Science & TechnologyS


Mars

Meet NASA's robot helicopter for Mars


RT
Sat, 12 May 2018 13:09 UTC
Mars helicopter
© NASA
A robot helicopter will fly the skies of Mars as part of the 2020 mission, NASA has announced, hoping to replicate the success of the Wright brothers on the red planet.

The 'marscopter' will be one of the components of the Mars survey mission scheduled to blast off in July 2020, the US space agency announced on Friday. It is supposed to fill in the important gap in observation capability between the ground rovers and orbital imaging probes.

"The ability to see clearly what lies beyond the next hill is crucial for future explorers," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator at NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, DC. "We already have great views of Mars from the surface as well as from orbit. With the added dimension of a bird's-eye view from a 'marscopter,' we can only imagine what future missions will achieve."
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Galaxy

Rogue star Gilese 710 hurtling towards our solar system will arrive sooner than we thought

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Thu, 10 May 2018 12:00 UTC
Gliese 623 A
Gliese 710 may be as dim as a red dwarf star, like Gliese 623 A (M2.5V) and B (M5.8Ve) at lower right.
According to new calculations, we may have a little less time to prepare for a star on course to kiss the edges of our Solar System.

Yep. Dwarf star Gliese 710, which we've known about for some time, could now arrive in 1.29 million years, instead of the previously calculated 1.36 million years.

Gliese 710 is what is classified as a rogue star - one that has gone roaming across the galaxy, free of the gravitational chains that normally hold stars in position.

At a speed of 51,499 kilometres per hour (32,000 miles per hour), it's not quite fast enough to be considered a runaway star, but it's still travelling at a hefty clip.

Comment: Whilst the flyby is apparently over a million years away, we should bear in mind that Gilese 710 is a body we know about and the predictions are based on our current models, because it is often the case that we are taken by surprise:

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Dig

Earth was warmer 500 million years ago and led to an explosion of life

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That
Thu, 10 May 2018 08:42 UTC
brachiopod fossils
Reflected light microscope images of some of the brachiopod fossils used in this study. They are not very pretty, but they are pretty useful for scientists researching ancient climates.
Tiny fossils unlock clues to Earth's climate half a billion years ago. Sea temperatures of 25C helped fuel an explosion of life on Earth about 500 million years ago on Earth, according to UK scientists.

Scientists from the UK and France have quantified the temperature of Earth's oceans over half a billion years ago by combining fossil data and climate models.
  • Study suggests early animals diversified in a greenhouse world, with a climate similar to that in which the dinosaurs lived
  • Chemical analysis was conducted on tiny fossils shells about 1mm long from blocks of limestone from Shropshire, UK, dated to between 515 - 510 million years old
  • Findings help to expand our knowledge of early animals and the environment in which they lived
Reflected light microscope images of some of the brachiopod fossils used in this study. They are not very pretty, but they are pretty useful for scientists researching ancient climates.

Comment: What seems apparent is that, on earth, life of a particular kind seems to thrive in more temperate climates:

Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes in The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction:
Allan & Delair bring serious questions to bear on the mainstream interpretation of our reality and history and do it armed to the teeth with science. The case they make for a Golden Age world prior to the Deluge is compelling and quite unique. Wielding hard data from literally every field of science, they demonstrate that hundreds of thousands of years of ice ages may be a myth created to explain many anomalous findings on earth that uniformitarian science had no other way to explain. This data strongly suggests a completely different planet prior to a worldwide cataclysm that they say occurred in 9500 bc, but the latest research puts the most recent major event back at least another thousand years. They refer to it as the 'Phaeton Disaster'.
See Also:

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Health

Self-repairing organs and the new research that could save your life in a heartbeat

Philip Ball
New Scientist
Wed, 09 May 2018 00:00 UTC
heart healing
© Lotte Keijzer
Our cells are more malleable than we thought - and by transforming them inside the body, we can mend broken hearts or even degenerating brains from within

What becomes of the broken-hearted? In cardiac medicine, the answer is usually brutally straightforward: they die. Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide and there is often precious little we can do about it. Pacemakers bring some relief and transplants work, but there are nowhere near enough donated hearts to go around. And unlike skin and liver cells, heart muscle cells can't remake themselves. Once they get damaged or die, they are gone forever.

Lab-grown stem cells, once the great hope for mending hearts, have disappointed. But over the past few years, cell biologists have been quietly exploring an alternative approach. Rather than growing cells in a dish and transplanting them, they want to switch their identities inside the body, so that we can heal ourselves from within.
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Fish

World's deepest plastic bag found at bottom of Mariana Trench - highlights spread of ocean pollution


The Telegraph
Thu, 10 May 2018 20:35 UTC
mariana Trench plastic pollution
The bag at the bottom of the Mariana Trench
The world's deepest plastic bag has been found at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench, highlighting the spread of ocean pollution.

Scientists made the discovery at 36,000ft (10,898m) in the world's deepest ocean trench, one of 3,000 pieces of man-made debris dating back 30 years.

Numerous international teams working around the world on over 5,000 separate dives and using deep-sea remote vehicles helped study the ocean beds to discover what lies beneath.

Over a third of the debris found was micro-plastic, with 89 per cent from single-use products.
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Galaxy

A mystery in the cosmic dawn: What's been eating the first starlight?

Colin Stuart
New Scientist
Fri, 11 May 2018 20:16 UTC
night sky mystery starlight
© Stewart Mcreath
A shoestring experiment in the Australian outback has seen the signal of the very first stars - and a weird effect astronomers are struggling to explain

In the dusty, dry outback of Western Australia there is nothing for miles around but red dirt, unpaved roads and the occasional kangaroo. A journey across this alien landscape is a lesson in solitude - just you and the road, a 4×4 as essential as a sense of adventure. Astronomer Judd Bowman at Arizona State University has been coming here for nearly a decade to visit the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, an old sheep and cattle station repurposed as a place to listen to the universe.

It hardly seems the stage for a scientific revolution, meagre compared with the cathedral-like majesty of machines like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Yet what Bowman and his colleagues have discovered here, using a telescope half the size of a ping-pong table, spells trouble for our picture of the early universe.
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Life Preserver

Chlamydia is killing off Australia's koala marsupials

Mindy Weisberger
Live Science
Wed, 09 May 2018 16:39 UTC
Koala bear in Australia
© Shutterstock
One of the leading killers of Australia's endearing koalas is a debilitating bacterial infection: chlamydia.

The idea of koalas with chlamydia - a common sexually transmitted infection in people - recently drew chuckles on HBO's "Last Week Tonight," but the disease, which is affecting koalas in epidemic proportions, is hardly a laughing matter.

Chlamydia-infected koalas made the news on Sunday (May 6) when the show's host, John Oliver, mentioned the dedication of a new koala ward at the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital, called the John Oliver Koala Chlamydia Ward, to treat the sick marsupials.

But chlamydia is no joke to koalas. Surveys have shown that some wild populations demonstrate a 100 percent rate of infection, which frequently leads to blindness, severe bladder inflammation, infertility and death. And treatment with antibiotics could create further problems for the marsupials, upsetting their gut microbes and making it difficult for them to digest the eucalyptus leaves that are a staple of their diet, researchers recently discovered.
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Nebula

Bioluminescence takes hold causing San Diego's night-time surf to glow

Gary Robbins
The Sand Diego Union-Tribune
Tue, 08 May 2018 13:35 UTC
bioluminescence
© Erik Jepsen/UC San DiegoErik Jepsen of UC San Diego took this image of bioluminescence along the San Diego County coastline on Tuesday night.
A red tide that developed off San Diego over the past few days is producing one of nature's small but grand spectacles: bioluminescent light in the ocean.

The algae bloom is filled with bioluminescent phytoplankton that lights up when the micro-organisms tumble down the face of waves at and near shore.

At times, the light appears when a surfer paddles his or her board through the surf, or simply walks on the beach.

The phenomenon was first forecast on Monday by Michael Latz, an internationally known bioluminescence expert at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

surfing red tide
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Attention

Google's massive carbon footprint revealed by new online tool

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That?
Tue, 08 May 2018 15:43 UTC
google carbon footprint
© Joana Moll“DEFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREST”: Screenshot captured on May 1, 2018 after 20 seconds.
Internet search giant emits 500 kg of CO2 emissions per second.

Every Google search comes at a cost to the planet. In processing 3.5 billion searches a day, the world's most popular website accounts for about 40% of the internet's carbon footprint.

Despite the notion that the internet is a "cloud," it actually relies on millions of physical servers in data centers around the world, which are connected with miles of undersea cables, switches, and routers, all requiring a lot of energy to run. Much of that energy comes from power sources that emit carbon dioxide into the air as they burn fossil fuels; one study from 2015 suggests internet activity results in as much CO2 emissions as the global aviation industry.
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Black Cat 2

Overpopulation of free-roaming cats driving hunt for better contraceptive


Phys.org
Thu, 10 May 2018 10:57 UTC
cat kitten
© CC0 Public Domain
While the true number of free-roaming cats in the United States is unknown, experts believe the population may rival that of pet cats, with estimates ranging from 70 million to 90 million. This staggering number contributes substantially to cat overpopulation and the estimated 1.4 million cats euthanized each year in this country alone.

"Uncontrolled reproduction in free-roaming cats is a major problem in the United States and abroad," said Dr. Kelly Diehl, Senior Scientific and Communications Adviser at Morris Animal Foundation. "While there are excellent trap and neuter programs, many communities just don't have the intensive resources needed for this type of long-term surgical intervention. There needs to be a faster, easier and less expensive method than surgery to address this health and welfare in free-roaming cats on a global scale."

Morris Animal Foundation-funded researchers at the Alliance for Contraception in Cats and Dogs embarked on a project to determine if GonaCon, a nonsurgical contraceptive used in some wildlife species, might provide a solution. The results, unfortunately, were not as promising for fertility control of free-roaming cats as previously indicated.
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