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Rapid gas flares discovered in white dwarf binary star for the first time


Phys.org
Thu, 26 Jan 2017 09:25 UTC
rapid gas flares
© University of Oxford
In February 2016 the dwarf nova SS Cyg anomalous outburst lasted for more than 3 weeks.
Incredibly rapid gas flares from a white dwarf binary star system have been detected for the first time by Oxford University scientists. The first sighting of such activity, it suggests that our current understanding of star habits and their capabilities is incomplete.

Dwarf novae (SS Cyg-like objects, which contain a Sun-like star orbiting a white dwarf star) are well known for their repeated, low-level, bursting behaviour (called "outbursts") but they have never been observed exhibiting behaviour on anything like the scale of rapid flares before.

Outbursts have previously been seen in white dwarfs, neutron stars and even enormous black holes residing in different galaxies. Such stars mainly feed on gas from their companion stars via accretion (where a large amount of gas is accumulated and builds up through gravitational force). Occasionally, these stars "throw up" some of the gas in the form of jets, which are powerful overflows of gas restricted to a single, narrow, cone-like flow.

Initial observations of the SS Cyg activity in February 2016 were considered an atypical outburst, but later telescopic analysis uncovered the intriguing revelation of rapid flares. The most fascinating and unexpected behaviour was observed at radio wavelengths towards the end of the outburst, when a "giant" flare was observed. Lasting for less than 15 minutes, it had the energy of more than a million times the strongest solar flares. The level of radio data recorded from the flare is unprecedented in dwarf nova systems and consistent with that expected from a jet.
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Info

Study relates Atlantic hurricane frequency to sunspot activity


CO2 Science
Fri, 27 Jan 2017 20:37 UTC
Annual hurricane count in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea
© Rojo-Garibaldi et al. (2016)
Figure 1. Annual hurricane count in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea over the period 1749-2012. Red line indicates the linear trend.
Paper Reviewed

Rojo-Garibaldi, B., Salas-de-León, D.A., Sánchez, N.L. and Monreal-Gómez, M.A. 2016. Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea and their relationship with sunspots. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 148: 48-52.

Although some climate alarmists contend that CO2-induced global warming will increase the number of hurricanes in the future, the search for such effect on Atlantic Ocean tropical cyclone frequency has so far remained elusive. And with the recent publication of Rojo-Garibaldi et al. (2016), it looks like climate alarmists will have to keep on looking, or accept the likelihood that something other than CO2 is at the helm in moderating Atlantic hurricane frequency.

In their intriguing analysis published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, the four-member research team of Rojo-Garibaldi et al. developed a new database of historical hurricane occurrences in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, spanning twenty-six decades over the period 1749 to 2012. Statistical analysis of the record revealed "the hurricane number is actually decreasing in time," which finding is quite stunning considering that it is quite possible fewer hurricanes were recorded at the beginning of their record when data acquisition was considerably worse than towards the end of the record. Nevertheless, as the Mexican research team indicates, "when analyzing the entire time series built for this study, i.e., from 1749 to 2012, the linear trend in the number of hurricanes is decreasing" (see figure above).

As for the potential cause behind the downward trend, Rojo-Garibaldi et al. examined the possibility of a solar influence, performing a series of additional statistical analyses (spectral, wavelet and coherence wavelet transform) on the hurricane database, as well as a sunspot database obtained from the Solar Influences Data Analysis Center of the Solar Physics Department of the Royal Observatory of Belgium. Therein, their exploratory analyses revealed that "this decline is related to an increase in sunspot activity."
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Pi

Time crystals: Scientists have confirmed a brand new form of matter

Fiona Macdonald
The Science Alert
Sat, 28 Jan 2017 00:00 UTC
time crystals
© Kent Schimke/Flickr
For months now, there's been speculation that researchers might have finally created time crystals - strange crystals that have an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, putting them in perpetual motion without energy.

Now it's official - researchers have just reported in detail how to make and measure these bizarre crystals. And two independent teams of scientists claim they've actually created time crystals in the lab based off this blueprint, confirming the existence of an entirely new form of matter.

The discovery might sound pretty abstract, but it heralds in a whole new era in physics - for decades we've been studying matter that's defined as being 'in equilibrium', such as metals and insulators.

But it's been predicted that there are many more strange types of matter out there in the Universe that aren't in equilibrium that we haven't even begun to look into, including time crystals. And now we know they're real.
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Blue Planet

Floating Libertarian city, a possible future reality

Dave Roos
Seeker
Fri, 20 Jan 2017 12:33 UTC
floating city
© YouTube
The Floating City of Artisanopolis gives us a preview of what sea-based civilizations may look like in the future.
When Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, helped launch the Seasteading Institute in 2008, it sounded like a libertarian pipe dream — floating cities free from government meddling (no regulation, no taxes) that would be testing grounds for technological, social and political innovation.

But this past January 13, the dream came one step closer to reality when the Seastead Institute signed a deal with French Polynesia that lays the legal groundwork for the world's first semi-autonomous floating city-state.

French Polynesia is a cluster of more than 100 islands in the South Pacific, the biggest and best-known being Tahiti. Like other coastal and island nations in the Pacific, French Polynesia is courting investment in the so-called "blue economy," the sustainable development of offshore energy production, wild-catch fisheries, aquaculture and tourism. The Polynesians are less interested in the seasteaders libertarian politics than their promise of delivering a high-tech floating village that will not only provide jobs for Polynesian workers, but attract investment dollars for Polynesian entrepreneurs.

sea community
© Seasteading.com
Another proposed model of a Seasteading floating city.
Joe Quirk is the Seasteading Institute's staff "Seavangelist" and author of the forthcoming Seasteading: How Ocean Cities Will Change the World, written with Seasteading Institute co-founder Patri Friedman. Quirk was part of a 10-person team who visited French Polynesia back in September. "This was a Polynesian-initiated project," Quirk told Seeker. "They reached out to us. It's an ideal country for seasteading, and they think we're the perfect industry for what they want to do with regard to the blue economy."

The long-term vision of seasteading is to construct fully autonomous floating cities on the high seas where the "next generation of pioneers [can] peacefully test new ideas for government." But for this first, proof-of-concept project, the Seasteading Institute was searching for an island partner with protected shallow waters and an openness to new type of economic model called a SeaZone.

Comment: Test tube experimental habitation riding on waves of change.

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Microscope 2

Evidence that some parts of the body stay 'alive' after death

Jen Viegas, Seeker
Live Science
Thu, 26 Jan 2017 07:30 UTC
Stem cells
© Nissam Benvenishty
Human embryonic stem cells remain alive and attempt to repair themselves after death.
Even after someone is declared dead, life continues in the body, suggests a surprising new study with important implications.

Gene expression — when information stored in DNA is converted into instructions for making proteins or other molecules — actually increases in some cases after death, according to the new paper, which tracked postmortem activity and is published in the journal Open Biology.

"Not all cells are 'dead' when an organism dies," senior author Peter Noble of the University of Washington and Alabama State University told Seeker. "Different cell types have different life spans, generation times and resilience to extreme stress." In fact, some cells seem to fight to live after the organism has died. "It is likely that some cells remain alive and are attempting to repair themselves, specifically stem cells," Noble said.

Signs of Cellular Life

The international team of scientists, led by Alex Pozhitkov, studied zebrafish and mice and believe that the phenomenon occurs in all animals, including humans.

Gene transcription — the first step of gene expression, where a segment of DNA is copied into RNA — associated with stress, immunity, inflammation, cancer and other factors increased after death. And this could happen within hours or even days after the individual as a whole was declared dead.

Interestingly, gene transcription linked to embryonic development also increased. It's as though parts of the body essentially go back in time, exhibiting cellular characteristics of very early human development.
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Comet

Anything to worry about with 'death asteroid' WF9?

Dan Seitz
Uproxx
Fri, 27 Jan 2017 15:27 UTC
comet to earth
© shutterstock
By now you've probably heard of 2016 WF9. Everybody is freaking out about this 'death asteroid' and, if the predictions hold up, it really is something to worry about. Except, as you might have guessed, the predictions do not actually hold up.

There's really only one person saying WF9 is the Sweet Meteor of Death some people were rooting for in the 2016 election: Dyomin Damir Zakharovich, a Russian astronomer who claims that the asteroid is actually a piece of Nibiru. What, you might ask, is Nibiru? Why, it's a planet we were told about by Nancy Lieder, a woman who claims to be in telepathic contact with aliens from Zeta Reticuli. This would be a good point to bring up that the "Nibiru cataclysm" was supposed to have happened in 2003.

In rather sharp contrast to the doomsaying, here's what NASA had to say about 2016 WF9:
2016 WF9 will approach Earth's orbit on Feb. 25, 2017. At a distance of nearly 32 million miles (51 million kilometers) from Earth, this pass will not bring it particularly close. The trajectory of 2016 WF9 is well understood, and the object is not a threat to Earth for the foreseeable future.

Comment: An asteroid is about to slip between Earth and the moon — the second near miss in 3 weeks

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Airplane

Russia developing super-heavy ground-effect civilian transport


RT
Sun, 29 Jan 2017 13:11 UTC
Russia super-heavy ground-effect civilian transport
© tsagi.ru
A civilian transport vehicle capable of hauling up to 500 tons of cargo across oceans is in the early stages of development in Russia. The vehicle would fly just meters over the surface to utilize so-called ground effect for better fuel efficiency.

A ground-effect vehicle is a combination of a maritime vessel and an aircraft. It can only travel over a more or less smooth surface like the ground, water, or ice, flying several meters above it to produce more lift force and less drag than any fixed-wing aircraft generates close to the ground. This makes it more fuel efficient and allows it to make longer journeys.

The Soviet military had several heavy GEVs built in the 1970s and 1980s, including the famous, but now-retired, Lun - a 243-ton anti-ship missile carrier. While the Navy was more interested in the ability of such vehicles to avoid radar detection, as well as their high speed, a leading Russian aviation research institution believes it can build a GEV capable of competing with freighter vessels and transport planes for a niche market.
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Igloo

Snowball Earth - Entire Earth covered by ice?


Post Independent
Sun, 29 Jan 2017 05:00 UTC
IceAge
© Neethis
Imagine the earth enveloped in ice, as it was during Snowball Earth times.
Imagine the entire Earth covered in ice. It's not that far-fetched. It actually happened - and more than once.

Was it because Anna got mad at Elsa? No - but the real reason is even cooler. Scientists figured it out only after a rather provocative hypothesis tied a bunch of bizarre evidence together.

The first clues were discovered on some desolate Atlantic islands. There geologists found layers of rock formed by glaciers, but sandwiched between tropical rocks. How had this happened? Did the islands tectonically drift from the tropics to the poles and then back?

Nope. Microscopic magnetic particles in the rocks showed that when they were originally deposited, the rocks were located near the equator. This could only mean one thing - that the tropics had once been covered by ice.

No problem, you say? There are glaciers atop plenty of equatorial mountains, like the ones that feed the Nile or that dot Ecuadorian rainforests. Maybe such high-elevation glaciers could explain the equatorial ice evidence geologists were finding.

Except that the tropical strata below and above the glacial rocks weren't deposited at high elevation. Rather they were deposited in warm water, near tidal flats and ocean beaches.

It gets even crazier. In other reaches of the globe, scientists scratched their heads about similarly bipolar deposits - in Australia, Africa, Asia and our own Rocky Mountains. Much like paleontologists figured out that dinosaurs all disappeared at the same time, it took a long time for geologists to figure out that all these glacial-tropical rocks were about the same age.

Meaning: Maybe the entire planet, even delightful places like Ecuador, had once been covered by vast sheets of ice. A Snowball Earth.
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Igloo

Ice age cycles linked to orbital periods and sea ice

Anthony Watts
Watts up with That
Fri, 27 Jan 2017 19:31 UTC
Ice Ages
© Jung-Eun Lee/Brown University
The Southern Hemisphere has a higher capacity to grow sea ice than the Northern Hemisphere, where continents block growth. New research shows that the expansion of Southern Hemisphere sea ice during certain periods in Earth’s orbital cycles can control the pace of the planet’s ice ages.
Providence, R.I. — Earth is currently in what climatologists call an interglacial period, a warm pulse between long, cold ice ages when glaciers dominate our planet's higher latitudes. For the past million years, these glacial-interglacial cycles have repeated roughly on a 100,000-year cycle. Now a team of Brown University researchers has a new explanation for that timing and why the cycle was different before a million years ago.

Using a set of computer simulations, the researchers show that two periodic variations in Earth's orbit combine on a 100,000-year cycle to cause an expansion of sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere. Compared to open ocean waters, that ice reflects more of the sun's rays back into space, substantially reducing the amount of solar energy the planet absorbs. As a result, global temperature cools.

"The 100,000-year pace of glacial-interglacial periods has been difficult to explain," said Jung-Eun Lee, an assistant professor in Brown's Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Studies and the study's lead author. "What we were able to show is the importance of sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere along with orbital forcings in setting the pace for the glacial-interglacial cycle."

The research is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
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Fish

Knight in slimy armor? US Navy scientists excited over new biomaterial artificially re-created from hagfish secretion


RT
Fri, 27 Jan 2017 22:52 UTC
Scientist and engineers
© Ron Newsome / www.navy.mil
Naval Surface Warfare Panama City Division (NSWC PCD) scientist and engineers (L-R) Dr Josh Kogot, Dr Michelle Kincer and Dr Ryan Kincer demonstrate the lab-created hagfish slim.
Could a substance derived from bottom-feeding prehistoric fish revolutionize battleship armor? US Navy scientists are betting on yes, pointing to the artificially re-created hagfish slime as the next frontier in maritime protection.

Working at the US Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City, Florida, biochemist Dr. Josh Kogot and materials engineer Dr. Ryan Kincer have developed a synthetic biomaterial by recreating the slime of the Pacific hagfish (Eptatretus stoutii) in a lab.
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