Science News

https://phys.org/news/2018-06-horizons-historic-kuiper-belt-flyby.html New Horizons wakes for historic Kuiper Belt flyby June 6, 2018, NASA NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is back "awake" and being prepared for the farthest planetary encounter in history – a New Year's Day 2019 flyby of the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule. Cruising through the Kuiper Belt more than 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from Earth, New Horizons had been in resource-saving hibernation mode since Dec. 21. Radio signals confirming that New Horizons had executed on-board computer commands to exit hibernation reached mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applie…

https://newatlas.com/vanishing-star-skip-supernova-black-hole/49725/ Birth of a black hole witnessed as star vanishes without a bang: For the first time, astronomers have witnessed a star disappear right before their eyes. Known as N6946-BH1, the star appears to have collapsed into a black hole without the usual flair of a supernova, which not only marks the first time scientists have witnessed the birth of a black hole, but could change our understanding of the life and death of stars. According to conventional thinking, when a star exhausts its energy supply, it violently ejects most of its matter outwards in a supernova, before collapsing in on itself to…

https://newatlas.com/neutron-star-collision-black-hole/54861/ NASA sheds light on strange object created in cosmic collision: In August 2017, astronomers were treated to one of the most spectacular stellar light shows ever seen – a collision between two neutron stars. The smashup was so powerful it sent gravitational ripples through the very fabric of spacetime, and produced flares in visible light, radio waves, x-rays and a gamma ray burst. Now that things have quietened down, astronomers have studied the strange object created in the cosmic collision. The LIGO facility was the first to notice something big was happening. On August 17 last year, the instru…

https://www.quantamagazine.org/evidence-found-for-a-new-fundamental-particle-20180601/

The official death toll in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria was 64. This number only included direct effects. Kishone et al. investigated whether the hurricane could have contributed to overall change in mortality e.g. due to displacement, loss of infrastructure or interrupted health care. Based on a survey from 3299 household they calculated an excess moratlity of 4645 excess deaths caused by the Hurricane Maria. The authors also asserted that due to survivor bias this number is on the conservative side. Kischone et al "Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria", JAMA, 2018, DOI: 10.1056/NEJMsa1803972

Could a prehuman industrial civilization have existed on the Earth millions of years ago? If it did how could we detect it's existence? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-an-industrial-prehuman-civilization-have-existed-on-earth-before-ours/

Some birds have been found to cooperate in multi species group that guards against invasion from other birds new to the area of both species! https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180521143827.htm

https://phys.org/news/2018-05-particle-rotating-spacetime.html How a particle may stand still in rotating spacetime When a massive astrophysical object, such as a boson star or black hole, rotates, it can cause the surrounding spacetime to rotate along with it due to the effect of frame dragging. In a new paper, physicists have shown that a particle with just the right properties may stand perfectly still in a rotating spacetime if it occupies a "static orbit"—a ring of points located a critical distance from the center of the rotating spacetime. The physicists, Lucas G. Collodel, Burkhard Kleihaus, and Jutta Kunz, at the University of Oldenburg in Germany,…

https://phys.org/news/2018-05-bone-trove-denmark-story-barbarian.html Bone trove in Denmark tells story of 'Barbarian' battle May 22, 2018 Find assemblages of femur, tibia and fibula, and two small stones. Credit: PNAS Thousands of bones from boys and men likely killed in a ferocious battle 2,000 years ago have been unearthed from a bog in Denmark, researchers said Monday. Without local written records to explain, or a battlefield to scour for evidence, experts are nevertheless piecing together a story of the Germanic people, often described by the Romans as "barbarians" for their violent nature. Four pelvic bones strung on a stick were among…

This is still highly controversial in the science world, so if the mods and/or admins see it as more appropriate for "speculation" then I welcome it removal to that section. My thoughts on this have always been that no known laws of physics were ever broken, rather that some apparent as yet unknown aspect could be at work. The following article and hypothetical seems to support those thoughts........ https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-have-a-weird-new-idea-about-how-the-impossible-em-drive-could-produce-thrust This Overlooked Theory Could Be The Missing Piece That Explains How The EM Drive Works What if it doesn't break the laws of physics?…

https://www.sciencealert.com/lightning-inside-ferocious-hurricane-blasted-beam-antimatter-earth-gamma-ray-flash-positrons/amp Hard core. They report having recorded gamma ray flashes with up to 20 MeV, which could have only been Matter-Antimatter annihilations. Since Positrons and Electron annihilate with 511 keV each, this is entirely possible. They're still unsure how exactly the positrons were created in the storm. My best guess would be that a few virtual electron-positron pairs were separated and the positrons were accelerated too fast toward the earth to interact with electrons in their vicinity. Well, just because it's my best guess doesn't mean it's a …

https://phys.org/news/2018-05-alma-most-distant-oxygen-universe.html Astronomers find evidence for stars forming just 250 million years after Big Bang May 16, 2018, National Radio Astronomy Observatory Not long after the Big Bang, the first generations of stars began altering the chemical make-up of primitive galaxies, slowly enriching the interstellar medium with basic elements such as oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. Finding the earliest traces of these common elements would shed important light on the chemical evolution of galaxies, including our own. New observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) reveal the faint, te…

https://phys.org/news/2018-05-astronomers-fastest-growing-black-hole-space.html Astronomers find fastest-growing black hole known in space May 15, 2018, Australian National University Astronomers at ANU have found the fastest-growing black hole known in the Universe, describing it as a monster that devours a mass equivalent to our sun every two days. The astronomers have looked back more than 12 billion years to the early dark ages of the Universe, when this supermassive black hole was estimated to be the size of about 20 billion suns with a one per cent growth rate every one million years. "This black hole is growing so rapidly that it's shini…

What can be done with this Hawaii volcano to prevent future loss of property? Got to be some Geo Physicists or Engineers on a site like this. Seems like an investment in a horizontal drilling rig to reach the nearest lava tube and give it every reason flow out into the sea (and admittedly the million dollar drilling rig). Hence the description "investment." Assume economics is no major issue. Surely something can be done to mitigate future problems. Pump a benign gas down there to force a controlled eruption? Pump Water down? Open artificial fissures in unpopulated areas to release pressure? Giant Slurpee Machine and pump the flavorful ice slurry into a ma…

This is another case where we discovered the asteroid, then lost it for several years, only to find it again just a week ago. Which would seem to indicate that just because NASA may have discovered 98% of the NEOs larger than 1 km, it does not mean that they know where those NEOs are now. Of the 17,785 NEOs (as of March 1, 2018) that NASA has discovered, I would be very interested in knowing the percentage of NEOs that NASA has lost since their discovery.

This BBC report is interesting as it is about a working test installation to inject atmospheric CO2 into volcanic basalt rock, permanently removing it from the atmosphere. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-43789527

I’d quite like to open a thread discussing the possible pros and cons of using this technique in humans. Where would I post it please? Summary: Glanzman and his team gave the snails a series of electric shocks to their tails. "The result is, their reflexes were greatly enhanced. If we touched their skin, they'll contract very strongly." When the snails were good and jumpy, the team extracted RNA from their nervous systems and injected it into untrained snails. "Twenty-four hours later, we tested the reflexes of those snails, and they showed the same reflexes of those that had been given electrical shocks," Glanzman said. …

https://phys.org/news/2018-05-scientists-discovery-yellowstone-extremely-relevant.html Scientists' discovery in Yellowstone 'extremely relevant' to origin of life May 15, 2018 by Evelyn Boswell, Montana State University Montana State University scientists have found a new lineage of microbes living in Yellowstone National Park's thermal features that sheds light on the origin of life, the evolution of archaeal life and the importance of iron in early life. Professor William Inskeep and his team of researchers published their findings May 14 in the scientific journal Nature Microbiology. "The discovery of archaeal lineages is critical to our unders…

https://phys.org/news/2018-05-evidence-plumes-jupiter-moon-europa.html Old NASA spacecraft points to new evidence of watery plumes over Europa May 14, 2018: A fresh look at data from a 1997 flyby of Jupiter's moon, Europa, suggests that NASA's Galileo spacecraft flew directly through a watery plume, raising hopes of probing the jets for signs of life around the second planet from Earth. The revelations Monday came after scientists revisited a puzzling reading from an instrument aboard Galileo, which in 1995 became the first spacecraft to enter the orbit of a gas giant planet. What they found was the most direct evidence yet of plumes emerging from…

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/westerhout-43-star-formation-05962.html New Study Casts Doubt on Currently Accepted Theories of Star Formation: An international team of astronomers has found that long-held assumptions about the relationship between the mass of star-forming clouds of dust and gas and the eventual mass of the star itself may not be as straightforward as scientists think. Their work is published in the journal Nature Astronomy. The underlying reasons as to why a star eventually grows to a specific mass has puzzled astronomers for years. It has been assumed that a star’s mass mostly depends on the original structure — known as a …

Earth's magnetic field is not about to reverse, study finds April 30, 2018, University of Liverpool A study of the most recent near-reversals of the Earth's magnetic field by an international team of researchers, including the University of Liverpool, has found it is unlikely that such an event will take place anytime soon. There has been speculation that the Earth's geomagnetic fields may be about to reverse , with substantial implications, due to a weakening of the magnetic field over at least the last two hundred years, combined with the expansion of an identified weak area in the Earth's magnetic field called the South Atlantic Anomaly, which stretches from…

https://phys.org/news/2018-05-sagittarius-swarm-black-hole-bounty.html Sagittarius A* swarm: Black hole bounty captured in the Milky Way center: Astronomers have discovered evidence for thousands of black holes located near the center of our Milky Way galaxy using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This black hole bounty consists of stellar-mass black holes, which typically weigh between five to 30 times the mass of the Sun. These newly identified black holes were found within three light years—a relatively short distance on cosmic scales—of the supermassive black hole at our Galaxy's center known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Read more at: htt…

This is not a small asteroid either. Although the article does not mention the size of the asteroid, the paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters estimates the diameter of the asteroid to be 265.2 > 291.1 < 311.4 km. Free Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.10163

Would aliens who evolved on a Super Earth be trapped due to the difficulty of leaving the planet? A Super Earth 16,000 miles in diameter with a similar density would have a volume 8 times Earth's, 4 times the surface area, and twice the gravity. Escape Velocity would be twice Earth normal? I'm not sure if my numbers are accurate but you get the idea. https://www.space.com/40375-super-earth-exoplanets-hard-aliens-launch.html

Here is an example of pseudo scorpions engaging in group hunting behavior. Could this be part of how other colonial arthropods evolved? https://www.newscientist.com/article/2168506-ferocious-pack-hunting-pseudoscorpions-believe-in-sharing-fairly/?