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Butterfly

Human brain evolved to be not just bigger but finely shaped and "massively reorganized"

University of New England
Phys.org
Thu, 09 Jul 2020 12:00 UTC
brains
© Gabriele Sansalone
Reconstruction of the 3D digital brains and phylogenetic tree of primates.
The human brain: not just large but finely shaped

Large brains have long differentiated humans and primates from other mammals and there is a clear evidence that brain mass increased through time.

Now a new study by the University of New England, in collaboration with Italian and American institutes, has shown that the evolution of higher cognitive capacity is not only due to having a larger brain but also due to the brain having the "right" shape.

While brain size has long been the preferred measured trait for anthropological investigations, the brain is not uniform in shape and displays considerable structural variation.

Comment: And we're still expected to believe - whether 'fast' or 'slow' - that this "massive reorganization" all happened by chance? And check out SOTT radio's:

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Moon

Weird green gel-like substance found on Moon identified by scientists


Inverse
Wed, 08 Jul 2020 20:43 UTC
Green gel-like goo on the Moon
© CNSA/CLEP
An image of the crater where the "gel like" substance was found.
While roaming the far side of the Moon, China's Chang'e-4 lunar lander mission discovered an unusual, gel-like substance on the lunar surface. The discovery puzzled scientists, who poured over the images sent over by the Yutu-2 rover to try and figure out what this strange substance is.

A year later, and a team of scientists may have just solved this lunar mystery.

A new study, published in the August issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters, revealed that the gel-like substance is, not very shockingly, rock. The reason why the rock glistened and appeared gel-like in the images captured by the Yutu-2 rover is that it was melted together possibly in the aftermath of a meteorite impact.

Yutu-2 landed on the Moon in January 2019 with a mission to explore the far side of the rocky body. The far side of the Moon is the side of the Moon that faces away from Earth, which makes it far and therefore far less explored.
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Blue Planet

Plate tectonics research rewrites history of Earth's continents

Curtin University
Phys.org
Fri, 10 Jul 2020 19:41 UTC
Earth Sun
© Pixabay
Curtin University-led research has found new evidence to suggest that the Earth's first continents were not formed by subduction in a modern-like plate tectonics environment as previously thought, and instead may have been created by an entirely different process.

Published in the journal Geology, the research team measured the iron and zinc isotopes in rock sourced from central Siberia and South Africa and determined that the composition of these rocks may have formed in a non-subduction environment.

Lead author Dr. Luc-Serge Doucet, from the Earth Dynamics Research Group in Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the first continents were formed early in Earth's history more than three billion years ago, but how they were formed is still open to debate.

Comment: See also:

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Comet 2

Comet NEOWISE has "supersized" nucleus, sprouts another tail


Space Weather
Fri, 10 Jul 2020 18:55 UTC
NEOWISE
© Sebastian Voltmer
Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) with Ion tail (!) captured on July 7, 2020 over the French village church of Spicheren. Stack of 63 frames captured with a Nikon D800 (ISO 320) and a 135mm lens. See also the related time lapse video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKuT2AWkfxk
Comet NEOWISE just keeps getting better. Not only is it visible to the naked eye in morning twilight, but also, now, it has two tails. Sebastian Voltmer photographed them over the village church of Spicheren, France.

The brighter of the two is the dust tail, made of dusty-rocky grains sprinkled like crumbs along the comet's curved orbit. Just above it is the faint ion tail, made of gas shoved straight away from the sun by the solar wind.

"The ion tail is relatively dim," says Voltmer. "To record it, I had to stack 63 frames captured with my Nikon D800 digital camera (ISO 320)."

Look carefully at the ion tail; it's blue. This makes it tricky to see against a backdrop of blue twilight. Visibility will improve in the days ahead as the comet moves into darker skies farther from the sun.

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

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Music

Earth's atmosphere rings like a bell


University of Hawaii
Wed, 08 Jul 2020 09:17 UTC
Earth
The thin, critical envelope of the Earth's atmosphere is just visible on this global image.

A ringing bell vibrates simultaneously at a low-pitched fundamental tone and at many higher-pitched overtones, producing a pleasant musical sound. A study, published in Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, by scientists at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Kyoto University, shows that the Earth's entire atmosphere vibrates in an analogous manner, in a striking confirmation of theories developed by physicists over the last two centuries.

In the case of the atmosphere, the "music" comes not as a sound we could hear, but in the form of large-scale waves of atmospheric pressure spanning the globe and traveling around the equator, some moving east-to-west and others west-to-east. Each of these waves is a resonant vibration of the global atmosphere, analogous to one of the resonant pitches of a bell.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Earth changes in an electric universe: Is climate change really man-made?

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Question

4 mysterious, unidentified circular objects discovered in outer space

Mara Johnson-Groh
Live Science
Thu, 09 Jul 2020 19:17 UTC
CSIRO's ASKAP
© CSIRO
Antennas of CSIRO's ASKAP telescope at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia.
There's something unusual lurking out in the depths of space: Astronomers have discovered four faint objects that at radio wavelengths are highly circular and brighter along their edges. And they're unlike any class of astronomical object ever seen before.

The objects, which look like distant ring-shaped islands, have been dubbed odd radio circles, or ORCs, for their shape and overall peculiarity. Astronomers don't yet know exactly how far away these ORCs are, but they could be linked to distant galaxies. All objects were found away from the Milky Way's galactic plane and are around 1 arcminute across (for comparison, the moon's diameter is 31 arcminutes).

In a new paper detailing the discovery, the astronomers offer several possible explanations, but none quite fits the bill for all four new ORCs. After ruling out objects like supernovas, star-forming galaxies, planetary nebulas and gravitational lensing — a magnifying effect due to the bending of space-time by nearby massive objects — among other things, the astronomers speculate that the objects could be shockwaves leftover from some extragalactic event or possibly activity from a radio galaxy.

"[The objects] may well point to a new phenomenon that we haven't really probed yet," said Kristine Spekkens, astronomer at the Royal Military College of Canada and Queen's University, who was not involved with the new study. "It may also be that these are an extension of a previously known class of objects that we haven't been able to explore."
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Seismograph

The sixth sense of animals: An early warning system for earthquakes?


Phys.org
Fri, 03 Jul 2020 16:01 UTC
Professor Martin Wikelski attaches accelerometers to the collars of farm animals
© Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Professor Martin Wikelski attaches accelerometers to the collars of farm animals.
Even today, nobody can reliably predict when and where an earthquake will occur. However, eyewitnesses have repeatedly reported that animals behave unusually before an earthquake. In an international cooperation project, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz/Radolfzell and the Cluster of Excellence Center for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior at the University of Konstanz, have investigated whether cows, sheep, and dogs can actually detect early signs of earthquakes.

To do so, they attached sensors to the animals in an earthquake-prone area in Northern Italy and recorded their movements over several months. The movement data show that the animals were unusually restless in the hours before the earthquakes. The closer the animals were to the epicenter of the impending quake, the earlier they started behaving unusually. The movement profiles of different animal species in different regions could therefore provide clues with respect to the place and time of an impending earthquake.

Experts disagree about whether earthquakes can be exactly predicted. Nevertheless, animals seem to sense the impending danger hours in advance. For example, there are reports that wild animals leave their sleeping and nesting places immediately before strong quakes and that pets become restless. However, these anecdotal accounts often do not stand up to scientific scrutiny because the definition of unusual behavior is often too unclear and the observation period too short. Other factors could also explain the behavior of the animals.
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Blue Planet

What a mass of rotting reindeer carcasses taught scientists

Phoebe Weston
The Guardian
Wed, 08 Jul 2020 07:54 UTC
reindeer
© Olav Strand
In August 2016, 323 wild tundra reindeer were killed in a freak lightning event on Norway's Hardangervidda plateau.
In August 2016, a park ranger stumbled upon 323 dead wild tundra reindeer in Norway's remote Hardangervidda plateau. They had been killed in a freak lightning event. But instead of removing the carcasses, the park decided to leave them where they were, allowing nature to take its course - and scientists to study this island of decomposition and how it might change the arctic tundra ecosystem.

Over the years scientists observed the bloated, fly-infested bodies turn into dry skeletons. The latest paper, published by the Royal Society in June, looked at the creation of a "landscape of fear", as top predators such as wolverines, golden eagles and arctic foxes took advantage of the carrion.

"The landscape of fear framework has provided a better understanding of animal decisions in relation to food and safety trade-offs, predator-prey relationships and how communities are structured across trophic levels," it concluded.

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

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Blue Planet

Fossil jawbone from Alaska forces rethink of dinosaurs in the Arctic

Public Library of Science
Phys.org
Wed, 08 Jul 2020 20:51 UTC
dromaeosaurid
© A. Chiarenza
Fossil jawbone from Alaska is a rare case of a juvenile Arctic dromaeosaurid dinosaur.
A small piece of fossil jawbone from Alaska represents a rare example of juvenile dromaeosaurid dinosaur remains from the Arctic, according to a study published July 8, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza of the Imperial College London, UK, and co-authors Anthony R. Fiorillo, Ronald S. Tykoski, Paul J. McCarthy, Peter P. Flaig, and Dori L. Contreras.

Dromaeosaurids are a group of predatory dinosaurs closely related to birds, whose members include well-known species such as Deinonychus and Velociraptor. These dinosaurs lived all over the world, but their bones are often small and delicate and rarely preserve well in the fossil record, complicating efforts to understand the paths they took as they dispersed between continents.

The Prince Creek Formation of northern Alaska preserves the largest collection of polar dinosaur fossils in the world, dating to about 70 million years ago, but the only dromaeosaurid remains found so far have been isolated teeth. The jaw fossil described in this study is a mere 14mm long and preserves only the tip of the lower jaw, but it is the first known non-dental dromaeosaurid fossil from the Arctic. Statistical analysis indicates this bone belongs to a close relative of the North American Saurornitholestes.

Comment: See also:

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Brain

Neurologists warn of potential for serious brain disorders in people with mild coronavirus symptoms

Ian Sample
The Irish Times
Wed, 08 Jul 2020 16:29 UTC
Fulminating ADEM showing many lesions.
© Rodríguez-Porcel F, Hornik A, Rosenblum J, Borys E, Biller J
Fulminating Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) showing many lesions.
Doctors may be missing signs of serious and potentially fatal brain disorders triggered by coronavirus, as they emerge in mildly affected or recovering patients, scientists have warned.

Neurologists are today publishing details of more than 40 UK Covid-19 patients whose complications ranged from brain inflammation and delirium to nerve damage and stroke. In some cases the neurological problem was the patient's first and main symptom.

The cases, published in the journal Brain, reveal a rise in a life-threatening condition called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (Adem), as the first wave of infections swept across Europe. At University College London's Institute of Neurology, Adem cases rose from one a month before the pandemic to two or three a week in April and May. One woman, who was 59, died of the complication.

Comment: Considering the general consensus that Covid-19 did not have a natural origin, perhaps one might wonder about its proclivity to attack the brain and nervous system . . .

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