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

[Jundo]

I also thought this fun, and left me feeling some special friendship with a supernova and the universe ... (Of course, we are the universe, thinking breathing star dust made of supernovas!)

NASA is showing you the picture the Hubble Space Telescope took on your birthday

NASA is celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope's 30th year in orbit, and even though most of the celebrations have been canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, you can still explore some of its amazing contributions online.

https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/what-did-hubble-see-on-your-birthday

I got this ...

On your birthday in 2000 ... Supernova Remnant N 49

N 49 is a supernova remnant in a neighboring galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. The delicate filaments are sheets of debris from a stellar explosion whose light would have reached Earth thousands of years ago.

Hmm, wonder if I have an atom or two from Supernova Remnant N 49?? Hmm.

[Jundo]

I feel that, if folks read an article like this, and are left feeling that the universe is just rolls of the dice, and we are small and insignificant in it, they may perhaps be missing something.

If folks are left instead with the view that we are the incredible product of the whole universe rolling our way, and that something more may be afoot, I feel that they are closer to the truth. We should not be here by the incredible odds, and as the lovely outcome of every needed twist and turn. Perhaps ... just perhaps ... those dice are a bit weighted.

===================

Is life a gamble? Scientist models universe to find out

Scientists suspect that the complex life that slithers and crawls through every nook and cranny on Earth emerged from a random shuffling of non-living matter that ultimately spit out the building blocks of life. ... Tomonori Totani, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Tokyo, modeled the microscopic world of molecules across the epic scale of the entire universe to see if abiogenesis is a likely candidate for the origin of life. He was essentially looking at whether there were enough stars with habitable planets in the universe at the time to allow complexity to arise. His results, published Feb. 3 in the journal Nature, show the betting odds for life emerging are not good, at least for the observable universe.

... "I hoped to find at least one realistic path of abiogenesis, to explain abiogenesis by words of science," Totani told Live Science. "Sometimes people claim that abiogenesis probability is incredibly low and that the origin of life cannot be understood by science. I, as a scientist, dreamed to find a scientific explanation of why we are here."

... Scientists think life emerged on Earth around 500 million years after the planet formed. Given that there are an estimated 10 sextillion (10^22) stars in the observable universe, it may seem that the odds of life popping up in the universe should be good. But researchers have found that the random formation of RNA with a length greater than 40 is incredibly unlikely given the number of stars — with habitable planets — in our cosmic neighborhood. There are too few stars with habitable planets in the observable universe for abiogenesis to occur within the timeframe of life emerging on Earth.

"However, there is more to the universe than the observable," Totani said in a statement. "In contemporary cosmology, it is agreed the universe underwent a period of rapid inflation, producing a vast region of expansion beyond the horizon of what we can directly observe. Factoring this greater volume [of stars with habitable planets] into models of abiogenesis hugely increases the chances of life occurring."

After our universe flashed into existence some 13.8 billion years ago during the Big Bang, it underwent a period of rapid expansion that continues today. If we think of the universe as a loaf of bread baking in the oven, our observable universe is like a bubble of air trapped in the dough, where the walls of the bubble are the farthest distance light can travel since the Big Bang. As the loaf rises (inflation), our bubble grows while other pockets of air within the bread get farther away. Our observable bubble of air is all that we can see, even though the rest of the loaf is out there.

It is estimated that the whole universe could contain more than 1 googol (10^100) stars. When Totani factored in this new abundance of stars, he found that the emergence of life was no longer improbable, but very likely.

This may be good news for the RNA world hypothesis, though it could also mean that the search for life in the universe is a hopeless pursuit.

If life first got its start in RNA, "life on Earth was created by a very rare chance of producing a long RNA polymer," said Totani. "Most likely, Earth is the only planet harboring life in the observable universe. I predict that future observations or explorations of extraterrestrial life will yield no positive results.

If by chance, life is discovered elsewhere in our cosmic neighborhood, Totani believes it would likely be of the same origin as life on Earth. Life may have hitched a ride from comets and asteroids across interplanetary or interstellar space, seeding the local universe with life from a single origin event.

https://www.livescience.com/origin-of-life-rna-universe-model.html

====================

And another fortunate happenstance ...

Tectonic plates helped early Earth evolve 3.2 billion years ago, and that shaped how life developed

Earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old, but understanding when it evolved from a sizzling hot ball to a planet that could host life is a little more difficult.

Part of that puzzle has to do with plate tectonics, which are crucial to every aspect of our planet. The world's oceans and continents sit on 15 different blocks of crust that move and shift.
While we largely think of them as responsible for creating mountains and earthquakes, the movement of these plates also contributed to creating environments with the right conditions to support life, chemically and physically.

Now researchers believe that plate tectonics were actively moving around on Earth as early as 3.2 billion years ago, which suggests an early evolution of our planet, according to a new study.
Researchers have debated over the years about when plate tectonics became active, arguing over a timescale from 1 million to 4 million years ago. The reason it's difficult to find a clear-cut answer is because rocks containing information that old don't exist anymore or they've been largely changed by their environment.

Doctoral student Alec Brenner and Assistant Professor Roger Fu, both in Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, sought out samples of rock older than 3 billion years old in Western Australia. ... In this case, the researchers were able to look at the record of the magnetic field in 235 different samples from the rock. Together, they showed that this part of the Earth's crust drifted about 2.5 centimeters per year 3.2 billion years ago. ... This suggests that early Earth was more similar to the one we know today. This means that early life on Earth, meaning single-celled organisms, had a more stable, moderate environment than previously believed.

https://us.cnn.com/2020/04/22/world/earth-plate-tectonics-timeline-scn/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Onka]

I still say we're not special and really do feel that saying this is most definitely coming from a glass half full position. I just appreciate the humility associated with not being special and for all of human progress with a little more humility we may not be as destructive.
Gassho
Onka
st

[Jundo]

I still say we're not special and really do feel that saying this is most definitely coming from a glass half full position. I just appreciate the humility associated with not being special and for all of human progress with a little more humility we may not be as destructive.
Gassho
Onka
st

Oh, I say we are special ... but I feel that every grain of sand and worm, rusty tin can and moment, mountain and star is special too. So, all is special.

It is just a bit strange that the universe wound round through billions of years to have Onka and Jundo thinking about it, when that appears so unlikely to have been the case. Seems the worms and stars could have got along fine without us.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Onka]

Same info different source. It is interesting despite my still thinking we're not special
It'd be cool to do a road trip over to Western Australia to stand near the area and kinda just be in awe of science. I knew a woman from roller derby who was a Vulcanologist. Her derby name was Tectonic Drift which people who didn't understand the science thought was a brilliant and clever name haha. Possibly one of the most intelligent and interesting people I've ever met. Being in her company was so intellectually stimulating.
Anyway...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/oldest-direct-evidence-plate-tectonics-found-australia/

Gasho
Onka
st

[Jundo]

Just to help us cast our eyes on the "big picture" when we are so distracted by events on our little planet and small bit of nature and time ...

Astronomers find the Wolfe Disk, an unlikely galaxy, in the distant universe

Astronomers have spotted a massive disk galaxy, not unlike our own, that formed 12.5 billion years ago when our 13.8 billion-year-old universe was only a tenth of its current age. But according to what scientists know about galaxy formation, this one has no business being in the distant universe.

This discovery is challenging how astronomers think about galaxy formation in the early universe.

... According to their observations, the galaxy's disk has a mass of 70 billion times that of our sun. It's also rotating at 170 miles per second, which is similar to our Milky Way galaxy. But galaxies with stable, well-formed disks, like the Milky Way, formed gradually and appeared later in the universe's timeline, with some dated to 6 billion years after the Big Bang.

In the early days after the Big Bang, the universe was largely a blank slate. Eventually, this was followed by galaxy formation that was pretty messy. Small galaxies merged and crashed together along with hot gas clumps.

"Most galaxies that we find early in the universe look like train wrecks because they underwent consistent and often 'violent' merging," said Marcel Neeleman, lead study author and postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, in a statement. "These hot mergers make it difficult to form well-ordered, cold rotating disks like we observe in our present universe."

The study published this week in the journal Nature.

So how did a well-formed rotating disk galaxy appear during this turbulent period? This galaxy formed and grew, researchers concluded, in a different way, known as cold-mode accretion. ...

https://us.cnn.com/2020/05/23/world/...rnd/index.html

One for Shoka and our other bee keepers ...

Pollen-starved bumblebees bite 'half-moons' into plants to make them bloom

When their pollen supply runs short, bumblebees bore tiny half-moon-shaped holes in the leaves of flowering plants, causing blooms to appear weeks ahead of schedule.

Bee-bitten plants bear flowers about two weeks to a month sooner than untouched plants, according to a new study, published today (May 21) in the journal Science. Researchers attempted to recreate these bee-bite patterns using metal forceps and a razor, but even then, the damage inflicted by bees boosted flower production more effectively than the scientists could; bee-bitten plants bloomed eight to 25 days before the artificially damaged ones did, depending on the plant species. https://www.livescience.com/bumblebe...oom-early.html

Hawaii just got a new 'largest volcano on Earth.' (Condolences to Mauna Loa.)

Poking out of the sea 590 miles (952 kilometers) northwest of Honolulu, Hawaii, two barren peaks rear their heads. The little pinnacles, which stand about 170 feet (52 meters) above sea level at their highest point, bely a monstrous mountain of ancient magma beneath them. Turns out, these two unassuming nubbins are actually the tips of Pūhāhonu — the single largest volcano on Earth, scientists have found.

... Mauna Loa, the gently-sloping behemoth that bulges out of Hawaii's Big Island, has long been designated the world's largest volcano. From its base on the seafloor to its summit thousands of feet over the island, Mauna Loa rises more than 30,000 feet (9,170 m) — making it technically taller than Mount Everest — and encompasses more than 19,200 cubic miles (80,000 cubic km) in volume. There's no question it's gargantuan; however, researchers now claim that Pūhāhonu actually has Mauna Loa beat — thanks largely to tens of thousands of cubic miles of volcanic rock buried beneath the ocean floor. ... The team found that Pūhāhonu contains approximately 36,000 cubic miles (150,000 cubic km) of rock — giving it a volume more than twice that of Mauna Loa.

https://www.livescience.com/puhahonu-largest-and-hottest-volcano-on-earth.html

One for my new book manuscript, "ZEN of the FUTURE!" ...

Colonizing Mars may require humanity to tweak its DNA

Genetic engineering and other advanced technologies "may need to come into play if people want to live and work and thrive, and establish their family, and stay on Mars," Kennda Lynch, an astrobiologist and geomicrobiologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, said ...

... Genetic enhancement may not be restricted to the pages of sci-fi novels for much longer. For example, scientists have already inserted genes from tardigrades — tiny, adorable and famously tough animals that can survive the vacuum of space — into human cells in the laboratory. The engineered cells exhibited a greater resistance to radiation than their normal counterparts, said fellow webinar participant Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine, the medical school of Cornell University in New York City. ...

... Harnessing these traits might also someday allow astronauts to journey farther than Mars, out to some even more exotic and dangerous cosmic locales. For instance, a crewed journey to the Jupiter moon Europa, which harbors a huge ocean beneath its icy shell, is out of the question at the moment. In addition to being very cold, Europa lies in the heart of Jupiter's powerful radiation belts. ...

https://www.treeleaf.org/forums/showthread.php?16498-Renamed-Thread-The-Zen-of-Technology-Scientific-Discovery%21

Gassho, J

SatTodayLAH

[Jundo]

One more ... even science sometimes getting something wrong is often very interesting ...

Strange ice formations may have tricked physicists into seeing mysterious particles that weren't there

What if one of the strangest, most unsettling findings in particle physics turned out to be an illusion?

Since March 2016, two mysterious signals from Antarctica have baffled researchers. Twice now, a high-energy particle has seemed to burst straight up out of the ice, tripping detectors on a balloon-borne experiment floating overhead. It's as if the particles had passed through the entire Earth unscathed. But that should be all but impossible: None of the known particles, which collectively are described in a physics model known as the Standard Model, can make that trip at high-energy levels.

Particles that are otherwise identical can carry different loads of energy, and the amount of energy a particle is carrying can change its behavior. Ghostly, low-energy neutrinos can slip through all of the planet’s crust, molten rock and iron unbothered. But they don't pack enough punch to create the signals found in Antarctica. High-energy neutrinos are powerful enough to create the signals. But since these higher-energy neutrinos have larger "cross sections" — they impact a bigger region of surrounding space — they tend to bang into things rather than slip through them. It's the difference between tossing a marble through a fishing net and trying to shoot a beach ball through the same gaps. No known high-energy neutrino should be able to pass through the entire Earth and emerge from Antarctic ice.

... Now, in a new paper published April 24 in the journal Annals of Glaciology, a joint team of physicists and glaciologists argue that the ANITA anomaly likely isn't evidence for new physics. Instead, it may simply be a trick of the ice. Complex, hidden structures in the white expanse might have reflected radio waves in unexpected ways, fooling ANITA's radio receivers into registering the particle as if it were coming from inside Earth.
https://www.livescience.com/mysterio...f-the-ice.html

[Jakuden]

Thank you for all these articles Jundo, it's nice to be able to avoid my news app right now and find the interesting stuff here, LOL

Gassho
Jakuden
SatToday/LAH

[Jundo]

Perhaps putting aside all the national symbols and politicians ... a wonderful achievement for our planet today ...

(at least I think so. Or is space just becoming the next corporate franchise? Like, we rename the International Space Station for a sponsor, like "Space Base Kellogg's"? )

... anyway really an international effort.

And how cool are those space suits!

https://youtu.be/s4CISUyYoDc

Gassho, J

STLah

[Amelia]

My husband and I were very giddy to watch this!

Gassho
Sat today, lah

[Jundo]

Oh, so that's where it went! I knew we left that somewhere!

Half the matter in the universe was missing. Scientists just found it hiding in the cosmos

In the late 1990s, cosmologists made a prediction about how much ordinary matter there should be in the universe. About 5%, they estimated, should be regular stuff with the rest a mixture of dark matter and dark energy. But when cosmologists counted up everything they could see or measure at the time, they came up short. By a lot.

The sum of all the ordinary matter that cosmologists measured only added up to about half of the 5% what was supposed to be in the universe.

This is known as the "missing baryon problem" and for over 20 years, cosmologists like us looked hard for this matter without success.

It took the discovery of a new celestial phenomenon and entirely new telescope technology, but earlier this year, our team finally found the missing matter.

... In 2007, an entirely unanticipated opportunity appeared. Duncan Lorimer, an astronomer at the University of West Virginia, reported the serendipitous discovery of a cosmological phenomenon known as a fast radio burst (FRB). FRBs are extremely brief, highly energetic pulses of radio emissions. Cosmologists and astronomers still don't know what creates them, but they seem to come from galaxies far, far away.

As these bursts of radiation traverse the universe and pass through gasses and the theorized WHIM, they undergo something called dispersion.

The initial mysterious cause of these FRBs lasts for less a thousandth of a second and all the wavelengths start out in a tight clump. If someone was lucky enough — or unlucky enough — to be near the spot where an FRB was produced, all the wavelengths would hit them simultaneously.

But when radio waves pass through matter, they are briefly slowed down. The longer the wavelength, the more a radio wave "feels" the matter. Think of it like wind resistance. A bigger car feels more wind resistance than a smaller car.

The "wind resistance" effect on radio waves is incredibly small, but space is big. By the time an FRB has traveled millions or billions of light-years to reach Earth, dispersion has slowed the longer wavelengths so much that they arrive nearly a second later than the shorter wavelengths.

Therein lay the potential of FRBs to weigh the universe's baryons, an opportunity we recognized on the spot. By measuring the spread of different wavelengths within one FRB, we could calculate exactly how much matter — how many baryons — the radio waves passed through on their way to Earth.

... By mid-July 2019, we had detected five more events — enough to perform the first search for the missing matter. Using the dispersion measures of these six FRBs, we were able to make a rough calculation of how much matter the radio waves passed through before reaching earth.

We were overcome by both amazement and reassurance the moment we saw the data fall right on the curve predicted by the 5% estimate. We had detected the missing baryons in full, solving this cosmological riddle and putting to rest two decades of searching.

https://www.livescience.com/missing-...ed-cosmos.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Shinshi]

Oh, so that's where it went! I knew we left that somewhere!





Gassho, J

STLah

Now if they could just solve the missing sock phenomenon.

Gassho, Shinshi

SaT-LaH

[Jundo]

A healthy diet means he barely shows his age!

A dinosaur's last meal: A 110 million-year-old dinosaur's stomach contents are revealed

A dinosaur with impressive armored plates across its back became mummified around 110 million years ago after enjoying one last meal before dying.

And now we know what it ate for its last meal. Dinosaur stomachs and evidence of their diets are rarely preserved. Occasionally, seeds and twigs have been found in the guts of dinosaur remains, but never conclusive evidence about the actual plants. In this case, a muddy tomb encased and preserved the dinosaur so well that even its stomach contents remain to tell us that it was a picky eater.

"The leaf fragments and other plant fossils were preserved down to the cells," said David Greenwood, study coauthor, Brandon University biologist and University of Saskatchewan adjunct professor, in an email. The nodosaur, known as Borealopelta markmitchelli, was found in 2011 during mining operations north of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada.

... The fossil was unveiled after museum technician Mark Mitchell dedicated six years to painstakingly revealing the dinosaur's preserved skin and bones from the marine rock in which it was encased. In life, the dinosaur — a type of ankylosaur — weighed more than a ton. But it lived off of plants and favored ferns ...

This nodosaur was picky. The researchers compared the contents of its stomach with fossil leaf studies from the same time period and region. The nodosaur specifically ate the soft leaves of certain ferns and largely neglected common cycad and conifer leaves. Overall, they found 48 microfossils of pollen and spores including moss and liverwort, 26 club mosses and ferns, two flowering plants and 13 conifers. "The lack of horsetails, and rarity of cycads and conifers is surprising, given that these are very common in the surrounding flora,"

https://us.cnn.com/2020/06/02/world/...rnd/index.html

https://youtu.be/CehqV3lfayA

Gassho, J

STLah

[Onka]

A healthy diet means he barely shows his age!

https://youtu.be/CehqV3lfayA

Gassho, J

STLah

"You're not leaving the table until you've eaten ALL your ferns, not just the ones you like"
Gassho
Onka
ST

[Jundo]

Ok, not really science ... although gravity, inertia and some other physical principles are involved I guess ...

An amusement park in the Netherlands, closed at the time because of the pandemic, filled a roller coaster with giant teddy bears.

I just like it.

https://youtu.be/d2Tl5K8y22w

Gassho, J

ST+Lah