The Zen of Technology & Scientific Discovery! (& Robots)

[Jundo]

Sprawling 8-mile-long 'canvas' of ice age beasts discovered hidden in Amazon rainforest

An 8-mile-long "canvas" filled with ice age drawings of mastodons, giant sloths and other extinct beasts has been discovered in the Amazon rainforest.

... Indigenous people likely started painting these images at the archaeological site of Serranía La Lindosa, on the northern edge of the Colombian Amazon, toward the end of the last ice age, about 12,600 to 11,800 years ago. During that time, "the Amazon was still transforming into the tropical forest we recognize today," Robinson said. Rising temperatures changed the Amazon from a patchwork landscape of savannas, thorny scrub and forest into today's leafy tropical rainforest.

https://www.livescience.com/ice-age-...rt-amazon.html

https://youtu.be/Aaezu7rQwfk

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Just recall, as you read this, that Zen folks drop all relative measures of "near and far," or "large and small." We do not necessarily conclude that a tiny speck is less the whole than a great galaxy, and all are precious in their place. Truly, every inch of the universe is the center of the universe as much as any or all the others. It is true, ask an astrophysicist:

Where Is the Center of the Universe?

The universe, in fact, has no center. Ever since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, the universe has been expanding. But despite its name, the Big Bang wasn't an explosion that burst outward from a central point of detonation. The universe started out extremely compact and tiny. Then every point in the universe expanded equally, and that continues today. And so, without any point of origin, the universe has no center.

One way to think about this is to imagine a two-dimensional ant that lives on the surface of a perfectly spherical balloon. From the ant's point of view, everywhere on the surface looks the same. There is no center on the sphere's surface, nor is there an edge.
https://www.livescience.com/62547-wh...-universe.html

Zen folks would merely note that the ant is the sphere, the sphere the other face of the ant.

And so ...

Gaia space observatory maps nearly 2 billion stars in Milky Way galaxy

Astronomers have mapped the most extensive atlas of our Milky Way galaxy yet, including the positions of each and every one of those stars. The European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory also tracked the movement, colors and brightness of these stars as well as the first visible measurement of the acceleration of our solar system.

The new data confirms that the solar system is accelerating in its orbit around the Milky Way. Over the course of a year, our sun accelerates toward the Milky Way's center by 7 millimeters a second. Overall, the sun's orbit around the Milky Way is about 230 kilometers per second, or 514,495 miles per hour.
https://us.cnn.com/2020/12/03/world/...rnd/index.html

But that's just our galaxy ...

Scientists just mapped 1 million new galaxies, in 300 hours

Astronomers in Australia have just mapped 83% of the observable universe, in just 300 hours.

This new sky survey, which Australia's national science agency (CSIRO) described in a statement as a "Google map of the universe" , marks the completion of a big test for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope –- a network of 36 antennas rooted in the remote Western Australia Outback. ... By harnessing the telescope's full potential, researchers mapped roughly 3 million galaxies in the southern sky, according to a paper published Nov. 30 in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. As many as 1 million of these distant galaxies may be previously unknown to astronomy, the researchers wrote, and that's likely just the beginning. ... The resulting map, which covers 83% of the sky, is a combination of 903 individual images, each containing 70 billion pixels. (For comparison, the highest-definition cameras for sale snap a few hundred million pixels per image).

https://www.livescience.com/fastest-all-sky-map-ever-askap.html

https://youtu.be/WMVCaKiPY6A

Of course, that's merely the observable part ... yet all us, and we are just this.



Sorry to run long, as many words as start in the sky.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

PS - Oh, and so many mysteries await ...

Ghostly circles in the sky can't be explained. And astronomers are excited.

In September 2019, my colleague Anna Kapinska gave a presentation showing interesting objects she’d found while browsing our new radio astronomical data. She had started noticing very weird shapes she couldn’t fit easily to any known type of object ... a ghostly circle of radio emission, hanging out in space like a cosmic smoke-ring. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what it was. A few days later, our colleague Emil Lenc found a second one, even more spooky than Anna’s.

Anna and Emil had been examining the new images from our pilot observations for the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project, made with CSIRO’s revolutionary new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope.

EMU plans to boldly probe parts of the Universe where no telescope has gone before. It can do so because ASKAP can survey large swathes of the sky very quickly, probing to a depth previously only reached in tiny areas of sky, and being especially sensitive to faint, diffuse objects like these.

... We know what they aren't

We have ruled out several possibilities for what ORCs might be.

Could they be supernova remnants, the clouds of debris left behind when a star in our galaxy explodes? No. They are far from most of the stars in the Milky Way and there are too many of them.

Could they be the rings of radio emission sometimes seen in galaxies undergoing intense bursts of star formation? Again, no. We don’t see any underlying galaxy that would be hosting the star formation.

Could they be the giant lobes of radio emission we see in radio galaxies, caused by jets of electrons squirting out from the environs of a supermassive black hole? Not likely, because the ORCs are very distinctly circular, unlike the tangled clouds we see in radio galaxies.

Could they be Einstein rings, in which radio waves from a distant galaxy are being bent into a circle by the gravitational field of a cluster of galaxies? Still no. ORCs are too symmetrical, and we don’t see a cluster at their centre.

A genuine mystery

... Or perhaps they are something else entirely. Two Russian scientists have even suggested ORCs might be the “throats” of wormholes in spacetime.

https://www.livescience.com/ghostly-...tronomers.html

[Jundo]

From 300 MILLION kilometers away ... to the Australian outback ... and next stop, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency laboratory in: TSUKUBA, JAPAN! and other place worldwide.

https://youtu.be/pac5ZZTjIl0

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Is anyone on Earth not an immigrant?

Almost every human population has moved at some point.

As scientists find more ancient human DNA, sample more modern DNA and develop more ways to analyze this genetic material, it's revealing a lot about how early humans moved — and moved and moved — around the world, coming to inhabit nearly every swath of land.

So after thousands and thousands of years of nearly constant migration, are there any people out there who have never left the spot where it's thought Homo sapiens evolved? Put another way, is there anybody on Earth who isn't an immigrant?

"From a scientific point of view, maybe the only people that you could consider not to be immigrants would be some Khoe-San-speaking groups in southern Africa," said Austin Reynolds, an assistant professor of anthropology at Baylor University in Texas who specializes in human population genetics.

The designation Khoe-San (pronounced coy-sawn) refers to certain African communities in the areas of Botswana, Namibia, Angola and South Africa who speak similar languages with distinctive clicking consonants, Reynolds told Live Science.

https://www.livescience.com/are-all-...mmigrants.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Heitou]

If everything is correct my family started out as Norse and moved to Germany, France, England, Scotland, Ireland and then the United States.

Gassho
John
SatLAH

[Onka]

This is pretty interesting and relevant...

Watch how the coronavirus can spread in an office

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-09/watch-how-the-coronavirus-can-spread-in-an-office/12646348

Gassho
Onka
Sat today

Sent from my SM-A205YN using Tapatalk

[Jundo]

Past to present ...

How Neanderthal DNA affects human health -- including the risk of getting Covid-19

Early modern humans originated in Africa and started spreading around the world about 80,000 years ago. As they traveled, they came across other ancient humans, including Neanderthals, who had already populated Europe and parts of Asia. Some of them had sex and gave birth to children -- current-day human DNA still carries echoes of these prehistoric sexual encounters.

The evidence that Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals first emerged in 2010, after Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo pioneered methods to extract, sequence and analyze ancient DNA from Neanderthal bones. Pääbo mapped the entire Neanderthal genome, and thanks to his work, scientists can compare Neanderthal genomes with the genetic records of living humans today.

Most living people can trace a very small percentage of their DNA to Neanderthals -- and that likely includes Africans, who until recently had been thought to have no genetic link to Neanderthals.

Scientists have been trying to figure out what, if anything, this genetic legacy means. Research has found links between Neanderthal DNA and fertility, how people feel pain and immune system functionality. Neanderthal DNA may affect skin tone and hair color, height, sleeping patterns, mood and even addiction in present-day Europeans.

What's more, Neanderthal DNA may play a small role in swaying the course of Covid-19 infection, recent research has shown.

... To be clear, Capra said he can't look at an individual and determine whether they have Neanderthal DNA by their hair, skin color or features.
"Every week I get emails that ask, 'I have hair on these bits of my body, does that mean I'm Neanderthal?'"
"No, the effects are in most cases modest -- in the order of 1% or 2% of the variation in traits that you see across the whole population."https://us.cnn.com/2020/12/09/health/neanderthal-genes-human-health-covid19-scn-wellness/index.html

... present to future:

Epic time-lapse shows what the Milky Way will look like 400,000 years from now

In the new simulation, 40,000 stars — all located within 325 light-years of Earth's sun — whiz through space, leaving long trails of light behind them. Each point of light represents one real object in the Milky Way, and each shining trail shows that object's projected movement through the galaxy over the next 400,000 years. Brighter, faster streaks are located closer to our solar system, while dimmer, slower ones live much farther away.

According to ESA researchers, the simulation shows an unsurprising pattern: By the end of the animation, most stars seem to be clustered to the right side of the screen, while the left remains relatively empty. It's not because the stars are being pulled by some newborn black hole or an alien tractor beam; it's simply that our sun is constantly moving too, causing passing stars to appear more clustered in the opposite direction.

... The data that made this mosaic of cosmic fireflies possible comes from the Gaia satellite's third official data release (EDR3), which became publicly available on Dec. 3. The new data dump contains detailed information on more than 1.8 billion celestial objects, including the precise positions, velocities and orbital trajectories of more than 330,000 stars within 325 light-years of Earth, according to a news release from the ESA. (The 40,000 stars represented in the simulation were chosen at random.)
https://www.livescience.com/gaia-map-40000-stars.html

https://youtu.be/ObjP1ZgxUyA

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

We are here because of the incredible balance and moderation of the heavens, neither too close nor too from the sun, a star which itself maintains its own fine balance ...

Sun launches explosion of electromagnetic energy towards Earth: Geomagnetic Storm Watch issued

A spectacular display of the northern lights is possible Wednesday night as far south as Pennsylvania and Oregon.

Communication disruptions could come, as well.

After several months of hiatus, the sun has awoken into a new period of solar activity. An impressive solar flare and Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) December 7 hurled plasma and magnetic field toward earth. ... Some of the sun's energy will reach our atmosphere Wednesday night and Thursday, motivating stargazers to look toward the night sky in anticipation of the colorful, shimmering northern lights. ... The incoming solar particles and magnetic fields released from the sun during a CME force the release of particles already trapped in the earth's atmosphere. This triggers reactions forcing photons of light activated by oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the upper atmosphere.

... If your favorite radio station crackles with static or your GPS strays by a few yards, it's not just another byproduct of a crazy year. The incoming solar weather can actually cause communication disruptions such as GPS positioning errors and interference within our power grid. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center says that the potential exists for strong storm levels "if the magnetic field carried with the CME connects well with Earth's magnetosphere."

https://us.cnn.com/2020/12/09/us/northern-lights-display-wednesday-night-scn/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Whether or not a "Dog has Buddha Nature," they can't tell a "MU" for a "MO" ...

Dogs will never speak human. Here's why.

Dogs' brains cannot distinguish words that differ by a single speech sound, such as "sit" versus "set."

... most dogs can pick up only a limited number of words in their lives, and a new study may help explain why.

The study found that dogs' brains cannot distinguish words that differ by a single speech sound, such as "dig" versus "dog," or "sit" versus "set." This makes dogs similar to human infants, who also can't distinguish between words with similar sounds. But around age 14 to 20 months, babies typically start to learn that every sound in a word matters (i.e. that "dog" and "dig" are different words), and this allows their vocabulary to soar, the authors said.
https://www.livescience.com/dogs-word-processing.html

Gassho, J

SAT(NOT SET) TODAY, lah

[Jundo]

I thought this very neat. Although just a hypothesis, I think Zen folks have a soft spot for any solution to universal puzzles which leap beyond normal "common sense" categories ... such as "time" or "timeless," "birth and death," or ... in this case ... energy vs. particle ...

Fragments of energy may be the fundamental building blocks of the universe

Matter is what makes up the universe, but what makes up matter? This question has long been tricky for those who think about it – especially for the physicists. Reflecting recent trends in physics, my colleague Jeffrey Eischen and I have described an updated way to think about matter. We propose that matter is not made of particles or waves, as was long thought, but – more fundamentally – that matter is made of fragments of energy.

... Sir Isaac Newton introduced the idea that all matter exists at points called particles. One hundred fifty years after that, James Clerk Maxwell introduced the electromagnetic wave – the underlying and often invisible form of magnetism, electricity and light. The particle served as the building block for mechanics and the wave for electromagnetism – and the public settled on the particle and the wave as the two building blocks of matter. Together, the particles and waves became the building blocks of all kinds of matter.

This was a vast improvement over the ancient Greeks’ five elements, but was still flawed. In a famous series of experiments, known as the double-slit experiments, light sometimes acts like a particle and at other times acts like a wave. And while the theories and math of waves and particles allow scientists to make incredibly accurate predictions about the universe, the rules break down at the largest and tiniest scales.

Einstein proposed a remedy in his theory of general relativity. Using the mathematical tools available to him at the time, Einstein was able to better explain certain physical phenomena and also resolve a longstanding paradox relating to inertia and gravity. But instead of improving on particles or waves, he eliminated them as he proposed the warping of space and time.

Using newer mathematical tools, my colleague and I have demonstrated a new theory that may accurately describe the universe. Instead of basing the theory on the warping of space and time, we considered that there could be a building block that is more fundamental than the particle and the wave. Scientists understand that particles and waves are existential opposites: A particle is a source of matter that exists at a single point, and waves exist everywhere except at the points that create them. My colleague and I thought it made logical sense for there to be an underlying connection between them.

Think of energy as made up of lines that fill up a region of space and time, flowing into and out of that region, never beginning, never ending and never crossing one another.

Working from the idea of a universe of flowing energy lines, we looked for a single building block for the flowing energy. If we could find and define such a thing, we hoped we could use it to accurately make predictions about the universe at the largest and tiniest scales.

There were many building blocks to choose from mathematically, but we sought one that had the features of both the particle and wave – concentrated like the particle but also spread out over space and time like the wave. The answer was a building block that looks like a concentration of energy – kind of like a star – having energy that is highest at the center and that gets smaller farther away from the center.

Much to our surprise, we discovered that there were only a limited number of ways to describe a concentration of energy that flows. Of those, we found just one that works in accordance with our mathematical definition of flow. We named it a fragment of energy. For the math and physics aficionados, it is defined as A = -⍺/r where ⍺ is intensity and r is the distance function.

... We were stunned. ... Our initial work demonstrated how a new building block is capable of accurately modeling bodies from the enormous to the minuscule. Where particles and waves break down, the fragment of energy building block held strong. The fragment could be a single potentially universal building block from which to model reality mathematically – and update the way people think about the building blocks of the universe.
https://www.livescience.com/fragment...-universe.html

"Fragments of Energy" ... good name for a band!

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

From 300 MILLION kilometers away ... to the Australian outback ... and next stop, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency laboratory in: TSUKUBA, JAPAN! and other place worldwide.

Oh, well, turns out that the samples are not being analyzed at JAXA (the Japanese NASA) here in Tsukuba, but at our arch-rival ... the JAXA facility in Sagamihara!

Darn Sagamihara! Gives me gas!

Hayabusa2 mission confirms return of an asteroid sample, including gas, to Earth

The gas was the first step in helping the researchers to confirm that the spacecraft successfully collected a sample from Ryugu in 2019 when the spacecraft visited the asteroid. Researchers confirmed that the gas originated from Ryugu because their analysis of the gas shows that it is different from the atmospheric composition on Earth. Two separate analyses, one in Australia on December 7 and another between December 10 to 11 at the Extraterrestrial Sample Curation Center on the JAXA Sagamihara Campus, helped the teams arrive at the same result. The gas likely came from the collected material on the surface and beneath the surface of the asteroid itself.

... Altogether, the mission's scientists believes one gram of material was collected, but they can't be sure until they open it completely. "One gram may sound small, but for us, one gram is huge," said Masaki Fujimoto, deputy director general of the department of solar system sciences at JAXA, during an online briefing hosted by the Australian Science Media Centre. "It is enough to address our science questions."
https://us.cnn.com/2020/12/15/world/...rnd/index.html

You see, it is very simple. The Hayabusa travelled over 500 kilometers round trip to do this ...



... then got off the wrong exist on the expressway ...




GAS -- sho, J

STLah

[Inshin]

The matter of after life and rebirth solved by scientists? https://www.indy100.com/offbeat/is-t...box=1608157567

[Jundo]

The matter of after life and rebirth solved by scientists? https://www.indy100.com/offbeat/is-t...box=1608157567

I am a great skeptic on overly literal models of rebirth, and the idea that "I" literally come back in any way recognizable as my "I" ...

... but I have to object to this article. To turn around the old joke about the Zen Master asked about death: "Yes, I am a physicist ... but I ain't a dead one." This fellow doesn't know enough to draw such a conclusion, and the whole thing cannot be tested now in any case. Scientists have no idea (pun intended) about what is consciousness, except that it is tied somehow to the brain (but the question of whether it is "just the brain," or whether the brain is just tapping into something more fundamental ... all speculation right now!!) It is one of those questions where the scientist has no better information than the Tibetan lama, and all are just guessing, talking out of their imaginations ...

Dr Carroll explained that for there to be an afterlife, consciousness would need to be entirely separated from our physical body.

But instead of an ever-lasting soul, consciousness appears to essentially composed of a series of atoms and electrons.

He doesn't know that for sure.

Sorry to run long ... into the next life.

Gassho, J

STLah

PS - I am now watching a series called "Westworld" while on the exercise bike (trying to expand my "this life"), and the story is about sentient robots who live in simulations and keep being brought back to life (by their disneyland like creators) every time they are killed. The "robots" are actually about as biological as we are, so it is not even clear that they are different from "people" although engineered. It is just a show, but heck, could be that too!

https://youtu.be/QRi3ULhyQq0

[Inshin]

Thank your for the recommendation. I just came across a documentary "A glith in the matrix" exploring the idea that all this is a simulation!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W0RgpwWlEZo&feature=youtu.be

Gassho
Sat