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Mars

NASA image reveals probable sandstone layers on Mars

Evan Gough
Universe Today
Thu, 23 Jan 2020 00:00 UTC
sandstone
© NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Light-toned layered deposits thought to be sandstones in West Candor Chasma, Mars. They may have formed in an ancient wet and potentially habitable environment.
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been in orbit around Mars for almost 14 years. It carries a variety of instruments with it, including the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) instrument. That instrument has collected thousands of images of Mars.

CRISM's main purpose is to created detailed maps of the surface mineralogy of Mars. It can detect iron, oxides, phyllosilicates (clays,) and carbonates. All of these materials are indications that Mars was wet in the past, or is still wet now

Usually, CRISM images are paired with High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) images of the same area. HiRISE is one of three cameras on the MRO, and the most powerful. In fact, HiRISE is a reflecting telescope, the largest ever carried on a deep space mission. It can image the surface of Mars in great detail, and NASA makes HiRISE images available on the website.
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Cloud Precipitation

Climate (not humans) shaped early forests of New England

Harvard University
Phys.org
Wed, 22 Jan 2020 11:29 UTC
sandplain
© David Foster, Harvard University
Conservationists have employed prescribed fire in an attempt to maintain openland habitats such as the Katama sandplain grassland on the island of Martha's Vineyard. Research by Oswald and colleagues indicates that, despite a large human population for thousands of years, fire was uncommon and landscapes across southern New England were heavily forested until European contact and deforestation for agriculture. Grazing and other agricultural practices can be used to maintain these uncommon habitats today.
A new study in the journal Nature Sustainability overturns long-held interpretations of the role humans played in shaping the American landscape before European colonization. The findings give new insight into the rationale and approaches for managing some of the most biodiverse landscapes in the eastern U.S.

The study, led by archaeologists, ecologists, and paleoclimatologists at Harvard, Emerson College and elsewhere, focuses on the coast from Long Island to Cape Cod and the nearby islands of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Block Island, and Naushon — areas that historically supported the greatest densities of Native people in New England and today are home to the highest concentrations of rare habitats in the region, including sandplain grasslands, heathlands, and pitch pine and scrub oak forests.

"For decades, there's been a growing popularization of the interpretation that, for millennia, Native people actively managed landscapes — clearing and burning forests, for example — to support horticulture, improve habitat for important plant and animal resources, and procure wood resources," says study co-author David Foster, Director of the Harvard Forest at Harvard University. This active management is said to have created an array of open-land habitats and enhanced regional biodiversity.

Comment: As noted above, the conservationists - opening up the land with controlled burning - have actually been doing the exact opposite to what the native peoples were doing. And this wouldn't be the first time ill-informed and biased conservation efforts, despite their best intentions, have run counter to what nature intends. It also reflects that, in the long term, man's impact is relatively insignificant:

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Microscope 2

15,000-year-old unknown viruses found in Tibetan glacier

Bob Yirka
Phys.org
Fri, 24 Jan 2020 12:00 UTC
glacier
© CC0 Public Domain
A team of researchers from The Ohio State University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found a host of ancient virus groups in ice cores taken from a Tibetan glacier. They have written a paper about their discovery and uploaded it to the bioRxiv preprint server.

Back in 1992, a team of researchers collected ice core samples from a glacier in the Tibetan Plateau — they calculated the ice to be approximately 15,000 years old. Some of the samples were put into cold storage for study at a later date. Then, in 2015, another team collected ice core samples from the same glacier — they were also put into cold storage for later study. In this new effort, the researchers carried out one part of the testing planned for the cores — looking at what sort of organisms might be trapped in them.

When the two teams originally collected their ice core samples, they did not ensure the equipment they were using would not contaminate the cores they were collecting. That meant the researchers with this new effort had to take special care to remove any contamination that had occurred during initial extraction and to make sure they did not introduce any contaminants of their own.

Comment: It's interesting the viruses were noted as different possibly due to "differences in climate", one wonders what these differences were and how different?

The location is also notable, because, as detailed in New Light on the Black Death: The Viral and Cosmic Connection:
In a letter to Lancet [1],Wickramasinghe explains that a small amount of a virus introduced into the stratosphere could make a first tentative fallout east of the great mountain range of the Himalayas, where the stratosphere is thinnest, followed by sporadic deposits in neighboring areas. Could this explain why new strains of the influenza virus that are capable of engendering epidemics, and which are caused by radical genetic mutations, usually originate in Asia? Wickramasinghe argues that if the virus is only minimally infective, the subsequent course of its global progress will depend on stratospheric transport and mixing, leading to a fallout continuing seasonally over a few years; even if all reasonable attempts are made to contain an infective spread, the appearance of new foci almost anywhere is a possibility.
And, for reference, a map showing the Himalayas (red dot) and the Tibetan Plateau:

himalayas
© Google Maps
See also:

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Microscope 1

DNA sleuths read the coronavirus genome, tracing its origins and looking for dangerous mutations

Sharon Begley
STAT
Fri, 24 Jan 2020 00:00 UTC
coronavirus microscope
© The New England Journal of Medicine
Electron micrographs of isolated 2019-nCoV particles (left), and in cells from human airways (right), marked with arrows.
As infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists race to contain the outbreak of the novel coronavirus centered on Wuhan, China, they're getting backup that's been possible only since the explosion in genetic technologies: a deep-dive into the DNA of the virus known as 2019-nCoV.

Analyses of the viral genome are already providing clues to the origins of the outbreak and even possible ways to treat the infection, a need that is becoming more urgent by the day: Early on Saturday in China, health officials reported 15 new fatalities in a single day, bringing the death toll to 41. There are now nearly 1,100 confirmed cases there.

Reading the DNA also allows researchers to monitor how 2019-nCoV is changing and provides a roadmap for developing a diagnostic test and a vaccine.

Comment: See also:

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Galaxy

A giant star ate its dead neighbor and caused one of the brightest supernovas ever

Brandon Specktor
Live Science
Thu, 23 Jan 2020 00:00 UTC
supernova
© : Science Photo Library - MEHAU KULYK via Getty Images)
A bright supernova flares across the sky in this illustration. In 2006, researchers detected one of the brightest supernova explosions ever — and they may finally be able to explain it.
In 2006 a star exploded 50 billion times brighter than our sun. New research suggests it wasn't one star, but two.

In September 2006, an exploding star 50 billion times brighter than Earth's sun blazed to life 240 million light-years away in the Perseus constellation. For 70 days, the blast grew brighter and brighter, outshining its home galaxy by tenfold and measuring hundreds of times more powerful than a typical supernova. At the time, this superbright supernova (also known as a "hypernova") was the brightest stellar explosion ever detected.

What was so special about this record-setting blast (officially labeled SN 2006gy)? Nobody knew. But now, more than a decade later, scientists may finally have a clue. In a new study published today (Jan. 23) in the journal Science, astronomers re-analyzed the mysterious emission lines radiating from the explosion about a year after it peaked.

The team discovered large amounts of iron in the emissions, which they say could only be the result of the supernova interacting with some preexisting layer of stellar material ejected hundreds of years earlier.
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Hearts

Oak trees protect citrus crops from deadliest disease, scientific study reveals

koestoyo
University of Florida
Tue, 21 Jan 2020 08:26 UTC
Huanglongbing
© USDA
Symptoms of Huanglongbing include asymmetrical, blotchy yellowing or mottliCredit: ng on leaves with patches of green on one side and yellow on the other.
Image
Wise old oak trees may hold an extract that citrus growers can use to protect their fruit trees from the deadliest citrus crop disease the world has known.

The plant disease is called huanglongbing, or HLB, also known by its English name, citrus greening. The disease shows its presence when leaves turn lighter shades of green.

According to University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Science's (UF/IFAS) officials, HLB is responsible for a 90 percent reduction in the production of Florida's most valuable crop.

"Research scientists work with a sense of urgency to contain the pathogen and to manage HLB's impact on our important crop," said Lorenzo Rossi, assistant professor of plant root biology at the UF/IFAS Indian River Research and Education Center (IRREC), located in Fort Pierce, at the center of the Indian River District. The district is known for its peerless grapefruit quality, where it borders the state's central east coast, from its northernmost point in Micco, Florida, to its southernmost point in northern Palm Beach County.

Comment: As one comment under the article wondered, perhaps mulching with oak leaves could have a similar effect? What this study reflects is that few plants thrive in monocultures or the sterile and restrictive environments most frequently used throughout agricultural production these days, and, were we to understand the synergies in nature, farmers could significantly increase production while reducing the need for chemicals.

In our time where plant diseases are rampant, productivity is struggling, and the food supply is becoming increasingly toxic because of ill informed farming methods, learning how to work with nature has never been so critical for our own survival:

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Cassiopaea

Light from Betelgeuse faintest ever recorded, temperature way down in just 4 months, yet star has 'swollen' by 9%

Evan Gough
Phys.org
Thu, 23 Jan 2020 12:00 UTC
Betelgeuse
© ESO
This picture of the dramatic nebula around the bright red supergiant star Betelgeuse was created from images taken with the VISIR infrared camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). This structure, resembling flames emanating from the star, forms because the behemoth is shedding its material into space. The small red circle in the middle has a diameter about four and half times that of the Earth’s orbit and represents the location of Betelgeuse’s visible surface. The black disc corresponds to a very bright part of the image that was masked to allow the fainter nebula to be seen.
Betelgeuse keeps getting dimmer, and everyone is wondering what exactly that means. The star will go supernova at the end of its life, but that's not projected to happen for tens of thousands of years or so. So what's causing the dimming?

Villanova University astronomers Edward Guinan and Richard Wasatonic were the first to report Betelgeuse's recent dimming. In a new post on The Astronomer's Telegram, the pair of astronomers report a further dimming of Betelgeuse. They also point out that although the star is still dimming, its rate of dimming is slowing.

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star in the constellation Orion. It left the main sequence about 1 million years ago, and has been a red supergiant for about 40,000 years. It's a core-collapse SN II progenitor, which means that eventually, Betelgeuse will burn enough of its hydrogen that its core will collapse and it will explode as a supernova.

Comment: A great variety of activity occurring in space has been in the news recently: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Arrow Down

David Klinghoffer: Evolutionary thinking in a "state of decadence"


Uncommon Decsent
Thu, 23 Jan 2020 18:32 UTC
evolution decline
David Klinghoffer quotes from a post by paleontologist Gunter Bechly on everyone's favorite cuddly pet, prehistoric scorpions:
In today's science world it is no longer sufficient to objectively describe some nicely preserved ancient fossils. You must overinterpret the evidence and oversell their importance with a fancy evolutionary narrative. And you do not have to hesitate to be really bold with your claims, because neither the scientific reviewers nor the popular science media will care if your claims are actually supported by the evidence. This system is broken. It was broken by the pressure to publish or perish, by the pressure of public relation departments to generate lurid headlines, and by the pressure of the idiotic paradigm that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution.

David Klinghoffer, "Scientific Decadence and the Myth of Objectivity" at Evolution News and Science Today
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Moon

China releases huge batch of amazing Chang'e-4 images from moon's far side

Andrew Jones
Space.com
Thu, 23 Jan 2020 18:37 UTC
Chang'e-4
© CNSA
An image taken by China's Chang'e-4 mission on the moon.
China's long-lived lunar robots Chang'e-4 and Yutu-2 are once again at work on the far side of the moon, where they woke up for their 14th day on Jan. 18 and 19 respectively.

And those of us here on Earth can take a new look through the lander's and rover's lunar eyes, as China released a huge batch of data on Monday (Jan. 20). The data release includes high-resolution images of the moon from the Chang'e-4 lander's terrain camera and the panoramic camera on the Yutu-2 rover.

Chang'e-4 just reached the first anniversary of its historic landing in Von Kármán Crater, within the gigantic South Pole-Aitken basin. The newly published photos cover nearly a year of pioneering exploration on the far side of the moon, where no previous mission has landed.

Comment: See also:

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Brain

Scientists discovered a rat that had basically no brain but functioned normally

Aria Bracci, Northeastern University
Medical Xpress
Thu, 23 Jan 2020 19:36 UTC
professor
© Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University
Psychology professor Craig Ferris, Praveen Kulkarni, and their team oversaw the discovery of a rat that could see, hear, smell, and feel just like its peers, even though it was walking around with basically no brain.
One day, a scientist in Craig Ferris's lab was scanning the brains of very old rats when he found that one could see, hear, smell, and feel just like the other rats, but it was walking around with basically no brain — and likely had been since birth.

This rat, named R222, did have a brain. But its brain, affected by a condition called hydrocephalus, had compressed and collapsed as it filled with fluid, and many of the functions that would ordinarily be carried out in the brain had relocalized to areas that weren't taken over by fluid.

This provided the tools for Ferris, a psychology professor at Northeastern, to investigate how powerful the brain remains, even when tight on space. This, he says, might even influence the ever-present goal of machine learning: How small can you be and still get the job done?

Comment: As detailed in the article Man living with 90% of his brain missing similar discoveries have been made in humans:
"He was living a normal life. He has a family. He works. His IQ was tested at the time of his complaint. This came out to be 84, which is slightly below the normal range ... So, this person is not bright — but perfectly, socially apt".
See also: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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