integrative Biology Professor Prashant Sharma used robust genetic analysis to demonstrate that horseshoe crabs are arachnids like spiders, scorpions and ticks.

Blue-blooded and armored with 10 spindly legs, horseshoe crabs have perhaps always seemed a bit out of place.

First thought to be closely related to crabs, lobsters and other crustaceans, in 1881 evolutionary biologist E. Ray Lankester placed them solidly in a group more similar to spiders and scorpions. Horseshoe crabs have since been thought to be ancestors of the arachnids, but molecular sequence data have always been sparse enough to cast doubt.

University of Wisconsin-Madison evolutionary biologists Jesús Ballesteros and Prashant Sharma hope, then, that their recent study published in the journal Systematic Biology helps firmly plant ancient horseshoe crabs within the arachnid family tree.

By analyzing troves of genetic data and considering a vast number of possible ways to examine it, the scientists now have a high degree of confidence that horseshoe crabs do indeed belong within the arachnids.

Comment: It seems that were these evolutionary biologists to question their foundational theory for evolution, things may become a little less 'complicated': Why Darwinism Is Wrong, Dead Wrong - Part 1: Intelligent Design and Information

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More research shows that sound waves could carry mass

Phys.org
Thu, 14 Mar 2019 11:43 UTC

A trio of researchers at Columbia University has found more evidence showing that sound waves carry mass. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Angelo Esposito, Rafael Krichevsky and Alberto Nicolis describe using effective field theory techniques to confirm the results found by a team last year attempting to measure mass carried by sound waves.

For many years physicists have felt confident that sound waves carry energy-but there was no evidence to suggest they also carry mass. There seemed to be no reason to believe that they would generate a gravitational field. But that changed last year when Nicolis and another physicist Riccardo Penco found evidence that suggested conventional thinking was wrong. They had used quantum field theory to show that sound waves moving through superfluid helium carried a small amount of mass with them. More specifically, they found that phonons interacted with a gravitational field in a way that forced them to carry mass along as they moved through the material. In this new effort, the researchers report evidence that suggests the same results hold true for most materials.

Comment: See also:

Wind turbines: Neither clean nor green, they provide ZERO global energy

Matt Ridley
The Spectator
Sat, 13 May 2017 09:00 UTC

We urgently need to stop the ecological posturing and invest in gas and nuclear

The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that 'the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year'.

You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades - nay centuries - of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

Here's a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world's energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.

Comment: See also: Wind farms produced 'practically no electricity' during Britain's cold snap

Scientists attempting to revive woolly mammoths look for alternate methods

PhysOrg
Tue, 12 Mar 2019 17:59 UTC

The frozen carcass of a female mammoth on display in Yokohama a few years ago.

A team of scientists in Japan has successfully coaxed activity from 28,000-year-old cells from a frozen mammoth implanted into mouse cells, but the woolly mammal is unlikely to be walking among us soon.

The project by an international team took cell nuclei from a well-preserved mammoth discovered in 2011 in Siberian permafrost and placed them into several dozen mouse egg cells.

Of those, five displayed the biological reactions that happen just before cell division begins, said Kei Miyamoto, a member of the team at Kindai University in western Japan.

Another shoddy review of Behe's new book on the limits of Darwinian evolution shows the limits of the Darwinian intellect

Michael Behe
Evolution News
Tue, 12 Mar 2019 18:04 UTC

As noted here earlier, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne reviewed Darwin Devolves for this past Sunday's Washington Post. As you might expect, it's written in the venerable style of Richard Dawkins's review of The Edge of Evolution for the New York Times back in 2007: long on sneering, smearing, and assertion; short to nonexistent on telling readers what the book's actual arguments are. Alas, Coyne's piece has too little intellectual content to sustain any real engagement. So I'll simply proceed from its beginning to its end, with lines from his review in bullet points and italics. My comments follow directly after each.

"intelligent design" arose after opponents of evolution repeatedly failed on First Amendment grounds to get Bible-based creationism taught in the public schools. ... : intelligent design, which scientists have dubbed "creationism in a cheap tuxedo."

Good idea - let's link the author to a scorned group right at the start and smear his motives.

Tiny insect uses plant stems to communicate

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 13 Mar 2019 17:42 UTC

A small-sized but common group of insects known as planthoppers - comprising the order Fulgoromorpha - advertise their presence to potential mates by deploying a unique, and only now discovered, organ to send long-distance messages along plant stems.

There are more than 12,000 species of planthopper worldwide, and their secret communication device - dubbed the "snapping organ" - was found by researchers led by zoologist Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou from the University of Oxford in the UK while examining one of them, Agalmatium bilobum.

Locating the organ answered a key question about the group. How could each insect produce a sustained thrumming vibration along plant stems when its musculature was simply not capable of moving fast enough to produce it?

The answer, Davranoglou and colleagues found, lies in the mechanics of the snapping organ.

It functions through the explosive release stored elastic energy. A catapult provides a reasonable approximation, except that for the planthoppers the release forms one half of a high-speed cycle of capture and release that results in a shaking movement of the abdomen and the narrowcast of mating signals.

Scientists see how bone marrow treatment for cancer can also benefit individuals with symptoms of schizophrenia

Moises Velasquez-Manoff
The New York Times
Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00 UTC

A bone-marrow transplant treated a patient's leukemia - and his delusions, too. Some doctors think they know why.

The man was 23 when the delusions came on. He became convinced that his thoughts were leaking out of his head and that other people could hear them. When he watched television, he thought the actors were signaling him, trying to communicate. He became irritable and anxious and couldn't sleep.

Dr. Tsuyoshi Miyaoka, a psychiatrist treating him at the Shimane University School of Medicine in Japan, eventually diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. He then prescribed a series of antipsychotic drugs. None helped. The man's symptoms were, in medical parlance, "treatment resistant."

A year later, the man's condition worsened. He developed fatigue, fever and shortness of breath, and it turned out he had a cancer of the blood called acute myeloid leukemia. He'd need a bone-marrow transplant to survive. After the procedure came the miracle. The man's delusions and paranoia almost completely disappeared. His schizophrenia seemingly vanished.

Comment: See also:

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HashAttack2

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"Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus" came from a lab. [Link]

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Science & Technology

New celestial phenomenon, STEVE, closely correlated with violent disturbances in Earth's magnetosphere says study

Time reversal achieved by physicists using quantum computer

What the world's oldest eggs are revealing about dinosaur evolution

Horseshoe crab throws theory of arachnid evolution into disarray

More research shows that sound waves could carry mass

Wind turbines: Neither clean nor green, they provide ZERO global energy

Scientists attempting to revive woolly mammoths look for alternate methods

Another shoddy review of Behe's new book on the limits of Darwinian evolution shows the limits of the Darwinian intellect

Tiny insect uses plant stems to communicate

Scientists see how bone marrow treatment for cancer can also benefit individuals with symptoms of schizophrenia

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