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Winging it: Ladybugs make complex origami-like folds to stash their wings

Emily Conover
Science News
Tue, 13 Jun 2017 15:30 UTC
ladybugs
© Kazuya Saito 2017
WINGING IT Ladybugs fold up their wings when they land. To view that process, scientists replaced part of a ladybug’s red-and-black wing case with a transparent resin.
Those who struggle to fit a vacation wardrobe into a carry-on might learn from ladybugs. The flying beetles neatly fold up their wings when they land, stashing the delicate appendages underneath their protective red and black forewings.

To learn how one species of ladybug (Coccinella septempunctata) achieves such efficient packing, scientists needed to see under the bug's spotted exterior. So a team from Japan replaced part of a ladybug's forewing with a transparent bit of resin, to get a first-of-its-kind glimpse of the folding.

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Propaganda

The Pentagon's new 'kinetic energy projectile' weapon is essentially a weaponized meteor strike

Jared Keller
Business Insider
Wed, 07 Jun 2017 14:25 UTC
Supersonic weapon
© DARPA/Lawrence Livermore National Lab
A DARPA rendering depicts a supersonic conventional weapon as it emerges from its rocket nose. Not quite Jerry Pournelle’s ‘Rods From God,’ but just as terrifying.

Comment: Note that nowhere in the article was the word meteor was mentioned. Given the context of the article, we can't help remembering what Victor Clube, author of The Cosmic Serpent and The Cosmic Winter, once said: "We do not need the celestial threat to disguise Cold War intentions; rather we need the Cold War to disguise celestial intentions!"


In the 1950s, Jerry Pournelle imagined the military equivalent of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Toiling away as a Boeing operations researcher in the afterglow of the Manhattan Project and the Soviet Union's First Lightning nuclear test in 1949, the U.S. Army veteran envisioned a weapons system armed not with munitions and other chemical explosives, but massive rods forged from heavy metals dropped from sub-orbital heights. Those "tungsten thunderbolts," as the New York Times called them, would impact enemy strongholds below with the devastating velocity of a dino-exterminating impact, obliterating highly fortified targets — like, say, Iranian centrifuges or North Korean bunkers — without the mess of nuclear fallout.

Pournelle, whose years of experience in aerospace would fuel a career as a journalist and military science fiction writer, named his superweapon "Project Thor." Others just called it "Rods From God." In reality, weapons researchers refer to it as a "kinetic energy projectile": a super-dense, super-fast projectile that, operating free of complex systems and volatile chemicals, destroys everything in its path.

Comment: See also: Reading Celestial Intentions Through the Wrong End of the Telescope: Missiles, UFOs and the Cold War

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Beaker

The very real dangers of CRISPR gene editing technology

Dr. Mercola
mercola.com
Tue, 13 Jun 2017 19:11 UTC
gene editing techniques
CRISPR gene-editing technology has been taking the medical world by storm, showing potential for treating diseases ranging from cancer to type 2 diabetes. The technology has been moving full-steam ahead, with a trial in humans already started, even as the repercussions of gene editing remain largely unknown.

A new study has highlighted the uncertainties, showing that unintended mutations may result when you dice and splice the human genome, but it's too soon to say whether the mutations are a cause for alarm.

What Is CRISPR?


Comment: See also:

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Bizarro Earth

Signs of past mega-quakes show wide-ranging implications of major rupture on California's San Andreas fault

Rong-Gong Lin II
Los Angeles Times
Tue, 13 Jun 2017 12:00 UTC
San Andreas Fault
© U.S. Geological Survey)
The San Andreas fault, in heavy red, slices through key mountain passes including the San Gorgonio Pass and the Cajon Pass.
As Interstate 10 snakes through the mountains and toward the golf courses, housing tracts and resorts of the Coachella Valley, it crosses the dusty slopes of the San Gorgonio Pass.

The pass is best known for the spinning wind turbines that line it. But for geologists, the narrow desert canyon is something of a canary in the coal mine for what they expect will be a major earthquake coming from the San Andreas fault.

The pass sits at a key geological point, separating the low desert from the Inland Empire, and, beyond that, the Los Angeles Basin.

Through it runs an essential aqueduct that feeds Southern California water from the Colorado River as well as vital transportation links. It's also the path for crucial power transmission lines.

California earthquake experts believe what happens at the San Gorgonio Pass during a major rupture of the San Andreas fault could have wide-ranging implications for the region and beyond.

Comment: New study finds that California's San Andreas Fault could actually rupture along its entire 800-mile length

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Book

Long lost diary may hold key to unearthing 'eighth wonder of the world' in New Zealand


RT
Wed, 14 Jun 2017 15:38 UTC
Archive illustration of the White Terrace, New Zealand
© British Library / Wikipedia
Archive illustration of the White Terrace, New Zealand.
In events reminiscent of the plot of an Indiana Jones adventure, two researchers believe the discovery of a historic diary may be the key to finding New Zealand's mysterious Pink and White Terraces - the fabled 'eighth wonder of the world.'

Made up of large mounds of silica deposits, the terraces were once a feature of the Lake Rotomahana region until a massive volcanic eruption at Mount Tarawera in 1886 purportedly changed the area's landscape forever.

Now, the discovery of a field diary belonging to Swiss geologist Ferdinand von Hochstetter may provide a way to uncover the pink hued springs that were once renowned among indigenous people for their healing qualities.
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Snowflake Cold

Astrophysicist: "Mini Ice Age is here to stay"


Principia Scientific International
Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00 UTC
mini ice-age
British Physicist and weatheraction.com front man, Piers Corbyn, issues a stark rebuke to climate alarmists who claim the 18-year-old pause in global warming won't last.
"The mini ice age is here to stay!"
Illustrating his analysis of the data with deft graphwork Corbyn shows that in April 2017 temperatures in both the northern and southern hemispheres plunged dramatically last month.
"The mini ice age is in a new phase and is here to stay for at least 20 years."
Corbyn is not alone among respected international scientists who foresee a new era of ice and cold with inherent damaging impacts on world agriculture, disease and political fallout. The really obvious evidence is the dramatic absence of any sun spots in recent weeks.

The daily Berliner Kurier reports solar physicists at the ultra-warmist Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) are warning that Europe may be facing "a mini ice age" due to a possible protracted solar minimum.
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Magnify

Study: RoundUp herbicide caused lab ants to stop digging

Eli Chen
St. Louis Public Radio
Tue, 06 Jun 2017 23:15 UTC
ants
© WEBSTER UNIVERSITY
Webster University students dosed western harvester ants with various contaminants, including Roundup, to see how they affect behavior.
A study at Webster University has revealed that Monsanto's weed killer Roundup can significantly change ant behavior.

Researchers began two years ago to study how ants are affected by man-made contaminants, including Roundup. The product has become controversial recently due to allegations that its key ingredient, glyphosate, causes cancer in humans.

The ant study hasn't been published yet, but student researchers noted that the herbicide significantly affected western harvester ants.

"When we put Roundup in the habitat, all digging ceased. I was dumbfounded. I didn't believe it,"said Victoria Brown-Kennerly, a geneticist at Webster University who supervised the project.

"These chemicals are not lethal to the animals, but it's definitely changing their behaviors."Western harvester ants, often used in ant farms, are known to create underground tunnels.
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Evil Rays

Quasiparticles imaged, half-light/half-matter could lead to faster circuits, higher bandwidths

Iowa State University
Science Daily
Wed, 07 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
Quasiparticles
© Zhe Fei/Iowa State University
This image shows how researchers launched and studied half-light, half-matter quasiparticles called exciton-polaritons. A laser from the top left shines on the sharp tip of a nano-imaging system aimed at a flat semiconductor. The red circles inside the semiconductor are the waves associated with the quasiparticles.
Zhe Fei pointed to the bright and dark vertical lines running across his computer screen. This nano-image, he explained, shows the waves associated with a half-light, half-matter quasiparticle moving inside a semiconductor.

"These are waves just like water waves," said Fei, an Iowa State University assistant professor of physics and astronomy and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory. "It's like dropping a rock on the surface of water and seeing waves. But these waves are exciton-polaritons."

Exciton-polaritons are a combination of light and matter. Like all quasiparticles, they're created within a solid and have physical properties such as energy and momentum. In this study, they were launched by shining a laser on the sharp tip of a nano-imaging system aimed at a thin flake of molybdenum diselenide (MoSe2), a layered semiconductor that supports excitons.

Excitons can form when light is absorbed by a semiconductor. When excitons couple strongly with photons, they create exciton-polaritons.
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Ice Cube

Earth's atmosphere is more chemically reactive in cold climates, glacial maximums

University of Washington
Science Daily
Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00 UTC
Becky Anderson
© Mark Stone/University of Washington
Becky Anderson in UW's IsoLab cold room analyzing sections of an ice core from Antarctica to see if they show the same trend as the Greenland cores.
Unseen in the air around us are tiny molecules that drive the chemical cocktail of our atmosphere. As plants, animals, volcanoes, wildfires and human activities spew particles into the atmosphere, some of these molecules act as cleanup crews that remove that pollution.

The main molecules responsible for breaking down all these emissions are called oxidants. The oxygen-containing molecules, mainly ozone and hydrogen-based detergents, react with pollutants and reactive greenhouse gases, such as methane.

A University of Washington study published May 18 in the journal Nature finds that during large climate swings, oxidants shift in a different direction than researchers had expected, which means they need to rethink what controls these chemicals in our air.
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Magnify

100 million-year-old amber holds tiny feathered chick

Mindy Weisberger
Live Science
Fri, 09 Jun 2017 11:20 UTC
chick foot
© Lida Xing
A close-up view of hatchling's feet shows its digit pads and claws
Much of the body of a wee Cretaceous-era chick was preserved in incredible detail in a piece of Burmese amber, and bears "unusual plumage," according to the researchers who described the unique find in a new study.

Excavated from a mine in what is now northern Myanmar, the precious lump of fossilized tree sap is estimated to be about 98 million years old, and holds the most complete specimen to date representing a group of extinct toothed birds called enantiornithines (eh-nan-tee-or-NITH'-eh-neez), which died out at the end of the Cretaceous period (about 145 million to 65.5 million years ago).
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