Science News

https://www.space.com/mars-rover-opportunity-declared-dead.html One of the great exploration stories of our time is officially over. NASA declared its Opportunity Mars rover dead today (Feb. 13), more than eight months after the solar-powered robot went silent during a raging dust storm on the Red Planet — and a day after the final calls to wake Oppy up went unanswered. "I declare the Opportunity mission as complete, and with it the Mars Exploration Rover mission complete," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said today during an event at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. [Mars…

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20190214 LIGO Receives New Funding to Search for More Extreme Cosmic Events News Release • February 14, 2019 Grants from the U.S., United Kingdom, and Australia will fund next-generation improvements to LIGO The National Science Foundation (NSF) is awarding Caltech and MIT $20.4 million to upgrade the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), an NSF-funded project that made history in 2015 after making the first direct detection of ripples in space and time, called gravitational waves. The investment is part of a joint international effort in collaboration with UK Research and Innovation and the A…

After exploring for 15 years across 45 kilometres of the Meridiani Planum region of Mars, NASA’s Opportunity rover is officially dead.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00575-2 R.I.P.

https://newatlas.com/earliest-evidence-life-mobility/58435/ Two billion-year old fossils reveal earliest evidence of living locomotion: For most of the time Earth has been inhabited, life took the form of single-celled organisms that just sat there in lumps, or floated around on water currents. But now fossils found in the African country of Gabon have turned up the earliest evidence of life showing some initiative and moving around of its own accord. It now seems that life was mobile some 1.5 billion years earlier than previously thought. more at link...........

I came across a couple of articles that, for different reasons, argue that string theory cannot be correct. The first, from the failure to find evidence for supersymmetry: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/02/12/why-supersymmetry-may-be-the-greatest-failed-prediction-in-particle-physics-history/ The second looks at the types of universes that are possiblest in string theory: https://www.quantamagazine.org/dark-energy-may-be-incompatible-with-string-theory-20180809/

https://phys.org/news/2019-02-possibility-underground-volcanism-mars.html New study suggests possibility of recent underground volcanism on Mars February 12, 2019, American Geophysical Union A study published last year in the journal Science suggested liquid water is present beneath the south polar ice cap of Mars. Now, a new study in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters argues there needs to be an underground source of heat for liquid water to exist underneath the polar ice cap. The new research does not take sides as to whether the liquid water exists. Instead, the authors suggest recent magmatic activity—the formation of a magma chamber within…

https://phys.org/news/2019-02-james-clerk-maxwell-telescope-flare.html The Hawaii-based James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) has discovered a stellar flare 10 billion times more powerful than the Sun's solar flares, a history-making discovery that could unlock decades-old questions about the origin of our own Sun and planets, giving insight into how these celestial bodies were born. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-02-james-clerk-maxwell-telescope-flare.html#jCp the paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/aaf3b1/meta The JCMT Transient Survey: An Extraordinary Submillimeter Flare in the T Tauri Binary System JW 566…

https://phys.org/news/2019-02-nasa-impact-crater-greenland-ice.html NASA finds possible second impact crater under Greenland ice February 11, 2019 by Maria-José Viñas, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center A NASA glaciologist has discovered a possible second impact crater buried under more than a mile of ice in northwest Greenland. Credit: NASA Goddard A NASA glaciologist has discovered a possible second impact crater buried under more than a mile of ice in northwest Greenland. his follows the finding, announced in November 2018, of a 19-mile-wide crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier—the first meteorite impact crater ever discovered under Earth's ice shee…

A hungry mosquito is at best a nuisance; at worst, it is a transmitter of deadly diseases. Now, researchers have discovered a way to stop mosquitoes biting — by using human ‘diet’ drugs to trick them into feeling full. The scientists suggest that the drugs could one day be used to control the spread of diseases. Their results are reported in Cell on 7 February.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00511-4

Exploring applications for tires and more; electric vehicle magnets research motor... Perhaps you are lucky catching the next broadcast : ----> https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/scienceview/20190206/2015208/

SPAM LINK DELETED I can't understand it clear...

When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they caused so much death and disease that it changed the global climate, a new study finds. European settlers killed 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America, causing large swaths of farmland to be abandoned and reforested, researchers at University College London, or UCL, estimate. The increase in trees and vegetation across an area the size of France resulted in a massive decrease in carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, according to the study. Carbon levels changed enough to cool the Earth by 1610, researchers found. Columbus arrived in 1492, "CO2 and climate had been…

Neanderthals and Denisovans might have lived side by side for tens of thousands of years, scientists report in two papers in Nature. The long-awaited studies are based on the analysis of bones, artefacts and sediments from Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, which is dotted with ancient-human remains. They provide the first detailed history of the site’s 300,000-year occupation by different groups of ancient humans.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00353-0

https://www.yahoo.com/news/earths-oldest-known-rock-found-211500968.html

(Not really science news, but this is probably the most appropriate forum.) There is an episode of the series In Our Time about the life and work of Emmy Noether: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00025bw

Something strange is going on at the top of the world. Earth’s north magnetic pole has been skittering away from Canada and towards Siberia, driven by liquid iron sloshing within the planet’s core. The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts into a rare move. On 15 January, they are set to update the World Magnetic Model, which describes the planet’s magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00007-1

Hey everyone im new to these forms and wanted to use this as a platform to incite thoughtful discussion relating to the scientific world (I guess thats fairly obvious since im posting this haha) but I wanted to speak about something I came across recently. Recently a report was issued from Nature regarding the political environment of Nicaragua and its effects on the scientific/academic communities residing there and in the U.S. I was wondering why the importance of academia is suddenly thrown out the window when an individuals loyalty to their government comes into question. As a result of the political uprisings in Nicaragua, environmental protections such as the f…

Scientists drilling into a buried Antarctic lake 600 kilometres from the South Pole have found surprising signs of ancient life: the carcasses of tiny animals preserved under a kilometre of ice. The crustaceans and a tardigrade, or ‘water bear’ — all smaller than poppy seeds — were found in Subglacial Lake Mercer, a body of water that had lain undisturbed for thousands of years. Until now, humans had seen the lake only indirectly, through ice-penetrating radar and other remote-sensing techniques. But that changed on 26 December when researchers funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) succeeded in melting a narrow portal through the ice to the water below. …

Every year, water shortages affect more than one-third of the world’s population. In 2017, even Rome — ancient pioneer of urban water provision — saw its myriad public drinking fountains switched off. Environmental economist Edward Barbier plunges deep into these and other stories from the fascinating, often fraught world of water management past and present in his scholarly but accessible study The Water Paradox. Barbier investigates, too, the threats looming over water resources. The paradox is this: despite ample scientific evidence on exploitation and overuse of fresh water, and ample wealth, knowledge and institutional power, humanity has created a preventable w…

https://newatlas.com/brightest-quasar-600-trillion-suns/58020/ From our point of view here on Earth, the brightest object in the sky is unquestionably the Sun. But this unremarkable star is a mere 10-watt bulb compared to quasars, extremely luminous galactic cores that shine so intensely thanks to their ravenous hunger for nearby material. Now, astronomers have detected the brightest quasar ever found, shining with the light of almost 600 trillion Suns. The quasar, officially designated J043947.08+163415.7, pips the previous brightness records by a fair margin. Until now the title belonged to a quasar shining with the equivalent of 420 trillion Suns, while the m…

Scientists and the models they build have underestimated the amount of methane seeping from beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet and into the atmosphere, according to new research.https://www.upi.com/Greenlands-ice-sheet-is-emitting-a-lot-of-methane/3321546532876/

Can do new chronology using help solar eclipses? Perhaps everyone interested in reading, for example, the history of Assyria, Babylon and Egypt, has at some point noticed some references to solar eclipses observed at that distant time. This is one: deleted

Japan’s exit from the International Whaling Commission should encourage a stronger role for science. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) has always existed in uneasy tension between those who want to protect whales and those who also want to eat them. Late last year, the tension finally snapped with the announcement from Japan that it is leaving. This was accompanied by a pledge that the nation will resume commercial whaling in the Pacific Ocean, and end its controversial research whaling programme in Antarctic waters.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00076-2

Although black holes are objects of central importance across many fields of physics, there is no agreed upon definition for them, a fact that does not seem to be widely recognized. Physicists in different fields conceive of and reason about them in radically different, and often conflicting, ways. All those ways, however, seem sound in the relevant contexts. After examining and comparing many of the definitions used in practice, I consider the problems that the lack of a universally accepted definition leads to, and discuss whether one is in fact needed for progress in the physics of black holes. I conclude that, within reasonable bounds, the profusion of different defin…

The Southern Ocean is one of humanity’s allies, slowing global warming by absorbing heat and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But now researchers report that the choppy waters around Antarctica are also quietly belching out massive quantities of CO2 during the dark and windy winter, reducing the ocean’s climate benefit. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07784-1