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Active object in Jupiter's orbit is first of its kind seen by astronomers


University of Hawaii
Wed, 20 May 2020 19:35 UTC
asteroid 2019LD2
© JD Armstrong/IfA/LCOGT
Image of asteroid 2019LD2 taken on June 11th, 2019, using the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) NetworkÊ »s 1.0-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo, Chile.
We often think of asteroids and comets as distinct types of small bodies, but astronomers have discovered an increasing number of "crossovers." These objects initially appear to be asteroids, and later develop activity, such as tails, that are typical of comets.

Now, the University of Hawaiʻi's Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) has discovered the first known Jupiter Trojan asteroid to have sprouted a comet-like tail. ATLAS is a NASA-funded project using wide-field telescopes to rapidly scan the sky for asteroids that might pose an impact threat to Earth. But by searching most of the sky every two nights, ATLAS often finds other kinds of objects - objects that aren't dangerous, but are very interesting.

Early in June 2019, ATLAS reported what seemed to be a faint asteroid near the orbit of Jupiter. The Minor Planet Center designated the new discovery as 2019 LD2. Inspection of ATLAS images taken on June 10 by collaborators Alan Fitzsimmons and David Young at Queen's University Belfast revealed its probable cometary nature. Follow-up observations by the University of Hawaiʻi's J.D. Armstrong and his student Sidney Moss on June 11 and 13 using the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) global telescope network confirmed the cometary nature of this body.

Later, in July 2019, new ATLAS images caught 2019 LD2 again - now truly looking like a comet, with a faint tail made of dust or gas. The asteroid passed behind the Sun and was not observable from the Earth in late 2019 and early 2020, but upon its reappearance in the night sky in April of 2020, routine ATLAS observations confirmed that it still looks like a comet. These observations showed that 2019 LD2 has probably been continuously active for almost a year.
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Roses

Bumblebees bite plants to make them flower early

Virginia Morell
National Geographic
Fri, 22 May 2020 18:18 UTC
bumblebee
© Stephen Dalton, Minden Pictures
A buff-tailed bumblebee flies among flowers in England. Many bumblebee species are declining due to climate change.
How it actually works remains a mystery, but if replicated by humans, it could be a boon for agriculture.

Bumblebees aren't merely bumbling around our gardens. They're actively assessing the plants, determining which flowers have the most nectar and pollen, and leaving behind scent marks that tell them which blooms they've already visited.

Now, a new study reveals that bumblebees force plants to flower by making tiny incisions in their leaves — a discovery that has stunned bee scientists.

"Wow! was my first reaction," says Neal Williams, a bee biologist at the University of California, Davis. "Then I wondered, how did we miss this? How could no one have seen it before?"

Comment: See also:

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Bulb

An Italian philosophy journal takes a small step towards Intelligent Design


Evolution News
Thu, 21 May 2020 17:24 UTC
socrates bust
© Wikimedia Commons
Socrates, a bust displayed in the Vatican Museum
Philosophers are making some important and interesting contributions to the conversation about biological origins. Earlier today we saw that philosopher Subrena E. Smith registered a harsh critique of evolutionary psychology in the journal Biological Theory, even saying that evo psych explanations are "impossible." Now, a new paper in the Italian philosophy journal Humana Mente, "Residuals of Intelligent Design in Contemporary Theories about Language Nature and Origins," observes that the arguments of intelligent design proponents are applicable to many explanations of the origins of language. The authors are cognitive scientists at the University of Messina, and although the English translation isn't always easy to follow and some of their ideas about ID are both dated and heavily critical, the openness to taking ID seriously is clear.

First, the authors semi-accurately describe ID arguments, noting:
ID's current and general criticism — not only to evolutionism but also to biological science — is not that complex phenomena can't be explained without the participation of a creator God, but rather that they can't be entirely solved inside a radically monistic theory. In other words, they can't be exposed to a naturalistic reduction...
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Pi

Bionic eye with sharper vision than real eye could be ready in just five years, experts say

Shaun Wooller
NY Post
Thu, 21 May 2020 17:25 UTC
bionic eye
© SWNS
The bionic eye converts images through tiny sensors that mirror a human's light detecting photoreceptor cells.
A bionic eye could give sight to millions in just five years, experts say.

The world's first 3D artificial eyeball is capable of sharper vision than a real human eye. Images are converted through tiny sensors that mirror the light-detecting photoreceptor cells.

The sensors are packed into a membrane of aluminium and tungsten shaped into a half sphere, mimicking a retina. The electrochemical eye, name EC-EYE, resembles sinister super computer HAL in 1968 sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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Radar

Want one? Russia's newest radar, with ability to track 1K+ fast-moving and hypersonic weapons, is up for sale


RT
Thu, 21 May 2020 12:52 UTC
Russian radar
© Rosoboronexport
Russian hypersonic radar
Russia once claimed gold in the race for hypersonic dominance after rolling out a range of ultra-fast projectiles. Now it's offering unique radar protecting against weapons of the same kind - even if they come in huge numbers.

Having unbeatable offensive weapons - for example hypersonic missiles - could be a game-changer in the age of modern, fast-paced warfare. But it's equally crucial to have something that shields you from those designed or deployed by an adversary.

And Russia's newest radar station is able to fit the bill, Rosoboronexport, the government agency in charge of arms trade, said this Wednesday. The radar, which is the latest addition to the Protivnik (Adversary) family, is likely to turn a few heads abroad due to its capability to "efficiently detect a wide range of existing and future flying objects, including hypersonic targets."

The looks of the radar, mounted atop a standard military-issue KAMAZ truck, isn't as impressive as its unique features. Its antenna is sensitive enough to detect targets flying at 8,000kph (nearly 5,000mph) and at a distance of up to 450km (280 miles). The newest edition of the Protivnik series "can simultaneously track at least 1,000 thousand objects" and distinguish between eight classes of missiles, Rosoboronexport revealed.
Crew compartment
© Rosoboronexport
Crew compartment
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Info

Hawaii just got two new 'largest volcanoes'

Brandon Specktor
Live Science
Thu, 21 May 2020 13:15 UTC
The Gardner Pinnacles
© Google Maps
The Gardner Pinnacles are all that's visible of what is now considered the world's largest, and hottest, volcano. It's called Pūhāhonu, and it lies northwest of Honolulu, Hawaii.
Poking out of the sea 590 miles (952 kilometers) northwest of Honolulu, Hawaii, two barren peaks rear their heads. The little pinnacles, which stand about 170 feet (52 meters) above sea level at their highest point, bely a monstrous mountain of ancient magma beneath them. Turns out, these two unassuming nubbins are actually the tips of Pūhāhonu — the single largest volcano on Earth, scientists have found.

Pūhāhonu — meaning "turtle rising for breath" in Hawaiian — is part of the long chain of undersea mountains and volcanoes that stretch from the Hawaiian Islands to the eastern edge of Russia. Many of the chain's 120-or-so volcanoes are long dead and buried beneath the waves, though the relatively young peaks that make up the Hawaiian Islands still tower over the land (and, occasionally, blow their tops).

Mauna Loa, the gently-sloping behemoth that bulges out of Hawaii's Big Island, has long been designated the world's largest volcano. From its base on the seafloor to its summit thousands of feet over the island, Mauna Loa rises more than 30,000 feet (9,170 m) — making it technically taller than Mount Everest — and encompasses more than 19,200 cubic miles (80,000 cubic km) in volume. There's no question it's gargantuan; however, researchers now claim that Pūhāhonu actually has Mauna Loa beat — thanks largely to tens of thousands of cubic miles of volcanic rock buried beneath the ocean floor.
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SOTT Logo Radio

MindMatters: Directed Panspermia, Intelligent Design and the Role of Psi

Corey Schink and Harrison Koehli
Sott.net
Thu, 21 May 2020 00:00 UTC
intelligent design
On today's show we continue our wide-ranging discussion of the Holy Grail, cometary bombardments, and the role of intelligence in the universe. As we've discovered, understanding these three, seemingly unconnected, topics may be more critical than ever to understanding the origins of life and the extreme times the earth is once again going through.

While many proponents of intelligent design strive to illustrate the sheer impossibility of 'random' processes to account for the origins of life, they typically remain silent on the nature of the intelligence capable of doing so, and the means by which it implements its design. It's no wonder, since their scientific reputations are already on the line and the field of study that seeks to understand the mind's potential to interact with the universe in many mysterious ways - parapsychology - is itself verboten in modern scientific discourse.

But we here at MindMatters don't face such constraints. If intelligence accounts for the myriad designs of life, then it is in the science of the mind that we should seek our answers. So today we turn to the vilified field of parapsychology to tease out a mechanism that can explain how an intelligence could, without a trace, initiate and maintain the grand experiment of life on earth.


Running Time: 00:55:21

Download: MP3 — 50.7 MB

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Telescope

Astronomers have just detected a new kind of asteroid orbiting Jupiter

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Thu, 21 May 2020 17:16 UTC
new type asteroid
© ATLAS/University of Hawai'i
New asteroid found to have faint comet-like tail
We tend to think of asteroids and comets as pretty strictly delineated categories.

Comets have long, looping orbits and are loaded up with volatile ices that sublimate, generating a dusty, misty halo and tail when the comet comes close to the Sun. Asteroids, on the other hand, are generally considered rocky, dry and inert, with orbits in the Solar System similar to those of the planets.

Every now and again, though, we come across something that challenges these definitions. And a newly discovered asteroid called 2019 LD2 is truly special - an asteroid of a kind we've never seen before.

It has an asteroid-like orbit, but a comet-like tail. That's rare, but not unknown - we call asteroids that exhibit comet-like characteristics (such as outgassing and sublimation) active asteroids. It's not the what, but the where that makes 2019 LD2 unique.

Comment: Astronomers are still holding on to the 'icy snowball' theory of comets for dear life. Notice the mental gymnastics they engage in to explain an asteroid behaving like a comet. The Electric Universe theory postulates that all comets are asteroids traversing fields of electrical charge, a view that fits the observed facts.

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Galaxy

Cosmic rays may have left indelible imprint on early life

Taylor Kubota, Stanford University
Phys.org
Thu, 21 May 2020 10:32 UTC
cosmic ray
© Simons Foundation
Showers of high energy particles originating from the sun and our galaxy collide with nitrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere. At ground level, the shower is dominated by magnetically polarized muons. At the protobiological site, nucleic acids assumed either a right-handed or left-handed helical conformation. The magnetically polarized radiation preferentially ionized one type of 'handedness' leading to a slightly different mutation rate between the two mirror proto-lifeforms. Over time, right-handed molecules out-evolved their left-handed counterparts.
Before there were animals, bacteria or even DNA on Earth, self-replicating molecules were slowly evolving their way from simple matter to life beneath a constant shower of energetic particles from space.

In a new paper, a Stanford professor and a former post-doctoral scholar speculate that this interaction between ancient proto-organisms and cosmic rays may be responsible for a crucial structural preference, called chirality, in biological molecules. If their idea is correct, it suggests that all life throughout the universe could share the same chiral preference.

Chirality, also known as handedness, is the existence of mirror-image versions of molecules. Like the left and right hand, two chiral forms of a single molecule reflect each other in shape but don't line up if stacked. In every major biomolecule — amino acids, DNA, RNA — life only uses one form of molecular handedness. If the mirror version of a molecule is substituted for the regular version within a biological system, the system will often malfunction or stop functioning entirely. In the case of DNA, a single wrong handed sugar would disrupt the stable helical structure of the molecule.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Bizarro Earth

ESA's SWARM investigates weakening of Earth's magnetic field, possible split up of South Atlantic Anomaly

European Space Agency
Phys.org
Wed, 20 May 2020 08:04 UTC
Swarm probes for Earth's magnetic field
© ESA/ATG Medialab
In an area stretching from Africa to South America, Earth's magnetic field is gradually weakening. This strange behaviour has geophysicists puzzled and is causing technical disturbances in satellites orbiting Earth. Scientists are using data from ESA's Swarm constellation to improve our understanding of this area known as the 'South Atlantic Anomaly.'

Earth's magnetic field is vital to life on our planet. It is a complex and dynamic force that protects us from cosmic radiation and charged particles from the Sun. The magnetic field is largely generated by an ocean of superheated, swirling liquid iron that makes up the outer core around 3000 km beneath our feet. Acting as a spinning conductor in a bicycle dynamo, it creates electrical currents, which in turn, generate our continuously changing electromagnetic field.

This field is far from static and varies both in strength and direction. For example, recent studies have shown that the position of the north magnetic pole is changing rapidly.

Over the last 200 years, the magnetic field has lost around 9% of its strength on a global average. A large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America and is known as the South Atlantic Anomaly.


Comment: See also:

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