Science & TechnologyS


Moon

Russian probe crashes into Moon - Roscosmos


RT
Sun, 20 Aug 2023 09:00 UTC
luna25
© RoscosmosLuna-25
The accident occurred after Luna-25 switched to an incorrect orbit, Russia's space agency says...

Russia's Luna-25 automatic interplanetary station has collided with the Moon, space agency Roscosmos has said.
"According to the results of a preliminary analysis... the Luna-25 spacecraft switched to a non-designated orbit and ceased to operate due to a collision with the surface of the Moon."
The probe was due to receive a signal to form a pre-landing elliptical orbit on Saturday, but communication was lost at 14:57 Moscow time (11: 57 GMT), the agency explained. Efforts on Saturday and Sunday to locate the craft and restore contact were unsuccessful.

A commission involving representatives of several agencies will be assembled to establish the reasons for the loss of the probe, Roscosmos said.

Luna-25 was launched on August 11 by a Soyuz 2.1b rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Amur Region of Russia's Far East. It was the first probe sent to the Moon by Russia since the Soviet era. The mission aimed to achieve the first ever landing near the south pole of Earth's satellite, known for its difficult terrain.
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Snowflake Cold

Another eminent scientist dissents from the 'settled' science on climate

Chris Morrison
The Daily Sceptic
Thu, 17 Aug 2023 07:00 UTC
Housecards
© Unknown
Given how much scientific work has been done on chaotic weather and climate patterns since the Second World War, it might be a surprise that the best that 'settled' science can come up with to explain all recent changes is that it's all down to humans adding small amounts of a trace gas into the atmosphere by burning previously sequestered plant material. But how plausible is that hypothesis? Not very, says Dr. Stuart Harris, a retired Professor of Geography at the University of Calgary, in a recently published and wide-ranging review of climate. The relationship of carbon dioxide to atmospheric air temperature has been widely discussed for 50 years, writes the author, and evidence from 24 sites shows that warming during the current deglaciation appears to precede increasing CO2 concentrations.

As the full implications of Net Zero start to become apparent, it is increasingly clear that blaming all climate change on human-caused C02, as the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states, is a political construct that will enrich global elites and impoverish ordinary people around the world. In Harris's view, the climate of the Earth is driven by uneven solar heating of the surface, and the movement of the excess heat in the tropics towards the cooler polar regions, primarily via ocean currents, modified by the movement of air masses. Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen also argues that most weather and long-term climate change is caused by heat exchanges across the planet. In his view, doubling C02 from its present level would lead to only a 2% perturbation to this vast energy budget.
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Brain

Neuroscientists re-create Pink Floyd song from listeners' brain activity

Lucy Tu
Scientific American
Tue, 15 Aug 2023 06:30 UTC
Pink Floyd
© Rob Verhorst/Redferns/Getty ImagesPink Floyd performs on stage at Earl's Court in London during The Wall Tour on August 6, 1980. Researchers re-created the band's song "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1" from listeners' brain activity.
Researchers hope brain implants will one day help people who have lost the ability to speak to get their voice back — and maybe even to sing. Now, for the first time, scientists have demonstrated that the brain's electrical activity can be decoded and used to reconstruct music.

A new study analyzed data from 29 people who were already being monitored for epileptic seizures using postage-stamp-size arrays of electrodes that were placed directly on the surface of their brain. As the participants listened to Pink Floyd's 1979 song "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1," the electrodes captured the electrical activity of several brain regions attuned to musical elements such as tone, rhythm, harmony and lyrics. Employing machine learning, the researchers reconstructed garbled but distinctive audio of what the participants were hearing. The study results were published on Tuesday in PLOS Biology.

Neuroscientists have worked for decades to decode what people are seeing, hearing or thinking from brain activity alone. In 2012 a team that included the new study's senior author — cognitive neuroscientist Robert Knight of the University of California, Berkeley — became the first to successfully reconstruct audio recordings of words participants heard while wearing implanted electrodes. Others have since used similar techniques to reproduce recently viewed or imagined pictures from participants' brain scans, including human faces and landscape photographs. But the recent PLOS Biology paper by Knight and his colleagues is the first to suggest that scientists can eavesdrop on the brain to synthesize music.
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Archaeology

From bad to worse for Darwinism, as new Cambrian Explosion finds arrive

David Coppedge
Evolution News
Thu, 17 Aug 2023 06:54 UTC
Walcott Quarry
More bad news for Darwinism arrived after my last article about Cambrian Explosion. I showed there that taphonomic conditions should have produced Precambrian animal fossils had they existed. Now, some of the other props for Darwin's House of Cards have been removed. Tom Bethell had said in that book, "The near-instant explosion of body plans is the opposite of what Darwin's theory predicts" (p 134).

Oxygen Theory Deflated

"No, oxygen didn't catalyze the swift blossoming of Earth's first multicellular organisms," begins some news from the University of Copenhagen. "Life on Earth didn't arise as described in textbooks." What? Textbooks wrong? Shocking!
"The fact that we now know, with a high degree of certainty, that oxygen didn't control the development of life on Earth provides us with an entirely new story about how life arose and what factors controlled this success," says the researcher, adding:

"Specifically, it means that we need to rethink a lot of the things that we believed to be true from our childhood learning. And textbooks need to be revised and rewritten." [Emphasis added.]
Textbooks had been saying, "increased oxygen levels triggered the evolutionary arrival of more advanced marine organisms." Scientists at the university, with international peers, claim that the oxygen theory "is being disproved" by measurements of oxygen levels in rocks dating from "the Avalon explosion, a forerunner era of the more famed Cambrian explosion." The Avalon Explosion they date at "between 685 and 800 million years ago."
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Comet 2

New Comet C/2023 P1


Spaceweather.com
Thu, 17 Aug 2023 19:11 UTC
A hyperbolic comet is falling into our solar system. Japanese amateur astronomer Hideo Nishimura discovered it just a few days ago in the constellation Gemini. Although it is relatively dim right now (magnitude +9), Comet Nishimura (C/2023 P1) could soon brighten more than 100-fold to become a naked-eye object in mid-September.
Comet C/2023 P1
© Dan BartlettA sky map with an inset photo of the comet from Dan Bartlett of June Lake, CA
A "hyperbolic comet" is a comet with too much energy to remain trapped inside the solar system. It will visit us only once, with the sun acting as a gravitational slingshot, sending the comet hurtling back into deep space after its flyby. Does that mean Comet Nishimura is an interstellar comet? Not necessarily. It might have come from the Oort Cloud. Indeed, that is more likely.
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Brain

Source of hidden consciousness in 'comatose' brain injury patients found


Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Mon, 14 Aug 2023 18:10 UTC
mri brain scans generic
Columbia researchers have identified brain injuries that may underlie hidden consciousness, a puzzling phenomenon in which brain-injured patients are unable to respond to simple commands, making them appear unconscious despite having some level of awareness.

"Our study suggests that patients with hidden consciousness can hear and comprehend verbal commands, but they cannot carry out those commands because of injuries in brain circuits that relay instructions from the brain to the muscles," says study leader Jan Claassen, MD, associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and chief of critical care and hospitalist neurology at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

The findings could help physicians more quickly identify brain-injured patients who might have hidden consciousness and better predict which patients are likely to recover with rehabilitation.
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Brain

Strange, two-faced brain cells confirmed to exist, and they may play a role in schizophrenia

Rebecca Sohn
Live Science
Fri, 04 Aug 2023 06:58 UTC
neurons
© BlackJack3D via Getty ImagesA newly confirmed class of brain cells seems perplexing at first glance, but understanding its function could help explain the underlying causes of conditions like autism and schizophrenia.
A strange class of brain cell has two features that seem to contradict each other, leading scientists to question whether it really exists. But now, a new study of mouse and human brains not only supports these paradoxical cells' existence but also hints that they could help explain the neurological underpinnings of conditions like autism and schizophrenia.

Published in July in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, the study found that two chemical markers, which were once thought to mark neurons with opposite roles, are sometimes found in the same neuron. Neurons with both of these markers, researchers found, frequently activate, or "express" genes related to the production of cellular energy using oxygen.

In postmortem brain tissue from donors with either autism or schizophrenia, neurons with these markers had altered gene expression related to this process, compared with tissue from people without the conditions.

This finding potentially jibes with research linking schizophrenia and autism to genetic changes that contribute to oxidative stress, or the buildup of reactive byproducts of energy production in cells. The research could be a step toward better understanding these complex neurological conditions.

Comment: See also: A mysterious brain network may underlie many psychiatric disorders

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Saturn

100-year-long 'megastorms' on Saturn are creating radio signals that scientists can't fully explain

Brandon Specktor
Live Science
Mon, 14 Aug 2023 21:21 UTC
Saturn 2010 megastorm
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteA closeup of the 2010 megastorm that formed in Saturn's northern hemisphere, wrapping around the entire planet
Imagine a thunderstorm so massive that its dark outline wrapped around the entire planet.

Such terrifying "megastorms" are common on Saturn. Also called "Great White Spots," they erupt once every 20 or 30 years in the planet's northern hemisphere and rage nonstop for months. Astronomers have spotted six of these planet-wide storms whipping around on Saturn since 1876. The most recent storm struck in December 2010, when NASA's Cassini spacecraft happened to be orbiting the planet, snagging a front-row view of the megastorm's entire 200-day life span.

Now, new research into the epic 2010 storm has found that those 200 days of thunder were just a few drops in a much bigger, weirder meteorological bucket. According to recent radio telescope scans, the ongoing impacts of megastorms that erupted on Saturn more than 100 years ago are still visible in the planet's atmosphere today, and they left behind persistent chemical anomalies that scientists can't fully explain.

In other words, long after a megastorm fades from view, its impact on Saturn's weather lasts centuries.

"For most of the time, Saturn's atmosphere looks hazy and featureless to the naked eye in contrast to Jupiter's colorful and vibrant atmosphere," the researchers wrote in a study published Aug. 11 in the journal Science Advances. "This picture changes when we look at Saturn using a radio eye."
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Fireball

Giant Deniliquin structure in Australia may be largest asteroid impact on record

Andrew Glikson
The Conversation
Sun, 13 Aug 2023 20:59 UTC
ISS view over Australia
© NASA/Wikimedia CommonsISS view over Australia at night.
In recent research published by myself and my colleague Tony Yeates in the journal Tectonophysics, we investigate what we believe - based on many years of experience in asteroid impact research - is the world's largest known impact structure, buried deep in the earth in southern New South Wales.

The Deniliquin structure, yet to be further tested by drilling, spans up to 520 kilometres in diameter. This exceeds the size of the near-300km-wide Vredefort impact structure in South Africa, which to date has been considered the world's largest.

Hidden traces of Earth's early history

The history of Earth's bombardment by asteroids is largely concealed. There are a few reasons for this. The first is erosion: the process by which gravity, wind and water slowly wear away land materials through time.

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


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Info

China achieves 'huge breakthrough' on laser weapons technology


Algora Blog
Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:55 UTC
  • High-energy laser weapons can now operate 'infinitely', thanks to a new cooling system that completely eliminates the build-up of waste heat
  • The technology could significantly change the face of battle by extending engagement times, and increasing range and damage, researchers say
Stephen Chen in Beijing via South China Morning Post (behind Paywall)
Laser Weapons
© US Marine CorpsScientists in China have claimed a major breakthrough in laser weapons technology, potentially changing the face of battle.
Chinese military scientists have announced a major breakthrough in laser weapon technology, claiming they have developed a new cooling system that allows high-energy lasers to operate "infinitely" without any build-up of waste heat.

According to scientists at the National University of Defence Technology, in Changsha, Hunan province, the new cooling system completely eliminates the harmful heat that is generated during the operation of high-energy lasers. The issue has been a major technical challenge for laser weapon development.

With the new technology, weapons can now generate laser beams for as long as they want, without any interruption or degradation in performance.
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