Science & TechnologyS


Solar Flares

The Sun is being weird. It could be because we're looking at it all wrong

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Sat, 18 Jun 2022 18:42 UTC
Sun's South Pole
© ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI TeamThe Sun's south pole, imaged by Solar Orbiter in 2022.
Something weird is going on with the Sun.

So far, almost every day in 2022 it has erupted in flares and coronal mass ejections, some of which were the most powerful eruptions our star is capable of.

By itself, an erupting Sun is not weird. It erupts regularly as it goes through periods of high and low activity, in cycles that last roughly 11 years.

The current activity is significantly higher than the official NASA and NOAA predictions for the current solar cycle, and solar activity has consistently exceeded predictions as far back as September 2020. But a solar scientist will tell you that even this isn't all that weird.

"We can't reliably predict solar cycles," solar astrophysicist Michael Wheatland of the University of Sydney, Australia told ScienceAlert.

"We don't completely understand the solar dynamo, which generates the magnetic fields seen at the surface as sunspots, and which produce flares. This is one of the outstanding problems in astrophysics; the inaccuracy in the prediction is unsurprising."

Unsurprising, sure. But what if that very lack of surprise - that we expect to be bad at predicting solar cycles - means we need to completely rethink how we do it? What if we're basing our predictions on the wrong metric?
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Info

Blood pressure e-tattoo promises continuous, mobile monitoring


The University of Texas at Austin
Mon, 20 Jun 2022 18:22 UTC
Bloop Pressure
© The University of Texas at Austin
Blood pressure is one of the most important indicators of heart health, but it's tough to frequently and reliably measure outside of a clinical setting. For decades, cuff-based devices that constrict around the arm to give a reading have been the gold standard. But now, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University have developed an electronic tattoo that can be worn comfortably on the wrist for hours and deliver continuous blood pressure measurements at an accuracy level exceeding nearly all available options on the market today.

"Blood pressure is the most important vital sign you can measure, but the methods to do it outside of the clinic passively, without a cuff, are very limited," said Deji Akinwande, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Austin and one of the co-leaders of the project, which is documented in a new paper published today in Nature Nanotechnology.

High blood pressure can lead to serious heart conditions if left untreated. It can be hard to capture with a traditional blood pressure check because that only measures a moment in time, a single data point.

"Taking infrequent blood pressure measurements has many limitations, and it does not provide insight into exactly how our body is functioning," said Roozbeh Jafari, a professor of biomedical engineering, computer science and electrical engineering at Texas A&M and the other co-leader of the project.
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Telescope

Scientists discover a multiplanet system just 33 light-years away


Science Daily
Wed, 15 Jun 2022 12:46 UTC
planets
Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a new multiplanet system within our galactic neighborhood that lies just 10 parsecs, or about 33 light-years, from Earth, making it one of the closest known multiplanet systems to our own.

At the heart of the system lies a small and cool M-dwarf star, named HD 260655, and astronomers have found that it hosts at least two terrestrial, Earth-sized planets. The rocky worlds are likely not habitable, as their orbits are relatively tight, exposing the planets to temperatures that are too high to sustain liquid surface water.

Nevertheless, scientists are excited about this system because the proximity and brightness of its star will give them a closer look at the properties of the planets and signs of any atmosphere they might hold.
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Info

Microsoft plans to preserve music for 10,000 years using glass-based storage medium

Mark Wilson
Fast Company
Fri, 03 Jun 2022 06:56 UTC
A new vault for music could protect one of our greatest art forms for future generations.
Glass Encoded with Music
© Global Music Vault
Nothing is forever. By Microsoft's estimation, hard drives protect data for five years before they can go bad. Tape lasts about a decade, while CDs and DVDs can make it as long as 15 years before their contents are at risk of becoming illegible.

While we seem to live in an age of progress — the iPhone can store thousands of songs in your pocket and stream countless more from the cloud — even in the best of cases, those songs will deteriorate millennia earlier than hieroglyphics carved into stone by the ancient Egyptians.

This is the core challenge behind the Global Music Vault. Located in Norway, it's part of a cold-storage facility drilled into the very same mountain as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. While the seed vault protects the earth's cache of seeds, the Global Music Vault aims to preserve the sonic arts for generations to come.

"Here, master music files and irreplaceable music data are to be preserved in music capsules, protected in the vault, and remembered for eternity," the company explains. Technically, a venture company called Elire Group is overseeing the vault, while a partnership with Microsoft is testing a new, glass-based storage medium to make this vision possible.
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Water

China's confirms water on moon with lunar lander Chang'e 5

Chinese Academy of Sciences
Sci Tech Daily
Tue, 14 Jun 2022 12:00 UTC
china chang'e 5 moon
© CNSA/NASAArtist's illustration of China's moon sample-return spacecraft.
China's first lunar sample-return mission, Chang'e 5, is the fifth lunar exploration mission of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, launched on November 23, 2020. It landed on the moon on December 1, 2020, in the Northern Oceanus Procellarum near a huge volcanic complex, Mons Rümker.

Oceanus Procellarum, which translates in Latin to "Ocean of Storms," is a vast lunar mare — a dark, basaltic plain that was formed by volcanic activity triggered by ancient asteroid impacts on the far side of the Moon. Maria (plural for mare), which translates in Latin to "seas" were named as such because early astronomers mistook them for actual seas. Similarly, Oceanus Procellarum was called an ocean due to its vast size, as it stretches more than 1,600 miles across.

At its landing site on Oceanus Procellarum, Chang'e 5 collected over 60 oz. of lunar samples from a core about 3 feet deep. The Chang'e 5 Ascender lifted off from the moon on December 3 and the Orbiter/Returner returned the samples to Earth on December 16, 2020. Scientists have been studying the samples ever since.

Comment: See also:

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Cassiopaea

Did supernovae help form Barnard's loop?


The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Thu, 16 Jun 2022 19:40 UTC
A new view begins to piece together the 3D puzzle of Orion and how Barnard's Loop may have formed.
Barnard's Loop

Cambridge, MA - Astronomers studying the structure of the Milky Way galaxy have released the highest-resolution 3D view of the Orion star-forming region. The image and interactive figure were presented today at a press conference hosted by the American Astronomical Society.

Led by researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, the work connects 3D data on young stars and interstellar gas around the Orion complex of star-forming regions. Analysis of the 2D and 3D images, alongside theoretical modeling, shows that supernova explosions within the last 4 million years produced large cavities in the interstellar material associated with Orion.

One particular cavity the team discovered may help explain the origin of Barnard's Loop, a famous and mysterious semi-circle in the night sky first observed in 1894.
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Comet

Near-Sun comet roasted to death


National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
Wed, 15 Jun 2022 06:57 UTC
Sun Grazing Comet
© Subaru Telescope/CFHT/Man-To Hui/David TholenNear-Sun object 323P/SOHO observed by the Subaru Telescope on December 21, 2020 (left) and CFHT on February 11, 2021 (right). 323P/SOHO on its way to perihelion is seen as a point source in the center of the left image; after the perihelion, the comet has developed a long narrow tail as seen in the right image.
Astronomers using a fleet of world leading telescopes on the ground and in space have captured images of a periodic rocky near-Sun comet breaking apart. This is the first time such a comet has been caught in the act of disintegrating and could help explain the scarcity of such periodic near-Sun comets.

The Solar System is a dangerous place. In textbooks we see figures of celestial bodies orbiting around the Sun in orderly orbits. But that's because if an object's orbit doesn't fit this pattern, gravitational effects from other objects destabilize the orbit. One common fate for such ejected bodies is to become comets in near-Sun orbits where they will eventually plunge into the Sun. Because these comets pass so close to the Sun, they are difficult to spot and study. Most have been discovered by accident in solar telescope observations. But even taking this difficulty into account, there are far fewer near-Sun comets than expected, indicating that something is destroying them before they get a chance to make their fatal final dive into the Sun.

To better understand these comets, a group of astronomers from Macau, the US, Germany, Taiwan, and Canada observed an elusive near-Sun comet called 323P/SOHO with multiple telescopes including the Subaru Telescope, the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), the Gemini North telescope, Lowell's Discovery Telescope, and the Hubble Space Telescope. The orbit of 323P/SOHO was poorly constrained, so the group didn't know exactly where to look for it, but the wide field of view of the Subaru Telescope allowed them to "cast a wide net" and find the comet as it approached the Sun. This was the first time 323P/SOHO was captured by a ground-based telescope. With this data, the researchers were able to better constrain the orbit, they knew where to point the other telescopes and were waiting when 323P/SOHO started to move away from the Sun again.
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Info

One in 500 men may carry an extra sex chromosome (most without knowing it)

Nicoletta Lanese
Live Science
Wed, 15 Jun 2022 20:19 UTC
The study included more than 200,000 men in the U.K.
Chromosomes
© BSIP / Contributor via Getty ImagesMost commonly, females carry two X sex chromosomes and males carry an X and a Y.
As many as one in 500 men may carry an extra sex chromosome — either an X or a Y — but very few of them likely know about it, a new study suggests.

The research, published June 9 in the journal Genetics in Medicine, included data from more than 207,000 men who provided information to the U.K. Biobank, a repository of genetic and health data from half a million U.K.-based participants. Typically, males carry one X- and one Y-shaped sex chromosome in each of their cells, but among the study participants, there were 213 men who carried an extra X chromosome and 143 that had an extra Y.

Very few of these men either reported being diagnosed with a chromosomal abnormality or had such an abnormality noted in their medical records: Of the XXY men, only 23% had a known diagnosis, and just 0.7% of the XYY men had a diagnosis. (The potential symptoms of having an extra Y chromosome can be very subtle, which may somewhat explain the difference in diagnosis rates, according to the Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center.)

"We were surprised at how common this is," Dr. Ken Ong, a pediatric endocrinologist in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge and a co-senior author on the study, told The Guardian. "It had been thought to be pretty rare."

Previous estimates suggested that roughly 100 to 200 men out of every 100,000 are XXY, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute, and an estimated 18 to 100 out of every 100,000 were thought to be XYY, the authors noted in their report.
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SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: MindMatters: The War Paradox: How Warfare Breeds Cooperation, and Cooperation Reduces Warfare

Harrison Koehli, Elan Martin, Adam Daniels, L.P. Koch
Sott.net
Wed, 15 Jun 2022 00:00 UTC
ultrasociety
Today on MindMatters we discuss complexity scientist Peter Turchin's 2015 book, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Turchin walks us through 10 millennia of human cultural evolution: from tribes and chiefdoms to the first states and empires, to our modern "ultrasocial" states. Contrary to pet theories and many ingenious hypotheses over the generations, the development of large, complex societies was not the result of agriculture or even ideas--the primer driver has been warfare: the technologies humans have developed to defend and conquer, the cooperation needed for both, and the cultural practices and values that developed and survived as a result.


Running Time: 01:38:39

Download: MP3 — 135 MB


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Microscope 1

Japan scientists say Ryugu asteroid samples contain clues to origin of life

Natalie Neysa Alund
USA Today
Wed, 15 Jun 2022 12:04 UTC
mineral sample ryugu asteroid
© JAXAMinerals of the Ryugu sample, reported on June 10, 2022 by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
Dust from an asteroid collected by a Japanese space probe contains clues to the origin of life, suggesting it was formed in space, scientists reported Friday.

Japan's Hayabusa2 space mission dropped samples from the asteroid Ryugu to Earth in the Australian outback in December 2020. It was then moved to Japan to be studied for insights into the origins of the solar system and life on Earth.

Scientists most recently announced the finding included nearly two dozen types of amino acids in the sample, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said.

Finding amino acids is a big deal, because they make proteins and are necessary to support life. This is also the first time they've been found on an asteroid, the Japan Times reported

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