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Astronomers have discovered swarms of tiny comets orbiting an alien sun

Rafi Letzter
LiveScience
Mon, 05 Feb 2018 16:19 UTC
Star KIC 3542116
© NASA / arXiv
This image shows how star KIC 3542116 looks to the Kepler space telescope. Cooler colors represent darker regions, and warmer colors represent brighter regions.
There are tiny comets orbiting foreign suns. And human beings can detect them.

Six times, about 800 years ago, dark things passed between the bright-yellow dwarf star KIC 3542116 and Earth. They were small in cosmic terms, about 330 billion tons (300 billion metric tons). That's about the size of Halley's Comet, or just one-245 millionth the mass of Earth's moon.

But they were big enough. They blocked a fraction of a fraction of the light that was streaming outward from that star. Eight hundred years later, the sensitive lens of the Kepler Space Telescope - a nearly meterwide piece of precision-cut glass floating in the darkness of space - detected that dimming as KIC 3542116's ancient light reached this solar system.
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Pi

Job One for Quantum Computers: Boost Artificial Intelligence

George Musser
Quanta
Mon, 29 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
The fusion of quantum computing and machine learning has become a booming research area. Can it possibly live up to its high expectations?
Quantum nueral network
© Josef Bsharah/Quanta Magazine
In the early '90s, Elizabeth Behrman, a physics professor at Wichita State University, began working to combine quantum physics with artificial intelligence - in particular, the then-maverick technology of neural networks. Most people thought she was mixing oil and water. "I had a heck of a time getting published," she recalled. "The neural-network journals would say, 'What is this quantum mechanics?' and the physics journals would say, 'What is this neural-network garbage?'"

Today the mashup of the two seems the most natural thing in the world. Neural networks and other machine-learning systems have become the most disruptive technology of the 21st century. They out-human humans, beating us not just at tasks most of us were never really good at, such as chess and data-mining, but also at the very types of things our brains evolved for, such as recognizing faces, translating languages and negotiating four-way stops. These systems have been made possible by vast computing power, so it was inevitable that tech companies would seek out computers that were not just bigger, but a new class of machine altogether.
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Brain

Ancient virus could be the reason humans developed the ability to think

Liam S. Whittaker
CSGlobe
Wed, 07 Feb 2018 14:07 UTC
consciousness
© Getty
We all have consciousness, but explaining why and how our thoughts occur has always been a scientific mystery
An ancient virus could be responsible for human consciousness, giving you the ability to think for yourself.

New research has linked a human gene responsible for conscious thought to a virus that was spread in the early days of humanity.

Two papers published in the Cell journal discuss the origins of the Arc gene, which packages up genetic information and sends it around nerve cells in little virus-style capsules.

These packages of information are believed to be critical to how our nerves communicate and could be responsible for our thoughts.

Elissa D. Pastuzyn, who authored one of the studies, said: "Evolutionary analysis indicates that Arc is derived from a vertebrate lineage of Ty3/gypsy retrotransposons, which are also ancestors to retroviruses."

Comment: For more on the links between viruses and human evolution, see:

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Sun

The sun is blank, NASA data shows dimming continues (UPDATE)

Anthony Watts
Watt's Up With That
Fri, 15 Dec 2017 15:59 UTC
blank sun sunsposts dimming
© Solar Dynamics Observatory HMI Continuum
The blank sun
As the sun gets successively more blank with each day, due to lack of sunspots, it is also dimming. According to data from NASA's Spaceweather, so far in 2017, 96 days (27%) of the days observing the sun have been without sunspots. Here is the view today from the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite:

Today at Cape Canaveral, SpaceX launched a new sensor to the International Space Station named TSIS-1. Its mission: to measure the dimming of the sun's irradiance. It will replace the aging SORCE spacecraft. NASA SDO reports that as the sunspot cycle plunges toward its 11-year minimum, NASA satellites are tracking a decline in total solar irradiance (TSI).

Across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, the sun's output has dropped nearly 0.1% compared to the Solar Maximum of 2012-2014. This plot shows the TSI since 1978 as observed from nine previous satellites:

Comment: The increase in cosmic radiation is bad news for the Earth: UPDATE Feb 1st, 2018:

From SDO:
The sun has had no sunspots for almost two weeks (as of Feb. 1, 2018) and just has a single, tiny one that appeared on Jan. 31, 2018. The video shows a rotating sun in filtered light for the past week, but it is even hard to tell the sun is rotating since there are just about no features. Even the small spot that appears on the 31st is hard to see. This spotless period is a prelude to the approaching period of solar minimum next year, when the sun's activity will be at the low end of its 11-year cycle. Credit: Solar Dynamics Observatory, NASA.

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Sun

Princeton physicist William Happer states the obvious: Climate models 'don't work'

Michael Bastasch
The Daily Caller
Mon, 05 Feb 2018 21:27 UTC
Al Gore
© Reuters/Yuri Gripa
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore attends Unlocking Financing for Climate Action session during the IMF/World Bank spring meetings in Washington, U.S., April 21, 2017.
Princeton University physicist William Happer is not a fan of models used to predict future manmade global warming, and stars in a new educational video laying out the reasons he believes climate models are faulty.

"And I know they don't work. They haven't worked in the past. They don't work now. And it's hard to imagine when, if ever, they'll work in the foreseeable future," Happer said in a video produced by PragerU.

In the video, Happer argues that even supercomputers used to predict the weather and forecast future global warming aren't strong enough to capture the complexity of Earth's atmosphere, including cloud cover and natural ocean cycles.

"That's why, over the last 30 years, one climate prediction after another - based on computer models - has been wrong," Happer said in the video. "They're wrong because even the most powerful computers can't solve all the equations needed to accurately describe climate."

Comment:

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Galaxy

A scientific theory and the multiverse madness

Sabine Hossenfelder
Cosmos & Culture
Mon, 22 Jan 2018 10:23 UTC
Milkyway
© NASA/Brunier
Milky Way Galaxy
Newton's law of gravity - remember that? The force between two massive bodies decreases with the inverse square of the distance and so on?

To use it, you need a constant, "Newton's constant," also called the "gravitational constant," usually denoted G. You can determine G to reasonable accuracy with a few simple measurements. Once you have fixed the gravitational constant, you can apply Newton's law to all kinds of different situations: falling apples, orbiting planets, launching rockets, etc. All with only one constant!

This ability to explain many superficially different processes is what makes natural laws so powerful. Newton's contemporaries were suitably impressed.

After Newton came up with his equation, he could have reasoned: "Since I don't know this constant's value but have to measure it, the constant could have any value. So, there must be a universe for each different value. I conclude that we live in one of infinitely many universes - one for each value of the gravitational constant. I will call this collection of universes the "multiverse.""

But he didn't.

Newton was famously minimalistic with his assumptions and even refused to speculate whether there were deeper reasons for his law of gravity, arguing this was unnecessary. "Hypotheses non fingo," he wrote, "I feign no hypotheses."

But that was then.
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Mars

HKU scientist's key discoveries in the search for life on Mars

Dr. Joseph Michalski
EurekAlert
Tue, 06 Feb 2018 00:00 UTC
NASA Mars image
© NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
False color image from the HiRISE instrument aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the diversity of rocks exhumed from the Martian subsurface meteor impact, Nili Fossae area. It contains rocks that were altered by fluids in the Martian crust billions of years ago.
The planet Mars has long drawn interest from scientists and non-scientists as a possible place to search for evidence of life beyond Earth because the surface contains numerous familiar features such as dried river channels and dried lake beds that hint at a warmer, wetter, more earthlike climate in the past. However, Dr Joseph Michalski of the Department of Earth Sciences & Laboratory for Space Research at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and his colleagues have published papers recently that cast increased doubt on the idea of surface life evolving on Mars. These paradigm changing publications have recently been published in Nature Geoscience (December 2017) and Nature Astronomy (February 2018).

For the last 2.5 billion years, surface life on Earth has thrived largely due to the evolution of photosynthesis. Surface life is abundant and very successful because of the availability of sunlight, surface water, generally moderate climate conditions, and the protection of our magnetic field. But the planet Mars would have never experienced such habitable conditions at the surface. Michalski and colleagues published results in Nature Astronomy showing that the climate of Mars has probably been extremely cold and dry most of the time. They argue that the familiar aqueous features on Mars included widespread, weathered soil horizons, could have formed in geologically short climate "excursions." In other words, Mars was cold and dry throughout its history and only had abundant liquid water at its surface during short episodes of climate change.
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Info

Jupiter & Saturn - Gas Giants?

John Ackerman
acksblog
Mon, 05 Feb 2018 18:08 UTC
Jupiter
© NASA
Fig. 1. The band of Jupiter’s atmosphere wrapped around its equator, increases its apparent equatorial diameter.
In addition to their low densities, planetary scientists believe Jupiter and Saturn are 'gas giants' because of their oblatness. However, cyclic catastrophism explains their high oblatnesses in the context of their highly deuterated Methane Gas Hydrate composition (MGH). Oblatness O = (equatorial diameter (DE) - polar diameter (DP))/ (equatorial diameter (DE)). The oblatenesses of the outer planets are:

Jupiter = 0.06487, Saturn = 0.09796, Uranus = 0.02293, Neptune = 0.01708, Pluto = 0.0000

The difference between the high oblateness of Jupiter and Saturn versus Uranus, Neptune and Pluto has resulted in planetary scientists deciding that the former are 'gas giants' and the other three 'ice giants'. However, they are all ice giants - methane gas hydrate (MGH) is a form of ice which forms in the presence of ample methane. The impact on Jupiter 6,000 years BP is what made both Jupiter and Saturn appear to be gaseous.
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Info

'Superionic ice' found on Uranus and Neptune

Jonathan Kesh
Outer Places
Tue, 06 Feb 2018 19:42 UTC
Uranus and Neptune
© NASA
The idea of something being simultaneously a liquid and a solid should be rightfully confusing, because it seems to go against our basic understanding of how things like matter work. But ice (or water?) with those qualities may be pretty common in our outer solar system.

In a study published in Nature Physics, a strange substance known as "superionic ice" is described as such - not quite water, not quite ice, as conductive as metal, and almost molten in its texture, according to Raymond Jeanloz, a co-author of the study and professor at University of California, Berkeley.

While its existence had been suspected for some time, it was finally created and observed at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

First experimental evidence for #superionic ice: After decades of experiments, researchers have observed that under high temperatures and extreme pressures, water takes on a novel form and becomes superionic.

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Info

Unknown language discovered in Southeast Asia


Lund University.
Tue, 06 Feb 2018 17:27 UTC
A previously unknown language has been found in the Malay Peninsula by linguists from Lund University in Sweden. The language has been given the name Jedek.
Malaysian Village
© Niclas Burenhult
"Documentation of endangered minority languages such as Jedek is important, as it provides new insights into human cognition and culture", says Joanne Yager, doctoral student at Lund University.

"Jedek is not a language spoken by an unknown tribe in the jungle, as you would perhaps imagine, but in a village previously studied by anthropologists. As linguists, we had a different set of questions and found something that the anthropologists missed", says Niclas Burenhult, Associate Professor of General Linguistics at Lund University, who collected the first linguistic material from Jedek speakers.

The language is an Aslian variety within the Austroasiatic language family and is spoken by 280 people who are settled hunter-gatherers in northern Peninsular Malaysia.

The researchers discovered the language during a language documentation project, Tongues of the Semang, in which they visited several villages to collect language data from different groups who speak Aslian languages.

The discovery of Jedek was made while they were studying the Jahai language in the same area.
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