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

[Seibu]

Yeah I'm so excited about the Solar Orbiter mission and I'm looking forward to seeing new images of the Sun's polar regions.

Gassho,
Seibu
sattoday

[Jundo]

Back down to earth ...

Absolutely Massive Extinct Turtle Weighed 2,500 Pounds and Had Giant Horned Shell

Venezuela ... Five to ten million years ago, this was a humid swampy region teeming with life. One of its inhabitants was Stupendemys geographicus, a turtle species first described in the mid-1970s.

Researchers of the University of Zurich (UZH) and fellow researchers from Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil have now reported exceptional specimens of the extinct turtle recently found in new locations across Venezuela and Colombia. “The carapace of some Stupendemys individuals reached almost three meters, making it one of the largest, if not the largest turtle that ever existed,” says Marcelo Sánchez, director of the Paleontological Institute and Museum of UZH and head of the study. The turtle had an estimated body mass of 1,145 kg (~2,500 pounds) — almost one hundred times that of its closest living relative, the big-headed Amazon river turtle.

... Despite its tremendous size, the turtle had natural enemies. In many areas, the occurrence of Stupendemys coincides with Purussaurus, the largest caimans. This was most likely a predator of the giant turtle, given not only its size and dietary preferences, but also as inferred by bite marks and punctured bones in fossil carapaces of Stupendemys.
https://scitechdaily.com/absolutely-...-horned-shell/

Purussaurus, the largest caiman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purussaurus

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

A mysterious population of ancient humans lived in West Africa about half a million years ago, and scientists believe their genes still live on in people today.

This "archaic ghost population" appears to have diverged from modern humans before Neanderthals split off from the family tree, according to the research published by the "Science Advances" journal.

The split appeared to have taken place between 360,000 and a million years ago, say the researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles. These ancient humans had babies with the ancestors of present-day Africans, much as Neanderthals reproduced with the ancestors of modern Europeans, wrote geneticists Arun Durvasula and Sriram Sankararaman.

DNA from this archaic population makes up between 2% and 19% of modern West Africans' genetic ancestry, they said.

... "Everybody tends to mate with everybody. I think we're going to find more and more of these 'ghost' populations coming up."

https://us.cnn.com/2020/02/13/world/...scn/index.html

... and ...

Distant solar system object covered in complex organic molecules

More than a year after NASA's New Horizons mission closely flew by a small, distant Kuiper Belt Object, researchers have been able to sift through the data and learn intriguing new details about this fossil from the formation of the solar system. Located four billion miles beyond Pluto, Arrokoth is the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft. ... And one of the most intriguing discoveries about Arrokoth is that it's covered in methanol ice and unidentified complex organic molecules, according to the researchers. ... Methanol could be on the surface of Arrokoth as a result of several possibilities, including a mixture of water and methane ice that was exposed to radiation via the sun's cosmic rays. Water itself has not been detected on the surface of the object. ...
https://us.cnn.com/2020/02/13/world/...scn/index.html

Gassho J

stlah

[Geika]

Don't forget the asteroid flyby tonight/ tomorrow morning!

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/02/14/world/asteroid-earth-flyby-scn-trnd/index.html

Gassho
Sat today, lah

[Jundo]

I am writing a new book, "Zen of the Future," part of which puts some Buddhist tenets in modern terms, that we are already living in a "virtual reality" or "video game" ... whether naturally evolved or designed ...

So, this is interesting to me. Many thoughts, some real concerns. We will soon be in a world where we can choose to live in almost any environment, including with those who have died ... touching them, talking with them ...

https://youtu.be/uflTK8c4w0c

Mother 'reunited' with dead daughter on South Korean VR show

A tearful reunion between a mother and her dead daughter via advanced virtual reality for a South Korean television has become an online hit, triggering fierce debate about voyeurism and exploitation.

The footage began with the girl — who died of leukemia in 2016 — emerging from behind a pile of wood in a park, as if playing hide-and-seek.

“Mom, where have you been?” she asks. “I’ve missed you a lot. Have you missed me?”

Tears streaming down her face, Jang Ji-sung reached out toward her. “I have missed you, Na-yeon,” she told the computer-generated 6-year-old, her hands moving to stroke her hair.

In the real world, Jang was standing in front of a studio green screen, wearing a virtual reality headset and touch-sensitive gloves, her daughter’s ashes in a locket around her neck.

At times the camera cut to Jang’s watching husband and their three surviving children, wiping away tears of their own.

A nine-minute clip of the Munhwa Broadcasting Corp. documentary “I Met You” has been watched more than 13 million times in a week on Youtube.

Many viewers offered Jang their sympathy and support for the concept.

“My mother unexpectedly passed away two years ago and I wish I could meet her through virtual reality,” said one.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/20.../#.XkkbCmgzaHs

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Did dinosaur blood run hot or cold? Their eggshells may hold a clue

Now, new research from Yale University suggests that the blood that coursed through their giant frames would have been warm, rather than the cold-blooded creatures we traditionally assumed them to be. The findings come from an analysis of fossilized eggshells.

"Dinosaurs sit at an evolutionary point between birds, which are warm-blooded, and reptiles, which are cold-blooded," said Robin Dawson, who conducted the research while she was a doctoral student in geology and geophysics at Yale. "Our results suggest that all major groups of dinosaurs had warmer body temperatures than their environment."

... By looking at the order of oxygen and carbon atoms in the fossilized egg shells, the researchers were able to calculate the dinosaur mom's internal body temperature. It's a process called "clumped isotope paleothermometry."
"Eggs, because they are formed inside dinosaurs, act like ancient thermometers," said Pincelli Hull, an assistant professor at Yale University's Department of Geology and Geophysics, and a co-author of the study. ... So unlike reptiles, which rely on heat from the environment, the research indicates that dinosaurs were capable of internally generating heat.

https://us.cnn.com/2020/02/17/world/...scn/index.html

... and from the "technology that is cool, but do we really need it ... is it just another potential weapon, and is it good for the environment?" category ...

A jetpack company just reached a major milestone in our quest to fly like Iron Man

he team at Jetman Dubai built a jet-powered wingsuit and say they just reached a major milestone with it -- a pilot took-off from the ground and then transitioned into a high-altitude flight.
The achievement occured last Friday, when Jetman pilot Vince Reffett took off from a standing start on the runway at Skydive Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and then flew up to nearly 6,000 feet in altitude. He also demonstrated the ability to hover, stop, turn and maneuver.

https://youtu.be/nj-Iwv5NJKg

Reminds me of the guy in France with the real hoverboard ...

https://youtu.be/-kB-BGMXxZc

The dinosaurs had us beat there too ...



Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Well, don't hold your breath until we get there ... but at least there will be something to breathe.

Notice that this says OTHER GALAXY, not -just- some OTHER PLANET!

We are not alone.

Molecular oxygen discovered in another galaxy for first time ever

In a research published in The Astrophysical Journal, they noted that it was discovered in the Markarian 231 galaxy, 561 million light-years from Earth. A light-year, which measures distance in space, equals about 6 trillion miles.

"This first detection of extragalactic molecular oxygen provides an ideal tool to study AGN-driven molecular outflows on dynamic timescales of tens of megayears," the researchers wrote in the study's abstract.

The researchers used the IRAM 30-meter radio telescope in Spain to make their observations after looking at it for four days. It's unclear what is causing the oxygen to appear, but it may be due to "the interaction between the active galactic nucleus-driven molecular outflow and the outer disc molecular clouds," the researchers wrote in the study.

Oxygen is necessary for life as we know it, according to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, but so far, molecular oxygen has been difficult to find. It has been detected in the Orion nebula, but since it experiences intense radiation from the young stars being formed, it's possible the water ice is split into a molecular level, allowing for the discovery of oxygen.

Oxigen is the third most abundant element in the universe, trailing hydrogen and helium. Some scientists believe oxygen in space is stuck with hydrogen in the form of water ice, which could be why it is hard to detect.

Whatever it means ... I feel like I need oxygen after reading this:

Abstract
We report the detection of an emission feature at the 12σ level with FWHM line width of about 450 km s−1 toward the nearest quasi-stellar object, QSO Mrk 231. Based on observations with the IRAM 30 m telescope and the Northern Extended Millimeter Array Interferometer, the 11–10 transition of molecular oxygen is the likely origin of the line with rest frequency close to 118.75 GHz. The velocity of the O2 emission in Mrk 231 coincides with the red wing seen in CO emission, suggesting that it is associated with the outflowing molecular gas, located mainly at about 10 kpc away from the central active galactic nucleus (AGN). This first detection of extragalactic molecular oxygen provides an ideal tool to study AGN-driven molecular outflows on dynamic timescales of tens of megayears. O2 may be a significant coolant for molecular gas in such regions affected by AGN-driven outflows. New astrochemical models are needed to explain the implied high molecular oxygen abundance in such regions several kiloparsecs away from the center of galaxies.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab612d

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

And speaking of "holding your breath" ...

Scientists discover first known animal that doesn't breathe (and has no mitochondrial genome)

... all other multicellular animals on Earth whose DNA scientists have had a chance to sequence have some respiratory genes. According to a new study published today (Feb. 24) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, H. salminicola's genome does not.

A microscopic and genomic analysis of the creature revealed that, unlike all other known animals, H. salminicola has no mitochondrial genome — the small but crucial portion of DNA stored in an animal's mitochondria that includes genes responsible for respiration.

While that absence is a biological first, it's weirdly in character for the quirky parasite. Like many parasites from the myxozoa class — a group of simple, microscopic swimmers distantly related to jellyfish — H. salminicola may have once looked a lot more like its jelly ancestors but has gradually evolved to have just about none of its multicellular traits.

"They have lost their tissue, their nerve cells, their muscles, everything," study co-author Dorothée Huchon, an evolutionary biologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, told Live Science. "And now we find they have lost their ability to breathe."

Those "eyes" are actually stinging cells, Huchon said, which contain no venom but help the parasite latch onto a host when needed. These stinging cells are some of the only features that H. salminicola has not ditched on its journey of evolutionary downsizing.

"Animals are always thought to be multicellular organisms with lots of genes that evolve to be more and more complex," Huchon said. "Here, we see an organism that goes completely the opposite way. They have evolved to be almost unicellular."

So, how does H. salminicola acquire energy if it does not breathe? The researchers aren't totally sure. According to Huchon, other similar parasites have proteins that can import ATP (basically, molecular energy) directly from their infected hosts. H. salminicola could be doing something similar, but further study of the oddball organism's genome — what's left of it, anyway — is required to find out.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Billion-year-old green algae is an ancestor of all plants on Earth

The oldest green seaweed on record, the ancestor of all land plants, lived about 1 billion years ago, a new study finds.

Scientists have discovered the fossils of what may be the oldest green algae ever known. The newfound seaweed — called Proterocladus antiquus — lived about a billion years ago. And even though it was tiny, about 0.07 inches (2 millimeters) in length, the algae had a big role: It could produce oxygen through photosynthesis.

"Its discovery indicates that green plants we see today can be traced back to at least 1 billion years ago, and they started in the ocean before they expanded their territory to the land," study lead researcher Qing Tang, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech, told Live Science in an email.

Until now, researchers didn't have hard proof that green algae lived that long ago. Rather, computer models, including those based on molecular clocks, indicated that photosynthesizing plants arose between the Paleoproterozoic era (2.5 billion to 1.6 billion years ago) and the Cryogenian period (720 million to 635 million years ago).

...

Just like modern-day algae, P. antiquus has differentiated, branched cells and root-like structures, Tang said. It likely played an important role in the ancient ecosystem by producing oxygen, he said. In addition, it likely provided food and shelter to other organisms.

"Most of the organisms (particularly cyanobacteria) in this period were either planktonic or lying on the seafloor," Tang said. P. antiquus also grew on the seafloor, indicating that it could have served as an ideal place for living, hiding, resting for other organisms, he said.

Life on Earth is dependent on photosynthesizing plants and algae for food, yet land plants did not evolve until about 450 million years ago, Tang said. "The new fossil suggests that green seaweeds were important players in the ocean long before their descendants, land plants, took control," he said.

https://www.livescience.com/oldest-g...iscovered.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Heitou]

Wow you guys seace to amaze me I love it. I'm glad I found you.

Gassho
John
SatToday

[Jundo]

Biggest explosion in the universe spotted by astronomers

A record-breaking explosion created by a black hole 390 million light-years away has been discovered by astronomers.

"In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain," said lead author Simona Giacintucci, director of research at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC.

"A key difference is that you could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas," Giacintucci said.

The explosion originated from the center of the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Clusters of galaxies are the largest-known structures in the universe. Gravity holds these groups containing thousands of galaxies togethe

... Black holes don't just gobble up material, they blast it out as well -- usually in the form of jets or beams of material. And this one breaks all previous records. The energy that created the explosion was five times greater than MS 0735+74, once known as the largest and most powerful explosion.

Astronomers made the observation using ground and space-based telescopes, including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory, Australia's Murchison Widefield Array and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India.

https://us.cnn.com/2020/02/27/world/...scn/index.html

... fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater ...

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jakuden]

I love this thread.
We are vast compared to a single-celled organism. We are beyond minute compared to a black hole. We are part of both and both are part of us.

Gassho
Jakuden
SatToday


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[Jundo]

... one of the greats ...

Freeman Dyson, quantum physicist who imagined alien megastructures, has died at 96

Dyson imagined a universe in which alien civilizations harness the energy of the stars.

Legendary physicist and big thinker Freeman Dyson died today at age 96 in New Jersey after a fall earlier this week ... Dyson first became widely known for important work in the late 1940s on the interactions between light and matter, then went on to have a remarkably wide-ranging career. He published papers on the future of the universe, worked on ideas for a nuclear-explosion-powered spacecraft that was never built, developed new ideas in mathematics and philosophy, and imagined how humans of the far future — as well as alien civilizations — might live and operate in space. ...

... Arguably, Dyson's most famous idea was the "Dyson sphere," a hypothetical structure a civilization might build around a star to enclose it and best harness its energy. ...

Dyson was also known for his idiosyncratic views on climate change, notions that he largely publicized toward the end of the first decade of the 21st century. While he did not dispute that human emissions were causing Earth's climate to warm, he expressed frustration with the tone in which the subject was discussed at the time, as The New York Times reported in 2009. Dyson suggested that other problems were more important and expressed doubts about some techniques used by climate scientists to estimate the effects of future warming. He also argued that planting billions of trees, genetically engineered to capture more carbon than existing trees, would solve the problem. As of 2020, such genetically modified mega-forests do not exist and the world has continued to experience increasingly drastic effects from climate change.

... Dyson argued that if the universe continues to spread out forever and cool down, life might not die out as most physicists assume.

"Looking at the past history of life," Dyson wrote, "we see it takes about [1 million] 10^6 years to evolve a new species, [10 million] 10^7 years to evolve a genus, [100 million] 10^8 years to evolve a phylum and less than [10 billion] 10^10 years to evolve all the way from the primaeval slime to Homo sapiens. If life continues in this fashion in the future, it is impossible to set any limit to the variety of physical forms that life may assume. What changes could occur in the next 10^10 years to rival the changes of the past?

"It is conceivable," Dyson continued, "that in another 10^10 years, life could evolve away from flesh and blood and become embodied in an interstellar black cloud or in a sentient computer."

Dyson went on to write that life might require warmth, liquid water and a reliable energy source to persist in a cold universe, but only if consciousness is tied to the body.

"Since I am a philosophical optimist, I assume … life is free to evolve into whatever material embodiment best suits its purposes," he wrote.https://www.livescience.com/freeman-...ead-at-96.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Shokai]

Is thia the same Dyson that revolutionized the design of Vacuum cleaners, fans and hand dryers?
gassho, Shokai
stlah

[Kotei]

Is thia the same Dyson that revolutionized the design of Vacuum cleaners, fans and hand dryers?
gassho, Shokai
stlah

That would be Sir James Dyson.
Gassho,
Kotei sat/lah today.