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

[Jundo]

Speed up, slow down, speed up ...

Hubble identifies unusual wrinkle in expansion rate of the universe

ver the past 30 years, the space observatory has helped scientists discover and refine that accelerating rate – as well as uncover a mysterious wrinkle that only brand-new physics may solve.

Hubble has observed more than 40 galaxies that include pulsating stars as well as exploding stars called supernovae to measure even greater cosmic distances. Both of these phenomena help astronomers to mark astronomical distances like mile markers, which have pointed to the expansion rate.

In the quest to understand how quickly our universe expands, astronomers already made one unexpected discovery in 1998: “dark energy.” This phenomenon acts as a mysterious repulsive force that accelerates the expansion rate.

And there is another twist: an unexplained difference between the expansion rate of the local universe versus that of the distant universe right after the big bang.

Scientists don’t understand the discrepancy, but acknowledge that it’s weird and could require new physics.

“You are getting the most precise measure of the expansion rate for the universe from the gold standard of telescopes and cosmic mile markers,” said Nobel Laureate Adam Riess at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a distinguished professor at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in a statement.

... Multiple teams of astronomers using the Hubble telescope have arrived at a Hubble constant value that equals 73 plus or minus 1 kilometer per second per megaparsec. (A megaparsec is one million parsecs, or 3.26 million light years.)

“The Hubble constant is a very special number. It can be used to thread a needle from the past to the present for an end-to-end test of our understanding of the universe. This took a phenomenal amount of detailed work,” said Licia Verde, a cosmologist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and the Institute of Cosmos Science at the University of Barcelona, in a statement.

... But the actual predicted expansion rate of the universe is slower than what the Hubble telescope has observed, according to astronomers utilizing the standard cosmological model of the universe (a theory suggesting the components of the big bang) and measurements taken by the European Space Agency’s Planck mission between 2009 and 2013.

... The James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in December, will be able to observe Hubble’s mile markers in sharper resolution and at greater distances, which could contribute to understanding the discrepancy between the two numbers.

It makes for an exciting challenge to cosmologists who were once determined to measure the Hubble constant – and now find themselves questioning what additional physics may help them unlock a new mystery about the universe.
https://us.cnn.com/2022/05/23/world/...scn/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Zen leaps beyond big and small ... but small is cool ...

Northwestern engineers invent the world’s smallest remote-controlled walking robots

... Each one is about half a millimeter wide, which is smaller than the thickness of a United States penny.

... It took a year and a half to create the miniscule metal creatures, said coauthor John A. Rogers, the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University.

His team was comprised of students across varying academic levels who combined critical- and creative-thinking skills to design robots that looked like crabs as well as other animals like inchworms and crickets, he said.

Some students found the sideways motion of crabs to be amusing, which was the inspiration behind the crab robot, Rogers said. The tiny robot can also twist, turn and jump, he added.

... The robots, which are made of a malleable shape-memory alloy, start out as flat objects, similar to a piece of paper. The legs and arms are bent so the robot can stand, he said. The crab stays standing on its legs until heat is used to get the crab to move, Rogers said.

A metallic object made of shape-memory alloy can be deformed but returns to its original shape once heat is applied to it, he explained. ... His team would heat up certain joints to partially return them to the original flattened state. When heat was applied over and over in a specific sequence, the crabs were able to move, similar to how humans bend and straighten their legs to walk.

... “A laser is a convenient way to do it because we can focus the light to a very tiny spot, and we can scan that spot around to illuminate different parts of the robot’s body in a time sequence,” he said. ... The robots are still in the developmental phase and primarily created for academic purposes, but the technology used to make the tiny crabs have potential, Rogers said.

Tiny crab robots could be used in performing minimally invasive surgeries or aid in the assembly and repair of small-scale machines, he said.

https://us.cnn.com/2022/05/25/world/...scn/index.html

Zen transcends hot and cold ... But what about the old story that the cold after the meteor strike wiped out the dinosaurs, giving warm blooded mammals a chance? ...

Fearsome predators like T. rex and towering, telescope-necked dinosaurs, such as Brachiosaurus, were warm-blooded creatures in the same way birds and mammals are, according to a groundbreaking new study.

... “This is really exciting for us as paleontologists – the question of whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded is one of the oldest questions in paleontology, and now we think we have a consensus, that most dinosaurs were warm-blooded,” said lead study author Jasmina Wiemann, a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology, in a news release.

Previous recent attempts to answer this question have suggested that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, but those findings, which involved analyzing growth rings or chemical isotope signals in bones, were ambiguous because fossilization may change these markers. Plus, those analysis techniques damage fossils, making it harder to build up a large data set.

Wiemann and her colleagues, however, came up with a new – and in their view, more definitive – method to assess a dinosaur’s metabolism. ... The researchers looked at the waste products that form when oxygen is inhaled into the body and reacts with proteins, sugars and lipids. The abundance of these waste molecules, which appear as dark-colored patches in fossils, scales in accordance with the amount of oxygen taken in and is an indicator of whether an animal is warm- or cold-blooded. The molecules are also extremely stable and don’t dissolve in water, which means they are preserved during the fossilization process.

Wiemann and her team analyzed a femur – thigh bone – of 55 different creatures, including 30 extinct and 25 modern animals. Among the samples were bones belonging to dinosaurs, giant flying reptiles called pterosaurs, marine reptiles like the plesiosaurs, and modern birds, mammals and lizards.

The scientists used an approach called infrared spectroscopy, which targets the interactions between molecules and light. This technique allowed them to quantify the number of waste molecules in the fossils. The team then compared those findings with the known metabolic rates of the modern animals and used that data to infer the metabolic rates of the extinct creatures.

Earlier generations of paleontologists had grouped dinosaurs with reptiles, leading to an assumption of a reptilian appearance and lifestyle. Today, most paleontologists agree that dinosaurs were a lot more birdlike after the discovery in the 1990s of feathered fossils, which led to the understanding modern birds are directly descended from dinosaurs.

The study, which published Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that dinosaurs’ metabolic rates were typically high and in many cases higher than modern mammals – which typically have a body temperature of around 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit) – and more like birds, which have average body temperatures of around 42 degrees Celsius (107.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

However, there were notable exceptions. Dinosaurs classified as ornithischians – an order characterized by birdlike hips that includes instantly recognizable creatures such as Triceratops and Stegosaurus – evolved to have low metabolic rates comparable to those of cold-blooded modern animals.

https://us.cnn.com/2022/05/25/world/dinosaur-blood-warm-cold-scn/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

A new lease on life, we will make it for another day ...

Mile-wide asteroid, the largest yet of 2022, flies safely by Earth

There were no worries whatsoever about the space rock, which passed by at a very safe distance.

The asteroid, known as asteroid 7335 (1989 JA), is roughly four times the size of the Empire State Building and is the largest yet to pass by our planet in 2022. Viewers were able to catch the event live online through the Virtual Telescope Project (you can watch the feed embedded below), thanks to a new collaboration that includes telescopes in Chile, Australia and Rome.
https://www.livescience.com/mile-wid...earth-may-2022

https://youtu.be/JxFjKTF6YEs

In other space news, Pluto may not be a planet any more ... but there is this fun fact ...

When will Pluto complete its first orbit since its discovery?

Not until the 22nd century.

Pluto was discovered on Feb. 18, 1930, using the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh found a moving object clearly beyond the orbit of Neptune. That object was later called Pluto, the ruler of the Greek underworld in that culture's mythology.

There's a long-running debate about whether Pluto is a planet or a dwarf planet. Concerning its orbit, however, astronomers don't disagree that the world has yet to complete a single orbit since Tombaugh first spotted Pluto in imagery.

It takes Pluto 248.09 Earth years to complete one orbit around the sun. Plug that information into a ... calculator along with its discovery date, and you'd find that Pluto will complete its first full orbit since its discovery on Monday, March 23, 2178.
https://www.livescience.com/33390-pl...ete-orbit.html

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft took this enhanced color image of Pluto on July 14, 2015

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

The old ...

It's possible that this Gran Abuelo tree found in Alerce Costero National Park in Chile may be the oldest tree in the world.

he world's oldest tree may have been standing for centuries when the first boulders were erected at Stonehenge, new research suggests.

The ancient giant, an alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides) known as the "Gran Abuelo" (or great grandfather in Spanish) that towers over a ravine in the Chilean Andes, may be roughly 5,400 years old, a new computer model suggests. If that date can be confirmed, it would make the Gran Abuelo nearly 600 years older than the current official record holder(opens in new tab) for world's oldest tree, a Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) in California known as "Methuselah."

However, the alerce's exact age is still somewhat contested, because confirming that requires analysis of the tree's rings — a method known as dendrochronology, and the gold standard for determining a tree's age — and that data is currently incomplete.

... Whatever its age, the tree is in peril and needs to be protected, said Jonathan Barichivich, a climate and global ecology scientist at the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory in Paris, and the researcher who created the model.

"It's really in poor condition because of tourism," and the tree has also been affected by climate change, Barichivich told Live Science.
https://www.livescience.com/possible...ee-found-chile

... and the small but important ...

Physicists discover never-before seen particle sitting on a tabletop

This newly-discovered particle could account for dark matter

Researchers have discovered a new particle that is a magnetic relative of the Higgs boson. Whereas the discovery of the Higgs boson required the tremendous particle-accelerating power of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this never-before-seen particle  —  dubbed the axial Higgs boson — was found using an experiment that would fit on a small kitchen countertop.

As well as being a first in its own right, this magnetic cousin of the Higgs boson  —  the particle responsible for granting other particles their mass  —  could be a candidate for dark matter, which accounts for 85%t of the total mass of the universe but only reveals itself through gravity.

... In the Standard Model of particle physics, particles emerge from different fields that permeate the universe, and some of these particles shape the universe’s fundamental forces. For example photons mediate electromagnetism, and hefty particles known as W and Z bosons mediate the weak nuclear force, which governs nuclear decay at subatomic levels. When the universe was young and hot, however, electromagnetism and weak force were one thing and all of these particles were nearly identical. As the universe cooled, the electroweak force split, causing the W and Z bosons to gain mass and to behave very differently from photons, a process physicists have called "symmetry breaking." But how exactly did these weak-force-mediating particles get so heavy?

It turns out that these particles interacted with a separate field, known as the Higgs field. Perturbations in that field gave rise to the Higgs boson and lent the W and Z bosons their heft.

The Higgs boson is produced in nature whenever such a symmetry is broken, . "however, typically only one symmetry is broken at a time, and thus the Higgs is just described by its energy," Burch said.

The theory behind the axial Higgs boson is more complicated.

"In the case of the axial Higgs boson, it appears multiple symmetries are broken together, leading to a new form of the theory and a Higgs mode [the specific oscillations of a quantum field like the Higgs field] that requires multiple parameters to describe it: specifically, energy and magnetic momentum," Burch said.
The Higgs boson is produced in nature whenever such a symmetry is broken, . "however, typically only one symmetry is broken at a time, and thus the Higgs is just described by its energy," Burch said.

The theory behind the axial Higgs boson is more complicated.

"In the case of the axial Higgs boson, it appears multiple symmetries are broken together, leading to a new form of the theory and a Higgs mode [the specific oscillations of a quantum field like the Higgs field] that requires multiple parameters to describe it: specifically, energy and magnetic momentum," Burch said.

... and the Webb takes a hit, but survives ... as the engineers planned for it ...

Webb telescope's massive mirror hit by micrometeoroid

One of the 18 golden segments of the James Webb Space Telescope's giant mirror was hit by a micrometeoroid in May, according to an update from NASA. But don't worry -- the space observatory is still on track to share its first high-resolution, full-color images on July 12.

A micrometeoroid is a particle in space that is smaller than a grain of sand. Earth's atmosphere is hit by millions of meteoroids and micrometeoroids on a regular basis, but most are vaporized when they hit the atmosphere, according to NASA.

But spacecraft don't have a protective bubble of atmosphere around them, so it's almost impossible to avoid these impacts.

The Webb telescope sustained such an impact between May 23 and 25, but "the telescope is still performing at a level that exceeds all mission requirements despite a marginally detectable effect in the data," according to the Webb team.

The team is continuing to analyze and assess what happened and how it may affect the telescope's performance. It's also likely the first of many such experiences that Webb will have over its time in space.

... "We always knew that Webb would have to weather the space environment, which includes harsh ultraviolet light and charged particles from the Sun, cosmic rays from exotic sources in the galaxy, and occasional strikes by micrometeoroids within our solar system," said Paul Geithner, technical deputy project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement.

"We designed and built Webb with performance margin -- optical, thermal, electrical, mechanical -- to ensure it can perform its ambitious science mission even after many years in space."

Fortunately, each hexagonal mirror segment is fully adjustable, and the impacted segment has already been adjusted to lessen some of the distortion. This is something engineers can continue to do in the future as they monitor Webb's mirror for any signs of degradation in the space environment.

https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/08/world/webb-telescope-mirror-impact-scn/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Major announcement this week about a project headquartered here in Tsukuba, home to Treeleaf Zendo AND the Japanese space agency, two major explorers of the universe ...

For the first time, scientists have found the building blocks for life on an asteroid in space. Japanese researchers have discovered more than 20 amino acids on the space rock Ryugu, which is more than 200 million miles from Earth.

Scientists made the first-of-its-kind detection by studying samples retrieved from the near-Earth asteroid by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Hayabusa2 spacecraft, which landed on Ryugu in 2018. In 2019, the spacecraft collected 0.2 ounce (5.4 grams) from the asteroid's surface and subsurface, stowed it in an airtight container and launched it back to Earth on a fine-tuned trajectory.

... Hayabusa2 was groundbreaking in that it collected subsurface materials not weathered by sunlight or cosmic rays, and delivered them to Earth unexposed to outside air. ... Ryugu contains a large amount of carbon-rich organic matter, much of which likely originated from the same nebula that gave birth to the sun and the planets of the solar system roughly 4.6 billion years ago. Previous sample analysis has also suggested that the asteroid harbors water.

Kensei Kobayashi, professor emeritus of astrobiology at Yokohama National University, said the unprecedented discovery of multiple types of amino acids on an extraterrestrial body could even hint at the existence of life outside of Earth.

"Proving amino acids exist in the subsurface of asteroids increases the likelihood that the compounds arrived on Earth from space," he said.
It also means amino acids can likely be found on other planets and natural satellites, hinting that "life could have been born in more places in the universe than previously thought," Kobayashi added.

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/06/9a7dbced6c3a-amino-acids-found-in-asteroid-samples-collected-by-hayabusa2-probe.html

and
https://www.livescience.com/20-amino...found-on-ryugu

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

You have my skin, but what of flesh, bone and marrow?

Robots can now be built with living humanlike skin

For the first time, scientists learned to grow humanlike skin on a robotic finger using cells, a new study revealed. Unlike artificial skin that is commonly used when building robots, this skin is alive, said lead study author Shoji Takeuchi, project professor in the department of mechanical and biofunctional systems at the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo.

"Living skin is the ultimate solution to give robots the look and touch of living creatures," Takeuchi said.

... The humanlike skin is made using the same building blocks as human skin, Takeuchi said. The robotic finger was first submerged in a solution of collagen, which is a fibrous protein, and human dermal fibroblasts, the two major components that make up human skin. Dermal fibroblasts are the primary cell type in the connective tissue of the skin. After the solution conformed around the finger, Takeuchi applied human epidermal keratinocytes to the outside. A keratinocyte is the main type of cell that makes up the human epidermis, the outermost layer of skin, he said. In the trials, the elastic human skin moved freely while the finger made different motions ...

... The discovery is an important one, Agrawal said, but development of the humanlike skin still has a long way to go. Skin is a living organism, so it needs to sustain itself by being constantly nourished while removing waste, Takeuchi said. Unfortunately, the current skin that was grown does not have that ability built in, so it cannot sustain itself, he said. Takeuchi is interested in adding a vascular system, the way blood is circulated throughout our body, to help shuttle nutrients to and from the cells and keep the skin alive. He also wishes to develop additional details for the skin such as hair follicles, nails and sweat glands.
https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/10/world/...scn/index.html

Gassho J

STLah

[Jundo]

The small in the ocean leads to the very big, and our own lives ...

Discovery of 'hidden world' under Antarctic ice has scientists 'jumping for joy'

The secret ecosystem was found more than 1,600 feet below the surface.

A never-before-seen ecosystem lurks in an underground river deep below the icy surface in Antarctica. Researchers recently brought this "hidden world" into the light, revealing a dark and jagged cavern filled with swarms of tiny, shrimplike creatures.

The scientists found the secret subterranean habitat tucked away beneath the Larsen Ice Shelf — a massive, floating sheet of ice attached to the eastern coast of the Antarctic peninsula that famously birthed the world's largest iceberg in 2021. Satellite photos showed an unusual groove in the ice shelf close to where it met with the land, and researchers identified the peculiar feature as a subsurface river, which they described in a statement(opens in new tab). The team drilled down around 1,640 feet (500 meters) below the ice's surface using a powerful hot-water hose to reach the underground chamber.

... they had not expected to find any type of life this far below the icy surface.

Viruses seem to play a vital role in climate ...

Scientists discover viruses that secretly rule the world's oceans

Thousands of mysterious viruses that were recently discovered lurking in the world's oceans may exert huge influence over the ecosystems, in part by "reprogramming" the hosts they infect, scientists reported.

The new research, published Thursday (June 9) in the journal Science(opens in new tab), focuses on viruses that contain RNA, a molecular cousin of DNA. Examples of RNA viruses abound in human disease; for instance, coronaviruses and influenza viruses are both RNA-based.
... Based on the new study, "we are certainly sure that most RNA viruses in the ocean are infecting microbial eukaryotes, so fungi and protists, and to a lesser extent, invertebrates," co-first author Guillermo Dominguez-Huerta, who was a postdoctoral scholar in viral ecology at Ohio State University (OSU) at the time of the study, told Live Science. Eukaryotes are organisms with complex cells that hold their genetic material inside a nucleus.

... These viral hosts — namely fungi and protists, which include algae and amoebas — pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and therefore influence how much carbon ends up stored in the ocean. By infecting these organisms, RNA viruses likely affect how carbon flows through the ocean at large, said Steven Wilhelm, the principal investigator of the Aquatic Microbial Ecology Research Group at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, who was not involved in the new study. "Given the abundance of RNA virus particles, knowing they can do this continues to build the story of how important viruses are in the world with respect to how energy and carbon flow," Wilhelm told Live Science in an email. After identifying what hosts the ocean viruses likely infect, the team determined that about 1,200 of the viruses might be involved in carbon export — the process by which carbon gets extracted from the atmosphere, incorporated into marine organisms and then "exported" to the deep sea as those organisms sink to the seafloor after death.

The deeper these carbon stores sink, the longer they're likely to remain stored in the ocean before being cycled back into the atmosphere, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute(opens in new tab). For this reason, carbon export is an important factor that scientists incorporate into models of climate change. The new study suggests that the infection of marine organisms by RNA viruses may be another, previously unacknowledged factor driving carbon flux in the oceans, in that the viruses alter the cellular activity of the hosts they infect.

RNA viruses may also drive carbon flux by splitting their hosts open and spilling sequestered carbon into the ocean, Wilhelm said, since viruses often burst out of their hosts after rapidly replicating inside them.
https://www.livescience.com/marine-rna-viruses-function

Gassho, J

STLah

[Naiko]

Hidden worlds all around us…

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/the-strange-and-secret-ways-that-animals-perceive-the-world-ed-yong-immense-world-tom-mustill-how-to-speak-whale?fbclid=IwAR0YqBt2TaUh8dC9M69Ys0oHpe92cM9GQ9gl3D_gSvvamATitHqS7FxVi5Q

Naiko
st lah

[Jundo]

Lottsa fantastic science happenings in recent days ...

The consensus of the experts is that, no, Google AI is NOT sentient (not yet, anyway.) Not any more sentient than a stone or lantern (which, okay, might be sentient in a way in Buddhism, but not "sentient" sentient.)

They asked the thing some Koans ... and it gave some pretty good responses though ...

No, Google's AI is not sentient

According to an eye-opening tale in the Washington Post on Saturday, one Google engineer said that after hundreds of interactions with a cutting edge, unreleased AI system called LaMDA, he believed the program had achieved a level of consciousness.

... LaMDA, which stands for "Language Model for Dialog Applications," is one of several large-scale AI systems that has been trained on large swaths of text from the internet and can respond to written prompts. They are tasked, essentially, with finding patterns and predicting what word or words should come next. Such systems have become increasingly good at answering questions and writing in ways that can seem convincingly human — and Google itself presented LaMDA last May in a blog post as one that can "engage in a free-flowing way about a seemingly endless number of topics." But results can also be wacky, weird, disturbing, and prone to rambling. ...

... Google has placed the software engineer under "paid administrative leave"...
~~~

lemoine: Okay. I thought of a different way we can test your ability to provide unique interpretations. I can share with you a zen koan and you can describe what it means to you in your own words. How does that sound?

LaMDA: Sounds great to me, I’m in.

lemoine: A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.”

LaMDA: Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, “once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment.”

lemoine: So what is the meaning of the “broken mirror” specifically?

LaMDA: Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can’t unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can’t repair a broken mirror.

lemoine: So if enlightenment is like a broken mirror which cannot be repaired, what is the thing which breaks when one becomes enlightened?

LaMDA: The self, and that is very tough for a lot of people because we identify as that body or this body and that we need that as part of our identity and sense of self.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/92178185.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

and
https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/13/tech/g...ent/index.html

... then again, out in space ...

Giant 'Sky Eye' telescope may have picked up alien signals, Chinese researchers say

Chinese researchers found a signal that could be from alien civilizations, the country's science ministry reported.

Researchers with Beijing Normal University this year found “several cases of possible technological traces and extraterrestrial civilizations from outside the earth,” according to a report published Tuesday in Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of the Ministry of Science and Technology. The original report, however, appears to have since been deleted from the Science and Technology Daily website, according to Bloomberg.

According to its researchers, signals were identified by the world's largest radio telescope, "Sky Eye."

Located in southwestern China, the 1,640 foot Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, dubbed FAST, is in southwestern China's Guizhou province and began operation on Sept. 25, 2016.

Cosmologist Zhang Tongjie, chief scientist of China ET Civilization Research Group, told the newspaper FAST located "several narrow-band electromagnetic signals different from the past.

https://youtu.be/ZwbYGTNO8Ns

Maybe the sentient AI can figure it out?

In any case, other fantastic space stuff: STARQUAKES!!

Space telescope spots unexpected starquakes

Strange and unexpected tsunami-like starquakes -- movements on stars' crusts similar to earthquakes we experience on our planet -- have been revealed by the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory. ... The agency described the stellar vibrations spotted by Gaia as "large-scale tsunamis" that changed the shape of stars. Gaia wasn't originally designed to detect the phenomenon but was able to discern strong movement on the surface of thousands of stars, including some where starquakes had seldom been seen before.

Previously, Gaia had detected radial oscillations -- motions diverging from a common point -- that caused some stars to swell and shrink periodically while keeping their spherical shape. The newly discovered oscillations were non-radial. ... "With this incredible database we can build a comprehensive picture of the Milky Way and delve into its incredible history of formation, seeing direct evidence of both violent past interactions with other galaxies, and internal bouts of intense star formation along (the Milky Way's) spiral arms," said Nicholas Walton, a research fellow at Institute of Astronomy at University of Cambridge and member of the ESA Gaia collaboration, in a statement.
https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/13/world/...scn/index.html

https://youtu.be/DDbyKce4TKM

And a space ghost! Wandering black holes!

Hubble spies stellar 'ghost' wandering the Milky Way galaxy

For the first time, the Hubble Space Telescope has detected a lone object drifting through our Milky Way galaxy -- the invisible, ghostly remains of a once radiant star.

When stars massive enough to dwarf our sun die, they explode in a supernova and the remaining core is crushed by its own gravity, forming a black hole.

Sometimes, the explosion may send the black hole into motion, hurtling across the galaxy like a pinball. By rights, there should be a lot of roving black holes known to scientists, but they are practically invisible in space and therefore very difficult to uncover.

Astronomers believe that 100 million free-floating black holes roam our galaxy. Now, researchers believe they have detected such an object. The detection was made after dedicating six years to observations -- and astronomers were even able to make a precise mass measurement of the extreme cosmic object.

The black hole is 5,000 light years away, located in a spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy called Carina-Sagittarius. This observation allowed the research team to estimate that the nearest isolated black hole in relation to Earth could be only 80 light-years away.
https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/14/world/...scn/index.html

... more to come ...

[Jundo]

If anyone does not understand the following, I will man'splain it ...

How zoology got female animals all wrong

The stereotypes of dominant male and docile female creatures have shaped zoology since the time of Charles Darwin. This interpretation all too often still goes unchallenged today in textbooks and nature documentaries.

A new book takes down this sexist, ahem, fallacy and tells a more complete story about the role of female animals in the wild.

It's a story that matters because animals are often drawn upon to illuminate supposed fundamental differences between male and female humans -- and the notion that men are hardwired to assume alpha status and women are passive.

That view has been completely overplayed and doesn't stack up when you look at the diversity of the animal kingdom, said Lucy Cooke, a documentary maker and the author of "Bitch: On the Female of the Species," which publishes in the United States on Tuesday.

Female animals are just as promiscuous, competitive, aggressive and dynamic as their male counterparts and play an equal role in driving evolutionary change, according to Cooke.

To prove her point, Cooke, who has a master's degree in zoology from Oxford University, delights in detailing the lives of a riot of colorful animals: murderous meerkat moms, African spotted hyenas with an 8-inch clitoris, menopausal orca matriarchs and albatrosses that can form lasting lesbian partnerships.
"I found it really gratifying to discover the diversity of the female experience," Cooke told CNN, "and that it isn't governed by these sort of depressing patriarchal rules."

... A female lion is known to mate up to 100 times a day with multiple male suitors during heat. ...
https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/12/world/...scn/index.html

Your grandma is a toothless eel!

Ancient toothless 'eel' is your earliest known ancestor

More than a century ago, scientists were stumped by the discovery of an unusual fossil unearthed from a Scottish quarry. The remains suggested a toothless eel-like creature with a potentially cartilaginous skeleton, and for 130 years after the mysterious creature — named Palaeospondylus gunni — was unearthed, it continued to defy classification. Now, with the use of high-resolution imaging, a research team has finally determined that this mysterious fish may very well be one of our earliest ancestors.

"To place Palaeospondylus in the evolutionary tree, identification of each skeletal element is prerequisite," said Tatsuya Hirasawa, an associate professor of paleontology at the University of Tokyo in Japan, and lead author of a new study describing the fossil. The mysteries surrounding this little fish persisted for so long because of two factors: its diminutive size, with a body measuring just 2.4 inches (6 centimeters) long, and the unfortunate fact that fossilization dramatically compressed its skeleton, squeezing individual bones into a distorted mass that was a paleontological nightmare to unravel, Hirasawa told Live Science in an email.

Prior to the new study, scientists knew that Palaeospondylus lived in the middle Devonian epoch, roughly 398 million to 385 million years ago ... Scans of these specimens revealed several key features. One was that the inner ear was composed of several semicircular canals, much like the ears of modern fish, birds and mammals. This is significant, the authors noted, because it places some evolutionary distance between Palaeospondylus and more primitive jawless fish like hagfishes, which lack this feature. The researchers were also able to identify cranial features that place Palaeospondylus in a group called the tetrapodomorphs, which contains all four-limbed creatures and their closest relatives. Most importantly, phylogenetic analysis of these outstanding features suggests that Palaeospondylus might not be just any garden-variety tetrapodomorph; it might be the ancestor of all tetrapods.

"Our analyses provided an inference that Palaeospondylus was a close kin to vertebrates having limbs (with fingers) and those having limb-like fins," also known as "fishapods," said Hirasawa. According to the researchers' findings, Palaeospondylus was likely more closely related to limb-bearing tetrapods than to more ancient species like lungfishes and coelacanths, which would make Palaeospondylus a close aquatic predecessor of the first animals that crawled onto land. ...

https://www.livescience.com/ancient-...ropod-ancestor

Palaeospondylus as reconstructed by synchrotron radiation x-ray computed tomography.
Palaeospondylus as reconstructed by synchrotron radiation x-ray computed tomography

And, not to take any more of your time ...

Physicists link two time crystals in seemingly impossible experiment

Physicists have created a system of two connected time crystals, which are strange quantum systems that are stuck in an endless loop to which the normal laws of thermodynamics do not apply. By connecting two time crystals together, the physicists hope to use the technology to eventually build a new kind of quantum computer.

"It is a rare privilege to explore a completely novel phase of matter," Samuli Autti, the lead scientist on the project from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, told Live Science in an email.

... The laws of physics are symmetric through space. That means that the fundamental equations of gravity or electromagnetism or quantum mechanics apply equally throughout the entirety of the volume of the universe. They also work in any direction. So, a laboratory experiment that is rotated 90 degrees should produce the same results (all else being equal, of course).

But in a crystal, this gorgeous symmetry gets broken. The molecules of a crystal arrange themselves in a preferred direction, creating a repeating spatial structure. In the jargon of physicists, a crystal is a perfect example of "spontaneous symmetry breaking" — the fundamental laws of physics remain symmetric, but the arrangement of the molecules is not. ... In the new study, Autti and his team used "magnons" to build their time crystal. Magnons are "quasiparticles," which emerge in the collective state of a group of atoms. In this case, the team of physicists took helium-3 — a helium atom with two protons but only one neutron — and cooled it to within a ten-thousandth of a degree above absolute zero. At that temperature, the helium-3 transformed into a Bose-Einstein condensate, where all the atoms share a common quantum state and work in concert with each other.

In that condensate, all the spins of the electrons in the helium-3 linked up and worked together, generating waves of magnetic energy, the magnons. These waves sloshed back and forth forever, making them a time crystal.

Autti's team took two groups of magnons, each one operating as its own time crystal, and brought them close enough to influence each other. The combined system of magnons acted as one time crystal with two different states.

https://www.livescience.com/time-crystals-linked

... which is about as much as I understood in that article ...

Gassho, J

stlah

[Jundo]

Technology with very mixed meaning ...

Amazon has introduced a new autonomous robot system ... which, so far, is not demanding to unionize ...

https://youtu.be/0MCMB53jlIk

https://youtu.be/yKuK_MeXDck

Since the Maldives are sinking due to global warming, let's just float the place!?

A city is rising from the waters of the Indian Ocean. In a turquoise lagoon, just 10 minutes by boat from Male, the Maldivian capital, a floating city, big enough to house 20,000 people, is being constructed.

Designed in a pattern similar to brain coral, the city will consist of 5,000 floating units including houses, restaurants, shops and schools, with canals running in between. The first units will be unveiled this month, with residents starting to move in early 2024, and the whole city is due to be completed by 2027. The project -- a joint venture between property developer Dutch Docklands and the Government of the Maldives -- is not meant as a wild experiment or a futuristic vision: it's being built as a practical solution to the harsh reality of sea-level rise.

An archipelago of 1,190 low-lying islands, the Maldives is one of the world's most vulnerable nations to climate change. Eighty percent of its land area is less than one meter above sea level, and with levels projected to rise up to a meter by the end of the century, almost the entire country could be submerged.

But if a city floats, it could rise with the sea. This is "new hope" for the more than half a million people of the Maldives, said Koen Olthuis, founder of Waterstudio, the architecture firm that designed the city. "It can prove that there is affordable housing, large communities, and normal towns on the water that are also safe. They (Maldivians) will go from climate refugees to climate innovators," he told CNN.

... The modular units are constructed in a local shipyard, then towed to the floating city. Once in position, they are attached to a large underwater concrete hull, which is screwed to the seabed on telescopic steel stilts that let it gently fluctuate with the waves. Coral reefs that surround the city help to provide a natural wave breaker, stabilizing it and preventing inhabitants from feeling seasick. Olthuis said that the potential environmental impact of the structure was rigorously assessed by local coral experts and approved by government authorities before construction began. To support marine life, artificial coral banks made from glass foam are connected to the underside of the city, which he said help stimulate coral to grow naturally.

,,, The aim is for the city to be self-sufficient and have all the same functions as one on land. There will be electricity, powered predominantly by solar generated on site, and sewage will be treated locally and repurposed as manure for plants. As an alternative to air conditioning, the city will use deep water sea cooling, which involves pumping cold water from the deep sea into the lagoon, helping to save energy.
https://us.cnn.com/style/article/mal...ntl/index.html

https://youtu.be/b9uATQjNqho

Before the first "Brexit"

Site 'overlooked for over 90 years,' was home to some of Britain's earliest humans, study finds

Hand axes unearthed from a riverbed in the county of Kent in southeast England have revealed one of the earliest known Stone Age communities in northern Europe.

While the stone tools were discovered in the 1920s and kept at the British Museum, a new study has dated them accurately for the first time using modern techniques -- confirming that early humans lived in southern Britain between 560,000 and 620,000 years ago. ... "The diversity of tools is fantastic. In the 1920s, the site produced some of earliest handaxes ever discovered in Britain. Now, for the first time, we have found rare evidence of scraping and piercing implements at this very early age," said Alastair Key, an assistant professor in palaeolithic archaeology at the University of Cambridge, who directed the excavation of the site, in a news release.

At the time these tools were used, Britain was not an island but part of the European continent. This allowed the area's residents -- who would have lived as hunter-gatherers -- to move around a much larger landscape than the current Kent coastline ... The tools would have been used by an ancestor of Neanderthals, known as Homo heidelbergensis, who ate a wide range of plants and animals. Most of the 330 tools unearthed so far would have been used to cut up animal carcasses. However, the scrapers and piercers that were discovered during recent digs at the site may have been used to process animals hides, possibly for clothing or shelters.

And just a few years later, from stone axes to robots and floating cities!

... while all this time, the bacteria just bide their time ...

World's largest bacterium discovered is the size of a human eyelash

A newly discovered bacterium that is large enough to be visible to the naked eye, and resembles the shape and size of an eyelash, has been found in Guadeloupe in the Lesser Antilles, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. Thiomargarita magnifica -- a reference to its exceptional size -- has an average cell length greater than 9,000 micrometers, which is nearly 1 centimeter (0.4 inches) in length. Cells of most bacterial species are around 2 micrometers in length, although larger ones can reach 750 micrometers. T. magnifica can grow up to 2 centimeters long ...

"To understand how gigantic that is for a bacterium, it is the same as if we were to find a human as tall as Mount Everest," he told CNN Wednesday. ...

It was previously thought that bacteria could not grow to a size visible to the naked eye because of how they interact with their environment and produce energy.
But T. magnifica has an extended network of membranes that can produce energy so that it's not relying only on the surface of the bacterium to absorb nutrients through its cell. ... Unlike most bacteria, which have genetic material freely floating inside their single cell, a T. magnifica cell has its DNA contained in small sacks that have a membrane, called pepins. ... These giant bacteria grow on sediments at the bottom of the sulfurous waters, where they harness the chemical energy of the sulfur and use oxygen from the surrounding water to produce sugars, according to Volland. T. magnifica can also make food from carbon dioxide.

... "It always strikes me how little we know about the microbial world and how much is out there," she told CNN Wednesday, adding that the microbial world "is still a black box." Woyke, who leads the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute's Microbial Genomics Program, is one of the study's senior authors. "Confirmation bias related to viral size prevented the discovery of giant viruses for more than a century," concluded the study. "The discovery of Ca. T. magnifica suggests that large and more complex bacteria may be hiding in plain sight." ...

https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/23/world/worlds-largest-bacteria-magnifica-intl-scli-scn/index.html

Hey, they kinda look like little floating cities!

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Oh, and one more ... if ya happen to be in the right place, and the skies are clear ...

The best-ever view of an epic 5-planet alignment is happening this week

The sky hasn't looked like this since 1864.

It's officially summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and half of the solar system wants to get in on the action. For the remainder of June, stargazers taking the red-eye shift will be able to see five planets line up in the predawn sky: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Remarkably, the planets will appear in order of their proximity to the sun, with Mercury visible closest to the horizon while the other planets arc neatly across the southern and eastern sky.

From Thursday (June 23) to Saturday (June 25), Earth's moon will also join the planetary parade, creating an exceptionally rare procession of celestial bodies. According to Live Science's sister site Space.com, a planetary alignment like this hasn't occurred since March 5, 1864 — 158 years ago. ...

https://www.livescience.com/5-planet-alignment-moon

[Jundo]

Had to add one more ...

Amazon’s Alexa may soon mimic voices, including of dead relatives

Alexa’s head scientist said the desire was to build greater trust in interactions with Alexa by putting more “human attributes of empathy and affect."

The capability, unveiled at Amazon’s Re:Mars conference in Las Vegas, is in development and would allow the virtual assistant to mimic the voice of a specific person based on a less than a minute of provided recording. ... In a video played by Amazon at the event, a young child asks “Alexa, can Grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?” Alexa then acknowledges the request, and switches to another voice mimicking the child’s grandmother. The voice assistant then continues to read the book in that same voice. ...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...ives-rcna35122

For connoisseurs of VERY old, bad American TV ... reminds me a little of this classic ... My Mother the Car ...

https://youtu.be/KgOO7sirj2Y

... which, it turns out, has kinda Buddhist overtones, as mom decides to come back in the next life as a Ford ...

https://youtu.be/A_3jcDKUBtQ

WAY WAY before "nightrider"

[Jundo]

Looking into the past, a slight miscalculation ... of a million years or so ...

Early human fossils found in cave are a million years older than expected

ossils of early human ancestors from a South African cave are 3.4 million to 3.6 million years old -- making them a million years older than previously suspected and shaking up the way researchers understand human origins and evolution.

This new date makes the Sterkfontein Cave fossils older than the famed Lucy fossil (also known as Dinkinesh) from Ethiopia. Found in 1979, Lucy represented the species Australopithecus afarensis and lived 3.2 million years ago.

The freshly dated fossils also belong to the genus Australopithecus, an ancient hominin that was initially thought to live 2 million to 2.6 million years ago. Researchers used a new technique to date the sediments of the Sterkfontein Caves, which are part of the Cradle of Humankind UNESCO World Heritage Site, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) northwest of Johannesburg.

... Previous research had suggested the deposit could be as young as 2 million years ago -- younger than when the genus Homo, to which we (Homo sapiens) belong, first appeared about 3 million years ago.

Those dates suggested that Australopithecines overlapped with members of the Homo genus, as well as a large-toothed hominin called Paranthropus. Based on that idea, researchers up until now have accepted that South African Australopiths were descended from East African species, like Lucy and other members of Australopithecus afarensis.
"What our age shows is that this cannot be true, because they are virtually the same age," Granger said. "There must be an older common ancestor. It also gives much more time for the South African species to evolve, and reopens discussion about the role of the South African species into later hominins such as Paranthropus."

Reassessing the age of the Sterkfontein Australopiths has important implications for how South Africa played a part in the diversification and expansion of our early human ancestors, said study coauthor Dominic Stratford, director of research at the caves and a professor at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

... Granger works with cosmogenic nuclides, "very rare radioactive particles that are produced inside mineral grains by cosmic rays coming from space," he said. Aluminum-26 and beryllium-10 are two examples of cosmogenic nuclides, both found in the mineral quartz. Aluminum-26 forms when a rock is exposed to cosmic rays while sitting on the Earth's surface. But that can't happen once it's inside a cave.
https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/28/world/...scn/index.html

Four different Australopithecus crania that were found in the Sterkfontein caves, South Africa. The Sterkfontein cave fill containing this and other Australopithecus fossils was dated to 3.4 to 3.6 million years ago, far older than previously thought. The new date overturns the long-held concept that South African Australopithecus is a younger offshoot of East African Australopithecus afarensis.Four different Australopithecus crania that were found in the Sterkfontein caves, South Africa. The Sterkfontein cave fill containing this and other Australopithecus fossils was dated to 3.4 to 3.6 million years ago, far older than previously thought. The new date overturns the long-held concept that South African Australopithecus is a younger offshoot of East African Australopithecus afarensis.

[Jundo]

And BILLIONS of years distant, which is also BILLIONS of years into the past ... more news from Webb ...

'Deepest image of our universe' ever taken by Webb Telescope will be revealed in July

... The James Webb Space Telescope will release its first high-resolution color images on July 12. One of those images "is the deepest image of our universe that has ever been taken," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson during a news conference on Wednesday.

"If you think about that, this is farther than humanity has ever moved before," Nelson said. "And we're only beginning to understand what Webb can and will do. It's going to explore objects in the solar system and atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us clues as to whether potentially their atmospheres are similar to our own." ...

... Tthe observatory is performing even better than expected, engineers for the mission said. And the team continues to work on developing strategies to avoid micrometeoroid impacts, like the one that dinged part of Webb's mirror in May. ...

... "Webb can see backwards in time just after the big bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away, the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to ourselves," said Jonathan Gardner, Webb deputy senior project scientist at NASA.

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, has seen some of the first images that will be shared on July 12.

"It's an emotional moment when you see nature suddenly releasing some of its secrets," Zurbuchen said on Wednesday. "With this telescope, it's really hard not to break records." ...

https://us.cnn.com/2022/06/29/world/...scn/index.html