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Mars

Antarctic fungi possibly able to survive on Mars - ISS experiment shows promise


RT
Sun, 31 Jan 2016 15:30 UTC
ISS mars fungi
© European Space Agency
An astronaut fixes the EXPOSE-E platform onto the International Space Station. ESA
Two super-resilient fungi were able to survive, and even grow, when exposed to a Mars-like environment aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The experiment gave clues as to how life may have once thrived on the Red Planet and possibly could again.

The tiny fungi, Cryomyces antarcticus and Cryomyces minteri, are two cryptoendolithic organisms found in extreme conditions on Earth. They are able to survive in the cracks of rocks by feeding on traces of minerals. Members of the ISS Lichens and Fungi Experiment (LIFE) team collected samples in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a snow-free desert in Antarctica that suffers from high winds and low temperatures, making it arguably the least hospitable place on the planet.
fungi grow mars
© S. Onofri et al.
Section of rock colonized by cryptoendolithic microorganisms and the Cryomyces fungi in quartz crystals under an electron microscope.
The team then blasted them up to the space station and placed them outside the Columbus module on a special research platform known as EXPOSE-E that has an atmosphere consisting of 95% CO2, 1.6% argon, 0.15% oxygen, 2.7% nitrogen, and 370 parts per million of H2O; with a pressure of 1,000 Pascals - all parameters similar to those found on Mars. The fungi were also pelted with ultra-violet radiation.

Eighteen months later, scientists studied the results, which have been published in the journal Astrobiology.
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Nebula

Space weather: Cosmic radiation intensifying as we enter another Solar Minimum

Seneca
The Watchers
Thu, 28 Jan 2016 17:22 UTC
Cosmic rays chart
© spaceweather.com
An increased activity of cosmic rays has been observed around the Arctic Circle by the neutron monitors during the last year. The same trend was also noted in an independent measurement project carried out by the Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus over California. The experts think these changes are closely related to a drop in solar activity, as we enter another Solar Minimum.

Cosmic rays are a significant form of space weather. They get accelerated toward the Earth by distant supernova explosions and other violent events and are capable of seeding clouds, triggering lightning and penetrating commercial airplanes.

According to the measurements conducted by the Spaceweather.com team, flying back and forth across the continental USA only once, can absorb an amount of ionizing cosmic radiation equivalent to 2 or 5 dental X-rays. More to the point, the cosmic rays can affect mountain climbers, high-altitude drones and astronauts onboard the International Space Station in the same manner.
Cosmic rays Mar 2015 to Jan 2016
© spaceweather.com
To measure the radiation, the students have been launching helium balloons into the stratosphere, as a part of the monitoring project. The obtained results showed an excellent match with measurements conducted in polar latitudes.

In general, the polar latitudes are highly suitable for performing such measurements, because the cosmic radiation is concentrated there due to Earth's magnetic field configuration. However, it turns out that cosmic rays are not intensifying only over the poles of our planet, but also over lower latitudes, where the magnetic field is stronger and shields against deep space radiation more efficiently, as well. An example for this is the measurement project carried over California.

Comment: There is plenty of evidence that an increase in cosmic radiation not only affects the planet in the form of major earth changes, but the also affects the humans residing on it. See:

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Robot

Tipping point for workerless agriculture: World's first robot-run lettuce farm to produce 30,000 heads daily

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
Global Economic Analysis
Sat, 30 Jan 2016 16:54 UTC
Lettuce farm
© Spread
Future of Farming

The future of farming has arrived. It's vertical, soilless, and run by robots.

Tech Insider reports World's First Robot-run farm will harvest 30,000 heads of lettuce daily.
The Japanese lettuce production company Spread believes the farmers of the future will be robots.

So much so that Spread is creating the world's first farm manned entirely by robots. Instead of relying on human farmers, the indoor Vegetable Factory will employ robots that can harvest 30,000 heads of lettuce every day.

Don't expect a bunch of humanoid robots to roam the halls, however; the robots look more like conveyor belts with arms. They'll plant seeds, water plants, and trim lettuce heads after harvest in the Kyoto, Japan farm.

The Vegetable Factory follows the growing agricultural trend of vertical farming, where farmers grow crops indoors without natural sunlight. Instead, they rely on LED light and grow crops on racks that stack on top of each other.

In addition to increasing production and reducing waste, indoor vertical farming also eliminates runoff from pesticides and herbicides — chemicals used in traditional outdoor farming that can be harmful to the environment.

The new farm, set to open in 2017, will be an upgrade to Spread's existing indoor farm, the Kameoka Plant. That farm currently produces about 21,000 heads of lettuce per day with help from a small staff of humans. Spread's new automation technology will not only produce more lettuce, it will also reduce labor costs by 50%, cut energy use by 30%, and recycle 98% of water needed to grow the crops.
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Galaxy

Enormous invisible gas cloud careening toward Earth with power of 2 million suns


Sputnik
Sat, 30 Jan 2016 04:49 UTC
Gas cloud
© NASA
An invisible gas cloud of spectacular proportions, moving at some 700,000 mph, is believed to be heading for a collision with our galaxy, releasing enough energy to form over two million new stars.


​But nobody alive on Earth today should worry, as it is expected to occur some 30 million years in the future, according to research published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The cloud was discovered in 1963 by American astronomer Gail P. Smith, and later named after him. Since then, the "Smith Cloud" has been thoroughly examined by various astronomers using the Green Bank Observatory and the Hubble Telescope.

According to estimates, the cloud formed on the outskirts of the Milky Way during the period when dinosaurs walked the Earth, approximately 70 million years ago. The Smith Cloud trajectory has been poetically described by astronomers as: "what goes up must come down." After forming, cosmologists note that the cloud was blown away from the Milky Way and then, reaching its farthest point, turned back.

"It's [the path of the cloud] telling us that the Milky Way is a bubbling, very active place where gas can be thrown out of one part of the disk and then return back down into another," Andrew Fox, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, leader of the research team said, outlining that movement of gas reflects changes constantly occurring within our galaxy.
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Bell

Science of sound proves you are a cosmic instrument

Christina Sarich
Waking Times
Tue, 26 Jan 2016 00:00 UTC
Cymatic frequency
© blenderartists.org
Cymatic frequency: Human voice made visible.
  • Music in our DNA
  • Harmony in health, variations cause deterioration
  • Nerves transmit musical impulses, not electrical ones
  • Intelligence correlates with harmony
"Music is the universal language of mankind." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

An ancient understanding of the cosmological universe puts forth that inaudible music calculates the position of the heavenly bodies in our skies. With quintessential harmony, Mars, Neptune, Uranus, and all the other planets are held perfectly in place, with the harmonic ratios of each planet determining how they respond to one another, and how they affect all life on the planet earth, as well as sentient life elsewhere in the galaxy. The ancients understood that cosmic harmony is the state of enlightenment. Disharmony, is when the egoic nature, or false self has not been healed, and conducts the 'show' of our lives - the musical, as it were, of you.

Comment: A sound theory! All matter exists at specific densities or vibrations and each particle has its own unique resonant frequency, its own place in the cosmic symphony. Our choices lie in selecting which currents, which harmonies, we merge with and what message or frequency wave we emanate and amplify.

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Info

Moon born in a head-on collision with Earth

Belinda Smith
Cosmos
Fri, 29 Jan 2016 19:56 UTC
Lunar Rock
© Paul Warren/UCLA
A close-up of lunar rock from the Apollo 17 mission. Its oxygen 'fingerprint' matches that of Earth rocks.
As births go, they don't come much more violent than the Moon's.

Some 4.5 billion years ago, the young Earth collided with a developing planet, Theia. But instead of dealing each other a glancing blow, chemical analysis shows the collision was head-on, disintegrating Theia and part of Earth into a hot swirling disk of water and dust surrounding what was left of Earth.

This mix eventually clumped together to become the Moon, a new study suggests.

The key to the findings is the unique oxygen "fingerprint" that is found in all the planets, moons, comets and asteroids in our Solar System, including the Earth and the Moon.

More than 99.9% of Earth's oxygen is "normal", with each atom containing eight protons and eight neutrons. But there are small quantities of slightly heavier oxygen - molecules with an extra neutron jammed in.

While this "fingerprint" is a reliable identifier, it has traditionally been very hard to detect. So the University of California Los Angeles-led team used new, super-sensitive equipment to analyse seven lunar rocks brought back by the Apollo 12, 15 and 17 missions, as well as a lunar meteorite, and compared them to six volcanic rocks from the Earth's mantle. They found their heavy oxygen levels to be almost identical - within five parts per million.

To have that level of similarity, the planetary objects must have crashed into each other straight on. A side blow couldn't account for that degree of mixing.
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Info

Herpes in space: NASA using $80,000 in grants to study how it mutates in space flight


RT
Fri, 29 Jan 2016 04:16 UTC
Herpes research
© Maxim Shipenkov / Reuters
NASA is engaged in a study of four types of herpesviruses to better understand how they mutate - and worsen - before, during, and after manned space missions. Funded by grants and contracts totaling $80,000, it is expected to be completed by May of 2018.

Titled "Effect of Spaceflight on Herpesvirus Genome Stability and Diversity," the research is being conducted out of the University of Florida.

"The goal of this study will be to determine the changes in the genomic and mutational diversity that is present in the Herpesvirus virome present in astronaut saliva and urine samples collected before, during, and after space flight," NASA said on its website.

Comment: See also:

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Nebula

Is consciousness the product of carefully balanced chaos?

David Shultz
Science
Tue, 26 Jan 2016 19:15 UTC
signals in the brain
© agsandrew/Shutterstock
Is my yellow the same as your yellow? Does your pain feel like my pain? The question of whether the human consciousness is subjective or objective is largely philosophical. But the line between consciousness and unconsciousness is a bit easier to measure. In a new study of how anesthetic drugs affect the brain, researchers suggest that our experience of reality is the product of a delicate balance of connectivity between neurons—too much or too little and consciousness slips away.

"It's a very nice study," says neuroscientist Melanie Boly at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the work. "The conclusions that they draw are justified."

Previous studies of the brain have revealed the importance of "cortical integration" in maintaining consciousness, meaning that the brain must process and combine multiple inputs from different senses at once. Our experience of an orange, for example, is made up of sight, smell, taste, touch, and the recollection of our previous experiences with the fruit. The brain merges all of these inputs—photons, aromatic molecules, etc.—into our subjective experience of the object in that moment.
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Beaker

Evolution: Still a theory in crisis

Ann Gauger
Evolution News and Views
Wed, 27 Jan 2016 01:39 UTC
bird
© Christian Mehlführer
Michael Denton has written a sequel to his groundbreaking book, published in 1985, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. As readers of Evolution News know, the new book is Evolution: Still A Theory in Crisis. The thing to note, first of all, is that the new title is correct.

Even after thirty years. The problems Denton outlined more than thirty years ago are still there. The main argument of Denton's book, that nature is discontinuous and not the product of gradual incremental change, is as true today as it was then, despite the predictions of scientists that new discoveries in developmental biology would come to the rescue.

Denton's thesis has history behind it. It comes from a long line of structuralist biologists. In fact, before Darwin, nearly every mainstream biologist held a structuralist point of view -- as opposed to an adaptationalist one -- and for many years after Darwin the idea of structuralism persisted as an acceptable view.


Comment: How can forms and types exist, "prefigured into the order of things from the beginning"? For an atheist answer, see Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. For a theistic view, see William Dembski's Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information.

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Magnify

Scientists discover possible biological cause of schizophrenia that could lead to cure

Andrew Griffin
The Independent
Thu, 28 Jan 2016 19:30 UTC
synapses of primary human neurons
© Heather de Rivera / McCarroll lab
Imaging studies showed C4 (in green) located at the synapses of primary human neurons
Scientists might have found the biological cause of schizophrenia, in a study that has been described as a "turning point" in tackling mental illness.

A new study appears to show that the devastating disorder is linked to a physical process where connections between parts of the brain are "pruned" away.

The finding could lead scientists to be able to work out a way of treating the disease at its source, rather than simply looking to reduce the symptoms. It might even be discovered that schizophrenia could be triggered by an infectious agent.

When people are going through adolescence, their brains are re-wired in a way that sees some synapses cut away. But a gene leads some people's brains to prune away too much, and leads to presentations of schizophrenia, according to the study.

The extreme "pruning" can bring about the symptoms of schizophrenia, which can be hugely debilitating and lead people to lose their grip on reality and see delusions and experience paranoia.
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